Intel Blogs

Greetings Fiscal Cliff Dwellers!  By the time you read this there will be less than two weeks before automatic sequestration cuts take effect - - - a week of which the Congress will be in recess!  What was meant to be a “poison pill” to force the legislative and executive branches to compromise on rational budgets so the government could reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next ten years now appears inevitable.  Since January we have been fed a steady stream of increasingly dire consequences from Navy aircraft carriers not deploying, to Army readiness declining, to Air Force airplanes not being maintained, to civilian workers being furloughed, and to contracts being canceled unless there is some relief from the automatic 9.4% sequestration of funds scheduled for March 1st.   Yet none of this doom and gloom was in evidence as late as Thanksgiving of 2012 when the reflexive answer from DoD consistently was “the Congress won’t allow sequestration to happen!”
 

Unless we are existing in a weird parallel universe, the Mayan’s were clearly wrong about the world ending last month,  but the National Intelligence Council’s “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds” does warn the U.S. will likely lose its status as the planet’s only superpower by then.  And how about that fiscal cliff?!?  Lots of drama for New Year’s Day legislation that only raised taxes on those making $400k or more without any meaningful impact on reducing the deficit or dealing with sequestration.  More or less a two month “U” turn at the fiscal cliff or a demonstration of “Democracy Inaction!”
 
The White House and the Congress “agreeing “ to defer dealing with either the debt ceiling or sequestration for two months only insures that budgetary uncertainty for almost all national security accounts will continue until “March Madness.”  Sequestration will then join raising the debt ceiling and extending the Continuing Resolution (CR) for the rest of FY 13 as requiring legislative action of some type in March.  While there could be some kind of grand bargain providing a comprehensive solution to all three of these separate but related tectonic fiscal issues, I remain unable to see what will change between now and March given the political posturing that has been going since 2010 without any significant increases in revenues or cuts in spending.  And as we heard the President and the Republican leaders of Congress publicly “trash talking” with each other on January 14, any discussion about raising the debt ceiling is an opportunity for political brinkmanship regarding shutting down the government.
 

Given the unknowns about whether the world will end on 21 December as foretold by the Mayan Calendar or if the US government will find itself mired at the bottom of “Fiscal Cliff Washington” come New Year’s Day, any discussion about what will hold the Intelligence Community’s (IC) attention in 2013 seems premature. However, despite the notoriety of both of these “black swans,” I remain unabashedly optimistic the Mayan Astrologers have miscalculated and that the IC can muddle through 2013 on $65 billion even if most of it is borrowed money.
Before we get into any soothsaying for 2013 we probably should check my homework on this subject for 2012 when I fearlessly predicted six things that I thought would demand the IC’s attention.

My initial intent was to discuss with you the intelligence related issues associated with the September 11th Benghazi attack and offer my views on the proceedings of AFCEA’s Fall Intelligence Symposium that focused on the importance of implementing  the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (IC ITE, pronounced “eye sight”).  This train of thought, however, was jarringly  interrupted Friday (9 Nov) afternoon with  the mind bending announcement that the President had accepted (reluctantly) David Patraeus’ resignation as CIA Director because of an extra-marital affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell (“ALL IN - - - The Education of General David Patraeus” with Vernon Loeb).  Ironically, Patraeus’ necessary but unforced departure from the seventh floor at Langley will vector us back to Benghazi and IC ITE.
My first reaction to the bulletin “Petraeus Resigns” was this probably is related to Benghazi being cast as an intelligence failure and somebody with sufficient name recognition had to fall on their sword post election to placate administration critics and get this story out of the media.  My next thought was what does unexpectedly having to find a new CIA Director means for IC?

Last month when we gathered around the browser, I was expressing my concerns about a “guns of October” scenario emerging in the Middle East and assuring you that I did not believe the attack in Benghazi on September 11 represented an intelligence failure.  Within days of posting, the conflict in Syria expanded to Turkey retaliating with cross border fire against Assad’s government forces.  Then on September 28th the DNI issued a statement clarifying that subsequent intelligence showed the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was not a spontaneous reaction to the YouTube “Innocence of Muslims” film trailer but rather it was a planned terrorist attack meant to kill Americans and embarrass the United States (http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/96-press-releases-2012/731-statement-by-the-odni-s-director-of-public-affairs-on-intelligence-related-to-the-terrorist-attack-on-the-u-s-consulate-in-benghazi).  As I started to write this edition, Secretary of Defense Panetta spoke at Business Executives for National Security (BENS) dinner on October 11th aboard the INTREPID Museum in New York City laying out the cyber threat to national security and how DoD is preparing to deal with it (http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1728).

I started over Labor Weekend to write about my increasing concern about the escalating number of Green on Blue attacks in Afghanistan during August, and even though they are continuing they seem to have receded in importance relative to raising level of violence in Cairo, the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens (along three other Americans) in our Benghazi Consulate, and anti American demonstrations in 20 other countries all triggered by the offense taken at an amateurish YouTube video that seems to mock the Prophet Muhammad.  As with the Danish cartoons from years past, Arab Muslims again seem to be looking for the opportunity to be offended so they can blame the West for what ails their societies.  Or perhaps there is latent Arab anger that the US never relented in its efforts to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice.  Meanwhile unrelated to the YouTube clip (it’s a trailer not movie) titled the “Innocence of Muslims” Assad is ramping up his violence against Syrian rebels offended by his secular dictatorial regime while Israel’s Prime Minister is publicly insisting the US articulate for all to know its conditions for taking military action against Iran’s nuclear weapons development program.

I don’t agree with the view expressed by some that the IC not warning of violent demonstrations at the American Embassy in Cairo or the attack on the Consulate in Benghazi represents an intelligence failure.  The political volatility in both Libya and Egypt seems to have been understood and conveyed by the IC; however, at least in Cairo the IC along with the news media continue to be challenged by extracting actionable intelligence from social media.