Irregular Warfare Podcast - Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: US Intelligence in a Changing World

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

This episode focuses on the US intelligence community and its role in supporting the spectrum of national security missions, from the heavy counterterrorism focus of the post-9/11 era to today's environment of strategic competition. Dr. Amy Zegart, author of the book Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence, and Ms. Susan Gordan, former principal deputy director of national intelligence, join the podcast to explore the evolution of the intelligence community, particularly since 9/11. They explain the increasing influence of technology and cyberspace and reflect on ways in which the intelligence community might continue to adapt and retain its competitive advantage while the United States continues to face a multitude of threats and missions across all domains of warfare. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The revolution of open source intelligence and the ability of anybody with an internet connection to collect, analyze, and they're accelerating the timeframe that intelligence needs to operate, and they're changing what has to be done by clandestine capabilities and what doesn't need to be done inside governments. My greatest worry on CT isn't the analysis, it isn't even the policy, it's that I don't think that's a mission you can do over the horizon. And so much of our awareness of what's going on is because we're present in those places where those threats are emergent. And so I worry that as our footprint becomes smaller, as we bring our troops home, and I think that's a really good thing to do.

But this notion that we're going to be good against the CT threat without being present in some of the most dangerous places in the world, I think is just making ourselves feel good. Welcome to Episode 58 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I am your host, Shawna Sinnott, and my co-host today is Laura Jones. Today's episode focuses on the U.S. intelligence community and its role in supporting the spectrum of national security missions, from the heavy counterterrorism focus of the post-911 era to today's environment as strategic competition. Our guests begin by establishing the evolution and characteristics of the post-911

intelligence community that enabled it to effectively support the range of counterterrorism missions around the globe. They then evaluate the factors that have challenged the IC in recent years from the increasing influence of technology in cyberspace to the nature of supporting operations in novel and non-permissive environments worldwide. They conclude by reflecting on ways in which the IC might continue to adapt and retain its competitive advantage while the United States continues to face a multitude of threats and missions across all domains of warfare. Dr. Amy Zeger is the Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Professor of Political Science by courtesy at Stanford University. She specializes in U.S.

intelligence, emerging technologies and national security, grand strategy, and global political risk management, and has served in a number of advisory capacities for the U.S. government. Dr. Ziegert's most recent book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, The History and Future of American Intelligence, serves as the foundation for this discussion. The Honorable Susan Gordon served as the fifth principal deputy director of national intelligence at the Office of the Director of National intelligence from August 2017 to August 2019. In this role, Ms. Gordon was a key advisor to the president of the National Security Council and led the 17 member intelligence community, a role which was the culmination of over three decades of government

service. Ms. Gordon currently serves as a fellow at Duke and Harvard universities, as well as on numerous boards of organizations focused on the development of national security capability and competitiveness. 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 is our conversation with Dr. Amy Ziegert and Sue Gordon. Dr. Amy Ziegert, Sue Gordon, thank you so much for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare

Podcast. We're really looking forward to this conversation about the role of the intelligence community in supporting the emerging threats in national security. Well, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having us. Really excited to be here with you, Shawna. So we're just going to start with some scene setting. When we think about the intelligence community and the post-911 environment, Amy, could you introduce us to what that architecture is and how it's set up or how it was set up in the post-911 era to address the threats that the United States was facing?

Sure. So if I had to describe the current architecture in three words, it would be number one, vast. So it's gotten a lot bigger since it was before 9-11, both at the federal level and the state and local level. Think about hundreds of joint terrorism task forces where there were dozens before, obviously the new director of national intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Centers. The second word I would use is it's more tactical. It's more focused on finding and taking terrorists off the battlefield and preventing terrorist attacks. And then third, it's more integrated, much closer integration, as you know, between intelligence and warfighters on the ground. Sue, what does this setup mean for your experience within the IC? Was this effective in addressing the intelligence issues that were going on in the past 20 years?

you whether the DNI was the perfect solution to that, but it certainly had that effect. So that's one. The other effect that I think is too often missed is the inclusion of civilian agencies. The inclusion of the FBI and DHS into what is called the intelligence community at exactly this moment has been transformative. And it was an important part of the CT fight. It turns out to be an important element of the digital fight and the cyber fight. And that would not have happened without the action to create a D&I-led intelligence community that forced integration in the way that Amy talked about. And then I think centers are an important element, but of the National Counterterrorism Center specifically, it thrusts

the intelligence community a bit into the policy community in a way that it had not been before. And so I think there are a lot of elements of that catalytic moment that they carried through that changed us and changed us mostly effectively. The problem is that anytime you hold on to a change longer than the environment persists, you run into a problem. And I think that's what we're wrestling with now. But as far as those changes during that time, I think they were pretty effective in terms of what they were trying to do. I'd like to jump in and talk about what they were trying to do.

So if we have this vast and integrated intelligence architecture that's created post 9-11, was it able to operate on multiple axes and cover down on multiple threats? Or was it really singularly focused on the counterterrorism fight and kind of this irregular wars that we found ourselves in the last 20 years? Yeah, so I'll start, Amy, and you fix this. It's a great question. I think you have to say it was effective. If you were there on 9-11, and you thought that you would never walk down a street without being afraid that a plane was going to fly into the building next to you, and you think 20 years later that we have not had a significant terrorist attack on the homeland, those activities, I think, were effective.

