Haft of the Spear

The whole sign-around-the-neck thing is – sadly – all too true. The fact that such a practice is accepted should be a greater concern to everyone than any other aspect of the story. It seems small but it tells us a lot about how successful efforts to reform and/or bring the analytic core up to a uniform and high level of performance will be. Any effort that requires posters, banners, signs, tags or other such reminders is asking for trouble …

For starters, eventually all such devices become a part of the scenery and effectively ignored. In time they become a joke. One need only look to the INFOSEC world for the lesson: if you have to constantly remind or “train” people not to do something, you’re not serious about prevention. Hitting people where it hurts – in the wallet, for example – sends a message few forget quickly. Not as easy to do in the gov’t, but there are other ways to communicate a point just as effectively without fluff.

Let’s also not forget about the elephant in the room so many of the in- or under-experienced commentariat fail to acknowledge: the sheer absence of political discourse in the vast bulk of the community. Two decades I climbed the ladder and I can count on one hand with enough fingers left over to make a rude gesture in the UK the number of people whose political affiliation I am expressly aware of (and that from water-cooler talk, not practice in the discipline). I’ve said this many times before, but where intelligence work is actually done, it’s about how well your brain functions, not what PAC you donate to. Appointees work in a different world – that’s the system we have – and that findings don’t always jibe with doctrine is indeed a political problem but it is not an intelligence one. If anyone should be displaying a sign around their neck, it should be everyone in the community that isn’t on the General or Executive Schedule. Don’t just turn on the disco lights when the cleaners show up; do the same for the politicos and drive the point home: you are just visiting; we live here.

• There was no uniform mentoring or training program – in serious practice, not just in name – in place in the community (I’ve worked in more places than most, so I feel confident painting with a broad brush). Lots of paper-based requirements that are OBE as people get brought on and missions have to be accomplished.
  
• Consequently, no external observer should have been expected to place much confidence in the analytic findings of a community where standards, skills and qualifications are spotty affairs at best. Not that brainpower is lacking, but by way of example, the Army made me go through several hundred hours of training before it turned me loose to work on analytic problems; it would have been unusual in the past for re-treads from other disciplines or fresh faces from college to get the same treatment in civilian ranks.
  
• That those new to the ranks are being baselined against a common standard is nice, but that still leaves 45% of the workforce in spotty condition and that 45% tends to be the people in charge. As one new to the ranks relayed to me:
  

“There is a serious disconnect between the rhetoric at the top and practice at the bottom. Every attempt to share, collaborate or write for release gets squashed because ‘someone might steal our ideas.’ Technically speaking, isn’t that the point of working together across a community?”

The issue of politicization of intelligence is not insignificant, but its not a problem were going to solve with new signs and old practices. The saving grace is that democratizing technology is creeping into the business and in time so will accompanying practices (at least we can hope). Issues people have with Fingar notwithstanding, as a representative of his generation of practitioner, he is essentially the arrival of sliced bread in a home-baked world.