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By Root 820 0

such as China, Russia still, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and, to a lesser degree, Iran. Second, these states pose the same dilemma in terms of the limits of technical collection and the difficulty of human collection. Third, it is important to remember that the collection systems in orbit in 2008 were designed and launched either at the end of the cold war or in its immediate aftermath, when the nature of the post-cold war world left little guidance as to intelligence needs. So, to an extent the United States is still using a technical collection system built for the Soviet target, whose applicability to early twenty-first-century problems may be somewhat limited.

THE EMPHASIS ON SOVIET MILITARY CAPABILITIES

The predominant question within the Soviet issue was that of the nation’s military capabilities, which posed a threat to the United States and its allies.

Capabilities refer to the current forces or those being planned. The U.S. intelligence community sought information about the quantity and quality of Soviet armed forces across the board; the directions of Soviet military research and development and new capabilities the Soviets might be pursuing; the degree to which current and planned capabilities posed a threat to U.S. and allied interests; and the Soviet doctrine, that is, how the Soviets planned to employ forces in combat.

With the right collection systems, much of a potentially hostile nation state’s capabilities can be known. This is particularly true of deployed conventional and strategic forces, which are difficult to conceal, as they tend to exist in identifiable garrisons and must exercise from time to time. They also tend to be garrisoned or deployed in large numbers, which makes hiding them or masking them impractical at best. The regularity and precision that govern each nation’s military make it susceptible to intelligence collection. Forces tend to exercise in regular and predictable patterns, which also reveal how they are intended to be employed in combat. Research and development may be more difficult to track up to a point, but systems must be tested before they are deployed, again exposing them to collection. In other words, these military activities in any state tend to self-reveal. Research and development can be done secretly, in laboratories or remote sites, but eventually all weapons have to be tested—repeatedly—before they can be deployed.

Although the U.S. intelligence community made mistakes during the cold war, such as overestimating and underestimating missile forces, overall Soviet capabilities were fairly well known in detail. Some level of comfort may even have been derived from tracking these hard objects. As one senior military intelligence officer put it, “The Soviet Union was the enemy we came to know and love.” Some people dismissed the so-called bean counting, arguing that the military inventories were undertaken largely to justify bigger defense budgets. (“Bean counting” is a somewhat pejorative term that refers to intelligence products that tally up the number of forces, equipment, and manpower in foreign militaries. Although demanding and necessary, critics do not see these products as insightful or analytical.) The logic of this view was difficult to follow, because the intelligence community had little institutional interest in larger military forces. Within the national security sector of the budget, every dollar that went to defense was one dollar less that was available for intelligence, which was always funded at significantly lower levels than defense. intentions—the plans and goals of the adversary—are a more amorphous subject and pose a much more difficult collection problem. They need not be demonstrated, exercised, or exposed in advance, and they may not even be revealed by regular military exercises. Standoff or remote collection systems, which may be useful for collecting against capabilities, may reveal nothing about intentions. Signals intelligence may help reveal intentions, but this collection task may require espionage.

During