All war is based on deception

Introduction

            Immediately following master Sun’s famous dictum we are given a good idea of how to turn it into practice, and it sounds a lot like fourth generation warfare or even like hybrid warfare: Be where the enemy does not expect you, do what the enemy does not think you will do, look like something you are not. As important as deception is then, it is remarkable that we have to wait until the end of the book to see how we should deal with an opponent also taking the same advice: we should spy on them. Sun Tzu believes spying—and by proxy one supposes in intelligence–is an essential part of successful warfare. His rational is decidedly clear eyed and like so much of Sun rings modern and fresh: spying saves resources[2].

The costs associated with spying in the modern era are enormous. The 2009 ‘official’ budget for the National Intelligence Program of the United States was just shy of $50Billion[3]. Is this still a justifiable cost? Sun Tzu suggests it may be, especially compared to the alternative: fruitlessly burning resources, and ultimately defeat. If “All war is based on deception” as master Sun would have us believe and practice, it follows that to practice war there must be secrets. What of this age then, and these wars? On the modern battlefield the notion of secrecy is under siege, and in many ways rightfully so, for holding on too close to secrecy has done us no favors, and could well led the United States and her allies’ right back to the ruin they were designed to avoid.

            Little research has been done addressing the growing capabilities of private internet based entities in areas traditionally considered “secret intelligence”. Companies such as Google are now developing sensor capabilities that 20 years ago would have been exclusively the province of governments and then developing automated exploitation capabilities that government never envisioned.

            This paper attempts to address this gap. It also attempts to predict the direction of this trend and what affect it will have on the intelligence community. Finally it suggests ways the overall IC can become more effective by, at least partially, embracing the “open secret” community. The Author does not suggest the abandonment of secrets but rather that their importance will be reduced as civilian technologies in the hands of individuals erode their reason for being.

How We Got Here

            The 1990’s seem to have been era when exceptional-ism reined king in the zeitgeist of international affairs: The collapse of the Soviet Union coupled with the rapid destruction of Iraq, (one of the Soviet’s most valued client states) suggested not only a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) but also the “end of history” all together. Now of course we see that others saw history differently than Francis Fukuyama, and that more to the point of this paper, felt a need to respond to that vision militarily.

RMA

            The concept of RMA is best defined by Thomas Kearney and Eliot Cohen, two of the oldest proponents of it: “…a quantum change in the means of waging war and its outcome, such that the very face of battle—its lethality pace and geographical scope —is transformed. In most cases, a revolution in war involves the rise of new warrior elites, new forms of organization and new dominant weapons”[4] This was the case following the end of Desert Storm/Shield. Iraq had previously defeated Iran; one of the Middle East’s best trained, best equipped, and best manned militaries. Iran was still feeding off the ample stockpile of equipment sold to the Shah by the West and retained many Western trained personnel, especially the Air Force[5]. At the same time Iraq, as a Soviet Union client state, mirrored the Soviets in both equipment and tactics. Thus Iraq, a 1980’s Soviet military, defeated a circa 1978 Western military in a way that felt like a knock down drag out fight. It took the better part of a decade to do it. That it took the ‘coalition’ only a few months to thoroughly defeat the same military that had just defeated Iran on face show an RMA.

GW

            The alternative to “revolutionary” view of warfare was the “generational” view.  Because 9/11 proved that indeed there was no end to history, that religion really did still matter, and that technology was only as good as the flawed people who used and designed it, the generational view of warfare was much less “exceptional” in its outlook.  Refined about a decade after the concept of RMA really took hold it conceived of the conflicts of 2004 as Fourth Generation (4GW) and defined them this way: “… (4GW) uses all available networks—political, economic, social, and military—to convene the enemy’s political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is an evolved form of insurgency.”[6]  It too is on the way out, however: having been with us for “seventy years”[7] something new maybe underfoot: the fifth generation of warfare (5GW)[8] where super-empowered individuals or more likely microcells are able to project themselves on the state, causing untold damage.  This may well be the wave of the future: “In the UK’s view, al-Qaeda is likely to fragment and may not survive in its current form. Instead, smaller, “self-starter groups” will likely grow stronger and more prominent.”[9]

CIR ; 5GW

            While the debate between the two camps has at points been acrimonious, there is between them a belief that, whatever they thought of warfare in the 1990’s something very different is going on now. Frank Hoffman, perhaps to the annoyance of “traditional” RMA thinkers[10] has labeled the new RMA “Complex Irregular Warfare”.[11] T.X. Hammes, while giving short shrift to technology in the hands of the military[12] acknowledges the potential devastating use of new technology in the hands of individuals and insurgents.[13]The emerging security environment, whether regarded as 5GW or another RMA is a reflection of the current civilian culture. Eliot Cohen indicated that societal change is at the heart of past ‘big changes’ and this one will be no different: “(the RMA) will be shaped by powerful forces emanation from beyond the domain of warfare”.[14] It is also a reaction to the dominance of the United States and her allies in virtually all other military endeavors. What are the societal changes that will shape the next ‘big change’? They are at their core media innovations: “a democratization of communications, an increase in public access, dramatic cost reductions in both production and distribution, and a greater understanding of how to exploit images that create and reinforce a particular ideology or narrative. Like the French levée en masse, the evolving character of communications is altering the patterns of popular mobilization, and having profound implications on why and how people will fight. The availability of modern media in all its many forms has radically changed the manner by which adversaries acquire and disseminate strategic intelligence, recruit, rehearse, and promote their cause”[15]

Politics

            One flaw with both Generational and Revolutionary interpretations of warfare is that their proponents give little space for politics, which is ultimately the reason wars are fought. It might also be the reason it is so hard to decide if a big change, either generationally or revolutionarily has occurred.  Rather than military impact alone, a working understanding might go like this: When one power defeats another militarily in an obviously one sided way, other significant powers are forced to make a political choice:

•  Accept an alliance with the winning power
• Quickly copy the winning power
• Forge an alliance with a power that copied the winning power
• Create your own ‘big change’.

            Formality of the alliance is not the point. The alliance can be overt or secret, implied or unambiguous, it makes little difference. Each passing monumental change requires more expenditure and increasing reliance on the nation’s industrial and technological base[16] and they are intimately connected to the zeitgeist and prevailing technologies of the time, as seen during the Napoleonic era[17], where national awakening resulted in nationalist armies[18] and later in the industrial age which created railroad mobile forces.

RMA Evolves

            State centered ‘big changes’ of the past are build one on top of the other. For example to be a full participant in the last major change, C4ISR, you also had to be able to wage war in the style before it: Nuclear weapons with reliable strategic level delivery systems (“nuclear triad”).  The last two RMAs have seen a sharp decrease in the numbers of full participants. The nuclear RMA has had only seven participants to date. Nuclear weapons, because of their destructive power, are unlikely to be actually used even in supposedly ‘unstable’ situations like that between Israel and the potential nuclear power state Iran[19]. New tactics were needed to counter threats and minimize casualties, but not predestine nuclear war. While others may have parts of the C4ISR picture, only the United States has thus far been willing to take on the full range of expenses necessary to fully implement the now familiar list of improvements[20]: GPS, advanced communications, precision guided munitions, and precision strike capability. At the end of Desert Storm/Shield only the United States retained all the necessary assets to be regarded as a great power.

