Theory and practice

Abstract

A sometime practitioner reflects on how theory might help address the challenges of doing intelligence: balancing strategic and tactical; knowing when ‘stories’ have been overtaken; understanding intelligence–policy relations in ways more subtle than ‘politicization’ adapting to big data; rethinking the canonical, and no longer helpful ‘intelligence cycle’; collaborating more with the private sector; and perhaps hardest, dealing with ‘false facts’.

Notes

1. Treverton et al., Toward a Theory of Intelligence.

2. Kendall, “The Function of Intelligence.”

3. This is the subject of a history of the NIC’s last two decades, edited by Robert Hutchings and me, with chapters by the last eight NIC chairs, Truth to Power.

4. Michael Warner calls these ‘proto-state sovereignties’. See his “Intelligence as Risk Shifting.”

5. For a critique of the intelligence cycle along those lines, see Hulnick, “What’s Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle.” See also Phythian, Understanding the Intelligence Cycle, which includes an article by Hulnick.

6. A good primer on ABI is Biltgen and Ryan, Activity-based Intelligence. I thank Ryan for being my guide to ABI.

7. This uses language from my post, ‘The Future of Intelligence’, available on the SM&A website, http://www.smawins.com/Home/News_Details/42.

8. See New America Foundation, “Terrorism in America After 9/11.”

9. This and the following paragraph draw on Hutchings and Treverton.

10. The unclassified market, the Good Judgment Project, is described in Tetlock and Gardner, Superforecasting.

11. This is a major theme of the NIC’s most recent Global Trends, which I had the honor to preside over, Global Trends.

12. Michael Herman makes this point sharply. See his Intelligence Power in Peace and War.

13. Such efforts have a long lineage. See Sherman Kent’s charming piece about his effort to do the same, “Words of Estimative Probability.”

14. See Kerbel and Olcott, “Synthesizing with Clients, Not Analyzing for Customers.”