Seraphim
11-01-2003, 03:17 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14278-2003Oct24.html
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 25, 2003; Page A01
The U.S. military intelligence gathering operation in Iraq is being undercut by a series of problems in using technology, training intelligence specialists and managing them in the field, according to an internal Army evaluation.
A report published this week by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., uses unusually blunt language to identify the intelligence problems and to recommend solutions. In discussing the training of intelligence specialists, for example, it states that commanders reported that younger officers and soldiers were unprepared for their assignments, "did not understand the targeting process" and possessed "very little to no analytical skills."
In a related assessment, the report also states that reserve troops specializing in civil affairs and psychological operations sent earlier this year to Afghanistan received "marginally effective" training before their deployment. "The poor quality of mission preparation was inexcusable given that the operation was over a year and a half old," it concludes.
The Army critique of U.S. intelligence efforts in Iraq is especially noteworthy, because the Bush administration and senior military commanders have maintained for months that more U.S. troops are not needed in Iraq, and that what is needed, instead, is better intelligence. The report discloses, for example, that the intelligence teams already operating in Iraq have been far less productive than the Army expected them to be. The 69 "tactical human intelligence teams" operating in the country at the time of the study, at the beginning of the summer, should have been producing "at least" 120 reports a day, but instead were delivering an average total of 30, it states. It attributes that apparent underperformance to "the lack of guidance and focus" from the intelligence office overseeing the teams' work.
The report also says that some key intelligence machinery has been misused in Iraq, which raises questions about the high-tech solutions that some at the Pentagon are advocating to improve the U.S. military's performance in Iraq.
Most notably, it is critical of how unmanned aircraft have been used in recent months. At one point, it notes that one such "unmanned aerial vehicle," or UAV, was assigned to find buried aircraft. Also, a major UAV system, the Hunter, was kept idle for 30 days because it had not been assigned an operational frequency on which to operate.
Managers of UAV operations were "overwhelmed" with tasks and were "lucky" to have their aircraft in the right place at the right time, the report says. UAVs fly so slowly, it adds, that they could not get to where they were needed. So, while the planes were employed to try to locate Iraqi fighters attacking U.S. military convoys, "the daily mortar and rocket attacks on bases and convoys became virtually undetectable to the UAVs," the report says.
In another technological issue, the report says that a network that was supposed to link intelligence teams and convey time-sensitive information among them -- as well as permit them to tap into an evolving database -- worked so poorly that it was "nonexistent." The report recommended that, among other things, the teams be provided with satellite telephones -- gear that most news reporters working in Iraq and Afghanistan possess as a matter of course.
Intelligence gathering in both those countries has also been hampered by problems with interpreters, the report notes. Not only was there a "lack of competent interpreters throughout the theater," it says, but those available "were not used to their full capability." Poorly trained soldiers would speak to their interpreters, for example, rather than maintain eye contact with the people being questioned. Also interpreters were wasted on errands such as being sent with troops "to buy chicken and soft drinks," the report says.
Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said the findings about intelligence problems are consistent with the some of the shortcomings she observed during a recent trip to Iraq.
"The fundamental thing you see as an outsider is that there is no mechanism to tell the good guys from the bad guys, whether it's in the towns or on the borders," Pletka said. She said she was surprised that the U.S. military has not developed a national database that could be used quickly by field units to identify former Baathists and others detained in raids.
That lack, combined with a reluctance to rely on Iraqis for that judgment, means that detention decisions frequently are made "arbitrarily, from lack of knowledge," she said.
In an unusual sidelight, the report also notes an instance in which some surveillance technologies appear to be working too well. The sensors being used by conventional Army units are so "sophisticated and accurate," it says, that they are detecting Special Operations troops hiding near the battlefields. Thus, it recommends that, to avoid "friendly fire" incidents, those unconventional forces consider abandoning their "long-standing unwillingness . . . to disclose their unit locations."
Lt. Col. Robert Chamberlain, the top intelligence trainer at the Army's Joint Readiness Training Center and senior author of the study, did not return calls seeking comment. Sgt. Maj. Lewis Matson, a spokesman at the Central Command, the headquarters for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, noted that the report is in the tradition of the Army's "after-action reviews," in which a premium is placed on honest assessments to correct potentially lethal mistakes.
