No, not THAT kind…

Military/government intel…

Back in the day, we operated on the excursion, trend and pattern scenarios with respect to intelligence.

By that I mean the first ‘change’ in pattern was known as an excursion. Was this due to something in the environment? New equipment? A change in the Bear’s SOP? Or a screwup by the crew?

If we saw the same thing with another unit, in the same relative place, then we had a trend… e.g. Crazy Ivans started alternating right and left, rather than the pattern of always going left.

If the third, fourth, etc. continued then we had a new pattern. The next question was why? That lead down a number of different avenues- Environmental, equipment changes, leadership changes, governmental policy changes, or…

That usually opened a can of worms, as it might take six months or more to dig deep enough to even have a guess at the correct answers. Part of the problem was dealing with the various stovepipes (‘Stovepipes’ are a term for limiting access to mid-levels, e.g. like smoke out a chimney, it only goes to the top directly from the source) in the intelligence world. When you asked something that crossed those stovepipes, and you made the mistake of addressing the question to both of them at the same time, you usually didn’t get an answer from either…

No stovepipe wanted ‘their’ intel to be questioned by anyone else, much less to have it combined with other pieces of data. I think that was the first time I heard the infamous “Denial is not just a river in Egypt”.

It became even more interesting when your team in the Fleet went back and did your own reconstructions of multiple events, identified what y’all considered to be factors/influencers/change agents and submitted them back up the chain, especially if there were any indicators there might be things on your side that was an influencer (like John Walker)… 🙁

What usually happened was your report got over classified and disappeared into the black hole, never to be seen again and a ‘politely’ worded message would come back to your superiors to the effect of “Stop that shit. You don’t know what you’re doing, cleared for, don’t have ‘all’ the data, yada, yada, yada.”

Normal response was to shrug, put the report in the ready intel file and use the locally generated data to brief crews going forward. Sometimes a year or two later, you’d see an ‘update’ come out from the intel folks that looked suspiciously similar to what you’d put forward.

Today’s intel world is NOT that much different. There aren’t the levels of activity or experience we had, which leads to less data to analyze, which means more ‘in depth’ analysis of each individual item, leading to even longer delays in getting the information out… The stovepipes may have different names, there is a ‘so called’ Director of National Intelligence, website HERE. Having said that, I’d damn near guarantee there are still those stovepipes, not only within the various agencies, but each agency is it’s OWN stovepipe, protecting its ‘turf’, assets and analyses… Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is the ultimate cat herding job today…

Borepatch, you are reading him, right? And In From the Cold and Virtual Mirage, same same, are three of the good guys who have looks into security, cyber and intel for the uncleared…

One thing I do believe we will see under Trump is a more ‘realistic’ set of analyses of intel and agencies being called for their prevarications, stonewalling and failure to cooperate (or at least I hope so).

There are way too many things ‘teetering’ on the edge of falling into open conflict around the world, our military is hurting for personnel, equipment and maintenance, and the troops are tired. This is NOT a good scenario in light of the multiple treaties we have that require us to support folks in a mutual aid environment.

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