Perhaps We Should Have Shouted

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Perhaps We Should Have Shouted:

A Twenty-Year Retrospective

By ROBERT DAVID STEELE VIVAS

Robert David STEELE Vivas has been a Marine since 1975 and an intelligence professional since 1979. He writes frequently on intelligence and strategy.

In 1988 it was my great privilege to serve as the senior civilian responsible for founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (MCIA), and in the same year, to serve as a staff writer for General Al Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps (CMC) His 1989 article, “Global Intelligence Challenges for the 1990’s,” concisely identified the differences between the conventional and emerging threats, called for a radical increase in our exploitation of open sources of information, and demanded that we devise new means of producing intelligence (decision-support) about radical and revolutionary non-state threats so as to justify and guide what he called “peaceful preventive measures.” No general then or since has made as much sense. He was a warrior, but above all he was a leader who understood the urgency of education and the role of intelligence as a form of remedial education for decision-makers.

Below I reproduce the core distinction that General Gray made on the basis of the strategic generalizations that were achieved very quickly by MCIA in its pioneering Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) study, Overview of Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World, eventually published in 1990.

Conventional Threat
+Governmental
+Conventional/Nuclear
+Static Orders of Battle
+Linear Development
+Rules of Engagement
+Known Doctrine
+Strategic Warning
+Known Intelligence
Assets / Emerging Threat
+Non-Governmental
+Non-Conventional
+Dynamic or Random
+Non-linear
+No Constraints
+Unknown Doctrine
+No Existing I&W Net
+Unlimited 5th Column

Figure 1: What the Marines Knew in 1988

I feel such as sense of déjà vu, especially as I recollect how General Gray stressed in his article that the narcotics threat then resisted so fiercely by the other three military services was in fact a “type” threat that we needed to take seriously.

In 1992 I participated in three significant national defense evolutions: a force structure study, a national intelligence review based on lessons learned from Gulf War I, and a comprehensive review of defense command and control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) led by The Honorable Dwayne Andrews. In brief, here is what I learned back then:

Ø  Shooters don’t do calculus—USMC absolutely would not reduce shooters to augment thinkers as a force multiplier

Ø  Numerous intelligence failures across all of the disciplines in Gulf War I, but especially Human Intelligence (HUMINT), were ignored

Ø  As long as there is plenty of money for the military-industrial complex in C4I (generally, Service-specific communications systems), no one really cares about intelligence results

In 1992 I also sponsored a conference on OSINT. Over the course of fifteen years I recruited 750 world-class speakers and trained 7,500 mid-career officers from across 40 countries and—I am told—indirectly influenced another 25,000 in another 50 countries. In the USA, only the U.S. Special Operations Command J-23 (OSINT Branch) meets my expectations of competency.

On 19 December 1995 I was one of a handful of Americans invited to address the French national conference on “War and Peace in the 21st Century.” Dr. Robert Gates, Dr. Samuel Huntington, and Dr. Charles Cogan (a former covert operations personality) were the others, with Sir Michael Howard from England being memorable as well.

Below is the original outline of my remarks.

DIAGNOSIS of the Failure of Intelligence (INT)

1. Four Warrior Classes

2. Dependency on Information

3. Information Explosion-Drowning

4. Technological Complexity and Vulnerability

5. Ascendancy of the Disposed

STRUCTURAL IMBALANCE in Defense and INT

1. States Assume Borders, Citizens, Tax Base

2. Defense Assumes Conventional Enemy

3. Intelligence Assumes Conventional Enemy, Optimizes

for Secrets

4. Information Infrastructure Assumes No Threat, No

Attack

5. Law Assumes General Obedience, Domestic Criminals

NEW FORMS OF VIOLENCE and INT Challenges

1. Information Warfare (Global, Corporate, and Individual,

Citing Schwartau, Strassmann)

