Come on Howard.

With all kidding aside from my previous post on Saturday: Let me say that I respect whatever personal/professional description you wish to put on this. But you're well enough aware to know exactly why I have used "Stovepipe" in this context of my topic.

Let's take a look at the following:

There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy. In the early summer of 2001, a career official assigned to a Pentagon planning office undertook a routine evaluation of the assumption, adopted by Wolfowitz and Feith, that the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, could play a major role in a coup d’état to oust Saddam Hussein. They also assumed that Chalabi, after the coup, would be welcomed by Iraqis as a hero.

An official familiar with the evaluation described how it subjected that scenario to the principle of what planners call “branches and sequels”—that is, “plan for what you expect not to happen.” The official said, “It was a ‘what could go wrong’ study. What if it turns out that Ahmad Chalabi is not so popular? What’s Plan B if you discover that Chalabi and his boys don’t have it in them to accomplish the overthrow?”

The people in the policy offices didn’t seem to care. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study’s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure. “Their methodology was analogous to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up heads,” the official told me. “You need to think about what would happen if it comes up tails.”

Greg Thielmann, after being turned away from Bolton’s office, worked with the INR staff on a major review of Iraq’s progress in developing W.M.D.s. The review, presented to Secretary of State Powell in December, 2001, echoed the earlier I.A.E.A. findings. According to Thielmann, “It basically said that there is no persuasive evidence that the Iraqi nuclear program is being reconstituted.”

The defectors, however, had an audience prepared to believe the worst. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence. In the late nineteen-nineties, for example, he had chaired a commission on ballistic-missile programs that criticized the unwillingness of intelligence analysts “to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand.” After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon’s policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials.

By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war. The undeclared decision had a devastating impact on the continuing struggle against terrorism. The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed.

Chalabi’s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President’s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. “They’d pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided,” Greg Thielmann told me. “There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi’s sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President.”

That's all from: THE STOVEPIPE

Therefore, with all due respect, my: Cooked Intel: So the 'Stovepipe' Stops Where?

~OGD~

ps: Howard: You aren't missing anything. Yes. It does appear to be a 'failure' at the policy level. But, it's more that just a simple 'failure' which implies a possibility of a mistake. It was a concerted effort to manufacture, "Cooked Intel" . . .

What is the proper portfolio of an intelligence operation in and for the DoD? Support of troops (tactical and strategic)? Support of policy? Geopolitical? And who (Congress? POTUS? SecDef?) determines the limitations, if any?

Let me answer first with what doctrine, much of it preceding the current Administration says, and then address some of the issues. I will also try to offer comments on your second question.

First, do note that there are service-level and national-level DoD intelligence operations, and, of the latter, there are some that are rather more (DIA) and less (NSA/CSS) directly involved with direct military operations.

Support of troops starts with intelligence functions built into them. An Army or Marine battalion has an intelligence officer and a very small number of assistants, and may control battlefield collection assets such as human scouts, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), short-range radars, etc.

In the reorganization of the Army around the new brigade structure, there is a quite substantial component in each brigade charged with intelligence and closely related functions. The jawbreaker of the designation is C4ISRSTA:

Intelligence components go up the troop command chain. As one gets higher, there are interesting methods where troops can access resources, such as satellite photography. This is under a program called TENCAP (Tactical Exploitation of National Intelligence Capabilities). There are also programs that allow troops to get information relevant to national intelligence into national channels quite quickly; it doesn't flow all the way up the military food change. The different services have different names for the latter function.

There are times that military detachments with a primarily national mission (e.g., communications intelligence) are attached for tactical unit, mostly so they can be protected as they approach something accessible only from short range.

So, one answer, a partial one, is that there is a clear troop support function, and a feeder from field units into the national intelligence process.

At the Service and DoD national level, you have several DoD and joint-to-various-levels members of the intelligence community. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) runs collectors including military attaches and spies recruited through military channels. DIA is the national center for a very specialized and technical topic, Measurement and Signal Intelligence (MASINT). I'm happy to discuss what goes into MASINT, but it would be a digression here.

DIA and Service agencies do references and elements on foreign militaries, doctrine, and equipment. Some of this is in DIA, which may assemble multiple military contribution. The Army, for example, has the National Ground Intelligence Center (Charlottesville, VA) containing the highly regarded Intelligence Threat Analysis Detachment. The Air Force has several comparable units, such as the Foreign Technology Division in Dayton, OH.

DIA and usually the service agencies are involved in either writing or reviewing national documents, such as National Intelligence Estimates (NIE). These are contributions of the entire intelligence community, and certainly feed into policy but are not supposed to have policy recommendations.

Estimates, or other documents called net assessments in the US -- the better Soviet-coined term is correlation of forces -- which examine the military context of various policy choices, especially dealing with the balance of US vs. foreign troops available. GEN Shinseki's comments on the size of force needed for an Iraqi occupation is a classic correlation of forces analysis, but remember that he was acting at a national policy, not intelligence, level when he made that assessment to COngress.

The limitations of portfolio are specific to programs, and truly the White House, Congress, and Pentagon all are involved.

2. Who are the proper customers for DoD intelligence providers? In addition to DoD personnel for whom the intelligence product was produced, to whom outside DoD (other governmental agencies and actors, the public, etc.) may DoD intelligence personnel communicate that intelligence?

Depending on the product, military organizations, other intelligence agencies, Congress, the White House, other cabinet agencies, and indeed the public. I'd have to deal with specific examples, but a good deal of military references are available, admittedly not always easy to find. I'd add that while they are not strictly intelligence community, a lot of very good, very accessible information comes out of both the student papers at the midcareer and senior military colleges, and the separate research institutes attached to them.

As to Feith, I remain confused why we are calling his activities intelligence. It appears that he took intelligence information and selectively inserted it into the policy process, not the intelligence process.

--

Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*