Gray Intelligence

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It will take mission over mechanism to function against today's adversaries.

The U.S. intelligence community must centralize both collection and analysis to most effectively leverage technical and analytic expertise. Restructuring the intelligence community as a technical core of collection capabilities, surrounded by an analytic corps organized by areas of responsibility, would improve efficiency, depth and transparency of intelligence analysis.

Developing as well as sustaining an intelligence capability that will protect this country in the 21st century requires adapting to the changing threat at the organizational level. The intelligence community that won the Cold War is not prepared for today's asymmetric warfare. Today's approach of dividing it into agencies that are largely defined by their collection mechanisms creates barriers to coordination, cooperation and information-sharing. Our stovepiped bureaucracy is not flexible nor fast enough to cope with the innovations of proliferating global adversaries.

In this age of asymmetric warfare, intelligence is synonymous with national defense. Terrorist adversaries are too dispersed to destroy and too fanatical to deter. The best hope for national security is accurate, timely, accessible information and actionable analysis. The intelligence community must be organized by mission—not collection mechanism—to fully utilize technical proficiency and analytic expertise.

Currently, the community is divided into an alphabet soup of organizations, with key agencies focusing on single-collection disciplines, or "-INT." The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) specializes in human intelligence (HUMINT); the National Security Agency (NSA) specializes in signals intelligence (SIGINT); the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) specializes in imagery intelligence (IMINT) and its products; and so forth. This focus on function has enabled each agency to develop and refine the technologies and best practices associated with its particular collection capability. But the challenge of asymmetric warfare calls for a different organizational design. A reorganization would inject energy into existing analytic resources.

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GRAY INTEL
We all have heard of OSINT and Black intel ( HUMINT and SIGNT ), but there is also a range of Intelligence on the Internet that is GRAY, Just out of reach of OSINT but available if you know how to get it.
It is not HUMINT or SIGINT.
It is there, and not quite invisible, its Gray. But requires some expertise to acquire it.

Internet Intelligence will become part of force protection, any where in the world there is war, war will have a layer of Internet as part of the war domain.

US Military is in dire need of a high security Intelligence Dump with strings to originators.
Where everything is fed into a data base, based on security levels.
It is high risk, high reward paradigm, but in view of the High risks by the 1% possibilities ( Nuclear ), our current intelligence sharing paradigm HAS NOT improved much over pre 911 methods.
And it still lacks a feedback loup for the Intelligence collectors, a quality rating or desirability rating.
Field operators, just forward what they suspect is actionable, without much guidance on quality.

My estimate based on OSINT and and the WAR, places Intel collection and action at around 70% effectiveness.

The Paradigms are there for much higher effectiveness, but needs leadership and force to implement them.

An Agency with holding high value Intel for security reasons, or lack of recognition of Intel value ( another form of Gray Intel, unrecognized Intel ) will be the cause of missing that 1% probability high damage attack.
Same as pre 911 conditions.
The Intel was there to prevent 911, but was not circulated/shared or recognized. It was Gray.
And feed back was negative about the intel collected ,USA did have it, but because the analysts never saw it till after 911, and it wasn't shared , feedback was incorrect.
And there still isn't an effective feed back loup.

A feild operator can collect a key piece of actionable Intel and it gets passed up many levels to the 'End users', where it is very effective, without the originator ever knowing its value or desirability.

Its a dumb waiter system, food goes just one way, maybe there should be some feed coming back to the Field operator, "MORE", LESS, GREAT, OK, 5 STARS, ONE STAR.

Gerald

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