The Future of Intelligence

[Music] good evening everyone and thank you for attending the latest in a series of public events in 2021 by the michael v hayden center for intelligence policy and international security and you're in for a treat tonight i am mark rozelle and i serve as the dean of the char school of policy and government here at george mason university and we are very proud to host the hayden center the academic calendar year may have just finished up but the hayden center just keeps going tonight we have over 800 persons signed up from all over the united states and internationally participants specifically are from 41 states and the district of columbia as well as 28 countries six continents and 40 different colleges and universities the hayden center is part of a larger security studies emphasis in the char school we have as well the center for security policy studies directed by professor ellen lapson who also directs our international security studies master's degree program and that has been a top 10 program nationally for four years running in the u.s news and world report rankings we are fortunate to have many leading scholars and practitioner teachers in our international security studies master's degree program and related to that by the way is our unique program in biodefense studies and given its emphasis on infectious diseases and public policies to combat those you can imagine interest in that program has grown substantially additionally we have a very generous gift from the diana davis spencer foundation supporting scholarships for char school students in security studies fields such as the two degree programs that i just mentioned and the hayden center of course honors its founder general michael v hayden who has been on our faculty for the past 11 years i would like to now welcome the executive director of the hayden center larry pfeiffer the past director of the white house situation room and he will introduce our program larry thank you very much mark and uh to those folks out there who are from the char school from george mason university and other universities congratulations on getting through another semester it's been a crazy year we are hoping we're putting it behind us and when we come back in the fall we're actually going to be able to spend some time together in person uh for those of you we have a lot of people attending today so i think we've got some new folks for those of you who aren't familiar with the hayden center uh we were founded about three and a half almost four years ago now uh by general hayden and uh our goal is to kind of take the mystery out of intelligence um better explain the role it plays in supporting policymakers and our national and homeland security communities we do that largely through events like this uh before the pandemic most of our events all of our events were in person we hope to get back to those in-person events late summer or into the early fall so stay tuned for that uh all of our presentations whether they were in person or virtual are available on our youtube channel so if you're interested in seeing other events like this one go to the channel and you'll see plenty plenty there to watch we're very active on social media twitter facebook linkedin welcome you guys connecting there and following us a little administrative remark uh tonight uh as we we're gonna proceed with a moderated conversation for for a period of time but at a certain point uh we are gonna take audience questions so if you have questions uh please use the q a box in your zoom tool to type your question and send it to us don't use the chat box to send questions because we're not going to monitor that one as closely if you wish to be identified please put your name put your organization we would especially ask our journalist friends out there to please identify yourself if you are a journalist and we can mention uh what magazine or news service you belong to thank you um the future of intelligence a heck of a topic to be discussing right now uh myself many of my colleagues really look at uh the intelligence business at a as at a serious point of inflection um in in many many different ways um we are looking at a um a vast and wider array of targets you know we've been dedicated to counter terrorism as our primary emphasis for most of the last couple of decades uh but now we're looking at uh russia china iran north korea um you know how much emphasis should we be putting on those how much emphasis should would that take away from counter terrorism we have transnational issues that are growing in importance cyber uh public health pandemics um climate change uh how much emphasis and investment needs to be put into those areas we have a great debate going on uh in our community about open source information versus secrets should we should we be investing our energy in open source given the large volumes of material that's available or should we be leaving that to the private sector and perhaps investing and focusing our energy on those true secrets that cannot be obtained in any kind of open manner uh then there's technology uh there's a lot of technology it's moving very fast it's moving dramatically what are the implications of uh harnessing that technology with regards to analysis with regards to collection with regards to clandestine and covert operations how does it change how the intelligence community and customers of the intelligence community interact and get information um that all then drives questions of talent you know what are the competencies we're really looking for now how has that changed what happens to the folks who've been working 20 to 30 years and then now they've got to do something different or use technologies they're not familiar with and then and more and more over time that the competition from the private sector for that same talent pool has grown grown fierce uh so tonight gonna gonna bring to you a panel here that brings literally hundreds of years of intelligence experience and leadership to the table uh all of them have led their agencies through uh transformative journeys and they can maybe go into more detail on that if they care um in terms of our panel members we have michael morell who's going to serve as a moderator michael's a senior fellow here at the hayden center but more importantly he served as deputy director of cia from 2010 to 2013 twice was our acting director he spent a good period of time as director of intelligence uh all culminating from many many years as uh as an analyst and senior analyst john brennan also of cia director of cia from 2013 to 2017. he was president obama's homeland security advisor from 09 to 13. he founded and became the director of what became the national counterterrorism center and important to us he was a hayden center guest in november of 2019 for a panel that made quite a bit of news at the time so you may want to go check that one out uh robert cardillo director of the national geospatial intelligence agency which from this point on i will just call nga from 2014 to 2019. uh just before that he served as the first deputy director of uh national intelligence for intelligence integration uh from 2010 to 2014 he had a fantastic career dia and nga he served as deputy director and director of analysis at dia from 06 to 10. served as senior leader in all of cia's directorates and uh is famous for having designed and driven the development of ink utel uh which is a private non-profit innovation incubator uh delivering tech solutions to the ic uh she is also has the distinction of being the last in-person hayden center guest back in february of 2020 before this pandemic hit us general hayden our last family member director of cia from 2006 to 2009 he was the first principal deputy director of national intelligence from 05 to o6 served as the deputy sorry served as the director of the national security agency from 1999 to 2005 at that time the longest serving director he led the air intelligence agency before that served as a deputy chief of staff in korea uh was the u.s european command j2 he was the founder of the hayden center almost four years ago and is a visiting professor here at char school now many of you realize remember general hayden had a pretty serious stroke a few years ago back in the late 2018 so he's made a heck of a comeback but he does have a condition that many stroke victims have called aphasia that affects his speech so there may be times tonight where he you know has to dig a little harder to find the word of the phrase so uh he asks your your indulgence there um the the key thing to remember is aphasia does not affect the intellect or the knowledge and uh all the time i've spent with general hayden the last few years i can attest to that being very very true um lastly and before we turn to the guests i did want to mention uh a outfit that has been very very helpful to general hayden the last few years is something called the stroke comeback center and today is a special day of fundraising at the stroke comeback center so if you're listening to us or when you're finished listening to us if you go to strokecomebackcenter.org they have a donate button click on that button you'll