 Can you hear me okay? All right, well good morning. And I want to thank again the faculty for the opportunity to come here and address your students. It's a real thrill. As many of you spent a lot of time in these kind of auditoriums and these kind of seats. And when you finally get invited to be on this side of the microphone it kind of tickles you. And also in particular I appreciate the opportunity to come and speak at the Naval War College. The oldest of all of the service war colleges kind of completes my trifecta now since I spoke previously at the Army and the Air War College and now visited the 50th state Rhode Island, the only state I'd never been to before. So thank you for the opportunity to check off some of my personal goals there while we're at this. I want to congratulate all of you on being here. Certainly in my service it's a selective process for deciding who gets to benefit from the advantage of attending a senior service college. And it's an unparalleled opportunity to take a year away from other kinds of duties kind of as we say in my service take a knee perhaps in yours you know some shore duty, some family time but to really pause, reflect, think learn and connect. And you know various professional military education opportunities that I have had. There's always the saying, it's only a lot of reading if you do it. And instructors who assign way more reading than you feel like you can do. But I prefer the adage, you get out of things what you put into it. And I found that the vast majority of readings I was assigned were worth my time. And I would encourage you to not only do the readings but to think about and reflect on them and most importantly connect the dots that you are trying to bring out your instructors are trying to bring out and convey to you. And then finally I think one of the most important things about senior service college opportunity is the opportunity to engage with fellow professionals. You will probably be surprised at how many times your paths are going to cross. And I know that many of you did PME at the field what we call the field grade level in the army is 04s or 05s. And I know that many of you at the college 06 colleagues that I met in that opportunity I have had far richer and more frequent interactions with those people than those colleagues and fellow classmates than I did for my previous opportunities. So this morning what I would like to do is discuss the role of strategic intelligence and its impact on decision making and policy making. My experience is predominantly at the combatant command operational theater CJTF kind of level. I do not have a deep experience in advising the president. I don't have any experience in advising the president. I don't have a deep experience of advising policy makers outside the department of defense. But I do have some insight into how that works. I am now assigned to the office of the director of national intelligence where they do in fact deliver intelligence daily to various cabinet secretaries. So I can perhaps provide some insight into that but my personal expertise and examples will primarily be about serving at the combatant command level or at a CJTF. So I am also going to mirror my comments to great extent on comments that I made at the Army War Colleges and the Army Forum. They had several days to talk about strategy and specifically I talked about how to be a wise consumer of strategic intelligence. Another thing I really enjoy about these kinds of opportunities is a lot of times intel folks are stuck talking to other intel folks. I really enjoy talking to operators and those who actually use the intelligence that we produce for their own operations. And I would say the first step of strategic intelligence is that you have to have a strategy to begin with. You have to have a framework that that intelligence is going to support. And the way I think of a strategy and I hope this is not at odds with the instruction that you're receiving here at the War Colleges, a strategy is when you understand here is where I am or where we are today and here is where we want to go in the future. This is the environment we have to operate in the conditions that are going to affect us and you develop a plan to get from the current location to a future goal and objective. And that can be a strategy for how you intend to transition to retirement or civilian life after the military. It could be your strategy for how you are preparing your family long term for a financial future. It could be a strategy for modernizing the US Navy. It could be a strategy for how do we change our service to better operate in a digital era. It could be a strategy for defeating the physical caliphate of ISIS. But this is the way things are right now. This is how we need them to look in the future, know your enemy, know yourself, understand the environment that you have to operate in, what are the various factors that are going to influence that. And then developing what is probably a multifaceted, multi-domain multiple line of effort plan for getting there. Assigning responsibilities, providing resources, monitor execution and monitor the environment. And so I think we understand, you know, what that looks like at the theater level. You know, I've got an air component. I'm going to give them the task among other things of conducting a strategic air campaign that is going to degrade ISIS sources of revenue, specifically their ability to extract and profit from oil resources in Syria. I've got another element that's part of my ground component. They are going to have some building partner capacity tasks working with the Iraqi security forces. And then finally, perhaps, you know, there's some state-side elements that I've given some cyber tasks, a separate line of effort where they are going to prevent ISIS from disseminating their glossy publications De Beek and Ramia magazines and limit their ability to inspire followers around the world. Multiple lines of operation multifaceted. And I would say when you think about this as a concept for a strategy, again, a plan of getting from one from where we are to where we need to be multifaceted, multi-domain, multiple lines of effort when we think about it at the national level it's often called a whole of government approach. You know, perhaps it is the maximum pressure campaign on Iran. And so there are certain tasks that the Department of Treasury has or the Department of Justice for designating organizations for financial