AL Productions

I received my recent issue of Vanity Fair (VF), and accompanying it was an additional, smaller magazine filled exclusively with Ralph Lauren (RL) advertising. Now I confess to a certain weakness for all things RL and wish my closet was filled with more of his... products. However, as an inveterate observer of all things RL, I noticed that Andrew Lauren, RL's son, is prominently featured, something I hadn't noticed before. So this got me to thinking, "What films has he produced?" I mean, I wrote a book but does that make me an author? And perhaps more importantly, "Are his films any good?" So I fired up IMDB and saw that Andrew's company, AL Productions, has created three films: (1) G (2002); (2) The Squid and the Whale (S&W, 2005); and (3) The Spectacular Now (TSN, 2013). But then I wondered, are these movies any good? As it turns out, S&W received a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and TSN also received a 93%, which is in my humble opinion is more than a little impressive. I look forward to watching TSN at some point and will write a review when I do. I also need to finagle a trip to New York to review the Polo Bar. I know, the world of RL is a weakness.

CIA Reorganization

On March 7th, the NYTimes features an article on Director John Brennan's reorganization of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia. There are those who argue both sides of the reorganization, with those from the Agency who remember and like it the way it was arguing that the changes are intended to create a "legacy" for those currently in charge. However, there are a couple of cross currents that inform and argue for the change. First, the threats currently faced by the Agency are much different than those that agued for its creation in 1947 at the outset of the Cold War. America's primary competition at that time was the Soviet Union -- what is present-day Russia -- which was primarily a regular or symmetric conflict in which one superpower was in a state of conflict with a second. The primary threats now are irregular or asymmetric in which a "regular" state finds itself in conflict with a less organized -- that is, "irregular" -- organizations, movements, or populations with an emphasis on radial Islam. It is instructive to review Steve Coll's description of the 1979 US embassy burning in Islamabad, Pakistan in Ghost Wars. To the point, US leadership was doubtless so focused on the familiar née comfortable foreign policy analytic posture of the Cold War that this attack, which occurred mere days after the Iran embassy takeover, caught them by surprise. Martin van Crevald's Transformation of War (1990) helps to provide insight into this dynamic, but institutionally the US Federal Government is still searching for the best ways to understand and address these more demographic and less state-based challenges.

Second, since 9/11 when radical Islam made its presence known on American shores, the Agency has been focused on targeting individuals. This targeting process was popularized by the character Maya in the movie Zero Dark Thirty, and is examined in much more detail by the HBO documentary Manhunt. However the premise is pretty simple: find people such as Al Qaeda's key leaders and take them off the battlefield. However, taking insurgents off the battlefield can cause unintended consequences as pointed out by Stanley McCrystal's Insurgent Math, which asks how you can have 100 insurgents, take away 10, and end up with 110? The answer is that the civilian casualties associated with such insurgent removal operations can radicalize populations. Once you realize this, then the question becomes, how can you understand, account for, and minimize these unintended consequences.

Third, when thinking about unintended consequences, the natural way to proceed is thinking about ways to understand complex social systems. That is, human societies are made up of lots of interconnected components and features that operate on both short and long timescales. With regard to Insurgent Math, removing insurgents from the battlefield may make sense from a short-term perspective, but if it creates problems in the long term, then have you done more harm than good. Also, the multiple interconnected system features can be considered from the perspective of counterinsurgency theory, which considers governance, development, and local populations in addition to the usual security concerns of the military. The Defense Intelligence Agency's Michael Flynn and his co-authors wrote in Fixing Intel that analysis had been too concentrated on details and that insufficient detail had been given to the intelligence supporting military operations. Flynn specifically said that intelligence had become too functional -- that is, focused on narrow technical areas. He recommended that, in contrast, intelligence analysis should become more regional -- that is, focused on all the relevant factors with a specific area of interest or operations.

The Agency has historically been organized around a significant cleavage between the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) that performs analysis and Directorate of Operations (DO) that does the things we all see on movies. During the targeting operations since 9/11, these two activities have grown closer together. It seems to me that if the proposed reorganization is correctly executed (and that's a big if), then the changes proposed for the Agency could help improve both analysis as well as operations.