The shift didn't happen overnight. But in 2001, no agency was really focused on the terrorist threat in any great extent. You have the National Counterterrorism Center come into being, craft develops around counterterrorism. Then the agencies start picking up the ball, and they start devoting more resources within their own agencies. And by the end of this 15-year period between 2001 and I'm going to say 2016, we've gotten pretty good at it, at counterterrorism. We've built new muscle memory. We were holding on to some of the Cold War pieces because that's what our heritage was, but we were not making much investment in the world that was unfolding during those counterterrorism years. In other words, we still had the strategic play

of the Cold War that we were feeding off of. We see counterterrorism develop and all the new skills and cyber and being able to deal with individuals. But we're a little bit consumed with that. And we're missing what's happening with the rest of the world. And so when we wake up from that, I'm going to say victory, you see us behind the eight ball when it comes to threats that have emerged over time. to threats that have emerged over time. I think I would go back a little bit further in time, though. So if we think about adapting from what to what, we were at a disadvantage coming out of the 90s to start with. That peace dividend was a strategic miscalculation. So you're talking about an intelligence community whose workforce had been cut by about 25%, I think, across the board. You know, we had big cuts in military spending as well. So we're coming from behind the curve when 9-11 hits to ramp up our counterterrorism. And so there's not a lot of slack in the system to develop or to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time to fight the counterterrorism fight and still retain those capabilities for all the other threats in the

world because the intelligence community was largely hollowed out by those decisions, I think, in the 90s. So I don't know if you agree or disagree with that. I don't know that it felt hollowed out to me, although certainly what was existing had to be used to pay for what was new, right? That is certainly true. We certainly thought we had defeated Russia. And so Russian resources just get completely decimated. But Amy, I think one of the things that I sense is that the intelligence community tends to not want to give up missions, right? So they may hollow it out, but they had the Soviet Union during the time of proliferation. So I'm going to say from 91 to 2001, instead of having to only focus on the Soviet Union, now we're focusing on the rest of the world. And then

9-11 happens, and we further have to keep doing the Soviet Union, do proliferation, rest of the world. Now we have to get counterterrorism. Now we're carrying all those three things along. And so this notion of never making a real decision about recrafting your focus, but trying to continue to do everything you've been doing is how you get this hallowing out feeling. Amy, you write a lot about other aspects of inefficiencies within spies, lies, and algorithms in this era. Does that all result from this tension between singular focus versus vast focus? Or what were some of the other drivers of the way this architecture was not supportive of achieving the IC's end goals in a timely fashion? Well, so I always think about adaptation as a race. And it's not just that you're changing,

it's are you changing fast enough to deal with the threat landscape that you confront? And so that's a constant struggle for intelligence agencies. And so I was just last night looking over, because that's what I do for fun, looking over old DNI threat assessments, and something really struck me, right? So if you go back 10 years to 2012, that annual unclassified threat assessment gets it right. It lists cyber in the top three threats facing the United States. It says cyber threats are going to get worse. It singles out Russia and China. So the threat assessment saw the changing landscape. The question was, did we match resources against priorities in 2012 to now?

And the answer is no, we didn't match resources against priorities. And so we're now seeing a lot of shifting to deal with emerging technologies. But the IC saw that pattern coming 10 years ago. Absolutely. But there's a difference between seeing it and committing to it. This is the Kodak conundrum. They knew that digital was coming, but they just couldn't commit to it. I think what I was trying to talk about is you needed to let go of some things in order to put resources on the new. And that is really hard because the assistant secretary you're serving is still demanding

all the things that you needed. And one of the things you and I have talked about, I think the other thing that the Intelligence Committee didn't quite adapt to was how much information was openly available. And so it was still trying to answer every question with the traditional sources it had that were limited in their capacity. And so that further focus forced them to deal with a smaller set of things than they needed to over time. But I think you're right. It is both a resource picture that doesn't scale and inability to choose to stop doing things. I'd also like to ask, along with that train of thought of how much did the act of the crisis play into that as well? And if we're reacting to the crisis of 9-11,

and we're reacting now to these large muscle movements of, you know, the Afghanistan invasion, and then the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and we have to plus up very quickly. And if we're talking about inefficiencies in that system, how much of that institutional inertia was embedded because we were responding to a large shock to the system? And is it going to take a large shock to the system to push some of those inefficiencies out? Crises always help, but they aren't enough because what they tend to do is inject a large set of resources for a particular purpose and do nothing about the other things that need to be serviced or the things that are second order effects. The hardest thing to do is to figure out what is the intelligence community's role with any new crisis? What are you going to do about it, not just throw things against it?

