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Thinking straight and talking straight: Problems of intelligence analysis

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00396330600594231

1468-2699

Douglas Hart, Steven Simon,

Intelligence, Security, War Strategy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement The authors wish to thank the US Air Force Research Laboratory for funding portions of the software functionality described in this article. All views expressed, however, are the authors' own and do not reflect the policy of any US government agency. Notes 1. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, 22 July 2004, http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf. 2. Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report to the President of the United States, 31 March 2005, http://www.wmd.gov/report/wmd_report.pdf. 3. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of 11 September is another example of this reorganisation reflex. In that case, the key agency, the FBI, was excluded from the new department because removing it from the Department of Justice would have provoked a political backlash. 4. Toby Dodge, personal communication. 5. Elizabeth B. Welles, 'Foreign Language Enrollments in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2002', ADFL Bulletin, vol. 35, nos. 2–3, Winter–Spring 2004, pp. 7–26. 6. Author conversation with former senior CIA official. 7. President Bush apparently understands the gravity of the problem; he told 100 college and university presidents gathered at a State Department conference, 'In order to convince people we care about them, we've got to understand their culture and show them we care about their culture … You know, when somebody comes to me and speaks Texan, I know they appreciate the Texas culture. When somebody takes time to figure out how to speak Arabic, it means they're interested in somebody else's culture.' Michael Janofsky, 'More Money Sought to Teach Languages', The New York Times, 6 January 2006, http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/06/news/speak.php. 8. Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson, 'Thinking Outside the Tank', The National Interest, Winter 2004/05, pp. 90–98. The Defense Department faces the same deficit of culturally aware personnel. Molngomery McFate, a cultural anthropologist who works with the US military to strengthen its capacities in this area, quotes one Special Forces colonel assigned to the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence as saying, 'We literally don't know where to go for information on what makes other societies tick, so we use Google to make policy.' See Montgomery McFate, 'The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture', Joint Force Quarterly, issue 38, 3rd quarter 2005, pp. 42–8, http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/cvr38.pdf. I am indebted to Professor Jonathan Stevenson, US Navy War College, for pointing this out to me. 9. Mark Clayton, 'Rethinking Thinking', The Christian Science Monitor, 14 October 2003. Other experts believe that, in some respects, college students are averse to critical thinking; see Peter A. Facione et al., 'Are College Students Disposed to Think?', paper presented at the International Conference on Critical Thinking, Sonoma State University, August 1993. 10. On White House pressure placed on the intelligence community, see Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Next Attack (Henry Holt/Times Books, October 2005). 11. Private communication. The official indicated that there were as yet no data on the critical-thinking skills of new analysts. 12. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). 13. Ibid., p. 6. 14. For Christianity these works would include those of Aquinas and Kant, for Judaism Maimonides and for Islam Ibn Sina or Ibn Khaldun. 15. Jay Tolson, 'The New School Spirit', US News and World Report, 14 February2005, http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/050214/14college.htm. 16. Data are from The US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS) and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. 17. Beth McMurtrie, 'Future of Religious Colleges is Bright, Say Scholars and Officials', The Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 October 2000, p. A41. 18. John Diamond, 'It's No Secret: CIA is Scouting for Recruits', USA Today, 22 November 2005. 19. Tenet also said, 'I don't know about the rest of the community – I think they face the same problem we do – but over the next five to seven years we are losing a good portion of our expertise'. See S. Hrg. 107-597, 'Current And Projected National Security Threats To The United States', Hearing Before The Select Committee On Intelligence Of The United States Senate, One Hundred Seventh Congress Second Session, February 6, 2002, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/020602transcript.html. 20. Rob Johnston, Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic Study (Washington, DC: The Central Intelligence Agency, 2005), p. xiii. 21. Ibid., p. 15; James Risen, State of War (New York: Free Press, 2006), p. 7 22. See Paul R. Carlile, 'Transferring, Translating, and Transforming: An Integrative Framework for Managing Knowledge Across Boundaries', Organization Science, vol. 15, no. 5, September–October 2004, pp. 555–68. 