Beyond Sharing
Intelligence, We Must
Generate Knowledge
| By Jeffrey A. Isaacson and Kevin M. O'Connell |
Jeffrey Isaacson is vice president and director of the National Security Research Division at RAND. Kevin O'Connell is director of RAND's Intelligence Policy Center.
The sharing of intelligence figures prominently in President Bush's proposal for a new Department of Homeland Security, under which the directors of Central Intelligence and the FBI would be required to disseminate relevant information to an intelligence entity within the new department. In the broadest sense, this requirement reflects the growing belief—strengthened in the aftermath of Sept. 11—that U.S. intelligence is in need of serious change. More narrowly, the requirement reflects a strong sense that better information sharing—both within and beyond the U.S. government—is essential to combat a networked, global terrorist threat.
The need for change has been well articulated. Today's intelligence community still retains the structure, stovepipes, and culture befitting an organization born of the cold war. Whatever its failures of Sept. 11, the community did largely what it was designed for: focusing its interest overseas, with scant attention to the links between home and abroad. In many ways, bin Laden and his treacherous followers exploited the bureaucratic artifacts of our own intelligence history. And given an intelligence culture dominated by secrecy, it is not surprising that the legacy of U.S. intelligence was to share as little as possible with potential collaborators, both inside and outside the government.
The scope of necessary change has yet to be articulated. We suggest that the intelligence community needs to rebuild an analytical cadre of highly skilled and continuously retrained specialists who can integrate knowledge pertinent to counterterrorism gained from multiple data sources, professional disciplines, and social sectors.
How Did We Get Here?
Historically, the need for a high level of secrecy within the intelligence community is understandable. The Soviet Union expended significant resources on its own intelligence collection against the United States and its allies, even during World War II, when the Soviet Union was considered a U.S. ally. It also sought to undermine our efforts by infiltrating our national security establishment with treasonous agents. In such a climate, it made sense to limit the information flow as much as possible. After all, the fewer who knew, the fewer the conduits that could be compromised. U.S. political sensitivities reinforced the notion, giving preference to intelligence focused away from the homeland. And given the nature of superpower competition, there was little need for the intelligence community to share information broadly, especially with U.S. domestic agencies not directly concerned with national security.
Needless to say, all that has changed. U.S. departments and agencies long considered to be outside the national security arena—such as the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or the U.S. Border Patrol—now play an important role in securing the homeland. State and local governments, too, play a role and would benefit from intelligence, not only to assist in the interdiction of threats but to manage the consequences of attack. These entities also represent potentially important sources of intelligence data. Similarly, foreign governments have become increasingly active as receivers and transmitters. Even the private sector has a role to play in hardening transportation, information, and various other infrastructures against terrorist threats, both domestically and abroad.
Recent discussions about "how to fix the problem" have resulted in a number of proposals to create new organizations and new networks, like an intelligence section of the new Department of Homeland Security. Implementing such fixes will certainly pose challenges, given such problems as security classification, further "compartmentation" of information, and the aging state of information technology in many agencies. But improving the intelligence community's wiring diagram is the easy part of facilitating better intelligence sharing. The hard part is generating better intelligence to share, wherever it turns out to be. U.S. decisionmakers must be careful to understand that we can paralyze our efforts to secure the homeland by disseminating information that is "inactionable" (or not useful), incomplete, or simply lacking in solid analysis. Unlocking the vault of secrecy is only the first step. We must reestablish our nation's analytical capacity and curiosity, starting with the intelligence community.
How Do We Get There?
Analyzing terrorism is not like analyzing Russian naval strength or Latin American political systems; such analyses rely upon well-defined indicators and data sources. In contrast, counterterrorism analysis must provide structure to information that can be highly fragmentary, lacking in well-defined links, and fraught with deception. It must infer specific strategies and plans from small pieces of information. It must find common threads among seemingly disparate strands. And unlike the terrorist, who needs only a single vulnerability to exploit, the analyst must consider all potential vulnerabilities.
Accomplishing these tasks will require broad, integrative analyses like never before. Only some of this analytical capacity resides within the intelligence community today; much resides elsewhere within the U.S. government, in the private sector, and even abroad. Restructuring government can, in principle, help to pull together this capacity and, over time, mitigate the problems associated with blending different organizational cultures. But more analytical capacity needs to be developed. If we believe the domestic terrorism problem will continue, then the intelligence community should begin now to expand its ability to provide integrative analyses and strive to sustain it over the long term. Only then can we ensure a comparative intelligence advantage over our adversaries.
Technology must also play a key role in driving this comparative advantage. In an era in which some of the traditional tools of U.S. intelligence—on-site reporting, commercial imagery, and foreign broadcasts—are available to adversaries on the Internet, the only solution is to gain access to more-sophisticated sources or to make better analytical use of existing data. Today, the most compelling intelligence support to the global war on terrorism is taking place when analysts fuse their knowledge and data interactively. This involves combining two or more pieces of information obtained through human intelligence (humint), imagery intelligence (imint), measurement and signature intelligence (masint), and signals intelligence (sigint) in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This powerful technique—increasingly known as "multi-int"—is now being used aggressively and to the extreme disadvantage of our adversaries. But it will require continued development and investment to realize its full potential.
In summary, intelligence is gaining importance as an instrument of national power in the war on terrorism, and there is little question of the need to share intelligence more effectively among U.S. government agencies, allies, and private enterprise. But while the exchange of data is an important first step, it is only a first step. We must strive toward a more collaborative consideration of ideas, alternative views, and, ultimately, solid analysis upon which to make decisions that will enhance the security of our country and the global community.