Innovating a new intelligence architecture, a prerequisite for building the developmental state in a world of uncertainty and fragility

Successful states are able to navigate the complexities of geopolitics, the challenges and opportunities that pepper the strategic landscape and make sense of what is often an opaque and dynamic world.

A nation’s intelligence apparatus constitutes the apex of its efforts to make sense of a world in flux, inform strategic decision-making and warn of the perils around the corner or further afield. The idea that any state with our level of domestic complexity and fragility, continental engagement and international ambition can succeed without effective intelligence is not merely naive but dangerous.

It would also be a gift to criminals, terrorists and states that seek to weaken us. Our national security apparatus enters an era of institutional transformation in the context of a fluid and fragile geopolitical situation, compounded by a polity characterised by fracture, instability and strategic drift.

Recent developments such as the Review Panel on the State Security Agency, testimonies at the Zondo commission and the intensifying internecine warfare in Crime Intelligence and SAPS provide both an opportunity and need for reflection and crafting a new path to confront the challenges facing our national security infrastructure.

While the focus of commentary has been on the allegations and counter-allegations of corruption and the factional abuse of intelligence, the questions we need to ask must go well beyond this. Our ability to create an effective, agile and accountable intelligence capability depends on the extent to which we can elevate our thinking to the strategic level and adopt a more holistic view of where we are, what we require and what our options are.

Context is king

The primary driver that determines the nature, scope and mission of an intelligence institution is an appreciation of the real world. If the last 26 years of governance has taught us anything it is that looking at the world or ourselves through idealistic lenses does not provide a sound basis for understanding the world.

Contemporary geopolitics is characterised by the dangers inherent in the contestation for supremacy between the US and China.

The Trump administration clearly positioned the US for a confrontation with China, not only in the Asia-Pacific theatre, but on the African land mass as well as the Indian Ocean.

This strategy is not a Trumpist aberration, but a logical development of Obama’s Pivot to Asia and its consequent militarisation through the  US Air-Sea Battle Doctrine, initially secret and then made public in 2010.

The idea that the new Democratic administration would fundamentally shift course on the major strategic question of our time is simply naive, if hopeful. Preponderance is deeply embedded in US strategy, and our neighbourhood is already a site of contestation between US Preponderance and China’s Peaceful Rise.

South Africa needs to navigate this emerging contestation with great finesse and caution. The role of effective intelligence, using the full arsenal of intelligence resources, is a prerequisite for the protection of our national interest as this dynamic play out.

We face a situation where the ANC, the country’s historical instrument of national cohesion, has lost its own cohesive ability.

The disintegration of the ANC constitutes a threat to the cohesion of the society as a whole, particularly in the absence of any alternative cohesive instrument. This has significant consequences for stability, but equally so for the ways in which foreign actors engage the ANC and state. It is a vulnerability that any sensible international player will exploit.

States are self-interested entities that seek to optimise their influence comparative to other states.

Great Powers are central to shaping the geopolitical domain through a wide range of tools at their disposal, including persuasion, economic incentives or the creation of an information environment favourable to themselves.

At the other end of this spectrum lies coercive action that ranges from diminished trade, the denial of key positions in international institutions, the instigation of social unrest and the sabotage of key state entities.

Much of this statecraft is conducted through covert action, which emphasises the centrality of intelligence in accurately characterising the nature of other states’ strategy towards us without becoming embroiled in meaningless sloganeering.

Our national interest is inextricably linked to peace and security on the continent, where we collectively face serious threats but also a significant opportunity to re-engineer its economic and developmental trajectory.

The last decade of strategic drift in South African foreign policy coincides with and probably contributed to, the emergence of a powerful bloc underpinned by non-African interests, clearly aimed at reversing the traditional anti-imperialist positions of the AU, South Africa and its allies.

Our single biggest challenge is the collapse of the apartheid economy and our inability to construct a new people-centred, developmental economy. Our ability to rescue the South African national project depends on constructing such a new economy, a central plank of which should be the opportunities presented by increasing integration on the continent.

The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) provides the first significant opportunity in recent years to shape Africa’s independent path to economic prosperity, coupled with an increased integration of its people and economies. This opportunity must be nurtured and safeguarded, while at the same time SA must be in a position to optimally benefit from AfCFTA. In the light of this, the centrality of economic and political intelligence cannot be overstated.

New domains of statecraft, warfare and intelligence

The reconstruction of our intelligence architecture occurs at a time when a revolution in military and intelligence affairs (RMIA) is unfolding, with the concomitant recalibration in the conduct of statecraft, warfare and intelligence.

The key tenets of this RMIA are technological, strategic and informational. This trinity of factors are all interdependent, and its application in the real strategic domain has already been witnessed elsewhere, including Venezuela, the US and UK, Ukraine and Iran.

