INFORMATION OPERATIONS:

PUTTING THE “I” BACK INTO DIME

Robert David Steele

February 2006

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CONTENTS

Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2. The IO-Heavy Mission Areas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

3. Information Challenges. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

4. Statement of Requirements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

5. Conclusions and Recommendations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Appendix: Analytic Models for Modern IO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 

Endnotes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

v

FOREWORD

The Department of Defense (DoD) has made major strides in the 

development of concepts and doctrine for Information Operations 

(IO). In a substantive break with past traditions, the Secretary of 

Defense has made the U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) 

and the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) supported 

commands rather than supporting commands. USSTRATCOM has 

the national mission and is taking the lead in IO. USSOCOM has 

the national mission and is taking the lead in the Global War on 

Terror (GWOT). Across all other Combatant Commands, and within 

all services and agencies of DoD, the Undersecretary of Defense 

for Intelligence (USDI) is sponsoring transformative leap-ahead 

endeavors in Strategic Communication, Open Source Intelligence 

(OSINT), and Joint Intelligence Operations Commands or Centers 

(JIOC) focused on interagency and interservice information-sharing 

and collaboration.

This monograph offers an overview of the operational and 

information challenges that face DoD, describes six “IO-heavy” 

mission areas, goes on to outline a detailed strategic concept of 

operations, and ends with a requirements statement, intended to 

be helpful to every COCOM, service, and agency. As the author 

suggests, IO can be viewed from a content perspective as having 

three ingredients: Strategic Communication (the message), OSINT 

(the reality), and JIOC (the technology). By clearly addressing global 

monitoring in all languages, 24/7; integration of a global manmachine foreign language translation network; and exploitation of 

leap-ahead deep web data mining and predictive analysis softwares—

the author is defining “best practices” helpful to DoD. The Strategic 

Studies Institute hopes that this monograph will stimulate a better 

understanding of modern IO.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 

vii

SUMMARY

The end of the Cold War and the emergence of terrorism; radicalized religion; the proliferation and commoditization of weapons 

of mass destruction (WMD); and the increased informational and 

economic power of Arabia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, 

Russia, and Venezuela, among others, have brought Information 

Operations (IO) to the forefront of the unified national security 

strategy.

In the past year, IO has matured from an early emphasis on the 

protection of critical infrastructures and against electronic espionage, 

and is now more focused on content and on interagency informationsharing. The value of information—all information, not only secret 

information—and the value of global monitoring in all languages, 

24/7, have been clearly established by the Undersecretary of Defense 

for Intelligence (USDI).

This monograph defines and discusses three IO elements:

• Strategic Communication (the message);

• Open Source Intelligence (the reality); and,

• Joint Information Operations Centers (the technology).

These elements are further discussed in relation to six “IO-heavy” 

mission areas:

• Information Operations generally;

• Peacekeeping Intelligence (reactive);

• Information Peacekeeping (proactive);

• Early Warning (conflict deterrence, proactive 

counterterrorism);

• Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations; and,

• Homeland Defense and Civil Support.

The monograph concludes with a strategic overview of the various 

conceptual and technical elements required to meet modern IO 

needs, and provides a requirements statement that could be tailored 

to the needs of any Combatant Commander, service, or agency.
viii

Recommendations.

Executive. The creation of a National Information Council 

(NIC), coequal to the National Security Council (NSC) and the 

National Economic Council (NEC), is necessary if the White House 

is to both harness the distributed intelligence of the nation and the 

world, and also achieve its objectives in public diplomacy, strategic 

communication, interagency information-sharing and collaboration, 

the renaissance in public education, and the resurrection of national 

research.

Congress. Intelligence and information-sharing are inherent 

critical aspects of all government operations. Each congressional 

committee should create a Subcommittee on Intelligence and 

Information Operations (I2O). The chair and ranking minority 

member of each of these subcommittees, or their designated 

representatives, should in turn comprise a new Special Committee 

on I2O that has oversight over the national Open Source Agency, 

information operations across all federal agencies, and a special 

relationship with the respective Intelligence Committee, which shall 

continue to focus on classified sources and methods.

White House. Expand the extraordinary Earth Science 

information-sharing initiative to include the sharing of information 

about disease, crime, poverty, and other nontraditional threats to 

our national security and prosperity.

Director of National Intelligence. Free the Open Source Agency 

(OSA) from U.S. intelligence community affiliation or direct oversight. Instead, follow the expert recommendation that it be a sister 

agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors under Department 

of State auspices. Fully fund the Open Source Information System–

External (OSIS-X) as a commercial venture open to all legitimate 

governments; nongovernmental organizations; and private sector 

corporations, universities, and groups.

Department of State. Establish an Office for Information-Sharing 

Treaties and Agreements. This small office of perhaps 10 individuals, 

led by accredited diplomats, would negotiate information-sharing 

treaties with nations and information-sharing agreements with 

organizations, with the immediate objective of extending data and 

information standards to all participants. Integrate all Embassies 

into information-sharing mode.
ix

Department of Defense. Rapidly establish JIOCs within each 

Combatant Command (COCOM) as well as a DoD JIOC, while 

establishing two new Combatant Commands: one for I2O, and one 

for Stabilization & Reconstruction. Integrate the Strategic Decision 

Support Center envisioned by Captain Scott Philpott, USN, into 

COCOM I2O. Redirect the U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) 

toward the oversight and orchestration of Big War. COCOM I2O 

should have oversight of the Defense Information Systems Agency 

(DISA), Defense Technical Information Service (DTIC), and the varied 

Departmental-level intelligence organizations as well as authority 

over the JIOCs at each COCOM similar to that retained by the services 

over ground, sea, and air components. Deliberately attend to the I2O 

needs of policy, acquisitions, logistics, and operations with OSINT 

as the source of first resort (always copied simultaneously to the 

relevant all-source intelligence provider). Place the National Guard 

under the operational oversight of the U.S. Northern Command 

(USNORTHCOM), and begin the process of redirecting the Guard 

toward a true Home Guard role in which they have specialized 

units for medical, fire, police, and disaster-relief engineering that are 

equally suitable for homeland security duties as well as support for 

global stabilization and reconstruction operations.

	 General Services Administration (Office of Intergovernmental

Solutions). Sponsor a summit and an ongoing Wiki web site on the 

four “opens” that will energize information-sharing in the future:

a. Open Source Software

b. Open Source Information

c. Open (Electromagnetic) Spectrum

d. Open Hyperdocument System (OHS)

Department of Commerce. Issue an antitrust waiver for a 

private sector OSINT skunkworks that will fully integrate and test 

all avail-able open sources, softwares, and services. This will do for 

IO/OSINT what the Microelectronics and Computer Technology 

Corporation (MCC) initative sought to do for artificial intelligence 

under Admiral Bobby Inman. This skunkworks will accelerate the 

development of open common standards for information-sharing 

that will be truly worldwide, with the added advantage of developing 
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commercial alternatives for the sharing of secret information across 

national, cultural, and government to nongovernment boundaries 

on a by-name, by-paragraph basis.

Department of Justice. Propose to Congress legislation that 

would mandate the open disclosure and stability of Application 

Program Interfaces (API) within all software purchased by the 

government and offered for sale within the United States. API are 

the equivalent in cyberspace of a common railway guage such as was 

required to make national rail a reality. Demand that all software 

have transparent stable API by 2008, or be banned from the Federal 

marketplace.

Open Source Agency. Execute the 100-day start-up plan, which 

(already drafted) is easily doable by drawing on the OSINT pioneers 

across the U.S. Army and in other services. The plan includes:

1. IO/OSINT training program employing resident, mobile, and 

remote learning

2. IO/OSINT help desk, 24/7, multi-lingual

3. IO/OSINT global translation web in all languages that will 

support 911 calls

4. IO/OSINT historical and cultural “Manhattan Project” 

5. OSIS-X with DoD first, then NATO, then each COCOM’s 

coalition partners

6. OSIS-X free access to all NGOs and academic institutions

7. Create a living directory of top 100 experts on each country 

and topic.

8. Create Texas Early Warning Center

9. Create New York Corporate Warning Network

10.Digital Marshall Plan using residual capability in abandoned 

satellites

11.Subsidize the Security Affairs Support Association (SASA) 

in developing executive seminars in information-sharing and 

intellectual property management—then create the University 

of the Republic as a fee-based means of fostering informationsharing across organizational boundaries.
xi

U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps. Focus on recruiting, training, 

and nurturing an Army and a Marine Corps of self-starters, each 

able to master at least one foreign language, each able to master 

Eastern fieldcraft, stealth, and patience, and each able to leverage 

their innate intelligence, communicated intelligence, information 

superiority, interagency planning and operations, and precision 

delivery of water, food, medicine, and munitions where required, 

in order to stabilize and reconstruct any environment, at home or 

abroad. It is brainpower, not firepower, which will win the 100-year 

six-front war upon which we are now engaged.

U.S Navy and U.S. Air Force. Focus on creating a 450-ship Navy 

capable of global distributed operations in littoral waters, and on 

being able to carry out two Berlin Airlifts simultaneously, one with 

organic air and one with conscripted air. Speed of presence, triggered 

by early warning, not massed fires over time, is what matters now.

U.S. Public. You may not be interested in war, but war is 

interested in you. We are at total war. Thomas Jefferson had it right: 

“A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.” IO and OSINT, 

at root, are about educating and legally and ethically engaging every 

person of good will in the honorable tasks of protecting our nation 

and enhancing our prosperity.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The end of the Cold War and the emergence of terrorism; 

radicalized religion; the proliferation and commoditization 

of weapons of mass destruction (WMD); and the increased 

informational and economic power of Arabia, Brazil, China, India, 

Indonesia, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela, among others, have brought 

Information Operations (IO) to the forefront of the unified national 

security strategy.2 The administration and Congress both recognize 

that strategic communication, public diplomacy, and interagency 

information-sharing and collaboration must be core competencies 

within a transformed national security arena. Robust interagency 

information-sharing and collaboration practices will be most effective 

if there is a common understanding of the real world based on global 

foreign information acquisition and analysis. This monograph 

offers a campaign plan for meeting the requirements established 

by the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (USDI) in January 

2004: universal coverage, 24/7, waged in all languages, extending 

down to the tribal and neighborhood levels of granularity.3 This 

proposed capability addresses the specific needs of the U.S. Strategic 

Command (STRATCOM), the U.S. Special Operations Command 

(SOCOM), and the regional Combatant Commanders (COCOM) and 

their supporting elements including the services. It also provides 

for rapid inexpensive replication across all federal, state, and local 

elements associated with homeland security or national security, 

and for rapid inexpensive migration to coalition governments and 

nongovernmental organizations that agree to enter into informationsharing treaties or information-sharing agreements with the 

Department of Defense (DoD).

In the Age of Information, the primary source of national power 

is information that has been converted into actionable intelligence 

or usable knowledge. According to Alvin and Heidi Toffler, 

“Knowledge—in principle inexhaustible—is the ultimate substitute.”4

 In their book, PowerShift, the Tofflers go on to discuss 

knowledge as a substitute for wealth, for natural resources, for 

energy, for violence,5 and even for time and for space. Knowledge—
the vast majority of which is not classified—is the ultimate source of 

national power.

It is for this reason that Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence 

(USDI) Dr. Stephen A. Cambone is “on point” when he demands 

as his primary objective for Defense information and intelligence: 

“universal coverage, 24/7, in all languages in near-real-time, at substate levels of granularity.”6

 This transformative vision was validated 

by the Defense Science Board in two seminal studies, Strategic 

Communication (July 2004), and Transitions to and from Hostilities

(December 2004).7

Achievement of this well-chosen set of objectives demands three 

separate transformative Information Operations (IO) campaigns, 

each integrated and extendable down to the state and local 

levels for Homeland Defense, and also transferable externally to 

nongovernment (NGO) and other organizations controlling the 

90 percent of information that will never be readily available to 

classified agencies:8

Information-Sharing: the creation of joint interagency informationsharing and collaboration networks and centers whose capabilities can be 

replicated quickly and inexpensively by, among others, homeland security 

elements including states and counties, NGOs, universities, and coalition 

partners.9 This capability ensures that what we already know, or what 

our allies already know, can be readily shared with all concerned.

Global Monitoring: the establishment of a mission-oriented global 

information monitoring system that can master the full spectrum 

of available information in all languages10 and that is both tailored to 

defense needs and responsive to operational tempo (i.e. effective in nearreal-time).

Translation: the establishment of a man-machine foreign language 

translation network that can collect, process, and exploit foreign language 

information, both written and verbal, in real-time, at the tactical, 

operational, and technical levels.11

This monograph outlines how we might integrate three IO 

elements—Strategic Communication (the message), open Source 

Intelligence (the reality), and, Joint Intelligence Operations Centers 

(the technology)12—in support of six distinct “IO-heavy” operational 

missions:
• Information Operations,

• Peacekeeping Intelligence (reactive),

• Information Peacekeeping (proactive, preventive),

• Early Warning (conflict deterrence, proactive 

counterterrorism),

• Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations, and

• Homeland Defense and Civil Support.

Concurrently we must also revitalize national education and national 

research in tandem with the foundation of national power in the Age 

of Information.

It is imperative that DoD integrate the design, funding, and 

management of all three IO elements into one coherent whole. 

Addressing any one of them in isolation is a prescription for 

failure.13 It is also imperative that we follow the USSOCOM lead and 

recognize that finished secret intelligence is a fraction of the secret 

information available to us, and that all raw information—secret, 

unclassified, operational, logistic—must be brought together across 

distributed “pits” that are able to share all relevant information with 

one another.

Figure 1 shows an advance view of this monograph’s concluding 

illustration. The monograph will explain why it will be helpful to 

DoD IO.

Modern IO is not about the old messages of psychological 

operations (PSYOPS), but rather about empowering billions of people 

with both information tools and access to truthful information. It is 

about education, not manipulation. It is about sharing, not secrecy. 

It is about human understanding to create wealth and stabilize 

societies, not about the threat of violence and the delivery of precision 

munitions. IO substitutes information for violence.
DGI: Director of Global Information GIC: Global Intelligence Council GSC: Global Strategy Council

Figure 1. Creating the World Brain for U.S. Benefit.

OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES

Information Operations.

Although the classified world has been aware of the vulnerability 

of electronic communications and computing systems for decades, 

and some extraordinary intelligence operations were conducted in 

the latter part of the 21st century, by the year 2000, a succession of 

computer worms, notably the Morris worm and the Y2K problem 

itself, had attracted the public’s attention, as well as the attention 

of adversaries who were previously unaware of their vulnerability. 

Doors started slamming shut around the world as the United States 

lost access to previously “wide-open” systems. We responded, as 

America is accustomed to do, by throwing money at the problem. IO 

became synonymous with a mix of critical infrastructure protection 

and a mad dash to penetrate any and all computer systems without 

regard to cost-benefit analysis. We also failed to invest in Tasking, 
Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (TPED), burdening our 

all-source analysts with increased volumes of captured information, 

while providing them with virtually no tools for making sense of 

that information.14 Neither the U.S. intelligence community, nor the 

operational commanders ostensibly responsible for “requirements,” 

actually produced any coherent requirements. IO was “collectioncentric” and lacking in focus on definition of requirements, collection 

management, postprocessing, sense-making, or even actionable 

intelligence. The system was on auto-pilot, going over a cliff.

We went over the cliff on September 11, 2001 (9/11). Despite 

such books as American Jihad and Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared 

War on America,

15 despite a prior car bomb attack on the World Trade 

Center (and the capture of an entire apartment’s documents that the 

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) failed to translate), despite the 

FBI’s timely capture of a key 9/11 participant with his laptop (which 

FBI lawyers would not allow to be examined), we failed to prevent 

9/11. The only airplane that failed to hit its target was taken down 

by heroic U.S. citizens acting on public “intelligence” obtained by 

cell phone. This is a key observation: informed citizens acting on 

open source information can make a difference. 

The events of 9/11 put the champions of open source information 

(OSIF) and open source intelligence (OSINT) over the top. Although 

the status quo bureaucrats and their legislative allies defeated 

virtually all of the intelligence reform recommendations put forward 

by genuine reformists, including the widows and orphans of 9/11,16

proponents for transformative OSINT, aided by an open-minded 

USDI and Congressman Robert Simmons (R-CT-02), were able 

to leverage the tiny little box of recommendations on p. 413 of the 

9/11 Commission Report (recommending an Open Source Agency 

coequal to and completely independent of the Central Intelligence 

Agency (CIA),17 and related recommendations from two Defense 

Science Board reports, to achieve independent operating status 

within DoD.18

The “content” aspects of IO are now in the ascendancy. IO 

content can be thought of in two parts: Strategic Communication 

(the message) and OSINT (the reality). The first cannot be effective 

without the second. It is not possible to craft the right message, nor to 

deliver that message to the right person at the right time in the right 
6

context, without first understanding “ground truth” at a substate 

level of granularity (tribes, villages, neighborhoods). OSINT is the 

horse seeing the path, strategic communication is the cart carrying 

the message. One must precede the other.

