Center for a New American Security

I was on a plane to the Middle East on Sunday evening when I spotted these lines from Leon Panetta's op-ed in the Washington Post:

My friends Laura Rozen and Michael Cohen are way off base if they think the report written by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn on the failure of military intelligence in Afghanistan constitutes a crisis in civil-military relations.

This summer, as Gen. McChrystal took command in Afghanistan, it became clear to both him and his intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Mike Flynn, that the way we gather and process intelligence in Afghanistan was broken. Yesterday, Maj. Gen. Flynn issued a new directive to all intelligence officers and their commanders in Afghanistan outlining a new way forward. He asked the gang at the Center for a New American Security to simultaneously publish a copy for public consumption, and after running the paper through an internal and external review process, we did so today.

Reader "Devil Dawg" writes in from Iraq to illustrate the problem I addressed in an earlier post. Not being able to share information with our alleged "partners" due to classification issues is no joke. Neither is the difficulty Gen. McChrystal is going to have getting U.S. military units to truly partner with the ANSF as he intends.

Here's a wonderful anecdote that illustrates the problems with the culture of classified information in the US military and how it affects the mission in Iraq.

Josh Foust has a good op-ed in the New York Times on interpreters and their importance. The whole thing is good, but one bit is especially worth highlighting:

Eli Lake was right to profile Derek Harvey, the widely respected intelligence officer now starting a center in U.S. Central Command for the study of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Harvey has this right:

Obviously, I have already read the damning 318-page report on the intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iraq released by RAND (.pdf) and authored by Russ Glenn and Jamie Gayton. Obviously. I read it on the Metro to work this morning.

The report is causing quite a stir.

Stephen Walt -- who has apparently written more than just one book -- has a post up on foreignpolicy.com on the military budget and why it will be so hard to trim. He cites a study by Cindy Williams, who I once heard give a three-and-a-half-hour lecture on the federal budget with a special emphasis on defense spending. I am not kidding when I say that it was three and a half of the most fascinating hours in my life. For serious.

...

Official cover worked well for the duration of the Cold War, when holding a job at a U.S. Embassy enabled American spies to make contact with Soviet officials and other communist targets.

But many intelligence officials are convinced that embassy posts aren't useful against a new breed of adversaries. "Terrorists and weapons proliferators aren't going to be on the diplomatic cocktail circuit," said one government official familiar with the CIA's cover operations.

Effective human intelligence is the cornerstone of effective counterinsurgency. The Army and Marine Corps have dealt with the need for effective human intelligence by declaring "every soldier and Marine a sensor" and pretty much leaving it at that. The best units have developed somewhat effective debriefs and tactical human intelligence teams, short in number, have been pushed down from the echelons above reality that they resided up until 2005 or so.