 Welcome to the U.S. Naval War College, the Navy's home of thought. NWC Talks features our world-class experts examining national security matters. We hope you enjoy the conversation. We live in an age of unprecedented intelligence capabilities. For example, I know you're watching me right now, but do you know who's watching you? Like it or not, intelligence is a feature of our daily lives, and this new reality poses challenges to the U.S. government, the intelligence community, and national security professionals. But there are also greater historical forces at work that we must face as an entire country. Now military historians have distinguished between a revolution in military affairs and a military revolution. Briefly, a revolution in military affairs refers to changes in tactics, doctrine, or technology that change the character of warfare. But a military revolution refers to changes in warfare that fundamentally transform state and society. For many years now, intelligence studies have proposed an ongoing revolution in intelligence affairs, and they say that it's affecting traditional intelligence organizations, operations, and analysis. But the world is also experiencing an intelligence revolution that is changing state and society as we know it. I'm Dr. Jeff Rogg, a postdoctoral fellow in the National Security Affairs Department, and this is NWC Talks, America and the Intelligence Revolution. Today, I want to discuss why the United States is struggling to adapt to the intelligence revolution, and therefore why the United States is at risk as both a global power and a constitutional state in the 21st century. Intelligence is often called the world's second oldest profession, but it's really only been a profession for the past century, give or take a few decades in the 19th century. Over this time, the world began to experience an intelligence revolution. Now, paradoxically, the United States played a pivotal role in igniting the intelligence revolution, but the history of intelligence in the United States has not prepared us for its challenges. As it turns out, both the cause of and solution to these problems lie in civil intelligence relations. Civil intelligence relations refers to the relationship between intelligence on the one hand and the state and society that it serves on the other. There have been two major themes in American civil intelligence relations. First, there's an ideological theme. Since the very beginning, this country has always used intelligence. This goes back to the Revolutionary War even. But the American people didn't like the idea of their government doing sneaky spy stuff, and they especially didn't like the idea of their own government spying on them. And this ideological theme interacts with a structural theme. The US has continuously faced problems with how we organize, legislate, guide, and really define the role of intelligence in American national security. One major issue that reflects this is that we've had a tendency to subordinate intelligence to other institutions of national security, like the military, diplomacy, and law enforcement. These national security institutions and their executive departments compete with each other and they've prevented intelligence coordination. They've also inhibited the emergence of an independent intelligence profession and institution. Jumping a little bit ahead in American history, the Cold War was really the formative period for American intelligence. After the Second World War, the threat of the Soviet Union and communism provided the basis for a Cold War consensus between the American people and the government. And this allowed the creation of an American national security state with a large peacetime intelligence system. But this US intelligence system reflected rather than resolved tensions in American civil intelligence relations. For example, the CIA was created in 1947. And under the 1947 National Security Act, it had a legislative mandate to coordinate intelligence. But immediately, competition with other executive departments, like the State Department or Department of Defense, undermined its ability to coordinate intelligence. At the same time, we also created an artificial wall between foreign and domestic intelligence, because we said that the CIA couldn't have any domestic police powers. But this, in fact, was a reflection of civil intelligence relations. First, there was bureaucratic competition with the FBI, which was really a law enforcement organization that absorbed domestic intelligence powers. And second, there was American ideological concerns at the time over a super spy system or an American Gestapo. Also during the Cold War, the US created even more intelligence organizations like the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency. And it subordinated them to the Department of Defense. But this, in fact, reflected ongoing tensions in civil intelligence relations, including competition over key intelligence functions, like signals intelligence in the case of the NSA, and a sort of ideological belief that intelligence should serve defense purposes, especially in the context of the Cold War. Now, this is just a brief survey of what was happening with intelligence in the United States. But I really want to emphasize what happened with intelligence in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union set out to create the new communist citizen. And in order to do this, it had to watch people and monitor their behavior. So it used pervasive intelligence with the goal of reordering state and society. Other communist states like China used intelligence for similar purposes. It's this motivation to use intelligence to transform society that helped generate the intelligence revolution. Another pillar of the intelligence revolution that evolved out of the Cold War intelligence competition was with technology. Both the Soviet Union and the United States developed increasingly sophisticated intelligence collection systems and platforms. And they used these aside from traditional human espionage. So the Cold War actually helps usher in the information age with satellites, computers, and the internet. Today, this new technology allows states to spy on their citizens beyond anything the Soviet Union could have dreamed of. Consider China's emerging social credit system. The goal is to shape people's actions, behavior, relationships, even their minds. So China is using the combination of intelligence and technology to change state and society. As the US government accuses the Chinese company Huawei of being a proxy for Chinese intelligence in the Chinese state, there's a long history in the United States of cooperation between the US intelligence community and the private sector. This goes back to the 1920s in the Cypher Bureau, to the Cold War NSA programs, Shamrock and Minaret, to