Pearl Harbor Redux?  

Updated Dec. 10, 2001

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The tragic events of Sept. 11 have evoked memories of Pearl Harbor. The terror incidents also have raised allegations about continued security gaps and massive intelligence failures. On top of the fallout from failing to assess South Asian nuclear programs, North Korean missile progress, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and the Ames fiasco, the current crisis finds the U.S. intelligence empire reeling.

Once the dust settles, criticism from outside the bureaucracies will inevitably call for major reforms to what is commonly called the Intelligence Community (IC). The term is actually an oxymoron, since the American IC is a bewildering amalgamation of stove-piped and competing organizations, with little common leadership or sense of priorities. It is not a true community, or even a confederation led by any central direction. National leaders and the public expect the U.S. budget of $30 billion for "intelligence" to provide ample warning of myriad threats from disparate sources. However, both policy-makers and Congress will have to be smarter consumers, and demand a lot more for their money.

The existing intelligence structure is a patchwork, born in the early days of the Cold War, and it requires serious reengineering if it is to appropriately advise and reduce uncertainty for the national leaders and policy-makers. Without such reengineering, future Pearl Harbors could occur with greater frequency and even greater consequences.

Another Pearl Harbor?

In some respects, there are several surface level similarities between two attacks almost 60 years apart.¹ Both Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center attack were deadly and carefully prepared assaults on U.S. soil that killed many citizens. Both attacks were also predated by massive amounts of raw information picked up by sophisticated electronic intelligence and cryptologic tools. But while intentions were clear, the exact time and mode of attack were ambiguous.

Intelligence gatherers, analysts and policy-makers alike ignored clear indicators of enemy intentions and growing capabilities before both attacks. The process relied upon new technologies like radar and intercepts with little insight into the social and cultural roots of the adversary's cause and support network. The intentions of adversaries routinely surprises the U.S. intelligence complex, even when it is evident after the fact. Both then and now, there was little human intelligence. Both times, American analysts refused to think in terms of the adversary's viewpoint. In both cases, organizational "seams" were exploited by the adversary to drive home an attack with devastating loss of life. Both events were great shocks, and both events galvanized a complacent government and people to action. Pearl Harbor stimulated the eventual creation of the CIA, and the attacks at the World Trade Center may yet create a 21^st Century intelligence capability for the world's remaining superpower.²

 
Were We Really Surprised?

While the American public may have been surprised, the nation's senior leadership and its intelligence community should not have been. The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) has regularly advised the president and Congress that threats were emerging with potentially massive implications. The DCI has also advised Congress that his ability to provide early warning about emerging technologies and threats is diminishing, thanks to globalization and the diffusion of information and technology it facilitates. The combination of these trends augurs for much greater uncertainty and vulnerability. In the words of one blue ribbon panel, "Americans are much more vulnerable than they believe themselves to be," and perfect intelligence will not prevent all surprises.³

Even a cursory examination of the public, unclassified testimonies of the DCI indicate clear warnings.⁴

 

DCI before the Senate Armed Services Committee (Feb. 2, 1999)
	"First, there is not the slightest doubt that Osama bin Laden, his worldwide allies, and his sympathizers are planning further attacks against us."
	"Bin Laden's organization has contacts virtually worldwide, including in the United States - and he has stated unequivocally that all Americans are targets."
	"Bin Laden's overarching aim is to get the United States out of the Persian Gulf, but he will strike wherever in the world he thinks we are vulnerable."

 

DCI before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Feb. 2, 2000)
	"We remain concerned that terrorist groups worldwide continue to explore how rapidly evolving and spreading technologies might enhance the lethality of their operations."
	" ... we know that a number of these groups are seeking chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) agents. Among them is bin Laden. His operatives have trained to conduct attacks with toxic chemicals or biological toxins."
	"Osama bin Laden is still foremost among these terrorists, because of the immediacy and seriousness of the threat he poses. Despite some well-publicized disruptions, we believe he could still strike without additional warning."

