Irregular Warfare Podcast - Insiders, Outsiders and Enablers: Intelligence Support to Irregular Warfare

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Episode 104 examines the role of intelligence professionals and agencies at the tactical and operational levels of irregular warfare while diving deeply into the links between US SOF and the CIA.  Our guests begin with an overview of the history of the CIA and the development in intelligence capabilities throughout the Global War on Terror, and then they discuss ways that intelligence professionals can partner most effectively with other organizations. Finally, they close with a discussion about the future of intelligence collection.

There's a lot of tradecraft that has to get unlearned as well. You know, war zone tradecraft is not real tradecraft. So if you have someone who speaks a language, who's a skilled interrogator, do that battlefield interrogation, capitalize on shock capture at the point of capture, you can get a lot out of it. But I've also seen Intel fail to live up. They can't keep up physically. They're not delivering on the battlefield. They're too slow. They're too timid.

And that has a bad effect on the entire intel process. Welcome to Episode 104 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Louis Taberki, and I'll be joined by my co-host, Julia McLennan. Today's episode focuses on intelligence support to regular warfare. Our guests begin with an overview of the history of the CIA and the development in intelligence capabilities throughout the global war on terror. And then they discuss ways that intelligence professionals can partner most effectively with other organizations. Finally, they close with a discussion about the future of intelligence collection.

Lieutenant Colonel Retired Charles Fain currently serves as the Chair for the Study of Special Operations at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and as an Assistant Professor in the Defense and Strategic Studies Program. He holds six advanced degrees, and prior to his academic career, he served as an infantry officer in the 101st Airborne Division before switching to the Military Intelligence Corps, as an infantry officer in the 101st Airborne Division before switching to the Military Intelligence Corps, where he served in the 2nd Infantry Division, the 5th Special Forces Group, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the Joint Special Operations Command. Dr. David Gio is an Associate Professor of History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he serves as a History Fellow for the Army Cyber Institute. David is also the Director of Studies for the Cambridge Security Initiative. Before starting his academic career, David was an intelligence officer,

first at the FBI working on economic espionage and counterterrorism, and later in the CIA as both an analyst and operations officer on multiple continents. He has served as a Naval Reserve officer as both an intelligence and foreign area officer. He recently co-edited Great Power Cyber Competition, Competing and Winning in the Information Environment with IWI's Maggie Smith. His article, The More Things Change, Humant in the Cyber Era, serves as the anchor for today's conversation. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point,

dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Charlie Faint and Dave Geo. Charlie and Dave, welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Louie, so glad to be here with you and Julie, a big fan of IWI and first time on the show. So thanks so much for having me. Yeah, what Charlie said. Thanks for the invitation. Excellent. So Dave, we mentioned in your intro that you've spent some time working at the Central Intelligence Agency. Can you give our audience a brief overview of some of the historical links between the CIA, the U.S. Special Operations Forces, and irregular warfare? I thought I would start just by saying a little bit about me. Before I

came to academia, I spent almost a decade at CIA in both analytical and operational roles, which is a bit of a unicorn. But one of the highlights of my career was spent as a CIA liaison officer working with Joint Special Operations Command for a few years in the Middle East. And one of my jobs was to serve as a sort of belly button or coordination officer between JSOC and the CIA station. And I came to really admire the flexibility and the sort of mission oriented nature of the operators that I had the pleasure of working with. But enough about me to your question about the historical links. Yeah, I mean, the history of US intelligence and special operations, and I think the intersection between the two actually dates right back to the founding of America, when General

Washington needed troops for intelligence missions to collect information about the disposition of British forces in the colonies. We now sort of understand that to mean reconnaissance more than intelligence. So the word has changed over time. But in fact, there's a statue of the brave but relatively bad intelligence officer, a guy called Captain Nathan Hale, outside of CIA headquarters. And Hale answered Washington's call for an intelligence mission to go undercover into British-occupied New York City, and was unfortunately quickly discovered and executed by the British, age 21. Obviously, CIA wants its officers to have better tradecraft than the doomed Captain

Hale, but he serves as an inspiration, I think, for his willingness to put up his hand, a very biblical, here I am, send me approach. But just speeding up closer to our own time, I think it's worth mentioning the other major military statue at CIA headquarters, which is, of course, of General William, quotes, Wild Bill Donovan. And his World War II era Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, was a sort of proto paramilitary intelligence sabotage and special operations force. Donovan was a brilliant visionary, an energetic leader, but not really a great manager. But he did say memorably

that he wanted his OSS officers to be Harvard PhDs who could handle themselves in a bar fight. Across the lobby from CIA's famous stars on the wall and the Book of Honor, which commemorates CIA's fallen officers. There's a book with the names of fallen OSS officers and men, although there was, of course, no such thing when those people served the country. There was no such thing as CIA. The final thing I wanted to mention on this point about the historical links is that both Special Operations Command and CIA consider General Donovan to be the father or maybe even the sort of godfather of their respective organizations. And you'll be familiar with the CIA crest, the famous one with the shield and

the compass rose and the eagle on it. But CIA's Directorate of Operations has its own lesser known crest, which has the same spear that SOCOM uses. And it's the same spear from the OSS patch. So, Charlie, you guys actually stole that, but we forgive you. It's impossible to sort of overstate how important Donovan was in CIA's own founding mythology. At its headquarters, CIA has a long hallway with a bunch of portraits called the Director's Gallery, which obviously has the portraits of all the directors of Central Intelligence in it. And the first painting is actually of General Donovan, although he was never a DCI. So CIA decided to fudge this history so that the organization

