Intel officers conduct morning updates & offer deskside briefings every single day, all over the world. It has taken on an almost ritualistic status, modeled after the President's Daily Brief. But is it really the best way to deliver intelligence in the 21st-c? I doubt it.

We've traditionally modeled intelligence after the production of newspapers, a concept itself that didn't really gel until the 19th-century, but evolved to put "all the news fit to print" in a single location once per day.

Today's newspapers of record, notably the NYT, have recognized that static snapshots in time are decidedly outdated and that stories must be continuously updated to keep pace with the rate of change in a vastly more complex global environment.

Intelligence, meanwhile, has been reluctant to change, keeping the once-per-day model of morning or afternoon briefings, daily readbooks that are like newspapers, and even in the posting of digital products.

It clings to rituals like the PDB, for instance, for plenty of good reasons, but one of those is that it gives the intel people daily facetime with the President and his cabinet officers, which is a valuable commodity in and of itself.

But this certainly isn't the best way to deliver insight, context, and understanding across the entirety of government. I think we can do better.

I was a briefer for four years at the Pentagon. I came in every morning at 4am to start prepping for an 8am standup briefing for GO/FOs and other senior executives. Contractors came in even earlier to monitor traffic and see what would be included. It was very much a newspaper.

This daily show consumed vast resources to produce read books at various levels of classification, an in-person delivery for a room of a hundred or so people, and the linking in of outstations all over the world. It was, almost without fail, a shit-show.

It almost always turns into theatre, as SESs and lower-ranking officers attempt to impress the "boss" with either stump the chump questions or deflection onto their own competing priorities to show their "value" to the organization.

The best thing the intel officer can do is stay humble, know their material, and often give platitudes like, "that's an interesting question sir, we'll look into it," and then hope they forget about it.

The value created in those dog-and-pony shows is probably close to nil, in my view. Deskside briefings are more productive, and allow the intel officer to develop a much closer relationship with their principal client.

But these are few and far between on account of conflicting schedules, competing priorities, and the time-demands always eating at the principal's day. Intelligence usually is a "nice to have" not a "must-have."

All of these efforts, the big group presentation, or the smaller in-person deskside presentation, are directed against a single individual, usually the commander of a unit or the director of an agency or at higher levels a deputy secretary or cabinet official.

So you have an enormous amount of time and effort going in to produce intelligence that is often discarded because the principal didn't have time to look at it that day. I can't count how many days I sent people to the shred room to dispose of unread copies of readbooks.

Now, you may be thinking, well Zach just sucked at his job. And that could be true. But based on my exchanges with other intelligence officers, both within DoD and without, I get the sense this is a widespread condition.

As an analyst and a briefer, I usually thought (naively) 'wow, this is great information. If only I can deliver it to my principal, they'll grasp how important it is and know what to do about it.'

Sadly, this is hardly ever the case. It's not that our principals are dumb. It's that the demands of modern, complex institutions require so much mental energy that they can't spare the bandwidth to think about future problems - particularly if they're beyond their time horizon.

So, there would be my dumb ass, telling general so-and-so about this great new technology or weapons platform the Russkies were developing and all the implications it might have for future warfare. As if they could do anything about it.

I think our users would be much better served if we started to instead focus on helping them solve the challenges they are faced with and responsible for meeting today than merely telling them what the adversary did in the last week or piquing their interest in a future problem.

Which is one of the reasons I think we need to transition "intelligence" from the delivery of information to more of a problem-framing, decision-supporting, and consensus-building facilitation service.

Intelligence officers are smart, holistic thinkers who see problems in terms of systems and their networked effects. What's more, they're trustworthy. They can be useful sounding boards for decision-makers and advise them on how to think about problems more constructively.

Now, at the highest levels, this already occurs. It's practically the model the NIC was designed around. CIA Directors and now the DNI serve as senior advisors to the President on matters of intelligence specifically and national security more broadly.

But policies are not made by fiat, and the President, while often the loudest voice on any issue, is certainly not the only voice. American national security policy is made through a cacophony of competing voices.

The IC spends an exorbitant amount of time & resources to inform the president and her cabinet officers at the top of the hierarchy. But injecting intelligence at the top of the pyramid & hoping it sticks is less fruitful than letting it grow organically in the network, I think.

In those daily briefings I used to do, they would often be standing-room only. But a lot of the attendees were other intel folks, to be honest. The vast majority of the agency in question weren't privy to such engagements, even if they were sometimes webcast and accessible.

Most people are just busy doing their jobs and were either uninterested in or didn't have the time to waste listening to a "brief" that could go on for an hour and a half or more (again, usually with unnecessary grandstanding).