I gotta be the first to say it: "Love that package!" I grew up with Moore, so I'm still slightly partial to him, but he couldn't have worn those "shorts." Viva Sir Sean!

There will always be a generation gap in everything - even if there is no possible way to delineate one, like in the military. "Back here in the DC area" seems to be a much more important, and actually functional, distinction.
But as for information, technology can make it fully interactive, live (verb) in a way. I'm talking about wikis and such. There was lots of talk about organizational information systems in business several years ago when I was paying attention. Improving not the information available itself, but its utilization. Where's that at? Is that the Human Terrain thing I keep hearing about? Can everybody use it, comment and shape it?
Finally, I'm so tired of hearing things like "confuse strategy, policy and tactics." The question words are all you need: what, why, when, how, etc.

I will be an BN S2 when I graduate the MI captain's course in May-ish so I totally agree with Flynn. A few of his comments, like sending intel people to the lowest levels, getting rid of powerpoint and commander's focusing on Intel are things all I agree with. (All the Captain's (young guys) who read the report here love it and hope it can actually get accomplished.)

What bugs me about McCreary's response is it sounds very much like what the "old guys" say about COIN in general. (I won't say names but readers can probably guess.) They always say that nothing the COIN community says is new. McCreary said, "The report contains few new insights about the nature and needs of military intelligence in support of fighting an insurgency." Well then why are all the MI people in love with it? Because they military has lost its way about COIN and intelligence to support it. Saying that we don't need to study COIN because it has already been written ignores the fact that the military is not fighitng COIN properly right now.

Mr McCreary is a great intelligence professional who spent 4 decades serving his country with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of the young analysts he trained respected his experience and perspective. At one time, Nightwatch was his nightly Top Secret missive, sent out to select individuals working for the Joint Staff and being on that list was a status symbol. Mr McCreary is a great American.

When Mr McCreary retired, his final Nightwatch was a lament about our loss of analytic ability. He described it as a Crisis of Analysis. 9/11, overestimating Iraqs WMD program and underestimating Pakistan's nuclear program were cited as failures of analysis that crushed the credibility of the intelligence community. I saw a similiar tone in that message that I saw in the Flynn report.

Its true that some of the report is elementary and common sense intelligence work. Of course, if younger analysts are impressed by it, perhaps it is because they have not been trained by Mr McCreary's calibre of expert. Or perhaps they figured these lessons out on their own and haven't seen their leaders doing these things. Mr McCreary began his career during the Vietnam era. He knows what its like to fight a "Long War." Many of the senior officers of today didn't spend most of their company grade time fighting a war (or two, or three, depending on how you define it). If the junior guys consider such elementary recommendations novel, perhaps it is because the mid levels guys have been doing things poorly for quite some time.

As far as the decision to publish it in CNAS, there are legit concerns there. Similar reports were written about intelligence in Iraq before the surge. Petraeus did the same thing as McCrystal in asking for more troops when he needed them. But Petraeus didn't ask for them publicly and the intel reports were never public. The people who needed to see them, saw them. And it should be noted, another think tank was involved in those discussions as well.

The report was one part State of the Intel Union, one part Professional Military Education on counter insurgency Intel, and one part General Officer Bright Idea on moving information around better. The fact that people are reading it and talking about it is a marvel.

Prior to 1960, the State Department had a geographic liason who scrupulously hunted down, collected and made maps, census comilations, critical locations, etc... and send them to somebody higher who could use them. No such animal anymore. Dated back to the old Gertrude Bell days...

In Vietnam, you had a hearts and minds mission, so military intel would have lots reasons for lots of stuff.

Then, the gap. Then to stabilization/reconstruction/COIN, but military intel didn't catch back up to it.

As a civilian planner/demographer/GIS type, I'm used to spinning Civilian Information Management Systems (CIMS) like a top. Enterprise-wide, geo-spatially referenced data, cross-correlated to anything. It's all here, and everybody knows what to do with it.

So I went to Iraq in 2008 for a planning and GIS implementation assignment, and ended up doing just basic mapping---walking Gertrude's path through the North.

Aside from physical features, US maps weren't worth the paper they were printed on. But everybody was using them, and reams of equally unreliable population, tribal, etc... data that had the same limited value.

If I wanted to see footprints across the desert, military intelligence could do that, but it couldn't tell me, with accuracy, where any province or district was, which agency of government was responsible for which road or bridge, or how many people were where, when. .

And the Iraqis were using hand drawn, hand-colored maps from years ago, trying to become the managers of a province shown on either ancient or US maps.

