Q&A: Dennis C. Blair

GIF 2009 Volume: 7 Issue: 6 (November/December)

Dennis C. Blair
Director of National Intelligence

Ashore, he served as director of the Joint Staff and as the first associate director of central intelligence for military support at the CIA. He has also served in budget and policy positions on the National Security Council and several major Navy staffs.

From 2003 to 2006, Blair was president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Defense Analyses, one of the nation’s foremost national security analysis centers. Most recently, he served as the John M. Shalikashvili chair in national security studies at the National Bureau of Asian Research, and the deputy director of the Project on National Security Reform, an organization that analyzes the U.S. national security structure and develops recommendations to improve its effectiveness.

A 1968 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Blair earned a master’s degree in history and languages from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and served as a White House fellow at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Following are edited excerpts from Blair’s address to the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s GEOINT Symposium. I just came yesterday from St. Louis, the western campus of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

I saw countless teams who are working on real problems, taking advantage of technology, reaching across agencies, reaching around time zones, reaching across space in order to do magic things. And that’s what the future of intelligence is, if we can work together as an integrated team.

And it’s welding together teams like that, whether it’s things I can do by pushing down from the top of the organization, just by encouraging the idea that this is a good thing to do, making sure that we nourish it from the bottom up, clearing away the obstacles to that sort of cooperation and integration. That’s how we really achieve the great intelligence that this country deserves.

In addition to four goals, the national intelligence strategy lays out our mission objectives—that is, what we intend to accomplish. Tasks like combating violent extremism, countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and enhancing cyber-security. On top of that, we have our enterprise objective. That’s the how we get the job done—improved integration and sharing, and improved acquisition.

Our overall national security strategy calls on us to be more agile. We can’t always predict the future, so we have to be able to react and operate in it when it comes up on us. We have to be more integrated.

And again, we have to exemplify American values, because these are real patriots who are working in the U.S. intelligence community, doing great things for their country in ways that we can’t talk about. They don’t have to be a mystery, even though we have secrets, and the country should be as proud of them as I am.

One of the big things that makes us effective as a national intelligence community is the technology that we can leverage with those in the private sector, both the things that you can build with us and the expertise that you have in order to get this job done. So let me talk briefly about some areas in which the products and the members of the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation tie in so superbly to our national intelligence strategy.

That first goal mentioned was enabling wise policy. This goal puts a premium on collection against leadership intentions of our adversaries or of other countries that we deal with, or of groups that aren’t countries, but who are important to American interests, or the interests of our allies and partners.

The key is integrated collection strategies in which we take our most sensitive and advanced systems, put them together and direct them toward providing the best intelligence we can to support key policy decisions.

A recent example in which this worked very well has been the Qom centrifuge facility being built in Iran. We’ve been watching, through various intelligence means, this construction site for a while and it’s not secret that if you’re keeping an eye on the building of a large structure, GEOINT is right there in the heart of keeping you informed and understanding what’s going on. We put the GEOINT together with intelligence coming from many other sources.

And we had a good picture of what was going on when the moment turned, as it did at the U.N General Assembly this year and the president decided, with the cooperation of other allies, to make public the fact of this previously hidden and undisclosed centrifuge facility, which Iran was building against several U.N. Security Council resolutions. Enabling wise policy, GEOINT was at the heart of what we did to support it.

The second goal is supporting effective action, and we’ve made tremendous strides. Technology can help us with speed, correlation, display and language. Conventional military units in Iraq and Afghanistan have now come to expect outstanding GEOINT. They don’t leave home without it.

What’s magic to me to see is that previously, we sort of classified GEOINT in an inverse proportion to the distance away from the target that you were. You all remember stuff from satellites we didn’t really talk about. If it was from an airplane, it was kind of O.K, and if you saw it with your eyes, it was unclassified.

We’ve realized that what really matters is getting together everything that you can see about a target across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and to get it together and display it in a way that it can be used by the people who have to take action.

I think the great stride that we made in Iraq was in taking what previously was available to some of our highly specialized units, at very high classification levels, and making it available to wide numbers of users, whether they be conventional military units, diplomats or government workers.

