zenpundit.com

An intriguing post from the loudly mysterious Kent’s Imperative:

“SIGINT in the exaflood environment ”

“There has been a lot of talk recently regarding the implications of the rising rate of data exchange for policy issues such as network neutrality and broadband penetration. The term exaflood – coined by one particularly lobbying group – is apt enough, even if one doesn’t necessarily agree with their proposed solution approaches.

….Traditional SIGINT techniques – even within the relatively new realm of digital network intelligence – are the products of an earlier era, in which the target set and its emanations were distinct enough from its environment to be amenable to capture and analysis using a certain degree of discrimination. The kinds of intelligence that will be required against the adversaries of tomorrow will be increasingly less able to rely on the traditional tradecraft which is undergirded by such assumptions.

We do agree with the statement, frequently attributed to former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis & Production Mark Lowenthal, to the effect that “there is no such thing as information overload, only poor analytical strategies.” However, the exaflood will challenge both collection and analytical strategies such as never before. Against this backdrop, we look to the continuing infrastructure, language, and human resources challenges faced by those in this section of the community, and greatly wonder if our future community will be adequate to the task.”

Read the rest here.

Hmmm. What does this mean then? Will the digital environment itself be the target with “the system” set to by stymied by ( and thus alert human operators to the existence of) processing of data pattern anamolies ? Looking for “non-haystack”, however defined, to stand out from a sea of carefully studied hay? How do we know the exact parameters of a continuously evolving complex system of systems of networks ? My head spins.

I am thwarted in my attempt to comprehend by my inherent  non-geekiness. My kingdom for a slide rule!

The Wilson Quarterly has a not terribly flattering review of the creation of The Department of Homeland Security:

“The Homeland Security Hash”

“Much as it opposed a new department, the Bush administration felt it could not let the Senate Demo­crats take the lead on homeland security, especially not with the congressional elections looming in November. By early spring, the White House had decided to design its own ­merger.

It could not be just any merger, however. According to a 2005 retrospective by Washington Post reporters Susan B. Glasser and Michael Grunwald and a study last year by four researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Defense Management Reform (Legislating Civil Service Reform: The Homeland Security Act of 2002), the White House concluded that if it wanted to take back the homeland security issue, nothing but the biggest merger in modern history would do. Ignoring warnings of bureaucratic train wrecks and a clash of cultures, the administration put five White House aides to work on designing a maximum ­merger.

Selected for their loyalty more than their collective knowledge of government reorganization, the Gang of Five-or the G-5, as its members liked to call themselves-included a future Internal Revenue Service commissioner, a National Guard major general, and three other ­mid-­level aides. But experienced or not, the G-5 was given firm instructions to think big. “The overriding guidance,” G-5 member Bruce M. Lawlor later told the Post, “was that everything was on the table for consideration.”

The members of the G-5 took their mandate seriously, and began searching the federal organization manual for merger targets. Although the G-5 used the Senate proposal as a foundation and certainly knew enough to get started, the planners soon strayed far from the notion that the new department should be built around agencies with similar missions. What about adding the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)? The Secret Service? The National Guard? The Drug Enforcement Administration? The Federal Aviation ­Administration?

The choices seemed endless. The G-5 even considered detaching the Lawrence Livermore ­nuclear ­research laboratory from the Department of Energy and slipping it into Homeland Security. Richard Falkenrath, a G-5 member, simply called up a friend and asked which laboratory might fit: “He goes, ‘Livermore.’ And I’m like, ‘All right. See you later.’ Click.”

It was all part of the ­maximum-­merger zeitgeist. More agencies equaled a better ­reorganization.”

Read the whole thing here.

I’m not an expert on DHS matters, so anyone who has some knowledge of this process is cordially invited to sound off in the comments.
 

