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The Funniest Clothing Labels Ever – When was the last time you read the label on your favorite shirt or most comfortable pair of jeans? Maybe it’s time to take a look, your clothing tags may hide a funny message.

The Perfect Gift For Someone You Hate – Hungry AND tired? You can rest on this soft body pillow shaped like smoked pig’s feet! What really amazes us are the details, it looks so real… and so disgusting.

Every Cat at 3AM – If you currently have or have ever had a cat, you’ll be able to relate to Gus Johnson’s video, in which he demonstrates one of the many ways in which our furry friends can be a-holes.

The Funniest Dog Videos Of All Time – We understand the value of a good funny dog video, so here’s a list of our six best viral pup videos of all time. You’re welcome.

Mildly Infuriating Things In Life – Sometimes the internet shows you a photo that’s ever so slightly wrong that it sticks in your brain forever…

Funny Images Showing How Differently Men and Women Act – Yup, we’re different and there is no denying that fact. We have different bodies, different brains and different ways of using both.

Dads Who Didn’t Want The Damn Dogs In Their Lives – Dad logic is a weird thing. They say they hate dogs, and then you end up with a gallery like this…

Random Funny Pictures – What do you do when you are bored at work? You just mindlessly scroll through random funny pictures, of course!

Mr. Bean Playing Every Role In Hollywood – When one thinks of a rugged, versatile actor capable of elevating any role given to them, Mr. Bean naturally springs to mind. And yet he was never cast as Frodo Baggins or Indiana Jones, which in our eyes is one of the saddest tragedies of modern filmmaking.

Funny Thanksgiving Cake Fails – Thanksgiving is a day to reflect and enjoy time with family… and sometimes to FAIL.

Still bored to tears and want to see more funny and entertaining links? You should check out Linkiest, Leenks, or Fark!

The post This Month’s Funniest Internet Finds first appeared on .

When you think the internet can’t get any more niche, it finds a way to get even more specific. We’re, of course, talking about an Instagram account @BagDogs that is solely dedicated to sharing people’s photos of dogs chilling in bags as they are being transported from point A to point B. Scroll down to see some of their best photos!

The post This Instagram Account Shows People Carrying Dogs In Bags, And It’s Hilariously Adorable first appeared on .

Once you’ve reached optimal cat lady status, there comes a time in your life where you think it’s necessary to start massaging your cat’s head. Luckily, someone has already created a cat head massager, and it is most likely the most specific niche product you could think of. You can get it on Amazon or AliExpress.

If your cat didn’t love you before, rest assured he will love you now. Your cat will be so thankful for the head massage that he might even ignore you for less time throughout the day, and if you’re really lucky, your cat may even acknowledge your existence. …Or you can use it on yourself if you have a particularly small head.

In case you feel like you should have this thing in your (and your cat’s) life, you can get it on Amazon or AliExpress.

The post Cat Head Massager Is The Cutest Thing Ever first appeared on .

People are weird. They cook and eat the strangest things. This time it’s an octopus stuffed inside a turkey, sitting on top of crab legs, and (optionally) garnished with bacon strips. This monstrous culinary invention was inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, and honestly… it looks like a crime against food.

If this gallery wasn’t disgusting enough for you, you should also check out pre-cooked canned chicken that we’ve previously featured on this fun and useful site. We know you’ll love it!

The post Meet Cthulhu Turkey: It’s a Turkey Stuffed With Octopus That People Actually Make first appeared on .

Kids say the strangest and funniest things. We’ve always loved the frank, honest and unadulterated way that little humans choose to express themselves. They see things from a different perspective to us grownups whose thoughts have been shaped and molded by the world around us. NYC school teacher Alyssa Cowit was so fascinated by the questions and comments from her Kindergarteners that she decided to start an Instagram account, called Live From Snack Time, to chronicle them. Scroll down for some of the best ones!

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People who live in the big cities are definitely masters of eavesdropping. Sometimes they can’t help it, accidentally overhearing conversations from complete strangers can be so funny, it’s hard not to share them with someone else. And here comes the fittingly named Instagram account Overheard San Francisco that’s dedicated to sharing the funniest eavesdropped interactions in San Francisco and the Bay area. Scroll down to see the funniest examples!

The post Hilarious Private Conversations People Overheard In San Francisco first appeared on .

Cipher Brief Expert Tim Willasey-Wilsey is a Visiting Professor at King’s College, London and a former senior British diplomat. From 1996 to 1999 he was senior advisor to the British government on overseas counterterrorism.  This piece was first published by RUSI in London.  The views do not represent those of RUSI.

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Analysis of openly available sources indicates that a British report shared with the US in December 1998 described an early stage of the 9/11 plot.

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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Two extracts from Presidential Daily Briefs (PDB) are given some prominence in the 9/11 Commission report into the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. One is from a PDB delivered to President Bill Clinton on 4 December 1998, and the other is from a PDB given to President George W Bush on 6 August 2001. Both are presented inside a textbox and both contain intelligence ‘from a friendly government’ which provided the first and only significant suggestion that Al-Qa’ida (AQ) planned to hijack aircraft in the US.

Eight months after the attacks, under Congressional pressure, the Bush administration was obliged to reveal some details of the PDBs, and on 17 May 2002 the New York Times disclosed that ‘the report provided to the president on Aug. 6, which warned him that Mr. bin Laden’s followers might hijack airplanes, was based on 1998 intelligence data drawn from a single British source, government officials said today’. The British government was obliged to acknowledge that the intelligence came from British sources. The Guardian reported on 18 May that ‘The memo received by Bush on 6 August contained unconfirmed information passed on by British intelligence in 1998’. The Independent ran much the same story with additional detail.

Both PDBs quoted from one British report from December 1998. The key question is whether this report, with its significant deviations from what actually happened on the day, actually referred to the 9/11 operation. Subsequently published evidence points compellingly to this indeed being an early version of the 9/11 plan.

The heavily redacted British contribution was shown on pages 127 and 128 of the 9/11 Commission’s report. It reads:

‘On Friday December 4 1998 the CIA included an article in the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) describing intelligence received from a friendly government about a hijacking in the United States.

‘SUBJECT. Bin Laden preparing to hijack US aircraft. Reporting [passage redacted] suggests bin Laden and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Sheikh Omar Abdal Rahman,  Ramzi Yousef and Muhammad Sadiq Awda. One source quoted a senior member of the Gamaat Al-Islamiya (GI) saying that “as of late October the GI had completed planning for an operation in the US on behalf of bin Laden but that the operation was on hold. A senior bin Laden operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit GI counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options – perhaps including an aircraft hijacking. GI leader Islambouli in late September was planning to hijack a US airliner during “the next couple of weeks” to free Abdal Rahman and the other prisoners according to what may be another source. The same source late last month said that bin Laden might implement plans to hijack aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.’

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In May 2002 the US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice issued a statement observing (correctly) that the report had mentioned ‘hijacking in the traditional sense’ with no indication that aircraft would be used as weapons of mass destruction. Her testimony to the 9/11 Commission made broadly the same point.