sanctions. Service officers in the Department of State are working hard with their counterparts in other nations to bring them on board for our plan for what we intend to do with Iran. And then the Department of Defense that has its own elements that it is executing in terms of that maximum pressure campaign against Iran. Again, the same concept. But I think when we think about strategic intelligence and monitoring that environment that we're going to operate in it's so much more complex than the kinds of tactical intelligence that at least young army intelligence officers are charged with monitoring. Where it really tends to be almost exclusively focused on unless it's a counterinsurgency weather and terrain. You know it's been freezing we've had freezing temperatures for an extended period of time that's going to affect mobility and our ability across terrain. We're looking at avenues of approach, key terrain obstacles, maneuverability and trafficability. When you start talking about strategic intelligence there's a need to monitor almost everything. You know demographics social factors cultural dynamics, popular sentiment, political developments new technologies economic trends it calls for a much greater breadth of information to meet and monitor to meet the needs for monitoring these various aspects of the environment. I would say you know some of the types of things in monitoring that environment that we need to do at the national level would be things like China's development of the 5G technology the rise of populist parties in Europe what does that mean for some of our strategies or you know progress that China is making with its one belt one road initiative. And monitoring the environment that we are trying to operate in and understanding what impact that is going to have on your strategy. So the first step just having a strategy to begin with having a plan and then clearly communicating that and ensuring that everyone under you understands what we're trying to accomplish at the national level you know when I mentioned the maximum pressure campaign on Iran this takes the form in large part and is led by National Security Council with their various meetings that they have with representatives from different governmental departments in my experience again working primarily at the combatant command and below for Afghanistan General Votel who was my boss at CENTCOM was very clear our job that the Department of State had the lead, Ambassador Khalilzad we were in support of his efforts and our role was to create security conditions that would most likely compel the Taliban to come to the table and negotiate with Ambassador Khalilzad and his staff our role at CENTCOM where you had a four-star that is forward fighting the fight in Afghanistan was to implement aspects of the President's South Asia strategy regarding Pakistan and the Central Asian States so that it would free up the four-star commander in Afghanistan to fight the fight and to create those conditions to get the Taliban to the table. For defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria we were given almost incompatible tasks of defeating ISIS on the ground on Syria which really could not be done without partnering with the heavily Kurdish SDF forces and to do this while keeping Turkey on side in NATO and not drifting closer to Russia very challenging given the animosity and the deep-seated belief of the Kurdish forces as being a threat to Turkey and then finally I think I've touched briefly on some of the things related to a maximum pressure campaign against Iran which is a part of our national strategy today so having a strategy communicating it and ensuring that all of your subordinate elements and everybody who is part of that effort knows and understands what you're trying to accomplish and then as I've mentioned monitoring the environment and a key part here I think is to ask the right questions. I touched on just a few of the many facets of the environment that you need to monitor at the operational or strategic level. There's so much information out there asking the right questions to help hone the machine, the intelligence enterprise, in narrowing down and providing you the information that's most needed. What can change things for you? Who is adopting the 5G technology? Monitoring Russia and Chinese weapon development. Not just what are they making. Who is buying it? How is it being used? How are they monitoring the performance of new Russian capabilities in Syria to better understand how those systems perform? Understanding how they're being employed. Monitoring other nations' exercises to understand developments that they're making in terms of joint war fighting capabilities. Looking for instance in my CENTCOM hat watching Pakistan's naval exercises to understand the insights it might provide for us on how they would intend to fight India potentially in that kind of example. It's about asking the right questions so that your intel team is not spinning their wheels wasting their time collecting, analyzing, and reporting on things that are not useful to you. And a specific example I'll give there goes back to my experience in Afghanistan. And when I arrived in Afghanistan in the summer of 2012 I had this impression you know how it is when you first show up someplace you notice things and then after you've been there 30 days you're one of those folks, like everybody else for whom everything seems normal and you've stopped questioning why you do things the way they are. But when I first arrived at the International Security Assistance Force, the four star headquarters in Afghanistan, I had this impression of this giant machine. We were counting a lot of stuff. We had an army of horses, operation research systems analysis folks. And they had a whole platoon of them down three star headquarters as well. In particular we were counting violence stacks roadside IEDs, heat maps by time, by district, by region trying to correlate it with our own activities. And I was, that was among many things that we were counting in. It just seemed like this big, I imagine this big Willy Wonka machine with all these knobs and dials and if we could get them all adjusted just right in some combination of electrical power generation and girls in school and minimizing IEDs and businesses that are open here, if we get them all lined up just right, instead of spitting out a candy bar, this big machine was going to spit out victory and we could all go home. That's the way it felt. But there are 30 days, you stop asking questions you just keep producing your little heat maps about IEDs and where they're going off. And then General Dunford came in and I'm a huge fan, just a brilliant commander and he said I was running the GIOC, the Joint Intel Operations Center at the four-star headquarters and he said, I don't care about that. He said, let the three-star headquarters worry about that. I want you to tell me about the confidence of the Afghan people in their government. And I went, that's really hard. I don't have any sensors for that, not something like FlyISR and Collect, but it was the right question to ask. It was the right strategic question and he was reorienting our staff at the four-star headquarters to focus on the strategic questions and the things that he needed to engage on. And again, let the three-star headquarters worry about that tactical stuff, about where the IEDs are going off, what the violence looks like. They're the ones that are working with the Afghan National Security Forces. I'm focused on the big strategic picture, so asking the right questions. Another thing that General Dunford did that I really appreciate and valued is he opened the door, he opened the aperture to his thinking. So before him, you know, sorry, the commander would meet in his office with the door shut with the two and the three, probably the five sometimes, and then they'd come out and give guidance. General Dunford opened the door a little more, and you know, it wasn't like this, but you know, there might be 12, 15 people, you could backbench if you were an 06 in a key position and to sit and hear the commander think out loud and talk about what was on his mind and share his experiences was tremendously valuable as the intel team to help us in collecting the right information and produce the products that he needed because we were gaining insight into what was important to him. And so, you know, we call it the commander's PIR, Priority Information Requirements, Intelligence Requirements. They're typically drafted by the two and the three, but they are the commander's questions. And if you don't understand the commander's strategy and what he's thinking about and what's important to him, then you're not going to be able to produce the strategic intelligence products that are most needed. He really has to allow you to get inside his head to understand what he's trying to achieve, what decisions and actions he might take so that you can identify for him risks to his campaign or opportunities that he can take advantage of. General Votel was another commander I worked for who was fantastic in this regard. And so, you know, as you're monitoring the environment, you can identify ooh, Kurdish separatist campaign. This is a risk. This is a potential risk to our campaign and something that I need to bring to the boss's attention. Or, ah, you know, I need to tell General Townsend about how things are unfolding with the Iranian-aligned militia groups, the Hashir Shadi in Iraq. If you're not inside his head and don't understand the actions he might take or the decisions he's considering, then you will only be reactive and will not be able to proactively arm him or her for action. And so, I think the best intelligence products derive some kind of action. And by action, you know, in my experience again working for these commanders, it could be, hey, I need to incorporate XYZ in my talking points with General Bajwa. Or, that development the Hashir Shadi is concerned to me, I need to make an office call and pay a visit to the Prime Minister. Maybe I need to alert the Secretary of Defense. Maybe I need to ask the chairman to call his counterpart General Garasimov in Russia. Maybe I need to reposition forces, reconsider my scheme of maneuver. The action on the part of the commander might be, look like not in action. It might be, you've confirmed that my scheme of maneuver is the appropriate one and I'm going to stick with it. It may be directing the J-5 to set up some kind of operational planning team or the J-3. So, some kind of action. And I'd been asked by the faculty to please elevate some of my examples and not speak strictly about combatant commands or CJTFs, I would say. At the national level some of these actions might be, you know, I'm going to launch Secretary Pompeo around the world. And he's going to start talking about why we need to put additional sanctions on Iran. An action might be, you know, I'm going to the NATO summit and these are some things I'm going to need to talk about in terms of what our partner nations are doing in their own defense spending. It might be calling President Erdogan in Turkey to talk about his intent to purchase the S-400 weapon system from Russia. It might be about designating a various group or an actor as a terrorist organization. The best intelligence is going to drive some kind of action or activity. And there's just so much information that's out there. The ability of the intelligence team to screen all of that information and then package it in a usable way that is relevant to that leader is very difficult if you don't understand, if you're not in their head, if you don't understand what they're trying to accomplish and what kinds of opportunities are available for them to take action. So for this to happen, and I've described, you know, General Dunford and General Townsend, and I'm sorry I don't have a lot of naval examples, although General Dunford, I guess is technically a member of the C-Services, was that the intel team has to be trusted member of that inner circle. And so in particular, those who are interacting with the commander, not only does the intelligence have to be a quality that someone wants to read and digest, but whoever is delivering that to the commander, there has to be a degree of rapport. It has to be a very personal relationship. And when I worked for Lieutenant General Townsend, now General Townsend, the AFRICOM commander, I worked for him in Iraq and Syria for Operation Inherent Resolve, he always said the most important personal relationship that he had after his XO was the relationship with the two. Because when you come and tell him about a threat, or when you warn him about a risk to the campaign, or you're advising him of a potential opportunity, if there isn't a level of trust and rapport, he's not going to consider that or act on that. And more than any of the rest of his staff, that was one that when you look him in the