The New Zealand Government has never had more useful intelligence available to it than it does today. Yet it is not digesting that intelligence quickly enough to matter.
The problem is not what we know. It is how we decide.
One of us spent decades in uniform, and learned that information has a shelf life. An assessment that arrives after the moment to act has passed is a history lesson, not intelligence. Military planners call this getting inside the adversary’s decision cycle: seeing, judging and acting faster than the other side can respond. The force that does it wins, even when it is smaller. Especially when it is smaller.
New Zealand is small. We will never out-collect larger nations, and we should not try. The most useful material is increasingly open to anyone: commercial satellite imagery, ship and aircraft tracking, social media, corporate filings and a flood of specialist analysis published every hour. An analyst in Wellington with an internet connection and a bank account can know, in near-real time, much of what matters about a crisis in the Pacific, the South China Sea or the Strait of Hormuz.
The question is whether that knowledge reaches the people who must act on it, in time.
We fear it does not. Our system of government still runs on an industrial-age model: over-classified, sequential, scheduled, paper-bound, with analytical purity that is designed to deliberate rather than act. Papers move from agency to agency, through consultation rounds and committee cycles, before they reach Cabinet. That process was built for careful policymaking in a slower world, and it still serves that purpose. It does not serve a world in which a naval blockade, a cyberattack or a political collapse in a neighbouring state can unfold over a weekend, or even overnight.
The gap between what is knowable and what Cabinet can act on is currently measured in weeks. It should be measured in days and, at times, in hours.
Others have already moved. In Washington, the President receives an intelligence brief every day, a practice that dates to the early 1960s. Canada, too, has built regular strategic intelligence briefings into the work of its Prime Minister. Our closest partners do not treat intelligence as an occasional input. They put it at the centre of government, on a fixed rhythm.
New Zealand has not. We never fully completed the shift from the industrial age to the information age. Now the environment is shifting again, into what we would call the age of intelligence, where the advantage goes not to whoever holds the most data, but to whoever turns it into decisions fastest. That leaves us two steps behind.
Artificial intelligence makes this gap both more dangerous and more fixable. More dangerous because others are already using AI to sift vast streams of information at a speed no human team can match. More fixable because the same tools are available to us, often cheaply.
What would closing the gap look like? Four things that Cabinet can act on today:
1. Appoint an appropriate dedicated, permanent National Security Advisor (NSA) and a Director of National Intelligence (DNI)
2. Stand up a full-time process to convene ministers within hours of named warning indicators being crossed – and test and evaluate this mechanism robustly against real-world scenarios – this process will only work if there is integration of key private sector leadership as can be seen in other serious nations
3. Pre-delegate specific, time-limited authorities to selected Chief Executives and Ministers for a rehearsed menu of fast-moving real-world contingencies and scenarios – and conduct rehearsals of the decision process with the decision makers
4. Fund and mandate formal open-source and AI tradecraft standards for implementation across the National Security System
None of this requires collecting more intelligence – it requires organising to act on what is already known. Speed in a crisis is rarely about technology. It is about who is allowed to pick up the phone. This authority must be real, tested in training against current contingencies so that there is trust and confidence in crisis.
After all, our All Blacks do not go on the field to face a crisis, they work through careful selection, plenty of in camp practice and a game plan. Ad hoc does not win the Bledisloe Cup.
This does not require a large new budget. It requires a decision about organisation and culture. That is good news, because organisation and culture are things a government can change quickly if it chooses to.
Some will argue that speed risks poor judgement, and that careful deliberation is a strength of our system. They are partly right. Not every decision should be fast. But a government that can only move slowly has no choice at all. The aim is not to abandon deliberation. It is to give ministers the option of acting while the window is open, rather than discovering afterwards that it has closed.
Strategic relevance in this decade will belong to governments that organise themselves to act within that window, not to those that write the best assessment after it has shut. Our partners and competitors are already reorganising around that idea.
Wellington can do the same, and it can start today. The intelligence is there. What is missing is a system built to use it.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
New Zealand is small. We will never out-collect larger nations, and we should not try. The most useful material is increasingly open to anyone: commercial satellite imagery, ship and aircraft tracking, social media, corporate filings and a flood of specialist analysis published every hour. An analyst in Wellington with an internet connection and a bank account can know, in near-real time, much of what matters about a crisis in the Pacific, the South China Sea or the Strait of Hormuz.
The question is whether that knowledge reaches the people who must act on it, in time.
We fear it does not. Our system of government still runs on an industrial-age model: over-classified, sequential, scheduled, paper-bound, with analytical purity that is designed to deliberate rather than act. Papers move from agency to agency, through consultation rounds and committee cycles, before they reach Cabinet. That process was built for careful policymaking in a slower world, and it still serves that purpose. It does not serve a world in which a naval blockade, a cyberattack or a political collapse in a neighbouring state can unfold over a weekend, or even overnight.
The gap between what is knowable and what Cabinet can act on is currently measured in weeks. It should be measured in days and, at times, in hours.
Others have already moved. In Washington, the President receives an intelligence brief every day, a practice that dates to the early 1960s. Canada, too, has built regular strategic intelligence briefings into the work of its Prime Minister. Our closest partners do not treat intelligence as an occasional input. They put it at the centre of government, on a fixed rhythm.
New Zealand has not. We never fully completed the shift from the industrial age to the information age. Now the environment is shifting again, into what we would call the age of intelligence, where the advantage goes not to whoever holds the most data, but to whoever turns it into decisions fastest. That leaves us two steps behind.
Artificial intelligence makes this gap both more dangerous and more fixable. More dangerous because others are already using AI to sift vast streams of information at a speed no human team can match. More fixable because the same tools are available to us, often cheaply.
What would closing the gap look like? Four things that Cabinet can act on today:
1. Appoint an appropriate dedicated, permanent National Security Advisor (NSA) and a Director of National Intelligence (DNI)
2. Stand up a full-time process to convene ministers within hours of named warning indicators being crossed – and test and evaluate this mechanism robustly against real-world scenarios – this process will only work if there is integration of key private sector leadership as can be seen in other serious nations
3. Pre-delegate specific, time-limited authorities to selected Chief Executives and Ministers for a rehearsed menu of fast-moving real-world contingencies and scenarios – and conduct rehearsals of the decision process with the decision makers
4. Fund and mandate formal open-source and AI tradecraft standards for implementation across the National Security System
None of this requires collecting more intelligence – it requires organising to act on what is already known. Speed in a crisis is rarely about technology. It is about who is allowed to pick up the phone. This authority must be real, tested in training against current contingencies so that there is trust and confidence in crisis.
After all, our All Blacks do not go on the field to face a crisis, they work through careful selection, plenty of in camp practice and a game plan. Ad hoc does not win the Bledisloe Cup.
This does not require a large new budget. It requires a decision about organisation and culture. That is good news, because organisation and culture are things a government can change quickly if it chooses to.
Some will argue that speed risks poor judgement, and that careful deliberation is a strength of our system. They are partly right. Not every decision should be fast. But a government that can only move slowly has no choice at all. The aim is not to abandon deliberation. It is to give ministers the option of acting while the window is open, rather than discovering afterwards that it has closed.
Strategic relevance in this decade will belong to governments that organise themselves to act within that window, not to those that write the best assessment after it has shut. Our partners and competitors are already reorganising around that idea.
Wellington can do the same, and it can start today. The intelligence is there. What is missing is a system built to use it.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
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