This article was invited by the editors to be the keynote essay in the inaugural issue of a brand new professional journal published by the Defense Intelligence College Foundation. At that time I had been working for several years as the assistant to the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Policy). My duties included a great deal of liaison with all the branches of the intelligence community. This essay urged on the professionals of the intelligence community the need to recast themselves if they were to remain relevant to policy makers in the much-changed strategic climate of the post-Cold War world. I thought then and think now that America’s superb intelligence professionals overhauled themselves with much more agility than they are credited. Successful intelligence hangs as much on the skill of the user-decision maker as on the intelligence producer. These considerations continue to figure in some of my op-eds. Spring 1992.
Defense Intelligence Journal, Spring 1992
It is difficult to be astonished anymore. Remarkable events, most unforeseen, have been unfolding for the past few years at a pace unprecedented in modern times. Future historians, looking back at the late 1980s and early 1990s, will likely identify ours as the period of one of the sharpest rearrangements of the global political, military, and technical terrain in hundreds of years.
Among the interesting questions future historians will evaluate is how well we were able to adapt our institutions and their strategies to the new realities. Likely, we will be rated for our agility. Did we take up sound policies? Did we have a clear-eyed understanding of the new circumstances? Did history race ahead as we dawdled with old habits? Or did we manage to keep a hand on events and shape them, where possible, towards a future more civil and less violent?
Central to any success will be the efficacy of the policy-intelligence partnership, a partnership which must itself adapt swiftly if we collectively are to meet history’s test. From the policy side of that special relationship, this essay oilers a personal view of what the new geostrateglc realities might imply for intelligence as it serves the political officials and military commanders who lead the national security apparatus.1
What Has Changed? The New Security Climate
For the 40-year run of the Cold War, pollcymakers and intelligence confronted the threat of World War III originating with a sudden, massive attack by the Warsaw Pact into Western Europe. The prospects and forces of each side evolved over the decades. But it was not until the rise of the new democracies in Eastern Europe during the “Revolution of 1989” that we were loosed from the need constantly to watch, to deter if possible, and to fight if necessary this canonical threat of a sudden global war centered in Europe. Illustrating a human corollary to Newton’s Third Law about actions and reactions, several generations of policy and intelligence professionals alike (including many reading this article) were strongly shaped by their obligations to contain and outlast this very real Soviet-cum-Pact threat. Cold War policy- and strategy-making were necessarily centered on the US-Soviet military balance. Only the Intelligence Community seemed fully equipped to address such issues. A penchant for secrecy closed off the Communist societies behind an Iron Curtain guarded by a vast and decidedly hostile security apparatus bent on subverting our defenses.
As a natural consequence, intelligence in the Cold War became a profession markedly Soviet-centered, highly militarized and preoccupied with secrets: learning theirs and protecting ours. Animated by the need to protect the “sources and methods” used to probe denied targets, secrecy became a central, indeed vital ingredient of national security. Additionally, the Soviets themselves were, in Churchill’s phrase, a “puzzle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma.”
Intelligence became the official lnterpreter of Soviet capabilities and proclivities. Some specialists on the policy side (experts like George Kennan) could illuminate political developments and provide a historical context. But for day-to-day advice, Cold War pollcymakers, military or political, needed to turn to intelligence for interpretations of the Soviet threat. Intelligence became uniquely chartered to exercise a near monopoly on information and evaluation about the Soviet side of the military, economic, and political confrontation. It was a most successful and skilled monopoly, to be sure, but one whose former ways are not altogether suited for the new circumstances.
The forces that ended the Cold War propelled intelligence into some radically new circumstances. Three major events quickly rearranged the security terrain, each signaling that the defense intelligence aperture needed to be opened wider and wider.
The Revolution of 1989. In the remarkable months of Fall 1989, communist governments in Eastern Europe fell, the Berlin Wall came down, and several new democracies took their first, independent steps. Political independence from the dictates of Moscow, the start of a Soviet military withdrawal from Eastern Europe, and the historic CFE treaty, combined to close out the threat of a sudden, massive invasion of Western Europe. At the same time. Gorbachev’s reforms offered the prospect of a transformation of the Soviet Union itself. A warning apparatus, previously tuned to the possibility that only a couple of weeks of warning might be available, estimated that one or two years would be required were a hard-line Soviet government to attempt to stem these reformist tides and return to coercive policies backed up by an outsized military. As the Cold War division of Europe ended. Germany reunited and further altered the political and military landscape. Problems which had necessarily been seen against the backdrop of world war could now be seen individually in a regional context. And where there had been Warsaw Pact opponents carrying out highly cloaked military maneuvers now there were new states in Eastern Europe asking for membership in NATO and exchanging visits with Western security officials.
It may yet be some time before we have fully pulled ourselves out and away from our Cold War mindsets. Reaching back across the two world wars, the era of security policy and intelligence dominated by a major military threat in Europe spans nearly a full century. Perhaps the single most important step toward breaking free of that powerful history will be our ability to think about national security without an explicit “threat.” Compared to our new circumstances, wars cold or hot were easy. A declared adversary or an outright enemy posed a specific problem to the policymaker and offered a specific target to intelligence. Other problems become secondary, lesser included cases. Strategy for the policymakers, especially those leading a rich and powerful nation like the United States, became mostly a matter of calculating how much military strength was enough to out-muscle the hostile state. Intelligence services were drawn into serving that calculus of comparative military capability.