role with any new crisis? What are you going to do about it, not just throw things against it? And so I would argue that Russian interference in the 2016-11 was a cyber 9-11. There is nothing more fundamental to our democracy than our elections and believing in ourselves, and that was an assault. And the fact that we miss seeing it coming in the first place, and the fact that we miss seeing it coming in the first place and the fact that we haven't responded to it more aggressively, I think is an interesting issue when you now look at economic crises and pandemics and climate and how you work through, okay, what's the role of intelligence? What resources we put in? Not just throwing a bunch of resources at a new issue and expecting the intelligence community to do the same thing everyone else is doing with more resources. Is that because the political drivers are different or that the populace doesn't see

the same effect as some of maybe the national security professionals of a 9-11 versus a Russian interference in an election? Is that a politics intel tension? I think the Russian interference had two elements of it that were difficult for us. Number one is we are still trying to close the gap between geopolitical effects of technical events. In the workforce, there is a technical workforce and they do technical things. And then there's the geopolitical workforce and they do geopolitical things. There was no way we should have missed Russian interference in the election because we know that all the way back to Soviet doctrine, it was undermining democracy. If someone

had said, hey, you know what? They had this cool new tool called cyber that is stealthy, costs nothing, has volumetric effects. We would have gone, oh, gloriosky, I bet they're going to use that. But because cyber was the purview of the technical folks. So one thing is we're having a hard time mashing up technical analytics and effects with geopolitical effects. And then the other thing that happened with the Russian interference is it quickly became a political event. And so we had a hard time dealing with the fact that it had nothing to do with our political system. It had to do with what the Russians were doing and, quite frankly, the Chinese and the others were doing against it. But because it became mired in a political debate, I think we had a hard time getting the concurrence of the Congress and the politicians that we should double down on that issue. What do you think, Amy? and the politicians that we should double down on that issue. What do you think, Amy? I completely agree with you that Russia's election interference in 2016 was the canary in the coal mine, that this was the equivalent of a 9-11 in terms of the cyber threat to our nation. Nothing's

more foundational than our presidential election. I guess I would differ on a couple of things. It's funny that you're being more critical of the IC than I'm going to be standing on the outside. My sense from reading the declassified documents is that the community actually got three of the four aspects of Russia's interference, understood what was happening And it was the amplification of messaging by RT and other propaganda outlets. What they missed was the weaponization of social media. That was nowhere in the assessment. And that to me suggests not only the weaknesses that you described, but there's a conceptual problem. What is the cyber threat? And I think for too long, the conceptualization of the cyber threat in DOD and the IC was hacking machines. And of course, what we now know is that it's also hacking our minds and sowing division and changing how we think and waging information warfare.

And I still think we're struggling organizationally in the U.S. government to figure out how to put those pieces together, the hacking of machines and the hacking of mines. So I think I probably am more critical because I think if intelligence is good, you beat the future to the spot. And certainly contemporaneously, we understood it when we saw it, but we hadn't done a lot of preparing for that. This was the next wave that they were going to use. Right. It still was too aside, too arcane for us to really put it into play. And I think we have woken up to the fact that cyber is the way that every intent of adversary and competitor is going to be affected. Every action, whether that is active measures or psyops or economic manipulation, it's all going to go through cyber. So I think we have woken up to that, but it has taken a long time. I'd like to shift to the main part of our conversation here, which is about the evolution and the continuous adaptation of the infrastructure

that we have to address the threats that are here today. And so we've talked about where we started in the post 9-11 environment, the CT environment, and now we're at this phase where we're facing near-peer great power threats. Is that shift how you would characterize the trajectory of the IC from 2001 to now? I think at the top line, that's a pretty good description of our move. I think about it as Cold War, counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism, great power competition. I think that's the right arc. And there are a lot of things in there that if you break it down, need to change, even though it seems like a nice, smooth continuum where the evolution of capabilities should carry you through

those things. I think in the middle of the change from counterterrorism to great power competition has been that the world has become digitally connected and that has introduced speed and equality in technology and changes in use and ubiquity in terms of reconnaissance in really interesting ways. It's changed partnerships away from fixed allies to ones based more on economic pressures, and they tend to be more situational. So I think you have the arc right from counterterrorism to great power. But I think if you dump the fact that the world became digital in that, you see that not only do we need to understand threats differently, but how they behave is different because this is a digitally connected world. Yeah, I would just add, I think that there are

fundamentally different dynamics. So the top line narrative makes sense, but below that are really important differences between great power competition today and the Cold War, for example. It's not a back to the future moment. And I think Suze hit that intervening variable exactly right, and it's technology. And I think technology is driving a couple of dramatic things. Number one, what's the source of power today? Power operates differently today than it did even 10 years ago. So the United States in cyberspace is one of the most powerful countries in the world, but we're also one of the most vulnerable countries in the world. So power and vulnerability go hand in hand in the digital world in a way they don't

in the physical world. I also think that technology is driving the threat landscape. Why is China so powerful today? Because China has stolen our intellectual property and is focused on being an economic, ideological, and military competitor. And that's fueled by technology. And then I'd say the second piece behind that is complexity. So we've talked already about complexity of how the IC has to deal with a number of different

challenges in the world and did in the post 9-11 context. We've never seen this kind of complexity today. So I'll give you one example. We face this paradox of geography has never been more important and geography has never been less important, right? We think about the war in Ukraine. You think about global climate change. You think about China's aggression in the South and East China Seas. Geography matters, right? We know that. But then in the virtual space, geography doesn't matter. States can wage all sorts of destructive and degrading and deceptive attacks across vast distances from their own territory. So policymakers, I think, and intelligence officials have to deal with this paradox of how do you deal with something that's of critical

