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¹ Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 2021, Maintaining the Intelligence Edge: Reimagining and Reinventing Intelligence Through Innovation, a report of the CSIS Technology and Intelligence Task Force, Washington, DC, January.

enunciated by diverse experts, for example from the Congress, the private sector, and prominent congressionally directed commissions, including the recent Solarium and AI commissions.”²

Several external factors over recent decades have heightened the importance of S&T to the IC. The growth of commercial enterprises based on cutting-edge S&T—for example, AI-based software and the use of big data, advanced computing, microelectronics, biotechnology, novel materials, and other developments—means that technology and its applications are progressing rapidly on multiple fronts. And many of these developments are occurring not only in open environments such as universities and government laboratories but also in commercial firms. At the same time, this increased commercialization of S&T is also becoming more international. That is especially true for fields such as life sciences research and development (R&D), telecom, and computing-based technologies that have taken root in multiple countries. On top of these trends is China’s ascension as an economic and political rival, and as a global leader in S&T. The IC in general needs a more effective mechanism than it currently has to gain this knowledge and understanding—what the committee calls “S&T awareness”—and to feed relevant information where it is needed within the IC for S&TI and for mission support. In order to assimilate a full picture of significant global scientific activities, especially those deriving from developments in emerging technologies, one cannot—and should not—rely on intelligence agency sources alone. A useful understanding of current, vital progress in many fields must be filled out by continual input from other U.S. agencies, laboratories, federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), research universities, and the private sector. Unlike the IC, these all have ready access to expert scientists, who interact with foreign partners and with national and international scientific bodies and networks.

These trends combine to imply a pressing need for the IC both to enhance its awareness of these advances and to innovatively incorporate these capabilities into the various IT missions. Those capabilities must support the IC in several ways:

• Generating and maintaining S&T awareness—which includes S&T from all sources that could be useful—to enable recognizing and tapping external S&T advances to support IC operations, including collection, analysis, support, and management. These external advances are in addition to the IC’s internal S&T investments.
• Carrying out S&TI—which consists of collecting and analyzing information about current S&T advances, particularly by adversaries or that may be used by adversaries—in order to prevent surprise, to be able to surprise adversaries, to negate adversarial advantage, or to provide advantage to the United States. Whereas information for S&T awareness can be provided by a broad range of technically trained people, collecting and analyzing for S&TI requires specialized skills and training (intelligence tradecraft). Multiple agencies contribute to this part of the mission, and their work needs to be coordinated. S&TI has traditionally been focused on assessing S&T of adversaries, using open-source and classified means. For this task, there are existent coordinators in place like the National Intelligence Manager for S&T and the National Intelligence Officer for S&T. With the rise in S&T competencies abroad and in the academic and commercial sectors, the target space for S&TI has expanded greatly.
• Creating new capabilities through the IC’s own investments.

The IC’s ability to adopt and leverage S&T advances and to perform S&TI are intimately linked; both call for a high priority on in-depth understanding of S&T. These two broad functions must be better integrated and coordinated across the IC. Strengthening the IC’s capabilities in S&T also calls for it to take greater advantage of not only its own S&T capabilities but also those within other government agencies, across the whole of the nation, and globally. At present, the IC is not as effective as it needs to be in knowing about and agilely implementing advances that come from the global S&T ecosystem. As a result, there is a growing risk that the United States may be surprised by its strategic competitors and adversaries and may forfeit opportunities to surprise them at key times.

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² Cyberspace Solarium Commission, 2020, United States of America, Cyberspace Solarium Commission Final Report, March, https://www.solarium.gov/report; National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, 2021, Final Report: National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, https://www.nscai.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Full-Report-Digital-1.pdf.

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³ Note that associated manufacturing readiness levels should be considered along with respective technology readiness levels.

2. How can the IC derive best value from—and influence as appropriate—the investments of other U.S. government agencies?
3. How can the IC gain best benefit from the efforts of U.S. industry and academia (including both in R&D and in education) and national laboratories?
4. How can the IC best interact with the global S&T enterprise? Failing to engage with the increasingly globalized S&T environment risks forgoing what may be the best available technology and raises the likelihood of technological surprise. On the other hand, there are also risks associated with adversarial access to critical S&T and on reliance on technology that adversaries originate, dominate, own, or control.

Analysis of these four broad questions is the primary focus of the report.

KEY RECOMMENDATION

The committee’s analysis of the four broad questions above led to the following recommendation. This echoes the recommendation in the Intelligence Edge report that a chief technology officer position be established for the IC.

