Company Level Intelligence Led Operations

[Cavguy]

Thanks Jed, I wasn't specific enough in my post.

I certainly believe the section as a whole must be bigger, I was mainly referring to the actual MI based augmentation, at a minimum. I'd like more, but a few actual MI NCO's plus platoon level intel augmentees can do it.

Good catch on the source. What you stated was what I meant, forgetting that "source running" to a CO CDR isn't the same as to a pro. I basically meant being able to recruit and pay informants, and give them low level tasks. THT's have this ability, but there aren't enough to go around, so the commander winds up "running" these low level sources, even though it's technically illegal. Having a HUMINTer (even better a team) in the company would allow him to create and develop informants in a more professional manner, and provide the expertise into keeping him out of trouble.

(trying to stay "above the line" in the discussion)

[William F. Owen]

I basically meant being able to recruit and pay informants, and give them low level tasks. THT's have this ability, but there aren't enough to go around, so the commander winds up "running" these low level sources, even though it's technically illegal. Having a HUMINTer (even better a team) in the company would allow him to create and develop informants in a more professional manner, and provide the expertise into keeping him out of trouble.

This indicates a vast problem area, based on my experience, but I am not sure how I can usefully comment given Jedburgh's prescription - WHICH I FULLY AGREE WITH as concerns intent.

About all I can say is IMO, this is not something the company level should be involved in. I guess I'll leave it at that.

[selil]

It kind of sounds like you all do it differently in the military than we did it in law enforcement. From the sounds of it you all have large centralized authority that takes in from a variety of channels information and feeds that down to the unit/solider level. In law enforcement an officer/detective receives information and feeds "some" of that information up into either a detective bureau or now I guess Fusion Centers (though those may be going away). My experience obviously is at the bottom of that chain, but our expected effectiveness was at the localized or even patrol area. Since I worked in the court/corrections bureau we interviewed prisoners for housing assignments and gained some valuable/actionable intelligence on near feudal associations. I'm likely way off base and my knowledge is several years out of date. It seems like if you are dealing with an insurgency that is a distributed, and loosely organized entity, that a distributed intelligence apparatus with centralized reporting would be much better.

[slapout9]

selil, you head the nail on the head. Good LE Intel is run from the street up to the top. Which then can be added to the big picture, which sometime never comes back down but at least they know about it.

[wm]

What Slapout and Selil are calling intel would be what I call situational awareness. Depending on your frame of reference, situational awareness is what you really want anyway, IMHO. At the company level , I suspect I'd want to know who the likely bad guys are in my AO, what kind of things they might be contemplating doing, and what "tools" they might be planning on using to do it. To get this type of info, I think the "cop on the beat" approach to collection and analysis is probably the right model. Sort of like this: "I heard on the street that the A St. Gang is thinking they want to have it out with the Oak Hill Ave boys on Thursday night with knuckles, pipes, and baseball bats. Joe X from A St. was seen playing with a .38 last week. Last three times they fought, they had their dust ups in one of the vacant lots in the industrial park near the river. " You don't need some high level intel system pushing stuff down to you to figure out what all that means. And, it probably won't get you that kind of data to analyze anyway, while your foot patrols and neighborhood visibility will.

In fact, the more stuff that gets pushed down to you, the harder it will probably be to separate the wheat from the chaff, if there's even any wheat in the delivery. Having an intel analyst, who is most likely going to be an E3, E4, or junior E5, there at the company is not likely to be much help in sifting either. They will probably not have enough experience to find the gems any better than anyone else just because they got some schooling at Huachuca. The HUMINT guy that Cavguy wants may be a little more senior, but I doubt will have the all source experience needed to provide a good overall picture.

Common sense, tempered with sufficient cultural awareness to understand what is different every day about the AO compared to being back home on the block, probably does more in developing the situational awareness needed to mount sucessful stability ops at the company level.

[Ken White]

...........

[Cavguy]

They will probably not have enough experience to find the gems any better than anyone else just because they got some schooling at Huachuca. The HUMINT guy that Cavguy wants may be a little more senior, but I doubt will have the all source experience needed to provide a good overall picture.