be donating to help an organization that's helped to get general hayden back to where he is today uh and importantly you're going to be helping all those other folks who are working hard to come back to their maximum potential so with that i do turn it over to general hayden for uh some brief hellos and uh and then michael will begin the program so thanks everybody okay michael that's going to be a real i'm looking forward to this michael thank you again larry thank you again this is going to be awesome so mike you have it great thank you general hayden um so this is really special for me um you know to to be with this amazing group um people i worked for people i worked with um everyone um i consider a friend um so i think this is going to be a terrific conversation and i'm really looking forward to it so i want to start with what i think most people would consider an easy question but may generate may generate i'm not so sure but may generate a little debate among our panel um and that is with regard to the mission of the intelligence community you know it has always been to collect information some of it clandestinely some of it not on to analyze that information and to paint uh unbiased by politics or unbiased by policy picture of the world that the policymakers in both the executive branch and congress and those who carry out that policy right in the military or law enforcement or what have you um to give them a picture of the world a picture of the situation they face a picture of the threat a picture of the opportunity um and occasionally when the president asked for it uh to take action on the president's behalf we call it covert action to take action on the president's behalf to change a situation on the ground somewhere right to further a president's policy objective that has long been the mission so my question to the panel is is that still the mission or do you think the mission needs to change um and i'm going to start i'm going to start with sue in terms of answering this question um well one i'm i'm with you michael i'm i'm sitting in a room with people that all of whom i worked for i may be the only one who could say that um and all whom i could uh consider friends so i'm delighted to be here and we'll have a great romp through the night um my definition of the mission of intelligence is to know the truth to see beyond the horizon and to allow leaders to act before events dictate so let's break that down a little bit what is the truth um to me the truth is what is rather than what you prefer it to be what is rather than that is what is presented to you so some ability to have that objective view without judgment of whether it's good not good right wrong but it just what is see be on the horizon you know when we first started this game or at least when i did the verizon was a physical horizon we tossed stuff up in the air so we could see what was going on in the soviet land mass i think that there's a digital horizon that we're trying to see beyond i think there's a temporal horizon that we're trying to at least have some contextual information so that we can if not no intent infer intent and then the ability to to give information to leaders so they can act before events dictate and what i mean by that is that is the greatest advantage that we provide is knowing a little bit more a little bit sooner so the leader has a running start on making a decision rather than having their hand forced by events i don't think there's anything about the that which i've described that is irrelevant today or tomorrow i do think the modality of how you achieve that is vastly different and i think we'll talk about that but from a straight mission perspective that's how i see it i think it's relevant but i think how you do it is really different today from how we did it in 1947 or 61 or 89 or 2001 and i think that's the fun to talk about now so i've heard you once or twice mentioned that you think the american people are a customer of the intelligence community and did i get that right and how do you think about that uh so they're the ones that give us our authority they're the one whose interests were ultimately serving so i've always thought the american people um we owe them our honor because they entrust us with special authorities now i see it even more clearly now that the threat surface has expanded beyond governments to private industry and to individuals with the digital environment with cyber crime and influence activities i think then we have to be even more directly sharing what we know because their ability to understand the challenges and threats we face with out the lens of policy politics i think is really important but i'll say michael i don't think that the tradecraft of talking to the american people is the same as the tradecraft of talking to governments and policymakers so i think we need to and they are a direct customer but i think we're still in our nascents in terms of how to do that we still when we talk directly to the american people we sound like bad unclassified right and we're going to just have to get better than that we we can't talk in our arcane language that we've honed over the years but do i think we need to give that information to the american people because in some cases they're the best to secure america i do robert um so first i just have to join sue and revel in this environment general hayden it's always a privilege to spend time with you and be in your presence and then john and michael just just wonderful um it is going to be fun and sue's already made it so um michael i have a quick answer to your question it gets the same place as sue and i say no our mission has not changed at all because i equate our mission with the outcome not not our outcome but the nation's outcome and so i believe our profession exists to advantage decision and and and we either do that we're either there at the time we present the material in a way that frames or creates insight or understanding or maybe just narrows confusion a little bit so they can make just a little better decision so again to me that's our mission hasn't changed uh i gotta stop following sue in this broadcast okay and everything else has changed right everything and we'll get to that everything else yeah no that's fine this is fun well um let me just say i am so honored to be part of this panel and especially anything that is associated with the hayden center uh i i jump at the opportunity to do so because mike hayden is just such a intelligence icon that i think we all learned so much from him over the years uh and i will associate myself with both sue and robert's comments um that digital domain which didn't exist really when i joined cia back in 1980 has i think fundamentally uh changed uh the the nature of intelligence work because of all of the challenges the threats the opportunities that exist in that environment because that is the place where most human activity takes place uh but then also when i think back when i started out in 1980 we were still in the cold war uh although i agree with robert that you know we're still into ensuring that the outcomes are going to advance u.s national security the types of things that we're dealing with these days whether it is pandemics or climate change other types of transnational and global issues i think it's much more at the forefront for intelligence professionals in terms of what they need to do to give that decision advantage which is i think what sue is referring to ensure that policymakers the ones that sort of hold our safety security and prosperity in their hands have as much insight as possible into the truth as we know it so they can chart the way ahead for for our country so how do you all think about the range of issues that larry outlined um how do you think about where the ic needs to put its focus put its resources and let me ask a very specific question with regard to that issue um should china become what the soviet union was to the intelligence community right should it infuse um almost everything that we do how do you think about you know china as the defining challenge and then how the ic approaches that um and how the resource allocation should work given the large number of other issues that are out there um so john let's start with you this time the united states i think is unique in the world in terms of its global responsibilities which means that the intelligence community then the united states has to be prepared to deal with all the issues that might arise on that global stage and so it's you know we've referred in the past to uh five-year-old soccer that you know when the soccer ball goes to one end of the field all those little legs carry to that one end of the field but in the intel's community you really cannot do that so i agree that china demands a very prominent and almost dominant sort of focus as far as resource allocation and the interests of the intelligence community at the same time though there are so many other issues and what we don't want to do is to deprive some of these other issues of the necessary resources the capabilities that exist unfortunately back in the 1990s after the collapse of the soviet union michael as you well know