2005 Naval Intelligence Essay Contest 1st Prize Winner
Cosponsors: Naval Intelligence Professionals, Naval Intelligence Foundation, U.S. Naval Institute
To regain its focus on today's relevant threat in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, Naval Intelligence needs a two-pronged approach: one looking for Victor and the other for Waldo.
Georgi Arbatov, a leading Soviet specialist on the United States, once said that, "We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We will take away your enemy." Although he was not addressing Naval Intelligence, his words proved prophetic. Naval Intelligence was unable to find its bearings in a radically different world in the wake of the demise of the threat it had evolved to combat. Recommendations for new core competencies are legion, including subspecialties in human intelligence or intelligence collection, refocused support to the warfighters, making operational intelligence or targeting the key measure for evaluating intelligence professionalism. These recommendations, however, treat the symptom, not the disease. In the Cold War, Naval Intelligence had a focus because it evaluated itself on its knowledge of the Soviet threat and its ability to provide warfighters relevant threat information. The demise of the Soviet Union removed those performance measures. To recover its vision, Naval Intelligence must return to an organization based on the relevant threat.
The role of intelligence, as defined by JCS Joint Publication-2, is to provide knowledge of the enemy, telling commanders "what their adversaries or potential adversaries are doing, what they are capable of doing, and what they may do in the future." Most suggested Naval Intelligence reforms place their emphasis on only one aspect of these requirements, while warfighters expect their intelligence staffs to answer them all. The answers may come from different sources, but they always relate back to the enemy. The first priority of Naval Intelligence must be the ability to answer any question a commander may ask about a potential adversary. To successfully do that, the community must organize and evaluate itself based on its knowledge of the threat.
Reason for Being
During the Cold War, Naval Intelligence officers were expected to do a tour at a fleet ocean surveillance facility. There they were evaluated on their ability to provide valueadded information to warfighters. Intelligence officers had to understand the Soviet threat to succeed. While Third World threats existed, they were primarily Soviet client states, using Soviet weapons and tactics. Diverse tours did not make a difference; one could do analysis at one command and collection management at another; the requirement for success remained the same—a thorough understanding of the Soviet threat. By organizing and evaluating in this manner, the community ensured that no matter what assignment intelligence officers were given, they had the skills to support warfighters. This organizational structure lost its utility when the Soviet threat disappeared.
If a threat-based raison d'etre is needed, what threats are faced now and in the future? For the first post-Cold War decade the threat appeared to be rogue states. The events of 9/11 showed that activities in failed states like Afghanistan could pose just as potent a threat to U.S. lives and interests. Since 9/11, the Navy has conducted combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and stepped up maritime interception operations in the Arabian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Gulf of Aden to deny terrorists the use of the seas. At the same time, carrier and expeditionary strike groups continue their forward presence missions in the western Pacific. At present, Naval Intelligence is supporting operations against insurgents and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, counter-proliferation and deterrence operations in the Middle East and western Pacific, and network development and pattern analysis for force protection and marine interception operations against terrorists, pirates, and smugglers.
The Future
For tomorrow, a pessimistic view holds that conditions in much of the world will worsen, breeding additional instability and conflict: "to understand the future of the next fifty years, then, one must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic destiny, and the transformation of war."1 This future anticipates increasing anarchy in much of the Third World coupled with the threat of an assertive China competing for resources and a place in the sun. In this future, the Navy faces a wide array of enemies, from capable conventional forces with a modern order of battle, to terrorist cells and criminal gangs armed with little more than cell phones and improvised weapons. Not all surveys of the future landscape are doom and gloom. Globalists believe increased connectivity between regions, nations, and cultures will minimize the chance of great power conflict—such as between the U.S. and China—while improving the stability and living conditions of the rest of the world. For globalists, future threats are less likely to be peer competitors than violence and instability exported from the areas left behind by globali/.ation and which lack strong connections to an increasingly integrated world.2
While optimists and pessimists disagree in tone, they generally agree on terrain. The pessimistic coming-anarchy view forecasts hotspots including sub-Saharan west Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, the Balkans, and Central and Southern Asia.3 If the northern tier of South America is included, this region matches the area globalists identify as having the least stake in the evolving international system and as the most unstable. Coincidentally, this geography encompasses the majority of U.S. military operations over the past 15 years. Of note is the ratio of conventional, high-intensity conflict to low-intensity conflict and associated stability/support operations. Operation Iraqi Freedom consisted of three weeks of conventional war followed by two years (and counting) of counter-insurgency operations. Operation Enduring Freedom has been an unconventional war from the beginning. Operation Allied Force was the most prolonged conventional conflict since the end of the Cold War, lasting more than three months; yet NATO troops remain in the former Yugoslavia six years later. The fighting in Somalia never had a conventional phase, moving from humanitarian assistance to stability operations and then to a manhunt for individual warlords.
Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military started a new stability and support mission every 18 to 24 months with each mission lasting between five and eight years.4 Many of the potential hotspots facing the military pose a similar challenge, with the number of conventional military threats decreasing. Prospects are that the future will resemble the recent past and more time will be spent in unconventional and low-intensity conflicts.
Fewer conventional military hotspots does not mean that the traditional naval threat has evaporated. The 1996 deployment of two carrier battle groups to the Taiwan Strait is a reminder that not every threat comes from terrorists and insurgents. While unconventional conflicts are the high-probability, low-impact events we will face regularly, then conventional conflict with China. North Korea, or Iran is the low-probability, high-impact event that must also be planned against. In the past five years, China's impressive economic growth fostered significant increases in military acquisitions. In addition to building an improved order of battle, China is incorporating lessons learned from U.S. expeditionary experiences by enhancing its command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I), joint interoperability, and providing realistic training.5 Conventional war with China and the lesser threats posed by North Korea and Iran cannot be ruled out. While continuing to support unconventional operations ashore, Naval Intelligence must also maintain continued vigilance against the conventional military threats those countries pose. These different threats require vastly different forms of intelligence support.
Needle and Needles
Conventional threats require Naval Intelligence capabilities similar to those of the Cold War. The skills necessary to track Soviet Victor nuclear-powered attack submarines are the same skills needed against the Chinese Navy, North Korea, and Iran. Providing intelligence support against conventional military targets builds on the Naval Intelligence community's operational intelligence heritage that combines signals, imagery, and pattern analysis to track, locate, predict, and target a potentially hostile force. Finding a needle in a haystack—"Where's Victor?"—was the community's core competency in the Cold War; perhaps more important, it is what Naval Intelligence wants to do: Track defined military units and provide quality targeting data to shooters. It is a capability that must be maintained; but as recent history suggests, an increasing number of Naval Intelligence professionals are doing everything but operational intelligence against conventional military forces.
Unconventional warfare is a provebial exercise in "Where's Waldo?" Instead of trying to find a needle in a haystack, analysts are looking for a needle in a haystack full of other needles. Instead of targeting an enemy order of battle, individuals have to be tracked and analyzed. This is not just a difference in scale, but in kind. Imagery is often of little use when trying to locate a terrorist cell, signals intelligence is usually ambiguous at best, and analysts must wade through and evaluate volumes of human intelligence. The analytic challenge is different, as is the customer. For unconventional targets, Naval Intelligence is likely to be supporting Navy or joint special operations forces or a joint task force ashore conducting operations against terrorist or insurgent targets. The increasing number of intelligence personnel deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan is a clear demonstration that Naval Intelligence is expected to move beyond its traditional target set to understand new enemies and support new customers. With the continued shift of billets ashore to joint intelligence centers, more Naval Intelligence professionals are finding that their premier operational tour is no longer wearing wash khakis supporting O-6 captains and their staffs under way, but instead inside a tent in a desert supporting O-3 captains and their platoons ashore.
With radically different threats, how are threat-based core competencies established? Restructuring Naval Intelligence to focus only on unconventional targets would have catastrophic effects on the ability to support warfighters in the event of a conventional conflict. Yet attempting to maintain a core competency focused only on traditional skills flies in the face of operational reality. It is time for Naval Intelligence to go retro and resurrect an idea from the 1970s: the high-low mix.
The Mix
The high-low mix was platform-focused. On the high end, the Navy developed and deployed Aegis guidedmissile cruisers to defend carrier battle groups and take the fight to the Soviet Navy. At the same time, the Navy had to defend the sea lanes of communication to Europe, thus the low end Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates were built-simpler ships that could be produced in larger numbers because of their low cost. This mix allowed the Navy to meet the different facets of the Soviet threat with the right capabilities at the best cost. A mix of intelligence capabilities to meet the diverging threats of the post-9/11 world is needed.
