Post by Moses on Apr 9, 2006 3:57:05 GMT -5
Stephen Cambone
Department of Defense
Intel chief learns from ‘failure of imagination’ on Sept. 11
March 31, 2006
Stephen Cambone is undersecretary of Defense for intelligence.
Photo by Alan Lessig / Times News Service
Stephen Cambone, as undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, is the No. 3 man at the Pentagon and widely regarded as Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s right-hand man. Confirmed for the newly created position in 2003 after years of working with Rumsfeld, he faces critics who question his role in the nation’s efforts to reform intelligence and his thinking on how to fight the war on terror.
Cambone and Rumsfeld met in 1998, when a Republican-controlled Congress asked a panel of five Republicans and four Democrats to address the growing threat of nuclear proliferation from rogue states such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The panel was chaired by Rumsfeld, who had been President Ford’s Defense secretary.
“They were looking for a staff director,” recalled Cambone. “I had followed the missile defense business for a long time” — as director for strategic defense policy at the Pentagon under the elder President Bush and, specifically, under Stephen Hadley, now national security adviser.
As chief of staff, Cambone helped draft a 300-page report, unanimously endorsed by the commission, that stated, “The threat to the U.S. posed by these emerging capabilities is broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the intelligence community. . . . The U.S. might well have little or no warning before operational deployment.”
“Cambone passed the Rumsfeld test,” writes Rowan Scarborough in “Rumsfeld’s War: The Untold Story of America’s Anti-Terrorist Commander.” “He was smart and willing to work long hours on tough problems.”
With the election of the current President Bush in 2000 and Rumsfeld’s return to the Pentagon, Cambone was tapped as a special assistant to the secretary and deputy secretary. In July 2001, he was confirmed as principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for policy.
To assist in the military’s technological leap forward, certain cutbacks would have to be made. It didn’t take long, as Scarborough points out, before “Cambone was demanding force structure cuts, with briefing charts that showed how the Army could cut two divisions, about 40,000 soldiers. The Navy could afford two less carrier battle groups. Maybe the Air Force didn’t need the new F-22 stealth fighter.”
Despite resistance from within, Cambone helped end billion-dollar programs such as the Comanche helicopter and the Crusader artillery vehicle. “As time goes on,” he said in a January interview, “those things that might have made sense 10 or 12 or 15 years ago when they were first envisioned may not make as much sense when you look out 10 or 15 or 20 years. . . . I think if you ask the chief of staff of the Army, he finds that the dollars freed up by the Comanche decision have gone a long way toward fixing other more pressing problems he has, where ‘pressing’ is now defined as the changed environment in which he’s operating. It’s not a battlefield that’s full of surface-to-air missile batteries and radars where he has to have a stealthy helicopter to operate.”
The cause of this changed environment was Sept. 11, 2001, a day Cambone spent in the Pentagon — much of it with Rumsfeld, even dropping him off at home later that night.
Looking back, Cambone said he believes “9/11 was about anticipation. It was a failure as much of imagination as of analysis. There had been enough examples of . . . terrorists hijacking airplanes, trying to hijack airplanes, attacking large buildings and so forth. There probably might have been more attention to it than there was. . . . The real issue was insufficient imagination to envision someone doing something like that.
“But taking terrorism seriously and then undertaking the necessary measures to prevent that terrorist or organization from carrying through on those plans as best one can was also missing,” he said. “So the failures, such as they were, extended over the preceding decade in the way in which the country — and not a particular administration — but the country approached terrorism. And, consequently, the terrorists had sufficient freedom to operate that they could put that plan together and execute it.”
Not another intel agency
In his new role as the country’s first undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, Cambone is quick to point out that his office is not itself an intelligence agency.
“It doesn’t do collection. It doesn’t do analysis. It doesn’t do production. It doesn’t do dissemination,” he said. “It will evaluate how well those things are being done. It will help the secretary to adjust where he might recommend that DoD resources be put with respect to intelligence capabilities. It will help him to propose where the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] might choose to distribute the national intelligence program funds. It will help him think through with his combatant commanders what the best organizational structures are and how best to move the information.”
