Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, naval intelligence officers have grappled with ways to reorganize their community. Billets have been moved and other changes implemented, but the transformation is incomplete. The most critical need is for development of a new set of core competencies of equal importance to those that provided operational intelligence to deployed forces during the Cold War. The demands and enabling technologies of precision strike make transforming naval intelligence more urgent than ever.
The active-duty naval intelligence community differs significantly from the warfare communities (broadly speaking, operators or war fighters) it supports.1 Most obvious is its size. A mere 2.5% of the naval officer corps, intelligence officers must provide war fighters with services and products covering a global range of threats, including terror groups, nation-states, and their various coalitions.
Second is the dispersion of naval intelligence billets. Nearly two of every five are in joint assignments, and fewer than one in four is afloat. This is particularly evident in the lieutenant commander through captain ranks. These "fleet-grade" officers are the heart of any officer community, its most experienced cadre. For non-war fighters, the interaction of this group with operators is what establishes their community's reputation. In these grades, more than 50% of naval intelligence billets are with joint commands.2
At the heart of this development was a consistent focus on supporting deployed tactical forces with operational intelligence. This became the central organizing purpose for naval intelligence, enabled by all-source intelligence fusion practiced at OSIS nodes. OSIS nodes became centers of excellence where junior officers were inculcated with the values and norms of the profession. At these centers, an officer's competency in the community's core function was validated.
A culture emerged around providing operational intelligence. The skills learned at OSIS nodes applied directly to tasks on board ships and to afloat staffs. Performing well at an OSIS node became an essential milestone for advancement. This completed the Cold War transformation of naval intelligence. In the terms of one popular management book, the community was "aligned": doctrine (organizational strategy), TTP (processes), and career paths (people) all focused on the "main thing"—providing operational intelligence to war fighters, the customer.3
From a naval intelligence standpoint, the flaw in the JIC concept is that JICs focus on intelligence at the operational and theater-strategic levels, primarily addressing the needs of the regional combatant commanders under whom they serve.5 When OSIS nodes gave way to JICs, naval intelligence lost its ability to maintain focus on the Navy's principal tactical formations—carrier and expeditionary strike groups and amphibious ready groups. From that point, its relevance to the fleet was diminished.6
After billets were transferred en masse to JICs in the early 1990s, alignment slipped between naval intelligence and Navy war fighters. The ability to influence analytical focus and production priorities dissipated within these larger joint commands. With a more tenuous link to deployed naval forces, naval intelligence officers became less germane at the warfighter level.
The JIC consolidation affected all the services; all have blunted the impact to some extent. Pacific Air Force headquarters, for example, retained significant intelligence capacity by collocating an air intelligence squadron. U.S. Army Pacific headquarters leverages a collocated military intelligence battalion. As a result, intelligence assets are readily available to these commands. Nothing like this is available to the Pacific's Maritime Component Commander, where the Pacific Fleet Director for Intelligence (N2) retains only 30-odd staff members and is dependent on JIC Pacific for all analysis and reporting.
The Navy has applied a similar mitigation strategy to Central Command, which (not unrelated) has been its most active warfighting theater since the Soviet Union's demise. There, the Commander of Naval Forces and Fifth Fleet retains a traditional Navy operational intelligence-focused organization. But this exception only proves the rule: after JICs took over so many critical billets, alignment was lost.
The Transformation around Us
In regaining a central organizing purpose and reestablishing core competencies, naval intelligence must accommodate two trends. Both have been in the making for more than a decade, but neither has been addressed strategically by the naval intelligence community.
The first is the ongoing communications revolution, with movement of data the primary issue: how much, how fast, and how widely distributed. The second is the elevation of precision strike to an ethos throughout all warfighting communities. From an intelligence standpoint, precision strike is concerned with the fidelity, interpretation, and use of data. Together, these developments form the backdrop for the transformation of naval intelligence. If intelligence officers align their doctrine, TTP, and career paths with these fundamental changes, they will regain relevance to naval war fighters.