He noted that the UAV involves a relatively new technology, and that "there are clearly still bugs." Likewise, he said, the network problems in the human intelligence operation reflect the continuing efforts of the military to computerize its operations. He also noted that, despite the difficulties found in training civil affairs troops for Afghanistan, "over two years, a lot of great things have been accomplished."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Follow up story
http://slate.msn.com/id/2090585/
Err War
The Army buries its mistakes.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, October 31, 2003, at 3:15 PM PT
Back in Soviet times, there was a Russian army general who liked to bellow, "Analysis is for lieutenants and women." This brute-force approach to military matters didn't serve the Soviet Union well in the long run. Unfortunately, the same attitude seems to be creeping into the U.S. Army today.
Two pieces of evidence shine all too glaringly: 1) an official, unclassified, and highly critical report on the U.S. Army's inefficient-to-shoddy intelligence practices in Iraq and Afghanistan, written by the Center for Army Lessons Learned in Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.; and 2) the removal of this report from the center's Web site, after the Washington Post published a story summarizing its contents.
The report and its suppression make clear that, in pre-war training, combat deployment, and after-action assessments, the Army hierarchy in the field and the political hierarchy in Washington devote woefully scant resources to analysis of what they're doing—and that they hold the analysts themselves in contempt, sometimes lethally so.
Administration officials and their critics agree that better intelligence is needed to deal with the guerrilla war that's escalating daily in Iraq. So the release, late last month, of the "lessons-learned" report (which you can still read on the globalsecurity.org Web site) certainly dealt a shock. Some key findings:
The 69 U.S. tactical human-intelligence (HUMINT) teams in Iraq were expected to produce at least 120 "information intelligence reports" a day, but they've been putting out, on average, just 30—"not because of the lack of activity but because of the lack of guidance and focus" from their superiors.
Most of these superiors are junior military intelligence officers who "did not appear to be prepared for tactical assignments." Even captains "lacked advanced analytical capabilities."
HUMINT databases were stored on separate computer systems, many of them loaded with incompatible software, none of them connected in such a way that the data could be shared. As the report dryly puts it, "Connectivity between the terminals was non-existent, and had an adverse effect on HUMINT mission capability."
Other phrases that pop up repeatedly in the report: "very little to no analytical skills," "lacked the foundations of collective management," "junior officers who had no formal training," "information overflow," "no internal analysis capability," "lack of competent interpreters," "no ability to analyze the information," and so forth.
The report also finds that HUMINT personnel were (and, one Pentagon official tells me, still are) often ordered to take part in four-man units that kick down doors and raid buildings. The report notes that it's a bad idea to use spies in this way: "THTs [tactical HUMINT teams] rely on the ******* they generate with the local population and their ability to collect information. Putting them on a door-kicker team ruins that *******."
But here comes the killer (literally). The report adds, in wryly understated parentheses, that when HUMINT agents were assigned with a door-kicker team, "they were usually the #2 man, who statistically is the person who gets shot." (Italics added.)
In other words, intelligence-gathering and intelligence-analysis teams are held in such low esteem that they're supplied with mismatched computer systems, they're manned by junior officers (or more senior officers who've received little training), they're assigned to risky raid operations that have nothing to do with their missions, and, as if to place an exclamation point on their dispensability, they're put in the raid-team's most dangerous slot.
Why is this happening? Certainly no one in a position of authority explicitly wants to put spies at greater risk or to withhold resources from those who analyze the information that spies gather. A likely explanation is simply that the incentives—the systems of rewards and penalties that govern modern military life—are geared elsewhere.
Careers tend to be advanced on the battlefield or in the chain of big-ticket weapons procurement—not in the shadows of conflict or under the green eyeshade of "support analysis."
The Army has long been dominated by armor and artillery, and decisions about its budgets, missions, and priorities tend to be made by officers who rose through the ranks during the Cold War as commanders of armored divisions. A shift has begun to take place, as high-tech munitions and surveillance systems come into the arsenal, and as "rogue regimes" and terrorists replace the Soviet Union and China as the leading threats—but, at least as it affects military institutions, this shift is still in its early phase. (One tangible sign of a shift is the recent appointment of Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, a former Special Forces commander, as the Army's chief of staff; but even he can push through reforms only so far in the short run.)