and others no there was an effort to downsize the intelligence community including our presence abroad and that presence abroad really takes quite a bit of time to develop and if you reduce that you're not going to have those the same opportunity as far as whether you're talking about human assets or technical capabilities or other types of things so this is where i think the real challenge comes to intelligence community leaders i know i felt it how do you allocate a finite amount of resources across the global stage that is both dynamic as well as has some enduring intelligence challenges that you always need to continue to focus on and that's where i think the challenge in the decades ahead is going to lie and john how did you how did you try to do that when you were the director well when you were my deputy i'd ask you for advice and then sue and robert and others well this is where i think there really needs to be a interaction between the intelligence community leadership and policy makers because obviously you know our first customer is the president united states and you want to make sure that that national security team the ones that actually are executing policies and developing them they're going to have the benefit of the intelligence input so what we wouldn't do in the intel community is just you know change the dial on our own whim we understood what some of these enduring intelligence challenges are but the same time we needed to be able to support the near-term demands of policy makers and so as we would fine-tune our collection capabilities and our analytic capabilities we would have to do it in concert with those folks that would sit around that white house situation room table and debate these issues particularly in the beginning of an administration and i know this first year by administration that's what they're doing they're trying to recalibrate or fine-tune those intelligence capabilities according to policy priorities robert um i i largely agree with john on on the china question and at the risk of being one of those five-year-old kids though i'll just say i think it's the clearest threat to our long-term position in the globe and while i completely agree that that we we have to cover the other angles of threats and and you know one of which sue already spoke about the the misuse and the and the in the perturbation of our digital fabric to undermine you know governance and confidence that i do think it's appropriate not akin to the soviet union i think that was a different time in a different model but that and i'm fine with john's phrase of dominant dominant focus i'll also remind though that sometimes you know people will say well they you know they'll use the term ic priorities i don't go no that's incorrect right the intelligence community has no priorities other than our customers and so from from the president on down we have to reflect that and so again i i think we need to be tuning right now i think we need to be prepared and i know we'll talk about the methods uh michael here tonight because it it it's a different contest with china um and it's played at so many multiple levels that quite frankly the ic was not called upon in the past to do that i think we have to learn new muscle movements here in order to provide that um you know material insight understanding so that our national security team can make the best decision to align ourselves as a nation across the board uh to combat this what i see is a as a as an existential threat so robert do you do you do you think that china is in the dominant position today um do you think it needs more resources you know across the community um and if so what would you cut assuming you couldn't have additional resources fair because i often asked my policymaker customers the same question when they would add three more number ones to our list please tell me what you would have us not do um you know michael i'm i'm two plus years out um i i don't think there's been a dramatic change so my my comments are mid 2019 and i do think i do think that broadly speaking that's correct dominant uh would be appropriate um uh allocation of resources but i'm worried less about amount and more about type um here's here's what i mean i look um you michael we're brought in as an economist and so we've been doing economic analysis for a long time as a community um i believe from my seat that we have undervalued that over time and that i think we're playing catch-up now to raise our game to work with partners in treasury to work with partners in the international community and to work with with private companies as well in a way that that raises insight trade monetary policy um uh international sanctions etc and that's where i i worry about and if if you ask me where um i would i would take risk uh these days um uh i look um this is going to be hard for me from a dod defense intelligence officer but i i have to say that i do worry that sometimes we put we put so much attention on 5 and 10 and 15-year weapons analysis for example that that that was necessary at a time and i think the soviet area was that time that may be misplaced in in an era of digital engineering in which the time frames for those changes are going to be much quicker and i just worry if if our long-term r d and i i feel bad already that i'm putting myself in the you know the camp that says that's not worthwhile it is but i may make a trade on that michael so that i could be better at the more innovative agile changes that i think are going to affect us sooner and bigger sue um trying to think of something that's additive to say um listen i these are such remarkable times and i'm now old enough that i can say they're different and they're different in the numbers of things that we have so we have china and global economic competitiveness and not only is china worthy of a preeminent position in our concern but they are also a different kind of threat in other words applying all our crate tradecraft of the last 70 years to china won't be enough because they're not the same they're not the monolith that we taught against so not only is china emergent and because of a digital economic world a different kind of threat the intelligence community is really going to have to get on its horses to be able to have the analytic foundation to really understand this threat different from an analog to the soviet union so we have that we've got the hardy perennials you know russia russia isn't going away north korea iran um counterterrorism and then we have this new set of national security concerns from pandemic to climate to domestic extremism to displaced persons and humanitarian crises those are surely national security threats and i think there's a really interesting question that the intelligence community is going to have to ask itself is whether it has unique capability that needs to be applied and what would that look like which is not just another agency looking at the same thing but it's doing something clever like let me look at the intersection of climate models and national security models to see what comes out so you have that whole set of new national security issues that the intelligence community is going to have to figure out whether it has enough discrete advantage to warrant resources against it and then the last thing since we're kind of transitioning to resource issues is the intelligence community does not have the technical foundation to deal with this data world whether it is in its infrastructure whether in its hiring whether it's in the speed of motion its ability to work with data um it doesn't necessarily have the same the collectors that it needs to go after data that are going to provide the advantage that we last had so i think the country lay down is about right but underneath that there's a huge transformation i think that's going to have to go on to be able to understand these things that sound like they're the same but are phenomenally different in character hayden i just want to ask if you agree with the rest of the panel that china should be the dominant focus of the community while still maintaining a capability across this broader range of issues yes indeed that is okay i was i was thinking about when i was at cia you know and i would go on monday morning and say you know i've got gotta go to china i i gotta go to china but it was it was really hard because a lot's going on so i did it on monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday saturday well i'll do it next week and next week and that's the problem about that i should have done more you know what i mean but we couldn't do it yeah no i felt the same way um i want to ask one of one of you um because i think i think all of you made a really important point about um how china is different than than than other challenges we face certainly different than the soviet union what do we what what questions do we need to provide answers to to policy makers about china for them to make the right choices um with regard to how we deal with that country who wants to go first i'll go first um and you and john you and and robert can fix it um i remember in 1983 i went over to the soviet union as part of a small team