New Big Change Competitive Adaption

            It is, in short a product of a competitive adaption process. Completive adaption is organizational learning not “in isolation but within complex adaptive systems, where both sets of imperfectly informed, interdependent players gather and analyze information to change practices and outmaneuver their opponents…Theses interactions are fundamentally dynamic. Players who fail to respond quickly to adverse circumstances…do not perform particularly well…”[21] While Michael Kenney’s definition may be fine-tuned to the interaction of law enforcement to narco-traffickers and to security forces to terrorists it gives us a key insight to the history of warfare, how we got to this point, and where we go from here. Intelligence is central to that process. This is because “intelligence, at its core  is less about getting the facts right or wrong than providing competitive advantage in foresight and situational awareness to decision makers”[22] Intelligence is essence to responding quickly “In an environment marked by the rapid appearance and disappearance of issues or targets; by a relatively finite range of target states but virtually infinite set of real or potential target groups; and by extraordinary volatility in our technical environment; the only measure that counts is how well US intelligence aligns itself with the world beyond its walls”. [23]

            The new ‘big change’ is a shocking and total reversal of this paradigm: stateless organizations using commercialized near military grade equipment (GPS, Internet, satellite and cellular communication) along with the element of surprise to achieve their strategic objectives. The post-Cold War era has been defined by the increase in connectivity and linkages between states and among societies. Conveniences such as the internet, instant banking, cheap travel, and mobile phones greatly increase the global reach of terrorist organizations.[24]The notion that al Qaeda operates in a uniquely enabling global environment is reinforced both by its deeds and, most especially, by its means.[25]Rather than one power that can call all the shots via extremely expensive technology, weapons and manpower, the new enemy treats all these things as commodities, much as global business does: technology is cheap, desperate people are cheaper, and suicide bombers don’t need a lot of training. Its main traits are it is cheap, the attack rage from very sophisticated to remarkably simple while the attackers themselves are no more sophisticated (the technology is getting better and making up the difference), the speed with which decisions are made, the lack of a strong central organizational authority. Whether one uses terms like convergence, net war, or fourth-generation warfare to describe the systemic characteristics of transnational terror or insurgent groups, the underlying propositions are quite similar–namely that networked organizations are used both to create capabilities and to exploit an enemy’s vulnerabilities. In both the virtual and real worlds, networked support mechanisms are crucial to the success of transnational movements.[26]While it is Islamic and Norco-terrorists that are the vanguard for this new terror, the very openness and “cheapness” of this will insure that virtually all players will have their turn at bat.

State Responds to New Big Change

            The state has options. Following the paradigm of competitive adaption to its logical conclusion, the state too will respond in one of the ways outlined above — likely, it will choose to quickly emulate, decentralize some of apparatus, while retaining centralized control of other parts of itself. The monopolies the state has on both legal intelligence and still has on legal violence, once core elements of the state’s rational to exist will be central to the efforts. This will be so at least for the United States, though it might not be so for other states that may eventually choose to ally themselves with terrorists, possibly do to massive internal demographic shifts. This situation will remain unit there is another ‘big change’ While such events are exceptionally difficult to predict, it goes without saying that the rate with which man acquires new knowledge is quickening, and thus it should surprise no one if such changes happen more often.  This paper will deal centrally with the intelligence question.

Asymmetric Intelligence

            The change within the intelligence community since the end of the cold war in at least one way reflects the challenges felt by the over all military and could not be starker:

            Whereas cold war strategy was premised on the symmetry of mutual knowledge and fear between two super-powers, the war on terror is premised on the fear of the unknown. As US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in 2002, the new enemy is ‘the unknown, the uncertain, the unseen, and the unexpected.’…In the war on terror, being the strongest is not enough. The concept of ‘asymmetric warfare’ thus serves a useful purpose in re-describing military might as itself a kind of vulnerability.[27]

            This is one of the many paradoxes of fighting in an environment where the weak, bold, and massively decentralized have advantages over the strong, slow and structured. Succeeding in an asymmetric intelligence environment will require the United States to address that the problem, likely through mirroring, at least in part. As we will see the Untied States chose differently.

Civilian Intelligence

            Vital to any clandestine organization is the ability to collect information and keep track of activities. Modern transnational terrorism presents problems to intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. While geography certainly plays into the difficulties in tracking down figures like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in the mountainous Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan, the process of globalization has created a newly difficult topography that terrorists can use to great benefit[28]. The state no longer has the near-monopoly on intelligence as it once did. Indeed civilian technology is evolving rapidly eroding the states ability to keep up. Commoditization if technology is resulting in “civilian” equipment (superior to military equipment of even a decade ago)being sold at extremely low cost, which in turn greatly increasing the amount of people who could benefit from the experience of, for example, Iraqi fighters. “The basic technology trends behind the current Information Revolution can be summarized as in three phrases: growing capabilities, falling costs and greater connectivity”[29] This results in what John Robb calls “open source warfare,”[30] where independent or semi-independent “super-empowerment”[31]actors can use the internet and other technologies to make attacks that once were the province of well-organized terrorist cells. Indeed the over all trend is not looking good for the establishment: the speed at which information is collected and processed; even our ability to distinguish collection, processing, and analysis as distinct phases of an information cycle; and the speed of decisions—will continue to change at blinding speed.[32]Writing from the vantage point of the traditional press NikGowing points out that “Overall, this surge of civilian information is having an asymmetric negative impact on the traditional structures of power”[33]. This is just as true for the IC as it is for the press, or really any other institution.

Terrorist Using New Tech

            Numerous specific examples of terrorists using the latest in technology can be cited to illustrate this point, and it is a consistent element of terrorist planning, a method of creating efficiencies and advantages where the authorities otherwise have huge advantages. That terrorists are willing to use new technology should come to a surprise to no one: as far back as 1995, officials responding to a fire in an apartment complex in Manila uncovered a terrorist plot. One of the key findings in this case was a laptop computer that contained the details of a massive plot to commit terrorist acts.  The plot, known by the conspirators as “Oplan Bojinka”, involved smuggling explosives onto several US airlines coming from Asia. If successful, the plan would have resulted in the deaths of over 4000 people, and the undetected escape of the perpetrators.[34]The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 involved the use of such technology as satellite technology, air travel, fax technology, internet access, and other forms. Terrorists have recently even used Facebook to recruit followers with notable results.[35]

More About Civilian Intel

            The state once had sole access and control of satellite images, and the sole legal authority (to say nothing of technical ability) to break secure communication links. Yet recently there have been indicators of a shift in technically derived intelligence. The U.S., long the master of TECHINT faces a challenge not to another nation-state but to a combination of private industry and foes willing to use ruthlessness and surprise. The use by terrorists of commercially available satellite imagery[36] that can be manipulated in ways Kennedy could hardly have dreamed of during the Cuban Missile Crisis is only the beginning of a coming equalization in TECHINT between the state and openly available sources. That Google Earth, for example, is used both by HAMAS[37] and NATO for imagery is treated as common knowledge now, whereas 20 years ago the notion that the United States and Soviet Union using the same systems to spy one another would have been unthinkable. New technologies from GOOGLE and others would have been considered highly classified projects a few short years ago: capturing logs from WiFi networks[38] is nothing more than SIGINT for example. Nor do governments retain a monopoly on secure communications:  the FBI, for example has recently warned that the use of encryption technology can secure communications of terrorists.[39]In a first for the state publically available intelligence is in some respects actually superior to classified intelligence: face recognition technology applied to the web[40] is another (very novel) form of IMINT, for which there is no ‘classified’ version. The same is true for the very sophisticated GOOGLE street view which also has the advantage of being produced in such a way that it is extremely useful and tremendously flexible.  It should be noted here that, at least for the time being and likely for long into the future these technologies will be of far more use to the enemy than to the state. There is no GOOGLE street view of villages hidden in the ToraTora Mountains, but there is a clearly identified GOOGLE street view of what is allegedly SAS HQ in London![41]Indeed as Jennifer Sims points out this deepening and broadening of private sector surveillance, together with its public acceptability represents a double-edged sword. On the one had the prospective reach of national intelligence is increased of the purpose of warning and crisis management on the other hand terrorist have at hand a society prewired for their own purpose[42]

            But maybe the best example of this accelerating trend is the 2008 Mumbai attach where attackers had prepared for the attack by consulting Google Earth, used Satellite telephones, GPS receivers to plot escape paths and navigate by boat, used 3G blackberry phones to monitor the media live and thus “counter law enforcement and military efforts to contain and control the movements of the attackers”[43],[44]. Not only does the 21st-century global system create operational benefits, but it has changed the strategic environment in ways amenable to transnational groups like al Qaeda. The strategic picture is best visualized as a broad enabling environment of bad governance, nonexistent social services, and unmet expectations that characterizes much of the developing world.[45]The assumption made by the policy makers that the west will always enjoy an advantage in TECHINT is open to question, or more likely the assumption itself maybe irrelevant.