the post-911 NSA programs, Stellar Wind and Prism. And at the same time, today, private companies like Google are using intelligence collection and big data to monetize surveillance. So really, there's no place to hide as a private citizen these days as big governments and corporations exploit intelligence to try and understand and influence our behavior. In short, we're in the middle of an intelligence revolution. Ongoing events actually further reinforce the effects of the intelligence revolution. Take, for instance, COVID. Countries like China, South Korea, Israel and Singapore leveraged intelligence organizations or capabilities to do what we all now know as contact tracing. But we're not tracing a virus. We're tracing human beings, including their daily activities, their social lives, even their spending habits. The US has proven resistant to downloading these contact tracing apps. And part of this is due to the American people's continuing fear over surveillance, privacy and civil liberties. But even beyond COVID, we face an onslaught of intelligence challenges that strike at fault lines in American civil intelligence relations and have left us fumbling for responses to the intelligence revolution. For instance, some SolarWinds cyber intrusion. Members of the government, the media and national security professionals have referred to it as a cyber attack. At the same time, the US intelligence community have said that it was cyber espionage. So the US still tends to conflate intelligence in the military, just like it did during the Cold War. And this point raises the issue with how the United States has organized and structured intelligence as part of the national security establishment. SolarWinds has generated a new debate over the functions of the NSA and cyber command. Importantly, both Department of Defense components. The Department of Defense still controls the most organizations, capabilities and has the biggest budget in the US intelligence community. This is a problem and often an overlooked one for civil military relations because the US military controls key intelligence functions and capabilities that provide even further pathways for the military to potentially threaten American liberty. When we combine this with the NSA's history of surveillance that has swept up millions of Americans, even if unintentionally, the old boundary between foreign and domestic intelligence and the view that intelligence is a subordinate function of the military are increasingly irrelevant. After all, America's adversaries are harnessing intelligence in increasingly sophisticated ways to undermine American political, military, economic, even our social strength. At the same time, the United States still tends to regard military strength as the ultimate measure of national power. Nikita Khrushchev allegedly once said that the Soviet Union would defeat the United States even without firing a shot. Whether or not he said this, it didn't come true. But today, Russia is trying to do something similar by using intelligence and disinformation to target the American political system and civil society. Americans have utterly failed to unify against this foreign intelligence threat. And we've actually rewarded Russia by further dividing ourselves politically. China has also weaponized disinformation. In the case of COVID, China has used propaganda to tell the world that the United States was responsible for creating COVID. And so it's trying to use disinformation to raise its standing and lower ours as a global power. And aside from the better known cases of Chinese economic espionage, China is currently collecting the private data and biometrics, including the DNA of tens of millions of Americans. So the Chinese state is honing its ability to target American citizens individually and collectively. Just imagine if China is able to apply the lessons of its social credit system in the United States without our knowledge or even our understanding. What this means is that the United States must transition from a state designed around industrial warfare because we're no longer in the industrial age, we're in the information age. So subordinating intelligence to the military, which was seemingly legitimate course of action for most of American history, will not satisfy the disruptive transformations of 21st century conflict and competition. Now as a product of its past, the United States currently does not have a unified coordinated intelligence institution. To borrow an expression from the historian, Thomas Troy that he used for American intelligence in the 1940s, today, the director of national intelligence is a head without a body and the US intelligence community is a body without a head. One possible solution and something we always talk about is structural intelligence reform. So one idea is a department of intelligence. According to this model, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency would no longer be Department of Defense components because their mandates and capabilities exceed defense. The CIA would also be part of this Department of Intelligence, as would a new domestic intelligence agency that absorbs the domestic intelligence functions of the FBI, because it's really a law enforcement organization, not an intelligence organization. But as we can guess, the two enduring tensions in American civil intelligence relations would continue to plague any attempt at structural intelligence reform. First we have the problem with bureaucratic competition from executive departments that always undermines intelligence coordination. And then we have American ideological concerns over a powerful unified intelligence institution that can threaten our liberty and our privacy. Still it's increasingly apparent to many observers that the United States needs structural intelligence reform. But perhaps the main flaw in this approach is the tendency of the US government and national security professionals to try to reorganize our way out of crises. Again, the idea of a revolution in intelligence affairs dominates the debate in government and among national security professionals because it proposes that the solutions to our intelligence problems lie within the ability of the government to solve. But this isn't just a revolution in intelligence affairs, it's an intelligence revolution that is changing state and society as we know it and therefore requires the attention of the American people. In other words, the American people simply cannot remain mired in older patterns of structure and thought regarding intelligence. Reforming not only how we organize our intelligence system but also how we legislate it, define its roles and balance its dangers, requires the participation of the American people. I just want to lay out a few of the tensions that we need to grapple with as an entire country. The