Juicebox Mafia- Attackerman dead on about NCTC lameness
I do slag on the Juiceboxers when they ask for it, but I also will back them up when they hit the target. Today the Attackerman has a good piece up at his day job about the black hole of intelligence and operations that is the National CounterTerrorism Center, the whole thing is worth reading. Like any bureaucratic Franken-Agency it is a soup sandwich and failing to do anything close to what it ought.
According to interviews with several veteran NCTC analysts, the five-year-old center, meant to be a hub for pulling together terrorism information from across the 16-agency U.S. intelligence community to better anticipate future attacks, has a cumbersome bureaucratic structure and a questionable set of institutional values. Only half of NCTC’s roughly 300 analysts focus directly on al-Qaeda — with some analyzing terror groups that do not threaten the United States, like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka or the Hamas radicals of the Gaza Strip. Analysts are valued by the volume of writing they produce for policymakers, not the impact that analysis has on counterterrorism operations. Analysts entering NCTC from the partner agencies are assigned to areas where NCTC has vacancies, regardless of their particular specialties. And the managers who preside over analysts seeking to connect the dots — as Obama chastised the intelligence community for falling short on the Christmas would-be attack — are often inexperienced in intelligence analysis themselves.
Sad but true. There was always a separation when I was in Group between teams and those who directly support their operations and everyone else collectively know as Admin. It was a question of mentality as much as organization, operators make things happen, administrators write memos and reports. NCTC is a bureaucracy so it is focused on admin, JSOC is a collection of pipehitters so it is focused on operations. Many of the normal support positions in Group that would be filled by officers from a branch like Supply, Admin etc. were actually filled by SF qualified officers. This was done because they had been on a team and knew how to make things happen, so in the role of support they kept an operations-focused mentality. When team guys had to pull support roles, which everyone eventually had to, we would give them a hard time by calling them Former Action Guys. You can see the acronym and I hope my DADT repeal cred will forgive my use of it.
The bottom line was that the entire unit was focused on achieving real world results on the ground where it matters. That is almost never the case in a bureaucracy and the NCTC is a perfect example. It is administratively-oriented and consequently focused on passing reports up the line showing where all the money being shoveled at it is going not on providing useful info to actually counter terrorism. This is the case at virtually all agencies tasked with trying to fight the terrorists. They gather mountains of data and then flounder around in it like Scrooge McDuck swimming through his treasure. But they rarely manage to turn the bureaucratic beast toward operational uses i.e. noting that a Nigerian loser was heading our way, or that a US officer was conversing with a terrorist cleric. Sadly they likely never will, but all Congress knows how to do is create more admin nightmares.
There is a report from MG Flynn the officer responsible for Intel in Afghanistan that ripped the entire effort to know what is going on there a new asshole. There is no useful intel for anyone to use and operations suffer accordingly. His solution was elegantly simple, put the intel assets down with the operational units, not at HQs and bureaucratic hives where they are detached from any reality or the need to help the folks who are actually fighting terror. That same prescription is valid for the layers and layers of admin that were grafted on top of our intel apparatus after 9/11. They are managers and drones and they provide no useful, actionable info to anyone at the pointy end of any of our spears. Fire all the ass-covering bureaucrats who are stealing oxygen and pulling down fat salaries and put analysts down at the lowest levels of every agency fighting the fight and then simply pull down the barriers between the agencies erected by those same turf-protecting bureaucrats. Shut down DHS and the DNI and power down to the people who are still action-oriented.
Tags: al qaeda, attackerman, DHS, juicebox mafia, NCTC, terrorism
Jimbo,
Pres. Obama has just made the situation worse with his order that every lead be chased down. That diverts attention and amps up the noise in the intel.
Further, he and AG Holder have demonstrated time and again that they are more interested in supporting/protecting terrorists than killing them. By placing terrorists in the legal system, they are risk collection methods and sources (or just publishing them for their own political gain).
With the pending decision to make the daily intel brief public (regardless of the delay), it will result in less time sensitive information cutting through the bureacracy and fewer foreign intel services sharing information.
This Admin is setting us for a real bitch slap from our enemies and all he will say is that he inherited it from Pres. Bush.
I have not been to Afghanistan, but it seems to me that pushing the intelligence function down the hierarchy is necessary not only for special operations forces, but for general purpose forces as well (if not more so). Speed up the intelligence process and localize it. At the same time, plug it into the bigger operational picture because there will be relationships that you cannot see from up close which become apparent when you zoom out and see the big picture. I think any intelligent Soldier can understand the basic analytical tools with just a little training, and most Americans have plenty of computer savvy. A further benefit of setting up intelligence cells at lower echelons is that (I’m speculating here) I would expect a greater appreciation for the usefulness of intelligence among the riflemen in the line platoons of a rifle company if some of the NCOs had worked in an intelligence cell during a rotation at Polk or during a previous tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. If so, then the greater first-hand appreciation for the intelligence-operations dynamic may yield better collection and exploitation, which supports analysis and targeting, therefore producing more effective operations…so and so forth.