Advancing Strategic Thought Series

HUMAN INTELLIGENCE:
ALL HUMANS, ALL MINDS, ALL THE TIME

Robert D. Steele

May 2010

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Previous works by Mr. Steele include:

1. Information Operations: Putting the “I” Back Into DIME, February

2006, available from www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/
display.cfm?pubID=642. In the Age of Information, the primary
source of national power is information that has been converted
into actionable intelligence or usable knowledge. Information
operations is the critical ingredient in early warning, peacekeep-
ing, stabilization and reconstruction, and homeland defense.

ii
2. The New Craft of Intelligence: Achieving Asymmetric Advantage
in the Face of Nontraditional Threats, February 2002, available
from www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pub
ID=217. This monograph is the third in the Strategic Studies Insti-
tute’s “Studies in Asymmetry” Series. In it, the author examines
two paradigm shifts—one in relation to the threat and a second in
relation to intelligence methods—while offering new models for
threat analysis and intelligence operations in support of policy,
acquisition, and commands engaged in nontraditional asymmet-
ric confrontation.

3. Chapter 9, “Threats, Strategy and Force Structure: An Alternative

Paradigm for National Security in the 21st Century,” in Steven Metz,
ed., Revising the Two MTW Force-Shaping Paradigm, Carlisle, PA:
Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, April 2001, pp.
139-163, available from www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/
PUB297.pdf.

4. Chapter 12, “Presidential Leadership and National Security

Policymaking,” in Douglas T. Stuart, ed., Organizing for National
Security, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army
War College, November 2000, pp. 245-282, available from www.
strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB299.pdf.

ISBN 1-58487-439-2

iii
 FOREWORD

For almost 2 decades, the author has been explor-

ing the opportunities for strategy, force structure, and
interagency or coalition operations in light of changes
in the real world. His first monograph, The New Craft
of Intelligence: Achieving Asymmetric Advantage in the
Face of Nontraditional Threats, outlined the relevance of
his vision to asymmetric warfare, and has since been
proven to be true. His second monograph, Information
Operations: Putting the “I” Back Into DIME, established
the technical, conceptual, and doctrinal opportunities
for a world in which every soldier’s primary duty is
not to be a rifleman (an inherent responsibility), but
rather to apply the wisdom of Colonel John Boyd,
USAF (Ret.), and Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act
(OODA)—to be, at all times, a consummate collector,
producer, consumer, and analyst of real-world real-
time information and intelligence, while also serving
as a communicator at a face-to-face level.
With this third and final monograph in the series,
the author explores the centrality of Human Intel-
ligence (HUMINT) in meeting the needs of the U.S.
Army, as well as the Department of Defense (DoD),
and the whole of government, for relevant informa-
tion and tailored intelligence essential to creating a
national security strategy; for defining whole of gov-
ernment policies that work in harmony; for acquisi-
tion of the right capabilities at the right price in time
to be useful; and for operations, both local and global.
The author outlines 15 distinct types of HUMINT,
only four of which are classified (defensive and offen-
sive counterintelligence, clandestine operations, and
covert action), with the other 11 being predominantly
unclassified. Additionally, he argues that they are

v
completely lacking in integrated management or in-
novative leadership. The author, well-grounded in the
literature of how complex organizations fail and how
resilience and sustainability can be achieved through
collective intelligence, offers the U.S. Army an orien-
tation to a world in which thinkers displace shooters
as the center of gravity for planning, programming,
and budgeting, as well as the proper structuring of
mission mandates, force structures, and tactics and
techniques to be used in any given mission area.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director
Strategic Studies Institute

vi
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ROBERT D. STEELE is a retired Marine Corps infan-

try and intelligence officer and also qualified as an
S-1/Adjutant, with service at all levels from platoon
to Service Headquarters. After four years active duty,
the balance of twenty to be spent in the Individual
Ready Reserve (IRR), and a decade as a clandestine
case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
he resigned from the CIA to accept a Marine Corps
invitation to be the senior civilian responsible for cre-
ating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (today a
Command) and served as the study director for the
flagship study, Overview of Planning and Programming
Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World.
He resigned from the Marine Corps civil service in 1993
to lead the modern Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
revolution, and is the author of the DIA, NATO, and
SOF OSINT Handbooks, as well as personally respon-
sible for training 7,500 officers from 66 countries. His
latest book, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Di-
versity, Integrity, and Sustainability, outlines a course
of action for creating public intelligence in the public
interest across all organizations, beginning with the
United Nations. Mr. Steele founded OSS.Net, Inc. and
Earth Intelligence Network, the latter a 501c3 public
charity, and is the foremost proponent for a Swedish
concept enhancing, Multinational, Multiagency, Mul-
tidisciplinary, Multi-domain Information-Sharing
and Sense-Making (M4IS2). Mr. Steele holds graduate
degrees in international relations and public adminis-
tration from Lehigh University and the University of
Oklahoma. He has also earned certificates in intelli-
gence policy from Harvard University and a diploma
in defense studies from the Naval War College.

vii
 PREFACE

This monograph was inspired by three U.S. Army

encounters. First, was a pro bono engagement with
the new U.S. Army Civil Affairs Brigade, then com-
manded by Col Ferd Irizarry, USA. His vision for the
future is breathtaking: a future in which Civil Affairs
personnel are the essential facilitators for transitions
to and from hostilities, as well as the essential means
by which multinational information-sharing and
sense-making that is unclassified, can be shared, and
helps to prevent conflict while creating local stabiliz-
ing wealth. Next came the annual U.S. Army Strategy
Conference of 2008, focused on “Rebalancing the In-
struments of National Power.” The findings of that
event are a perfect introduction for this monograph,
and are summarized in an Appendix with pointers
to longer summaries. Finally came an encounter with
a most professional officer, the Chief of Staff for the
Directorate for Human Intelligence (DH) within the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). That individual’s
open-mindedness led to an overnight drafting of the
new craft of human intelligence (HUMINT) in the con-
text of the DIA’s global mission and global challenges.
My own view, formed over 3 decades in govern-
ment service, is that the military is the one part of gov-
ernment that is able to move, do, and communicate on
a global basis, and we need to find a way to expand that
capability to empower the “whole of government.” I
believe that the Department of Defense (DoD) must
become a “core force” for the nation, a broader deeper
foundation for national security than merely warfight-
ing, with two major support functions:
1. Be the basis for a coherent polity, using a uni-

ix
 versal draft with three options after a com-
mon boot camp: Armed Forces, Peace Corps, or
Homeland Service.
2. Be the global general service for multinational
and interagency communications, intelligence,
logistics, and mobility.

From Base Force to Core Force and Beyond.

General Colin Powell, USA (Ret.), devised the con-

cept of a “Base Force.” This inspired me, when invited
to speak in Germany at the George Marshall Center in
the 1990s, to devise the concept of the “Core Force.”
Within DoD, the U.S. Army would be the “core of the
core” (see Figure 1.)

Figure 1: Core Force with Eight Human Functions.

The core force, the inner circle, represents the ser-

vices of common concern without which no world
power can operate: the ability to communicate any-

x
where, anytime; the ability to acquire and make sense
of information so as to produce decision support (96
percent unclassified and shareable); and the ability to
move personnel and materials from any point to any
point in a most expeditious manner, with desolate
airfields unsuitable for commercial aviation being the
norm. We can reconfigure our combatant commands
as whole of government task forces, with the appro-
priate assistant secretaries moving their flags into the
field.
The eight human functions represent the value-
added areas where the military is uniquely qualified
and competent as the primary element of government
around which we can all rally.
At the very top is strategic thinking and advice to
policymakers, with one big difference: the military—
at every rank—must make speaking truth to power
vastly more important to its ethos than loyalty to the
chain of command. The Constitution is what we swear
to support in our Oath of Office, not the chain of com-
mand. Truth and morality are a primary force.
Next down are two critical domestic roles: bond-
ing our citizenry (including immigrants regardless of
age) through common training and service; and be-
ing able to address domestic challenges with military
discipline and effectiveness. I am among those who
believe that the National Guard should revert to being
primarily a homeland force, and one focused on local-
ized disaster relief and the maintenance of good order
and discipline in times of crisis, while also available
for short duration (no more than 90 days) missions to
aid others outside the United States.
Electronic security and ground truth are global
missions that require a degree of pervasive defense
presence in cyberspace on the one hand, and a degree

xi
of pervasive but inoffensive presence—real humans
with human eyes, ears, and brains—everywhere. We
have failed at both, in part because we spent too much
time on offensive electronic warfare, something the
Chinese have mastered, and not enough time on es-
tablishing standards that protect all electronic infor-
mation, not just sensitive information.
Of all the missions depicted in Figure 1, none is
more important than the ground truth mission. The
reality is that our embassies have become little for-
tresses from which few dare to venture far afield. The
diplomats are in the minority within their own em-
bassy, and have virtually no funds for entertaining di-
verse constituencies, and even less for commissioning
local commercial sources of legal, and ethical infor-
mation for specific products. Indeed, the only people
with money to spend in the U.S. overseas community
are the spies, and they insist that one commit treason
before they will listen. In combination, how we relate
to the rest of the world is pathologically inept.1
Force on force, and constabulary operations or
small wars, are two completely different endeavors
in every possible sense of the word, and require two
completely distinct forces that train, equip, and orga-
nize for their assigned mission. The two do not over-
lap and cannot be mixed. They can be orchestrated
in those instances where one front is conventional
and the other unconventional, but they are not inter-
changeable forces.
Where does this leave us? Here are the high points:
1. Unclassified decision support — ground truth
— is the single most valuable and relevant
service the U.S. Army can provide to the rest
of the DoD and the rest of the government as
well as the nation (schoolhouses, chambers

xii
 of commerce, etc.). Unclassified ground truth
is not the purview of the spies—they have
rejected that mission, leaving the way open
for the Civil Affairs community to become the
ombudsmen of the best truth outside the wire.
2. Peer-to-peer human communication and in-
teraction is the single most valuable aspect of
a global presence. General Anthony Zinni,
USMC (Ret.), is on record as emphasizing the
importance of long-term relationships and of
truly understanding the character and nature of
those with whom one is dealing.2 In this vein, the
Army Strategy Conference of 2008 placed equal
emphasis on the human terrain system (HTS)
and on having a corps of advisors who are resi-
dent in their respective countries, not simply go-
ing in and out as mobile training teams (MTT).
3. The importance of deep cultural knowledge
cannot be overstated. Cultural Intelligence is a
key factor in preventing conflict as in stabilizing
and reconstructing areas torn by conflict.3
4. Peaceful preventive measures, as called for
by General Al Gray, USMC (Ret.), then
Commandant of the Marine Corps, are a
primary mission of the U.S. Army, no longer an
afterthought or an unfunded deficiency. Civil
Affairs, not the tank corps or artillery or even the
infantry, is the king of the 21st century battlefield.
Real men prevent war; and if not, achieve
“one man—one bullet” precision as needed

The U.S. Army, the DoD, and the Republic.

America is at a crossroads. The lack of an inte-

grated interagency process for developing coherent
sustainable (affordable and realistic) strategy is at a

xiii
historic low point. We are unwisely spending $75 bil-
lion a year on global secret technical collection efforts,
while spending relatively nothing on processing, or
interagency sharing of data, or on decision support.
This is the root cause for our inability to plan, pro-
gram, and budget for whole of government strategy
and operations.4
This monograph aspires to be nothing less than a
manifesto for mental and cultural transformation of
the U.S. Army, the U.S. DoD, all civilian elements of
our national security bureaucracy, and all external or-
ganizations such as international organizations (IO)
and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as well
as foundations. The core concept within this mono-
graph is that the U.S. Army can:
1. Be the first within the U.S. Government
to understand—as the Singapore military
understood instantly—that we must
defend America against all threats,
not just nation-state military threats.
2. Be the first within the U.S. Government to
understand—as corporations are now rapidly
appreciating—that Generation 2.0 is the first
generation of young people who are not “little
versions of us.” They are digital natives; they
have transformed themselves in the process
of growing up, and most (not all) of our tried
and true boot camp processes are history.
3. Be the first within the U.S. Government to
understand that decision support information
(intelligence regardless of classification) is
the key to creating and stabilizing the earth.

The greatest strategic error we have made has been

to neglect the education and the civic engagement of
our public, a public that has grown out of touch with

xiv
global realities, less competitive in the international
marketplace, and virtually oblivious to the corpo-
rate, federal, state, and local miss-steps enacted in our
name. Information costs money and confuses; public
intelligence makes money, guides money, and can
create a prosperous world at peace.
The U.S. Army can combine an appreciation of ex-
ternal reality and a valuation of our digital natives by
becoming the brain group for global interagency and
combined operations that leverage information peace-
keeping.
Figure 2 summarizes the relevance of this work to
each of the Army’s strategic issues.

Figure 2. Relevance to Army Strategic Issues.

xv
 This monograph specifically recommends the im-
mediate conversion of the Coalition Coordination
Center (CCC) at the U.S. Central Command (US-
CENTCOM) into a Multinational Decision Support
Center (MDSC) capable of early warning, predictive
analysis, and unclassified decision support to stabili-
zation, reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, and
disaster relief operations. Under the oversight of the
Director of the DIA, this capability could be offered to
the United Nations (UN) and other NGOs as a means
of better implementing the recommendations of the
Defense Science Board study on Transitions to and from
Hostilities.5 Most significantly, this would also provide
a neutral multinational hub for receiving the bulk of
the global information needed to make sense of the
world, a hub that is not now available to the secret
national intelligence community of any nation; and it
would simultaneously serve as a foundation for har-
monizing government, corporate, non-governmental,
and charitable spending on assistance to all underde-
veloped and/or unstable areas.
This work, in support of the Strategic Studies In-
stitute, the U.S. Army War College, and the Army’s
strategic issues, provides a review of the nuts and
bolts of Seventh Generation Warfare (see Figure 3), a
level of warfare previously referred to as “Informa-
tion Peacekeeping,” the logical follow-on to the six
generations of warfare so ably studied and taught by
Dr. Max Manwaring, U.S. Army (Ret.), of the Strategic
Studies Institute.6

xvi
 Figure 3. War and Peace: The Seventh Generation.

In Sun Tzu’s terms, it is safe to say that today he

would suggest that we do not know our enemy, we do
not know ourselves, and we are thus at very high risk
of failure.7 More recent books examining the collapse
of complex societies arrive at a similar supporting
conclusion: When governments fail to adapt, to have
open minds and receive reality-based information,
and when they persist in policies, behaviors, and in-
vestments that are out of touch with reality, then they
tend to lose legitimacy, as well as efficacy, and seces-
sionist movements repressed in the past tend to come
to the fore. Most interestingly, secessionist movements
succeed in their objective primarily when the nation
they seek to separate from is engaged in arduous com-
bat on a large scale, far from the homeland.8 In the
information age, the age of globalization, and the age
of the five billion people at the bottom of the human

xvii
pyramid, there are no longer enough guns to force any
decision on any population.9 Stabilization, reconstruc-
tion, and a new form of engaged democracy, com-
bined with moral capitalism, orchestrated giving, and
a heavy blend of sustained cultural awareness, edu-
cation, and humanitarian operations, are going to be
the primary instruments of interagency and coalition
forces if we are to achieve a sustainable peace in this
century.
In this environment, as in the law enforcement en-
vironment, shooting is the last thing we want a Soldier
to do, and thinking is the only thing we will want ev-
ery Soldier to be doing 24/7. In this context:
• Consensus replaces command,
• Education replaces discipline,
• Information operations evolve to demand
greater budget and manpower share—no more
than 10 percent of it secret,
• Multinational replaces unilateral,
• Research—multinational research—replaces
unilateral acquisition, and sharing replaces
hoarding,
• Soft power displaces hard power,
• Funding emphasis shifts from complex heavy
metal weapons, to multinational open sources,
shared decision support, and full spectrum
peace operations,
• Training emphasizes multicultural, multia-
gency, multidisciplinary, and multidomain in-
formation sharing and sense-making (M4IS2).

The best concise explanation of the importance

of the radical departures from tradtional command,
communication, education, information operations,
intelligence, and research and training is to offer two
competing viewpoints of what the primary role of ev-

xviii
ery Army or other service person is (1) Every Soldier
will be a rifleman; or (2) Every Soldier will be a collector,
consumer, producer, and provider of information and intel-
ligence.

Digital Natives.

A major challenge facing the U.S. Army is the

changing nature of its population, both officer and
enlisted. Figure 4 summarizes the competing—the
starkly distinct—natures of the population entering
on duty (learners) and the population now in com-
mand and control (teachers).

Figure 4. Differences Between Incoming and

Commanding Populations.10

At its most fundamental, seventh generation war-

fare is total, pervasive, sustained, nuanced, and can
only be won by fighting ideas, not weapons.11 Soldiers
must be both first to fight and fighting smart.

xix
 Sun Tsu had it right. To defeat the enemy with-
out fighting is the acme of a warrior’s skill.12 We have
wasted 50 years and destroyed tens of millions of
lives, eradicating entire cultures, because we failed to
heed President and General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
warning about the military-industrial complex, and
because our flag officers have forgotten their Oaths of
Commission and confused loyalty to partisan politi-
cians, with their responsibility to respect the integ-
rity of the Constutition and always—without excep-
tion—tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth. The plague of falsified reporting, including
operational test and readiness reporting and casualty
reporting, as well as suicide statistics, is a disgrace to
the heritage of West Point’s “Long Gray Line,” and to
its famous motto, Duty, Honor, Country.13
Brainpower, not Firepower, is what we need to
bring to bear, and we need to do this 24/7 in all lan-
guages and all mediums.14 It is in that context that this
monograph reinventing HUMINT is respectfully pre-
sented to the U.S. Army.

ENDNOTES

1. My second graduate thesis, for the University of Oklaho-

ma, studies strategic and tactical information management for
national security, using the three embassies I was familiar with,
to draw out an understanding of what information we have ac-
cess to, exploit, share, and make sense of. The conclusion of the
study was that embassies access 20 percent of what can be known
that is relevant, and in the process of communicating back to
Washington, mostly via hard copy in the diplomatic pouch, spill
80 percent of that. Hence, Washington is operating on 2 percent
of the available relevant information.

2. He makes this point in Tom Clancy, General Tony Zinni,

USMA (Ret.) and Tony Koltz, Battle Ready, Berkeley, CA: Berkley

xx
Trade, 2005; and also in General Tony Zinni, USMA (Ret.) and
Tony Koltz, The Battle for Peace, New York: Palgrave McMillan,
2007.

3. I consider this topic (Cultural Intelligence) to be so impor-

tant that I have scheduled a book on Cultural Intelligence: Faith,
Ideology, & the Five Minds for Peace for 2009. The editors will be
Dr. Susan Cannon, whose degree is in Integral Consciousness,
and Professor Daniel Berghart, of the National Defense Intel-
ligence College, among a handful of U.S. Government officers
with a deep grasp of this vital topic. Existing references in-
clude Jean-Marie Bonthous, “Culture: The Missing Intelligence
Variable,” presented to the annual international conference of
Open Source Intelligence, 1993, available from www.phibetaiota.
net/?p=4195; my own “Information Peacekeeping & The Future
of Intelligence: The United Nations, Smart Mobs, & the Seven
Tribes,” available from www.phibetaiota.net/?p=2823; and more
recently, John P. Coles, “Incorporating Cultural Intelligence into
Joint Doctrine,” IOSphere, Spring 2006. Given the fact that most
intelligence analysts have been on the job less than 5 years and
have virtually no understanding of foreign languages, cultures,
and environments, I consider this the single greatest challenge
facing the U.S. Government in the 21st century. Within the pub-
lic literature, one finds two aspects of cultural intelligence: one
focused on cultural imperialism, the other on cultural intelligence as
a facilitator of commercial transactions. It merits comment that
there is an entire literature on “client relationships” that can be
translated to meet U.S. Army needs. Ross Dawson’s Developing
Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Ser-
vices, Maryland Heights, MO: Butterworth-Heineman, 2000, is
representative.

