Fragile that it led to the class. Thank you very much. Were through our appointed time. Well break for now and come back at 3 30. I believe theres a break outside for all of you. Then mcraven will have his remarks. [ applause ] let me also thank director jim clapper and director john brennan, two very Close Friends who have worked with me side by side for many years now. We are really blessed to have these two gentlemen in the positions they are in. I cant think of any two guys that have done more to protect this nation over the years than jim clapper and john brennan. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us today. [ applause ] and i also want to recognize again former director porter goss. Great to have you here. Youve added a lot to the last two days. I would be remiss if i didnt call out my very good friend and ment mentor, admiral. He has graciously worked with me as i have established my tenure here at the university of texas. Thank you again very much. Im going to approach this a little bit differently here. Youve been looking at the first customer. Now were going to take intelligence and move it down to a tactical level. Then frankly i hope to be able to walk you from the tactical back up to the first customer. Ive been asked to talk about why is intelligence necessary. I want to start off with a little bit of a thought experiment. In the world of special operations one of the things we have to tackle often are hostage rescues. Put yourselves in a situation where you have a hostage situation, and you have perfect intelligence on what is going on in the single room. You have a single room. Theres a hostage. He is on the right side of the room. He is in a chair. He is bound. You know exactly where he is. Theres the hostage taker. The hostage taker is on the other side of the room. You know exactly what Weapons Systems he has. You know the dimensions of the room. You know the thickness of the walls. You have some understanding of the intent of the hostage taker, and you have some understanding of how the hostage himself or herself might react. You know how the door swings open. You have for all intent and purposes perfect intelligence. And the purpose of that intelligence of course is to mitigate the risk to a manageable level. On the outside of that door you have special operations soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines that were prepared to go in and rescue this hostage. You have it throughout those points in time, so it is constant intelligence. Of course, what that does for you is it really does reduce that risk to a manageable level. Now, always in the process of going through the door you blow the door open. The first man through the door could stumble and that creates problems and the next man has to adjust. All those sorts of things are in play. With perfect intelligence, the chances of success on that particular operation are very high. So when we look at intelligence from a military standpoint and ill talk a little bit later about how i think policymakers use this intelligence from the military standpoint, we love to the defense is stronger than the offense, but the defense just has to preserve and protect while the offense has to impose its will upon the enemy. The defense only has to preserve and protect. The offense has to impose its will on the enemy. If youre going to impose your will on the enemy, the better the intelligence, the more likely you are to be successful against the stronger form, i. E. The defense. Of course, intelligence is never perfect. So well start with imagery, image intelligence. Many years ago in 2005 we were tracking a very, very high value al qaeda target in iraq, but in 2005 the special forces there, we had only one predator. The predators were fairly new on the battlefield. We had a very qualified special operations force, but we had one aircraft. And we had been tracking this individual through human intelligence and we knew that he was going to have or we suspected he was going to be in a certain place out in al ramadi. We had our human intelligence surrounding where we thought the human link up was going to be with this bad guy. As the link up was occurring, we were not able to verify the individual in question was there. We thought we had identified the appropriate vehicle that the bad guy was in and the vehicle started to move. And that was fine because we had a single predator overhead and we were watching as this vehicle moved and then a second vehicle joined the convoy. Now we had two vehicles. At some point in time they came to a crossroad. The Lieutenant Colonel who was working for me turned and look at me and said, you have to call it. Are we going left . Or are we going right . We took the right. We followed the vehicle on the right for quite sometime. And again, the predator flies at a fairly high altitude. This was 2005. The quality of the sensors werent all that great, but all of a sudden the vehicle stopped at a palm grove. Right at that moment in time as we were watching this vehicle the optical ball that is underneath the predator recycled. It goes from a picture that appears to be a couple 100 meters away to a picture that is now several thousand feet away. It recycled up and it shocked us all. We could still see the vehicle. But instead of the vehicle being this large, it was now about this big. About 15 seconds later the ball reactivated and came back done. We thought good. Everythings fine. We continued to follow the vehicle. E finally my patience ran out. So we interjected the vehicle. We stopped the vehicle. There was just a driver inside. Not the guy we were looking for. There was an ak47 in the back and a laptop. We scarfed that up. As we began to do the forensics, we went back and looked and we thought something is amiss here. As we did the forensics, we found right at that point in time when that optical ball recycled and went in from a closein view to a distance view the individual ran into a palm grove and we missed him. It took us another year to kill this individual. In that years time dozens