At the same time, it is not possible for DoD to be effective at 

either strategic communication or OSINT if each of the Combatant 

Commanders (COCOM) and each of the services is executing 

contracts willy-nilly for either outgoing messages or incoming 

reality, with a variety of contractors and a variety of systems and 

products that never come together in any one place nor in a fully 

interoperable relationship. Content needs standards as much as 

any system. It is especially important that USSTRATCOM, which 

has the IO message/reality mission, and USSOCOM, which has the 

Global War on Terror (GWOT) mission (and also the nation’s finest 

operational OSINT capability),19 form an “IO Axis” that each of the 

COCOMs and the services, as well as DoD intelligence agencies, 

can plug into. Expenditures on IO/OSINT (including man-machine 

foreign language translation) by the National Security Agency 

(NSA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Intelligence 

and Security Command (INSCOM), to take three examples, must 

be managed by USDI or an operational field activity reporting to 

USDI in a manner such that we optimize what we spend and how 

we exploit what we capture or buy.20

Finally, there are two vital aspects of IO that USDI appears to 

be pursuing: DoD must serve a critical role as, first, the “hub” for 

interagency information-sharing within the U.S. Government and 

down to the state and local authorities; and second, as a bridging 

network across multinational multiagency boundaries, enabling 

more intimate and respectful information-sharing operations with 

coalition partners and NGOs than ever before, generally via the 

COCOMs and their JIOCs.

In summary, modern IO, the new IO, has three parts:

• Strategic Communication (the message),

• Open Source Intelligence (the reality), and

• Joint Information Operations Centers (the technology).21
With the foregoing discussion as preamble, the six IO-heavy 

mission areas will be reviewed in Chapter 2 with comments on the 

importance of DoD IO to the revitalization of national education 

and national research. Following a review of the mission areas, 

information challenges at each level of analysis (strategic, operational, 

tactical, and technical) will be examined in Chapter 3, as well as the 

strategic concepts for global IO. Chapter 4 sets forth the requirements 

statement for integrated IO. Chapter 5 contains conclusions and 

recommendations. The Appendix illustrates two analytic models for 

modern IO.

9

CHAPTER 2

THE IO-HEAVY MISSION AREAS

Peacekeeping Intelligence.

Peacekeeping Intelligence (PKI) is reactive, and must always 

be distinguished from Information Peacekeeping (IPK), which is 

proactive. PKI has been demeaned and ignored by United Nations 

(UN) leaders for decades. UN successes in the field, for example in 

the Congo in the 1960s, have occurred only when Force Commanders 

or selected national elements have chosen to ignore UN bureaucratic 

prejudices against the practice of sensible all-source military 

intelligence.22

In 2000, errors of the past were recognized, and a dramatic 

change in UN attitudes began to occur.23 No longer a dirty word, 

“intelligence” increasingly was understood to be essential to the 

accomplishment of the UN mission at multiple levels.24

Strategic. At the strategic level, the UN traditionally goes wrong 

in two ways: failing to act soon enough for lack of compelling 

early warning, and failing to provide the correct mandate for the 

peacekeeping or peace enforcement mission.25 The mandate is the 

basis for both the timing and the composition of the operational force 

to be employed. Intelligence is now valued at this level.

Operational. At the operational level, the UN in the past has sent 

the wrong mix of forces, generally lacking organic intelligence 

capabilities spanning the full range from aerial imagery and 

unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), to signals intelligence interception 

capabilities, to human intelligence and counterintelligence personnel, 

to qualified trusted translators. Intelligence is now impacting on this 

level.

Tactical. At the tactical level, the UN often has failed because the 

contributing nations’ military elements are not trained, equipped, 

or organized for operating in a failed state environment, and such 

law enforcement elements as might be included in the UN force 

structure tend to be both illiterate and incapable of driving a vehicle, 

much less operating a computer.26 Every Force Commander is now 

demanding organic capabilities.
10

Technical. At the technical level, the military forces assigned to 

the UN peacekeeping mission often will fail because their traditional 

intelligence collection equipment is unsuited for urban areas; for 

distribution down to the squad level; or for focusing on targets 

that do not “emit,” wear uniforms, carry visible arms, or ride in 

conventional military vehicles with clear markings and known 

signatures. Force Commanders are buying hand-held video cameras 

and other devices out of their own personal funds and sharing 

knowledge about unconventional intelligence sources and methods, 

including open sources and methods.

In recognition of the urgent need for new and original concepts, 

doctrines, sources, tools, and methods for the conduct of PKI, the 

Swedish Supreme Commander has directed the establishment of a 

Peacekeeping Intelligence Course to be offered each March-April in 

Sweden. 

Each of the IO initiatives being sponsored by USDI has 

considerable potential in support of PKI. Supporting PKI, and UN 

Force Commanders in the field, will reduce demands for unilateral 

U.S. force deployments, and also increase opportunities for transitions 

from hostilities to stabilization and reconstruction operations.

In concluding this section, we may note three areas where the 

UN and the United States have mutual interests and possibilities.

Maps. The single biggest deficiency in PKI is the almost total 

lack of 1:50,000 combat charts with elevation contour lines for the 90 

percent of the world where instability is endemic.27 In the Congo, for 

example, where Major General Patrick Cammaert is now the Force 

Commander, the National Geospatial Agency (NGA) has only seven 

out of the over 3,000 1:50,000 sheets needed for tactical military 

operations in that area. For under $1M, East View Cartographic, the 

private sector counterpart to NGA, can produce the 191 most critical 

map sheets needed for peacekeeping operations in the Congo. There 

is a need for a robust USDI program to accelerate the commercial 

production of tactical military maps needed by the UN and also 

needed by any U.S. forces engaged in follow-on stabilization and 

reconstruction missions. If it can be done in the private sector, it 

should not be done by NGA, which has more urgent and sensitive 

demands on its capabilities.
11

UN Centers. Prior to departing his assignment as Military Advisor 

to the Secretary General, Major General Cammaert cited a need for 

Joint Military Analysis Centers (JMAC) in each conflicted region. 

The first is being established in Africa, where it is widely understood 

that a regional approach to intelligence is necessary. Single country 

intelligence centers and intelligence campaign plans are ineffective. 

When attempting to interdict smuggled small arms, mercenaries, 

unauthorized Private Military Corporations (PMCs),28 blood 

diamonds, trade in women and children, or illegal funds transfers, 

only a regional approach stands any chance of being effective. There is 

real potential in the USDI interest in creating replicable JIOCs, in that 

a planned overlay and planned interoperability between U.S. JIOC 

and UN JMAC could have very positive outcomes in support of the 

four salient regional objectives—Diplomatic, Information, Military, 

and Economic—which I incorporate in the acronym DIME.

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). While the UN has now accepted 

the importance of intelligence or decision support, the member nations are not about to give it substantial classified intelligence support, 

and the reality is that most classified intelligence capabilities are 

relatively useless in failed state environments. The one area where 

the UN and DoD have absolute common cause is that of OSINT. To 

paraphrase Hugo Smith, as he put it so well in 1994, UN intelligence, 

by the very nature of UN operations, is best when it is overt, using 

methods that do not compromise the integrity or impartiality of 

the UN, when the information can be shared and become widely 

known.29 There is every reason for DoD to establish informationsharing agreements with the UN for each of the complex emergencies 

where military personnel are operating, and with other NGOs as 

appropriate.30 Indeed, in the OSINT arena, one can easily perceive the 

potential value of UN leadership in OSINT, with DoD subsidizing a 

mix of NGO and Google-like private sector initiatives.

Information Peacekeeping.

The concept of “information peacekeeping” or IPK emerged 

in the late 1980s when the author first tried to get a grip on global 

coverage and realized that no one nation, hence no one intelligence 

agency, could succeed on its own, and began devising concepts for an 
12

information continuum, burden-sharing, and “virtual (distributed) 

intelligence communities that fully engaged the private sector.31

In 1997, based on my conversations within the United States 

Institute of Peace (USIP) and my work on an invited paper entitled 

“Virtual Intelligence: Conflict Avoidance and Resolution Through 

Information Peacekeeping,” the concept emerged in full form at the 

Virtual Diplomacy conference of April 1-2, 1997.32 In the development 

of my ideas, a negative evolution—the growing gap between elites 

with power and experts with knowledge—was offset by the slow but 

steady emergence of what is today called “collective intelligence” or 

“wisdom of the crowds.”33

The paper emphasized that the core competency for diplomats 

was the harnessing of distributed unclassified knowledge, or “tools 

for truth,” in order to discover, discriminate, distill, and disseminate 

knowledge helpful to both protecting national security and nurturing 

national competitiveness.34 The following general principles of 

information peacekeeping are discussed in the closing section of the 

paper, which was published 8 years ago, and remain relevant today 

to the design and implementation of modern IO.

• Information peacekeeping is the ultimate global presence.

• Information peacekeeping is the first policy option—both 

to ensure that the policymaker has a full knowledge of the 

situation, and to impact constructively on those we seek to 

influence.

• We need to develop an information peacekeeping “order of 

battle,” with related tables of organization and equipment—

most of which can be “virtual” and rely on private sector 

providers of information and information technology who 

are mobilized “just in time.”

• Information peacekeeping is the operational dimension of a 

broader approach to national intelligence.

• The nature of global security and the ease of movement of 

transnational criminal and other rogue elements require the 

virtual constant integration of law enforcement, military, and 

civilian agencies as well as all elements of national intelligence 

into a larger secure global information architecture.
13

• Information is the ultimate countervailing force against the 

emerging threats, and the most cost-effective means of 

devising diplomatic and other responses intended to avoid or 

resolve conflicts.

• At least 80 percent of the information the policymaker needs 

in order to conduct information peacekeeping operations is 

not controlled by the government: “Knowing who knows” 

and the creation of management, technical, security, and 

procurement architectures that permit harnessing the 

distributed intelligence of the entire world (not just U.S. 

citizens with clearances), are the emerging new sources of 

national power.

• Because the policymaker is inundated with contradictory 

information lacking systematic evaluation, a critical priority 

must be the transfer of the proven methods of classified 

intelligence analysis to the world of unclassified information.

• Unclassified information is critical to converting policymakers’ 

minds and winning public hearts. The policymaker can

succeed without classified information but he or she cannot

succeed without a mastery of unclassified information.

• Multichannel delivery of “truth” is the SIOP35 of the information age.

• Information peacekeeping is an information-intensive process 

with both mass and niche audiences; it is not a low-cost 

alternative to traditional warfare, but it is less expensive.

• The information “center of gravity” will vary from conflict 

to conflict, from level to level,36 and from dimension to 

dimension.37 The greatest challenge for the policymaker will 

be to manage a national intelligence and information-sharing 

architecture that can rapidly identify the information center 

of gravity, prepare the information “battlefield,” and deliver 

the appropriate (non-lethal) information “munitions” to carry 

the day.

IO is ultimately about using information as a substitute for conflict 

and as a means of creating wealth that stabilizes the now impoverished regions of the world.
14

Early Warning.

We do not lack for sources and methods relevant to Early 

Warning, although we could certainly do vastly better simply by 

attending to all sources in all languages all the time. What we lack 

is imagination on the part of analysts, who are largely young, white, 

bland, and distanced from foreigners; and focused attention on 

the part of policymakers. Kristan Wheaton, one of America’s most 

talented defense attaches at the time he wrote the book, The Warning 

Solution: Intelligent Analysis in the Age of Information Overload, makes 

three important points:38

• Policymaker Overload. Referring specifically to Kosovo, 

he points out that the U.S. European Command all-source 

analysts had all the warning they needed, but could not 

“break through” to the bosses because, at the time, Kosovo 

was a $1 billion problem, and the policymakers, including 

the Supreme Allied Commander, were preoccupied with $50 

billion dollar problems.

• Iconoclasts Need Not Apply. Overloaded policymakers, and 

the all-source managers of analysts who serve them, do not 

like to be made uncomfortable by iconoclasts and mavericks. 

Not only does “the system” not search for such individuals, it 

actively shuts them out.

• History and Culture Ignored. In specific relation to the Kosovo 

campaign and the early warning that was both achieved and 

not achieved, he stresses that it is human understanding of 

historical and cultural facts and biases, not current intelligence captured through technical means, that really puts the 

meat into Early Warning.

We do receive some Early Warning from analysts, and we can 

increase that by a factor of 1,000X if we get a grip on what the 

Swedes call M4 IS: multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, 

multidomain information-sharing. However, regardless of how 

much substantive Early Warning we have, our biggest problem 

remains a lack of Early Attention by policymakers. In addition to 
15

the ideas put forth in Kristan Wheaton’s work, we have a book by 

Thomas Davenport and John Beck titled The Attention Economy: 

Understanding the New Currency of Business, which is dedicated to the 

topic of organizational “attention deficit disorders.”39 They also offer 

useful suggestions. First, they recommend that resources be allocated, 

and management attention be structured, along the following lines:

Global coverage for AWARENESS. In contrast to the current 

obsession with terrorism, which is no higher than number five 

or six on most professional threat lists40 and which has joined the 

“hard targets” of the past as the focus of loosely-coordinated effort 

among the classified agencies, these authors recommend a global 

spider web, very lightly spun, to capture those weak signals, many 

of which will pertain to topics (for example, the emergence of bird 

flu in China) that are not normally sought by classified means. The 

recommendation of these authors tallies precisely with a report 

done for George Tenet, then Director of Central Intelligence, titled 

The Challenge of Global Coverage. Delivered in July 1997, this report 

recommended that $1.5 billion a year be spent, comprising $10 

million for each of 150 combined “low priority” countries in the 

Third World addressing specified nonconventional targets, including 

disease, poverty, water scarcity, etc.. The report was promptly filed 

and forgotten. Just as in the old DoD, where a Chairman of the Joint 

Chiefs of Staff was quoted as saying, “Real men don’t do Operations 

Other Than War,” the leadership of the U.S. intelligence community 

remains convinced that they are in the business of generating secrets 

for the President, and there is but lip service given to meeting the 

needs of all federal agencies at all levels, with no appreciation at all 

for the value of public intelligence.41 The good news for all of us, 

as validated by such distinguished authors and practitioners as Dr. 

Michael Herman of Oxford,42 is that global coverage can be largely 

accomplished through free and low-cost monitoring of open sources 

of information in all languages, all the time. Somebody has to do it, 

and that somebody is probably the private sector, under mandate 

from DoD, and with virtual global collaboration from coalition 

militaries in every country.

Surge local focus for ATTENTION. Classified assets simply do not 

surge. Classified imagery satellites are optimized for hard targets and 

do not do well against jungle canopy or caves in mountains. Signals 
16

capabilities are terribly ineffective against Third World languages 

and fast-changing signatures. Clandestine assets tend to be clustered 

in the capital cities and focused on the cocktail party circuit. They 

also do not transfer well—in one case, two clandestine case officers 

sent to Somalia without language skills literally became unhinged, 

according to an extensive investigation by The Washington Post. In 

contrast, private sector capabilities, with all necessary language and 

local knowledge qualifications, focused on open sources can surge 

very ably.43 Commercial imagery on demand within 2 days, with 

2-day repeat cycles, and 1-meter resolution? Broadcast monitoring, 

local area gray literature collection, mosque sermon monitoring, a 

photograph of an arms dealer’s front door taken with a cell phone 

camera, boots on the ground for verifying whether the new uranium 

mine really exists? No problem. Not only no problem, but available 

at a fraction of the cost of a classified asset. All you need is a decent 

budget and a mind-set acknowledging that legal and ethical open 

sources of information just might be your best option. It bears 

mention that open sources can be discreet—commercial enterprises 

and private investigators routinely sign and enforce nondisclosure 

agreements with severe penalties for infractions.

Domestic political focus for ACTION. Early Warning that is classified 

can be safely ignored by officials—there are rarely any political 

consequences for pretending that certain intelligence does not exist. 

In contrast, well-structured, well-documented public intelligence, 

ideally with strong visuals, can have a “CNN effect” on policymakers, 

forcing them to at least consider some form of action. Commercial or 

open source information is also shareable easily with Congress, close 

allies, near-at-hand coalition partners, and even distrustful countries 

and activist organizations.

Davenport and Beck go on to cite relevance, community, 

engagement, and convenience as the four key factors in attracting 

and holding the attention of individuals and to specify four 

“attention tracks” that each analyst or policymaker must manage: 

focusing one’s own attention; attracting the right kind of attention to 

oneself; directing the attention of those under one’s oversight; and 

maintaining the attention of one’s customers and clients.

