The people and organizations responsible for collecting, formulating, and disseminating intelligence are known, collectively as the Intelligence Community. Recently this community has come under criticism, some severe, for its size, unwieldiness, cost, and errors. In July the Washington Post published a year-long study by an investigative reporter and staff highly critical of the Intelligence Community. In July and August a number of classified documents regarding Iraq and Afghanistan were aired publicly on the internet at the Wikileaks site. An article appeared in the Wall Street Journal”> accusing the CIA of “getting it wrong” about Iran’s nuclear program. This was also addressed in an earlier entry, 24. Did the CIA Get It Wrong In Iraq? in this blog.
Much of the criticism comes from people who do not understand the nature of intelligence, from those who have a particular ax to grind (and there I would include the writer Jay Epstein, and former New York City Mayor Ed Koch), from those frustrated with a lack of intelligence on critical issues (such as what is Osama Ben Laden’s precise location and support infrastructure), and certainly from those who disagree with intelligence findings. When intelligence reports conflict with views about “what is” on the part of policy makers, the messenger often gets blamed. I have mentioned that regarding at least two intelligence reports, I myself experienced reports shoved aside or denigrated because they conflicted with a stated policy. Certainly the reports that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq conflicted with the views of President George W. Bush and his advisors, since going to war with this as the casus belli was a decided policy.
The intelligence community is responsible for providing accurate and usable information to those in charge of national security. The successful intelligence process converts acquired information into clear, comprehensible intelligence and delivers it to the president, policymakers, and military commanders in a form they can use to make educated policy decisions. Generating reliable, accurate intelligence is an active, never-ending process commonly referred to as the intelligence cycle.
The process begins with identifying the issues in which policy makers are interested and defining the answers they need to make educated decisions regarding those issues. We then lay out a plan for acquiring that information and go about collecting it. Once we have the proper intelligence, we sort through it, analyze what it means, and prepare summary reports and recommendations, which we deliver to national security policy makers. The answers our reports supply often reveal other areas of concern, which lead to more questions. In this way, the end of one cycle effectively leads to the start of the next.
Now we can give a general statement of what intelligence analysis is:
Intelligence analysis is the application of individual and collective intellectual methods to weigh data and test hypotheses within a political-cultural context.
The literature about intelligence does not make explicit what intelligence analysis is. The graphic description of the process is helpful, but still not totally explicit. What it does indicate is that the process of intelligence analysis is a highly interactive, dynamic, and social process. The key to understanding analysis is to think of it as a verb rather than a noun. It is a process. It involves a great deal of informal, yet purposeful collaboration during which individuals began to make sense of raw data by negotiating meaning among the historical record, their peers, and their supervisors.
The graphic representation of the cyclical process of producing intelligence describes the activity of analysis. It may be described also the say way one describes the process of science. Scientific advance does not usually begin with a hypothesis. In fact, it almost never does. The steps of science, and, I argue, production of intelligence are:
- Observation
- Correlation
- Generalization
- Experimentation
These four steps, in turn, generate new observations, so the cycle continues, eventually producing new scientific knowledge. The precise same four steps are precisely the same for producing useful intelligence. In following entries I will present what the elements are of each of the steps 1. – 4. above. What will turn out to be most significant is the methods of observation necessary to gather facts. Correlation will involve connecting the many facts gained through observation by a variety of methods, some of them highly complex. Only when the facts have been correlated, or connected by methods of relating them, is the analyst ready to make a generalization which, in intelligence, is the same as an intelligence finding. No analysts will be given the right to disseminate a finding on their own volition. Before an intelligence report is disseminated it must go through exhaustive testing against what is known to be true. When the community (or a significant part of it) is convinced that a finding is accurate it can be disseminated.
At many points of this cycle (another way of looking at the figure above) new questions may well be raised. That, in turn, may generate new requests for information, and the cycle continues. The four-step cyclic process listed above is scientific in nature and must meet a fundamental requirement. I believe that requirement is as follows.
I define intelligence analysis as the organization of knowledge in such a way that it commands more of the hidden potential in information.
This definition is a paraphrase of J. Bronowski in his book, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper and Row (1965), p. 7). Bronowski is defining science, and his definition has a definite parallel in intelligence analysis.
As shown in the practical cycle of intelligence analysis in the figure above, the common procedure that results in an intelligence report usually begins by a request from a consumer to answer some question. When the question becomes an intelligence task, the first step is reviewing the literature to determine what is already known. The “literature” may mean previous intelligence reports or even raw data that has not been put in a coherent form. Often (usually) there are gaps in the data. This is a reality that led Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to utter the worst statement I’ve ever read in the field of intelligence.