Three things two remember:

(1.) in conflict areas, people move around a lot (refugees, displacements) so having ten year old data, or projections of ten year old data, is useless. Modern conflict-mapping integrates current dynamics (like UN refugee registrations), and real-time, best available data. It is an active dynamic factor needed to plan any reasonable military, and especially civilian, responses. In Iraq, no US party, as late as 2008, had established even a good baseline population count, let alone an effective conflict-tracking system.

(2.) Provincial and district boundary changes in a conflict zone are both symptoms and evidence of conflict, as parties jockey for positions, push out others, etc..., and are, as with population data, a dynamic factor, but essential to understand if you intend to understand the underlying conflict, or effectively stabilize or reconstruct there. Town and village names change with each displacement (at one time, the town was known by its Arabic name, and another by its Kurdish or Turkmen name).

(3.) Routine property information (who owns which land where) is far more accurate than "tribal mapping" based on "windshield anthropology.

Geez, both Iraq and Afghanistan evolved from very old tax systems, and were up-trained to modern UN census data approaches.

So, we have a civilian system and techniques that routinely can split the atom (so to speak), and a military intel system that is using High School microscopes for increasingly civilian problems.

Yet, in 2008, several of us had to, under the table, build accurate provincial/district/sub-district maps, and create population tables from UN and Iraqi sources because: DoS doesn't do mapping and regional data for stability/reconstruction enterprises; USAID does not have technical capacity; NGA doesn't have the resources because all of its funds go into fancy technology; and the US military wouldn't do it because, in 2008, they were leaving soon.

So we spent $53 billion dollars in reconstruction funds, with little result, because nobody had a map (a civilian data set).

Look at Afghanistan. Same thing. Drones flying to every threat, but we don't know whether there are 33 million Afghans or 24 million people.

The issue today, in light of the highly complex civilian aspects of these missions, and the complete reliance of the civilian responders on the military as source, dictate that the problem goes way beyond just DoD.

There is not a piece of Mr. McCreary's critique that I could disagree with.

The warnings he provides are just plain frightening.

Excellent pieces by STEVE358 & IRONCAPT. "Look at Afghanistan. Same thing. Drones flying to every threat, but we don't know whether there are 33 million Afghans or 24 million people." To borrow the phrase: we aren't going to kill our way out, and as MajGen. Flynn suggests, we need our collection effort to focus on the population-centric.

Additionally, IRONCAPT's remark may have merit, "If the junior guys consider such elementary recommendations novel, perhaps it is because the mid levels guys have been doing things poorly for quite some time." One would think after eight years, juniors would be those mid-level guys?

Anecdotally, I once had a short conversation with John McCreary concerning Sun Tzu's Art of War and the Chinese Taoist theory concering the inevitability of change and living harmoniously with it. : )

Thanks

Every day that you are not engaging locally, talking to people, is another day you become more fearful to do so. Experience is oxygen. Information is the currency of these wars. Rather than white knuckling singleton agent meetings on the compound, we ought to imbed intelligence officers into the tribes. Go live with them. In six months we would know the language like natives and have relationships that matter; we would probably have a few officers convert to islam, marry, birth a few cute kids (that would take few extra months), and understand the context. Our current strategy seems to max out the risk and minimize the gain. I am fairly positive you can get the junior officers to volunteer for the project. The senior officers? No. They don't have the stones because almost one of the senior officers running the intel community ever carries a pistol into an agent meeting. It is completely outside their range of experiences. This is why there is a building culture gap between the intelligence officers who volunteered after 9/11 and the ones running the community.

There is nothing new or insightful in the article that hasn't been said before. Intelligence people are well aware of this deficiency - at least some of us are - but apparently we've done a poor job explaining it to our superiors.

MG Flynn's prescription, as is almost always the case with senior leaders, involves rearranging and creating new pucks on the org chart. Not surprisingly, such solutions rarely do anything to solve the fundamental problems they were implemented to address. This case will be no different. He would be better served by turning the problem over to 3 or 4 knowledgeable sergeants to solve.

Anyway, the reason the US intelligence community doesn't know basic information on Afghanistan is plain to see if people would only spent a moment to consider what information is being sought and how that information might be acquired.

In short, this information is simply not available. As far as information and details on local populations is concerned, we might as well take a map of Afghanistan and put "Hic sunt dracones" over 95% of it. That's what decades of war and isolation do to insular clan-based societies - societies that were poorly understood to begin with. The fundamental problem is that no one outside the relevant, local populations have this information, not even the Afghan central government which is just as ignorant of their own country as we Americans are.