And so, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has made great advances in its ability to fight and maneuver with speed and precision on the battlefield—but it's not very good at building the peace, or ensuring security, afterward. In fact, it's regressed at this art. In World War II, the U.S. Army had an enormous civil-affairs department, which started planning for the postwar occupation of Germany in 1942—three years before the war ended. Today, the U.S. Army has almost no civil-affairs branch—"peacekeeping" is not rewarded, in budgets or promotions—and so, in Gulf War II, there was, stunningly, no planning for postwar occupation at all.
Similarly, the Army has done much to incorporate the new high-tech weapons and sensors into its arsenal, but, as the lessons-learned report reveals, it has done little to incorporate them into its training programs, support budgets, or promotional practices—in short, its system of incentives, of rewards and penalties.
The Army will feel no great pressure to change this system as long as the Pentagon and the White House keep critical reports such as this one out of the public eye. The suppression of this report is but a piece of a broad administration policy that views secrecy as a default mode. After the Post published an excerpt of the Center for Army Lessons Learned report, the Army shut down the center's entire Web site. (It has since come back on, but the report was deleted.) The Pentagon recently removed from all public sites the membership list of its advisory Defense Science Board. The official reason is to protect the members from possible terrorist attacks. But this is nonsense. Surely the upper echelon of actual Pentagon officials would be more likely targets, but their names are public. (A more likely, if cynical motive, is to keep secret the board's corporate affiliations; Richard Perle, after all, was forced to step down as chairman—but not resign from the board—after press reports revealed financial conflicts of interest.)
This is too bad for many reasons. Even high-ranking administration officials are realizing that their policies—both for the occupation of Iraq and for the war on terrorism—are floundering. Donald Rumsfeld's leaked memo, earlier this month, was a cri de coeur for fresh ideas. But nothing fresh can flow if they keep circling the wagons, shutting down Web sites, cutting off criticism, and disdaining analysis.
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 25, 2003; Page A01
The U.S. military intelligence gathering operation in Iraq is being undercut by a series of problems in using technology, training intelligence specialists and managing them in the field, according to an internal Army evaluation.
A report published this week by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., uses unusually blunt language to identify the intelligence problems and to recommend solutions. In discussing the training of intelligence specialists, for example, it states that commanders reported that younger officers and soldiers were unprepared for their assignments, "did not understand the targeting process" and possessed "very little to no analytical skills."
In a related assessment, the report also states that reserve troops specializing in civil affairs and psychological operations sent earlier this year to Afghanistan received "marginally effective" training before their deployment. "The poor quality of mission preparation was inexcusable given that the operation was over a year and a half old," it concludes.
The Army critique of U.S. intelligence efforts in Iraq is especially noteworthy, because the Bush administration and senior military commanders have maintained for months that more U.S. troops are not needed in Iraq, and that what is needed, instead, is better intelligence. The report discloses, for example, that the intelligence teams already operating in Iraq have been far less productive than the Army expected them to be. The 69 "tactical human intelligence teams" operating in the country at the time of the study, at the beginning of the summer, should have been producing "at least" 120 reports a day, but instead were delivering an average total of 30, it states. It attributes that apparent underperformance to "the lack of guidance and focus" from the intelligence office overseeing the teams' work.
The report also says that some key intelligence machinery has been misused in Iraq, which raises questions about the high-tech solutions that some at the Pentagon are advocating to improve the U.S. military's performance in Iraq.
Most notably, it is critical of how unmanned aircraft have been used in recent months. At one point, it notes that one such "unmanned aerial vehicle," or UAV, was assigned to find buried aircraft. Also, a major UAV system, the Hunter, was kept idle for 30 days because it had not been assigned an operational frequency on which to operate.
Managers of UAV operations were "overwhelmed" with tasks and were "lucky" to have their aircraft in the right place at the right time, the report says. UAVs fly so slowly, it adds, that they could not get to where they were needed. So, while the planes were employed to try to locate Iraqi fighters attacking U.S. military convoys, "the daily mortar and rocket attacks on bases and convoys became virtually undetectable to the UAVs," the report says.