Decisionmaker inattention is not unique to government. The 

most acute observer of the global business intelligence scene is an 
17

Israeli, Ben Gilad, who tells us:

One of the facts that amazed me the most over the past 8 years while 

helping American and European firms improve their ability to read their 

markets, was how insulated top executives were from competitive reality. 

This is because they secure their competitive intelligence (market signals 

regarding change) at best through a close circle of “trusted” personal 

sources, or at worst through those one-page news summary clippings. 

Top managers’ information is invariably either biased, subjective, filtered, or 

late.44

Moreover, problems of poor performance characterize America’s 

scientific and technical (S&T) communities. Bradford Ashton and 

Richard Klavans, the two top practitioners in America in the field 

of predictive analysis for S&T, state: “The practice of applying 

intelligence principles to science and technology (S&T) in business 

is a new field . . . . Unfortunately, at this time, information on the 

practice of [competitive technical analysis] in business is diffuse and 

fragmented.”45

While there are some bright spots, such as the Academy of 

Competitive Intelligence organized by Jan Herring, a former National 

Intelligence Officer for Science & Technology46 in partnership 

with Ben Gilad and Leonard Fuld, and there are a few exceptional 

practitioners here and there,47 by and large business intelligence is in 

the basement—one- and two-person shops cutting and pasting and 

without the budget or the tools or the mindset to do Early Warning 

or Predictive Analysis.

Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations.

Congress had to legislate the capabilities for Special Operations 

and Low-Intensity Conflict, as well as the requirement for jointness 

(Goldwater-Nichols Act). Today DoD is more mature and more openminded. It is DoD that has taken the lead in defining, through the 

Defense Science Board, a need to move smoothly into the business 

of Stabilization and Reconstruction.48 It is DoD that sees clearly the 

need for joint interagency collaboration and information-sharing 

centers. It is DoD—not the mandarins of classified intelligence—that 

sees the value of close and open collaboration with NGOs using the 
18

civil affairs model for multilateral liaison, rather than the intelligence 

model of compartmented bilateral liaison. DoD has, in short, come 

of age.

We are moving, in simplistic terms, toward four “forces after 

next” to address the four emerging types of conflict:49

• Big War/Information Operations (USSTRATCOM)

• Small War/Global War on Terror (USSOCOM)

• PeaceWar (Not Yet Assigned)

• Homeland Defense (U.S. Northern Command

[USNORTHCOM]).

By way of introduction to Stabilization and Reconstruction (S&R) 

operations, we would make two observations: first, that there 

are growing calls for a unified national security budget, in which 

diplomatic, military, and law enforcement investments and 

capabilities are orchestrated within a coherent strategy rather than 

in their current stovepiped isolation;50 and, second, that Singapore 

is leading the way in focusing its Ministry of Defence on all threats, 

whether man-made or not. The appearance of Severe Acute 

Respiratory Symptoms (SARS) was a wake-up call for them. Such 

an “attack” could wipe out their population in a matter of weeks. 

“Defense” today must be global, integrated, and prepared for all 

threats, both those that involve a heavy metal military, and those 

that require operations other than war (OOTW), including medical 

prevention, interception, and recovery.51

In my 2002 work, The New Craft Of Intelligence: Personal, Public, 

and Political, I devoted five chapters to unconventional threats—

global conditions including poverty and mass migrations that spawn 

terrorism; plagues, toxic bombs, resource wars, and water shortages; 

and global genocide—and to these we would today add support 

for numerous dictators52 and various immoral manifestations of 

capitalism, both of which undermine any public diplomacy or 

strategic communication message we might wish to deliver.

For the sake of emphasizing the importance of the S&R mission, 

which has yet to be assigned, and which could reasonably be either an 

addition to USSOCOM or a new interagency Combatant Commander, 
19

let us briefly review the “state of the world” as various troubled 

nations impact on U.S. national security in the form of increased 

threats from illegal immigration, energy supply interruptions, water 

shortages, the spread of pandemic disease, crime, terrorism, etc.:53

• Complex Emergencies: 32 countries

• Dictators Supported: 44 countries

• Refugees/Displaced: 66 countries

• Starvation: 33 countries

• Plagues: 59 countries

• Ethnic Conflict: 18 countries

• Child Soldiers: 41 countries

• Censorship: 62 countries

• Water Scarcity: widespread

• Resource Wars: widespread.

DoD’s new-found focus on S&R is very wise. Not only are 

there not enough guns on the planet to enforce security54 (peace is 

security without force; security is enforced peace),55 but it clearly 

has been established by numerous authorities that the combination 

of legitimacy56 and localized wealth creation is the sine qua non 

for stabilizing and nurturing large populations. Corruption and 

censorship undermine wealth creation. Neither benign dictatorships 

nor a dramatic increase in foreign aid will do it. We need to nurture 

the three billion new capitalists of China and India, not fear them.57

Information, not foreign assistance, is the key to this mission.

Homeland Defense and Civil Support.

DoD has recently published a clear mandate on this topic in a 

document titled Homeland Defense and Civil Support.

58 It espouses a 

defense in depth. As stated on the first page:

This active layered defense is global, seamlessly integrating U.S. 

capabilities in the forward regions of the world, the global commons of 

space and cyberspace, in the geographic approaches to U.S. territory, and 

within the United States.
20

We would add two observations: first, that the single “constant” 

between DoD and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 

is information and intelligence; and, second, that in this age of 

improvised terrorism where sleepers already in the United States 

use commercial vehicles and local supplies to attack homeland 

targets, the only thing that can be intercepted and acted upon is 

information.

The capabilties for Homeland Defense and Civil Support as 

particularly emphasized in the DoD strategy document (pp. 3 and 4) 

are as follows:

• Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance

• Information-Sharing

• Interagency and Intergovernmental Coordination

• Joint Operations (for Homeland Defense).

The first three of the four capabilities are focused exclusively on 

information and intelligence, while the fourth demands the fullest 

possible implementation of common interoperable command and 

control, communications, and computing (C4I) systems. Since DHS 

and its constituencies cannot afford the high-end systems that DoD 

has been funding for itself, and DoD cannot afford to pay for 50 to 

5,000 C4I nodes across America, there is only one option: an open 

source software solution that allows everyone to tie in to a new Open 

Source Information System-External (OSIS-X),59 and the melding of 

OSIS-X into an Application-Oriented Network (AON)60 that permits 

the sharing of secret information on a by-name basis regardless of 

nationality 24/7.61

There is a subtlety involved in all this that requires strong scrutiny 

by both DoD and DHS information and intelligence managers. While 

DoD can and should be responsible for global monitoring in support 

of defense missions, we must be accutely conscious of the possibility 

(in my opinion) that 50 percent of the “dots” relevant to preventing 

the next 9/11 will be “bottom-up” dots collected at the county level 

by direct observation from citizens, public employees, and law 

enforcement professionals. Today those dots have no place to go. 

Although congressional hearings have been held and will be held 

again on the need for a national domestic intelligence network,62 DoD 
21

should consider a pilot project with the U.S. Northern Command 

(USNORTHCOM) and a few key states (e.g., New York, Texas, 

Virginia) in which DoD’s man-machine foreign language processing 

capabilities are made available to all 911 operators, at the same time 

that a new number, 119, is established as a pathway for citizens to 

report via locationally-aware voice, image, or electronic message, 

any suspicious individuals, packages, or activities.

More specifically, it is imperative that DoD expand its vision for 

IO to include a recommendation to the President that DHS receive a 

matching investment of $1.5B a year for 50 state intelligence centers 

and networks, each funded at $30M per year at final operational 

capability. The National Guard is uniquely qualified to man those 

centers, since it can hold both military commissions with access to 

national foreign intelligence, and state law enforcement commissions 

with access to citizen information under strict privacy protection. 

Guardsmen are, not, however, qualified to design or build these 

centers. A special DoD-DHS task force is recommended.63

Homeland defense suffers from one major handicap that must 

be overcome, the same handicap that prevented the FBI from being 

effective in the months leading up to 9/11. Lawyers, including 

especially lawyers at USNORTHCOM, are both uninformed and 

timid when it comes to a determination of what can and cannot be 

collected and exploited when using open sources of information 

about U.S. citizens or foreigners within the borders of the United 

States.64 It would be most helpful if DoD established, in partnership 

with the Department of Justice, a legal working group with a 24/7 

Help Desk able to protect the Combatant Commanders, the National 

Guard, and others, from their own lawyers whose timidity-based 

ignorance leads them to say “no” when they actually have no idea 

what the law allows.

National Education and National Research.

The failure of education in the United States, in which U.S. students 

consistently are falling behind Indian and Chinese students—as well 

as Nordic and many other nationalities—has been the subject of 

many books and commentaries and will not be examined in detail 

here. However, it is vital to understand that one cannot have smart 
22

spies in the context of a dumb nation, nor can one have effective 

OSINT or effective strategic communication (and public diplomacy) 

if these are perched on a hollow shell.

In addition to failing at science and technology, with a majority 

of our engineering and computer science graduate students now 

hailing from outside the United States rather than from within 

our own citizen base, we have the problem of insularity. Both 

David Boren (former Chairman of the Senate Select Committee for 

Intelligence, today the President of the University of Oklahoma) and 

David Gergen (former Senior Editor of U.S. News & World Report

and presidential advisor) have called for the “internationalization of 

education.”65 Both fear that our children—and their parents—are so 

intellectually and emotionally isolated from overseas realities as to 

foster an attitude of neglect among our political leaders.

With the collapse of education comes the collapse of research 

and then development across all S&T domains. Lou Dobbs on CNN 

has focused on the out-sourcing of jobs from America. Now Thomas 

Friedman of the New York Times points out in emphatic terms that 

America is losing basic research and development work, the heart 

and soul of modern productivity and wealth creation, to China and 

India.66

It is all interconnected. My view is clear-cut: IO and national 

intelligence writ large (i.e., truly national, embracing all elements of 

society, not only the spies and purveyors of secrecy) are potentially 

the “lifeboat” for rescuing America from its intellectual and moral 

decline.

Unlike the Vietnam era, when DoD was asked to help create the 

Great Society by absorbing into the Army Category IV individuals 

who were “brain challenged,” we are today in a completely different 

situation. DoD has an opportunity to recruit and nurture the best and 

the brightest, to achieve universal coverage, 24/7, in all languages, 

and to cycle the resulting “ground truth” back into society and 

particularly back into the classroom, as well as across the national 

S&T laboratories.

In combination, legal and ethical Strategic Communication, 

OSINT, and joint interagency information-sharing entities can 

revitalize the nation. We must “think big” and “dare to want it all.”
23

Not Covered by This Monograph.

This monograph does not cover the dramatic exponential 

changes that are occurring in the information technology arena writ 

large, namely, the changes characteristic of information about and 

within genetics, robotics, nano-technology, and the related fields 

of cognitive science and informatics. We agree with those who 

believe that advances in information technology could produce 

revolutionary wealth and revolutionary solutions to the problems 

that plague the world, including poverty, pestilence, pollution, and 

the vanishing of our most precious resource, water. However, we 

also believe that the humanities are behind the sciences, and that 

Henry Kissinger is correct in saying that the sources and methods 

of governance are not keeping pace with the scale and speed of the 

challenges to governance.67 It is my view that IO, if carried out by 

DoD in the enlightened manner that is potentially possible, has the 

possibility of revolutionizing governance by revolutionizing what 

government can know, how it knows it, how it decides, and how it 

communicates both its decision and supporting information. Modern 

IO is the first step toward revolutionary wealth.68

25

CHAPTER 3

INFORMATION CHALLENGES

The Strategic Problem.

At the strategic level and directly related to a half-century 

of focus on a handful of hard targets considered to be military 

threats, the United States finds itself with a military optimized for 

force-on-force confrontations between nation-states and a national 

intelligence community optimized for stealing secrets through 

technical means, with an extremely limited range of focus and almost 

no flexibility. The bulk of the money for intelligence is invested in 

technical collection rather than in Tasking, Processing, Exploitation, 

and Dissemination (TPED).69 Of intelligence funding, 99 percent is 

focused on secret collection rather than open source information 

acquisition and exploitation. Emerging threats and nonstate actors 

are best understood through realization of Dr. Cambone’s vision 

of universal coverage, 24/7, in all languages, using open sources of 

information. At the same time, DoD lacks adequate personnel with 

language skills relevant to most of the complex emergencies and 

conflict zones where U.S. forces are engaged.

Here following are pointed words taken from recent official 

pronouncements of the U.S. Government on the strategic problem 

under discussion:

Much of the needed information and knowledge can be found in 

unclassified sources, [but] the pursuit, exploration, and exploitation of 

open sources have taken a back seat to learning secrets. While we in 

no way denigrate the importance of the latter, we ask the [Secretary of 

Defense] to instruct [the Defense Open Source Council] to establish a vital 

and active effort focused on using open sources to provide information 

on cultures, infrastructure, genealogy, religions, economics, politics, and 

the like in regions, areas, and states deemed ripe and important.70

DoD does not have an effective language oversight program. There 

is no systematic requirements determination process. There is no 

comprehenisve and accurate database of DoD personnel with language 

skills. . . . What we [must be] concerned with is . . . anticipating tomorrow’s 

requirements.71
26

[T]he need for exploiting open source material is greater now than ever 

before . . . since the spread of information technology is immune to many 

traditional clandestine methods of intelligence collection . . . open source 

materials may provide the critical and perhaps the only window into 

activities that threaten the United States.72

The Operational Problem.

At the operational level, interagency collaboration within the 

U.S. Government, federal-state-county collaboration among the 

three levels of homeland governance, and multinational interagency 

collaboration within any given regional theater of operations are 

severely constrained, almost to the point of complete ineffectiveness. 

The cause is decades of investment in unilateral classified 

communication systems to which others—including elements of the 

federal government not traditionally engaged in national security 

affairs and U.S. law enforcement at the state and local levels—cannot 

be granted access. The problem is exacerbated during the transitions 

to and from hostilities, on behalf of which the Defense Science Board 

has determined that information-sharing with NGOs is absolutely 

essential to both campaign planning for military operations and 

the execution of post-hostilities S&R operations. The problems 

evident in our own homeland security information environment 

are compounded dramatically when we are seeking to access and 

exploit foreign information.

Today there is no single agency or computer network that integrates 

all [national] security information [worldwide] . . . instead, most of the 

information exists in disparate databases scattered among federal, state, 

and local entities. In many cases, these computer systems cannot share 

information—either “horizontally” (across the same level of government) 

or “vertically” (between federal, state, and local governments). Databases 

used for law enforcement, immigration, intelligence, and public health 

surveillance have not been connected in ways that allow us to recognize 

information gaps or redundancies.73

The USG cannot meet its own obligations to the American people to 

prevent the entry of terrorists without a major effort to collaborate with 

other governments. We should do more to exchange terrorist informatin 

with trusted allies. . . .74
27

The Tactical Problem.

At the tactical level, two problems persist, one from the past and 

one newly recognized. The continuing problem is associated with 

the disconnect between classified national systems that cannot see 

under bridges, within neighborhoods, and into hearts and minds; 

and the distinct but related problem of delivering useful fused 

intelligence to the front lines—to the those fighting to achieve 

objectives in the last mile. The newly recognized problem, dealing 

with the proliferation of coalition allies, NGOs, private military 

contractors (PMC), religious organizations, and increasingly selforganized citizens groups, is that of establishing effective means both 

of sharing unclassified information when it makes sense to do so, 

and of establishing a shared view of the battlefield, be it diplomatic, 

informational, military, or economic.

The other tactical problem is within the homeland security 

environment. DoD is totally correct to focus on defense in depth, 

but right now the troops on the front line—our citizens, local police, 

paramedics, and firefighters—are completely outside of the C4I 

“loop.” DHS has labored heroically to address this problem, and 

there are close to 30 different C4I systems reaching various state 

and local authorities in generally convoluted and difficult-to-use 

ways. However, the reality is that DoD needs to suggest to the 

President—the only person who can make this decision—that the 

time has come for America to have an end-to-end C4I system that 

goes from schoolhouse to White House—every agency, every office, 

every state, every county, every university, every business, every 

labor union, every religious parish—needs to be able to plug in to a 

national intelligence and information-sharing architecture, with the 

state intelligence centers and networks as the “hubs” for state-based 

information-sharing. Roughly 90 percent of what everyone knows 

is not secret, so it makes sense to focus this new tactical system on 

unclassified commoditized elements, rather than trying to force 

fit an unaffordable Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) 

architecture to a role it simply cannot fulfill.
28

The Technical Problem.