Finding out this information is more akin to discovering some isolated tribe in the Amazon than it is to traditional intelligence tradecraft. It really is anthropology and the only method to collect this kind of information is to send lots and lots of people out to collect it, which isn't easy or practical in a war zone. What we need are a few thousand Richard Burtons and TE Lawrences. These people will have to learn the languages, the dialects, live with each group for some months and gain the trust of the locals in order to learn what they are really about. Less than that and one will only discover the mask they put on as a defense against outsiders.

No amount of organizational puck-moving, fancy fusion centers or journalist/analyst flying squads will be able to get the population information most think is so critical to US military objectives. The US intelligence community, thanks largely to Congress, is incapable of accomplishing this task on any significant scale, and what few capabilities it does have are spent hunting for HVI's because that's what they've been directed to do by Generals running the show.

The alternative is to use US troops as intelligence collectors, which is part of MG Flynn's solution. Of course, that is imperfect for a number of reasons which should be obvious, but perhaps it will be good enough.

I don't disagree with some of Andy's points---that the intelligence community knows about the gap, can't get to it by just rearranging boxes, nor that anybody is really doing anything about it.

Where we part company is the same tired old "but it can't be done" thing.

Afghanistan is a country of some 24 million people, some in very different arrangements, including, according to UN Habitat, large "informal urban settlements" (slums) of refugees displaced from villages and valleys to the best refuges they can find. At the same time, Forbes Magazine's reporters can describe the real estate market in Herat, and business reporters can describe the various efforts to move Afghan goods around Pakistan to substantial Indian markets.

At the same time, 6 million of them are school children reporting every day to a government school house which we pay for. Millions more are in daily engagement with one form of civilian aid or refugee system or another. If half of them are in this category of daily engagement with governments, aid programs and NGOs, there is no excuse to label them "Dragons" or any other form of unknowable sub-human entity.

In Iraq, I heard everyone of those "chestnuts" as the excuse for traveling blind---even after we put together a lot of it (which was ignored by the system).

Somehow or another, the intelligence community has convinced itself that either the national government doesn't have anything, and the tribal leaders won't tell---just stamps it: "Here there be dragons" and walk away.

Walking away has consequences, as both McCreary and Cordesman abundantly not, when, in that walk, you leave 130,000 troops blind in the field, and thousands of UN/US and other civilian workers equally blind and discharging billions of dollars haphazardly into a conflict zone that has no effective diagnosis or strategy. More important, as we see, is drones firing endlessly into a mounting civilian casualty list, and continuously failing efforts to bring aid, stability or reconstruction to those 24 million Afghans who pose either an opportunity or threat. They are not dragons, unless we make them so.

To build even a reasonable picture for the UN Disputed Internal Boundaries Team in Iraq last year, it took data sleuthing, imagery and mapping, and lots of real-time and engaged field work by knowledgeable folks who either spent years studying these problems and/or had the right context and contacts. Iraqi agencies did not always know what they had, and many were reluctant to part with any until they figured out that you already had most of it from other sources. Lots of the information from the field was contrary, self-serving, or the inevitable inaccurate results of asking shell-shocked civilians about things around them.

The huge amount of demographic, mapping, etc...research I did for the UN DIBS Team in Iraq has been gathering dust on a one terrabite hard drive in my office for a year. Not one single US party has ever asked for it or seen it. It's quite simply a disgrace. ( I had a 14 month assignment, and when I left, was never debriefed, just given a one year non-disclosure agreement which has since expired).

In Iraq, it was the odd places at the fringes and outer boundaries that were at once the hardest to define and the most important. In almost every instance for those, my best contacts were, in fact Gen. McCrystal's SF Teams and Mitt Teams who were out there watching them, as acutely trained observers. When asked for what I was looking for, they either had it on the top of their heads, could draw it out for me on a map, or could rapidly get it.

All that said, the intelligence community has the duty to either see through the conflict and post-conflict challenges to credible constructs of the pieces that matter, or send a loud signal that it doesn't have it and won;t get it---so that decision-makers either understand the fortune telling limits, or can find alternative solutions.

Here be Dragons is a stamp that says to the adventurous: go forth and explore, survey and find. And to the less adventurous: stay away.

It is not a final stamp, and it is not good enough for this circumstance.

Stephen Donnelly, AICP
Former Senior Urban Planning Advisor, Iraq (2007/2008)
Former Expert, Cartography, Demographics, Planning, UN Disputed Internal Boundaries Team, Iraq (2008)

As i am sure you found, the more time you spent touching Iraq, the more accurate your understanding of it got. Out of the compound, on the ground, licking the dirt = intelligence that matters.

the more you get data about the war, the less you understand it