2. Transnational Gangs—Money, Computers, Fifth

Column, Ruthlessness

3. Proliferation—Sowing Dragon’s Teeth

4. Disease—Socio-Economic, Ideo-Cultural, Techno-

Demographic

5. Economic Competition and National Attractiveness

EARLY WARNING through Virtual Communities

1. Chaos and “Just in Time” Order via Virtual INT

2. Voluntary Sharing & Integration of Information

3. Public Makes Policy, Public Must Understand Threat

4. Political Accountability Essential—Leadership

5. Warning for Integration of Defense and Police

PREVENTION & ACTION with Information Strategies

1. Domestic Intelligence—Statecraft as Soulcraft

2. Environmental Intelligence—Eliminate External

Diseconomies

3. Technical Intelligence—Bad Engineering, Bad Human

Resource Management (“Gov Spec Cost Plus”)

4. National Information Strategies—Four Pillars

5. Bottom Line: Know When to Kill, Kill Wisely

I take no pleasure in seeing such anticipatory insight ignored by those gathered in Paris for the event but I also hold the USG blameless—I failed to impress.

In 1998 the Army Strategy Conference, an annual event, addressed Asymmetric Warfare. Below are the highlights from that professional gathering of scholars and practitioners.[1]

·  Decision-making has forgotten to plan, cannot adapt to change, and is unable to stimulate a serious dialog

·  Mobility is more important than mass

·  Technology without intelligence is blind

·  Weapons’ cost must be appropriate to the target profile and priority

·  Time and space favor the asymmetric non-traditional enemy

·  We spread ourselves too thin, this also favors the asymmetric enemy

·  Vulnerabilities are largely in the civil sector

·  Enemies know how to wage war between the seams of our legal systems

·  Nation is vulnerable to campaigns that leverage the international and local medias

·  Dependency on volunteer contractors in the battle area is a major Achilles’ heel

·  We constantly underestimate willingness of others to do great harm to bystanders

Above is my mid-1990’s proposed “four forces after next,” updated in 2008 to add the Information

·  Technology will not replace boots on the ground

·  We suffer from fallacy of misplaced concreteness (or more recently, from ideological fantasies unchecked by reality)

·  We don’t do offensive asymmetry

·  Our planning process cannot deal with radical rapid shifts

·  Civil-military relationships are weak

·  States are unlikely to attack us directly

·  Army-Marine Corps competing with Navy-Air Force for budget share

·  Need a new military: four forces after next:

o  Big War (60%)

o  Small War (20%)

o  Peace War (10%)

o  Homeland Defense (10%)

·  Soldiers cannot be policemen—but civilian capacity to plan, program, command, and execute complex peace operations does not exist—need Whole of Government capacities

·  Active-reserve mix needs adjustment

·  Private sector role needs examination

·  Intelligence remains an afterthought

·  Issue is one of balance across the instruments of national power

Operations (IO) implications for how we need to integrate thinkers with shooters from now on.

This was in 1998. We would not hear such heresy again until 2008, when the same Army Strategy Conference addressed the need for Rebalancing the Instruments of National Power. Complete notes from every speaker, and my own summary article, are online.[2] Below are a mere handful of the insights, most a stark repetition of the same thoughts ten years earlier, now given slightly more cachet by Dr. Joseph Nye’s publications on “soft power” and the new meme de jour, “Whole of Government” planning and operations.

·  We are not well organized for new era

·  Threats are complex and dispersed

·  We’ve neglected four of the five D’s, Defense being the one not neglected:

o  Diplomacy

o  Development

o  Domestic Capacity (Private Sector)

o  Decision-Support (Intelligence)

·  Military cannot win peace alone

·  Preventive action prior to crises needed

·  Need stabilization & reconstruction forces

·  USA suffers from a strategic deficit—we lack strategists as well as standing plans for inter-agency engagement before, during, and after conflict

·  Security must be re-defined to address non-military non-human threats (disease, environment) while also addressing failed states and super-empowered individuals

·  Existing funding vehicles do not work

·  Information domain is key terrain and we continue to be complacent and ignorant

·  Money assigned to information arena is buying tools, not content and not understanding

·  Need a Cultural Advisor to the President

I neglect many other highly relevant observations only to emphasize that my notes online do justice to the event and all of the speakers, in detail.

My three “take-aways” from this event revolved around what may finally be a new-found appreciation for the following facts:

Ø  Our system simply does not work

Ø  We have no idea who is doing what or who is spending what or what is being bought country by country or issue by issue

Ø  We lack a strategic analytic model that defines linkages and allows for early warning of non-traditional crises while enabling both Whole of Government and the voluntary harmonization of multinational budgets and behaviors on any given mutual interest.