Available information in 33+ languages and at least 12 dialects 

of Arabic has proliferated geometrically.75 Not only has print media 

information grown beyond all bounds, but African, Arabian, and 

Asian radio and television have done so as well. They are often the 

only sources available to illiterate individuals comprising a breeding 

ground for terrorists and criminals. Our national systems—both 

technical and human—are unable to muster the effort to acquire, 

translate, and analyze all relevant open information. At the same 

time, much of what we know is buried in electronic mail and personal 

hard drives that are not normally indexed for search and retrieval by 

any enterprise-wide system, much less a network. Tactically, there 

is a need for a leap ahead in both Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) 

technology, and in the exploitation of globally distributed multimedia 

and multilingual information for specific localized needs.

STRATEGIC CONCEPT FOR GLOBAL IO (M4 IS)76

Appreciating the Magnitude of the Challenge.

The global information explosion and its logarithmic increase 

cannot be understated. Figure 2 illustrates where information 

quantities are headed. Information has doubled over these past 2 

years, so we are now looking at 100 billion gigabytes or 100 exabytes, 

roughly equivalent to 2 trillion four-door filing cabinets of hard-copy 

documents.77 Within this complex multimedia and multilingual 

environment, the noise to signal ratio will get tougher, and so also 

will the early warning, anomaly detection, and pattern recognition 

challenges. 

This is just the digital information—when one adds unpublished 

local or expert knowledge, locally-available hard copy or “gray 

literature,” and geospatial information as well as television and 

audio programming not available through the Internet, the awesome 

magnitude of this challenge becomes apparent.

The critical ingredient in making sense of all this information in 

near real-time is a scalable database architecture that is capable of 

real-time content-based routing; high-speed, continuous indexing; 
29

. . . In Just the Past Two Years . . In Just the Past Two Years

2000 3B

2001 6B

2002 12B

2003

24B

40,000 BCE

cave paintings

bone tools

writing

paper

printing

electricity, telephone

transistor

computing

Internet

(DARPA) The web

GIGABYTES

2000 rich content Source: UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems

Figure 2. The Growth of the Global Information Challenge.

and rapid search-and-retrieval across all relevant databases both 

public and private.

Linking Strategic Communication and Special Operations.

From my perspective, the IO mission of USSTRACOM and 

the GWOT mission of SOCOM comprise the two ends of an axis 

along which all other Combatant Commanders; defense agencies; 

and federal, state, and local information operations—especially 

public diplomacy by the Department of State and commercial risk 

monitoring by the Departments of Commerce and Treasury—can 

“plug in.” The STRATCOM investments planned for global IO 

and the SOCOM investments planned for enhanced information 

technology applications and open source intelligence can and should 

be integrated by USDI using a commercial “virtual back office” for 

unclassified DoD information.78

There are other major contributors, notably elements of the UN 

engaged in peace enforcement operations and in S&R missions, 

and international law enforcement activities focused on capturing 

and containing terrorists, arms proliferators, and smugglers. This 
30

strategy is consistent with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) 

interest in considering the maximum possible use of commercial 

providers of open source intelligence collection and processing in 

behalf of defense and homeland security.79

Within the U.S. Government, the search for “common solutions” 

by OMB could be substantially enhanced if DoD were to fully 

integrate experts on the U.S. Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), 

the Data Reference Model (DRM), and the National Information 

Exchange Model (NIEM) into its planning and oversight of contracts 

related to interagency collaboration and information-sharing 

centers.80

The Department of State deserves special mention. Although 

historically it has been the primary collector, processor, translator, 

interpreter, and disseminator of foreign language information relevant to U.S. national security and foreign policy, over time it has 

chosen to become an end-user of intelligence and to abdicate its 

role as the nation’s primary overt collector and evaluator of foreign 

information. This monograph respects State’s preferences, but 

advocates a partnership between State and DoD in which DoD provides 

State with 10 nonreimbursable personnel positions with which to 

create an Office of Informaton Sharing responsible for negotiating 

information-sharing treaties with nations and information-sharing 

agreements with organizations, including NGOs, universities, and 

other private sector parties. We also recommend that State, along 

with DHS, be treated as “first among equals” as clients for the DoD 

IO system.

The U.S. Departments of Commerce, Treasury, and Transportation, as well as the Department of the Interior, also require special 

mention. Both Osama bin Laden and China understand that 21stcentury warfare centers around economic advantage, not military 

advantage. Both are focused—the one for destructive reasons, the 

other for constructive reasons—on economic, trade, financial, and 

energy networks. It is not possible to protect U.S. national security 

nor to nurture U.S. national competitiveness without the application 

of the most advanced defense information and intelligence concepts 

possible to commercial, economic, treasury, transportation, 

agriculture, and health matters. It is all connected.

STRATCOM-SOCOM represent the first tier of connectivity. 
31

DHS and NORTHCOM, followed by the regional COCOMs, are the 

second tier of connectivity. The rest of the government is in the third 

tier, while coalition governments and NGOs are in the fourth.

Creating the Open Source Information System-External (OSIS-X).

Figure 3 illustrates our understanding of the four quadrants of 

information that every COCOM and defense agency must be able 

to gain access to in order to plan and carry out their missions. Huge 

investments have been made in the two secret quadrants, but virtually 

no money at all has been spent on the two unclassified quadrants. 

Figure 3. Open Source Information System-External.

DoD should deliberately fund OSIS-X as a commercial venture, 

taking care to migrate key personnel and standards from Intelink 

and OSIS in order to create a universal global network that can 

not only receive and make sense of all unclassified information in 

all languages and all mediums, but can also be paid for—in cash 

and in kind—by all governments, corporations, and transnational 

organizations that choose to participate. 
32

The cost of global information to the government would be sharply 

reduced, in part by eliminating the need for multiple subscriptions 

to expensive commercial subscription and aggregation services81

that have been overtaken by direct source access at lower cost via 

the Internet, and in part by creating a global network that facilitates 

the harnessing of distributed global intelligence that easily can be 

routed to the high side of government systems. This network should 

provide for the exploitation of leap-ahead commercial technology 

and new forms of security that will increase what can be shared and 

with whom under appropriate dissemination controls with workable 

audit trails.

Generic Information Collaboration Center.

The Joint Interagency Collaboration Center (JICC) initiative 

at SOCOM (see Figure 4) should become a replicable generic 

capability.

Such a capability could be migrated quickly from its first 

implementation at SOCOM, to STRATCOM and the Multinational 

Force in Iraq (MNF-I), then to other theaters (especially NORTHCOM 

for the homeland security implementation), thereafter to each state 

(creating generic statewide Community Intelligence Centers),82 and 

then outwards to the varied NGO agencies that have important 

global databases and subject-matter expertise relevant to targets of 

mutual interest, including failed states.83

Creating Regional Multinational Centers and Networks.

OSIS-X could offer free uploading to all regional COCOMs and 

their coalition allies so that the information can be indexed, secured, 

and easily harvested to the high side by USDI’s chosen integrator. The 

generic ICC should be migrated to regional multinational informationsharing centers that could eventually become multinational allsource intelligence and operations centers (see Figure 5) where 

coalition militaries can compile unclassified information from across 

their respective countries, while allowing a multinational team led 

by the United States to process and make sense of this information 

for regional early warning and action purposes.
33

Figure 4. Providing a Generic Information Sharing Solution.

It will be important, if we are to honor NGO concerns about 

transparency and propriety, to keep the core regional information 

center “pure” by dealing only with open sources of information 

that can be shared with NGOs. However, the depiction in Figure 

5 deliberately reflects a future evolution of such centers (or mirror 

centers at another location) into all-source collection management 

and processing facilities.

Global S&R Operations.

DARPA STRONG ANGEL84 open source software appears to be 

relevant, in conjunction with INTER-4 tactical computers85 sanitized 

for general use, to rapidly establishing both theater-wide and tactical 

information-sharing and collaboration networks. These networks 

would employ shared low-cost information analytics and decisionsupport features. Both NGO and the DHS constituencies (state and 

local governments) share a common problem: lack of funding for 

high-end communications and computing systems. The solution 

is to extend STRONG ANGEL to the point where it can be easily 

adopted by anyone as a basic desktop and/or hand-held toolkit. It 

should be possible for NGOs and for state and local governments to 
34

Regional Information Center

Chief of Center 

Singapore

Deputy for Collection

Australia

Deputy for Processing

Malaysia

Deputy for Analysis

China

OSINT

HUMINT

IMINT

SIGINT

Digitization

Translation

Visualization

Analytic Support

Waring

Estimative

Countries

Issues

Deputy for Counterintelligence

Japan

Deputy for Covert Action

Thailand

Figure 5. Concept for Harnessing Coalition Information.

contribute information to the DoD system at no cost to themselves, 

and for them to draw relevant information approved for release at 

no cost to themselves. Enabling this participation will substantially 

increase the amount of relevant unclassified information available 

to all DoD elements, while also enabling collaborative online 

work and information-sharing in near real time across all mission 

areas. This will also enable coalition partners who are not part of 

the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and who cannot 

afford unilateral top secret systems to have a viable multinational, 

multiagency information-sharing toolkit available to them.

This is all the more true because the existing DoD Global 

Information Architecture (GIG) is both out of date and unaffordable 

by anyone else.86 The high-end proprietary Information Technology 

(IT) solutions are not only too expensive, but also pathologically 

noninteroperable. Open source software and open (electromagnetic) 

spectrum are, along with open source information, the heart of 21st 

century IO. This wealth of knowledge can be mined by DoD if it 

makes open source software a viable option.

Harnessing the Seven Other Tribes.

Within each nation-state, the national government, the military, 

and the national law enforcement community represent just a 
35

fraction of the local knowledge and the direct access to varied open 

sources of multilingual and multimedia information. The seven other 

“tribes” include the business sector, the academic community, the 

NGOs, the local or regional news media, and self-organized citizen 

groups, labor unions, and religious congregations. Our concept of 

operations provides for the facilitation of web-based voluntary but 

also accredited and authenticated participation by any and all elements 

whose employees will be afforded anonymous access across the 

system, with the entire process taking place generally through and 

with the encouragement of their governments. The creation of such 

networks within each nation-state, and within each region, actually 

facilitates strategic communication in that the same network used to 

receive open source information can also be used to broadcast, in a 

carefully measured manner, specific messages to specific groups. 

It is important to stress that classified information is a small 

fraction of the relevant information needed for strategic 

communication, peacekeeping intelligence, information peacekeeping early warning, and S&R. The vast majority of the information 

needed by DoD is unclassified, generally not online nor subject to 

deep web data mining, generally not in English, and generally not 

readily identifiable unless a witting and willing volunteer from 

the owning organization “offers it up.” Roughly 90 percent of 

the information we need is unclassified and available only from 

organizations that will not share that information with secret 

agencies. Civil affairs is the model to use.

Sense-Making.

The U.S. Government has some pockets of excellence in sensemaking, but, in general, most of the government, including DoD, is 

still in the industrial era of paper reports and isolated human analysts 

trying to “connect the dots” without adequate toolkits. DoD needs 

a Strategic Decision-Support Center such as has been proposed by 

Captain Scott Philpott, USN, one of the original architects of the 

USSOCOM “pit.” Such a Center must bring together in one place the 

following elements:

• OSINT super-searchers with global access;

• Classified super-searchers with full access to all raw secrets;
36

• Brainstorming network with both in-house and distributed 

experts;

• Geospatially and time/date-based visualization; and,

• Modeling and simulation using rapid response incremental 

approaches.

Putting the I Back Into Diplomatic, Information, Military, and 

Economic (DIME).

DoD needs to create or contract for a global open source acquisition, 

analytics, and technical information-sharing environment. It must 

be able to increase by an order of magnitude, and then a double 

order of magnitude, the near-real-time multilingual and multimedia 

information that can be delivered to DoD elements. It would be 

used to support operational planning, acquisition and logistics 

management, and all-source intelligence targeting, evaluation, and 

integrated production. This capability must merge global acquisition, 

translation, statistical analysis, analytic services (including historical 

and cultural analysis), and tailored dissemination in near-real-time. 

Such a capability will dramatically reinforce DoS public diplomacy, 

DoD strategic communication, and other missions, while being 

directly transferable to DHS. For example, the man-machine foreign 

language network can be used to reinforce all 911 Emergency 

Responder networks now lacking in foreign language capabilities.

The I, or Information, cannot be put back into DIME from the 

high side or secret side of the U.S. intelligence and information 

environment. It can be restored only from the unclassified side, 

the side that is open to both receiving information from external 

parties, and sharing information with those same parties. DoD, 

using the overt civil affairs model for liaison rather than the secret 

intelligence model for bilateral covert liaison, is the only element of 

the government capable of putting the I back into DIME.

Google, in the private sector, may offer a solution. Google is the 

only truly affordable, scalable network available to all parties in 

all languages. Google’s main problems are (1) its lack of security, 

and (2) the imprecision of its search, which substitutes popularity 

for relevance. Both of these shortfalls are resolvable, the first by 
37

integrating the CISCO Application Oriented Networking (AON) 

family of capabilities for secure content-based routing and global 

security access rules; the second by integrating IBM’s Database 2 

with OmniFind as an internal database standard for corporate and 

nongovernmental access.

The day of unilateral secret systems is over. DoD has begun 

to recognize that 90 percent of the content—and 90 percent of the 

capabilities—for achieving information superiority are in the private 

sector. The initiatives being taken by the Under Secretary of Defense 

for Intelligence are right on target, but need to be orchestrated to 

achieve information superiority in all languages.

39

CHAPTER 4

STATEMENT OF REQUIREMENTS

Global Access to Open Sources.

A major impediment to DoD and U.S. Government effectiveness 

in the Open Source Information (OSIF) and Open Source Intelligence 

(OSINT) arenas is the lack of a single system that can store all 

OSIF/OSINT funded by all elements of the government, while 

simultaneously offering a means of distributed search and retrieval 

from across all private and public databases that are not part of the 

U.S. intelligence community (and do not desire to be). OSIS-X will 

resolve this deficiency, and in adopting all relevant Intelink and OSIS 

meta-tagging standards, will allow for constant easy harvesting from 

OSIS-X all the way to the high side. The Under Secretary and the 

Defense Open Source Council (DOSC) have articulated a good firstever definition of DoD mission-oriented needs for tailored OSIF/

OSINT support to the COCOMs and the various defense elements.87

Among the desirable features that diverge from traditional 

U.S. intelligence community approaches to OSIF/OSINT are the 

following:

• Need near-real-time processing of all open sources in all 

languages;

• Translators need not be U.S. citizens if using cover support 

plans;

• Includes global access to subject matter experts who are not 

U.S. citizens;

• Includes commercial imagery and geospatial information;

• Includes offline gray literature as well as “street talk” and 

sermons; and,

• Must be shareable with NGOs and other foreign 

organizations.

Deep web content acquisition not available from commercial 

aggregators is a major aspect of the open source information 
40

challenge. However, private databases, especially NGO databases, 

niche and mainstream publications, gray literature, sermons, and 

street talk, as well as new knowledge created by subject matter 

experts on demand, are part of the larger global pool. They can and 

must be addressed in at least 33 languages all the time, and in up to 

185 languages some of the time.

Presently, there appear to be roughly $1.5B over 5 years in open 

source information contracts under disparate management across 

the COCOMs and the various elements of DoD. It is imperative 

that those contracts be brought under centralized oversight so that 

requirements can be deconflicted, standards established, best prices 

and practices understood, and—most important of all—deliverables 

brought together into OSIS-X and not buried within various “pits.” 

Ideally, such contracts will inspire matching funding for DHS, and 

OMB eventually will prevail in its view that a national Open Source 

Agency, a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors 

and one independent of all Cabinet departments, is the best way to 

address national needs for both unclassified and sensitive information 

sharing.

Access to open sources is not achieved solely through physical 

contact or cash payment. Sharing begets sharing. The Silicon Valley 

Hackers Conference discussed this topic in the 1990s,88 concluding 

that, for every piece of useful information that one posts on the 

Internet, 100 unsolicited pieces of related information come back, of 

which 10 are unique and useful. That is a 10:1 return on the sharing 

investment. OSIS-X will not only make sense of all that we can 

know and prevent dots from being dropped in the future, but it will 

create an information ecology, an environment in which information 

attracts more and more information, makes more and more sense, 

and ultimately changes the American way of war and the American 

way of commerce.

Geospatial Tagging and Visualization.

In 1988, at a meeting of the General Defense Intelligence 

Program (GDIP) taking place at USSOCOM, as the Marine Corps 

representative I stressed the need for geospatial tagging of all data 

collected by all disciplines, pointing out that automated all-source 
41

fusion would not be possible until this became a pervasive practice. 

In 1992, at a meeting of the Council of Defense Intelligence Producers 

(CDIP) taking place at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, the Marine 

Corps representative (Colonel Bruce Brunn, then Director of the 

Marine Corps Intelligence Center) said, “I don’t care how much 

order of battle data you give me; if I cannot plot it on a map, it is 

useless to me.”89 We were both referring to 1:50,000 combat charts 

with elevation contour lines, the only acceptable resolution when 

you are an infantry commander trying to survive in defilade, or kill 

other people who are themselves using defilade to avoid artillery 

and direct fire. 

