RAND views analytic tradecraft

The new RAND study “Assessing the Tradecraft of Intelligence Analysis” has been out for more than a few days now, but deserves an in depth look by those that may have merely given it a passing glance. It was brought to our attention by the Analyst’s Corner, which has become increasingly consistently interesting (although we knew it would be, given the earlier writings of its author.)

What is interesting is that the report is very much a snapshot of a transition period – one might even be temped to say one that was taken at the height of the revolution in intelligence affairs. We agree with our virtual colleague Michael Tanji in his statement that “The dominant pattern in the U.S. intelligence agencies has been not stasis but almost constant revision, even to the point of disruption.” It is for this reason we have tended to look upon the cottage industry of intelligence reform with great suspicion, as too often of late we have had more than our fill of academics and other outsiders writing in with inspiration from what those in forward deployed locations often call the good idea fairy.

However, RAND’s study brings to the debate a number of important concepts, that while not new, certainly need to be circulated more widely. In part, this is due to the commendable methodology chosen for the study, in conducting formalized interviews across the community, targeted against not merely the ever changing organization charts (which as RAND itself noted “names have been a moving target”, given reorganization), but against the National Intelligence Priorities Framework and the Analytic Resource Catalog.

Among these critical concepts are the emphasis that analytic tradecraft is about the management of tradeoffs. There are few other human endeavors where this is not true, but for too long the community has focused on the ideal state, rather than maximizing the best possible outcome from the existing states. The ideal picture approach is very much an academic conceit, and assumes a mythical power to create organizational change simply by redrawing organograms or renaming offices under some centralized directive from on high. The real community simply does not respond to such abstracts in the clean and dispassionate fashion that many reformists would wish for. These tradeoffs are also one of the reason initiatives which begin organically within the working level line analysis shops are the most successful, as they allow those with the greatest stake in the outcome to balance their tradeoffs to the best possible effect.

The RAND study addresses interesting aspects of the increasingly dominant focus on current intelligence at the expense of longer term deep analysis. It also touches upon the issues of compensation and human resources that we have so often mentioned in these pages. We are quite pleased to see an increasing recognition of the importance of targeting analysis as a distinct discipline within the field – and given the delay between the interviews and the release of the public paper – one that we feel has been increasingly internalized within the community.

Collaboration and data sharing issues are discussed, but fall far lower in the spectrum than discussions of intelligence quality and value – quite in line with our own experiences.

The need to strengthen analytic training and education throughout the community is likewise emphasized, with the idea of a standard curriculum model again surfacing. We are aware of at least one quite promising effort in that regard, that goes far beyond what is typical academic fare; and hope to see further aspects of the model developed for mid-level and journeyman class analysis audiences in future iterations.

All in all, the RAND study is an excellent contribution to the literature which we are grateful now sees the light of day. There is much food for thought, which we will no doubt revisit again in due course. We did initially give pause upon a day’s reflection, fearing our agreement with the paper stemmed too much from a potential echo chamber effect of seeing similar views reflected back at us. However, these are things that are rarely formally captured in discussions of reform or the future of intelligence (at least, those written by outsiders). It is important to get them onto the table in a more formal setting – for as much as we believe in the value of the blog, it is a different vehicle for inquiry and scholarship than that of a more rigorous study approach.

On the 500…

It’s not quite the epic of Spartan battles – nor even the parody which declares, “Tonight we dine in Virginia.” But the DNI’s newly released 500 day plan has something akin to martial feel to it – albeit buried somewhere in the glossy public relations image management slick. One can sense the fights to come over its execution, quietly brewing somewhere in the administrative offices.

We understand the need for strategic planning, particularly to move large bureaucracies in new directions. This is especially apparent when there are multiple such bureaucracies involved – all of which who have previous shown hostility of varying degrees towards the commander’s intent on transformation.

Yet we cannot help but note Zenpundit’s accurate calling out of the Soviet flavor to the exercise. The core and enabling initiatives most surely do have a certain ideological element to them – the kind of deeply abstract ideal one expects to see scrawled in meter high characters on some Chinese banner outside the People’s Party Congress. And some offer little more than slogan – such as the continued insistence on a kind of diversity most likely to be interpreted by skin color or gender metrics rather than the measures which are truly needed, such as language capabilities, personal travel and regional experiences, unique skills and backgrounds, or other forms of real thought diversity.

