delanceyplace.com 2/22/08 - army intelligence

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In today's excerpt - defense intelligence. Alex Rossmiller, former U.S. defense analyst in Iraq, reports that in addition to dealing with constant department reorganizations, altered report contents, and disregarded information, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency also lacked sufficient access to computer resources:

"We simply could not believe that, three years into a major war, the most significant military and foreign policy operation in decades, and with American soldiers dying on a daily basis, the main Department of Defense Iraq intelligence shop was in temporary office space without the resources necessary to succeed.

"The office was budgeted for roughly a hundred people and ... we actually had about eighty. For those eighty, we had approximately sixty computer stations. At any given time, there were people who simply could not do their jobs because we didn't have enough computers. ... Within DIA, there are three distinct vital networks that analysts use to do their missions correctly. ... Those three include two classified systems, which I'll call ClassA and ClassB, as well as the unclassified Internet or Unclass. ... Fifty-five or sixty stations were Class A-connected, but the other two systems, both crucial, were sparsely allocated ... we had about fifteen ClassB and a dozen Unclass machines for sixty computer screens. ... I sometimes asked about the issue ...

" 'Are we ever going to get more ClassB and Unclass machines in here?' 'I'm working on it, man, I'm working on it.' ...

"We had this conversation, or a variant thereof, probably twice a month. ... To add insult to injury, the room adjacent to [ours] was filled with probably seventy empty cubicles, most of which had two or three of the systems already set up. ... When we asked management why we couldn't use the unused workstations in the adjacent room, leadership told us that they were J3 [operations] spaces. ...

"To alleviate the [issue], most of the office used some version of an early shift and a late shift. ... We just had too many bodies for too few computers. ... The adjacent space had been empty for months before I arrived; it remained so throughout the time I spent [there], and, according to friends still in the office, it's unoccupied as of this writing. ... I suppose it's not surprising that Department of Defense and administration leadership who failed to provide proper armor for troops and transportation in Iraq would neglect the intelligence operation driving the war effort."