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Naval PostgraduateSchool (NPS) Trip Report

Background:

Invited by Captain Steve Ashby, the Senior Intelligence Officer at NPS, to come speak to students of the NS4159 Intelligence Seminar course (part of the core curriculum for Naval Intelligence Officers attending NPS), I presented two topics. The first was the command brief for Chief of Naval Operations-Intelligence Plot (CNO-IP) wherein I described the role, organization, and the “deliverables,” that make CNO-IP, Admiral Vernon Clark’s premiere intelligence center. The second topic I covered was Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). This was done in a discussion forum, seeking to create dialogue with the students on a very salient and important issue for the future of the Intelligence Community, including Naval Intelligence.

CNO-IP Command Brief:

The brief on CNO-IP was well received, and somewhat to my surprise, generated a number of questions right from the beginning. A representative sample of the questions asked throughout the brief (in no particular order), is as follows:

  1. Does CNO-IP conduct analysis?
  2. Is CNO-IP a producer of [finished] intelligence?
  3. If we already have Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), why do we need CNO-IP?
  4. How much support does CNO-IP give to the Fleet and/or the Operators?
  5. Is the focus of CNO-IP tactical or strategic, or both?

The brief helped separate fact from fiction – as CNO-IP has(in my humble opinion) a dual reputation. On the one hand, while CNO-IP has the pseudo-“mythic” reputation of representing only the “best-of-the-best” within in Naval Intelligence derived from the fact that it serves the DNI, OPNAV, and SECNAV leadership directly, the brief helped demonstrate that what makes CNO-IP stand out (among other things) is its unique role: CNO-IP acts as the conduit – the voice – for the rest of Naval Intelligence as it strives to support the senior leadership within the Dept. of the Navy, and the rest of the IC on naval-specific issues. On the other hand, CNO-IP has gained notoriety for its relentless pursuit for the ‘truth,’ one earned because its watch officers and briefers never fail to call any and every command they need in attempt to get “the latest greatest,” intelligence or to get the “ground truth” on a variety of intelligence issues of concern. The command brief helped lay the foundation in order to better understand CNO-IP’s unique role in the Naval Intelligence Community and its aggressive drive to correctly report [the first time] on issues of concern to the senior naval leadership.

Overall the interest level of the students regarding CNO-IP was high, they asked many relevant questions, and ultimately I believe they were left with a much clearer understanding of CNO-IP.

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Discussion:

–The Future of OSINT within DoD & IC –

Although asked by Captain Ashby to speak generally on the topic of OSINT, having followed OSINT for some years (prior to my time at NPS) I believed that merely discussing what OSINT was neither as interesting, nor as pertinent given my audience: graduate students who are junior- to mid-grade intelligence officers, the future leaders within Naval Intelligence, some of whom could go on to senior leadership positions. Thus, I decided we ought to discuss OSINT and its future role within Intelligence Community writ large.

In preparation for this portion of my speaking engagement I began to do a little research to see what OSINT issues were gaining the most ground of late. I turned to OSS.net, the internet homepage of Robert David Steele’sOpen Source Solutions, where I came across a posting that suggested the office of USD(I) Dr. Cambone was responsible for figuring out what to do with the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations to create an ‘Open Source Agency.’ I then got in contact with Colonel Vincent Stewart, USMC, who works for USD(I) and has been tasked with researching/reporting on the issue. In an office-call with Colonel Stewart, we discussed this along with other intelligence and OSINT-related issues. I came away from this discussion realizing that a number of key questions needed answered and issues addressed, if DoD/IC was going to effectively implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations. However, the one question that underscored them all was one Colonel Stewart posed to me, something he himself (along with his staff) was wrestling with: [a somewhat paraphrased version of question]

“Does OSINT need an Open Source Agency to be effectively utilized, or is OSINT more of a ‘toolkit,’ another essential component of the all-source intelligence process that must be made available to everyone within the community?”

After beginning the discussion on OSINT with students by describing what constitutes OSINT, and armed with Colonel Stewart’s question, I posed it in like fashion to the class to see what dialogue it would generate. The following is a number of impressions, answers, questions, and points of recommendation (all paraphrased as I did not take notes since I was the discussion moderator) that I took away from the discussion with the students in light of this question:

  • One of the initial responses received on whether or not to create an Open Source Agency although somewhat rhetorical in nature, was reminiscent of what Colonel Stewart and I discussed, “why create another individual agency, only to have it become another bureaucracy?”
  • In a similar vein, another student suggested that OSINT needs no ‘agency,’ as it was already freely available via the web – it had just yet to be harnessed.
  • OSINT may exist as finished products already they just need to be found and exploited.
  • Comments suggesting web-enabled technology and software solutions were needed to make OSINT more readily available to all emerged out this as well, underscoring the reality of the need for technical solutions to be factored into the OSINT-equation. Too, it highlighted the tendency of the relatively young intelligence officers of today to think in terms of technology, somewhat to the exclusion of the human factor.

