The Search for Strategic Intelligence

[Entropy]

Col. Jones,
A few more thoughts on your post:

WHAT exactly is strategic intelligence?

There are the book answers, but I think strategic intel can be divided into two categories: (1) Strategic warning and (2) strategic estimates that support policy. One aspect of Strategic intelligence that I believe is important is that it must be purposely limited (or focused) in some way to make it manageable and meaningful. Just because the issues may be "big picture" doesn't mean they can be open-ended or unlimited in scope. That why intel shops (and even CoCOMS) have specific responsibilities and that is why, I believe, there aren't many people dedicated to looking at the "big picture."

Warning is very broad and deep from an intelligence perspective since it can include any kind of intelligence (including a lot of tactical intel) and is continually updated, so it is also timely. It is functionally limited, however, to the narrow purpose of preventing surprise. That narrow purpose makes it manageable.

Estimates, by contrast, are not functionally limited. Instead, the scope of intelligence is limited as well as the time frame (ie. It’s difficult to keep the estimate continuously current). The NIE is the most obvious example of this kind of strategic intel.

why is it so rarely asked for, and even more rarely provided?

A few reasons (which are only my subjective, but informed opinion):

- Military commanders are used to tactical and operational intelligence and they want what they know (a point you touched on).

- Military intelligence people are trained in tactical and operational intelligence support and they provide what they know. It's easy to see how ops and intel people reinforce each other’s tendency to stay inside the operational/tactical box. Personally, I didn't begin to develop a strategic mindset until graduate school because my entire military experience was at the tactical and operational levels. So strategic education and training for intelligence people and senior leaders is necessary and it's simply not happening.

- The strategic questions that many want answered are usually too broad and unfocused to be practically answered. Consider the issues you list in your original post. You have probably hundreds doctoral theses worth of research and analysis in there. The questions you want answered require the kind of knowledge that is both a mile wide and a mile deep. I submit that it’s impossible to continuously maintain that level of expertise. The intel community works on such big questions through committees of experts who have the mile deep knowledge and together they potentially reach the mile-deep and mile-wide goal. They can’t sustain that, though, because they have to maintain their expertise. Now, there are certainly those who look at strategic problems through the mile-wide, inch-deep model. That is the realm of politicians, pundits and current intelligence. A middle ground is difficult to find. Be glad your intel people gave you a 1000 yard stare instead of trying to give you a shallow “Fred Barnes” answer.

- The cost-benefit of resourcing strategic intel vs. current/tactical/operational is perceived to be low most of the time for a variety of reasons one could write a book on. One reason is the "what have you done for me lately" syndrome. The guy who produces daily or weekly and can answer tactical and operational questions in minutes or hours is simply more valued than the guy who produces quarterly or semi-annually and needs weeks or months to answer strategic questions. For example, the history of strategic warning since 1947 shows a recurring pattern:
1. Resources get pulled out of strategic warning to support something else.
2. A major warning failure occurs.
3. The AAR identifies lack of support to strategic warning as a major factor in the failure.
4. Strategic warning becomes well-resourced and respected in the immediate aftermath.
5. Memories are short and pretty soon the leadership begins wondering why so much is going to the warning function when they don't appear to be doing much of anything.
6. Return to step 1.

There is also the problem that significant resources can be spent on a strategic subject that turns out to be irrelevant or simply confirms the common wisdom. Leaders then view the effort as wasted. That's not nearly as a big a problem at the operational and tactical level.

- Strategic intel requires direction and the continuous support of leadership. Unlike other types of intelligence, it can't be done ad hoc or as an additional or secondary duty. It's hard to overestimate how important that is. No analyst, no matter how proactive, is going to be able to answer those questions you listed unless that is their primary job. If you want them to be able to answer strategic-level intel questions then you need to get them out of the tactical and operation environment and assign them to work on strategic-level intelligence, exclusively.

