Reformulating the Intelligence Community

The following is a position paper of the Jacksonian Party.

The author of this paper has previously written on this topic and the title of this article is a direct link to that article.

With the expected tapping of Gen. Michael V. Hayden to head up the CIA there has been some restiveness heard from the CIA itself. To those folks in the CIA, may I remind them that they serve and report through their chain of command to the Executive as Head of Government. Your mission is to follow orders and protect the Nation as your Oath that you have taken has told you. Your likes and dislikes do *not* matter. If you have problems with the way Intelligence is being gathered and used and you suspect the subborning of your chain of command you may go to: The Inspector General's Office, the FBI Counter-Intelligence units, and Congress. You do NOT report to the media or the American People directly on such things unless you suspect complicity in ALL of the above acting in a conspiracy. To do otherwise is to break your Oath to the Constitution and We the People.

The Jacksonian Party does not care who is in charge of which Agency in the Intellligence Community so long as a high degree of professionalism and skepticism are brought to same. Sorting out what is and is not factual from what *might* be factual to what is *pure speculation* requires such, and the people are ill-served by political ideologues in such positions as they tend to become blinded to certain activities done in areas by individuals and groups.

The Jacksonian Party, using the paradigm put forth by the Open Source Initiative community believes that 'Many eyes makes for good interpretation of Intelligence.' As has been identified in the basis article the IC is in a position of not being able to 'connect dots' as it is not formulated around that concept. By forming to work against a huge State-based opponent the entire IC is not agile enough to get information about nor combat a distributed, networked opponent who ignores State boundaries, rarely uses State-based mechanisms and uses asymmetrical warfare as its basis of existence. Clearly the concepts of 'turf' to surround Intelligence types must come to an end as there is no such thing as Intelligence that works in a vacuum.

To that end the Jacksonian Party recommends a complete and entire reformulation of the Intelligence Community as a whole. There are no indispensable Agencies and the only thing to be considered is to how best to gather Intelligence of all types, from all sources and formulate the reasoning driving events so as to better understand them and identify the Enemies of the United States. The era of separated Intelligence capability and reporting shall end.

As a foundation the new Intelligence Community Paradigm shall be based upon an internetworking of all individuals within the Community as a whole. Agencies will no longer be the sole holders of individuals and Intelligence types. Agencies *shall* define the skills necessary to gather and analyze types of Intelligence and be the custodians of those skill sets and identify the level of capability of any individual in the entire Community that has some or all of the skill sets they oversee. Further, such Agencies shall be the ones that identify *Experts* in such areas, both inside and outside the Federal Government.

To do this simple shift of focus from Agencies to skills is an entire shift from Intelligence types to 'connecting dots'. So as to allow dot connecting to take place, no Agency shall have the sole storage or use of any Intelligence type, although it may set security levels for such information based on Sources and Methodology of gathering same. Thus the Director of National Intelligence shall use the policy and direction part of the NSA for this and this organization will report ONLY to the DNI and have oversight on the entire networking and security needs of the ENTIRE Intelligence Community. This key removes the turf battles over Intelligence and requires Agencies to give up this notion that they 'own' Intelligence. Intelligence types may have certain needs in manpower, computer capability, networking, instructions, teaching, etc. Intelligence types are NOT owned by an Agency but the fulfillment of that type is a responsibility of that Agency to the Intelligence Community as a WHOLE.

For this simple and single shift of perspective the Intelligence Community shall have to do something it has never, ever done before: find out what ALL of its people can actually DO.

One would think that this would be an obvious item that was done decades ago, but do remember that the focus was by Intelligence type against a large State-based foe that was seeking to infiltrate and disinform certain Agencies on certain types of Intelligence. By opening up all of the skills of all of the individuals for use, and for quality control, any single point of information can quickly be checked multiple times for its plausibility, reliability and to see if it fits in the larger collection of all information surrounding it. This can only be done in the modern, internetworked world and ONLY done by a flat Intelligence Community that lacks hierarchy but not directive or direction. In this world in which someone knowledgeable in type fonts can bring down a large Main Stream Media figure and give lie to an entire report by removing its foundations there is no such thing as an 'irrelevant' skill.

To that end an entire inventory and rostering of every individual within the Intelligence Community, their skills, knowledge, work capabilities and history, and *past times* or hobbies or avocations is MANDATORY. To those that swear the Oath to do all within their capability to protect and defend the Constitution, they will now be told that they will make EVERYTHING they know and can analyze available for their Nation. Even trivial background and skills that may seem absolutely and positively irrelevant are to be taken in, even if it is just a listing of free-form text by that individual of 'other things' they know. NOTHING is unnecessary in the modern world of distributed threat analysis as those opposing the United States will use *any* method or avenue of attack that they can think of to do so. Thus the entire IC skills base must be available to find and counter such threats.