            Australia,[46] Britain,[47] Canada[48] and no doubt many other countries are sure to continue investigations and consider measures in an attempt to stop GOOGLE and others from conducting what is, in essence, Signals Intelligence.   There is no reason to believe that the capabilities themselves will be equally reined in. Similar experiences attempting to impose law on such entities as Napster (a file sharing application that allowed for the illegal sharing of music) successfully controlled a business entity but untimely spawned the creation of the leaderless and highly decentralized eMule[49]. In the context of strategic communications Dr. David Betz notes that “global Jihad has nothing close to the physical resources of even the smallest Western state. But in the virtual dimension all that power simply does not count for much.”[50] In the context of intelligence it may come to mean even less.

Is it Enough?

            However clever Google street view might be for the vision of 5GW to truly come to pass however requires more from the internet than just this? Does the internet have what is necessary for an individual to take on the state and win? In terms of domestic targets for terrorism, the United States, in addition to highly populated areas such as office buildings, shopping centers, schools and the like, has a large number of vulnerable targets.[51]  America has ten nuclear production and research sites that require protection.[52]  Additionally, there are over 800,000 locations in the United States that produce, store, or consume hazardous materials that are virtually unprotected from terrorist activities[53]. Terrorists typically have to reveal themselves only twice in a given operation: first to do surveillance and then to conduct execution. One useful use of the internet for a terrorist then is to reduce exposure by not having to do surveillance. In a sense the internet, for sort of ‘standard’ terrorist operations has already achieved this: airline schedules are posted online, for example. But to conduct a more innovative attack the internet seems to only offer partial answers. According to a 2007 report from RAND, one of the few, if not the only study one to comprehensively analyze how much information of about US key infrastructure is in fact online and view it form the perspective of terrorists, the answer is remarkable but mixed[54]. The study started with the openly available US Army information requirements document and a copy of the ‘Manchester document’ which is the closest thing we have to terrorist “doctrine,”” to guide information requirements.  While none of the targets selected had quite enough online to make physical surveillance completely redundant, enough was there to significantly reduce surveillance requirements. That trend will likely continue, an perhaps accelerate as more and more ‘normal’ people post individually made pictures and accounts of their experiences on line. Even surveillance itself, though, can be eased by the internet as it can yield almost any technological gadget to any individual in the world with the desire and valid credit card terrorists have a nearly unlimited supply of the latest weaponry, surveillance, and espionage tools[55] in near anonymity.[56]This contrasts with what is available currently to the would be Terrorist in the realm of what he has to develop for himself: WMD would be necessary for the individual to truly take on the state and win, and of those the most likely, in the author’s opinion, to achieve the desired aim with relative anonymity are chemical and  bio-weapons. Online information that is useful, currently at least is scarce:

            “Best described as ‘inspirational’, they are generally crude amalgamations of widely available, open-source material and rarely provide sufficient detail to allow safe and successful production of sophisticated chemical or biological agents, and much less help the reader to weaponries or deliver them. Nevertheless, these manuals reveal the existence of what appears to be a small and committed network within the online jihadist community that has an enduring interest in the development of CBW, and hence analysis of these manuals is important to gauge their efficacy.”[57]

            We would be foolish to think that simply because the moment is not here that it is not coming. Such a failure of imagination would result in unthankful consequences. Rather now is the moment to rethink the intelligence community to respond to these possibilities in a predictive manner.

Intelligence responds, but not an intelligent response

            A word of warning in advance: “The absence of declassified information on the daily performance of intelligence agencies makes the evaluation of intelligence reforms difficult.”[58] This paper is by its nature the product of an intelligence officer who has served tactically, operationally and strategically in Military intelligence for ten years. In intelligence circles that means I’m just now starting to understand the enemy, and my own agencies. That said when I look around my office I see so many things: cubicles, sensitive material, analysts. But not one is a native Arabic speaker. Not one Muslim. Most here do not even experience their own religion majestically; it is very hard for them to understand why anyone, when scientific facts of the world are so clear, would ever see majesty in something so plainly irrational: it is clear that the factors motivating some insurgents today are not reflected by broad historical trends, nor do they follow previously recognized phases. Even the insurgent’s organizations are vastly different. More importantly, some insurgents do not seek clearly defined political objectives or attainable goals. Some do not even seek the overthrow of an existing regime or control of a state’s ability to govern; for these groups and individuals just participating in the jihad is enough.”[59]

            The experience that the people in the office bring to their work cannot be dismissed, and they are as a whole broadly and deeply educated. Most are military veterans, a few have very grey hair, have retired more than once, from the military, then the government, and now working as a defence contractor, but seem to have never really left this place, much less this community. For them it isn’t so much about the money, but rather it is about ‘they’ and ‘them’.  Few of them, I would say, are uniquely educated though some are uniquely, if not exactly relevantly, experienced. The work rarely takes advantage of the gifts those few have. We are chosen not so much because we speak the right language, but because we speak the military language well.  We are chosen because we can speak the language that is understandable to military and civilian staffs—short to the point, clear beyond nuance, the stuff of power point. The language of people who want answers not more questions, even if more questions is all the information really allows confidently. To do this and still remain accurate we must report on very small things—guy moves from here to there, for instance, and then attempt to draw conclusions. The common analogy in intelligence is the puzzle, but in reality it is more like pixilated art, where really near it looks like something, really far it looks like something, but in the middle you see all the white space. My experience is not by far unique. An estimated 854,000 people[60] hold a Top Secret clearance in the United States Intelligence Community. That is the first prerequisite necessary for becoming an analyst. While it cannot be said that the analysts are all working on Counter-Terrorism, it is safe to say that most were hired as a response to 9/11[61], and that is reflected in the level of experience required to do the job “ half the analysts are relatively inexperienced… Contract analysts are often straight out of college and trained at corporate headquarters.”[62] It is no wonder that as “American strategists and policymakers”[63] to say nothing of intelligence analysts have such a hard time shaking of their own cultural precepts.

Sharing Intel Internationally is Tough

            The character of intelligence agencies throughout the world is one that limits the sharing of information necessary for the international fight against terrorism. This is in part because of cultural differences in what constitutes a “threat” for example European counterterrorism approaches that target operational cells and overlook support cells that disseminate propaganda, recruit members, procure supplies, maintain transport, forge false and adapted identities, facilitate travel, and organize safe houses fail to address the underlying problems of infrastructure.[64]In the wake of the September 11th attacks, the one international agency that has attempted to coordinate international intelligence-sharing efforts has been the United Nations.[65]  The UN has acted by passing a number of resolutions to extend and reinforce the scope of its existing anti-terrorism measures.[66] In passing Security Council resolution 1373 in September 2001, the United Nations has strengthened international co-operation against terrorism and required states to take action against terrorists and terrorist funding within their jurisdictions, including freezing their assets.[67] It has established the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee to act as a monitoring body to ensure states comply with resolution 1373[68]. More recently, in March 2004, it acted to strengthen the committee’s mandate. Under resolution 1390, adopted by the Security Council in January 2002, all states are required to take action against the terrorists listed by another Security Council Committee, ‘the 1267 Committee’.[69] That committee’s listing process relates to terrorist entities associated with Osama bin Laden, with al-Qaeda, and with the Taliban.[70] That committee also monitors compliance with the comprehensive travel, financial and arms sanctions that were put in place against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.[71] Perhaps it should go without saying, but UN resolutions for all of their well-meaning are still totally unenforceable, and are therefore routinely ignored where ever they conflict with perceived national interests.

In Another Part the Reason is Technological

            American security is to maximize, in extent and in duration, our technical advantages, including military technology.  At some point, of course, these advantages create other organic imbalances, as, for example, may be occurring in the gap between the capabilities of the American military and those of its allies, even in the other industrial democracies.  At some point, gaps of this sort render meaningful coalition operations inefficient or even dangerous.[72]

            To say nothing about by through and with partners who can range from countries with basically no secure networks to “influence holders” that are in fact the real people in charge of a situation. In this way, and referring back to a previous thought, our very strengths technically become our weakness.

Sharing Intel among ourselves is tough.