In another technological issue, the report says that a network that was supposed to link intelligence teams and convey time-sensitive information among them -- as well as permit them to tap into an evolving database -- worked so poorly that it was "nonexistent." The report recommended that, among other things, the teams be provided with satellite telephones -- gear that most news reporters working in Iraq and Afghanistan possess as a matter of course.
Intelligence gathering in both those countries has also been hampered by problems with interpreters, the report notes. Not only was there a "lack of competent interpreters throughout the theater," it says, but those available "were not used to their full capability." Poorly trained soldiers would speak to their interpreters, for example, rather than maintain eye contact with the people being questioned. Also interpreters were wasted on errands such as being sent with troops "to buy chicken and soft drinks," the report says.
Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said the findings about intelligence problems are consistent with the some of the shortcomings she observed during a recent trip to Iraq.
"The fundamental thing you see as an outsider is that there is no mechanism to tell the good guys from the bad guys, whether it's in the towns or on the borders," Pletka said. She said she was surprised that the U.S. military has not developed a national database that could be used quickly by field units to identify former Baathists and others detained in raids.
That lack, combined with a reluctance to rely on Iraqis for that judgment, means that detention decisions frequently are made "arbitrarily, from lack of knowledge," she said.
In an unusual sidelight, the report also notes an instance in which some surveillance technologies appear to be working too well. The sensors being used by conventional Army units are so "sophisticated and accurate," it says, that they are detecting Special Operations troops hiding near the battlefields. Thus, it recommends that, to avoid "friendly fire" incidents, those unconventional forces consider abandoning their "long-standing unwillingness . . . to disclose their unit locations."
Lt. Col. Robert Chamberlain, the top intelligence trainer at the Army's Joint Readiness Training Center and senior author of the study, did not return calls seeking comment. Sgt. Maj. Lewis Matson, a spokesman at the Central Command, the headquarters for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, noted that the report is in the tradition of the Army's "after-action reviews," in which a premium is placed on honest assessments to correct potentially lethal mistakes.
He noted that the UAV involves a relatively new technology, and that "there are clearly still bugs." Likewise, he said, the network problems in the human intelligence operation reflect the continuing efforts of the military to computerize its operations. He also noted that, despite the difficulties found in training civil affairs troops for Afghanistan, "over two years, a lot of great things have been accomplished."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Follow up story
http://slate.msn.com/id/2090585/
Err War
The Army buries its mistakes.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, October 31, 2003, at 3:15 PM PT
Back in Soviet times, there was a Russian army general who liked to bellow, "Analysis is for lieutenants and women." This brute-force approach to military matters didn't serve the Soviet Union well in the long run. Unfortunately, the same attitude seems to be creeping into the U.S. Army today.
Two pieces of evidence shine all too glaringly: 1) an official, unclassified, and highly critical report on the U.S. Army's inefficient-to-shoddy intelligence practices in Iraq and Afghanistan, written by the Center for Army Lessons Learned in Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.; and 2) the removal of this report from the center's Web site, after the Washington Post published a story summarizing its contents.
The report and its suppression make clear that, in pre-war training, combat deployment, and after-action assessments, the Army hierarchy in the field and the political hierarchy in Washington devote woefully scant resources to analysis of what they're doing—and that they hold the analysts themselves in contempt, sometimes lethally so.
Administration officials and their critics agree that better intelligence is needed to deal with the guerrilla war that's escalating daily in Iraq. So the release, late last month, of the "lessons-learned" report (which you can still read on the globalsecurity.org Web site) certainly dealt a shock. Some key findings:
The 69 U.S. tactical human-intelligence (HUMINT) teams in Iraq were expected to produce at least 120 "information intelligence reports" a day, but they've been putting out, on average, just 30—"not because of the lack of activity but because of the lack of guidance and focus" from their superiors.
Most of these superiors are junior military intelligence officers who "did not appear to be prepared for tactical assignments." Even captains "lacked advanced analytical capabilities."