Indeed, even in late 1998, there was a profusion of threat reports of which the aviation strand was just one. The MI5 official history comments aptly that the Service was puzzled as to why there were so many more reports of threats than actual attacks: ‘Even the most reliably sourced intelligence received on this question usually consists of a snapshot of a proposed plan being discussed. Most of the reporting does not make clear how far advanced the plan is’ (Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, pp. 802–806). What MI5 did not realise at the time was that AQ operations could take up to three years from inception to execution.

Steve Coll writes that ‘Within the morass of intelligence lay ominous patterns. One was an interest by bin Laden’s operatives in the use of aircraft … yet at the counter terrorism security group meetings and at the CIA’s counter terrorist centre there was no special emphasis placed on bin Laden’s threat to civil aviation or on the several exposed plots where his followers had considered turning hijacked airplanes into cruise missiles’ (Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, pp. 419–420).

Although the December 1998 report appears fragmentary, there were a number of aspects of particular interest. The first was the name Ramzi Yousef. Yousef had studied electrical engineering at Swansea Institute from 1986 to 1990 before exploding a massive bomb under the World Trade Centre in February 1993 and then planning the Bojinka Plot against airliners in the Philippines in 1994. Yousef had been arrested in Islamabad in February 1995 and sent to the US, where he was tried and imprisoned for life. He was an energetic and imaginative terrorist, and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was also known to move in terrorist circles.

The aviation link must have struck a chord, too. The British were also interested in Hussain Kherchtou, who had been in Kenya at the time of the Embassy bombings and was himself a pilot. He later provided a debrief to the FBI. His story and his courtship by the British came into the public domain because of a subsequent US court case and a talkative FBI officer.

The Egyptian angle also would have provoked little surprise. On 19 November 1995 Egyptian terrorists had blown up the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, killing 13 – only yards from the British High Commission compound with its exposed staff housing and kindergarten. The British had a miraculous escape that day.

The concern for the release of Sheikh Abdal Rahman, ‘the Blind Sheikh’, was consistent with the widespread devotion which the preacher inspired among Islamist radicals and particularly Egyptians. His imprisonment in New York for his part in Yousef’s attack on the World Trade Centre had caused significant distress among his many adherents, who all wanted his release.

The idea that AQ would strike the US had first surfaced in 1997 and felt like the logical next step. Only a month beforehand (in November 1998), AQ had attacked two US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people including 12 US citizens. These operations had served as a wake-up call for those who thought the AQ threat was being exaggerated, and some who even conceived of Osama bin Laden himself as a benign figure who had somehow got out of his depth.

There were also some puzzling elements in the report. The first was the rather outdated idea of hijacking an aircraft to demand the release of the Blind Sheikh. It felt more in tune with Palestinian terrorist methods of the 1970s, and it was already known that Ramzi Yousef had developed the idea of exploding full airliners in flight.

The involvement of Gama’at Islamiya (GI) seemed odd. Bin Laden was known to be close to Ayman Al-Zawahiri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), with whom GI were usually at daggers drawn. At the time GI were conceived of more as domestic Egyptian terrorists compared to the internationalist EIJ. Indeed, GI’s most recent operation had been the Luxor Massacre of November 1997, which killed 56 foreign tourists.

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The name Islambouli carried great resonance. This was Mohammed Shawqi Islambouli, who had tried to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995. His brother Khalid had been one of the assassins of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981 and had been tried and executed in Cairo. However, although Mohammed was thought to be in Afghanistan, he was not then known to be close to bin Laden, let alone Al-Zawahiri.

The dates made little sense. On the one hand an attack seemed imminent, but on the other hand it was ‘on hold’. But such is the nature of counterterrorist reporting: small fragments of a much bigger jigsaw.

Nonetheless, the report was taken very seriously on its receipt in the US. President Bill Clinton’s counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke summoned his Counterterrorism Security Group. ‘To address the hijacking warning, the group agreed that New York airports should go to maximum security starting that weekend. They agreed to boost security at other East coast airports. The CIA agreed to distribute versions of the report to the FBI and FAA to pass to the New York Police Department and the airlines. The FAA issued a security directive on December 8, with specific requirements for more intensive air carrier screening of passengers and more oversight of the screening process, at all three New York City area airports.’

Of course, when 9/11 happened nearly three years later, there were two very significant differences. Although aircraft were indeed hijacked, they were used as missiles rather than as bargaining chips, and the terrorists were mainly Saudi and not Egyptian. So what happened between December 1998 and September 2001 which could explain these changes?

The 9/11 Commission report (drawing on material from the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) provides a fascinating section on AQ’s development of aviation methodology. Even before bin Laden had left Sudan in mid-1996, he had allegedly discussed the use of aircraft with Mohammed Atef: ‘(1) they rejected hijackings aimed at gaining the release of imprisoned comrades as too complex, because al Qaeda had no friendly countries in which to land a plane and then negotiate; (2) they considered the bombing of commercial flights in midair, as carried out against Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a promising means to inflict massive casualties; and (3) they did not yet consider using hijacked aircraft as weapons against other targets.’

So, why was the idea of a traditional hijacking still being discussed as late as December 1998? The answer must lie in the Egyptian jihadists’ determination to win the release of the Blind Sheikh. Mustafa Hamid, a journalist who was with bin Laden in Afghanistan, provides illuminating insight into the wrangling between EIJ and GI in Afghanistan. Hamid documents the tortuous process by which GI, with some reluctance, formed a union (‘The World Islamic Front against Jews and Crusaders’) with AQ, EIJ and others, but recounts how GI insisted on secrecy about their involvement. Hamid also describes GI’s determination to obtain the Blind Sheikh’s release and the involvement of one of their operatives in the African Embassy bombings (Mustafa Hamid and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan, p. 241 and pp. 263–266). So GI was indeed part of bin Laden’s group in Afghanistan and was involved in operations at the time of the December 1998 report.

However, bin Laden became increasingly irritated by the endless squabbling among the two Egyptian groups. Lawrence Wright, drawing upon a variety of sources, chronicles the disastrous attack on Luxor, which had the effect of alienating the Egyptian population from both groups. When on 23 February 1998 bin Laden’s second fatwa announcing the ‘World Islamic Front’ was published in an Arabic newspaper in London, GI were appalled, and some members tried to have Rahman pronounced emir instead of bin Laden. No wonder that Wright concludes that ‘bin Laden had had enough of the in-fighting between the Egyptian factions. He told both groups that their operations in Egypt were ineffectual and too expensive and that it was time for them to turn their guns on the United States and Israel’ (Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, pp. 290–296). This may explain why the December 1998 report mentions the operation being ‘on hold’. Between December and the spring of 1999, the GI team and Islambouli must have been stood down.

According to the 9/11 Commission report, in March or April 1999, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) – who had hitherto allegedly been on the fringes of AQ – was summoned to Kandahar, where he discussed the aircraft plan with bin Laden and Mohammed Atef. Four operatives were chosen to begin work on the US project. However, ‘travel issues … played a part in al Qaeda’s operational planning from the very start. During the spring and summer of 1999, KSM realized that Khallad and Abu Bara, both of whom were Yemenis, would not be able to obtain US visas as easily as Saudi operatives like Mihdhar and Hazmi’. And so, the 9/11 plot developed with 15 of the 19 terrorists being Saudi nationals. Only Mohammed Atta was Egyptian.

KSM’s key involvement in the 9/11 plot makes it evident that there could not have been a second GI plot running in parallel, because KSM and Islambouli were close associates. Robert Baer and the 9/11 Commission report agree that KSM and Islambouli were working together in Qatar in the mid-1990s. For KSM it must have been difficult to abandon the rescue of his nephew, but he would have known that a traditional hostage release operation had none of the ambition or scale of bin Laden’s new thinking.

On 6 August 2001, only five weeks before the attacks, the December 1998 report featured once again in the PDB given to George W Bush at Crawford, Texas, entitled ‘Bin Laden determined to strike in US’. It began: ‘Clandestine foreign government and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US’, and concluded: ‘We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting such as that from a [redacted] Service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “blind Sheikh” Omar Abdal Rahman and other US-held extremists … Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.’

The PDB of 6 August caused some discomfort to the Bush administration and led to a National Security Archive page devoted to that one PDB (of which the December 1998 British report was just one constituent part).

The CIA Director George Tenet, who had been a tireless pursuer of the AQ threat before 9/11 and a regular correspondent with and visitor to London, regretted that more had not been done ‘to protect the United States against the threat. To cite two obvious and tragic failures, only after 9/11 were cockpit doors hardened and passengers forbidden from carrying box-cutters aboard US commercial airliners’ (George Tenet, At the Centre of the Storm, p. 205).

The British report of December 1998 was fragmentary, and while it was certainly ‘sensational’, it was not half as sensational as the actual events of that unforgettable and tragic day.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the authors, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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(Editor’s Note: This article was first published by our friends at Just Security and is the third in a series that is diving into the foundational barriers to the broad integration of AI in the IC – culture, budget, acquisition, risk, and oversight.)

OPINION — As I have written earlier, there is widespread bipartisan support for radically improving the nation’s ability to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI). For the Intelligence Community (IC), that means using AI to more quickly, easily, and accurately analyze increasing volumes of data to produce critical foreign intelligence that can warn of and help defuse national security threats, among other things. To do that, the IC will have to partner closely with the private sector, where significant AI development occurs. But despite the billions of dollars that may ultimately flow toward this goal, there are basic hurdles the IC still must overcome to successfully transition and integrate AI into the community at speed and scale.

Among the top hurdles are the U.S. government’s slow, inflexible, and complex budget and acquisition processes. The IC’s rigid budget process follows the standard three-year cycle for the government, which means it takes years to incorporate a new program and requires confident forecasting of the future. Once a program overcomes the necessary hurdles to be included in a budget, it must follow a complex sequence of regulations to issue and manage a contract for the actual goods or services needed. These budget and acquisition processes are often considered separately as they are distinct, but I treat them together because they are closely related and inextricably intertwined in terms of the government’s purchasing of technology.

Importantly, these processes were not intended to obstruct progress; they were designed to ensure cautious and responsible spending, and for good reason. Congress, with its power of the purse, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as the executive branch’s chief budget authority, have the solemn duty to ensure wise and careful use of taxpayer dollars. And their roles in this regard are vital to the U.S. government’s ability to function.

Unfortunately, despite the best of intentions, as noted by some in Congress itself, the budget process has become so “cumbersome, frustrating, and ineffective” that it has weakened the power of the purse and Congress’ capacity to govern. And when complicated acquisition processes are layered on top of the budget process, the result is a spider web of confusion and difficulty for anyone trying to navigate them.

The Need for Speed … and Flexibility and Simplicity

As currently constructed, government budget and acquisition processes cause numerous inefficiencies for the purchase of AI capabilities, negatively impacting three critical areas in particular: speed, flexibility, and simplicity. When it comes to speed and flexibility, the following difficulties jump out:

• The executive branch has a methodical and deliberate three-year budget cycle that calls for defined and steady requirements at the beginning of the cycle. Changing the requirements at any point along the way is difficult and time-consuming.
• The IC’s budgeting processes require that IC spending fit into a series of discrete sequential steps, represented by budget categories like research, development, procurement, or sustainment. Funds are not quickly or easily spent across these categories.
• Most appropriations expire at the end of each fiscal year, which means programs must develop early on, and precisely execute, detailed spending plans or lose the unspent funds at the end of one year.
• Government agencies expend significant time creating detailed Statements of Work (SOWs) that describe contract requirements. Standard contract vehicles do not support evolving requirements, and companies are evaluated over the life of the contract based on strict compliance with the original SOW created years earlier.

These rules make sense in the abstract and result from well-intentioned attempts to buy down the risk of loss or failure and promote accountability and transparency. They require the customer to know with clarity and certainty the solution it seeks in advance of investment and they narrowly limit the customer’s ability to change the plan or hastily implement it. These rules are not unreasonably problematic for the purchase of items like satellites or airplanes, the requirements for which probably should not and will not significantly change over the course of many years.

However, because AI technology is still maturing and the capabilities themselves are always adapting, developing, and adding new functionality, the rules above have become major obstacles to the quick integration of AI across the IC. First, AI requirements defined with specificity years in advance of acquisition – whether in the budget or in a statement of work – are obsolete by the time the technology is delivered. Second, as AI evolves there is often not a clear delineation between research, development, procurement, and sustainment of the technology – it continuously flows back and forth across these categories in very compressed timelines. Third, it is difficult to predict the timing of AI breakthroughs, related new requirements, and funding impacts, so money might not be spent as quickly as expected and could be lost at the end of the fiscal year. Taken together, these processes are inefficient and disruptive, cause confusion and delay, and discourage engagement from small businesses, which have neither the time nor the resources to wait years to complete a contract or to navigate laborious, uncertain processes.

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Simply put, modern practices for fielding AI have outpaced the IC’s decades-old approach to budgeting and acquisition. That AI solutions are constantly evolving, learning, and improving both undermines the IC’s ability to prescribe a specific solution and, in fact, incentivizes the IC to allow the solution to evolve with the technology. The lack of flexibility and speed in how the IC manages and spends money and acquires goods and services is a core problem when it comes to fully incorporating AI into the IC’s toolkit.

Even while we introduce more speed and agility into these processes, however, the government must continue to ensure careful, intentional, and appropriate spending of taxpayer dollars. The adoption of an IC risk framework and modest changes to congressional oversight engagements, which I address in upcoming articles, will help regulate these AI activities in the spirit of the original intent of the budget and acquisition rules.

As for the lack of simplicity, the individually complex budget and acquisition rules are together a labyrinth of requirements, regulations, and processes that even long-time professionals have trouble navigating. In addition:

• There is no quick or simple way for practitioners to keep current with frequent changes in acquisition rules.
• The IC has a distributed approach that allows each element to use its various acquisition authorities independently rather than cohesively, increasing confusion across agency lines.
• Despite the many federal acquisition courses aimed at demystifying the process, there is little connection among educational programs, no clear path for IC officers to participate, and no reward for doing so.

The complexity of the budget and acquisition rules compounds the problems with speed and flexibility, and as more flexibility is introduced to support AI integration, it is even more critical that acquisition professionals be knowledgeable and comfortable with the tools and levers they must use to appropriately manage and oversee contracts.

Impactful Solutions: A Target Rich Environment

Many of these problems are not new; indeed, they have been highlighted and studied often over the past few years in an effort to enable the Department of Defense (DOD) and the IC to more quickly and easily take advantage of emerging technology. But to date, DOD has made only modest gains and the IC is even further behind. While there are hundreds of reforms that could ease these difficulties, narrowing and prioritizing proposed solutions will have a more immediate impact. Moreover, significant change is more likely to be broadly embraced if the IC first proves its ability to successfully implement needed reforms on a smaller scale. The following actions by the executive and legislative branches – some tactical and some strategic – would be powerful steps to ease and speed the transition of AI capabilities into the IC.

Statements of Objectives

A small but important first step to deal with the slow and rigid acquisition process is to encourage the use of Statements of Objectives (SOO) instead of SOWs, when appropriate. As mentioned, SOWs set forth defined project activities, deliverables, requirements, and timelines, which are used to measure contractor progress and success. SOWs make sense when the government understands with precision exactly what is needed from the contractor and how it should be achieved.

SOOs, on the other hand, are more appropriate when the strategic outcome and objectives are clear, but the steps to achieve them are less so. They describe “what” without dictating “how,” thereby encouraging and empowering industry to propose innovative solutions. SOOs also create clarity about what is important to the government, leading companies to focus less on aggressively low pricing of specific requirements and more on meeting the ultimate outcomes in creative ways that align with a company’s strengths. This approach requires knowledgeable acquisition officers as part of the government team, as described below, to ensure the contract includes reasonable milestones and decision points to keep the budget within acceptable levels.

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New Authorities for the IC

Two new authorities would help the IC speed and scale its use of AI capabilities: Other Transaction Authority (OTA)  and Commercial Solutions Openings (CSO). Other Transaction Authority allows specific types of transactions to be completed outside of the traditional federal laws and regulations that apply to standard government procurement contracts, providing significantly more speed, flexibility, and accessibility than traditional contracts. While OTA is limited in scope and not a silver bullet for all acquisition problems, OTA has been used to good effect since 1990 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Activity (DARPA), DOD’s over-the-horizon research and development organization, among others.

CSOs are a simplified and relatively quick solicitation method to award firm fixed price contracts up to $100 million. CSOs can be used to acquire innovative commercial items, technologies, or services that close capability gaps or provide technological advances through an open call for proposals that provide offerors the opportunity to respond with technical solutions of their own choosing to a broadly defined area of government interest. CSOs are considered competitively awarded regardless of how many offerors respond.

Both OTA and CSO authority should be immediately granted to the IC to improve the speed and flexibility with which the IC can acquire and transition AI into the IC.

Unclassified Sandbox

The predictive nature of the IC’s work and the need to forecast outcomes means the IC must be able to acquire AI at the point of need, aligned to the threat. Waiting several years to acquire AI undermines the IC’s ability to fulfill its purpose. But with speed comes added risk that new capabilities might fail. Therefore, the IC should create an isolated unclassified sandbox, not connected to operational systems, in which potential IC customers could test and evaluate new capabilities alongside developers in weeks-to-months, rather than years. Congress should provide the IC with the ability to purchase software quickly for test and evaluation purposes only to buy down the risk that a rapid acquisition would result in total failure. The sandbox process would allow the IC to test products, consider adjustments, and engage with developers early on, increasing the likelihood of success.

Single Appropriation for Software

DOD has a pilot program that funds software as a single budget item – allowing the same money to be used for research, production, operations, and sustainment – to improve and speed software’s unique development cycle. AI, being largely software, is an important beneficiary of this pilot. Despite much of the IC also being part of DOD, IC-specific activities do not fall within this pilot. Extending DOD’s pilot to the IC would not only speed the IC’s acquisition of AI, but it would also increase interoperability and compatibility of IC and DOD projects.

No-Year Funds

Congress should reconsider the annual expiration of funds as a control lever for AI. Congress already routinely provides no-year funding when it makes sense to do so. In the case of AI, no-year funds would allow the evolution of capabilities without arbitrary deadlines, drive more thoughtful spending throughout the lifecycle of the project, and eliminate the additional overhead required to manage the expiration of funds annually. Recognizing the longer-term nature of this proposal, however, the executive branch also must seek shorter-term solutions in the interim.

A less-preferable alternative is to seek two-year funding for AI. Congress has a long history of proposing biennial budgeting for all government activities. Even without a biennial budget, Congress has already provided nearly a quarter of the federal budget with two-year funding. While two-year funding is not a perfect answer in the context of AI, it would at a minimum discourage parties from rushing to outcomes or artificially burning through money at the end of the first fiscal year and would provide additional time to fulfill the contract. This is presumably why DOD recently created a new budget activity under their Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) category, which is typically available for two years, for “software and digital technology pilot programs.”

AI Technology Fund

Congress should establish an IC AI Technology Fund (AITF) to provide kick-starter funds for priority community AI efforts and enable more flexibility to get those projects off the ground. To be successful, the AITF must have no-year funds, appropriated as a single appropriation, without limits on usage throughout the acquisition lifecycle. The AITF’s flexibility and simplicity would incentivize increased engagement by small businesses, better allowing the IC to tap into the diversity of the marketplace, and would support and speed the delivery of priority AI capabilities to IC mission users.

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ICWERX  

To quickly take advantage of private sector AI efforts at scale, the IC must better understand the market and more easily engage directly with the private sector. To do so, the IC should create an ICWERX, modeled after AFWERX, an Air Force innovation organization that drives agile public-private sector collaboration to quickly leverage and develop cutting-edge technology for the Air Force. AFWERX aggressively uses innovative, flexible, and speedy procurement mechanisms like OTA and the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs (SBIR/STTR) to improve the acquisition process and encourage engagement from small businesses. AFWERX is staffed by acquisition and market research experts who are comfortable using those authorities and understand the market. While the IC’s needs are not identical, an ICWERX could serve as an accessible “front door” for prospective partners and vendors, and enable the IC to more quickly leverage and scale cutting-edge AI.

De-mystify Current Authorities

While there is much complaining about a lack of flexible authorities in the IC (and a real need for legal reform), there is flexibility in existing rules that has not been fully utilized. The IC has not prioritized the development or hiring of people with the necessary government acquisition and contracts expertise, so there are insufficient officers who know how to use the existing authorities and those who do are overworked and undervalued. The IC must redouble its efforts to increase its expertise in, and support the use of, these flexibilities in several ways.

First, the IC should create formal partnerships and increase engagement with existing U.S. government experts. The General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) and FEDSIM, for example, work across the federal government to build innovative acquisition solutions and help agencies more quickly adopt AI. In addition, DOD’s Joint AI Center has built significant acquisition expertise that the IC must better leverage. The IC also should increase joint duty rotations in this area to better integrate and impart acquisition expertise across the IC.

Second, the IC must prioritize training and education of acquisition professionals. And while deep acquisition expertise is not necessary for everyone, it is important for lawyers, operators, technologists, and innovators to have a reasonable understanding of the acquisition rules, and the role they each play in getting to successful outcomes throughout the process. Collaboration and understanding across these professions and up and down the chain of command will result in more cohesive, speedy, and effective outcomes.

To that end, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) should work with the many existing government acquisition education programs, as well as the National Intelligence University, to develop paths for IC officers to grow their understanding of and ability to navigate and successfully use acquisition rules. The ODNI also should strengthen continuing education requirements and create incentive pay for acquisition professionals.

