A paper by Jeffrey R. Cooper on “Curing Analytical Pathologies” (pdf) that was withheld from the CIA web site but posted on the Federation of American Scientists web site last week has now been downloaded tens of thousands of times, suggesting that there is widespread interest in a critical assessment of intelligence analysis.
One of the analytical techniques cited favorably by Cooper (at pp. 48-49) is called “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses” (ACH).
More information about this structured, methodologically rigorous approach to intelligence analysis was presented in a January 2000 paper (pdf) by Air Force MSgt Robert D. Folker, Jr. that was published by the Joint Military Intelligence College. The author compared it with less formal approaches and found that it offered significant advantages.
“At the heart of this controversy is the question of whether intelligence analysis should be accepted as an art (depending largely on subjective, intuitive judgment) or a science (depending largely on structured, systematic analytic methods).”
“Resolving this question is necessary to provide direction and determine an efficient and effective approach to improve analysis,” wrote MSgt. Folker.
“If qualitative intelligence analysis is an art, then efforts to improve it should focus on measuring the accuracy of one’s intuition, selecting those analysts with the best track record, and educating them to become experts in a given field.”
“If, on the other hand, qualitative intelligence analysis is a science, then analysts should be trained to select the appropriate method for a given problem from a variety of scientific methodologies and exploit it to guide them through the analytical process,” he wrote.
Based on empirical tests, the author found reasons to conclude that there is indeed a “scientific” dimension to intelligence analysis that has been neglected, and that intelligence analysis would benefit from more structured approaches.
See “Intelligence Analysis in Theater Joint Intelligence Centers: An Experiment in Applying Structured Methods” by MSgt Robert D. Folker, Jr. (USAF), Joint Military Intelligence College, January 2000.
The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons, and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987.. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]
On 14 April 2023, the Belarusian Ministry of Defence released a short video of a Su-25 pilot explaining his new role in delivering “special [nuclear] munitions” following his training in Russia. The features seen in the video, as well as several other open-source clues, suggest that Lida Air Base––located only 40 kilometers from the Lithuanian border and the […]
A photo in a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) student briefing from 2022 shows four people inspecting what appears to be a damaged B61 nuclear bomb.
In early-February 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) had informed Congress that China now has more launchers for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) than the United States. The report is the latest in a serious of revelations over the past four years about China’s growing nuclear weapons arsenal and the deepening […]