1,500.<\/p>\n
That figure stunned me. I found it in the 12th paragraph of a front-page<\/a> New York Times<\/em> story about \u201csenior commanders\u201d at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM<\/a>) playing fast and loose with intelligence reports to give their air war against ISIS an unjustified sheen of success: \u201cCENTCOM\u2019s mammoth intelligence operation, with some 1,500 civilian, military, and contract analysts, is housed at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, in a bay front building that has the look of a sterile government facility posing as a Spanish hacienda.\u201d<\/p>\n Think about that.\u00a0 CENTCOM, one of six<\/a> 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.\u00a0 Let me repeat that: 1,500 of them.\u00a0 CENTCOM is essentially the country\u2019s 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 Pakistan\u2019s border to Egypt.\u00a0 That\u2019s no small task and about it there is much to be known.\u00a0 Still, that figure should act like a flash of lightning, illuminating for a second an otherwise dark and stormy landscape.<\/p>\n And mind you, that\u2019s just the analysts, not the full CENTCOM intelligence roster for which we have no figure at all.\u00a0 In other words, even if that 1,500 represents a full count of the command\u2019s 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<\/a> in Qatar, CENTCOM still has almost half as many of them as military personnel on the ground in Iraq (3,500<\/a> at latest count).\u00a0 Now, try to imagine what those 1,500 analysts are doing, even for a command deep in a \u201cquagmire\u201d in Syria and Iraq, as President Obama recently dubbed it (though he was admittedly speaking about<\/a> 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.\u00a0 Even given all of that, what in the world could they possibly be \u201canalyzing\u201d?\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n Of course, in the gargantuan beast that is the American military and intelligence universe, streams of raw intelligence beyond compare are undoubtedly flooding into CENTCOM\u2019s headquarters, possibly overwhelming even 1,500 analysts.\u00a0 There\u2019s \u201chuman intelligence,\u201d or HUMINT, from sources and agents on the ground; there\u2019s imagery and satellite intelligence, or GEOINT, by the bushelful.\u00a0 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, there\u2019s undoubtedly a river of full motion video, or FMV, flowing into CENTCOM headquarters and various command posts; and don\u2019t forget the information being shared with the command by allied intelligence services, including those of the \u201cfive eyes<\/a>\u201c nations, and various Middle Eastern countries; and of course, some of the command\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n And while you\u2019re 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.\u00a0 Think of it: the U.S. Intelligence Community has — count \u2018em — 17<\/a> agencies and outfits, eating close to $70 billion<\/a> annually, more than $500 billion<\/a> between 2001 and 2013.\u00a0 And if that doesn\u2019t stagger you, think about the 500,000 private contractors<\/a> hooked into the system in one way or another, the 1.4 million people<\/a> (34% of them private contractors) with access to \u201ctop secret\u201d information, and the 5.1 million — larger than<\/a> Norway\u2019s population — with access to \u201cconfidential and secret\u201d information.<\/p>\n Remember as well that, in these years, a global surveillance state<\/a> of Orwellian proportions has been ramped up.\u00a0 It gathers<\/a> billions of emails and cell phone calls from the backlands of the planet; has kept tabs on at least 35 leaders<\/a> of other countries and the secretary general<\/a> of the U.N. by hacking<\/a> email accounts, tapping<\/a> cell phones, and so on; keeps a careful eye and ear on its own citizens, including video gamers<\/a>; and even, it seems, spies on Congress<\/a>.\u00a0 (After all, whom can you trust?)<\/p>\n In other words, if that 1,500 figure bowls you over, keep in mind that it just stands in for a far larger system that puts to shame, in size and yottabytes<\/a> of information collected, the wildest dreams of past science fiction writers.\u00a0 In these years, a mammoth, even labyrinthine<\/a>, bureaucratic \u201cintelligence\u201d structure has been constructed that is drowning in \u201cinformation\u201d — and on its own, it seems, the military has been ramping up a smaller but similarly scaled set of intelligence structures.<\/p>\n Surprised, Caught Off Guard, and Left Scrambling<\/strong><\/p>\n The question remains: If data almost beyond imagining flows into CENTCOM, what are those 1,500 analysts actually doing?