            Ambivalent responses from the international community only represent part of the problem facing the United States Intelligence community. Within the United States, over twenty agencies responsible for intelligence-gathering were forced to combat years of rivalry and fighting over limited funding, to cooperate fully in intelligence-sharing. A key lesson drawn from Congressional and other inquiries into the September 11 intelligence failure is that the government did not make good use of the information it had already collected and failed to utilize information-sharing authorities at its disposal.[73] The United States has traditionally drawn distinctions between law enforcement and foreign intelligence, and between agencies operating domestically and those focused overseas.[74] Sometimes these distinctions have been seen as creating a barrier that has prevented the useful sharing of information and other forms of collaboration among various agencies.[75] One theme of the 2001 Patriot Act was to break down the barrier between law enforcement and intelligence.  There were, in fact, many such barriers built between and within agencies over the past sixty years as a result of various legal, policies, institutional, and individual factors.[76] Some barriers were meant to protect individual rights.[77] Others were meant to protect national security interests. Some of the barriers meant to protect legitimate interests were bureaucratically misconstrued to the point that they served neither civil liberties nor national security.[78]

            Faced with an increasingly defused and open and networked enemy, the answer of the United States was to centralize the intelligence community under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) ostensibly to increase collaboration across the Intelligence Community (IC)[79] in an effort to and prevent what was perceived to be one of the main failings of the pre 9/11 IC FBI, CIA, and DoD aren’t talking to one another. The results thus far have been underwhelming: a recent survey of the IC found that only 30% of managers in the community “Are seeing considerably more collaboration” within their oven agency since six years ago[80]. While information on the matter is sparse, it is safe to assume, generally, that the further an analyst goes from his bureaucratic safety net, the less likely s/he is to collaborate, with an analyst most likely to collaborate within their own agency and least likely to collaborate with foreigners outside the Intelligence community.  The results are predictable:

            Most scholars would agree that hierarchies like those found in the intelligence community are capable of missing available information. Typically, information only makes its way up the chain if, at each level of the hierarchy, the supervisor chooses to pass it on. Accordingly, an unpopular speculation can easily be blocked by one of the many links in the chain. Moreover, even if the relevant information reaches the top of the hierarchy, the actual evaluations and policy prescriptions are made by a small set of individuals.[81]

There is An Awful Lot of Material out There

            The Central Intelligence Agency, which is the premier intelligence-gathering apparatus of the United States, consists of two major divisions. One, the operations directorate is responsible for gathering intelligence, and the other, the Intelligence Directorate is responsible for taking the raw data and discerning meaningful information.[82] While the exact numbers are classified the Intelligence directorate is much larger than the operations directorate.[83] All the different types of intelligence data needs to be examined, its reliability checked, and analyzed for meaning. The CIA has “desks” or departments for each nation of the world. This type of organization does not lend itself to dealing with multi-national organizations.[84] Assuming one could add “desks” for each of the current functioning terrorist organizations, both analysts and field agents for each one would be required. The pure volume of information gathered is daunting. Between human intelligence (HUMINT-the “take” from spies and operatives), signal intelligence, (SIGINT-interception of radio or cell phone communications), document intelligence (DOMEX, anything from pocket litter taken on the battlefield to cell phone and computer exploitations), and all other forms, each of these desks could easily yield millions of pieces of data that would need to undergo full analysis.[85] In order for the United States intelligence community to respond to these threats, they would have to deploy a prohibitive number of intelligence analysts and collection specialists The CIA and every other intelligence agency lack the manpower and budget necessary to give all the data its due attention.

HUMINT is a Tough Business

            Going back for a moment to the Art of War, no matter how modern Sun Tzu sounds there are some things which he could not predict. Modern information technology and technologically based spying is one of them, and maybe the reason why modern readers of The Art of War seem to disregard the last section of the book: it seems out of touch with how spying is done in the modern age. But here it seems everything old is new again the contemporary commander should reconsider Sun Tzu’s advice on spying in more than just an abstract way. Human Intelligence (HUMINT), particularly the ‘human geography’ sort of HUMINT described in paragraph nine[86] is central to winning insurgency.  Before 9/11 HUMINT was nearly a lost art in the United States, distinctly out of favor compared to signals intelligence (SIGINT) and imagery intelligence (IMINT) both technical intelligence (TECHINT)[87]. The 9/11 Commission Report implies the woeful state of things when its top priority for the CIA was to build (as if from scratch, an odd thing to as an agency that is supposedly in that business!) “its human intelligence capabilities”.[88]This is not to suggest the process will be easy and the problems with obtaining solid HUMINT can be overwhelming. Language ability: simply learning a language won’t make a person a native speaker, for another planting a spy in a tribal base society is nearly impossible: A near East Division operative quoted by Mark Kauppi makes the case well. The CIA probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan.”[89] Other options present similar or worse problems: Recruiting an agent may involve getting involved with disreputable people[90] and leaves you open to the double cross.[91]The final category, “walk-ins” are notoriously unreliable (though not always so[92]) and usually concerned wither with their own financial gain or have alter motives.[93]

The Tools Analysts Use are Suspect

            Even the “mental tools” which analysts use to data to finished product are worrisome. There are too many to list here, but I will use three to give an example of what I mean. The first is a substantial process called Intelligence Preparation of the Battle space (IPB) which “integrates intelligence analysis with operational planning and command decision-making. It is a structured, continuous four-phase analytical approach to defining the battle space, describing battle space effects, evaluating the adversary and determining courses of action.”[94] Even gifted staff officers note that the process can takes a while. It is quite possible to use it to great effect against terrorists in a known battlefield, but in situations where the enemy has complete tactical surprise it is ineffective: you need to know where the battlefield is first.

            While Terrorists “adopt surprising, asymmetric COA because novelty is what the battle space affords, group capability permits, and stakeholders action demand”[95]the counter terrorist analyst is comically trapped looking at the opposite of novelty—modeling and trend analysis. There is little nice to say about either, as they are both holdovers from the cold war era, and were not that great even then. Colin Gray’s quote on the matter is worth reading in regards to this Voodoo of trend analysis that far too many even clear headed[96] thinkers in the intelligence community feel should remain: should give pause to those inclined to indulge in confident prognoses is the notorious unreliability of trend analysis. Even the most accurate identification and analysis of recent and current trends cannot offer a reliable guide to the future. Trends come in bunches, they interact both with each other and with their contexts, and it is their consequences, rather than they themselves, which make the future. Trend-spotting in the1900s did not point unerringly to the Great War of the 1910s. The 1920s did not flag the perils of the 1930s. More recently, in the 1970s not many among us anticipated the apparent nonlinearity of the collapse of the Soviet emporium in the late 1980s. Defense planning geared to fit a world shaped by the trends identified today is almost certain to rest on shaky assumptions. To repeat, it is the consequences of current trends that matter. Understanding those consequences is an art, not a science, and its most vital need byway of technical support is a crystal ball. If crystal balls are unavailable, the only resource is guesswork. When that guesswork is historically educated and dressed up in scenario form, its prospective value is maximized, always bearing in mind the fact of our irreducible ignorance. There should be no need to remind people that no fancy methodology as an aid to defense planning can overcome the laws of physics. The future has not happened. Beware of those who are addicted to the use of the thoroughly misleading concept, the foreseeable future. The future is not foreseeable, period.[97]

Gray Continues

            There is no reason to believe that the theorists and officials of today are anymore gifted in the prophecy department than were their predecessors. Bluntly stated, the historical record of tolerably accurate strategic futurology is anything but impressive. There is usually someone who sees the future with uncanny perceptiveness, but, alas, at the time it is impossible to know his or her identity.[98]

            Modeling, long a staple in social science, is also problematic, in part because of the paradox of warning. As Cooper points out “We need to understand that “warning” is largely built on modeling (either explicit or implicit) and syntheses, which are deductive processes, and not on analysis, which is an inductive process.”[99] If your models are correct and your forecasts are thought reasonable, people will take action on them. In turn terrorists will likely take notice of those actions, call off the operation, or hit something else. “The paradox is that since nothing happened, you can’t know whether you were correct in your assessment or whether the terrorists never planned to attach the facility in the first place!” [100]How do you know then if your model was right? How do maintain accuracy with your model for the future?