doesn't have to look back to the rather more forgettable Rear Admiral Sidney Sowers as their founding father. Excellent, Dave. Thank you for that history. Charlie, did you want to follow up on that at all? I just wanted to reinforce what Dave was saying, the close tie, especially the origin between the CIA and the special operations community. And it goes deeper than just the image that I just learned that we borrowed from CIA and OSS with the spear. So on many of my deployments, we work very closely with the CIA and any number of other intelligence agencies, both on the regular warfare front, special operations and conventional warfare. So just going into this conversation, I'd just like to say I appreciate the teamwork

that we enjoyed through both the military and the civilian side of Intel. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Excellent. Thanks so much. So, Charlie, you spent a lot of time working at tactical and operational levels as a military intelligence officer in the Army. Can you give our audience an overview of the development of operations and intelligence fusion throughout the past 20 years? Yeah, absolutely. And I wonder if Dave's experience would be similar to mine, but Julia, to me, the biggest change is in terms of capability. So I came into the Army under the Branch Detail Program and I commissioned in 1995. So when we consider what tactical intel could

bring to the table back then, it was actually very little. When I was an infantry officer in the 101st Airborne Division, it seemed to me that all the intel folks did was hand out maps and checks arms rooms. And they got yelled at when the USR stats were wrong. USR is the unit status report. So it was pretty lame. And when we went to the field, the intel shop had to chiefly rely on templating, which was really just the best guess about where the bad guys were going to be and what they're going to do. And they almost always guessed wrong because they had very little experience themselves, both on the ground and at Fort Campbell itself. And other than the scout platoon, the intel team had almost no assets to get after their mission with. So there was no drone

support, access to classified systems were extremely limited, and you had almost certainly no real-time imagery coming into your battalion level command post so usually the battalion commander in the s3 the operations officer with the benefit of having a great deal of tactical level experience having been at the installation longer were usually far better at estimating both enemy composition and disposition so they expected and received very little from their intel shops of course that all changed as the intel branch became more capable advances in technology and doctrine spread up the Intel process enormously, and we started to be able to actually do things for commanders. So now, instead of just saying that Intel drives operations in modern warfare, especially when it applies to

irregular warfare, we find Intel truly driving operations. I think that's the biggest difference, Julia. Great. Thank you so much, Charlie. So, Charlie, throughout your career, intel capabilities vastly improved while much of the U.S. military focused on the global war on terror instead of on conventional war or great power competition. So building upon those ideas and upon some of your writings on the targeting process, also called F3EAD for find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, and disseminate. Do you think the lessons learned in intelligence throughout the global war on terror are transferable to great power of competition or not?

100% transferable. Targeting is targeting. Doctrine is doctrine. Intel cycle is Intel cycle. I think largely it's a matter of application and a matter of convincing folks to use this. What was interesting to me, Louis, especially when we started promoting F3EAD, which was largely developed inside JSOC, although certainly not exclusive to it, and I don't think we came up with it, we just expounded upon it,

it was to get other people to accept and use the process. Part of it was because it was perceived as coming from the special operations community. People didn't want to do that. They were like, oh, that's just something only JSOC could do. That's not true. Anybody could do F3 EAD. Anybody could be innovative. Anyone could exercise some discipline initiative, come up with new ideas, think creatively to get after these problems.

So I think anybody can do it. I go back to another famous strategist, B.H. Liddell Hart, who said the only thing that's harder to get a new idea into a military mind is getting an old idea out. So we have a lot of old ideas in there, in our heads. A lot of them are good. So I think if we expose ourselves and accept new ways of thinking, we could take the intel community a lot farther. Yeah. I mean, just building on Charlie's point, number one, he mentioned BH Liddell Hart. And so Charlie got his alma mater of Yale in the conversation. So I'm going to now abuse the microphone and say that BH Liddell Hart was at Corpus Christi

College, Cambridge. So we're even, Charlie. But no, on a more serious point, I mean, warfighter needs, just looking through militaryINT just wasn't getting to the warfighter that needed it in time behind the proverbial green door. And so we knew things about the North Vietnamese army, but we were unable to act on it because we couldn't get the intelligence downrange to the people who actually needed the warning or needed to be able to act on it. And then just moving to the first Gulf War, I'm reading General Jim

Clapper's Facts and Fears right now, his memoir. And he really goes into some detail about his time trying to provide imagery intelligence to General Schwarzkopf in the first Gulf War. And basically, Schwarzkopf was entirely unimpressed with the imagery effort. And so really, entirely unimpressed with the imagery effort. And so really, that was a driving factor. And so I think like so many things, failure to do the job leads to reflection and, hey, how can we do this better? Great points all around there, Dave. Thank you. So as a follow-up for Charlie, during the global war on terror, the exploitation step of the F3 EAD process often featured soldiers on the objective conducting sensitive site exploitation. What other methods of exploitation have worked for you when putting soldiers on or near the objective wasn't possible?

Great question, Louie. Of course, on the ground is typically the best means of exploitation, but it doesn't have to be that way. You can exploit imagery intelligence. You can exploit measurements and systems analysis. You can exploit anything emanating from that site after you hit it for example if the target was a radio relay station you don't necessarily need somebody on the ground there to establish that you've achieved the desired effects for example if you want it destroyed if you want to just not broadcasting you carry out whatever kinetic or

non-kinetic event you want on it then then the exploitation and analysis of it, you realize that nothing's coming from that site anymore, so you've achieved the desired effect. So there's any number of ways that you can achieve the exploitation analysis and the dissemination aspect that happens after the action's on, whatever it is that the commander decides to do against that target. And then the other next portion of the F3AD is the analysis and then the dissemination. And often, I think we develop the capabilities to conduct that offsite as much as possible for the safety and security of the

analysts who don't need to be anywhere near the objective. Do you think there is immense value in having analysts close to or having personal relationships with the folks on the operational side? Or is that just a nice to have that is totally unnecessary? No, I think that the closer you can have the entire effort to the actual objective is, generally speaking, a better way to do business. But it has to be the right intel people, Louis. It's got to be people that are steeped in the culture of the organization, that are physically fit, that are masters of their craft. They've got to have credibility with the operation folks they've got to be able to provide something to them that is worth their sometimes literally their weight if you're considering aircraft trying to move people around they've got to be able to pull

their own weight they've got to be able to provide the right impact so i've seen a lot of success come from folks who are or are signals intelligence operatives and get embedding with the operators and going on site with them, they can download whatever digital media is right there, exploit it instantly, and then go on to the next target almost immediately. Same with human forces. So if you have someone who speaks the language, who's a skilled interrogator, do that battlefield interrogation, capitalize on shock of capture at the point of capture, you can get a lot out of it. interrogation capitalize on shock of capture at the point of capture you can get a lot out of it but i've also seen Intel failed to live up they can't keep up physically they're not delivering on the battlefield they're too slow they're too timid and that has a