HUMINT databases were stored on separate computer systems, many of them loaded with incompatible software, none of them connected in such a way that the data could be shared. As the report dryly puts it, "Connectivity between the terminals was non-existent, and had an adverse effect on HUMINT mission capability."
Other phrases that pop up repeatedly in the report: "very little to no analytical skills," "lacked the foundations of collective management," "junior officers who had no formal training," "information overflow," "no internal analysis capability," "lack of competent interpreters," "no ability to analyze the information," and so forth.
The report also finds that HUMINT personnel were (and, one Pentagon official tells me, still are) often ordered to take part in four-man units that kick down doors and raid buildings. The report notes that it's a bad idea to use spies in this way: "THTs [tactical HUMINT teams] rely on the ******* they generate with the local population and their ability to collect information. Putting them on a door-kicker team ruins that *******."
But here comes the killer (literally). The report adds, in wryly understated parentheses, that when HUMINT agents were assigned with a door-kicker team, "they were usually the #2 man, who statistically is the person who gets shot." (Italics added.)
In other words, intelligence-gathering and intelligence-analysis teams are held in such low esteem that they're supplied with mismatched computer systems, they're manned by junior officers (or more senior officers who've received little training), they're assigned to risky raid operations that have nothing to do with their missions, and, as if to place an exclamation point on their dispensability, they're put in the raid-team's most dangerous slot.
Why is this happening? Certainly no one in a position of authority explicitly wants to put spies at greater risk or to withhold resources from those who analyze the information that spies gather. A likely explanation is simply that the incentives—the systems of rewards and penalties that govern modern military life—are geared elsewhere.
Careers tend to be advanced on the battlefield or in the chain of big-ticket weapons procurement—not in the shadows of conflict or under the green eyeshade of "support analysis."
The Army has long been dominated by armor and artillery, and decisions about its budgets, missions, and priorities tend to be made by officers who rose through the ranks during the Cold War as commanders of armored divisions. A shift has begun to take place, as high-tech munitions and surveillance systems come into the arsenal, and as "rogue regimes" and terrorists replace the Soviet Union and China as the leading threats—but, at least as it affects military institutions, this shift is still in its early phase. (One tangible sign of a shift is the recent appointment of Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, a former Special Forces commander, as the Army's chief of staff; but even he can push through reforms only so far in the short run.)
And so, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has made great advances in its ability to fight and maneuver with speed and precision on the battlefield—but it's not very good at building the peace, or ensuring security, afterward. In fact, it's regressed at this art. In World War II, the U.S. Army had an enormous civil-affairs department, which started planning for the postwar occupation of Germany in 1942—three years before the war ended. Today, the U.S. Army has almost no civil-affairs branch—"peacekeeping" is not rewarded, in budgets or promotions—and so, in Gulf War II, there was, stunningly, no planning for postwar occupation at all.
Similarly, the Army has done much to incorporate the new high-tech weapons and sensors into its arsenal, but, as the lessons-learned report reveals, it has done little to incorporate them into its training programs, support budgets, or promotional practices—in short, its system of incentives, of rewards and penalties.
The Army will feel no great pressure to change this system as long as the Pentagon and the White House keep critical reports such as this one out of the public eye. The suppression of this report is but a piece of a broad administration policy that views secrecy as a default mode. After the Post published an excerpt of the Center for Army Lessons Learned report, the Army shut down the center's entire Web site. (It has since come back on, but the report was deleted.) The Pentagon recently removed from all public sites the membership list of its advisory Defense Science Board. The official reason is to protect the members from possible terrorist attacks. But this is nonsense. Surely the upper echelon of actual Pentagon officials would be more likely targets, but their names are public. (A more likely, if cynical motive, is to keep secret the board's corporate affiliations; Richard Perle, after all, was forced to step down as chairman—but not resign from the board—after press reports revealed financial conflicts of interest.)
This is too bad for many reasons. Even high-ranking administration officials are realizing that their policies—both for the occupation of Iraq and for the war on terrorism—are floundering. Donald Rumsfeld's leaked memo, earlier this month, was a cri de coeur for fresh ideas. But nothing fresh can flow if they keep circling the wagons, shutting down Web sites, cutting off criticism, and disdaining analysis.