Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy (61 page)

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Authors: Mark M. Lowenthal

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Again, there is a nexus to terrorism. Outbreaks of certain diseases (such as anthrax, smallpox) must be studied to determine if they are natural occurrences or terrorist attacks. Even if it can be proven that an attack is bioterror, determining the point of origin can prove to be extremely difficult, as was the case with the anthrax mail attacks in the United States in 2001. In such instances, there will also be tremendous political pressure (governmental and public) to provide an answer as quickly as possible.
The environment issue is also somewhat amorphous. The basic goal—preserving a healthier global ecology—stumbles when it comes down to practicalities. As has been the case with international efforts to deal with AIDS, the nations at the center of the issue have different interests and preferences. The international community may believe that it has a vested interest in the preservation of some local ecological habitat, such as a rain forest. However, the nation whose land it is may be more interested in its own economic development than in the stewardship of a world ecological resource.
The basic intelligence tasks are identifying major threats to the environment, identifying states whose policies may be harmful to the environment, and tracking major changes in the environment. Again, a gap separates intelligence from what policy makers are supposed to do with it. Substantial intelligence community involvement in environmental policy dates back only to the late stages of the cold war.
Much of the intelligence about the health and environment issues can be carried out by means of open sources. Commercial infrared satellites can track environmental changes. The spread of disease also can be tracked overtly. Intelligence on these issues has tended to suffer from the inattention of policy makers and from the fact that overt means of collecting intelligence have been less fully developed than the clandestine means.
Access to water is an important issue in its own right and in relationship to global warming. The issue is driven, in part, by the growth in global population, which puts increasing demands on all water sources, both surface and aquifers. Building dams, both to control flooding and to create reservoirs, has both political and environmental consequences. For example, China’s population and its continued economic growth is outpacing available water resources and water, unlike oil or minerals, cannot be shipped in sufficient quantities to make any appreciable difference. The growing need for water, worldwide, has serious policy implications and is an area where more intelligence analysis may be required over the next few years.
As was noted earlier, in 2007, the House Intelligence Committee requested that an NIE be prepared on global warming. Initially, DNI McConnell demurred, although he eventually agreed to have such an NIE written, even as he noted that this effort would not be at the expense of such issues as terrorism. Inevitably, the DNI could not simply refuse to have such an NIE prepared. There are two broad issues to be considered analytically. The first is the degree to which global warming is occurring, at what rate, and what steps might reverse any adverse trends. This does not require many intelligence sources and can probably be written to a very large extent with expertise from beyond the intelligence community. The second issue is the consequences of prolonged and continued global warming in terms of U.S. national security interests, taking into account shifts in weather, their effect on agriculture, rising ocean levels, the potential for regionally determined diseases to spread to newly warming areas, and so on. Questions of this sort will likely be much more speculative and are also likely to become fodder in the political debate over global warming. This is likely to be another NIE where the DNI cannot keep unclassified KJs (which many are likely to be unclassified in any case) from being published.
PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS
 
Since the end of the cold war, international peacekeeping operations have expanded dramatically. Regional outbursts of violence, most of them within the borders of one country (or former country), have required the imposition of external troops to restore and then maintain peace. Peacekeeping operations are a direct reflection of the failed states issue discussed in the previous chapter. The external troops have customarily been formed into multinational units. Although many of these nations have experience in allied operations—at least training operations—the participants tend to cross the boundaries of old alliances. United Nations-mandated forces in Bosnia, for example, included North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies (Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and the United States) and their former Warsaw Pact foes (Russia, Ukraine), along with other nations. A similar array has been formed in Afghanistan. Successful military operations require strong intelligence support; multinational operations require intelligence sharing. But even in the aftermath of the cold war, some U.S. policy makers and intelligence officials are reluctant to share intelligence with former foes, nonallies, and even some allies. Responsible civil and military officials may find themselves torn between the need to keep peacekeeping partners well informed to carry out successful operations and the recognition that sources and methods may be compromised even beyond the limited peacekeeping theater of operations.
The use of peacekeeping or other internationally sanctioned operations for unilateral intelligence purposes became an issue in 1999. A former member of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM)—which was responsible for monitoring Iraqi destruction of its WMD—alleged that the United States used a UNSCOM inspection team to plant intelligence collection devices. Some saw the U.S. action as a necessary precaution against a hostile state: others believed it violated the basis of the UNSCOM mission.
NETWORK WARFARE (INFORMATION OPERATIONS)
 