The emergence of the concept of Non-Linear Hybrid Warfare into the contemporary strategic lexicon has profound implications for the conduct of strategic and intelligence affairs. The expansion of the Grey Zone, the increasingly vague boundaries between War and Peace and the weaponisation of the information domain, are factors that could be wielded against us at a moment when our lack of national cohesion and our institutional fragility most exposes us to, and compounds, the effect of such measures.

The weaponisation of internal ANC conflict, the lack of consensus on building the developmental state and our decreasing influence on the continent will be worsened by an assault that deploys non-kinetic means of warfare, yet achieves the same effect – a loss of sovereignty, social fracturing and an inability to exercise any freedom of manoeuvre to advance our national interest.

The development of micro-targeting and its integration with mass technical surveillance is particularly disconcerting in SA, where our national centre of gravity is firmly located in a small group of political leaders or functionaries within the ANC. It is the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel, compounded by the very real fissures within the ruling party.

Building capable intelligence

While the opportunity to learn from the last decade and more of mismanagement, strategic drift, factionalism and opportunism is significant, our collective task is to ensure that we learn the right lessons. Without this, the entire exercise will repeat itself in the not too distant future.

What are some of these lessons?

Intelligence without strategy is the equivalent of deploying a missile without a guidance system, and the construction of an intelligence architecture without a National Strategy and National Security Strategy will have the effect of creating a bureaucratic apparatus that has no sense of mission, cannot develop a cohesive strategic or institutional culture, recruit the right staff, deploy them properly or resource them in a manner equivalent to their purpose.

The first order of business in crafting a new architecture is therefore to initiate an inclusive and rigorous strategy development process. My own view is that such a process and consequent strategy will make evident the need for a transformation in intelligence far beyond the return to the status quo before the merged SSA.

If SA ever needed an intelligence capability it is now, when the country is fragile, its social cohesion fractured and the geopolitical situation fraught with potential conflict. But any old cosmetic rehash for the purposes of public consumption won’t do.

Testimony before the Zondo commission serves a cathartic purpose, but also carries within it the potential to simply identify a few villains in what remains a complex problem. Such a narrow, if appealing, view of the causes of the rot in our intelligence community will not allow us to create a capability that can meet the challenges we face.

We also face the risk of conscious “under-reach” that is the tendency to compensate for abuse by moving to the other extreme, of not capacitating the new institutions with the authority, strategic direction and mandate to do proper intelligence work.

The ideological basis for this has already been planted in the suggestion that our intelligence services can only function properly within the context of what some refer to as intelligence as done in the established democracies. Apart from the fact that in matters of intelligence these states preach one thing and practise something else, it is critical that we create an independent path in recreating our intelligence architecture instead of copying a “do as I say, not as I do” model from the “developed democracies”.

The widespread interception of personal communications by British and US intelligence exposed by Edward Snowden, the mode of accountability by obfuscation so essential to British intelligence oversight and the use of torture by the CIA offer a cautionary tale. We cannot replace factionalised intelligence with neutered intelligence.

The liberation movement has a long history of innovation in theory, organisational design, mobilisation and tactics. This history was preceded by the innovation and boldness displayed by our people during the wars of resistance against colonialism.

Instead of mimicking a liberal-democratic farce of how intelligence ought to be done, we should draw on the extensive resources available in our security community, academic and policy circles and civil society to create institutions that are capable of serving the national interest.

The learning required to build an intelligence architecture that capably serves the nation’s interests requires a conscious effort to dislodge ourselves from groupthink, placing the national interest at the core of our efforts, a bravery to go beyond what is known and comfortable, and a commitment to challenging our own biases.

All of this is easier said than done, especially in a burocratised and factionalised intelligence community. Through the work our team at ACSIP has done with analysts and national security leaders, we have experimented with a range of models, activities and approaches to institutional analysis and strategy.

This includes complex-dynamic national security scenario analysis, strategic gaming and strategic culture exploration. The toolbox to innovate and deliver an effective intelligence architecture should use these and other tools and resources instead of reverting to the standard box-diagram exercises that seeks to shift things around to minimise disruption and guarantee everyone’s place in a new institution.

Those who will lead this transformation into an uncertain future have at their disposal the commitment of the South African people, the professionalism and patriotism of the majority of intelligence professionals and the willingness of experts from all fields to ensure their success.

What we require from them is boldness in vision and a drive to innovate an architecture that can meet the challenges of our complex times, serve the nation loyally and is composed of the best among us.

David Africa is the director of the African Centre for Security and Intelligence Praxis (ACSIP), a South African think tank and capability development consultancy. Africa has worked in counter-terrorism, intelligence and national security strategy since 1995.