In the intervening time, in 2004, the United Nations (UN) High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Changes produced an extraordinary report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. This report identified, in priority order, the following ten high-level threats to humanity and thus to our security:

01 Poverty

02 Infectious Disease

03 Environmental Degradation

04 Inter-State Conflict

05 Civil War

06 Genocide

07 Other Atrocities

08 Proliferation

09 Terrorism

10 Transnational Crime

No one that I can recollect made mention of this internationally-validated threat review in 2008. Despite the fact that LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret) was the American participant, this comprehensive definition of both the threats and their relative priority in relation to human security was ignored, not only in the USA, but around the world by governments carrying on with “business as usual.”

With that as preamble, and meaning no disrespect for the hundreds of Americans from Franklin “Chuck” Spinney to Col John Boyd, USAF (Ret) to Col G. I. Wilson, USMC (Ret) and many others, I will begin my conclusion—what is to be done—with a quotation from Senator San Nunn (D-GA), then the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC).[3]

I am constantly being asked for a bottom-line defense number. I don’t know of any logical way to arrive at such a figure without analyzing the threat; without determining what changes in our strategy should be made in light of the changes in the threat; and then determining what force structure and weapons programs we need to carry out this revised strategy.

The Threat

The “threat” to the USA can be summarized with two words: global destabilization. This is not the place to review our role in creating that threat, only to address “what is to be done” about it.

The threat is predominantly non-military in nature, and demands not only Whole of Government remediation, but multinational and non-governmental remediation. The U.S. Government (USG) is not trained, equipped, organized, nor led so as to be competent in either of those two capacities.

The threat is best understood in the context of Buckminster Fuller’s “system of systems” so that we might recognize that all of the threats are related to one another and must be addressed as a systemic whole. Invading Haiti or Panama or Afghanistan or Iraq without planning for the transition to peace is at best delusional and at worst a betrayal of the public trust.[4] Although we give lip service to this idea of waging peace now, it is still not real—to the slightest degree—in how we continue to plan, program, budget, train, equip, and organize.

It merits emphasis that the U.S. Intelligence Community (US IC) is not trained, equipped, organized, nor led to be effective in all-source collection and processing—i.e. including all open sources in 183 languages we do not speak—nor does it have a strategic analytic model able to generate decision-support helpful to each and all the threats.

Cabinet Departments and independent agencies do not “do” intelligence. They thrive on biased, late, filtered, and incomplete information from stakeholders, and strive to maintain budget share, nothing more.

In the absence of “management” from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), we must add our own incoherence to the threat list. We are our own worst enemy, combining ignorance, hubris, a blundering bureaucracy, and a plundering private sector, all coming together to make the USA a clumsy even ridiculous Goliath in a world swarming with agile Davids.

In this light, the current military budget and what it buys can be seen as both grotesquely expensive and ineffective—even assuming the best possible weapons and mobility systems performance, we have a force built to address only 10% of the threat.

The Strategy

There is no point in reviewing either the national or the military strategy of the USG today, as both are completely disconnected from both reality and the needs of the American people. They are at best publicity documents driven by ideological fantasy, and at worst a severe betrayal of the public trust—an impeachable offense if the public ever notices.

If the federal government—a service of common concern created by the fifty United STATES of America—is to justify its existence in light of today’s threat environment, it must return to the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and re-discover our shared purpose: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e. fulfillment of our potential, not joy for joy’s sake).

Should the federal government recommit to founding principles, then it follows that our national strategy must strive to protect all who enjoy our domestic environment from each of the ten threats here at home, while addressing the eradication of all ten threats simultaneously, first in the Western Hemisphere where instability most directly threatens our future, and then in the rest of the world. In both instances, our foreign interventions must be both Whole of Government and multinational in nature.

Domestically, we have achieved a complete disconnect among the individual citizens who pay taxes; the national (partisan) legislative branch that authorizes and appropriates those taxes (while also assuming trillions of dollars in debt not approved by the public); the Executive that spends that money, in the case of the Department of Defense (DoD) without ever accounting for it; and the private sector that profits at taxpayer expense while externalizing social and environmental costs to future generations. In my view this means that our federal government is either clinically insane or insanely criminal.