Preparing the Intelligence Community for Future Challenges
And therefore only the enlightened sovereign and the worthy general who are able to use the most intelligent people as agents are certain to achieve great things. Secret operations are essential to war; upon them the army relies to make its every move.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
It is said that the oldest profession in the world is prostitution. It is also said that the second oldest profession in the world is espionage. In order to succeed in international conflicts, it is essential for a nation to have information about its allies and its enemies. This information is called intelligence.
Spycraft is the art of intelligence gathering. And while the U.S. was immensely successful in spycraft during World War II, and for periods during the Cold War, lately, U.S. intelligence capabilities have been slipping. Perhaps it has to do with the end of the Cold War, or with international spying incidents like the John Walker case, Aldrich Ames, and now the Los Alamos scandal. But there is no doubt that American capabilities are lagging.
As the United States withdraws more of its forward deployed forces from around the world, draws down its military hardware and manpower, the need for a strong intelligence program is all the more apparent.
Indeed, it is intelligence that provides the target information for NATO commanders in the air raids over Kosovo. It was intelligence that provided similar target information in Desert Storm and on movements of Iraqi Republican Guards. And it also was intelligence that verified the success (or failure) of bombing runs over Iraq.
Today, however, intelligence and spycraft need to do more than just provide target information to military commanders. It also needs to provide U.S. policymakers with sufficient information on how to anticipate, avoid, and at least prepare the U.S. for future global conflicts that may endanger U.S. interests abroad.
There are two major areas that the U.S. needs to improve upon to accomplish this mission. First, it must achieve a better Human Intelligence (HUMINT) program. While the U.S. HUMINT program today remains arguably the best in the world (some say the KGB and Israel still are better), there are certain regions where this capability is severely lacking. Part of this is because of the many restrictions Congress has placed on the Executive Branch for conducting covert operations (a negative outcome of the Iran/Contra scandal).
But part of it also has to do with the resources dedicated to this aspect of spycraft. While, with very few recent exceptions, the U.S. intelligence budget has always been kept classified, it is clear that more resources need to be spent in this vital area. Thus, the President should seek, and Congress should grant, a budget increase for this intelligence community.
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