Great Post. What I have been insufficently articulating is what I want from the intel guy. I don't need someone telling me about my AO. I know and see that from walking and talking to the people every day in sector, and my patrol leaders have the "feel" for what is going on. Most "boots on the ground" leaders understand it far better than a junior enlisted or midgrade MI guy ever will. (Although there are the exceptions) What we consistently fail at is to capture that information higher and lower.

I see two major gaps. The first is a lack of ability to gain, manage, and utilize informers that constantly approach leaders. I like your "cop" analogy - the guy who will tell you about the drug gang on the "down low". It's the role of THT's to do, but because commanders don't have enough THT's they wind up doing it out of necessity, legal or not. Every successful commander I saw had his informers and sources. One can wring hands about whether they should, but to be successful and know your AO you need a few informers. Sorting through and evaluating their information is tough. Many informers don't want to talk to an E3 THT member, they want to talk to the boss or an officer. Having a HUMINT type on staff can help guide the tactical leaders through it, keep them out of trouble, and keep higher in the loop.

The second gap is someone to debrief patrols, package the reports, and send them higher in an MI friendly way. Someone who knows all the MI databases and systems and can pull from higher's (vast) resources. Imagery, mapping, social networking tools, ISR coordination, etc. He can be the agent for procuring information for the Platoons and a conduit for their info higher.

As I said, I'm less interested in an analyst to tell me what is going on than personnel to help in the above fashion.

Without MI help, the work is done by whoever the commander picks (FIST, Company Intel Cell, etc) who are "pickup artists" at the tasks. In COIN, the Army owes a commander a trained intel support team at the company level. My higher S2 was always defensive when I criticized his analysis, and he finally reminded me that I wasn't sending him much to help fill in his picture. The commander, XO, and 1SG are so consumed/exhausted/busy they need a full time pro to do it, not a Shanghai'd 11B, 19D/K, or 13F.

Read that amazing NYT article on Afghanistan yesterday, and ask yourself if that commander has time to compile and manage his intel cell. He needs a pro to help, IMO.

[Jedburgh]

....Without MI help, the work is done by whoever the commander picks (FIST, Company Intel Cell, etc) who are "pickup artists" at the tasks. In COIN, the Army owes a commander a trained intel support team at the company level. My higher S2 was always defensive when I criticized his analysis, and he finally reminded me that I wasn't sending him much to help fill in his picture. The commander, XO, and 1SG are so consumed/exhausted/busy they need a full time pro to do it, not a Shanghai'd 11B, 19D/K, or 13F....

In this, the conventional Army (with substantial differences in context, admittedly) is trying to replicate intel support capabilities that exist in the SF Groups. Unfortunately for the conventional units, the MI slots (and the 18F positions) have long been a part of SF authorized fill, while the rest of the Army is trying to beg, borrow or steal MI soldiers to pick up the slack. I don't see the Army expanding the MI field further to formally fill this requirement.

So, the critical issue is manning. There simply aren't enough analysts / collectors to go around. And the majority of MI troops who do get cut away to work at Co level are going to be junior enlisted - and at that level (with the exception of the rare few with true natural talent) they're not going to have any more ability than the "pick-up artists" you are currently working with. And of the NCOs that do get sent over - you're always going to get a chunk who were let go to you for a reason.

Personally, I think a good combat arms staff SFC/MSG who is already settled in the unit has far more capability to fill that operational need than a SPC/SGT MI troop who comes in as a new attachment to fill a temporary need. Learning "databases and systems" is the easy part - being able to integrate it into an operational context is quite another. An experienced NCO is always going to be better at putting it into context for the commander than a cherry analyst on his first deployment.

Perhaps what is really needed is an effective O&I course for combat arms NCOs that is similar to the 18F course (the current Battle Staff course doesn't cut it).

