The Role of Intelligence is to Speak Truth to Power
“Intelligence can give leaders all the warning in the world. What it cannot give them is the wisdom to profit from it.”
The most dangerous sentence in national security is this: we were warned. Long before drone swarms appeared over modern battlefields, professionals inside the national security community had already explained exactly where the technology was headed.
Analysts, strategists, and technologists warned that small, networked autonomous systems would eventually overwhelm traditional defenses. They described a future in which dozens or hundreds of inexpensive unmanned systems could coordinate, converge on a target from multiple directions, and saturate even advanced military systems.
Those warnings were not speculative. In the early 2000s, strategists John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt explored swarm warfare in their influential study “Swarming and the Future of Conflict.” Their analysis described decentralized forces operating as networks rather than traditional formations. Instead of centralized command directing units one at a time, autonomous nodes coordinate across a distributed network and converge simultaneously on a target.
The logic was simple and devastating. A swarm does not behave like a traditional military unit. It behaves like nature. Birds flock. Fish school. Ants coordinate. Each element is inexpensive and expendable. The power comes from collective behavior. Technologists soon translated these concepts into algorithms inspired by nature, including decentralized control systems, collision avoidance techniques, and distributed communications architectures.
Had the United States defense industrial base taken those warnings seriously twenty five years ago, the country would likely dominate the architecture of swarm warfare today.
Instead, the United States spent decades investing in exquisite platforms costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars while adversaries invested in thousands of inexpensive autonomous systems. Drone swarms are now operational reality across multiple conflicts, demonstrating the exact dynamics early strategists predicted.
This pattern of ignoring professional warnings runs deep through American national security history. Time and again, military professionals and intelligence officers have raised alarms only to be dismissed, marginalized, or punished for speaking inconvenient truths. The result has been measured in wars, strategic shock, and loss of life.
Consider the case of General Billy Mitchell. In the 1920s he warned that aircraft would dominate future warfare and demonstrated the vulnerability of battleships to air attack. Instead of embracing the warning, the military establishment court martialed him. Fifteen years later, Japanese aircraft devastated the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Signals intelligence also provided warning before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Indicators existed across diplomatic and intelligence channels, yet the warnings were not synthesized effectively or acted upon in time.
Decades later, counterterrorism professionals repeatedly warned about the growing network surrounding Osama bin Laden. The findings of the 9/11 Commission later documented how the threat had been recognized long before the attacks but was not treated with sufficient urgency.
The Interagency Terrorism Response and Awareness Program (ITRAP) was one of those moments when the national security system briefly saw the future clearly - and then looked away.
In the late 1990s, ITRAP brought together intelligence professionals, law enforcement, emergency response planners, and national security officials to examine how the United States might respond to a coordinated terrorist attack inside the homeland. During the first national-level exercise, known as “Top Officials” (TOPOFF), the scenario examined the consequences of simultaneous attacks in multiple American cities carried out by a transnational terrorist network.
As part of the intelligence planning team for that exercise, I watched analysts and operators walk through the exact vulnerabilities that later became tragically familiar: decentralized extremist networks capable of coordinating complex operations, the possibility of synchronized attacks across multiple urban centers, and the overwhelming strain such events would place on intelligence, law enforcement, and emergency response systems.
The conclusions were sobering but unmistakable - America could be struck by Al Qaeda in multiple cities at once. Those warnings were documented, briefed, and circulated through the national security bureaucracy. Yet, like so many warnings in our history, they struggled to penetrate the political and institutional inertia of the moment.
A few years later, on September 11, 2001, the scenario that we had modeled as planners became reality, when coordinated attacks struck New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, proving once again the hard truth at the center of intelligence work: the warnings are often there, but whether a nation acts on them in time is a different question entirely.
In 2002 the large military exercise Millennium Challenge demonstrated how Iranian asymmetric tactics could overwhelm technologically superior forces. Retired Marine General Paul Van Riper used unconventional strategies to devastate the opposing fleet early in the exercise. Rather than fully confronting the implications, the scenario was reset. Van Riper walked, because the Government chose to ignore reality - for a feel good exercise win.
Cybersecurity professionals have also warned for decades that civilian digital infrastructure could become a battlefield. Today, state-sponsored actors exploit routers, cloud infrastructure, and software supply chains to conduct espionage and disruption operations at global scale.
Just this week, the Justice Department and Microsoft exposed a routine hacking incident. It is a strategic intelligence campaign by Russia’s GRU that weaponizes one of the most mundane pieces of technology in modern life - the small office and home office router. By quietly compromising these devices and redirecting DNS traffic through Kremlin-controlled infrastructure, Russian operators created a global surveillance platform capable of intercepting credentials, monitoring communications, and mapping sensitive networks across governments and critical infrastructure sectors.
Warnings about strategic supply chains followed the same pattern. Analysts warned that dependence on foreign manufacturing for semiconductors and rare earth materials could create strategic vulnerability. But what did the government do, allow all of our industrial base to move offshore, for PEACE DIVIDENDS. Those concerns are now central to our new reversal and national security policy.
The maritime chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz have repeatedly appeared in war games and strategic simulations, for 25 years. Analysts have long warned that asymmetric tactics would disrupt one of the world’s most critical energy corridors.
There is a fundamental structural reason this pattern repeats:
The role of intelligence is to speak truth to power.
The role of politics is often to resist uncomfortable truths.
Warnings that challenge prevailing assumptions threaten programs, budgets, reputations, and political narratives.
But the battlefield does not care about bureaucratic comfort. When warnings are ignored, reality eventually imposes the correction. Drone swarms, cyber operations, information warfare, and distributed autonomous systems are no longer theoretical concepts. They are present battlefield conditions.
Professionals inside the intelligence and military communities will continue to do their duty and raise alarms about emerging threats.
The question history repeatedly asks is whether national leaders will listen before crisis forces the lesson. Because when warnings are ignored, the cost is always paid later—usually in blood.
Selected Sources
Swarming and the Future of Conflict – John Arquilla & David Ronfeldt - https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA525163.pdf
Army University Press – Swarm Warfare Research -
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/
The 9/11 Commission Report - https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf
Millennium Challenge 2002 War Game Analysis - https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA514825.pdf
Microsoft Threat Intelligence Reporting on Nation-State Cyber Operations - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/
U.S. Department of State – Fact Sheet on the TOPOFF Exercise Program, Top Officials (TOPOFF) Counterterrorism Exercise Overview
TOPOFF 2000 After-Action Report, TOPOFF 2000 After‑Action Report (National Response Team)