importance and of no importance at the same time? Not to mention the fact that we're talking about rising states, failing states, non-state actors, and a whole host of different threats. It's just so much more difficult, I think, for policymakers and intelligence officials to wrap their arms around the threat landscape. And there is no unifying concept, really. Great power competition captures part of it, but misses a lot of it also. And that's not just on the adversary capabilities. I mean, this has affected the US government's Intel collection capabilities as well, right? It has. And so this is something Sue and I have talked about before, which is the revolution of open source intelligence and the ability of anybody with an internet connection to collect, analyze, and distribute intelligence. Not all of it good, not all of it accurate, but that's fundamentally changed the

competition battle space, if you will, for insight. If you think of intelligence as the business of gaining insight, there are many more players out there that are in that space, and they're accelerating the timeframe that intelligence needs to operate, and they're changing what has to be done by clandestine capabilities and what doesn't need to be done inside governments. Yeah. And I think one of the things that I talk a lot about is technological ubiquity, that this is a world where every technology is available to everyone.

And the one that puts it to clever use faster is the one that's going to win. one and the one that puts it to clever use faster is the one that's going to win. A corollary to that is we are now aware of the technological ubiquity and we are disproportionately relying on assessments of capability, raw capability like we used to, rather than understanding use. And I think that puts an incredible burden on intelligence to not just see what is physically present, what weapons and capabilities they have, but how are they going to put it to use? in my irregular warfare brain, well, that sounds like IW, right? That sounds like the struggle for legitimacy within a population. And does the last 20 years of irregular warfare that the United States found itself in, does that give us tools that we can then just shift and adapt for struggles like that? Maybe take these tactical intelligence tools and make them strategic? The answer is decidedly yes, but you have to decide to do that. I think we are, as a collective,

really struggling. And when I say collective, as a nation, that includes everything from the policymakers to the intelligence officers to the warfighters, to decide what it is that we want to do. How is it that we want to interact with the world? How far do we want to go to shape the world to our view of what is right, to entwine ourselves in things that we may not consider our business? So I think absolutely, there is so much work that has been done that started during CT on IW and information shaping and perception shaping. And now that we have all these tools and we've seen the real life, I think there are a lot of ways that could be used strategically. But I do think that the thing that's going to be the impediment is not our ability to do so,

it's going to be our will to do so. With this emerging digital era, did the IC actually experience any significant organizational or bureaucratic changes in the same ways we had the post 9-11 creation of the DNI and other types of organizations? Have we seen that in the scale of addressing cyber and technology? Not heretofore. There were a couple attempts. There was the introduction of a cyber threat integration center within the D&I structure that did some really good work in terms of trying to take the CT model and apply it to digital threats and get an integrated picture. I think you see the National Counterintelligence Center take on a much bigger cyber role during that time. I think you see the intelligence community's interest in digital work,

everything from the cloud to a thing called iSight, which was their integrated technology infrastructure, focus on both moving data and protecting data. But the notion of what to do organizationally about cyber, other than US. Cyber Command and then the argument of whether that should be together with NSA, they haven't really settled on what's going to be done organizationally. And part of the reason is because cyber is ubiquitous. If you take what Amy said earlier, and you say that it's the modality that every activity is affected, how would you ever put together a cyber center? Because its mission would be absolutely huge. And so I think at DHS, their introduction of a cyber capability for

homeland defense became a nice triumvirate with FBI and NSA and it to try and thwart cyber threats. But it isn't an integrated approach yet. Amy, how do you see it? This is where I think I'm going to be more critical of the U.S. government, I think, than you, Sue. I think we're in a September 10th footing with respect to cyber. I think we're nowhere as a U.S. government, nowhere close to where we need to be. We've seen some real progress over the past several years. So you'd mentioned Cyber Command, the National Cyber Director, the creation of CISA and Homeland Security, all really important developments. But even with roughly 2,800 employees in that crucial cyber organization trying to protect civil society from cyber attacks, it's one-tenth the number of people

that protect our national parks, right? So if you get a sense of how important the cyber battle space is for our country and how little attention is being put and organizationally to focus on that challenge on the policy side, and you have to have the policy side interacting with the private sector, it's not just an intelligence battle. It's a hard problem to solve. I grant you that, especially because the private sector has a huge role to play, as we all know, owning and operating 85% of critical infrastructure. But we're still at the point where it's sort of public service announcements and voluntary patching and some collaboration when there's a major breach like Microsoft Exchange or SolarWinds. That's not how to run a railroad.