Today, 17 years after Colonel Mike Pheneger, then J-2 of SOCOM,90

and I made this an issue, we still do not have 1:50,000 combat charts 

for most of the Third World where S&R operations will take place 

and where UN forces are engaged in combat operations across 16 

complex emergencies.91

There is good news, however. The National Geospatial Agency 

(NGA) has evolved toward a digital geospatial architecture, and 

Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED) are available at 10, 3, and 1 

meter resolution, some Swiss cheese data gaps notwithstanding. It is 

now possible, if all data inherit geospatial tagging upon being entered 

into the system of systems, to move toward automated geospatial 

depictions of data from multiple sources in multiple languages. At 

the same time, the commercial geospatial industry has matured, and 

it is now possible to mirror NGA capabilities in the private sector.

We need two initiatives: First, we must demand geospatial tagging 

from all disciplines, including Human Intelligence (HUMINT). This 

will be aided by the emergence of locationally-aware devices, but 

needs flag-level attention now.92 Second, we must fund commercial 

production of 1:50,000 combat charts for the UN combat missions 

that will eventually require the introduction of U.S. forces engaged in 

S&R activities. Figures 6 and 7 illustrate two alternative geospatiallybased visualizations.93

There are numerous open source as well as proprietary 

visualization tools that can be applied. Figure 7 shows a depiction 

from one promising DARPA-funded source. There are others. We 

specifically avoid favoring any one visualization system—it is the 
42

underlying data processing94 which makes customized visualization 

possible for a wide variety of needs across the full spectrum of endusers.

Shareable situational awareness enables successful operations of 

distributed networked forces and their coalition partners. Experience 

from Operational Intelligence (OPINT) based experimentation 

during recent deployments to Afghanistan, Indonesia, and Iraq has 

highlighted the profound need for shareable situational awareness 

tools and visual representation methods to enable rapid sharing 

of complex critical data in a timely manner with multiple coalition 

partners. These capabilities are needed to support the difficult modern 

missions of distributed networked forces and their coalition partners 

in austere environments with challenging rules of engagement.

Figure 6. Alternative Visualization Options.

These kinds of depictions and the ability of varied parties to 

share near-real-time “looks” at trends, patterns, and emerging 

event sequences will be facilitated by embedding geospatial tagging 

attributes into all hand-held and other collection and reporting 

devices.
43

Same Data - Different Focus

Events (incidents) and entities occur in space 

and over time.

There are multiple parameters of interest for each 

event/entity. 

General Concept Overview

Shareable Situational Awareness

Figure 7. Other Visualization Options. (continued on next page).
44

Textual information can be turned on and off depending on use

Figure 7. Other Visualization Options 

(continued from previous page)

Man-Machine Foreign Language Translation Network.

Machine translation, despite decades of effort, is in its infancy. 

While CYBERTRANS and SYSTRAN are useful in a limited sense, 

they are by no means adequate to the task of comprehensive near-realtime translation, nor even to the task of nuanced selection of materials 

for closer examination by humans. With Babylon Enterprise, they 

are helpful in providing “good enough” title and text translation for 

a human eye to evaluate possible utility, and they are also helpful in 

translating from English into foreign languages searchs for relevant 

documents across varied systems (e.g., SAP, Oracle, Siebel).

Online dictionaries, despite claims made by many promoters of 

these tools, are also in their infancy. Dramatic improvements are 

expected soon but not through the beltway bandits. We have found 

that personnel indigenous to the country where the target language 

is spoken can create really excellent online dictionaries at a fraction 

of the price demanded by beltway bandits, with the advantage of 

having nuanced terms and tailored specialty dictionaries included 

as a routine part of the development.

Where major gains can be made in the near term is in the 

exploitation of distributed human subject-matter experts with 
45

native-level fluency. We must break out of the strait-jacket mindset saying that only U.S. citizens with clearances can be used to do 

translations for national security or intelligence purposes. When it 

is the norm for most translations to be of unclassified and global 

piecemeal web-based material, for example, it makes sense to think 

in terms of translators in this specific order of utilization:

• Foreign indigenous personnel;

• U.S.-based native-fluency personnel;

• U.S. citizens with near-native fluency living overseas;

• U.S. citizens with clearances, including reservists working 

from home; and, 

• U.S. citizens with clearances on site.

Open sources without near-real-time evaluation, gisting, 

extraction, or translations are of marginal value. There are four 

distinct time/cost paradigms in the foreign language arena, and our 

current practices do not manage the four adequately. We must avoid 

the temptation to demand the translation of everything. Translations 

are a complement to pattern and predictive analysis in the original 

language, and to gisting by experts with native-level fluency. We 

must focus on the wheat, not the chaff.

Analytic and Decision-Support Services.

In evaluating those who offer “analytic” services, they should 

always be asked to present their models for analysis. More often than 

not, they will not have any but will instead be relying on “bodies 

by the hour,” doing cut-and-paste extraction and database stuffing. 

That is not analysis.

Key personnel being proposed as analysts must demonstrate, 

apart from the required educational and experience credentials, an 

ability to break down a problem, create and test hypotheses, construct 

a research argument or finding, and itemize essential elements of 

information that are missing and that could, if found, help resolve 

uncertainty.
46

There is no substitute for subject-matter experts (SME). However, 

the current practice is biased in favor of SMEs who are captive within 

vendor organizations, and consequently just one layer removed 

from the bureaucratic mind-sets they are supporting. There is also 

a bias toward SMEs that are U.S. citizens and have clearances. This 

is not the most effective means of understanding the real world. 

Instead, we must strike a balance in our outreach and integration by 

embracing:

• World-class experts regardless of nationality, hired one day 

at a time,

• World-class experts that are U.S. citizens without clearances,

• Retired government or private sector specialists, and

• Dedicated full-time analysts at the journeyman level.

If a vendor cannot readily identify the top 25 experts in the world on 

any topic, he or she is not ready to provide world-class support.

Statistical analysis and pattern or predictive analysis and trend 

detection are very important aspects of modern IO now that the 

center of gravity has shifted toward content analysis. The government 

should be very cautious in evaluating claimed capabilities where there 

is a heavy reliance on statistics packages or pre-packaged software. 

If the individuals contemplated for hire do not have a very advanced 

mathematical background (which includes multivariate analysis/

data mining), then they are just blind users of software they do not 

understand, the equivalent of a student using a crescent wrench 

without the slightest idea of the physics underlying mechanics.

One common mistake within IO is to substitute quantity for 

quality, and analyze chatter in relation to volume with no real 

opportunity for delving into the content. The best pattern and 

predictive analysis are done against unstructured multimedia data, 

in the original languages, with a global network of SMEs able to 

detect and highlight nuances in the context of the patterns found by 

automated analysis. Such capabilities are not linear in nature—they 

detect anomalous clusters, and they also flag vacuums, i.e., missing 

information that would normally be present.
47

Operational Open Source Software 

Collaborative Analytic Toolkits.

Many governments, including the United Kingdom, Norway, 

Israel, Germany, Brazil, and China are moving toward open source 

software instead of proprietary software as is offered by Microsoft, 

for three reasons: first, they feel they cannot impose on their citizens a 

requirement to buy proprietary software in order to read government 

documents; second, proprietary software is unaffordable at local 

levels trying to catch up to the national level’s embrace of modern 

information technology; and third, proprietary software, Microsoft’s 

in particular, is notoriously insecure.95 Open source software, while 

its maintenance is not free, offers a lower total cost of ownership 

than proprietary software. DARPA STRONG ANGEL is on the right 

track. DHS, its state and local constituencies, and the NGOs merit 

DoD support in this area.

SILOBREAKER is used to obtain an unmatched combination of 

web-based access to tens of thousands of sources around the world, 

and the Elucidon suite of tools. The larger American and European 

information industry players—the ones created in the aftermath 

of World War II and in the heyday of mainframe computers 

that still dominate many of their operations, will be completely 

overshadowed—and many driven to bankruptcy—by the new secure 

Internet, OSIS-X, and SILOBREAKER-like capabilities that are now 

commoditized.96

Tactical Hand-Held Devices.

In the Third World, it will be the cell phone, not the personal 

computer, that drives micro-capitalism, informed democracy, and 

localized access to the global grid. The World Bank is usefully 

funding millions of Motorola cell phones adapted to World Bank 

specifications to be distributed in the Third World at a cost of under 

$30 each. It is important to note that in areas where individuals are 

living on $2 a day, this cost, while trivial to us, is to them as relatively 

large an investment as the average American might make in his or 

her personal automobile.
48

The tactical computers commissioned by USSOCOM, which are 

hand-held computing devices, are at the other end of the spectrum 

of technical sophistication. Between them are commercial specialized 

hand-helds that include locational awareness, cameras, and the 

capability to report ground truth information upwards by use of 

a simple template and to pull down tailored information whose 

relevance is enhanced by the locational awareness of the device (“show 

me car rental agencies within a mile of my location” or “show me a 

1:50,000 depiction of the other side of that hill, 500 meters away”).

Within complex emergencies in particular, where U.S. forces will 

be heavily interactive with NGOs as well as coalition law enforcement 

personnel and others, it is the tactical hand-held device that will 

bear the greatest burden in IO. Such devices, in addition to being 

locationally aware, must also be aware of who else is in their area 

by classification (NGO, U.S. Government, etc.), and will, by virtue 

of this knowledge when combined with localized content-based 

routing, be able to exchange “dots” locally without having to suffer 

the long reach-back and delayed processing characteristic of today’s 

stovepipes.

Precision Strategic Communication.

Novices do broadcast press releases. Journeymen do specialized 

lists. The real masters, however, know how to reach key communicators in any domain, any country, “by name.” Moreover, they employ 

individualized messages, informed by values-based biographies and 

sophisticated social network analysis.
49

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

IO and the Fate of the Nation.

The fate of the nation rests on IO and how we execute the IO 

mission in the next several years. There are three parts to that mission: 

Strategic Communication (the message), OSINT (the reality), and 

JIOCs (the technology). Figure 8, duplicating Figure 1 shown in 

Chapter 1, illustrates our vision of how commercial implementation, 

funded and overseen by DoD, could benefit the information health of 

our nation.

Figure 8. Creating the World Brain for U.S. Benefit.

Each of the layers shown in Figure 8 is both achievable in the nearterm, and of inestimable value in revitalizing national education, 

R&D, and intelligence. We describe each very briefly below. If Google 

can be co-opted, such improvement will happen fast.

OSIS-X. The commercial implementation of OSIS discards the old 

legal and security mind-sets and moves directly to commercial-level 
50

openness combined with commercial-level security. By migrating 

the “look and feel” of OSIS and Intelink to the commercial sector 

and by adopting the excellent meta-tagging philosophy of both 

Intelink and the federal data management and national information 

exchange models, OSIS-X provides all federal agencies and all state 

and local authorities with an open but secure “leap ahead” approach 

to information-sharing.

GPS RFID-X. The government has been slow to adopt both Radio 

Frequency Identification (RFID) and mandatory geospatial tagging 

such as XML-Geo. This next level up will provide incentives for 

data that is properly tagged with geospatial as well as time and date 

information, and will enable “Green Lane” speed of processing for 

compliant sectors (e.g., cargo ships with containers so equipped).

Scientific and Technical (S&T) Revitalization. The Defense Technical 

Information Service (DTIC) does information monitoring in support 

of defense S&T, but its access to foreign language information, where 

most of the real innovation is occurring, is virtually nonexistent. 

USDI’s initiative, when implemented commercially, will open the 

floodgates of access to foreign S&T, and will lead to a resurgence of 

Nobel Prizes across the U.S. S&T community.

Global Scope. A Director of Global Information (DGI), perhaps 

sitting on top of a government-sanctioned skunk works,97 and 

orchestrating a multinational Global Intelligence Council (GIC) and 

a multinational Global Strategy Council (GSC), will take American 

understanding and influence to a new level of play. 

Intelink-X. Multilateral classified information-sharing will occur 

soon. In an era when information converted into intelligence and 

knowledge is a substitute for wealth, violence, energy, water, and 

everything else, only the the United States has the power to execute 

the practical vision represented by Intelink-X. DoD is the catalyst for 

its achievement.

The 21st century, unlike the 20th, demands a sophisticated 

and constant application of all the sources of national power. It 

is no longer sufficient to have the strongest largest military or the 

strongest largest economy. Indeed, under the pressures of the trade 

and budgetary deficits and GWOT, there are those who say that 

America is “running on empty”98 and at risk of a strategic collapse.
51

Modern IO is the seed for a total transformation of the American 

way of war, a new American way that practices information peacekeeping and reflects a new commitment by America to stabilize 

the world intelligently rather than violently. It is a holistic mission 

that must be accomplished by the J-3 using a civil affairs mind-set, 

with the J-2 limited to internal validation and support. There are 

not enough guns on the planet to force our will upon another or to 

protect our quality of life for future generations.99 IO is the new way 

of war and of peace.

The USDI strategy of integrating Strategic Communication 

(the message), OSINT (the reality) and JIOCs (the technology) is 

constructively transformative. This strategy must be understood by 

all concerned, and it must be managed as a whole, not as discrete 

financial hand-outs in exchange for limited localized mission 

support. While Strategic Communication is the mission to be 

supported, OSINT must come first. Without global OSINT, 24/7, 

down to the neighborhood, village, tribal, and provincial levels, we 

will not be able to do the Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield 

(IPB) necessary to deliver effective messages “by name,” nor to act 

intelligently, using all the instruments of national power in every 

clime and place.

Nor can we do this alone. We can fund the architecture and we can 

offer other legitimate governments and organizations an opportunity 

to participate, but we must do so with a willingness to listen to 

what we hear, and a willingness to change our behavior where it 

makes sense to do so in keeping with our objective of stabilizing and 

reconstructing the world. Seven generations from today, what will 

we have wrought?

Recommendations.

Creation of a National Information Council (NIC), coequal to 

the National Security Council (NSC) and the National Economic 

Council (NEC), is necessary if the White House is both to harness 

the distributed intelligence of the nation and the world, and to 

achieve its objectives in public diplomacy, strategic communication, 

interagency information-sharing and collaboration, a renaissance 

in public education, and the resurrection of national research. One 
52

priority should be the orchestration of information technology and 

informatics initiatives from the various elements of the government 

(e.g., the National Science and Space Administration [NASA] and 

the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA]) so as 

to accelerate the application of information advances to conflict 

prevention and resolution, and to the creation of wealth.

Congress. Intelligence and information-sharing are inherently 

critical aspects of all government operations. Each congressional 

committee should create a Subcommittee on Intelligence and 

Information Operations (I2O). The chair and ranking minority 

member of each of these subcommittees, or their designated 

representatives, should in turn comprise a new Special Committee 

on I2O that has oversight over the national Open Source Agency 

and information operations across all federal agencies, and a special 

relationship with the respective Intelligence Committee, which shall 

continue to focus on classified sources and methods.

White House. Expand the extraordinary earth science informationsharing initiative to include the sharing of information about disease, 

crime, poverty, and other nontraditional threats to our national 

security and prosperity.

Director of National Intelligence. Free the Open Source Agency 

from U.S. intelligence community affiliation or direct oversight. 

Instead, follow the expert recommendation that it be a sister agency 

to the Broadcasting Board of Governors under Department of State 

auspices. Fully fund the Open Source Information System–External 

(OSIS-X) as a commercial venture open to all legitimate governments, 

nongovernmental organizations, and private sector corporations, 

universities, and groups.

Department of State. Establish an Office for Information-Sharing 

Treaties and Agreements. This small office of perhaps 10 individuals, 

led by accredited diplomats, would negotiate information-sharing 

treaties with nations, and information-sharing agreements with 

organizations, with the immediate objective of extending data and 

information standards to all participants. All embassies should be 

integrated into it.

Department of Defense. Rapidly establish JIOCs within each 

Combatant Command (COCOM) as well as a DoD JIOC, while 

establishing two new Combatant Commands: one for I2O, and one 
53

for S&R. Integrate the Strategic Decision Support Center envisioned 

by Captain Scott Philpott, USN, into COCOM I2O. Redirect the 

USSTRATCOM toward the oversight and orchestration of Big War. 

COCOM I2O should have oversight of the Defense Information 

Systems Agency (DISA), DTIC, and the various departmentallevel intelligence organizations. It should also have authority 

over the JIOCs at each COCOM analogous to that retained by the 

services over ground, sea, and air components. The I2O needs of 

policy, acquisitions, logistics, and operations should be deliberately 

attended to, with OSINT as the source of first resort (always copied 

simultaneously to the relevant all-source intelligence provider). 