Hard to Keep a (useful) Secret These Days

            Even after you wade through all of those considerable deficiencies there is a fine issue that needs to be addressed in the modern context of conflict. They come in the form of two paradoxes of secrecy itself:

Friends are infiltrated
The first paradox: Those forces in a counterinsurgency and counterterrorism that are the most useful are often times those that are most infiltrated by the enemy. Inversely those forces that are most trustworthy are also the least useful. In essence if you intend to fight the enemy with local forces, count on the idea that you tell them your enemies will know in advance.

            This is likely just as true in counter terrorism as it is in counter insurgency. It is important to note that a ‘local power’ should not be confused with local jurisdiction.  Taking my experience in the Philippines as an example, the ‘local force’ that the United States was advising in a ‘by through and with’ strategy was deeply infiltrated by the enemy. But even if it had not been so, the truth was that the soldiers of the Army of the Philippines were simply more loyal to their communities than they were to the government and would, of course, warn their relatives in advance of any pending attack. Nor is this problem isolated to the Philippines but is also true of Afghanistan, Somalia, or anywhere where loyalties to home, family, ethnicity or God matter more than nation: Simply because the mosque is in London, just as an example, does not really mean that the government of England has the primary loyalty of the people inside. The local power, the local “influencer” in this case quite possibly the imam is for all intents and purposes the guy you need to talk to, as it is possible that jurisdictional civil authorizes may be distrusted, or may distrust any intelligence they themselves did not generate.

Asymmetry in Intelligence: We Are Telling Them Everything

            The second paradox: There exists a huge (and widening) asymmetry in intelligence where the state is at a huge disadvantage. One reason is that we are giving information about ourselves to our enemies at increasing rates. The second is that just is not that much about our enemies that is knowable under any circumstance. Secrecy simply serves to aggravate the problem.

            I’ve already explored the notion that there is an awful lot that is known about ‘us’ already. Despite the efforts of the taciturn, recluses, adulteries, addicts, the afflicted, insolvents and the felonious it looks like even on a personal level data will become public knowledge and that knowledge will become easier and easier to access. And while this will be mostly done quite against our wills, it is interesting to note how much of it we are doing ourselves: 41% of the U.S. Population is on Facebook. There are similar numbers in Britain, Australia and Canada[101]. In what manner terrorist could use that knowledge is anyone’s guess, but what is known is that criminals are catching on to the possibilities of cross referencing twitter and Facebook posts with Google Street view and taking advantage accordingly.[102] Around the corner are technologies that allow your GPS enabled 3G phone to be traced by your “friends” in real time: there are already such devices, but is not quite real time.[103] A program in the developments phase for iPhone recently foiled a burglary of itself using real time GPS tracking![104] for  It is only a matter of time before people who are ruthless  and have nothing to gain but the glory of God will mix this knowledge with surprise and  make this too part of their intelligence tool kit.

AQ Small Intel Service Huge

            As an example of what I mean take Al-Qaeda. The assessed grand total of solid Al-Qaeda fighters (those who have pledged allegiance to bin Laden personally) rests at about 100.[105]While the total number of people working across the West on the Al –Qaeda portfolio is hard to assess, a very recent Washington Post article suggested that the United States alone has “Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations”[106]Worse still, as we are constantly being told, information on terrorists is ‘sketchy’ or ‘unreliable’ despite there being a huge amount of it[107]. Indeed the traditional government approach of “more”[108] does not seem to make much difference if it is ‘more of the same’:

            A fair question; however is “If the U.S. government doubled the number of counterterrorism analysts, would that translate into a 100% improvement in tactical warning?” No senior analyst to whom I have posed this question was willing to take the bet. Indeed the consensus was that it is better to have 50 well-trained and exercised analysts than 150 novices. Furthermore it the quality of the collected intelligence does not improve it doesn’t matter how many analysts are looking at it—the resultant product will still lack the targeting specifics that consumers are looking for from the intelligence community.[109]

Intel is Everywhere

            Complicating efforts still further is a strong belief in the Intelligence community that the information is out there somewhere. And that the ‘somewhere’ in question must be hidden, rather than in plane site. The results of this obsession can be quite amusing: A recent article in Playboy magazine illustrates how different U.S. government departments were bilked, by a man who had supposedly designed a computer program that sensed secret messages Al-Qaeda was sending via Al-Jazeera[110]. The culture of secrecy is so prevalent that these various departments kept the nature of the fraudster under wraps!

            Alas this is one of those situations where the United States in particular and the West more generally is unlikely to actually be able to buy its way out of as Taylor and Goldman suggest: “Certainly money makes some difference up to a point, but the IC passed that point years ago and the history of intelligence suggests that neither size nor money correlate with success”.[111] Recent thinking published on the Foreign Affairs website suggest the risks of terrorism are far overblown and that perhaps any more money spent on countering terrorism is a waste, and the nearly $1 trillion spent already has turned in to a sort of cottage industry a “self-licking ice cream cone”.[112]

WikiLeaks

            Finally information technology itself makes sharing information easier and keeping secrets much more difficult. As Frank Hoffman points out, “Perceptions may trump or displace reality within the information dimension of a “counterinsurgency.” In the Information Age, perceptual isolation will be even more difficult, if not impossible. Today there is simply too many sources and means by which to transmit ideas and images in real time.”[113]Examples abound: WikiLeaks, the website that is specialized in disclosing corporate and military secrets is perhaps the best case. Recently WikiLeaks published 90,000 classified documents concerning the war in Afghanistan revealing deep distrust on the part of Military Intelligence officials of Pakistan.[114]Even if organizations such as WikiLeaks or the more tabloid militarycorruption.com could ever be shut down, inevitably they will live on in the form of a totally virtual leaderless enterprise. This is not simply a problem for the West however. As the case of Burma during recent anti-government protests and the disaster following a cyclone prove. There the Junta imposed a draconian crackdown on people powered journalism, but ultimately to no avail as images were posted online almost in real time anyway[115]illustrating Gowing’s point that this allows for the “instant bearing of witness by almost anyone with the modest amount of cash now needed to buy a mobile phone with a camera lens or just a standard digital camera”[116]

Language: Forever a Problem

            The language problem is evergreen first identified as far back as the 1950’s. Taylor ; Goldman make the point well, “An upgrade of IC language skills is another change that would greatly improve collection as well as analysis. ‘A critical shortage of linguists with security clearances has crippled American intelligence efforts for decades, and will take decades to remedy fully’. In January 2006, then President Bush introduced the “National Security Language Initiative” aimed at increasing the number of Americans/students learning foreign languages, particularly what the initiative refers to as “critical-need” languages such as Arabic, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, and Chinese[117]The number of collectors or analysts who actually speak a fluent, colloquial version of almost any Asian or Middle Eastern language is extremely low.’”[118]The Commission indicated that, “our vital interests are impaired by the fatuous notion that our competence in other languages is irrelevant”[119] This represents a tardy effort on the part of the United States to create “American” Arab-Language speakers, rather than utilizing people who are already here. We need people who bend to the secrecy of the intelligence, not question whether intelligence that is so highly classified that no one can read it was ever worthwhile to collect in the first place. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence finds that the necessary cadre of U.S. intelligence linguists skilled in regional languages such as Pashto, Dari and Urdu “remains essentially nonexistent.”[120] In its 2010 budget report, the Committee warns: “Persistent critical shortages in some languages contribute to the loss of intelligence information and affect the ability of the intelligence community to process and exploit what it does collect.”[121] The gap has become critical in the war effort, especially in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater, where al Qaeda and Taliban operatives text message, e-mail and talk in languages that the intelligence community had largely ignored before 2001[122],  and that intercepting phone and radio calls in the region’s native tongues is critical to monitoring terrorist camps and movements in Pakistan’s tribal areas.[123] This is to say nothing of the hundreds, potentially thousands of regional dialects that amount to wholly different languages around the world. The authors own experience in the southern Philippines is but one example: there each island had its own ‘dialect’ of Tagalog, these dialects where almost wholly different from one another and from Tagalog. Often our host nation allies spoke none of the local dialect. Local islanders spoke six or seven languages, none of them Tagalog. The results were predictable: the host nation military was just as foreign to area as we were.

