Military and there is the relatively quick often we turn to that instrument often. In principle this seems like a world setup for diplomacy. But that has been less developed in our arsenal of things to do than military options. So i think you are right. I share your sense that we ought to be looking more toward diplomacy and other measures. The problem with economic assistance and those things are very longterm; right . It comes back to the time of the officials and the time that must be adhered to to get something done. And that also increases the temptation to look for military instrument probably. I do your your sense personally as a citizen thinking about these issues that we havent quite got that balance right. We are just so much better that military things than we are at other things that it is, i think, tempting to turn to those instruments. Lady in the front row. Thank you. I was wondering if you have any comments on the presence of china and russia in latin america especially in those regimes who are at the brink of collapse like venezuela and when everybody is talking about the arrival of the cold war . Thank you. Mostly, i dont worry about the presence of china. I worry a little bit more about russia. But i dont worry about the presence of china in latin america. If venezuela is expecting china to bail them out they will be disappointed. As i look at chinese actions, we are in a period where everything china does looks sinister. But i think much of what they do is the result of them being bigger and richer than they used to be. If i look at their actions in africa, for example, my judgment is most of what they did is good or a waste of money and in either case i dont care much about it. Russia, given the history and all that, is a little difference but i dont worry about their presence in latin america. Latin americans looking for china to be a major player will be disappointed greg, if your budget could expand and you had freedom to move in a lot of other directions. What new nios would you establish and would you break any up so you could spend more time providing those issues . The first thing i would do would be to have a little unit i have a Strategic Group and i would have ten people who would be strategic analysts. They would work with the nios and their deputies. I would like to to have some people freed from the crush of daily support to be more strategic. I think i would do that before creating more nios. We are always under pressure to create more but i try to resist it. I mind rather have a Strategic Reserve that would give us more increased reserve to be more strategic and be the ones we are planning and pushing off to the right. Yes, maam, in the front. Second row. Mira daniels. Dr. Treverton, if there were three tools to improve analytics generally, even academically, what would they be . You can even give one because i have strong feelings about this. Good question. I am interested in tools and there are plenty out there. We are doing two things. One is there is this intelligence prediction market. You have probably seen phil headlock has been writing about this and he is on the outside running something called the good judgment project. It has been quite interesting. We are taking it over at the nic. It has been developed by the Intelligence Community version of darpa. I am pretty excited about it. The good news is, the deadlock is that just like athletes some people are betting at predicting than others. Even better than that is a little training helps. Even a couple hours of training makes People Better predictors. The training goes to the direction of helping to keep people open minded one secondly longer than they are likely. I want to do two things. I want to make it an in teterna. If there is a likelihood of decline and we know the analyst we can have a conversation. I dont care about the numbers but the conversation. And we will try to extend questions to more strategic longer term. Big data is obviously out there. But one thing i am intrigued by running a pilot with my africa account and the presumption is there is not a lot of great Intelligence Data about africa but a lot of data out there. I have a Data Scientist looking for data sets. Now the data is good enough that you can foresee disease or famine. The next step is getting good enough to tell analyst to look here and look at this connection. Those are the things personally i am excited about at the nic now by way of tools. Second row here. Thank you. Andy stewart, travel app. I would like to throw out two solve questions. Does the nic have different strategic views and assumptions from putin . We have two different strategies. Do you have insight that is driving our thinking being different from his and the gamble that follows . And more critically maybe what can we do to incentvise the sunni arabs to go with us and dump isil . Seems like we have are having a hard time. Those are more policy questions than intelligence questions. Let me talk about the putin piece. I dont have much to add to what i had earlier. Putin is obviously, i think, at this point relatively pleased with ukraine turned out. He pushed ukraine westward into things he didnt want to. So he is probably regarding it as a semisuccess. In syria, we will see. Many of the things he is doing, including his desire to come to an agreement with us, as evidence that he is concerned about the longerterm. He understand that it could be a quagmire. All of the things he has done reduced the pressure on him to commit significant ground forces. Yes, sir. Second row here. Thank you. Irv chapman from bloomberg. You mentioned the overclassification the intelligence agencies indulge in. You have been talking about classifying documents to avoid embarrassment. Could you enlighten us how 2,000 documents became classified after politics reared its ugly head . I dont really know the answer. You are certainly right. It is not that people are trying to protect the guilty by classification. There may be some of that. But it is mostly all of the pressure in the system you never get pinged for overclassifying something. But you can get in