Given its century-long run, threat thinking became a sturdy habit, perhaps even an addiction. Many continue to hunt for threats in the belief that we must replace the Soviets with some combination of Third World adversaries in order to lay a new yardstick for sizing our own military. Obviously, latent threats do lurk in some regions. Scarcely a comer of the world is free of historic animosities or outright conflicts. We have to expect from time to time that some could metastasize to the status of threat, occasionally to “enemy.” But threat mongering, counting the dwindling supply of villains, must be seen as the lesser included case to the more important tasks of guarding interests and managing uncertainties. For intelligence, these pose a vastly more subtle and diverse array of problems.
Out from under their necessary preoccupation with Soviet military strength, policymakers and strategists must now incorporate an array of nonmilitary factors into their designs. And the intelligence apparatus must stretch to fuse new kinds of information into “defense” intelligence. The 1988 Soviet tank production problem illustrated how, even before the end of the Cold War, decompensates had begun to factor other elements into a national security framework that had generally used the US-Soviet military balance as a proxy for “national security” and “defense.”
In the fall of 1988, the press tracked an intelligence debate about Soviet tank production: was it going up or down? Gorbachev, then three years into his reforms, was talking about cutting production; the naturally skeptical community couldn’t find persuasive evidence of an actual downturn. Indeed, tank production seemed dangerously high, perhaps 5,000 a year. Ultimately, the issue turned not on order-of-battle estimates, but on economics. It was clear, regardless of their claims or our estimates, that the Soviet economy couldn’t sustain high tank production levels. At the time, founding military estimates on so fuzzy a science as economics was not an easy leap for most of us. We have since learned to turn more easily to the economic side of military estimates. Press accounts of the state of the former Red Army are now dominated by the economic: how much the new governments can afford will determine the size of the military establishments of the new republics and the production rates of many of their military factories. Whether the troops can be paid and housed may be a central factor in the overall political stability of the new states, especially in Russia.
These extra-military dimensions to national security go beyond the economic, of course. Chernobyl is a prime example. In addition to vividly demonstrating the widespread risks to the security of the neighboring peoples, farms, arid industries of radiation from a nuclear reactor, the Chernobyl disaster has reportedly engendered a powerful antipathy to nuclear weapons among the now franchised Ukrainian, Belarus, and Russian populations. As a consequence, the future character, say. of the Belarus military may be shaped strongly by the degree to which the extensive contamination from Chernobyl will handicap economic productivity and bias the newly franchised voters. Intelligence estimates limited solely to enumerating division flags, tanks, and manpower in Belarus would not likely furnish insights sufficient to frame our relationship toward that nascent republic. Nor could such traditional estimates fully inform our understanding of their own sense of individual military security requirements.
The fall of 1989 was a watershed in military analysis. With the subsequent demise of the USSR itself. “Soviet” military analysis, the most elite of the intelligence trades, has become a dramatically different discipline. Where once we looked down the gun barrels, so to speak, of Pact forces poised to attack the West, we focus now on the internal dynamics of the former Pact states, needing to understand internal security troops as well as we once tracked the offensive army. A formerly monolithic Soviet military dominated by the Red Army and the General Staff is now splitting into factions of sometimes uncertain allegiances who face each other across historic ethnic and territorial dividing lines.2 Where formerly we studied Russian railroads to appreciate how the Soviets might be able to reinforce the front, now our interest in railroads might spring from a concern about how the Russian transportation network might be hindering or helping President Yeltsin’s economic reforms.
We had begun to make those lists of adaptations, with most of us still thinking of the Soviet Union as a durable state with a long-term future, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and kicked off a second series of rearrangements in the geostrateglc climate.
The Gulf War. The defensive Operation DESERT SHIELD and the offensive DESERT STORM posed a number of sharp challenges to the Intelligence Community. Overall, intelligence response was superb. The official after-action reports to Congress noted that “No combat commander has ever had as full and complete a view of his adversary as did our field commander.”3
In some respects, Iraq posed a familiar problem: an enemy with a massive military capability, much of it trained in Soviet doctrine, and practiced in a style of static warfare which we had watched closely for years. Run by a dictator and his coterie through a highly centralized apparat, Iraq was very much a denied target. In fact, the combination of Soviet training and US intelligence assistance during the Iran-Iraq war had equipped Iraq with a good understanding how to deny information to US technical surveillance systems.
But not all was a copy of the familiar Soviet threat. Iraq had acquired an extensive array of western military equipment, built some of its own, and learned during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war how to use it. The product was a hybrid military and a much more difficult intelligence problem. Iraq’s air defense system, for example, was based on a blend of French, Soviet, and other capabilities. After the conflict ended, the Iraqis disclosed previously unknown minefields built with advanced Italian mines mixed in with older, familiar Soviet designs. Intelligence needed to supply information about weapon combinations that crossed prior divisions of expertise and included a good many systems formerly listed in the tables of friendly forces. In another arena, the maritime intercept operation to enforce the UN-mandated economic sanctions demonstrated the importance of maintaining a global data base on merchant ship movements and the transfers of equipment to suspect states.
