Right.

If the S9 didn't have it, he could easily get it.

As a dumb-ass DoS civilian reconstruction guy stumbling around a Division Command in Iraq in Jan 2008, it took a little while to figure out who, in a mil structure, had the best reconstruction info.

At COB Spiecher, I was introduced at a conference and made some comments about locating things needed for reconstruction planning.

As I walked out, two guys came up and explained that they did targeting: One said: I do kinetic targeting. The other said: I do non-kinetic targeting.

So, I went to visit them at the Div HQ.

Obviously, they had mapped and located a lot of stuff to either blow up or not. It was ahiuge amount of good stuff.

Then, as I walked through the building, the Div Eng folks opened their doors: roads, bridges, electrical systems. There wasn't a whole lot that they didn't have in their sphere, or terrain didn't have access too.

By the time I got to S9/CA, they were tracking agriculture, economics, etc..., etc...

No offense, but, for my purposes, there was only a little that S2 had that I needed. Everybody else was so helpful and contributing that, like them, I could run the risk of having so much information that a Tower of Babel could begin to grow.

Same at MND-C, etc...

What I learned was that 90% of anything I needed to know was there. It just hadn't been asked for for my purposes or format. Getting to 99% was just a moderate effort.

Funny thing is that when you went "upstairs" to the Palace (and even to Al Faw), they had a lot less quality info, and what MNDs knew was not trickling up, mostly because they seemed to be focused on sending out and collecting answers to specific requests rather than wandering around to see what was known.

All the info flow, but without adequate wisdom flow...

And it didn't take long to figure out why. Short-tour rotating collection folks there were fixatedon (and swamped with) creating monthly reports, building information, not knowledge. They got their accountabilities in.

How to fix it?

Steve