- Strategic intel usually requires a depth of knowledge that is incompatible with the 2-3 year PCS cycle and the frequent internal moves over the course of one assignment. When I was at EUCOM, for example, I was in training for 3 months, on a watchfloor supporting theater units for 8 months, in an analysis shop doing mainly operational-level analysis (with a bit of what I'd call strategic) for six months, supporting a war (Allied Force) for 4 months, back to the analysis shop for 3 months, then PCS. Also, a turnover with your replacement is almost always inadequate (a couple of weeks usually) and is often nonexistent since assignments (at least in my experience) are frequently gaped. It's not hard to get quickly spun-up to support current intel. It's very hard to get spun-up on strategic topics because the required depth-of-knowledge is so great.

- Strategic intel has been intentionally and unintentionally outsourced. Most inputs into strategic intel are open-source, so the unclassified guys (Janes, EIU, etc.) can seriously compete. The obsession with current intel and punditry doesn’t help.

- Stovepiping, which is still a problem. Strategic intelligence questions are almost always interdisciplinary and it's unlikely a CoCOM or any one agency will have all the expertise in-house. Getting analysts at another agency to help you with your problem can be a bureaucratic nightmare unless you're at the NSC-level and can order production of an NIE and force the various agencies to participate.

-Communication. Requests for analysis and information are invariably altered as they pass through layers of bureaucracy so the problem an analysts gets is often much different from what the originator wanted. I’ve seen this particularly with sycophantic officers who, upon hearing a question from the General during a briefing, will order up reams of wide-ranging analysis for what was only a simple clarification. More wasted effort is the result.

- Finally, there is asking the right question, which is more difficult than most people think. IOW, defining the intelligence requirement is critically important. This requires collaboration between the analyst and the “customer” to determine exactly what is and is NOT needed. It’s important that the problem not be too open-ended but it also can’t be overly narrow. The latter was a serious flaw in the Iraq WMD NIE which led to OIF. Here’s how Robert Clark puts it in his book on intelligence analysis:

The problem definition was focused solely on the question of whether Iraq had WMD programs, and if so, what they were. By focusing on weapons of mass destruction, analysts had a tendency to fit all evidence into a WMD model. Analysts assumed that Iraq had WMD programs, and analysis proceeded from that point. A broader look at Iraq’s overall military capability would have found more logical explanations for some of the evidence.

I think your issues are worth exploring. I think you need to sell the idea to your leadership in order to get the resources. I think you’d be best served by forming a group of experts to look at your issues and giving them the time and resources necessary to examine your issues. As I mentioned to you in another thread, a Commander's priority intelligence requirements (PIR's) are how intel people prioritize intelligence production. Changing the PIR's to strategic priorities is an important first step. Good luck!

[Steve the Planner]

50 billion a year on intelligence gathering, and most of it is, as many said, tactical.

It is easy for me to incorrectly suggest that I was a dumb-ass civilian planner/development manager before I answered Ambassador Crocker's call for a civilian surge in 2007, but the truth is that as a former tank commander in Germany during the mid-70s, I was transfixed by the issue of boundaries and populations (and movements in response), which my subsequent education (undergrad: geography/economics), and grad: planning & policy), all reinforced.

Truth is I worked on regional geographic analysis through experiences like with a railroad industrial development shop, for a regional business park developer, and as a planning expert on school boundaries, growth patterns, and economic/demographic/industrial/infrastructure consequences.

Throughout, a substantial component of my real estate client base was the signal intelligence core in the Baltimore-Washington Corridor, but, while mindful of their capabilities, on the civilian side (like Surfbeetle), we were punching through new levels of applications of civilian technology (GIS, disaggregated population studies and forecasting, market-based momentum patterns, and systems dynamics models for regional, area, and sub-area public resource planning.

With that as a background, I went to Northern Iraq to form a civilian reconstruction planning hub to link PRT, US mil, and Iraqi governance and service extension, but was floored by the lack of relevant US knowledge, in 2008, of the background geographic, demographic, economic, infrastructure and systems knowledge needed to understand what was going on there.