Most critically, though much of the philosophy within the document tracks with what we here at Kent’s Imperative have long emphasized, we remain somewhat skeptical of the implementation of true steps towards the revolution in intelligence affairs. Too often we have seen major programs begun with high hopes, only to see the usual bureaucratic inertia and poisons corrupt the efforts into a pale imitation of what could have been.

But in fact, those efforts which we have seen to be successful were the ones built around a shared vision and dream. These are the concepts and ideas which were successfully branded – often in a manner that provoked multiple competing interpretations (and therefore growth and innovation.) They were the programs which drove imitation and expansion in new contexts and new environments – often by those who may not have even seen the originals, but rather merely re-created them whole from the cloth of rumour. Such efforts were themselves often more useful and innovative than the programs they sought to copy, even though they too often suffered from the poor cousins’ syndrome, with a sort of cargo cult sadness about them. But as a wise man once said, you have to want a frontier.

Thus we sincerely hope that the 500 day plan will drive more professionals within the community towards the kinds of shared vision that can propel forward transformation. From its sterile and glossy pages there are the hints of far more radical ideas and deeper changes spoken of in the dissident literature, and in the back halls and vaults. The first intimations of real change are on the wind…. but will this be merely another wisp of smoke from distant shores?

Body shops and the salt mines of the intelligence industry

One of the most pervasive problems in retaining talents and experience intelligence professions is the terrible consequences of dysfunctional HR and line management processes. We have discussed many times the symptoms of these issues previously, especially as they relate to the unique geographic, economic, and social milieu of the greater Washington DC metro area.

Many of these symptoms stem from the same underlying cause – the inappropriate perception of analysis activities within the “business” of the intelligence enterprise. Too often, the increasing push towards layers of middle management and houses ever more fines divided into “highly polished cylinders of excellence” has led to the perception that the first line of analytic production is simply a routine thing that is the inevitable result of assembling junior staff into co-located spaces in some Taylorite fantasy of efficiency and output. The black box of complex knowledge work is not easy to represent in most organograms and process charts, so it is often simply ignored or taken for granted. Thus, there has been a creeping in of far too industrialized a set of metaphors into the lexicon of the cottage industry of intelligence reform and transformation studies. The end result of this choice of the wrong model is a mismatch between working level perceptions, desires, and ultimately morale on the one hand – and on the other, the policies, priorities, and effectiveness of most management.

The business of intelligence is, and will remain, a craft profession. It is distinctly not amenable to industrialization in classic bureaucratic models, and it is most effective when its informal guilds are encouraged to grow organically through the mentoring of younger members in an apprenticeship and journeyman fashion, honed within a common culture and shared sense of community.

In the contemporary intelligence environment, we fear too much of these key dynamics are not only being lost through inattention and misunderstanding, but deliberately being destroyed in the service of flawed ideologies of management. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the convulsive evolution of intelligence privatization. We are strong proponents of contracting activities in intelligence, both as a result of our beliefs in the theoretical benefits of a more market-based approach to utilizing scare talent and other resources more effectively, but also from our personal experiences seeing the flexibility, initiative, and inter-disciplinary / cross-domain benefits brought by the private sector to the intelligence community’s problem space.

Yet the current manner in which intelligence privatization is managed often illustrates the deeper problems which occur when the profession’s craft nature is ignored. We have seen too many contracting shops in which intelligence professionals – particularly those in the analyst, watchstander, and operational roles – fall under structures developed originally for engineering, software development, or even physical services functions. The disconnects that arise in such cases are rarely more clear cut anywhere else in the community. Thus we see a troubling trends in the increasing number of body shops, in which a clearance and a heartbeat are the only pre-requisites for entry, and success is not measured by the quality of the effort but by how many billets (and at what margin) the PM can staff - and the government client manager can command to grow their own personal fiefdom and institutional rice bowl. The line professionals – those that actually are engaged in the art & science itself – are physically sequestered and culturally disconnected at a client site, isolated in practice from corporate structures who do not share their world or even understand day to day struggles and ongoing concerns. The limited contact with higher echelons that does infrequently occur is all too often not a good occasion: contract changes, irrelevant managerial blather, or feel good boosterism that does nothing to speak to the working lives of those at the coal face and does even less to help their morale.

