SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW – The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is offering some rather overt clues about just how the country’s 18 Intelligence agencies (including itself) will be dedicating resources and talent over the next four years as the United States in the long-term, faces pacing threats from China and in the short-term, focuses on Russia’s war in Ukraine and how it is redefining global alliances based either on democratic values or something very different.
The ODNI’s 2023 National Intelligence Strategy, released earlier this month, describes an “increasingly complex and interconnected threat environment” with threats not only from the usual suspects that include China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, but also notes the increasing role of non-state actors and their ability to affect national security outcomes, interestingly noting the ability of multinational corporations and transnational social movements to “create influence, compete for information, and secure or deny political or security outcomes,” among other things.
“In addition, shared global challenges, including climate change, human and health security, as well as emerging and disruptive technological advances, are converging in ways that produce significant consequences that are often difficult to predict,” said Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in the opening introduction to the strategy that will guide the Intelligence Community’s (IC) work over the next four years.
THE CONTEXT
- The U.S. National Intelligence Strategy is released every four years and is intended to guide the focus of all 18 members of the IC.
- The 2023 strategy describes six goals that include; positioning the IC for intensifying strategic competition, recruiting and developing a workforce that includes the diverse talents it will need, delivering solutions to national security threats at scale, expanding and strengthening U.S. alliances, focusing on transnational challenges like climate change, drug trafficking and supply chain disruptions, and enhancing resilience “in a world still emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.”
- The last National Intelligence Strategy, released in 2019 focused on; strategic intelligence, anticipatory intelligence to address new and emerging trends, current operations intelligence, cyber threat intelligence, counterterrorism, counterproliferation and threats from foreign intelligence entities.
THE EXPERT INTERVIEW
Former Principal Deputy Director for National Intelligence during the Trump Administration, The Hon. Susan Gordon sat down with The Cipher Brief to talk about what’s different with the new National Intelligence Strategy and what it means. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The Hon. Susan Gordon, Former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Partner at Gordon Ventures
The Hon. Susan M. Gordon spent more than 27 years at the CIA, served as Deputy Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and as the fifth Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence (PDDNI). In 1998, she designed and drove the formation of In-Q-Tel, a private, non-profit company whose primary purpose is to deliver innovative technology solutions for the agency and the IC. She currently serves on a number of boards, including the Defense Innovation Board and is a partner at Gordon Ventures.
The Cipher Brief: Let’s start with the basics. Why produce a public-facing national intelligence strategy? In the first place and how does the 2023 National Intelligence Strategy differ from the last one published in 2019 while you were PDDNI?
Gordon: You do it because you ought to do it. It’s good to write down - in an unclassified fashion - how you see the world and where you intend to go. It's good to do and it’s good to have it be open to the public. I think because of some of the moves the intelligence community has made on the transparency fronts, it might get even more play than it's had before. So that's why you do it.
The 2023 strategy is an interesting and straightforward document that articulates six goals. And what is interesting to me are the differences from the 2019 version, but also the similarities.
At the foundational level, there are some common themes; We need to get more digital; we need to get more integrated; we need to be even faster and more responsive. We need to do things at scale, we need to innovate. All of those things were evident in the 2019 version, and they're evident today. So common themes in terms of imperatives, but the 2023 strategy is interesting to me in a couple of ways. One, it is much more reflective on and responsive to external conditions.
The last one was, ‘let us look at ourselves and what we need to be in response to this world’, but it was really about what the intelligence community needed to be. My overall impression of the new strategy is reflective of a changed world and recognition that not only does intelligence have a role, but intelligence has a role as a partner. So, it's articulating those big national security and global security challenges. And then talking about the responsibility and the response to those challenges, to which the number one goal is to be positioned to give advantage in a world of strategic competition. And you didn't see that really anywhere in the 2019 version.
There are a whole lot of things that flow from strategic competition, and I think the new strategy does a great job of pulling that out. It's not just China, but it's economic impact. It's the diversity of technology, it's the number of creators that are in the world and the challenges to democracy. It does a really good job of highlighting that but also talking about what the elements of competition are and highlighting areas where the intelligence community perhaps needs to strengthen capability where it has not historically been strong.
It talks about talent. I don't know that it was revelatory in terms of how it pursues the need for talent. It certainly pays homage to the challenge of getting talent and the process of having a security clearance. But it is very clear that competing for talent and the kind of talent we need; technological talent, cultural talent that it needs in order to do this mission, is there.
Solutions at scale, I love that. It certainly talks about the need to get away from bespoke solutions. You've got to bring the whole power of the intelligence community together. What was interesting to me about this notion of solutions at scale, is that it really implies the use of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to establish standards across the community for the more, I'm going to call them ‘mundane’ processes, that when they are not harmonized, really slow not only the community down, but those who would deal with the community. You don't want companies to have to have seven different rules to deal with seven different agencies. So, this notion of solutions at scale is good.