I would look at at these civilian maps, and my geographer's eye would immediately track to the fact that provincial and district boundaries were often illogical and in conflict. Why, in one map, was Taji shown as a part of Salah ad Din, and in another, as a part of Baghdad? Why was the majority of Bayji city shown to be a part of Tikrit? Why, as a senior civilian reconstruction adviser, was I unable to determine from competing population data, whether Samarra had 200,000 or 400,000 people enclosed within the defensive wall?

On the action level, we had USAID and CERP money pouring into proposals to restart poultry processing when, in fact, none of the poultry production needed to support a poultry restart was in place, and there was no systematic process in place to map out the poultry chain and dependencies (grain mills, egg hatcheries) necessary to make these poultry processing houses sustainable.

With MND-North (in 2008), we began the process of systematically mapping out the agri-business sector, industrial sectors, and political boundaries. For the first time, we knew how many asphalt plants existed in Northern Iraq and theoir current capacity and status (and therefore, the maximum amount of asphalt available for road repair). For the first time, we mapped out the locations of regional Iraqi highway repair facilities, and the fact that they had NO equipment---a good reason why reconstruction was at a crawl on the Iraqi side.

This past summer, for example, I saw a press release from John Nagl and a group of investment partners, that they had funded the opening of the first tomato canning factory in Iraq (in Kurdistan). In fact, Balad Canning Factory was reopened with a $10 million capaital injection in June 2008, but the demand for tomatoes in drought-and refugee-pressed Mosul was so great that all the tomatoes from Balad were being trucked up to Mosul.

It just didn't make sense.

So, in 2008, we started from scratch the systematic mapping and analysis of civilian economic, population, admin/political boundaries, and infrastructure in order to move beyond wasted efforts to chase "low-hanging fruit," one brigade at a time, and in the fifth year of "occupation" (also one year at at time).

Armed with the realization that so much of Iraq's civilian information was either terrible or misleading, I started going through reports like the DoS pre-war Iraq Study Group, and quickly understood that much of the "insights" were nothing more than uninformed WAGs from ex-Iraqis, and lacked any credibility for analysis or planning of anything substantive about Iraq.

Moreover, I came home with terra drives full of historical boundary maps and population data (gathered while with the UN Politcal Team), to which I have since added many more terrabytes of open source historicasl reports and documents, and the picture is clear, at least to me, that much of what is now needed to be known to make clear assessments of the political condition and structure of Iraq, was easily knowable---but nobody had put it together in a way typical of most civilian analytical frameworks.

So, I am watching the same patterns emerging in Afghanistan---background civilian data that is just GIGO---and fundamental emerging trends that any reasonable civilian analyst in the US would have spotted and opined on years ago, but are completely missed in our tactical, geophysical and military only focus.

As with the Afghan Population thread from last week, was Afghanistan bigger than Iraq (No), and what of the now-missing 5 million Afghans resulting from the CIA Factbook's recent reduction of population estimates from 33.6 million to 28.4?

Obviously, all the rest of the minute Afghan sub-population calculations (percent ethnic, age, urban, etc..) is just GIGO.

Same with Entropy's effort to track Afghan provincial and district boundaries. In a conflict zone, these dynamic boundary changes are both a driver, and evidence of, potential or past conflict. The Iraqi ones are a clear roadmap of, and to, conflict.

In Iraq, for example, we could have just integrated the civilian mapping sources (including deed references and names) to accomplish twice as much knowledge, systematically, as was gained from haphazard HTS data. That hugely valuable info about property ownership, names and families, was readily available as frame to rapidly convert HTS into a fact-checker and troubleshooter instead of a piece-meal collector.

Yes, I have seen a lot of the tribal mapping stuff, and a lot of it, by contrast to more concrete sources (census, deeds, etc.), as field checked by UN staff from the DIBS team, is remarkably substandard for strategic-level analysis.

As for core reconstruction, it didn't take Beetle or I to be on the ground to have pointed out that a brigade-level profusion of well-drilling (as a quick hit drought response) would have significant ramifications for water tables (and existing wells) in Northern Iraq, and that, with or without them, large numbers of droughted-out farmers would be flocking as refugees to cities like Mosul, compounding urban political instability issues there.

