Intel story

THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY WANTS DISRUPTIVE CHANGE AS LONG AS IT’S NOT DISRUPTIVE

This story may be apocryphal, but it has circulated for several years now in American intelligence circles. Its longevity is a testament to its power in portraying what is now an inconvenient truth: that the intelligence community was designed for — and its legacy mindsets, structures, and behaviors remain fundamentally geared for — a strategic environment defined by a closed problem set (the Soviet Union) that demanded classified collection in order to gain relevant insight.

Of course, the world has largely moved on. Today, the globalized — interconnected — world is wide-open and awash in what is sometimes termed “U3” — ubiquitous, useful, and unclassified — information. Moreover, it is precisely this U3 information that is the key to understanding the complex (expansive, open, and networked) challenges (think political and economic contagion, pandemics, terrorism, climate change, mass migration, growing influence of Russia and China, transnational crime, proliferation, cyber-security, etc.) that now characterize and dominate the strategic environment.