Bad effect on the entire Intel process so bring it back to your original question Yes, I think that would be a good way to do it if you could have dedicated Intel people Freeing up the operators to do operator things, Intel people do Intel things, and you keep that virtuous circle going between ops and Intel, I think you get a lot better effects. Well, Charlie, I think you're right, but you neglected that the Intel people should also be allowed to grow beards, but that's neither here nor there. I wanted to say something about debriefing, because I think really having the analysts around for debriefing is hugely beneficial. In my own career, Dave Geo doing the debriefing is, what do you have to say?

I don't know. What do you want? What do you need to know? I don't know. And so having the analyst there, I can recall one personal story where we had an analyst come out and the analyst basically just took pages and pages of notes asking really probing questions because he was a subject matter expert. And I basically just sat there and poured tea for people because the analyst was taking charge of that. And that was great. Nowadays, when we think, you know, especially in CIA, now we even have mission centers,

right? What's that for? That's to put analysts and operations people as close together as humanly possible. But I was just thinking about, you know, it wasn't always that way, of course. And in fact, during the Bay of Pigs planning, for instance, the analysts at CIA had no idea that the Bay of Pigs, the invasion of Cuba with Cuban expatriates was even going to happen. And afterwards, they were like, yeah, we could have told you that was never going to work. The analysts were entirely cut out of the process.

Another fun fact at CIA is that there used to be an armed guard between the operational elements and the analytical elements. And you'd think, oh, that's because you have to keep the analysts out of the cool operational planning. It's actually the opposite. The armed guard was to keep the operations people out because they were only read into their own programs, but the analysts were read into many more programs across a variety of compartments. And so in the old days, there was an armed guard and there was even a separate

bit of the cafeteria at CIA headquarters for people undercover to eat in. And so when we look at mission centers and how lashed up we are today, it's so remarkable when you think about how far we've actually come in the sort of the history of at least of the intelligence community and CIA in particular. Thank you both. What a fantastic conversation so far. Can you tell us sort of a twofold question? Can you tell us what enablers are? And as you've seen various U.S. Army units work with many different enablers throughout multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, how did units employ enablers effectively and where did you see friction? Absolutely. Great question. So enabler is a difficult term to describe because I don't think it's been officially doctrinally explained in JP 1-0-2, the dictionary of doctrinal terms. focus of an organization. So I am an enabler. I was an Intel person supporting various special operations units, but there are some units that are specifically dedicated to Intel. So they're out there, their mission is Intel Gathering. So they're not enablers, they're carrying out the

operational mission. Nonetheless, I think we can think of supported versus supporting is a good way to envision what enablers do. So majority of my career, I supported the operational commander, supported his or her decision making, gave them the information they needed to make operational assignments. And I helped enable the operation. That could be any number of things from getting somebody paid to get them fed to help them find the bad guys on the battlefield. And it's been interesting over time to see the evolution of how enablers are perceived and utilized, especially in the special operations community. So I got my start in special operations in the 5th Special Forces Group when I was a young captain. And it's interesting in Special Forces, I'm very grateful for my experiences in 5th Group.

I had a great time there, commanded two companies there got my first deployment etc but i think that the special forces regiment will never be as good as it could be because they don't invest in their enablers so special forces as a regiment to the best of my knowledge still true today they don't have any type of robust selection assessment or training process for their enablers. So if you go to be a Green Beret like Louie, if you want to be Special Forces, there's this enormously selective and difficult, arduous training pipeline. You come out the other side, you've got your Green Beret, you're ready to go. You're an extremely qualified person.

There's no equivalent to that on the enabler side. It's a needs of the Army assignment. You can go to 10th Special Forces Group as easily as you could go to 10th Mountain Division. There are some exceptions to that on the navel or side it's the needs of the army assignment you can go to 10th special forces group as easily as you could go to 10th mountain division there are some exceptions to that there are some some organizations some group s2 some group commanders will get involved in in the selection of their individual folks but there's no robust program across the board you you try you compare that to places like the Ranger Regiment or 160th where I served or JSOC where I served. You've got to try to be in those units. It's hard. They have a high level of expectation out of them.

And that attracts a different type of soldier to those organizations. If you know you've got to try out for it, that weeds out a certain number of non-hackers right off the bat. Plus, on the back end, when I got done with Green Platoon and reported in my battalion in the 160th, for example, I was accepted there in a way that I wasn't in 5th Group because I actually had to try out to be there. I did everything that the pilots did short of flying the helicopters, and JSOC largely the same way. So I think that's the biggest thing, the change that I've seen in the special operations community with regard to enablers, and the single biggest failing I still see in some organizations

like Special Forces, who again, I believe, can never reach their full potential until they make an equal investment in their enablers. Dave, I know you have not served in the Army per se, but you've been kind of as an outsider, as an enabler, or as an intelligence support. And other times you've been the main effort. Can you comment on being on both sides of that at times and places, what it's like to be on either side and how to best navigate that? Yeah, I guess I'd put my Navy Reserve hat on, you know, for a little over 22 years, I've been a reservist. And yeah, you know, I think like Charlie, you know, it's not really a great news story, if I'm honest, because a lot of Navy Reserve intelligence professionals are extraordinarily capable. And a lot of times

they would get mobilized to JSOC or to some other special outfit, and they would basically get told, sit in the corner and call her, and if we need you, we'll call you. And so I think just from a talent management point of view, I think we could really squeeze so much more capability out of these folks, at least on the Navy Reserve side. It's, hey, you are a full up round, right? You're qualified and you're going to go here. And they don't make any differentiations. They don't interview.