It is not surprising that such shops face staggering turn-over and declining brand images within a closely knit community comprised in no small measure of professional with prior experience cutting across a number of shops. Many corporate entities are almost entirely unaware of these effects, as they occur not in the shiny offices of a Tyson’s business park but in the back halls of some SCIF floor a “remote” client sites. Such shops often cannot conceive of an alternative, let alone understand how their turnover costs them more than the time a billet is unfilled (or that HR must spend to find a new candidate.) These kinds of shops do not grasp the nature of intellectual capital – and indeed, much of what they rely on in the first place to drive their business came not from the cultivation of their staff but was purchased in the form of prior service employees.

Not all shops in the private sector are so short-sighted, just as many government sections too often share the same flaws and worse. Good shops are becoming increasingly easy to distinguish from the bad ones. Good shops are the ones with senior management frequently on-site, and not just for business development or to watch over the shoulders of their staffers. They are the shops whose authority has been devolved from the unreachable heights of some corporate hierarchy vertical to a flattened structure within easy reach of the line. They maintain robust communities of interest, tying together professionals in billets across contracts and clients, and even outside of their firms. Good shops are the ones in which ongoing training and education is not only available but actively encouraged – and which provide internal and functional alternatives to key government schools which are all too frequently closed to contractors (even if they are staffed but contract instructors, and teach blue badgers with identical jobs as their green badge counterparts.) Most critically, these are the shops in which advancement in the profession is not divorced from advancement in the firm, as is the case for many of knowledge workers with specialized key skills and abilities.

For its part, the government side of the contracting equation must do more to encourage good shops by finding and rewarding these strategies when awarding new work. The IC must provide more opportunities to its contract workforce to pursue their own cultivation – including opening previously locked professional development pathways, even if it means a dramatic expansion in the school houses will be required. The self defeating but ever more common dynamics of treating contractors as second class citizens, seen as necessary but barely tolerated evils, has to end. This also means an end to the too easy attempts at the politicization of privatization as an issue every time a new contract award comes up, or a new study is crafted. Given the percentages of contractors in the community, and the key role they play in major programs (especially in comparison to the kinds of tasks that government assignments often entail), if the IC cannot re-conceptualize itself in a manner that includes such a large part of its contributors, it cannot sustain or grow itself as an institution.

And in turn, if contracting shops cannot re-invent themselves - no matter that origins or culture of their parent company – into agile, knowledge based and analyst/operator centric organizations, they will be unable to survive in the intelligence market over the long term. The IC as a marketplace will not be just another few quarters, but rather decade of change under unique dynamics at the close of a historical epoch and the birth of its successor. Only those shops which can come to terms with this, in a strategic and futures oriented perspective, will survive the shakeups which are most surely coming down the difficult roads which lie ahead.

The sins of analytic methodologists

We are strong proponents of improving the rigour in intelligence analysis, and have frequently advocated for the better grounding of new analysts (and in-service training) in formal logic, epistemological theory, and structured technique. At the same time, however, we are deeply mindful of the continuing unmet needs for more creative and imaginative analysis, which moves further afield from the narrowly constructed questions of current uncertainties and into the realm of the unknown unknowns.

We are thus deeply troubled to observe a frightening trend in the work of some methodologists attempting to “solve” the problems of analytic rigour through new tradecraft practices. There is an increasingly common conceit that reliance on the analyst - subject to, cognitive bias, information overload, and human fallibility – can be engineered out of the process of doing intelligence. Instead, certain methodologists would substitute organizational structures, workflow re-organization, and the introduction of supposedly superior quantitative metrics in order to create a new standard for “answers”. The underlying thrust of these efforts is to reform intelligence activities towards a more “repeatable” process, often described by industrial or scientific metaphors such “foundry” or “lab”. These typically originate from the engineering and technical intelligence disciplines, and are usually directed as criticism of typical all source efforts – particularly those grounded in social science fields or qualitative methodology. Among the recent examples of these attempts at “standardizing” the process of analysis – with new emphasis on technical and quantitative approaches – is the 2006 DNI Galileo program paper “Predictive Network Centric Intelligence.”

