By Geoff Fein
While the entire intelligence community changed as a result of the 9/11 attacks, the principle areas where Naval Intelligence expanded were capabilities in the area of human intelligence (HUMINT) as well as support to Navy special warfare and expeditionary warfare, a Navy official said.
“We have, and are executing over the next five budget years, an increase…a realignment…of 567 billets into Navy special warfare and expeditionary warfare,” Rear Adm. Tony Cothron, director of Naval Intelligence, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
That represents a dramatic increase in support to SEAL forces, he added, “because the target today is people.”
“More importantly, today in the war on terror, it is the ability to pinpoint individuals,” Cothron said. “The real change in the 21st century is this demand for precision intelligence…discreet intelligence.”
Just about every weapon the Navy has is a precision weapon system, he added. From the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile to air-dropped bombs, they are going after discreet targets. The effort, Cothron noted, to determine what that target is takes a tremendous amount of intelligence effort.
“And that’s not provided solely by our intelligence forces in the Navy. That’s usually a result of a collaboration and the use of intelligence capabilities around the globe, the entire intelligence capability of the nation,” he said.
Not only is it very common, but in fact it is the practice everyday for the Navy in the Arabian Gulf and in the Western Pacific to be in contact with elements of the National Security Agency (NSA), getting direct support from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), getting reports from the CIA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and from the intelligence professionals aboard ships, Cothron explained.
“Those staffs are literally collaborating over chat, e-mail, phone calls, video teleconferencing, back with the rest of the intelligence community,” Cothron said. “So what we have today in the 21st century, with our flat world of technology, is a highly collaborative intelligence community that our commanders at sea and ashore really depend upon.”
One area that has seen an uptick in focus is maritime domain awareness (MDA).
Cothron said MDA is fundamental to what naval intelligence does.
“What we’ve always done is to understand the threat that’s at sea. The president has a national strategy for maritime security. That strategy implemented several plans. One of them is a plan for MDA, and a plan for global maritime intelligence integration,” he said.
The Office of Naval Intelligence, as well as the United States Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center at Suitland, Md., are the core elements of global maritime intelligence integration. On a day-to-day basis they are providing intelligence support for MDA, working with the fleet, policy makers, the State Department, Department of Defense (DoD), and with allies, Cothron said.
“We are constantly looking at not only for potential threats, but supporting proliferation security initiatives and other national initiatives that are going on,” he said. “And that’s an ongoing effort that we are doing every day.”
Navy Secretary Donald Winter has been designated the executive agent for MDA, Cothron noted. “And Secretary Winter has been a real champion of improving and enhancing the Navy’s intelligence capabilities and the DoN’s (Department of the Navy) intelligence capabilities to support MDA and really everything we have.”
Winter has been very successful in steering additional resources toward intelligence, Cothron added.
“We have a spiral 1 initiative going on that’s building additional capability and capacity that we focused on here, on the intelligence side, to enable greater speed and capacity for individual analysts,” he said. “Our job in this arena is not tracking every ship that floats or every piece of iron in the water; it’s finding the ships that counts…the targets that count…and figuring out who can take the right kind of action.”
It’s not about boarding ships, Cothron added.
“It may be the Gendarme in some country who boards a ship and arrests somebody who is proliferating some material and the U.S. Navy doesn’t have to divert for that,” Cothron said. “If we have that awareness through our partnerships around the globe, we can enable the right kind of action and in fact help shape positive relationships between countries.”
But sharing intelligence information with foreign nations is complex, he added.
“You have to know who you are talking to, what you are talking about. You have to be thoughtful, so there is a lot of training involved, a lot of rules involved,” Cothron said. “It’s just a complex environment, but that’s the world we live in today.”
It’s not a bipolar, two-dimensional, socialist versus democratic world, but a more complex world with lots of issues, lots of things going on, he added.
“Thank goodness the [folks] who do this are incredibly more talented today. We are getting the nation’s best into the [intelligence] community. There is a demand signal that’s just amazing,” Cothron said. “For every single officer candidates’ slot, we have sometimes up to 100 applications. It is one of the most highly sought after fields that there is. The resumes I see and the kids coming in are eye-watering. Our retention rate is 92 percent for intelligence officers, and in the 90s for intelligence warfare officers too, for a first tour officer.”
Today’s Navy intelligence force is now 26,200 personnel and includes full-time dedicated intelligence professionals, all-source general intelligence officers and enlisted cryptologic technicians, information warfare professionals (formerly cryptologic officers) and those unrestricted line officers, aviators, surface ship drivers, and submariners who are dedicated on a day-to-day basis to collecting intelligence, Cothron explained.
Just about every Navy platform operating out there today is in essence an intelligence collector, he added.
“We have dedicated platforms like EP-3 that I do count in those 26,000. That number represents what is funded in either the military intelligence program budget or the national budget,” Cothron said.