US forces took to the field with a wealth of new weaponry and other capabilities. On the intelligence side, the technologies of the C3I systems contributed as much as precision munitions and Stealth strike aircraft to the decisive Coalition victory over the considerable Iraqi force. Computers, networked through high capacity data links, distributed imagery and data in volumes never before achieved to users hungry for even more information, delivered faster. An amalgam of military sensors and intelligence systems scouted the land, air, and sea dimensions of an operational theater several hundred miles deep.
While the tools were state of the art. the “C3I vs. C3I” battle followed the classic lines of an information war: both sides masked their own intentions and dispositions with deception and camouflage measures; both protected their own communications; both conducted psychological operations targeted against the opposing troops; both staged propaganda and diplomatic campaigns for political support. By virtue of their singlemindedness and inherent need for camouflage and control, dictatorships can be expected to be more adept at these arts and. Indeed, Iraq showed considerable prowess in its efforts.4 As the aggressor, Saddam held the initiative at the outset of the crisis. By successfully hiding much of his nuclear, chemical, and biological developments and by successfully playing hide-and-seek with his mobile Scud capability, he managed to retain offensive options even after the fighting concluded.5
Yet in some key respects, the Coalition had overcome those advantages even before the shooting started. Once it did, the Coalition exercised an overwhelming C3I advantage. Air strikes in the opening phases of the campaign chopped up Iraq’s military command infrastructure leaving Baghdad nearly unable to synchronize its many forces in the field. The intelligence balance was completely lopsided. The Iraqi military leadership was severely constrained as the United States and Coalition operated with a more robust capability than had ever before been fielded. Countering Iraqi NBC (Nuclear, Biological and Chemical) and Scud capabilities and bypassing a formidable array of defenses in Kuwait, the now famous “left hook” was made possible by our deception efforts and battle plan.
Combined arms warfare came of age in the Gulf. Or, to be more blunt, the integrated campaign against Iraq sounded the death knell for parochial ways. Most especially those of the Intelligence Community. Virtually every integrating node of the intelligence architecture constructed to support the theater commander and the Washington leadership, including the very successful Joint Intelligence Centers (JICs), was put together on the fly after the crisis started. Intelligence was not alone in needing to invent new ways of doing business, of course, but there is an instructive contrast with, for example, F-117 Stealth fighter employment or the air-land battle troops. Those forces arrived with doctrine in hand, trained, and ready to fight. Intelligence arrived with insufficient Arabists, insufficient knowledge of Iraqi military capabilities or motivations, little awareness of the extraordinary Iraqi nuclear programs, virtually no knowledge of how to assess the impact of the economic sanctions, and no organizations designed to conduct advanced scouting operations across a large theater or to fuse massive quantities of disparate information.
The intelligence professionals who rallied to create wholly new organizations and procedures are much to be praised. Brilliantly improvising, they rapidly gained a commanding upper hand. Because they were so successful, we can now be more candid in our self-appraisals of what new directions intelligence might take to exploit the experiences in the Gulf War. Whatever those directions, they unquestionably must include a “combined intell” analog to the combined arms concept which melds multiple services in Joint operations and those with other nations’ forces into fully combined operations. Intelligence, says the experience in the Gulf, must now become genuinely joint and fully capable of rapidly being combined with intelligence operations of other, cooperating nations.6
Attention was still focused on Iraq and the growing civil war in Yugoslavia when on August 19, 1991 the coup plotters detained Gorbachev. Their attempt to seize control of the Soviet government set in motion yet another dramatic shift in the geopolitical terrain and further transformed the nature of defense intelligence.
Collapse of the Soviet Union. The prior collapse of the Warsaw Pact had moved intelligence out of its 40-year preoccupation with a notional Eurasian-centered global war and the concomitant focus on military forces. Regional security issues and economic factors came forward in importance. On the heels of those changes, the Gulf War displayed new technologies and highlighted the importance of combined intelligence organizations. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union came yet more complexities. Further widening the aperture, these changes highlighted the importance of the political dimensions of intelligence. And the changes came at a gallop.
The formerly glacial pace of Kremlin politics had spawned a set of Kremlinologlsts able to divine meaning from small shifts in the signatories to party leader obituaries. Now, “Who’s in charge?” became a prime question with a different answer every week. We will continue to encounter new names, new places, and new political agendas for a long time to come in this vast, important region. The Cold War challenge of tracking the military designs of the single, central government in Moscow has exploded into a very complex and largely political intelligence problem. At least 15 states so far seem to be emerging from the wreckage of the USSR. Various factions contend for leadership in many different types of infant democracies; all confront the dozens and dozens of ethnic groupings which cross the new political borders.
As these political issues come to the fore, intelligence loses its near monopoly as the purveyor of information and estimates about the successor states to the Soviet empire. Most of the “targets” are no longer fully denied. The openings promised by glasnost and the fall of the Iron Curtain culminated in the days after the coup with the dissolution of the Communist party and some of the organs of state security. Suddenly, visitors and cameras were inside the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters and prison; archives were being opened; tours of military equipment and defense factories were being set up. There are some secrets left, for sure, but in many cases, the new governments seem as uncertain as we about “facts” like the military budget. With hyperinflation, new currencies, different ways of keeping the books by new bureaucracies just taking root, “We don’t know.” is as good an answer in Kiev or Moscow as it is in Washington to many of the important questions.