23. One example of such a tool is the very popular 'product life-cycle management' software. Current PLM software includes special modules that support collaboration between designers and managers. See 'Better by Design', The Economist, 15 September 2005. Another example is the new crop of tools that are helping businesses network. For more information see 'Networking: A Special Edition', The New York Times, 5 October 2005. 24. The rise of computer use in US schools has been phenomenal over the last decade. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/publications/2005015/2.asp#2b) in 2003, the ratio of students to instructional computers with Internet access in public schools was 4.4 to 1, a decrease from the 12.1 to 1 ratio in 1998. Even more telling is the increase of access to the resources made available through the World Wide Web in the classroom where students use them every day. In 2003, 93% of public school instructional rooms had Internet access, compared with 3% in 1994. Computers and now laptops and handheld devices have become ubiquitous in the classroom. Similar increases have been found in computer use at home by children. A 2003 study showed that 88% of 8th-grade students (13–14-year-olds) in public schools use computers at home (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/nativetrends/ind_6_1.asp). 25. Ultima Online is an excellent example of a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game where hundreds of thousands of people co-inhabit a virtual world. See http://www.uo.com/ageofshadows/viscent.html for more information. 26. The term 'tradecraft' was invented by John Le Carré as the Circus's technical term for procedures and techniques related to the conduct of clandestine operations. Its adoption by the intelligence community shows how thoroughly and ironically life imitates art. 27. Johnston, Analytic Culture, pp. 17–21. 28. Tools that support structured arguments, also sometimes called models, are already popular among a certain class of analysts. For example, law-enforcement agencies use a general purpose tool called Analyst Notebook (http://www.i2.co.uk/Products/Analysts_Notebook/default.asp) to build a variety of structured arguments from terrorist intent to threat assessments. At the other end of the spectrum, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) has sponsored an extensive effort to build a special-purpose structured framework for predicting the future (see International Futures at http://ifsmodel.org/). Few, if any, of these tools, however, support collaboration or encourage dialogues among analysts. 29. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, 20 December 2002, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/911.html. 30. Ibid., p. 342. 31. For more information on tagging websites see 'Websites of Mass Description', The Economist, 15 September 2005. An example of a social bookmark tagging system that is currently being used world-wide can be found at http://del.icio.us. 32. Intel.icio.us is a fictitious website, but the idea is that it would mimic the capabilities of the public http://del.icio.us website except focus on intelligence issues and only be available on a classified network. 33. A blog is a website for maintaining an on-line journal (thus a 'web log' or 'blog') taking the form of an extended conversation, and usually focusing on a particular topic area. The importance of blogs is illustrated by the US government's approach to the phenomenon, which is similar to that undertaken by industry over the last few years. The government is apparently in the process of establishing 'official' blogs in order to influence the evolution of the blogosphere amongst its millions of employees, while at the same seeking to define and enforce standards of behaviour for government bloggers. See, for example, John Hockenberry, 'The Blogs of War', Wired, vol. 13, no. 8, August 2005, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/milblogs.html?pg=1&topic=milblogs&topic_set=. 34. Amanda Lenhart et al., 'Online Activities and Pursuits', Reports, Pew Internet and American Life Project, February 2004, http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/113/report_display.asp. 35. More information about Technorati may be found at http://www.technorati.com/about/. 36. A good description of blogs about blogs may be found in Dan Mitchell, 'A Blog That Blogs Corporate Blogs', NYTimes.com, 7 January 2006. 37. 'Yesterday's Papers', The Economist, 21 April 2005. 38. 'Poll: Most Americans Unfamiliar with Blogs', CNN.com Technology, 3 March 2005, http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/03/03/poll.blogs/. 39. The Pew Internet Study. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDouglas HartDouglas Hart is president of Cyberneutics, Inc. an international security policy and information technology consultancy located in Virginia. Since its founding in 1999, Cyberneutics has been involved in the development of analytical software tools for US and Allied agencies, to include variants of the applicaitons discussed in this article.Steven SimonSteven Simon is Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author, with Daniel Benjamin, of The Next Attack : The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right (2005).