The fundamental flaw in many of these methodologists' efforts is that they are essentially reductionist attempts to force the difficult and oft-times messy art of intelligence entirely into the narrow box of its scientific side. While there is a place for scientific approaches, particularly in the grounding and validation of assessment, the inherently creative, non-linear, and even non-rational elements of the profession can never be completely discarded. Most recent intelligence failures have occurred, not due to a lack of precision in judgment, but from a lack of imagination in identifying, describing, and forecasting the uncertain dynamics and emerging complexities of fast-changing accounts.

Most methodologists are very good at creating shiny and intricate machines for solving puzzles to produce answers of intelligence “fact” – often with great and noteworthy expenditure of time, effort, and resources. However, the community is challenged most today by mysteries, to which there may never be a single set of answers but rather only approximations and options, set against the backdrop of an ever evolving understanding of situations obscured by the fog of war, time/distance, culture, and levels of commitment.

It is also fascinating to note that many of the methodologists reject individual level approaches to solving difficult intelligence problems, preferring instead to focus on the creation of new systems and processes. It is our contention that the analyst will always remain the heart of intelligence insight, and the things that happen inside the human mind are non-replaceable - and frequently non-reproducible – elements that cannot be dissected and pinned neatly for methodological examination. The analysis “bench” will never be deep enough to support the creation of large structures of process in which analysts become interchangeable parts. Analytic tradecraft can provide best practices to help avoid certain fallacies and other mistakes, and can demonstrate cases in which valuable lessons can be learned, but it cannot by itself produce the innovative and imaginative prediction that will help decision-makers address the kinds of challenges they increasingly face.

It is for this reason that we continue to emphasize the importance of the cultivation of the analyst above all else. We would hope that the methodologists would at least consider pursuing research, which rather than seeking to radically restructure the forms of complex intelligence activity that have evolved under brutally Darwinian pressures, will instead support the pursuit of excellence by individuals facing hard challenges in the face of serious consequences. The analytic house neither needs nor particularly wants shiny new puzzle machines – but is desperate for additional tools and techniques which can be called upon to address mysteries in times of crisis, and when other sources of inspiration have run dry.

Pursuing the 28%

Issues of recruiting and retention of the next generation of intelligence professionals have been much on our minds as of late. We grapple with the endless difficulties created by bureaucracy, culture, and rent-seeking behaviors on the part of government and contractors throughout the community. We are witness to the effects of the demographic shifts within so many agencies, and the often confused responses to the changes that those shifts have created. We are also keenly aware of the unparalleled dysfunction of the clearance process and security system – acknowledged by all, remedied by none.

We are not alone in writing about these issues. Haft of the Spear & Mountain Runner highlight a classic case of a candidate caught between worlds and hamstrung by a system he cannot understand nor maneuver in. (While his attitude early in the process was unhelpful, and likely led him in part to his current straights, we view this as much a failure of the recruiting process as anything else. We should not expect candidates to want to come to the three letter world anymore – rather we must sell them on why they would want to, else we will lose them to other places more compatible with their lifestyles and desires.)

The pool of candidates is simply too small to keep losing the good ones. As Former Spook notes, we are looking at somewhere less than 28% of the population of 17-24 year olds as new entrants into the community (and of those, the ones we need most perhaps make up an even more distressingly small percentage). The ones that are interested in our community are perhaps only a fraction of that total…

Every day, opportunities are slipping away to find, inspire, and keep the best and the brightest. Time and again, shops devolve as their linchpin performers leave for greener pastures; and those that remain are the ones who dictate policies and products which are mired firmly in the worst sort of mediocrity.

It is not enough to say “the system” is too large and complex for effective change. It is not enough to call for reform of the organization chart without looking at transformation on the line, and at mission management level.

Another graduating class has just left the intelligence studies academy, and the stories of their travails in navigating the hiring process will no doubt continue to surface over the course of the summer. And for every story that is told, there are a dozen others in which the candidate quietly slipped off the a high paying position in the civilian world, looking at competitive intelligence (or management consulting) – using the very same skillsets so much in demand in the community.