They would probably be mad at me for saying this, but I don't see any real thought process or deliberation, right? They just pluck sailor who happens to have all of the boxes green and put them at place X. And so I've seen a lot of people, unfortunately, a friend of mine, for instance, was a CIA military analyst and she was brilliant. And for whatever reason, she just did not get on with her group. And many people had bad deployments, I think, because their talents were just entirely wasted. So yeah, I agree with Charlie. And I think that's something that we

could do a heck of a lot better to really maximize the potential out of people who, after all, it's an all-volunteer force, right? We want to serve. That's why we're here. So you might as well get the most out of us, especially as a reservist, because you can't mobilize a reservist. If you mobilize them for a year, then you have to rest them for five, just in dwell. And so even me, I think I was relatively underutilized in my own deployments. And then I hit retirement eligibility with the Navy never being able to really use me for any of the skill sets that I had. And that's a personal frustration. So I do think we could do a lot better, both for the special operations units and also by the sailors, who at the end of the day, I think are very keen and willing and have a lot to offer. Dave, that reminds me of at least the junior levels in the Foreign Service, where

there seems to be no rhyme or reason beyond, are the correct boxes ticked to send you to country X. And oftentimes those boxes aren't things like cultural or language familiarity. You'll see people with years of language experience or cultural familiarity within a particular country get passed over for assignments there, but selected for something else just because they have some specific functional training box checked regardless of their life experiences before joining up. Well, I mean, I was just going to say, that sort of represents, when we talk about intelligence or we talk about special operations forces, I mean, we're really talking about American intelligence, right? The way we do it, because we often say intelligence to mean everything from Russian intelligence

to Chinese intelligence, to British, to Israeli, to whatever, right? We just use the word. And the national expressions of that word are so, so different. And I think for us, both in the intelligence community, in the law enforcement community, and in the foreign service, what you basically see is the sort of the worshiping at the altar of the generalist, where, yeah, I want to be able to drop a foreign service officer in Peru or in Japan or in Canada or in Kabul, and they're just supposed to like work. And that's the same view, I think, in CIA, right?

You should be able to just drop a fully trained, experienced case officer wherever in the world, and sort of it's fungible, right? They're all the same person, and they'll just figure it out. And when I look at other countries, particularly the Brits, just because they're smaller, they just don't have the ability to not use resources in a smarter way. I'm here in London. My sort of day job is at King's College London at the moment. And when I work with the British MOD, they just can't afford to make a bunch of generalists. They just have to have people who are specialists in certain things. And so you can see that in their career trajectory. I mean, they have the classic T.E. Lawrence, the Arabist who spent their entire career

in the region and speaks a lot of different dialects of Arabic. Whereas from what I've seen, we teach somebody Arabic and then we send them to Doha or wherever. And then we send them, then we teach them Japanese and send them to Japan and lather, rinse, repeat. And so I think when we talk about intelligence, or I defer to you, to Charlie on special operations, the altar of the generalist, I think is just the path that we've chosen. And I don't know if it's a deliberate path, if it's the right one, or if we're just not holding our assignments process to the level of deliberation that we ought to. Dave, that's another great point. I was thinking when you were talking about the ways that intel works differently in different countries, my father was in special forces in the early days of SS before it was his own branch. So back when

dad was in fifth group, everyone wore their branch insignia on their collar, the branch that they came from. So in my father's case, it was military intelligence. And when he would go overseas to help train various forces, especially in the Middle East, because that's fifth group's mission, people would ask him what that insignia was, because it's pretty obvious what armor insignia is or aviation or infantry, but we got the squashed bug of the rose and the sun and the dagger and everything else we got the squash bug of the rose and the sun and the dagger and everything else we got going on. It's very confusing. When dad would tell him it was intel, they treated him very differently because in the Shah of Iran times, the intelligence forces were the secret police.

So intel does a lot of different things depending on where you go and what you're doing at the time. And I also like your example of the Brits. I worked very closely with the British. I had a UK deputy twice when I was with the task force in Iraq, and those were great individuals. I think a lot of times people forget how capable the US intel system really is because we are so large and because we have so much money. That's the reason we could do so much. Now, whether we're doing so much well, I think that's an entirely open question. So combining a few of the comments that I just heard. So if you are the main effort,

you're a Greenbrae or you're over in JSOC as one of the operators or you're a commander at one of these various levels, it seems to me like to best utilize your intelligence assets, you need to understand the pipeline, the origins of the culture of where to best utilize your intelligence assets, you need to understand the pipeline, the origins of the culture of where you're getting your intelligence folks to understand generally where they come from, and then to try to get to know each one individually as best as possible to see where their skill sets are. Does that sound like the general path to success if you're working with intelligence enablers? I think you're hitting it dead on.

