Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only "marginally relevant" to the overall mission, focusing too much on the enemy and not enough on civilian life, according to NATO's top intelligence official.
The stinging assessment — released less than a week after a suicide bomber killed seven CIA employees and a Jordanian intelligence officer in eastern Afghanistan — said field agents are not providing intelligence analysts with the information needed to answer questions asked by President Barack Obama and the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
U.S. intelligence officials and analysts are "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects ... and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers," U.S. Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn wrote in a 26-page report released Monday by the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington.
The officials "can do little but shrug in response to high-level decision makers seeking the knowledge, analysis and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency," Flynn wrote in the report, which was co-authored by his adviser, Capt. Matt Pottinger, and Paul Batchelor with the Defense Intelligence Agency.
"These analysts are starved for information from the field — so starved, in fact, that many say their jobs feel more like fortune telling than serious detective work," said the report. "It is little wonder then that many decision makers rely more on newspapers than military intelligence to obtain `ground truth.'"
Field intelligence officers should not limit their reports to diagraming insurgent networks, Flynn suggested. They also should provide information about meetings with villagers and tribal leaders, translated summaries of local radio broadcasts that influence local farmers and field observations of Afghan soldiers and aid workers.
Flynn suggested setting up one-stop information centers where unclassified information could be organized and made available to the military, donor nations and aid workers.
The report does not mention the CIA, which suffered a deadly blow to its operations on Dec. 30 when a suicide bomber attacked inside Camp Chapman, a highly secured forward base in eastern Khost province. The agency could not immediately be reached Tuesday for comment on the report.
The report uses "intelligence community" to refer to the thousands of uniformed and civilian intelligence personnel serving with the Defense Department and joint interagency operations in the country.
In conventional warfare, troops depend on big picture intelligence to figure out their ground strategies, but in a counterinsurgency, troops, aid workers and others on the ground are usually the best informed about the enemy, the report said. Brigade and regional command intelligence summaries that rehash the previous days fighting are of little use compared with periodic reports that also address changes in the local economy, corruption and governance.
UPDATES:
More info from this one:
Bullet points from SWJ Blog:
- Empower select teams of analysts to move between field elements, much like journalists, to visit collectors of information at the grassroots level and carry that information back to the regional command level.
- Integrate information collected by civil affairs officers, PRTs, atmospherics teams, Afghan liaison officers, female engagement teams, willing non-governmental organizations and development organizations, United Nations officials, psychological operations teams, human terrain teams, and infantry battalions, to name a few.
- Divide work along geographic lines, instead of functional lines, and write comprehensive district assessments covering governance, development, and stability.
- Provide all data to teams of "information brokers" at the regional command level, who will organize and disseminate all reports and data gathered from the grassroots level.
- The analysts and information brokers will work in what the authors call "Stability Operations Information Centers," which will be placed under and in cooperation with the State Department's senior civilian representatives administering governance, development and stability efforts in Regional Command East and South.
- Invest time and energy into selecting the best, most extroverted, and hungriest analysts to serve in the Stability Operations Information Centers.
Danger Room's wrap up
Put succinctly, the coalition has plenty of information about the enemy, but is clueless about the terrain it occupies and the communities it engages. “In a recent project ordered by the White House, analysts could barely scrape together enough information to formulate rudimentary assessments of pivotal Afghan districts,” the report states. “It is little wonder, then, that many decision-makers rely more upon newspapers than military intelligence to obtain ‘ground truth.’”
By: Brant
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment