SUBJECT: Tactical HUMINT
1. Thank you for asking me to think about the future of tactical HUMINT. In this age of technology, gadgets, and gizmos, I'm pleased to offer my thoughts about our long-neglected intelligence discipline, tactical HUMINT, which in my judgment has a definite place in our force XXI Army. HUMINT, with functioning human brains at work, will be an excellent complement to information from technological wizardry. We can and should create symmetry between technological and human-provided information.
2. The shape of tactical HUMINT forces, however, will most certainly be different than what we know today. Moreover, the intent for seeking and using tactical HUMINT will be altered from what we've been accustomed to over the years. Along with the shape and intent of tactical HUMINT, we also have to deal with the crucial ingredient for exploiting our capabilities to the maximum -- implications for intellectual development.
3. To have a viable role in providing information for Force XXI,
several things must occur.
a. We must adapt our HUMINT force structure to meet the demands
of a fluid and fast-changing battlefield or environment. Matrix
teams of people with different skills and thinking styles will
come together and disband. These teams will be armed with high-speed
notebook computers, tactical satellite communications, and sufficient
bandwidth to move data quickly around the globe.
b. Tactical HUMINT must re-orient its focus to include performing
predictive analysis, protecting information centers of gravity,
conducting force protection operations that include protecting
purveyors of information, conducting passive and active OPSEC,
and defeating tactical terrorism.
c. We must change the way we train our CI, interrogation, and analytic personnel. We must teach them synthesis along with better analysis, holistic thinking and planning, and prediction. To do so we need to enable our learning triad -- schoolhouse, individual, unit -- to attain a coherence of learning throughout the Army and soldiers' careers. In essence, we must balance how we want our machines to evolve with developing our most treasured asset and unexploited dimension of the future battlefield -- the human mind. Because Long Range Surveillance, spot reporting, and other types of tactical battlefield HUMINT will remain much the same for Force XXI as it has in the past, I concentrate the attached paper on aspects of tactical HUMINT I believe we need to do the most thinking about.
4. We've attempted to do much of what I discuss in the attached paper in the 501st MI Brigade. The fine soldiers of the brigade have much to offer the Army with respect to things we've done right, things we've done wrong, and where we believe we should go in the future with tactical HUMINT. I've provided a paper written by one of my CI company commanders on CFSO training -- Captain Kyle Averill, and a paper written by my S-3 -- Major Mary Legere, as additional thinking on tactical HUMINT. With Force XXI, we will have an Army with an ever increasingly voracious appetite for information. Army intelligence has as its raison d'etre to satisfy that appetite and present information in the form that will help the most. But, Army intelligence must wisely use all of its means to provide valid information to commanders before we can become an indispensable aspect of Force XXI.
5. Here are three additional thoughts to leave with you.
a. For the most part, the status quo won't last with the accelerating
rate of change we'll experience as the information revolution
tightens its grip on the shape of the future Army. We must break
out of our old patterns and shape the future, not
be helpless idiots to change that will occur with tremendous sound
and fury.
b. We owe it to our Army as an institution to create and exploit
synergism with good thinking and change in the way we plan and
execute tactical HUMINT.
c. We owe our soldiers the opportunity to grow intellectually
to the limits of their potentials.
d. We must adapt to change that comes. The future is not merely
something out there, abstract, hazy, fuzzy, it is now.
We must re-orient our focus. We must change our organizational
structure to make it relevant and useful. And, we must work very
hard to enable people to improve intellectually. If we do these
things and capture the energy and force that such change will
bring, tactical HUMINT will have a permanent and valuable place
on battlefields and operating environments of Force XXI.
The way we were before Force XXI
While G-2 of the 82d Airborne Division, I was enormously
frustrated with two parts of the tactical HUMINT picture -- counterintelligence
and interrogation. I knew extremely valuable information was
available from our counterintelligence (CI) and interrogation
of prisoner of war (IPW) soldiers, but we lacked automation to
process information and communications to move it in time to make
a difference to tactical commanders. Thus, CI- and interrogator-provided
information was, for the most part, historical, making it largely
irrelevant. Plus, our inadequacies in automation, communication,
and ultimately, thinking, tied us to locations from which it was
difficult to move. We needed to be near communications nodes
and large concentrations of rear-area soldiers performing combat
service support (CSS) functions. We were tied to traditional
ways of using our counterintelligence soldiers -- passive OPSEC
surveys, SAEDA, and low-level security investigations.
I tried to get our CI soldiers to work with CI priority
intelligence requirements (PIR) and perform some intelligence
preparation of the battlefield (IPB) around critical nodes with
varying degrees of success. These were difficult functions then
as well as now because our soldiers lacked and still lack sufficient
intellectual underpinnings to enable them to understand the battlefield,
counterintelligence PIR, rear-area IPB, reverse IPB and so forth
they need to perform tactical HUMINT functions on the Force XXI
battlefield and operations other than war (OOTW) environments.
Force XXI -- influence on structure
Now, with even more complexity, comes the battlefield
of Force XXI and accompanying notions of information centers
of gravity, IPB, reverse IPB, tactical terrorism, and active
OPSEC along with passive OPSEC. Traditionally, CI people have
generally worked, with CI people, IPW with IPW people, and analysts
with analysts. In Force XXI, flexible teams of 97B, 97G, 97Ek
96B will come together and disband.
These soldiers will work together to perform complementary
functions that create a significant form of synergy on the future
battlefield. These soldiers will be mobile and fully capable
of moving around the battlefield to find sources of problems and
information. They won't be tied to fixed facilities because they
will have notebook computers and satellite communications; a theater
rapid response intelligence package (TRRIP)-like capability will
reside on each piece of automation equipment. Analysts will help
interrogators ask intelligent questions of prisoners, detainees,
line-crossers, and infiltrators. These questions will come from
PIR indicator analyses specifically tied to the situation at hand,
whether it be order of battle or political situation in an OOTW
scenario, thereby always tying the efforts of our synergistic
matrix team to information needs of commanders.
Counterintelligence soldiers will work with interrogators
and order of battle analysts to obtain information dealing with
force protection, and enemy special operations forces (SOF) and
their potentialities, including surveillance, reporting, destruction
through active sabotage, or tactical terrorism. The CI soldier
of Force XXI will work with a very fast, light-weight notebook
computer loaded with HUMINT software that is logical and uniform
at all levels of command, and has meaningful, manipulable fields
that help soldiers sort information into categories and correlations
with blazing speed. Armed with these tools and improved mental
capabilities, soldiers will be able to send digital information
around the battlefield, exchange files with other teams, access
databases in the U.S. from information-exploitation sites, and
exchange ideas with other analysts through chatter on electronic
mail.
Roles and missions of Force XXI tactical
HUMINT forces
In Force XXI, several roles and missions for tactical HUMINT will exist, some fairly traditional, others dramatically different than anything we've engaged in before as the following paragraphs discuss.
For the first time, the Army can focus its HUMINT efforts through help from high-speed, computing equipment. This equipment will grow in capability as will the human intellect if we make the right commitments to developing our capabilities to think. Powerful automation equipment, such as ASAS all-source and ASAS single-source will enable counterintelligence analysts to sort through massive amounts of data, establish relationships through correlation, obtain overhead- and ground-induced imagery, relate what's happening in one location with another or several others, perform a detailed terrain analysis, and perform predictive intelligence. From predictions coming from interaction between human intellect and silicon, counterintelligence personnel, in cooperation with indigenous police, military police, and host-nation security forces will be able to thwart hostile actions against our forces.
No other force in the world is, or will continue to be, as vulnerable to interdiction of automation and communications as we are. We will maintain this dubious distinction as long as we are the epicenter for information and attendant technology. Thus, we must anticipate that a skilled and determined foe will come at our information centers of gravity with great guile, energy, and in some cases violence.
CI soldiers will conduct IPB of space around and
over these centers and perform reverse IPB to understand how enemy
forces could come at these hubs of automation, communications,
and intellectual power.
CI soldiers will provide commanders with overhead imagery, digital hand-held imagery, webs of information flows, and concentric rings of protection composed of CI, military police, electronic intrusion experts, combat forces, host-nation police, CI, and combat forces. These target folders will help commanders protect their information centers of gravity and other valuable resources.
Penetration and vulnerability analyses will correlate well with IPB and reverse.IPB. On top of concentric rings of protection, CI people will emplace and enact webs of information through information-sources that have been built through extensive contacts and liaison with members of the concentric rings of protection and the host-nation support of any country we're supporting. Our CI personnel will receive support from national analysts working the problem at hand.
The goal of tactical and national interaction being to anticipate and defeat enemy attacks on our information centers of gravity with the synergistic power inherent to a collapsed VENN-diagram of automation, communications, collection, and analysis/synthesis. I advocate an active, aggressive role for our CI personnel in the bid to deny, delay, and thwart enemy efforts to destroy, damage, or manipulate our information centers of gravity. Our CI personnel will anact their aggressiveness through interaction with supported commanders and a web of analysts scattered around the world through near-interactive computers and communications.
Specifically, our CI personnel will know enemy special operations forces (SOF) and tactical terrorism force modus operandi extremely well and particularly in the context of operational environments. As such, our CI personnel must have a vision of how an opponent will attempt to gain information through surveillance, destroy our centers of gravity, destroy our personnel, and affect our soldiers' state of morale. Once we have an accurate expectation of what the enemy wants to do and develop an idea of how he intends to accomplish what he wants, our CI soldiers can set out to deny information and thwart enemy attempts to affect adversely our centers of gravity, soldiers, and morale. In this approach, I advocate a very active and aggressive modus operandi for CI soldiers in which they are aggressively involved in gaining information pertaining to the opponent's capabilities and intentions, designing ways to thwart those plans, and helping to execute denial.
CI personnel will have to think about protecting purveyors of information, not simply the hardware and structure where information resides and gets used. In particular, CI soldiers will have to protect contractors who repair our machines of war, automation equipment, and communications equipment. In many respects, information minds have turned into knowledge and understanding is much more valuable and vulnerable than hardened facilities where information operations occur.
But these operations will divide into three paths.
The FIRST PATH, most usually taken, involves traditional OPSEC. Traditional OPSEC is passive. It includes avoiding patterns, using camouflage, cover, and concealment, knowing enemy intelligence collection and maintaining communications security.
The SECOND PATH, rarely taken, involves active OPSEC and manipulating OPSEC indicators to support tactical deception. The concept is for CI personnel to know and understand how opponents make decisions, what information sources they depend upon to make those decisions, how they use automation and communciations to make decisions, what forms of feedback opponents need and seek, and how they communicate decisions. Our CI personnel will put their minds into the minds of opponents to understand the importance opponents attach to seeing or hearing certain things provided by the very people our CI personnel are supposed to be denying information -- those who engage in surveillance operations and report what they see to enemy decision makers.
With this knowledge, CI soldiers, in activist roles, advise commanders on what to show enemy commanders and when to show it to create an illusion in the mind of opponents and their decision making apparatus. This active OPSEC role provides support to tactical deception. For example, if CI analysis indicates a high probability that an enemy long-range surveillance team is observing from a given location, rather than taking them out, show them things that cause the enemy commander to believe what the friendly commander wants him to believe.
What better person to advise the commander on tactical deception than soldiers schooled and skilled in the opponent's intelligence collection operations, decision making, and susceptibility to deception? Of course, embarking on such a venture will require a radical overhaul of the way we train our CI soldiers in our institutions and in our units. This approach presents a slightly different approach from the past where CI support to deception was decidedly less active, but is nonetheless what the future portends for those bold enough to seek new roles and missions of counterintelligence for Force XXI.
The THIRD PATH, almost never taken, involves CI personnel actively planning and executing counter-reconnaissance operations. In some situations on the Force XXI battlefield, our opponents won't be highly technical and will rely on traditional HUMINT to collect information. In other situations, our opponents will be technologically advanced and will use HUMINT to balance technical collectors and to seek intentions. Regardless of sophistication, we must assume an intelligent enemy will actively seek valuable information.
Our CI personnel, through interaction with warfighters and understanding their PIR, will understand critical places and information centers of gravity. Through good thinking, IPB, and reverse IPB, they will know where opponents could observe our critical locations and information centers of gravity. It follows then that CI personnel will be involved in planning and executing the means to destroy those elements of the opponents providing information to opposition decision makers unless we want to leave the enemy collection efforts in place to support our deception operations.
Along with our information centers of gravity, another vulnerability is our country's strategic center of gravity -- our national will. In the future, opponents will attack and attempt to manipulate our national will through activities at the tactical level of war. Ironcially, their medium for this assault will be our own media, SATCOM, instantaneous reporting, and our aggregate psyches that believe we won't and can't suffer large losses in military endeavors whether it be fighting a conventional or OOTW opponent.
Some historical precidents include Vietnam, the Gulf War and our attendant fears of large casualties, and Somalia where 18 American deaths changed national policy. From these historical precidents, an opponent can easily deduce that our national will is easy to manipulate. The unwitting helpers in these manipulations are our media. Thus, our future opponents will target and attack our soldiers, assassinating, bombing, kidnapping with malice and forethought -- activities that will be part of a synergistic strategy to attack the glaring vulnerability of our national will.
Terrorist acts will be perpetrated by special operations
forces (SOF), agents, or dissidents, and will include assassinations,
kidnappings, bombings, using weapons of mass destruction and sabotage.
Our CI soldiers will be heavily involved with anticipating, denying,
and attacking terrorists. This problem set, a Force XXI role
and mission, is a BATTLEFIELD/ENVIRONMENTAL TERRORIST situation,
which differs from the traditional notion of terrorism we've been
dealing with over the years. The strategy and commitment of terrorist
soldiers against our vulnerabilites could be linked not only across
levels of war, but also globally, from region to region. Our
CI soldiers need to understand these linkages and relationships
Overarching training implications for tactical HUMINT.
We will need to enable our soldiers to be more productive through knowledge and understanding than they currently are. The Army must be a totally learning organization in which our soldiers learn something new every day and put forth a positive attempt to develop the intellect similar to how most people attempt to develop their bodies in physical training. A firmer partnership among the triad of learning -- institution, individual, organization -- must take hold. The Army must develop a sound institutional vision and clear articulation of expectations for each aspect of the triad. Coherency, the clarion call, means what soldiers learn at different stages of their careers and at different locations makes sense and relates with previous and future learning.
In any imaginable schema, soldiers will take on an even greater share of the learning burden. They must become self-directed learners, beginning with defining a learning requirement, then developing a plan of action to satisfy the requirement, and executing a plan of learning without the benefit of a formal institution or a resource director guiding them in the learning experience. The following paragraphs offer some ideas on training implications for tactical HUMINT.
We'll have to provide our soldiers with a solid intellectual foundation during the infrequent times they return to our training institutions. The intellectual foundations they form in schools will grow and develop in their organizations and through self-directed learning. We will have to help our soldiers think about thinking much more than we do now. We will have to teach our CI people (1) fundamental knowledge pertaining to opponents they will be facing, (2) basics of CI PIR development and how to perform CI PIR indicator analysis to guide their collection and force protection activities, (3) basics of CI support to force protection source operations (CFSO) in tactical and language driven scenarios, (4) how to use interpreters to question prisoners about CI-related matters, (5) and basics of automation and terrestrial and satellite communications, to name just a few of the specialized skills for operating in Force XXI.
Additionally, CI personnel will have to know the basic theory involved in tactical deception so they can advise commanders on how best to deceive given the enemy situation, enemy capabilities to collect information against friendly forces, how the enemy uses information to make decisions, and what type of feedback the enemy will seek. CI personnel will have to know the basics of opponent decision-making, not only decision-making processes but also informational inputs decision-makers will believe and rely upon. CI personnel will need to know how the opponent's process of deception relates to enemy efforts to find, destroy, or manipulate images in friendly information centers of gravity.