eye, there has to be a degree of trust in what you are telling him. It's very, you know, he had to work kind of finesse sometimes at US Central Command on folks who would interact with key senior leaders in delivering their intelligence each day. If you have an analyst that you sense they're shaky or maybe the boss doesn't trust them or question them, you've got to swap them out because there has to be this level of rapport. And I think that many of the comments that I'm making about strategic intelligence, you could also say pertain to the rest of the staff. You've also got to trust the three, you've got to trust the five. And I think one of the comments about opening the aperture and expanding your inner circle to ensure that key members of your staff understand what you're trying to accomplish is certainly not unique to the intelligence war fighting function. It also pertains to your ops and your planners as well. Understanding how your boss receives information, you know, General Allen, another member of the C services. When he received information in and worked, he wanted to get his read book first thing in the morning and he would read it alone in his room with his coffee. Some of your commanders will write in the margins and return it with questions. I love that. I love the interaction. Some are going to, you know, General Votel we deliver the book and you kind of sat and watched him read it in silence. That was a little awkward. But he's a brilliant man and you just kind of adjust to them over time. General Townsend was very extroverted. There was nothing he liked more than sitting in our tiny little plywood skiff with an analyst on either side of him and a map in the middle and having a dialogue with them about, you know, whatever condition of the battlefield we were going to discuss that day. So understanding how your commander likes to receive information. Are they a graphic person? Do they want to read in silence? Do they want long literature? And in particular one of the challenges we sometimes face in the intel community is you know all this stuff winnowing it down to just those key nuggets to tell the commander exactly what he needs not leaving anything out but not having anything extra. There's an expression I love. I think it's Mark Twain. I would have written you a shorter letter if I'd had more time. It takes a lot of work to distill things down to those essential nuggets and you really can't do it if you don't understand what he or she is trying to accomplish so that you can distill it down into something really concise. I used to tell folks I would love to put you in the boss's shoes for one day and have you see how much information he is expected to consume and digest. And if you did that for a day you'd understand why this three page single space word document is just not going to cut it. You've got to distill it down into something that is really usable in concise. So to kind of recap where we're at I've talked about having a sound strategy communicating it to your team monitoring the environment by asking the right questions including key leaders in your inner circle so that they can help and scan the horizon in the environment and identify what you need to know and then establishing that degree of trust rapport with a credible intelligence leader who can manipulate the intelligence enterprise to get you what you need. I think the next step for a consumer of strategic intelligence is you need to demand quality intelligence and provide feedback and you know I've talked about I love it when a boss says this graph is too busy well I'd prefer to have it be just right but I mean I appreciate the feedback this graph is too busy you know so-and-so doesn't want to read he wants you to tell him about it one that you must insist on is do not accept raw traffic do not accept people just and this happens in DC all the time it drives me nuts it's got to come with context what does it mean what are we doing about it I'll try to do this without making it you know you could trace back and attribute it to someone I heard they were prepping someone to go across the street and talk to the president it was in May tensions are rising with Iran the table and you know what do you got what do you got in this guy says we have a threat report that's a problem right there a threat report we have a threat report that Iran is looking at pulling operatives from Lebanon and sending them to Diyala and Waysett provinces in Iraq to kidnap American service members and then they go on to the next person I was back bitching I wanted to pull my hair out one I would never present a single unattributed threat report I wouldn't even give that to the commander in Baghdad you know I'd want to know does the RSO at the embassy think it's real you know is this a credible source have we heard from them before is this feasible why would Iran take operatives from Lebanon when there are Iranian-aligned Shia militia groups ready to do us harm right now in Baghdad I don't need to move people from Lebanon to other provinces to execute what's probably a pretty complex operation of kidnapping figure out where the Americans are how they drive to work every day that's not imminent and then the last thing we haven't been in Waysett or Diyala provinces since 2011 so I would totally disregard this kind of threat report but I hear it happen all the time people just shove these reports in front of seniors in DC I've thought about what makes this happen just a couple more examples when I was at CENTCOM I could control what the CIA provided to General Votel I could control what any of the other agencies gave him but CIA had their own link with him and they would come brief me on these highly compartmented reports that they were going to give General Votel typically on the Taliban and are they going to reconcile or not and every other report would contradict each other I can't keep straight the names of all these different Taliban leaders my eyes are rolling back and back why do I have to look at this all I want to do is just give it to an analyst an expert have him look at it and tell me what it means and they said well we're giving it to you because this afternoon we're going to give it to General Votel I said why are you going to give this to General Votel well we give it to General Votel because we're going to give it to the secretary why do you give it to the secretary because there are senior leaders out there that think it's really hot and sexy to like