Capitol Hill has an idea to save money. This year’s National Defense Authorization Act—which designates the Pentagon’s budget and expenditure—suggests that the Army may want to assign a program executive office to gather open-source intelligence. The assumption verges on the audacious. Is Congress suggesting that publicly-available material may be better than some military resources?
By way of context, a program executive office is the core structure in the military’s acquisition and management process. Each office oversees the lifecycle of a particular set of initiatives. The Army, for instance, has a program executive office for ground combat systems, while the Navy has one for aircraft carriers. The list is ever-expanding—or perhaps contracting under the new administration.
The current National Defense Authorization Act, ratifying some $895 billion in federal outlays this fiscal year, was signed by President Biden in early January. The terminology related to the fine print is carefully-worded. The legislation does not say that the Army must create an open-source intelligence capability, only that it should think about building what we assume is advanced proficiency. At minimum, we can conclude that open-source intelligence is now broadly-held to be legitimate enough that Congressional overlords consider it an essential component of strategic analysis.
Open-source intelligence is not new, but methods of course have changed. During World War II, federal agents monitored foreign radio broadcasts for information that could further validate troop movements or infrastructure developments. Today these efforts are embraced by countless private-sector actors worldwide, including dedicated for-profit companies. They may decode geolocation data from smartphones or parse social-media accounts on multiple networks. There are also non-profit organizations in this game, such as OSINT for Ukraine.
An expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, a private-sector think tank, asserts, “Big, complex organizations have trouble assimilating lots of information, but that doesn’t mean you don’t try. You just accept that they’re going to be limited.”
In a military sense, open-source intelligence is one, but not the only, component of the decision-making mix. Other verticals might include signals communication and classified information. If nothing else, Congress is validating the notion that there is a disproportionate volume of information on the internet that should be gathered, processed, and interpreted in a more official framework. Will a formal Congressional mandate to use open-source intelligence be forthcoming in the next National Defense Authorization Act? The opportunity raises a material set of questions, some of which may be ethical in scope. ■
Our Vantage Point: Open-source intelligence is a cost-effective reconnaissance tool. At the Pentagon, bureaucratic inertia may have constrained widespread adoption, despite its prevalence elsewhere. Congress nudges the military to incorporate the approach more aggressively in the information mix.
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