The Potential of Integrating Intelligence and Intuition
JUNE 10TH, 2022 BY CARMEN MEDINA | 0 COMMENTS
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — When I was just starting out at CIA, there was an analyst in my group who worked in a particularly methodical way. As she read all the various intelligence reports, she would type on a sheet of paper (and it was a typewriter then) the excerpts that she considered meaningful. She would then cut the paper into strips, so that each strip contained just one excerpt, and filed them in notebooks. When it came time to write an article about a particular issue, she would pull out the relevant strips of paper, organize them into paragraphs, write connecting and transition language and an occasional topic sentence, and, voila! She had an analytic product.
I am not making this up. On occasion, I would walk by this analyst’s cubicle just when she had laid the strips of paper in the optimum order, and I would be sorely tempted to blow on her desk to scatter the strips hither and yon. I never did that, but I did – even as a junior analyst – ask my bosses whether they approved of this approach to analysis. I certainly didn’t. Even early in my career, I appreciated that reality was not a cut-and-paste operation. I remember them shrugging their shoulders and remarking that they couldn’t argue with the productivity. Our analyst was the most prolific member of the team, churning out analytic content at twice the rate of any of the others. But her intelligence reports, accurate in the details, were uninspiring in their insight.
This memory came to mind when I read about the Director of National Intelligence’s ongoing review of how the IC assesses the fighting power of foreign militaries, particularly their “will to fight.” The effective stubbornness of Ukraine’s military surprised US policymakers who had been told by the IC that Russian forces would make short work of its defenses. What were those assessments based on? My hunch is they were based on the available reporting, which probably could account for concrete, objective things such as the quantity and quality of military equipment, and even anticipated tactics. But there were clearly some aspects of the situation that traditional intelligence reports could not account for no matter how meticulously they were assembled.
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-potential-of-integrating-intelligence-and-intuition?mc_cid=23081ccd40&mc_eid=1fe7f7d069