I'd make it even more specific. It just takes the commander to care. When I'm thinking about my experiences in the task force, especially towards the latter days in Afghanistan, I worked for an individual who at the time was the commander of the Ranger Regiment, and he was in charge of the task force. very first thing he had people brief every night, his outstations, was exploitation. That's literally the first thing he had them brief on the VTCs. And because it was important to him, it became important to the commanders. So anything that the commander thinks is important, anything the commander checks, people are going to tend to do better or be more interested in. And because he thought it was important, that made all of the subordinates care more about the intel process. Rangers always care, but now they care more because the commander's really into it. And that made us sharper and better. And it's just, again, this virtuous cycle of intel and ops working together

and making each other better. So I think it starts at the top. If you have a commander that understands intel and has high expectations of the intel community, intel support, then I think you can get a lot out of them. And in regular warfare and special operations, tend to have that type of commander in droves. Excellent. Thanks. Thanks for that, Charlie. So I'll leave this to either one of you to answer first. So occasionally out in the force, I'd hear things like never trust the CIA or the CIA will take and take and take,

but they'll never give anything back. Do either of you know where those ideas originated or if they have any merit? Yeah. So, so, uh, Louie, I have some strong feelings about this and anyone who spent time in the classroom with me, when we talk about this type of thing knows, knows what I'm about to say. And I think it is largely situational dependent and it depends on what echelon you're operating at. And I'll give a specific example here and I'll turn it over to Dave because I imagine he's going to want to respond to this. So obviously I have a lot of respect for the CIA. I specifically asked for Dave to be on this show with me and I know his background. I've got friends that are in the CIA, but I had a really hard time working with the CIA

downrange. And the reason was largely cultural. Without going into specifics of any organizations or or things that were happening it seemed to me that at the at the bottom operator level like the folks that are out there gathering intelligence or the analysis whatever we get along really well and at the upper echelon at the top level we got along really well for example jeremy crystal would have the senior representative of the cia sit beside him at his briefings. So when we see the VTCs, you see General McChrystal, you see a sergeant major sit beside him, and then you see a senior executive from the CIA. That's how important the relationship was with him, and he wanted everybody to see it. But at middle management, where I had to live, it was a completely different story. And it was very difficult to get cooperation at that

level. It was very difficult to have relationships. I felt like we were being stonewalled. Because our organizational mantra was share till it hurts. Jeremy McChrystal and Admiral Craven behind him, and I'm sure continue to this day, wanted to make sure that we were sharing all the information we could with anyone who could find it of use, which was a fundamental change that I'll talk about a little bit later on in this podcast. But that was not the middle management of CIA. So I butted heads with them constantly. I really did not regard the CIA at the middle management where I had to live to be good partners with us. And I wasn't shy about sharing that. So I think some of its

personality, some of its organizational cultural, but it all comes back to who's going to work with us, who's willing to engage in the type of good faith that we need. So it was hard at my level, good on the bracketing levels, but it could be better. And I think part of the problem I came to understand over time was when you're in middle management, that's the most difficult place to be because you're still trying to make it so if you're at the bottom level of the operators and analysts you're just trying to get through the day you're just trying to go if you're at the top you've already made it but in middle management if you want the type of core operation that I was seeking you have to take risks if you're trying to get promoted if you're really career focused then risk isn't the way to do it so I

attribute it largely to that. So that was my my biggest experience in the operation between SOF and CIA. Yeah, I mean, I've seen a lot of that, Charlie. You know, I guess, you know, something I like to tell the DOD people is that CIA spends a lot of time fighting with itself. You know, so, you know, everybody sometimes can just be, you know, hard to work with. You know, it's definitely not the Brady Bunch, you know, inside CIA. I think a lot of this is personality driven as well. You know, I mean, I think, you know, people sometimes get along and there's trust and, you know, and they've come through a training pipeline together or they know each other from a previous tour or deployment.

And other times, you know, they just don't. I do think overall the agency and, you know, the military work well together. And, of course, there's a three star at CIA, you know, who's sort of responsible for the military integration aspects. But, you know, I think you're right at the sort of the middle the middle management level. It's the it's the worst. And I think there's a couple of reasons for that. You know, and I think one of them, frankly, is just, you know, you need tight operational security. And so, you know, sharing till it hurts that CIA, at least on the on the operational side, you know, is just not a thing that they would understand.

Because, you know, for them, you know, the asset security or the mission security is absolutely everything. And you have to balance that, I think, because it's not really a two way street, if you've got a chief of station, because the chief of station can say, you know, no, you may not come into this country and do X, Y, Z that you want to do. And unfortunately, or otherwise, the military element has to say, you know, chapter and verse, you know, this is what I want to do. This is the flight I want to come in on. This is the car I want to rent. This is the hotel I want to stay at. This is the person I want to meet and on and on and on. And all of those operational details are in there. And, you know, no CIA station chief or chief of operations or whomever is sort of signing off on the other end. They

don't, you know, sit there and try to say, how can I deny this? But I think it can feel that way on the other end, because they have a lot of stuff. There's a lot of moving pieces inside, you know, inside the station or inside the country, you know, and the worst of all possible worlds, you know, is having the military and case officers and whomever else, you know, operationally tripping over each other. And so you need to do a lot of deconfliction. The chief of station doesn't have to give a reason why you can't do something, right? Because the need to know in that situation sort of goes one way, you know, so they're not going to write back and say, well, you can't come here because we have a super sensitive meeting at this time,

at this place with this person, you know, so you kind of feel I think on the outside. And, you know, before Charlie gets mad at me, you know, I've been on the other side of that coin, you know, I'd left CIA. But I was I was recalled to active duty as a J2X director, which is the chief of human intelligence and counterintelligence for East Africa. And I was responsible for 12 countries for the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa. And so I had at least 12 different chiefs of station who all hated my guts, you know, because my guys wanted to operate in that country. And, you know, and they were just like, hey, Dave, you know, it's just not worth the risk or whatever. You know, the game isn't worth or whatever. The game isn't worth the candle. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. I got all of these responses back. And I had this maybe inflated sort of egotistical view that when I showed up, yeah, I'd be wearing