Third, the IC should prioritize and use direct hire authority to recruit experts in government acquisition, to include a mix of senior term-limited hires and junior permanent employees with room to grow and the opportunity for a long career in the IC. Such a strategy would allow the IC to quickly tackle the current AI acquisition challenges and build a bench of in-house expertise.

Finally, practitioners should have an easily accessible reference book to more quickly discover relevant authorities, understand how to use them, and find community experts. A few years ago, the ODNI led the creation of an IC Acquisition Playbook, which describes common IC acquisition authorities, practices, and usages. The ODNI should further develop and disseminate this Playbook as a quick win for the IC.

Incentivize Behavior

To encourage creative and innovative acquisition practices, as well as interdisciplinary collaboration, the IC must align incentives with desired outcomes and create in acquisition professionals a vested interest in the success of the contract. Acquisition officers today are often brought into projects only in transactional ways, when contracts must be completed or money must be obligated, for example. They are rarely engaged early as part of a project team, so they are not part of developing the solutions and have minimal investment in the project’s success. Reinforcing this, acquisition professionals are evaluated primarily on the amount of money they obligate by the end of the fiscal year, rather than on the success of a project.

Therefore, to start, project teams should be required to engage acquisition officers early and often, both to seek their advice and to ensure they have a good understanding of the project’s goals. In addition, evaluation standards for acquisition officers should incorporate effective engagement and collaboration with stakeholders, consideration of creative alternatives and options, and delivery of mission outcomes. If an officer uses innovative practices that fail, that officer also should be evaluated on what they learned from the experience that may inform future success.

Lastly, the ODNI should reinvigorate and highlight the IC acquisition awards to publicly reward desired behavior, and acquisition professionals should be included in IC mission team awards as a recognition of their impact on the ultimate success of the mission.

Conclusion

Between the government’s rigid budget and acquisition processes and confusion about how to apply them, there is very little ability for the IC to take advantage of a fast-moving field that produces new and updated technology daily. Tackling these issues through the handful of priority actions set forth above will begin to drive the critical shift away from the IC’s traditional, linear processes to the more dynamic approaches the IC needs to speed and transform the way it purchases, integrates, and manages the use of AI.

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Cipher Brief Expert Tim Willasey-Wilsey is a Visiting Professor at King’s College, London and a former senior British diplomat. From 1996 to 1999 he was senior advisor to the British government on overseas counterterrorism.  This piece was first published by RUSI in London.  The views do not represent those of RUSI.

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Analysis of openly available sources indicates that a British report shared with the US in December 1998 described an early stage of the 9/11 plot.

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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Two extracts from Presidential Daily Briefs (PDB) are given some prominence in the 9/11 Commission report into the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. One is from a PDB delivered to President Bill Clinton on 4 December 1998, and the other is from a PDB given to President George W Bush on 6 August 2001. Both are presented inside a textbox and both contain intelligence ‘from a friendly government’ which provided the first and only significant suggestion that Al-Qa’ida (AQ) planned to hijack aircraft in the US.

Eight months after the attacks, under Congressional pressure, the Bush administration was obliged to reveal some details of the PDBs, and on 17 May 2002 the New York Times disclosed that ‘the report provided to the president on Aug. 6, which warned him that Mr. bin Laden’s followers might hijack airplanes, was based on 1998 intelligence data drawn from a single British source, government officials said today’. The British government was obliged to acknowledge that the intelligence came from British sources. The Guardian reported on 18 May that ‘The memo received by Bush on 6 August contained unconfirmed information passed on by British intelligence in 1998’. The Independent ran much the same story with additional detail.

Both PDBs quoted from one British report from December 1998. The key question is whether this report, with its significant deviations from what actually happened on the day, actually referred to the 9/11 operation. Subsequently published evidence points compellingly to this indeed being an early version of the 9/11 plan.

The heavily redacted British contribution was shown on pages 127 and 128 of the 9/11 Commission’s report. It reads:

‘On Friday December 4 1998 the CIA included an article in the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) describing intelligence received from a friendly government about a hijacking in the United States.

‘SUBJECT. Bin Laden preparing to hijack US aircraft. Reporting [passage redacted] suggests bin Laden and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Sheikh Omar Abdal Rahman,  Ramzi Yousef and Muhammad Sadiq Awda. One source quoted a senior member of the Gamaat Al-Islamiya (GI) saying that “as of late October the GI had completed planning for an operation in the US on behalf of bin Laden but that the operation was on hold. A senior bin Laden operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit GI counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options – perhaps including an aircraft hijacking. GI leader Islambouli in late September was planning to hijack a US airliner during “the next couple of weeks” to free Abdal Rahman and the other prisoners according to what may be another source. The same source late last month said that bin Laden might implement plans to hijack aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.’

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In May 2002 the US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice issued a statement observing (correctly) that the report had mentioned ‘hijacking in the traditional sense’ with no indication that aircraft would be used as weapons of mass destruction. Her testimony to the 9/11 Commission made broadly the same point.

Indeed, even in late 1998, there was a profusion of threat reports of which the aviation strand was just one. The MI5 official history comments aptly that the Service was puzzled as to why there were so many more reports of threats than actual attacks: ‘Even the most reliably sourced intelligence received on this question usually consists of a snapshot of a proposed plan being discussed. Most of the reporting does not make clear how far advanced the plan is’ (Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, pp. 802–806). What MI5 did not realise at the time was that AQ operations could take up to three years from inception to execution.

Steve Coll writes that ‘Within the morass of intelligence lay ominous patterns. One was an interest by bin Laden’s operatives in the use of aircraft … yet at the counter terrorism security group meetings and at the CIA’s counter terrorist centre there was no special emphasis placed on bin Laden’s threat to civil aviation or on the several exposed plots where his followers had considered turning hijacked airplanes into cruise missiles’ (Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, pp. 419–420).

Although the December 1998 report appears fragmentary, there were a number of aspects of particular interest. The first was the name Ramzi Yousef. Yousef had studied electrical engineering at Swansea Institute from 1986 to 1990 before exploding a massive bomb under the World Trade Centre in February 1993 and then planning the Bojinka Plot against airliners in the Philippines in 1994. Yousef had been arrested in Islamabad in February 1995 and sent to the US, where he was tried and imprisoned for life. He was an energetic and imaginative terrorist, and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was also known to move in terrorist circles.

The aviation link must have struck a chord, too. The British were also interested in Hussain Kherchtou, who had been in Kenya at the time of the Embassy bombings and was himself a pilot. He later provided a debrief to the FBI. His story and his courtship by the British came into the public domain because of a subsequent US court case and a talkative FBI officer.

The Egyptian angle also would have provoked little surprise. On 19 November 1995 Egyptian terrorists had blown up the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, killing 13 – only yards from the British High Commission compound with its exposed staff housing and kindergarten. The British had a miraculous escape that day.

The concern for the release of Sheikh Abdal Rahman, ‘the Blind Sheikh’, was consistent with the widespread devotion which the preacher inspired among Islamist radicals and particularly Egyptians. His imprisonment in New York for his part in Yousef’s attack on the World Trade Centre had caused significant distress among his many adherents, who all wanted his release.

