REMARKS OF ROBERT M. GATES DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE AFCEA ANNUAL INTELLIGENCE SYMPOSIUM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88G01117R001004240001-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 15
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 30, 2011
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: October 7, 1986
• Content Type: MISC

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Remarks of Robert M. Gates
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
Before
AFCEA Annual Intelligence Symposiuia
Naval Surface Weapons Center
New Hampshire Avenue and White Oak
White Oak, Maryland
7 Octooer 1080
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lI
7 October 1986
Low Intensity Conflict:
War By Another Name
I want to thank AFCEA for inviting me to address this
conference on Intelligence Support for Low Intensity Conflict.
The Director of Central Intelligence and I, as you may know,
coordinate the national level activities and budgets of all the
elements of the US Intelligence Community -- including the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency
(NSA), CIA, and the foreign intelligence elements of the FBI,
the Departments of Energy, State and Treasury and the military
services. It is in the context of our overall Intelligence
Community responsibilities that I speak today, for the critical
role of intelligence in the American conduct of Low Intensity
Warfare transcends the capabilities of any single agency,
Indeed, bureaucratic parochialism and turf battles -- within
and among policy and intelligence agencies -- have in the past
been an obstacle to US conduct of war against subversion,
insurgency, terrorism and narcotics,
In January of this year, Secretary Shultz said "low
intensity conflict is the prime challenge we will face, at
least through the remainder of this century. The future of
peace and freedom may well depend on how effectively we meet
it." The same month, Secretary Weinberger said, "much has been
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written about low intensity warfare, but it remains an open
question how much is understood. Of greater certainty is the
fact that little of what is understood has been applied
effectively."
In my confirmation hearings last spring I said that "I
believe that we face a very complicated international
environment. Resistance movements are fighting Soviet
aggression in their country. There are groups resisting the
imposition of Marxist-Leninist regimes supported by the Soviet
Union, Cuba and Vietnam in their countries, The Soviets have a
very active covert action program aimed at political
destabilization that we estimate broadly is costing them on the
order of $4 billion a year. We are confronting problems in the
world of narcotics, terrorism, proliferation of chemical and
biological weapons, and a host of other problems. I think that
the experience of the last 10 years would suggest that in many
of these cases, diplomacy alone is not an effective
instrument. I think that experience also would show that in
many of these instances, overt military action by the United
States is either not appropriate, or would not be supported by
the American people or the Congress. At that point, the United
States has two options. It can develop other instruments by
which to carry out its policy and to try and protect its
interests, or it can turn and walk away." This conference and
others like it contribute to developing the other instruments
for waging low intensity conflict. We cannot and must not walk
away.
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Low Intensity Conflict: What Is It?
Low intensity conflict presents us with a major emerging
national security challenge. We are only beginning to come to
grips with defining the issue coherently, attacking it
analytically and countering it operationally, And, while many
parts of our national security machinery are -- or soon will
have to become -- involved in confronting the threats posed by
low intensity conflict, the foundation of our efforts to meet
these threats lies in intelligence -- in understanding the
problem, collecting information and analyzing it, in providing
the decisionmaker with a framework and, increasingly often, the
means for combatting it,
While we in the intelligence business still view
insurgencies and the political penetration of national
liberation movements by Marxist-Leninist groups as a primary
element in defining low intensity conflict, we also include
traditional law enforcement issues like terrorism and narcotics
under the low intensity conflict heading -- particularly when
the foreign purveyors of such actions conspire together or with
insurgent groups for broader mutual benefit.
Terrorists, and especially those States which support them,
are carrying out low intensity conflict, Shia extremists in
Lebanon are a good example -- in their self-styled war against
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Israel and Western influence, they've combined guerrilla
attacks and terrorism, much of it under the sponsorship of Iran
and Syria. Drug runners who gain the protection of insurgents
become more than a law enforcement problem; in some cases, they
gain the potential clout to threaten a government allied to the
US, such as in Colombia. Insurgents who ply the drug trade to
fill their coffers and add to their foes' problems, and even
governments, such as Cuba and Nicaragua, which are involved in
moving drugs to earn hard currency and to undermine their
enemies are also engaging in low intensity conflict,
Low intensity conflict is the "weapon of choice" in the
Third World, and its many manifestations constitute the slings
and arrows of availability and economy against larger, more
developed powers whose defenses are designed primarily for
nuclear and conventional military conflicts and whose strengths
are in economic development and democratic values. It is a
classic case of the capacity to destroy arrayed against the
capacity to build,
Moreover, since low intensity conflict is the great
equalizer for those who operate below the margins of nuclear
power and conventional armies, it has a definite allure for
Moscow in its global competition with the US, In a world where
the nuclear and conventional balance changes slowly and where
Soviet economic, political and ideological power is stunted,
the opportunities in low intensity conflict provide the Soviets
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one of their few good lines of attack against the West. It has
not been lost on the Soviets that the practitioners of low
intensity conflict who score spectacular successes against the
West by bending or defining the rules -- like the Iranian
takeover of our embassy -- are finding ways past the West's
defenses, both physical and psychological.
