Appetite for intelligence: outdated Army training, education programs get revamped.

The U.S. Army is preparing to expand its intelligence workforce by as many as 15,000 officers during the next several years.

The move, which is intended to provide field commanders with on-the-spot intelligence, not only will require additional manpower, but also a sweeping overhaul of Army training and education programs that were fashioned for the Cold War.

With intelligence units now deployed on average one year out of two, the stress is taking a toll on the force, said Lt. Col. Stephen Iwicki, Army deputy director for actionable intelligence. "Retention is falling in high-optempo units," he said in an interview. Battalion intelligence staffs in Iraq have doubled in recent months, from four or five analysts to 10.

The number of soldiers and officers assigned to brigade intelligence staffs is expected to soar from 51,000 today to 66,000 by 2011, as the Army reorganizes its 10 divisions into 43 self-sustaining "modular" brigades. The largest increase, of about 9,000, will be in the ranks of "humint," or human intelligence specialists, who rely on their own wits and knowledge of the local culture to identify the enemy, rather than on information collected by sensing devices.

Other occupations forecast to grow in demand are unmanned aircraft operators, electronic signals intelligence specialists and data analysts, said Iwicki.

Cuts to intelligence budgets following the end of the Cold War and outdated training programs left the Army ill equipped to contend with "irregular" enemies such as the insurgent guerillas it is fighting in Iraq, Iwicki noted.

During the past two years, the Army has launched a number of efforts that are aimed at making up for gaping holes in intelligence training, he added. A case in point is the upcoming opening of the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

The program will cover three major areas: cultural awareness, red teaming (learning how to think like the enemy) and open-source intelligence analysis.

Red-teaming courses will start in October and will last 18 weeks, Iwicki said. The Army funded two courses a year and is setting up a distance-learning curriculum as well. Non-Army participants will be allowed a small percentage of the slots available, he said.

The ultimate goal, set by Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, is to have a red-team trained officer in each brigade staff. It will take at least four to five years to get there, Iwicki said. Each team will have about 20 people.

To assist U.S. commanders in Iraq, meanwhile, the Army Intelligence and Security Command assigned four groups of experts, known as "tactical over-watch" teams, to become a sort of 911 service for troops in the field, Iwicki said. Each team of about 20 includes uniformed Army personnel, intelligence civilians and contractors. The 3rd Infantry Division has been testing the concept since August. "They provide relevant tactical support 24 hours a day," Iwicki said. "The 3rd ID is happy with the support."

In creating these teams, the Army is recognizing that, with limited access to classified intelligence, commanders in Iraq have become dependent on information that is collected and scrutinized by analysts working from secret facilities in the United States.

Although tactical commanders are benefiting from improved information systems that they control from the battlefield, such as mapping technologies and imagery databases, they rely on analysts based in Fort Belvoir, Va., to provide sensitive intelligence that only is available on classified networks.

In acknowledgment that the intelligence available to U.S. forces often can be inadequate, Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, recently approved the opening of a joint intelligence operations center that is scheduled to be up and running in Iraq this summer.

The center will be responsible for "collaborative intelligence analysis," Iwicki said. "We need to get everyone working on a common network ... down to the battalion command post level."

In a dispersed battlefield such as Iraq, it is not enough for commanders to know what is happening in the area they oversee. They also need a broader picture of what's taking place elsewhere in the country, Iwicki said. To make it easier for soldiers to report information during patrols or other reconnaissance missions, the Army plans to field 1,000 handheld computers, known as "commander's digital assistants."

The Army purchased 75 prototype CDAs last fall, and sent them to Iraq. But soldiers found that the devices were not rugged enough, nor were they as useful as they could be, Iwicki said. "The beta version was working OK, but we found another system that was better, with better capabilities." The prototype CDA, made by General Dynamics Corp., will be replaced by a new version--a commercial handheld computer called Tacticomp, made by Inter-4 Corporation. The new system will be in production in June.

"We plan to buy 1,000 to make it available at the platoon level," Iwicki said. "It's a more rugged box." Unlike the earlier CDAs, which are equipped with individual satellite communications antennas, the Tacticomp devices are grouped in a wireless local-area network, which makes them more functional for small units. In an area covered by a platoon, for example, most of the devices are wireless and talk to a master switch, which has a satellite communications capability, Iwicki explained. "It's a better system overall."

Tacticomp already is being employed by the U.S. Special Operations Command. Under a project called "Pathfinder," SOCOM funded a prototype intelligence network that feeds video from loitering small unmanned aircraft--called Raven--down to company commanders, platoon leaders and platoon sergeants equipped with the handheld computers. Adam Fields, a senior Army engineer who worked on Pathfinder, said that, during a recent exercise at Fort Benning, Ga., commandos touted the utility of a wireless network that also is rapidly deployable.

The Army intends to purchase one Tacticomp for every platoon, Iwicki said. There are nine platoons in each combat battalion, "so every time the platoon goes out on patrol, they have a CDA," he said. A larger, tablet version stays in the command post.

The next step is to make sense out of the data. While analysts process reams of intelligence, that information is not always useful or comprehensible to tactical commanders. "Fusion is our biggest technology risk," said Collin Agee, director of Army intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

Simply stated, fusion is about taking pieces of information and "putting the puzzle together," Iwicki said. "The challenge is that there is too much data," which is both good and bad news. "We want more information, but we need better tools to manage it."

Army analysts have met some degree of success with XML tagging technology, which works like Google. "Fusion has been a challenge for years," Iwicki said. And things are likely to get worse as the Army moves toward fielding the Future Combat Systems, a complex network of vehicles and sensors. An internal study showed that each FCS brigade will cough up 178,000 reports in a single mission. The Army has yet to come to grips with how to merge that information, he said. "It's complex."

Another area where intelligence has proved unsatisfactory is urban reconnaissance, Agee told a defense industry gathering in Arlington, Va.

"We are starting to study that very hard," Iwicki said. Army doctrine for decades has been wedded to the notion that commanders will bypass a city, surround it and wait the enemy out. "We know we can't do that any more," he said.

Also complicating matters for intelligence analysts is the shortage of reliable translators.

"We are overwhelmed by the translation challenges in Iraq," Agee said.

One option the Army is contemplating is to set up a "1-800-linguist" hotline that would make a pool of Arabic linguists in the United States available for translation services, Iwicki said.

Many of the translation problems, he explained, result from a lack of understanding of the culture. In Arabic, for example, there are more than 20 ways to spell Mohammed. An intelligence analyst trying to gather information on a certain Mohammed would query a database and get 2,300 hits, but more than 28,000 hits if all the different spellings are included.

Underpinning the Army's strategy to give commanders more useful information about the enemy is to train every soldier to be a better observer and reporter, Iwicki noted.

The Defense Department has spent billions of dollars over several decades developing smart munitions that can hit targets with pinpoint precision, but has not focused on turning "soldiers into sensors," and teaching them intelligence gathering and reporting skills, he added. "We also have to train commanders on how better to communicate requirements to soldiers, and not just hand them a list."

The Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth is in charge of developing an "every soldier a sensor" training program, Iwicki said. "Every school will teach that, from basic training on."

Part of what makes soldiers valuable intelligence collectors in Iraq is their ability to gain the trust of the locals, noted Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Upon returning from a recent visit to Iraq, Levin said that, based on conversations with commanders, he concluded that even though the insurgents employ shrewd tactics, troops generally "feel a lot better about their capability to gather intelligence," because there is "greater willingness on the part of the community, including the [formerly pro-Saddam] Sunnis, to come forward with information."