08 April 2006

Finding the Enemy

General Mike Hayden, the senior intelligence officer on active duty, lectured his service on their approach to intelligence collection and analysis the other day. Mike had been pretty quiet since the tempest over NSA “wiretapping” began last year. Perhaps he feels it is safe to address something as innocuous as how his Service is handling the family business.

Or maybe he is picking up an important thread. The military cannot afford the weapons they are trying to buy, and everything else is being squeezed out to accommodate their purchase.

Hayden is Ambassador John Negroponte 's Deputy Director of National, and a former director of the National Security Agency. He has not served in an Air Force job since he left for Fort Meade, and is only the third career intelligence officer to make four-star grade.

Hayden was interviewed by one of the trade rags last week, and he was in an expansive mood. He said it was a good thing that Air Force doctrine had elevated the importance of intelligence, and integrated it as a critical factor in warfighting.

Which it is, of course, but not quite the way the fighter jocks consider it. Everything must contribute to “bombs on target.” Anything else is wasted effort.

The Service has quite a hole to climb out of. After the end of the Cold War, intelligence had been de-emphasized under Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak. He was the lead man in the ascendance of the fighter guys, and in order to make the reductions in the force that Congress demanded, he identified the intelligence communities of targeting and weaponeering.

Hundreds of junior officers had their careers abruptly terminated. By the end of the decade, the Intelligence office on the Air Staff in the Pentagon was “integrated” into an office code in the Operations Department.

Rated pilots were placed in charge of the intelligence functions. They were prime general officer billets, and a fine place to stash men whose time in the cockpit was done.

Unfortunately, these warriors did not understand much about the business of intelligence, and the Air Force found itself increasingly out of the intelligence decision-making loop at the highest levels.

In order to finance the stratospherically expensive F-22 Raptor aircraft (low-rate production cost estimates range as high as $200 million per plane) the Service looked for money everywhere.

The annual national intelligence budget has been described as  approximately $44 billion dollars. That is not the actual number, of course, since that remains classified. But it is “close enough for Government Work” as the saying goes.

Air Force decided to reduce its own investment in intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance, and let the national intelligence community pick up the slack.

Hayden told the interviewer that by 2001, the Air Force 's capability to conduct tactical photo reconnaissance was limited to four pods assigned to the Virginia Air National Guard at the Richmond International Airport

Career Air Force Intelligence officers have complained that there is a glass ceiling above the rank of Colonel. No intelligence specialist has been selected to the rank of Brigadier in over five years, and Hayden is the last one remaining on active duty, though he is not in an air Force billet.

The lack of eligible candidates means that not a single one of the nine Combatant Commands has an Air Force officer as the chief intelligence officer. All are filled by Army or Navy officers, and these are the stepping stones to key appointments in the Services or as Agency Directors.

There is talk that the Air Force is going to change the way it does business, and get back in the game. It will take a while to do that, since these institutions do not change course on a dime.

The General did not mention it, but the high cost of building ships is causing the Navy to go down the same road. Navy has adopted the same programmatic strategy when it comes to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms; i.e., find the necessary capability where it is funded outside the Navy, and hope it will be available when it is needed.

Navy has clearly said in writing is looking to the Air Force to meet its requirements in space because AF is the DoD Executive Agent for Space. The Air Force, in turn, is looking to the Intelligence Community. No one is quite sure where they are looking.

The end result of the last six years of transformation in DoD may be a force that is agile and lethal- but does not know how to find the enemy.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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