 

DCI before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Feb. 7, 2001)
	"The threat from terrorism is real, it is immediate, and it is evolving. State sponsored terrorism appears to have declined, but transnational groups - with decentralized leadership that makes them harder to identify and disrupt - are emerging."
	"Terrorists are also becoming more operationally adept and more technically sophisticated. Terrorists are seeking out "softer" targets that provide opportunities for mass casualties."."
	"Osama bin Laden and his global network…remain the most immediate and serious threat. As shown by the bombing of our Embassies in Africa in 1998 and his Millennium plots, he is capable of planning multiple attacks with little or no warning."

 

National Intelligence Council (December, 2000). The NIC produced a global assessment last year called Global Trends 2015.5
	Transnational Terrorism: "Between now and 2015 terrorist tactics will become increasingly sophisticated and designed to achieve mass casualties. We expect the trend toward greater lethality in terrorist attacks to continue."
	Critical Infrastructure: "Some potential adversaries will seek ways to threaten the US homeland. The US national infrastructure - communications, transportation, financial transactions, energy networks - is vulnerable to disruption by physical and electronic attack because of its interdependent nature and by cyber attacks because of their dependence on computer networks."

 

Problems in U.S. Intelligence

A number of issues and potential deficiencies regarding the American intelligence community have been identified by blue ribbon panels, congressional studies, and books by former intelligence professionals. They reveal a number of common themes.

	Lack of clear priorities for intelligence products.
	Lack of centralized management over many competing programs and organizations.
	Over-reliance on very high cost, technical collection systems, which are rapidly becoming obsolete.
	Significant gaps in analytical capabilities, especially foreign cultures and languages.
	Massive imbalance between collection and analysis capabilities.
	Lack of strong oversight of covert operations, and weak Human Intelligence (HUMINT) capabilities.
	Growing imbalance and competition between strategic intelligence, and support for military operations.6

Prescriptions

The following prescriptions seek to relieve some, but not all, of these problems. In general, the thrust is a reversal of intelligence priorities that crystallized during the Cold War. These proposals give greater weigh to national security over pure military matters, to strategic interests over Defense Department priorities, to analytical product over collection means, and to fuzing useful information instead of hoarding secrets. Given the realities of today's world, predicting and preempting all potential attacks is unreasonable. However, there is more than sufficient need and opportunity to re-craft the U.S. intelligence arm into an effective instrument of national security.

Provide Clear Policy and Consumer Priorities.
The National Security Council needs to provide clearer priorities and direction to the IC.⁷ A National Intelligence Priorities and Programs Council (NIPPC), chaired by the National Security Advisor, should drive this process. Consumers, rather than producers of intelligence, should have an active role on the NIPPC. The DCI can serve as the executive secretary of this entity, and should strive to ensure the NIPPC produces clear direction, an executable set of priorities, and balance between requirements and available resources. Requirements for crossover issues such as homeland security should be incorporated into this priority list, with the director of the Homeland Security Office sitting on the NIPPC.

Provide Strong Community Management and Leadership.
One of the most common proposals for intelligence reform is a call to strengthen the authority of the DCI.⁸ Intelligence professionals realize that the DCI is not really a director and that there is no true central intelligence. The DCI has minimal authority over the resources and programs of the IC. In fact, the DCI really only has direct control over the roughly $3 billion allocated to the CIA, while almost 85 percent of the intelligence budget is under the purview of the secretary of defense.⁹ Rather than give the DCI complete control over a portion of DoD's budget, the DCI should focus on three broad roles: strategic advisor to the president; community manager (technology, resources and personnel system); and oversight of outputs (directing taskings and ensuring quality and timeliness of products). To enhance his ability to perform the first role, the DCI should be uncoupled from managing the CIA. The DCI cannot serve as an honest broker and manager of the overall community, while dual-hatted in the day-to-day management of an agency. This proposal does not leave the DCI without a power base or create a 'czar without Cossacks,' since both the major national analytic base (formerly the CIA) and the major collection agencies will report directly to him, after being realigned.

