Intelligence officers also sometimes talk about the “stovepipes within the stovepipes.” Within specific collection disciplines, separate programs and processes likely work somewhat independently of one another and do not have insights into one another’s operations, but they have an aggregate competitive effect that influences a particular INT. This is, in part, the natural result of the compartmentation of various programs for the sake of security, but it further exacerbates the stovepipes issue and makes cross-INT strategies more difficult.
THE OPACITY OF INTELLIGENCE. The U.S. intelligence process seeks to have analysis-driven collection. This is a shorthand way of recognizing that collection priorities should reflect the intelligence needs of those crafting the analysis. It further reflects the expectation, occasionally misplaced, that analysts have received a sense of the priorities from policy makers. In reality, the collection and analytical communities do not operate as closely as some expect. One of the most striking aspects of this is the view held by many analysts, including veteran ones, that the collection system is a black box into which analysts have little insight. Analysts say that they have no real sense of how collection-tasking decisions are made, what gets collected for which reasons, or how they receive their intelligence. To many analysts, the collection process is something of a mystery. This could simply be dismissed as the failure of one professional group to understand the methods of another group. But the divide goes to the heart of collection, often leaving analysts believing that they have no influence on collection and that whatever sources they do get are somewhat random and fortuitous. This view is significant because the intelligence community does spend some time educating analysts about collection, but often with little apparent return on the investment. This perceived opacity of collection also undercuts the goal of having analysis drive collection. It is difficult to know how to task a system that one does not fully understand.
DNI McConnell has taken some steps to improve the collection-analysis liaison. The current most pressing and difficult intelligence issues (Iran, North Korea, Cuba/Venezuela, terrorism, WMD proliferation, counterintelligence) have been assigned to mission managers, at the recommendation of the WMD Commission. These mission managers report to both the deputy DNIs for analysis and collection and are responsible for ensuring that the two aspects of intelligence work together to improve both collection and analysis. This arrangement likely improves coordination at the top but does not solve the problem of too many analysts not having a complete or useful understanding of the collection system.
DENIAL AND DECEPTION. A targeted nation can use knowledge about the collection capabilities of an opponent to avoid collection (known as
denial
); the target can use the same knowledge to transmit information to a collector. This information can be true or false; if the latter, it is called
deception
.
For example, a nation can display an array of weapons as a means of deterring attack. Such a display may reveal actual capabilities or may be staged to present a false image of strength. A classic example was when the Soviet Union sent its limited number of strategic bombers in large loops around Moscow during parades so they could be repeatedly counted by U.S. personnel in attendance, thus inflating Soviet air strength. The use of decoys or dummies to fool imagery, or false communications to fool SIGINT, also falls into this category. In World War II, the Allies exploited these techniques prior to D-Day to raise German concerns about an invasion in the Pas de Calais instead of Normandy. The Allies created a nonexistent invasion force, replete with inflatable dummy tanks and streams of false radio traffic, all under the supposed command of Gen. George S. Patton. In August 2006, the British Ordnance Survey, which is responsible for all official British maps (and traces its heritage back to 1791), announced that it would end an 80-year program of falsifying maps. During World War II, sensitive sites had been deleted from official maps to thwart German bombing targets. The British government noted that this deception policy had been made obsolete by high resolution satellite imagery and sources available on the Internet.
The intelligence community has devoted ever-increasing resources to the issue of denial and deception, also known as D&D. Intelligence officials seek to know which nations are practicing D&D, determine how they may have obtained the intelligence that made D&D possible, and then seek to design countermeasures to circumvent D&D. As more information about U.S. intelligence sources and methods becomes publicly available, D&D is an increasing constraint on U.S. collection.
However, D&D is also a complex analytical issue and must be approached carefully. Assume, for example, that a potentially hostile state, which has practiced D&D, is believed to be fielding a new weapons system. Collectors are tasked to find it, if possible, but they cannot. Why? Is it a case of D&D or is there no system to find? One cannot simply assume that failed collection is a result of D&D. The completely innocent state and the state with very good D&D both look identical to the observer. Thus, within D&D analysis lies the potential pitfall of self-deception. (One intelligence community wag put it this way: “We have never discovered a successful deception activity.”)
RECONNAISSANCE IN THE POST—COLD WAR WORLD. The U.S. intelligence collection array was largely built to respond to the difficulties of penetrating the Soviet target, a closed society with a vast land mass, frequent bad weather, and a long-standing tradition of secrecy and deception. At the same time, the primary targets of interest—military capabilities—existed in extensive and well-defined bases with a large supporting infrastructure and exercised with great regularity, thus alleviating the problem to some extent.
Does the United States require the same extensive array of collection systems to deal with post-cold war intelligence issues? On the one hand, the threat to the United States has lessened. On the other hand, intelligence targets are more diffuse and more geographically disparate than before. Also, some of the leading intelligence issues—the so-called transnational issues such as narcotics, terrorism, and crime—may be less susceptible to the technical collection capabilities built to deal with the Soviet Union or other classic political-military intelligence problems. Many of the current collection targets are nonstate actors with no fixed geographic location and no vast infrastructure that offers collection opportunities. These transnational issues may require greater human intelligence, albeit in geographic regions where the United States has fewer capabilities. At the same time, nation-state problems remain in North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China. Thus, it does not make sense to abandon entirely the old method of collection, and doing so would be fiscally impractical as well.