read the latest intel reports and it is not just like this one the example I gave you about you know they gave a senior this crappy, un-evaluated threat report well where's the context in this other stuff and the genie is out of the box it's really hard to get back in I used to get the electronic read book of a deputy assistant secretary at the Pentagon and it was full of just human reports and I think as the intel community your intel community if they're doing this for you they're advocating their responsibility to do analysis and tell you what it means and why we would force a deputy assistant secretary to figure out what these various human reports mean and whether they can be corroborated through imagery or consistent with what we've seen before or totally implausible that's our job so I think part of the problem is everyone wants to be in the know and they fear not having seen something that others have seen so we also had a special stream of highly compartmented sigint that we would get say on countries like Iran and I remember looking at one one time at Centcom and we found it highly implausible and decided not to give it to the boss I think General Votel was on travel so it was really the DCOM and but a subordinate commander, his staff speeding him all this stuff and he calls up he's like hey it's kind of who's got a secret hey you see this DCOM turns and looks at me Gibson out on me well because I didn't believe it so it's sometimes kind of a tricky thing and I've advised when subordinate twos would ask me hey I got this threat report I don't believe it do you think I should share it with the boss and I typically say if you think some other senior leader is going to table drop it somewhere then you might let him know I've seen this I don't believe it here's why we're not going to pursue it or talking to the RSO or these are the steps we're taking but there's this kind of I think this sort of climate or culture of people are afraid that somebody else has seen stuff they haven't seen and so they demand or insist this raw traffic do not accept it it is your intel team you're letting them off the hook if you're allowing them to just give you raw traffic if the last example I've given this regard this is awesome in DC you know again tensions heating up with Iran it was probably September and one of the people that goes across the river to deliver the PDB to cabinet secretary said secretary Pompeo said he's so sick of all these threat reports why do you keep giving me these threat reports and nothing ever happens and I said well why do we give him all these threat reports I mean you know I think that there is also sometimes on the part of certain entities a fear that if something happens and I didn't tell you about it I'm going to be on the hook so there's a little bit of a CYA there but but your intel team is not doing their job if they're just giving you raw stuff or they're giving you stuff that's not relevant they're just giving you material that lacks any kind of analytic contents so insist on it I think the second thing I would say in terms of having that interaction with those who provide intelligences to engage in dialogue this enables them to identify risks and opportunities and and analysts enjoy that they like they appreciate the feedback we were talking at breakfast this morning about a four star that a couple of us who have worked for before that was like a cipher like a statue like you know he provided no feedback when you briefed him and you don't know and he was also not someone who opened the aperture very big either he was someone who went in the door with two or you know behind the closed door with two or three people and then kind of came out and there was guidance so you never knew if you were hitting the mark or not is this right engage in dialogue and I'll just really appreciate and if you ever disagree challenge them you know I had some very cynical Pakistani analysts in Tampa and periodically General Votel would say you know what you're briefing me is not what I'm observing when I go there when I was in Afghanistan our DCOM was General Sir Nick Carter that he's the chief of defense forces in the UK now and he would be like you know that is not consistent with what I observe when I you know meet with senior leaders here in Kabul so challenge your analysts but you have to be careful to do it in a way that like any other staff that it doesn't shut them down and stop them from presenting you material and they've got to learn to grow skin and you know where a little Kevlar under their uniform but engage in dialogue and challenge them push back when you think it's appropriate the third thing I think I'd say is you must demand diverse products and viewpoints so it is important to hear multiple voices and again these things I'm talking about regarding strategic intelligence I'd say they pertain to so many other facets of senior level decision making it's important to hear multiple voices sometimes there is a resistance in certain commands or communities or elements that you know it has to have our unit or agency logo on it I think that would be a bad idea I think you should be receiving information from a variety of viewpoints and if somebody else puts something out that I agree with that's one less paper I have to produce and I'm going to put that in the boss's book I think it's important also to accept allied products you know we have allied partners who have capabilities very similar to ours and in some cases have much greater access than we do I was just talking to one of your classmates here Jane Stokes who I worked with at CENTCOM about the value that we put on information we got from Jordan you know tiny little country doesn't have a navy really but they have valuable human insights and tribal understanding of things that happen in southern Syria that we will never figure out so talking to allied partners and accepting their information and material in your books I think the specific example I'll give on that case is a Syrian example after a while after we liberated Raqqa and Manbij and some of the key cities in northern Syria the predominantly Kurdish but it was a Kurdish Arab force there would be reports we would hear that there were issues with the local Arabs but yet when you would go back to the guys on the ground and ask they'd say no there's nothing to see here we would go into villages to investigate this and meet with Arabs that would tell us no there's nothing going on here and the