All of this brings me back to Secretary Shultz's statement
that low intensity conflict is our primary challenge through
the rest of this century, It also brings me to the focus of my
remarks here -- the role of intelligence in support of our
efforts to manage low intensity conflict,
The Role of Intelligence
The Intelligence Community once allocated almost all of its
resources against the Soviet Union and China, but this has
changed dramatically over the last decade. As the challenges
of low intensity conflict have grown over the last several
years, the Intelligence Community has responded, The Community
started an aggressive rebuilding program in the early '80s that
has come to include, to a great degree, the intelligence
ingredients of low intensity conflict support, We have added
to our agencies a sizeable number of operations officers,
attaches and analysts in the Third World, and greatly expanded
our information base on the Third World. We've established the
Central America Joint Intelligence Team, a joint terrorist
C
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center, and built a Community terrorist data base. We've
developed better and quicker ways to deliver SIGINT and imagery
support to the field. We're now working to strengthen the
Intelligence Community's contribution to the war on overseas
narcotics production and networks. In Grenada, El Salvador,
Lebanon, the Achille Lauro, and Bolivia we have made a
tremendous contribution to successful US actions and policies,
and at the same time, used each experience to strengthen our
capabilities even more.
Low intensity conflict targets are more difficult for the
Intelligence Community to address than the traditional Soviet
intelligence target. Specific threats are all too often very
difficult to forecast. They are rarely foreseen in time to
have any impact on scheduled programmatic actions, and
frequently they occur in areas where we have little or no
intelligence infrastructure. Low intensity conflicts are often
less susceptible to national technical means and demand
dependence as well on traditional Humint, tactical signals and
reconnaissance means, and analysis. Making matters still
worse, access to the local country may be denied to us and
often there may be no official US presence of any kind --
Angola is a good example. When we have not adequately
anticipated a low intensity conflict situation, we often must
quickly develop an adequate intelligence infrastructure.
A
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Management
Let me comment briefly on the management impact of all
this. Much of the management problem relates to the issues
that I mentioned just a moment ago of setting priorities and
allocating resources, Here is an area where we can use your
help.
I think we'd all agree that the Intelligence Community
needs to place special focus, on a Community-wide basis, on low
intensity conflict intelligence support issues, at least to
assure that we understand low intensity conflict and can
improve intelligence support, This symposium and its DoD and
DIA predecessors are doing just that. But we must also
remember that intelligence is a supporting community and not a
policymaking organization. No major shifts of resources or
priorities can be sustained without a policy consensus, We are
seeing such a consensus develop around counterterrorism and
drug enforcement.
We need sharply focused management in the field as well as
a Washington-level intelligence resource and policy forum that
includes all participants at national and theater level, For
excellent model, A similarly useful role is played by the
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Terrorist Incident Working Group and its Operations Support
Group.
The management of our collection assets is another issue
that cuts across priorities in allocating and melding
resources, There is no question but that our classic
collectors do a terrific job collecting against low intensity
conflict targets and that they will continue to be tasked, At
the same time the old "keep it simple" rule is unquestionably
essential to low intensity conflict collection. This is
country. Here is another place where technology --
particularly low cost, simple to operate and maintain
technology -- can help.
Another challenge we, as managers, confront is the
difficulty of anticipating the next hot spot and committing
resources,
constraints. Who could have anticipated in 1980 that Grenada
would become the focus of US military action? Mexico, the
Philippines, Southern Africa and others are comparatively easy
to plan resources for. But how can we allocate resources well
in advance to be ready for crises in Suriname, Haiti, New
Caledonia, Chad, North Yemen, or countless others?
