ARTICLE 

New Intelligence Office Must Fix Information Breakdowns 

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by Sandra I. Erwin 

Military commanders often have complained that the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy fails to adequately satisfy their needs for up-to-the-minute information about the enemy. Their frustration has been further

exacerbated by the fact that, when intelligence does arrive, it is likely to be “late, unfocused and insufficient,” said a top aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

On March 1, the Pentagon is due to report to Congress on its plans to stand up its own intelligence unit, whose sole mission is to ensure that military operators get the information they need, on time. Heading that office will be an undersecretary of defense for intelligence, who will make certain that “intelligence exists as a service to operations,” said Richard Haver, Rumsfeld’s special assistant for intelligence.

“The connection between intelligence and operations has long been neglected,” Haver told military officers and contractors attending a conference of the Surface Navy Association.

To fix this gap, the Pentagon needs an in-house operation that can cut through the unwieldy red tape that frequently slows down the flow of information to military commanders in the field, he explained.

Rumsfeld views this as a serious enough problem to warrant the creation of a new undersecretary of defense, a rare occurrence, said Haver. The secretary “chartered this

organization to connect the operators back to someone who is going to represent them.”

The intelligence post would be the fourth defense undersecretary, joining those for policy, acquisition and technology, and personnel and readiness.

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed that the operators and the intelligence agencies, for a long time, have lived in isolated “stovepipes.” That is not acceptable in today’s world, where the enemy is “adaptive,” Myers told reporters during a media breakfast. The desirable situation is for the intelligence folks and the operators to be “totally integrated,” Myers said.

Haver noted that an unresponsive intelligence service is “one of the broken pieces in the Defense Department.”

The operators “don’t find the intelligence world user friendly. ... They get a long litany of bureaucracy they have to work through to get things done, layers of procedures, tasking orders.

“The Defense Department has to see that the right tools are built, the right systems are procured,” Haver said. “The secretary wanted to create an undersecretary whose job was devoted exclusively to making intelligence work for operations.”

Rumsfeld’s nominee for the post is Stephen Cambone, a trusted aide who has been running the Pentagon’s program analysis and evaluation office.

By Pentagon standards, the new intelligence office will be staffed lightly, said Haver. “The secretary likes flat organizations,” so the undersecretary can expect a staff in the “double-digits” range.

“The intention is to pick war fighters to work directly for the secretary. ... [Possibly] three-star officers coming from major commands ... People who have suffered for the lack of information or have an appreciation for how the information can transform their operation.”

Unlike other Defense Department organizations, the intelligence shop will be required to participate in real-world operations, said Haver. The staff will “spend half the time in the field, understanding what operators need ... not standing in the Pentagon hallways or in some marble tower, inside the Beltway.”

The intelligence staff also will lobby on Capitol Hill, securing the appropriate access to key committees. “They will need to work the Hill in an advocacy mode,” Haver said. “Inadequate advocacy means inadequate resources.”

Also needed is “advocacy within the building,” in the Pentagon, he added, to protect intelligence programs at the budget table, for example.

Haver cautioned that Rumsfeld’s intent is not to step into the CIA’s turf, but rather to “interact” with the director of central intelligence and with other agencies involved in law enforcement and homeland security.

But Haver makes no secret of his belief that the CIA way of doing business is outmoded and ill equipped to handle the demands of the ongoing war on terrorism. That is why Rumsfeld wants the new office under his purview to introduce innovation into the intelligence world—to help make the United States less vulnerable to terrorism and its security policies less predictable, he noted.

“The world has figured out how we do business. ... The world has caught up,” Haver said. “All you have to do is look at the spy cases that have accumulated in the last 15-20 years.”

When it comes to the performance of U.S. intelligence, very few “real secrets” remain, he said.

Conversely, “there is a long list of secrets we used to have that have exceeded their half life and are no longer real secrets. ... The only people they are secret from are the American public.”

The techniques and procedures the United States uses to collect, analyze and distribute intelligence, for the most part, are well understood by the governments of many countries, including potential enemies, Haver suggested. “What we are basically about has for too long been inadequately protected. ... If we are going to have the right information 10 to 15 years from now, we are going to have to reinvent how we do this.”