trouble for letting out something that is classified and not realizing. So all of the setups in the system push to overclassification. About the 2,000 documents you are probably as well informed about that as i am. Okay. In the middle. The red tie gentlemen. Thank you. We are seeing that over the past few years russias influence in the Southeast Europe or western b b balkens has been increasing. How do you see this trend over the next few years balkans . I take putin serious with his claims. The challenge to russia is that almost everything putin has done, from my perspective, are causing russias downfall. But that is years away. As the saying has it in the long run we are all dead; right . And putin seems oblivious to the harm he is doing to russia in the longer run. He is fixed on the short run. I think the policies he has pursued will continue. He doesnt have the where with all and doesnt want to take the huge risks i hope. But i imagine he will push to get a seat at the table, try to assert his weight with respect to the former soviet sphere. If you talk to the chinese about central asia they just laugh at russia saying they have no capacity. In the back row, please. Thank you, kevin barron with defense one. Could you talk more about the use of covert operations on the rise . Touch on the question of overclassification. We heard a lot of Officials Say the Intelligence Community needs to do a better job telling its story and they want the American Public to understand it more. Yet we are fighting a covert war, in the dark, when it comes to terrorism and isis. How can that be reconciled . What kind of conversations are happening and what changes could or should be made to open up any of this . Listen, joe, i would not say our actions against isis are covert. Some of them are discreet and small units but i would not say there is much secret about th them. That is interesting. In general, you are right. We do a terrible job at helping the American People understand our work, how we do it, and my favorite example is the 215 program. The telephone met data program. If you could have imagined intelligence getting out in front of this and saying the purpose of this program is to limit the number of phone calls we listen to. But once snowden gets it out it is mass surveillance which we all know is impossible in any case. If it were possible to imagine intelligence getting far enough out in front to talk about the 215 program. Got the numbers out and looked at the number of conversations listened to is pretty small. It is that that is the challenge. Unfortunately it is hard for me to imagine that intelligence could be that proactive. People say if you do that you will tell the people against us what we are doing but that is the cost of the world you live in particularly if you are going to do things that involve your citizens or inhabitants. Gentlemen in the middle. Third row. Thank you, greg, for a really fun presentation. I enjoyed. My name is tim tyler and i am a former defense person and i used to fund gregs Research Back in the day. Will you do it again . Youve got enough now. I noted we had a question about domesic politics and we have observed isis is not an ex existential threat. And we know America Needs to take into account domestic politics among our allies if we hope to deploy cruise missiles hence the dual track with the pea peacekeeping and deployment track. Do you find today we have appreciation on the intelligence as we look at the gather issues . If you you were counterpart anywhere in western europe and looked at the United States and its domestic political situation wouldnt you be spinning in your grave almost . Yes, is the answer. We obviously pay a lot of attention to domestic politics because we understand our own role. We like to think intelligence is important in determining policy but we recognize it is one factor among many and domestic politics, personal ambition, lots of other things trump intelligence. That is true with other countries as well as our own. It is like i like you, if i were my counterpart and i talk to my british counterpart quite a lot, i would be turning and spinning in my grave. The lady in the back on the side, please. Thank you. Sputnick international news. I would just like to get your thoughts first of all on north korea and the fact that in the past 24 hours they put Nuclear Weapons on high alert. And a second question on russia because there are more and more areas regionally where american and russian interest are intersecting in the middle east and europe so forth. What do you see is the consequences of engagement between russia and the United States and then the consequences of confrontation or as you said isolation . Well, north korea, as we all know is a real puzzle. It has this state that is essentially failed in every respect but still has Nuclear Weapons, sophisticated weapons of some sort. We dont know how sophisticated but it is a puzzle. It is in some ways the only thing they have got. And kim jo yong has. It is the only thing that deters regime change in north korea. This latest bout is probably not as surprising as it may seem. We have seen it before. Exactly what is happening is not clear. So far it is mostly talk as far as we can tell. But we will see. It is there, again, i said earlier one wild cardthi i worry is about a Nuclear Weapon going off and north korea a place where that might come. On russia, i dont have much more to add. You asked about policy preferences really. I think the u. S. Russian relations have gotten pretty bad despite the effort to reset. And there is, i think, a lot of concern about putin personally. If you convince your best friend in europe, angela merkle, that you are a liar that is not helpful and putin managed to do that. I see opportunities for us to engage the russians in some sense the sensational hostilities and the middle east isnt a bad start. It will continue to be a mix obviously of cooperation and some competition. Although as i said in the long run it seems to me the russian hand is pretty weak and what putin did a good job of is playing a weak hand pretty well. Gentlemen in the