Huachuca Center to be Home of Human-Intel Training

American Forces Press Service ^ | Jim Garamone

[SandRat]

WASHINGTON, April 10, 2007 – The Department of Defense is establishing a home for human intelligence at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

Defense Intelligence Agency Director Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples participated in ceremonies opening the new Joint Center of Excellence for Human Intelligence Training today.

The center will answer a need for developing and exploiting intelligence from human sources.

“Human intelligence within the Department of Defense needs a home,” said Steve Norton, chief of the Defense Human Intelligence Management Office at DIA.

The home of infantry in DoD is Fort Benning, Ga., he said. “Where’s the home for human intelligence? We have a tougher time with that,” he said. “I can see this evolve into the home of human intelligence.”

Human intelligence is the “coin of the realm” in America’s fight against terrorism, Norton said during a recent interview. “Every commission has validated this; commanders in the field tell us it is their priority in the intelligence field.”

The U.S. intelligence emphasis has shifted from exploiting nation states to infiltrating terrorist groups. With that change in emphasis the importance of information from human sources has grown, Norton said.

“In the Cold War, we had a defined enemy in a national sense,” he said. “You could put your intelligence assets and train them in known areas.

“We went from communism to terrorism, and those that threaten our country, our allies, our people are everywhere in a sense,” he said.

Each of the services trains its own intelligence specialists, which is not the most efficient or effective system. “If you had one entity in the department and one school, then there would be one standard,” Norton said. “If you have a variety of services, combatant commands or agencies involved in human intelligence, then you have a variety of training systems that you have to look at.”

The graduates of the center will be certified and have recognized capabilities, he said. The capabilities and skills that are necessary for human-intelligence collection are the same from one service or agency to the next.

“We need to be interoperable,” Norton said. “We have to be able to take people who are graduates of our schools and assign them to joint commands that require their expertise.”

DoD has tactical, operational and strategic intelligence collectors. Intelligence specialists are debriefers, interrogators and analysts. “It’s a wide range,” Norton said. “The center is not just one course, but a series (of courses) that focus on advanced human-intelligence training.”

The center’s faculty and students will come from all services. It will not be involved in initial training for intelligence specialists, but for mid-level officers and NCOs. One course -- military source operations -- will have roughly 250 students in the first class. Norton said he expects the center to grow as it adds more classes. Training will be hands-on, he said.

“One of the reasons we wanted to go to this joint center concept was the fact that there is limited faculty out there,” he said. “In other words, there are only so many human-intelligence specialists that exist in the real world. It is critical that we get those people on the platform to teach the next generation (of human-intelligence specialists).

Related Sites:
Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

[SandRat]

FR WAR NEWS!

WAR News at Home and Abroad You'll Hear Nowhere Else!

All the News the MSM refuses to use!

Or if they do report it, without the anti-War Agenda Spin!

[mylife]

You cant go to a party or a bar anywhere in town without the humint guys asking all types of friendly questions L0L

[Covenantor]

Terrific. They can start with surveillance and interdiction exercises on the southern border. Then proceed to interrogation techniques and analysis.

I understand that source material for the course can be found in abundance there for free.

[advertising guy]

a “home of human intel” used to be a church.......:(

[AdmSmith]

will have roughly 250 students in the first class.

Is this a good idea? What about compartmentization. One bad apple or one in the wrong situation can compromise all of them.

http://www.mkintel.org/Market%20Intel%20Archives/0904-033%20The%20External%20-%20Internal%20Intelligence%20Units%20and%20Systems%20Process.htm

[Real Analyst]

You had a recent thread about Custer. It is ironic that someone like him -egomaniac, never had an original thought in his life, never led troops in combat, never ran HUMINT, never did any analysis other than to word edit slides for his bosses; is going to be commanding Wegotcha while this center of excellence is supposed to be standing up. Unless of course the HUMINTERs’ task is to find all the pictures that Custer hangs on the wall of himself. From CENTCOM - his biggest accomplishments there were to make crude jokes, give his opinion on who the hottest female reporters were that he interviewed with, fill the hallway with pictures of himself, outline which countries had the best looking hookers, provide comparative rug shopping prices, purchase not legally made in the US really dumb DVDs to play on the plane while riding around the region, and avoid anything controversial, like real intel work. His most remarkable accomplishment was to make CENTCOM’s 1200plus intel outfit the most useless and ignored outfit by anyone forward deployed in the war zone. He had the chance to lead in wartime by driving quality analysis and improving intel in theater but chose to make no hard decisions in order to not offend those higher up who were important to his next star - guys on the ground mean nothing to him. He will laugh like an idiot at dumb jokes and act like a clown in order to be one of the guys. Is that leadership during war? He is appropriately named — like George Armstrong, he can neither see the obvious nor will he listen to those who try to get the right things done. Yep — just the guy to have at Huachcuca to be a model for HUMINT. Anyone of quality assigned to that center will have to be sure to not actually appear to be doing a good job since Custer only applauds mediocrity, will not want the best and brightest because they might actually show up his inferiority and has no standards when it comes to intel work. He has fooled many many people along his careerist path. If he were to advertise for a staff for this center, by his standards, the ad would say “only those who accept low standards and will kiss my butt need apply”

[SandRat]

Come on don’t hold it in tell us what you really think.

Thanks for the G-2 on Gen Custer an appropriate follow-on to Kennedy - Fast.