Others, however, hope the undersecretary will do more. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a January interview: “We’re now 13 months after the signing of the intelligence reform bill and we don’t have the intelligence community that we have to have. I didn’t expect it to get done in 13 months, but the key questions that will determine [whether] that legislation was successful or not are still unanswered. . . . Do we have an integrated intelligence community being directed by the DNI? That question has not been answered yet. The integration of the military components in the intelligence community has been extremely difficult, extremely complicated, and it’s not complete.”
Having said that, the congressman takes Cambone “at face value that he is doing everything he can to make that process successful.”
Abu Ghraib mistreatment
A year into his new job, Cambone found himself sitting before the Senate Armed Services Committee, testifying on the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., asked: “Were you encouraging a policy that had military police officers enabling interrogations, which created the situation?” Cambone cut him off with a definitive “no.” But there was no denying wrongdoings occurred, and the undersecretary spoke openly about it.
“The Iraqi detainees are human beings, they were in U.S. custody, we had an obligation to treat them right, and we didn’t do that,” he said. “That was wrong. . . . To those Iraqis mistreated by the U.S. armed forces, I offer my deepest apology. It was un-American and it was inconsistent with the values of our nation.”
The war on terror
But Abu Ghraib was just a battle and not the war for Cambone. A seemingly larger conflict may be over the undersecretary’s penchant for forward thinking. As the war on terrorism is being fought on the ground, some believe Cambone’s efforts and resources are being frittered away on high-tech gadgets not to be seen this decade.
“This war is being fought with assets, intelligence or otherwise, that for the most part were purchased 10 or 15 years ago — whether it’s tanks or airplanes,” Cambone said. “And if they weren’t purchased that long ago, they were certainly designed 20 years ago or more. Now given those kind of cycle times, unless you start to think about what you’ll need 20 years from now and begin putting in place those changes, we will, 20 years from now, be looking back at systems which are 40, 50 or 60 years since their design.
“In all cases that’s not bad,” he said. “But for things like the technical means for having the situational awareness that you want to have, the revisit times that you would like to have, the ability to cue, when able, to track and to hand off military targets to military forces on the battlefield, you have got to start making those investments today.”
VICTORINO MATUS
Department of Defense
Intel chief learns from ‘failure of imagination’ on Sept. 11
March 31, 2006
Stephen Cambone is undersecretary of Defense for intelligence.
Photo by Alan Lessig / Times News Service
Stephen Cambone, as undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, is the No. 3 man at the Pentagon and widely regarded as Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s right-hand man. Confirmed for the newly created position in 2003 after years of working with Rumsfeld, he faces critics who question his role in the nation’s efforts to reform intelligence and his thinking on how to fight the war on terror.
Cambone and Rumsfeld met in 1998, when a Republican-controlled Congress asked a panel of five Republicans and four Democrats to address the growing threat of nuclear proliferation from rogue states such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The panel was chaired by Rumsfeld, who had been President Ford’s Defense secretary.
“They were looking for a staff director,” recalled Cambone. “I had followed the missile defense business for a long time” — as director for strategic defense policy at the Pentagon under the elder President Bush and, specifically, under Stephen Hadley, now national security adviser.
As chief of staff, Cambone helped draft a 300-page report, unanimously endorsed by the commission, that stated, “The threat to the U.S. posed by these emerging capabilities is broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the intelligence community. . . . The U.S. might well have little or no warning before operational deployment.”
“Cambone passed the Rumsfeld test,” writes Rowan Scarborough in “Rumsfeld’s War: The Untold Story of America’s Anti-Terrorist Commander.” “He was smart and willing to work long hours on tough problems.”
With the election of the current President Bush in 2000 and Rumsfeld’s return to the Pentagon, Cambone was tapped as a special assistant to the secretary and deputy secretary. In July 2001, he was confirmed as principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for policy.
To assist in the military’s technological leap forward, certain cutbacks would have to be made. It didn’t take long, as Scarborough points out, before “Cambone was demanding force structure cuts, with briefing charts that showed how the Army could cut two divisions, about 40,000 soldiers. The Navy could afford two less carrier battle groups. Maybe the Air Force didn’t need the new F-22 stealth fighter.”
