Achieving Intelligence Dominance

The US needs to adjust its defense capabilities to 21st century, population centric conflicts, according to a new think tank report, Peter A Buxbaum writes for ISN Security Watch.

In the 2009 Academy Award-winning movie The Hurt Locker, a Baghdad butcher holds a cell phone as he stands near the site of an improvised explosive device (IED). A squad of US soldiers shouts at the Iraqi to put the phone down. He smiles and waves, reassuring the soldiers he is not a threat. Then he presses a button on the cell phone and detonates a bomb, killing one of the soldiers.

Such an incident would be rare, according to the authors of a new report from the National Strategy Information Center, a Washington-based think tank, if their recommendations were to be implemented by the US military.

The report, titled Adapting America's Security Paradigm and Security Agenda, posits that the population-centric warfare being pursued in Afghanistan and Iraq is here to stay for decades to come, and that the US needs to adapt its military thinking and its capabilities to meet that challenge.

The risk of an incident portrayed in The Hurt Locker could have been mitigated, according to the report, by achieving intelligence dominance, a technique originally developed by the British during World War II, and since also practiced by Israelis, Australians and others.

Information dominance involves developing deep local knowledge by assigning agents or operatives to relatively small geographical areas of responsibility. The report argues that the US needs to develop this kind of capability together with its host nation partners in current and future population-centric conflicts.

The Legacy

Intelligence dominance is not unknown to the US. A secretive Department of Defense program called Legacy recently received enhanced funding by the House of Representatives in its fiscal year 2011 defense authorization act. "Legacy assisted with the development of an indigenous capacity to infiltrate and disrupt local terrorist networks," noted a report on the legislation, released in May by the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee.

But the committee also commented, "many innovative programs for mapping complex and social landscapes, understanding relationships among key actors in insurgencies, identifying the key goals of marginalized groups that could lead them to be recruited by terrorists, and integrating approaches to reduce the appeal of terrorist groups have failed in the past for lack of institutionalized support."

It is just such institutionalized support that the National Strategy Information Center is advocating in its report. "The US did much of this in a very effective but ad hoc fashion in Iraq, before and during the surge in 2006 and 2007," said the NSIC report.

The persistence of population-centric warfare is related to the proliferation of weak, failing and failed states, Roy Godson, president of the National Strategy Information Center and professor emeritus at Georgetown University, told ISN Security Watch. States in that category comprise around half of all states worldwide, he said.

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