The New Main Thing
A naval intelligence officer's career should deliberately and actively encompass targeting's joint definition: "selecting and prioritizing targets and matching the appropriate response to them, taking account of operational requirements and capabilities."10 This definition easily encompasses an old-style operational intelligence focus on finding, fixing, and tracking the adversary, but it also can accommodate newer concepts, such as information operations. Such breadth is not a liability, since the goal is a common and unifying concept.
Transitioning to a new focus for naval intelligence involves many issues and challenges. We cannot define a narrow path to future alignment, but we can identify approach corridors:
- Naval intelligence officers must be trained and experienced specialists before arriving at their first sea duty assignment. Sending unskilled labor to the fleet yields a predictable result: officers are given tasks not commensurate with their grade and education. For example, carrier intelligence center first-tour intelligence officers brief aircrews on the day's air traffic "hot areas," then gather and compile postmission data on operational minutia, such as fuel usage. A third-class air traffic controller has the training to do this and much more.
Many lateral transfers to naval intelligence do not even receive a basic course in intelligence, let alone gain proficiency in a core competency. This bespeaks an ill-conceived organizational strategy. What value is an intelligence officer to the war fighter if no specific skills are required to be one? If no special training is required, the position ought to revert to a collateral duty for operators.
This is made urgent by the fact that the 2003 goal for lateral transfers is 30% of naval intelligence officer accessions; the most critical gap being filled at the lieutenant commander grade.11 The prospect of fleet-grade officers with no specific expertise or training—let alone experience—ought to cause deep reflection on how and where naval intelligence fits in the Navy's warfighting firmament.
- To align on a unique and valuable service to war fighters, naval intelligence officers should adopt three core competencies: (1) Knowing where the right target is and how best to attack it. This begins with the skills of old-style operational intelligence but adds those of targeteers and weaponeers. It requires joint warfare-savvy intelligence planners intimately familiar with the targeting process and able to translate commander's intent into target lists. This requires a detailed and sophisticated understanding of the adversary and effects-based operations. (2) Knowing how effectively combat operations (both kinetic and nonkinetic) are accomplishing tactical and operational objectives. This involves battle damage assessment and how that integrates with operational net assessment. Both require all-source intelligence analytical skills and a detailed understanding of the adversary. (3) Ensuring intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations fulfill the Navy's targeting and combat assessment requirements. Skills required are those of intelligence-collection managers and ISR operations specialists.12
- Precision strike must be backed by precision targeting. No matter how well the Navy solves the movement-of-data-to-shooter problem, it still must contend with the fidelity, interpretation, and use-of-data problem. Gathering the right data (through ISR operations), assessing and confirming it (by synthesizing it with multiple sources of intelligence), and understanding the desired (and realized) effects of combat action can be the raison d'être of a realigned naval intelligence community.
This will require expertise in much more than targeting TTPs, demanding as well a detailed understanding of the adversary—be it a terrorist group, conventional military, or a coalition of both. Community size will not permit specialization across all potential enemies, but we should strive for regional expertise. The helter-skelter assigning of personnel to disparate regions throughout their careers must yield to sustained involvement with one region. This effort should be complemented by a serious commitment to graduate-level regional studies and language training.
During the Cold War, naval intelligence confronted a single global threat. An officer moving from Pearl Harbor to Norfolk, or from Rota to Kamiseya, could apply his or her experience directly to achieving the main thing. Today, those officers need to position themselves as experts at targeting regionally based, religiously and ethnically motivated groups, acting either with nation-states or independently. These groups are constrained by cultural factors, which can be exploited if understood. Success in precision targeting will demand that naval intelligence apply graduate-level training about an adversary's region, and because language is culture, proficiency in one related language is a necessity. A very high percentage of naval intelligence officers should achieve a Master of Arts in a regional studies program and demonstrate proficiency in a nonnative language.