A near-successful bombing on Christmas, a suicide attack on the CIA -- it's been a rotten ten days for the U.S. Intelligence Community. And unless things change in a serious way, the spy agencies can expect many more rotten days ahead. But there are some steps that the IC can take in 2010 that could mean fewer failures, more success, and more lives saved. Think of them as New Years' resolutions for the spy agencies.
__Pink Slips. __The changes in intelligence law and policy that were issued after 9/11 were the most significant and far-reaching since America revamped its intelligence apparatus for the Cold War. But the Christmas day plot is just the latest in a series of avoidable gaffs and near-misses that will not stop as long as until a President with sufficient will and fortitude decides to clean out the managerial ranks of the intelligence community. Old hands always decry any calls for a purge of the workforce, but forty years as a Cold Warrior is poor preparation for the world we are in today, or the world of tomorrow. Most of the workforce today consists of new hires (since 2001) and near-retirees; the mid-careerists fled as their agencies were driven into the ground. That’s the cadre you need to get back if you are going to move intelligence into the future.
Go All In for 2.0. Intellipedia is the Intelligence Community's version of Wikipedia; A-Space is the so-called "Facebook for Spies." Both are great tools that have almost no bearing on the day-to-day practical aspects of producing intelligence. Intellipedia isn’t official; glossy four-color paper reports are official. Posting on A-Space takes time away from your "real job." There is no practical reason why the IC could not immediately adopt a "living intelligence" model that gets vetted and valid intelligence into the hands of consumers in near-real-time -- not weeks or months after-the-fact. Such a model would actually allow analysts more time to think about the problems at hand, rather than following dated, time-wasting protocols. What hinders progress in this area is Intelligence Community management that is more concerned with getting credit than serving the intelligence needs of consumers. To be fair, you might see forward progress from recalcitrant managers if they were rated and encouraged to act like members of a community, not monks in a cloister.
Align Policy with Practice. After 9/11, "need to know" was supposed to be replaced with "responsibility to share." There was supposed to be a recognition that information improperly dispersed could lead to tragedy. However, sharing is still a curse word amongst those who run the community. Just ask any junior analyst who makes the mistake of telling his boss that he had a great dialog with his counterpart in the agency across town. Managers resist putting sharing policies into practice - and beat up on subordinates who try to do just that - because it puts their little empires at risk. The question no one ever asks these human roadblocks: How do you sleep at night knowing your industrial-age processes and parochialism makes it easier to kill Americans? Does anyone *not *think that we would have had a more complete understanding of the airline security threat on December 25th had more people had a chance to talk with and bounce ideas off of their peers about "the Nigerian" and related issues?
Get Real About Training. Some of the most prestigious schools in the country give their knowledge away for free. But analysts have to cut throats, practically, in order to take these advanced courses in cultural, military, and intelligence studies. The armed services have offered correspondence and online education for years, because they recognize lifetime learning is important and that missions tend to get in the way of a normal schoolhouse routine. How come the information enterprise has yet to figure out that it should be offering the same options to its workforce so that they're more likely to understand the issues and put out intelligent, meaningful content? Would an FBI special agent who was able to actually learn something about Islam (radical or otherwise) have been so quick to dismissMajor Nidal Hasan's telling emails?
__Open Back Up. __None of us is as smart as all of us, which is what made BRIDGE - an IC effort to connect those in the community to experts on the outside – so exciting. Sadly, BRIDGE was closed down not long after launch. At the same time, another sharing effort, UGov, was slated for the chopping block. Neither BRIDGE nor UGov is a panacea for what ails the IC, but the more minds put against any given problem is likely to produce better results. The IC has always reached out to outside expertise for its most significant efforts , like National Intelligence Estimates. But BRIDGE was the only known acknowledgment that the same sort of outreach could have an impact at more granular levels. The IC has plenty of smart people in its ranks, but it doesn't have a monopoly on brains by any stretch. Why wouldn't you leverage the best minds nation-wide on national security issues? How must more effectively - or early - could we be mitigating threats if we maximized opportunities for insight and original thought and minimized group-think? That is a question we'll never know unless someone rebuilds (the) BRIDGE.
Terrorism, transnational crime, cyber security: all problems that are only going to get worse as the world gets more wired and interconnected; all problems that cannot be addressed without a strong intelligence apparatus. The security of the nation is every administrations primary responsibility, which makes resolving to spend political capital on these low-cost, high-return efforts no-brainers.
[Photo: CIA]
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