RECOMMENDATION 2.1: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) should consider elevating the priority of science and technology (S&T) by clearly designating an individual to strengthen these Intelligence Community (IC) capabilities. This individual—a chief technology and innovation officer (CTIO)—would report to the Director of National Intelligence, serve as Chief S&T Advisor to the Director, and be charged with the following responsibilities:

• Develop and maintain healthy sharing and participatory relationships across the IC and between it and many relevant domestic and global S&T entities.
• Identify S&T trends with special IC relevance and plan balanced programs of open-source and classified collection and analysis to enable their expedited development and utilization.
• Lead efforts to integrate and coordinate S&T awareness and science and technology intelligence (S&TI). Because S&TI and S&T awareness require different skill sets, and the organizational cultures endemic to each function differ considerably, the CTIO would need to be fully conscious of these differences while fostering shared capacity and understanding to benefit both enterprises.
• Convert this heightened strength in S&T to operational advantage more rapidly and agilely.
• Maintain a diverse, skilled team, selected from within the IC, to be deployed to support the above activities deemed critical to the S&TI mission.

ODNI already has a Director for S&T, but with a more limited remit and placed somewhat lower in the organization. The goal of this recommendation is to raise the visibility of S&T—assigning it to someone who reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence—and broadening the responsibilities. The committee is agnostic on whether to accomplish those goals by recasting the existing position or adding a new one. The paragraphs that follow further describe the important roles and functions of a CTIO.

This function needs to be centralized within ODNI through an office that interfaces with the global S&T enterprises, and then interfaces with the relevant IC agency S&T directorates and managers, and—separately—with those individual agency components that conduct S&TI. The purpose would be to aid those directorates and components, which would maintain primary responsibility for mission support or for S&TI. Each of these activities—using S&T for mission support, and S&TI—requires specialized skills already resident in the individual agencies, but that could be strengthened.

The CTIO should be technically astute and administratively skilled, and be given the authorities to be effective in the roles recommended here. Among those authorities, the CTIO would need to establish incentives (and reduce disincentives) for IC and non-IC entities to mutually participate in and share early results from S&T activities that may have special relevance for IC mission enhancement. The committee is not envisioning a “czar” with strong

powers across the IC, but rather an individual and office specialized in managing these issues because they have become more prominent and impactful.

The exact roles, responsibilities, and authorities of the CTIO would be developed by the IC’s leadership (with the approval of Congress if legislative changes are needed). The primary goal in the committee’s vision is that the CTIO will need a very good understanding of what is going on across the IC: what is working well, and what is not; what shortcomings there are in the IC (or in a particular agency) regarding S&T knowledge; how external changes will affect this; and whether there are new S&T tools that could be used to improve efficiency. Based on a good understanding and process for staying current on what is happening across the IC, the CTIO would have to understand what is happening in the broad S&T community and identify areas that can help solve problems or close gaps internal to the IC. Building on this base, the office would develop and execute a process to fulfill these goals and incentivize key stakeholders to contribute to them. The committee recommends the following responsibilities:

• Outward-facing responsibilities
  • Establish and operate a coordination mechanism for S&TI carried out across the IC. This mechanism might include recruiting and assigning technically astute and operationally savvy IC S&T Liaison Officers to work closely with domestic and foreign non-IC entities, and integrate their findings and insights to maintain an awareness of the global S&T landscape.
  • Establish an S&T evaluation and assessment activity that analyzes the information gleaned from the previous item and, as needed, apprise the DNI and raise attention within the elements of the IC that are best suited to utilize the information. This activity can also feed special requests to the Liaison Officers and open-source analysts.
  • Broaden the IC’s engagement with relevant FFRDCs, the Department of Defense’s university affiliated research centers (UARCs), and selected academic institutions that do classified research, all of which can also provide indirect links to private industry S&T. The CTIO could facilitate partnerships and bilateral arrangements when opportunities to advance IC impact could be achieved via collaboration.
  • Expand the IC’s collaborations with private corporations, non-profits, and academic institutions performing unclassified basic and applied research, including systems engineering that may have potential applications to the IC mission and pre-competitive R&D.
  • Coordinate international S&T activities across the IC and make international S&T a high priority, such as through more open engagement with allies.
• Inward-facing responsibilities
  • Serve as a high-level champion for the IC’s efforts to develop or acquire and deploy transformational S&T from wherever it may arise. This could include a CTIO funding mechanism, but promising S&T capabilities relative to a particular mission area should still be managed by the agency program manager responsible for that mission and for subsequently demonstrating proof-of-concept, engineering for tailored uses, and deployment.
  • Establish and promulgate technical standards and processes to lead IC entities in transitioning S&T to reliable, high-quality operational capabilities (e.g., standards for test, evaluation, and validation including standards for independent technical review); care must be taken that this setting of standards does not become more check blocks administered through oversight.
  • Ensure that S&T best practices and S&T results (within the constraints of necessary compartmentalization) from each agency’s S&T activities are shared among constituent members of the IC S&T community.