Another reason for the loss of “market share” by the intelligence services lies in the inherent conjunction of the press and politicians in a genuine democracy. Formerly captive journalists are beginning to report real news; policymakers, formerly reliant on intelligence experts to interpret the nuances behind the managed news, now often find the press accounts to be the quickest and most fulsome source of minute-by-minute information. Meetings of the “CIS” leaders are a good example. Formerly, Kremlin leaders met in deepest secrecy making decisions we might not tease out until years later. Now the collective leadership of the Commonwealth, if such an entity still exists by the time this article is published, announces its meetings and schedules its press conferences in advance.
Finally, politics and policies in the new states are naturally the domain of our own diplomats and policymakers. As we expand our official contacts with the new leadership figures in the new states, our policymakers may develop a richer set of personal contacts and more direct insights into policy issues and decisions than intelligence alone can provide. This is an especially important recognition for intelligence: in an even partially democratic society, matters of politics, economics, and security are inherently “political” and are, therefore, largely addressed by government leaders in public fora. One attends to and gleans information from these political venues in ways somewhat different from those used when confronting a military problem inside a sealed society. Now we can just ask.
—————————————————————————————— Adding to the angst of many in the Intelligence Community about seemingly being upstaged by the open press and the policymakers themselves is another political complexity: how to report on the many different ethnic, religious, and other factions where US military interests are not directly threatened. The diversity of languages, cultures, and histories demands a formidable expertise not previously nurtured inside the Community. There is a bewildering patchwork of minorities and specialized political agendas inside the former Soviet Union as there is another within the former Yugoslavia and across the worlds of Arab and islam and China. Which to study? Which to leave for CNN?
One new, high-priority challenge may rely on some traditional skills: demilitarization arid defense conversion. There seems to be broad agreement among the new states that the grossly oversized former Soviet military must shrink. Clearly, the impoverished successor states must cut military production if they are to afford the civil reforms their people so desperately need. But we shall need to monitor this “conversion” process in order to calibrate our own defense posture and. importantly, to assist with advice and support as the new states take form. We also will want to track the “brain drain,” the risks of special expertise, equipment, and materials migrating into other, dangerous hands. So far this is more theory than accomplishment. Even with direct access to military people and plant managers, little is known by anyone: reformers, advisors, or observers. Intelligence will have much to offer about what types of new military organizations might emerge, which plants might still produce weaponry, what defense budgets mean, and so on. While there has been much attention to the risks of dispersion of nuclear scientists, we also might be alert to the spread of the terrorist training, espionage, and internal security skills which also were staples of the malevolent Soviet empire. New intelligence offices have been specially chartered to improve our capabilities of tracking this proliferation.
There is more, but this short survey is enough to demonstrate how pervasive are the changes in the global security climate and how extensive is their impact on intelligence. Policymakers face the same changes, of course. Their reactions have been to set new policies, design new strategies thereby changing substantially their requirements for intelligence.
The New Regional Defense Strategy
Defense policy leaders moved very rapidly to shelve the Cold War policies of containment. Even before the Berlin Wall had fallen in November 1989, policy officials were designing a replacement for the old strategy of deterring a global war stemming from a sudden, massive Soviet-Pact attack into Europe. The new Defense Strategy was formally announced by President Bush August 2, 1990 in a speech in Aspen. Colorado. The new strategy shifted from a concern with global war to a regional focus, a principle being tested that same day by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. A thorough reevaluation was undertaken immediately after the August coup attempt in Moscow. After verifying that the fundamental structure of the President’s August 1990 defense strategy was sound, the review refined the strategy to incorporate the lessons of the Gulf War and the hopeful rise of the many new and friendly democracies in Eastern Europe. Russia, and Eurasia.7
Forward Military Presence. The cornerstone of the new strategy is to exploit the political power of a credible forward military presence. The United States derives great benefits from the combination of forces stationed forward, the overseas base and logistics infrastructure, and the operational presence delivered by naval forces on patrol plus foreign exercises by all the services. A continued US military presence in key regions, notably in Asia. Europe, and the Middle East. Is. as a matter of strategic principle, deemed essential to the long-term security of the United States and our regional allies. In Asia, for an important instance, the assured presence of American land-based and naval units ameliorates some of the historic tensions underlying the region’s political dynamics. In Europe, as in Asia, US ground forces, sized to retain military credibility, are an irreplaceable symbol of the enduring US security and economic interests.
For intelligence, the forward military presence precept dictates a careful gauging of the political, military, and economic dynamics of each key region. In a sense, this reverses the Cold War priority on assuring that war could be deterred, or successfully fought if necessary, to a more active stance of reinforcing the peace with credible presence. To that end the strategy introduced the concept of strategic depth, the idea that the US wishes actively to promote a geopolitical climate as remote from global and major regional war as possible.8 The most subtle and important intelligence roles will be found in enabling the dynamic orchestration of policies to shape the strategic climate and preclude the rise of non-democratic, hostile powers.
Crisis Response. Part of the strategy’s effort to sustain that strategic depth is to require the capability for decisive intervention in a major regional contingency. This will pose difficult warning problems. As Saddam Hussein demonstrated, even very sizeable military forces can be marshalled and moved so that unambiguous warning is reduced to days or even hours. In contrast, a Soviet grab for oil and a warm water port in the Gulf region in the old days would likely have offered a couple months of clear warning. Furthermore, each of these potential regional crises will likely pose a different mixture of weapon systems, doctrine, and terrain problems. Intelligence will be challenged more than ever to be widely knowledgeable of Third World crisis potentials and to sound useful, timely alerts. The requirement of the strategy selectively to forestall. If possible, and to intervene decisively, if necessary. In these regional brouhahas will be a cardinal driver of intelligence.