Place the National Guard under the operational oversight of the 

U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), and begin the process 

of redirecting the Guard toward a true Home Guard role in which 

it has specialized units for medical, fire, police, and disaster-relief 

engineering that are suitable equally for homeland security duties 

as well as support for global S&R operations. Direct DARPA to 

establish an S&R Directorate charged with developing information 

solutions for conflict prevention and resolution, and the creation of 

indigenous stabilizing wealth.

General Services Administration (Office of Intergovernmental 

Solutions). Sponsor a summit and an ongoing Wiki web site on the 

four “opens” that will energize information-sharing in the future: 

1. Open Source Software; 2. Open Source Information; 3. Open 

(Electromagnetic) Spectrum; and 4. Open Hyperdocument System 

(OHS).

Department of Commerce. Issue an antitrust waiver for a private 

sector OSINT skunkworks that will fully integrate and test all 

available open sources, softwares, and services. This skunkworks 

will accelerate the development of open common standards for 

information-sharing that will be truly worldwide, with the added 

advantage of developing commercial alternatives for the sharing 

of secret information across national, cultural, and government-tonongovernment boundaries on a by-name, by-paragraph basis.

Department of Justice. Submit proposed legislation to Congress 

mandating the open disclosure and stability of Application Program 

Interfaces (API) within all software purchased by the government 

and offered for sale within the United States. Demand that all 
54

software have transparent and stable API by 2008, or be banned from 

the Federal marketplace. This is the only way to achieve our full IO 

potential.

Open Source Agency. Execute the 100-day start-up plan that already 

has been drafted and is easily achievable by drawing on the OSINT 

pioneers across the U.S. Army and in other services to include:

1. IO/OSINT training program, resident, mobile, and remote 

learning;

2. IO/OSINT help desk, 24/7, multilingual;

3. IO/OSINT global translation web in all languages, including 

support of 911 calls;

4. IO/OSINT historical and cultural “Manhattan Project,” 

starting with Iran;

5. OSIS-X with DoD first, then NATO, then each COCOM’s 

coalition partners;

6. Grant free OSIS-X access to all NGOs and academic 

institutions;

7. Create a living directory of top 100 experts on each country 

and topic;

8. Create Texas Early Warning Center;

9. Create New York Corporate Warning Network;

10. Implement Digital Marshall Plan, using residual capability in 

abandoned satellites; and

11. Sponsor a University of the Republic to foster informationsharing.
55

APPENDIX

ANALYTIC MODELS FOR MODERN IO

There are numerous analytic frames of reference and 

methodologies, and we strive to recognize and exploit them all, as 

appropriate. Here we wish to put forward just two (Figures 10 and 

11) that we have found useful and relevant to the challenges facing 

STRATCOM and SOCOM, among others.

Over time and space

Channels & Borders

 Of strategic value

Quantities & Distribution

Internally available for use

 Volatility of sectors

Training & Maintenance

Mobility implications

 Cohesion & Effectiveness

Military Systems One by One

Climate Manipulation

 Civil Power, Transport, 

 Communications, 

Finance

STRATEGIC

Integrated

Application

OPERATIONAL

Selection of

Time and Place

TACTICAL

Application of

Finite Resources

TECHNICAL

Isolated

Capabilities

Military Sustainability

Geographic Location

 Civil Allies

Military Availability

Geographic Resources

 Civil Stability

Military Reliability

Geographic Terrain

 Civil Psychology

Military Lethality

Geographic Atmosphere

 Civil Infrastructure

Figure 10. Analytic Domains and Levels of Analysis.

It has been our experience that too many so-called analytic services 

limit their efforts to database stuffing and summarization. As shown 

in Figure 10, there are four levels of analysis—strategic, operational, 

tactical, and technical; the threat, and consequently the needed 

message, changes at each of these four levels. By distinguishing 

between military, geographic, and civil domains, by understanding 

the uniqueness of each of the four levels of analysis, and by placing 

particular emphasis on the civil domain, we can enhance our analytic 

statecraft. The latter would entail a strong focus on civil psychology, 

on indicators of civil stability, and on influences relevant to civil 

allies (and competitors), in combination with an understanding of 

the civil infrastructure, and all forms of communication in the target 

societies.
56

Figure 11. Framework for Predicting 

and Understanding Revolution.

Our second analytic frame of reference (Figure 11) combines a 

deep understanding of human psychology and sociology with a 

suitably complex yet refined understanding of the dimensions of 

revolutionary change in any nation-state, tribe, or neighborhood. 

Analysis of emerging and unconventional threats is not about 

traditional orders of battle, but rather about the psychology of 

the individual and the sociology of the substate group. It is about 

connecting ideas and people.
57

ENDNOTES

1. DIME: Diplomatic, Information, Military, Economic.

2. Although reformists have called for a unified national security budget 

process, this is still not practiced. The diplomatic budget (Program 150) and the 

military budget (Program 50) are devised in isolation from one another, while 

the information and economic budgets are scattered across multiple jurisdictions. 

Considerable savings, and a considerable enhancement of U.S. national security as 

well as national competitiveness, could be achieved if there were a unified national 

security planning, programming, and budgeting system (PPBS) that integrated both 

acquisition and operational campaign planning across diplomatic, information, 

military, and economic jurisdictions; and if “total information awareness” were 

centered on public information using Google and other available open systems, 

rather than being centered on secret information and closed intelligence systems 

that lack access to 90 percent of the relevant information.

3. Dr. Stephen Cambone articulated this requirement in a speech to the Security 

Affairs Support Association (SASA), the premier forum for senior executives in 

both government and industry who are engaged in intelligence support operations. 

See full text at www.oss.net/extra/news/?id=2354, where additional commentary is 

provided, and also at www.oss.net/extra/news/?module_instance=1&id=2369. 

4. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, PowerShift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the 

Edge of the 21st Century, Bantam Books, 1990, p. 86. The Tofflers are investigative 

journalists and researchers at heart, and tend to do direct interviews and exploit 

raw information sources rather than secondary sources. They complement and 

are in total harmony with such other extraordinary current works as Thomas 

Stewart, The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-First Century 

Organization, Currency, 2001; and Barry Carter, Infinite Wealth: A New World of 

Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era, Butterworth Heinemann, 1999.

5. Their discussion of knowledge in relation to violence is contained in War 

and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Little Brown & Company, 

1993, where the chapter on “The Future of the Spy” provides the first major public 

discussion of “the rival store” that focuses on open sources of information in all 

languages. They also addressed this theme when speaking in 1993 to the second 

annual international conference on “National Security & National Competitiveness: 

Open Source Solutions,” in Washington, DC, November 2, 1993. The complete text 

of their remarks to this audience of over 800 predominantly U.S. military officers 

is available online at tinyurl.com/dzwbz. 

6. Supra note 2.

7. Both reports are downloadable at the Defense Science Board web site, 

under Reports, at www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports.htm. The third DoD publication that 

underpins this monograph is Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Homeland 

Security Gordon England’s Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support, June 

2005, available online at www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2005/d20050630homeland.
58

pdf. Careful reading of these reports will document two critical strategic and 

transformative themes common to all three: (1) information-sharing, exploiting 

all sources in all languages all the time, is the central tenet of defense in the age 

of information; and (2) nongovernmental organizations external to the U.S., and 

county-level law enforcement and civil organizations at the lowest level of the U.S. 

domestic governance hierarchy, must be included in defense information-sharing, 

at a cost they can afford (which is to say, at almost no cost to them) for access to 

“the network.” This makes it clear that classified networks are not, repeat, not the 

answer to the larger challenge of global information monitoring and sharing.

8. The ideal approach to global information capture and exploitation is 

one in which diplomatic arrangements (the negotiation of information-sharing 

treaties with nations and information-sharing agreements with organizations) are 

implemented by the military using the civil affairs model, under J-3 operational 

control. Only when the information is “inside the wire,” should it be subject to J-2 

quality control and oversight.

9. One of the most important lessons learned from the GWOT is that 

intelligence is the smallest part of the information-sharing challenge, although 

also the most difficult to break out of the stovepipes. External open sources of 

information, operational traffic, logistics information, and acquisition capabilities 

and countermeasures information are all vital parts of the IO mosaic. Novices 

argue about sharing classified information; mid-level experts argue about U.S. 

Government interagency information-sharing; the real masters understand, as 

the Swedes have taught us, that the “endgame” in IO is about multinational, 

multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing, M4 IS. As the 

Jolt cola commercial says, “Dare to want it all.” For a report on the 3rd Annual 

Peacekeeping Intelligence Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, December 4-5, 2004, 

site of the first recorded mention of M4 IS, see the trip report at tinyurl.com/a4f4r.

10. There are 33 core languages (Arabic, Aramaic, Berber, Catalan, Chinese, 

Danish, Dari, Dutch, English, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, 

Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Kurmanji, Norwegian, Pashto, Polish, 

Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, and Urdu) within 

which Arabic has at least 12 nuanced variants: Andalusi Arabic (extinct, but having 

an important role in literary history); Egyptian Arabic (Egypt), considered the 

most widely understood and used “second dialect”; Gulf Arabic (Gulf coast from 

Kuwait to Oman, and minorities on the other side); Hassaniiya (in Mauritania); 

Hijazi Arabic; Iraqi Arabic; Levantine Arabic (Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and 

western Jordanian); Maghreb Arabic (Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, and western 

Libyan); Maltese; Najdi Arabic; Sudanese Arabic (with a dialect continuum into 

Chad); and Yemeni Arabic. 

11. Machine translation and online dictionaries are completely inadequate to 

this challenge at this time, as are the limited number of U.S. citizens eligible for 

clearances. However, it is possible, if we break away from the rigid obsession with 

using only U.S. citizens with clearances, to create a global network of machine 

translation, innovative tailored online dictionaries; and a very broad network of 
59

near-real-time human monitors, reporters, and translators who post material to 

the web as it becomes available, with translations and subject-matter annotations. 

The key here is to make the network multinational rather than unilateral.

12. The I in JIOC is for Intelligence, the C can stand for Center or Command, 

depending on how the COCOM wants to adapt the concept. Some, like EUCOM, 

appear to desire a command with all the authorities inherent in command, while 

other COCOMs are more comfortable with it being a center, so they do not have to 

tackle the challenges associated with breaking down the stovepipe authorities that 

plague the COCOMs. USDI’s intent appears to be the establishment of a functional 

intelligence construct similar to the Joint Force Air Component Commander, 

JFACC, or Ground Component Commander, GCC, who would have all the 

authority to conduct the fight for knowledge, to include the protection component 

of the fight for information. While some interpret the I as standing for Information, 

or Interagency, USDI’s intent appears to be for it to represent Intelligence, but in 

the broadest interpretation of the word, embracing all available information in all 

languages and at all levels of classification across all mission areas.

13. Peter Drucker, writing in Forbes ASAP on August 24, 1998, at p. 46:

The next information revolution is well under way. But it is not 

happening where information scientists, information executives, and the 

information industry in general are looking for it. It is not a revolution in 

technology, machinery, techniques, software, or speed. It is a revolution 

in CONCEPTS. So far, for 50 years, the information revolution has 

centered on . . . the “T” in IT. The next information revolution asks, What 

is the MEANING of information, and what is its PURPOSE? And this 

is leading rapidly to redefining the tasks to be done with the help of 

information, and with it, to redefining the institutions that do these tasks. 

. . . We can already discern and define the next . . . task in developing 

an effective information systems for top management: the collection and 

organization of OUTSIDE-focused information.

14. The Report of the Independent Commission on the National Imagery and 

Mapping Agency, 2000, includes the following statement in the Foreword: “The 

Commission validates the charge that the Intelligence Community is “collection 

centric,” thinking first of developing and operating sophisticated technical 

collection systems such as reconnaissance satellites, and only as an afterthought 

preparing to properly task the systems and to process, exploit, and disseminate the 

collected products.” The report goes on to provide a brutally detailed indictment 

of decades of neglect for “sense-making” tools. View at www.fas.org/irp/agency/

nima/commission/toc.htm. 

15. Steve Emerson, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, Free Press, 

2002; and Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, 

Forum, 1999. Although American Jihad was published in the immediate aftermath 

of September 11, 2001, Steve Emerson had been briefing this message since 

1994, when he produced a 1-hour special documentary for Public Broadcasting 
60

Corporation (PBS) that displayed covert videos of imams on U.S. soil calling for 

the murder of Americans. Bodansky, then a senior staff director on the Republican 

Task Force on Terrorism on Capitol Hill, was ignored on the Hill, and despite his 

book being a New York Times #1 Bestseller, was ignored across the bureaucracy 

as well. “Mind-set,” as so many have documented, is a very powerful filter, able 

to block very strong signals if they are inconsistent with the receiving person’s 

preconceived notions.

16. Michael A. Turner, “Intelligence Reform and the Politics of Entrenchment,” 

International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall 2005, 

pp. 383-397, provides an objective and well-documented analysis of how vested 

interests prevailed, and true intelligence reform, including the all-important 

changes in mind-set and culture, was blocked. This reference is not online. For 

a shorter commentary that distinguishes between reactionary, evolutionary, and 

revolutionary intelligence reform, see Robert David Steele, “Intelligence Affairs: 

Evolution, Revolution, or Reactionary Collapse?” International Journal of Intelligence 

and Counterintelligence, forthcoming, at tinyurl.com/8e6wx. Additional references 

are at www.oss.net/extra/news/?module_instance=1&id=1334. 

17. As of July 2005, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was said to be 

considering a Federally-Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) for 

OSINT. This may help CIA address its own internal needs, but it will not address 

the broader needs of DoD, or any other U.S. Government agency including 

Commerce, Education, Environmental Protection Agency, Interior, and Justice, 

among others, nor will it be responsive to operational or tactical levels of command 

and staff operations. As of September 14, 2005, there were unconfirmed reports 

that the DNI has realized that an independent national Open Source Agency, as 

we have long recommended, is actually essential to his success, and that he has 

asked Dr. James Billington, Librarian of Congress and veteran of the original Office 

of Strategic Services, to serve as the founding director of the OSA. If true, this is an 

inspired decision and choice.

18. As this monograph goes to press, the news media are delving into reports 

that “Able Danger,” a data-mining and sense-making endeavor alleged to have 

been managed in the Tampa area, identified three of the 9/11 hijackers a year 

prior to 9/11, but that this information was not shared with the FBI because 

military lawyers and managers believed that they were not allowed to collect 

information on U.S. citizens or green-card holders. There were two important areas 

of ignorance among those making that decision, ignorance that persists today at 

USNORTHCOM and elsewhere: (1) visa holders are not U.S. citizens or greencard holders and are fair game; and (2) overt information is not proscribed by EO 

12333. Commands are free to collect overt legally available public information on 

anyone, including U.S. citizens. Open source information can be converted into 

open source intelligence without violating any privacy or regulatory constraints, 

and it is therefore an essential foundation for domestic security operations. It 

can provide a basis for alerting appropriate authorities who can then exercise 

their legal powers to obtain subpoenas or begin surveillance under established 
61

legal mandates and protocols. DoD can and should be the lead on global overt 

information monitoring, including within the homeland. Where DoD needs 

to improve is in its mind-set and knowledge of the law. DoD must err on the 

side of excessive sharing, not on the side of inappropriate concealment of overt 

knowledge.

19. USSOCOM is the only element of the U.S. Government that has been 

consistently innovative and transformative in OSINT support to both all-source 

intelligence and to operations and logistics. 

20. Under USDI leadership, the Defense Open Source Council (DOSC) 

has completed its investigation and made recommendations that have been 

coordinated at the flag level across all services and agencies of DoD. A fine start, 

DoD nevertheless continues to lack a Combatant Commander for Intelligence. It 

could also benefit from redefining USDI to make it clear that USDI is responsible 

for all information as well as intelligence. It is essential that operational, logistics, 

acquisition, and other information be managed as a coherent whole, not in isolation 

from classified intelligence. Sharing and sense-making, not hoarding and secrecy, 

are the watchwords today.

21. USSTRATCOM has a Joint Information Operations Center (JIOC) with 

a responsibility for integrating IO across all military and operational areas. 

See note at www.stratcom.mil/FactSheetshtml/Jointpercent20Infopercent20Operations 

percent20Center.htm. USSOCOM is taking the lead for USDI in building a Joint 

Interagency Collaboration Center (JICC) that is intended to create a rapidly 

replicable set of technologies that can be migrated to the other COCOMs and—

ideally—to DHS constituents and to the NGOs. The National Guard activities in 

various states do not appear to have a coherent concept of operations, nor do they 

appear to have any larger concept for being connected to a DoD-DHS continuum 

of IO sources and services. The Guard is well-qualified to man information-sharing 

facilities, but it is not qualified to design or build them on behalf of the states.