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.
As silly as this reads, it is a truism. We can do our best to find out what is already known, and what is gathered but not reported, and we may still find that neither we, nor anyone else in the intelligence community know enough to come to some consensus on the best way to answer the consumer’s question. More data may be required to convince enough people to reach consensus.
Here we have to avoid a logical trap. Too many people believe that all is needed for intelligence is data. No finished intelligence is a collection of facts. It will not do to call an intelligence report true or false in the simple sense in which every fact is either so or not so. All the data have to be woven together into a coherent picture of how “what we know” (data) is linked and built up into a logical conclusion. This is a creative act, not simply a regurgitation of facts.
All intelligence is a search for unity in hidden likenesses. (Bronowski, p. 13) The search may be on a grand scale, such as determining which nation states have the capacity for using nuclear weapons. But there are discoveries that are made by snatching small likenesses from the air, too. The intelligence discoveries may be highly significant if the analyst is bold enough and asks the right questions.
I did an analysis of loss of aircraft in Vietnam. Why were we losing so many aircraft when we had certainly achieved air superiority? The answer lay in observing the thousands of ancient antiaircraft guns that the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had (presumably from China). By fooling US aircraft into evasive maneuvers the NVA lured aircraft to fly into a barrage of conventional antiaircraft firepower. Also, owing to the radical evasive maneuvers the planes used whenever the pilots detected a radar signal, many aircraft flew “beyond the envelope” and crashed into the ground without even being hit. This, to be sure, was not a popular finding with the Navy or the Air Force, especially when coming from a junior analyst in the U.S. Army.
Scientific reports are generally produced for the use of the scientific community. Thus, in science, there are not many institutional “positions” on scientific knowledge. If a scientific result is “sufficiently crazy” it may be shattering in scientific knowledge.
Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli were two giants of physics in the twentieth century. Pauli gave a lecture and afterwards Bohr was called upon to comment. Pauli remarked, perhaps in jest, that the theory may, at first, look “somewhat crazy.” Bohr then replied that the problem was that it was not crazy enough.
“Sufficiently crazy” does not mean silly wild guess, or worse. It means a departure from what accepted knowledge. The really good analyst looks for the appearance of “likenesses” for order does not exist or display itself of itself.
[I]f it can be said to be there at all, it is not there for the mere looking. There is no way of pointing a finger or a camera at it; order must be discovered and, in a deep sense, it must be created. What we see, as we see it, is mere disorder.
When Isaac Newton set out to show that the fall of an apple must be drawn to earth by gravity, he did not have a new idea. That conception was older than Newton. What struck him was the conjecture that the same force of gravity, which
reaches to the top of the tree might go on reaching out beyond the earth and its air, endlessly into space. Gravity might reach the moon. (Bronowski, p. 14)
This was Newton’s new thought. It might be gravity that holds the moon in orbit. Newton calculated what force from the earth would hold the moon, and compared it with the known force of gravity at tree height. The forces agreed; Newton says laconically,
I found them answer pretty nearly.
They agreed only nearly; the likeness and the approximation go together, for no likeness is exact. In Newton’s sentence, both modern science and the modern nature of intelligence are full grown. The process of analysis is the discovery at each step of a new order that gives unity to what had long seemed unlike.
This doesn’t always work in intelligence for the policymakers have desired positions for which they want corroboration. Intelligence agencies also have positions, historical, organizational, and. The analyst may find that previous written products given to consumers in the past. That is, the analyst looks for the accepted organizational response before generating analytic hypotheses. This can distort the intelligence finding, and is something to be taken up in a later blog entry.
Understanding organizational-personality is critical to understanding the meaning, context, and process of intelligence analysis. Real organizational and political consequences are associated with changing official analytic findings and releasing them to consumers. The
- Organizational consequencesare associated with challenging other domain experts (including peers and supervisors).
- Political consequences arise when consumers begin to question the veracity and consistency of current or previous intelligence reporting.
These last two items are at the heart of what can go wrong with intelligence analysis. That will be investigated in a future blog entry. The next few entries will be:
- How intelligence observations are made and data collected.
- Why intelligence reports go wrong.
- How the intelligence community is structured for producing intelligence.
- Needles in a haystack: how a new analysis was produced on Iran’s cyber war.
As always, comments are welcome.
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