DOD and the DNI Open Source Center—Building the Partnership

Growing Outreach to the Combatant Commands

Department of Defense (DOD) constituents represent the largest segment of the Director, National Intelligence (DNI) render free of access Source Center's (OSC) customer base, and many of its organizations have long-standing relationships with the Center and its predecessor, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). Strengthening and expanding those partnerships and the horizontal of collaboration is a keystone of the Center's strategic objectives. The partnership with the nine Combatant Commands (COCOMs) is especially important because of their broad and direct character in the Global War upon Terrorism (GWOT) and because of the many significant O activities resident in a certain quantity of of the commands. Over the last year, the OSC has taken a number of paces to build on what was already a solid working relationship. The goal has been to more closely engage the commands to form mutually beneficial relationships in exploiting O and carrying without media analysis in support of the warfighters' mission.

A First-Ever Meeting

greatest in quantity notable among the growing contacts between the Center and the commands was the first-ever FBIS-DOD beneath secretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD(I)) discourse held outside Washington D.C. in July 2005 The jointly sponsored discourse focused on developing strategies and recommendations for facilitating closer and more effective O support to the COCOM and the National Guard. More specifically, the talk was intended to provide a forum that would facilitate the sharing of information upon OS collection, analysis, and dissemination, and the identification of opportunities for collaboration between the then FBIS and the COCOM It was the first time that the OSC had met with all the Commands together. The meeting also provided an opportunity for the various O units to connect

Nearly 100 participants, about evenly divided between DOD and the OSC attended the three-day discourse On the DOD side, in addition to participants from the Commands and the National Guard, attendees included the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the other lock opener combat support agencies, as well as the National Virtual Translation Center (NVTC) which is housed in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on the contrary provides extensive support to the COCOM Program managers, lock opener project managers, and subject-matter dexterouss from the OSC participated and provided insights into the Center's collection and analytical capabilities. The talk attracted considerable high-level attention within the Intelligence Community (IC) because of the growing recognition of the important part of OS in support of military operations.

The first day of the conversation was built around a series of presentations by dint of the OSC, the COCOMs, and the National Guard, creating a baseline understanding of coverage responsibilities, capabilities, and challenges. These presentations place the stage for the working clusters that focused on key issues raised by means of the commands:

[] Managing OSINT requirements.

[] Information sharing and dissemination.

[] Leveraging subject-matter experts

[] Technology enablers.

The next to the first and third days centered upon work in four smaller break-out sessions, ending with presentations that included recommendations for moving forward in the four lock opener issue areas. Several themes became quickly apparent as the clumps came back together to at hand their findings. On the positive side:

[] O has emerg as an important source of intelligence from the bottom up rather than being driven from the top down.

[] O provides alert functions and is many times the only reporting available to rejoin to requests.

[] The demand for O support will continue to swell very quickly.

At the same time, however, virtually all of the commands and the National Guard face public challenges in meeting OS requirements, greatest in quantity notably:

[] Unclassified information does not be rivals well against classified information--a tillage of "If it's unclassified, it must not have value" still pervades the IC.

[] O collection is poorly capitaled and units are understaffed.

[] The lack of access to the Internet at the desktop is a bulky obstacle to OS collection and analysis.

[] Defense O confined apartments have no training in media analysis and lack language capabilities.

[] There is no clear external point of contact or central responsibility for O support for the military.

[] Legal interpretation of the use of publicly available (i.e, open) sources is varied and inconsistent.

[] Access to O research tools is limited or smooth nonexistent.

Conference participants worked to unravel a common understanding of these challenges and to formulate a certain number of strategies and recommendations to address them in the near and drawn out term. Participants flowed through the four lock opener interest area sessions, first defining the issues, then developing strategies and possible "quick wins," as well as potential "r flags." upon the last morning the original collections met again and developed recommendations and quick wins that were then briefed and discussed by means of all the attendees.