
The killing of the American-born Yemeni terrorist Anwar al Awlaki on Sept. 30 continues to show how broadly integrated U.S. military operations and intelligence have become. According to media reports, two Predator drones fired Hellfire missiles at al Awlaki as he and three others were traveling in a car. Also killed was Samir Khan, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was the editor of the al Qaeda magazine Inspire.
The deaths of al Awlaki and Khan were the culmination of an intensive effort to track down and eliminate the threat these people posed to America and its citizens. But our ability to conduct such operations depends on accurate and timely intelligence, as well as a robust communications architecture to help choreograph and synchronize the effort.
Prior to 1991, such synchronized operations were more the product of luck and good timing than anything else. We also did not have the benefit of accurate and timely intelligence in the same way that we do today. Up until the end of the Cold War, our intelligence efforts were quite manpower-intensive. Few collection efforts had been automated to the extent they are today and the favorite solution intelligence managers had was to throw people at a problem in the hope that they would stumble upon the answers we needed.
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