a Navy uniform. But I was a farm grad, and I kind of had the proverbial ring. And I had several deployments under my belt. And I said, you know, look, I'll tell you what you want to know. And think of me as a pair of hands that, you know, sort of understands what you're trying to do as well. And they were like, yeah, thanks a lot, Dave. I'll call you if I need you. And they never did, you know, because although I was formerly part of the team, I wasn't part of the team now. And that hurt, you know, but, you know, I sort of came to understand what they were trying to do. And at the end of the day, they live in those countries, whereas my guys would just be TDYing

there. Why does that matter? It matters because if something goes wrong, it's not Dave Geo who's going to get, you know, called on the carpet of the host country, right? You know, I don't cash that check. The COS has to cash that check. And so that's not a fun day. And so, you know, I think it's a tough balance because it's just not an equal sort of relationship. And I think if you're an operator, you know, in particular, nobody likes to be told, you know, what you can't do. So I do think that there are tensions, but I also think that there are some sort of understandable reasons

for the tensions just beyond, you know, people being difficult. Louis, I think Dave made some excellent points now, and it's great for folks, especially folks that haven't operated in the same circles that Dave and I have over all these years to understand both of those points of view. So well said on that, Dave. And also, I want to make it clear that I don't think SOF gets it all right all the time when it comes to relationships, and certainly not in the early days of the GWAT. Louie, I know that IWI, we like to tell stories on podcasts, so I've got a quick one for you. My first tour in Iraq was, was the group MI detachment commander for fifth group. A lot of Iraq 2004. So shortly after the war took place. And when we were building out our compound, we were by the the the JSOC compound was was directly adjacent to us. We shared a wall. Even though we were adjacent to each other, we were worlds apart. So I did what most young tactically proficient captains would do. I went next door to do some adjacent unit coordination with the

task force and they wouldn't even let me in. Couldn't get in. I was like, hey, we're in the same army. We're all in SOF together. Maybe there's something that my guys could do to help you out, but they wouldn't let me in. And their dismissive attitude was there's nothing that you could possibly contribute to what we're doing here. We don't need you. So I came back to Iraq several years later after being in Afghanistan two or three times. Came back, and this time I was with the task force, and there was a literal hole in the wall between the two organizations so people could come freely back between Fifth Group's compound, the Se of compound camp sarvison is what we called it and the the task

force compound when i came back the third time the last time i served in iraq we were all sharing a jock a joint operation cell so eventually we we the task force quit being so parochial about organizations and started spreading our arms wider and encapsulating more and more people, sharing some information, getting some information back, building that team, building the network to defeat a network. And over time, we started getting it right. And my understanding is it's still that way today. So a lot less parochialism, a lot more inclusion in the force, because what we found is enablers doesn't just apply to individuals, it can apply to organizations. So I think if we take that type of mindset into anything we do in the military, soft or not, IW or not, military or civilian, that anyone could be an enabler and we might be able to help each other.

And there's possible to do win-win, even in the intel community. I think that better serves our organizations and the nation. Charlie keeps using the word enabler, you know, an enabler at CA is someone, you know, who doesn't take away your car keys when you're drunk, you know, like there's just no, there's no sort of, you know, it's just funny, right? I mean, because they really are just worlds apart, you know, but I hesitate to get into, you know, sort of swapping stories with people like Charlie, because you're always going to lose. But I'll add one anyway. I think, you know, the benefits of working with SOF are truly fantastic.

I think sometimes CIA thinks that it's the world's most nimble bureaucracy, you know, and it sort of famously pissed off Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld for getting into Afghanistan first after 9-11. But I can recall a case overseas when I was a case officer working with Naval Special Warfare, and we had captured an al-Qaeda facilitator, and we needed a Somali linguist pretty urgently because we couldn't actually debrief the guy. And so I cabled CIA headquarters and I was like, Hey, this is what I need. And they were like, fill out 51 forms and maybe we'll find somebody. And they were just really unhelpful. And I, as I said earlier, at the beginning of the podcast, I was, you know, sort of the belly button with the sealed detachment commander. And I went to him and I said, you know, hey, I need a Somali linguist, what can you do for me? And he got out this like, Mac, this tough book, you know, that could be dropped from the top of a tall building and survive. So he got out his magical, you know,

special operator computer system. And he starts, you know, pounding away on the keyboard. So he got out his magical, you know, special operator computer system and he starts, you know, pounding away on the keyboard and he's like, oh, okay. It says here that there's a Marine E4 who's a truck maintainer several countries away who was born in Somalia and, and immigrate emigrated to Minnesota or something. But I bet you he speaks Somali. And I was like, okay, that sounds promising. And then he gets back on his tough book and he's like, oh, and I can have an airplane, pick him up and bring him here by the day after tomorrow. And then he asks me with a straight face, would that be too late? Question mark. I was like, no, dude, that, that would be just fine.

Thank you. So, you know, I think softF has certain capabilities, you know, just to get things done. And I think there's also one, you know, that I would say in terms of downrange, SOF could debrief people. They could do certain things that CIA would require many, many, many layers of approval and lawyers and some even, in my view, relatively basic stuff needed to be signed off on by one of the top five people at CIA. And it was in whatever the opposite of Charlie's virtuous cycle is where they made it so that it was important enough that it had to be signed off on by a super senior person. But at the same time, it wasn't that important. And so you could never get it on their calendar or on their same time, it wasn't that important. And so you could never get it on their calendar, right, or on their desk, because it actually wasn't that important. So I

was sort of stalled, you know, for many days, or maybe even weeks, you know, trying to do the most basic case officer functions that could not be approved by my chief of station. And anyway, so the moral of the story is, you know, I won't bore your listeners with Title 10 versus Title 50 authorities, but the long and short of it was the SEAL could basically do almost whatever he wanted if he asked the JAG at JSOC, who I think was probably a lieutenant commander. And it was an email. And he was like, you know, hey, dude, can I do XYZ? Here's the information you need. And the lawyer would come back and be like, yep, sounds good. Go ahead. And so we actually operated more

