The Albanese government will soon unveil its response to the 2024 Independent Intelligence Review. This report – the latest in a periodic exercise that also produced reports in 2004, 2011 and 2017 – was always going to struggle with expectations. The 2017 review was transformative, empowering the now-Office of National Intelligence (ONI) to provide more central leadership. It is not immediately clear where the scope for more reform lies.
If we are indeed facing the prospect of a regional conflict, the government may turn to DIO for support in new ways.
The smart money is on incremental changes which fine-tune intelligence arrangements. At a broad level this is sensible, but given that it includes 10 agencies, there are grounds for thinking more creatively about parts of our sprawling intelligence community.
In 2020, a fundamental change quietly came into effect: the establishment of a Defence Intelligence Group. This was an internal Defence reform which combined a couple of intelligence agencies and some ADF capabilities under a single Chief of Defence Intelligence.
One concern under this arrangement is the status of the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO), which provides all-source assessments of military-strategic issues such as strategic doctrines, weapons developments, and defence industry trends. This agency’s history goes all the way back to the early Cold War, but few people know anything about it. Long before open source intelligence was the craze, DIO’s 1950s incarnation was sifting through massive volumes of innocuous data, from infection rates (how many Chinese soldiers are too sick to fight in Korea?) to industrial supply chains (are Japanese manufacturers eyeing re-armament?).
DIO’s low profile is not surprising. It produces tech-heavy reports which are meant to guide defence policy and military planning. If this type of intelligence is not always glamourous, it is critical for a multi-billion dollar Department which exists to guard against future threats to national security. DIO’s task is to figure out what those threats look like.
The received view is that DIO was saved by Arthur Tange, the Defence Secretary who thwarted the Hope Royal Commission’s recommendation to abolish the agency. Tange was a powerful operator, but his position – that Defence required its own assessment capability – was sound. If Hope had got his way, it’s not clear whether our forces in Afghanistan or Iraq would have received the dedicated support which DIO was able to provide.
Moreover, DIO does more than deliver battlefield intelligence. As other reviews have noted, it serves as a counterweight to analysts in ONI, injecting contestability into a process that is prone to group think. The most significant failure in Australian intelligence history – the mistaken judgement about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in 2003 – partly reflected a failure of cooperation between these agencies, with DIO’s more accurate technical knowledge not properly addressed by analysts in the Office of National Assessments, as it was then called.
DIO does more than deliver battlefield intelligence. It serves as a counterweight to analysts in ONI, injecting contestability into a process that is prone to group think.
Unfortunately, a new type of wedge is pushing ONI and DIO in different directions. ONI has embraced public engagement through public speeches, commissioned research, academic meetings, and grant funding. Under the leadership of its first Chief of Defence Intelligence, DIO took the opposite approach.
Since 2020, DIO’s website and its reports on economic trends have disappeared from view (some older reports are available in another part of the Defence website but haven’t been updated). The identity of DIO’s Director also vanished, only to surface in a Parliamentary report this year, when it was revealed that DIO was now directed by the Chief of Defence Intelligence.
Putting aside the issue of why Defence didn’t explain this when it first announced the reform, this raises questions about leadership focus and strategic direction. Coordinating the intelligence functions and projects within Defence is already the job of several people. How one individual is also expected to oversee DIO’s assessment process is anybody’s guess.
The optimistic view is that DIO’s analysts will now have a direct line to the most powerful intelligence official in Defence, and that the Head of Intelligence Assessment (of the same rank as the previous Director DIO position) can look after the quality of intelligence.
If we are indeed facing the prospect of a regional conflict, however, the government as a whole (not just Defence) may turn to DIO for support in new ways. In the United Kingdom, for instance, defence intelligence has released summaries of the war in Ukraine to blunt Russian disinformation. As Chris Taylor argues, we live in an age in which intelligence needs to be more involved in warning of complex threats and communicating its thinking.
On this front, DIO is disadvantaged. The other agency under the Chief of Defence Intelligence – the Australian Geospatial Intelligence Organisation – is a national-level capability which supports other parts of government. AGO has its own Director – the one before last even took the initiative to publish about its work in a defence journal – and a public strategy. Other agencies are also experimenting in this space.
The contrast with DIO is not encouraging. In some ways, the new Chief of Defence Intelligence is well positioned to drive innovations in the way DIO is managed as a national resource – greater transparency, collaboration, and declassification – but there has been no apparent interest in these issues yet.
To be fair to Defence, the media’s coverage of intelligence skews heavily to spy scandals or attendance at the Cabinet’s National Security Committee. Chalk this up to the typical fascination with clandestine power over the equally important, unsexy analytical side of the intelligence business.
Let us hope that the Independent Review is more creative in thinking about the role of DIO, and that the government is listening.