Strategic Deterrence and Defense. The new strategy emphasizes that the task of strategic nuclear deterrence has shifted to a regional context. The four nuclear successor states to the Soviet Union have, so far, professed a wish to cease the canonical nuclear confrontation between two offensive nuclear missile triads. Thanks to the President’s two nuclear initiatives intended to encourage that thinking, dramatic reductions of both tactical and strategic warheads are underway. But even as we work toward a cooperative relationship to replace the East-West nuclear confrontation, regional strategic problems have become sharply more serious. Iraq showed the new pattern. Over the next decade one to two dozen states will achieve strategic weapon status through a combination of ballistic missile acquisition and indigenous nuclear and biological warhead development, both potentially helped by ex-Soviet or other experts for hire on the underworld arms market.
These changes mean that, if anything, strategic intelligence is becoming more important than ever, but with a major shift in focus. The old comparisons of offensive nuclear triad vs. triad and target base development have now been substantially altered. So has the relationship between strategic and theater nuclear weapons: we have backed away from the use of theater or tactical weapons as deterrent steps on the escalation ladder, although we do retain the option of restoring some tactical weapons to ready status. Intelligence will be challenged to appraise the interactive influences between our remaining nuclear deterrent arsenal, other friendly nuclear stockpiles such as the British or French (or even the Russian), and rogue Third World states rattling nuclear- or biological-tipped rockets. Space defenses are still in the future, but they, too, are part of the new strategy and will become a greater part of the intelligence picture. The President’s strategic nuclear initiative spoke of the prospect of “extended protection,” whereby the US ballistic missile defense umbrella might be extended over friends and allies, perhaps with some cooperatively participating in the overall effort. “Strategic defense” intelligence is becoming a new subdiscipllne alongside the strategic offensive deterrent specialists who must themselves shift to a regional-strategic focus.
As Iraq demonstrated by its threats during the Gulf War, biological weapons (BW) have joined nuclear devices in the strategic category.9 A dozen or more states appear to be actively pursuing these horrendously lethal capabilities. We must now come to the recognition that BW, heretofore more of a fright in the scientific closet than a practical capability, is feasible and, to some states, is seen as useful. Very few in the Intelligence Community have mastered the biomedical disciplines needed to understand the mechanisms by which various BW agents kill or incapacitate, how those agents are manufactured; how they may be delivered variously in local terrorist, battlefield “tactical,” or genuinely strategic attacks; how intelligence systems could warn of impending attack; and how various defensive measures work.
Third World NBC and missilery is one area where the targets are going to be vigorously denied. Witness Iraq’s success in hiding both an offensive nuclear warhead program and an equally massive program of constructing nuclear-hardened defenses. It also is a prime area for intelligence cooperation. As the success of the UN-sponsored intrusive inspections suggests, it is possible that new types of international intelligence organizations might be chartered to probe for dangerous activities across traditional barriers of sovereignty.
Likely to be one of the more challenging problems on the new intelligence agenda will be the task of advising the policymaker what influence we may exert over an ambitious Third World leader with a strategic arsenal of nuclear and/or biological warheads and an inventory of mobile ballistic or cruise missiles. Concepts of deterrence drawn from our familiar and stable paradigm of East-West strategic nuclear deterrence may not be wholly relevant. Perhaps we will need to consider other verbs like compel in addition to the accustomed logic of deter. And how will we know if the other side is influenced? Different leaders might act differently and send much different signals than the conservative old men who used to run the Kremlin.
Reconstitution. The fourth leg of the new strategy is a new concept that proposes to avoid our pattern of pell-mell demobilization after a successful war. Reconstitutlon will assure that we retain the capability, should it ever be needed, to grow our defense capabilities back up to the larger sizes and modern capabilities needed were we again to confront a very large regional adversary or even a future global threat. The challenge for intelligence will be to create a new concept for long-range warning. In fact, warning seems an inappropriate term for the caution flag raised if a state starts arming in ways which may become dangerous in five or ten years. Indications and warning techniques were geared toward crisply sounding the alert should the Soviets begin a major, final buildup to launching a massive offensive and, in part, to alerting on potential attacks in the Third World. Short-notice I&W (Indications and Warning) will continue in importance as discussed in the regional crisis response section above. But different sorts of problems are posed if the requirement is to advise policy makers that we are losing strategic depth, that our comparative position versus a major potential adversary is being eroded. Hitler’s Germany in 1933 offers an example of a period of apparent peace transitioning into the precursor of war.
In sum, the new regional defense strategy is a strategy bent toward maximizing US strategic depth in a period of great uncertainty and transformation. Such a strategy dictates high readiness and relies on exceptionally skillful, wide-ranging intelligence. The strategy also enables the substantial reduction in the size of the US defense establishment. In round numbers, US force structure is being cut by 25 percent over the period 1990 to 1995 with some sectors cut even more drastically. Clearly, intelligence also must shrink. It is easy to argue that these times need more, not less intelligence, but that is a false and lazy claim. As a matter of strategic principle, defense, including defense intelligence, can and must take up a somewhat smaller portion of the national treasure. The trick is to “build down,” to improve while cutting. This will likely be a challenge as daunting as any facing the Community. In history, the periods after a war have almost always been times of stifling stagnation. History also suggests that periods of downsizing are usually times of conservative retrenchment with the new and experimental sacrificed to the budget knife in order to retain the tried and true. Those fates cannot be allowed at this point. The current circumstances insist that we emerge from the ongoing build down leaner, but even more capable.