Strengthen the Strategic Analysis and Estimates Function.
Analysis is the unwanted stepchild in U.S. intelligence agencies today.¹⁰ The National Estimates program is often criticized by the policy community for producing watered down National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). Many policy-makers find little value in the long-term views and trend analyses conducted by the National Intelligence Council. This criticism may reflect more on the poor management skills of the policy community, however. If the national security community, especially the NSC staff, would advance past crisis management, and stress preventive diplomacy and long-term planning, the value of an effective strategic analysis function could be appreciated. The NIC should be broadened and renamed the National Assessment Center (NAC), focusing on strategic, interagency and multidisciplinary products for the nation's senior leadership.¹¹ It should produce both short-term and long-term estimates or assessments. To preclude "lowest common denominator" products, the NAC's products should include sources and dissenting views. The NAC should be located in Washington, closer to policy-makers and consumers, and serve at the direction of the DCI. It should not be at Langley (CIA headquarters), to ensure it can serve as a bridge for including the business community, technology development venues, academia and nongovernmental organizations. Many outsiders knew about India's nuclear developments, but were never asked. The NIC has made strides in this area, and it is imperative to cast as wide a net as possible and access outside experts.¹²

The new NAC should develop a comprehensive assessment on homeland security threats as a priority effort in the near term to help guide the NSC's efforts, and that of the director of the Homeland Security Office, to develop a strategy to deter, protect and respond more effectively to modern threats.

Consideration should be given to creating a National Fusion Center with access to all databases and analyses produced by the IC. This center would report to the DNI, but would be manned with an interagency pool. The center would be an all source center with state-of-the-art databases and advanced technological tools for analysts including data mining techniques and intelligent agent software for various users. Consumer's should have the ability to "reach back" into the center for data from various sources. This would extend the NSA's Intenet system to a higher level, and meet a need identified during Joint Forces Command's recent experiments for future conflicts.¹³

This proposal centralizes data to facilitate distributed and competitive analysis. It makes far greater sense to centralize data and the management of the databases than to centralize analysis. Analysis must remain close to the customer and be tailored to the customer's requirements. Competitive and even redundant analyses are not expensive, and will do much to preclude "group think." Multiple advocacy and devil's advocates are far preferable to watered-down and extensively coordinated corporate products.¹⁴ An IC-wide, multi-disciplinary and inter-agency approach will be a significant intelligence multiplier for many consumers, but particularly in the war against terrorism which crosses all boundaries.

Create a More Efficient and Rational Technical Collection Capability.
As recommended by several key commissions and intelligence professionals, all the technical collection agencies, including both the National Reconnaissance Office, and National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) can be consolidated within the National Security Agency.¹⁵ They may be retained as distinct entities but report to the NSA. This will help breakdown the collection stovepipes that have developed when separate technologies evolved over time. Now that some of these technologies are converging, or at least need to be merged digitally for dissemination, there is more to be gained by consolidating them under common management. It will also highlight and rationalize the significant resource investments and tradeoffs that must be made in the next few years to revitalize collection assets. U.S. SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) capabilities have been overcome by resource reductions, technological change in encryption, and a weak management culture.¹⁶ NSA now must collect and exploit electronic signals in a vastly different communications environment. It requires significant resources, both human capital and advanced computer and telecommunications systems, to accomplish its work. Furthermore, its analysts need highly sophisticated software tools to exploit the data NSA must acquire in the future.