As the Intellligence Community as a whole needs covert operational capability and the current CIA has been using retired military personnel for such things, this loop is to be CLOSED and the entire covert missions capability brought directly under the President for personal direction and sign-off on missions. This is the old OSS brought back to life. This *new* OSS will go beyond the military realm for its needs and seek help from the rest of the IC for mission information gathering, local knowledge support and other support information and capabilities. As it will be a direct adjunct of the DoD it will fall under the UCMJ and will not be a separate and 'deniable' arm within a civilian Agency. The era of the CIA determining if it should have the means and methods to dispose of Foreign leaders shall come to an end and that full cognizance moved back to the DoD and directly accountable to the Executive.

As the Intelligence Community requires HUMINT in foreign lands to operate, it shall require a covert Intelligence capability that is civilian in nature and will directly be operated by the State Department as they are the sole Agency for direct communications with Foreign Nations. The State Department may exercise means to place personnel in other Agencies for foreign assignments or through commercial or private intermediaries or groups or companies. As a result, all Intelligence of any sort collected by the State Department goes into the entire Intelligence Community as a whole.

To enable active Intelligence Analysis in this distributed environment, individuals will garner assignments from more senior personnel who will stand up ad hoc groups to meet listings of needs put out by the Executive, DNI, Agencies and other sources. Individuals will have all current assignments listed and time apportioned to such also listed so that groups that stand up can properly sort and find individuals with necessary skills to meet the goals of that group. Once an individual is asked and they assess their skills against the requirement, they can say how closely they match up to that requirement. Even if the fit is not good they will be required to meet that need if no one more capable is available. The best available skills are leveraged in this manner and when better becomes available all work materials pass to that new individual and the previous is dropped from the group roster, although an 'on-call' status may be placed for such.

As each working group has a Goal that has its objective defined by Policy, there will be no extraneous groups to look out for the needs of a particular Agency unless that Agency passes such needs up to the DNI or Executive for work. There may be some perennial problems that will require full time work, but be passed off frequently from individual to individual over a period of days, weeks, months or years. These are not only difficult National problems but a perfect place to hone and train individuals and assess their expertise in a given job function.

DoD Intelligence organizations, while oriented towards specific goals given to them via this network, play a key and vital role in this new and flattened structure. Many of those serving in those areas are *experts* in strange and extraneous methodologies for designing, constructing and delivering weapons of all sorts and this is a key area for defense of the Union. Even if it is just a cursory examination request from a working group on the order of: 'We are seeing these materials moving by this group to this place, is it dangerous?' Connecting dots is a Community level effort, and DoD plays a key and vital role in helping to know and assess threats based on military level hardware.

For the average Intelligence Analyst there is actually no such thing as 'free time'. Time not spent on active group work shall be spent: reading and analyzing news events or other forms of articles and giving notation to same for the entire IC, honing skills in certain areas, especially those needed by the IC, and reviewing other people's work as their skills and interests suit them. In this manner the entire constellation of skills and capabilities is captured and Intelligence Analysts are productively adding to the entire cooperative enterprise of the IC while even finding out things about hobbies and past-times, as new and novel techniques found in one area may be applied to another and more critical area of knowledge. By spending overhead time to put in some metadata to commentary, all of this is captured as part of the job function for individuals.

This article ends here as a foundational conception of a New Intelligence Community Paradigm. It should be noted that in this dis-intermediation of Analysts from hierarchy, the entire overhead of bureaucracy is significantly reduced. Entirely new means of synthetically gathering performance capability to assess capability will need to be done as there will be *no* permanent supervisors for individuals. Their capability in adding to the collective effort of the entire IC network is of paramount importance. Job *categories* disappear, and instead the fulfillments of actual *needs* takes prominence. Much other work will need to be done from Network Security, data storage and replication, skills assessment, work tracking, etc. While this will be years in the doing, it is absolutely necessary to meet the modern, non-State based foes who will do anything to erode the concept of the Nation State on a global base and bring down the United States in particular. And as expected, this job is not a 'punch the clock' sort of thing, but a permanent on-call system which will need to adapt itself over commercial lines to allow people with expertise to do work in non-secure settings and still contribute to the security of the Nation.

Basically, the IC needs to join the 21st Century. Not just shuffling boxes on organization charts around.

The Jacksonian Party is all FOR that.