4. The 7-year mark is from the UN and scientific reporting

that says that we reach an irreversible tipping point with re-
spect to climate change and global warming within 7 years. The
longer mark is one I have assigned, during which I believe the
United States, and the U.S. Army and its Civil Affairs Brigade in
particular, must pursue peace on all fronts, using shared infor-
mation and unclassified decision support—including the Earth-
Game™—as the common language of peace.

xxi
 5. Defense Science Board, Transition to and From Hostilities,
Washington, DC: Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Ac-
quisition, Technology, and Logistics, January 2005. This report,
and a second report done in the same year on Strategic Commu-
nication, comprise the foundation for a renaissance of irregular
warfare, including what General Peter Schoomaker called “White
Hat SOF” and what General Al Gray, then Commandant of the
Marine Corps, called “peaceful preventive measures.” General
Gray’s article on “Intelligence Challenges in the 1990s,” American
Intelligence Journal, Winter 1988-89, remains a seminal work and
is available from www.oss.net/BASIC.

6. Max G. Manwaring, as briefed to the international confer-

ence on open source intelligence, “War and Conflict: Six Genera-
tions,” 2003.

7. Chinese philosopher and General Sun Tzu’s famous apho-

rism, “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can
win a hundred battles without a single loss,” is available from
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The.Art.of.War#Quotations.

8. See Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cam-

bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990; and Peter Turchin,
War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, New York:
Plume, 2007.

9. This point is capably made by Jonathan Schell, The Uncon-

querable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, New
York: Penguin, 2005. I am not opposed to the use of force, but
believe that it has become an ineffective tool for achieving po-
litical ends. On this pragmatic basis, Schell builds a case for civil
noncooperation, which he argues has long played a crucial role
in deciding otherwise bloody conflicts.

10. Charles Babuti Murphy, Apple Education, available from

www.apple.com/au/education/digitalkids/disconnect/landscape.html.

11. This idea is illustrated in the movie War Games, which

climaxes with the computer being taught that the only winning
solution is to not compete. There is a wealth of literature that
supports the proposition that the politics of secrecy and scarcity

xxii
have inflicted unnecessary suffering on hundreds of millions.
Corruption, both within governments and within corporations
that have created a global class war, has led to the annual ex-
penditure of over $900 billion a year on war, when informed cal-
culations suggest that for less than a third of that, $230 billion a
year, we can eradicate all 10 of the high-level threats. An early
overview by Australian Lieutenant Colonel Ian Wing, “Broad-
ened Concepts of Security Operations,” Strategic Forum, National
Defense University, #148, October 1998, available from www.ndu.
edu/inss/strforum/SF148/forum148.html, provides a helpful listing
of peace-related mission areas.

12. Sun Tzu.

13. Falsified reporting is best known at the acquisition level.

Two examples include the Marine Corps squadron commander
falsifying reports on the VS-22 operational test and evaluation
performance, and the U.S. Army’s National Ground Intelligence
Center (NGIC) falsifying data to justify desired weapon systems
procurements. See “Marine Fired After Being Accused of Falsi-
fying Osprey Records,” Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service,
January 18, 2001; and Sherrie Gossett, “Intel Allegedly Falsified
to Justify Weapons Purchases,” CNSNews.com Staff, March 16,
2006. The lack of an independent Operational Test & Evaluation
Agency (OTEA) has been a back-burner issue since Chuck Spin-
ney made the cover of TIME in the 1980s as a whistleblower. The
author is personally familiar with Marine Corps deception, for
example, parking all vehicles on the dock when they arrive, so as
to keep them in C-2 status, knowing that to use them would be
to break them.

14. The good news is that Public Intelligence in six slices is

here to stay: Collective (social networks), Peace (harmonization of
peaceful preventive measures), Commercial (from moral green to
golden peace), Gift (harmonization of charitable giving against
the 10 high-level threats), Cultural (raising a new generation
without embedded biases), and Earth Intelligence (eliminating the
human consumption of the Earth) are ascendant.

xxiii
 HUMAN INTELLIGENCE (HUMINT):
ALL HUMANS, ALL MINDS, ALL THE TIME

INTRODUCTION

Human intelligence (HUMINT) has been mori-

bund in the United States since the 1970s, if not ear-
lier, as the U.S. rushed to substitute technology for
thinking (intelligence producers) and partisanship for
discourse (intelligence consumers). Persons involved
in counterintelligence (CI), security, analysis, and in-
telligence consumation are included in my definition
of HUMINT. Over the course of several decades, we
have destroyed clandestine HUMINT, while also ne-
glecting CI and security, depreciating open source in-
telligence (OSINT)1— which comprises 80 percent2 of
the harvestable foundation for HUMINT—and ignor-
ing the educational needs of our Soldiers,3 analysts,
and our consumers.
Today it can reasonably be argued that only the
U.S. President receives decision support (mediocre at
best) from a $75 billion a year U.S. Intelligence Com-
munity (USIC),4 while cabinet officials and congres-
sional committees receive none at all. Defense officials
receive 4 percent, at best5 of what they need to know
from secret sources and methods, little of that use-
ful to the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) or other
whole of government planning.
In this monograph, I focus only on HUMINT as
a broad multidisciplinary endeavor, not on known
USIC deficiencies or global data pathologies and in-
formation asymmetries not yet addressed by the USIC
or the U.S. Government (USG) as a whole. HUMINT is
defined as 15 distinct subdisciplinary specializations,6
all of which must be managed as a whole in order to

1
enable cross-fertilization among overt, covert, and
clandestine sources and methods.
I conclude that, in light of the lack of a whole of
government decision support architecture, and the
clear and present danger associated with the 10 high-
level threats to humanity, eight of which are nonmili-
tary, the Department of Defense (DoD) is the only ele-
ment of the USG able to create a 21st century HUMINT
capability—a “Smart Nation.” 7

THREATS, STRATEGY, FORCE STRUCTURE,

AND ACTION-SPENDING PLANS

The USG is supposed to be attending to all threats

to humanity and the nation by devising a strategy
and attendant force structure (capabilities) for each
element of whole of government operations. The tax-
payer funds are the means, the government is the ways,
and a prosperous world at peace is supposed to be the
end.
I have come to the conclusion that intelligence
without strategy, intelligence without good gover-
nance, is inherently wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive.
This compounds the waste, fraud, and abuse that is
the current condition of 60 percent of the USG—and
80 percent of the USIC—today.8
Implicit in this is the kernel of an idea, that defense
intelligence, no matter how ably it might be conceptu-
alized, developed, and implemented, is itself fruitless
in the absence of good governance and holistic whole
of government operations. The current Secretary of
Defense has alluded to this in his statement that “the
military cannot do it alone.”9 This is correct, but it
avoids the underlying problem: We have a govern-
ment that is inherently incoherent and incapable.

2
 The USG ignores 8 of the 10 threats to humanity:
(1) poverty, (2) infectious disease, (3) environmental
degradation, (4) interstate conflict, (5) civil war, (6)
genocide, (7) other atrocities, (8) proliferation, (9) ter-
rorism, and (10) transnational crime.10 The cabinet de-
partments receive no intelligence (decision support)
of note from the secret USIC, and are inept at creating
their own unclassified decision support—they actual-
ly represent the recipients of taxpayer largesse, not the
public interest or even less the taxpayers themselves.
This places the burden on the DoD and the U.S. Army.
The President—like all others in our government—
is a good person trapped in a bad system. Neither the
National Security Council (NSC) nor the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB), nor the Congress of
the United States with its varied staff elements, includ-
ing the generally superb Government Accountability
Office (GAO), are capable of serving the public inter-
est for one simple reason: We are a "dumb" nation in
which the taxpayers have abdicated their civic duty to
attend to government, demand a return on investment
(ROI) for their taxes, and exercise their responsibil-
ity to be the sovereign Republic that the government
serves.

A NATION’S BEST DEFENSE

From 1988 onwards, inspired by all that I learned as

a co-founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Agency
(MCIA), today a command, I have sought to reform
national intelligence, now on the tail end of the sec-
ond of three eras.11 The first era, the era of secret war
and ostensibly deniable covert actions tantamount to
undeclared war, ended with the 1986 U.S. conviction
in the World Court for mining the harbors of Nica-

3
ragua.12 The second era, the era of strategic analysis
fostered by Sherman Kent in the aftermath of World
War II, lost the last of its integrity in the Vietnam war,
when “reasonable dishonesty” and the politicization
of analysis castrated the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA). The CIA has become a gulag,13 both because it
lost its integrity, and because it failed to get a grip on
openly-available information.14
The 1980s were an interregnum, and as one of the
first officers to be assigned terrorism as a primary tar-
get, I can testify that we were not serious then, and I
do not believe we are serious now—not because we
do not try, but because we do not understand the sys-
tem-of-systems approach to waging peace alongside
irregular warfare.15
Today the public is discovering that its elected and
appointed leaders lack the depth and breadth of un-
derstanding—or the intelligence (decision support)—
to make sense of and address the 10 high-level threats
to humanity. Our leaders to date have been incapable
of or unwilling to harmonize the 12 core policies16
within our own government (to include production
of a sustainable balanced budget), and also appear
oblivious to the impending collapse of an overly com-
plex top-down governance structure that has failed to
adapt and is in no way anticipatory, coherent, resil-
ient, or sustainable.
There is good news. The related concepts of Open
Source Intelligence (OSINT), bottom-up collective in-
telligence, and the social creation of infinite wealth are
emergent. It is in this context that I believe we will see
a rebirth of the intelligence profession. We are at the
very beginning of a new era of smart nations, clever
continents, and the world brain complemented by an
EarthGame™ in which all humans have access to all

4
information in all languages all the time. The time has
come to sharply redirect national and defense intel-
ligence. I suggest we begin with HUMINT,17 and that
we redefine it as being comprised of education, intel-
ligence, and research, with the citizen (and the Soldier
in the field) as the prime factor.
This may not seem important to the U.S. Army
at first glance, but it is, because bad decisions made
in isolation from the totality of our national interests
(e.g., surging in Afghanistan being treated as an isolat-
ed decision without regard to the state of the economy
or of the treasury) ultimately lead to the U.S. Army
being put way out on a limb.
“A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.”18
Humanity Ascending is the mission, HUMINT is the foun-
dation. This is as true for the U.S. Army as it is for the
Republic as a whole.

HUMINT FOR THE PRESIDENT

In 1994, I conceptualized the end of the linear par-

adigm of intelligence, and the emergence of the dia-
mond paradigm.19 (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Linear versus Diamond Intelligence

Process.

5
 The linear process is what we still have in place to-
day, and “intelligence” is placed before the President
just once a day, in a largely sterile “President’s Daily
Brief” (PDB). Intelligence is not at his side throughout
the day. Now imagine a completely new process in
which the President (or whatever “decider” is being
served) is exposed to the complete range of all human
knowledge in all languages, most of it not secret and
shareable, as needed. The construct shown in Figure
2 is equally applicable for every policymaker in the
DoD, for every acquisition manager, for every com-
mander, for every staff action officer all the way to
every Special Forces A Team commander or company
commander in the field.

Figure 2. Putting the President in Touch with

Humanity and Reality.

6
HUMINT FOR THE SECRETARY

When General Alfred M. Gray, USMC, then Com-

mandant of the Marine Corps (CMC) directed the cre-
ation of what became the MCIA in the early 1980s, he
was driven by the same vision that led to the creation
of the Marine Corps University: no one else—not the
U.S. Navy, not the U.S. Army, not the U.S. Air Force—
was properly and fully addressing the needs of the na-
tion’s only combined arms expeditionary force. Each
of the other services developed policies, acquisition
programs, and operational campaign plans based on
being the biggest with the mostest, with ample time
to deploy and no worries about logistics supportabil-
ity. My mission, as the senior civilian, was to create a
center that would meet the commandant’s needs for
intelligence support for policy, for acquisition (both
requirements for and countermeasures against), and
only tangentially, to also support the Fleet Marine
Force (FMF), that was in theory adequately supported
by the new consolidated Joint Intelligence Centers
(JIC) within each theater.
The fact that there was literally nothing at all in the
secret databases about 80 percent of the world—the 80
percent where the Marines almost always went—and
that no one at any level had access to open sources
of information in 183 languages, most of it not online
(still true today), only became clear after we spent the
first $20 million.
As the Secretary of Defense seeks to address the
“Valley of Death” in defense acquisition,20 along with
the continuing recalcitrance of the three big Services
reluctant to risk budget share,21 he would do well to
remember Howard Odum’s counsel on the need to

7
understand (and I would add, influence) the system
of which one is a part.22 Put bluntly, not only can the
military not “do it alone,” which the Secretary recog-
nizes, the military also cannot succeed in the future
unless we first restructure and rebalance all of the in-
struments of national power.23
Absent a complete makeover of national and de-
fense intelligence as well as defense engineering, DoD
will continue to operate in the context of a pathologi-
cally deficient policymaking environment divorced
from holistic reality; a 1950s government structure
that is severely deficient in every respect, beginning
with a stovepiped planning, programming, and bud-
geting system (PPBS); and an international spectrum
of players (what I call the “eight tribes”)24 that is seek-
ing leadership—intellectual and intelligence leader-
ship or decision support—on how to create a prosper-
ous world at peace.25
The Secretary is overlooking the actionable truth
right under his nose: Until he asks the right question,
he will continue to get the wrong answer.26

THE FAILURE OF HUMINT

(STOVEPIPES, SEGREGATION, AND SECRECY)

Max Weber is renowned for his theory of bureau-

cracy, a model or system for controlling people, things,
and most importantly, information. Under this theory,
“lanes in the road” or “stovepipes” become sacrosanct
fiefdoms. Under this theory, applied in the academic
world, specialization leads to segregation, and segre-
gation ultimately leads to stupidity—ignorance of the
whole, and even ignorance of the role the special ele-
ment plays in the whole.27
Put differently, the entire body of human knowl-

8
edge has been misdirected toward reductionism,
knowing more and more about less and less, to the
point that no one has the whole picture. Former Secre-
tary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made this criticism
of the classified world with respect to its knowledge of
missile defense intelligence; it is even more true of all
unclassified knowledge.28 (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3. Scattered Knowledge.

THE FUTURE OF HUMINT (BROADLY AND

PROPERLY DEFINED)

HUMINT (broadly and properly defined) will be

the heart, soul, and brain of 21st century intelligence,
not only within governments, but within all eight
tribes of intelligence. In addition to CI and Security,
I explicitly include both analysts of individual techni-

9
cal collection disciplines and all-source analysts; and
consumers at every level from President to action of-
ficer.29
HUMINT at the strategic level will be about smart
nations, clever continents, and the world brain. At the
operational level it will be about multinational infor-
mation-sharing and sense-making to achieve mutual
objectives by harmonizing up to $1 trillion a year in
spending via an online Global Range of Needs Table
that harmonizes organizational budgets by location
and policy objective, while also inducing direct chari-
table giving by the 80 percent of the one billion rich
who do not currently give. The harmonization will
occur voluntarily through the use of shared decision
support.30
At the tactical level, HUMINT will become the
queen of the intelligence chessboard, providing direct
support to the king—any decisionmaker—by harness-
ing the distributed intelligence of all humans in all
languages all the time—both those in the specific area
of interest, and those outside who have something to
contribute—and by restoring human primacy in rela-
tion to all technical intelligence operations, technical
intelligence will excel with HUMINT, not alone.
Financially and technically, HUMINT should con-
trol and redirect signal intelligence (SIGINT), imagery
intelligence (IMINT), and measurements and signa-
tures intelligence (MASINT) because for the first time,
the managers of HUMINT will understand the HU-
MINT Trifecta:
1. Educate and nurture the all-source analysts and
consumers;
2. Demand ROI metrics for all sources and
methods of intelligence. This will cut technical
funding in half to the benefit of education,
HUMINT, and research; and

10
 3. Provide the decisionmaker with concise,
contextually-grounded all-source insights in a
“just enough, just in time” manner that leaves
no decision—whether of policy, acquisition, or
operations—without a firm foundation31 such
that we eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse.

The future of HUMINT lies in creating the world

brain32 and the EarthGame™,33 with clandestine and
covert activities playing the vital but fractional role
they merit in the larger context of all humans, all
minds, all the time. Without HUMINT, most techni-
cal intelligence is noise. Without HUMINT, decisions
will continue to be made in a vacuum, at great cost.
Figure 4 is the culmination of my 30 or so years
in the intelligence business. I will not belabor the fact
that many other nations are vastly superior to the
United States in their management of “full spectrum
HUMINT,” but I will mention two: the People’s Re-
public of China (PRC), and the Islamic Republic of
Iran.34 What I now understand is how very fragment-
ed the single discipline of HUMINT has become. It has
no leadership of the whole, in part because the OMB
gave up the “M” in the 1980s, if not sooner, and in part
because within the IC and the DoD, we are still orga-
nized into stovepipes that do not interact well among
themselves.35 This leaves the President—and all cabi-
net secretaries including the Secretary of Defense—
without any decision support at all when it comes to
the core presidential duty of ensuring that the USG is
trained, equipped, and organized to preserve and pro-
tect the United States.36 Put most directly, managing
HUMINT as I suggest will immediately enhance de-
cisionmaking by the President, the cabinet secretaries
the congressional committees, and field commanders.

11
Note: LNO = Liaison Officer, SME = Subject Matter Expert.

Figure 4. Integrated Full-Spectrum

HUMINT Management.37

As I discuss each of the 15 HUMINT elements, I

am acutely conscious of the failure of our national ed-
ucational system. I believe we have failed our children
(and consequently our recruiting pool for the U.S.
Army) in three ways: First, we have allowed local gov-
ernment insiders to cheat the educational system by
providing tax breaks, public land and public services
to corporations, reaping handsome commissions and
fees for themselves, while dramatically reducing the
tax base that supports locally-funded education.38 Sec-
ond, we have failed to update a school system initially
designed around the needs of farmers (summers off)
and then of factories (rote learning), and more or less
beaten much of the creativity and curiosity out of our
children by the time they enter the fifth grade.39 They

12
have to fight their way out of the box we built around
them. We should be in year-round education, with ap-
prenticeships that nurture whole-person growth with
a full range of human trade and professional skills that
are needed for localized resilience. We should be em-
phasizing team learning, project learning, challenge
examinations based on distance learning, and real-
world problem-solving. We should be teaching the art
of global multinational information access. Third, we
have broken the links between the natural world—the
Earth, the human world termed by some as the anthro-
posphere40—and the world of faith, spirit and mind, be
it an agnostic noosphere41 or a form of religion.42
Our children, in brief, have been raised in a bubble,
and have not learned how to do whole systems think-
ing in a spontaneous or collective fashion. At the same
time, we have broken the accountability and transpar-
ency links between those who pay taxes, and the gov-
ernment officials that spend that revenue.
In my view, the future of HUMINT demands that
we create an Open Source Agency (OSA) as called for
by the 9/11 Commission,43 and that we make OSINT
our top priority for both funding and the attention of
our national and defense intelligence leaders, as called
for by the Aspin-Brown Commission.44 It is only in the
context of what OSINT can do, that clandestine HU-
MINT and the other slices of HUMINT can be fully ef-
fective. As provided for in the Smart Nation-Safe Na-
tion Act,45 an OSA funded by the DoD would provide
the following HUMINT foundation for all eight tribes:
1. Office of Information Sharing Treaties and
Agreements (OISTA);46
2. Office of the Assistant Secretary General for
Decision Support (ASG DS) within the United
Nations (UN), and a UN-validated Global

13
 Range of Needs Table to harmonize U.S. $1
trillion a year in spending by others;47
3. Multinational Decision Support Center
(MDSC), along with regional centers (one per
continent);48
4. A Multinational Decision Support University
(MDSU) to train executives (at all levels) from
all nations and all eight tribes of intelligence,
together.49

I will begin my review of the 15 slices of HUMINT

in the 21st century with a quotation from Senator Dan-
iel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), who invited me to tes-
tify50 to the Moynihan Commission.51 From their letter
of transmittal:

The Commission’s report is unanimous. It con-

tains recommendations for actions by the Executive
Branch and the Legislative Branch, with the object of
protecting and reducing secrecy in an era when open
sources make a plenitude of information available as
never before in history. 52

The United States has lost the ability to intelli-

gently collect, process, exploit, and analyze global
knowledge, all of it originating with indigenous hu-
mans speaking 34 core languages53 and thousands
of additional dialects and micro-languages. This has
happened because the political leadership of both par-
ties has been captured by Wall Street and the military-
industrial complex to the detriment of diplomacy,
development, and democracy, all three of which de-
mand rigorous respect for all relevant information
(96 percent of which is openly available according
to General Anthony Zinni, USMC [Ret.]). His hard-
earned and practical observation is vital to the future
of HUMINT:

14
 80 percent of what I needed to know as CINCENT
[Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command] I got
from open sources rather than classified reporting.
And within the remaining 20 percent, if I knew what
to look for,54 I found another 16 percent. At the end
of it all, classified intelligence provided me, at best,
with 4 percent of my command knowledge. 55

HUMINT, since World War II has been misdi-

rected. Separately, I have published an early evalua-
tion of why OSINT is so important to every aspect of
military policy, acquisition, and operations, and will
not belabor the point here other than to state my view
that radical force structure redesign is not properly
supported by military or civilian intelligence today,
because its practitioners do not know how to train,
equip, and organize in order to provide whole of gov-
ernment decision support, or how to serve every level
of decision across every mission area, both military
and civilian.56 The time has come to redefine HUMINT
concepts, doctrine, and practices.