And it talks about partnerships. I think that's its strongest component, when it talks about whom the intelligence community needs to partner with and the intention to partner not only with non-state actors, but different than say, just Five Eyes partners, differently. It talks about sharing data. If I were to choose what I think is the strongest focus area, it's that notion that we are an interconnected community that extends beyond our traditional community definitions, and there is no solution to any of the problems that we have that don't harvest that. So, I love that as a goal going forward.
The strategy also talks about transnational issues. That's really where they go heavy into areas that we haven't called out as much in terms of climate and biosecurity and things like that. I think that's terrific.
What's also notable is that it's not super heavy on cyber and almost nowhere is there a mention of space. It was noticeable to me that, different from either threat assessments or the annual threat assessments or previous versions, that those weren't called out in terms of areas, but I can see how they fit into the other categories.
I love that they talk about technology in the way they do, because this is an area that needs to be strengthened nationally. Our approach to technology security has been lists of technologies that can't be exported, generally derived from government programs. I think if you really take on understanding the threats and vulnerabilities and the importance of technologies and the intelligence communities into that fray, you're going to have the ability to recognize important technologies and then assess them and come up with policies to both ensure that we invest in them and ensure that we watch them in a really exciting new way.
I see how they talk about technology as a real new area of foundation that could create a much more effective way of understanding what we must develop and what we must protect in a world of distributed capability.
And then last is, it ends on resilience. Not only talking about the resilience of the intelligence community, but the intelligence community's role in national resilience and resilience of democratic systems. That's a great thing to call out.
What I would say across the board in this strategy is that it is good on goals but it's a little light on how they're going to achieve them. So, I’ll be interested to see the programs they put in place to address these issues but I think they’ve done a good job of identifying the kinds of issues that we now see as a nation, to which intelligence needs to contribute and participate.
The Hon. Susan Gordon is just one of the many national security experts taking part in this year’s Cipher Brief Threat Conference October 7-10 in Sea Island, Georgia. Apply today for your seat at the table. Space is limited.
The Cipher Brief: You mentioned a lot of really important points and we could talk in depth on each one. The resiliency part is really interesting because since 2019, we've endured the COVID pandemic, a continued rise in cyber threats and we’re led to believe that there are persistent threats to U.S. national critical infrastructure from China and Russia. So, resilience is one that it's often always below the surface, and we don't think about it a lot, but could really prove to be one of the most intractable challenges that the United States has faced in quite some time. The intelligence community is center to understanding those threats. How do you feel the U.S. is postured today toward understanding threats to critical infrastructure and toward building better resilience?
Gordon: I think one of the most exciting things about this 2023 strategy is that at last, we are not presuming absolute superiority and control over everything that's going on so that we can do a very narrow mission. To me, this is just a revelation in terms of saying, ‘Man, this is a big world and there are lots of threats.’
Not all the decision makers that affect them are nefarious, nor are they in governmental control. And yet, our role, intelligence's role, for national security is actually to use our talents to participate in that most fundamental issue of resiliency. We have to have something in order to be able to protect it. I think it's a great recognition of these big forces, not all of which are just political military forces that threaten us. So that's number one.
How well are we positioned? I think reasonably well positioned if it's a threat from a known actor. I think this focus that they've mentioned perhaps overcomes that failure of imagination that we've had that says we're probably pretty well positioned to understand EMP programs of our adversaries and competitors, electric magnetic pulse weapons, probably well positioned against that. We are probably not well positioned relative to the fact that weather is a much greater threat to our power grid and understanding what the result of a diminished power grid would be in terms of the security of our nation and how do we think about the strengths of the intelligence community being brought to that sort of thing?
So, I think we're just fine with the kind of threats across the board to power grids that are coming from actors that we know are bad guys trying to do bad things to us. The more coupled threats, the more non-predictive threats that bypass governmental systems and go directly to our citizenry or our private sector, I think is not as well positioned in part because it’s not clear that we, the intelligence community, thought that was our responsibility, and two, not clear that in it not being our responsibility, we thought it was really our domain to become sound enough in those disciplines to use our craft to go against it. To me, this is kind of like step one, calling it out.
I think under this resiliency you're talking about democracy and the functioning of governments and the ability to do it, and I think that's a really interesting space to figure out how you apply that effectively.
I think it's also a pretty - I'm going to use the word clever and I don't mean it in any sort of snarky sense - way of also being able to address those things that are undermining democracy here at home and how you figure out the role of intelligence within that.
