The article called for a re-direction of the US Intelligence Community away from its obsession with a few hard targets and toward emerging threats and non-state actors; and away from its obsession with secret technical collection and toward open and human sources.<\/p>\n
He \u2013 and the Commandant \u2013 were ignored.<\/p>\n
In the Fall of 1992 he wrote the first article on intelligence transformation, \u201cE3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & Intelligence<\/a>,\u201d as published in Whole Earth Review<\/em>. Sandra Cruzman, his former boss and the senior female at the Central Intelligence Agency, told the person who gave her the article, \u201cThis confirms Steele\u2019s place on the lunatic fringe.\u201d<\/p>\n In December 1992 he sponsored the first international conference on OSINT. He was not ignored, he was told never to do that again. So he resigned and kept going.<\/p>\n In 1993 he introduced the National Security Agency (NSA) to hackers, In 1994 he was the opening speaker at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) and wrote the first warning letter to the White House<\/a> on the need to spend $1 billion a year (in 1994 dollars) on cyber-security. The letter was co-signed anonymously by NSA\u2019s top computer security engineer.<\/p>\n He (and his co-signers) were ignored.<\/p>\n Instead of securing US communications and computing capabilities, NSA set about \u2013 with the explicit complicity of the CEO\u2019s of Dell, HP, IBM and others \u2013AT&T, Google, and Microsoft would be documented later \u2013 to install back doors of convenience. According to Steele, NSA gutted what little security was already in existence, and spawned the Chinese and Russian hacking industry.<\/p>\n In 1997 General Peter Schoomaker, then Commander in Chief of the US Special Operations Command (CINCSOC) called him in for a briefing and immediately directed the creation of the J-26, the first OSINT branch in the US military. Within a year, that unit was answering 40% of all Special Operations intelligence requirements world-wide, with 22 people and $5 million in out-sourcing to individual subject matter experts.<\/p>\n When General Schoomaker departed SOCOM, the Establishment swept in, closed the unit down, and CIA forbade all military intelligence elements from doing \u201cactive OSINT\u201d (talking to humans). Only \u201cpassive OSINT\u201d \u2013 document exploitation then, social media monitoring now \u2013 was allowed.<\/p>\n It can be said \u2013 and Steele says it often \u2013 that NSA gutted US communications and computing security for its own convenience, while CIA destroyed the promise of OSINT out of fear \u2013 the fear that one day a President such as Donald Trump might understand that spies and lies are not worth what we pay for them, while OSINT can answer 80% or more of all decision-support questions, not just for the President and the national security team, but for every aspect of government across all policy domains from agriculture to water.<\/p>\n Fast forward to today. Steele has published eight books on intelligence reform<\/a>, two with Forewords from Senators with experience as Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He has testified to Congress, in one instance defeating the entire intelligence community with six phone calls<\/a> for a benchmarking exercise sponsored by the Aspin-Brown Commission; in another he explained to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan how the real purpose of secrecy<\/a> is not to protect sources and methods well known to our adversaries, but rather to protect the ability of the secret world to lie to Congress and the President with impunity.<\/p>\n As the Trump Administration is formed \u2013 and particularly in light of public comments by both the President and his National Security Advisor about the utility of open sources of information. We asked Steele seven questions. His answers are below.<\/p>\n I could not have asked for a better combination than Donald Trump, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, and Mike Flynn. They understand what I have been saying for 30 years \u2013 that we need to migrate away from spies telling lies (or doing mass surveillance on our own public) and toward open source decision-support that helps end elective occupations, gratuitous covert operations and drone assassinations, while favoring peace and prosperity.<\/p>\n OSINT is the only way to achieve Whole of Government decision-support with the added advantage that the Congressional jurisdictions can receive a copy of the same decision-support being provided to the Executive agencies and departments. I just completed a three-monograph series on grand strategy, global reality, and re-inventing national security<\/a> (for the US Army Strategic Studies Institute), and could not be happier \u2013 the Trump team is channeling Ron Paul toward a foreign policy of peace and commerce.<\/p>\n The US intelligence community is a spending program, nothing more. It is not held accountable for actually producing decision-support, and does not even have the ability to distinguish between and produce four different forms of decision-support: strategic, policy, operations, and acquisition.<\/p>\n Joe Biden is completely wrong when he calls the secret world a \u201ccrown jewel.\u201d<\/p>\n A more accurate description is \u201cflakes of gold dust buried in a very large cow pie.\u201d<\/p>\n CIA has been destroyed by the drone assassination program and before that by the rendition and torture program. It is not trained, equipped, and organized to do what the President and the Cabinet need: collect, process, and analyze all open sources first, then all clandestine human sources needed to supplement open sources, integrate imagery and signals, and deliver actionable decision-support not just to the President, but to every Cabinet official. Intelligence \u2013 decision-support \u2013 is about answering questions for specific deciders.