under his authorities than under my authorities just to get the mission done because CIA, I think, had lost some of the nimbleness. I regret to say, but I think it had lost some of the nimbleness. And so JSOC kind of became the whole filler to keep the mission going. I think you bring up such an important point, Dave, when you talk about JAGs and the relationship with the Judge Advocate General. So my last couple of tours downrange, I did a lot with human intelligence, especially interrogation, exploitation of human detainees. And we relied on our JAGs not to rubber stamp the things that we were doing, but to make sure that we were staying in compliance. Because so much of our flexibility and our ability to get the job done in the National Task Force was due

to our credibility. And it always blows people's minds when they're like, oh, I bet you guys were doing all kinds of this and that to your detainees. Like, no, we weren't. We were doing literally by the book, by the unclassified manual is how we did that. It's not a secret. It's how we did it. We just did it better than anybody else, and we had our JAGs right there with us all the way,

and I'll name one guy. I'll call him Joe because that was his name that worked with us, and Joe was a very successful JAG, would not rubber stamp us, but normally would find a way to get to yes. And if he ever told us no, then we knew it was for a good reason. So if you're operating in the Intel community, it's essential, especially in soft to have a JAG that really understands how to get to yes and how to say no. So that's just a shout out to the Judge African Generals and the way that they enable Intel. So they are also enablers, Charlie.

Is this what you're telling me? 100%. In every sense of the definition that we talked about in this show today, yeah. Excellent. Thank you both. So Dave, a bit of a pivot towards the future on this one in regards to some of your recent articles and work with Great Power Cyber Competition. You've written that regardless of improvements in signals intelligence, open source intelligence, or other intelligence capabilities, human intelligence will always be

necessary. Can you explain your perspective on that to our audience? Yeah, I think we need to stop writing the human obituary. I've read so many, you know, human obituaries. I should start like, you know, keeping a little scrapbook collection. You know, now we just need to hack for everything. And these things keep coming up. And I think it's just wrong for several reasons. I think we're always going to need humans. The other ints are great.

I don't want to take anything away from them. The geoint people are great. The, you know, the NSA wizards, you knowTs are great. I don't want to take anything away from them. The GEOINT people are great. The NSA wizards are great. I do think there's a bit of a SIGINT bias that's kind of built into the DoD and, I don't know, you could have two QAnon conspiracy theorists, you know, and we capture that SIGINT cut. And then people are like, oh, look here, it's true. It's, you know, it's firsthand. And so I think sometimes we kind of don't understand, you know, the limitations of some of the other ints. And also, I think the ways in which we try to ameliorate, you know, human, because you

always hear, well, you know, human, because you always hear, well, you know, they're humans and they're lying and they just doing it for the money or they have an agenda or whatever. And those things might be true, but case officers are trained to deal with bias, to get through people's, you know, sort of axes that they're trying to grind. You can, you can deal with falsification by trying to verify, you know, and cross-check other sources, right? That agent can build up a record of reporting accuracy. And so, you know, just sort of dismissing humans, you know, as kind of classified gossip, you know, I've heard one too many times, you know, and I think it does humans a disservice. And I think it also

does the analysts a disservice. What does the case officers a disservice? Because we're not just writing down, we're not human tape recorders. We're not writing down everything the person is saying. We take our notes, we probe, we question, we ask the same question a couple of different times. We really try to make sure that we have a coherent story. And then the collection management officers help us make sure that what we're reporting actually is pegged to an intelligence requirement. And then the analysts, they're not robots either, right? Like they're not AI, they're not chat GPT.

So they see what comes in and they read the context statement and they go, well, this person has an interest in this, or the context statement and they go, well, this person has an interest in this, or the person has a bias about that. And the analysts take all that into consideration. At the end of the day, cyber ops are great. What happens if, you know, let's take Putin as an example, right? You know, I don't think he, he's not Doogie Howser, right? He doesn't keep a digital diary, you know, at the end of every day, you know, dear diary, tomorrow I plan to invade Ukraine, right? And so we don't just, you know, you can't just hack into that. And so you need people in the inner circle, right? The famous Bin Laden

courier, not that he was a recruited agent, but the point is, you know, that it's ultimately a human thing. The other thing you hear a lot is, well, you know, cyber can do so much, and it's true. But here's another dissertation topic for you. Humans and cyber, I think, interact synergistically, because you can have human-enabled cyber operations, right? Think Stuxnet. How else are you going to get a, you know, a virus onto a closed system, right? You need a human being, right, to actually insert that virus. And then, of course, you know, the other way around, you know, you can have cyber-enabled human operations as well. And so I think we need to focus more on the synergistic effects between human and the other ints and stop trying to like rank order ints, like they're bronze, silver,

and gold. We're going to go ahead and wrap up as much as I've enjoyed this conversation and don't really want it to end. We'll wrap up with just a couple closing questions. So Charlie, real quick with you. So what are some key ideas that you wish IC partners understood about working with soft personnel? So I think this is a compound question that I'll answer as briefly as possible. So when I see us dealing with SOF, I think, first of all, the people that

are dealing with SOF need to get over the imposter syndrome. I remember my first times engaging with SOF personnel when I was not SOF myself, thinking that they know all the answers they have all the equipment they can do everything that's not the case so soft is extremely capable but I think non soft personnel and soft personnel need to remember the fifth soft truth which no one likes to talk about which is most special operations require enabling from from non soft organizations so we're all in this together and we should all think who needs to know who can help me and who can i help and if folks from outside the soft community are keep that in mind and the soft community i think we'll get along really well the last bit i'll have julia

