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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (22642)	12/30/2004 9:19:43 AM
From: Bruce L	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23153

KB, Good George Friedman piece on the problems in the CIA; it is not the amount of intelligence, but the difficulty of analyzing this intelligence in a "committee" system. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX December 29, 2004 LEARN MORE ABOUT STRATFOR >> "Analysis requires inference, intuitive leaps and guess work. If your system precludes these things, you will wind up with a fully sourced failure." The CIA Needs Time to Think By George Friedman Jamie Miscik, deputy director of intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was fired this week. As deputy director, Miscik ran the analytic shop. According to media reports, she was fired for squandering resources on day-to-day reports while ignoring the broad trends that were the real threats. In other words, she was fired for looking at the trees rather than the forest and daily announcing the discovery of a new tree instead of appreciating the larger landscape. Miscik was certainly part of the problem, but she neither created it nor was she solely responsible. There is a natural tendency on the part of intelligence organizations to decay. The day-to-day process in intelligence -- as in any business -- makes it difficult sometimes to stand back and look at the big picture. That's one of the things that happened at the CIA. Everyone is so busy they didn't have time to think. But there is a deeper problem as well. The CIA's Directorate of Intelligence (DI) is loaded with smart and dedicated people. Unfortunately, they rarely get a chance to run the shop. Under George Tenet, who became head of the CIA in 1996, "business processes" were put into place. Now, it isn't clear to me that these processes work well in business, but they certainly don't work well in intelligence. These processes are not designed to unleash brilliance. They are designed to implement and sustain a smoothly running, replicable system. They grind down the brilliant by subjecting their ideas to processes that are built around meetings. Ideas are submitted through a maze of review committees, and it is in these committees that power in the DI rests. Analysis is not made by brilliant people. They just submit their ideas to the committees. These committees, like committees everywhere, are run by people who like being on committees and who know how to be good committee members. The difference between a brilliant working analyst and a brilliant manager is a difference in species. They are as different as night and day and they produce very different results. There is another problem, however: the obsession with sources. That seems like a strange thing to say. Sources, like motherhood, are beyond reproach. But in focusing on source-based analysis, there are two built-in traps that can be fatal to intelligence. The first is the fact that you can never source everything, and the mere fact that you don't have a source doesn't mean things aren't going on out there. If you insist on full sourcing, you are guaranteeing failure. You will miss important things. The craft of analysis requires inference, intuitive leaps and guess work. If your system precludes these things, you will wind up with a fully sourced failure. If the analyst is not permitted to do his or her job, you will wind up with partial reality masquerading as full reality. Second, there are major events that do not have sources or where the source is misleading. During the fall of the Soviet Union or the fall of the Shah in Iran, all of the sources close to the leadership were useless. The leadership had no idea what was going on or were lying. Planting a mike in the Shah.s bedroom would only get you denial. On a deeper level, no one really knew what was going to happen. There were no sources. There was a broad social event underway that anyone could see and some might understand. It wasn't a sourcing issue. It was an analytic issue. The charge against the DI is valid -- they focused on the trees and not on the forest. But the problem was deeper than that. No matter how closely they viewed the trees or how carefully they counted them, they would never find them all. The long, tedious work of counting trees masked the real issue: seeing the forest no matter how many trees, precisely, were in place. The CIA spends huge amounts of money on collecting intelligence. That simply isn't the problem. The CIA had the information it needed on 9-11. They simply didn't understand what it meant. Like the Israelis in 1973, the United States and Soviets in 1941 or the French in 1940, the will to understand was more important than the will to collect. In all of these cases, the proper call could have been made with one-quarter of the available intelligence. Without the proper analytic ethic, doubling the collection would not have worked. Analysis is about having the courage to stand alone even in the face of a well-armed committee, replete with flow charts and "powerpoints". Without the courage to infer, and an organization that respects inference, the people who are great at team work and group think will take the system down every time.

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (22642)	12/31/2004 11:25:04 AM
From: Libbyt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23153

Thanks for posting that article...especially at this time of year when many of us seem to be thinking of changes we want to make in the new year. I've found it interesting that several of the members of the Advisory Board for Innerworth have worked with athletes to improve their performance in their sport. I've often thought that some of the same traits that make an individual successful in sports, also makes them successful in trading and other areas of business. Wishing you and the other posters on HTP a very Happy New Year!