RAND recently published the findings from a conference it hosted on long-term and strategic analysis (“Making Strategic Analysis Matter”).
Much of the report focused on the cultural differences between intelligence analysts and the policymakers who are the consumers of the analysts’ work product. The cultural gap is especially wide between the producers of long-term and strategic intelligence and policymakers, who, with their inevitable focus on day-to-day problems, often find long-term and strategic analysis an entertaining luxury that they simply can’t fit into their hectic schedules. Many of the participants at the conference seemed focused on a marketing problem – how to convince policymakers to pay attention to their long-term and strategic research.
A table from page 19 of the report (which I adapt) tries to summarize the cultural differences between analysts and policymakers:
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Intelligence analysts |
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Focus on foreign countries |
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Reflective, wants to understand |
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Usually strives to be analytically objective |
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Long tenures and time horizons |
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Believes in continuous product improvement |
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Enjoys dealing with complexity |
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Prefers scenarios and probabilities to predictions |
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World is a given, to be understood |
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Input and output is written |
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Policymakers |
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Focus on Washington DC policy process |
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Active, wants to make a difference |
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Strives to impose policy preferences |
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Short tenures and time horizons |
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Wants quick and final advice |
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Wants simplicity |
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Wants the “straight answer” |
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World can be shaped, especially by the U.S. |
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Prefers to operate in oral settings |
Has the recent appointment of two policymakers/operators (Leon Panetta and David Petraeus) to CIA had any effect on the transmission or reception of long-term and strategic intelligence from analysts to policymakers? A hypothesis would be that experienced operators like Panetta and Petraeus, once at CIA, would have a better grasp of what strategic intelligence was most useful to top policymakers and would have better credibility convincing their bosses to pay attention to that intelligence. If this hypothesis is true, it might say something about how to get top policymakers to pay more attention to long-term and strategic intelligence.
Comments
Bob,
<a href="http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/showthread.php?t=8837">I would suggest reviewing this thread</a>.
My view has changed a bit since that conversation. I think the biggest impediment to strategic intelligence is that we seem to have a set of ever-changing incoherent strategies. I'm not sure how it's possible to have strategic intelligence in the absence of strategy.
<blockquote>Strategic intelligence has to be looking into WHY these threats exist and what best helps leaders apply efforts that get in front of these problems and nip them at their causal roots. Perhaps analysts did follow the trail to the causal roots, and found a large locked door marked "US foreign policy and the domestic policies of our major allies in the Middle East - Do not enter, do not analyze, and do not criticize." </blockquote>
Question asked and answered many times. We know the causal roots you speak of and long ago policymakers decided that they weren't going to change our foreign policy or support for our major allies. Further intelligence assessments which make the links you describe aren't going to result in a change in US foreign policy. I think you possibly make the mistake of assuming that intelligence will lead policymakers down the correct rosy path or will at least force them reexamine their preferred policies. Sadly, that's very rarely the case.
All you need to do for confirmation on is look at Afghanistan. It's not surprising the last <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/steve-coll-afghan… Afghanistan NIE's</a> did not come with unclassified judgments and the 2008 NIE was, according to some, actively suppressed by the Bush administration. (Note, the Steve Coll article contains links to Wikileaks documents about the 2008 NIE and they are not labelled as such in his article - you have been warned.)
Since the beginning the intel community and region experts have identified the conditions and factors necessary for stability in Afghanistan, and Pakistan is the focus for most of those factors. We can't seem to do much regarding Pakistan and we haven't really tried to, for example, improve Indian - Pakistani bilateral relations. Policymakers have ignored or downplayed the importance of those assessments and instead put the focus on things they think they can control, like troop strength and tactical and operational strategies inside Afghanistan. There's another Afghanistan NIE that is in the works now - will yet another explanation of causal factors change anything?
