DoD Buzz: US Afghan Intel ‘Ignorant’ And ‘Incurious’

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US Afghan Intel ‘Ignorant’ And ‘Incurious’
By Greg Grant Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 11:51 am
Posted in Intelligence, International, Land, Policy

The top intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, just released a damning report urging a wholesale shakeup of the intelligence gathering and analysis effort there. The report, Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan, released through the Center for New American Security, a Washington DC think tank, is a devastating assessment of the failed intelligence effort in Afghanistan. It details how poorly the U.S. intelligence community has adjusted to the demands of counterinsurgency, as well as the community’s continuing obsession with unnecessary secrecy, a Cold War legacy that hinders its effectiveness in a world where the vast majority of useful information is open source.

Basically, the top intel officer in Afghanistan says the intelligence community is largely irrelevant to the war effort there. The industry that isn’t irrelevant and actually provides useful information and intelligence to war fighters, according to Flynn: the media.

“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy. Having focused the overwhelming majority of its collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade. Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers – whether aid workers or Afghan soldiers – U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-​​makers seeking the knowledge, analysis, and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency.”

The intelligence failure occurs at every level from small units to higher echelon headquarters, the report says. At battalion and below, intel shops know quite a bit of relevant information about their immediate surroundings, but they are woefully understaffed and thus can’t mine what they have for useful nuggets. Too much of their analytical effort is focused on rooting out enemy IED networks. While understandable, bomb emplacers are mere foot soldiers, readily dsicardable and easily replaceable. Taking out IED cells is certainly a laudable goal, but the cells are just enemy units, and low level ones at that. “A single-​​minded obsession with IEDs, while understandable, is inexcusable if it causes commanders to fail to outsmart the insurgency and wrest away the initiative.”

Higher echelons, brigade and regional commands, provide ground units with little information that is useful or that they don’t already know. While the higher headquarters have access to vast amounts of intercepted signals intelligence and imagery provided by drones and satellites, they use all that high-​​speed intel to try and spot IED emplacers. “Some battalion S-​​2 officers say they acquire more information that is helpful by reading U.S. newspapers than through reviewing regional command intelligence summaries. Newspaper accounts, they point out, discuss more than the enemy and IEDs.”


Rest of article and an interesting discussion at: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2010/01/05/us-afghan-intel-ignorant-and-incurious/?wh=wh

[izquierdista]

1. It may be open source, but it's not always in English

Poor language skills have always tripped up the "master race" fascists.