Former Iraq inspector calls for new weapons control policy

The former top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq said Wednesday that the government should refocus its weapons control policy as part of reorganizing the federal intelligence community.

David Kay, who led the Iraq Survey Group in 2003, said the U.S. government should focus more on understanding the intent and planning of potential terrorists, and should prioritize the development of technology that allows close-contact monitoring of organizations and people.

"Anyone who believes you can control information related to the production of chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons by simply operating a better security system has not looked at the real cases of how information flows around us," he said during a keynote speech at the Government Security Expo and Conference in Washington.

"We have got to change fundamentally," Kay added. "This will actually be the challenge of the next administration; to change our weapons control policy from one that was concerned with capabilities-of limiting capabilities and understanding capabilities-to one that is much more concerned with intentions, motivations, plans and actual activities."

Kay argued that U.S. national security policy should be driven by a realization that homeland security is affected by failed nation-states, economic devastation in developing countries, and the failure of social integration in countries with rapidly growing populations. Those issues help create radical Islamic fundamentalism, humanitarian crises, destruction and disruption of resource infrastructure, refugee fluxes, and the spread of endemic disease such as AIDS, according to Kay, who estimated that there are up to 70 failed nation-states containing more than half of the world's population living in abject failure.

One of the primary challenges facing the government is developing technology that allows close-contact monitoring, said Kay, adding that the U.S. intelligence community is insufficiently organized for that purpose.

"We have spent more than 30 years going further and further out to be able to stare over boundaries. We need technologies that allow us to get close in," the former weapons inspector said. "I would say that I do not think the 15 dinosaurs of the current intel community will be the people who will develop those technologies at the pace we need them. Either that system must be broken or those technologies need to come" from the private sector.

Kay added that new intelligence capabilities need to be "widely sharable" and credible, particularly given the failures over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

"There is not enough money in the U.S. economy if we solely focused on defense. Not only will it bankrupt us, it ultimately will not work," he said. "We need to invent and operationalize both a diplomatic strategy and an intel capability that allows us to shape that battlefield of failed states so we reduce the challenges you have to face."