Best Practices in Military Intelligence

The sheer number of threats against America requires that we think strategically about military intelligence as applied to those threats. The target (or subject) of intelligence activities includes not only existing threats to our national interest but also emerging and evolving threats, both by state- and non-state-actors. We must collect, organize, and categorize information about these actors, then communicate that information to the right people at the right time in order to strategically approach the desired end state of a secure America.

Several guidelines for achieving the above are given in the video "Applying the Strategic Approach to Military Intelligence," which, unfortunately, is not publicly available. Some of these guiding principles include:

1. Military intelligence must be mission driven. We must understand our objectives - our mission - and be able to convert those objectives into concrete actions at the operational level. Another way of formulating this is that we must be cognizant of our objectives, of our role in the F3EAD and other cycles, and act accordingly. All actions must be measured by the extent that they further our mission.
2. Because of the importance of the mission, and the severity of the consequences should we fail, we must become subject matter experts to the point of dominating the intelligence battle space.
3. The best way to accomplish this is to employ individuals who are proactive, who are facilitators and can network, who understand the function of intelligence, and most importantly are of high moral character. By having such individuals in place, they can overcome any defects in a slightly flawed system.
4. Team leaders must be able to keep the team on track and must challenge team members to reach and exceed their preconceived abilities as analysts. The leader must also be able to differentiate quality team members from toxic actors (those that are politicized, subversive, etc.) and take corrective action to limit the damage caused by the latter.
5. The mission and supporting critical activities should be written into a "mission statement" before entering a high-stress environment with rapid operational tempo. This allow teams and their leaders to remain "centered," and continue being proactive.

These principles form the basis of an extremely capable intelligence organization. There is a weakness not addressed in that video, however. Intelligence teams must surely meet all the above-listed principles to be effective in their job of providing superior intelligence to enhance decision making. Possessing all these qualities is called "being on the happy path" in the parlance of information technology.

What happens when we leave the happy path? Meaning, what happens when a team (or whole agency) fails to meet one or more of those criteria? At best it leads to the agency failing in their job of providing timely, relevant, accurate and actionable intelligence; at worst it leads to systematic abuse.

Intelligence agencies used to be reigned-in through several means: congressional oversight, budgetary limitations, and the court system. Each of those has failed: congress no longer provides oversight, as proven by their willingness to extend the warrantless wiretapping provisions of the Patriot Act, as well as the initial ratification of that act itself. Budgetary concerns are no longer the concern of either political party. Further, the decreasing cost of IT resources (storage and processing) makes automated intelligence gathering extremely affordable. Finally, the court system has turned a blind eye to the 4th Amendment and the protections it affords to Americans, and private companies (especially those in the telecom and banking sectors) are more than willing to be accessories and share customer data.

Without some sort of external check on intelligence agencies, we must rely on them to be self-regulating, which means that they are unregulated. It is not clear how to reestablish boundaries on the scope of intelligence agencies other than by addressing the above-mentioned political, fiscal, and legal failures. By not reestablishing these checks, military intelligence agencies will not only experience mission creep but also mission drift, rendering those agencies less able to provide intelligence for our protection as a nation as well as altering the relationship the agencies have with our fellow citizens.