People matter most. People perform well when they are appropriately motivated and properly led. Our number one job is to lead the people of naval intelligence. If we do that job at all levels properly, our people will execute naval intelligence’s mission-driven functions and tasks not only well but exceedingly well. This was true when Naval Intelligence was founded in 1882 an they are true to this day.
While conducting the naval intelligence mission, we should remember that we have the privilege and honor of serving as leading members of two proud and noble professions. The first is the profession of naval arms; the second, the profession of intelligence. We need to keep our unique placement in and access to those two professions at the front of our minds while we lead the sailors, civil servants, and contractors who form the naval intelligence team in the era of digital warfare.
Fortunately, we are aided in our leadership endeavors by U.S. naval intelligence experts who came before us and left us with books to help our generation and future generations understand how best to practice our profession. Two of those books command our collective attention as we think about the work required to lead naval intelligence in the present era.
The first of those works was authored in mid-1980s by now-retired Navy Captain Wayne Hughes. Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice (Naval Institute Press, 1986) was the first major work released on the subject of naval warfare at the tactical level since the period leading up to World War II. It still has a great deal to teach us about the profession of naval arms.
The second, penned by great Central Intelligence Agency Director Allen W. Dulles, is The Craft of Intelligence (Harper Collins, 1963). It was among the first serious works about the Central Intelligence Agency since its establishment under the National Security Act of 1947. As its name implies, it had, and still has, much to teach about the practice of intelligence.
Fleet Tactics places emphasis on what Captain Hughes calls the “five cornerstones of maritime warfare.” The first and foremost of those cornerstones is that people matter most. Casting aside then-conventional wisdom, the author argues “sound tactics, extensive training, and careful planning will win a great victory [only] when they are accompanied by an unwavering determination [on the part of the engaged warriors] to inflict—and accept—losses.”[i]
After reminding the reading audience of the predominance of attrition—or death, destruction, and loss—over maneuver in sea combat, Hughes further asserts “superior tactics may tip the balance, but the wit and ingenuity required for such tactics become overshadowed by sheer grit in the latter stages of a long war.”[ii] He supports that assertion with well-studied and well-explained examples from the Age of Fighting Sail through the nuclear era and the dawn of the Information Age.
Grit is vital, regardless of technology, particularly when the sides engaged in sea combat are at or even near the point of technological parity. We should think about that point carefully considering that we, the Russians, and the Chinese in the main have access to the same, increasingly robust, and largely commercial data, analytic, network, cloud, and end-use hardware technologies that are entering and exiting the global marketplace at a dizzying pace.
The Craft of Intelligence also highlights the primacy of having people who are tougher and more determined than the opponents they face in prolonged conflicts, such as the Cold War, which was raging in the early 1960s or the Long Wars that have been challenging the United States on multiple fronts since a point not long after the Cold War came to an end. It, though, adds a great deal about the additional qualities and characteristics of the people we should seek, select to fill, and retain in the ranks of the American Intelligence profession.
They must, according to Dulles, possess the keenest possible “understanding of other points of view, other ways of thinking and behaving, even if those other ways of thinking and behaving are quite foreign to their own. Intelligence professionals must not and, in fact, cannot be rigid, close-minded,” or incapable of accepting the truths revealed from a close, careful, quantitative analysis of what we might now call in the Data Science arena the full corpus of discoverable and accessible data. [iii]
What data science and such related digital warfare matters as artificial intelligence (AI), to include machine learning (ML), are doing today is introducing us to data-driven ways of thinking and behaving. If he were alive today, Dulles would tell us that we and the people we to lead must be more open to what the data and AI/ML algorithms are telling us, even if data science remains a foreign and often uncomfortable concept.
Consider those two points—that people matter most and that people need to be tough but open to what data and algorithms have to tell them—while thinking about the challenge of leading U.S. naval intelligence professionals in and beyond this, the exciting but often-unsettling era of head-to-head digital warfare with state actors who are as committed as we are to leveraging advances in commercial information technology to further the pursuits of their vital national interests.
The first point matters, because, as Captain Hughes teaches us, the crew has been, is, and always will be—even in the data-driven digital era—the ultimate determinant of success or failure on and under the cold and unforgiving sea. If the crew members come together, overcome the challenges thrown at them, and do their jobs rapidly and well, the chance of victory in the maritime domain increases significantly. If they do not, the specter of defeat becomes a near certainty.
