Special Operations CommanderWilliam Mcraven discusses the importance of good military intelligence and its role in strategic decisionmaking. Admiral mcraven played a leadership role in osama bin ladens capture and advised president s george w. Bush and barack obama, as well as secretaries of defense, state, and homeland security. The cia, lyndon b. Johnson president ial library, and the university of texas at austin cohosted this event as part of a symposium titled the president s daily brief. It is just under one hour. Our next speaker is a umnist of the Al University of texas. Hook em horns. Graduate withn a degree in journalism. He went on to serve 37 years in the u. S. Navy, where he became a navy seal and ultimately advanced to the rank of four srta four star admiral. Admiral mcraven led a force of 69,000 men and women. He advised president s, secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, and other top u. S. Officials in the areas of u. S. Foreignpolicy and defense. In addition to many other operations, admiral mcraven headed up a special ops rate in 2001 that led to the killing of osama bin laden. Briefing president obama in realtime as the operation was executed. The same year, he was named times runnerup for person of the year. Theral mcraven became chancellor of the university of texas system earlier this year. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome chancellor William Mcraven. [applause] adm. Mcraven thank you very much. The lbjhank you and library for hosting this magnificent event. Let me think jim klapper and john brennan, two those friends who have worked with me sidebyside. We are blessed to have these two gentlemen in the position they are in. I cannot think of any to guys that have done more to protect protect the to United States than these two guys. [applause] i want to recognize former director. You have added a lot to the last two days and i would be remiss if i did not call out my friend admiral bobby inman as he has walked me through the minefields that can be the politics of the university of texas and has graciously worked with me as i have established my tenure here at the university of texas. Thank you again very much. [applause] i am going to approach this a little bit differently. You have been looking at the first customer. Now were going to take intelligence and move it down to a tactical level. I hope to walk you from the tactical backup to the first customer. I have 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 is hostage rescues. Put yourself in a situation where you have a hostage and you have perfect intelligence on what is going on in the single room. You have a single room. There is 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. There is a hostage taker on the other side of the room. You know what weapon systems he has. You know the dimensions of the room. You have 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 perfect intelligence. The perfect of that intelligence is to mitigate the risk to a manageable level. On the outside of the door, you have special operations soldiers that are prepared to go in and rescue this hostage. Not only do you have perfect intelligence at a point in time, but you happen throughout those points in time. It is realtime intelligence and it is confident intelligence. What that does for you is it reduces the risk to a manageable level. Always in the process of going through the door, you blow the door open. The first man through the door can stumble and that creates problems and the next man has to adjust because you have a moving hostage taker. All that is in play. With perfect intelligence, the chances of success on that operation are very high. When we look at intelligence from a military standpoint, and i will talk a little later about how policymakers use this intelligence, but from the military standpoint we love to talk about the fact that the defense is stronger than the offense. The defense just has to preserve and protect while the offense has to impose its will on the enemy. The defense only has to preserve and protect and the offense has to impose its will on the enemy. If you are 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. Intelligence is never perfect. I will walk you through some of the significant uses of intelligence we have. We will start with imagery. Tracking a very, very high value al qaeda target in iraq. In 2005, the special forces there had only one predator. Predators were relatively new on the battlefield in terms of the military. We had a qualified special Operations Force but we had one aircraft. We had been tracking this individual through human intelligence and we knew that he was going to have a rendezvous at a certain place out in our ramadi. We had human intelligence surrounding where we thought linkup would be and a single printer overhead. As the linkup was a a single predator overhead. As the linkup was occurring, we were not able to verify the person was there. We thought we had identified the appropriate vehicle. The vehicle started to move. That was fine because we had a predator overhead and we were watching as his vehicle moved and a second vehicle joined the convoy. Now we had two vehicles, which was fine because they were moving together. At some point in time they came to a crossroad and the Lieutenant Colonel who was working for return and looked at me and said, youve got to call it. Are we going left or are we going right . So we took the vehicle on the right and we allow the vehicle on the left to move out in another direction. And so we followed the vehicle on the right for quite some time. The predator flies at a fairly High Altitude and this was 2005. The quality of the sensors were not that great. The vehicle stopped near a pond. We had a good bead on the vehicle. It was the only vehicle around the palm grove. Right around this time, the optical bowl underneath the predator recycled. He goes right picture that seems to be a couple hundred meters away to a picture that is now several thousand feet away. It recycled up and it shocked us all. We can still see the vehicle but instead of it being this large, it was now about this big. We watched very closely. 