HUMINT: DEFINING AND MANAGING THE

FIFTEEN SLICES

Today each of the 15 slices is being managed in iso-

lation, and that must not be allowed to continue. The
DoD can fix this for a whole of government benefit.

Citizen as Sensor and Sense-Maker.

In 1986, while I was managing Project GEORGE

(Smiley) in the Office of Information Technology
(OIT) at the CIA, I defined the needs for information
technology (IT) support to both clandestine opera-

15
tions and all-source analysis, and that is where I had
my blinding flash of insight on the challenges of data
entry. The bottom line is that no one government, and
less so any one agency, can afford, understand, or ex-
ecute global data entry. The only possible solution is
one that harnesses the distributed intelligence of the
whole earth, i.e., all humans, all minds.57
In 1994, I realized that it is not possible to have
smart spies in the context of a dumb nation, and in
2006, working with Congressman Rob Simmons (R-
CT), I realized that 50 percent of the dots which need
to be connected to prevent the next September 11,
2001 (9/11), or to respond to a natural disaster such
as Katrina, will be bottom-up dots from citizens and
police on the beat. Those dots have no place to go to-
day in 2010, 9 years after 9/11. We need unclassified
state-based fusion centers in which sensitive informa-
tion from all eight tribes can be processed,58 and that is
why the Smart Nation-Safe Nation Act59 that I devised
includes $1.5 Billion to create 50 state-based Citizen In-
telligence Centers and Networks to be manned by the
National Guard (which can hold both local law enforce-
ment commissions and foreign intelligence clearances),
and another $1.5 Billion funding for foreign open source
information acquisition and processing initiatives that
harness all that the UN system and our multinational
partners can help us access, exploit, and share from
schoolhouse to White House, and worldwide.
The one thing the United States can do for our fu-
ture generations is to get a grip on HUMINT in all its
forms, and help the eight demographic challengers60
to implement the world brain and the Earth Game™
via free cell phones for the poor, and call centers that
teach the poor “one cell call at a time.”61
A LINUX quote can be adapted here. They say

16
“Put enough eyeballs on it, and no bug is invisible.”
62
I say, Put enough minds to work, and no threat, no
policy, no challenge will withstand the collective in-
telligence of We.
From a HUMINT perspective, there are at least
three priceless (hence, unaffordable by any one gov-
ernment) citizen-based contributions to national intel-
ligence: as a source of personnel; as a source of overt
observation; and as a source of clandestine and coun-
terintelligence help. The USG has failed over time to
be effective across all three of these vital domains.63
This is one reason I believe in universal service (and
the right to bear arms) as the foundation for liberty
within a republic with a sovereign people.64
The near-term importance of the citizen-observer
is not well-understood by leaders in government or
corporations or even most nonprofit organizations
in part because those leaders are 10-20 years behind
in their understanding of what modern technology
makes possible. In brief, the spread of cellular tele-
phones, including cell towers in remote regions pow-
ered by solar energy65 or ambient energy,66 has made
possible the integration of three wildly productive
factors: citizen “eyes on,” web data templates, and
cellular short message service (SMS) inputs with geo-
spatial attributes and photographs.
Figure 5 shows a very short list of applications that
exist today, many of them award-winning and all of
them suitable for rapid migration to all locations and
across all issues.67 Educating the rest of the world,
free, is part of this slice.68

17
Blood Testing Mobile phone hacked to be a portable blood
tester capable of detecting HIV, malaria,
other illnesses
Child Malnutrition UNICEF, Net Squared (USAID 1st Prize)
City Problems ClickFix transparency anywhere in the
world
Corrupt Ofcials Indonesia pilot project.
Crisis Response InSTEAD GeoChat
Crop Disease Africa pilot, treating disease via cell phone
Disease 12 sources, close to 100 diseases, each
plotted individually, can zoom in on any
country
Election Irregularities VoterReport India, Electoral Commission
Intervention, Forged Votes, Inammatory
Speech, Other Irregularities, Violence,
Voter Bribing, Voter Name Missing, Voting
Machine Problems
Environmental Monitoring Mobile phone photos plus GPS enhance
citizen-scientist responsiveness, utility, and
credibility
Flood Warning FloodSMS
Genocide Eight stages start with easy to detect
demonization
Roadway Fatalities SafeRoadMaps
Sexual Harassment Egypt pilot project
Trafc Many locations, volume, noise, pollution
Vandalism Anonymous texting as it happens, England
Violence India, elsewhere, on verge of 911 SMS
plotting
War Actions in Gaza Aljazeera, distinguishes among Air Strikes,
Announcement, Deaths, Israeli Casualties,
Israeli Forces, IAid, Casualties, Protests,
Rocket Attacks.

Figure 5. Direct Cell Phone Report Systems

Using SMS.

18
Soldier as Sensor (Overt/Open Signals).

In this monograph, the term “Soldier” embraces

both military and civilian personnel serving domes-
tically or overseas. The concept of the “strategic cor-
poral” is well-established,69 both by Field Marshall
Erwin Rommel, and more recently (1999) by General
Charles Krulak, USMC.70 The concept of “command-
er’s intent” is also well-established, having been given
global recognition by General Gray.71
However, our Soldiers continue to be treated as a
quantity good rather than a quality being. Up to this
point, we have trained, equipped, and organized our
military around high-cost, high-maintenance tech-
nologies without regard to the needs or abilities of
the individual Soldier, and we have not treated the
individual Soldier with the respect each merits when
properly educated, trained, led, and listened to. The
Soldier is the ultimate HUMINT asset.72
Especially troubling to me is the continuing resis-
tance to the concept developed by the Swedish military
and enhanced by myself: Multinational, Multiagency,
Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing
and Sense-Making (M4IS2). 73
In my view, whole of government training, equip-
ping, and organizing, led by the U.S. military and us-
ing U.S. military training facilities, can most fruitfully
be enhanced by making it multinational and multi-
functional in nature. A stellar example of success is
offered by the annual Strong Angel exercise, an an-
nual series of civil-military demonstrations that show
methods for civilian and military agencies around the
world to work effectively together within a disaster
response. It is especially noteworthy for providing
TOOZL, an analytic and communications toolkit on a

19
flash-drive, consisting of Free/Open Source Software
(F/OSS) that anyone can use without cost.74
Here again, we see the vital need for education and
training in the context of a national strategy, a mili-
tary strategy, a robust nationwide education system,
continuing adult education, and multinational infor-
mation-sharing.
HUMINT starts in the classroom and is then aug-
mented in real-life. It is essential to the success of the
secret elements of HUMINT that we plan for the full-
est possible exploitation of the nonsecret elements.
Patrolling by infantry is how we create a 360-degree
human safety network.75 Unfortunately, we have al-
lowed our force reconnaissance—our deep humans—
to be reduced in numbers, experience, and utility. On
the battlefield, it is force reconnaissance that emplaces
“close in” technical devices.

Operational Test & Evaluation (OT&E).

I realize that operational test and evaluation

(OT&E) must fall under the oversight of the Under-
secretary of Defense for Intelligence [USD(I)] because
speaking truth to power cannot apply only to “red”
forces, or to “white,” “yellow,” and “green” forces,
but to our own “blue” forces as well. Lies kill one’s
comrades. We must stop lying to ourselves!
This first became apparent to me in 1988 when
the MCIA pioneered strategic generalizations about
the real-world: bridge-loading limits (30-ton limits
on average across the Third World); line-of-sight av-
erages (under 1,000 meters); hot and humid aviation
days (the DoD standard for OT&E is warm and not
humid)—the list is long.
What the four Services build and buy in isolation

20
from one another has virtually nothing to do with the
actual 10 high-level threats to humanity, not even to
the single interstate conflict threat (number four on
that now universally-applauded list). Indeed, the
Services have been caught manipulating threat data-
bases so as to justify bigger systems with more com-
plex elements, to the point that the systems cannot
go over any normal bridge in the Third World; need
one contractor per Soldier to maintain in the field;
and are irrelevant against 80 percent of actual needs.
This is unprofessional.
Despite the best efforts of the Joint Forces Com-
mand (JFCOM) and of course the Undersecretary of
Defense for Acquisition [USD(A)], the DoD is easily
20 years away from being globally-relevant and ef-
fective at operations other than war (OOTW), now
more fashionably called stabilization and reconstruc-
tion (S&R) operations, with a side dish of irregular
warfare (IRWF), not to be confused with information
operations, (IO—a mutant mix of public relations and
psychological operations on steroids, with zero intel-
ligence).
I finally realized the insanity of a multiservice array
of capabilities that are not understood by Presidents
or even the commanders who oversee them when I
learned that we sent 10 tomahawks to kill Osama bin
Laden. They took 6 hours to reach his camp, passing
over Pakistan, which assuredly alerted him. More re-
cently, we have been using drones to kill clusters of
individuals, mostly bystanders. We are oblivious to
the long-term human impact of our actions.
I have come to the conclusion that not only must
all weapons, mobility, and communications systems
be validated by the USD(I) across the requirements
and procurements process and in OT&E, but that spe-

21
cific operational plans require USD(I) validation as
well. We have to stop carpet bombing villages, and get
down to one man - one bullet efficacy while nurturing
everyone else.

Inspector-General (Organizational, USG,

International).

Inspector-General (IG) endeavors in the past have

spanned the full spectrum from over-zealous investi-
gations of minor infractions through largely ceremoni-
al and entirely predictable inspections of administra-
tive minutia. More recently, efforts by the Director of
National Intelligence (DNI) to integrate IG functions
across the 16 agencies nominally under his authority,
and the equally recent emergence of interest in trans-
national or regional IG collaboration within select
intelligence, military, and law enforcement communi-
ties, are both worthy of note.76
Every graduate degree in public administration re-
quires a course in program evaluation, and it is there,
not in regulatory compliance and after-the-fact inves-
tigation, that the IG can make a real contribution. The
IG, like each of the other slices in the larger HUMINT
pie, must be an integrated part of the totality of full-
spectrum HUMINT with an intimate constructive—
not punitive—relationship with and among all slices.
A director of the OMB—which has done some
good things in its search for common solutions—
might consider the varied IG cadres as an extension
of OMB’s reach, and work hard to restore the manage-
ment function of OMB while also redirecting the IG
function toward improved remediation and oversight
of requirements definition, capabilities acquisition,
and operational efficacy.

22
 The GAO can no longer be shut out of the USIC.
Easily 80 percent of secrecy is being used to avoid
accountability,77 and as paradoxical as it may sound,
transparency is something that is desperately needed
within the secret world, at least with respect to finan-
cial inputs and consequential outputs. In my view, at
least half, if not two-thirds, of the entire USIC budget
could be, and should be, available for redirection by
the President toward education, whole of government
and multinational intelligence (decision support) that
is not secret, and research focused on the eradication
of the 10 high-level threats to humanity, eight of which
are now ignored.
At the same time, we need to question the entirety
of our military assistance budget. In brief, we need an
IG inspection of our fundamental assumptions about
war and peace in the 21st century.
At the strategic level, the IGs should all be in alli-
ance with the GAO, OMB, and General Services Ad-
ministration (GSA), seeking to define completely new
21st century objectives that are transformative of the
means, ways, and ends of government, not just seek-
ing to be more efficient and legal with old means, old
ways, and old ends.

Security Observation/Remote Webcams/

Floating Periscopes.

Humans are the essential element in security ob-

servation and in the exploitation of distributed secu-
rity cameras including the new wireless (some solar-
powered) webcams. Based on my own experience, I
find three general areas that could be improved: First,
no one country can be covered by a single security
plan, even one that distinguishes among mission, fa-
cilities, movement, and individuals. In one particular

23
country, we found the need for three separate security
surveillance and preparation plans, one for the north,
one for the south, and one for the capital city. Indeed,
I am reminded of General Zinni’s extremely useful
observation that Vietnam was actually six wars: (1)
Swamp War, (2) Paddy War, (3) Jungle War, (4) Plains
War, (5) Saigon War, and (6) DMZ War; each with its
own lessons, tactics, and sometimes equipment differ-
ences.78
Second, we have been slow to empower our dis-
tributed forces with both modern security surveil-
lance technology, and the tactical processing power
needed to do “face trace” or find other anomalies that
might be missed by the human eye.79 In contrast, the
Metropolitan Police of London (Scotland Yard) have
dramatically reduced crime and increased arrests by
using a city-wide array of surveillance cameras with
very clever humans exploiting them from a central
location that also has access to distributed culturally-
astute interpreters of body language in context.
Third, between solar power, relay stations, and sat-
ellite communications, there is no reason why we can-
not field persistent ground surveillance, for example,
along the Somali coast. In my view, we are spending
too much time worrying about close-in force protec-
tion, and not nearly enough time thinking about and
practicing distributed observation for early warning. I
might mention in this regard that when I was asked to
review the new counterterrorism plan for one Service
in the aftermath of 9/11, I found the Service planners
to have doubled-up everything that existed previ-
ously, with zero innovation. My short response was
move your virtual perimeter out 100 klicks, brief every
waitress and gas station attendant and truck driver in
that circle that you can, and give them a number that

24
is answered 24/7, as well as an incentive to call in.
Security is a form of static HUMINT combined
with on demand HUMINT, and only a robust educa-
tional program can make it effective.80 Working with
elements of the UN Department of Safety and Security
(DSS), I have found a real hunger for creating com-
pletely new forms of smart security that emphasize
the human factor rather than the physical. We can all
do better.

Document Exploitation/Imagery.

Based on conversations I have had with peacekeep-

ers and others, we appear to have enormous opportu-
nities for improvement. I am told, for example, that
it still takes 4-6 weeks for 10 pages of captured Dari
documents to be translated and returned to the tacti-
cal commander, there being no practical or responsive
Dari translation capability within Afghanistan.81
I have two reactions: First, given the number of in-
dividuals living in Afghanistan that speak and read
Dari while also being reasonably fluent with English,
I see our security mind-sets interfering with tactical
needs for rapid exploitation of captured documents.
There are a number of ways to achieve time and risk-
based security while meeting the needs of the tacti-
cal commanders. I can do Dari translations from the
field within 4-6 hours. Why is this still a problem? Old
minds and processes.
My second reaction is to wonder why we have not
implemented a global grid using www.telelanguage.
com, and field digitization (to include pen-based digi-
tization) that can go directly from the field to a Dari
translator on call in that given instant. Figure 6 shows
an illustration of generic capabilities since 1997.

25
 Figure 6. Global Collection, Translation,
and Annotation.82

This area is urgently in need of a multinational bur-

den-sharing network. The current 11-nation capabil-
ity is trivial—90 nations is my standard.83

All-Source Analysts & Global Experts.

Although the classical definition of HUMINT

emphasizes clandestine collection and covert action
(agents of influence, propaganda, paramilitary opera-
tions), I believe that in an age when 80-90 percent of
the information from humans is overt, and secret in-
telligence provides, at best, 4 percent of a combatant
commander’s information, we have to rethink HU-
MINT.
I submit that both the CIA and the DoD are in error

26
in their current approach to manning. The CIA tends
to hire very young people unproven at clandestine or
analytic tradecraft, while the DoD uses enlisted per-
sonnel for many tasks that in my view require a liberal
arts college education.
I believe that over the next 10 years we must mi-
grate away from putting new hires into anything
other than OSINT exploitation, and emphasize mid-
career hires for the senior all-source analytic positions,
as well as HUMINT collection and CI positions (the
latter retaining their life’s pattern as legitimate cover).
At the same time, we must empower all-source an-
alysts with the resources and the multinational social
skills with which to leverage global experts regard-
less of nationality, and with the ability to draw on the
MDSC for reach-back to all eight tribes of any given
country.
As a general rule of thumb, I believe each division
manager should have $1 million a year; that each branch
manager should have $250,000 a year; and that each
individual analyst, no matter how junior, should have
$50,000 to spend, on a mix of external expertise, com-
bined with travel to conferences or in-house seminars
and sounding boards—anything that is legal to buy.84
It costs less than $1,000 to identify the top 100 pub-
lished experts in any field based on citation of their
work, and another $1,000 or so to communicate with
each of the published experts so as to identify the top
25-100 unpublished experts. Every analyst should
have such a network on call.
In the overt arena, clandestine case officers skilled
at tradecraft cannot cut it. It takes a substantive expert
with tangible rewards to offer in the form of legally
shareable information, privileged access, unconven-
tional insights, or straight-up modest consulting fees

27
(as little as $250 or as much as $5,000) to work the
global overt expertise grid.
Notably absent from my thinking are defense con-
tractors and their costs.85 I am skeptical about the value
of people sitting in offices, and I am also a strong pro-
ponent of centralized OSINT contract management
along with rigorous metrics for accountability, as well
as a “buy once for all” OSINT acquisition system. I
believe the U.S. Army must develop both strategists
and foreign area specialists within its own ranks, not
as an out-sourced function, and must nurture these
individuals over the course of a career, not “one tour
and out.”

Defense Attaches, Technical Liaison.

This category includes every human assigned any

form of international or interagency responsibility,
and I especially wish to include our officers assigned
to military groups (MILGRP), to the schools of other
nations, and to all external billets including fellow-
ships at think tanks, command exchange tours, and so
on. Civilian intelligence personnel distributed among
the combatant commands are now under the Director
of the DIA oversight, and that is a good start for the
DoD. Country teams remain a kludge of single repre-
sentatives from multiple agencies that often out-num-
ber (and out-spend) the diplomats, and by no stretch
of the imagination can any embassy be considered to
be coherent in how every person is harmonized to cre-
ate a whole.86
In my view, we are long overdue for a top to bot-
tom review of how the DoD as a whole, and each
individual Service, handle the selection, assignment,
and on-going oversight and exploitation of all officers

28
as well as noncommissioned and enlisted personnel
serving in external billets. The same is true for all the
other agencies, most of which are incapable of ad-
dressing contingencies or fielding task forces that are
trained, equipped, and organized for short- to long-
term operations under conditions more often than not
hazardous.87
For this group, very possibly the “center of grav-
ity” for HUMINT as a whole, I have a few thoughts:
1. There is no substitute for continuity in-country
and on the desk in Washington, DC. We need
to get serious about deep language training
and repetitive area tours. Ideally embassy
personnel should have 6-8 year assignments
with assured promotions, and staggered
tours so the second officer arrives midway
through the tour of the person being replaced.
2. MILGRPs are a wasted asset from an IO point
of view. I had an excellent talk with a MILGRP
liaison officer at the U.S. Pacific Command
(USPACOM) in 1994, and learned that MILGRPs
have no information sharing or sense-making
responsibilities to speak of—they are there
to focus on moving U.S. military equipment
into the local pipeline. That needs to change.
3. Even if the rest of the USIC and the rest of the
USG are not ready for whole of government
operations, the DoD needs to take the lead. A
good start would be to create a special sense-
making unit within the DIA/DH that deals
overtly and respectfully with every single
DoD body (and in the ideal, with every other
USG body assigned to an external billet world-
wide), while treating the 137 Defense Attaché
locations as the core mass, building from there.

