06.01.11
The Empire’s Dog Feces: Drones and gadgets preferred to mingling with the dirty, scruffy natives
Military operations in Afghanistan rely too much on intelligence gathered by unmanned drones, often exclude important publicly available data and do not focus enough on the recruitment of human agents, a Pentagon report says.
The report by the Defense Science Board, a panel that advises the Pentagon, says that the defense budget does not properly direct funding for open-source intelligence collection – information available to the public and gathered from a wide variety of sources, including academic papers and newspapers.
From Steven Aftergood at the FAS Secrecy blog, last week:
With its overwhelming emphasis on technical collection, U.S. military intelligence is poorly equipped to meet the requirements of the counterinsurgency mission, according to a recent study (pdf) by the Defense Science Board.
A copy of the report is archived at the Secrecy blog.
It is worth a look, if only for the paradoxical list of Defense Science Board members, many of them from the drones and gadgets technical collections agencies, industry and lobby.