So you're absolutely right. 100% right. Not sure I see this as just an intelligence issue, in part because exactly what you said, 90% of the threat service is not controlled by the U.S. threat service is not controlled by the U.S. government. And one of the problems with this threat is that our system, this whole separation between the government and the private sector and between federal and state and local, is actually fighting against our ability to do something about it. So totally agree with you, but there are reasons why we's so hard for us to do because it just goes slamming in to separation of powers and privacy. Now, one of the things I think we need to do is get the private sector to feel more responsible for national security. So I have a two-part piece. Number one, I think the intelligence community had better start producing assessments for

the private sector. The intelligence community needs to become the supporting command to the private sector. It just does. It's in the business of national security. If national security is being both threatened and affected by the private sector, then we've got to figure out how to give them the best tools that they can. So I think that's a huge shift and it would be controversial. Those are the threat actors and national security decision makers now, get them the information they need. And the second thing is, you know, back in 1933,

after the crash, we formed the SEC and you see the rise of generally accepted accounting practices because we figured out that what was going on in businesses and fraud affecting national security, isn't it the time for generally accepted security practices? And if you are a publicly traded company, it's not your decision about how well you want to protect it, but you must protect it to a certain level. So I think this is a naughty K-N-O-T-T-Y problem. I totally agree. I'm in violent agreement with both of those proposals. But I think where we are is at this point, it's largely voluntary. And I'm not in favor of a lot of government regulation. But when you're talking about national security and incentivizing the

private sector to protect things that really have national significance, there's really no other path forward. But how do you do that when a lot of these private companies have just as much business in competitor states than in the United States, when you have companies like Google or others who are basically doing projects for the Chinese government? I can't remember whether you, Shauna, or Laura raised this. I think you don't let a good crisis go unrecognized. I think Ukraine was a really interesting catalyzing moment where companies of their own accord, before they were forced to do things, made decisions about who they were going to do things with.

I think there needs to be more discussion around that. I think that will be peeled back. I think the Russians are hoping we will peel that back. But I think that's an important piece, is that they have to recognize what they're a part of. But then the second thing is, if the U.S. is going to be leading technologically, if we are going to be present in how the international standards are set, we can't tell our companies that they can't participate globally. The U.S. government's going to have to be party to helping companies figure

out how they can productively engage because disconnecting is not going to work for us either. But companies are going to have to recognize what they're a part of and start making decisions. And I think Ukraine is a really interesting moment where they started to make that move. It wasn't on cyber, but it was on the issue of what do I stand for? Who do I support? I think this harkens back to something Sue said, and I think it's such an important point about how the intelligence community needs to produce intelligence for the private sector, right? That they have customers that don't just have security clearances anymore. And that's important, not just for the information that it provides,

but for the cultural connections or the trust that it develops. So we've talked a lot about organization, but we haven't talked about that trust factor, which I think is so crucial for the intelligence community today. And I think we've come a long way from the days of Snowden in Silicon Valley, where there was just terrible distrust between the private sector and the government in general. And the rise of the China threat has made that connection better. But it's important for the intelligence community to become much more comfortable dealing in the open, producing for the open. And because we can't afford to have the intelligence community behind skiffs and behind security

clearances, When we think about this digital landscape that we're in and how big a role the private sector plays, there's just no way for the government to go it alone in this threat landscape. And the other thing is, you know, we think of intelligence as being a secret. I will tell you the best part of intelligence is the craft of intelligence that allows what is fundamentally uncertain information be put together in a way that can be dealt with as certainty. If the intelligence community doesn't get a voice out there with all the information that's available, the world will go screaming by and people will be making decisions based on opinion that has bias. What I think the most wonderful piece of intelligence is that which describes the world as it is rather than someone prefers it to be. And so if the intelligence community doesn't learn how to participate in this world

and share its craft, the world will use information that looks a lot like it, but is thin gruel compared to that stuff when it's at its best. I'd like to jump in there just real quick about that point, Sue, is has the world already kind of gotten by the intel community when, you know, misinformation and disinformation has been so targeted and so ubiquitous now, and we don't really still seem to have a good handle on it. So when we have these struggles, largely over control of populations, how does Intel then use those crafts in a world where facts don't really seem to hold up the way they used to?

So Amy talks about this so eloquently in the shift from strategic to tactical. And in a tactical world, it is really hard for intelligence to keep up. And if you think about Ukraine as a great example, Ukrainians using Hawkeye 360 that geolocated RF events and black sky that gave them imagery, and they were doing amazing things, putting all that together. And that felt pretty good to them. But in the after effect, you're going to see that they did not understand how to use the limitations of that data and understand that to produce an even better effect that they might over time. So I think soft commanders have gotten so wonderful about using open source information

and tactical information in order to have a great instantaneous threat picture that overcomes some of the timeliness weakness of intelligence, but it is still not the picture of really what's evolving beyond that tactical moment. I actually think Ukraine provides an amazing example of the strategic value of intelligence in the sort of information warfare battle space. So you think about the declassification of intelligence of the Biden administration. I think it's a paradigm shift and it served a number of purposes, but I think, I'm speculating of course, but I think the primary purpose was get the truth out before the lie. And if you get the truth out, sequencing matters, right? If you get the truth out before the lie. And if you get the truth out, sequencing matters, right? If you

get the truth out first, it's harder to believe the lie. And oh, by the way, the Russian people at the time still had access to the internet. So they heard American policymakers talking about the intelligence that Putin was planning to invade. They were told he wasn't, and they know what the truth is. So I think that was of enormous value, getting the truth out first. I think it played a huge role in rallying the allies, in making it hard for third parties like China to be able to sit on the sidelines cost-free. They've had some heartburn in Beijing, and they should, because they can't deny the truth. I think this was a masterful use of intelligence and a high-risk use of intelligence, because of course, if Putin had

decided not to invade, people would be complaining that the intelligence was wrong yet again, even though it was right all along. Amy, all of these factors that you both discussed have demonstrated that the nature of state on state competition appears much more complex and moves a lot more quickly than the Cold War type of competition. What does the U.S. government, what does the intelligence community need to do to wholly address GPC today? And because things happen so quickly, that pace of change is so important. What does the government need to do very quickly and what can they afford to do more deliberately with those organizational and functional changes? I think what has to get faster is offloading to machines

what machines can do better than humans. So when you think about basic things, like we've talked about technology as it affects adversaries, but the IC needs to adopt technology much faster than it has, much more broadly than it has to augment the human analyst. So pattern recognition or queuing

news stories or other types of information that may not seem directly relevant to an analyst, but an algorithm might pick out that could put information in front of an analyst that they would otherwise not be able to see because they're trying to go through all sorts of information daily as they get to the office. The ability to harness the speed and power of, in particular, artificial intelligence to augment human analysis, I think is crucial for the community. And I think we've, again, like everything, there's been progress made, but not nearly enough in terms of AI capabilities being used across the intelligence community. So that needs to get faster. But some things need to

become slowed down. And what needs to be slowed down, I think of two categories of things. Number one, when we're talking again about information warfare, just slowing down the pace of a lie getting into the world, having private sector firms do things like pause, the default being a pause of putting something on Twitter or something on Facebook, as opposed, the default being a pause of putting something on Twitter or something on Facebook, as opposed to the default being put it out there and then try to walk it back. That can be incredibly helpful as sort of a fire break for disinformation online. Another complexity we face today is cognitive complexity. Just individuals are overloaded by what they have to do in their daily jobs.

And we have to be able to set aside time to think, to be strategic, to look over the horizon. And I worry with that tactical tilt that we've developed over the past 20 years in fighting terrorism, and it's been incredibly successful. But that tactical tilt is not the same thing as a strategic orientation. And that strategic orientation takes time. And that tactical tilt is not the same thing as a strategic orientation. And that strategic orientation takes time. And that's the most precious resource we have. I'll take a different tack because Amy's answer was just so very good. I think the first thing is the world's changed so much, we can't draft off the work of our predecessors anymore. And we have been evolving systems and approaches for 70 years. I think it's time that we need to think of some new

approaches. What is the information we need and how do we develop the capability to go get it? We've done that so many times over our history, but it's time to do it again. So to you, Amy, I would say I would spend a lot of effort to try and make the digital environment transparent, to use time as a discriminator for the appearance of lies, not to put things back together. Because if I could see the life and breath and pattern of the digital environment, I would distinguish true from false and I would know how to operate within it. I think there are so many opportunities. We are going to find that climate and human migration and food disparity and economic

insecurity are going to be huge factors of what happens geopolitically. The second is, if we don't completely transform our processes, we will never get there. From security clearances to how we let contracts, we have got to make them relevant. And then I'm just going to hit again that we need to get a conversation going with the American people about what the true nature of the threats are, because they have to become critical consumers of information. We have to develop a group of citizens that are more steeped in civics, more critical thinking, and not just technologists, but thinking about what's going on around them. So I think all those are pieces that need to be addressed in order for us to be able to thwart the threats that we now confront.

We've hit on both that after 9-11, the architecture changed, and we got this vast integrated system. And now we're facing another change as well with emerging threats, faster threats, new technological threats that are out there. And we seem very wholly trying to shift to great power competition or strategic competition, however you want to name it. But we have not fully divested from the CT fight. And, you know, we say we're going to do small footprint operations and things like that. But where does that leave the intel community? Can they do both those things? Or can they do all of those things, especially when the global war on terror still remains global? You can't do it the same as we've been doing it. It's just too many resources and too many other demands. But it's probably an okay

time to reconsider where we are, where the thread is going, where our gaps are, and where we need to have collection. I think we've done really pretty well on data collection. I think our information technology systems could be even better in terms of being able to identify, I hate the words of dot connecting, but I think RIT systems could do a little bit better job with the data that we have and the data we continue to bring in. My greatest worry on CT isn't the analysis because I think it's become ingrained. It isn't even the policy. It's that I don't think that's a mission you can do over the horizon. And so much of our awareness of what's going on is because we're present in those places where those threats are emergent. And so I worry that as our footprint becomes smaller,

as we bring our troops home, and I think that's a really good thing to do. But this notion that we're going to be good against the CT threat without being present in some of the most dangerous places in the world, I think is just making ourselves feel good. Yep, technical action is wonderful. I've done it for a whole career. But there is something against this threat that presence matters. I can't say anything better than that. The only thing I would add is we're going to have to be able to do both. And the question is, how do we do both? The CT challenge isn't going away. And in times of scarcity, that can also be a spur to innovation. So we mentioned crises earlier, that crises are often a catalyst for innovation. Well, scarcity and the removal