Interrogators must have a better understanding of what commander's information requirements are; they must understand PIR and the process of developing PIR. They must understand PIR indicator analysis in which they develop indicators that serve as a framework and guide for developing the very questions they ask prisoners, detainees, or suspects. Along with sustaining proficiency in their language, interrogators for Force XXI must understand some fundamentals of U.S. tactics so they can relate their interrogations to the friendly scheme of maneuver.
They must understand their opponent's modus operandi for command and control and the fundamentals of the opponent's order of battle, equipment, doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures. These knowledge requirements will remain the same in theory for OOTW; however, the essence of what our interrogators will have to know and understand between more traditional combat operations and OOTW will differ dramatically. The challenge for our interrogators will be to prepare for a conventional combat situation while also preparing for OOTW situations. The problem sets and thinking challenges are different. Perhaps the best bet is to teach them the basics of both ends of the spectrum with the understanding that their units will broaden their base of knowledge and prepare them for situations located in the middle of the extremes. Additionally, these soldiers will have to learn and sustain proficiency in their language.
Another requirement our interrogator of Force XXI
will have is to be comfortable with matrix teams in which 97Es
work with 96Bs and with 97Bs, understanding what each brings to
the effort and how each MOS complements the other. We will need
to train these soldiers to achieve synergy in these teams.
Specific HUMINT Training Implications
to Support Force XXI
The Army's training institutions need to provide CI, interrogation, and analytic soldiers a solid intellectual foundation for helping them think about what it is they are supposed to be doing. If the Army buys into the new thrust I've articulated for CI, interrogator, and analytical soldiers, we will have to invest more in the school-base. Additionally, we'll have to re-orient our learning philosophies to help these soldiers understand the environments they will operate in, have knowledge and understanding to hook in to as intellectual moorings, and weave coherent, successive levels of complexity through basic, BNCOC, ANCOC levels of the Army's school system.
Information will be the sine qua non of Force XXI. Intelligence operations will provide access to competitive information (that which is valuable because both sides in a duel compete for it). Thus, the Army needs to improve its training for soldiers to learn how to collect, analyze, and synthesize information to make it presentable and usable to warfighters.
We've spent great amounts of money on simulations involving combat arms operations. Simulations such as TACSIM have provided the intelligence scenarios for these simulations. But unfortunately we've spent very little on developing simulations to develop detailed intelligence operations. TACSIM models and simulations that should provide the means to teach analysis and synthesis don't. These models, for the most part, make a mockery of the complexity of modern information operations and are largely inadequate to teach the thinking and planning we need to execute intelligence support to Force XXI -- planning, collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, denying, and manipulating.
In the new century, intelligence personnel will only receive bits and pieces of information, not self-explanatory wholes requiring no thinking. Our analytic and collection personnel will have to break apart requirements into pieces through indicator analysis then task collection systems or HUMINT for bits and pieces of information relating to the requirements. Both of these processes take highly developed and skilled thinking, a capability most people don't have but can learn. Good simulations and scenarios made for areas of the world and driven by language could be a way to help our soldiers prepare for HUMINT operations in Force XXI.
Until we make a concerted effort help our people learn how to think, not what to think, through a coherent effort among schoolhouse, unit, and individual, our efforts to be major participants in the information revolution will remain mediocre at best. Until we treat HUMINT with the same degree of urgency and worth as SIGINT and IMINT, we will continue to miss important sources of information. In short, we'll miss out on information that can help us determine or predict specificity and intentions, characteristics many types of commanders will need to wage operations in the 21st century.
In the 501st MI Brigade, we require our CI, interrogator, MDCI, and order of battle personnel to perform several sophisticated intellectual functions in our efforts to protect our information centers of gravity from attack. Some of these functions include PIR indicator analysis, IPB in urban and rural areas, reverse IPB, analysis of how enemy SOF would attack or surveil, analysis of agent and terrorist operations, concentric ring of protection analyses, web of information analyses, vulnerability and penetration analyses.