\u00a0 How are they passing their time?\u00a0 What exactly do they produce and does it really qualify as \u201cintelligence,\u201d no less prove useful?\u00a0 Of course, we out here have limited access to the intelligence produced by CENTCOM, unless stories like the one about top commanders fudging assessments on the air war against the Islamic State break into the media.\u00a0 So you might assume that there\u2019s no way of measuring the effectiveness of the command\u2019s intelligence operations.\u00a0 But you would be wrong.\u00a0 It is, in fact, possible to produce a rough gauge of its effectiveness.\u00a0 Let\u2019s call it the TomDispatch<\/em> Surprise Measurement System, or TSMS. Think of it as a practical, news-based guide to the questions: What did they know and when did they know it?<\/p>\n Let me offer a few examples chosen almost at random from recent events in CENTCOM\u2019s domain.\u00a0 Take the seizure at the end of September by a few hundred Taliban fighters of the northern provincial Afghan capital of Kunduz, the first city the Taliban has controlled, however briefly, since it was ejected from that same town in 2002<\/a>.\u00a0 In the process, the Taliban fighters reportedly scattered up to 7,000 members<\/a> of the Afghan security forces that the U.S. has been training<\/a>, funding, and arming for years.<\/p>\n For anyone following news reports<\/a> closely, the Taliban had for months been tightening its control over rural areas around Kunduz and testing the city\u2019s defenses.\u00a0 Nonetheless, this May, based assumedly on the best intelligence analyses available from CENTCOM, the top U.S. commander in the country, Army General John Campbell, offered this predictive comment<\/a>: \u201cIf you take a look very closely at some of the things in Kunduz and up in [neighboring] Badakhshan [Province], [the Taliban] will attack some very small checkpoints… They will go out and hit a little bit and then they kind of go to ground… so they\u2019re not gaining territory for the most part.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n As late as August 13th, at a press briefing<\/a>, an ABC News reporter asked Brigadier General Wilson Shoffner, the U.S. deputy chief of staff for communications in Afghanistan: \u201cThere has been a significant increase in Taliban activity in northern Afghanistan, particularly around Kunduz.\u00a0 What is behind that?\u00a0 Are the Afghan troops in that part of Afghanistan at risk of falling to the Taliban?\u201d<\/p>\n Shoffner responded, in part, this way: \u201cSo, again, I think there’s been a lot of generalization when it comes to reports on the north.\u00a0 Kunduz is — is not now, and has not been in danger of being overrun by the Taliban, and so — with that, it’s kind of a general perspective in the north, that’s sort of how we see it.\u201d<\/p>\n That General Cambell at least remained of a similar mindset even as Kunduz fell is obvious enough since, as New York Times<\/em> reporter Matthew Rosenberg reported<\/a>, he was out of the country at the time. As Goldstein put it:<\/p>\n \u201cMostly, though, American and Afghan officials appeared to be genuinely surprised at the speedy fall of Kunduz, which took place when Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander of coalition forces, was in Germany for a defense conference… Though the Taliban have been making gains in the hinterlands around Kunduz for months, American military planners have for years insisted that Afghan forces were capable of holding onto the country\u2019s major cities.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201c\u2018This wasn\u2019t supposed to happen,\u2019 said a senior American military officer who served in Afghanistan, speaking on the condition of anonymity. \u2018The Afghans are fighting, so it\u2019s not like we\u2019re looking at them giving up or collapsing right now. They\u2019re just not fighting very well.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s generally agreed that the American high command was \u201ccaught off guard<\/a>\u201d by the capture of Kunduz and particularly shocked by the Afghan military\u2019s inability to fight effectively.\u00a0 And who would have predicted such a thing of an American-trained army in the region, given that the American-backed, -trained, and -equipped Iraqi Army on the other side of the Greater Middle East had a similar experience in June 2014 in Mosul<\/a> and other cities of northern Iraq when relatively small numbers of Islamic State militants routed<\/a> its troops?