Causes of Failure within the Intelligence Community
In chapter 3 of our text we find the major causes of intelligence failure listed as subordination of intelligence policy, unavailability of information when and where needed, received opinion, and mirror imaging. Of these four causes of failure, even though all are important, I believe received opinion is the most important area in regards to intelligence failure.
Looking at subordination of intelligence to policy you will find that this type of failure is caused by an analysis leaning towards what an individual analyst believes his/her superiors would want to hear. As noted in Silent Warfare Understanding the World of Intelligence subordination of intelligence to policy “is perhaps the most commonly discussed source of error or bias in intelligence analysis”.[1] This form of failure may be the most commonly discussed but I feel it is not the most important to address of all the types of intelligence failures. Historical examples of this may include analysts trying to appease leaders from authoritative dictatorships such as Hitler’s Germany and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Unavailability of information is the most interesting problem to me in regards to intelligence. According to Shulsky and Schmitt “this unavailability has various causes: for example, security regulations…,bureaucratic jealousness and power struggles, or simple lack of awareness in the office processing the data of another office’s information needs”.[2] Our text points out the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese as an example of unavailability of information when and where needed. I also feel that the attacks on US soil on September 11th 2001 show this country’s weakness when it comes to this sort of information sharing. The 9/11 Commission Report was drafted as a result of the breakdown of information sharing that allowed the attacks to happen and included recommendations on what steps to take to prevent that breakdown from possibly happening again.
The most important cause of failure within the intelligence community in my opinion is received opinion, or “those opinions about a subject that are generally regarded without sufficient investigation, as true” according to Shulsky and Schmitt.[3] Our text uses the Iraq invasion of Kuwait as an example citing analysts whose opinions were that Iraq would not invade Kuwait despite imagery that showed troop build ups along the border of the two countries. In the supplemental reading for this week, the ICD 203 Analytic Standards document, details how to generate assumption (which is part of the process of analysis) without letting “conventional wisdom” create negative results. The document states “analytic products should identify indicators that would signal whether assumptions or judgments are more or less likely to be correct” as an answer to the possible problem of received opinion.[4]
Mirror imaging is the last of our four causes of failure. In my opinion this is the least important of the four and deals with the assumptions made on unfamiliar situations based on familiar situations. Basically the assumption is made based on what the entity making the assumption would do if they were in a similar situation. Our text cites the Yom Kippur War in 1973 in which “Israel’s intelligence services did not imagine that the Arabs would begin a war that they seemed sure to lose”.[5]
After researching the subject of causes of failure within the intelligence we find four major causes. These causes include subordination of intelligence to policy, unavailability of information when and where needed, received opinion, and mirror imaging. Although all of these factors are important, I feel that received opinion is the most mitigated by intelligence community standards and mirror imaging is the least mitigated.
[1] Abram N. Shulsky and Gary J. Schmitt, Silent Warfare Understanding the World of Intelligence (Potomac, 2002), 64.
[2] Abram N. Shulsky and Gary J. Schmitt, Silent Warfare Understanding the World of Intelligence (Potomac, 2002), 65.
[3] Abram N. Shulsky and Gary J. Schmitt, Silent Warfare Understanding the World of Intelligence (Potomac, 2002), 65.
[4] Intelligence Community Directive Number 203 (June, 2007) http://www.dni.gov/electronic_reading_room/ICD_203.pdf
[5] Abram N. Shulsky and Gary J. Schmitt, Silent Warfare Understanding the World of Intelligence (Potomac, 2002), 67.
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