own reporting that was coming up from our human channel said there's nothing going on here but I started to think about it and I realized that all of our human sources as well as Arabs that we were meeting with were really provided to us by Kurds and even the Arabs we were meeting with were Arabs that were introduced to us by Kurds and I thought I'm not sure we're seeing the full objective picture of what's happening here so I went to the CIA and I said you know here's what I think I'm observing that's happening with military reporting in Syria you know what do you got and their networks were much the same either coming from Kurds or from sources that have been introduced to them by Kurds and really a lot of the same Kurds so I went to the French and I said you know I know that you are operating independently here you have completely different sources than we do I'm really interested in your assessment of the Kurdish Arab dynamics in northern Syria and they were fantastic they produced a product for me got it translated into English in probably about eight days and it was I felt more objective and a little different than anything that was available in American reporting and I gave it to General Hotel and I said sir because we had concerns about this I think you need to read this so except reporting insist on products and viewpoints from all over you need to be exposed to multiple viewpoints your own analysts run into their own biases especially if they've been looking at things for a really long time and then finally I'd say accepting unclassified reporting there's such a wealth of information that's available unclassified now but sometimes Intel teams or agencies will resist providing classified information and I think you need to be very receptive to that as well so the fourth point I think I would make after you know the way that you demand quality intelligence don't accept raw traffic without analog analysis engaging dialogue and demand diverse products and viewpoints the fourth point would be thinking about how you receive intelligence or information writ large particularly when it's bad news or you don't agree with it you know we all have heard don't shoot the messenger and again this is another one that pertains not only to intelligence but to other things you know when you shoot the messenger when you are extremely volatile when you receive information that you don't like over time your staff will be reluctant to present that information to you even when it's the truth and again this will pertain you know operations logistics intelligence so your demeanor in the manner in which you receive information that you don't like or isn't what you want to hear is really important still challenging it when appropriate but challenging it in a way that doesn't shut down the team with general vote tell I would know that I was presenting information that he really didn't want to hear because as I finished he would just kind of look at me and say thanks and then he turned to someone else and I think okay it's you know he didn't really want to hear that but he accepted it and it never shut me down or present prevented me from presenting other information to him that he might not like and you really have to be where what we call politicization of intelligence be vigilant it's rarely blatant in my experience in the military but it can it can be sneaky and insidious and works its way in in part people who want to please the boss people who want to give the boss good news again that gets back to how you receive information that you don't like right before I actually was two J2s before I got sent com but they were still working through this when I got there there was an allegation to the department of defense IG that sent com staff was doctoring intel it was in the early phase of the fight against ISIS that analysts would produce things that told about ISIS victories and that someone somewhere in the high levels was changing adjectives or adverbs making things sound less bad than they really were there was a big investigation it was not founded it found other problems but they did not find that they were fixing intel but there was a belief on the part of some of the analysts that what I'm submitting what I believe to be true is being changed by someone in the command and that is very very dangerous the intelligence community has analytic tradecraft standards and training to prevent that but commanders also play a role and again I think it often gets back to how you receive information I have seen commanders at subordinate elements who tried to suppress reporting that was coming out of their area perhaps they didn't like the way it was being said who tried to stop human reports from leaving whenever the hair would go up on my necks and I would either call them directly or there too to talk about you cannot this is very dangerous you cannot it says you have got to let these kinds of reports out out into the open and I don't know if this class has or is reviewing as part of the curriculum that Afghan papers the secret history of the war the whole you know series of articles that came out in the Washington Post in December that kind of accused perhaps rightly folks of between the news on the street and by time it would hit the press in the United States taking on a much rosier view sometimes of the way things that were going in Afghanistan I think we all bear a responsibility for ensuring that it is the truth that we're conveying and again commanders can play a role in promoting honest candid objective feedback or by shooting the messenger or reacting negatively inadvertently color the kinds of reporting that happens I think it's not good for anybody I think the most extreme example of politicization of intelligence would be actual omission or cutting and sometimes we see you know people choose not to forward information because it's bad news and the only specific example I can give there was you know you could google it there was a member of I think it was Department of State INR who resigned because his papers on climate change or the information he wanted were not allowed to be included that would be an example I think of omission of politicization of intelligence that results in omission always tell the truth is a mantra that my early bosses instilled in me I once worked as a young captain for the director of the defense intelligence agency Lieutenant General Patrick Hughes and I remember DIA this was in the 90s DIA had just released