<\/p>\n At that time, U.S. military leaders and top administration officials right up<\/a> to President Obama were, as the Wall Street Journal<\/em> reported<\/a>, \u201ccaught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces\u201d and the successes of the Islamic State in northern Iraq.\u00a0 Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt of the Times<\/em> wrote<\/a> in retrospect, \u201cIntelligence agencies were caught off guard by the speed of the extremists\u2019… advance across northern Iraq.\u201d And don\u2019t forget that, despite that CENTCOM intelligence machine, something similar happened in May 2015 when, as Washington Post<\/em> columnist David Ignatius put it, U.S. officials and American intelligence were \u201cblindsided again<\/a>\u201d by a very similar collapse of Iraqi forces in the city of Ramadi<\/a> in al-Anbar Province.<\/p>\n Or let\u2019s take another example where those 1,500 analysts must have been hard at work: the failed $500 million<\/a> Pentagon program to train \u201cmoderate\u201d Syrians into a force that could fight the Islamic State.\u00a0 In the Pentagon version of the elephant that gave birth to a mouse, that vast effort of vetting, training, and arming finally produced Division 30, a single 54-man unit<\/a> of armed moderates, who were inserted into Syria near the forces of the al-Qaeda-aligned al-Nusra Front.\u00a0 That group promptly kidnapped<\/a> two of its leaders and then attacked the unit.\u00a0 The result was a disaster as the U.S.-trained fighters fled or were killed.\u00a0 Soon thereafter, the American general overseeing the war against the Islamic State testified<\/a> before Congress that only \u201cfour or five\u201d armed combatants from the U.S. force remained in the field.<\/p>\n Here again is how the New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a> the response to this incident:<\/p>\n \u201cIn Washington, several current and former senior administration officials acknowledged that the attack and the abductions by the Nusra Front took American officials by surprise and amounted to a significant intelligence failure.\u00a0 While American military trainers had gone to great lengths to protect the initial group of trainees from attacks by Islamic State or Syrian Army forces, they did not anticipate an assault from the Nusra Front. In fact, officials said on Friday, they expected the Nusra Front to welcome Division 30 as an ally in its fight against the Islamic State.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201c\u2018This wasn\u2019t supposed to happen like this,\u2019 said one former senior American official, who was working closely on Syria issues until recently, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Now, if accurate, this is wild stuff.\u00a0 After all, how anyone, commander or intelligence analyst, could imagine that the al-Nusra Front, classified as an enemy force in Washington and some of whose militants had been targeted<\/a> by U.S. air power, would have welcomed U.S.-backed troops with open arms is the mystery of all mysteries.\u00a0 One small footnote to this: McClatchy News later reported<\/a> that the al-Nusra Front had been poised to attack the unit because it had tipped off in advance by Turkish intelligence, something CENTCOM\u2019s intelligence operatives evidently knew nothing about.<\/p>\n In the wake of that little disaster and again, assumedly, with CENTCOM\u2019s full stock of intelligence and analysis on hand, the military inserted the next unit of 74 trained moderates into Syria and was shocked (shocked!) when its members, chastened perhaps by the fate of Division 30, promptly handed over<\/a> at least a quarter of their U.S.-supplied equipment, including trucks, ammunition, and rifles, to the al-Nusra Front in return for \u201csafe passage.\u201d Al-Nusra militants soon were posting photos of the weapons online and tweeting proudly about them.\u00a0 CENTCOM officials initially denied that any of this had happened (and were clearly in the dark about it) before reversing course and reluctantly admitting that it was so. (\u201c\u2018If accurate, the report of NSF [New Syrian Forces] members providing equipment to al-Nusra Front is very concerning and a violation of Syria train-and-equip program guidelines,\u2019 U.S. Central Command spokesman Colonel Patrick Ryder said.\u201d)<\/p>\n To turn to even more recent events in CENTCOM\u2019s bailiwick, American officials were reportedly similarly stunned as September ended when Russia reached a surprise agreement with U.S. ally Iraq on an anti-ISIS intelligence-sharing arrangement that would also include Syria and Iran.