The high end would be a conventional warfare track, providing intelligence support to antisubmarine warfare, antisurface warfare, air defense, theater ballistic-missile defense, and strike warfare. The conventional track analyst would be expected to demonstrate mastery of traditional operational intelligence and strike warfare and be able to answer "Where's Victor?" The low end reflects a great deal of what Naval Intelligence is now doing. This threat track has a laundry list of associated concepts-low-intensity conflict, military operations other than war, and asymmetric warfare among them-but for simplicity will be referred to as the unconventional warfare track. This is naval support to ground operations ashore. These missions require analysts to answer "Where's Waldo?" Through the Cold War, Naval Intelligence painstakingly acquired expertise at addressing conventional threats, which must be maintained. The Navy's increasing involvement with unconventional warfare means that focusing core Naval Intelligence competencies solely on conventional naval missions short-changes our ability to support the much broader realm of war where the Navy now spends much of its time.
Its Adoption
If a high-low mix is the right way ahead for Naval Intelligence, how is it adopted? Instead of platforms, our new threat-focused core competency is tied to the detailing process. Following their first tours, intelligence personnel must move into one of two analytic tracks: a conventional warfare track with a focus on operational intelligence and strike-warfare skills; and an unconventional track with a focus on nodal analysis and target development. Each track will dictate assignments, allowing analysts to build on their experience over successive tours. Under the current detailing process, a junior officer could do a first tour on a carrier standing a tactical intelligence watch, followed by a tour as a collection manager at Southern Command, and then a tour at sea as the targeting officer for an air wing. This officer will spend a significant portion of each tour learning not just a new job. but completely new missions. Learning curves on new assignments cannot be eliminated, but the learning curve associated with new threats can and should be. While this may seem radical, it is no different from other Navy communities. Just as naval aviators, surface warriors, and submariners, intelligence officers will be expected to understand the underlying elements of their profession—collection, exploitation, analysis, and briefing-and then apply those basics to a particular type of threat.
To fully implement a threat-based detailing process, billets must be designated as conventional, unconventional, or neutral and personnel detailed appropriately. Ultimately, this will increase the importance of a theater joint intelligence center tour for Naval Intelligence ashore. Such tours will be the equivalent of the original fleet ocean surveillance facility tours, where intelligence officers are expected to demonstrate mastery of their skills and excel against their peers. This shift occurred a decade ago, but the community must publicly embrace it and acknowledge that joint intelligence centers are required postings where officer and enlisted professionals must excel. For this approach to succeed, billets must be coded along the lines of the command's mission; they cannot be evenly balanced across the theaters. For example, Northern and Southern commands would have a majority of their billets coded as unconventional specialists, because the threats they face are predominantly counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, and counter-insurgency. Pacific Command would have the greatest concentration of conventional specialists because of the potential threats of China and North Korea. European and Central commands would have both, with a slight bias toward the unconventional track.
Some billets will not fall into either track and will be considered as neutral duty, but it must be the theater joint intelligence centers where Naval Intelligence professionals break out by demonstrating their mastery of a threat and their ability to support warfighters. In today's environment, an analyst supporting human intelligence operations against drug cartels in Southern Command could be as important to warfighters as a targeteer supporting strike planning against the former Yugoslavia in European Command. Naval intelligence should reflect and reward this.
Detailing to later sea billets must incorporate this same approach based on the primary mission of the platform. Conventional specialists would serve on carriers, air wings, or on carrier strike group staffs as their primary mission will remain conventional combat. Unconventional specialists would serve as ship's company on amphibious ships or expeditionary strike group staffs, as their primary missions will be closely tied to supporting ground operations. Looking farther down the road, conventional track intelligence specialists would serve on board cruisers for their traditional naval combat and Tomahawk missile-strike missions, while their counterparts would support operations by the forthcoming littoral combat ships. All tours with SEAL teams, special boat units, and naval coastal warfare units should count as the equivalent sea tour for intelligence officers and specialists on the unconventional warfare track. In the present and likely future operating environment, intelligence personnel assigned to these units are likely to spend an equal amount of time deployed, usually in austere conditions in direct support of combat operations.