To those of us who used to have to go into some room on a ship to be shown a display that we weren’t allowed to talk about when we walked out of the room, this is a tremendous stride forward that has made all the difference in terms of our effectiveness in the field. And we never want to go back. We just want to go forward.

The challenge there is to get that to others outside the armed forces. I think the armed forces, after Iraq, have become used to that sort of intelligence and are very demanding customers, which is good. They know what’s available. They challenge us to find ways to get them. Our challenge now, I think, is to get that to some of the more nontraditional customers who are going to make a difference in very important areas of the world to the United States, like Afghanistan.

The key to success in Afghanistan will not be done by solely military forces. They will just provide the environment under which improved governance, the improvements to the capabilities of Afghan officials on the scene, and greater opportunity, can actually harden that country against the Taliban. Intelligence can empower those activities that are important to us, just the way it’s empowered the providing security by military units.

Our third strategic goal, delivering balanced and improving capabilities, is extraordinarily difficult. And it’s going to take a lot of work between those of you who are in the private sector and those of us who are in the intelligence community. Our budgets are continually squeezed by the present, by funding what we’re doing every day.

Now, these daily activities, as I mentioned, are driving us to make improvements, and that’s good and that leads to balancing capabilities for the future. But we still have legacy systems that are wearing out. We have to decide what to do about them. We have to leave that margin so that we can take advantage of technological opportunities in order to do our job better.

The next generation of electro-optical systems is one set of decisions we’ve made along that line.

Last spring, the secretary of defense and I decided to pursue the development and acquisition of the new generation electrooptical system. And it’s a classic example of making an investment and improving and balance capabilities.

We’re trying to balance intelligence for military requirements and for other requirements with technical cost and risk. I happen to know it’s a balance, because I’ve received a criticism from virtually every side of the spectrum on it, so I know I have it just about right. But this is going to be something that’s important to us and our successes for many years.

The new generation electro-optical system will be a core component of our national security system. We studied the requirements of any new imagery system to replace our current architecture. We studied hundreds of potential solutions trying to project our minds into the future, consulting with end users and outside experts.

We worked this in great detail with Capitol Hill, and we came to the conclusion that this country should not surrender the GEOINT information advantage that we currently enjoy over both current and potential adversaries. And the question was how to build a long-term sustainable imagery architecture.

The NGEO is going to be a descendant of past successes in this type of collection system, but just as important, we’re going to profit from our past mistakes. It’s tragic to lose a satellite on the launch pad. It’s downright embarrassing to lose it in a factory on the drafting table or in the requirements process. And to avoid all of that, we’ve taken advantage of the painful lessons that we’ve learned in some recent years in order to make sure that the NGEO system does it right.

But it’s not just building that system, but also continuing and in fact increasing our strong reliance on commercial providers of imagery of various wavelengths as an integral part of our GEOINT support to both policy and action. We can continue and will increase our efforts to integrate it as a foundational part of GEOINT in the future, which, as I mentioned, we blend with other types of intelligence in order to do the job we have to do.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence offered an alternative proposal that had a lot of good ideas.

After looking at it hard, reviewing within the intelligence community, DoD and the White House, we realized that it just wouldn’t meet the number of critical requirements for intelligence that we saw in the future.

But the process was a healthy one. There were strong criticisms and strong passions. People cared about the important issue, and I came out with what I think is the right kind of balanced program for the future. We’ll continue to look at new technologies. There are amazing things that can be done in order to learn things that we never were able to do before.

We’re basically committed to a foundational imagery architecture that is balanced, that incorporates both government systems and commercial systems. We think it will serve this country well for many years into the future. As for our final strategic goal, the operating as a single integrated team, I would say that the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency under Admiral Murrett really serves as a model for the members of the rest of the intelligence community.

A little over a quarter of the NGA workforce at any one time is not at a light table in either Bethesda or St. Louis, but in Kabul or even outside of Kabul in Afghanistan. They are in Latin America, Africa and all around the world making sure that the GEOINT is used in a complementary way, in order to do the right thing both out in the field and to be connected to the policy intelligence that we do back in Washington.

I really think that GEOINT is a model for playing a strong team role in what we do in the intelligence community, and it was great to see what they’re doing in St. Louis.