second row here. Thanks very much. Dan from Kings College london. I wonder if you could reflect on how your job, or the nics job, has changed in the two decades between your tenure there . And how you relate to your customers and the impact you have with policymakers. Global trends is an innovative, analytical product but you mentioned there are 700 pieces of paper that fly out of the building. In those two decades, what types of analytical changes have you seen that gain traction with your customers . What types of product presentation gain traction with your customers . How has it changed and what have you found to be the most effective changes . I think two big changes probably dont go to products but to process. One, as i said, the big change is the involvement of the nic in current intelligence support. That is good and bad. It is good. When i was at the nic before we used to ask if we were relevant. We dont have that anymore. We are up to our eyeballs in relevance. That is the biggest change. The other one is how much more embedded intelligence is in the process than 20 years ago. I suspect that largely resulted from the facts we have been fighting wars for the last 15 plus years. For better or worse you can make policy toward china without intelligence. It is hard to fight a war without intelligence. That is probably the main thing responsible for the embedding. When i look at email traffic back and forth it is continually. It is continually. Those are the things i am not sure the products maybe they believed have changed more than they have. But what is striking is senior officials still live in an oral and paper world. You know . None of them have time to be out there on their computer looking at anything. That is going to change. Now the president gets his daily brief on an ipad. So do i which is nice. And it is only a little worse than paper. As far as i can tell, we spend a lot of money on ipads and an equal amount taking the guts out of them. It is sort of a reader not an ipad. But it is the first step. I think sooner or later policy people will want a ton of 24 7 conversations with their intelligence support people on their ipad. I was talking to my australian counterpart the other day and his prime minter is angry he cannot do it now. The Prime Minister in the morning first thing gets on his ipad and talks to his cabinet members and he is frustrated he cannot do that with his Intelligence Analyst as well. That gentlemen there. Ryan brown with cnn. I wanted to piggy back on the question about the future trend for extremist violence in the middle east. You said it was going to be sustained for the foreseeable future and talked about the empowerment of smaller groups. I know you said isis reaped their own destruction. But in terms of how their capabilities will advance over the next five years and also whether or not their ability to attack europe or the United States will advance as well . Yeah, as i said about attacking, the ones i worry about are the ones we have seen. The ones where they are inspired not necessarily responsible or operati operationally in control. Their capacity to do that is growing. I worry about the lone wolves or small groups or people inspired by isis or controlled or guided by them. I think that will continue to be the most significant terror threat. In terms of capabilities, you know, so far isil, nothing surprised us much by the tools they used but they used them effectively. They used social media and other things for communication and recruiting. No great innovations there. But pretty effective use. But as we look forward, all of the things that we have, from drones to miniaturization, our opponents are going to acquire as well. Maybe slightly later we hope than we do. But among the trends that are going the wrong direction are it seems to me the greater availability of lethal, Dangerous Technology to terror groups. Stanley, all the way in the back. Stanley cope. I am puzzled by your comments we do the military stuff well. How is war a continuation of politics by other means . What political results have we achieved by our use of military power . We are very good at blowing stuff up. Nobody can stop us if we want to destroy a target. But look at libya. What political results are we achieving by the use of our military force . That is absolutely the right question. What i meant is we are good at doing military operations; right . Whether they achieve their desired result is another question. You put it very well. That is the big question. I think you are exactly right. I think we are better at doing the operations than we are at putting them in the context that actually achieves the outcome we care about. One minute. Microphone. Natalie from csi. Regarding the lack of government counterparts on the ground in areas of isis control how do you see that affecting the recruitm of Human Resources for human operations. Say it again regarding the lack of government counterparts in areas of control of isis, how do you see that affecting recruitment of sources for human operation . Honestly, i am not an expert on this. I was an expert on the difficult and dangerous operation. Someone asked about getting the sunnis on our side. There is a tipping point. If you want to go against isis you have to be convinced you have enough company to protect you. Otherwise you will lose your head. One of the liabilities is governing territory. It isnt as easy as it looks. We saw bad things but lots of good as well. I think in some ways they are caught in something that is ideologically talking about the caliphate on one hand and talking about the apocalypse on the other hand. That is something they have to work out. But i think them trying to hold and govern territory is a liability for them. Gentlemen here, please. Thank you very much for your comments. I have two questions for you. One, how do you account for the repeated failures on the part of the u. S. Intelligence community to an advertiticipate things li russias annexation of crimea or russias decision to involve itself militarily in syria even. My second question is in your five year and 20 year outlook