Externe

The congressman believes that NOAH should reside within the
Defense Department and is modeling the hub's concept on a
U.S. Army organization he closely follows. He says the idea
for NOAH comes from officials in several federal agencies.
However, it is also based on his own experiences with the
U.S. Army's Intelligence and Security Command's (INSCOM's)
Land Warfare Information Activity (LIWA) and Information
Dominance Center, Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
Patterned after LIWA (SIGNAL, March, page 31), NOAH would
display collaborative threat profiling and analysis with the
aid of a variety of electronic tools, the hub would
support national actions, Weldon discloses.
The congressman is conscious of other initiatives such as
linking counterintelligence groups throughout the community.
He also is aware of the Central Intelligence Agency's,
(CIA's) counterterrorism center, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation's (FBI's) National Infrastructure Protection
Center and a new human intelligence (HUMINT) special
operations center, ``We don't need another

[[Page H5248]]

analytical center. Instead, we need a national-level fusion
center that can take already analyzed data and offer courses
of action for decision making,'' he insists.
Weldon's wide experience in dealing with officials from
the FBI, CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) convince
him that policy makers are continuing to work in a vacuum.
``Briefings and testimonies are the primary vehicles for
transmitting information to leaders. The volume of
information germane to national security issues is expanding
so rapidly that policy makers are overwhelmed with data,'' he
claims.
Robust situational awareness of asymmetric threats to
national security is a key in assisting leaders, Weldon
observes. ``Policy makers need an overarching information and
intelligence architecture that will quickly assimilate,
analyze and display assessments and recommend courses of
action for many simultaneous national emergencies,'' he
declares. The concept of NOAH also calls for virtual
communications among policy makers.
Weldon's plan is for White House, Congress, Pentagon and
agency-level leaders each to have a center where they
receive, send, share and collaborate on assessments before
they act. He calls NOAH the policy maker's tool. In the
collaborative environment, the hub would provide a
multiissue, multiagency hybrid picture to the White House
situation room and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
NOAH's concept also includes support for HUMINT and
peacekeeping missions along with battle damage assessment.
The same system could later help brace congressional
committees and hearings. The new capability would allow
application of foreign threat analyses to policy, while
providing a hybrid situational awareness picture of the
threat, Weldon relates. Industrial efforts of interest to the
policy maker could be incorporated, and academia also could
be directly linked.
In meetings with high-level FBI, CIA and defense officials,
Weldon stressed the need to ``acquire, fuse and analyze
disparate data from many agencies in order to support the
policy maker's actions against threats from terrorism,
[ballistic misile] proliferation, illegal technology
diversions, espionage, narcotics [trafficking], information
warfare and cyberterrorism.'' He is convinced that current
collection and analysis capabilities in various intelligence
agencies are stovepiped. ``To some extent, this involves turf
protection, but it clearly hinders policy making.''
Weldon, who was a Russian studies major, offers some of his
own recent experiences as examples of why there is a strong
need for NOAH. He maintains close contact with a number of
Russians and understands their programs and technologies. The
congressman is quick to recall vignettes about Russian
officials and trips to facilities in the region.