Commercial overhead imagery capabilities can be used to augment national systems.
Systems such as IKONOS, LANDSAT, SPOT, a have ended the U.S. and Russian
monopoly on overhead imagery. Any nation—or transnational group—can order imagery from commercial vendors. They may even do so through false fronts to mask their identity. This commercial capability remains so new that its implications have not been completely thought out by those building the commercial systems and by intelligence agencies. On the positive side, commercial imagery offers opportunities, freeing classified collection systems for the truly hard targets.
In 2007, Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the senior intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force, noted that commercial imagery and online mapping software allowed anyone detailed knowledge of potential targets. Deptuta also acknowledged that this capability could not be controlled or reversed. A sense of the power of these commercially available capabilities can be had from the August 2007 announcement by Digital Globe, a U.S. commercial system, prior to the launch of its WorldView-1 satellite. This satellite will be able to revisit a site every 1.7 days and will be capable of taking images of up 290,000 square miles (750.000 sq. km) a day, with a resolution (see below) of 0.5 meters (roughly 20 in.). Interestingly, WorldView was developed in cooperation with NGA to ensure continued access to high quality commercial imagery.
Shutter control
(that is, who controls what the satellites will photograph) is already an issue, for example, between those in the U.S. government who seek to limit photography of Israel and those who own the satellites. Dramatic changes occurred in the U.S. use of commercial imagery during the Afghanistan campaign (2001- ), affecting each of these issues and perhaps suggesting a new relationship between the intelligence community and these commercial providers.
Finally, open-source information is growing rapidly. The collapse of a number of closed, Soviet-dominated societies drastically reduced the
denied targets
area, that is, target areas to which one does not have ready access. One intelligence veteran observed that during the cold war 80 percent of the information about the Soviet Union was secret and 20 percent was open, but in the post-cold war period the ratio had more than reversed for Russia. Theoretically, the greater availability of open-source intelligence should make the intelligence community’s job easier. However, this community was created to collect secrets; collecting open-source information is not a wholly analogous activity. The intelligence community has had difficulties assimilating open-source information into its collection stream. Moreover, the intelligence community harbors some institutional prejudice against open-source intelligence, as it seems to run counter to the purposes for which the intelligence community was created.
SATELLITE VULNERABILITY. As much as technical collection satellites are national assets, they also represent points of vulnerability. During the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union both considered deploying
antisatellite
(ASAT) weapons, and both nations tested ASATs. There were efforts to negotiate a specific ASAT arms control treaty but these did not prove productive. However, in a series of treaties limiting or reducing strategic nuclear weapons [the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) agreement, Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, SALT I and II Treaties, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)] both nations agreed not to interfere with one another’s “national technical means” of collection (NTMs), a euphemism for the satellites. Both nations appeared to agree that strategic stability depended on knowing what the other state was doing, rather than operating blindly in a crisis.
In the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union there were frequent press reports that an apparently impoverished Russia had, at best, only a few operational imagery satellites. Some reports suggested that, for periods of time, the Russians were “blind.” This could be seen as dangerous not only by Russia but by other states as well, again fearing miscalculations during a crisis.
The United States is extremely dependent on satellites for intelligence collection, for communications, and for a host of commercial applications. Much of the U.S. military advantage, the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), depends on accurate, timely intelligence being fed to U.S. forces on a continuous basis. Although no state is likely to be able to compete with the United States militarily for some time to come, U.S. forces could be hobbled by attacks on satellite systems. That is why the Chinese ASAT test on January 11, 2007, in which they destroyed an old weather satellite, raised concerns in the United States and among U.S. allies. According to press accounts, U.S. intelligence had discovered indications of the ASAT preparations but the Bush administration chose not to say anything until after the test, although it is not clear that a U.S. intervention would have led to the test’s cancellation. There have also been press reports alleging that China has fired lasers in an effort to disable U.S. satellites when they pass over China.
There are few available remedies to a hostile ASAT capability. There are no alternatives to the roles played by satellites. Hardening satellites to enable them to withstand attack is difficult and makes them that much heavier, requiring a trade-off against collection payloads. It would be possible to build additional reserve satellites that could be launched if existing ones were disabled, but this requires an additional large investment. Even with additional satellites, there would be periods in which the lost capability could not be replaced immediately if weather or technical issues delayed a launch—again assuming that the reserve satellites were loaded on a rocket and placed on a launch pad, ready to go (an eventuality that raises maintenance and reliability questions). The U.S. Air Force is looking at the possible creation of minisatellites that could navigate autonomously and be used to inspect satellites or spacecraft for damage. This program could be useful in the event of an ASAT attack or presumed ASAT attack. Critics have argued that these satellites could also be used to disable hostile satellites.
Some might argue that an ASAT attack would be an act of war. However, even if one were able to determine who had conducted the ASAT attack, the attack itself would limit the ability to command, control, and target a military retaliation.
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
Each of the collection disciplines has strengths and weaknesses. But when evaluating them—especially the weaknesses—it is important to remember that the goal of intelligence is to involve as many collection disciplines as possible on the major issues. This should allow the collectors to gain advantages from mutual reinforcement and from individual capabilities that can compensate for shortcomings in the others.