Let me just turn back to a time not that long ago to provide a little perspective—the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the formative intelligence tales of the past.

It was really an event that brought GEOINT out into public for the first time, and an extremely important national security issue and foundational impression for many of my generation. I happen to have been a junior in high school. I recall it as a pretty exciting time, so take yourselves back to this day: October 21, 1962. You now have access to the Oval Office.

Today is the third U-2 flight in a week. This one brings back some photos that show that missile sites are being built on the north shore of Cuba. Flights earlier in the week showed some more new missile sites on the west side of the island that hadn’t been known about. The president was first briefed on the fact of these missiles in Cuba just five days before.

He called a meeting immediately afterwards with his advisers to come up with courses of action. The Soviet foreign minister told him that it had to be a mistake—the pictures were of agricultural implements.

You can store a lot of grain in a missile silo, I guess. But after seeing the photographs, after questioning photo interpreters and imagery analysts, the president decided to quarantine Cuba with the Navy. And tomorrow he would bring in congressional leaders and show them proof—again, GEOINT products of the Soviet missile bases. And at 7 p.m. the following night he would go on television, still a relatively new and untried medium of communication, to tell the American public about these bases in a live television address, and how he was bringing up the armed forces to DEFCON-3.

Adlai Stevenson will display GEOINT in the United Nations General Assembly and challenge the Soviet counterpart to deny it. In two days, the Organization of American States will approve the quarantine, while the president will receive a letter from the Soviet premier warning that a naval blockade will lead to war. The Strategic Air Command will go to DEFCON-2. Five days later, the president will be shown more photos from a reconnaissance flight, which show the Soviets trying to camouflage the missiles after realizing that they can be photographed.

The Soviet premier will then send another letter to the president proposing that he remove them if the president publicly pledges not to invade Cuba. In six days the Soviet Union will shoot down a U-2 over Cuba, killing the pilot and almost leading to U.S. military action. Robert Kennedy, the president’s adviser, brother and attorney general, will meet with the Soviet ambassador about a proposal for the United States to remove missiles from Turkey, and the president will offer the option of making a public statement that the U.S. will not invade Cuba if the missiles are removed.

And then finally, on October 28, the Soviet premier will announce over Radio Moscow that he is going to remove the missiles from Cuba. The president will immediately respond in a positive manner, agreeing secretly to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. But, since that won’t be made public, it’ll appear that the United States won the standoff without making concession. The end result will be that while the Soviet Union will not be embarrassed internationally, they’re the ones who blinked.

All this wouldn’t have happened without GEOINT playing a key role.

We can read the history of that, try to get the feel of what was going on as the interplay of intelligence and policy, the high stakes of nuclear weapons, international prestige on the line, and fundamental doctrine of the United States like the Monroe Doctrine coming into play.

One thing’s for sure: If you can bring good, unambiguous, clear and timely intelligence into the policy process, you can help make sure that things are averted, like nuclear war, and your country can follow its interests. That is really the sort of goal that we all have in the intelligence community, whether it is geospatial intelligence or any other. And what is our job in the future? It is to carry on the legacy of those who were doing that hard work back in 1962—those who have developed both technically and from a procedural and skill point of view since that time.

Every day in 2009, photographs that we take at various wavelengths, which we call GEOINT, will contribute immeasurably to understanding the threats that we now face, and the opportunities that have and will provide both those who are making policy and those who are taking the action in the field with a means to do the right thing.

So this is what our job really is in intelligence, with geospatial intelligence playing a strong role. I want to mention again that for all of the high technology gadgetry that we have, the amazing advances that we’ve made in terms of handling information, in terms of the precision of our systems, in terms of the volume of what we can collect, it really boils down to the people who are doing it, the men and women in the intelligence community who do that job.

For my mind, they’re up there with that special class of patriots that we talk about every day, whether they are members of the armed forces, first responders, policemen or firefighters. It is my hope and expectation that someday they will be recognized, that we can demystify our profession a bit so they get that same public respect that we accord to those who are putting it on the line for the country every day.

So that is what we’re up to in the intelligence enterprise, that is some of our strategy, and that is how geospatial intelligence fits into it. ♦

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