Each one of those is a failure by the administrative and functional nightmare that is the IC’s hiring processes, and in each of those individual failures lies the roots of the next major national intelligence failure.

Conference season

Our thoughts lately turn towards the perennial summer institution of the intelligence community conference – the time to travel (perhaps if only across town, and even to that most rare of luxuries - the world outside of the vault, the one with windows...), sit lightly (if long), and reflect upon the art and science rather than on the press of day to day events.

Our business side / competitive intelligence colleagues kicked off the season in the late spring, but then again vendors are always hungry for Q3 leads during the long doldrums of executive vacations and budget uncertainties.

The educator’s annual conference is currently going on, with a most interesting collection of heavyweights displaying great interest in the generation to which the Long War will be given.

A few of the more established intel schools are also hosting a small function of their own, as usual out in the boondocks of the Great Lakes.

And of course, there is the event everyone is waiting for: the DNI OSINT conference, where we hope to see something new, interesting, and definitive emerging from the movements within the open source side of the community. (Standing room only, already, we note.)

Let’s hope the powerpoint rangers practice better OPSEC for the remainder of the summer, based on the recent news.

We would also love to see a bigger push for paper submissions at these events. While it is nice to have a good lunch, and (hopefully) engaging speakers; these functions represent a unique chance to spur contributions to the literature in a manner that the longer production cycle journals do not. There are few other fields where conferences do not routinely include papers, and it has been a long time since the 2005 analysis conference.

Alas, in the meantime those seeking further reading from the conference literature must content themselves with the (sometimes overly) academic offerings from the International Studies Association’s past meetings.

We also await the emergence into the public light of the various indicators - which will (no doubt) manifest the trends of the ever-shifting currents of politics within the IC. These are troubled days, and much more will out before the season ends, we should think.

Teaching man to fish…

Among our recent struggles has been the increasingly difficult problem of cultivating a wider systems and strategic level viewpoint in intelligence professionals, not only regarding target accounts and substantive analysis efforts, but also in terms of how their contribution supports the intelligence community as a whole.

This is not an easy task. Strategic thinking remains one of the more difficult subjects to effectively convey in any classroom or on the job setting. True application of strategic level insights requires both a body of subject matter expertise but also experiential epiphanies of meaning and interactions across traditionally stove-piped domains and separated vaults.

It is a task also not made easier by many of the traditional means by which intelligence professionals are taught to perform, particularly those which demand adherence to specific methodology or a set series of templates for production. These include the entire academic model used as a template, in which production merely mirrors common styles used for journal articles or research papers in international affairs, political science, or other common disciplines within the ivory tower – a practice which may produce more readable material but often fails to address key aspects of utility and consumer outcomes. The academic model, however, remains all too prevalent within the intelligence community due to the emphasis on transcripts in hiring and promotion. Other templates may be derived from military reporting formats, used more generally across other disciplines due to individual or organizational familiarity; or even journalistic styles, adopted for current intelligence reporting but which pose their own unique problems in an increasingly mediated age.

We as a community are faced with increasing numbers of individuals which approach their profession as a series of set piece problems to be dealt with using processes and techniques set forth in manuals or in customary usage. This is all very well and good when those individuals are working in established functions and on target accounts with which the community has historic interest and experience; as those practices have been evolved from the collective experience and unique strategic thought of many a veteran practitioner. These practices as a body are often revisited over time through both formal and informal mechanisms of discussion and validation, as accounts pass from hand to hand and as new case studies are developed to help capture and pass along core tradecraft useful to those accounts.

However, when those same professionals who perform well in such existing assignments are placed into new roles in functions which previously did not exist (or were not codified and collected into a formal position), they frequently founder. Many are unable to articulate the reasons behind the success of previous practice, nor identify other applicable examples of tradecraft which might be applied to new types of target problems. Instead, they are often frustrated by repeated and futile attempts to pound their square peg templates into holes whose shape has not yet even been charted. Accidental successes of timing and interest are held up as proof of success of inadequate models, and when such successes prove fleeting individual analysts are often castigated for what are perceived as personal mistakes despite the clear failings of management dictates.

