Strategic culture as a constraint: intelligence analysis, memory and organizational learning in the social sciences and history

Abstract

Academics working on intelligence failure are famous for their pessimism. This paper is more optimistic and sees strategic culture as helpfully constraining the likely options of our enemies. It suggests that there is a wealth of innovative work here that we might exploit here to assist with strategic estimates and argues that it is puzzling that we have not tried to harness it before in a more programmatic way. It examines sets of different but related ideas about notions of strategic culture, historical analogies and social learning that have been developed by leading political scientists and then asks what they might contribute to improved intelligence analysis.

Notes

1. Lake and Shachtman, “Ex-CIA Chief: Why We Keep Getting Putin Wrong”, The Daily Beast, 2 March 2014.http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/02/ex-cia-chief-why-we-get-putin-wrong.html

2. Goodman, “The Dog That Didn’t Bark,” 529–51. See also Benjamin, Five Lives in One, 212–3; Andrew, Secret Service, 498.

3. Reiter, “Learning, Realism, and Alliances,” 490–526.

4. Yarhi-Milo, “In the Eye of the Beholder,” 7–51. See also Yarhi-Milo, Knowing the Adversary; Rezk, Western Intelligence and the Arab World.

5. The literature is vast but includes: Goldstein, Ideas and foreign policy; Larson. “The role of belief systems and schemas in foreign policy decision-making,” 17–33; Finnemore, “Norms, culture, and world politics,” 325–347; Olick and Levy. “Collective memory and cultural constraint,” 921–936; Paris, “Peacekeeping and the constraints of global culture,” 441–73.

6. The path-breaking book was Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time. More recently see Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich; Reiter, Crucible of Beliefs.

7. The first reference to “corporate memory” in the intelligence context is Thomas, “The Evolution of the JIC System,” in Andrew and Noakes (eds.) Intelligence and International Relations, 232.

8. See for example Betts, Enemies of Intelligence.

9. Herrmann and Choi. “From prediction to learning,” 132–3.

10. Some have even talked of a “memory boom” in history, see Lebow, “The future of memory,” 25.

11. See for example Goldgeier, “Psychology and security”, 137–66.

12. Dodgson, “Organizational Learning,” 375–94.

13. Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, 216–8; Houghton, “The Role of Analogical Reasoning in Novel Foreign-Policy Situations”, 523–7.

14. Raymond Williams famously defined culture as one of the three most complex words in the English language, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 87, 90.

15. Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture, 8–9.

16. Snyder, “The Concept of Strategic Culture,” in Jacobsen, (ed.) Strategic Power: USA/USSR, 3–9.

17. See Booth reply to Snyder in Booth, “The Concept of Strategic Culture Affirmed,” in Jacobsen, (ed.), Strategic Power: The United States of America and the USSR. The most important discussion of ethnocentrism in the security context remains Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism. The same year marked the appearance of Edward Said’s cultural analysis of ethnocentrism, Orientalism.

18. The classic statement of groupthink is Janis, Victims of Groupthink, 3–4.

19. Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism, 104–7.

20. Booth took little interest in intelligence studies, despite his location at Aberystwyth, one of its main centres of academic study.

21. Gray, “National Style in Strategy,” 21–2.

22. Johnston, “Thinking about Strategic Culture,” 36–43; Gray, “Strategic culture as context”, 49–69; Johnston, “Strategic Cultures Revisited: Reply to Colin Gray”, 519–23.

23. Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, 8, 136, 151.

24. Lewis, “The Blind Spot of U.S. Foreign Intelligence”, 44–55.

25. Bozeman, “Political Intelligence in Non-Western Societies,” in Godson (ed.) Comparing Foreign Intelligence.

26. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History.

27. Ethnocentrism in analysis is explicitly address in Johnston, Analytic Culture in the US Intelligence Community, 73–84.

28. Duyvesteyn, “Hearts and Minds, Cultural Awareness and Good Intelligence,” 445–59: Kelly et al, Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency.

29. Culture is rarely deployed in this sense in discussions of intelligence, but see Bonthous, “Understanding intelligence across cultures,” 7–34.

30. See for example, Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein, “Norms, Identity and Culture in National Security,” in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics.

31. Davies deploys an organizational view of intelligence culture see, “Intelligence culture and intelligence failure in Britain and the United States”, 495–520.

32. Kackman, Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture.

33. For an excellent review of the literature see: Lantis, “Strategic Culture and National Security Policy”, 87–113. See also Lantis, “Culture and National Security Policy,” with Darryl Howlett, in Baylis, Wirtz, Cohen and Colin S. Gray, (eds.), Strategy in the Contemporary World.

34. Johnston, “Thinking about Strategic Culture”, 37–9.

35. Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time.

36. Ibid.

37. Ianis, Groupthink: psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascos.

38. Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, 212–31.

39. Ibid. p.137.

40. Johnston, Cultural Realism; Gray, “National style in strategy,” 21–2, 32. Johnston, “Thinking about strategic culture”, 36–43; Gray, “Strategic culture as context,” 49–69; Johnston, “Strategic cultures revisited,” 519–23.

41. Reiter, “Learning, Realism, and Alliances,” 490–9.

42. Ibid.

43. Levy, “Learning and foreign policy,” 303–5.

44. Khong. Analogies at War.

45. Ibid. see also Huber, “Organizational learning,” 88–115.

46. Keslowitz, “Simpsons, 24, and the Law,” 2787; Tenenboim-Weinblatt, “Where is Jack Bauer when you need him?” 367–87; Zegart, “‘Spytainment’: the real influence of fake spies.” 599–622.

47. Schneider, Gleditsch, and Carey, “Exploring the past, anticipating the future,” 1–7.