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This book critiques the reliance of Western intelligence agencies on the use of a method for intelligence analysis developed by the CIA in the 1990s, the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH).
The U.S. intelligence community (IC) is a complex human enterprise whose success depends on how well the people in it perform their work. Although often aided by sophisticated technologies, these people ultimately rely on their own intellect to identify, synthesize, and communicate the information on which the nation's security depends. The IC's success depends on having trained, motivated, and thoughtful people working within organizations able to understand, value, and coordinate their capabilities. Intelligence Analysis provides up-to-date scientific guidance for the intelligence community (IC) so that it might improve individual and group judgments, communication between analysts, and analytic processes. The papers in this volume provide the detailed evidentiary base for the National Research Council's report, Intelligence Analysis for Tomorrow: Advances from the Behavioral and Social Sciences. The opening chapter focuses on the structure, missions, operations, and characteristics of the IC while the following 12 papers provide in-depth reviews of key topics in three areas: analytic methods, analysts, and organizations. Informed by the IC's unique missions and constraints, each paper documents the latest advancements of the relevant science and is a stand-alone resource for the IC's leadership and workforce. The collection allows readers to focus on one area of interest (analytic methods, analysts, or organizations) or even one particular aspect of a category. As a collection, the volume provides a broad perspective of the issues involved in making difficult decisions, which is at the heart of intelligence analysis.
In this seminal work, published by the C.I.A. itself, produced by Intelligence veteran Richards Heuer discusses three pivotal points. First, human minds are ill-equipped ("poorly wired") to cope effectively with both inherent and induced uncertainty. Second, increased knowledge of our inherent biases tends to be of little assistance to the analyst. And lastly, tools and techniques that apply higher levels of critical thinking can substantially improve analysis on complex problems.
The intelligence community (IC) plays an essential role in the national security of the United States. Decision makers rely on IC analyses and predictions to reduce uncertainty and to provide warnings about everything from international diplomatic relations to overseas conflicts. In today's complex and rapidly changing world, it is more important than ever that analytic products be accurate and timely. Recognizing that need, the IC has been actively seeking ways to improve its performance and expand its capabilities. In 2008, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) asked the National Research Council (NRC) to establish a committee to synthesize and assess evidence from the behavioral and social sciences relevant to analytic methods and their potential application for the U.S. intelligence community. In Intelligence Analysis for Tomorrow: Advances from the Behavioral and Social Sciences, the NRC offers the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) recommendations to address many of the IC's challenges. Intelligence Analysis for Tomorrow asserts that one of the most important things that the IC can learn from the behavioral and social sciences is how to characterize and evaluate its analytic assumptions, methods, technologies, and management practices. Behavioral and social scientific knowledge can help the IC to understand and improve all phases of the analytic cycle: how to recruit, select, train, and motivate analysts; how to master and deploy the most suitable analytic methods; how to organize the day-to-day work of analysts, as individuals and teams; and how to communicate with its customers. The report makes five broad recommendations which offer practical ways to apply the behavioral and social sciences, which will bring the IC substantial immediate and longer-term benefits with modest costs and minimal disruption.
This book describes some of the powerful metaphors that have developed over the past two decades about the workings of our minds including cognitive science (which embraces several disciplines, notably computer science, linguistics, neurophysiology and psychology), in an attempt to apply those metaphors to the workings of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence. These findings have obvious implications for the way the directorate recruits and trains its people. The term "cognitive science" embraces several disciplines, notably computer science, linguistics, and neurophysiology, as well as psychology. A cognitive scientist seeks to understand what the mind does when it searches for patterns, when it makes a value judgment, when it must choose between pattern-finding and judgment-making, when it engages in the myriad other activities that occupy it. Some fragmentary answers to questions such as this have become possible in the last 20 years. Before they are six years old, nearly all humans learn to generalize, to impute continuity, to discern relationships, and to determine cause-and-effect. Moreover, we can store the conclusions drawn from such processes in a way that gives us access to them without burdening our working memory. We also learn a language, that uniquely human capacity which sits at the center of conscious cognitive activity. Language opens the way to abstraction and generalization, and permits each normal human to develop a rich network of concepts. All of us are aware of the limitations of these processes. For example, we all are obtuse in dealing with logic and probability; we are comfortable with imprecision; and our minds are conservative in their approach to new information-quicker to recognize the familiar than the unfamiliar, reluctant to change concepts once we have accepted them. Finally, there are innumerable processes that influence our mental activity but are not accessible to the conscious part of the mind. FROM THE AUTHOR: The monograph has two parts: first, a survey of cognitive science as we understood it in 1984; second, suggestions for changing the way we do intelligence analysis in light of what the discipline was telling us. As I have indicated, I think the survey section holds up pretty well. While I would like to think the reader will learn something useful from immersion in all the detail (notably the diagram on page 10, which makes graphic the many elements that interactively shape our conscious mental activity), the basic concept is quite simple. The conscious mind cannot track more than about seven cognitive elements at the same time (cognitive science jargon often refers to these elements as chunks); and to cope with this constraint, our brains constantly manipulate those elements, always at top speed and usually outside our conscious awareness. This is revised edition of a manuscript that was originally published in 1984.
In their Second Edition of Cases in Intelligence Analysis: Structured Analytic Techniques in Action, accomplished instructors and intelligence practitioners Sarah Miller Beebe and Randolph H. Pherson offer robust, class-tested cases studies of events in foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, terrorism, homeland security, law enforcement, and decision-making support. Designed to give analysts-in-training an opportunity to apply structured analytic techniques and tackle real-life problems, each turnkey case delivers a captivating narrative, discussion questions, recommended readings, and a series of engaging analytic exercises.