Special comment: In 42 years, NightWatch has never seen a Presidential directive to intelligence and security entities remotely like that promulgated this week. It is a worthy document in intent and precision.
Its weak point is that implementation relies on the same people who failed, twice.
The two most extraordinary Presidential directives to the Director of National Intelligence have received no media coverage. The first is to “take further steps to enhance the rigor and raise the standard of tradecraft of intelligence analysis …” In other words, the analysts failed. They need more rigor in their analyses and better “tradecraft.”
The intent of the directive is clear, but its execution is problematic. Analytical tradecraft is in the dock. Commentators and very experienced practitioners frequently cite the “new” challenges in this “new” form of war. (Counter-insurgency is hardly new.)
The pubic is bombarded with “Newness,” but no transformation has occurred.
NightWatch senses that the intelligence failings cited by the President and cited by General Flynn are not failings of insight about new threats; they are the longstanding failings of complaisant analysts and supervisors, who shirk their responsibilities.
The 1978 HPSCI report on Warning found that in every crisis since Pearl Harbor, there always was enough information for competent analysts to issue actionable warning. The intelligence failures of the post-World War II era and the Cold War always were failures of analysts, not collectors and not systems.
President Obama’s statement repeats those findings in spades, 32 years later!
If it means anything, analysis transformation has to mean creation of a systematic, structured approach to analysis that always and everywhere is replicable, auditable, non-idiosyncratic and non-anecdotal and which has application across boundaries and groups.
There are few lessons for young analysts in idiosyncratic and anecdotal personal expertise. No one can live another person’s experiences and experts seldom agree on the significance of their experiences. So how can that mess be taught? Intelligence must escape this trap.
NightWatch insists that “expertise is necessary but not enough” to achieve actionable warning. To that assertion must now be added that sharing is not enough.
High predictability and the ability to warn in an actionable time frame require knowledge of threat phenomenology, the study of which has been neglected, except possibly at the tactical level. For example, two pieces of evidence – payment in cash for a transatlantic air trip and without checked luggage -- are the embodiment of actionable, phenomenological data.
Cash and no bags are universal red flags of threat that create a reasonable suspicion that justifies, nay compels, fail-safe security measures. This should be a “no-brainer.“
The other Presidential directive of special interest is, “Ensure resources are properly aligned with issues highlighted in strategic warning analysis.” The President issued a new directive on strategic warning analysis; not risk management, but warning. That has not happened since before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
One odd thing, though, is that the Defense Department and all its agencies, except the National Security Agency, received the directive but no direct guidance. DoD has more counter terrorism analysts in its national-level agencies and in the combatant commands than all the other agencies combined. Hmmm…
End of NightWatch for 8 January.
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