The following section suggests some of the innovations intelligence professionals might consider as they build down to a considerably smaller but better set of capabilities.
The Innovative Practice of Intelligence
Short of the President, there is no one person who is the policymaker. It is instructive to parse the array of defense clients. In order to connect the dots from the new climate and new strategy to the updated business of intelligence, it serves a line hierarchy which runs upward from the tactical (an individual unit commander in the field) through the operational (a military theater commander) to the strategic (the several facets of overall political-military direction in Washington). Several factors operating over the past decade or so have shifted considerably the hierarchy. Interactions, and interests of this array of national security officials, their staffs, and their intelligence associates.
The Tactical Level and Scouting. To repeat a crucial point made earlier, the day is long past when military intelligence folks could tend only to the operations of their own branch of service on the battlefield. Perhaps the number-one lesson to be seen in the Gulf War is that virtually all commanders in the field direct combined arms operations; no single service or specialty performs in a solo spotlight. Each modern ground, air, or naval commander orchestrates weapons with ranges and speeds across a battlefield of such depth that it is automatically made “purple” by interactions with units of other services and, often, of other nations. Obviously, intelligence support to these commanders must itself be Inherently purple. But at least as Important as a commitment to ecumenism may be the role of the tactical Intelligence officer In directing a scouting operation. This promises a dramatic shift in stature for the military intelligence officer In the field.
Heretofore, we have tended to treat our intelligence officers as a kind of human sponge: they were to soak up information from all possible sources and then, when squeezed, let go with a few cogent facts or a drop of wisdom. That talent will no doubt continue to be useful but a new and more muscular role grows out of the array of new technology and doctrine. The combat intelligence officer can take a leading role in actively directing tactical scouting operation.10 Data from new military sensors deployed by the fighting forces such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be fused in mobile command intelligence centers with data gained from theater- and national-level data. With computers and satellite communication links, the local J2 officer one day soon may be able to task a national satellite to snap and transmit a specific photo or ask a national intelligence center for a specific piece of information. The result will be a robust, dynamic scouting effort mounted with the same depth, speed, and integrative capacity of combat forces on the modem battlefield.
Active scouting will not be an activity confined to the tactical level, of course. In order to achieve such a capability, intelligence centers at higher levels will have to recognize the concept and configure their capabilities to provide the necessary interactive support to the intelligence officer working in the field alongside his tactical commander. At the tactical level, one challenge will be the need to achieve better ties among the sensors deployed by combat forces to permit the assembly of an integrated scouting picture.
The Operational Level and the Reconnaissance-Strike Complex. By the end of the Gulf War, CNN and the daily briefing at General Schwarzkopf’s headquarters had taught all the world about the operational level of warfare, the level between the tactical and the strategic where all the forces in a “theater” are integrated into a coherent “campaign.” In the Cold War context, campaigns were planning constructs for the several different regional operations to be mounted in concert were we to battle world-wide. Now a campaign is the single, overall effort in a regional conflict directed by a theater commander in chief, or “CINC” in US parlance. One way to look at a CINC and his theater headquarters is to see them as the directors of an operational level reconnaissance strike complex. The concept, first voiced by Soviet theorists in the 1970s, portrays the situation when advanced means of scouting, from space-based sensors to unmanned surveillance aircraft and high lech sensors, are connected to advanced combat systems such as high speed vehicles, long range weapons, precision munitions by a complex of interactive, computer-assisted command centers. The result is a coherent whole responsive to a single overall commander. The all-seeing complex can rapidly strike what It sees and observe, correct, and strike quickly again.
Achievement of the potential of the theater-level reconnaissance-strike complex may be one of the more important tasks of the Intelligence Community today. In part, the challenge is to move out of the era of stovepipe intelligence and into one where systems are designed from the ground up to dovetail into a coherent, theater-wide whole. More critical than the systems engineering, however, is the human engineering. Intelligence professionals will need career patterns that help them out of the stovepipes into genuinely purple expertise. That continuing cross-fertilization and the lessons mined from the experience in the desert might well lead to radical new designs for the intelligence organizations and procedures constituent in the overall complex.
Bomb damage assessment (BDA) was one of the acronyms learned by the public during the Gulf War. Bomb damage assessment can be seen as the means of closing the loop between the reconnaissance and the strike sides of the theater headquarters brain. It is perhaps better labeled SEA or “strike effectiveness assessment” to reflect the full range of factors which must be folded into a synoptic picture of what is being achieved on the battlefield. As the press tracked the remarkable air-ground offensive, it became clear that BDA/SEA capabilities were struggling to keep up with the information demands fostered by new generations of precision strike weapons. Amazing as the much-televised precision bombing was, the real key to the combat power in the Gulf was not the technology of laser-guided weapons but the operational fluency of a large, disparate force successfully executing new doctrines intended to achieve combat leverage through the close integration of many different kinds of combat units and weapon systems.
