Wheat from the chaff
When it comes to military intelligence, you get what you pay for. You pay a little to know a little, get a heads up. You pay more to know more certainly. If you want to know a particular thing you must design create and fund a specific program to gain that particular thing. Then, if you want to act on what you know, you pay again, and pay very steeply. The information that comprises intelligence is gained by gleaning open sources, and through techniques and channels of clandestine nature. Acting draws a path back to these latter and they dry up or are thwarted. They must then be rebuilt or new methods provided for at great expense.
This problem of knowing and acting is compounded if the action desired is a large scale demonstration of force on an international stage. Legitimate use of force asks for a high level of knowing. It wants to be multipily sourced, vetted, and demonstrable. This last means that you must lay something out - something akin to common legal expectations of evidence that would be required to deprive someone in civil society of property or life either to the people of the nation or nations or their representatives. War is not arrest or corporal punishment, it is capital punishment.
In many ways Intelligence is simply a subset of information gathering in general with its own group of techniques. Communications analysis falls into the two general catagories : quantitative and qualitative. One could look at how much communication traffic appears to be occurring and between how many nodes. This would include not only electronic means, but physical means: couriers and transactions. One could also intercept and possess these communications and try to determine their meaning or put it into some sort of context.
Photo-intelligence is another of these technical means. I learned the beginnings of aerial photo-intelligence where everyone in the military used to learn it, a school at Lowery AFB in Denver CO. Photo-intelligence runs the gamut between very objective and almost entirely subjective. Mostly it attempts to identify activity through associated physical objects. It attempts to ascertain the properties of objects: size shape, shadow, texture, type, color, material. From there it tries to speculate what can and cannot occur with, around, or within these objects or object clusters - their purpose. Or as we said at Lowery: What? I didn't join the damn Navy to learn trigonometry
[CPO] Sailor?
Sorry chief-- I didn't join the damn Navy to learn trigonometry, Sir!
that's better sailor .
When Secretary of state Powell went to the United Nations I was hoping he would have something to say. Something that would make me think they had something. A look through the keyhole that would sweep away the disparity between the administrations single-mined read of the situation and everyone else's questioning or more nuanced reads. They had nothing. They had pictures of buildngs and complexes and were saying things about them that were at the end of a long chain of conjecture and assumption, that had gotten beyond what the photographed objects could say for themselves.
Human Intelligence or humint is the biggest part of intelligence work, direct observation or inquiry. There is a tendency to see this work as people versus gadgets, and to place people ahead of the antennas and cameras. The Navy, used to working with mechanical devices, had no such prejudices. If a collection raised more questions than it answered, you tried to get closer and more personal with the next round. The intelligence and counter-intelligence worlds are a paranoid cowboy culture, and delusional mind sets like the FBI's Robert Hanson are not as abborational as some would prefer to believe. If you are familar with it - think of the book Memoirs found in a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem. The various Iraqi expatriates told the administrations AEI crowd a great many things, for their own reasons. Little or none of it usefully true. You get what you pay for.
Intelligence is a multifaceted and fragile thing. The intelligence community conducts collection and analysis - then they provide customer service by developing products. A lot of attention gets focused on a few key products - like the president's daily briefing and the national intelligence estimate. Since the Ford administration a number of people circulating in and around the military industrial complex (a phrase made memorable in a speech by Dwight Eisenhower) have been hammering away at these products as exercises in bureaucratic pollyanna groupthink. No matter what the threat from whatever direction the CIA was underestimating it. This heterodox inconclasm produced two results. first the CIA under this constant pressure began producing top level estimates which lay open to interpretation and were grounded only in their footnotes. The second thing is that as these people came together in the second Bush admistration now holding high ranking offices in the DOD and White House, They seem to have been unable to comprehend the totality of their power as the new institutional orthodoxy and produced intelligence largely divorced from reality. Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith's office of Special plans produced a privileged stove-piped narrative systematically pressuring the community and
distorting the product - gaming the system. The CIA, out of the business of critical analysis made no waves rocked no boats.
The Neoconservatives have talked a lot about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and democracies in the middle east. There is little evidence of either to be seen. President Bush is pleased to tell people that he knows that Iraq will not become an Islamic Republic because Adnan Pachachi, Ahmad Chalabi, and Abdel Aziz al Hakim have sat in his office and told him that's not what will happen Daily outrage, the nation. The U.S. and the CPA have encouraged low level civic democracy on one hand
In Iraqi Towns, Electoral Experiment Finds Some Success (washingtonpost.com)
while fighting national democratic aspirations as much as they can with the other (Guardian Unlimited | Of course the White House fears free elections in Iraq. Seeking to control a constitution writing and annointed process that will allow them to turn sovereign authority over to a preselected few. When the talked-about reasons melt away before your eyes like a soap bubble dragonfly, what is left is not an impenetrable mystery. What was done, was done for the other obvious reasons. Paul Wolfowitz has been saying as much since May. Iraq does indeed swim on a sea of oil , and the battalions and squadrons we had in Saudi Arabia will sit better and ever more visibly in the long run in Iraq.
The neoconservative monomania on Iraq was a false positive that left them looking on Libya, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea. You could call these false negitives. Al Qaeda's move towards outreach global terrorism got by them and the FBI. There is little the CIA can say about this, they seem to have come to conceive their new national role as awaiting and sweating the New Right's fantasies
CIA chief defends his analysts | csmonitor.com. The scale of the breakdown and degree of denial (Kojo Nnamdi interview. AEI fellow Laurie Mylroie 12Feb04) is the real story in all of this, it is undoubtedly what is pushing David Kay in the direction he has been going. They are eyeless in Gaza at the mill with the slaves.
Call this the Post Dreadnaught Era of intelligence collection. The Dreadnaught was a British Warship completed in 1906. It was revolutionary in the totality of its design and it started an arms race even before it hit the water. It was also very large, and took a couple of years to build. Displacing nearly 22,000 tons some five or six hundred feet long and made of metal, it pretty easy to spot from a distance and awkward to hid. Formerly things that could hurt a nation: warships, fleets of warships, or armies were like that; awkward to hid. Now things that kill the better part of a large city are luggage sized. Chemical weapons can be assembled in the same facilities that manufacture other industrial chemicals. Nuclear weapons while much harder to understand design and build, are open to component architecture and incremental transfer of parts, technique and assembly.
One element remains constant; the resources and interests of a state are involved in these. Even within the realm of stateless terrorism competence and skill sets, seem to emanate from the direction of state security forces. This is why some still believe
the War in Iraq Was the Right Mistake to Make. Until a time when the granularity of intelligence collection catches up with the granularity of potential threats volatile grand-strategizing will remain ascendent and this will never deliver opportunity or democracy to anyone.
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