29
Human Terrain Teams.

Rarely does one encounter a program that is at once

so well-intentioned and also so very badly managed
as the Human Terrain Teams (HTT) program. While
there must certainly be two sides to the story, and a
good manager will engage in compassionate listening
and a 360 degree evaluation before making changes, I
understand from multiple sources that this program is
out-of-control to the point of being dangerous to both
the individuals being misdirected into the program,
and the commanders and troops ostensibly receiving
this support. I believe this program must immedi-
ately be subordinated to the Director of the DIA and
therein subordinated to the DIA/DH, which should
be expanded to provide leadership and management,
including resource oversight, for all 15 slices of HU-
MINT. In its own words,

[Human Terrain System] HTS is a new proof-of-

concept program, run by the U.S. Army Training and
Doctrine Command (TRADOC), and serving the joint
community. The near-term focus of the HTS program
is to improve the military’s ability to understand the
highly complex local socio-cultural environment in the
areas where they are deployed; however, in the long-
term, HTS hopes to assist the U.S. government in un-
derstanding foreign countries and regions prior to an
engagement within that region.88

TRADOC is running this as an experimental program,

and they do not appear to have the knowledge—or
even the network to acquire the knowledge—needed
to manage this potentially valuable global grid of cul-
turally-astute SMEs.89
I am troubled by the various photographs that
contrast heavily-armed, heavily-armored individu-

30
als wearing sunglasses and trying to do the “hearts
and minds” deal without the skills to assimilate them-
selves and be effective. Overall, program manage-
ment, personnel selection, insistence on clearances, a
marginal training program, and very badly managed
in-country assignments and oversight appear to de-
mand an urgent and complete redirection of HTT. The
existing web pages are replete with known errors,90 in-
flated claims, and a reading list that would make any
real anthropologist weep.91 This program appears to
need a complete makeover. 92 Done right, HTT should
be inter-disciplinary and multinational, and should
not require clearances at all.

Interrogator-Translator Teams.

I have a special affection for interrogator-translator

teams (ITT), and a real sense of awe at the capabilities
of new forms of forward-deployed tactical analysts
who, among other achievements, sniffed out Saddam
Hussein’s final hide-out, something no national intel-
ligence capability was able to do.
For the purposes of this monograph, I want to
broaden the ITT category to include military police
(MP), civil affairs (CA), combat engineers (CE), and
all that come into contact with both prisoners of war
(POW)—which in the Marine Corps is an S-1/Adju-
tant housekeeping job rather than an S-2 intelligence
exploitation job—and with civilians, including our lo-
gisticians (who are constantly starved for intelligence
support at the same time that they have so much to
offer in terms of practical insights about access and
trafficability).
In peacetime, it has often troubled me that ITT as
well as CI personnel tend to be farmed out to take care

31
of all the temporary additional duty (TAD) demands
in a given headquarters, and at the battalion level to
find the least-desired Marine officers going into the
S-2 job. Of course my knowledge is dated, but some
things never change.
I believe the time has come to both fence all intel-
ligence personnel from nonintelligence assignments,
and to dramatically augment the assignment of intel-
ligence personnel down to the squad, platoon, and
company level. I have been enormously impressed
by the initiative of some company commanders in Af-
ghanistan, taking everyone with an IQ above 120 (or
whatever number needed) to get at least six smarter-
than-average individuals, to create company level ad
hoc field intelligence analysis units.93
I participated in two force structure studies when
serving the Marine Corps as the second-ranking civil-
ian in Marine Corps intelligence, and my arguments
for reducing shooters and increasing thinkers consis-
tently went nowhere. Now is the time for the USD(I)
and the D/DIA to take a fresh look at HUMINT across
the board, taking great care to define HUMINT as all
humans, all minds, all the time, and working from
there. HUMINT is no longer something that can be
isolated as an arcane specialization. Not only can the
commander not delegate intelligence,94 but the intel-
ligence staff officer must conceive and execute a new
form of HUMINT campaign plan that simultaneously
educates, trains, informs, empowers, and ultimately
protects every member of the interagency team that is
being supported, and that is both conscious of—and
able to exploit—every human several times removed
in their respective networks.95

32
Soldier as Sensor (Patrolling, Force Reconnaissance,
Covert “Hides”).

Patrolling is a fundamental element of infantry

operations, and appears to rise and fall in cycles. Its
companion, force reconnaissance, also tends to rise
and fall. There is no substitute for a human brain at-
tached to human eyes and ears, particularly when
real-time contextual understanding and warning is
needed. While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
and forward air controllers (FAC) and aerial observ-
ers (AO) can be most helpful, it is the human on the
ground that produces “ground truth,” a “360 degree”
appreciation that cannot be achieved by any combina-
tion of technologies, close-in or remote. This is as true
of peacekeeping operations as it is of full-spectrum
hostilities.96
Professor Richard Aldrich, whose chapter, “From
Ireland to Bosnia: Intelligence Support for UK Low
Intensity Operations,” has a special lesson for us with
respect to the importance of placing soldiers in covert
“hides.”

In both Ireland and Bosnia, units on the ground appre-

ciated the importance of a holistic approach to intelli-
gence. Intelligence was vital to support even the small-
est units and every patrol devoted time and attention to
intelligence gathering. Patrols were often high-profile
affairs whose main function initially was to reassure the
public and to assert authority. In both environments,
patrols required intelligence support from covert ob-
servation points to reinforce their security. Substantial
numbers of covert observation posts had to be estab-
lished in order to reduce the number of patrol incidents.
In Ireland, soldiers, often trained by the members of the
SAS, would lie in cover with binoculars, high-powered
telescopes, and night vision devices for days or weeks

33
 on end in order to observe specific individuals or areas.
Such covert observation posts could link with patrols in
order to dominate an area. But the work exposed them
to attack if their location was uncovered by passing ci-
vilians.97

He goes on to observe:

In both Irel�������������������������������������������
a������������������������������������������
nd and Bosnia, tactical intelligence gath-
ering was lent an additional importance because the
flow of intelligence from the higher echelons to those
on the ground was weak. Intelligence at ground level
flowed up, but not down.98

I also believe that a great deal more can be done

in using force reconnaissance to emplace close-in re-
mote monitors, including webcams and live audio de-
vices, in enemy encampments and criminal enclaves.99

Defensive Counterintelligence.

We now cross the line from the first 11 overt ele-

ments of HUMINT, and move into the final four, each
replete with classified sources and methods that can-
not be discussed here.100
My first point is that CI is a completely distinct
specialization, not to be confused with clandestine
HUMINT. The first requires the detection, without
warning, of the in-house suspect of illegal or even
unsanctioned activities and disclosures potentially
threatening to the United States.101
Despite the fact that Presidents (e.g., Ronald Rea-
gan)102 and Senators (e.g., Durbin, Hatch, Rockefeller,
and Shelby)103 leak and destroy sensitive capabilities
overnight and without any recrimination, defensive
CI is supposed to be the pro-active means by which we

34
prevent, detect, and deceive those who seek to betray
our national security enterprise from within. Contrac-
tors, in my view, are 80 percent of the challenge.
Aldrich Ames (CIA) and Robert Hansen (Federal
Bureau of Investigation [FBI]) are noteworthy failures
of defensive CI. Ames was driving a Jaguar and paid
cash for a $450,000 house. When asked to investigate
his claim that his Colombian wife inherited the mon-
ey, the CIA Chief of Station (COS) in Bogota blew off
the request. Hansen, a study in contradictions, from
ostensibly devout Catholic to worshipping a stripper,
failed to arouse any serious attention.
Defensive counterintelligence, as best I can tell, has
three major failings today. First, it is considered—at
least within the CIA—to be a backwater and a dump-
ing ground, an undesirable assignment, and one that
I believe still lacks good leadership, not for lack of
good people, but for lack of appreciation. Second, the
culture of the U.S. intelligence community is one of
“once in, can do no wrong.”104 This is compounded
by a lack of contractor-focused CI.105 Third, the data
access system of systems of the U.S. intelligence com-
munity is not designed to track individual access or
specific document access across the board. Individu-
als receive generic “CODEWORD” clearances and
then have relative carte blanche access. We are not us-
ing information technology well for CI, either defense
or offensive.
To appreciate defensive CI and needed reforms,
read Merchants of Treason: America’s Secrets for Sale,106
and Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spycatcher’s World.107
There are other books, but these two capture the essence
of why defensive counterintelligence really matters.
Defensive CI is much easier if we reduce unnecessary
secrecy.

35
Offensive Counterintelligence.

Offensive CI is very similar to clandestine HU-

MINT, but with a very special focus that is rarely
taken seriously. It demands the obsessive identifica-
tion of individuals responsible for penetrating our
own organizations, rather than—as with defensive
counterintelligence—the identification of our own
nationals who might be vulnerable to recruitment for
the purpose of betraying secrets, whether wittingly or
unwittingly.108
Within the CIA, this can be a dumping ground,
but more often than not it is simply an additional duty
and not given the emphasis that it merits. In my own
case, it was one of two full-time jobs to which I was,
assigned and I was literally the only person in the CIA
paid to think about penetrating the U.S. targeting ele-
ment within the clandestine service of a specific de-
nied area country.
An emerging aspect of offensive, as well as defen-
sive, CI is to be found in the cyberwar and electronic
security arena. The Chinese appear to have mastered
the art of riding the electrical grid into computers that
are otherwise not on the Internet. Based on my own
experience with the Special Communications Center
(SPINTCOM) at the MCIA, it is all too easy to feed
naïve lance corporals free games that they then insert
into the SPINTCOM computers to fritter away the late
night hours. The complexity of the cyberwar arena is
not well-understood in the United States. I tried to
flag this with a $1 billion a year budget in 1995, pull-
ing together expert advice from, among others, the top
NSA consultant on cyber security. 109 Today, the NSA
is asking for $12 billion a year, and in all likelihood
will focus more on expanding its access to every da-

36
tum about every person in America, and be less suc-
cessful at helping to create a fireproof national grid.
The situation is not made any better by the fact that
virtually all of our supervisory control and data acqui-
sition (SCADA) systems are on the open Internet as a
result of companies deciding in the 1980s and 1990s
that they could save money by not having stand-alone
systems impervious to hacking, doing so in part be-
cause we lack a national industrial security strategy
and policy.
My personal inclination is to place security and
defensive CI under one deputy director, while placing
offensive CI, covert action, and clandestine HUMINT
under another deputy director. The third—and the
principal deputy director— would manage the first 11
slices of overt HUMINT. I believe that managing overt
HUMINT together with CI and clandestine HUMINT
will add enormous value at virtually no additional
cost.110

Covert Action HUMINT.

There is no finer overview on covert action that

is legally available to the public than that of Alfred
Cumming.111 Traditionally, since the National Secu-
rity Act of 1947, covert action has been (in theory) the
exclusive province of the CIA and defined in general
terms as agents of influence (pushing governments to
do things against their own best interests but favored
by U.S. policymakers); propaganda (media manipula-
tion); and paramilitary operations including coups, in-
stability operations, and sabotage of perceived threats
(e.g., a nuclear or bio-chemical facility). Support activ-
ities such as Air America or Southern Air Transport,
and administrative activities such as money launder-

37
ing (to include the creation or complete subordination
of entire banks), the acquisition of enemy weapons for
use by our own “false flag” forces, and more recently,
rendition and torture, all fall in this arena.
I am persuaded by my own direct experience and
a lifetime of reading, that U.S. policymakers are nei-
ther sufficiently informed nor ethically grounded, and
therefore should not be authorizing covert actions,
with two exceptions: the capture or assassination of
key terrorist or gang leaders, and the interdiction of
key ingredients of chemical, biological, radiological,
and nuclear (CBRN) weapons of mass destruction
(WMD).112
Covert actions violate the Geneva Convention, and
harken back to the first era of national intelligence,
war by other means. The very definition of covert ac-
tion, “an activity or activities of the United States Gov-
ernment to influence political, economic, or military
conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role
of the United States Government will not be apparent
or acknowledged publicity,”113 is sufficient to suggest
that covert action flies in the face of reality and sus-
tainable consensus, and is largely unachievable—the
USG cannot keep most secrets.
I include in covert action the funding of foreign-
ers including foreign intelligence services that skim
half the money and do evil in our name.114 There is no
substitute for reading Cumming’s brilliant 9-page un-
classified information paper.115 The USG at this time
lacks a strategic analytic model for understanding all
10 high-level threats to humanity and for harmoniz-
ing whole of government operations across all 12 core
policies, and the USG is largely incapable of compe-
tently directing or executing covert actions, a few iso-
lated operations notwithstanding.

38
Clandestine HUMINT.

From where I sit, the CIA has become useless. It

refuses to abandon official cover, and it has proven in-
capable of scaling up nonofficial cover despite spend-
ing tens of millions of dollars, if not more, on up to
21 “pseudo-companies,” 20 of which had to be shut
down recently.116 At the same time, the CIA’s young
case officers (C/O) and analysts deprive the CIA of
any claim to special competence in HUMINT or all-
source intelligence. 117 (The majority of the CIA analyt-
ic population now has less than 5 years employment
at the CIA).
The DoD has until recently been unwilling to chal-
lenge the CIA, and kept most of its clandestine activi-
ties in a “hip-pocket” mode, as best I can tell from
open sources. I believe that the DoD recognizes that
if it wants to achieve world-class intelligence capabili-
ties across the board, it must create them for itself; I
write this monograph in part to help the DoD get it
right.
In clandestine HUMINT, something I care deeply
about, one needs to nurture leaders with open minds,
and ideally leaders with very strong backgrounds in
unconventional and irregular operations. Nothing
handicaps clandestine HUMINT more than conven-
tional mind-sets (i.e., uniformed leaders lacking clan-
destine experience), combined with lawyers afraid of
their own shadows.118
I helped think about the clandestine service of the
future, and saw clever recommendations ignored by a
succession of CIA leaders. I recommend the creation
of five slices of clandestine HUMINT, completely
apart from the CIA, which I would convert into a sin-
gle Classified Technical Intelligence Agency (CTIA),

39
with one floor for each of the technical disciplines. The
existing D/CIA could become the Deputy Director of
National Intelligence (DDNI) for Technical Collection
Management, while the D/DIA becomes the DDNI for
Human and Open Source Collection Management, as
well as All-Source Analysis.119 My five recommended
slices are:
• 1/5: Exceptionally talented entry-level citizens
to serve indefinitely,
• 1/5: Mid-career U.S. citizens who have created
their cover and access,
• 1/5: Mid-career foreign nationals who have
created cover and access,
• 1/5: Mid-career case officers from other
countries on rotation,
• 1/5: “It’s just business;” one time business deals
with no further ado.

Although CIA counterterrorism managers have

done some very good hiring—I love the quote, “The
college degree can come later,” when hiring a foreign-
er with skills as a GS-15—on balance we need a new
nonofficial service.120

HUMINT REQUIREMENTS AND COLLECTION

MANAGEMENT

The USIC still does not have a serious require-

ments and collection management system (RCMS),
not least because it considers the President its only
“real” client; it has not trained a cadre of specialist re-
quirements officers; and it persists is disregarding the
value of OSINT while focusing on triage among the
classified disciplines.

40
 As a consultant to the IC map (ICMAP),121 I point-
ed out the obvious, to little effect: that the IC was ask-
ing Question #4 of the following four questions, and
ignoring the first three:
1. Can we FIND our answer in what we already
have?
2. Can we GET our answer from someone we
know?
3. Can we BUY our answer from the private
sector?
4. WHICH classified systems should we TASK?

One of the unique advantages of HUMINT is its

ability to receive and act on questions that are full
of nuance, ambiguity, and complexity. Whereas the
technical collection disciplines have to be told “what,
when, and where,” in the case of HUMINT, we only
have to get three things right:
1. Understand the question,
2. Know who knows (the human source will sort
out the nuances),
3. Connect the source with the client or debrief the
source.

The major obstacles to HUMINT success are, in

this order, our consumers, out-dated security guide-
lines, and ignorant lawyers.122 To be successful, HU-
MINT managers must first educate all those “inside
the wire.”
HUMINT costs less, requires less time, and is
much more responsive than technical collection, in
part because with HUMINT, processing is embedded
all along the human chain, from source to collector to
analyst to consumer.
I will end this brief overview with the very last
sentence of Jim Bamford’s most recent book, Body of

41
Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security
Agency:

Eventually NSA may secretly achieve the ultimate

in quickness, compatibility, and efficiency—a com-
puter with petaflop and higher speeds shrunk into a
container about a liter in size, and powered by only
about ten watts of power: the human brain. 123

HUMINT INTERDISCIPLINARY SUPPORT

Without getting into classified sources and meth-

ods, it is nonetheless necessary to emphasize the vital
role that HUMINT plays in tipping off and supporting
the technical collection disciplines. By way of context,
the technical collection disciplines are vacuum clean-
ers in contrast to the precision of HUMINT, and suffer
further from lacking the processing power to detect—
in real-time—the anomalies and patterns or to trans-
late—in real-time—the most important conversations.
Hence, HUMINT can be—but usually is not—a vital
force multiplier for the technical disciplines.
SIGINT relies heavily on HUMINT for the acquisi-
tion of code books from the field. It should rely heavily
on HUMINT for the identification of specific commu-
nications devices that are being used to communicate
using clandestine methods such as steganography, or
bland conversation that is heavily laden with covert
meaning; but in reality the HUMINT discipline has
failed to develop as broadly and deeply as it should
among indigenous sources, in part because the field of
multinational clandestine HUMINT is in its infancy.
SIGINT also relies heavily on HUMINT for the em-
placement of close-in technical monitoring devices,
the procurement of listening posts, and the handling
of real-time monitors and translators for close-in col-
lection.

42
 IMINT tends to be self-sufficient, but because of its
genesis as a precision collection system with very high
resolution, it still does not do wide-area surveillance.
While IMINT still cannot see under jungle canopy,
into caves, or even into urban areas in any sort of co-
herent manner, when told exactly where to look, IM-
INT can add value. The advent of UAVs has dramati-
cally increased IMINT value at the tactical level, but
the processing and the connection from the collection
platform to the end-user in the field are still severely
deficient.
MASINT depends heavily on HUMINT for collect-
ing samples (e.g., of water downstream from a sus-
pected bio-chemical factory) or for emplacing close-
in devices that seek to collect signatures in the form
of smells, air composition, or other electro-magnetic
anomalies characteristic of specific capabilities.
Cyberwar, both offensive cyberwar and defen-
sive cybersecurity, is in its infancy, the warnings and
the substantive recommendations of the early 1990s
having been ignored. The importance of HUMINT in
cyberwar cannot be overstated, but will certainly be
ignored by the new “cyber czar.” Both offensive and
defensive CI—HUMINT subdisciplines—should play
a major role in both defensive protection and offen-
sive penetration of cyberspace.
All four of the mentioned above technical collec-
tion disciplines should, but do not, rely heavily on
OSINT. Although the NSA has a fine effort to leverage
OSINT in targeting telecommunications (for example,
using OSINT to study the emergent Chinese cellular
capabilities), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency (NGA) makes use of commercial source im-
agery, in reality both the NSA and the NGA are so
heavily defined by their legacy systems that they have

43
yet to make the fullest possible use of OSINT in all
languages and mediums. MASINT is very new and
has sought to leverage OSINT, but MASINT relies too
heavily on defense contractors (very large vendors),
and the latter are not skilled at global OSINT in all lan-
guages using HUMINT intermediaries—they prefer
to sell the government “butts in seats” surfing the In-
ternet, a means of running up very large bills (and 200
percent overhead charges) without actually drilling
down to exactly what is needed and could be obtained
at very low cost if they truly understood multinational
open sources and methods.
Remembering that OSINT is a part of HUMINT,
Figure 7 illustrates how OSINT should be managed,
both to relieve the classified disciplines of require-
ments that can be answered with open sources and
methods, and to enhance the efficacy of the classified
sources and methods.

Figure 7. OSINT andClassified HUMINT in

Relation to Other INTs.

44
CONCLUSION: THE HUMINT PLAYING FIELD

General Gray created the MCIA because he under-

stood that expeditionary and constabulary operations
were unique, and that intelligence support for the
USMC was not to be had from others. I now believe
that HUMINT must be elevated to be the “first ser-
vice” (inclusive of OSINT) and that the intelligence di-
rectors or advisors to agency heads, cabinet secretar-
ies, and commanders, among others, must be, above
all, skilled at HUMINT requirements definition and
consumption, as well as sharing all information they
touch on their own. Figure 8 illustrates integrating the
three main consumer groups and the 10 threats and 12
policies they must address, while also depicting the
internal HUMINT capabilities, the external HUMINT
network of “eight tribes,” and the M4IS2 environment.