The big lesson that I learned is that, at the strategic level, there is no understanding of how to collect and analyze routine civilian data with the level of acuity or dynamism helpful to plan and implement in conflict or post-conflict environment.

I know that many folks believe that by spending $50 billion annually on intelligence gathering, they must know something, but, from my perspective, it is a very tactical something, and the gap for strategic purposes is, in fact, huge?

How many other countries, like Iraq in 1990, aren't we tracking, and don't know enough about to be ready to effectively gauge and respond to? My guess is that it is far more than policy makers think.

That's my Sunday missile.

Steve

[davidbfpo]

Steve the Planner cited:

How many other countries, like Iraq in 1990, aren't we tracking, and don't know enough about to be ready to effectively gauge and respond to? My guess is that it is far more than policy makers think.

The UK learnt this lesson wayback in 1982, when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands; an intelligence target we did watch, not enough. The Franks Report on the intelligence failure: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/arch...p?docid=109481

More contemporary example, Germany no longer gives Latin America any priority in intelligence gathering.

Today I'd suggest there are large chunks of the world which are little watched or the USA depends on others to assist with what little they have. If the DEA focus didn't exist and the drugs trade was not international where would Latin America feature for the USA? Pretty low.

davidbfpo

[Steve the Planner]

David:

In college, I was required to write a book report for a Geographic Thought class, so, like any good college student, I browsed the shelves for the thinnest book I could find---a 1935 tome on the geography of conflict.

What was there? Indo-China, Falklands, the Middle East, Balkans, Afghanistan/Pakistan/Kashmir, etc....

Not very complicated, is it?

Steve

[davidbfpo]

Steve,

Valid point, but taking the Middle East as one example. Oil production IIRC was concentrated in a few places, notably Abadan, Iran; the oil resources in North Africa e.g. Libya had not been identified. So the focus in the region has moved around.

I am sure mapping of conflict will show the same places dominate, so will an article search - who for example watches the Dardenelles closely now?

Reversing the focus - which areas do not feature? Have those changed over time?

Ethiopia is one country that has a low historical profile, for a variety of reasons and without media and NGO reported starvation i.e. Band Aid would it feature on a current map of places that need watching? I think not.

Geography is one aspect, important yes; there are others - religion for one.

davidbfpo

[Steve the Planner]

Far be it from me to say that our investment in tactical intelligence isn't crucial, but it would be good, at some level, to improve acuity on the basics like gepography, demographics, trade patterns, basic structure and function of internal governments, and key infrastructure---for the purpose of possible conflict analysis.

On the other hand, when I first heard about Human Terrain, it was in that context, not as just an anthropological endeavor about tribes.

In the pre-Kennedy days, every Embassy, for example, had a geographic attache, whose sole job was to collect any and all maps, reports and studies he could gather, and feed them into the system where folks in Foggy Bottom could study them to help interpret the World.

No more geographic attaches, and if there were, I doubt the collected info would go anywhere. Looks to me like even the CIA is just looking on the web, including our site. Not what people think.

Steve

[Jedburgh]

...it would be good, at some level, to improve acuity on the basics like gepography, demographics, trade patterns, basic structure and function of internal governments, and key infrastructure---for the purpose of possible conflict analysis.

Amen. I would only insert a phrase into your statement:

It would be good, at some level, to improve acuity on the basics like geography, demographics, trade patterns, basic structure and function of internal governments, and key infrastructure - and the interactions and interdependencies between and among those factors - for the purpose of possible conflict analysis.

...On the other hand, when I first heard about Human Terrain, it was in that context, not as just an anthropological endeavor about tribes...

See Edward Ullman, Human Geography and Area Studies, published in 1953. In the paper, Ullman describes how the discipline of geography is more than just physical geography or maps. He goes on to differentiate specific geographic studies between other social science disciplines, and sums up with an advocacy for a multi-disciplined team approach to area studies:

...By spatial interaction I mean actual, meaningful human relations between areas on the earth's surface, such as the reciprocal relations and flows of all kinds among industries, raw materials, markets, culture and transportation-not static location as indicated by latitude, longitude, type of climate etcetera, nor assumed relations based on inadequate data and a priori assumptions.....