of americans and hundreds or thousands of iraqis were killed. And it really shows us both the power of Imagery Intelligence and also the limitations. The other Technical Intelligence we use is signals intelligence. I wont go into a great deal of detail. We have the ability to understand what is happening between two individuals on various communications. At one point in time in a country far, far away, not iraq or afghanistan, we were pursuing a target and we had interpreted listening to the two individuals on their devices. We thought again they were going to link up with a very highvalue target in this particular country. So we stood ready to conduct a strike. And as the operation evolved and we were continuing to pull in Technical Intelligence, we took the opportunity and took the strike and while it was a bad guy, it was not the bad guy we were looking for. Later on, i was asked a question about the quality of the intelligence and how i viewed the risk and how that risk was, in fact, presented to the Decision Makers up the chain of command. It is something as a user of intelligence and a conveyer of the quality of the intelligence and the need for action that i never forgot. Suffice to say and ill talk a little bit more about it you have to be certain the quality of the intelligence you get is, in fact, reducing the risk. We have other types of intelligence where we have large sensor devices, and we use this quite a bit in iraq and afghanistan to hopefully locate buried homemade explosives. We would position these sensors on large aircraft. They could at times determine whether or not a particular route, a road had been dug up, and a homemade explosive had been put in that road. The technology was good, but it was hardly perfect. Many times we would send assault folks in based on the intelligence we had to see if we could diffuse the weapon. It turned out it was some young boy digging in a road that had no bearing on the threat that we perceived it to be. Of course, theres always human intelligence. Thats probably the hardest of the intelligence, but frankly the most important and the most vital in terms of understanding the context. Of course, human intelligence gives you a sense of the intent of the individual. Nothing i think is harder to determine than the intent of a particular individual no matter whether you know them well or do not. You just never know what their next move will be. So what we have tried to do since 9 11 is how do we go about improving the quality of intelligence . So in the imt realm, the quality of the image, of course, has increased dramatically. In the early days, the isr, the optical ball, is what we could consider standard definition, so the quality of the image you got was sometimes a little grainy. Not that you couldnt see people very clearly, but it didnt also operate well at night, so there were a lot of problems with it. As time as gone on and technology has gottenssfx betted better, the quality of that image is as clear as im looking at you in some cases and thats very, very important because, again, the purpose of the intelligence is to buy down the risk. If you dont understand the factors that are involved in creating that risk, if youre looking at a picture that isnt as clear as you think it is, then that risk is greater and youre not going to be able to provide the options that you want to the Decision Makers. You also need more angles. I talked about the fact we had one predator. If one predator is good, more predators are better. The fact of the matter is a single angle on a target, particularly as we were looking at afghanistan, many times we would be looking at a compound in afghanistan. The angle of the view was obstructed by the compound itself, so consequently you went in without perfect intelligence. Sometimes without good intelligence, but it was better because you had some angle. Working predators with support with the aircraft in the sky all that requires a very delicate and sophisticated dance and thats very difficult to do, but it is important to make sure under the imagery aspect of this you have multiple angles. Fortunately, over time what we found was some ith some of our platforms is they were limited in time frame. The helicopter was limited by fuel. In the middle of the operation you would have to land the helicopter. It was the only helicopter with the only optical ball we had. You just couldnt do business that way. We invested a lot in making sure we had multiple platforms in order to do the job. Then we talked about the time frame. When you look at the pdbs and what they provide the president in terms of strategic intelligence and Operational Intelligence frank asked a question yesterday to director brennan and i about the quality of intelligence and what you can get down to the soldier today. What you can get to the soldier today is unprecedented. The soldier in the fox hole can have a visual view of the battlefield, but if that view is time linked and i associate with it i have a box at the stadium to watch the football games. We have a number of tvs up in the box, but the tvs are about five seconds late. You know what means when youre watching football and you hear everybody cheer and you look up and wonder what theyre cheering about . Five seconds later you find out what they were cheering about. In the world of intelligence when that intelligence has to be so timely because it is being relayed to the operator, the soldier on the ground, five seconds can be a lifetime fi. Five seconds can mean the difference between life and death. The timing between the actual capture of the image and the return is as small as you can make it. It is about making sure the analysts you have and the interpreters that you have are good. As we are chasing bad guys around the world, some of the dialects we are trying to translate are not common. Therefore there may be one or two people in the department of defense that speak this particular dialect. And they may not speak it as well as you would hope they would speak it. In the middle of a complex operation