Oversight by the NSA will generate greater coherence, oversight, synergy and accountability. To support the principle of central support and shift from defense to national security, the NSA would shift from reporting to the defense secretary to the DCI. Care will have to be taken to ensure that military requirements are met by the national program managers. The current intelligence review conducted by the highly respected former national security advisor, Brent Scrowcroft, reportedly has come to this conclusion as well.¹⁷

Personnel reforms to ensure that NSA can compete and interact with the private sector must be pursued vigorously, and the NSA must look for innovative vehicles, like the CIA's Int-Q-Tel venture firm, to ensure it has access to the latest technological advances around the globe.¹⁸

Strengthen Analysis Capabilities.
The CIA should be renamed the National Intelligence Agency, with its director (DNI) reporting directly to the DCI, as an equal partner with the director of NSA. The DNI should immediately focus on revitalizing the agency's human resources. There is a severe shortage of professional intelligence officers with the linguistic, operational, and analytic skills needed to advance the nation's interests overseas.¹⁹ The IC as a whole is woefully short in analysts with the foreign area and cultural background to discharge its intelligence mission. Rather than produce its own students from an internal school, as Congress has recently proposed, the NIA should leverage the existing university education system in the United States or abroad, to expand its language and foreign culture expertise. Simultaneously, such a program may do far more for agency recruiting than an isolated, government program. This program should be supported by scholarships and with personnel incentives to attract and maintain the necessary talent base. Secondly, the DNI must sharply enhance the HUMINT collection program overseas, and should be granted the necessary resources and legislative mandate to do so as aggressively as possible.

Conclusion

Because the structure of U.S. government is designed, with checks and balances, to resist change, bureaucracy often can be altered only in the aftermath of disaster. The end result is long periods of stasis punctuated by infrequent spasmodic reactions. Both the executive and legislative branches are guilty of this disease, witness the numerous reorganizations within the Justice, Defense and Health and Human Services Departments, and the flurry of post-crisis legislation in both bodies. The intelligence community is not immune from this syndrome either.²⁰

The U.S. strategic culture also contains a slightly hubristic confidence in technical solutions. Hence, an emphasis on space-based collection and automation in the U.S. intelligence field. In her history of the day that will live in infamy, Roberta Wohlstetter concluded that the problem was not a function of collection, but analysis. It was not a lack of data, but "too much noise." "We failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor not for want of the relevant materials," she wrote in Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, "but because of a plethora of irrelevant ones."²¹

We now live in a world where "noise," both the critical and the irrelevant, abounds. As the recently completed Hart-Rudman Commission (U.S. National Security Commission/21^st Century) and the Defense Department's Quadrennial Defense Review both note, we live in an age where even excellent intelligence cannot prevent strategic shock.²²

Today's strategic paradox is the heightened need for strategic warning and precise intelligence to support preventive diplomacy and timely action, in the midst of a world where intelligence is harder and harder to produce. The U.S. government is not adequately organized at this time to address this paradox and myriad other challenges posed by a global century. The various components of government, and the intelligence community particularly, have been slow to adapt. The potential consequences of such inertia are no longer acceptable.²³

End Notes:

¹  For an overview of Pearl Harbor's intelligence issues, see David Kahn, "The Intelligence Failure of Pearl Harbor," Foreign Affairs, Summer, 1984, pp. 24-36.

²  For a detailed description of the creation and evolution of the CIA, see Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design, The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 163-204.

³  New World Coming: American Security in the 21st Century, Major Themes and Implications, Phase I Report of the U.S. National Security Commission/21^st Century, Washington, DC, Sept. 15, 1999, p. 6. This effort is commonly referred to as the Hart-Rudman Commission after its co-chairs, former Sen. Gary Hart and former Rep. Warren Rudman.

⁴  All of these are drawn directly from the CIA website at www.cia.gov/terrorism/pub_statements_cbrn.html

⁵  This forward looking document is at www.cia.gov/cia/publications/globaltrends2015/index.html

⁶  Most of this was drawn from IC 21: The Intelligence Community in the 21^st Century, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, 104^th Congress, March 1996, and a summary in Robert David Steele, On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World, Fairfax, VA: AFCEA Press, 2000, pp. 220-221.

