7. Strategic Integrity Done Right
Integrity Emergent: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog 31 March 2011
Captain Porter explained that US policy could benefit
from adhering to a coherent strategic context. He was
concerned that our leaders increasingly are becoming
captive to temporal urgency without being able to
consider a wider strategic perspective. We need to
appreciate the interconnectedness and complexity of our
strategic environment – better described as a strategic
ecology. He said that this argues for a whole-of-nation,
functional approach to development, diplomacy and
defense, versus simply treating these as organizational
stovepipes. He pointed out that such a functional
approach has now been recognized in the National
Security Strategy, the Quadrennial Defense Review, and
the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.
Reference: National Strategic Narrative
Reference: Frog 6 Guidance 2010-2020
11. What Should We Do?
Open Tri-Fecta (1, 2, 3) + Education + Mind-Set (Culture)
Current Cyber-Command Proposed Cyber-Command
TIRED, Expensive, Wasted WIRED, Empowers, Leverages
Electronic Warfare 1 Open Spectrum &
2 Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS)
Computer Network Data Security from Hand to Cloud +
Operations Time-Based Risk + Trusted Humans
Psychological Operations 3 Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
i.e. Public/Global Intelligence
Military Deception Whole of Government/Smart Nation/
Multinational Decision-Support
Operations Security Education in All Possible Forms
Change the Mind-Set & Culture
13. Rest of World Matures
Open Everything Especially the Open Tri-Fecta
14. Autonomous Internet 101
C4I is DEAD—M4IS2 AutoNet are New Memes
Freedom Box .. Solar-Powered Internet
Mesh Networks .. Mass Steganography
Crowd-Sourced Satellite Service (Free)
21. Ten Trends in Education (IO)
1 Web-Searching
2 Blending Learning
3 Free/Open Source Software
4 Open CourseWare
5 Learning Portals
6 Learners as Teachers
7 Electronic Collaboration
8 Alternative Reality including Serious Games
9 Mobile Real-Time Learning
0 Networks of Personalized Learning
22. Key IO Topics
Authorities. Modify every single policy, acquisition, & operations authority.
Organizations. Cyber (9) in every organizations—create the distributed Army
brain.
Signal Management. Open Spectrum now, data security not network security.
Enterprise Services. Simple cell phones, OnStar, regional call & data centers.
Operationalize Cyber. Every Army body is a thinker first, a shooter second.
Execute Full Spectrum Cyber. Civil Affairs rules now, put the best & brightest
there.
Global Command & Control. Multinational, shared information as harmonizer
Agile Cyber Proponency. Everyone on Earth has an IP address. Leverage that.
21st Century Cyber-Warrior. May the crowd be with you—leading minds.
Requirements & Resources. Done right this impacts on every Army element.
Cyber-Command in Three Words: Education, Intelligence, Research.
26. Cyber-IO: The Global Context
“ Secret intelligence is ten percent
of all-source intelligence, and all-
source intelligence is ten percent of
Information Operations.”
Renier Cruz, GS-15 (Should be DISL/SES)
US Special Operations Command J-2 Pit Boss
27. Iraq Case Study Japan Case Study
Strategic Lessons Strategic Lessons
• Secret intelligence manipulated • Long-term total cost matters
• Secret intelligence ignored • Climate change a vital context
• Secret intelligence inadequate • Precautionary principle not present
• Obsessions block global coverage • Intelligence assessment not done
• No coherent iO strategy/message • Integrity lacking in private sector
• Lack of policy integrity hurt bad • Integrity lacking in public sector
Operational Net Assessment Operational Net Assessment
B Kick-Off OOB A One guy—one—got it and warned
C Battle damage F Blown off by his corporation
D Congressional debate F Blown off by the government
D WMD actual status F No learning at all since 1952
F Covert Operations Options F No calculation of consequences
F Global IO Images F No provision for Chernobyl need
F Post-War Insurgency Intelligence F Misrepresentation to public
F Reconstruction Intelligence F Cost to be borne by public
Bottom Line: Intelligence irrelevant, Bottom Line: IO 21 demands 360
Information Operations non-existent view, long view, deep true cost study
Let me begin by observing that last night’s gathering was hugely helpful to me. I came here with a particularly negative view of PSYOP, and that has been fixed. The “do not surrender” success story was for me especially impressive. Still, I am sure that there is much more that IO can do and that needs to be done. I hope this briefing is provocative, and that it reaches those most in a position to craft the future of the US Army.