The army, again integrated with the rebels in 1996 was never, in my time there, able to engage with insurgents: they always slipped away just before they arrived on seen. Lack of results caused the Pilipino southern command to be replaced: the Pilipino Army was replaced by their Marines. The Pilipino Marines had not been integrated with the insurgents. They were, in almost every way a more combat ready force, and a more trust worthy lot.  Almost immediately the results were tragic: one ambush after another and an island that had been considered ‘pacified’ came immediately back into play. In the author’s mind the reason for our reversals were clear: from the perspective of the enemy our host nation allies were just as foreign as we were.

Should the National Security Language initiative work, it would not produce a cadre of language speakers for a generation, and even then they are more likely to know “educated” language rather than ‘low-class’ street or rural  dialects that make the difference in intelligence. In truth, while programs like this are a good strong start with numerous economic and social synergies being apparent in learning the major languages being “fluent in obscure dialects”[124] that the intelligence community really requires is either going to have to come from the IC training its own linguists of from the IC taking a leap of faith and allowing more openness. Current intelligence personnel are reluctant to learn languages in part because of opportunity lost.[125]The results are staggering: “In 2001 only 20 percent of the graduating class of clandestine case officers was fluent in non-Romance languages. Robert Baer, a veteran CIA clandestine case officer, noted that even after the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, the CIA employed not one case officer who spoke Pashto, the dialect of the major ethnic group in Afghanistan, and still had none as of 2002”[126]The alternative Betts voices in the form of a question: Should U.S. intelligence trust recent, poorly educated immigrants for these jobs if they involve highly sensitive intercepts? How much will it matter if there are errors in translation, or willful mistranslations that cannot be caught because there are no re-sources to cross-check the translators?”[127]

            There are some solutions being found in the form of technology and electronic or ‘machine’ translation:

            Foreign language speech and text are indispensable sources of intelligence, but the vast majority is unexamined: Volumes are huge and growing; processing is labor intensive; and the U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism communities have too few people with suitable language skills. Because it would be impossible to find, train, or pay enough people, creating effective foreign language technology is the only feasible solution[128]

            Perhaps, but this is, and always has been a tough problem to solve technically. Anyone who has attempted to translate web pages from French in to English via either the Google language tool or Babble fish notes that the translation is acceptable only if the alternative is nothing at all. Worse still, the mechanism that Google uses is dependent on logarithms of already translated web pages: “Such services “learn by analyzing collections of documents that have been translated by humans”[129]. The more pages that are translated, the more the machine ‘knows’ and the better it itself can translate. By its very nature then the languages it does best with are widely spoken and translated languages. And the ones it does worst in are those with either no alphabet at all, or that are very rarely used online, such as those of rural people in Afghanistan, or Islanders in the southern Philippines. Add to this that people in these settings are often multi-lingual or multi dialectic and in the course of one conversation may switch between languages and dialects it is easy to see that technical solutions will be no panacea either.

            So to summarize the intelligence community has far too many people, too few of the people who have the really necessary skill sets, is neither well centralized nor sufficiently decentralized and is using methodology that is likely not going to result in anything approaching success.

An Alternative: “The Open Secret” Open Analytical Communities

            Before we go too much further into and admittedly partial solution for the ills of the intelligence community it will be beneficial to define what the problem is. After all, if there was no real threat, then all the aforementioned issues would merely just amount to a gigantic, but inert, waste of time energy and effort. Berkowitz ; Goodman summarize the change from the Cold War world this way “Today in contrast intelligence organizations must prepare for a variety of unrehearsed scenarios with a fluid set of coalition partners.”[130]

Wicked Problem

            But of course there is a very real threat in the global insurgency. It amounts to three connected phenomena: the first is the Wicked Problem (or in Ackoff’s parlance ‘messes[131]’) that is the crux of the global insurgency. The characteristics of Wicked Problem include:

• There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
• Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
• Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.
• There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.

Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.

Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.

• Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
• Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
• The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained innumerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.

 The planner has no right to be wrong (Planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate[132]

            Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge about the issues related to the Global insurgency can immediately recognize it as a Wicked Problem: “The new terrorism would seem to be a major exemplifying case for complexity theory – for example, it exemplify major un-proportionalities between cause and effect, unpredictable outcomes and self-organizing, emergent structures. Complexity is geared to just such (seeming) contradictions as the disproportion between a fragile group of plotters and the devastating global effects of their actions.[133]

Why Do We Care?

            The second related phenomenon is the ‘why do we care?’ to the first: Black Swan events. Black swan evens have in turn three characteristics:

Outlier status: Nothing previously “can convincingly point to its possibility”. “Extreme impact” and “third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”[134]

            The end results of the Global insurgency are described nicely here as well. Despite all the efforts made by the 9/11 commission, or really other post terrorism events commission, these events are intensely novel. In other words they cannot actually be predicted via tend analysis, and really can only be picked up via exposure: as Taleb explains early in his book and with a nod to the world of economics “the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error”[135]. All the ‘tell tail signs’ that in retrospect would indicate they are predictable, are only that in retrospect. In this way intelligence regarding terrorism is very different form counter insurgency intelligence: there is plenty of “trend” in CI where as in CT, if the terrorists in question are worth a damn, there is no trend at all. The only answer is to increase your exposure to the Terrorists themselves, and this is very difficult to do if your 800,000 or so people with a Top Secret clearance live most of their lives in climate controlled office blocks doing ‘trend analysis’ all day!“Terrorist attacks that depend on the element of surprise are, by their very nature, similar to questions whose answers are only known by a select few.”[136]

Super Empowerment

            Finally the link between the two is the super-empowered individual. Seemingly part of the zeitgeist of the moment (and thus, it follows of all previous “big changes” in warfare are to be emulated) the super-empowered individual is hailed by both Thomas X. Hammes and John Robb. To Hammes: “In sum, political, economic, and social trends point to the emergence of super-empowered individuals or small groups bound together by love for a cause rather than a nation. Employing emerging technology, they are able to generate destructive power that used to require the resources of a nation-state.”[137] Robb takes it a step further and suggests that these small groups could take on the nation state and win.[138] There are precursors to the super-empowered individual, but as of today the potentially wide spread destruction of web enabled individuals or micro-cells has not occurred. We likely will not be able to predict when it will happen as it happen and will be completely novel. Some seemingly proto super empowered events have already occurred, including the one man terrorist who decided to blow up French speed cameras[139] and perhaps most hauntingly the Oklahoma City bombers. Currently however super-empowerment remains basic: The current crop of individuals is “amateurish”[140] and though these terrorists have yet to produce anything very successful even a “failed operation that garners media attention is as good as a victory for an aspiring extremist group” It seems for now that the Jihadist community is steering clear of the spectacular event in favor of smaller operations that are more likely to succeed.

            What we have then are black swan events superimposed on wicked problems and executed through super empowered individuals.. What is worse the intelligence community has a poor record in deal with either black swan’s events such as 9/11or wicked problems such as the Afghan insurgency. Indeed Taleb directly call out intelligence analysts as a group seemingly incapable of making accurate predictions about worthwhile events (i.e. Black Swans)[143]If there is potential then it comes from the very fact that we are losing the advantage in TECHINT. The intelligence community’s reliance on highly sophisticated sensors has created a sort of cloistering where only the most privileged access to the very best information. The shortening of that has meant that the difference between that information and the information at much lower levels will soon be virtually ill. The cloistering is eroding and with it brings increased exposure. The key will be to redesign the intelligence community in such a way that risk is incorporated into the decision process. Flattening the organization remains the preferred method of increasing exposure and is diametrically opposed to the reforms passed after 9/11 that create a highly centralized structure and left inter agency communications issues largely in tact.

PART III

Idealized Design

            Increasing exposure is no easy feat in the world of Counter-Terrorism. The price for failure is high, so high that attempts of change the Intelligence community post failures has been met with stiff resistance—and considering that many of the reforms have been counterproductive, rightly so. What is needed at the start of any reform of the IC is a solid idea of what the end state that we have in mind is, and what prevents us from being there. The process is called Idealized Design. Idealized Design starts off with a simple premiums, which I will apply to this situation: “An idealized design of a system is the design its stakeholders would have right now if they could have any system they wanted”[144]

            If an intelligence agency were being designed to meet the challenges of global insurgency, would it look anything like the CIA or the Intelligence community more broadly?