Figure 8. HUMINT Field—Sources, Targets,

and Consumers.

45
 The military is responsible for defending against
all threats, not just armed threats. I believe that the Re-
public is facing serious threats to its survival, threats
both domestic and foreign, and that the DoD and the
DIA must rise to these challenges if we are to preserve
and protect the United States in the 21st century.

HUMINT and Whole of Government Force

Structure.

I have participated in two force structure studies

and written a number of chapters and articles on strat-
egy and force structure.124 The guidance of Senator
Sam Nunn (D-GA) remains eternally valuable:

I am constantly being asked for a bottom-line defense

number. I don’t know of any logical way to arrive at
such a figure without analyzing the threat; without
determining what changes in our strategy should be
made in light of the changes in the threat; and then
determining what force structure and weapons pro-
grams we need to carry out this revised strategy.125

HUMINT must strive to meet the needs of all con-

sumers across all agencies of government, in large part
because the civilian successes help avoid a need for the
military interventions and mobilizations; and because
the future is unaffordable as things now stand. The
United States is insolvent, the government is chaoti-
cally incoherent, and only intelligence-driven leader-
ship can save us. General Gray nailed it in 1988, listing
the differences between conventional and emerging
threats (see Figure 9): 126

46
 Conventional Threat Emerging Threat

Governmental Nongovernmental
Conventional/Nuclear Nonconventional (Assymmetric)
Static Orders of Battle (OOB) Dynamic or Random OOB
Linear Development Non-linear (e.g., Off the Shelf)
Rules of Engagement (ROE) No Constraints (ROE)
Known Doctrine Unknown Doctrine
Strategic Warning No Established Intelligence and
Warning Network
Known Intelligence Assets Unlimited 5th Column

Figure 9. Déjà vu—The USMC Knew All This

in 1988 (21 Years Ago).

In 1998 the U.S. Army Strategy Conference ad-

dressed force structure needs. Figure 10 is a depic-
tion of the “Four Forces After Next” that I presented
in 1998 to general acceptance.127 In 2008, the same
an-nual conference addressed the same question, the
findings in 1998 having been ignored, and we have
yet to see any grasp of whole of government strategic
planning and programming from the White House,
the OMB, or the Cabinet Secretaries.128

47
 Figure 10. DoD as a HUMINT Force for Peace,
Security, and M4IS2.

Now is the time for the President and Secretary of

Defense to think “big.”129
Only the DoD can move, deliver, and communi-
cate globally on a no-notice basis, and this is why the
DoD should be the core force for all future whole of
government operations. This is a concept I developed
in the 1990s for a briefing to East and West European
parliamentarians at the George Marshall Center, a
concept I continue to believe in, that prizes the DoD as
the hub of interagency operations, both domestically
and internationally. It merits comment that three of
the core force elements are thinkers rather than shoot-
ers, three are shooters able to think, and the last—con-
stabulary stabilization operations—is an even mix of
thinkers and shooters.

48
 I will not belabor Sun Tzu’s wisdom about the acme
of skill being victory without fighting, but I will point
out that the PRC is waging peace (irregular warfare)
with presidential-level trade missions, massive loans,
major construction projects, and free headquarters
buildings for regional organizations (no extra charge
for the embedded audio-visual remote monitoring de-
vices). They have also mastered cyber warfare, some-
thing I and others warned about in the early 1990s.130
From where I sit, the USG is scattered, and only
the DoD can get us on track. Figure 11 shows my 1998
depiction of the “Four Forces After Next,” updated to
show the IO implications.

+ SOLIC = Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict.

+ Cost of National Guard redirection split amoung all four CINCS.
+ CINCHOME Intelligence includes citizen continuing education.

Figure 11. Four Forces After Next with

IO Attributes.

49
 I venture to suggest that the CIA is never going
to offer whole of government intelligence suitable
for deciding how we train, equip, and organize both
military and civilian elements of the USG. In fairness,
the DoD does not use intelligence properly to sup-
port all policymakers, all acquisition managers, or all
commanders, staff, and action officers across the inter-
agency spectrum of need, but there is no reason why
it cannot do so beginning immediately. It merits com-
ment that because of the size of its budget—the largest
discretionary spending element in the total USG bud-
get—how the DoD applies intelligence really makes a
huge difference. If the DoD commits to nonfossil fuels
(which also have very low heat signatures), it can move
an entire industry overnight. Similarly, what the DoD
does in the way of personnel policies impacts on the
whole nation. I believe we need to restore universal
service, but with a huge difference—only volunteers
are joined to the Armed Forces and the Peace Corps,
all others are directed into homeland duties.131
If the DoD will take the lead with respect to most
if not all of HUMINT, we all win. A Nation’s best de-
fense is an educated citizenry.

HUMINT Technologies—Enabling Not

Defining HUMINT.

Where HUMINT has been failed by the informa-

tion technology (IT) function is with respect to desk-
top analytics and very large-scale processing. Today,
the very best office I know is J-23 at U.S. Special Op-
erations Command (USSOCOM), and they are still
having to deal with over 20 distinct software packages
that no one has been able to integrate.132 If we shift to
F/OSS, as many governments are doing, this will help.

50
As we move into multinational HUMINT operations,
we will encounter a need to share very large databases
with very strong encryption, as well as geospatial at-
tributes, and we will need to do this at machine speed.
I believe the next revolution in HUMINT will be
found in helping both overt and covert analysts and
operators to connect the dots in the first two phases
of the HUMINT cycle; spotting and assessing, while
also exploiting much more ably all that comes from
the handling phase of the HUMINT cycle.133
Multinational information-sharing and sense-mak-
ing is going to be the primary means by which we add val-
ue to both shared and unilateral HUMINT. Near-real-time
M4IS2 is the center of gravity, NOT unilateral operations.
One technology and its application that has im-
pressed me greatly is biometrics. Used to anonymous-
ly identify sources prone to selling their knowledge
to multiple buyers, it may prove to be the most sensa-
tional deconfliction device around, and can be scaled
to allow for multinational source deconfliction along
with visualization of multinational networks of sourc-
es relevant to any given geospatial area of interest or
topical domain.
We can do better on hand-held reporting devices
with embedded encryption, as well as at-rest encrypt-
ed storage of anything that leaves a secure facility.
Human-emplaced sensors, including disposable
sensors that melt down in 24 hours, as well as brown-
water electronic picket lines, are of interest to me. The
ability to sense explosives regardless of the container,
something I identified as a requirement for the Marine
Corps in 1988, remains unmet.134
Telelanguage, mentioned earlier, and regional
information-sharing and sense-making centers can
double as call centers for secure calls from the street

51
(a global Early Warning network no government can
afford, that is on 24/7), should allow for tactical real-
time document exploitation as well as tactical real-
time translation of any dialect, 24/7, no matter where
one is in the world.
HUMINT can and should be applied to IT discov-
ery and development.135

HUMINT: The Essence of the Republic, of Defense,

of the U.S. Army.

American national security has been severely un-

dermined by decades of excessive spending on stra-
tegic technologies at the expense of tactical human-
centered technologies; by a lack of integrity (or more
kindly, perspective) across the board among our ex-
ecutive and legislative branch leaders; by a confusion
between loyalty to the Constitution (we swear an oath
to defend it) and loyalty to the chain of command; and
by information asymmetries and data pathologies that
have prevented the art and science of intelligence—
decision-support—from developing.136
I believe that HUMINT, properly understood, is
about education, intelligence, and research in the pub-
lic interest. HUMINT is predominantly overt, and to
the extent that overt HUMINT is properly managed,
clandestine HUMINT and covert HUMINT, as well as
both defensive and offensive counterintelligence, can
be ethical, precise, and consequential.
George Will once published a collection of his
Op Ed pieces under the title, Statecraft as Soulcraft.137
I firmly believe that HUMINT is the pinnacle of the
intelligence profession, for it deals with the most glo-
riously complex, challenging, and potentially enlight-
ened (now most dangerous) species on the Earth.

52
 HUMINT has spent the last quarter-century be-
ing displaced by the technical collection disciplines in
every sense of the word but one: results. One good
HUMINT asset, whether overt or covert, is worth
more and costs less than any constellation of complex
technologies whose product cannot be processed in a
timely fashion, and that requires tens of thousands of
human beings to create, maintain, and exploit.
America today needs multiple forms of healing,
from how we elect our leaders to how we govern
ourselves, to how we preserve and protect the Repub-
lic. In every single instance, it will be HUMINT, not
some arcane collection of technologies, that discovers,
discriminates, distills, and delivers education, intel-
ligence (decision support), and research—whether
from direct human observation or with support from
technologies—for the benefit of humanity.
Machines are programmed and perform at the
lowest common denominator of the sum of their hu-
man contributors. Humans, in contrast—properly led,
properly trained, properly equipped—are uniquely
capable of “on the fly” innovation, catalytic insights,
nuanced expression, compassionate listening, and a
myriad of other tradecraft as well as socio-cultural
skills that no machine will ever master.
HUMINT is the essence of the Republic, and “only
integrity is going to count.”139 Integrity. E Veritate Po-
tens (From Truth, Power).

WHAT HAS CHANGED?

I thought to conclude with two charts, and then

offer some recommendations for the future direction
of U.S. Army HUMINT. Figure 12 shows the old stan-
dard Principles of War (with their acrostic MOOSE-

53
MUSS), with the traditional definitions on the left and
the modern alternative definitions on the right.

M – Mass – Concentrate Combat Mass: the aggregate commons

Power at decisive time and place. sense of the public, sharing
wisdom
O – Objective – Direct every Objective: the collective good
military operation against a clearly achieved through appreciative
dened, decisive and obtainable inquiry, and sustainable precisely
objective. because it reects group consensus
O – Offensive – Seize, retain and Offensive: neutralize any
exploit the initiative. attack with swarm offense and
dissipation defense.
S – Surprise – Strike the enemy at Surprise is for the stupid. Cast a
a time, a place and in a manner for wide net, put enough eyes and ears
which he is unprepared. on it, and no bug is invisible.
E - Economy of Force – Allocate Expansion of Force: here comes
minimum combat power to everybody, an Army of Davids, the
secondary efforts. network is the computer
M – Maneuver - Place the enemy in Maneuver to have no enemies, but
a position of disadvantage through instead to create innite stabilizing
exible application of combat wealth and robust communities
power.
U - Unity of Command – For every Unity of Purpose within all groups
objective, ensure unity of effort and at all levels (local, provincial,
under one responsible commander. national, regional global) is the
only sure deal
S – Security – Never permit the Security “just in case” is evil
enemy to acquire an unexpected and expensive; the best security
advantage. comes from good intention & trust
building
S – Simplicity – Prepare clear, Sensibility is the root of all good –
uncomplicated plans and if it makes sense, others will agree;
clear, concise orders to ensure if it does not, you should not be
understanding. doing it

Figure 12. Principles of War versus

Principles of Peace.

54
 When combined with the 10 high-level threats to
humanity that Dr. Brent Scowcroft, Lieutenant Gen-
eral USAF (Ret.), and others defined in the report of
the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Op-
portunities, we cannot help but observe that the cur-
rent U.S. national security strategy ignores all but two
of these threats. Some opportunities for the U.S. Army
are identified in Figure 13.
High-Level Threat US Army Opportunities
Poverty Stability Guarantees for Demilitarization
Civil Affairs Brigade as Cadre for Global Army
Infectious Disease National Guard medical at home & abroad
Universal draft & culture of fitness
Healthy environmental standards for all
National Guard as natural cure data source
Environmental Degradation Precision intervention & reconstruction
Rapid response disaster relief
Inter-State Conflict Free cell phones and connectivity to all
Free knowledge on demand in all languages
Global Range of Gifts Table to house level
Civil War End U.S. support for the 42 dictators we love
End overseas bases and deployments
Focus on peaceful preventive measures
Genocide End small arms trade as SOF interdiction
Other Atrocities Global biometrics to stop trade in humans
Screen and do not train gang members
Proliferation End U.S. role as world’s #1 merchant of death
Regional small arms interdiction networks
Terrorism (Large Scale) Flag officer integrity—keep eye on the ball
Use Rangers to interdict bin Ladens
Regional harmonization of efforts
Tactical excellence in “track & whack”i
Transnational Organized Crime Create international law enforcement cadre
Use Rangers to take down key nodes

i.
Figure 13. Summary of Threat Opportunities
I credit A. J. Rosmiller, author of Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of
Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad for
to theU.S. Army.
Pentagon, Presidio, CA: Presidio Press, 2008, with
introducing me to this term. As my review at Amazon articulates, although he served
only briefly, but inclusive of a tour as a defense analyst in Iraq, he produced a
“Unclassified
remarkably mature, patriotic,decision
and relevantsupport
indictment to all parties”
of much hasfor
of what passes
been removed from each of the blocks above, in part
defense intelligence.

to emphasize that it is the foundation for everything

55
the U.S. Army might seek to do, and therefore must be-
come as pervasive and ingrained in every concept and
doctrine so as to redefine the U.S. Army as the world’s
first information operations (IO) force in being.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Embracing the U.S. Army as a whole person orga-

nization, the following recommendations are intend-
ed to both create a smart Army that is globally mobile
and effective, while also making the U.S. Army the
single most effective hub for both interagency whole
of government operations, and multinational multi-
functional operations.
1. Civil Affairs Command. I recommend that Civil
Affairs be upgraded to at least a three-star command
but ideally a four-star command that embraces mili-
tary police, medical, engineering, and other human-
to-human specializations, retaining the regional struc-
ture but creating regional brigades in which the U.S.
battalion is the core force for a multinational brigade
that includes nongovernmental and other nonmilitary
force structure. Psychological Operations (PSYOP) is
long over-due for being phased out. A new blend of
strategic communications and OSINT could be de-
veloped under the Civil Affairs Information Manage-
ment rubric, with decision support and multinational
information-sharing as a primary mission area.
2. Global Health. The United States is completely
lacking in domestic surge capacity across the board.
There is an urgent need for field hospitals and mobile
medical units that can be deployed on a worldwide
basis to contain diseases that might otherwise jump on
an airplane and come home; these capabilities would
also be structured for rapid redeployment to the home
front as needed.

56
 3. Environmental Engineering. The Corps of En-
gineers can be brought into the 21st century and made
a globally-potent force if its culture can be modified
and humanized. Poverty creates more environmental
damage and more disease and more crime than any
natural disaster, at the same time that most natural
disasters are actually acts of man (e.g., paving over
watersheds, thus increasing the virulence of storms).
Sustainable design is the combat zone of the future.
Just as the Army needs strategists, so does it need en-
gineers capable of Earth engineering.
4. Communications. Nokia has developed cell
phones that recharge on ambient energy and do not
need an electrical grid in support. We are at the very
beginning of an era where face-to-face human com-
munications are the acme of skill, and vastly more im-
portant than force of arms for the simple reason that
there are not enough guns on the planet to force our
way. Communications educate, education creates sta-
bilizing wealth. Crowded spectrum is an issue right
now. The U.S. Army could take the lead in devising
open spectrum communications and fielding a multi-
national Communications Corps working in tandem
with the Civil Affairs Corps to free individuals from
ideologues by giving them the means to “jack-in” to
the global grid directly.
5. Logistics. We cannot afford to meet the needs
of the five billion poor, but we can offer the world
a Global Range of Needs Table that leverages other
people’s time and money. In tandem, the Civil Affairs
Corps and the Communications Corps could make it
possible for one trillion dollars a year of funds from
organizations, as well as the one billion rich (80 per-
cent of whom do not give to charity now), to volun-
tarily harmonize their programs and spending, while

57
individuals use Army-documented needs online to do
peer-to-peer giving. There are some programs now
that do this, all tiny. A global grid is needed, and the
U.S. Army can offer it up as a spin-off of its global
ground-truth observations.
6. Biometrics. In my view, the greatest threat to
the internal stability and the long-term effectiveness
of the U.S. Army is the raw fact that it is training the
Taliban in Afghanistan and criminal gang members
in the United States. A global effort is needed to cre-
ate a biometric database of every person of interest
who should not be trained by the U.S. Army, and who
should not be admitted to a Western country. Mobile
teams from the U.S. Army can install and service these
devices while surveying law enforcement capabilities.
7. Track and Whack. The carpet bombing approach
to community neutralization does not work. The U.S.
Army is perfectly suited to develop a global multina-
tional “track and whack” program that is legitimized
by an international court and includes internation-
ally-posted convictions and demands for surrender
followed by “one man-one bullet” administration of
punitive and preventive justice. This cannot be done
outside of international law. It must have global legal
validity.

ENDNOTES

1. Dr. Joseph Markowitz, the first and only Director of the

Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO), and I have
agreed that it is vital to distinguish among open source infor-
mation (OSIF), open source intelligence (OSINT), and validated
OSINT (OSINT-V), the latter of which can only be done by gov-
ernment all-source analysts with full access to all relevant Top
Secret CODEWORD information. In this monograph, OSINT
represents all three, the distinctions having been made in this

58
note. A recent discussion about misperceptions in OSINT is con-
tained in “The Open Source Program: Missing in Action,” Inter-
national Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Fall 2008, pp.
609-619, available from www.phibetaiota.net/?p=2603.

2. Further on in this monograph, I quote General Anthony

Zinni, USMC (Ret.), as saying that secret sources provided “at
best” 4 percent of his command knowledge. I believe that the
80-20 rule of thumb is a good one with respect to just about any-
thing, but the reality is that no more than 10 percent of what we
need to know to do strategic, operational, tactical, and technical
intelligence is actually secret and worth the risk of going after—
two different things.

3. For the sake of brevity and because the U.S. Army is the
“center of gravity” for what few advances are taking place in the
related fields of communications, education, and intelligence, the
term “Soldier” is used in this monograph to represent all individ-
uals on the cutting edge of danger in the service of their country,
i.e., it includes Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, members of
the Coast Guard, and police on the beat in every neighborhood.

4. For close to a decade, I have been saying $65 billion, de-

liberately understated, while the official number slipped to the
public by Mary Graham, then Deputy Director of National Intel-
ligence for Collection (DDNI/C) has been $44 billion. We know
now that the actual amount is at least $75 billion, as announced
by the current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Admi-
ral Dennis Blair, USN (Ret.), on September 15, 2009, reported
in Adam Entous, “Secretive Spending on U.S. Intelligence Dis-
closed,” Reuters, Tuesday, September 15, 2009, available from
www.phibetaiota.net/?p=10778. This number does not factor in cer-
tain other programs in Treasury and Defense to which the DNI is
probably not privy.

5. General Zinni’s complete quotation to this effect is found

on p. 15.

6. In the intelligence world, “discipline” refers to one of the

major forms of collection—human, imagery, signals, and mea-
surements and signatures—while in the academic world, disci-
pline refers to a specialization topic such as archeology, history,

59
or psychology. I use the term multidisciplinary to refer to both,
and will further discuss the unusual complexity that emerges
when one deals with all that humans can know in all forms about
all topics.

7. My seminal article, also briefed by invitation to the Library

of Congress Forum, is “Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, Policy,
Intelligence, and Information,” Government Information Quarterly;
Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 159-173; and “Creating a Smart Nation: Infor-
mation Strategy, Virtual Intelligence, and Information Warfare,”
in Doug Dearth, Alan Campen, and R. Thomas Goodden, con-
tributing eds., CYBERWAR: Security, Strategy, and Conflict in the
Information Age, Fair Oaks, VA: Armed Forces Communications
and Electronics Association (AFCEA), May 1996. Later I created
the book, THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the
Public Interest, Oakton, VA: OSS, 2006, which provides all neces-
sary information to actually implement these ideas.

8. PriceWaterhouseCoopers has documented the fact that

over 50 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the United
States is wasted, available from blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/04/10/
report-us-wastes-more-than-half-of-health-spending/. The USG is an
industrial-era system that has been captured by special interests.
It combines industrial-era legions of clerks with top-down micro-
management, and in the worst of all possible worlds, misspends
the bulk of the taxpayer dollar. At the same time, it seeks to re-
strict and preempt state and local governments in their legitimate
setting of higher public standards for the environment and other
areas; instead, the federal government now sets ceilings rather
than floors, and this is the truth-teller on the failure of the exist-
ing government to adapt and to maintain its integrity.