Despite resistance from within, Cambone helped end billion-dollar programs such as the Comanche helicopter and the Crusader artillery vehicle. “As time goes on,” he said in a January interview, “those things that might have made sense 10 or 12 or 15 years ago when they were first envisioned may not make as much sense when you look out 10 or 15 or 20 years. . . . I think if you ask the chief of staff of the Army, he finds that the dollars freed up by the Comanche decision have gone a long way toward fixing other more pressing problems he has, where ‘pressing’ is now defined as the changed environment in which he’s operating. It’s not a battlefield that’s full of surface-to-air missile batteries and radars where he has to have a stealthy helicopter to operate.”
The cause of this changed environment was Sept. 11, 2001, a day Cambone spent in the Pentagon — much of it with Rumsfeld, even dropping him off at home later that night.
Looking back, Cambone said he believes “9/11 was about anticipation. It was a failure as much of imagination as of analysis. There had been enough examples of . . . terrorists hijacking airplanes, trying to hijack airplanes, attacking large buildings and so forth. There probably might have been more attention to it than there was. . . . The real issue was insufficient imagination to envision someone doing something like that.
“But taking terrorism seriously and then undertaking the necessary measures to prevent that terrorist or organization from carrying through on those plans as best one can was also missing,” he said. “So the failures, such as they were, extended over the preceding decade in the way in which the country — and not a particular administration — but the country approached terrorism. And, consequently, the terrorists had sufficient freedom to operate that they could put that plan together and execute it.”
Not another intel agency
In his new role as the country’s first undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, Cambone is quick to point out that his office is not itself an intelligence agency.
“It doesn’t do collection. It doesn’t do analysis. It doesn’t do production. It doesn’t do dissemination,” he said. “It will evaluate how well those things are being done. It will help the secretary to adjust where he might recommend that DoD resources be put with respect to intelligence capabilities. It will help him to propose where the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] might choose to distribute the national intelligence program funds. It will help him think through with his combatant commanders what the best organizational structures are and how best to move the information.”
Others, however, hope the undersecretary will do more. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a January interview: “We’re now 13 months after the signing of the intelligence reform bill and we don’t have the intelligence community that we have to have. I didn’t expect it to get done in 13 months, but the key questions that will determine [whether] that legislation was successful or not are still unanswered. . . . Do we have an integrated intelligence community being directed by the DNI? That question has not been answered yet. The integration of the military components in the intelligence community has been extremely difficult, extremely complicated, and it’s not complete.”
Having said that, the congressman takes Cambone “at face value that he is doing everything he can to make that process successful.”
Abu Ghraib mistreatment
A year into his new job, Cambone found himself sitting before the Senate Armed Services Committee, testifying on the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., asked: “Were you encouraging a policy that had military police officers enabling interrogations, which created the situation?” Cambone cut him off with a definitive “no.” But there was no denying wrongdoings occurred, and the undersecretary spoke openly about it.
“The Iraqi detainees are human beings, they were in U.S. custody, we had an obligation to treat them right, and we didn’t do that,” he said. “That was wrong. . . . To those Iraqis mistreated by the U.S. armed forces, I offer my deepest apology. It was un-American and it was inconsistent with the values of our nation.”
The war on terror
But Abu Ghraib was just a battle and not the war for Cambone. A seemingly larger conflict may be over the undersecretary’s penchant for forward thinking. As the war on terrorism is being fought on the ground, some believe Cambone’s efforts and resources are being frittered away on high-tech gadgets not to be seen this decade.
“This war is being fought with assets, intelligence or otherwise, that for the most part were purchased 10 or 15 years ago — whether it’s tanks or airplanes,” Cambone said. “And if they weren’t purchased that long ago, they were certainly designed 20 years ago or more. Now given those kind of cycle times, unless you start to think about what you’ll need 20 years from now and begin putting in place those changes, we will, 20 years from now, be looking back at systems which are 40, 50 or 60 years since their design.
“In all cases that’s not bad,” he said. “But for things like the technical means for having the situational awareness that you want to have, the revisit times that you would like to have, the ability to cue, when able, to track and to hand off military targets to military forces on the battlefield, you have got to start making those investments today.”
VICTORINO MATUS