Afterthoughts & Additions

1. Afterthoughts & Additions Robert David Steele Intelligence Coach bear@oss.net Prepared 30 August 2003

2. Intent • Recently two members of a highly-qualified audience of government professionals challenged me on both the relevance and accuracy of my work. One was a mid-career CIA employee, the other a mid-career Army NGIC employee. • These slides are my attempt to help them see the forest.

3. Premises 1 You don’t know what you don’t know. 2 Working 80 hour weeks is a sign of dedication, but also a sign of failure above 3 There have been improvements in national support to tactical operations, but to use a football analogy, we have gotten from the 10 yard line to the 50 yard line, and have a long way to go before we are fully capable.

4. From Overview Briefing 1 Collection is still terrible. No matter how good an analyst might be, they cannot overcome severe deficiencies in collection. 2 Processing is abysmal. It lacks geospatial tags for integrating multi-disciplinary information at the strategic or interagency level--localize solutions are fine, but do not address the broader community shortfalls.

5. Digital Analog Oral/Unpublished English Language NRO NSA FBIS UN/STATE Foreign Languages* CIA/DO Cascading Deficiencies: 1) Don’t even try to access most information 2) Can’t process hard-copy into digital 3) Can’t translate most of what we collect *29 predominant languages, over 3,000 distinct languages in all. Global Intelligence FailureBreakdown in Collection and Understanding

6. 50% Less Costly Does Not Exist OSINT HUMINT More Satisfying STATE SIGINT IMINT MASINT 0% 50% Global Processing FailureBreakdown in Exploitation, Dissemination

7. From New Rules Briefing 1 This briefing was provided in hard copy but not delivered--students got books, not read. 2 Global coverage of open sources in foreign languages is at best 20% of what could be had--probably closer to 10% 2 Sources are out of balance, we do not go “two levels down”, and we don’t ask or cannot answer three of the four collection questions.

8. Rule 5Intelligence without translation is ignorant Millions OSS Terrorism Project 1999 Arabic, Catelan, Chinese, Danish, Dari, Dutch, English, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Kurmanji, Norwegian, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Urdu • USA failed to translate captured documents from first World Trade Center bombing and from Philippines • Need global network of on-call translators in 29+ languages • Web-based

9. Rule 6Sources (& methods) balance matters more • Must strike better balance between • technical (-) and human (+) collection • secret (-) and open sources (+) • collection (-) and processing (+) • production (-) and reflection (+)

10. Rule 7“Two levels down” is the new standard • Nation-states are old targeting standard • New standard is at the province, company, and individual level • This is a double order of magnitude increase in the difficulty of being adequate State Targets -- Lots of Assets Organizational Targets -- Very Few Assets Individual Targets -- Virtually No Assets

11. Rule 18Collection doctrine more sophisticated • FIND the data if you already know it • GET the data if it can be gotten free from an ally or NATO or the church • BUY the data from the private sector • TASK classified collectors as a last resort FIND -- free, internal GET -- free, allies BUY -- low cost TASK -- expensive