9. See Senate Floor Statement on Secretary Robert Gates’

speech on “Tools of Persuasion and Inspiration,” July 28,
2008, available from www.levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.
cfm?id=301378.

10. As identified in priority order by the United Nations

High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change in their
report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, New York:
United Nations, 2004.

60
 11. I served as the Special Assistant to the Director (GM-14)
and also as the Deputy Director, a gapped billet for a lieutenant
colonel. Colonel Walter Breede III, USMC, was my first boss; Col-
onel Forest Lucy, USMC, my second; and I consider them, along
with Colonel Vincent Stewart, USMC, to be three of the finest
Marine colonels I have known in my lifetime. Their leadership
has made a huge difference in my professional life.

12. Wikipedia provides an adequate summary entitled Ni-

caragua v. United States, available from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Nicaragua_v._United_States.

13. Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World

Policy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949. The single
best description I have found of the CIA’s loss of integrity during
and after the Vietnam war can be found in C. Michael Hiam’s
utterly brilliant Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam
Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars, Hanover, NH: Steerforth
Press, 2006, where he quotes Kent asking Adams if the CIA’s
complicity in not counting the guerrillas (the Viet Cong) was
“beyond the bounds of reasonable dishonesty.” p. 122. His work
is complemented by many other books, notably George Allen’s
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Viet-
nam, New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2001; Bruce Jones, War Without Win-
dows, Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University Press, 1990; Jim Wirtz,
The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1994; and Orrin de Forest, Slow Burn: The Rise
and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam, New York: Si-
mon & Schuster, 1990. More recently, after visiting the CIA, John
Perry Barlow actually described the environment he experienced
as a “gulag,” in “Why Spy: If the spooks can’t analyze their own
data, why call it intelligence?” Forbes ASAP, October 7, 2002,
available from www.forbes.com/asap/2002/1007/042.html.

14. The short version of the modern contest of will, intellect,

and integrity between the CIA and me is available from www.oss.
net/HISTORY.

15. See Rowan Scarborough, “Tenet’s House of Cards,”

Human Events .com, August 23, 2007, available from www.hu-
manevents.com/article.php?id=22063.

61
 16. As identified by the Earth Intelligence Network (EIN)
from a review of Mandate for Change volumes for the last five
presidential elections in the USA. They are: agriculture, diplo-
macy, economy, education, energy, family, health, immigration,
justice, security, society, and water. It makes no sense, for ex-
ample, to use water to grow grain we cannot eat to fuel cars that
either should not be built at all, or should be running on natural
gas from Alaska.

17. Having authored four books specifically focused on the

reinvention of intelligence, I will only point to my most recent
works that address the larger context for intelligence reinvention
beyond HUMINT. They include “Intelligence for the President—
AND Everyone Else,” CounterPunch, February 27-March 1, 2009;
“Fixing the White House and the Intelligence Community,” White
Paper, OSS.Net, January 15, 2009; “The New Craft for Peacekeep-
ing Intelligence,” in Information and Intelligence Cooperation in
Multifunctional International Organizations, Stockholm, Sweden:
Folke Bernadotte Academy Sweden, March 30-April 7, 2009; and
“The Ultimate Hack: Re-Inventing Intelligence to Re-Engineer
Earth,” Denmark, October 27-28, 2009, available from www.oss.
net/HACK. Also relevant is my 3-day training for the “Class Be-
fore One” comprised of six UN system elements in a wartorn
country, “Creating the United Nations Open-Source Decision-
Support Information Network (UNODIN),” August 2007. My
1990s evaluation of the CIA, “HUMINT Successes & Failures,” is
still valid and available from www.phibetaiota.net/?p=3601.

18. This quote has been confirmed by the Library of Con-

gress and the University of Virginia as attributable to Thomas
Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin. “Humanity Ascending” is a phrase
I learned from Barbara Marx Hubbard, and the DVD series by the
same title. She cited Benjamin Franklin’s reference to the “divin-
ity in our humanity.” HUMINT is not about spying. HUMINT
is about learning, deciding, and evolving—humanity ascending.

19. “Private Enterprise Intelligence: Its Potential Contribution

to National Security,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 10,
No. 4, October 1995. The concept of both the journal and the book
that followed, were presented at the 1994 conference sponsored

62
by the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Stud-
ies (CASIS).

20. Searching for “Valley of Death” defense acquisition will

yield the latest articles. As of this writing, the best available is
from the Government Executive.

21. The best observation Chuck Spinney (the leading defense

whistleblower in the 1980s) ever made to me was in November
2008, when we had lunch, and he pointed out that not only does
the DoD research influence, define, and overpower most research
funded within the United States, but the most pernicious effect
has been to raise multiple generations of engineers trained to do
“government specifications, cost plus” engineering, which is to
say, the worst possible solutions at the greatest possible cost. In
the private sector, biomimicry and “cradle to cradle” zero waste
engineering are flourishing at a time when defense is so bogged
down in 1950s mind-sets and 1970s contract vehicles that it is
lucky it has not collapsed completely. This cannot stand—it must
be transformed.

22. “The only way to understand a system is to understand

the system it fits into.” Howard Odum was a pioneer of systems
ecology. Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog (www.phibeta-
iota.net), is a standard reference site now.

23. The Army Strategy Conference in 1998 produced the

first coherent vision for “what next” but was ignored. In 2008,
the same conference addressed the need to rebalance the instru-
ments of national power, and this too is being ignored despite the
fact that the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has been, up
to this point, a major proponent of national security reform. We
do not lack for knowledge—what we lack is access for those with
knowledge to those in power. Lip service, theater, and incremen-
talism are in no way transformative. “Perhaps We Should Have
Shouted: A Twenty-Year Retrospective,” available from www.
phibetaiota.net/?p=5818.

24. Government; military; law enforcement; academia; busi-

ness; media; nonprofit and nongovernmental; and civil society
inclusive of labor unions, religions, and citizen advocacy groups
as well as emergent citizen wisdom councils.

63
 25. My tentative view on how the USG and DoD could do
this is at my briefing for engineers, “The Ultimate Hack: Re-In-
venting Intelligence to Re-Engineer Earth”, available from www.
phibetaiota.net/?CA5=114.

26. Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) remains the most cogent thinker
on this point. At the time (1991 or 1992), Senator Nunn was Chair-
man of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC). I copied
down these words of wisdom while serving in the C4I Division of
HQMC as the General Defense Intelligence Program (GDIP) ana-
lyst. I have never been able to locate the original reference again,
but in direct correspondence with Senator Nunn’s staff in his retire-
ment, they said it sounded right. I have used this quote before, but
it evidently has never registered with any Secretary of Defense:

I am continually being asked for a bottom-line de-

fense number. I don’t know of any logical way to
arrive at such a figure without analyzing the threat;
without determining what changes in our strategy
should be made in light of the changes in the threat;
and then determining what force structure and
weapons programs we need to carry out this revised
strategy.

I know with absolute certainty that the Secretary of

Defense knows the answer at an intellectual level—
anything I can do, he can do better—but at a bureau-
cratic level, he is not asking the right question, which
is: In light of what we now know about the threat
(see below), how should we change the totality of the
federal, state, and local governments, and the totality
of the eight tribes that comprise any nation, so as to
achieve Buckminster Fuller’s vision? His core ques-
tion and his reflection on war on politics:

How can we make the world work for 100 percent

of humanity in the shortest possible time through
spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage
or disadvantage to anyone?

64
 Either you’re going to go along with your mind and
the truth, or you’re going to yield to fear and custom
and conditioned reflexes. With our minds alone we
can discover those principles we need to employ to
convert all humanity to success in a new, harmoni-
ous relationship with the universe. We have the op-
tion to make it.

Since it is now physically and metaphysically de-

monstrable that the chemical elemental resources
of Earth already mined or in recirculation, plus the
knowledge we now have, are adequate to the sup-
port of all humanity and can be feasibly redesign-em-
ployed to support all humanity at a higher standard
of living than ever before enjoyed by any human,
war is now and henceforth murder. All weapons are
invalid. Lying is intolerable. All politics are not only
obsolete but lethal. Available from www.newworlden-
cyclopedia.org/entry/Buckminster_Fuller.

Now imagine if 50 percent of the Defense Advanced Re-

search Project Agency’s (DARPA) budget were redirected to
waging peace—instead of robots programmed in theory to not
commit war crimes; why not very low cost solutions for clean
water, renewable energy, disease eradication, and so on? DARPA
represents the best and the brightest engineers lacking inspired
leadership and global perspective. Winning wars is not an out-
come—creating a sustainable peace is.
We still need spies and secrecy, we still need “four forces
after next” to deter and win wars, but more than anything else
we need intelligence-driven policy, acquisition, and operations,
whole of government policy, acquisition, and operations, and
most especially, whole of government integrity. Show me that,
and I will show you a prosperous world at peace.
Fifty-two questions and answers suitable for the President of
the United States are easily available from the Earth Intelligence
Network, www.earth-intelligence.net. It says a great deal about a
nation when those nominally responsible for the public interest
are not asking these questions nor considering these answers
(among other answers from other sources).

27. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organiza-

tion, New York: Free Press, 1997.

65
 28. See “The Ultimate Hack: Re-Inventing Intelligence to Re-
Engineer Earth.”

29. Action officers (AO) today are one deep and have zero
resources for securing OSINT, nor do they receive any support
at all from the USIC. In the Department of Energy (DoE), to take
one example, the AO for proliferation is in this situation, and de-
spite the fact that the CIA has Carol Dumaine working at the
DoE, the raw fact is that she is without influence or resources.

30. A major reason why the United States should pay for the
Office of the Assistant Secretary General for Decision Support in
the UN is so as to obtain UN validation of the table, which can
be presented to all foundations and others at an annual confer-
ence. By allowing anyone to add a peace target at all levels (from
household and village needs to a regional need for a water de-
salination plant), we harness the minds—and wallets—of every
human on the planet. Peer-to-peer giving, not foundation giv-
ing, is going to save the world by elevating the poor to the point
that they can create infinite wealth. For a graphic depiction of
how an online Global Range of Needs Table would work, see
my briefing, “The Ultimate Hack, Re-Inventing Intelligence to
Re-Engineer Earth.”

31. There is no substitute for having a high-quality HUMINT

professional alongside every major consumer of intelligence. Re-
quirements Definition is easily one third of the value of the intel-
ligence profession, the other two being Collection Management
inclusive of source discovery and discrimination; and Analytic
Tradecraft which should but does not now include advanced IT
exploitation of all available information.

32. The obvious reference is to H. G. Wells, World Brain, Lon-

don, UK: Adamantine Press, 1993. See also Howard Bloom, Glob-
al Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st
Century, New York: Wiley, 2001; and Hans Swegan, Global Mind,
London, UK: Minerva Press, 1995.

33. Medard Gabel, co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the

analog World Game, is the architect for the EarthGame™ which

66
is not really a game at all, but rather an interactive Operating
Manual for Spaceship Earth as he and Buckminster Fuller origi-
nally envisioned. The preliminary planning documents are avail-
able from www.phibetaiota.net/?p=14031.

34. My own examination of The Foreign Affairs System of the

People’s Republic of China, Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University,
1975, remains quite valid and is available online in my Early Pa-
pers. A current and concise definition of the “five circles” of Ira-
nian HUMINT has been provided by Amir Taheri, “As the U.S.
Retreats, Iran Fills the Void,” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2009.
The five circles are (1) commercial companies and banks, many
of them fronts; (2) charities and scholarships; (3) cultural centers
offering language and religion; (4) Hezbollah operating openly;
and (5) clandestine operations with and without indigenous Sun-
ni radicals in support. For an overview of Iran’s penetration of
Latin America, see Samuel Logan, “Iran’s Inroads and Deepen-
ing Ties in Latin America,” Mexidata.info, May 4, 2009, including
the phrase “as Iran continues to strengthen relationships, more
Iranian doctors, diplomats, teachers, businessmen and officials
are arriving in Latin America.”

35. They appear to be further trisected into Service, com-

mand, and tactical capabilities. As the global grid is enhanced,
these distinctions will become impediments, and it will be neces-
sary to harness all humans into one adaptable matrix. There also
appear to be a number of subterfuges for obscuring some units
in order to avoid their being subject to oversight, just as some
acquisitions are mislabeled, e.g., hand-held devices as code for
special lap-top computers.

36. While my observations are probably applicable to every

government and every nation, I limit my direct assertions to the
USG and the USIC that I know, as well as to anyone now serving,
tactical and technical details aside.

37. Education, lessons learned, research, and training (both

planned and as needed) are the foundation for achieving orga-
nizational intelligence, which is Quadrant IV after knowledge
management (KM), social networking (SN), and external re-
search (ER). External research and development (ER&D) is for

67
all practical purposes dead within the IC and the DoD, less the
spend-thrift DARPA and IC equivalents that are largely discon-
nected from the most urgent needs of the warfighter and intel-
ligence professional. A depiction I first presented to the NSA at
its first public conference in Las Vegas, NV, on January 9, 2002, is
available from www.phibetaiota.net/?p=21805. I have chosen to use
the terms defense counterintelligence and offensive counterintel-
ligence instead of the DoD terms defensive counterespionage
(DCE) and offensive counterespionage (OFCO) in part to specify
that I am not addressing these more sensitive endeavors in any
way, and in part to keep the terms more generic.

38. See Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from
America’s Class War, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008.

39. See Gordon McKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Cor-

porate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace, New York: Viking
Adult, 1998. More recently, John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass
Instruction, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: New Society
Publishers, 2008, has driven a definitive stake into the heart of
the childhood extension and compulsory prison system we call
school.

40. The anthroposphere is that part of the environment that

is made or modified by humans for use in human activities and
human habitats.

41. Noosphere, according to the thought of Vladimir Ver-

nadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, denotes the “sphere of human
thought.”

42. Faith matters, both in terms of ensuring that ethics and in-
tegrity are present in all aspects of our professional and personal
lives, and in a practical sense, as a common frame of reference
in the practice of HUMINT. Religion has been neglected by HU-
MINT, and must be a priority for both mapping and understand-
ing. I review a number of books on faith and religion at Phi Beta
Iota, available from www.phibetaiota.net.

43. The OSA cannot be under the CIA or secret intelligence

auspices for the simple reason that all of the information we want
can be gotten for free from others, but only if the OSA is under

68
diplomatic auspices. The spies can have a copy of everything, but
the original public information must remain public. See Final Re-
port of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States, Official Government Ed., Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, July 2004, pp. 23, 423.

44. See Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. In-
telligence, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, March
1996. A passing reference to the exercise is made in the section
on “Improving Intelligence Analysis,” subsection “Making Bet-
ter Use of Open Sources,” but the truthteller is in the final recom-
mendation that OSINT be a top priority for both more funding
and more attention from the (then) Director of Central Intelli-
gence (DCI). Senator David Boren (D-OK), today President of the
University of Oklahoma, was moved to contribute the foreword
to my first book in part because—he says this in his foreword—
both John Deutch and George Tenet refused to act on any of the
recommendations of the Commission, and especially those rec-
ommendations regarding OSINT needing to be a top priority for
funding and attention from the (then) DCI.

45. This, and other documents pertinent to the need for

legislative resolution of the shortfalls in every presidential and
congressional commission or panel on intelligence since 1947, is
available from www.oss.net/HILL.

46. This must be a diplomatic organization because most or-

ganizations and individuals will not share information with an
organization that is a formal part of the USIC, or even with the
DoD. Led by a senior U.S. ambassador, it could be collocated
with either the ASG for Decision Support at the UN, or the U.S.
Mission to the UN.

47. Selfishly, this is the fastest means by which to orches-

trate U.S. vacuum-cleaning of all unclassified information avail-
able from within the UN System. Pragmatically, by sponsoring
a Global Range of Needs Table, this office would help multiple
individuals and organizations collaborate (for example, a Ruma-
nian engineer with a spare part needed in Ghana, a German will-
ing to pay the FedEx fee, and a third party able to receive the part
in the capital city and deliver it to the village needing the part).
Thus, we harness the full human capacities of the planet; or help

69
organizations harmonize spending in a specific location such as
East Timor (Timore-Leste).

48. There are a number of locations where an MDSC could

be located, from Groton, CT, to New York to Quantico, VA, to
Tampa, FL. I believe we have no alternative but to create the first
de facto World Intelligence Center such as called for by Quincy
Wright in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1957; and the soon-
er we do that, the sooner we can begin effectively harmonizing
spending to create a prosperous world at peace through peaceful
preventive measures.

49. This idea was first presented in the chapter on “Presi-

dential Intelligence” in ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in
an Open World, Fair Oaks, VA: AFCEA, 2000. The National In-
telligence University (NIU) that is part of the secret USIC is not
suitable because its leaders know little about history, culture,
language, or open sources of information, and they do not have
the infrastructure for absorbing and enlightening large numbers
of individuals not eligible for standard USIC clearances. The Na-
tional Defense Intelligence College (NDIC) has done well with
its Multinational Intelligence Fellows program, and this could be
expanded as an immediate measure, but ultimately I believe we
need to think in terms of a Multinational Multifunctional Univer-
sity in which six nations such as Brazil, China, India, South Afri-
ca, Turkey, and Russia offer 2-month segments, with the students
moving from one to the other in sequence, and then spending a
final 2 years in residence at the MDSC.

50. Since leaving government I have been a champion for

reducing counterproductive secrecy while assuring necessary
secrecy—as Rodney McDaniel, the Executive Secretary for the
National Security Council has put it, only 10 percent of secre-
cy is actually legitimate, the rest is turf protection. As found in
Thomas P. Croakley, ed., Issues of Command and Control, National
Defense University, 1991, p. 68. My own testimony, in 1993, 1996,
and 1997, has been very straightforward: Unnecessary secrecy
impedes the effectiveness of government, while we also under-
mine our security with lip service to operations security (OP-
SEC) (e.g., clandestine operations run out of official installations
where nothing can be kept secret including the identity of every
single officer operating under official cover). I believe 20 percent
of our secrecy is justified, but at least half of that is done badly.

70
 51. U.S. Senate, Commission on Protecting and Reducing Gov-
ernment Secrecy, Document 105-2, Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1997. See also Ted Gup, NATION OF SECRETS:
The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life, New York:
Doubleday, 2007.

52. Read the letter of transmittal, available from www.fas.org/

sgp/library/moynihan/title.html.

53. Arabic (11 core variations), Aramaic, Berber, Catelan,

Chinese, Danish, Dari, Dutch, English, Farsi, Finnish, French,
German, Hindi (a continuum of dialects), Indonesian, Irish, Ital-
ian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Kurmanji, Malay, Norwegian,
Pashto, Polish, Portuguese, Punjab, Russian, Serbian, Spanish,
Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, and Urdu. Arabic variations (the CIA
often falls prey to its dependence on Lebanese Arabs, and the FBI
has similar issues): Andalusi Arabic (extinct, but has an impor-
tant role in literary history); Egyptian Arabic (Egypt) considered
the most widely understood and used “second dialect”; Gulf
Arabic (Gulf coast from Kuwait to Oman, and minorities on the
other side); Hassaniiya (in Mauritania); Hijazi Arabic; Iraqi Ara-
bic; Leventine Arabic (Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and western
Jordanian); Maghreb Arabic (Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, and
western Libyan); Maltese; Najdi Arabic; Sudanese Arabic (with a
dialect continuum into Chad); and Yemeni Arabic.

54. I speculate that this refers in part to his ability to ask any
of the 75+ nations participating in the Coalition Coordination
Center (CCC) in Tampa, FL, for assistance. It is my view that the
new fully-furnished CCC building should be converted into a
Multinational Decision Support Center (MDSC) that can feed a
copy of all unclassified documents into the high side of Intelink
via the electronic loading docks already in existence at USSO-
COM, while keeping ownership of the original so as to provide
decision support to stabilization and reconstruction, humanitar-
ian assistance, and disaster relief operations worldwide, all with-
out being encumbered by specious claims from the secret world,
which classifies everything for the simple reason that it only has
one communications and computing mode: Top Secret/Sensitive
Information. My briefing as given to the combined leaders of the

71
CCC delegations and then adapted for ASD/SOLIC (irregular
warfare) is available from www.oss.net/CCC; I believe the center
of gravity for HUMINT is both overt and civil, hence the new
Army Civil Affairs Brigade and the UN need to become primary
partners in collecting, processing, and exploiting of OSIF and
OSINT.