These responses pushed us in the direction of discussing, once again, the nature of OSINT itself and thus what constituted OSINT’s unique contribution to intelligence as a separate discipline. In attempt to challenge the audience’s presumptions about OSINT, I reminded them that OSINT is not commensurate with the internet. Conversely, I urged them to see that OSINT’s greatest contributions lay more with those resources, thoughopenly available (although not necessarily ‘free’), are by and large not available via the web, are not in English, and require native-level fluency of the target language not only to digest – but to acquire in the first place. Likewise, I suggested that “knowing who knows,” is almost as important as knowing itself, such that identifying the right experts – those who have the requisite language skills, education, contacts, in-country presence, analytical or practical expertise, and the like – was crucial to building a cost-effective OSINT endeavor from the ground up. Additionally, I suggested OSINT was not just valuable for the Intelligence Community but can adequately support decision making across the board. Thus, I reminded them that intelligence as a product derives its worth for the “value added” assessment it provides based upon sound analysis, not as a consequence of its collection methodology (i.e. secret intelligence must mean it is more accurate).

Further discussion points and questions include:

  • If an OSINT agency is created, who will have control of it? Who should be in control of it?
  • If a generic (non-Intelligence Community specific) Open Source Agency were created, who would handle the requirements/RFI’s (to ensure that each customer, primarily from among the pantheon of federal government entities, were adequately supported)?
  • If OSINT relies on non-governmental (proprietary, educational, or foreign entity) support, how do we ensure privacy for the provider? And, more problematic, how do we disassociate the negative connotation of “intelligence” from OSINT, when some of the best available experts from a variety of backgrounds want nothing to do with intelligence, much less government, or worst-of-all: clearances?
  • Arguments in favor of creating an Open Source Agency suggested that the benefit of having a work force not constrained to clearance-dictated hiring procedures and one where information sharing and horizontal integration were not just buzz-words but standard practice, would outweigh the potential for the agency to bureaucratize, at least in the interim.
  • The realization that what the IC and DoD both need more than anything else, a culture-change, was clearly resonated throughout the whole of the discussion.

In response to these statements/questions I agreed that what was missing from the change-movement (transformation) within the DoD and IC was a focus on the organizational culture aspect of the various entities within DoD/IC – even the larger culture of each. Additionally, I related to the class part of a discussion I had with Colonel Stewart where we discussed the conventional wisdom of the nation-state concept as the underlying framework against which all national-security related issues were analyzed. In light of such seminal (if not controversial) works as Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History,” Samuel Huntington’s, “Clash of Civilizations,” and Robert Kaplan’s, “The Coming Anarchy,” and others that Colonel Stewart and I both had read, it seemed surprising that we (DoD/IC) had such a hard time truly ‘thinking outside the box’ when it comes to conflict, strategy and change. Thus, I posed back to the students the question of what the end state in Iraq should be – challenging the otherwise taken-for-granted notion that Iraq should be encouraged to develop into something resembling western-style democracy. Bringing it back around to more-OSINT specific discussion, I suggested that we (as a nation) collectively failed before we ever stepped foot into Iraq because we did not understand the people whom we were attempting to liberate – where were the tribal studies on Iraq? If they were done, why weren’t they made available to the soldiers operating on the ground in the region? Such questions highlighted the reason we failed: because we relied on limited and narrowly focused secret means, well-known (and deceptive) collaborators, and operated from our expectations of the result (the liberation-to-democracy model) – rather than employing a host of open source means in order to provide context to those limited/narrow-focused secret means and deceptive collaborators as well as challenging our conventional wisdom to help more adequately shape our plan of action.

OSINT Discussion “Take Away’s”:

Ultimately what I took away from this discussion of OSINT from the intelligence officers/graduate students at NPS are as follows:

  • OSINT is still a troublesome concept for many intelligence officers to grasp; it is easy to think that OSINT is merely the web, when it is far more than that.
  • OSINT needs both new technologies and sociologies (culture) to be effectively employed.
  • OSINT may need to be disassociated from intelligence in order to facilitate the leveraging of non-governmental expertise as well as to ease the sharing of the “take.”
  • A small/streamlined “Open Source Agency” and a diverse/broad-scope “Open Source Toolkit,” are probably both needed to ensure that the private sector is leveraged sufficiently and the public sector is supported adequately.
  • If OSINT is indeed has value beyond the Intelligence Community specifically, but lends itself to supporting decision making across the spectrum, it ought to be organized outside of the IC or at least become an independent IC or DoD activity.

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