Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

110 • A Traveler’s Perspective on Third and Fourth Generation Warference in men’s lives. I’ve seen it happen where one of our people who is one of ourworst discipline problems is a different man after he spends a night saving a childfrom a flooded village.ME: You’ve talked about most of the functional areas – logistics, administration, aswell as operations with both air and ground forces. What about intelligence?LORD DORN: Well, of course we prize it, but we go about it quite differently thansome other countries.ME: Why is that?LORD DORN: My impression that altogether too much emphasis is placed on thegadgets and processes of acquiring intelligence and too little on the brainpower thatmakes sense of it. I’ve seen in other armies a veritable explosion of technicians, bothin and out of uniform, who appear to hold sway over what is essentially a nontechnicalproblem. Of course, you need some technical tools to do intelligence, just as you do inanything else. But we aren’t as obsessed by them as others are. We spend much lesstime and resources trying to get the latest and biggest “telescope” because no matterhow wonderful it is, it still can’t see everything. And even if it could, you would neverfind the one piece of information that explains everything else. No, the problem doesnot lie in getting information. While gathering information is certainly important,our challenges have always been in getting the most out of the information we get. I’drather get less information and be able to derive more understanding out of it.ME: How do you do that?LORD DORN: We keep the technicians in their proper place. Less is more. Fundamentally,intelligence is a warfighting problem – “operations written in red ink,” oneof your people used to say. At battalion levels, the commander is his own intelligenceofficer. At the brigade and division levels, intelligence officers were last year’s operationsofficers or battalion commanders. And our battalion commanders and operationsofficers are often last year’s intelligence officers. The intelligence and operations officersare interchangeable; they can do each other’s job. The advantage of having a separateintelligence officer is merely to have another head to think about the enemy – one whois doing that full time. The operations officer handles scouting and other informationgatheringoperations, not the intelligence officer. This frees him to analyze availableinformation instead of monopolizing his time merely obtaining it.ME: Aren’t your intelligence officers much less technically proficient?