55. General Zinni is quoted in my seminal chapter on stra-

tegic OSINT, “Open Source Intelligence,” Loch D. Johnson, ed.,
Strategic Intelligence Volume 2: The Intelligence Cycle, Westport,
CT: Praeger, 2007, pp. 95-122. The chapter alone is available from
www.oss.net/OSINT-S. The operational counterpart to this, an up-
dating of the NATO Open Source Intelligence Handbook that I wrote
by direction of Brigadier General Jim Cox, CA (then Deputy J-2
for Supreme Allied Headquarters Europe) and with oversight
from Lieutenant Commander Andrew Chester, CA, is in Loch
Johnson, ed., Handbook of Intelligence Studies, Philadelphia, PA:
Routledge, 2006, pp. 129-147. The chapter alone is available from
www.oss.net/OSINT-O.

56. See “The Importance of Open Source Intelligence to the

Military,” Loch Johnson and James Wirtz, eds., STRATEGIC IN-
TELLIGENCE: Windows Into a Secret World, Cary, NC: Roxbury,
2004, pp. 112-119, previously published in the International Jour-
nal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. Winter 1995, pp. 457-470.

57. RapidSMS as pioneered by the United Nations Children’s

Fund (formerly United Nations International Children’s Emer-
gency Fund), is proving itself daily.

58. OSA would be the executive agent for this program. The
National Guard can make a significant contribution—it is unique
for being eligible for both military clearances to access secret na-
tional foreign intelligence, and law enforcement commissions
from the Governor to allow access to crime databases. But the
National Guard bureaucracy cannot be asked to manage an en-
tirely new domestic program best funded and organized by the
OSA and its interagency management team. I continue to believe
that the National Guard, not the active duty force, should be re-
organized into stabilization and reconstruction brigades to meet
domestic needs and for short-term international needs with mili-

72
tary police, medical, legal, civil affairs, and other predominantly
civil applications of organized forces.

59. See www.oss.net/HILL for more information.

60. Also as defined by the Earth Intelligence Network, on the

basis of factual demographics: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia,
Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards such as the Congo, Ma-
laysia, South Africa, and Turkey.

61. Educating the poor “one cell call at a time” is the defin-
ing outcome and idea of the Earth Intelligence Network, and is
described in the larger context of creating public intelligence in
the public interest in a 10-page document. What most people do
not realize is that the combination of free cell phones among the
poor, when combined with call centers operated by the govern-
ment, instantly comprise a national and regional early warning
network without compare, and one unaffordable under any oth-
er schema.

62. Some quote this as “. . . all bugs are shallow.” Regardless,

the era of “open everything” is here to stay, and our task as in-
telligence professionals is to leverage the open and reinvent the
clandestine and covert.

63. I will not belabor the failings of the USIC and the U.S.
military intelligence community in “hiring to payroll,” code for
“fill as many desks as possible with the least expensive individu-
als;” nor will I harp on the reality that young people without sig-
nificant overseas life experience are marginally qualified to be
intelligence collectors, producers, or consumers. In this context,
it is sufficient to observe that we have failed to champion quality
education; we have failed to engage the other tribes of intelli-
gence; and we have failed to provide for a reliable 24/7 network
that can receive, make sense of, and exploit leads from citizens,
be they domestic or foreign. The Israeli’s excel at leveraging the
global Jewish diaspora, and have a term for those who help the
Mossad achieve clandestine objectives without qualm about be-
traying the government whose passport they carry: sayonim. See
Gordon Thomas, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and
Murder of a Media Mogul, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.

73
 64. In my view, universal service is the only possible foun-
dation for truly achieving total assimilation of—and nationwide
appreciation of and respect for—diversity. I do not believe indi-
viduals should be forced to join the Armed Services or to serve
overseas, so my proposal distinguishes between a common
bonding and training experience (2 months of common universal
training including survivalist basics), followed by service in the
Armed Forces or Peace Corps (voluntary), or in homeland service
(mandatory). Such universal service—including mid-career uni-
versal service for immigrants—will establish a foundation upon
which a University of the Republic can build cadres of human
minds spanning all eight tribes that will network over a lifetime,
and be the backbone for the smart nation.

65. See “Africa Cell Phone Provider’s Ingenuity Turns to

Wind and Solar,” EcoWorldly, May 28, 2008.

66. See “Wireless Power Harvesting for Cell Phones,” Dun-

can Graham-Rowe, MIT Technology Review, Tuesday, June 9, 2009.

67. A table of mobile SMS applications, nine pages as of May

2, 2009, is available from Earth Intelligence Network (EIN) in the
Peace Book section (www.oss.net/Peace). It will be updated over
time. Mr. Jason (“JZ”) Liszkiewicz, Executive Director of EIN, is
the editor and subject matter expert in this arena.

68. Statistical sources vary in the depiction of illiteracy

among Muslim youth from country to country (and between ur-
ban and rural areas) but as a rule of thumb, at least one-third of
these young Muslims are both illiterate and largely unemployed.
There are not enough guns on the planet to kill them all—educat-
ing them to the point that they can create localized stabilizing
wealth for themselves would appear to be the only sound strate-
gic choice, as well as the only affordable and achievable choice.

69. A useful overview by Major Lynda Liddy, AU, is provid-

ed in “The Strategic Corporal: Some Requirements in Training
and Education,” Australian Army Journal, Vol. II, No. 2, Autumn
2005.

74
 70. See “The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three
Block War,” Marines Magazine, January 1999. The reality is that
the USG does not train strategic corporals in any branch of the
government with the possible exception of the U.S. Marines. We
train clerks to do rote tasks, and we have too many chiefs that
cannot do the job while our entire middle will be departing be-
fore 2012. Now is the time to redefine HUMINT as a national pri-
ority, but with full respect for all thirteen slices managed together.
See the next note for the key to reinventing HUMINT with speed.

71. See Field Manual (FM) 1, Warfighting (USMC, 1989), Chap-

ter 4. I quote this section in its entirety because this is precisely
what the HUMINT discipline needs across all 13 slices:

We achieve this harmonious initiative in large part

through the use of the commander’s intent. There are
two parts to a mission: the task to be accomplished
and the reason, or intent. The task describes the ac-
tion to be taken while the intent describes the desired
result of the action. Of the two, the intent is predomi-
nant. While a situation may change, making the task
obsolete, the intent is more permanent and continues
to guide our actions. Understanding our command-
er’s intent allows us to exercise initiative in harmony
with the commander’s desires.

In order to maintain our focus on the enemy, we

should try to express intent in terms of the enemy.
The intent should answer the question: What do I
want to do to the enemy? This may not be possible in
all cases, but it is true in the vast majority. The intent
should convey the commander’s vision. It is not sat-
isfactory for the intent to be “to defeat the enemy.”
To win is always our ultimate goal, so an intent like
this conveys nothing.

From this discussion, it is obvious that a clear ex-

planation and understanding of intent is absolutely
essential to unity of effort. It should be a part of any
mission. The burden of understanding falls on senior

75
 and subordinate alike. The senior must make perfect-
ly clear the result he expects, but in such a way that
does not inhibit initiative. Subordinates must have
a clear understanding of what their commander is
thinking. Further, they should understand the intent
of the commander two levels up. In other words, a
platoon commander should know the intent of his
battalion commander, or a battalion commander the
intent of his division commander.

72. The contrast between the Eastern way of war emphasizing

human intelligence and stealth with a small logistics footprint,
and the Western way of war that emphasizes very expensive
technical mass with a very big logistics footprint, is ably made by
H. John Poole in such books as The Tiger’s Way: A U.S. Private’s
Best Chance for Survival, Chevy Chase, MD: Posterity Press, 2003;
and Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods,
Chevy Chase, MD: Posterity Press, 2004.

73. This was first made known to me at the Peacekeeping

Intelligence conference in Stockholm in December 2004. My trip
report, for that specific gathering, and other relevant documents
are easily viewed at www.oss.net/Peace.

74. Learn more at www.strongangel3.net. This endeavor is

funded by the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) and
is one of its most valuable, and least-costly, contributions to sta-
bilization and reconstruction operations.

75. I believe there has been considerable progress, to include

patrols armed with video cameras, small unit UAVs, and other
esoteric technologies, but we still have not figured out that we
can recharge our batteries with foot-power on the march—see, to
provide just one example, “Charging Your Mobile Phone Just By
Walking.” Softpedia, February 8, 2008. As this monograph went
to security review, the U.S. Army’s plans to issue multipurpose
iPod Touch devices appeared in the press. See “Apple’s New
Weapon: To help Soldiers make sense of data from drones, satel-
lites, and ground sensors, the U.S. military now issues the iPod
Touch,” Newsweek, April 27, 2009. If the U.S. Army made this a
two-way tool, using Soldiers as sensors reporting via RapidSMS

76
as pioneered by UNICEF, then Civil Affairs patrols could call in
“Peace Targets” and create an automated Stabilization and Con-
struction “roadmap” for the area.

76. On July 10, 2009, the inspectors general from five federal
agencies—the Justice Department, the DoD, the CIA, the Na-
tional Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence—released an unclassified report investigating the
origins and operations of the Bush administration’s warrantless
surveillance program. In the last couple of years, the DoD has
been helping other countries appreciate the beneficial role of the
IG at all levels, and there have been a couple of multinational IG
conferences inspired by conferences of government auditors, but
all are still working at the industrial level of not questioning fun-
damental systemic attributes as called for by the following: “To
ensure continued stability and protect the economic gains of both
developed and developing countries, we need to consider deep
and systemic reforms based on an inclusive multilateralism for a
global financial system that can better meet the challenges of the
21st century.” Statement on the global financial crisis by the UN
Secretary-General, November 2008.

77. A long-standing quote to this effect is, “Everybody who’s

a real practitioner, and I’m sure you’re not all naïve in this re-
gard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classifica-
tion is put: the legitimate desire to protect secrets, and the protec-
tion of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it’s
about 90% bureaucratic turf; 10% legitimate protection of secrets
as far as I am concerned,” Rodney McDaniel, then Executive Sec-
retary of the National Security Council, to a Harvard University
seminar, as cited in Thomas P. Croakley, ed., C3I: Issues of Com-
mand and Control, Washington, DC: National Defense University,
1991, p. 68.

78. General Zinni’s observation is extremely relevant to our

urgent needs, but neither the White House nor any major nation-
al security element is yet serious about creating the Strategy Cen-
ter such as he envisions. Were the Open Source Agency (OSA) to
be funded, the Strategy Center would be a part of it, and General
Zinni is the most qualified candidate to manage it, while also
managing a close relationship with the Multinational Decision
Support Center in Tampa, FL. I would recommend the Danish

77
three-star previously there and who is now the senior Danish de-
fense attaché in Washington, DC, to command the center.

79. The latest is “hair trace” as a means of validating or in-

vestigating recent travels and lifestyle habits of individuals un-
der scrutiny. See “Hair test reveals travel, lifestyle,” in cnetnews,
Military Tech, Vol. 1, June 1, 2009.

80. We still do not do multinational security collaboration

that would offer enormous dividends when we get around to it.
In any given foreign capital for example, the Regional Security
Officers (RSO) speak among themselves, but their video surveil-
lance systems, their watch lists, and other technical and human
measures are not integrated among embassies, and even less so
with corporate general managers, NGO security networks, etc.

81. As stated by a recently returned J-2 from Afghanistan,

speaking at the Swedish training course on “Information and
Intelligence Cooperation in Multifunctional International Opera-
tions,” Folke Bernadotte Academy, March 30-April 7, 2009. Notes
and most of the briefings are available from www.oss.net/Peace.

82. NRT (Near-Real-Time) using www.telelanguage.com and

other means including encrypted cellular telephones; SME (Sub-
ject-Matter Expert).

83. Intelink-U, which is not to be confused with the OSC, is

now open to 11 nations, up from the long-standing seven na-
tions. This is simply not serious, but it is understandable because
Intelink-U is trapped inside a system-high mind-set and a sys-
tem-high architecture. The fastest way to unscrew this and go
totally multinational is to implement my concept for a Multina-
tional Decision Support Center (MDSC) in Tampa, FL, that is also
a two-way reach-back hub for each of 90+ nations.

84. If HUMINT were managed as I propose, senior manage-

ment would quickly realize the benefits of redirecting excess
funds from a clandestine cadre that cannot recruit as it should,
to analysts able to legally commission works of very high value.
Furthermore, if we follow the Dutch example of not going after
anything with classified resources that can be gotten via OSINT,

78
we make our clandestine HUMINT 10 to 100 times more effec-
tive.

85. “Inherently governmental” is a vital phrase. I believe that

individuals who leave government prior to retirement to accept
offers from contractors should lose their clearances, which are
a privilege attendant to their prior employment. Special Forces
have the same problem. I consider both professions to be so de-
manding of integrity as to require a lifetime commitment. Second
only to our overinvestment in technologies as a major misstep, is
our over-reliance on contractors—70 percent of the USIC budget,
and increasing portions of the military services and civilian agen-
cies, to the point that our government is less and less effective at
higher and higher cost.

86. My second graduate thesis, at Phi Beta Iota, examines

three embassies from an IO point of view, and concludes that
most embassies access less than 20 percent of the relevant infor-
mation, spilling 80 percent of that in the way they transfer it back
to Washington, DC. Apart from being outnumbered by every-
one else, the diplomats have no money with which to purchase
OSINT, and the civilian spies, who have way too much money
to throw around, insist on dealing only with traitors. I continue
to believe that official cover should be an oxymoron, and the in-
teragency analytic units should occupy every secure compart-
mented information facility (SCIF) in every embassy. This view
is consistent with the recommendations made in the 1990s by
Brigadier General Stewart with respect to installing interagency
tactical analysis teams within each country team.

87. Two superb books for understanding the reality of OOTW

are Bob Oakley, Michael Dziedzic, and Eliot Goldberg, Policing
the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security, La
Vergne, TN: University Press of the Pacific, 2002; and William
Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World
of Endless Conflict, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. There is
an entire literature on intelligence-led policing that DoD needs to
master, along with the insight that law enforcement intelligence
must be fully integrated into both CI and HUMINT elements at
the planning stage, throughout operations, and staying over for
a transition as indigenous security organizations assume respon-
sibility.

79
 88. Human Terrain System (HTS), available from humanter-
rainsystem.army.mil/default.htm.

89. TRADOC had similar difficulties with respect to OSINT,

ultimately creating a very shallow doctrinal approach that insti-
tutionalizes the various existing bits and pieces without actually
pressing forward to define the total potential of OSINT done
right. Apart from my belief that the time has come to restore a
role for the individual branches (e.g., Army intelligence) in creat-
ing their own training and doctrine, I would venture to suggest
that the time has also come to create a multinational concepts,
doctrine, training, and collaboration network in which we can
leverage the socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic,
and natural-geographic knowledge of all eight tribes of intelli-
gence irrespective of nationality.

90. Project Camelot by the CIA in Latin America, and Project

Grandview by the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC)
are examples of prior endeavors. There are many others.

91. Two especially satisfying books on this strategic topic

(apart from the ethnocentric literature) are Robert J. Gonzalez,
ed., Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace,
and American Power, Austin: University of Texas, 2004; and the
classic by Ada Bozeman, Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft: Selected
Essays, Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 1992. Here in its entirety is my brief
review of the latter book, as it makes crystal clear why HTT can-
not be successful apart from the other 15 slices of HUMINT.

While reading this book, every intelligence profes-

sional should feel like a bashful second-grader shuf-
fling their feet while being kindly reprimanded by
their teacher. This book, a collection of essays from
the 1980s, is the only one I have ever found that truly
grasps the strategic long-term importance of intelli-
gence in the context of culture and general knowl-
edge. The heart of the book is on page 177: “(There
is a need) to recognize that just as the essence of
knowledge is not as split up into academic disci-
plines as it is in our academic universe, so can intel-
ligence not be set apart from statecraft and society,

80
 or subdivided into elements . . . such as analysis and
estimates, counterintelligence, clandestine collec-
tion, covert action, and so forth. Rather, and as sug-
gested earlier in this essay, intelligence is a scheme
of entire things. And, since it permeates thought and
life throughout society, Western scholars must un-
derstand all aspects of a state’s culture before they
can assess statecraft and intelligence.” The 25-page
introduction, at least, should be read by every intel-
ligence professional.

92. See Wikipedia’s Human Terrain System (HTS) and Hu-

man Terrain Team (HTT) pages for a shallow discussion of the
controversies. Denounced by the American Anthropological As-
sociation and clearly incapable of fielding a sufficiency of either
expertise or numbers, this program has nevertheless received
$40 million from the Secretary of Defense, no doubt because his
information about the program has been filtered and he is un-
aware of the documented and viscerally-deep criticisms of both
the program manager and virtually every aspect of the program.
A few minor successes aside (OSS created the tribal maps for
both Afghanistan and Iraq that were given to Special Operations
teams going in at a time when the CIA had no tribal maps), this
program is the poster child for consolidating the HUMINT (and
OSINT) program across all of the DoD and eventually the whole
of government—in other words, the DoD needs to follow the ad-
vice of Colonel Vincent Stewart, USMC, then the OSINT Program
Analyst for USD(I), and create the Defense Open Source Program
(DSOP) and fully-fund the Open Source Agency (OSA) but under
diplomatic auspices. HTT done right can be priceless.

93. As described in Intelligence Operations and Metrics in Iraq

and Afghanistan, Washington, DC: RAND, November 2008.

94. I was first made aware of this point by a Postgraduate

Intelligence Program (PGIP) thesis. I remember being very im-
pressed. While standard to doctrine (See FM 7-98, Chap. 6 – Com-
mand, Control, Communications, and Intelligence), it is especially
important here.

95. See the excellent Wikipedia article on “Six Degrees of Sep-

aration,” which taught me that Stanley Milgram’s “Small World

81
Problem” was preceded by Contacts and Influences by Ithiel de
Sola Pool and his student, Manfred Kochen. Finding a path from
a known asset or personality to a desired asset or personality is
a very important part of clandestine tradecraft as well as social
networking, but more often than not is neglected by case officers
in favor of random opportunism.

96. Ben de Jong, Wies Platje, and Robert Steele, eds., PEACE-
KEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Emerging Concepts for the Future, Oak-
ton, VA: OSS, 2003, both quotations, p. 92. Chapter 7 comprises
pp. 73-100. In 2002, it was my very good fortune to be invited
to speak on OSINT at a Dutch conference on Peacekeeping and
Intelligence co-sponsored by the Netherlands Defence College
(Institu Defensie Leergangen [IDL]) and the Netherlands Intel-
ligence Studies Association (NISA). This conference, held on
November 15-16, 2002, was my introduction to both the stars of
peacekeeping intelligence, notably Major General Patrick Cam-
maert, RN NL, and Colonel Jan-Inge Svensson, Land Forces SE.
Both remain devoted to creating the craft of peacekeeping intel-
ligence (PKI). The very best of the speakers as well as the very
best of those studying peacekeeping intelligence in the past, such
as Professor Walter Dorn of Canada and Professor Hugh Smith
of Australia are featured in the book.

97. There is a strong need for cohesive HUMINT manage-

ment between this particular “slice,” and the covert action and
clandestine operations slices. I am mindful of and most respect-
ful of the accomplishments of the United Kingdom (UK) 14 Intel-
ligence Company, the SAS over-all, and the more recently com-
missioned Special Reconnaissance Regiment, and the UK Army
Force Research Unit (FRU). I believe we can learn from others,
but I also believe the USA can take the lead in coherent HUMINT.
Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America, and Cold War
Secret Intelligence, London, UK: Overlook Hardcover, 2002.

98. Ibid. A lengthy treatment of Bosnia, with previously un-

heard of academic access to all relevant classified files, is provid-
ed by Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992-1995,
Amsterdam, Netherlands: Lit Verlag, 2003.

99. Processing, and especially near-real-time processing, re-

mains the choke point. While spending trillions on secret collec-

82
tion the USIC has consistently neglected processing, to the point
that today we still process less than 10 percent of all the signals
we collect, and perhaps, given the rise in traffic, less than 5 per-
cent. We do not have broad aggregate machine-speed pattern
and anomaly detection at the strategic, operational, and tactical
levels. Little has changed since my first book in 2000.