ADDITIONAL RECOMMENDATIONS

In addition to the above overarching committee recommendation, other recommendations of this report are given below, with the first digit of each one indicating the chapter in which it is found.

These recommendations are offered in a general sense (“The IC should … ”), recognizing that actual implementation would have to be assigned to specific S&T offices within ODNI and/or other IC agencies, and

recognizing that, to varying degrees, some agencies are already doing some of these things. The purpose of this report is to give advice to ODNI regarding handling of S&T at its level, and not to prescribe specific actions to individual agencies. ODNI would have a special role in coordinating the implementation of these recommendations within and across the agencies, and in formulating policy regarding these recommendations.

RECOMMENDATION 2.2: The Intelligence Community should increase its ability to mine open-source science and technology (S&T) information while remaining consistent with prevailing policies and laws regarding privacy protections. It must enable integrating open-source S&T information with classified intelligence.

RECOMMENDATION 3.1: The Intelligence Community (IC) should position itself to take better advantage of opportunities afforded by interagency science and technology (S&T) committees and other contacts with non-IC agencies that have substantial S&T activities. More interagency staff exchanges would be helpful, as would more active IC participation in cross-agency research and development. Successful activities on the part of some IC agencies should be studied and mined for best practices.

RECOMMENDATION 3.2: The Intelligence Community (IC) should engage in more active partnering with Department of Energy and Department of Defense laboratories (government, federally funded research and development centers, and university affiliated research center laboratories), to take advantage of their extensive infrastructure and capabilities as well as to employ them as a vehicle for expanding the IC’s access to academic and industrial research and development activities through overt relationships. The IC should increase its engagement with various laboratory program review activities.

RECOMMENDATION 4.1: The Intelligence Community (IC) should encourage its technical experts to engage more extensively on a professional level with their peers outside the relatively small IC environment. This would involve attending conferences in their respective fields of expertise, making presentations, and giving talks at other institutions, all with home agency support regarding travel, leave, and expenses. In addition, IC agency experts should be rewarded for inviting outside scientists and engineers to give talks at their home IC agencies. If the proposal to establish a chief technology and innovation officer within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is accepted, that office would be an ideal place to encourage and oversee these practices.

RECOMMENDATION 4.2: To institutionalize increased professional interactions between Intelligence Community (IC) science and technology experts and the rest of the technical world, IC agencies should consider establishing more rotational positions for leading researchers from academia and the private sector, including start-up and venture capital communities. Because SCI level clearances often require a long approval time and impose lifelong prepublication restrictions, some of the rotational positions should be established at both the unclassified and SECRET levels. The lower security level is often subject to a quicker security clearance process than is now practical for the higher level clearances more typical of IC staff. That said, because TS/SCI clearances are usually standard for IC staff, they should be expedited when possible for rotational positions.

RECOMMENDATION 4.3: The Intelligence Community (IC) should consider emulating some of the Department of Defense’s outreach efforts to scientists and engineers in research and development in order to establish trusted collaborations with academia and the private sector. Some of this is being accomplished in the IC, for example, in programs such as IC Scholarships and IC Centers for Academic Excellence. Such efforts should be expanded significantly to develop a trusted community of external researchers. This would be especially useful for engaging researchers without a long history of working with the IC.

RECOMMENDATION 4.4: The Intelligence Community (IC) should adopt more forward leaning policies for working with commercial industry to support joint IC-commercial technology development, such as data sharing, as well as acquisition approaches targeted at more effective scaling and implementation of commercial

technologies, such as bridge funding. Note that data sharing should go both ways: from the industry partner to the IC agency as well. In both cases, the IC should, by working directly with industry, become part of the technology development process. Additionally, a benefit to the IC of collaboration with the private sector would be increased science and technology awareness. The IC should adopt more active policies for working with commercial industry to support joint IC-commercial technology development, such as data sharing, as well as acquisition approaches such as bridge funding targeted at more effective scaling and implementation of commercial technologies.

RECOMMENDATION 5.1: Within its mining of open-source information in general, the Intelligence Community should increase the collection of open-source information on science and technology advances and early stage companies in foreign nations. The chief technology and innovation officer could coordinate these activities and potentially assign and/or post specialists to cover key regions and countries.

RECOMMENDATION 5.2: The Intelligence Community (IC) should increase its interactions with FVEY (Five Eyes, the intelligence partnership among the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand) and other allies through four steps:

RECOMMENDATION 5.3: The Intelligence Community (IC) should work to establish a center (e.g., a nonprofit or at a federally funded research and development center or university affiliated research center) operated external to the IC, focused on open-source science and technology (S&T) information collection. This center should take full advantage of collection opportunities, through a presence at international symposia, where potential competitors display their state-of-the-art efforts in mission-critical areas, such as semiconductors, information technology, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, quantum computing/sensing, biotechnology, and other emergent fields of S&T.

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