Observations on the Bean-Naquin Interview

摘要

Most startling in Douglas Naquin's interview with Hamilton Bean in these pages earlier this year were the areas of agreement between Mr. Naquin and me.1 We agree on the Intelligence Community's (IC) failure to alter its thinking. We agree that the IC's leadership (both strategic and operational) is incapable of making serious trade-offs from unprocessed secret collection to fully-developed open source intelligence (OSINT). We agree that the secret disciplines are stove-piped and out-of-touch with holistic decision-support needs for the whole of government Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution System (PPBES). And we agree that OSINT tradecraft exists and matters very much. We also agree that a more distributed business model for OSINT is essential for supporting national security, to which I would add national competitiveness.