of resources can be too. And if ever there were a community that will take advantage of that moment to innovate, it's the soft community. I agree with that. The other thing just popped into my head is when I think of the CT era, it was explosive in terms of sharing. And we shared and partnered with people that we didn't know how to trust. And that allowed so many of our successes. I see us going back into our holes a little bit and holding tight to data. Remember that sharing once you know there's a problem isn't good sharing. Sharing ahead of the problem is what allows you to thwart it. With that, since we have a lot of craft specific to the CT fight that we can continue to use and continue to innovate through, but how with this shift to focusing on Russia and China specifically, can we take this Intel apparatus and take it from very permissive

environments that we're used to operating in and take it to very not permissive environments? that we're used to operating in and take it to very not permissive environments. I would say that the technology is coming to help us to do that. This is one of the places that I worry so much about our soft community because we haven't made those technologies as robust as they need to be in order to be able to operate securely at distance. And our soft communities are working so hard against the threat that they have to use the best capabilities they can rather than capabilities that will absolutely protect.

And some of our adversaries are incredibly good at collecting data and processing data. And I worry that they're going to build patterns of life that could turn out to be difficult. So, you know, mobile security is something we have to keep working on. We have to keep focusing on it. And it's not just absolute, it's also using operational patterns to protect. But if we don't continue to push things into the field that will absolutely protect, I'm really worried that those things that we do today, because we can and must, will become patterns that will be defeated in the future. A lot of this brings up, you know, we're talking about, hey, we need new technology, we need new innovation, we need off-the-shelf options.

But that kind of seems like it's leveraging signals intelligence and electronic intelligence and a lot of not human-centered intelligence capabilities. Where does that leave human intelligence and where does that leave the future of human? We're always going to need humans. Electronic forms of intelligence can tell you that a building is there, but they can't tell you what the leader of the country intends to do with that building or that weapon system. So understanding, getting into the minds, the intentions, the thoughts, the weaknesses of the adversary will always be a crucial part of intelligence. That's getting harder.

So technological changes are creating denied space. When you think about the techno surveillance that you see in the streets of Beijing or in other parts of the world, it's getting harder and harder to meet with and recruit assets on the ground. But that's not to say that it can't be done and it has to be done. It's always going to be a part of intelligence and a crucial piece. One thing I think that worries me about the effects of the transition from not being as fully ingrained in the GWAT is that over the course of the past 20 years, the military, the DOD, and civilian agencies became very close and pretty effective at working

together because they were pursuing similar targets. They're living in the same areas, basically. What does this change mean for the future of interagency collaboration and organizational culture? And how do we keep those types of relationships from atrophying as we move forward? I'll start with you, Amy. So at the risk of angering my hosts, I would argue that I think the integration has been incredibly successful in combating terrorism, but it's come at a cost. And the cost is, you talked about the integration and living in the same space between civilian agencies and military. In a world where you can't tell those functions apart, that's not always good because intelligence agencies have specific missions.

They're unique missions. Warfighters have specific missions. They're unique missions. And I've written about the more that intelligence agencies are in the hunting business, the less they're in the gathering business. And so there's benefit to thinking about the unique capabilities and mission sets of these agencies and the limits of integration. So when we think about the transition from the global war on terror to great power competition, that integration is incredibly important and successful in the counterterrorism context, but it does come at a cost, an opportunity cost for

our intelligence agencies to put resources and mindshare in thinking about what can they do that nobody else can do? So I love intelligence. I love the craft of intelligence. I love the intelligence community. And I'm really critical of it in part because I think it'd be the hero of any story, just truth in advertising. One of the things that I love about the intelligence community is that it isn't a department. There's no secretary. The DNI is not a de facto secretary of the intelligence community. And so it is a loose consortium of independent agencies. And so a little bit of what Amy talks about is naturally gets the agility of not a homogeneous blob, and it gets the specificity of each of those missions being applied. And I think that is a great advantage. Where I think it is difficult is

that you have each one of the now 19 agencies looking at the exact same future, and as capabilities bloom, and as the world becomes more digital, you worry that there is both gaps because they're not acting as one and redundancies because they all can do the same thing. strong D&I that use the budget to say, we're going to build a budget to do the things that we need to do, not build it from the bottom up that says we're going to keep on doing all the things that we have. So when we're talking about the need to innovate better and quicker and adapt to not only emerging threats, but emerging technology at the same time, how does the United States government ensure that we've got the best brains and the best personnel on the ground that are attacking these issues? I'll start with that. I have lots of thoughts about the talent piece since I teach at Stanford and I want engineers to take my class and I want engineers to think about international security, whether they go as a lifer into the government or whether they start

their own company or go to a big tech company. I want them to think about these things. We need to do much better on the talent piece. Talent is the long pole in the tent. We have to have the best talent on the toughest problems for the country. That doesn't necessarily mean they have to be in the government. They have to be publicly minded. As we've talked about, the private sector plays a crucial role in great power competition in the digital space. And we need to have partners in the private sector that understand the national security implications of what they're doing. So I think we need to do a number of things. Number one, we have to reduce the pain points for bringing top talent into the government. The second thing is change the mindset about how you

market. This is a really fast changing demographic with different aspirations and different ideas. And so you got to tailor the marketing message to get the best talent. And then finally, there has to be more fluidity in and out of government. So it can't be seen as a lifetime career. That's just not how technical talent in particular typically sees their career paths. So you have to meet people where they are and give them the opportunities that appeal to them. So we've talked a lot about all of these things that need to happen, but a lot of these things can't happen internal to the intelligence community. They're reliant on other aspects of the US government to make them happen. So Amy, what are the roles of policymakers and lawmakers in particular in driving the next phase of intelligence community evolution?