The idea that AQ would strike the US had first surfaced in 1997 and felt like the logical next step. Only a month beforehand (in November 1998), AQ had attacked two US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people including 12 US citizens. These operations had served as a wake-up call for those who thought the AQ threat was being exaggerated, and some who even conceived of Osama bin Laden himself as a benign figure who had somehow got out of his depth.

There were also some puzzling elements in the report. The first was the rather outdated idea of hijacking an aircraft to demand the release of the Blind Sheikh. It felt more in tune with Palestinian terrorist methods of the 1970s, and it was already known that Ramzi Yousef had developed the idea of exploding full airliners in flight.

The involvement of Gama’at Islamiya (GI) seemed odd. Bin Laden was known to be close to Ayman Al-Zawahiri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), with whom GI were usually at daggers drawn. At the time GI were conceived of more as domestic Egyptian terrorists compared to the internationalist EIJ. Indeed, GI’s most recent operation had been the Luxor Massacre of November 1997, which killed 56 foreign tourists.

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The name Islambouli carried great resonance. This was Mohammed Shawqi Islambouli, who had tried to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995. His brother Khalid had been one of the assassins of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981 and had been tried and executed in Cairo. However, although Mohammed was thought to be in Afghanistan, he was not then known to be close to bin Laden, let alone Al-Zawahiri.

The dates made little sense. On the one hand an attack seemed imminent, but on the other hand it was ‘on hold’. But such is the nature of counterterrorist reporting: small fragments of a much bigger jigsaw.

Nonetheless, the report was taken very seriously on its receipt in the US. President Bill Clinton’s counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke summoned his Counterterrorism Security Group. ‘To address the hijacking warning, the group agreed that New York airports should go to maximum security starting that weekend. They agreed to boost security at other East coast airports. The CIA agreed to distribute versions of the report to the FBI and FAA to pass to the New York Police Department and the airlines. The FAA issued a security directive on December 8, with specific requirements for more intensive air carrier screening of passengers and more oversight of the screening process, at all three New York City area airports.’

Of course, when 9/11 happened nearly three years later, there were two very significant differences. Although aircraft were indeed hijacked, they were used as missiles rather than as bargaining chips, and the terrorists were mainly Saudi and not Egyptian. So what happened between December 1998 and September 2001 which could explain these changes?

The 9/11 Commission report (drawing on material from the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) provides a fascinating section on AQ’s development of aviation methodology. Even before bin Laden had left Sudan in mid-1996, he had allegedly discussed the use of aircraft with Mohammed Atef: ‘(1) they rejected hijackings aimed at gaining the release of imprisoned comrades as too complex, because al Qaeda had no friendly countries in which to land a plane and then negotiate; (2) they considered the bombing of commercial flights in midair, as carried out against Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a promising means to inflict massive casualties; and (3) they did not yet consider using hijacked aircraft as weapons against other targets.’

So, why was the idea of a traditional hijacking still being discussed as late as December 1998? The answer must lie in the Egyptian jihadists’ determination to win the release of the Blind Sheikh. Mustafa Hamid, a journalist who was with bin Laden in Afghanistan, provides illuminating insight into the wrangling between EIJ and GI in Afghanistan. Hamid documents the tortuous process by which GI, with some reluctance, formed a union (‘The World Islamic Front against Jews and Crusaders’) with AQ, EIJ and others, but recounts how GI insisted on secrecy about their involvement. Hamid also describes GI’s determination to obtain the Blind Sheikh’s release and the involvement of one of their operatives in the African Embassy bombings (Mustafa Hamid and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan, p. 241 and pp. 263–266). So GI was indeed part of bin Laden’s group in Afghanistan and was involved in operations at the time of the December 1998 report.

However, bin Laden became increasingly irritated by the endless squabbling among the two Egyptian groups. Lawrence Wright, drawing upon a variety of sources, chronicles the disastrous attack on Luxor, which had the effect of alienating the Egyptian population from both groups. When on 23 February 1998 bin Laden’s second fatwa announcing the ‘World Islamic Front’ was published in an Arabic newspaper in London, GI were appalled, and some members tried to have Rahman pronounced emir instead of bin Laden. No wonder that Wright concludes that ‘bin Laden had had enough of the in-fighting between the Egyptian factions. He told both groups that their operations in Egypt were ineffectual and too expensive and that it was time for them to turn their guns on the United States and Israel’ (Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, pp. 290–296). This may explain why the December 1998 report mentions the operation being ‘on hold’. Between December and the spring of 1999, the GI team and Islambouli must have been stood down.

According to the 9/11 Commission report, in March or April 1999, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) – who had hitherto allegedly been on the fringes of AQ – was summoned to Kandahar, where he discussed the aircraft plan with bin Laden and Mohammed Atef. Four operatives were chosen to begin work on the US project. However, ‘travel issues … played a part in al Qaeda’s operational planning from the very start. During the spring and summer of 1999, KSM realized that Khallad and Abu Bara, both of whom were Yemenis, would not be able to obtain US visas as easily as Saudi operatives like Mihdhar and Hazmi’. And so, the 9/11 plot developed with 15 of the 19 terrorists being Saudi nationals. Only Mohammed Atta was Egyptian.

KSM’s key involvement in the 9/11 plot makes it evident that there could not have been a second GI plot running in parallel, because KSM and Islambouli were close associates. Robert Baer and the 9/11 Commission report agree that KSM and Islambouli were working together in Qatar in the mid-1990s. For KSM it must have been difficult to abandon the rescue of his nephew, but he would have known that a traditional hostage release operation had none of the ambition or scale of bin Laden’s new thinking.

On 6 August 2001, only five weeks before the attacks, the December 1998 report featured once again in the PDB given to George W Bush at Crawford, Texas, entitled ‘Bin Laden determined to strike in US’. It began: ‘Clandestine foreign government and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US’, and concluded: ‘We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting such as that from a [redacted] Service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “blind Sheikh” Omar Abdal Rahman and other US-held extremists … Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.’

The PDB of 6 August caused some discomfort to the Bush administration and led to a National Security Archive page devoted to that one PDB (of which the December 1998 British report was just one constituent part).

The CIA Director George Tenet, who had been a tireless pursuer of the AQ threat before 9/11 and a regular correspondent with and visitor to London, regretted that more had not been done ‘to protect the United States against the threat. To cite two obvious and tragic failures, only after 9/11 were cockpit doors hardened and passengers forbidden from carrying box-cutters aboard US commercial airliners’ (George Tenet, At the Centre of the Storm, p. 205).

The British report of December 1998 was fragmentary, and while it was certainly ‘sensational’, it was not half as sensational as the actual events of that unforgettable and tragic day.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the authors, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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(Editor’s Note: This article was first published by our friends at Just Security and is the third in a series that is diving into the foundational barriers to the broad integration of AI in the IC – culture, budget, acquisition, risk, and oversight.)

OPINION — As I have written earlier, there is widespread bipartisan support for radically improving the nation’s ability to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI). For the Intelligence Community (IC), that means using AI to more quickly, easily, and accurately analyze increasing volumes of data to produce critical foreign intelligence that can warn of and help defuse national security threats, among other things. To do that, the IC will have to partner closely with the private sector, where significant AI development occurs. But despite the billions of dollars that may ultimately flow toward this goal, there are basic hurdles the IC still must overcome to successfully transition and integrate AI into the community at speed and scale.