There are those that can see above the daily grind of production and coordination, but they are often unable to express or ill-positioned to correct the course of the model. Indeed, these are the professionals most likely to burn out fast as they struggle both to overcome specific problems and issues in order to perform to the best standard possible, but also to take on entire systems and personalities to ensure others around them can also succeed. The departure of these rare individuals from units can have devastating effects on the value of functional teams, but unfortunately this is only usually recognized too late (if at all).

Now, we do not expect junior analysts or collectors to both master the art and science of their trade, the substantive aspects of their target account, and still have the bandwidth to look beyond their individual role to see systems as a whole. But frankly, we wish to see them better equipped to do so as they progress through the brutal learning curves of this profession; and ironically we are finding that older approaches to professional induction appear to have been actually better at accomplishing that task in the medium to long term. We strongly believe one of the keys to the older approaches (now fallen out of favour) is the delegation of significant early responsibility for design, execution, and management of specific encapsulated assignments; supported by available references and mentoring – but otherwise essentially on their own.

This philosophy does risk the successful outcome of initial products. In reality, it usually only risks a “re-do” of the task, typically by a more experienced veteran – something that happens frequently in assignments handed to developing juniors anyway, but with less potential for learning and growth. It is understandably difficult for senior professionals and line managers to watch junior staff make their own mistakes, and stumble through things their superiors so long ago internalized as to make them baseline assumptions of worldview. But there is a kind of value to that experience (especially when gently guided from the outside) that expresses itself down the road in better more systems oriented and strategic thinking, particularly if after action review and lessons learned processes are institutionalized within a unit.

These factors are one of the reasons the case study method is so successful, and why exercise environments can be rewarding far out of proportion to the resource investment required to bring them about. However, it takes a certain level of strategic perspective on the part of management to create conditions to cultivate their staff, including a deliberate suppression of the “old hand expert” mythos (itself quite damaging in the absence of smoking mirror), and a willingness to invest in internal development – things not easily found in the current climate which characterizes many GS-15 and SES offices.

There is hope on the horizon, though. The issues surrounding strategic thinking are receiving increasing attention in community circles, as are the questions of how it can be taught and otherwise cultivated. One of the key reasons we remain optimistic is the recent shift in emphasis within the community from the kind of broad and sweeping reform proposals which are the domain of agency heads and legislative / executive interaction toward a more narrowly constructed approach, which take core principals of the revolution in intelligence affairs and applies them not toward shuffling organograms and budget lines but in the pursuit of small, achievable changes that can have immediate impact on units and the consumers they serve.

In a way, this shift mirrors a similar dynamic observed by technologist Clay Shirky in the software development world, in which general mass programming solutions were seen to be supplanted by smaller and more tailored applications designed for specific niche roles within defined groups of users. Shirky refers to these new approaches as “situated software”, and we believe they are a natural reflection of the increasing demand pressures of customization by software consumers.

These same pressures are a work in the intelligence community, but without cultivating new strategic perspective they will not be satisfied.

Failing HR processes in the IC

We have been greatly concerned with the issues of recruitment and retention of the kinds of minds that the intelligence community needs most in the coming years, and the development and cultivation of the next generation that will replace them in the out-years. Our concerns are motivated not only by the ever increasing demand for intelligence (and intelligence-like) services throughout government and corporate environments, but what appears to be a systematic failure of organizational structure and process to identify, interview, vet, and place qualified candidates in roles which will satisfy them now and provide longer term growth potential.

It is widely acknowledged that one of the greatest drivers behind the success of the privatization of intelligence has been that contractors offer a greater flexibility of salary, working conditions, target accounts, initial hiring, and advancement. These benefits often come at a cost of stability, as contracts come and go, but good companies – those that are not simply body shops or churn mills – usually are able to offer a broad enough spectrum of options that individual analysts and officers are not caught out in the cold in most cases. (There are a few sometimes horrifying exceptions even in the best shops, especially when these involve transfers of clearances between entities - but that is another post entirely.)

The sheer volume of billets available in recent years (hiring of new GS/GG employees, and corresponding movement of GS to contractor, and contractor to yet another contractor) has however served to mask some fundamental human resources issues that are degrading community capabilities.

We are not speaking of the quality of life issues – although these are not insignificant, especially in light of the ever-expanding geographic scope and growing density of the Washington DC metro area. And for now, forget about compensation issues, as painful as these can be for junior folk – and as misunderstood as they are by most dual-income SES’s with net worth enhanced immeasurably by the property boom. We are not even talking about the language gap, or any of the myriad thorns surrounding clearance system problems.