biggest problem is that there's too much secrecy, mythology, and even distortions that complicate the American people's understanding of how our intelligence system was created and how it's evolved across history. The US government and the intelligence community have actually contributed to this problem because they haven't been transparent with the American people. In at least one instance that I've already mentioned, it's very clear, and since the very beginning, the intelligence community has frequently monitored the American people and it's done so on the basis of dubious legal and constitutional grounds. Problematically though, our laws and our statutory authorities are struggling to keep up with technological transformations that make intelligence not only more practical but also more necessary for national security. Furthermore, technology in the way our adversaries are harnessing it has destroyed the wall between foreign and domestic intelligence. And while the boundaries between foreign and domestic intelligence may be artificial, they're still important to the American people. The American people simply won't tolerate some things that the intelligence community does abroad done here. Now the exception to this is when there's a perceived threat and this is where things often go wrong. Many people are calling for a new domestic war on terror in response to the terrible attacks on the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021. However, American intelligence history provides ample warnings about how domestic intelligence eviscerate civil liberties. And this is something that goes back to the Revolutionary War, but we see continuously with the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, most of the Cold War, all the way to the near contemporary global war on terror. So what the American people need to learn is that we have to be careful what we wish for. Intelligence is a liberal by its nature, but the American people have a hard time coming to terms with the trade-offs between liberty and security. Far too often, we sweep aside liberty for security during a crisis, but then it's really hard to roll back intelligence powers and capabilities just because people no longer feel they're necessary. Our present predicament is particularly fraught, and this is because we're mixing intelligence with domestic politics. Foreign interference and disinformation aren't going anywhere, but the American people have made intelligence issues the basis for domestic partisan political disputes. So in effect, we're doing most of our adversaries' work for them. So as is often the case in American intelligence history, we are the authors of our own misfortune here. Mixing intelligence and politics has been a real Achilles heel in American civil intelligence relations throughout history, and it's one that our foreign adversaries will continue to exploit to undermine our faith in our political system. And worst of all today, we really don't have any good solutions to this, and we're still further dividing ourselves politically. Now in response to these provocations, many national security professionals are calling for a new era of political warfare, but U.S. intelligence operations during the Cold War era of political warfare didn't necessarily serve us all that well. We tend to define intelligence by its failures rather than successes, and these perceptions affect civil intelligence relations. And so during the Cold War, by the 1970s, revelations of U.S. intelligence operations abroad in countries like Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, and Chile clashed with American principles of self-determination and democracy. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence operations at home by the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI embarrassed, but also fundamentally scared the American people about our own intelligence system. And finally, revelations that American intelligence targeted student and civic groups, journalists and media companies, academics and academic institutions as part of what we call the cultural Cold War, ultimately clashed with the idea that American culture is just manifestly good, and it's something that people would accept without needing to use sneaky spy stuff to encourage them to. So as a result, during the Cold War, intelligence operations conflicted with American values and they eroded public trust between the intelligence community, the government, and the American people, the three pillars of American civil intelligence relations. So the lesson here is that we must take care that our response to intelligence activities by other states doesn't undermine our own constitutional system and the principles that give it meaning. Still, ultimately states like China and Russia are refining their intelligence systems according to the advances of the intelligence revolution in order to control their populations and influence ours. And at the same time, the whole of the United States, including the government, the intelligence community, private companies and social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, and the American people themselves are struggling to respond to the transformational challenges that the intelligence revolution poses. Here's the central tension facing the United States. In order to effectively confront our intelligence adversaries and intelligence threats in the 21st century, it seems like we're gonna have to adopt illiberal measures in both at home and abroad. But this was what the United States did during the early Cold War. And by adopting these measures necessary for national security and our status as a global power, we undercut our values as a representative government in a free society. So the United States potentially faces a startling trade-off in the 21st century. Either we create a new powerful national security state that wields intelligence across all its liberal forms, both at home and abroad, or we Americans fiercely protect our constitutional state and our civil liberties, but at the cost of global power and national security. Now this sounds like a rather stark answer to a seemingly reconcilable problem, but there's a saying in intelligence that you should always try to make sure you ask the right questions before thinking you've got the right answers. So I wanna leave you with a key question facing America in the era of the intelligence revolution. Can the American people adopt a new understanding and institution of intelligence to address the national security challenges facing us? And at the same time, can we achieve a healthy balance of civil intelligence relations that preserves American values, liberty, and our constitutional republic? I'd like to thank you all again for joining me. I'm Jeff Rog, and this has been NWC Talks, America and the Intelligence Revolution.