This has not changed much since the 1990’s, and in fact has gotten worse as our processes have atrophied. Not only does the acquisition community make a lot of mistakes, today it’s starting point is so far removed from reality that every system in our inventory—down to the infantry pop-guns that are ineffective beyond 300 meters—is a de facto failure. We continue to be our own worse enemy.
Command & Control is dead. Transparency, truth, and trust are ascendant. INTEGRITY is the word of the century. Only consensus rooted in legitimacy is sustainable and therefore affordable.
Integrity is about wholeness of view, completeness of effort, and accuracy or reliability. In other words, a lie lacks integrity. Falsified reporting and misinformation lack integrity. Integrity is a natural attribute of large groups and emerges from self-organizing over time. Public access to the truth is a multiplier.
This is the strategy that I have devised for cyber-IO. It begins with accepting reality, sharing information openly, coming together across all boundaries to focus on the long-term. Faith matters—accountability matters. Ultimately Gandhi had it right, not just because he sought the truth, but because he changed the game . The truth at any cost reduces all other costs. That is practical ethics in being.
Cyber-IO is a national state of mind and a national state of being. No amount of operational or tactical excellence, sacrifice, or expenditure can overcome strategic decrepitude. If the national leadership cannot control itself, and our morons, we should expect the enemy to leverage our ethical failures. This past week-end a UN contingent was overrun and killed by unarmed normal Afghans, not the Taliban. Koran burning was the enemy IO tool. We handed it to them.
As you all know, I consider most of our so-called “leaders” to be lacking in integrity—analytic coherence, consistency, and credibility. They have sold us out in favor of their own careers, confusing loyalty to the chain of command with loyalty to the Constitution, focusing on budget share instead of outcomes beneficial to the public. Capt Wayne Porter is in my view a signal—one of several I have seen—that Admiral Mike Mullen is trying to achieve an ethical break-out, even as he prepares to retire.
US secret intelligence has wasted one trillion dollars in the last 20 years because it has refused to accept the fact that 96% of what we need to know is not secret, not digital, and not in English. This is your operating environment. We are the beneficiaries of what others know, not the benefactors. Until we get serious about multinational IO, we are part of the problem.
My latest US Army Strategic Studies Institute monograph covers this, it is free online. Not only does Army IO need to own and re-educate the four secret slices, it needs to get a grip and nurture the other eleven to achieve 360 degree integrity across the Army brain. IO needs to start with humans—who do we know, what can we know, what can be sense. Humans, not bits and bytes, are core.
I am an honorary hacker and in 1994 told both the US Army and the National Information Infrastructure managers, in writing, what they needed to do. They did not listen. We have wasted over fifteen years. Unless our new flag officers break from the legacy systems and legacy mind-sets, the US Army is going to become largely irrelevant to a future dominated by hybrid networks sharing information.
I recognize that you have had successes on the left, but I continue to believe that the current mix of five traditional specialties is a form of Frankenstein, a term used by LtCol Andrew B. Seward, writing for the Army War College in 2004. Personally, I would finesse this by deferring to LtGen Alexander and the strategic cyber-command on all matters having to do with legacy concepts of information warfare. I was one of the pioneers, there is little to be gained from spending $12 billion on vendor vaporware. That is a dead end, Army should not follow the secret cyber-cluster over the cliff. The center of gravity is the Open Tri-Fecta, whole of government/multinational, and the education of the force in all possible forms. We must change the mind-set, to include going multinational—real multinational—as quickly as possible.
This is what the Dutch do. While we have been legalizing bad business practices the Dutch have built the highways of the mind such that data can travel at light speed and low cost at lower layers, not just the top layer. I am one of those helping create the Autonomous Internet, from OpenBTS to crowd-sourced free satellites, the world has changed dramatically and Army IO is—I believe—wildly out of touch with the art and science of what is and what could be. Leveraging the crowd requires that we connect to the crowd.
Like it or not, this is the real world. The US Government has become so dysfunctional that the rest of the world is starting to route around us—we no longer have the influence we once had because might no longer makes right, and legitimacy at the bottom of the pyramid really does matter. “ Because we say so” no longer cuts it. Today there is a premium on clarity, diversity, integrity, and respect for the whole. Truth and transparency are the new currency of international as well as domestic stability. Trust should be IO’s coin.
We just do not have the time to cover all this. Suffice to say that Egypt in particular has been a kick in the butt for the Autonomous Internet movement, and the US Government is neither trusted nor capable of shutting down this Internet at home or abroad. Here are some of the key terms. To the side is shown a small $169 device that turns any cell phone into a satellite phone.