The release of the conclusions in the recent NIE  (PDF) on Iran’s nuclear program has provoked widespread commentary in the blogosphere. The pure politics of the release is best dealt with elsewhere but here are a few words from some folks with more than nimble typing fingers to back up their analysis:

Haft of the Spear:

“The declassified key judgments of the latest NIE on Iran are yet another opportunity to get a glimpse of the inner-workings of the highest levels of the intelligence community. The picture isn’t pretty. The key judgments are notable for many reasons, not the least of which is how they contrast with the last NIE on this same topic. In 2005, with access to an Iranian source’s laptop, the community was confident that Iran was determined to build a nuclear weapon “despite its international obligations and international pressure.” Today it is equally confident that Iran halted its weapons program in 2003 and that it remained suspended for several years”

Whirledview:

“I will note that the supposedly secret uranium enrichment program that the administration accused North Korea of, and broke up the Agreed Framework for, was disavowed by the intelligence community earlier this year in much the same way that this NIE disavows the 2005 NIE on Iran. I’ll also note that proving a negative is difficult, and one of the favorite tactics of the right: we say that you’ve got a secret program. Prove to us you don’t.”

ArmsControlWonk:

“ Dafna Linzer reports in the Washington Post that a crucial bit of information was an intercepted communication by a senior Iranian military official “complaining that the nuclear program had been shuttered.”The intercept – which Linzer notes was one of 1,000 footnotes in a 150 page document – was the final piece in the puzzle, and Linzer reports that the intercepts were briefed to the Bush Administration “beginning in July.”So, that timing would be consistent with Mike McConnell’s reference to “new information collected in late spring that caused a reconsideration of some elements of the assessment.”

Swedish Meatballs Confidential:

“The ‘new’ NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program [9-page pdf] — which has been [minor tweaks aside] in the can for nearly a year now — was released this afternoon. It is clear why the Cheney Cabal didn’t want this estimate to see the light of day.”

Counterterrorism Blog:

“ While the NIE clearly shifts the assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it acknowledges the regime continues to engage in dangerous behavior and comes down firmly on the side of political and economic pressure as an effective means of changing Iranian behavior. According to the NIE, Iran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program on the fall of 2003 was “in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.” (It was around this time that the U.S. and other governments exposed the A.Q. Kahn network and its international nuclear weapons material black market). The key judgments conclude that “our assessment that the [nuclear weapons] program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue that we judged previously.”

Sic Semper Tyrannis:

” The chimera of Iran as deadly menace is a product of Israeli paranoia and debilitating fear of the “other.”  This fear saturates Israeli strategic thinking making impossible for them a rational contemplation of the odds against Iranian suicide attacks against Israel.  Israel rejects the concept of deterrence of nuclear attack through creation of MAD (mutual assured destruction).  I have described their reasoning elsewhere in these pages. Given the awful nature of Jewish history, such overwhelming fear of the return of the final “gollum,” or perhaps Azrael himself is comprehensible.”

Thomas P.M. Barnett:

“ Iran’s choice is reasonably smart: talk big like Libya, stop short of weapons like Japan, but signal willingness to aggressively defend like Israel. I told you these guys are not stupid.”

I recall, as a lowly grad student, that many of the documents I would have loved to have had my hands on – NIE’s and PDD/NSDD’s referred to in secondary literature – were locked up tight, despite having been issued sometimes decades earlier. It’s rather surreal, from a historian’s perspective, seeing even partial declassification of a just issued NIE. Until recently at least, the USG had still classified documents going back to 1917 ( most likely covering cryptological sources and methods)!

The devil is in the details, to which we are not privy. Traditionally, the NIC process constructing a NIE would have a NIO as point man and emerge as a consensus, with the CIA  often being the heavyweight in the interagency wrangling. Supposedly, procedures have changed since the pre-Iraq War days to clarify the degree of certainty in an inherently uncertain scenario. Given the general unwillingness of IC bureaucracies to reconsider even information-sharing habits, how robust were the changes in the analytical methodology ?