            Few serious observers of the intelligence community would suggest that what the United States has today is an effective use of resources, or that the long term viability of the project is not in question. Disasters such as 9/11 have only been narrowly avoided since, and the main instrument in defeating them has been exposure (i.e. alert passengers) and not intelligence. If anything the reforms since 9/11 have served to aggravate some poor practices from before: the United States now has an ever increasing number of people watching an ever decreasing number of sensors (people, systems) that provide unique intelligence.  The personnel in turn bring little more than university educations or military backgrounds to the problem, neither of with inherently makes them qualified. So afraid of exposure, so addicted to secrecy is the IC however that it would prefer to hire masses of unqualified persons in the hope of finding someone with insights that people with really insights but potentially risky pasts are simply ignored.

            Ackoff writes that “planning begins with the formulation of the “mess,” the complex system of interacting problems that constitute the future that he organization already is in if it does nothing”[145] The previous paragraph, and really all of the previous portion of the paper defines the ‘mess’. Should the United States choose to do nothing it should expect the Intelligence community to cost a lot more than it should and accomplish a lot less than it could. While not there yet individuals will one day be able to attack the state with very sophisticated weapons in such a way that the state will not be able to adequately respond. All the systems needed for the attack will be readily available, and will inspire others with grievances however legitimate of quixotic to do the same. “How do we transform NSA?” (Or CIA? or NGA?) is not a bad question.  “How do we do intelligence for the United States?” in the midst of volatile operational and technical environments is a better question, even if the answer leaves no room for any of the existing agencies to plan their 75th anniversaries.[146]We must let go of some of the more onerous assumptions about intelligence if we are to make any headway its reform. Those changes are coming whether we like it or not and we would be well advised to get ahead of them rather than react to the consequences of out ignoring them. Exposure will happen whether the policy makers like it or not, either on aircraft or online,[147] People will take matters into their own hands if the perception is that they can not contribute otherwise and that the government isn’t really doing much to prevent attacks.

            There are two constraints on idealized designs and on important requirement.

First the design must be technologically feasible—no science fiction…The constraint of technological feasibility ensures the possibility of implementation of the design but it says nothing about its likelihood… second constraint is that the design, if implemented must be capable of surviving in the current environment. Therefore it cannot violate the law and must conform to any relevant regulations and rules…

            Finally there is the important requirement that the process that the designed must be capable of being improved over time. If that which is designed is an organization or institution, it must be capable of learning and adapting to changing internal and external condition. It should be designed to be ready, willing and able to change itself or be changed. Therefore the product on an idealized design is neither perfect ideal nor utopian, precisely because it can be improved.[148]

            It is important to consider each in regards to any reform of the IC in which open analytical communities are considered as part of the solution. Is it technologically feasible? Since the solution to the problem of Black Swan events lays in exposure to them, the answer I propose is open analytical communities. Since the internet already has similar communities the answer to the first question is a resounding yes. What should it look like?

Fluid hierarchies based on contributions. The era of the ‘senior analyst’ that made his reputation tracking Russian Submarines 30 years ago and has done marginal work since then is over. Such persons simply do not represent anything useful in the current environment. Open analytical communities inherently punish those who rest on their laurels.[149]

            Self-selecting systems leadership systems abound on the internet: “Of particular importance for OS-INT is the collaborative moderation process supported by the code. Users who contribute good stories or comments on stories are rewarded with “karma,” which is essentially a point system that enables people to build up their reputation. Once a user has accumulated a certain number of points, she can assume more responsibilities, and is even trusted to moderate other people’s comments.”[150] That is merely one of a multitude of systems available as examples, and while it may seem a little ‘out there’ it cannot be argued that it is less of a meritocracy than the system currently in place (and its real alternative): some combination of longevity and cronyism.

The system should have very low costs. The last thing the Unites States needs is for another program that costs a bundle to add to Muller and Stewarts’s “self-licking ice cream cone”.

            Muller and Stewart argue that the real cost of terrorism rests in the vast Government spending that resulted after 11 September, and not in terrorism itself. While future attacks likely will do substantially more damage to the economy, the reality for today is that we do not want yet-another-new-service that adds significant costs but delivers nothing in the way of insight. Writing about new open analytical communities Stralder & Hirsh say: “The start-up costs for new projects are minimal, and possibilities for adapting the platform to the idiosyncratic needs of each project are maximized. The resulting diversity, in turn, enriches the connective learning process.”[151] The reason is not just that developers will likely do it for minimal costs, but also because of the assortment of incentives that can be offered, only a few of which cost anything. One potential mechanism for a fairly low cost incentive for the open analysis world might be to incentivise via games. Games fit the current zeitgeist well:“Anybody who has a product that can sense the product is being used…they’re going to want to create motivations for you to use the product. So fundamentally they’re going to make a game out of it because games are rewards based systems that motivate us to do things.”[152]

Whether the incentive is to engage in a vast highly cooperative world like World of Warcaft, or high tech scavenger hunts, games have been successful in bring large numbers of people together and making them think in creative ways to solve problems. Small, but interesting instances abound. For example students from MIT won $40000 from DARPA to find ten red balloons.[153] They did it in eight hours. Well, a ‘they’ did it: the strategy was to give out a sub prize of $2000 to each person who found a balloon. In another experiment Wired magazine columnist Even Ratliff attempted to completely “disappear”. Wired offered $5,000 to anyone who could find him, with $3,000 going to Evan if he made it a month undiscovered. He was found.[154]  In a follow on experiment Wired magazine in combination with a movie promotion, attempted to ‘disappear’ four people. As of writing two have been found.

In a high-tech social network culture enlisting the public in a combination scavenger hunt and most wanted poster is working rather well. These contrasts sharply with the real thing: ten year long hunt for Bin Laden. Open collaboration and the right incentive for the right information produced results for red balloons; could they produce the right results for terror cells as well?   An attempt to find out resulted in (largely misguided) public outrage when DARPA suggested using market mechanisms to predict terrorism.[156] While the culture of the internet seems to be shifting to a ‘for-profit’ model[157] there is still plenty of reason to thinking that contributes maybe motivated by forces other than “immediate financial gain”[158]

            The second constraint is more difficult. While the law likely does not have a lot to say about open collaborative environments, the history of the publicly led innovations in the field of intelligence has been shaky. The most prominent example is the so-called “Terrorism-market” which started out as a mechanism for analysts inside the IC to show, in reality, how much they really believed what they were writing. It morphed away from being an analytical tool to being an intelligence sensor (in reality a form of HUMINT) when it was proposed that it should go public. Modeled on the Iowa Electronic Political Markets, and on internal markets at Hewlett Packard, the intention was that in a world where terrorists had to reveal themselves ever more rarely, this might give them an irresistible offer, and thereby ease their capture. The amount of meta data (computer IP address, server IP address, registration information about the players, etc.) could have been a gold mine all its own. The public, politicians and the press hated it.[159]

            Early discussion of the terrorism market also focused on the consequences of having open registration for participation, which would potentially allow terrorists to profit from their activities…But on closer examination, concerns about terrorists making money seem far less pressing than the concern that they would use the market to foil the intelligence community… Given the willingness of terrorists to expend resources—including lives—on their missions, it is not far-fetched to imagine that they would be willing to take a financial loss to mislead the Pentagon.[160]

            Of course these were all likely factored in the first place. What the public couldn’t be made to understand is that the market was an attempt at exposure. Faced with having to explain intelligence to a public already skeptical of the process in a way that would invariably cause the enemy to understand as well, DARPA did the only thing they could do: they let the markets die.