<\/p>\n Today CIA is more like a classified news agency, about as worthless to the President as the New York Times<\/em>. My focus, once I realized the secret world provides \u201cat best\u201d 4% of what a major commander needs \u2013 that is General Tony Zinni\u2019s number<\/a> \u2013 has been on making the most of open sources and also changing the analytic model so that we do all ten high-level threats to humanity, all twelve core policy domains, all eight major demographics.<\/p>\n Put most simply, Jim Clapper and John Brennan have been about the abuse of secret power and about keeping the money flowing without being held accountable for producing actionable intelligence across the board. I am about providing diversified decision-support to all stakeholders including Congress, at the lowest possible cost, with a minimalist resort to secret sources and methods.<\/p>\n Intelligence should be the heart of evidence-based governance, not a catalog of war crimes.<\/p>\n You touch on my concept of the eight tribes of information<\/a> \u2013 academics, civil society including labor unions and religions, commerce especially small business, government especially local, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government\/non-profit. Unlike an information broker\u2019s discovery, investigative journalism, or research that is done by all these tribes, OSINT combines all of their sources and methods into one holistic approach that integrates both the proven process of intelligence, and true cost economics.<\/p>\n While the elements of government do decision memoranda \u2013 they are certainly producing decision support all the time \u2013 they are working with less than 2% of the relevant information, a problem shared with the secret world. In addition, OSINT is Human Intelligence (HUMINT), not technical intelligence. There are fifteen slices of HUMINT<\/a>, only four of which are classified. CIA ignores thirteen of the slices and stinks at the last two \u2013 clandestine HUMINT and covert operations.<\/p>\n I cannot over-stress the value that the taxpayer and government would receive if we did holistic analytics and true cost economics. In combination, they would help eradicate the 50% waste that is characteristic of all our policy domains from agriculture to energy to health to housing to the military to water; and they would begin our migration toward a new economy where everything is Made in the USA and the cultural and social benefits of keeping our production facilities here are not discounted, as they have been for so long.<\/p>\n The individual cabinet agencies can do their own research, but they are not trained, equipped, and organized to do OSINT \u2013 nor do they think strategically, where the whole matters more than an individual agency. The Nordics are starting to realize we need to do better at OSINT, my lecture to them is easily found online at OSINT Done Right<\/a>. The Cabinet agencies will continue to lie to the President and fight for budget share.<\/p>\n The President needs an Open Source Agency (OSA)<\/a> such as I have been proposing for twenty years. Such an agency would also support a Trump Channel<\/a> \u2013 a new form of direct democracy that pumps education out and polls citizens on every issue, every line item in every budget.<\/p>\n The short answer is no. Mike Flynn is now at the pinnacle of power and I believe he will make the same two mistakes that Henry Kissinger made: he will try to over-control the Department of State and Department of Defense \u2013 we can already see the push-back from Rex Tillerson and James Mattis \u2013 and he will stick with what he knows rather than going for the whole enchilada in the open source domain.\u00a0 He does not know what he does not know. Certainly I would be glad to help him create the OSA and the Trump Channel.<\/p>\n I am hopeful that the Secretaries of State and Defense will see that it is in their own best interests to create the OSA under diplomatic auspices, as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), with non-reimbursable funding from DoD. My memorandum to Joe Biden that was blocked from reaching him can be read online, with graphics<\/a>.<\/p>\n In its new incarnation, the OSA adds an Innovation Bureau that does Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) which solves three problems: it secures US communications and computing with open source security; it supports the migration toward managing defense, development, diplomacy, and commerce (D3C) as a whole; and it creates open source solutions for the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals \u2013 solutions that cost 10% to 20% of what the existing proprietary technologies cost.<\/p>\n I have published a post, Fixing Intel II<\/a>, that picks up where Mike Flynn left off. It is probably too radical for a first-term administration, but it could be useful as the left hand starting point, with the status quo<\/em> being the right hand starting point \u2013 the Trump team has to think through where they want to be on that continuum.<\/p>\n The primary difference between Mike Flynn\u2019s approach to intelligence and mine is that I think of it as a craft that should enhance every aspect of our democracy \u2013 I have published a Philosophy of Intelligence<\/a> and I am the foremost author on the topic of Applied Collective Intelligence<\/a> \u2014\u00a0 the integration of education, intelligence, and research, with holistic analytics and true cost economics being the foundation for getting it right.<\/p>\n The three areas where President Trump should focus right away are the electoral reform act; the creation of a Trump Channel and an Open Source Agency; and counterintelligence.