that um got in on the last fight before the kal shoot down and we were looking for bugs in the new soviet embassy which of course we found and the rest is history but what i took away from that trip i remember sitting there on winter nights in moscow working on this building thinking oh my god this is a third world country like i had been a soviet analyst in the october parades and everything and i remember looking at like we're making them too big so i think the first question that we really need to be able to answer is not just look at their absolute capability technologically but their wherewithal to put it into action to achieve advantage and interest that counters ours so i think we know this to be true but right now it's such an absolute almost a binary you know they're ahead of us in quantum we're they're catching up today ai i don't know that that's going to be enough i think we're going to have to put capability into use and give that assessment so that you can shape policy because a policy of not china is not going to work it would be devastating in so many ways to our own innovation engine so i think we're going to have to put capability into use and be good at assessing that for our policy makers to make good clear decisions yeah i would i would i really do think that policymakers really need to understand the spectrum of the chinese phenomenon in terms of the areas that we really need to be very concerned about because china does pose a threat and we consider it an adversary and what is it doing to undermine democracies around the globe and undermine u.s and security interests but i think there is a spectrum there are a lot of things that i think we can work with china on and we don't have to get into a confrontation with them and i think the intelligence community really can serve a very useful purpose in terms of helping to educate policymakers about that broad spectrum of engagements with with china unfortunately i think sometimes whether you talk about china or iran whatever else they're considered to be sort of monoliths and there's a lot going on inside of china in the region globally that i think the intelligence community has some of the world's best experts on a lot of these issues and so i think the more enlightened and more informed policy makers are about china and what does it mean to us interest going forward the good the bad and the ugly i think then policymakers will be able to i think make more informed judgments about how to engage and deal with china robert thoughts oh yeah so i'll see sue and john and raise them um because i did agree with those two approaches but i'm gonna frame it in the state of the union speech that our president just made in which he said we're we're in a battle of ideas and quite frankly uh democracy is now been tested like it's never been before and what is what is america other than that idea that we can create a social compact between the governed and the government in a way that respects privacy and individual liberty and yet provides general security um that's been tested as we know and and and we can talk more about that i think what we need to help expose quite frankly is is the chinese model and uh to john's point it isn't monolithic but it has quite different fundamental beliefs about that social compact and um i do think it's our job to do that illumination um um uh informing in this case i think it's both policy uh makers and the public frankly now we should talk about how we do that and where we do that and with whom we do that but i think because it is such a competition of ideas that part of our job is to to frame it in a way so that people can understand the choice uh that's at stake here and then one one last question about about areas of focus um i'd love to know what you all think about what the ic's role should be on climate change and on pandemics who wants to go first this time well i'll take a stab at it i i don't think that the ic should try to replicate or to try to outdo national science foundation you know as well as the you know cdc and other specialists in these areas but i think there are such tremendous implications of climate change and pandemics in terms of um economics in terms of political stability in terms of interstate conflict uh what is it going to mean when the the seas rise and uh coastal communities move have to move inland and put additional pressure on urban centers or migrate across borders these are types of things that i i think that the intelligence community can assess not the science of it so much although i think we do have some very you know good scientists but i i think more the the broader geostrategic implications and that security implications of these phenomena i think this is where the intel's community really can assist policymakers so they can understand what is coming and what the real impact is going to be as as these phenomena take more route i think i think john's got it right it you're not going to create a competitive scientific center um at the in the intelligence community but i do think we have long known particularly in climate that it's part of an ecosystem of of events that affect um food security uh economic security um energy security and all those things come into play and all those things create geopolitical events that must be dealt with and so i i i think we've got to get we have long known that this was true i think in the last couple years we've seen that climate change is not only strategic there are tactical implications of it right now that have to be dealt with so i i'd put us in the question of what can we do to add to that insight into the interaction between national security issues and climate issues pandemics are interesting where i wonder in that area one of the things that it would have been awfully nice to have was objective information about the truth and the ground truth about what was going on now interesting about how we'd go after getting it but remember we're not stuck with the collectors that we have today you know there was a day where we didn't have the ability to do what we do geospatially and so i think there is in pandemics some worthwhile exploration of what data would be useful to see events coming earlier and to understand the actuality different from that which is pervaded by politicians robert to me there's no question that we should be contributing and i like the way john put it contributing to both issues um augmenting adding where we can providing insight when there's confusion because again i go back to what to me our first principles we have always been in the security slash insecurity business stability slash instability and and what was more destabilizing in the past 18 months than this pandemic and uh and uh and and and i'm just say as far as we know it was naturally occurring an accidental transmission that led to humans and then a quick spread around the globe imagine and again michael i may be getting ahead of ourselves here but imagine if it was purposeful imagine if somebody did it with with nefarious intent to create confusion and economic and health and social damage so you know it's it's now an attack and of course we wouldn't question if it was our job to to contribute to the to the resolution the prevention if we can but resolution if we can't so so to me it's it's plain and i'll finish with this too michael it may well be analogous to the economic account you know we're not we're not trying to replicate wall street and bloomberg et cetera but we're trying to add value where we can and and how we can to sue's point and by the way how we need to reimagine how we do that how we can uh in a way that's advantage advantages to our decision makers so before we we turn to i think the most interesting question of how we actually do the mission um general hayden anything you want to add about this question of what we should be focusing on and how we should think about transitioning our focus um particularly away from counterterrorism and toward china yes indeed you know i i did a lot of times in nsa and at cia on terrorism okay and once lots going on and i i could see that but i couldn't do anything about it if you know what i mean okay so maybe if i was trying to do it again i would say listen that's important and let's do something about that not just about that but about this instead okay um that's great um and now i think we get to what larry was talking about when he talked about the ic being at an inflection point right so it's really not about mission to some degree it's about what we're going to focus on going forward but as you all talked about we got to do everything at the end of the day um [Music] making some choices here and there but the expectation is that we'll show up with some understanding of an issue so the question is how do we do that mission right how do we do the collection how do we do the analysis um how much do we rely on open source what's our relationship like with the private sector um how do we get the talent we need how do we think about talent perhaps differently than we used to right i think that's what larry was talking about when he was talking about an inflection point and maybe the place to start is just to