Now, how well prepared do you believe our 97B, 97G, and 96B personnel are when they arrive? How well prepared do you believe warrant officers are to perform this type of analysis? How many soldiers of any rank are prepared to perform this type of analysis, and then turn the result of their analysis into a meaningful plan of active-defense for commanders in charge of information centers of gravity? The answer is, in my experience, very few, if any. Additionally, these skills are difficult to teach because the people don't have a solid intellectual foundation. Instead, the schoolhouse teaches techniques, roles and missions, once useful (cold war era) but for the changfe in roles and missions for Force XXI, somewhat outdated. What we need is an intellectual foundation built upon information-age requirements and a vision of roles and missions of CI and interrogation personnel built to support commanders in all kinds of scenarios for successfully conducting operations in the 21st century and Force XXI operations.
We also need to spend time and effort in developing realistic CFSO training to enable our CI soldiers to learn not only tactics, techniques, and procedures, but the context in which such operations could occur and what specifically their jobs would be. At the center of all CFSO operations lies the friendly commander. His counterintelligence PIR must drive all CFSO operations; such operations will depend upon information. But how will the CI soldier of the 21st century know what information is important and what is meaningless in a huge sea of available information? The answer lies in focused PIR.
Unfortunately, in many situations confusion abounds -- in the minds of CI soldiers and in the minds of supported commanders concerning PIR. Often, PIR are broad and meaningless, devoid of careful thinking. We must challenge ourselves to teach commanders how to couch their PIR knowing that PIR come from a vision of the fight, concept of operation, center of gravity, and high-payoff target analyses. From a CI perspective, our commanders must learn that PIR involve what it is they want to protect, specifically including soldiers, traditional centers of gravity, information centers of gravity, and host-nation assets. Our CI soldiers must learn to take PIR, break them apart, and develop a collection plan and plan of operations that always hooks one way or another back to the commander's PIR. CI personnel must acquire not only the capability to develop friendly commander PIR but also to satisfy commander's PIR with resources at their disposal.
With a doctrine of force projection, our CI and interrogation soldiers must prepare for movement to and operation in a foreign country often training for deployment from CONUS bases. Training must include learning to interact with indigenous people in a potential host-country. It is through the informatin that the indigenous populace provides that we can get to the essence of force protection. If direct interaction isn't feasible, simulation can help our soldiers train.
CI and interrogation soldiers of a CONUS-based unit must know and understand what they will be involved with when they deploy, and they must have a vision of the fight or of OOTW. They need to know and articulate what their information requirements will be when they enter an alert condition, are enroute to an engagement area, after landing in a foreign country, and during actual operations. Their information and force protectins requirements, once again, will come from the minds of supported commanders. Additionally, our Force XXI CI and interrogation soldiers will need to know the physical environment of the operational area they will operate in and modus operandi and capabilities of foes.
Armed with a vision of operations, vision and PIR of supported commanders, knowledge of the environment where they will operate, and knowledge of threats, training can become practical and realistic. Training should include, to the greatest extent practicable, working with host-nation people and against opponents speaking a foreign language. CI and interrogation soldiers also need to train with people who speak the relevant foreign language; inevitably, they will have to interact with people from a host-nation who won't necessarily speak English.
Too much analytical training emphasizes mechanical processes of ADP or concentrates on cold-war era bean-counting approaches to thinking about military operations. We can't hope to enable the potential lying dormant in our soldiers minds to spring forth without a serious effort to teach them a graduated sequence of analytical and higher-level thinking skills. We must teach them to think using analysis and synthesis. We must teach them to look at situations, environments, and events holistically. Our analysts must be capable of understanding and using link-analysis, of searching for and answering mysteries, and predicting events from synthesis of both disparate and obviously connected pieces of information. How do we teach such intellectual skills?
First, we must agree with the principle I'm evoking and put money and effort into developing people's minds and intellectual skills. Such effort will take a major paradigm shift because traditionally, we spend more money on gadgets and gizmos than on developing intellects of our soldiers.
Second, we must develop simulation that promotes our soldiers' abilities to practice thinking skills with increasing degrees of complexity; conditions and standards will remain intertwined and absolutely related.