So the least reformed part of the intelligence apparatus over the past 20 years is, of course, the U.S. Congress. Policymakers have an important role to play. I mean, Sue has already talked about educating the nation about national security threats and what it means to serve and what the intelligence community does. There's no place better positioned to do that, to speak on behalf of the American people, to be ambassadors between the public and the secret world of intelligence agencies than the congressional oversight committees. And they have not done a good enough job at that education function.

So I think there's an important role to play. Tone at the top matters. Congress really matters. And that education function has to at least involve Congress, if not be led by Congress. That's a heavy lift, I recognize. But I am somewhat hopeful at the end of the day, if you look at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in particular, they've remained bipartisan despite a lot of pressures and polarization, and they've remained bipartisan about Russia's election interference in the 2016 election and other really difficult issues. So I think Congress has to play a big role. I think the executive branch and senior leaders of the executive branch have to get out in the public more. And I think they are doing that. You see Director Burns being much more public-facing. You see Director Haynes being much

more public-facing. General Nakasone, it's very important to him as well. I think these are really important precedents that they're setting. Yeah, if I were to add just one to that, and I think this is probably a bridge too far, but the committee structure itself needs an overhaul like the intelligence community did. Just the issues we're trying to address today are being thwarted because cyber is part of the judiciary, part in homeland security, part in intelligence, part in armed services. And we just have a hard time getting really good decision-making and oversight when it has to go through so when a committee stops. So that's the other thing I think I'd add to Amy's wonderful treatise. I know there's a lot deeper we could go on that. In the interest of time, we'll go to Sue.

What are the implications of these emerging challenges for academics and researchers? How can academia support this dialogue? You know, one of the, I think, most difficult things that has happened over time is when the private sector started funding so much research, the government kind of backed off a bit and let the private sector carry the weight in that area. And I think we reaped incredible benefits of it, but there are some things that we lost. I think there is work to be done in academia on trust, truth, information assurance, human-machine integration, because everything that Amy said about where AI can take us is going to depend on that intersection between human and machines, and it has been underinvested in.

And so I think there are so many areas. If I went even a step further, I would say that there is so much fundamental work that can be done at the open source level to understand threat trends and cultural trends and leadership trends and technological trends that could be fundamental pieces of work that could add to the conversation going on. So I would love it if what this moment of disruption caused was a research in that relationship between the government and academia to say, how do we take on these big challenges that aren't going to be solved by the next turn of technology, but take purposeful effort? And I think information is one that could really help.

Amy, I'd ask you the inverse of that. What would you say are the biggest implications or takeaways of your research for practitioners within the IC at any level? So I'm going to cheat on this question and add a little bit to what Sue said. So when I look at what academia and government need to do together, in academia, as you know, we have talent looking for problems. And in the government, there are problems looking for talent. And we need to have a mechanism to make those connections much more continuous and much more robust. So lots of people coming to university saying what you should work on or what we're

thinking about, we need to make that more institutionalized. There needs to be, for example, you know, a sort of a consortium where we can have an ongoing living list of thorny, unclassified problems that intelligence agencies, for example, feel like they would really use research in the academy to help, whether it's technical, whether it's social science. And everybody wins, right, from that kind of bridging. In terms of if I were queen of the world for a day and recommending what the government should do in intelligence, and so you and I have talked about this, I do think we need a dedicated open source intelligence agency. I think we're never going to drive the fundamental change of understanding, harnessing, using open source intelligence if it remains the stepchild inside

agencies that prize clandestine intelligence methods more. And that's just the nature of the beast. So to have a real seat at the table, to be able to attract the talent right away, to work on really interesting problems, but without a clearance, to be able to attract the talent right away to work on really interesting problems, but without a clearance, to stimulate the innovation of technological approaches in a lower risk way. I think an open source agency actually enables all of those things. So that would be my one recommendation for the government. And I think that's a great place to leave off for today. Dr. Amy Zeger, Ms. Sue Gordon, thank you so much for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare podcast. Laura and I really enjoyed having you here, and we appreciate your time. Well, Laura and Shana, it's been just a delight. I love the

podcast and really an honor to be with you and with Sue. Ditto. Thank you again for joining us for episode 58 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Jeff and I discuss the book The Bin Laden Papers with General David Petraeus and the book's author, Dr. Nellie LaHood. Following that, Kyle and Shauna talk to Dr. David Echo and Ambassador James Jeffrey about Dr. Echo's new book, The Insurgent's Dilemma. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, New book, The Insurg, YouTube, or LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter for access to our written content, upcoming community events, and other resources. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a comment and positive rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the Irregular Warfare podcast.

It really helps expose the podcast to new listeners. And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of Princeton, West Point, or any agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we will see you next time. Thank you.