Simply put, we are finding more and more that many HR functions – even in the largest and best run shops – are simply inadequate to the task at hand. HR elements usually lack fundamental knowledge regarding the skills, competencies, and substantive expertise needed to successfully carry out any given assignment. They are forced to rely on buzzwords, “coolness” factors, and poorly written generic position descriptions – all of which typically devolves to the worst of all screening criteria - the simple notations of a specific clearance level coupled with a heartbeat.

While the utility of the latter approach is bluntly a requirement of inefficiencies in current approaches to positive vetting, it is also fundamentally flawed and tends to place unqualified individuals who simply have required accesses into assignments where they quickly and inevitably fail. There are endless tragic stories of individuals being asked to leave a billet within weeks of initial assignment based on mismatch of skills to need, or personality to team – and these are just the ones to which the system was capable of dealing with. All too often, these individuals stay in place, taking up space and producing nothing of value – and usually creating additional issues of morale, policy, and new workload (spent cleaning up after the poorly suited individual’s attempts to show that they are working.)

The number of bodies cycling through the system also means that specific attention is rarely paid to candidates based on their individual capabilities and contributions, but rather candidates are grouped into classes of consideration dictated by ease of transfer, diversity points, or a rough sorting of generic top level account types (regardless of actual target assignments.) In this shuffle, a lot of individuals are slipping through the cracks – and not all will stay in the community when there are many attractive private sector offers out there that involve none of the kind of existential stress that a move within the community can entail. The best and most adaptable find their own billets, and make their own futures – but this takes time and attention away from target issues and accounts where their skills are needed most by the community.

So instead, we are treated to the endless parade of position vacancy announcements flooding major metropolitan area newspapers – including ever more specific write-ups of desired abilities to access classified systems by name, by clearance types, and by target account (OPSEC concerns which are simply lost in the noise at this point, but have the potential to create serious longer term implications for the community as a whole). The HR shops at major contractors are in a constant state of churn, with paper passing across desks constantly in a nearly mind numbing flow of names and histories. And these are the better functions – with well compensated, well motivated HR professionals attempting to cope with the deluge.

Government HR fares far worse, typically dominated by low level GS employees ranked in thankless hives, driven by ever more restrictive attempts at imposing equality and diversity preferences without regard to knowledge, skills, or abilities. (And while we are great fans of true diversity – particularly in the critical areas of language skills, cultural awareness, and overseas experience – we find that current systems designed to identify and promote diversity usually fail utterly in bureaucratic fashion, producing the appearance of diversity but not its actual benefits.) This also assumes that vacant billets are even budgeted – in too many shops, active billets vanish from year to year not due to a decision to cut, but based on poor program management which fails to handle the longer term effects of poor retention.

In response, so far we have seen only a Human Capital Plan and a “Hundred Day” Plan at the policy level – the first of which is, in our opinion, largely unhelpful; and the latter as yet largely an unknown factor. On the ground, there are increasing numbers of back door attempts to create solutions – from one day career fairs designed to establish a candidate pool with immediate offers to a manageable number of new bodies, to ever shorter series vacancy announcements attempting to certify a small enough list so that the best qualified candidates have a chance of making it through the process at all before they are snapped up elsewhere.

These solutions are stopgaps which can only delay the reckoning for the systemic dysfunction which plagues the community. The community is not getting the right new blood that is so needed (despite the high hopes we hold for many of the amazing young up and coming entrants we have been encountering in ever greater numbers), and it is grossly failing to retain and re-assign the critically small pool of experienced (but not retirement age) professionals that are the backbone of most program efforts.

It’s a game of musical chairs, and the looming uncertainties of election year politics and related funding impacts means there are a lot of people anticipating that the music may stop very soon. It is going to take serious effort by serious people, using market-based approaches that take into account the true nature of today’s intelligence community, to solve the dilemma and provide for the next generation. Otherwise, the HR problem will be one of the most prominent rocks upon which intelligence community reform efforts will founder, and no amount of research papers, policy studies, or expert commissions will suffice to save it.