It seems unlikely that the BDA/SEA problem (that is, how to improve the neural connections between the two halves of the reconnaissance-strike complex brain) can be solved by a single new organization or system. One of the challenges to the sector of the intelligence community working at the operational level with a theater commander will be to continue to advance BDA/SEA efficacy as doctrine and weaponry continue to evolve. A reconnaissance-strike complex is not a finite unit like a division or an air wing, which can be located at one base or moved to a particular corner of the battlefield. It is rather a heightened capability “deployed” into a region by a combination of moving various staff elements into a theater and of activating various computer systems and data links.
The complex as it existed in the Gulf War, centered in Riyadh with tentacles out all over the theater and data links back to central intelligence systems in Washington, need not be the only model. It might be equally valid to “deploy” the reconnaissance half of a complex into a crisis-torn region where we do not intend to intervene with military force, but where we do need to know more to manage our diplomacy, or to coach our friends in the region who are obliged to engage directly or to prepare intervene if we are directly threatened. Consider the current fighting in the Balkans or the recurrent risk of nuclear war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. In the one case a fine-grained understanding of the civil war among Serbs, Croats, and the other fighting factions might well enlarge our capacity to weigh in politically or aid third-party peacekeeping efforts. In the other case, we might be able to sound the alarm before, not after, the first shot of the world’s first regional nuclear war.
These are not recommendations, but examples to suggest that with the advent of the theater-level reconnaissance-strike complex. Intelligence can “deploy” a special and distinct capability to a theater, not Just tag along behind the combat units. We have reached the stage where we must be able to move an intelligence capability into a crisis region as readily as we can move an aircraft carrier. (Indeed, the ability of naval ships to move freely on the high seas suggests that operating the mobile elements of a reconnaissance-strike complex might be a new naval mission.) For the United States, this capability ought to be a special national strength. The provision of intelligence support can be one of our principal contributions to future coalitions gathered to counter a rogue regional state or dampen factional fighting.
The Strategic Level and the National Policymaking Arena
The strategic level is managed in Washington where the political and the military are blended. To be sure, political considerations often infuse military operations even down to the tactical level, but for this discussion we will focus on the intelligence Community’s political-military clientele in the capital where an important shift on each side of that constituency has taken place. On the military side, the consolidation of authority under the Chairman. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the concomitant rise in the power of the Joint Staff has clearly led to the emergence of the Joint Staff J2 as the premier military current intelligence officer. However, with the overall shift out of the militarized Cold War, and apart from the times when we have US military forces actively engaged in a regional crisis response, most key operational decisions are taken by senior officials from several parts of the Executive Branch working together in a venue called the interagency process. Those decisions are often taken in coordination with, or lead to changed policies toward, other governments.
It is in these arenas where the senior political appointees of the President take the lead. The military often is represented in the interagency discussions, but in this arena the political officials dominate the intensive, day-to-day operations in Washington and the diplomacy abroad. The end of the Cold War has revealed a major shortcoming in intelligence support to these political officials. As we have seen, intelligence was highly militarized during the Cold War. Understandably enough, the apex of defense intelligence was seen to be the top military leadership: the Service chiefs, and increasingly after the Goldwater-Nlchols reforms, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What that shift missed was the fact that, unless military power was directly engaged, it is the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy who leads the daily “operations” of the department in the interagency and diplomatic arenas. With the creation of a new Policy Issues Office (PIO) intended directly to serve this key official and other senior political appointees, DIA moved to support tills new reality. But organizational rearrangements of themselves will not be enough.
Of the many challenges ahead for intelligence, one of the most critical will be the development of the capabilities to deliver full-bodied intelligence support to these officials who engage complex security issues across a very wide operational agenda.
In sum, it seems that virtually every corner of the intelligence world confronts some combination of new circumstances, different clients with different needs, and opportunities to adopt new ways while adapting to lower budgets: an unprecedented opportunity to excel, some would say! The old wisdom, that the hardest half of the estimate was the work to define the terms of reference, may be a particularly cogent observation as we step into this radically transformed agenda for the policy-intelligence partnership. Operational tasks in the field and estimative work in the headquarters and in Washington will be well served by extra care and thought invested in “setting the TOR (Terms of Reference).” Who is the customer? What are the decisionmaking problems the intelligence is intended to aid? What is the range of considerations to be fused into the products? Old but useful questions. Almost all will have new answers.
Sources and Methods
Two main inferences emerge from this analysis. One is that defense intelligence must develop a culture substantially more open and inclusive. Nowadays, security issues are framed quite broadly. To be helpful, intelligence professionals must fuse an especially wide range of information into their assessments. And by its very nature, much of that information (political, economic, ecological, and so on) is often in the open. Certainly, there are denied targets and reasons to maintain sensitive methods of probing them. Intelligence will continue to deal in secrets. But overall, a wider intelligence aperture will necessarily focus less exclusively on the military factors that held our gaze through the Cold War. Inherent in that widening, and made opportune by the collapse of the hostile Soviet empire, is a necessary openness to intelligence. We are at a point where many types of intelligence can be done openly with open sources. The press is not a competitor, but a primary source. Reporters on the ground can communicate much more about the state of local politics in Kurdistan than can an overhead photo of refugee camps. A good journalist can paint a picture of dally life in a potential crisis spot which can enhance the feel of analyst and policymaker alike for the setting. With that context, analysis can focus more crisply on the specific policy issues on the decompensated’s table.
