Intelligence Innovation: Repositioning for Future Technology Competition
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In this edition of our newsletter, SCSP’s Katherine Kurata and Meaghan Waff discuss the speed of technological transformation and the need for a major catalyst of change in the Intelligence Community’s (IC) focus, methods, and culture.
Intelligence Innovation: Repositioning for Future Technology Competition
Today, we published the second Intelligence Interim Panel Report (IPR) which reflects the work that the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) Intelligence Panel has conducted over the past year and a half. It builds off of the first Intelligence IPR, Intelligence in an Age of Data-Driven Competition, that was summarized in our Mid-Decade Challenges to National Competitiveness report.
The geostrategic rivalry between the United States and the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) is intensifying and the speed of technological transformation is accelerating. As a result, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) finds itself operating in a vastly different environment than the one from 1947, in which it was designed to operate. Intelligence failures, foreign policy crises, congressional pressures, and changes to leadership within the White House and/or the IC have been the traditional catalysts for transformation of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Such blunt instruments were historically appropriate to address the national security crises at the time, which were primarily oriented around conventional warfare.
Today, national security threats have a broadened scope to include techno-economic competitiveness and other non-traditional military threats. As a result, the current operational environment for the IC is instead defined by the rapid development of tools, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and the private sector’s dominance in driving these technological advancements. Therefore, technological change must now be the major catalyst of transformation in the IC’s focus, methods, and culture.
With urgent transformation across partnerships, communications, adoption, and access, the IC can leverage extraordinary innovations in data and technology to sustain decision advantage amidst an explosive growth in data and escalating geopolitical competition with near-peer competitors. Building on our prior recommendations, in this interim panel report, we argue that the IC must urgently adapt in order to successfully navigate the challenges ahead, sustain America's competitive edge, and reaffirm its position as the nation’s first line of defense. To do so, it should focus on four priorities:
First, rapidly scale the use of cutting-edge generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) capabilities across the intelligence cycle to reinvent how intelligence is collected, analyzed, produced, disseminated, and evaluated. Adapting foundation models with IC data can automate discovery and analysis.
Second, reimagine intelligence partnerships, both domestically and abroad. The outdated hub-and-spoke model should shift to networked alliances to harness innovation. New inroads to domestic talent, tools, and technology are also essential.
Third, accelerate the IC’s use of openly- and commercially-available data by creating a new public-private partnership to harness the capabilities being developed outside the U.S. Government while working to establish a dedicated Open Source entity.
Fourth, extend IC support to enable strategic communications. With the right expertise, tools, and private sector links, the IC can mount agile responses and support broader government messaging across the contested digital information domain.
1. Seizing the AI Moment for Intelligence Advantage
The IC must take immediate action to leverage emerging technologies to collect, sift, and analyze global data flows to generate insight and deliver effects. Of all the emerging technologies, generative AI (GenAI) stands out because of its ability to synthesize and summarize large volumes of data, answer questions, and provide recommendations – enabling faster, and better-informed decision making and it has the promise to impact every part of the intelligence cycle, from planning and collection to analysis and dissemination. GenAI will enable the IC to cover more issues, and at greater depth. The IC’s use of GenAI could also facilitate a greater openness toward working with the private sector and incorporating other cutting-edge technologies.
Despite the profound opportunities, the proliferation of generative models is not without risk to the IC. GenAI will provide adversaries new avenues to penetrate the United States’ defenses, spread disinformation, and undermine the IC’s ability to accurately perceive their intentions and capabilities. GenAI will also put strain on several long-held IC practices and cultural norms. For example, the IC has long placed value on classified over unclassified data sources and avoided using data sources that might contain privacy and proprietary information because of legal restrictions. The use of GenAI will challenge these practices, so the IC will need to take steps to mitigate these new risks. At the same time, it cannot shy away from understanding and using technologies that its counterparts - both friendly and unfriendly - will be using.
The “AI Moment” has both short-term and long-term implications for the IC. In the short term, we recommend that the IC adhere to four critical principles to fully capitalize on GenAI’s potential. First, the IC should immediately begin to use, train its workforce to use, and create policies to govern the use of GenAI tools. Second, it should focus on being an “agile adopter” of Large Language Models (LLMs) by partnering with a leading foundation model provider to ensure that IC can fully leverage their model’s capabilities. Third, the IC should tackle privacy concerns up front to improve individual agencies’ potential discomfort in its use, particularly around data on U.S. persons. Finally, the IC should insist on community-wide AI solutions wherever possible so that collaboration and trust within the community is maximized.
These recommended measures are the minimum necessary to stay ahead of the PRC in the short-term, but they will not be enough to sustain the IC’s leadership. Therefore, as part of a longer-term strategy, we also recommend that the IC focus on three larger goals: increasing collection and analysis of foreign AI capabilities, building an AI-ready IC workforce by training the existing workforce, recruiting and promoting top technological talent, and leveraging external experts, and increasing the access and use of open source intelligence.
2. A New Tech-Enabled Vision for IC Partnerships
The IC’s foreign intelligence liaison relationships with allies and its partnerships with domestic organizations are a strategic asset. This model helps the IC extend its reach, gain an information advantage over adversaries and competitors, and detect and thwart threats. While these relationships have proven extremely effective at helping the United States gain tactical military advantages, they will need to be reoriented to support Washington’s most pressing challenge: prevailing in the techno-economic competition with the PRC.