as you are trying to interpret the nature and the intent of the bad guys through Technical Intelligence, the nature of that translator is absolutely critical. I learned this the hard way as well when i was giving a speech to the graduating west Point Academy points in afghanistan. I got up and gave what i thought was a rousing, fabulous speech to the graduating class. And i got a very polite applause at the end. I thought, boy, i missed have missed the mark. Your translator is terrible. He misrepresented everything you said. And so if you take that to an intelligence standpoint and you realize if you do not have the right translator, your understanding of the intent, therefore your understanding of the risk is entirely different. And the analystnalysts. We have a lot of analysts that look at these sort of things and it is the same problem set. You have to have analysts that understand in context whats going on. On the human side, we really do look at the training. The cia are without a doubt the worlds finest when it comes to intelligence analysis. We have great folks across the Intelligence Community, all the parts of the ic, some fabulous intel analysts. What separates us, the u. S. Intelligence community, is the quality of the training that these analysts go through in order to be analysts. It is like any other aspect of life. You have the rookie analysts and you have the experienced ed analysts. The reason you have the quality of pdb briefer you have is because that individual has spent a lot of time being an l analy analyst. Then again understanding the behavior of the individual. A lot of times were chasing people that we know very little about. Somebody in one of the organizations with the Intelligence Community knows something about them. And that person becomes a subject Matter Expert on a particular individual. Sometimes theres only one person or maybe one or two people and you really do rely a lot on them to provide you the analysis of that particular individual and that target set. As you look at the various types of intelligence, what we learn very quickly in the war in iraq is really where we started this is you have to be able to fuse the intelligence. We have always known that. The intelligence agencies have always understood that, but sometimes on the battlefield you tended to take whatever you got, an image, a Technical Intelligence, a human intelligence, and that became a little bit of your only source intelligence. What you have to be able to do is fuse them all together. It is the fused intelligence that now reduces your risk again. I go back to my scenario of the room. If all you have in that room is a camera that is observing the hostage and the hostage taker, then you dont understand the dialogue thats going on between the two. If you have the dialogue but you dont have a photo or a video stream, you have an incomplete picture. What is critical is to take these various types of intelligence and fuse them together. This is, again, a very important aspect of what we did in iraq. Not only did we fuse them, but from the military standpoint we realized we were not the sole source of intelligence when it came came to the various types of intelligence. We would bring in cia, National Geospatial agency, iraqi intelligence. We created these fusion cells. Also the conventional forces were part of these fusion cells. If you want to pass information and use information, you need to be to understand whats going on onyfqt the ground. So you pulled all the subject Matter Experts together in a single place and you would look at a target and fuse the intelligence to reduce the risk on a particular mission. We used a lot of what we called metcalfes law. Metcalfe created this law sometime ago that talks about Telecommunications Networks. In it when you look at a Telecommunications Network what he said was if you add a new node to a Telecommunications Network, so if you have a and b and then you add c, you get exponential power. Every time you add a node, you expone exponential increase the knowledge and the power of the intelligence thats out there. We had analysts from all the intel communities. You had a much better look at the picture on the ground. And this was vitally important. Again, with each node you added, you had a better understanding of the picture. So we took this concept of fusion and we started off small with fusion cells. We created these locally grown joint Interagency Task forces in iraq and then afghanistan. We began to partner the iraq and afghanistan node when we found out the enemy network did not see any boundaries between iraq and syria and afghanistan and pakistan and other places. Then we created this global chart where we could look at the problem set globally. We became better and better. Now lets talk about the intelligence and its role to the policymakers. I will use a little bit another football analogy, if i can. When you look at two opposing teams on the football field and you said im going to have perfect intelligence on my opponent and im going to be able to steal their signals. Im going to know exactly what i need to know about each player, which ones hurt, which one stayed up the night before, how fast are they. You know how theyre going to play on the football field and you say i got it. I have perfect intelligence on that Football Team. The problem is if that Football Team happens to be the Dallas Cowboys and youre a high school footba Football Team, i dont care how good your intelligence is. Its not going to help you. This is the point for poli policymake policymakers. Its not just about the intelligence. Its about using the intelligence to understand what your options are and how to apply those options against the problem set. I had a chance to talk to the texas Football Team a couple of weeks ago, and i was talking to them about the notre dame game. The notre dame game of 2007. In the notre dame game this was notre dame and the Naval Academy. The Naval Academy had not beaten the university of notre dame in 40 years. It was a given that notre dame was going