The other major conclusion is that, if there is any single category of analytic work to be accorded the elite status once reserved for Sovietologists, it is the experienced vision of the regional expert who can see five or ten years or more out into the futures of the key regions around the world. This used to be called the warning problem, but as we have seen, warning is too narrow a label. On the edge of a regional scrap, we might have warning of the actual engagement of military forces. If we are to engage, we will need more than hours to get there if we are to be decisive. Much better if we can see the storm clouds on the horizon and act to ameliorate the situation before lighting strikes, lightning which might one of these days come with a nuclear or biological warhead. Again, the key will be regional expertise and the organizational processes to fuse that knowledge with a variety of technical disciplines.
One final thought to go with the plea for farsighted regional intelligence expertise which can integrate information from many sources and across many disciplines. Forehanded advice to the policymaker must not be allowed to become merely the intelligence equivalent of newspaper “op-ed” writing. The remarkable new global security climate seems to excite the columnist in us all. We must not confuse opinion with intelligence which, while often helpful by offering a point of view, must stay firmly rooted in the retailing of facts.
These are the new challenges of actively working to protect and extend the strategic depth we achieved when we put the Cold War behind us and moved away from the edge of a military confrontation with the Soviet Union. It also is the kind of strategic depth we achieved when we crushed the Iraqi military and allowed the Middle East to move forward into an active peace process.
Quality Defense Intelligence Professionals
One cannot work around intelligence professionals without being reminded dally what an extraordinarily talented and dedicated group they are. The United States has been especially fortunate in the high caliber of the men and women who are drawn to the challenges of intelligence. In one of its prime tenets, the new regional defense strategy insists that the high quality of the US military be protected. That quality, which the world saw on television as it watched Americans responding to the crisis in the Gulf, must zealously be protected in the Intelligence Community, civilian and military, as well.
People are the real assets. Intelligence expertise cannot be built quickly. We must not let downsizing and radical transformations in the nature of the work precipitate an exodus of the best and brightest. As never before, defense intelligence, and national security, depend directly on a strong corps of gifted and motivated professionals able to thrive in these much more demanding climates. Of all the grades future historians might assign us, the one most telling will be high marks for reinforcing the quality of the intelligence corps as we adjust to the dramatically different tasks of the new security climate.
Notes
- The author wishes to acknowledge the important education in the profession he has received from the exceptional examples of Admiral Bobby Ionian, Vice Admiral William O. Studeman, and especially. Mr. Rich Haver. Special thanks for comments on this article go to naval intelligence analyst Ms. Jean Callaghan. Dr. (and Naval Reserve Intelligence Lieutenant Commander) David Rosenberg, former NSC staff member Mr. Rod McDanlel, and to the Journal co-editor. Dr. Mark Welsenbloom.
- Turning to historians and other outside experts for illumination about the roots of these “Hatflelds vs. the McCoys” animosities will often be more instructive than a count of each side’s armored personnel carriers.
- Conduct of the Persian Gulf Conflict—An Interim Report to Congress, Secretary of Defense, July 1991. See also the Final Report of April 1992, to be available through the Government Printing Office. The author was one of the officials responsible for organizing and directing the preparation of the report to Congress.
- Although the overwhelming victory of the Coalition swept most of their stratagems off the board, the intelligence professional will find the array of Iraqi gambits in the information war well worth study.
- One may not rush to blame intelligence alone for not unveiling the Iraqi NDC and missile efforts. Many factors contributed. Iraqi secrecy itself certainly gets a large share of the “credit” for successfully masking these huge activities.
- There is a legitimate, residual role to be played by the non-purple Service Intelligence staffs. From the pollcymnkcrs’ point of view there remains a need for specialized intelligence advice to augment that retailed by Joint Intelligence organizations. Again, the Gulf War provides recent illustrations. Navy Intelligence, with its specialized knowledge of merchant shipping, provided unique support to the Maritime Intercept Operations. Similarly, the intelligence staffs and their line associates at the advanced tactics schools like Navy’s Strike U. the Air Force Red Flag, and Army’s National Training Center were important sources of threat appreciations. The intelligence staffs of the services may often be able to augment the J2s of the Joint commands with specialized information about opposing equipment and tactics to a depth the operational staffs are unable to achieve. The challenge will be to deliver such specialized support in ways which fill out the Joint picture, not drag it back into parochial mono-dimensionality.
- The main architects of the new strategy were Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowltz and Principal Deputy Under Secretary (Strategy and Resources) I. Lewis Llbby. The same officials directed the 1991-1992 refinements. The author was a member of the development team. For a complete and official exposition of the New Regional Defense Strategy, see the testimony of Secretary Cheney before the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 31, 1992.
- This important concept is the wholly original creation of Principal Deputy Under Secretary I. Lewis Llbby, who developed the idea during the post-coup Defense Strategy review.
- The BW threat is very serious, complex, and woefully misunderstood. The few intelligence professionals who work in the area are exceptional, but they are too few and too poorly supported to constitute a fully dimensional guild of the caliber, say, that tracks nuclear submarines or Russian affairs. I urge the Intelligence Community to undertake the rapid development of a peerless BW intelligence capability. I also urge individual intelligence officers to familiarize themselves with the basics of BW, now and for the foreseeable future a prominent part of strategic deterrence and defense.
- For more on the concept of scouting, see Wayne Hughes. Fleet Tactics (Annapolis, Maryland: US Naval Institute, 1987).