The IC’s current approach to partnerships is increasingly ill-suited to the task because it assumes the IC, relative to its partners, is the dominant global player and the main source of innovation. Instead, foreign liaison partners are now less dependent on the IC to fill their intelligence collection gaps. The technological capabilities of domestic actors, particularly private companies and academic institutions, can also compete with that of the IC. The IC remains relatively slow in incorporating and utilizing new technologies, particularly as compared to the PRC. In order to stay ahead, the IC must elevate its relationships with foreign counterparts and change the paradigm for domestic partnerships.
Through efforts like the exchange of information, joint operations, and training, U.S. and foreign intelligence services have been able to leverage each other’s strengths to provide intelligence that they would otherwise not be able to obtain alone. However, the IC’s relationships with foreign counterparts have been plagued by a mindset that often sees these relationships as transactional, a source of suspicion, and separate from larger U.S. foreign policy messaging. In addition, the IC has largely only partnered with established “friends,” at the expense of currently unaligned or hedging states that could also provide significant advantages. We make a series of recommendations to strengthen these relationships, including creating a new Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Techno-Economic and Strategic Competition position exclusively focused on leading these efforts, facilitating reciprocal access to data for IC experts, partners, and customers, and building more infrastructure for bilateral and multilateral secure communications.
Partnerships with domestic commercial entities are a key tool for the IC to acquire specialized data, insights, and cultural, military, or linguistic contracting services that are otherwise unattainable or prohibitively expensive to develop in-house. However, classification issues and legal and resource constraints pose serious obstacles. We make several recommendations to bolster these partnerships, including establishing a new National Intelligence Capital Office, and creating and expanding opportunities for IC experts to work outside the IC and for private sector experts to serve in the IC to deepen their expertise.
3. Accelerating the IC’s Use of Open Source
Today’s IC has exceptional tradecraft and capacity in the world of classified intelligence; however, it is grappling with how to stay atop of the vast amounts of openly-available information that is growing exponentially each year, and largely being produced outside the scope of what the U.S. Government collects and analyzes. There is existing infrastructure in place in the IC that is focused on open source intelligence, including the Open Source Enterprise at CIA; however, these units do not have access to the full spectrum of private sector data, analytics, and business expertise across the myriad of disciplines required for companies to grow and function in part because of contract processes and security protocols. For U.S. national security to thrive in this era, the IC will need better access to, and understanding of, data and insights from open-source systems as the PRC and Russia are already successfully using open source data to target U.S. interests.
Several national security experts believe it is essential that the U.S. Government establish a new Open Source entity to address the shortcomings of the existing model and whose sole mission would be to harness the power of openly- and commercially-available data to ensure decision advantages. The key challenge is that a new agency would require time to establish. Therefore, in the meantime, we recommend that the U.S. Government create a new national security-focused non-profit organization to enable rapid capacity improvement for all IC agencies.
Hundreds of commercial companies already produce valuable data, tools, and insights in the open-source space. This new 501(c)3 organization–notionally referred to as Open Source Intel (Os-N-Tel)--could bring these companies’ products and services together in a vetted consortium guided by IC priorities and tradecraft standards. This framework would allow the government to benefit from the companies’ capabilities without being weighed down by the administrative challenges of identifying, contracting, integrating, and maintaining them. Os-N-Tel could offer a single place for these entities’ published analyses, reports, and other insights to be made available online. The organization could also help to establish best practices for sharing tradecraft standards between the IC and the private sector, leveraging more bulk open data at scale, and standardizing IC approaches to data rights and pricing.
4. Enabling a More Proactive U.S. Strategic Communications Posture
GenAI can significantly alter the speed of creation and quantity of information in the world, including inaccurate and deliberately false information. The PRC and Russia already undertake extensive efforts to shape the information environment using tactics like propaganda, censorship, and disinformation campaigns. The U.S. Government’s current strategic communications strategy is not-equipped to keep pace with the rapid information landscape, and responsibility for strategic communications remains divided between several departments and agencies. In addition, the U.S. Government has traditionally had a reactive and defensive posture in the information domain.
Countering Chinese and Russian disinformation with effective U.S. strategic communications is not solely the IC’s responsibility; indeed it is primarily the responsibility of policy agencies and law enforcement. However, the IC can pursue several lines of effort to provide support including: identifying adversaries’ platforms and strategies of communication, disrupting information their information operations, modernizing covert influence tools, and assisting policymakers where needed.
If the IC can create the infrastructure and policies necessary to facilitate a broader exchange of information between IC agencies and state and local authorities, federal agencies, academia, and the private sector, it will help to enhance national competitiveness with and resilience against enduring and emerging threats. To bolster this strategy, we make four key recommendations. The IC should clarify the roles of existing authorities among the IC and the U.S. Government that are involved in strategic communications to ensure there are no gaps, redundancies, or unclear lanes of responsibility. The IC should also build expertise on foreign malign information operations and capabilities, which can include countering foreign malign influence by cultivating technological capabilities to quickly identify AI-generated disinformation. Next, the IC should prioritize going on the offense, which will help the IC to better operate in and disrupt our adversaries’ closed foreign information environments. Finally, the IC should build incentives to attract and retain talent from fields that would promote, enhance, and benefit from this new strategic communications posture, ranging from anthropologists and sociologists, to network analysts, to data scientists, to generative AI engineers.
"The geostrategic rivalry between the United States and the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) is intensifying and the speed of technological transformation is accelerating. As a result, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) finds itself operating in a vastly different environment than the one from 1947, in which it was designed to operate. Intelligence failures, foreign policy crises, congressional pressures, and changes to leadership within the White House and/or the IC have been the traditional catalysts for transformation of the U.S. Intelligence Community"
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