I think there are ample examples of strategic intelligence ranging from economic to political to forecasting future spending on military modernization. Operational and tactical level intelligence for military consumers is threat centric for a reason. LTG Flynn makes a good case that for irregular warfare we have a deficit in understanding politics, social norms, economics at the operational and tactical level and that simply identifying the 10 digit grid coordinates of a target is insufficient, but I don't that is what the article is addressing. However, that doesn't mean the requirement to identify the 10 digit grid coordinate is now irrevelant, it is as relevant as ever.
JT,
In the last 10 years? All three. All staring at the same 50M target.
As to LTG Flynn's paper, certainly it suggested a need to expand the scope of tactical intelligence in theater to looking at more than just actual direct asptects of the organizations we had labeled as threats; but it fell far short of any suggestion at applying intelligence resources to the study and analysis of the larger dynamic of politics, policy and social discontent across the greater Middle East brewing beneath the various threat groups we study.
If we just study the populaces of the locations where such threat groups go to take sanctuary then we are staring at the wrong spot through a soda straw. Even when we study the populaces where nationalist movements are active, it does little good if we have placed a virtual sanctuary around the policies and actions of ourselves and the host nation government in that location as being 'all solution and no causation'.
Not all of this is the intelligence communities fault, as terrorism is a tactic, and we have been applying a "counterterrorism" (ie, "counter-tactic") approach, and that is a powerful force pulling everyone's focus and energy into a very symptomatic and tactical mindset.
Strategic intelligence has to be looking into WHY these threats exist and what best helps leaders apply efforts that get in front of these problems and nip them at their causal roots. Perhaps analysts did follow the trail to the causal roots, and found a large locked door marked "US foreign policy and the domestic policies of our major allies in the Middle East - Do not enter, do not analyze, and do not criticize." Perhaps.
But I agree, there is such a thing as strategic intelligence, we just aren't doing much of it that I see or hear about in the arena of non state actors.
Robert - The oxymoron you describe, is that the fault of the intelligence community or the policy makers doing 'strategy'? To whom are you refering to as the 'Intelligence Community' when you say they are very threat centric? Is that your BDE S2, CENTCOM J2, DIA country analysts, CIA POL-MIL analysts, etc.?
The phrase I am struggling with here is "strategic intelligence." I realize the old joke ala MASH, etc is the "military intelligence" is an oxymoron; but I seriously am not sure what is meant by, and have never seen "strategic intelligence." To me, that is the oxymoron, any fusion of intel and strategy. I like the list of characteristics, but my experience with the intelligence community is that it is very threat-centric and tactical, and current in focus; so well matched to the policy community described here as well.
I agree with the division described, I'm just not sure who these "strategic intelligence" people are.
I suspect both Robert Jervis, "Why Intelligence Fails," and Richard Betts, "Enemies of Intelligence," deal with the issues raised, and offer worthy analysis; I've read articles that (I think) form some of the foundations for each (Jervis, "Reports, Politics, and Intelligence Failures: The Case of Iraq," in the Journal of Strategic Studies, and Betts, "Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable," in World Politics (not to implicitly devalue the former, but the latter is truly superb)).
Regards
ADTS
I recommend readers look at the June 2008 issue of Intelligence and National Security, which has a special section 'Perspectives on Intelligence Analysis in the United States', especially a piece by Loch K. Johnson on the Presidential's Daily Brief and the NIE.
In the UK much was said about 'intelligence-led policing' and rarely was there any input on the relationship with decision-makers, whose priorities were very different.
This week I read in the Feb/March 2012 RUSI Journal an article 'In the Pursuit of Unity: the west and the break-up of Yugoslavia' by Josip Glaurdic, which noted the intelligence assessments were right, just that politicians ignored them.
This is an enduring problem unfortunately. Rand is reinventing the wheel here to a certain extent - the issues raised in the monograph have been understood since at least the 1940's. Sherman Kent's work on this topic, done, as I recall, before his retirement in the late 1960's, is just as relevant today as it was then.
I'm not sure it makes much difference to put a policy-maker/operator at the top of the intel chain - certainly that's not a new idea. More important is to have a person that is trusted by both analysts and policymakers and is able to bridge the divide between them. Unfortunately, that's a tall order and there aren't many who have the skillset and temperament to succeed.