US intelligence and Afstan--and friends

Further to this post,

Afstan: Reforming inadequate US intelligence

more from BruceR. (who has an intelligence background in Afstan, take a look at the photo here, more here) at Flit:

Cordesman on Flynn

I think Tony Cordesman, a seasoned int veteran, has written the definitive take on the Flynn report, "Fixing Intel." I agree with every word. My favourite quote:

"As a final comment, Fixing Intel repeatedly focuses on the need for internal transparency and to fight the tendency towards overclassification and compartmentation. This reflects a valid concern, and a tacit recognition of the fact that one never knows whether one is better off shooting the enemy, or ones own public affairs and security officers. All three actions generally have the same positive effect."

It's not all that wry, of course. His comments on the failure of accurate assessments of host nation forces being a major cause of defeat in Vietnam resonate strongly with me. Also what he has to say on intelligence-sharing with Pakistan...

Net assessment has been a problem for Western intelligence for a long time; our military (and others) don't like putting our own countries, allies and friends in the frame at the same time as the, er, adversaries. From Mr Cordesman:

...
A realistic net intelligence assessment is needed to deal with the full mix of foreign activities and motives. It also is need to deal with problems like corruption and ties to power brokers, ANSF officers and personnel with ties to the enemy and separate interests, and the fact that the host country is and must be a major intelligence target or will be a critically understated problem in every aspect of operations and planning.

Compartmented analysis that separates intelligence on the threat and partner, mentor, and trainer analysis of host country forces We lost the war in Vietnam for many reasons, but one was that we never had truly honest assessments of ARVN forces, and direct comparisons of ARVN and threat forces done in detailed net assessment terms. In fact, our training and rating experience in Iraq and Afghanistan closely tracks with the mistakes of Vietnam (and our brief training effort in Lebanon in the early 1980s.) The CM readiness ratings for Afghan forces have so far been unreliable at best, and have been worst in providing credible ratings of the units described as CM-1 or the lead. They do not honestly reflect combat performance, actual leadership quality, and how units evolve or devolve over time seeming to ignore real world factors like attrition, overdeployment and combat fatigue, and actual equipment holdings and readiness. There often are other reports covering such issues as well as the loyalties of key officers and officials but often in forms that make direct net assessment and comparability impossible.

Someone is needed to provide an objective, outside view of host country and ANSF performance and loyalty, and this need to be done in a net assessment context. If this is not the task of the intelligence community, whose task is it?

Assessing Allies as an Intelligence Target: This is equally true of assessments of the activities of our NATO/ISAF allies. Each pursues somewhat different goals, and sometimes operates under sharp national restrictions and caveats. There often is no unity of effort within a given allied country, and there are significant differences between some allied country military and aid efforts. These too are legitimate intelligence targets and the proper subject of net assessment. Moreover, as Fixing Intel points out, it is far too easy to focus on secrecy in this case host country and allied sensitivity. Here, it is important to point out that it took years to overcome this reality in NATO. Ironically, it was not until the MBFR exercise in the 1960s that it became clear just how damaging it was to ignore the fact that there were five different national concepts of how to fight a ground war, in the central region (ignoring two more in NORTHAG), and similar differences in planning for the air war plus two different internal NATO approaches to air operations. It took transparency and dialog not secrecy and fear of confrontation to deal with these issues...