Blog Post #2: A National Intelligence Strategy for Australia

In a previous post, I talked about the requirement for an Australian National Intelligence Strategy (NIS) for the Australian National Intelligence Community (NIC). In this follow-up, I’ll focus on what such a strategy might look like.

First, let’s look at what is widely recognised as the benchmark for what a NIS should look like – the US’ National Intelligence Strategy published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The Australian ONI’s leadership and enterprise management role was modelled on the ODNI, and the US NIS is widely understood by the NIC as a very important document. This begs the question: why doesn’t Australia have its own NIS?

The US develops and publishes its NIS every four years. The last one was published in 2019 – the last year of the Trump administration – and they were also published in 2014, 2009 and for the first time in 2005. The next one is due to be published in 2024 – the last year of the current Biden administration. Therefore, in the space of 18 years, the US Intelligence Community (IC) has produced four NIS’ to Australia’s none. Notably, the 2011 and 2017 intelligence reviews would have all had access to two and three US NIS’ respectively, with no apparent consideration given to whether a similar approach should be adopted by Australia.

What is in the US’ NIS and why is it important? In summary, the 2019 NIS states the US IC’s vision and mission and explains the current strategic environment in terms of both threats and opportunities.

The NIS then moves onto articulating seven mission objectives – three are foundational as they transcend threats and regions (strategic, anticipatory, and current operations intelligence), and four are specific topical mission objectives (cyber threat intelligence, counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterintelligence and security).

The NIS then identifies seven enterprise objectives: integrated mission management, integrated business management, people, innovation, information sharing and safeguarding, partnerships and privacy, civil liberties, and transparency.

Interestingly, the 2019 NIS objectives are almost the same as the 2014 NIS (by the Obama administration). This shows a significant continuity of objectives over an eight-year period and two very different administrations. Notably, in its conclusion, the 2019 NIS states that it provides:

…the IC with the DNI’s strategic direction for the next four years, aligns IC priorities with other national strategies, and supports the IC’s mission to provide timely, insightful, objective, and relevant intelligence and support to inform national security decisions and to protect our Nation and its interests. The IC must fully reflect the NIS in agency strategic plans, annual budget requests, and justifications for the NIP (the National Intelligence Program). The DNI will assess IC element proposals, projects, and programs toward the objectives of the NIS to realize the IC’s vision of a Nation made more secure by a fully integrated, agile, resilient, and innovative Intelligence Community that exemplifies America’s values.

These are powerful words to ensure alignment of such a large and diverse IC. There can be no doubt that such similar words, with the organisational and budgetary authority backing them up, would have a similar impact on the NIC’s ends, ways and means.

The intelligence debate in Australia generally focusses on technology, policy, privacy, and legislation rather than threat focussed operational capability and capacity. For example, there is little focus on the NIC’s capabilities and readiness to play its role in Australia’s national security apparatus. This is very different to the often-obsessive focus on ADF equipment acquisitions, strategy, and operations. There is possibly even greater debate on Australia’s diplomatic capability than there is on its intelligence capability.

Interestingly, issues of technology, policy, privacy, and legislation broadly correspond to the foci of the US NIS’ enterprise objectives and most of the content and recommendations of the past independent intelligence reviews. Indeed, the 2017 review specifically addressed issues such as coordination, intelligence priorities and resource management, evaluation, ICT connectivity, data sharing, accountability to government, workforce, cyber security issues, and science and technology. These are all important, but they are fundamentally at the policy and tactical levels.

The NIC needs to ask itself bigger strategic questions, and the government needs to ask these questions of the NIC. Questions such as: What is the NIC’s strategy to support government policy making in a deteriorating strategic environment with China where there is increasing ‘grey zone’ complexity and risk? If war does eventuate with China over Taiwan or another regional flashpoint, what is the NIC’s capability in supporting ‘wartime’ decision-making by the government? What is the NIC’s capability in supporting and enabling ADF and Allied operations at ‘campaign’ and ‘battle’ level? What is the NIC’s capability path to conducting all-source intelligence fusion to deliver a fully fused intelligence picture to decision-makers at all levels?

These questions, and many more like them, may be too much too soon for a public document, but they do need to be asked – even if they are only addressed within the walls of the NIC for now. A NIS is critical in providing the framework – ends, ways and means – to address them.

In 2004, Flood recommended the intelligence community be subjected to periodic review every five to seven years. With reviews published in 2005, 2011 and 2017 it appears that Australia is due for the next one in 2023. This is a matter that I recommend the new government prioritises. In a time of such strategic contestation, I argue that now is not the time to delay such an important undertaking.

I also recommend that the next independent intelligence review has a focus on intelligence strategy as a key driver of intelligence capability and capacity, with an orientation towards great power competition, grey zone operations, and high intensity combat operations against a modern adversary. I further recommend that the NIC be required to develop a NIS every four years, and that the NIC’s performance should be assessed against this strategy by follow-on independent intelligence reviews. This would then address the question of how do you know if you are achieving your objectives, if you don’t know what your desired end state is to begin with? Perhaps even the cycle for the development of the National Intelligence Strategy could be synchronised with the conduct of independent intelligence reviews.

In my previous post on this subject, I quoted Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: ‘having a strategy suggests an ability to look up from the short term and the trivial to view the long term and the essential…’ As our strategic environment continues to worsen, we need clear-eyed intelligence strategy more than ever. It is time for Australia to have a National Intelligence Strategy.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are solely my own and do not represent the views of any clients or employers.