\u00a0 Washington was once again \u201ccaught off guard<\/a>\u201d and, in the words of<\/a> Michael Gordon of the Times<\/em>, \u201cleft… scrambling,\u201d even though its officials had known \u201cthat a group of Russian military officers were in Baghdad.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, the Russian build-up of weaponry, planes, and personnel in Syria initially “surprised” and — yes — caught the Obama administration \u201coff guard<\/a>.\u201d Again, despite those 1,500 CENTCOM analysts and the rest of the vast U.S. intelligence community, American officials, according to every news report available, were “caught flat-footed<\/a>” and, of course, “by surprise<\/a>\u201d (again, right up to the president<\/a>) when the Russians began<\/a> their full-scale bombing campaign in Syria against various al-Qaeda-allied outfits and CIA-backed opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.\u00a0 They were even caught off guard and taken aback by the way the Russians delivered the news that their bombing campaign was about to start: a three-star Russian general arrived<\/a> at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to offer an hour\u2019s notice. \u00a0(Congressional lawmakers are now considering<\/a> \u201cthe extent to which the spy community overlooked or misjudged critical warning signs\u201d about the Russian intervention in Syria.)<\/p>\n The Fog Machine of American Intelligence<\/strong><\/p>\n You get the point.\u00a0 Whatever the efforts of that expansive corps of intelligence analysts (and the vast intelligence edifice behind it), when anything happens in the Greater Middle East, you can essentially assume that the official American reaction, military and political, will be \u201csurprise\u201d and that policymakers will be left \u201cscrambling\u201d in a quagmire of ignorance to rescue American policy from the unexpected.\u00a0 In other words, somehow, with what passes for the best, or at least most extensive and expensive intelligence operation on the planet, with all those satellites and drones and surveillance sweeps and sources, with crowds of analysts, hordes of private contractors, and tens of billions of dollars, with, in short, \u201cintelligence\u201d galore, American officials in the area of their wars are evidently going to continue to find themselves eternally caught \u201coff guard.\u201d<\/p>\n The phrase \u201cthe fog of war\u201d stands in for the inability of commanders to truly grasp what\u2019s happening in the chaos that is any battlefield.\u00a0 Perhaps it\u2019s time to introduce a companion phrase: the fog of intelligence.\u00a0 It hardly matters whether those 1,500 CENTCOM analysts (and all those at other commands or at the 17 major intelligence outfits) produce superlative \u201cintelligence\u201d that then descends into the fog of leadership, or whether any bureaucratic conglomeration of \u201canalysts,\u201d drowning in secret information and the protocols that go with it, is going to add up to a giant fog machine.<\/p>\n It\u2019s difficult enough, of course, to peer into the future, to imagine what\u2019s coming, especially in distant, alien lands.\u00a0 Cobble that basic problem together with an overwhelming data stream and groupthink, then fit it all inside the constrained mindsets of Washington and the Pentagon, and you have a formula for producing the fog of intelligence and so for seldom being \u201con guard\u201d when it comes to much of anything.<\/p>\n My own suspicion: you could get rid of most of the 17 agencies and outfits in the U.S. Intelligence Community and dump just about all the secret and classified information that is the heart and soul of the national security state.\u00a0 Then you could let a small group of independently minded analysts and critics loose on open-source material, and you would be far more likely to get intelligent, actionable, inventive analyses of our global situation, our wars, and our beleaguered path into the future.<\/p>\n The evidence, after all, is largely in.\u00a0 In these years, for what now must be approaching three-quarters of a trillion dollars, the national security state and the military seem to have created an un-intelligence system. \u00a0Welcome to the fog of everything.<\/p>\n ______________________________-<\/p>\n Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the <\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a> and the author of <\/em>The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, <\/em>The End of Victory Culture<\/a>. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs <\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/a>. His latest book is <\/em>Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World<\/a>.<\/p>\n