⁷  Preparing for the 21^st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence, Report of the Commission on the Roles and Missions of the United States Intelligence Community, (Brown Rudman Commission),Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, March 1, 1996, pp. 29-34; and Making Intelligence Smarter, The Future of U.S. Intelligence, Richard N. Haass, Project Director, Report of a Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, 1996, p. 2 and p. 10.

⁸  Preparing for the 21^st Century, pp. 52-54 and Making Intelligence Smarter, p. 3.

⁹  Robert M. Gates, "Revitalize the CIA," Wall Street Journal, Jan. 23, 2001, p. 27.

¹⁰  George Friedman, "The Intelligence War," the founder and chairman of STRATFOR.com at www.infowar.com/class_2/01/class2_091901b_j.shtml

¹¹  See Steele, p. 91; Robert J. Hermann, "Keeping the Edge in Intelligence," in Ashton B. Carter and John P. White, Keeping the Edge, Managing Defense for the Future, Cambridge, MIT Press, January 2001, p. 115; James Clapper, "Intelligence Reform: A Call for "Back To Basics," unpublished paper and briefing slides, undated, briefed to the staff of the Hart Rudman Commission in November, 2000, p. 10; and most recently by former NIC Vice Chairman Gregory Treverton, Reshaping Intelligence for the Age of Information, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 244-245.

¹²  Bruce D. Berkowitz, "The CIA Needs to Get Smart," Wall Street Journal, March 1, 1999, p. 24.

¹³  George Seffers, "Center Would Balance Fed War Efforts," Federal Computer Week, May 21, 2001, p.4.

¹⁴  Michael Handel, War, Strategy and Intelligence, London: Frank Cass, 1986, pp. 267-268; and Making Intelligence Smarter, p. 11.

¹⁵  Hermann, "Keeping the Edge in Intelligence," p. 115; and Clapper, "Intelligence Reform: A Call for "Back To Basics," pp. 4-5.

¹⁶  The NSA's manifest deficiencies are recounted in James Risen, "A Top Secret Agency Comes Under Scrutiny and May Have to Adjust," New York Times, Dec. 5, 1999, p.1; Warren P. Strobel, "The Sound of Silence?" U.S. News and World Report, Feb. 14, 2000, p. 24; and Neil King, "In Digital Age, U.S. Spy Agency Fights to Keep From Going Deaf," Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2001, p.1.

¹⁷  Walter Pincus, "Senate Clears Bill Raising Intelligence Spending 7 Pct," Washington Post, Nov. 9, 2001, p. A13.

¹⁸  John Markoff, "CIA to Nurture Companies Dealing in High Technology," New York Times, Sept. 29, 1999 at www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/biztech/articles/29cia.html

¹⁹  Reuel Gerecht, former CIA operative, called the CIA's operations directorate, "a highly bureaucratic, sclerotic institution that still remains most at home on the diplomatic cocktail circuit, structurally, culturally, and linguistically ill-prepared" for today's world. Cited in Judith Miller, "Flying Blind in a Dangerous World," New York Times, Feb. 6, 2000, p. D5.

²⁰  James Risen, "In Hindsight, CIA Sees Flaws That Hindered Efforts on Terror," New York Times, Oct. 7, 2001, p.1; Walter Pincus, "CIA Steps Up Scope, Pace of Efforts On Terrorism," Washington Post, Oct. 9, 2001, p.4.

²¹  Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962, p.3.

²²  New World Coming, p. 6, and Donald Rumsfeld, Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review, Washington, DC, September, 2001, pp. 6-7.

²³  A conclusion shared by various commissions and studies, including Stephen J. Flanagan, et al, eds., Challenges of the Global Century, Report of the Project on Globalization and National Security, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, Washington, DC, 2001 and the Hart-Rudman Commission Phase 3 Report, Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change, Report of the U.S. National Security Commission/21^st Century, Washington, D.C., Feb. 15, 2001.

By F.G. Hoffman Defense Consultant Hoffmanfg@aol.com

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