The second matters because, as Director Dulles teaches us, we need to cultivate our crew—the naval intelligence crew—to achieve victory by coming together to take the fullest and most effective advantage of all sources and methods available to them, and that includes the increasingly data-intensive array of digital sources and methods emerging at the junction of intelligence tradecraft and information technology.
The siren’s song coming from many digital theorists could tempt us to focus myopically on provisioning, consuming, and otherwise managing information technology, opening the aperture slightly every now and then to look at the data being inputted, outputted, processed, and stored with all that technology. If we give in to that temptation, we will miss the point, forego the opportunity to apply the lessons taught to us by Hughes and Dulles, and fail to advance the Naval Intelligence mission.
Our focus needs to be on the people who collect, process, exploit, analyze, disseminate, integrate, consume, or otherwise add value to the data being made discoverable by and accessible to naval intelligence at an ever-increasing volume, velocity, and variety.
Those people will perform well in not only peacetime but wartime, if and only if, we lead them well. There is in both the profession of naval arms and the profession of intelligence no responsibility great than leadership.
That’s why I want to leave you with tips for leading those people best positioned to add value to our data through their innovative, bold, and tough use of information technology:
(1) Strive perpetually to understand the dynamic, data-intensive naval intelligence and broader information warfare (IW) missions in depth, breadth, and detail;
(2) Apply your understanding openly, effectively, and with and for the people you lead; and
(3) Do so through the persistent, forward-looking, and innovative use of the “Three R’s”—requirements, resources, and results—framework.
First, let’s talk about mission. Everything we do begins and ends with not only a clear understanding of but a deep appreciation for the mission, functions, and tasks assigned to Naval Intelligence by the Navy and the Intelligence Community.
When it comes to requirements, we need to be able to discern, articulate, validate, and prioritize the capability requirements driven by Naval Intelligence’s assigned missions, function, and tasks. This is not something to delegate. It is a function of leadership, and it is a function undergoing a revolution driven by commercial best practices, the advancement and application of data science and digital design, and the growing recognition that things like content, capabilities, and connections matter more, much more, than the functions and features we’ve grown used to specifying under the Joint Capabilities Integration Delivery System (JCIDS).
We then need to be able to bring resources – to include not only bucks and billets but people and the increasingly commercial data, analytic, network, cloud, and end-use hardware services consumed by them – to bear against our valid requirements in order of priority.
Finally, we get to results. We need to be able to assess with and for the people we lead whether and to what degree the application of those resources have generated the required capabilities. If they have not, we need to do something about it. That is Leadership 101.
Another aspect of Leadership 101 is ensuring the capabilities so generated operate and interoperate efficiently and effectively within naval ikntelligence’s enterprise architecture. That enterprise architecture is known formally as the Naval Intelligence Operationally Networked Enterprise (NAVINT-ONE) and constitutes a topic worth exploring in other venues.
For now, remember: leading your people to take advantage of NAVINT-ONE through the use of the “Three R’s” framework. If you lead them well, they will perform exceedingly well in peacetime and in wartime, even in digital wartime.
I’d like to close by offering the following from Fleet Tactics:
Great transitions require the engineering insights to fuse several scientific potentialities into a dramatically different weapon or sensor, the tactical insights to see how the weapon will change the face of battle, and the executive leadership to pluck the flower of opportunity from the thorns of government. The inspiration for these transitions often comes from outside a navy. The perspiration always comes from within it.[iv]
Inspired by what commerical industry is doing in the digital marketplace and motivated by what we’re learning from studying the classic works of our professions, let us lead our people through the investment of the sweat equity needed to execute a transition that will set conditions for our Intelligence-empowered Navy to fight and win in the era of digital warfare.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hughes, Captain Wayne P., USN (Ret.), “Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice,” US Naval Institute, 1986
Dulles, Allen W., “The Craft of Intelligence,” The Lyons Press, 2006
[i] Hughes, Captain Wayne P., USN (Ret.), “Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice,” pp. 24-39.
[ii] Hughes, pp. 24-39.
[iii] Dulles, Allen W., “The Craft of Intelligence,” pp. 167-183.
[iv] Hughes, p. 221.
