It has been said that Osama bin Laden has done more for U.S. defense
transformation than all the committees and commissions that had been convened
in Washington prior to Sept. 11. At the same time, the terror attacks
have focused our attention on another urgent requirement that had been
much less discussed prior to September's attacks -- the need to produce real
and profound intelligence transformation.
Such a transformation should produce a dramatically revised view of the
role of the intelligence community. It would acknowledge that the community
is more important than ever before, truly at the "point of the spear"
in our efforts to preempt, monitor, and contain threats. It should also
recognize that we have by far the best intelligence organizations of any
country in the world. But it would also reveal the need for a next-generation
intelligence capability that graduates from the stove-pipes, centralization,
hierarchies, and methods and mentalities of the Cold War to the seamlessly
collaborative, distributed, more open possibilities of the Information
Age. To achieve this transformation, the Bush administration will have
to be prepared to go much further than it has thus far.
The war on terrorism. Transforming intelligence must begin with
the redefinition of its mission. The war on terrorism will obviously be
the top priority for the intelligence community, requiring a more flexible,
flatter, decentralized structure that is able to confront multiple, changing,
global, non-state, asymmetrical threats. President Bush's new doctrine
of preempting threats also demands a much greater emphasis on intelligence.
Indeed, preemption is an intelligence-driven concept, implying that we
can identify threats well before they can be realized and that our information
can be specific and detailed enough that we can act on it without unnecessary
collateral damage, physical or political. Identifying threats early enough
for them to be preempted assumes that the partnership between intelligence
operatives and special forces troops that worked in Afghanistan will become
a mainstay of the war on terrorism and our parallel efforts to contain
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Terrorism, of course, isn't the only threat. The United States must also
keep a sharper watch on states and groups that have access to weapons
of mass destruction. We must also monitor the activities of nations or
other actors that would mobilize opposition to us regionally or globally -- be
they rogue states or larger nations that might work simply to fill the
vacuum of leadership in movements that see America and our values as a
threat. Traditional strategic concerns have also not faded completely
from view even if they do not warrant the headlines they did a year or
more ago. Consequently, reinventing the intelligence community to respond
to the threat du jour, no matter how serious, would be a mistake.
Reinventing America's intelligence community is, to be sure, a complex
task. It is complex because the community itself is so complex, because
its missions are complex, and because that which works well is woven so
intricately with that which does not. Effective reform will require structural
transformation both within the community and among its clients and overseers
on the Hill. It will require rationalized budgeting and new legislation
that is a manifestation of a greater political will to effectively use
our intelligence resources, that indemnifies private sector partners,
and that makes intelligence sharing easier. Clearly, such legislation
is itself one of the steps required to produce the enhanced international,
domestic, and public-private collaboration that will be so critical going
forward. Operational capabilities, human intelligence sources, and electronic
intelligence resources will have to be augmented. In addition, three other
sets of changes that are less often discussed should become part of any
genuine transformation process. They are:
1. Create a domestic intelligence capability. Domestic intelligence
gathering is our weak spot, as the intelligence failures before Sept.
11 vividly demonstrated. The United States needs a new entity dedicated
solely to gathering, analyzing, and sharing domestic intelligence. One
oft-cited model is Britain's MI5, which operates under well-established
rules protecting privacy and civil liberties. In any case, this intelligence-gathering
capability would best be independent of either the FBI or the CIA to ensure
effective focus on its unique mission. It would not be a law enforcement
agency, allaying at least some concerns about potential violations of
privacy. But it should feed the new Department of Homeland Security, the
FBI, and, where appropriate, state and local agencies with a constant
stream of intelligence about the threats among us.
2. Increase use of open sources and external expertise. Next,
we need to vastly increase our ability to harness open-source information -- insights
drawn from the million unclassified pages of new information appearing
on the Web daily, plus that from other public sources. This information,
from chat-room conversations to the text of every significant newspaper
or media outlet worldwide to technical data on new technologies, is not
only critical to our understanding of the world but will be the primary
intelligence tool used by our adversaries. Well-analyzed open-source intelligence
can more easily be shared with the private sector and even state and local
governments with whom the sharing of classified intelligence is impractical.