By now many of you have probably read the exchanges between Thomas P.M. Barnett and Noah Shachtman of WIRED’s Danger Room over Shachtman’s recent article “How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social – Not Electronic“. If you haven’t, the exchange pretty much went like this:

“Wired’s subpar Iraq analysis” -Barnett

“My ‘Weird’ Article, ‘Well Worth the Read’ ” -Shachtman

“Tom’s reply to Noah” – Barnett

“Blog Fight? Zzzzzzzzzz” – Shachtman

“File it under whatever you want” – Barnett

Admittedly, Network-centric Warfare today is a larger concept than the original theoretical ideas of Arthur Cebrowski and John Garstka; whenever a theory is accepted by a large and powerful bureaucratic organization- like, say, the Pentagon – it collides with reality. Some ideas get tested, tinkered with, discarded or adapted to existing factional agendas by people with more enthusiasm than understanding. Network-centric Warfare, an emerging doctrine, had more “legs” inside the DoD bureaucracy than did it’s main rival, the 4GW School, because it suited the intellectual needs of armed services planning to fight a future “near peer competitor” state military and to rationalize the U.S. military’s systemic coordination and use of emerging technology on the battlefield (“rationalize” in the sense of provide a coherent order – though NCW was also used as a justification in making budgetary requests). And as with any bureaucratic paradigm shift, factional partisans who had career and mission objectives became personally invested in deriding or advancing NCW’s ” transformation”. That’s a far cry from the complexity of the NCW ideas, as presented by Cebrowski and Garstka. Some examples:

“Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future”

“Network-centric Warfare:An Overview of an Emerging Theory”

“Arthur K. Cebrowski on Transformation of Defense”

“Statement of Vice Admiral A. K. Cebrowski, Director, Space, Information Warfare, Command and Control, Chief of Naval Operations – Senate Select Committe on Intelligence Hearings 1997”

The crux of the problem with Shachtman’s article is that his opener gives the impression that the botching of the occupation in Iraq should be laid at the door of two men who articulated strategic ideas with impressive intellectual celerity and subtlety, one of whom is no longer able to defend himself.  It’s a preposterous implication. When the  4 star grandees of the post-Vietnam War U.S. Army decided to “purge” COIN doctrine from the Army’s institutional memory, Admiral Cebrowski was a mere Navy fighter pilot. The creation of the CPA with the subsequent incompetence of Paul Bremer and a bunch of non-Arabic speaking kids just out of college, who interned at AEI, was above the pay grade of any uniformed officer of the United States. Dr. Barnett, who was very close to Admiral Cebrowski, was justly irritated by this cartoonish libel of his friend and mentor.

In fairness to Shachtman, as the WIRED article proceeds, he offered a more nuanced picture of the role of Network-centric Warfare in the larger scheme of things and backtracked somewhat during his exachanges with Tom. However, not all of WIRED’s readers are defense geeks who surf obscure PDFs from OSD.mil and understand the entire context of defense doctrine and policy; Cebrowski and Garstka are therefore, left tarnished by Shachtman in a way that’s sort of akin to blaming William Lind and 4GW theory for Pakistan and India brandishing nuclear weapons at each other.

The prestigious SWJ Blog featured an important IO/Public Diplomacy article ” What the SecDef Didn’t Call For, But Should Have” by blogriend Matt Armstrong of MountainRunner. Matt is bringing one of those critical but obscure inside-baseball variables into the light of public view and out of the realm of government lawyers and interagency staff meetings.

An excerpt:

“In his clarion call to revamp the current structures of government to meet modern threats, Mr. Gates sidestepped an obstacle that has been misinterpreted and misapplied over the last three decades: Public Law 402: United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, commonly known as the Smith-Mundt Act. Despite popular belief, the restrictions the Act is known for today were not designed or intended to be a prophylactic for sensitive American eyes and ears.

Understandably, Mr. Gates did not suggest revising the “anti-Goebbels” act, even if it is misunderstood (while his Department firmly believes themselves to be covered by the Act, a source tells me outgoing Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes was not aware of this until a few short months ago). Smith-Mundt has shaped the content and methods of communications from State and Defense through institutionalized firewalls created along artificial lines, fostering a bureaucratic culture of discrimination that hampers America’s ability to participate in the modern struggle over ideas and managing perceptions.

Simple communications models of the 1940’s have been replaced by global networks of formal and informal media. Perception overcomes fact as deliberation by both the consumers and producers of news shrinks to almost nothing. Too often, by the time the truth comes out, the audience and media have moved on. How America participates in this new world is central to the success of Mr. Gates’ proposed reorganization”

Go read the whole thing…and give a shout out in the SWJ  Blog comment section.