get everybody's kind of general thoughts on this incredibly important question and sue let's come back to you for a first shot here um it's a world where all the threats today go to and through information we have got to be preeminent in the use of information we just do i don't i don't know how you have an intelligence community that is lagging in terms of the ability to both have access to the information you need and to be able to analyze the information that is so abundant that you can't do it manually so one way you do that is i think i just believe we have to double down on our ability in data access and i say that different from collection because i think it isn't necessarily a world where you're going to scoop up the world's data and hold it for yourself but you do need to be able to use any data that is useful to you and we have got to be able to use machines to help us so that's one um two um i don't worry about our ability to attract talent because the mission is really quite compelling um talent seeks quest and resources so i think we have as good a quest as any but i got to tell you when we turn the talent that comes in the door into bureaucrats when we try and hold them for 40 years and go through a step-by-step process we have got to be able to move people in and out even if they come and use them at different times in our careers we have got to break the bounds of the legacy of the collectors that we had as though we can just keep modifying to get to the new issues i think we have got to really consider analytic tradecraft today they're at the very least every analyst has got to be comfortable with data and technology we could talk about what happened with the 2016 russian interference in part because while we all knew that russia's intention was to undermine democracy we didn't put it together with the phenomenal capability of cyber in a predictive way so i've got to analytically bring technical acumen and social sciences and behavioral sciences all together and then the last is we have different customers we had different customers after 9 11. we had to get to state and local we have different customers now that have to include the private sector and the citizens robert um okay again thanks sue everything and i'm here for you robert i know you always are um so you know 1947 you know we were created uh and fit for purpose sue talked about that purpose right iron curtain throw things up in the air see look on the other side take pictures steal secrets and and we serve the nation well 1989 uh joint force um smart weapons maneuver warfare we caught up late but got there in time and we had the luxury of time 2001 and while we were strategic uh yeah strategically and tactically um surprised um as a nation we again went and made ourselves fit for purpose and they can serve the country well and you're asking the question now are we fit for purpose and for all the reasons that sue said i i don't believe we are and i'll talk about those in a minute but what i what i worry about what i worry about is that we won't have that demanding moment that that will create the change some of which sue spoke about because we are a bureaucracy and and and we do have agency and departmental equities that we represent and those are those are purposeful meaningful and and had good reason when they were created but what i worry about going forward is that that bureaucracy will not adapt and provide the agility the the time sensitivity the innovation that i believe is demanded now of the intelligence community and so i'm not saying we're going to reorganize i know we won't okay i'm not saying there's going to be some you know huge change in the director of national intelligence authorities i don't see that either um what i think is needed is almost harder and that's a reimagination of of who we are and and how we act and i love sue's verbs you know we have to be more comfortable with access before we collect and to tailor the latter we have to be more comfortable with with talent coming and going in in one area and i know this is trite to say but it's true we've got to get better at risk um you know for almost all of them i'll say all of my career the way to make if you're a gs12 the way to make it to gs 13 was don't make any gs12 mistakes just don't and you'll make gs 13. and and and on the contrary there wasn't a whole lot of fanfare and confetti for whatever a gs12 you know success was um so we have to we have to challenge that and i know that's really hard and i know it's fundamental to who we are but that's the conversation i think we need to have about uh not just how we bring that talent in how we how we let it go how we bring it back and how we raise it and reward it john i'll pick up on a point made by sue and went made by robert the term information dominance was quite popular about 15 years ago as open source is becoming more and more important and i i do agree that we need to have this this dominance on information and not all important information needs to be clandestinely acquired there is so much more that is publicly available now particularly in that digital domain in the social media environment and i really do think that um the intel's community really needs to tap into that as much as possible and so also that we don't waste time and precious resources going after information in a clandestine manner that may be in fact available in some type of open source environment it's number one number two i'm a liberal arts guy but as you well know i'm a wannabe systems engineer and i really am quite an advocate of much more integrated effort within the intelligence community and also within the u.s government the the departments and agencies really are legacies uh structures of what was created over the last 100 plus years or so and i think there have been some noble efforts to try to make this broader constellation of agencies and departments and authorities work more collaboratively together but i i do think that to deal with the challenges of the future we need to have a much more integrated approach i tried to do that at cia when we did some reorganization there but i think it needs to be broader than that because if we're really going to be able to tackle these issues effectively we need to be able to leverage optimally the capabilities the authorities the expertise the resources that exist sort of throughout the us government now this is a major major challenge and i don't think it's going to happen with you know one fell swoop but i think to robert's point the the demand signal that created for example the national counterterrorism center in the aftermath of 911 as well as some other types of things that happened over previous decades i'm hoping we're not going to be faced with a you know a 911 in this in the cyber world to really take steps that we need to take and when i talk about systems engineering i'm not just talking about the ic or the us government because i do think that there needs to be some unprecedented partnerships between the public sector and the private sector particularly as we're dealing with cyber and digital matters given the the role that the private sector plays and the ownership of a lot of these systems and networks they have and so i i do hope that as we go forward dealing with the challenges of each day that we keep an eye on the evolving nature of the future and what the us government needs to do to adapt and i really do think that's the key word the government's ability to adapt to the new changes that are frequently technologically driven but that unfortunately i think the constellation of departments and agencies right now are not as well prepared to deal with as they should be now michael if i can just pick up on one of john's points there one of the things that i noticed um when i was a principal deputy is so many more issues were economic but the intelligence community played disproportionately with the national security council and much less so with the national economic council as a matter of fact the constructs were were not similar at all but if there was one bin that intelligence was in it was national security not national economic if i look at the world today man i would go really hard to include commerce in the national security conversation i would want to include transportation in the national security conversation because when you don't include them you bring it into the traditional defense intelligence construct and we tend to hold a little tighter than really realizing what's happening in the kind of the commercial issues that are certainly security issues but not the same kind of security issues so i think there really is an evolution john i think you said it very well in terms of who's in this national security tent and once you think about that then you think about how intelligence serves all those people and it's not all the same so general hayden um sue and john and robert were in government um after we were um and they're describing what i think is a need for pretty significant changes in how we approach doing our jobs as intelligence officers and i'm wondering if it's does this sound to you as unprecedented or is is there something in the past that that