a report that said that Cuba is not planning to invade the United States or something along those lines and he was summoned to the hill to go explain to various members of the Florida delegation how could the intelligence community possibly come up with this that was my first exposure to anyone trying to politicize intelligence and he said always tell the truth I think another aspect of this to think about as a consumer or commander is you have to be careful and this can be hard to do you can't view the intelligence as your report card of how well you are doing or not and I think this is part of the challenge that we sometimes ran into particularly in Afghanistan is commanders who viewed negative reporting about you know Afghan national security forces still don't have their stuff together Taliban still controlling all this number of districts is people commanders, twos operators who were viewing that as their report card and fighting back against it so before I deployed to Afghanistan I did what's very typical in intel circles and I kind of did the rounds of all the agencies in DC and on the eastern seaboard before I went forward and as I went there was huge disparities in how people were seeing the war General Petraeus just left theater you may or may not be aware he had issued I think an unprecedented dissent by a commander of a CIA annual assessment called the national intelligence estimate actually I guess it wasn't technically CIA but CIA had a big hand in it of how the war was going and to have the commander on the ground publish this very lengthy dissent and so there was a lot of ill will between the CIA and the Department of Defense in terms of their views and before I went out there I'm doing the rounds and people would you know unprompted say you're going to hear a spectrum of views here's where we stand on this end as I categorized them the CIA and the National Ground Intelligence Center were doom and gloom it's disastrous it's all going to fail and a little disturbingly the folks in Tampa we had the AFPAC center as well as the folks forward in theater it was all sunshine and light it's all really good they just don't understand and the people who were doom and gloom would say you know those guys forward in theater and down in Tampa they're too close to the problem they're emotionally attached to success and they don't see the forest for the trees and then the sunshine and light folks would say you know as people at the CIA they don't understand they don't have any operational context they haven't been forward they're just looking at reports of course violence is up in that district it's up because we're operating off the fob if we went back to the fob there would be no violence they don't understand the operational context and they're just looking for negative stories and the scary thing is they're all looking at exactly the same data we would often have these okay what do you have that we don't have what do they have that you don't have all looking at exactly the same data and frankly it reminds me very much of politics in this country sometimes all looking at the same data and seeing it entirely differently and this is part of why it's so important as a commander and a consumer of intelligence products to insist on products from multiple viewpoints interestingly then I got forward to theater and I saw that same dynamic playing out in micro level I'd be sitting in my office at the four star headquarters listening to army captains on a VTC talk about how great their Afghans were doing out in RC south or east or wherever and and if I didn't know better if you just tuned out the words and listened to the tone it was like this is an army analogy I'm sorry company commanders at a quarterly training brief talking about all the great things that their company has accomplished in the last 90 days just very raw raw always looking for the positive and whenever my team would put out a negative report about the Afghan national security forces I'd get a nasty call from General Nakasone who was General Milley's two and saying you don't understand the context you're too removed even though we're three miles apart you're too removed you don't understand you know what's really going on out there so people become emotionally affected or they do I think lose objectivity sometimes and so again it's very important to insist on multiple viewpoints and the final point I'd make in that regard is keeping an open mind you yourself have to keep an open mind you have to be aware of confirmation bias on your own part on the part of your staff what is it you want to see because that data that I talked about in Afghanistan we all had the same data and you could bend you could use that data to support almost any argument about where you thought things were headed so beware of confirmation bias on your own or the part of your staff retain the ability to see things differently you know when you've got this strategy here's where I am here's where I want to be of course that's what you want to have happen but don't be so vested in that vision that you're unable to recognize when things are going in a different direction and sometimes it's in a positive way and something that you might fail to take advantage of an opportunity because of this vision you have to retain an ability to see that things are changing to accept the left hook and that's part of why you need those diverse views I think you know before we kind of open up for questions one of the things I want to do is talk a little bit about a reading you know back to my initial points I hope you do the readings a reading that I think you guys got from Dr. Jarvis on why intelligence and policy makers clash and just a couple things that I want to maybe hit out of that article and one of them is you know the expectations of policy makers and decision makers which you know as a member of the intelligence community I think are sometimes unreasonable Hollywood doesn't do us any favors you know enemy of the state 24 homeland you know it's just James Bond I mean I love those movies but you walk in and they go what is so and so doing I don't know let's see and they can pull up you know it just doesn't work that way and you know I remember many exercises beat up by the three of the commander about you know where are the enemy forces and they be like you know you got Blue Force tracker and you don't know where all our guys are but I'm expected to have this perfect knowledge of where the enemy is