15 seconds later, the ball reactivated and we thought everything was fine. We continue to fall the vehicle and finally my patience ran out and i asked the Assault Force to interdict the vehicle to capture whoever was inside. So we interdicted the vehicle. Were fired. There was just a driver inside. Not the guy we were looking forward there was an ak47 in the back and a laptop. So we quickly got that and got it back to our headquarters. As we began to do forensics, we went back and look and thought something is amiss. As we did the forensics, we found right at that point in llme when that optical ba recycled and went to a distance view, the individual had gotten out and ran into the palm grove and we missed him. It took us another year to kill this individual. Earsat yours time y time, dozens and americans and hundreds or thousands of iraqis were killed. It showed us the power of Imagery Intelligence and the limitations. The other Technical Intelligence we used, and i wont go into a great deal of detail, but we have the ability to understand what is happening between two individuals on various communications. Away,me in a country far not iraq or afghanistan, we were pursuing a target and we had interpreted listening to the two individuals their devices. We thought they were going to link up with a highvalue target in this particular country. We stood ready to conduct a strike. And weoperation evolved were continuing to pull in Technical Intelligence, we took the opportunity and took the strike and while was a bad guy, it was not the bad guy we were looking for. Questioni was asked a about the quality of the intelligence and how i viewed the risk and how that risk was, in fact, presented to the decisionmakers up the chain of command. It is something as a user of intelligence and a conveyor of the quality of the intelligence and the need for action that i never forgot. Suffice to say, you have to be certain that the quality of the intelligence is reducing the risk. We have other types of intelligence where we have large sensor devices. Use this quite a bit in iraq and afghanistan to locate buried explosives, homing disposes. We would position these sensors on large aircraft and they could determine whether or not a particular road had been dug up and explosives had been put in the road. The technology was good, but it was hardly perfect. Many times we would send a soul folks in based on the intelligence we had and sometimes it turned out it had been young boy that was digging in a road that had no bearing on the threat we proceeded to be. There is always human intelligence. That is the hardest of the intelligence, but frankly, the most important and most viable in terms of understanding the context. Human intelligence gives you a sense of the intent of the the individual. Nothing is harder to determine, whether you know them well or not. You never know what their next move will be. What we have tried to do since 9 11 was how do we go about improving the quality of intelligence . In the realm where we used imagery, the quality of the image has improved dramatically. In the early days in some cases, ball, washe optical what we consider standard definition. The quality of the image was sometimes a little grainy. Not that you couldnt see people clearly, but it did not operate well at night. There were a lot of problems with it. As technology has gotten better, the quality of that image has gotten to the point where it is as clear as i am looking at you in some cases. That is important. The purpose of the intelligence is to knock down the risk. If you dont understand the factors involved in creating the risk, if you are looking at a picture that is not as clear as you think it is, the risk is greater and you will not be able provide the angles. If one predator is good, more are better. Target. Angle on a in afghanistan sometimes we would be looking at a compound and the angle of the view was obstructed by the compound itself. Consequently, you went in without perfect intelligence. It was better because you had some angle. Pulling one predator and multiple predators together and working them with fire support that you get from the ac130s, one of our gunships, all that requires a delicate and sophisticated dance. That is difficult to do. It is important to make sure that under the imagery aspect you have multiple angles. Fortunately over time, what we found is some of our imagery platforms is they were limited in time frame. Before we had a predators, we had a helicopter with a small optical ball on it. Helicopters were limited by fuel and every once in a while you would have to land the helicopter was the only helicopter we had. The helicopter. It was the only helicopter we had and we realized we could not do business that way. The United States government invested a lot to make sure we had multiple platforms to do the job. Then we talk about the timeframe. When you look at bdbs and what they provide the president in intelligence, on the battlefield, and the question was asked yesterday to director brennan about the quality of intelligence and what you can get to the soldier today. What you can get to the soldier is unprecedented. The soldier in the foxhole can have a terrific view of the battlefield. A