that this sounds familiar to and is there a lesson learned from that or how do you think of how do you think about how unprecedented this sounds yeah that's really and that was really interesting because i'm thinking about way back when after world war ii okay we had a plan right we we did that okay for every okay and we did that for 10 20 30 40 50 60 years okay but now i'm looking at now and i'm saying that was then this is now and this is very very different and so i i like what we talked about now saying there's something going on so let's talk about it and do something more and and actually and different let me ask what i think is a really hard question although john you you were able to pull this off at the agency is how do you drive the changes that we're talking about here while stu still doing the day-to-day job of going to deputies meetings and principals meetings and briefings before congress and visiting foreign intelligence chiefs around the world how do you do the day-to-day and and keep up with your inbox while you're driving the kind of changes that you're all talking about how do you make that work it's john start with you since you really took this on well i had the benefit of being at cia in the intel's community in a security environment for 25 years and then another four years at the white house so i felt as though i had a fairly good understanding of the agency's mission when i became ci director and i relied heavily on a lot of my deputies and advisors but i felt an obligation as a leader to leave the organization in better shape for the future i think each director has that responsibility to build upon all the work that their predecessors have put into the organization so it is hard it is tough but i think one of the challenges for intel's community leaders is it cannot be substance all the time if you're running an organization you're the ceo of that organization yes you have a lot of responsibilities with liaison with the white house going to the security council meetings you have to stay up on substance but at the same time you're the orchestra leader you're the one that has to decide on you know what parts of the orchestra need to sort of move around to be changed or whatever and i i just think it it has to happen now i think there can be um some um support that is provided by a number of these outside groups that really have looked at these issues and you know advisory committees and other types of things that can give ideas uh and i i tapped into uh previous experiences i was very much in the mirror of what happened with the department of defense and goldwater nichols so the whole mission center construct was one that i both basically stole from the us military and so so i think that there is a there really has to be that determination in the part of leaders to spend time on organizational issues to include diversity and you know personnel and other types of things it cannot be substance all the time otherwise an organization will i think atrophy from the standpoint of its organizational capabilities and heft and robert you you drove change at nga can you talk about that experience i can um and again i had the distinct what i saw as an advantage of being born in the agency now the agency didn't exist but that's a minor point but born in the profession of imagery analysis doing that learning the business of intelligence through various opportunities and then leaving the agency for almost 10 years and so i got to learn what the agency was like both as a partner when i was at defense intelligence agency and i got to learn what nga was like as as a as a provider when i was at the white house and i was a demander and so when i came back michael i really had what i thought was a good sense that i i was worried that our historic pride which i shared because i was part of it was going to inhibit our future and and we were going to take that pride because of how well we had succeeded last year last decade and just go it'll work tomorrow and so without a i guess too clean of a of a plan my idea was to do two things one uh constructively disrupt see if i could i thought there was a false comfort there and i tried to challenge that and two my second recommendation probably should be my first is hire a world-class deputy all right and and get her in place and then give her the really hard uh assignment of making the change and uh sue i'm gonna pivot to you because i'm proud of what we did together by instilling the data science and the computational literacy and the and the move to commercial and public-private partnerships um but it does take a big team and a strong deputy to do that so so so you did that actually you did it to the agency you know starting very early with inquite and then a number of other initiatives and then you did it at nga and you tried very hard to do it as the pddni and talk a little bit about lessons learned from driving change i think you might be muted sir and i was not gonna have that happen today um so i think you have to as a leader have a vision of where you're going to go right it's not it's not doing all the things you do it's not even investing all the things you invest on you have to decide what you what you need to do for john when i had the good fortune of working for him he came to me one day with a task of sue i need you to figure out cyber for the agency and what he really meant was figure out how we're going to operate in a digital environment and that factored into his idea and that is we needed to create much more integrated products and integrate approaches for robert i think one of the things that robert did with nga is he had a vision that was not modernizing the mission of the agency it was imagining the agency in the future knowing what it must be and then building to that so my favorite approach is to imagine the future what you must be and then decide what you need to do in order to get there and invest to accomplishment not just a capability because what we so often do is we decide all the things that are important to us and then we peanut butter spread our our dollars against it always feeling good that we're doing something good and we are always doing something good the question is we're getting there so to me the issue is where do we need to get and then you fund to achievement not fund to capabilities capability you can always stretch out achievement can i think we underuse our budget to be shaping i think the dni could use its budget authority more i think each agency could i think we need to stop building bottom-up budgets asking everyone what they need to do the job because every job they're doing is important otherwise they wouldn't be doing it but you can't build programs that way we need to stop taking risks with the future and by that i mean putting off when we get there and start taking risk with the past and so i think those are the things and then the last is and it's something i benefited from throughout my career i had bosses who gave me impossible tasks and let me feel the weight of it and i made my share of mistakes but what you got when you did that was the a kind of innovation you won't get any other way and i think that john and robert and i hope i tried to push down responsibility when we had the vision and what i think we could each say is we got something good every time we had the courage to ask somebody else to deliver on that i'm gonna shift audience questions but i want to just ask general hayden who drove significant change at nsa as director drove change at cia if general if you have one piece of advice for today's intelligence community leaders on driving change what would you tell them do it do it that's that's right you know what i mean a lot of times i was saying okay i've done that that's good well okay that's enough and i'm looking back now and saying oh i could have done that one and that one and that one too just do it yes and hire hire good people and trust them to do the job okay um our first question is it's fantastic that is from a charis school student i had a hard time getting it out char school student um who's listening to all of this right and is wondering gosh what should i study if i want to work in the intelligence community what should i study how should i prepare myself to deal with this world that you guys are talking about sue your hand is still up so i'm coming to you oh shucks um and i was trying to look down too so you didn't come to me first okay um i do think it's a technical world whatever you study you need to be technically convert you need to be comfortable with technology um because it's just so many solutions are going through that but at the exact same time i really do want you to be a critical thinker i think as technology becomes less the discriminator itself and more the use of technology becomes the nature advantage i think people with great behavioral science foundation great social science foundation great ability to do critical thinking i would encourage you to be a reader so i can't pick one discipline um physics is a great discipline because it's just so foundational geography is a great discipline because it's all about the contextual relationship of one thing to another