Recent intelligence failures look like they were caused by people not following the existing rules. The solution is not more rules but going back to basics and weeding out senior officers who do not know, understand or care about the basics.

Real intelligence work is stultifyingly boring and unpleasant, try sitting in the back of a van with three other people for a few days c******g into a bucket while trying to get a photgraph of someone walking into a building or sitting in a room for a month trying to make sense of crates full of invoices.

People will take shortcuts for the wrong reasons and the right reasons but shortcuts lead to bad intelligence and dead soldiers. Put the right people in charge and let them get on with it and don't bitch at them if they don't tell you what you want to hear.

It used to be pretty widely held that intel agencies under DOD comprised about 80 percent of the U.S. intel budget. Has it gone up to 90? That would be news. I wonder what the source is behind that number.

I think Dan's CNAS lens is a little blurry.

A good bit of Flynn's report is about moving information around, sharing information in fact three of his first four directives address this exact issue. MG Flynn's report is as much about knowledge management as it is about intelligence -- maybe more. What is unique about Flynn's report is he wants Commanders (the guy's responsible for setting Priority Intelligence Requirements for tactical forces) to get their intelligence sections to focus more on issues of governance and economics versus a traditional enemy centric approach. Further rather than a "overhauling the US Intelligence Community" Flynn is advocating using analysts as information brokers to pull information from local/tactical levels to higher commands -- he also wants to pull information from groups not normally associated with intelligence -- PRTs, NGOs, civil affairs --- who have a good understanding of the environment.

I don't know many people in the military who consider this controversial --- this type of information has tactical and operational impact and is being sought by customers at all levels of command -- it's critical to COIN. Additionally, the product Flynn seeks is hardly revolutionary --- written Intelligence summaries not PPT....Flynn's report isn't trying to reform the entire IC - its meant to focus Commanders going to AFG to focus their intelligence staffs and challenging the intelligence apparatus in AFG to focus their analysis more on the operating environment rather than enemy forces.

The conference you cited had leaders from the IC whose mandate stretches beyond the AF-PAK -- its topics included - Has Intelligence Reform Made the Country Safer? and "What Are the Future Challenges for the Director of National Intelligence?" Perhaps Dan was expecting a topic such as -- "how is Regional Command West doing in pushing aggressive, hungry analysts down to infantry BNs and collaboration with UN groups?" Its a good topic -- but probably below the pay grade of the attendees. That said their have been conferences -- not open to the DC think-tank circuit -- that have looked at how to actualize MG Flynn's report --- they've been mainly DoD focused, but some DOS and other IC elements attended.

Finally, are you purposely intending to mislead with the 90% Military intelligence figure to distort the amount of money flowing into tactical/operational intel concerns from Flynn's report? Military Intel funding includes NSA and NRO --- which account for big dollars -- and are not cogent to Flynn's topics.

I can understand why CNAS would want to call attention to MG Flynn's report --- but the post here overstates the impact of that report on the direction of reform across the IC and in areas outside the realm of COIN. The IC reform effort and DNI are disasters, and would do well to develop a blueprint of MG Flynn's quality to bring some focus to their larger efforts.

Sean is on the mark.

The genesis of MG Flynn's comments and recommendations were driven/underscored by the White House debate.

Those folks were not asking about the threat stuff, but about the routine political/population/governance stuff which public servants/elected officials understand as the key drivers in the current definition (Not military but civilian solutions).

So they logically asked for the meaningful civilian info, and nobody had (has) it.

One of the underlying disconnects, still unresolved, between the intelligence community and COIN is the basic lack of training/understanding of routine civilian structures/operations/dynamics.

Look up online and you will find that NGA, for example, was writing op-eds in its internal magazines on this gap in 2008---the need for more civilian stuff: property maps, relevant political/administrative boundaries, useful population data. In Iraq, they spent millions on all this spooky anthropological tribal data to try to "divine" relationships on the ground; anyone who understands post-Ottoman bureaucracies and effective dictatorships knows that all that stuff was already written down in the Iraqi data systems. Every tax parcel, bongo truck, camel and internet cafe was all on record. The military intelligence community just does not understand how to interface with and use routine civilian systems---for their own purposes.

Anybody who has played Sim City knows that the city catches on fire if the investment in fire stations is too low, and then the tax base collapses, and the mob goes after the elected officials.

If you really want to do COIN, it is better to play Sim City (or actual GIS-based government management/decision-making software) than some military intel systems. Ask Wal-Mart to explain how its enterprise-wide integrated data system assures that every shelf is full every day in every store, and you get a glimmer of how out-of-date and disconnected military intelligence folks are from the civilian world. It is an entire cognitive lense that is missing, and all the underlying framework.

Having said that, its not rocket science, but it has to be led from the top. Intel provides what is asked of it, and there are plenty of smart ground commanders who know what they need, and have to ad hoc for it in their battle space. But reforming the intelligence community to be able to create/use/update civilian information on a systematic basis is still in the talking stages.

They just don't get it.