....Looks to me like even the CIA is just looking on the web, including our site....

I won't comment on the Agency specifically, but in general I do believe that an over-reliance on technology is destroying true analytic capabilities in many areas. I believe I've mentioned before on this board the story of the terrain team NCOIC in Afghanistan who had no clue how to develop a real terrain analysis narrative product supporting the imagery, but instead kept insisting that the imagery itself was all that was necessary.

[Bill Moore]

Some thoughts on this as I work on some projects in my lane:

1. What types of Competitors are associated with a problem, probably laid out in 3 tiers from those directly engaged, those 1 degree of separation away, and those 2 degrees of separation away.
a. Who are the state actors?
1. Nuclear States
2. Non-nuclear States
3. Failing States
4. Criminal States

The above list looks more like a typology than information that would inform a strategy. However, I know if you're working on this there is more to it than meets the eye. A list of all States under the classification of nuclear and non-nuclear doesn't inform strategy, but if a nuclear state is at risk of failing, then that becomes strategically important.

Then the pressing issue is determining why the State is failing, and using Steve the Planner's post as an example, I tend to agree that we don't do this well. Our IC is enemy focused, and that is still a critical component of intelligence for the military (probably still the most critical), but that doesn't provide the necessary information needed to rebuild Iraq or Afghanistan for example. Now we're getting more into what has been coined human terrain or human geography along with economics, politics, etc. and as Jedburgh pointed out how all these various items combine to provide a functional context. Not sure if that is rates as operational or strategic intelligence, just know that we need it.

I think there are two components that strategic planners/advisors require. One is a strategic design and the other is a list of our known strategic interests (security, economy, etc.)

A Strategic Design process that parallels Operational Design would potentially provide strategists a context to better understand whether a particular situation actually warrants a response on our part. Is this situation that actually threatens one of our strategic interests to begin with?

This step is critical, especially since the Joint Operating Environment (JOE) informs us that numerous trends are converging in troubling ways, so we'll be faced with more "potential" crises in the near future than we can ever hope to effectively deal with, so a strategy and strategic design is essential to inform our triage process. The IC would be responsible for continuously updating the design, which would require a reorganization process on their part, as this is not a simple undertaking.

Immediately following WWII the world was still complex, but our strategic priorities were more black and white. It was determined by our national leadership that rebuilding Japan and Germany to counter the growing communist threat was in our national interests, and IMHO it was a well informed strategy that resulted on substantial return on our investment.

Now jumping to the post Cold War era, we responded to the crisis in Somalia in the early 90s presummably because our leadership thought it was in our national interest to do so, but we accomplished little, and on the other hand we didn't respond to the crisis in Rwanda, why? This is the post Cold War era strategic gray area that we still live in.

One of advantage of having a strategy and strategic design (which should provide a common understanding of the issues to the U.S. Government, thus help facilitate consensus) is that once the leadership determines a particular effort is in our strategic interests then we should invest fully in it. Our design already tells us the risks if we don't do so. That begs the question do we get involved if it isn't in our strategic interests? Realpolitic suggests yes, but at least I would hope we would invest lightly and keep one hand on the eject button, so we don't get stuck in a quagmire that isn't truly in our long term interests. That means we would limit our public objectives so we don't box ourselves in with our own rhethoric.

In many ways the debate over Afghanistan relates back to a lack of strategy and strategic design. The key question now seems to be is it in our national interests to rebuild Afghanistan as stable state? Unfortunately there is no consensus, because we don't have a common understanding of the strategic context. If the answer is yes, then it will most likely call for a substantial investment, much like the investment we made in Germany and Japan. After eight years of fighting we still having fully committed to one approach or the other.

Strategy, Strategic Design and Strategic Intelligence are important, even if we can't define what it is :-).