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April 04, 2005

Smarter Intelligence

Reprinted from Tufts E-News.

With the United States involved in several military efforts around the world, the need for solid intelligence is high. But despite the recent appointment of a new national intelligence director and a change of leadership at the CIA, one Tufts international security expert says the U.S. has a long way to go to shore up its intelligence apparatus.

"In the past and today, U.S. intelligence has thought about threats and prepared to work against them as states," Richard Shultz, professor of international politics at The Fletcher School and research director of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, told The Christian Science Monitor. "Armed groups are not an ancillary problem, they are a major problem. It requires a different kind of intelligence than we have had in the past."

Shultz and Georgetown professor Roy Godson have studied U.S. intelligence efforts around the world, conducting research on three continents and exploring past efforts in confronting armed groups.

In a syndicated column for the Media General News Service, the two scholars' plan was described as focusing on the achievement of "'intelligence dominance' in vital areas."

This dominance, according to the article, would be achieved by dividing countries into regions that would be monitored by an "intelligence unit consisting of case officers, signals specialists and interrogators," supervised by a centralized intelligence station.

The numbers needed would be substantial, and such a plan could not be implemented in the short-term; to the contrary, as the article describes, it would require "a change of culture at the CIA and all the 15 other intelligence agencies [national intelligence director John] Negroponte commands."

In their research, according to Media General News Service, Shultz and Godson learned that covert groups like U.S. Special Forces were seen as effective on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but other units were not as successful.

Intelligence gathering methods also need to be modified, the scholars assert.

"It is not beating people up that is the key to the use of interrogation," Shultz told the Monitor. "The use of force is seen really as not the way to go. One can use tricks and other kinds of information."

In addition, the researchers found, the U.S. needs to evaluate its vulnerabilities more effectively. One such weak link exists, according to Shultz, at the U.S.-Mexico border.

"We believe there is an international Salafist jihadi movement with a goal to attack the near enemy and far enemy – the U.S.," Shultz told the Monitor. "These terrorists are smart. They study these issues and learn from one another. And one way in is right through the southern security perimeter."

Posted by jessica at April 4, 2005 01:15 PM