or you know here's another real example I remember summer of 13 we're briefing on elections in Afghanistan and General Milley who was a three star at the time just bullying me you know saying god damn it you know tell me who's going to win the Afghan elections and I thought we never know who's going to win but of course but yet you know I'm expected to tell you before we even know who all the candidates are who's going to win the Afghan elections so some of it defensively is is a little bit of unrealistic expectations but I think you know part of that has its origin in our own success and in Hollywood and in the American way of war which demands precision lethality minimal casualties technology and we expect to get a return on that investment and the way that we wage war and to use again another example from my experience the April 18 strikes on Assad's chemical infrastructure in Syria which was fantastic and we had you know weapons launched seaborn, airborne weapons US, UK, France from the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Gulf simultaneously launching hours apart sometimes the munitions depends on the speed at which they travel and where they're coming from all impacting within five minutes to utterly destroy two facilities that requires a lot of precision that is incredibly expensive now if we want to wage war like the Syrians and we just want a devastate Aleppo or Damascus or Ghouta that doesn't take a lot of intel you just drop a lot of barrel bombs so the American way of war demands precision and our commanders expect precision and I think this contributes to it and then you know this expectation that the intelligence community is always going to deliver and I think the intelligence community can only deliver like that in places that we are already looking at so another reason that you got to be in the commander's head and understand what's possible what those opportunities are because we do have finite resources and where are we going to focus them and if you have the opportunity potentially to rescue Caitlyn Coleman you've been held by the Hecani militants in Pakistan for a couple of years and maybe in the next 72 hours we're going to allow national mission forces to go rescue them that's not the time to say to the boss I don't know anything about Pakistani air defense you have to be looking at it in advance and you can't look at it in advance and understand what the commander might need if you're not in his head and you don't understand the strategy or the range of options that are available to them so I think that's one of the biggest challenges that I've had as an Intel professional and it was actually the mantra that we adopted at CENTCOM for our current Intel division is to be the first with the truth and it's a real struggle to be I'm sure newspapers face the same thing you know I got this piece of information I could drop it now but maybe it's not accurate and you do that too often and you lose your credibility but if you wait to double check triple check quadruple check make sure you're absolutely right on this and then go tell the boss well now it's too late and he's heard it from a bunch of other people already so being first with the truth is a very tricky part of I think of being successful in the American intelligence community you can't let others beat you but you gotta be right and so this is another part I think of the expectation of our intelligence community you know those policy makers or others who are inclined to resist information that a policy is failing perhaps that's been at the root of some of the challenges that we've had in Afghanistan and I think we have to think about as intelligence producers and as those who are delivering intelligence to key leaders you know how often does the boss need bad news because if you keep telling him every week they're gonna start tuning you out you risk becoming either the boy who cried wolf or you know I'm so sick of hearing this negative news from you that they're gonna shut you down and so when we think about how often do you need to reinforce bad news I think we need to ask ourselves is this gonna inform a decision or action and I've given some descriptions of some of the types of things that in my mind are action I'm gonna watch the Secretary of State I'm gonna call President Erdogan I'm going to make a press announcement I'm going to enact sanctions on someone if it's not tied to an action or decision and maybe I don't have to rush every repetitive piece of bad news to the boss or something that they might resist these are again part of I think what we call it the art of intelligence and having to have that close personal trusted relationship with the person that you're informing and then I think we have to recognize that a commander, policy maker decision maker is gonna make a call at the end of the day that is not based solely on intelligence usually you know it is in many cases gonna be particularly in the military based on gut and intuition and experience and intelligence is one of the many things that informs them and sometimes I think the intelligence community can get wrapped around the axle thinking they gotta be exactly right they gotta quaffle or qualify everything and you know I grew up in a community where the commander turns to you in the tent and says Deuce what do you think is going on? Well it could be this but here's what my money is on X you know he didn't want to hear this 80%, 70%, 65% kind of stuff that you sometimes get in intelligence products if you look back in the footnotes and then I think finally another key thing that is highlighted in this article is it can be hard to change people's minds on central issues you know so whether it's to do with Taliban reconciliation whether it has to do with you know Iran's or China's place in the world there are certain key beliefs that you just are not going to change a leader or a commander's decision criteria or you know the way they believe about something I have a lot of other things I could talk about but I don't want to dominate this conversation perhaps we'll weave some of that into the Q&A but as the instructors I said you know is this going to be a shy and reticent reserved group that is reluctant to talk about anything or are they going to be provocative engaging and I'm certainly hoping just like a commander that I might provide intelligence information to I'm hoping that this is a provocative and engaging group and I look forward to your questions thanks