To win the war on terrorism and protect the country from more 9/11s, the United States must launch a “massive intelligence assault,” Haver said.

“This country is too big to defend every reservoir, to prevent the wrong people from getting on every plane, to protect every pier and every railroad bridge, every interstate, every school. If we did try to protect everything in a foolproof way, we’d change the society that we’ve grown up to enjoy.”

The answer is not to turn this country into a police state, he added, but rather to “put pressure on the other side ... to take the war to him, not fight it here. The answer is to deeply penetrate them and put them on the run and keep them on the run.”

Painstaking intelligence work is at the core of homeland security, he said. “There aren’t a hundred million terrorists out there. There are a defined number. They are hiding among us. ... We have to strip away the sanctuary they seek. It will take exquisite and extremely difficult and risky intelligence to do that.”

Stricter security measures, such as tighter controls at airports, are only part of the equation. Checking every passenger’s shoes and bags do not “give us anything close to guaranteed security.” Stern security procedures may “slow down” the enemy, but they also will “make them go to some other weak point” in the U.S. infrastructure.

“The only way to really win this is to start with a massive intelligence assault against these enemies, strip away every bit of sanctuary they are finding inside our society, and do it without taking away our own rights and privileges,” Haver said. “Then, once we’ve stripped it away, go out and get them, put them on the run and, of course, we are going to have to kill a great deal of them, before the rest of them disappear. It isn’t a complex strategy.”


Emphasis on People

One message for the new undersecretary of intelligence is that he should emphasize people, rather than hardware, Haver stressed. “At the end of the day, it’s not about Chinese satellites, fancy receivers at Fort Meade [the National Security Agency], or about fancy computers and displays. It’s about the quality of the intellect of the people who are looking at a cacophony of conflicting, confusing and incomplete information and derive the right kind of knowledge out of it,” so they can inform those who have to make decisions in the battlefield.

For those in uniform, Haver’s advice is to “keep hounding us with the questions about what we don’t know. ... You have an absolute right to know what we don’t know about. You have to make the operations work.”

In the years ahead, Haver predicts that the level of “resources and activities” in the realm of intelligence will surge. “We will not just be buying the current programs, but aggressively going after new ways to do this job. ... It may take 10 years to correct the [current] problems.”

Earlier this year, Haver noted, “Congress gave us a substantial increase in funding [approximately a $4 billion plus-up for fiscal year 2003].” It is up to the Defense Department to prove to the lawmakers that “we know how to spend it.”

Asked about his expectations for the new undersecretary for intelligence, Myers forecast that the office will have a “huge impact in rationalizing the resources that go into intelligence.” A centralized intelligence operation, he said, will achieve “efficiencies by taking a broad look at systems and not consider them in a stovepipe.”

In the intelligence world, however, too much efficiency can be detrimental, Haver warned. “We have a terrible tendency to want to measure success in very short strokes: how many reports came out of this source this month or this year, how many recruitments, etc.” That is not how it works, he said. “A lot about human intelligence is serendipitous. It’s opportunities that fall in your lap. ... The people who do this well look for quality, are very tolerant of sowing many seeds and understanding that only a certain number of them are actually going to grow into healthy plants and bear a great deal of fruit.”

Despite what many people may have assumed, the notion of an undersecretary of defense for intelligence was not born after 9/11, but sprouted from an earlier event—the EP-3 spy aircraft standoff with China.

In April 2001, Chinese fighters intercepted a U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance aircraft in the skies over the South China Sea. A mid-air collision sent the Chinese jet into the ocean and forced the U.S. plane to make an emergency landing in Chinese territory. The 24 crewmembers of the EP-3 eventually were returned after being held on Chinese soil for 11 days. It took months to negotiate the return of the aircraft.

During the crisis, Haver recalled, those daily meetings at the Pentagon grew more crowded by the day, to the point that a much larger conference room was needed. Rumsfeld concluded that, “if all those people had to be there, there was something wrong with the system,” so he set in motion plans to create his own intelligence shop.

Before becoming Rumsfeld’s aide in 2001, Haver, who is a retired U.S. Navy officer, served as deputy director of naval intelligence and was vice president for intelligence business development at TRW Inc.

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