Third, we must view the mind as an additional and virtually undeveloped aspect of the Force XXI battlefield. As such, we must challenge our soldiers' minds, develop their intellects, and encourage them to think beyond the narrowness of the confines of traditional education and TRADOC's institutions. We must provide them with sufficient intellectual underpinnings their units can start building on when they arrive.
Part of the analytical challenge will evolve when skills of order of battle analysts merge with those of interrogators and CI personnel. With these people working together, they can learn about the needs of each discipline, combine their intellectual capabilities, capture strengths and negate weaknesses of each other, and develop a sense of intellectual synergism that soldiers operating alone in a single MOS can't hope to achieve. The ideal team would comprise varying numbers of MOS 96B, 97E, 97B, and 97G working together as a team in analysis and operations.
Fourth, force projection HUMINT teams will be able to develop hypotheses and use notebook computers and SATCOM to go electronically, through virtual reality, to analytical enclaves to obtain more information, discuss and debate hypotheses, and seek assistance in obtaining supplementary information or information the deployed team can't get to. What I like best about this approach though is the idea of presenting a hypothesis or series of hypotheses and asking others to challenge, debate, agree, or disagree. Such an approach has a wonderful, exciting potential to it.
Once we achieve, through analytical broadcast, hypotheses presentation and debates, exchanges of information, formulation of attendant questions, and developing and satisfying questions involved with additional mysteries, we'll have the aggregate intellects of hundreds of very bright people working on a problem instead of just the few forward-deployed. An analyst WAN could stretch from tactical to operational to strategic levels of war. This is one of the great things technology can help us do. It doesn't replace human beings, but provides a venue for connecting the minds of a multitude of people in an intellectually synergistic effort to use aggregations of intellects to make sense out of chaos, provide wisdom to collection, and ensure HUMINT efforts work parallel with SIGINT, and IMINT efforts.
Tactical HUMINT must be a part of a whole composed of signals intelligence (SIGINT), imagery intelligence (IMINT), and HUMINT. When it is, we can achieve synergy at the tactical level, powerful by itself, but much more powerful if we realize how tactical-level unfolds into operational-level HUMINT, and how operational-level HUMINT unfolds into strategic-level HUMINT. We must educate people to know and understand what tactical HUMINT can and can't do. We have to educate commanders to develop well-stated, precise PIR for the deep, close, and rear and how each of these elements of the battlefield framework relate and form a symmetry with the battlefield framework of our opponent, and how to create purposefully asymetrical situations to leverage for advantage.
The more precise commanders are in articulating PIR, the better off our HUMINT soldiers will be. Everything our interrogators, CI, order of battle, and MDCI soldiers do must tie to commanders' PIR. With well-stated PIR, good indicator analysis, and good collection planning to obtain commander-required information, tactical HUMINT can be indispensable to Force XXI commanders.
Information will be so important that our HUMINT teams will go forward to screen and speedily interrogate opponents instead of waiting for captured opponents to come to the rear. Our Force XXI commanders will need an edge in the desperate fights that await us in the 21st Century. Tactical HUMINT, coupled with the vagaries of a fast changing situation has the potential to provide that edge if we break our old patterns and shift to a new way of thinking, planning, and operating. At the upper tactical or lower operational level of war, where we will have joint interrogation facilities (JIFs) or combined interrogation facilities (CIFs), the same teams will have more time to mount determined and well-planned efforts to obtain information from the most resolute of foes. Tactical-level HUMINT won't have the time to engage in these types of activities because of the short-life of information and pressing needs of commanders for immediately valuable information.
With well-stated PIR, good CI indicator analysis,
and thorough and coordinated collection plans, our CI personnel
can make a difference in any operating environment. HUMINT teams
of the 21st century will be able to counter enemy efforts actively
to obtain information about friendly centers of gravity and use
information to counter enemy efforts to surveil and attack those
centers. Our tactical HUMINT has a great future for supporting
commanders in Force XXI. What we need to bring this potential
to life is a bold vision, plans to bring that vision to life,
and a commitiment to seek synergy through intellectual development
of our soldiers and interaction among our disciplines of intelligence.