is for people that are enablers in soft if you want the soft guys to respect you if you want to be included on missions if you want to do all these cool things that Dave and I've been talking about, you need to be good at your job and don't try to be good at their job. So if you're in a special forces unit, you're as an enabler, you're an enabler. Go be great at enabling. Let the ops guys do ops stuff. And that's how you get their respect. That's how you get asked out on missions and that's how you ensure that Intel always has a seat at the table. So thank you, Julia. Yeah, that's fantastic. And I can relate to what you're saying and I know many of our audience members will as

well. So for both of you, this is our final question. What are the implications from today's discussion for policymakers, practitioners, and academics working on irregular warfare? So yeah, Julie, this is a great question. So when we talk about implications, I was thinking during our discussion today, a lot of what Dave and I have been saying is not new. If we look back at my father or anyone else who spent a lot of time in Intel community before, I think we'll saw, we find a lot of the same problems and the same solutions. So what we're experiencing in the soft community and in the IC

is more a phenomenon of lessons observed versus lessons learned. So I think one of the reasons that what IWI is doing is so important is because podcasts like yours help reach the people that are making these decisions or will be making them down the road. So when I think about implications for practitioners and academics is that we're all in this together. We need to find a way to work together. We need to understand the cultures and the cultural differences. And as Dave mentioned, the organizational responsibilities and interests that go into it. Spend some time about your own profession and the other organizations you work with

and bring that to the table. When you're at the table, if you're in the room and at the table, regardless of who you're there with, you're there for a reason. So stand up, be an advocate for your profession, for the Intel community. Be able to provide something good

to the people that you're supporting and make sure that you're being as inclusive as possible in terms of bringing all those assets to bear, thinking about who could benefit from the information, the people that you're supporting and make sure that you're being as inclusive as possible in terms of bringing all those assets to bear, thinking about who could benefit from the information, who can help and who needs it. And I think that will make policy practice and academia better. Thank you. Well, that's going to be hard to follow. And I guess I only have a couple of things to add. You know, I think the first one is that the last 20 years or so of the GWAT has been a sort of out of body experience for CIA. You know, I think, you know, JSOC was sort

of like tailor made for the GWAT, you know, like it was just, you know, it was the right tool for the job. And CIA, I think to its great credit, tried to become the right tool for the job. It had to, you know, because there's, you know, young Americans in harm's way. And so, you know, I think CIA became, in the words of former CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz, he said it became predator-centric and military-focused or something like that. And I think that was true. And there are good reasons why it did what it did to try to support the national interest, right? And ultimately, that's what the National Command Authority needed. But it sort of got very tactical and very militarized. And I think we were sort of

robbing Peter to pay Paul for maybe 20 years or so. And now I think we have the opportunity to kind of get back to the classic, you know, I don't know if soft is made for great power competition. And, you know, I know there's a lot of thinking and writing about, you know, they were they were amazing at the GWAT. But, you know, now now what's the next step? Whereas it's the opposite for CIA. CIA wasn't made for the GWAT.

You know, now it's going back to, you know, great power competition to Russia, China, you know, that that's it's, That's its sort of bread and butter. And so I think actually they're in a good place, but there's a lot of tradecraft that has to get unlearned as well. War zone tradecraft is not real tradecraft. And so I think the junior officers who kind of came up serving in the war zones now need to kind of get back to the classical bits. I also wanted to say up, you know, serving, you know, in the war zones now need to kind of, you know, get back to the classical bits. I also wanted to say something, I guess, briefly, you know, for the practitioners out there, you know, especially for the analysts, because good analysts can make sense of a lot of information, but great analysts can actually drive operations to figure

out the information that they need, and then to, and then to sort of task the machinery to go get it. And so you see analysts sometimes being, well, I wish I had this or I wish I had that. Find a way to task the machinery to get what you need. A good analyst can really drive their own collection requirements. And I didn't do that well as an analyst. And looking back, I think I could have done that a lot better. And then finally, I'd like to quote a friend of special operations, David Oakley, who's called the shift from intelligence to enable action, which I think we saw over the GWAT period, to intelligence to enable understanding.

And I think that's going to be the real key moving forward, right? Intelligence is not a crystal ball. It's sense-making most of the time because it's a complex world. And I think we can also do a good job to demystify intelligence. I think people fear what they don't understand. And so I think there's a lot of suspicion in the United States about what are these intelligence people and what are they doing? And that's why I do what I do, is to speak, go on podcasts, write, teach. Those are important to me because I think we need to reconnect.

You know, special forces are, you know, sort of they're always the good guys and the heroes and that's great. And they are. But the intel people are as well. And sometimes I think they've been getting some bad press recently as the, you know, the deep state or whatever. I think they've been getting some bad press recently as the deep state or whatever. And I think we need to do stuff like, you know, like IWI and podcasts because we think we need to tell our own story because I don't think anybody's going to tell it for us if

we don't. And the days of, you know, no comments or, you know, I could tell you I have to kill you, you know, all that kind of stuff doesn't wash, you know, with young people anymore, doesn't wash with observers. And I think we need to kind of get out there. And instead of being reactive, you know, reactive transparency to leaks or bad press or whatever, I think we need to sort of have a positive message to get out there and explain, as we did today, you know, what is special operations? What is intelligence? Where do they overlap? And by demystifying it and helping people understand, they'll then have confidence in it. And it's only through that confidence in a democratic system that we then get the authorities that we need to go back out and keep the American people safe.

Thank you both so much for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you here with us. Thanks, friends. Thank you both very much. And thanks, Charlie, for the invitation. Thank you again for joining us for episode 104 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In the next episode, Ben and Nathan talk to Dr. Alexandra Tinchilla and Colonel Justin Huffnagle to discuss security force assistance in Ukraine. After that, Matt and I talk to Vice Admiral Mark Montgomery and Kurt Sanger about the idea of U.S. Cyber Force as a separate military branch. Be sure to subscribe to Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode.

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