My Share of the Task(91)

                Bennet put a single PowerPoint slide on the monitor, with five words in a line. Its simplicity belied how profoundly it would drive our mission to be a network:

                FIND—FIX—FINISH—EXPLOIT—ANALYZE

                The words represented our targeting cycle: A target was first identified and located (Find), then kept under continuous surveillance to ensure it hadn’t moved (Fix), while a raid force moved to capture or kill the targets (Finish). Material of intelligence value was deliberately secured and mined, while detainees were interrogated to find follow-on targets (Exploit); the information this exploitation yielded was then studied to better know our enemy and identify opportunities to further attack its network (Analyze).



                The military had used targeting cycles like this for a generation. But the task in Iraq—finding and stopping insurgents, not Soviet tank columns—demanded radically faster and often very precise execution. Innovative Green operators and commanders, including Scott Miller and Steve, the squadron commander from Big Ben, had outlined F3EA, as we called it, the previous January as they turned their attention from rounding up former Baathists to attacking Zarqawi’s emergent organization.

                Bennet’s brief captured an important and sometimes misunderstood layer of complexity—what he described as the “blink” problem. A blink was anything that slowed or degraded the process, which often involved a half dozen or more units or agencies working in as many locations. Between each step, information crossed organizational lines, cultural barriers, physical distance, and often time zones.

                “By the time we’re ready to go after another target,” he said, impassioned but focused, “it’s often days later, the situation has changed, and we’re essentially starting from square one.” The process felt slow at the time. In retrospect, it was glacial.

                Only part of this was due to our not-yet-robust technology infrastructure. Most of it owed to a lack of trust among the participants. In the world of intelligence, information was power, leading people at each stage to ask themselves a set of questions: Should we pass this intelligence, and if so, how much? If we share it, will we lose control over it? Will we get in trouble for sharing this information? Will those we pass it to use it in the way we agreed they would? These doubts cost us speed and often diluted the intelligence, making it less likely to lead to targets.

                An initial and soon fixed example involved the National Security Agency, one of our closest partners, which specialized in signals intelligence. By practice, the NSA provided us with condensed summaries and analyses of the signals it intercepted. TF 714 wanted to see raw intercepts right away, before receiving the NSA’s summaries a few days after the fact. Initially, the agency refused. The NSA was understandably concerned that we lacked the in-house expertise to avoid misinterpreting and misusing unfiltered information. But it also saw the analysis of signals intelligence as its proprietary domain and was reluctant to relinquish that unique role. Discussing this in terms of “blinks” helped us to identify and parse these choke points and to empathize with the viewpoints and incentives of our partners, like the NSA.

                We knew eliminating “blinks” would have a dramatic payoff but would require changes equally significant: They had to be physical, organizational, procedural, and—most important—cultural.

                Indeed, the greatest chance for improvement lay in how people felt about their involvement. Everyone needed to trust counterparts (especially those whom they’d never see in person) and believe in the network premise itself. To spark this, we in TF 714 leaned hard on our operators to use video teleconferencing to improve the frequency and quality of their interactions. We instructed our people to share more than they were comfortable with and to do so with anyone who wanted to be part of our network. We allowed other agencies to follow our operations (previously unheard of), and we widely distributed, without preconditions, intelligence we captured or analysis we’d conducted. The actual information shared was important, but more valuable was the trust built up through voluntarily sharing it with others.