With the establishment of its Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC) on August 3, the Defense Intelligence Agency now has new authority to engage in offensive counterintelligence operations that seek to thwart foreign intelligence activities.
If defensive counterintelligence is checkers, then offensive counterintelligence is chess.
Unlike defensive counterintelligence, offensive counterintelligence is intended to “make something happen,” a DIA spokesman said last week (pdf). It may involve infiltration, active deception and disruption of opposing intelligence services. It is hard to do well.
“DIA joins just three other military organizations authorized to carry out offensive counterintelligence operations–the Army Counterintelligence office, the Navy Criminal Investigative Serve and the Air Force office of Special Investigations,” reported Pamela Hess of the Associated Press. See “DIA’s New Mission Adds to Intel Arsenal,” August 5.
The Defense Intelligence Agency described at length the origins and intended functions of the new DCHC in a news media briefing last week. The transcript is here.
With targeted policy interventions, we can efficiently and effectively support the U.S. innovation economy through the translation of breakthrough scientific research from the lab to the market.
Crowd forecasting methods offer a systematic approach to quantifying the U.S. intelligence community’s uncertainty about the future and predicting the impact of interventions, allowing decision-makers to strategize effectively and allocate resources by outlining risks and tradeoffs in a legible format.
The energy transition underway in the United States continues to present a unique set of opportunities to put Americans back to work through the deployment of new technologies, infrastructure, energy efficiency, and expansion of the electricity system to meet our carbon goals.
The United States has the only proven and scalable tritium production supply chain, but it is largely reserved for nuclear weapons. Excess tritium production capacity should be leveraged to ensure the success of and U.S. leadership in fusion energy.