BLUF: The Next AI Problem for Intelligence Is Not the Model, It's the Manager

The Intelligence Community has decided AI agents are coming. It has not decided how they will be supervised, checked and held to analytic standards. In April, CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis said analysts will soon work alongside AI “coworkers” that draft key judgments and check them against tradecraft standards, and that within a decade officers will manage teams of AI agents. In August, DIA’s Chief AI Officer, MG Robert Kinney described this path as “building agents, and then agents with agents.”The direction is set. What is missing is the discipline for managing it. Building one capable agent is now an engineering problem that industry has largely solved. Getting a dozen of them to work together on an intelligence question or targeting or planning issue, without losing the sourcing, the dissent and the accountability that underpin intelligence work, is a tradecraft problem.That discipline has a name in industry: orchestration. It means deciding which agent does what, what each is allowed to touch, how their work is checked, and where and when a human must decide. For intelligence, orchestration is not a technical detail to leave to vendors. It is where analytic integrity will ...