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This places a premium on surge capabilities that can depend
on already existing data bases, and specialists on the general
art of combating or waging insurgencies, of countering and
thwarting terrorism, of tackling narcotics networks, We need a
core of experts -- still thin and fragile -- in each area to
ensure that new tactics, new information and old and new
experience are adequately integrated. This often will require
bureaucratic flexibility to create new organizations as they
are needed, as well as the innovativeness to identify ways in
which American strengths -- economic, political, technological
-- can be brought to bear. And it puts a premium on protecting
expertise even on small, currently or seemingly unimportant
countries.
Finally, let me address a critically important aspect of
intelligence support. For far too long, we have been content
to be passive participants in low intensity conflict. We
collect information, we analyze it, and we send reports to
policy agencies and officials. Yet, we know -- as I said
before -- that traditional diplomacy and military measures are
usually not effective against low intensity conflict --
especially insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, terrorism and
subversion. Often the most effective offensive weapons
available are those either in intelligence or are deeply
dependent upon the aggressive use of intelligence, We in
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intelligence can help combat low intensity conflict
effectively. But we can no longer think or behave as passive
observers, We in intelligence are the shock troops of low
intensity conflict, Managers must lead this change in attitude
and priority,
Low Intensity Conflict: War Between Nations
Let me close with a personal observation about low
intensity conflict, Too often we are preoccupied by tactics
and fail to achieve a strategic understanding of disparate
events and developments that we associate with low intensity
conflict. It is essential to appreciate that low intensity
conflict is preeminently still war between nations -- wars
without declaration, without mobilization, without massive
armies. It is that long twilight war described a quarter
century ago by President Kennedy.
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In the Third World, the Soviet Union has been conducting
for decades a war against the West. It has affixed itself like
a parasite to legitimate nationalist, anti-colonial movements
or to those who have overthrown repressive or incompetent
regimes and tried wherever possible to convert or consolidate
them into Marxist-Leninist dictatorships as in Nicaragua,
Angola and Ethiopia. It has worked to destabilize governments
in the hope of displacing them with others of its own choosing
as in the Congo, Ghana, Chile, Grenada, Pakistan, and the
Yemens. It has, directly and indirectly, supported
insurgencies in El Salvador, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the
Congo, Rhodesia, South Africa, and many others. Other measures
to secure control in Afghanistan having failed, it invaded,
It has directly and indirectly trained, funded, armed, and
even operationally assisted terrorist organizations such as
Fatah, Abu Nidal, and others. In all these areas, it has been
helped by its clients or dependents Cuba, Libya, Vietnam,
Nicaragua, and the East Europeans, Thus, as we reflect on the
last forty years of violence and instability in the Third
World, the Soviet Union and its surrogates have played a major
role. Their participation is a common feature of low intensity
conflict as is their ability relentlessly to sustain their
involvement over many years.
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Outside of Europe, it is hard to find terrorist
organizations that in some way or another do not enjoy the
protection of Syria, Libya, Iran, Cuba or Nicaragua, While not
all terrorist acts or groups are state sponsored, these
governments -- and others in Eastern Europe and elsewhere --
provide protection, facilities, funding, arms and political
support that makes it possible for most terrorist organizations
to operate and survive,
Thus, as we consider low intensity conflict and how to deal
with it, it is imperative to remember that the sources, the
wellsprings of such conflict usually are still governments,
And so I return to my original premise: We are at war, And, I
further submit to you that, as in the post forty years, these
political-military wars will dominate our foreign policy and
preoccupy our leaders as far into the future as we can see, If
we deny or simply fail to recognize that most low intensity
conflict is war and is being conducted or sustained by states
hostile to us, we will underestimate its durability, its danger
to us, and its scope. Similarly, we will deny ourselves both
weapons and opportunities appropriate for use against nations.
We can no longer allow our adversaries to say "what's mine is
mine and what is yours is negotiable" or subject to subversion,
attack or terror,
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I set forth these propositions and analysis because too
many treat low intensity conflict as a new and narrowly viewed
phenomenon, the latest fad -- the newest bandwagon
bureaucracies and contractors alike are climbing aboard because
it's perceived to be where the action and the dollars are, if
we fail to see the larger strategic picture, if we ignore the
lessons we can learn from our past experience in these
conflicts, if we regard low intensity conflict as a transitory
phenomenon rather than a dominant and enduring element of the
international environment to be strategically managed, then we
will constantly be on the defensive, we will be reacting --
dancing to the tune of Marxist-Leninist subversion and
aggression, of terrorists and drug dealers, As a country, as
corporate executives, and as government officials, we must
develop realistic policies, public support for those policies
and make the long term investment in resources, technology and
information essential to overcoming or winning low intensity
conflicts.
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