<\/p>\n I mention electoral reform because I have realized in the past decade that no issue in Washington will ever get an honest hearing \u2013 no matter how good the intelligence \u2013 unless we restore integrity to how we make decisions. Without an electoral reform act we will continue to have a two-party tyranny, and the Republican Party will continue to join with the Democratic Party in undermining President Trump at every turn.<\/p>\n The Trump Channel \u2013 a combination of outgoing fireside chats on every possible topic and incoming polling accurate to the Congressional district level \u2013 would be the President\u2019s bully pulpit and be rooted in an Open Source Agency that can produce unclassified decision-support about every topic \u2013 this is about public intelligence in the public interest.<\/p>\n Finally, the President needs to be aggressive about counterintelligence, starting with the realization that Reince Priebus is the Judas within the White House. Priebus\u2019 highest priority in life is the prevention of an electoral reform act that would unrig the system and strip the Republican Party of its short-term but very real power. I also expect the next batch of leaks to destroy the Republicans the way the first batch destroyed the Democrats \u2013 the President needs to connect to all of our eligible voters and not be dependent on the Establishment as now led by the Republican Party.<\/p>\n We have at least 500 traitors across the US Government (USG), we need to break the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) down, and then build it back up to the point that it can neutralize all financial, ideological, and religious traitors across the board. Donald Trump has survived a coup attempt \u2013 I am among a hand-full of people who persuasively denounced the lies led by John Brennan about the Russians hacking the election<\/a> \u2013 and I hope Donald Trump understands that everyone in this town \u2013 particularly the Republican Party leadership \u2013 is against him right now.<\/p>\n Unless President Trump includes these three initiatives in his 100-day plan, there is no point to any change in the classified world.<\/p>\n Having said that, I believe we can cut the secret world in half over four years, and make it a hundred times more useful. Generally speaking we need to remove the national intelligence functions from the Department of Defense budget, and restore the CIA as the central intelligence agency with Directorates for Signals and for Imagery intelligence, instead of separate agencies that\u00a0are easily 80% waste.<\/p>\n I favor eliminating the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Geospatial Agency (NGA), folding the 20% of each of those agencies that works into new Directorates at CIA for signals and imagery intelligence, and into the US Geological Survey (USGS) in the case of NGA.<\/p>\n We need to consolidate and radically mature our analysis \u2013 we have too many children and retirees going through the motions now; and we need to process much more than the 1% that we process now. From the ashes of what we have now we need to create a National Processing Center (NPC) and a National Analysis Center (NAC), both under CIA oversight.<\/p>\n HUMINT is in the toilet. CIA\u2019s dirty little secret is that all of its clandestine case officers are known to local liaison, it has no unilateral clandestine agents of note, and it receives 90% of what it passes off as clandestine intelligence from foreign liaison or legal traveler debriefings. At the same time, in an effort to protect its HUMINT mandate, CIA has failed for 30 years to be serious about managing all fifteen slides of HUMINT<\/a> and creating capabilities for ingesting open sources \u2013 most of what we need to know is not online, not in English, and not secret.<\/p>\n First let me say that I hope the President has asked Senator Dan Coats to phase out the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The DNI is a sinecure for thousands of double-dipping retirees, rotationals, and contractors. It produces nothing of value. Like the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) it focuses on budget share and keeping the money moving \u2013 often with lies to Congress as part of how it keeps the money moving.<\/p>\n I favor the elimination of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD-I). I hope the Secretary of Defense will consider converting that position \u2013 and the floorspace associated with that position \u2013 into an Undersecretary of Defense for Force Structure (USD-F), and redefine the three service secretaries into Deputy Undersecretaries for Ground, Air, and Sea Forces.<\/p>\n USD-I does not add value. Much of what it does could be done better by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and a reconfigured Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that is desperately in need of a complete make-over. In my view, if Ash Carter thought USD-I could be managed by an acquisition lawyer of very limited experience, the time has come to eliminate USD-I in favor of USD-F.<\/p>\n The heavy lifting in the next ten years is all about force structure \u2013 I am a huge fan of Col Dr. Doug Macgregor, of the Reconnaissance Strike Group (RSG) concept, and I strongly recommend Doug\u2019s latest book, Margin of Victory<\/em><\/a>. Doug\u2019s key point is that battles are won or lost ten years before they take place \u2013 our highest priority in my view should be to bring our forces home, close all our overseas bases, end all regime change and drone assassination operations, stop getting into elective wars, and focus on re-inventing defense from the ground up.