Around the world there is new energy for Open Everything, and that energy is inherently against fraud, waste, and abuse. The collective intelligence of the world is being unleashed and empowered. It is inherently in favor of dignity for all, democracy as the primary process, and an end to corruption.
I am a former spy, I have created a national intelligence analytic center, programmed for imagery satellites, stolen signals codebooks, and managed offensive counterintelligence. My books are all free online. Our secret intelligence community is not just in elementary school, it is in the section reserved for the “challenged.” Army cyber could lead the way on both open multinational sources and methods, and on holistic measures, what General Al Gray in 1989 called “peaceful preventive measures.”
In my view, national information infrastructure took a wrong turn in 1992 and went over the cliff in 1994. I lectured NSA’s first public conference in Las Vegas on this in 2002. Peter Drucker and I share the view that in this era, it is not the technology but rather the information that matters. How we collect, process, analyze, share, and act upon information is the center of gravity. Shutting off USB drives is the equivalent of putting a bullet in your brain so you won’t accidentally blurt out a secret.
Along with maturity comes responsibility. It is no longer excusable for any element of the US Government to be out of touch with reality, including historical reality, and the best available projections of the future. At the graduate level, IO must integrate Sciences, Humanities, and Faith. Security today is about everything, always. The US Army, alone among all elements, has the most to gain from getting a grip on reality by first creating a multinational global information sharing and sense-making grid.
The critical point here is that unclassified IO needs to be dominant if IO in particular and the US Army generally are going to be fully effective. Secret multinational, or time-based secret that rapidly becomes unsecret upon release, is also a major player. We cannot—as we do now—optimize for system high operations that demand that every unclas or secret interaction be treated as an exception.
Here I put it all together. No one in the US Government is capable of doing this for a single service or agency, much less Whole of Government, and certainly not a Multinational Coalition. This is the future. My HUMINT Trilogy at Phi Beta Iota provides more information about the art and science of the possible in this arena. We are operating at less than 20% of our potential.
Wrapping up this presentation, I offer you here ten trends in education from a spectacular book entitled The Web is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education . If the US Army is to be a learning organization, a smart organization, then the US Army Cyber-Command has to be about education, not about closing down USB drives while letting vendors profit from butts in seats and vapor-ware.
This is some fine print stuff. Right now Army IO is right back where Army Communications was in 1994 when I reviewed the Army plan for the National Research Council. You are destined to continue doing the wrong things righter for the next decade, and all of you will be long retired before someone like me is standing here in ten years saying the same thing to your replacements. It’s time we start doing the right thing.
CIA still does not read Facebook pages, not because it cannot but because it refuses to take open sources seriously. At the same time, the US is best pals with 42 of 44 dictators on the planet, and they generally demand that CIA not be allowed to talk to their dissidents. Revolution 2.0 has started, and it is being Tweeted. It is generally non-violent, and it is focused on ending corruption.
This was the heart of a white paper that L-3 paid me to write for DNI Negroponte. Nothing came of it because the stovepipes continue to rule and the $70-90 billion a year we spend on highly classified vendor vapor-ware would be called into question if we actually got good at the new meme in town, multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making: M4IS2. There is no reason why the US Army could not adapt this to its own needs.
I devoutly believe that the US Army in particular and the US military in general are a solid foundation for creating a Smart Nation, but only if Army IO rapidly matures to make the US Army both a learning organization, and an organization able to serve as the hub for a whole of government and multinational decision-support operations. You can do this. I certainly am available to help, and I absolutely wish for the success of Army IO.
Now just to put this in black and white, I offer this quote from a professional that I admire very much, Renier Cruz, the J-2 pit boss at SOCOM during the years when I supported their OSINT program. Take a minute to think about this. Pause. Intelligence is broken and IO—your successes not-withstanding—is non-existent in the multinational “everything always” sense that I have spent twenty years articulating. That is your starting point.
In the aftermath of the Japanese twin disasters of the tsunami and the nuclear meltdowns, now five in number with estimated 100 year containment costs, I thought to offer this slide for online study. IO has enormous potential for good, provided two conditions are met: First, that it have a strategic analytic model that is holistic, persistent, and deep. Second, that it have absolute integrity.
Crowd-sourcing….leveraging the cognitive surplus of humanity…harnessing the collective intelligence of all. IO can be, should be the World Brain and Global Game. Lies and secrecy do not cut it. I have been saying this since 1988 within the government, and since 1992 to the world at large. The truth at any cost lowers all other costs. May the Crowd be With You. [email_address]