22. The seminal work in the field, the classic report on UN success “against 

all biases,” is told by A. Walter Dorn and David J. H. Bell in “Intelligence and 

Peacekeeping: The UN Operations in the Congo, 1960-1964,” International 

Peacekeeping, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1995, reprinted as Chapter 15 in Peacekeeping Intelligence: 

Emerging Concepts for the Future, OSS, 2003.

23. Deputy Secretary General Louise Frechette, former Deputy Minister of 

Defence in Canada, assuming her new role in March 1998, was appalled at the 

lack of decision-support—another term for the intelligence cycle—within the 

Secretariat and Offices reporting directly to the Secretary General. She appears 

to be a compellingly effective but largely anonymous force in support of UN PKI. 

Completing the circle of sensible military professionals advising the Secretary 

General were Major General Frank van Kappen, Marine Corps of the Royal 

Netherlands Navy, who, in his own words, “failed” as Military Advisor to the 

Secretary General from 1995 to 1998 but, in fact, succeeded in setting the stage 

for his successor, Major General Patrick Cammaert. Secretary General Kofi Annan 
62

commissioned a Panel on U.N. Peace Operations, led by Mr. Lakidar Brahimi of 

Algeria. The Brahimi Report is a revolutionary document, which recognizes that 

the ultimate tool necessary to help the United Nations succeed in saving succeeding 

generations from the scourge of war is intelligence—actionable information. While 

the Brahimi Report recommendations were resisted and not fully implemented, 

they paved the way for the findings of other reports, notably the Millennium 

Report and the report of the High-Level Panel on Threat, Change, and Challenge, 

Creating a More Secure World, Our Shared Responsibility. Lieutenant General (Ret.) 

Brent Scowcroft was the U.S. representative to the latter panel. During this period, 

an edited work, Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future, OSS, 2003, 

was published, and was soon on display in the lobby of 1 UN Plaza. Copies were 

widely distributed by General Cammaert to Force Commanders and UN agency 

heads. Reporting to the 3rd annual PKI conference in Stockholm in December 

2004, General Cammaert said, “Intelligence is no longer a dirty word within the 

UN bureaucracy.”

24. “Peacekeeping Intelligence: Leadership Digest 1.0,” a distillation of 

the book, Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future (OSS, 2003), 

contains a complete discussion of PKI at the various levels and across collection, 

processing, analysis, and security. It can be found online at tinyurl.com/cdd5h. The 

book is available to individuals at Amazon.com. War colleges may buy the book at 

half-price from the publisher when ordering a minimum of 96 books, or 6 boxes.

25. Rwanda and now Sudan remain examples of UN and Western failures 

to intervene, in part because available public intelligence has not been sufficient 

to compel public policy. For a heart-rending account of the failure of the UN 

mandate and the UN bureaucracy in Rwanda, see Lieutenant General Romeo 

Dallaire, Canada, Shake Hands With The Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, 

Random House, 2003. For a learned discussion of both how easy it is to acquire 

early warning of genocide, and how to take practical action to prevent it, see 

John G. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide, Praeger, 2001; and also the web site, 

www.genocidewatch.org, where Dr. Gregory Stanton, a foremost authority, discusses 

the eight stages of genocide, including the stages preceding genocide where early 

warning is achievable.

26. Robert B. Oakley, Michael J. Dziedzic, and Eliot M. Goldberg, contributing 

editors, Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security, NDU, 

1988, is the source of the criticism of UN law enforcement cadres, and the definitive 

report on the “cop gap” in peacekeeping operations. The best available book on the 

recurring failures of both UN and Western interventions in failed states is William 

Shawcross, Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless 

Conflict, Simon & Schuster, 2000. The best documented inventory of “gap” nations 

is Robert Young Pelton, The World’s Most Dangerous Places, Harper, 2003. Although 

no longer in print and now a collector’s item, but visible in Pelton’s lectures on the 

real world, Map of World Conflict and Human Rights, from Leiden University and 

the Goals for Americas Foundation, remains an exemplary depiction of all that ails 

the world, where most conflict is substate conflict, not interstate.
63

27. Colonel Mike Pheneger, USA, then J-2 for the U.S. Special Forces Command, 

and the author, then Special Assistant and also Deputy Director of the U.S. Marine 

Corps Intelligence Center (today a Command) catalogued the 1:50,000 combat 

chart deficiencies in 1988. The author got maps added to the Foreign Intelligence 

Requirements and Capabilities Plan (FIRCAP) in 1992, but today, 13 years later, 

we still do not have 1:50,000 combat charts “on the shelf” because of a continued 

emphasis on digital products that will not operate with a bullet hole through their 

display screens. There are two bright spots: (1) we have Digital Terrain Elevation 

Data (DTED) for most of the world via the shuttle mission, although it tends to 

look like Swiss cheese due to multiple failures; and (2) at least one commercial 

vendor has NGA-level equipment and the ability to produce maps on a 24/7 

basis, with a single 1:50,000 combat chart costing $17,500. This is one problem that 

money can solve, beginning with each of the 16 most critical complex emergencies 

where multinational forces are in harm’s way.

28. We began calling for substate and nonstate Orders of Battle (OOB) in 1994. 

Both governments and vendors have failed to rise to the challenge. PMCs now 

join terrorists, criminals, “random actors,” and radicalized religious groups as 

belligerents whose key personnel and capabilities must be tracked. Fortunately, 

it is now possible to create such OOB on the fly, and without recourse to the 

commercial databases that have minimal foreign content and focus primarily on 

business needs. A global network of “virtual” defense and law enforcement attaches 

is in place and highly responsive, and can produce tailored “on demand” OOB for 

a fraction of the cost of the “gold license” fees that the commercial aggregators 

demand. Put bluntly: for $1M a year, DoD can get a gold license for content that 

will be useful 10 percent of the time, or it can obtain between 40 and 100 unique 

tailored products that do not exist in the commercial databases. DoD should buy 

information “by the drink,” not on a gold license basis. Commercial and academic 

aggregators mislead their clients when selling their access. They are largely 

focused on English-language information that is of business value. They have not 

invested in historical, cultural, social, ideological, criminal, and environmental 

data, and are not competitive with true multilingual tailored sources that can meet 

our demands “by the drink.” 

29. Huge Smith, “Intelligence and UN Peacekeeping,” Survival, Vol. 26, No. 

3, Autumn 1994, reprinted as Chapter 14 in Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging 

Concepts for the Future, OSS, 2003.

30. The traditional relationship between NGOs and the U.S. intelligence 

community, including the DIA, is completely unacceptable. The U.S. focus is on 

sanitizing classified information of marginal value, or stone-walling the NGOs 

completely after first getting everything the NGOs have to offer. A much more 

productive approach is to establish jointly shared requirements, to share what 

each knows via overt means, and to gradually expand the circle of participants 

in an overt network so that more and more distinct entities are both contributing 

original information, and drawing upon the aggregate information, to which DoD 

can add considerable value by applying generic sense-making tools.
64

31. Alvin and Heidi Toffler understood the importance of this concept when 

it was presented to them in 1992, and spent five of 12 pages of their chapter on 

“The Future of the Spy” covering “The Rival Store” as created by OSINT. These 

ideas evolved further toward 1994, and were addressed in “Talking Points for the 

Director of Central Intelligence” dated July 20, 1993, subsequently published in 

Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on “National Security & National 

Competitiveness: Open Source Solutions,” Washington, DC, November 2-4, 1993; 

“ACCESS: Theory and Practice of Intelligence in the Age of Information,” October 

26, 1993; “Reinventing Intelligence: Holy Grail or Mission Impossible,” Periscope, 

Journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, June 1994; and a keynote 

speech to the Association for Global Strategic Information (AGSI) in Germany 

titled “ACCESS: Theory and Practice of Competitor Intelligence,” printed in the 

Journal of AGSI in July 1994. All are at www.oss.net and easily found using the 

Google Super Search feature.

32. At www.usip.org/virtualdiplomacy/publications/papers/virintell.html, and published 

with the same title 2 years later in the Journal of Conflict Resolution at tinyurl.com/8teqf. 

Other later chapters and articles addressing the common theme of information 

strategy in relation to national security included “Information Peacekeeping: 

The Purest Form of War,” Chapter 7 in Lloyd J. Matthews, ed., Challenging the 

United States Symmetrically and Asymmetrically: Can America Be Defeated? Carlisle, 

PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, July 1998, pp. 143-171; 

“Information Peacekeeping: The Purest Form of War,” in Douglas Dearth and 

Alan Campen, Cyberwar: Myths, Mysteries, and Realities, AFCEA Press, June 1998; 

“Eyes Wide Shut,” WIRED Magazine, August 1997; INTERVIEW “Intelligence 

Strategique aux Etats-Unis: Mythe ou Realite?” Revue Francaise de Geoeconomie, 

Spring 1997; “Open Sources and Cyberlaw,” Fringeware, #11, April 1997; “The 

Military Perspective on Information Warfare: Apocalypse Now,” Enjeux Atlantiques, 

#14, February 1997; “Creating a Smart Nation: Information Strategy, Virtual 

Intelligence, and Information Warfare,” in Alan D. Campen, Douglas H. Dearth, 

and R. Thomas Goodden, contributing editors, Cyberwar: Security, Strategy, and 

Conflict in the Information Age, AFCEA, 1996; “Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, 

Policy, Intelligence, and Information,” Government Information Quarterly, Summer 

1996; and “Reinventing Intelligence: The Vision and the Strategy,” International 

Defense & Technologies, December 1995, bilingual in French and English; “Private 

Enterprise Intelligence: Its Potential Contribution to National Security,” paper 

presented to the Canadian Intelligence Community Conference on Intelligence 

Analysis and Assessment, October 29, 1994. Reprinted in Intelligence and National 

Security, Special Issue, October 1995, and also in a book by the same name, 1996. It 

merits comment that information is the ultimate asymmetric warfare tool.

33. A few works merit mention here: Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A 

Conversation with Karel Hvizdala, Vintage, 1990; Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: 

Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, Plenum, 1997; Howard Rheingold, Smart 

Mobs: The Next Social Revolution—Transforming Cultures and Communities in the 

Age of Instant Access, Perseus, 2002; Tom Atlee, The Tao of Democracy: Using CoIntelligence to Create a World That Works for All, Writer’s Collective, 2003; James 
65

Surowiecki, The Wisdom of the Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and 

How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations, Doubleday, 

2004.

34. Despite repeated efforts from 1992 to 2004 by the author to persuade the 

Department of State of the urgency of resuming its original responsibility for 

collecting, processing, translating, interpreting, and disseminating relevant foreign 

language information of importance to our foreign affairs, culminating in a speech 

at the State Department on March 24, 2004, “The New Craft of Intelligence: How 

State Should Lead,” co-sponsored by the Secretary of State’s Open Forum and the 

World Affairs Council, at www.oss.net/extra/news/?module_instance=1&id=2348, the 

author was informed by a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence that 

State desires to be a consumer of intelligence—including open source intelligence—

and not a collector of any kind of information, including overt information. 

35. SIOP: Single Integrated Operational Plan. When we talk about putting 

the “I” back into DIME, we are also talking about finally achieving a unified 

national security and national competitiveness program in which the Planning, 

Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) is applied coherently to diplomatic, 

information, military, and economic sources of national power, and single 

integrated DIME campaign plans are executed coherently at the strategic, 

operational, tactical, and technical levels of performance.

36. Strategic, operational, tactical, technical. The author is indebted to Edward 

N. Luttwak, whose book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, Belknap, 1987, not only 

distinguished among the four levels of warfare, but also showed how capabilities 

that may be considered deficient at one level actually interact to enable capabilities 

available at another level—e.g., man-portable antitank guns channeling enemy 

tanks for artillery, which in turn sets them up for aviation kills.

37. Political-military; socio-economic; ideo-cultural; techno-demographic; 

natural-geographic. It is not possible to succeed at IO without understanding both 

the dimensions of revolution and the aspects of socio-psychological personality 

within a society. Cf. Robert David Steele, Internal War: A Framework for the Prediction 

of Revolution, Lehigh University, 1976. The matrix was first published in Robert 

David Steele, On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World, AFCEA, 2000, p. 

153. The matrix is in the Appendix to this monograph.

38. Kristan Wheaton, The Warning Solution: Intelligent Analysis in the Age of 

Information Overload, AFCEA International Press, 2001. Wheaton teaches today at 

Mercyhurst College, where Robert Heibel, the founder, and Wheaton now are the 

key figures behind America’s first and foremost undergraduate program to teach 

Intelligence and Research Analysis. See the program at www.mciis.org/. 

39. Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: 

Understanding the New Currency of Business, Cambridge: Harvard, 2001. The 

elaboration which follows is provided by the author. 

40. The Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, A 

More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, United Nations, 2004, benefited from 
66

the participation of Lieutenant General (Ret.) Brent Scowcroft, former national 

security advisor to President George W. Bush. This panel concluded that the 

greatest threats to global peace and prosperity are, in this order:

• Economic and social threats including poverty, infectious disease, and 

environmental degradation;

• Interstate conflict;

• Internal conflict, including civil war, genocide, and other large-scale 

atrocities;

• Nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons;

• Terrorism; and

• Transnational organized crime.

Hence, terrorism is either fifth on this list or seventh, if the first is counted as three. 

The report, 262 pp. in length, can be seen at www.un.org/secureworld/report2.pdf. 

41. The recent announcement of a $100M allocation for a CIA OSINT capability 

approved by the DNI has been described by some as “a 25-cent raise for FBIS” or 

“fresh paint for the old lawn chair.” In the context of a national intelligence budget 

of no less than $50 billion a year, $100M is lipstick on the runt pig. Nothing less 

than a new $3B agency, with a diplomatic or civil affairs character rather than a 

secret intelligence mandate, will do—half for overseas monitoring, half for bottomup citizen intelligence processing at the county level across America.

42. Michael Herman, Intelligence Power in Peace and War, Cambridge, 1996, points 

out that most strategic or long-term intelligence is best done using broad access 

to multilingual open sources, while covert means are best reserved for absolutely 

vital penetrations of short-term threats not amenable to open source collection. 

His second book, Intelligence Services in the Information Age, 2001, adds additional 

graduate level reflections to his seminal earlier book. On the American side, the 

single best book along these lines is by Bruce Berkowitz and Allan Goodman, Best 

Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age, New Haven, CT: Yale, 2000.

43. The greatest deficiency of the existing open source information access 

capabilities within the U.S. intelligence community, apart from its mind-set and 

legal and and security obstacles, is its inability to scale globally, address the local, 

and do complex translations and multisource analysis in near-real-time. A key 

common finding of several books addressing the challenges of globalization 

for business is that anything less than global coverage and near-real-time 

understanding is unsatisfactory. The same literature also advises against “build it 

first and then try to sell it,” instead recommending constant vigilance and instant 

reaction. Here is a sample quotation: 

Instead of fruitlessly trying to predict the future course of a competitive 

or market trend, customer behavior, or demand, managers should be 

trying to find and deploy all the tools that will enable them, in some 

sense, to be ever-present, ever-vigilant, and ever-ready in the brave 
67

new marketplace in gestation, where information and knowledge are 

ceaselessly exchanged.

This boils down to global coverage and surge response in combination. Quotation 

from Regis McKenna, Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer, 

Harvard, 1997.

44. Ben Gilad, Business Blindspots: Replacing Myths, Beliefs, and Assumptions 

with Market Realities, Tetbury, England: Infonotics, 1996, p. 1, emphasis added. 

Gilad is also the author of Early Warning: Using Competitive Intelligence to Anticipate 

Market Shifts, Control Risk, and Create Powerful Strategies, American Management 

Association, 2004, but his earlier work remains his most trenchant—the latter 

being more about sources and methods.

45. W. Bradford Ashton and Richard A. Klavans, contributing editors, Keeping 

Abreast of Science and Technology: Technical Intelligence for Business, Battelle, 1997, p. 

viii.

46. www.academyci.com/About/herring.html. 

47. See, e.g., Craig Fleisher and Babette Bensoussan, Strategic and Competitive 

Analysis: Methods and Techniques for Analyzing Business Competition, Prentice Hall, 

2003. As a major on active duty in Sweden, Mats Bjore established the Swedish 

Long-Range Reconnaissance Unit for Cyberspace, otherwise known as the Swedish 

Military Open Source Intelligence Centre. He was subsequently nominated by 

the Royal Academy and received a personal decoration from the King of Sweden 

for this accomplishment. Together with Detective Steve Edwards in England, 

the creator of the Scotland Yard OSINT unit who was honored by the Queen of 

England, Bjore is perhaps the top OSINT performer in the world. He is CEO of 

InfoSphere AB, www.inforsphere.se and also a co-owner of Silobreaker, a UK-based 

OSINT access portal with tools.

48. Defense Science Board, Transition to and from Hostilities, December 2004. 

Its recommendations are being implemented via DoD Directive 3000.cc dated 

December 17, 2004, in draft.