visual view of the battlefield. , andat view is timed late i associate it with i have a box in 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. The you know what that means we were watching football and you hear everybody cheer and you were looking up and wondering, i wonder what you are cheering about, and five seconds later you begin to find out . In the world of intelligence, when the 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 and can mean the difference between life or death. As you look at the imagery, you have to make sure on ensuring the quality of the image is good, multiple angles are out there, and the timing between the actual capture of the image and the return is as small as you can make it. On the Technical Intelligence, this is really about ensuring we are able to collect on a variety of different platforms. I will not go into a lot of detail there. The other impact is making sure the analysts you have and the interpreters you have are good. In a lot of cases as we are chasing bad guys around the world, some of the dialects that we are trying to translate are not common, and therefore there may be one or two people in the department of defense that speak this dialect. They may not speak it as well as you would hope. 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 folks 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, i must have missed the mark. The chief of staff of the army came up to me afterwards and said your translator is terrible. He misrepresented everything you said. So if you take that to an intelligence standpoint and you realize if you do not have the right translator and if that late, your is understanding of the intent and your understanding of the risk is entirely different. We have a lot of analysts that look at these sort of things. It is the same problem set. We have to have analysts that understanding context what is going on. On the human side, we 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 community. Some fabulous intel analysts. The u. S. What separates Intelligence Community from any other organization in the world is the quality of the training 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 analysts. The reason you have the quality of pdb referred is because that individual has spent a lot of time being an analyst, able to convey the analytical information in context, and that is important to anyone that is receiving intelligence. Again, understanding the behavior of the individual. A lot of times we are 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 there is only one or two people. You really do rely a lot on them to provide you the analysis of that particular individual. As you look at the various types of intelligence, what we learned very quickly in the war in iraq is where we started this is that you have to be able to fuse intelligence. We have always known that. The intelligence agencies have always understood that, but sometimes on the battlefield you tend to take whatever you got, an image, Technical Intelligence, a human intelligence, and that became your only source. You have to fuse them altogether. It is fused intelligence that reduces your risk. I go back to the scenario of the room. If all you have in the room is a , then you dont understand what is going on between the two. If you dont have a constant video stream, you have an incomplete picture. What is critical to take these types of intelligence and fuse them together. This is an important aspect of what we did in iraq. Not only did we fuse them, but then we recognize from the military standpoint we also are not the sole source of intelligence when it came to various types of intelligence. Fbi, iraqi intelligence, and we would create these fusion cells. Conventional forces were part of these fusion cells. To passze if you wanted and use information, you need to understand what is going on on the ground. Sometimes the soldiers that were closest to the problem set could give you better insight on what was on the ground than the analyst in baghdad or fort bragg. You put all the subject Matter Experts in a single place and you look at a target set and fuse the intelligence and use this interagency process to have the best intelligence you could and reduce the risk on a particular mission. We used a lot of what we call metcalfs law. Bob metcalfe created the law that talks about telecommuting networks. When you look at telecommunications networks, what he said was if you add a new node to a telecommunications network, so if you have a and b c, what you get is an expansion increase in the power of communications. C and b have to be able to talk equally as strong as a nd b, this applies to Human Networks as well. Youy time you add a node, exponentially increase the power of the intelligence out there. As we created these Interagency Task forces, and we had analysts from all the intelligence communities, we had analysts and operators from the military at from all the other constituents out there fighting the battle, the state department, etc. You had a much better look at the picture on the ground. Added, youode you had a better understanding of the picture. We took this concept of fusion and we started out small with fusion cells. We started these locally grown joint Interagency Task forces in iraq and afghanistan. We began to partner the iraq and afghanistan node when we found the enemy network did not see boundaries between iraq and syria and afghanistan and other places and we created a global agency. We became better and better. Lets talk about the intelligence and its role at to the policymakers. I will use another football analogy, if i can. When you look at two opposing teams on the football field