Takaaki Asano, International Director/Senior Analyst
Exactly 20 years ago, in 2004, the United States underwent major administrative reforms related to intelligence. The impetus was the terrorist attacks that occurred in the United States on September 11, 2001. A congressional advisory committee compiled a report on the details of the incident and problems with the US government's counterterrorism measures, and released it in July 2004. At the time, it became a best-seller, selling over one million copies, an unprecedented record for a government publication.
The independent commission that compiled the report concluded that although the US government had the opportunity to detect the terrorist attack beforehand, the failure to share information effectively among multiple intelligence agencies was one of the factors that allowed this unprecedented terrorist attack to take place. At the time, in 2004, erroneous information regarding weapons of mass destruction, which served as the pretext for the start of the Iraq War, was also coming to light, and intelligence failures and the failures of intelligence agencies were important policy issues.
In this social atmosphere, a new law was passed in the US Congress in December 2004. It was decided to appoint a "Director of National Intelligence" to oversee the intelligence community, and the "National Counterterrorism Center" to analyze terrorist information was also established. The Director of National Intelligence was expected to integrate the intelligence produced by the various intelligence agencies with different objectives and capabilities, and function as the intelligence staff of the US President. The National Counterterrorism Center was a meeting place that brought together personnel from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Defense, etc., aiming to share information between organizations and personnel with different cultures and to have them eat from the same pot. Perhaps as a result of these efforts, there have been no terrorist attacks comparable to the 9/11 incidents on the US mainland since then, and in May 2011, a military operation was carried out in Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the terrorist attacks.
Since then, the environment surrounding information collection and analysis has changed significantly, but the challenge of intelligence integration that U.S. intelligence agencies tackled 20 years ago remains in a different form. For example, from the perspective of companies, it may seem that external variables have become more complex and opaque these days, but in fact companies themselves, which are part of the global supply chain, are also geopolitical players and have important information and means in their hands, even if they may not have wanted them. From the perspective of government intelligence agencies, this means that the materials and partners for integrating intelligence have expanded. In addition, the amount of data available outside the framework of information kept secret by each government has exploded, and the important challenge of how to integrate them and turn them into meaningful information products is beginning to be widely recognized, although it is by no means new.
The role of Sumitomo Corporation Global Research is to match up pieces of information, determine their value, put the puzzle together, and "draw auxiliary lines" that contribute to business activities. There is no need to use such a big word as intelligence; it is inevitable that integration work will be involved. Furthermore, although the macro situation analysis that we are responsible for may not match the time axis of current business activities, it seems necessary to explore ways to utilize business intelligence from a medium- to long-term perspective through communication between the information side and the decision-making side. According to the commander in charge of the aforementioned US military operation at the time, as a decision-maker, he was dedicated to building a better information circulation between the information side and the execution side.
For about half a century, the American intelligence agencies focused on fighting the Soviet Union, and for the next 20 years they reorganized themselves for the War on Terrorism. Now, it is time to reorganize their capabilities and organizations in the face of new threats, new technologies, and new fields. Although we cannot compare with the US intelligence agencies, which have an annual budget of $100 billion, as someone in the information industry, I am excited by the new attempts being made here and there, and I believe that many of the lessons learned can be applied to corporate intelligence activities.