100. I specifically eschew any discussion of defensive coun-

terespionage (DCE) or offensive counterespionage (OFCO).

101. I like the cryptic summary description by Joel Brenner,

until recently the top USIC official for counterintelligence: “If
there’s a hole in your fence, security’s job is to fix it. Our job in
part is to figure out how it got there, who’s been coming through
it, and what they took when they left,” he said, adding, “and how
to return the favor.” The first is defensive, the latter offensive
counterintelligence. As quoted in Pamela Hess, “US counterintel
chief to be replaced,” Associated Press, June 26, 2009.

102. President Reagan blew NSA coverage of Libyan com-

munications in relation to the Belle discotheque in West Berlin.
The then director of the NSA is described as livid, but impotent.
See David Wise, “Yakety-Yak: Assessing the Threat,” Los Ange-
les Times, May 26, 2002. I have long believed that Presidents and
other senior elected and appointed officers should not be beyond
penalty for such disclosures, and that no President should be al-
lowed to pardon one of their own staff for high crimes and mis-
demeanors whether directed by the President or not. We are long
overdue for a massive reduction of secrecy and a draconian in-
crease in the penalties for disclosing truly precious secrets.

103. Available from www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1543933/

posts.

104. The opposite of “can do no wrong” is the severe abuse

of authority in conducting witch hunts and using power to termi-
nate clearances without due process. Completely apart from the
security clearance process being a total abject disaster, the use by
management of “Fitness for Duty Physicals” (CIA) and arbitrary
command-based revocation of access or clearances (two different
things), is shameful.

83
 105. Security Clearance Reform (SCR) has received atten-
tion, but is making little progress. Not only do good people get
knocked out for truly insane reasons, but now we are told that
one in four of those with clearances has serious derogatory in-
formation that was not noticed when clearances were granted.
See “Pentagon Audit Finds Flaws In Clearances: One-fourth have
‘derogatory’ data,” The Washington Times, June 4, 2009, p. 1.

106. Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen, Merchants of Trea-

son: America’s Secrets for Sale, New York: Dell, 1989.

107. Stuart Herrington, Traitors Among US: Inside the Spy-

catcher’s World, Fort Washington, PA: Harvest Books, 2000. The
two key lessons that jumped out at me were the importance of
not allowing homesteading or long tours by classified material
control specialists, particularly in and around Eastern Europe (at
the time); and the equal importance of understanding the dif-
ferent cultural views on counterintelligence that are held by dif-
ferent categories of personnel, notably officers, warrant officers,
noncommissioned officers with decades of service, and long-
term civilian specialists.

108. In my own experience, the easiest traitors for the enemy

to recruit are found in the ranks of the contracting community
(70 percent of the secret budget, See Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire:
The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2008). The Soviets are known to target contractors who
have passed their lifestyle polygraph, and to run them until they
are scheduled (rarely) for a follow-up polygraph, sometimes 12
years, if not longer. I recollect this tid-bit from, I believe, Chris-
topher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, Instructions from the Cen-
tre: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975-85, London,
UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993, but it might have been a later
publication by the same authors. As a general rule, “false flag”
approaches with a commercial flavor, i.e., “help me now, get a re-
tirement job,” are used by both national enemies, and the United
States, as well as foreign contractors seeking an illegal advantage
in pursuing budget share.

109. See “TAKEDOWN: Targets, Tools, & Technocracy,”

Ninth Annual Strategy Conference, U.S. Army War College,

84
Challenging the United States Symmetrically and Asymmetrically:
Can America Be Defeated?” March 31-April 2, 1999, subsequently
published in a book by the same title.

110. It is not my place to suggest changes in the strategic-

tactical allocation of capabilities, but I do note with some inter-
est that small programs are proliferating across the Services and
commands, each generating its own practitioners with varying
degrees of quality, capability, and authority. In today’s world,
the distinction has blurred between strategic and tactical capa-
bilities, especially in the HUMINT arena, and I believe that there
is much to be gained from a comprehensive review and a virtual
integration that standardizes what can be standardized, while
empowering the confederacy (everyone keeps their own armies)
with a higher common efficacy.

111. Alfred Cumming, Covert Action: Legislative Background

and Possible Policy Questions, Washington, DC: Congressional Re-
search Service, February 9, 2009.

112. Radiological has been added in recent years because it

is now known that entire cities can be made uninhabitable by the
thoughtful spread of such materials. While nuclear in nature, a
radiological weapon does not require a nuclear device or explo-
sion for the spread of nuclear materials so as to severely contami-
nate an area. Such threats are overstated. Wrapping detonation
cord around every crane in Long Beach Harbor is faster, better,
cheaper, and will destroy shipping there for at least 2 weeks, a
catastrophic economic blow. I believe we need to devise a mul-
tinational due process, perhaps modeled after the International
Tribunal, so as to obtain balanced approval for actions that in my
view should not be done unilaterally so as to avoid blow-back.

113. Sec. 503c of the National Security Act of 1947 [50 U.S.C.
413b] as cited by Cumming.

114. I include here the Safari Club, ill-advised U.S. funding

of the Islamic radical wing of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intel-
ligence (ISI) organization, and the covert or clandestine support
for 41 of the 44 dictators now remaining, all of whom are “best
pals” with the USG (the election of President Obama has changed

85
nothing) under the guise of collaborating in the Global War on
Terrorism (GWOT). To be specific, we support personalistic dic-
tatorships (20, now less Hussein in Iraq); monarch dictators (7,
with Saudi Arabia being the first in class); military dictators (5,
with U.S. allies Sudan and Pakistan being 1 and 2 respectively);
communist dictators (5); dominant-party dictators (7); and lastly,
theocratic dictators (1, Iran). Cuba, Iran, and North Korea are
not our friends for ideological reasons largely unfounded in an-
alytically-supported reason. This is discussed in Mark Palmer,
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dic-
tators by 2025, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Properly
managed, national and military intelligence would not only de-
fine the “four forces after next” including the Peace Force, they
would define the need for both an Undersecretary of Defense for
Peace in the DoD, and an Undersecretary of State for Diplomacy
in the Department of State, with two Assistant Secretaries: one
for the dictators that agree to a 5 to 7-year exit strategy, and one
for those that refuse.

115. Cumming; also, see Endnote 111.

116. The actual number appears in different sources as be-

ing from 12 to 21. See Greg Miller, “CIA’s Ambitious Spy Plan
Falters,” Los Angeles Times, February 16, 2008. The reality is that
the CIA knows nothing of the real-world and is now incapable of
creating deep cover on a large scale. The only sustainable cover
in today’s era of digital records is one that is bona fide and has
been created unwittingly by an individual acting legitimately (or
illegitimately in the case of a Muslim merchant in Latin America,
to take one example of a high-value potential recruitment) for at
least a decade. To be truly effective at clandestine operations, we
need to hire individuals with their existing cover identity, not in
isolation for immersion in a totally flawed culture that lives im-
munity rather than cover.

117. The CIA’s nominal executive agency for HUMINT not

withstanding, it is now clear that Leon Panetta, who offered enor-
mous potential for a renaissance of HUMINT, has been captured
by the status quo ante crowd in both operations and analysis, and
I do not see the CIA being a major player in either respect in the
near to mid-term. As noted below, it may be best to redirect the
CIA—and the director of the CIA—to better integrate technical
collection requirements and evaluations.

86
 118. I left the CIA at a time when the lawyer had replaced
the bodyguard as the status symbol, and in my subsequent years
of civilian military experience, I have learned that most military
lawyers do not really know the law—and the applicable classi-
fied findings—as well as they should. When lawyers below the
national command level say “you cannot do that,” they usually
mean “I don’t really know for sure.”

119. I am mindful of the extraordinary role played by the

USD(I) today in orchestrating all elements of defense intelli-
gence. As a long-time admirer of General James Clapper, USAF
(Ret), I personally believe he is uniquely qualified to be the DNI,
and that his eventual appointment as DNI could usefully be ac-
companied by a conversion of the USD(I) into a new Undersecre-
tary of Defense for Operations Other Than War [USD(O)]. When
he becomes the DNI, he can take the national agencies with him,
and elevate the DIA to become the whole of government analytic
arm. I continue to believe that the South-Central Campus should
have three buildings, one each for education, intelligence, and
research, while the existing new building for the DNI at Bolling
AFB becomes a new all-source analytic facility, with the lower
floors open to uncleared specialists doing OSINT in support of
the all-source analysts across every domain.

120. A handful of special provisions could be included in the

Smart Nation-Safe Nation Act to provide for truly secret opera-
tional capabilities. However, bureaucracies cannot keep secrets.
The real challenge is to find leadership that is both fully capable
of managing extraordinary operations that include the deliberate
taking of life (one man-one bullet) and well-endowed with eth-
ics. Ethics matter more when you are engaged in sub-rosa activi-
ties; they can be all that stands between a crime against humanity
and a precision strike good for all. As discussed in the section
on Covert Action, the law is either unclear or narrowly against
active military covert operations; i.e., in theory, they can track a
terrorist or drug lord, but not kill them. DoD-led multinational
clandestine and covert activities are the fastest, best, and cheap-
est way to move ahead in the short-term, while we build longer-
term capabilities that are completely nonofficial and very very
good.

87
 121. This was the effort to finally create a comprehensive
collection management system across all classified disciplines,
but as noted in the body of this monograph, it suffered from a
complete lack of understanding among the so-called require-
ments and collection management specialists of OSINT, as well
as multinational information-sharing and sense-making opera-
tions (both overt and covert).

122. Consumers who say “tell me everything about every-

thing,” or “you figure it out,” have not been properly educated
or trained. I lost my clearances to a system that could not fath-
om 7,500 legal, ethical foreign contacts. Finally, lawyers— (US-
SOCOM) had to get a special ruling in 1997 from the Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight to educate their
Command’s lawyers on the legality of acquiring open source in-
formation from U.S. citizens.

123. James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Se-

cret National Security Agency, Prescott, AZ: Anchor, 2002, p. 613.

124. See “The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate,”

Joint Force Quarterly, Autumn/Winter 1998-1999; “Threats, Strat-
egy, and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National
Security in the 21st Century,” Strategic Alternatives Report, Carl-
isle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, November 2000; “Rebalanc-
ing the Instruments of National Power: The Forthcoming Na-
tional Security Act of 2009,” 2008; and most recently, “Fixing the
White House and National Intelligence,” OSS White Paper, April
2009; all four are available from www.phibetaiota.net.

125. Nunn; also, see Endnote 26.

126. Alfred M. Gray, “Intelligence Challenges in the 1990s,”

American Intelligence Journal, Winter 1989-1990. General Gray was
then Commandant of the Marine Corps (CMC), and directed the
establishment of the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (later re-
named MCIA) as well as the Marine Corps University. He was an
educator of the most extraordinary sort. This article by General
Gray remains the single most intelligent piece of policy wisdom
yet published, particularly with respect to the need for OSINT

88
about nonconventional threats, and the need to create unclassi-
fied intelligence justifying “peaceful preventive measures.” In
the right-hand column, (Asymmetric) and (e.g., Off the Shelf)
have been added to this depiction; otherwise this is as originally
published in 1989.

127. The summary of this 1998 conference was published as

“The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate,” Joint Force
Quarterly, Autumn/Winter 1998-99.

128. A summary of the 2008 Army Strategy Conference, “Re-

balancing the Instruments of National Power,” is available from
www.phibetaiota.net/?p=15655.

129. Creating the OSA under diplomatic auspices with non-

reimbursable funding from the DoD creates everything we need
to get a grip on all information in all languages all the time, and
provides the multinational foundation for collaboration in the
full spectrum of HUMINT from overt to covert, against all 10
high-level threats to humanity. Putting General Zinni in charge
of the embedded national Strategy Center adds so much value
that I speculate he would be identifying both huge costs savings
across whole of government operations in direct support of the
Director of OMB, at the same time that he would be providing
the international community with a Global Range of Needs Table
with which to orchestrate U.S. $1 trillion a year in combined fi-
nancial and social investment by organizations, and peer-to-peer
giving by individuals. This is not rocket science. All it takes is one
decision.

130. My short memorandum on Chinese irregular warfare,

available from www.phibetaiota.net/?p=15866, barely scratches the
surface. They are exporting men, and clearly doing very well in
the two areas where the United States is incapacitated: grand
strategy, and whole of government campaign planning and oper-
ations. The only way we can have a win-win with the eight chal-
lengers (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela,
and Wild Cards such as Congo, Malaysia, and Turkey) is if we
fund the World Game and EarthGame as shared assets.

131. President Obama lacks access to Epoch B leaders that

89
understand bottom-up development. He is trapped in a bubble
with industrial era carpetbaggers. From Small is Beautiful: Eco-
nomics As If People Mattered to Human Scale to ELECTION 2008:
Lipstick on the Pig, Oakton, VA: Earth Intelligence Network, 2008,
the literature is clear. Spend money on individual Americans,
and they will restore the Republic in terms of both infrastructure
and morality. There is an entire literature on resilience, adapt-
ability, and panarchy (the opposite of anarchy).

132. I served on the Information Handling Committee (IHC)

of the U.S. Intelligence Community as a whole, and also on the
Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group
(AIPASG) of the IC-wide Research & Development Committee
(R&DC). We found 20 different “all-source fusion” desktop proj-
ects, each funded by a different element of the IC (with multiples
at the NSA and the CIA), all with different requirements, differ-
ent individual contractors, and uniformly mediocre results. The
IC has spent close to a trillion dollars on technical collection, and
it still has no large-scale all-source fusion processing center, nor
does any analyst anywhere—inclusive of “the pit” at USSCOM—
have a proper digital desktop within which to exercise all 18 of
the functionalities identified in the 1985 report, Computer-Aided
Tools for the Analysis of Science & Technology (CATALYST), Wash-
ington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, October 1989. For a list
of software used by J-23 USSOCOM, see my memorandum on-
line, which also includes TOOZL elements and other notes, avail-
able from www.phibetaiota.net/?p=10653, undated memorandum.

133. I have studied Endeca, Palantir, the various CI/HU-

MINT tool sets and systems, and those initiatives of the Defense
HUMINT Management Office (DMHO) that are described in the
open source literature, e.g., “Defense HUMINT Needs Technol-
ogy, Too,” SIGNAL Magazine, October 2006. The most obvious
short-fall I see is that DMHO is too heavily reliant on others
and does not have direct access to the top U.S. IT scouts, such as
Stephen Arnold, CEO of Arnold IT, the only person outside of
Google that understands all of their patents, and the top person
in the United States on visualization, social network mapping,
anomaly detection, and other emergent IT capabilities that tend
not to be noticed by the DoD. I gave up on In-Q-Tel a decade ago
when my conference audience said it did not add value.

90
 134. I described this requirement to an Israeli officer in the
1990s. He laughed and said “We have the solution.” When I
asked, he was quick to respond: “A dog on a 500-meter leash.”
They do not actually need leashes. While I hesitate to expand
HUMINT to include trained dogs, I absolutely believe we have
not done enough to leverage animal senses in MASINT or in sup-
port of HUMINT.

135. As of April 8, 2009 the Defense Information Systems

Agency (DISA) was seeking help in finding Web 2.0 technolo-
gies; some are now at Web 4.0.

136. See my Annotated Bibliography at www.oss.net/BOOKS,

or for more active browsing, use the Reviews section available at
www.phibetaiota.net.

137. George Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft, New York: Touch-

stone, 1984.

138. In the past few years, I have spontaneously replicated

some of the thinking that Buckminster Fuller did first, and have
been much taken with the title of one of his books, Only Integrity
is Going to Count, New York: Critical Path Publishing, Abridged
Ed., March 2004. He describes us as information harvesters, and
states that problems are rarely physical. In this, he is joined by
Will Durant, who points out that social philosophy is the crux of
all human behavior, and what we do there determines all else.
So far, we are failing to achieve the ascendance of which we are
capable. A structured look at his thinking is available from www.
designsciencelab.com.

91
 APPENDIX

ARMY STRATEGY CONFERENCE OF 2008

Elsewhere I provide 29 pages of detailed notes on

this superb recent conference, as well as a 14-page
article on the conference submitted to the Joint Force
Quarterly.1
Here are the bare bone highlights from the 2008 con-
ference:
• Challenges more complex, threats more dis-
persed.
• Super-empowered individuals and nontradi-
tional social networks.
• Five D’s must be carried out simultaneously:
—Diplomacy
—Defense
—Development
—Domestic capability (private sector mobilized
by commerce)
—Decision support (unclassified intelligence,
harmonizing efforts).
• Preventive action, influence of others, and sup-
port to indigenous are key.
• Pearl Harbor had three long-term negative ef-
fects:
—Military took over national security process.
—Technical intelligence took over the budget.
—We substituted technology for thinking,” have
a strategic deficit.
• Not exercising U.S. influence in an intelligent
cost-effective manner.
• We are weakest in irregular warfare (waging
peace).
• Security must be redefined—high-level threats
respect no boundaries.

93
• USG handicapped in multiple ways:
— Very little stability—constant churn in people
and budgets.
— Lack interagency culture of collaboration.
— Lack flexible, sustainable, responsive budgets.
— We can influence rather than command, bad
at both.
— We have a huge historical knowledge gap.
— We have a huge cultural knowledge gap.
— Human terrain program lacks resources.
— Less than 1 percent of DoD budget spent on
social sciences.2
— New money pays for tools, not data3
— There is no coordination of research across
agencies or services.
— Innovators are too low in the chain.
— Bureaucratic turf wars continue to set us back,
at home and overseas.
• Good News:
— 2 4/7 reachback, when it is available, is deeply
valued.
— Human Terrain System (HTS) credited with
reducing kinetic 60-70 percent.
— After 9/11, NGOs more open to joint efforts.
— 38,000 NGOs have substantial budgets and
capabilities.
• Bad News:
— DoD must give up major systems to fund
peace operations.
— We are being destroyed by adversary infor
mation operations (IO).
— Simplest things are now virtually impossible
(e.g., building a road fast).
— Lack ability to field full range of expertise
across all departments.

94
 — Agencies and services continue to game the
system, not collaborate.
— USG is a systemic failure—horizontal
challenges, vertical organizations.
— We cannot answer question: what is being
spent by all in one place?
— We have no integrators or strategic connectors
in the USG.
— Indications and warnings are not coming
from the secret side.
• We Need:
— Brutally honest roles and missions debate.
— Resident military advisors everywhere (not
bases).
— Advisor Corps equivalent to 18th Airborne.
— Many more multinational students who
could become leaders.
— Deep lasting relationships at every level in
every country and organization.
— Ability to understand and leverage all actors.

I must stress that the above points are extracted

from detailed notes of what was said by scores of
speakers and participants within the 2008 conference
and represent my personal interpretation of what was
said to the assembled audience.4

ENDNOTES - APPENDIX

1. Both are available from www.oss.net/Peace, along with

other raw references being put together for a new book, PEACE
INTELLIGENCE: Multinational Multifunctional Information-sharing
and Sense-Making, available in raw form from www.phibetaiota.
net/?p=6362.

95
 2. This is equivalent to the U.S. intelligence community and
its treatment of “Open Sources,” which receive less than 1/2 of
1 percent of all funding, even though an increase to 5 percent
would increase by a factor of 10 to 1000 what we could know that
is relevant to any given strategic intelligence target.

3. This is especially true in the geospatial arena, where an-

nouncements are made about the expenditures on open sources
but where the reality is that 80 percent of the money is being
spent on building bridges from legacy systems optimized for pre-
cision imagery, not wide-area surveillance, to modern commer-
cial imagery systems, and there is virtually no money for either
acquiring all Russian 1:50,000 combat charts for the 90 percent of
the world for which we do not have combat charts with contour
lines on the shelf, or for buying at least one pass of commercial
imagery for every instability zone.

4. Complete citations with the notes are available from www.

oss.net/Peace. Over 1,400 nonfiction book reviews helpful to
achieving a global strategic perspective are available from www.
phibetaiota.net.

96
 U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General Robert M. Williams

Commandant

*****

STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

Director
Professor Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr.

Director of Research
Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II

Author
Mr. Robert D. Steele

Director of Publications
Dr. James G. Pierce

Publications Assistant
Ms. Rita A. Rummel

*****

Composition
Mrs. Jennifer E. Nevil