Since it is unrealistic to expect the best analytical talent to reside
within the U.S. government, the system must be reformed to enable quick,
easy access to a network of reliable, trusted external experts who can
augment internal analytical resources. The recent recognition that we
lack the language skills in the U.S. government to operate effectively
in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, or elsewhere in Central Asia (to
pick just one example) illustrates clearly the advantages of a system
that is designed to identify and tap special skills and knowledge sets
on demand.
We also need legal changes that will indemnify private sector database
owners and protect privacy when government agencies get access to proprietary
information like flight records, hotel receipts, rental car reservations,
and hospital records.
3. Redistribute the analytical structure and provide better user access
to raw intelligence. Fusing information from open and closed sources,
from the 13 separate intelligence agencies in the U.S. government, and
from international collaborators is one challenge of restructuring our
intelligence capacity. Here a reassessment not only of the technological
architecture of the U.S. intelligence community but also of the analytical
and intelligence-sharing model of that community is in order. We must
fight the impulse on the part of some bureaucrats historically associated
with the intelligence community to centralize everything as a solution
and we must also fight the impulse among other equally savvy and turf-conscious
bureaucrats to ensure that every department has its own capacity to do
everything.
The new model suggested in the administration's proposed Department of
Homeland Security is a step in the right direction; it provides for the
department to be fed raw intelligence from as many useful sources as possible
and then to conduct its own analysis. Professional intelligence gatherers -- using
the tools available for signals interception, gathering of imagery, human
intelligence gathering, and open-source intelligence gathering -- should
have the job of building databases that are accessible as broadly as possible
across agencies with policy responsibility. Different levels of security
clearance could protect access to particularly sensitive information.
Then analysts who understand the needs of end-user agencies -- the FBI, say,
or the Homeland Security Department -- could provide the refined product
for use within the agency.
There are approximately 13,000 analysts in the U.S. intelligence community.
Many of them view their jobs through the prism of bureaucracies that have
their own interests, culture, and instincts for self-preservation. Perhaps
once, in a world in which it was difficult to make raw intelligence flow
as freely among different locations or in which it was harder to protect
it, that made sense. But today, those analysts can be a distributed network
located in and among the end-user agencies who themselves have special
expertise that can better shape the analysis. This integration of intelligence
more deeply into the life of all end-user agencies is critical to produce
greater efficiency and to allow policymakers access to the broadest possible
range of credible views. It is also the way that modern, information-driven
businesses everywhere are being structured -- giving information tools to
user communities and breaking down centralized legacy systems.
The key to transforming U.S. intelligence is to change our fundamental
thinking. We must move from our traditional view of intelligence as a
sequestered world, insular and apart. Secrecy is essential in certain
areas and can be strengthened with new technologies, but the culture of
secrecy has also retarded the growth of the intelligence community and
hampered its ability to rise to the new set of challenges before it -- challenges
that at their core require demand enhanced collaboration with other agencies,
with law enforcement, with the military, with states, with localities,
and with the private sector. Holding information too closely stifles sharing,
breeds distrust among end-users, and sometimes prevents the joining of
all the pieces of a larger puzzle.
The process of reinvention has suffered a setback in that the Congress
and the administration have decided to put it off until the Department
of Homeland Security is operational. While establishing the department
should be an urgent priority, it does not exist in a vacuum. Without an
effective intelligence apparatus this new war cannot be fought or won.
Without it even a well conceived Department of Homeland Security is blind
and could be seriously hamstrung on the domestic front. In the best of
all possible worlds, therefore, we would realize that the creation of
the Department of Homeland Security is actually just one of several critical
steps involved in reshaping the U.S. security establishment to respond
to the new set of threats this nation faces.