[Cavguy]

Personally, I think a good combat arms staff SFC/MSG who is already settled in the unit has far more capability to fill that operational need than a SPC/SGT MI troop who comes in as a new attachment to fill a temporary need. Learning "databases and systems" is the easy part - being able to integrate it into an operational context is quite another. An experienced NCO is always going to be better at putting it into context for the commander than a cherry analyst on his first deployment.

Perhaps what is really needed is an effective O&I course for combat arms NCOs that is similar to the 18F course (the current Battle Staff course doesn't cut it).

No real disagreements there, good points. An E4 or junior E5 MI guy wouldn't be very value added, unless he was really high-speed. (I've always thought E-6 was about right) I have some concerns on this approach. I guess I never had great results from the combat arms S2 NCOIC (MSG) in my experiences, he was more of an assistant S3 SGM than an intel NCO, in practical use. I would see an additional combat arms SFC in the company as quickly becoming a HQ PSG rather than an S2 guy, because in garrison, what would he do?

Understand MI's manning challenges. However, it sure does seem like we have tons of guys running around in intel at nosebleed level, and very few at CO/BN level for a bottom-up intel environment.

I guess I'm looking for an endstate - a competent company intel cell that supports the commander and the platoons that isn't taken from existing authorizations.

[wm]

Personally, I think a good combat arms staff SFC/MSG who is already settled in the unit has far more capability to fill that operational need than a SPC/SGT MI troop who comes in as a new attachment to fill a temporary need. Learning "databases and systems" is the easy part - being able to integrate it into an operational context is quite another. An experienced NCO is always going to be better at putting it into context for the commander than a cherry analyst on his first deployment.

Perhaps what is really needed is an effective O&I course for combat arms NCOs that is similar to the 18F course (the current Battle Staff course doesn't cut it).

Concur. In most units where I ever served, we had a "field first/operations sergeant" that we carved out of hide if need be. Quite often it was the platoon sergeant who had done a bang up job training his/her LT platoon leader or the PSG who was lucky enough to get an LT assigned who already "got it" and could afford to spare that Sr NCO to the company. I think most Bde and higher level staffs probably have a few senior NCOs playing staff "toadie/go-fer" who could be spared to become company operations sergeants (I'm sure that TRADOC units have a bunch, unless things have changed radically), which is what I think we are really advocating for. They might need a little training on how to brief and debrief a patrol and how to poke in the data into a standardized report to the Bn2 shop, but the learning curve would be much less than trying to get an E4 96B up to speed.

[jcustis]

In this, the conventional Army (with substantial differences in context, admittedly) is trying to replicate intel support capabilities that exist in the SF Groups. Unfortunately for the conventional units, the MI slots (and the 18F positions) have long been a part of SF authorized fill, while the rest of the Army is trying to beg, borrow or steal MI soldiers to pick up the slack. I don't see the Army expanding the MI field further to formally fill this requirement.

So, the critical issue is manning. There simply aren't enough analysts / collectors to go around. And the majority of MI troops who do get cut away to work at Co level are going to be junior enlisted - and at that level (with the exception of the rare few with true natural talent) they're not going to have any more ability than the "pick-up artists" you are currently working with. And of the NCOs that do get sent over - you're always going to get a chunk who were let go to you for a reason.

Personally, I think a good combat arms staff SFC/MSG who is already settled in the unit has far more capability to fill that operational need than a SPC/SGT MI troop who comes in as a new attachment to fill a temporary need. Learning "databases and systems" is the easy part - being able to integrate it into an operational context is quite another. An experienced NCO is always going to be better at putting it into context for the commander than a cherry analyst on his first deployment.

Perhaps what is really needed is an effective O&I course for combat arms NCOs that is similar to the 18F course (the current Battle Staff course doesn't cut it).

The Marine Corps' efforts in just that direction (training a NCO in O&I matters) are the right stuff I think, and reading this thread has convinced me that I'd rather carve a guy out of my organization (it would be better to have the extra T/O slot nonetheless) as opposed to picking up a fellow of unknown quantity who I have to train as a shooter on top of getting him to understand me through implicit communication. Working from a good base of implicit communication will always serve as the better foundation.