I also think you can cover things in that same resiliency to address the fact that you can't have a national security and intelligence community that can't communicate when the power's out. So what are you doing to make sure that you have the systems that no matter what happens externally, we can still do our job? I love that one for those reasons.
I think we're half prepared, but this introduces the responsibility to get prepared for the things that we didn't know was our job.
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The Cipher Brief: US Indo-Pacific Command recently worked with Pacific region partners to conducting naval exercises and one of the scenarios involved a mass rescue and moving people from a conflict area. They were doing it under a scenario of limited internet, limited satellite connectivity and communications ability, so this is certainly an issue the military is thinking about. So, it’s likely to be something that China has been aware of and has probably been preparing for, for quite some time as well.
Gordon: Yeah. You and I have talked about this before. There was nothing good about the pandemic but if you use crises to become better, that's good. The greatest gift of the pandemic was to burst our bubble on this myth of ease and abundance, and to make us realize how thin we'd gotten in some capabilities, how dependent we had become on some others, and how our expectation was that we'd have everything when we needed anything, and that bubble just kind of burst.
So, to me, using that horrific development to recognize that we are not living in a world where everything is available whenever we want it has been good and I'm delighted to see the community saying, ‘Okay, we're in and now we've learned that, we're now applying that lesson.’
The Cipher Brief: That was a healthy wake-up call for all Americans. I want to talk about technology solutions at scale and the private sector. From your vantage point now, being heavily involved in the private sector and working with companies that are working on solutions for national security, I see and still sense that there are young companies and startups that want to do business with the intelligence community and there is still an overwhelming question of ‘how do I do it?’ If you don't have a clearance and a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), you could have issues. Can you give us a sense how companies today that want to work with the IC, that have technologies that could be really important for the intelligence community, are able to get in front of IC customers? Is it faster and easier or is there still a lot of work left to do there?
Gordon: We’ve known that there is this dynamic where there are technologies that exist that can solve the challenges that we have and that our system is keeping us from getting them, since at least 1998, when In-Q-Tel was created. And as much good as In-Q-Tel has done, I can say that it did not solve this problem in any significant way. There is just too much that the national security community and the intelligence community needs. There is increasing capability available in the commercial sector that could solve that. And getting this to happen just continues to vex us and it vexes me because it is 100% in our control.
I also sit on the Defense Innovation Board and we just put out a study on this for the department. The fact that we’re still talking about this problem 25 years after In-Q-Tel was formed just astounds me. So here's what we need to do.
Number one is you have to have vision. If you don't have something that you must have, not a capability you want but something you need to do, something you need to be able to do, and you are super clear about that and super clear that that is what you want and that is your intention and that is what you intend to put funds behind, then it’s going to be really hard for anyone else to decide where they need to invest. So number one is that it starts with vision.
As much as I love the areas and the intention of this, I would like one level down to say, ‘Okay, now what are we going to do? What do we need?’ And to be clear enough about where do we intend to put our energy behind accomplishing that.
The second thing is that we all talk about the acquisition system as being an impediment. There are pieces of it that are difficult; classification, secure facilities, all that kind of stuff. Seriously, all it takes is someone who knows what they want to do. You can get anything done. The acquisition system is arcane. It has a lot of process to it, all of which can be overcome with clarity and vision. So that's what we need.
The last thing is, well, there are so many things. But you need to have a way for the little guys to succees. Government does take a certain amount of time. You need to have a way for the little guys to stay alive long enough to be able to - after they convince you that they have something real - to be able to be included in a program that is going to be funded. Right now, that too often, takes too long and really small companies just don't have the resources to hang in there. There have been a lot of tries of giving funding upfront, like the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) process and lots of award programs and ways to give money to good ideas in small amounts. The problem is that it's almost self-defeating because they think something's going to come from that. They invest their own money in the companies, and if it never happens, now they're in a worse position.
So, we have to do something to link the vision to the outcome and get some budget process across. What's exciting is there are so many more new things that are in use in small areas. The problem is, and this strategy points to it, they aren't at scale. We're not getting the snowball effect. The intelligence community is doing tons of good things in this area. They're just not making a strategic difference. And I think that's what the new strategy is trying to address, which is vision and budget aligned to clarity of purpose and then a process that allows not just the established companies, but also the small ones, to win.
I will say for our folks in the smaller companies that are trying to break through, there are a couple things that you can do.
First, you can't leave all the work of integrating your product into a government system to the government. It's just too high a hurdle to overcome once you've developed it. So do the work to get involved in the exercises and the studies to learn everything you can about the environment. And go a little bit further to make sure whatever solution you proffer is one that could actually exist. Because I'd hate for you to have the idea that would save the world, but you can't get it through because it has to be completely redesigned to work on a government system.
Cipher Brief COO Brad Christian conducted this interview
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