Network warfare, formerly called information operations, deal with the use of computer technology to wage war and also to protect the United States from similar attacks. The first Gulf War gave a great boost to this operational concept. Intelligence officers find that
network warfare
allows them to be combatants, not just combat supporters.
The parameters of information operations have yet to be fully defined. The technology to disrupt communications and infrastructure, send false messages, and destroy vital information exists; firm operational concepts for using the technology do not. The same was true of virtually every other military technology—firearms, tanks, airplanes, and so on. Only through operations do military and intelligence officials learn the best ways to employ, and defend against, new technologies.
The widespread use of computers and the increasing dependence on them by all nations and their militaries underscore the appeal and the threat of information operations, which can weaken an opponent and lessen the chance of U.S. casualties in combat.
The doctrinal questions outnumber the accepted precepts. Should information operations be used preemptively, before hostilities begin? This would tend to preempt potential diplomatic solutions, which depend on the ability of leaders and diplomats to communicate authoritatively between capitals. One can easily envision heated debates between diplomats seeking to forestall information operations to keep lines of communications open and military officers arguing about the need to begin preparing the electronic battlefield. However, a broad and successful information operation might induce a hostile state to agree to end a crisis. It would not entail civilian casualties, as would a classic military attack. But is this the way the United States wants to behave? Would U.S. leaders feel compelled, for legal reasons, to regard an information operation as a covert action, launched with a presidential finding, instead of as a military operation? The agency largely responsible for information warfare, the National Security Agency, is both an intelligence agency and a combat support agency, so it bridges the gap. But this fact does not answer the question.
Battle damage assessment
(BDA), which became a major intelligence issue during the Persian Gulf War, would be difficult to perform in an information operation. Analysts in Washington (mostly at the CIA) differed with analysts in the field as to the efficacy of the air campaign in the Gulf War. How could BDA be carried out in the more opaque area of information operations? How could it be determined that an enemy’s computer system had been successfully disrupted, or that the enemy had just shut it down when it recognized that an attack was under way? How could it be discovered that the enemy had backup systems? If a successful information warfare attack is a precondition for some type of overt military operation, how can it be determined that the precondition has been satisfied? How much disruption should be caused? Disrupting enemy communications is useful, but should such action preclude, for example, the ability of an enemy headquarters to signal its troops authoritatively that hostilities are to cease? Or, having disrupted the enemy’s ability to communicate, how can an enemy’s offer to cease hostilities, to negotiate, and so on be verified?
Tension exists between two aspects of information operations: computer network exploitation (CNE) and computer network attack (CNA). A hostile or potentially hostile computer network offers two distinct choices. One is trying to break into the network—to find out who is using it for what means, that is, who is communicating on it—and extracting useful intelligence from it, perhaps using it to manipulate those whose network it is. This is CNE. Another is to attack the network (CNA) to destroy whatever capability it represents. However, once a network has been attacked and taken down, it can no longer be exploited. Therefore someone must decide whether it is more useful to allow the network to continue as a means of gaining more intelligence or if it is better to destroy the network.
As the United States learned in Afghanistan, there are targets in the developing world for which information operations are useless and unnecessary. Under the Taliban, the electronic infrastructure of Afghanistan had been allowed to deteriorate to the point where few suitable information operations targets existed.
Turning to the defensive problem, how can it be verified that a particular state or group is responsible for an information operations attack on the United States? As with terrorism and retaliation, the source of the attack is important. Moreover, if the United States were subject to such an attack, what should be the proper response? Retaliate via computers or with weapons? Again, is the response an intelligence action or a military one?
Much of the burden for these operations falls on NSA. Information assurance has long been one of NSA’s two major functions (alongside SIGINT). The director of NSA is now also designated as commander for the Joint Functional Component Command of Network Warfare, which is part of the Strategic Forces Command (STRATCOM).
In his February 2008 Annual Threat Assessment testimony, DNI McConnell discussed the new national cybersecurity initiative. He noted the United States’ increased dependency on and the increased number of attacks against the U.S. cyber infrastructure. The DNI singled out Russia and China of being capable of such attacks but also noted the rising threat from criminals and from terrorists.
DOMINANT BATTLEFIELD AWARENESS
 
Supporting military forces engaged in combat operations, usually called support to military operations (SMO), is one of the highest intelligence demands. A key aspect of SMO is the concept of
dominant battlefield awareness
(DBA). At the National Defense University in June 1995, then DCI John M. Deutch (1995-1997) defined DBA as the integration of imagery intelligence (IMINT), SIGINT, and HUMINT to give “commanders real-time, or near real-time, all-weather, comprehensive, continuous surveillance and information about the battlespace in which they operate.... Dominant battlefield awareness, if achieved. will reduce—never totally etiminate—the ‘fog of war,’ and provide you, the military commanders, with an unprecedented combat advantage.” DBA refers to the totality of information that is available to all commanders at all levels. It is not a single type of report or activity. DBA is closely tied to the
revolution in military affairs
(RMA). RMA is an ongoing broad doctrinal evolution and debate about the likely nature of future warfare, encompassing technology, strategy, tactics, and the use of intelligence.
DBA reflects at least two trends. The first is the great strides that U.S. intelligence has made in collecting and disseminating intelligence to military commanders in the field. Commanders believe that this superiority allows them to use forces more effectively, so as to achieve ends more quickly and with fewer casualties. The second is the so-called lessons learned from the first Gulf War about the problems in bringing intelligence to the field and getting the right intelligence to the right military user.
Although Deutch cautioned that the “fog of war” (a term coined by nineteenth-century Prussian general and military theorist Karl von Clausewitz for the confusion and uncertainty that are inevitable in any combat) will never be eliminated, many advocates of DBA seem not to have heard him. DBA is often oversold as the ability to bring near-total intelligence to commanders. This hyperbole puts intelligence on the spot for capabilities it does not have. Unrealistically high expectations may lead commanders to place greater reliance on intelligence (which may not be forthcoming) and less on their own instincts when dealing with the fog of war, which is the ultimate skill of a combat commander. (Gen. William T. Sherman observed that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was the superior commander because he was unconcerned about what the enemy was doing when out of sight.)

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