economics each of them are very good but just remember when you're studying at the end of the day it's how are you going to put it to use and if you do those things you're going to be all right so here's another great question so somebody's pointing out here that since it's creation you know the ic has only grown in the number of entities that are part of it you know should there is there an argument put it this way is there an argument for a contraction is there an argument for consolidation how do you guys think about that and robert since you spent the most time in different places let's start with you of course there is um an argument to be made for consolidation um i just think it's unrealistic so i it feels no offense to the char school feels a bit academic that you know we could say well what if this and what if that you know in our system uh team as i talked earlier about the agency prerogatives and the and the departmental equities etc remember congress gets a vote here and um that's not a that's not an easy venue to to to do a consolidation michael because by definition someone will be seen as losing you know authorities resources control whatever is the metric and our system enables that veto uh and i don't mean that in a presidential way just in a decision-making way so michael i think something truly traumatic would have to happen i mean a traumatic failure um in order for that to happen so i apologize for uh not answering the question because i i just don't see it as realistic i would take issue a bit with robert said i think that um if there was some contraction i think it would force more efficiency um and unfortunately i think in the past whenever problems have erupted more money has been thrown at the ic and more departments and components you know have grown up and it's become almost unwieldy and i think trying to stitch together an interoperable system that is optimally configured has become more and more challenging so i tend to be a contrarian on this issue i would almost advocate for a you know a 10 cut or so it would force those efficiencies within and among agencies so that they may be better outcomes as a result john john i wasn't you and i are in agreement i'm happy to go on record and say that money is not the ics problem i was talking organizationally uh and and i just and i just see there's too many defenders of each of the organizations that's the contraction that i don't see i would i'm going to top your 10 let's cut it 20 percent and see some real i'm just i'm efficiencies going to say we have two former pddni's here we've got the last and we've got the first yeah so love to hear what they have to say about this question um so first things first anytime you're listening to a former you ought to take everything we say with a grain of salt because by the way we had our run and if we're saying that there are things undone we we should have done it um i think i had this chance to consider the issue of contraction on my watch with with dan coats and i'm i'd go even further i'd say cut us in half and i think we'd find our essential element and we'd grow from there but i decided not to do it because i would have spent all my time fighting every single beer every single congressional committee every single constituency and so i what i chose instead was to double down on connecting the information believing that if we seamlessly could connect the information we would find those moments where we were actually the same and then you would move from there so i chose not to because i thought it would take my whole tenure and there were other changes that i needed i believe we needed to affect but i do believe if you could wave a magic wand there is a kind of volumetric growth like kind of where we got more resources and what had been one job it turned into three people doing the same job but i chose not to because i felt i didn't have time to fight that battle i wanted to instead say how do we organize against some of the threats but it's a it's it's a tough call i'd love to hear what pdd1 said yes yes pdd1 okay i was there and i had a meeting and i said uh we wanted to go over there and over there and over there it's not much money but we want to take it okay and they they said uh no i don't think so and that that was the problem right there you sue you said something about that right and and i did too but we didn't do it had we had some we could have chosen yeah exactly i think expediency drove me in a different direction but i think it will need to be done yep indeed so question about can the can a country be confident that the intelligence community is working together as it should right that they'll never be um difficult question right but there'll never be another intelligence failure that is a result of people not working together properly how much confidence do you have on where we are on that and maybe a better part of the question is how do you incentivize intelligence community officers to think of the whole community as a team um in fact even inside of an agency how do you consider how you incentivize officers to work as a team john let's start with you well i think the intel's community certainly works more collaboratively together today than it did certainly prior to 9 11 and even in the decade after 9 11. so i think there has been this incremental progress made and i think there are a number of ways that we can make the community work in a more integrated and therefore effective fashion one is one of the things i try to encourage ci officers to do is to serve rotations in other organizations because i think there is this parochialism that exists in certain agencies that they don't really understand the capabilities the authorities the expertise all the things that other agencies have to bring to bear and once they're exposed to that and once they operate within those environments i think they bring that back to those organizations secondly i do think that there is a need for more integrated units so that we bring together the nga folks the cia nsa and others that can work collaboratively environment against certain tough issues sometimes it's done for task forces but also i think there can be a more enduring collaborative sort of effort against some of these hard problems and china is a great example and i think was pointed out before that bringing commerce and other organizations into that tent that is looking at these really difficult challenges to our national security you need to bring the people together so they can work cheat to jail day in and day out on some of these problems any other thoughts on that yeah two things one um i think john's right with respect to um well i know john's right with respect we are we are much more integrated i mean the first 15 years of my ic career were in the dark uh not because i wanted to be it was just it was just that way i think we should tip our hat to our second director of national intelligence for for initiating joint duty uh assignments and mandating them for competitiveness for promotion to senior executive or senior intelligence service that's rewarding what you want right you want joint you want jointness you want integration well uh assign it and reward it um i i might just scale as john was talking you know as as as hesitant as i am to a reorg maybe there is a mission center way ahead i mean a true mission center way ahead and as a fan as i am of what john did at ticket nctc i think we all know too that every agency still sustains maintains a terrorism center it does okay and and we tolerate that uh for different reasons right mine's different because it's it's for this customer or that customer and i'm not saying those people are wrong it's just we we tolerate it and so perhaps there is an opportunity where we could it and maybe maybe china is the case or maybe economic intelligence sue's point about commerce and transportation is the case where because it's so new china's not new but the other aspects could be new that that we could come together in a different way and truly you know recreate our outcome without reorganizing the boxes let me ask a question about um i'm putting two questions together here and then i'm adding a little part of what i wanted to be my last question to you all um but a not insignificant share of the american population because of the last four years um believes that the intelligence community is part of this deep state idea right and believes that the intelligence community is not working on behalf of the national security of the united states they actually believe that the intelligence community is undermining the country so how should we how should intelligence community leaders talk to the country about what it's doing how it's doing it how do we educate those people who um have this fundamentally flawed view of who we are and what we do who wants to go first well i i can do that okay because i did it for 10 years okay and it was very interesting it's also important tell them what to do you know what i mean and if we don't do that then okay that's that's a real problem and by the way i can see you you're you're involved you're involved you're involved you're involved that's important that's very