            Would an open analytical community face the same withering critics? Some factors point to a different conclusion. For one, hopefully, the cost of the program would be fairly minimal, and the motivation for the participation would be different. For another open analytical communities enjoy a rather better reputation than the market does these days. Private citizens and business may be the first to be able to receive warning in cases of probable attacks as they are the first responders in the local level and in the state of which some may have not involve in such crisis.[161] The emerging solutions in order to share information at the local level are greatly needed by the federal government and adapt them and reconfigured to meet the needs of the government. Thus, the government should help in the development and researches that can help the responders in managing the attack crisis.[162]

            “Open source” refers to the sharing of information between the users and the producers and describes a form of production and development allowing access to final products in terms of distribution, contribution and communication. Academic articles as well as internet sources can be considered open source media with respect to intelligence public media.[163] Intelligence gathering would be supplemented by the virtual community of experts through a mechanism that would “incorporate the collective knowledge of the terrorism research community into the Government’s OSINT program”.[164] However, the intelligence community would be required to abandon war biases of secrecy and recognized the importance of OSINT in supplementing traditional forms of intelligence gathering.[165] According to Linus Toralds, the man behind the creation of the Linux operating system, “all computer problems are small when there are numerous eyes looking at them”.[166] It is through the working of many brilliant minds that any problem is solved. Another aspect is whether we could learn from the inverse relationship between agility and size, can we assume that the growth and future of the intelligence agencies are the same as the growth and future of the personnel?[167]

            Principles such as reputation, peer review, flexible involvement and responsibility, and free sharing of products are developed by the Open Source Software movement in gathering and analyzing information.[168] Distributing information in an efficient and collaborative manner requires two-way and multicast communication which is the foundation of many internets facilitated free and easy sharing of information.[169] However, the ability to coerce in limited due to certain factors. One factor is due to the “reputation-based” of authority. Another factor is due to the availability to all the members for products that are the results of a collaborative process. According to Stalder and Hirsh, “Resources do not accumulate with the elite”.[170]

Would it Look Like the CIA?

            Free sharing of information is motivated by “the fact that in a complex collaborative process, it is effectively impossible to differentiate between the “raw materials” that goes into a creative process and the “product” that comes out”.[171] It has nothing to do with anti-authoritarian social vision or altruism. According to Philip Bobbitt, the ultimate aim of the war of terror is the protection of civilians within its jurisdiction and not just because of territory or political issues or access to resources. [172]

            It is also of great importance that intelligence gathered form foreign lands are integrated and are able to move from classified and secret to lower levels for the use of law enforcement entities and homeland security. Personnel with language expertise and cultural insights are also prevented from viewing important information.[173] “Intelligence information is normally gathered and stored into highly classified, compartmentalized, and highly restricted federal government system”.[174] Proper handling and fair declassifying of legal safeguards are very important in moving intelligence information to targeted pieces of data.[175] However, these issues continue plague the efforts of the intelligence community in integrating data.

Terrorism is Mostly Legal

            Al Qaeda survives through older networks that have a long history of success. They are able to facilitate everything for recruitment to financing to material procurement to operational support by using smuggling networks, money laundering, gang, prison and drug. [176] However, as John Arquilla stated, it is deep understanding of networking that is lacking in the US military. It is the understanding between the relationship of those who brings and create new innovation whether for the good or bad of the people.[177] Stenersen supports this assumption as, according to him, it is reflected n the way people use the internet in order to gather and share information, meet people and send mails.[178] The important fact here is that most terrorist activities are legal; the only illegal part is the act itself, the actual attack. Though it is for the advantage of the terrorist, the fact that they are all unclassified makes it an advantage for the open community to detect.

            Rather than only criminal or political acts, terrorist are striking in many other unexpected ways such as attacks on computer infrastructure, attacks on space satellites, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. America must maintain spectrum dominance in the world since actions that were previously not considered as warfare are considered to be direct challenges to America today. The fact that a surprise attack may come from anywhere refusal may be interpreted as political threat.”[179] The most troubling element in today’s warfare is that terrorism may comprise of legal and illegal stuff.

We Need the Open Secret

            There are hundreds and thousands of terrorist cells running throughout the world at any given time and what we need is a new paradigm in the intelligence field: the open secret. Advantage must be taken form the cultural diversity of Western Europe and the United States. Using information regarding wealth and real restricted but can be considered unclassified data that can be created by the public and being paid by the government based on actual utility. The government can also use the techniques that are pioneered by companies such as Google or Amazon in order to improve reporting. [180]

Power point, need for customized ways to handle info

            A Power Point is a standard tool created in order to make difficult problems easier but it can be said that it has not served its purpose well.[181] What we need now is the new model for the decision makers or commander to be part of the decision making process when it comes with the necessity of information rather than the “brief the commander and then he makes a call” model. The low cost of Information Technology would make this possible[182] and could start with the creation of standard toolkits with customized applications in order to take information across the classified spectrum (what Hipple would call Heterogeneity[183]) in order to provide necessary information to the commanding officer at real time, a “user centered innovation process”[184], a concept largely borrowed from the IT community. A description of a tool kit follows:

            “Toolkits for user innovation and design are integrated sets of product-design,    prototyping and design-tested tools intended for use by end users. The goal of the toolkit is to enable non-specialists users do design high-quality, producible custom products that          exactly meet their needs. Toolkits often contain “user-friendly” features that guide users       as they work. They are specific to the type of product or service and a specific production       system.”[185]

            An example of this would be a semantic wiki. Taking advantage of wiki as a “simple online database with interlinked web-pages”[186] it adds the “Semantic   technologies aim for machine-to-machine integration and reuse of data. It allows expanding the structure unlike traditional database and resembles the more computer friendly and structured domain of databases by letting emergence from actual usage; collaborative, reuse of standard vocabularies and distributed work flows and processes.[187] The ability to mechanically cross-reference heterogeneous databases automatically[188] and then allow analytical comment is especially intriguing element of this technology especially since “the data comprising terrorist networks tend to be heterogeneous, multi-relational and semi-structured”[189] and “It is a fact that terrorist organizations do not provide information on their members and the government rarely allows researchers to use their intelligence data.”[190] Silicon Valley has created such product but may suffer in the long run due to matters of ownership.[191]

            Another technology that may be of great help is virtual reality (VR) which can be considered as a part of the Web 2.0. It goes beyond the traditional web pages by allowing Web content that is interactive and at the same time, user-generated. Aside from viewing contents of the web, VR enables sharing and modification of web contents and provides control over information flows.[192]

            A new Army organization was also established that will integrate graphics from video games into simulations for training soldiers as well as small-unit leaders; the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Project Office for Gaming (TPO Gaming). An Army simulation toolkit that allows the users to personally customize the training scenarios is being develop and scheduled to be deployed between the years 2010 and 2015.[193]

            Cooperation between the government’s military and commercial sector is necessary in order to uphold peace, stability and prosperity since they are the major players in the fight against terrorism. The use of emergent technology is also an important factor and should be used in the most efficient way. [194]

            How information can be distributed in a multi-security network is the main challenge in the field of Information Technology considering that it must be done in a timely manner and the source, protected if necessary. They may also be working with those inline with the terrorist group because of the accessibility of the information, thus it is also necessary to be cautious in order to win the war against terrorism.[195]

            The concept of Berners-Lee, “to let everyone not only see the source code, but also freely edit the content of pages they view” was incorporated in the Wiki platform allowing the user to modify the given information displayed through accessing a simple form. The changes done will automatically be shown without a review of the board or of the original author. The feature also consists of a history page that shows the changes made and to undo these changes if necessary. Thus, editing and writing in this system is cumulative since a user may add missing information and so, the depth of the article grows even deeper as time. This follows the “open source peer-review maxim, formulated by Eric Raymond as “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. This also allows the number of articles to increases through the collective input brought about by knowledgeable readers. [196]

Conclusion

            War has been part long part of our history. Global insurgency amounts to three related phenomena: first is the wicked problem, second is “why do we care” about the wicked problem and third, the super empowerment. There had also been many innovations in war that are being used by terrorist around the globe. Another alarming factor is that terrorist may be everywhere. Indeed, the government is facing a serious threat against terrorism every single day.

            In order to have a greater chance of defeating terrorism the government must use all information available and utilized them in a more efficient manner. For this matter, the Open Secret community must be embraced. The internet has been a fast growing media for information interchange and would be a great tool in the fight against terrorism. All that is required are some motivations for innovation from the government itself.

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