Among the top hurdles are the U.S. government’s slow, inflexible, and complex budget and acquisition processes. The IC’s rigid budget process follows the standard three-year cycle for the government, which means it takes years to incorporate a new program and requires confident forecasting of the future. Once a program overcomes the necessary hurdles to be included in a budget, it must follow a complex sequence of regulations to issue and manage a contract for the actual goods or services needed. These budget and acquisition processes are often considered separately as they are distinct, but I treat them together because they are closely related and inextricably intertwined in terms of the government’s purchasing of technology.

Importantly, these processes were not intended to obstruct progress; they were designed to ensure cautious and responsible spending, and for good reason. Congress, with its power of the purse, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as the executive branch’s chief budget authority, have the solemn duty to ensure wise and careful use of taxpayer dollars. And their roles in this regard are vital to the U.S. government’s ability to function.

Unfortunately, despite the best of intentions, as noted by some in Congress itself, the budget process has become so “cumbersome, frustrating, and ineffective” that it has weakened the power of the purse and Congress’ capacity to govern. And when complicated acquisition processes are layered on top of the budget process, the result is a spider web of confusion and difficulty for anyone trying to navigate them.

The Need for Speed … and Flexibility and Simplicity

As currently constructed, government budget and acquisition processes cause numerous inefficiencies for the purchase of AI capabilities, negatively impacting three critical areas in particular: speed, flexibility, and simplicity. When it comes to speed and flexibility, the following difficulties jump out:

• The executive branch has a methodical and deliberate three-year budget cycle that calls for defined and steady requirements at the beginning of the cycle. Changing the requirements at any point along the way is difficult and time-consuming.
• The IC’s budgeting processes require that IC spending fit into a series of discrete sequential steps, represented by budget categories like research, development, procurement, or sustainment. Funds are not quickly or easily spent across these categories.
• Most appropriations expire at the end of each fiscal year, which means programs must develop early on, and precisely execute, detailed spending plans or lose the unspent funds at the end of one year.
• Government agencies expend significant time creating detailed Statements of Work (SOWs) that describe contract requirements. Standard contract vehicles do not support evolving requirements, and companies are evaluated over the life of the contract based on strict compliance with the original SOW created years earlier.

These rules make sense in the abstract and result from well-intentioned attempts to buy down the risk of loss or failure and promote accountability and transparency. They require the customer to know with clarity and certainty the solution it seeks in advance of investment and they narrowly limit the customer’s ability to change the plan or hastily implement it. These rules are not unreasonably problematic for the purchase of items like satellites or airplanes, the requirements for which probably should not and will not significantly change over the course of many years.

However, because AI technology is still maturing and the capabilities themselves are always adapting, developing, and adding new functionality, the rules above have become major obstacles to the quick integration of AI across the IC. First, AI requirements defined with specificity years in advance of acquisition – whether in the budget or in a statement of work – are obsolete by the time the technology is delivered. Second, as AI evolves there is often not a clear delineation between research, development, procurement, and sustainment of the technology – it continuously flows back and forth across these categories in very compressed timelines. Third, it is difficult to predict the timing of AI breakthroughs, related new requirements, and funding impacts, so money might not be spent as quickly as expected and could be lost at the end of the fiscal year. Taken together, these processes are inefficient and disruptive, cause confusion and delay, and discourage engagement from small businesses, which have neither the time nor the resources to wait years to complete a contract or to navigate laborious, uncertain processes.

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Simply put, modern practices for fielding AI have outpaced the IC’s decades-old approach to budgeting and acquisition. That AI solutions are constantly evolving, learning, and improving both undermines the IC’s ability to prescribe a specific solution and, in fact, incentivizes the IC to allow the solution to evolve with the technology. The lack of flexibility and speed in how the IC manages and spends money and acquires goods and services is a core problem when it comes to fully incorporating AI into the IC’s toolkit.

Even while we introduce more speed and agility into these processes, however, the government must continue to ensure careful, intentional, and appropriate spending of taxpayer dollars. The adoption of an IC risk framework and modest changes to congressional oversight engagements, which I address in upcoming articles, will help regulate these AI activities in the spirit of the original intent of the budget and acquisition rules.

As for the lack of simplicity, the individually complex budget and acquisition rules are together a labyrinth of requirements, regulations, and processes that even long-time professionals have trouble navigating. In addition:

• There is no quick or simple way for practitioners to keep current with frequent changes in acquisition rules.
• The IC has a distributed approach that allows each element to use its various acquisition authorities independently rather than cohesively, increasing confusion across agency lines.
• Despite the many federal acquisition courses aimed at demystifying the process, there is little connection among educational programs, no clear path for IC officers to participate, and no reward for doing so.

The complexity of the budget and acquisition rules compounds the problems with speed and flexibility, and as more flexibility is introduced to support AI integration, it is even more critical that acquisition professionals be knowledgeable and comfortable with the tools and levers they must use to appropriately manage and oversee contracts.

Impactful Solutions: A Target Rich Environment

Many of these problems are not new; indeed, they have been highlighted and studied often over the past few years in an effort to enable the Department of Defense (DOD) and the IC to more quickly and easily take advantage of emerging technology. But to date, DOD has made only modest gains and the IC is even further behind. While there are hundreds of reforms that could ease these difficulties, narrowing and prioritizing proposed solutions will have a more immediate impact. Moreover, significant change is more likely to be broadly embraced if the IC first proves its ability to successfully implement needed reforms on a smaller scale. The following actions by the executive and legislative branches – some tactical and some strategic – would be powerful steps to ease and speed the transition of AI capabilities into the IC.

Statements of Objectives

A small but important first step to deal with the slow and rigid acquisition process is to encourage the use of Statements of Objectives (SOO) instead of SOWs, when appropriate. As mentioned, SOWs set forth defined project activities, deliverables, requirements, and timelines, which are used to measure contractor progress and success. SOWs make sense when the government understands with precision exactly what is needed from the contractor and how it should be achieved.

SOOs, on the other hand, are more appropriate when the strategic outcome and objectives are clear, but the steps to achieve them are less so. They describe “what” without dictating “how,” thereby encouraging and empowering industry to propose innovative solutions. SOOs also create clarity about what is important to the government, leading companies to focus less on aggressively low pricing of specific requirements and more on meeting the ultimate outcomes in creative ways that align with a company’s strengths. This approach requires knowledgeable acquisition officers as part of the government team, as described below, to ensure the contract includes reasonable milestones and decision points to keep the budget within acceptable levels.

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New Authorities for the IC

Two new authorities would help the IC speed and scale its use of AI capabilities: Other Transaction Authority (OTA)  and Commercial Solutions Openings (CSO). Other Transaction Authority allows specific types of transactions to be completed outside of the traditional federal laws and regulations that apply to standard government procurement contracts, providing significantly more speed, flexibility, and accessibility than traditional contracts. While OTA is limited in scope and not a silver bullet for all acquisition problems, OTA has been used to good effect since 1990 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Activity (DARPA), DOD’s over-the-horizon research and development organization, among others.

CSOs are a simplified and relatively quick solicitation method to award firm fixed price contracts up to $100 million. CSOs can be used to acquire innovative commercial items, technologies, or services that close capability gaps or provide technological advances through an open call for proposals that provide offerors the opportunity to respond with technical solutions of their own choosing to a broadly defined area of government interest. CSOs are considered competitively awarded regardless of how many offerors respond.