49. Numerous military professionals, including the author, have been making 

the distinction, since the mid-1990s, among the “four forces after next.” The annual 

Army Strategy Conference has consistently brought forth useful contributions, 

including some iconoclastic ones. The 1998 conference was reported by the author 

in “The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 

Autumn-Winter 1998-99, at www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/1520.pdf. 

50. Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), the Center for Defense Information (CDI), 

and the Security Policy Working Group (SPWG) all generally left-leaning but 

largely sensible organizations, have come together in an attempt to move money 

from a heavy metal military toward “soft power” law enforcement and diplomatic 

or foreign assistance initiatives. See a release leading to the full report at tinyurl.

com/dhjwb. My personal view is that a Unified National Security Budget is a good 

idea in theory, but not until the Office of Management restores the management 

(“M”) function. To be effective, a Unified National Security Budget requires (1) a 
68

complete appreciation for all global threats based on access to all open sources in 

all languages; (2) a national security strategy aware that creating wealth overseas 

is the fastest way of stabilizing very large populations; and (3) a Vice President 

or a Secretary-General for National Security that has command and control over 

State, Justice, and Defense, together. Right now State does not want to lead, Justice 

is incapable of leading, and Defense is too busy to lead an interagency program.

51. The UN Report, supra note 39, points out that biological security is a major 

concern.

52. The definitive work on why supporting 44 dictators makes our global 

stabilization program impossible to achieve is that of Ambassador Mark Palmer, 

Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025, 

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Ambassador Palmer recommends an 

Undersecretary for Democracy with two Assistant Secretaries: one for the dictators 

that agree to a 5-year buy-out, and one for the ones that do not. We would add 

our own complementary recommendation: an Undersecretary of Defense for 

Peacekeeping, with two Assistant Secretaries: one for the failed states that agree to 

accept our help, and one for the ones that do not.

53. Dictators itemized in Mark Palmer, Breaking the Real Axis of Evil; plagues 

from State of the World Atlas, 1997; water scarcity discussed by Marq de Villiers, 

Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, Mariner, 2001; resource wars in 

Michael Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, Owl, 2002; all 

others from the Map of World Conflict & Human Rights, PIOOM, 2002.

54. Cf. Jonathan Schell, Unconquerable World: Power, Non-Violence, and the Will 

of the People, Owl, 2004.

55. This is a point made by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and captured in a DVD under 

his name.

56. Max Manwaring, contributing editor, The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand 

Strategy for the Twenty-First Century, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. See also Max 

Manwaring, contributing editor, Environmental Security and Global Stability: 

Problems and Responses, Lexington, KY: Lexington, 2002; Max Manwaring and 

Anthony James Joes, contributing editors, Beyond Declaring Victory and Coming 

Home: The Challenges of Peace and Stability Operations, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000; 

Max Manwaring and John Fishel, contributing editors, Toward Responsibility in the 

New World Disorder: Challenges and Lessons of Peace Operations, London: Frank Cass, 

1998.

57. On the negative effects of corruption and immoral capitalism, see, for 

instance, John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, San Francisco: BerrettKohler, 2004; and William Greider, The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral 

Economy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. On the need to nurture three billion 

new capitalists and to have a strategy for energy independence, among other key 

protective measures, see Clyde Prestowitz, Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great 

Shift of Wealth and Power to the East, New York: Basic Books, 2005. Within the United 

States, there are numerous books on the manner in which the national security 
69

policy process is corrupted by special interests, including foreign interests. In 

combination, ground truth and morality are the two greatest weapons in America’s 

arsenal. They are rusty and unused weapons. Putting the I back into DIME will 

make them shiny, bright, and useful again.

58. The DoD overview document signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense 

Gordon England is Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support, Washington, 

DC: Department of Defense, June 2005, at www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2005/

d20050630homeland.pdf. 

59. The existing Open Source Information System (OSIS) is very well-managed 

within the legal and security constraints imposed by industrial-era intelligence 

mind-sets. It is incapable of rising to the challenge of global open source information 

sharing across both DHS and NGO boundaries. Only a commercial implementation 

will meet this need. It merits comment that FedEx is approved for the transmission 

of SECRET documents. OSIS-X will easily qualify for at least SECRET and 

probably TOP SECRET when using commercial encryption, audit trails and 

receipts, and by-name access controls. We respectfully note here that no official 

connection is implied between OSIS (created and managed by the government) 

and OSIS-X (to be created and managed by the private sector). We have chosen to 

use OSIS-X as a “shorthand” name because of the very broad appreciation, both 

within the United States and overseas, of the concepts and protocols established 

by OSIS under Intelink leadership. We also believe, as illustrated in our pyramid, 

that Intelink-X is inevitable and essential if we are to achieve true multinational, 

multiagency, multidisciplinary, and multidomain information-sharing at multiple 

levels of classification. Multilateral sharing, not bilateral sharing, will be the key 

characteristic of government intelligence as well as private sector intelligence in 

the 21st century.

60. All vendors, without preference, will have no alternative but to rapidly 

adopt and offer to their clients CISCO’s AON, the latest advancement in secure 

controlled routing technology. AON is specifically targeted to customers whose 

applications have proliferated into siloed and fragmented environments and 

who must now integrate these applications and services to improve collaborative 

business processes. AON is the first and only network-embedded intelligent message 

routing system providing ubiquitous, adaptable message-level communication, 

visibility, and security. These enable applications and the network to work together 

as an integrated system without requiring new intermediary layers or changes 

to existing applications. Also, this can be delivered in a network-based solution 

that is pervasive throughout the IT infrastructure. Today it is available to federal 

clients from L-3 Communications, MANTECH, and SAIC. 

61. This can be as simple as a cell phone with an open source browser that 

includes a known return address and password sequence for authenticating the 

individual’s access.

62. Congressman Robert Simmons (R-CT-02) is a member of the House Armed 

Services Committee and also of the committee responsible for Homeland Security. 

He is the “owner” of OSINT issues within the House, having championed OSINT 
70

before it became fashionable. His most recent hearing focused exclusively on 

OSINT in support of homeland defense. We anticipate a strong Congressional 

interest in how DoD and DHS can collaborate in making global OSINT, and 

domestic OSINT, more readily useful to the defense of our citizens here at home.

63. DHS has First Source and EAGLE acquisition projects. OMB has several 

task forces seeking “common solutions” for the entire federal community. The IC 

has its own solutions, including an unworkable expansion of OSIS out to the state 

and local authorities. DoD has its USDI investments. GSA has a collaborative tools 

network. DARPA has its own diverse investments, as does NASA, NOAA, and 

so on. Nowhere in the U.S. Government does there appear to be a focus on the 

urgency of creating a truly national information-sharing system that is built on a 

foundation of affordable open source software, shareable open source information, 

and accessible open (electromagnetic) spectrum.

64. Executive Order 12333 long has demanded the presumption that anyone 

within the United States should be presumed to be a U.S. citizen when inadvertently 

captured via classified collection means, but this does not apply to open sources 

and methods. One is also allowed to collect freely on individuals in the United 

States when they are known to be in association with a foreign power or thought 

to be an agent of a foreign or terrorist organization considered a threat to national 

security.

65. Cf. David Born and Edward Perkins, contributing editors, Preparing 

America’s Foreign Policy for the 21st Century, Norman: University of Oklahoma, 

1999.

66. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First 

Century, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005.

67. Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for 

the 21st Century, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. From the author’s Amazon.

com review of this book: The core point in this entire work is that both economics 

and technologies, including Internet and communications technologies, have so 

out-paced politics that the world is at risk. Globalization, terrorism, and other 

threats cannot be addressed with our existing international, regional, and national 

political constructs, and new means must be found—new political solutions must 

be found—if we are to foster security and prosperity in the age of complexity, 

discontinuity, and fragmentation.

68. Alvin and Heidi Toffler are publishing a new book in April 2006 tentatively 

titled Revolutionary Wealth. It will surely build on their quarter century of informed 

observation and reporting, as well as the works of others, such as Thomas 

Stewart’s The Wealth of Knowledge and Barry Carter’s Infinite Wealth, supra note 3. 

In the technical arena, the two most recent books covering genetics, robotics, and 

nanotechnology are those of Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution, New York: Doubleday, 

2005; and Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, New York: Viking, 2005.

69. This was the major finding of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency 

Commission Report of December 1999, concluding that we have been spending 
71

tens of billions of dollars on esoteric collection systems, without a commensurate 

investment in information technologies for Tasking, Processing, Exploitation, and 

Dissemination (TPED). Even today, as the IC experiments with ICMAP reveal, 

OSINT, though intended to be an all-source collection management tool, is not 

represented and the tool fails to provide for establishing whether we already know 

the information, whether an ally knows the information, or whether we can obtain 

or buy the information from the private sector.

70. Defense Science Board 2004 Summer Study on Transitions to and from Hostilities, 

Washington, DC: Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and 

Logistics, December 2004.

71. Ibid.

72. Report to the President of the United States, Commission on the Intelligence 

Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, 

Washington, DC, 2005.

73. The National Strategy for Homeland Security, The White House, 2004.

74. Information-sharing for Homeland Security: A Brief Overview, CRS, January 10, 

2005.

75. Supra note 9.

76. Multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain informationsharing.

77. The trolleys rolled into Congress with boxes and boxes of documents 

associated with the hearings for the nomination of Judge Roberts to the Supreme 

Court could be considered by a skeptic to be a sign of the administration’s desire 

to make it difficult for Congress to process the information. The reality is that 

across the federal government, hard-copy industrial era processes that are laborintensive still rule. Interns screen the mail to a Cabinet secretary, and, more often 

than we’d suspect, information coming into an agency is lost before it ever reaches 

the right person.

78. A concluding recommendation suggests that there is a need for a Combatant 

Commander for Intelligence and Information Operations (I2O), and that if such a 

COCOM is created, STRATCOM should be redirected to focus on planning and 

managing Big War. A case could also be made for a new COCOM for S&R, or it 

could be assigned to SOCOM or NORTHCOM, depending on the prevailing view 

within DoD leadership as to whether S&R is more closely related to containing 

terrorism or helping failed states recover from disaster in all its forms.

79. Code M320 was created by Sean O’Keefe, Deputy Director of OMB at the 

time (2000-01), acting on the advice of Don Gessaman, former Associate Deputy 

Director of OMB for National Security, who was, in turn, informed by the author.

80. One such expert, perhaps the ideal expert to help DoD and DHS work 

together, is Michael C. Daconta, author and co-author of 10 technical books, Chief 

Architect of DIA’s Virtual Knowledge Base, inventor of Fannie Mae’s Electronic 
72

Mortgage Standard, and today the DHS Metadata Program Manager with 

responsibility for being the lead for the FEA DRM Working Group, and the colead for NIEM. 

81. In general the aggregators, whose value was undeniable years ago, are 

no longer worth the price of their demanded “gold license.” They still tend to 

be largely a collection of English-language sources focused on business. Where 

they offer historical or cultural information this tends to be deceptive—token 

coverage rather than comprehensive. The cost, price, and technology model of the 

traditional aggregators are no longer competitive.

82. California is in the process of adding 20 analysts and an open source 

information collection and exploitation capability to its statewide intelligence 

network. We believe that every state will benefit from the USDI initiatives in the 

future.

83. This recommendation is consistent with the Defense Science Board report 

Strategic Communication, July 2004; and with Transitions to and from Hostilities, 

December 2004. However, by deliberately funding open source software 

collaborative work tools that can allow NGOs and state and local authorities to 

join the larger DoD network, the information power of these regional centers will 

be considerably enhanced.

84. Googling for DARPA STRONG ANGEL will produce various references. 

A roster of key players is provided by Commander Eric Rasmussen, USN, who is 

the driving force, at www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,1813578,00.asp. The other 

key person is Dave Warner of MindTel.

85. USSOCOM has $2M earmarked in 2006 for hand-held tactical computers. 

Separately, the World Bank is funding millions of Motorola cell phones that will be 

given out across the Third World to energize micro-capitalism. Somewhere between 

these two initiatives is the next hand-held that will be the sole communications 

and computing device for the billions of individuals in the Third World. Hence, it 

must be interoperable with OSIS-X.

86. Two excellent reports that illuminate the problems that persist are Defense 

Acquisitions: The Global Information Grid and Challenges Facing Its Implementation, 

Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), July 2004; and 

Information Technology: Major Federal Networks that Support Homeland Security 

Functions, Washington, DC: GAO, September 2004. In both reports, GAO makes it 

clear that what we have now is not working, and what we have planned is out of 

date. 

87. Although the DOSC lacks representation from policy offices, operational 

commanders, acquisition managers, and logisticians, it nevertheless fulfilled its 

mandate from USDI. 

88. The author is an elected member and was present for this discussion.

89. As recorded in Robert David Steele, On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an 

Open World, AFCEA, 2000, p. 36. The GDIP account is based on personal recollection. 

Mr. Marty Hurowitz and Mr. Keith Hall were parties to the conversation.
73

90. Colonel Pheneger received a Golden Candle Award in 1995. 

91. An excellent world map depicting the current 16 missions and the manpower 

involved (over 60,000 personnel) is at www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/bnote.htm. 

92. NASA has been experimenting with XML-Geo. There are undoubtedly 

other standards under consideration. Establishing a geospatial tagging standard 

must be a high priority if we are to reap the benefits in 2006 and beyond.

93. The first is from IcoSystem, a pioneer in visualization; the second from 

Dr. Dave Warner of MindTel, a pioneer in creating TIDES and other means of 

predictive analysis.

94. Which would include the CISCO AONS and the geospatially-compliant 

data meta-tagging that Team L-3 provides.

95. Apart from its relative lack of concern about security (with constant 

patches being the norm), as opposed to Macintosh or Linux, Microsoft now brags 

that most of its code is being written in China and India, both of whom have every 

opportunity to plant back doors and Trojan Horses into software being delivered 

to Microsoft for mass marketing.

96. This capability can be examined at www.silobreaker.com. It is the heart of the 

OSS.Net system for producing multi-lingual OSINT.

97. This is not the Federally-Funded Research and Development Center 

(FFRDC) envisioned by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and his 

staff. Any FFRDC that is beholden to and subordinate to the legal, security, and 

mind-set biases of the U.S. intelligence community is “dead on arrival.” Instead, 

this is envisioned as similar to the Microelectronics and Computer Technology 

Corporation (MCC), a unique private partnership created to help the United States 

preserve its edge in computer technology and led for a time by Admiral Bobby 

Inman, USN, Ret. With an antitrust waiver from the Department of Commerce, 

this skunk works would focus on creating public intelligence sources, softwares, 

and services that elevate the utility of all information to all citizens all the time.

98. Peter G. Peterson, Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican 

Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It, New York: 

Picador, 2005. The author is remarkable for being President of the Council on 

Foreign Relations and therefore very much an “establishment” personality.

99. Cf. Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the 

Will of the People, Metropolitan, 2003.

75

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ROBERT DAVID STEELE, having sponsored an annual international 

conference on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and what the 

Swedes call M4 IS, or multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, 

multidomain information-sharing, is a leading proponent for 

these activities. As the senior civilian founder of the Marine Corps 

Intelligence Command (1988-92) and subsequently as CEO of OSS.

Net, Inc., he has spent 17 years in advocacy. A former clandestine 

case officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he has 

served three back-to-back clandestine tours overseas, participated 

in strategic signals acquisition operations, helped program future 

imagery satellites, managed a global counterintelligence program 

against a denied area country, and defined future advanced 

information and processing requirements for a national agency. It 

was as the senior civilian at the Marine Corps Intelligence Command 

that he discovered that 80 percent of the information needed to do 

policy, operational, logistics, acquisition, and all-source intelligence 

was not secret, not in English, not online, and not visible to anyone 

in the National Capital Area (NCA). Prior to becoming a civilian 

intelligence professional, first at the CIA and then as a manager for 

the Marine Corps, he served as an infantry officer. Mr. Steele is the 

author of On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 

2000) and The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, and Political

(OSS, 2002). He is a contributing editor of Peacekeeping Intelligence: 

Emerging Concepts for the Future (OSS, 2003) and Peacekeeping 

Intelligence: The Way Ahead (forthcoming). He has been featured in 

the Year in Computers 2000 and twice recognized by Microtimes as one 

of the “industry leaders and unsung heroes who...helped create the 

future.” He is featured in the chapter on “The Future of the Spy” in 

Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of 

the 21st Century, where they discuss OSINT as “the rival store.” Mr. 

Steele holds an AB in Political Science from Muhlenberg College, an 

MA in International Relations from Lehigh University, and an MPA 

in Public Administration from the University of Oklahoma. He is a 

distinguished graduate of the Naval War College, and received a 

certificate in Intelligence Policy from Harvard University.