important i'm gonna i'm gonna date myself now and say we should all be like mike because what general hayden did for our profession i think is sir as much as you did for for for literally transforming our national security agency and for leading the central intelligence agency and being our first principal deputy you were a spokesman for our profession and and you and you did it in such an american way it was clear and non-technical and it and it was purposeful and with commitment and frankly we all need to be more like mike we we have to have that conversation because you're right michael this is dangerous um i said earlier that that the it's it's just an idea team uh this form of government we've chosen uh to adhere to and that idea doesn't work if those that that are governed don't believe in it it just doesn't work and so um i think now we have to be careful here because of um some history but i don't i i don't think being careful means we we can't get out there and have the conversation so i i think we have to engage the american public we got to win their trust back um because quite frankly as sue said earlier they're the ones who placed it in us to begin with and uh and we have to we have to we have to earn it john sue do you want to end anything i'd say obviously we're in a hyper partisan environment right now unlike any that i've seen in my my lifetime and very polarized as a country and any time someone speaks out including intelligence leaders it's you know potentially going to alienate you know one side of that ideological spectrum of the other but again it gets to the point as made earlier on i think sue's first comments to your initial question was we are supposed to be speaking truth we're not supposed to be partisan at all we're not supposed to be ideological we're supposed to be speaking the truth to our customers and also when we can and should the american public and so yes we're going to be caught in this whirlwind of politics when we appear in front of congress or that we speak out publicly but i think that's one of the you know responsibilities of intelligence leaders i think all of us have been equal opportunity offenders in terms of the different parts of the aisle that we upset when we talked about intelligence matters because we don't have agendas and i think that's so critically important for intelligence leaders not to have these partisan agendas despite the fact that they frequently will be labeled as partisans because the positions they take yeah i remember i had a conversation once with former president trump i think it was right after the worldwide threat assessment briefing and i and i said you do know that when the intelligence community says difficult things that serves you well right the that the american people need to know that for good bad or indifferent is giving the best it has without shading toward a particular outcome so so i think we need to talk about our discipline i think there's something heroic about it when it's practiced well i think you're right michael it's been impugned and i hate that but it can be overcome by our actions by our constancy i do think we have to be able to talk publicly about it robert said this so eloquently about general hayden you know post snowden when the intelligence committee could not figure out how to talk about itself he stepped in and gave us voice and he countered a narrative that was only one-sided and we need to do that now um more than ever i talk to a lot of students and one of the things i always say is i wish people knew us because i think what most people would find is we're just like them we're your neighbors we think about the world in the same terms in general that the american people do and i think we have to be true we have to fight against becoming stayed and becoming narrow and becoming stodgy we have got to be mindful of the trust that's instilled in us and be worthy of that and then we have to be able to talk about it openly because this is a world that can't live in the shadows so i want to give each of you about 30 seconds to 60 seconds just for any final final thoughts um robert thank you michael larry general hayden george mason for putting this together this this i thought it'd be fun and it was fun it's great to have this conversation michael i i'm an optimist and and and i believe our future is bright and we we are going to have to fight for it um john said polarized i think that's that's kind um there's there's very little in the middle these days there's very little uh conversation that's uh moderate and i don't mean that in a political sense and so i i think i think more than ever america needs its intelligence professionals to to not only do its job but to to explain it in a way that comports with our values uh which it defends and that it protects um our security going forward and so i think this is a conversation that has to continue and uh and i'm happy to be part of it i'm happy to learn from each of you uh as we have it and uh and and and look forward to doing that with all of you john since there are so many students that are listening uh just following up on the question earlier about what you should study whatever it is that interests you and motivates you study it with a passion and with an enthusiasm because almost any discipline i think ci has about 65 or 66 professional disciplines these days you can find a role uh in the intelligence community or nash security structure and if you're looking for a career that really is going to be so rewarding in terms of what you do day in and day out working with you know world-class experts as well as with tremendous patriots i really do think that the intelligence community uh as well as the broader national security committee law enforcement diplomacy military are really looking to tap into that tremendous tremendous wealth within our melting pot that is called america so again study as best you can and what it is that you like to do uh and really seriously consider a future uh for you uh in terms of your profession somewhere in that u.s government superstructure soon um don't be daunted you know this is a this is a moment where it all seems almost intractable but there have been times in our past where it i guarantee you it is seemed equally intractable and yet we found our way we found our way by digging in diving in believing that we must and then using all the talents that we had available to us so i think what i'd tell you is believe be big work hard and make the national security tent really big and we'll find our way general hayden very simply tell the truth tell the truth so let me let me thank all of you for joining us um it's been amazing um and i'm going to turn it over to larry wow that was uh that was just as remarkable maybe that was more remarkable than i thought it would be so thank you all very very much for joining us uh you've provided our students with a lot of great insights you've provided interested people in the public uh knowledge about the intel community where it's headed uh and that's everything we're trying to accomplish here i'm glad to have you uh sue and john back for a second round robert will take up on your offer to get more involved there thank you i worry a little bit that the only news we made tonight was that we should cut the ic budget by 50 and the guys are going to go to work tomorrow morning read the media highlights and say what were they saying um but we'll we'll see what happens there so thank you again general hayden any final comment it was wonderful let's do it again absolutely mark i think let's do it again is absolutely right i thank all of you for your participation your contribution to the hayden center events and michael morell asked the question what can you do better to educate the public so that people have a greater understanding of the role of intelligence in our society and i just want to say we appreciate what all of you are doing because you're all public intellectuals in a sense you're all reaching out to the public through various fora including these events at the char school work where we're trying to do our little part uh to educate the broader public and thank you michael hayden for the hayden center of making this all possible so this is a great way to end the academic calendar year at the char school at george mason university but as i said at the opening the hayden center continues so look forward to the next event uh go on twitter and follow the hayden center twitter account as well as the char school of policy and government or go to our websites and you can see what's coming up in our future programs thank everybody and good night [Music]

Channel: The Hayden Center

Views: 617

Rating: 4.4000001 out of 5

Keywords: Intelligence, Hayden Center, George Mason University, GMU, Schar School, Michael Hayden, Michael Morell, John Brennan, Susan Gordon, Sue Gordon, Robert Cardillo, Director of National Intelligence, ODNI, DNI, PDDNI, CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA, NGA, National Geospatial-Intelligencre Agency, GEOINT, HUMINT, SIGINT, NSA, National Security Agency, Future

Id: ycTwc8njWzE

Length: 90min 2sec (5402 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021