<\/p>\n In my recent three-monograph series<\/a> for the US Army Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), I conceptualize a three million soldier Army with no contractors based here within the Continental United States (CONUS); a long-haul Air Force that can deliver that Army at medium to heavy brigade scale anywhere on the planet within days; and a 450-ship Navy.<\/p>\n I totally support the President\u2019s view that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is largely worthless, and I totally support a termination of our funding and hosting of the United Nations (UN).<\/p>\n I would like to see the Secretaries of Defense and State form a working group that pools all taxpayer funds now going to subsidize foreign militaries and the totally dysfunctional international organizations, and devise a new approach to D3C that emphasizes joint multinational intelligence centers and information-sharing networks, that in turn support a full court press on OSEE. For example, we should be developing open source energy and water desalination plants to be put all along the Texas coastline, and after we take care of America First, export that open source technology to Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n In 1989 \u2013 I was his ghost-writer \u2013 General Al Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, called for a redirection of national intelligence such that it could support the case for \u201cpeaceful preventive measures.\u201d<\/p>\n I am quite certain that we need to transfer $150 billion a year from Program 50 (Military) to Program 150 (International Affairs) but that should not happen unless we also create an Open Source Agency that can help guide the direct delivery of that money to the village level, by-passing the quasi-criminal network of international and non-governmental organizations that waste 80-90% of the development funds on their own salaries and expenses.<\/p>\n Grand Strategy. We don\u2019t do it and what we offer up as a national military strategy has been so pathetic in the past that they are now classifying it to avoid the scorn and derision that greeted the last one \u2013 dishonest platitudes<\/a>.<\/p>\n I tried to reach Donald Trump to propose a Grand Strategy Summit to be convened prior to his selection of his Cabinet and prior to Inauguration Day, but I was not successful. The USA is out of balance \u2013 we have lost our integrity across all institutions \u2013 academics, the media, and the government are particularly unhelpful toward what should be our shared goal: peace and prosperity for all rather than war and waste that benefits the few.<\/p>\n No one since President Ike Eisenhower has ever attempted an official honest, comprehensive, and coherent formulation of a grand strategy that balances ends, means, and ways for all government functions, not only in the national security arena, where the military is consuming 60% of the disposable budget in 2015, but across the domestic front as well.<\/p>\n The grand strategy I have devised as a starting point for a presidential conversation<\/a> only covers the national security front. It makes specific recommendations for changes in the White House & Congress; Intelligence & Covert Actions; Diplomacy & Development; and the Army, Air Force, Navy, & Marines.<\/p>\n Changes are proposed at each of four levels \u2013 strategic, operational, tactical, and technical.<\/p>\n Among the highlights are the closure of all bases overseas and an end to all covert actions including regime change and drone assassination operations; and the creation, over the next ten years, of a 3 million soldier Army with no contractors and a new tracked armor Reconnaissance Strike Group (RSG) as the backbone of the US Army \u2013 the Marines can handle the permissive environments and wheeled operations; a long-haul Air Force; and a 450-ship Navy that can put fires and Marines on any target within 24 hours (today the few big ships we have are 4 to 6 days away from anywhere).<\/p>\n The new Secretary of Defense is one of America\u2019s most deeply read and serious strategic thinkers. The new Secretary of State is one of America\u2019s most successful business leaders across both urban and rural operations. As soon as possible, I believe they should ask President Trump to commission a Grand Strategy Summit that addresses domestic and foreign policies, practices, and budgets, as a whole.<\/p>\n The new Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is committed to a balanced budget with no borrowing \u2013 with such a Summit as a foundation, I believe we can rapidly eradicate the 30-50% waste that now characterizes the USG; we can rebuild our military here at home; we can execute peaceful development measures to stabilize those areas now exporting millions of illegal immigrants, and we can focus on what should have been our priority all these years: the full employment of every citizen.<\/p>\n Robert David Steele<\/em><\/strong> is an activist for electoral and intelligence reform. Starting in 1976 he has been a military intelligence officer, a clandestine operations case officer (spy), the co-founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, and the founder of the modern discipline of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). In the past twenty years he has trained over 7,500 mid-career officers from over 66 countries, but the Deep State continues to marginalize and censor those who seek to reduce secrecy and increase openness. He is the author of the <\/em>Trump Revolution<\/em><\/a> series at Amazon Kindle. His personal website is <\/em>robertdavidsteele.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Image 1<\/a>, 2<\/a><\/p>\n![\"spy\"](\"http:\/\/cdn.themindunleashed.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/spy-1024x658.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n