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Related: About this forumStill underestimating al-Qaeda & Taliban despite 1500 Military Analysts
http://www.juancole.com/2015/10/underestimating-military-analysts.htmlStill underestimating al-Qaeda & Taliban despite 1500 Military Analysts
By contributors | Oct. 16, 2015
By Tom Engelhardt | ( Tomdispatch.com )
~snip~
Think about that. CENTCOM, one of six U.S. military commands that divide the planet up like a pie, has at least 1,500 intelligence analysts (military, civilian, and private contractors) all to itself. Let me repeat that: 1,500 of them. CENTCOM is essentially the countrys war command, responsible for most of the Greater Middle East, that expanse of now-chaotic territory filled with strife-torn and failing states that runs from Pakistans border to Egypt. Thats no small task and about it there is much to be known. Still, that figure should act like a flash of lightning, illuminating for a second an otherwise dark and stormy landscape.
And mind you, thats just the analysts, not the full CENTCOM intelligence roster for which we have no figure at all. In other words, even if that 1,500 represents a full count of the commands intelligence analysts, not just the ones at its Tampa headquarters but in the field at places like its enormous operation at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, CENTCOM still has almost half as many of them as military personnel on the ground in Iraq (3,500 at latest count). Now, try to imagine what those 1,500 analysts are doing, even for a command deep in a quagmire in Syria and Iraq, as President Obama recently dubbed it (though he was admittedly speaking about the Russians), as well as what looks like a failing war, 14 years later, in Afghanistan, and another in Yemen led by the Saudis but backed by Washington. Even given all of that, what in the world could they possibly be analyzing? Who at CENTCOM, in the Defense Intelligence Agency, or elsewhere has the time to attend to the reports and data flows that must be generated by 1,500 analysts?
Of course, in the gargantuan beast that is the American military and intelligence universe, streams of raw intelligence beyond compare are undoubtedly flooding into CENTCOMs headquarters, possibly overwhelming even 1,500 analysts. Theres human intelligence, or HUMINT, from sources and agents on the ground; theres imagery and satellite intelligence, or GEOINT, by the bushelful. Given the size and scope of American global surveillance activities, there must be untold tons of signals intelligence, or SIGINT; and with all those drones flying over battlefields and prospective battlefields across the Greater Middle East, theres undoubtedly a river of full motion video, or FMV, flowing into CENTCOM headquarters and various command posts; and dont forget the information being shared with the command by allied intelligence services, including those of the five eyes nations, and various Middle Eastern countries; and of course, some of the commands analysts must be handling humdrum, everyday open-source material, or OSINT, as well local radio and TV broadcasts, the press, the Internet, scholarly journals, and god knows what else.
And while youre thinking about all this, keep in mind that those 1,500 analysts feed into, and assumedly draw on, an intelligence system of a size surely unmatched even by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Think of it: the U.S. Intelligence Community has count em 17 agencies and outfits, eating close to $70 billion annually, more than $500 billion between 2001 and 2013. And if that doesnt stagger you, think about the 500,000 private contractors hooked into the system in one way or another, the 1.4 million people (34% of them private contractors) with access to top secret information, and the 5.1 million larger than Norways population with access to confidential and secret information.
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