Originally Posted by Bob's World
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
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