The greatest potential benefit to a threat-based organization for Naval Intelligence is improved support to warfighters, especially in unconventional warfare. Those returning to the Fifth Fleet area of responsibility will likely be able to identify the order of battle and home ports of the Iranian Navy but are far less likely to have an understanding of the various terrorist groups operating in the region. This is despite the fact that Iran has not engaged the U.S. Navy in combat for almost 20 years; while terrorist cells in Yemen and Iraq have killed at least 20 sailors in the last five. At the same time, intelligence professionals on the conventional track will be able to build on successive tours studying an increasingly complex problem in the Pacific as China's military expands.
Transformed and Joint
A threat-based core competency is in keeping with the emphasis on transformation, the establishment of riverine squadrons and an expeditionary combat battalion, the need to provide enhanced support to post-war operations, and the growing requirement for direct support. Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, and Baghdad are voracious in their appetite for personnel, often reaching out and taking bodies from sea duty regardless of their designator. A threat-based approach will enhance Naval Intelligence's support to these requirements across the board. For better or worse, the U.S. military will be deployed ashore in support of the Global War on Terror for years to come. In the words of the Chief of the Naval Reserve, Vice Admiral John Cotton, on supporting operations in Iraq: "Are we going to take some sailors from sea and put them ashore to answer this call? The answer to that is a resounding yes."6 Navy intelligence personnel are supporting those deployments and have done so superbly, but they often face steep learning curves upon arrival in country. If they have no prior experience with the very different intelligence requirements for counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism, these sailors can spend the first half of their tours getting up to speed on the target and building a relationship with the national intelligence community experts in their area. To maximize human and signals intelligence in the unconventional track, analysts need to be able to tap into the resources available at the national agency level. Despite all reforms to date, getting all the useful information that falls below the reporting threshold requires personal relationships—which can take time to develop—with the analysts and report-writers inside the Beltway.
Naval intelligence achieved its form and built its strengths in response to the Soviet threat. The demise of that threat and the emergence of threats different in scale and kind means that the structure must be altered and new strengths built around new core competencies. If intelligence focuses on only one aspect of supporting warfighters, then it risks sinking into irrelevance if the war prepared for never occurs, or far worse, risks defeat in battle because of being unprepared.
The core competency for Naval Intelligence must be threat-based. In the Cold War, the Soviet Union threatened the existence of the United States and its Allies; therefore the core competency had to be built against that threat. Now, major threats to U.S. and Allied interests are as likely to emerge from failed states as from a rising peer competitor. To remain relevant, Naval Intelligence must be conversant with both threats; focusing on one at the expense of the other wastes resources, and leaves the Navy and the nation vulnerable.
Military philosopher Sun Tzu advised his commanders: "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril." Ensuring warfighters know the enemy is the primary role of Naval Intelligence; proper structure against both conventional and unconventional threats will help ensure that whatever battles loom, the Navy and national interest are not in peril.
1 Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy. New York: Vintage Books, 2000, pp. 18-19.
2 This view of globalization is articulated in The Pentagon's New Map by Thomas P.M. Barnett. Prof. Barnett makes distinction between the integrated '"core" states and the unstable, non-integrating "gap" states. Barnett uses the terms "core" and "gap" to measure a nation's connectivity to the rest of the world. Prof. Barnett also recommends reforms to address changing threats creating a military divided between a "Leviathan Force" for conventional threats and a "Systems Administrator" to address more unconventional threats and stability operations.
3 This geography is described in several books by Robert Kaplan including: Balkan Ghosts, The Ends of the Earth, Surrender or Starve, and East\vard to Taratarv.
4 "Defense Science Board 2004 Summer Study on Transition to and from Hostilities." December 2004, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.
5 "FY04 Report to Congress on PRC Military Power." Office of the secretary of Defense.
6 Sandra Jontz, "Sailors To Help In Training Of Iraqi Forces." Stars and Stripes, 23 June 2005. Intelligence was a community singled out by VAdm Cotton.
Lieutenant Commander Griffin is the intelligence officer on board the USS Kearsarge (LHD-3). He previously served as a counter-terrorism analyst at U.S. Central Command, a naval analyst at U.S. Strategic Command, and as a squadron intelligence officer for Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA)-192.