Both OTA and CSO authority should be immediately granted to the IC to improve the speed and flexibility with which the IC can acquire and transition AI into the IC.

Unclassified Sandbox

The predictive nature of the IC’s work and the need to forecast outcomes means the IC must be able to acquire AI at the point of need, aligned to the threat. Waiting several years to acquire AI undermines the IC’s ability to fulfill its purpose. But with speed comes added risk that new capabilities might fail. Therefore, the IC should create an isolated unclassified sandbox, not connected to operational systems, in which potential IC customers could test and evaluate new capabilities alongside developers in weeks-to-months, rather than years. Congress should provide the IC with the ability to purchase software quickly for test and evaluation purposes only to buy down the risk that a rapid acquisition would result in total failure. The sandbox process would allow the IC to test products, consider adjustments, and engage with developers early on, increasing the likelihood of success.

Single Appropriation for Software

DOD has a pilot program that funds software as a single budget item – allowing the same money to be used for research, production, operations, and sustainment – to improve and speed software’s unique development cycle. AI, being largely software, is an important beneficiary of this pilot. Despite much of the IC also being part of DOD, IC-specific activities do not fall within this pilot. Extending DOD’s pilot to the IC would not only speed the IC’s acquisition of AI, but it would also increase interoperability and compatibility of IC and DOD projects.

No-Year Funds

Congress should reconsider the annual expiration of funds as a control lever for AI. Congress already routinely provides no-year funding when it makes sense to do so. In the case of AI, no-year funds would allow the evolution of capabilities without arbitrary deadlines, drive more thoughtful spending throughout the lifecycle of the project, and eliminate the additional overhead required to manage the expiration of funds annually. Recognizing the longer-term nature of this proposal, however, the executive branch also must seek shorter-term solutions in the interim.

A less-preferable alternative is to seek two-year funding for AI. Congress has a long history of proposing biennial budgeting for all government activities. Even without a biennial budget, Congress has already provided nearly a quarter of the federal budget with two-year funding. While two-year funding is not a perfect answer in the context of AI, it would at a minimum discourage parties from rushing to outcomes or artificially burning through money at the end of the first fiscal year and would provide additional time to fulfill the contract. This is presumably why DOD recently created a new budget activity under their Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) category, which is typically available for two years, for “software and digital technology pilot programs.”

AI Technology Fund

Congress should establish an IC AI Technology Fund (AITF) to provide kick-starter funds for priority community AI efforts and enable more flexibility to get those projects off the ground. To be successful, the AITF must have no-year funds, appropriated as a single appropriation, without limits on usage throughout the acquisition lifecycle. The AITF’s flexibility and simplicity would incentivize increased engagement by small businesses, better allowing the IC to tap into the diversity of the marketplace, and would support and speed the delivery of priority AI capabilities to IC mission users.

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ICWERX  

To quickly take advantage of private sector AI efforts at scale, the IC must better understand the market and more easily engage directly with the private sector. To do so, the IC should create an ICWERX, modeled after AFWERX, an Air Force innovation organization that drives agile public-private sector collaboration to quickly leverage and develop cutting-edge technology for the Air Force. AFWERX aggressively uses innovative, flexible, and speedy procurement mechanisms like OTA and the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs (SBIR/STTR) to improve the acquisition process and encourage engagement from small businesses. AFWERX is staffed by acquisition and market research experts who are comfortable using those authorities and understand the market. While the IC’s needs are not identical, an ICWERX could serve as an accessible “front door” for prospective partners and vendors, and enable the IC to more quickly leverage and scale cutting-edge AI.

De-mystify Current Authorities

While there is much complaining about a lack of flexible authorities in the IC (and a real need for legal reform), there is flexibility in existing rules that has not been fully utilized. The IC has not prioritized the development or hiring of people with the necessary government acquisition and contracts expertise, so there are insufficient officers who know how to use the existing authorities and those who do are overworked and undervalued. The IC must redouble its efforts to increase its expertise in, and support the use of, these flexibilities in several ways.

First, the IC should create formal partnerships and increase engagement with existing U.S. government experts. The General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) and FEDSIM, for example, work across the federal government to build innovative acquisition solutions and help agencies more quickly adopt AI. In addition, DOD’s Joint AI Center has built significant acquisition expertise that the IC must better leverage. The IC also should increase joint duty rotations in this area to better integrate and impart acquisition expertise across the IC.

Second, the IC must prioritize training and education of acquisition professionals. And while deep acquisition expertise is not necessary for everyone, it is important for lawyers, operators, technologists, and innovators to have a reasonable understanding of the acquisition rules, and the role they each play in getting to successful outcomes throughout the process. Collaboration and understanding across these professions and up and down the chain of command will result in more cohesive, speedy, and effective outcomes.

To that end, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) should work with the many existing government acquisition education programs, as well as the National Intelligence University, to develop paths for IC officers to grow their understanding of and ability to navigate and successfully use acquisition rules. The ODNI also should strengthen continuing education requirements and create incentive pay for acquisition professionals.

Third, the IC should prioritize and use direct hire authority to recruit experts in government acquisition, to include a mix of senior term-limited hires and junior permanent employees with room to grow and the opportunity for a long career in the IC. Such a strategy would allow the IC to quickly tackle the current AI acquisition challenges and build a bench of in-house expertise.

Finally, practitioners should have an easily accessible reference book to more quickly discover relevant authorities, understand how to use them, and find community experts. A few years ago, the ODNI led the creation of an IC Acquisition Playbook, which describes common IC acquisition authorities, practices, and usages. The ODNI should further develop and disseminate this Playbook as a quick win for the IC.

Incentivize Behavior

To encourage creative and innovative acquisition practices, as well as interdisciplinary collaboration, the IC must align incentives with desired outcomes and create in acquisition professionals a vested interest in the success of the contract. Acquisition officers today are often brought into projects only in transactional ways, when contracts must be completed or money must be obligated, for example. They are rarely engaged early as part of a project team, so they are not part of developing the solutions and have minimal investment in the project’s success. Reinforcing this, acquisition professionals are evaluated primarily on the amount of money they obligate by the end of the fiscal year, rather than on the success of a project.

Therefore, to start, project teams should be required to engage acquisition officers early and often, both to seek their advice and to ensure they have a good understanding of the project’s goals. In addition, evaluation standards for acquisition officers should incorporate effective engagement and collaboration with stakeholders, consideration of creative alternatives and options, and delivery of mission outcomes. If an officer uses innovative practices that fail, that officer also should be evaluated on what they learned from the experience that may inform future success.

Lastly, the ODNI should reinvigorate and highlight the IC acquisition awards to publicly reward desired behavior, and acquisition professionals should be included in IC mission team awards as a recognition of their impact on the ultimate success of the mission.

Conclusion

Between the government’s rigid budget and acquisition processes and confusion about how to apply them, there is very little ability for the IC to take advantage of a fast-moving field that produces new and updated technology daily. Tackling these issues through the handful of priority actions set forth above will begin to drive the critical shift away from the IC’s traditional, linear processes to the more dynamic approaches the IC needs to speed and transform the way it purchases, integrates, and manages the use of AI.

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