Spies and bureaucrats: getting intel right

THE American intelligence community has meet withed two blows to its credibility in the past three and a half years. First, intelligence agencies failed to descry al Qaeda's terrorist plans for September 11 2001 Then, estimates of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs prov to be wildly not upon the mark. These failures have damaged decision makers' trust in the intelligence community. Faulty intelligence upon Iraq has also hurt American credibility abroad, making it more difficult for the Bush administration to speak with authority regarding North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, at least before North Korea made its startling announcement about having the bomb like intelligence failures have justifiably activeed investigations of the performance of intelligence organizations and calls for reform. They have also expos the Bush administration to the two domestic and international criticism--in the case of September 11 for not acting upon poor intelligence, and, in the case of Iraq, for acting upon poor intelligence.

While the sum of two units failures differ in a number of defer tos both are evidence of shortfalls in in what way our intelligence organizations collect and analyze information. The point in dispute is less one of bureaucratic design than of institutional agriculture Redressing these deficiencies, as oppos to the organizational reshuffling beloved by dint of Washington politicians, must be a central thrust of any meaningful program of intelligence reform.

A tale of sum of two units failures

There is a witticism told among military intelligence officers, frequently with some bitterness, that when things go on wrong it is labeled an "intelligence failure," on the other hand when they go right it is called a "military success" The implication is that while intelligence plays an important part in the formulation of national security policy, its character comes to light only when there is a catastrophe. Rightly or erroneously failures form the signposts of the history of intelligence, from Japan's surprise attack upon Pearl Harbor, to the failure to predict--or level initially to detect--China's entry into the Korean War, to the overestimation (and following underestimation) of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile force, to the inability to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the failure to foresee India and Pakistan's 1998 nuclear tests

smooth against such a backdrop, the American intelligence community's new track record hardly inspires confidence. It is veritable that intelligence agencies have achieved several victories, like as gathering the evidence that forced Muammar Qaddafi to draw near clean regarding Libya's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and the information that allowed authorities to dismantle Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan's nuclear smuggling ring. Doubtless they have had other successe that will single emerge from the shadows above coming decades. Still, these pale in comparison with the failure to warn of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the gros mischaracterization of Iraq's WMD programs.

While there is abundant we still do not know about the performance of the intelligence community in these cases, there is a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of that we do know now. The release of the report of the joint congressional inquiry into the September 11 terrorist attacks and the 9/11 Commission Report provide extensive information upon what American intelligence agencies did and did not know about al Qaeda. Similarly, the Senate pitch upon Committee on Intelligence's Report upon the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments upon Iraq, the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence upon Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (the Duelfer Report), and the British government's Review of Intelligence upon Weapons of Mass Destruction, chaired by dint of Lord Butler of Brockwell (the Butler Report), provide insight into American and British intelligence upon Iraqi WMD. (Another group, the Commission upon the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, reported to the president at the extremity of March, 2005.) Together these studies make fascinating, if at times alarming, reading.

not upon the radar screen

Of the sum of two units most recent intelligence embarrassments, the worst--the failure to warn of the September 11 attacks--was also the least surprising. The intelligence community's inability to foresee suicide aircraft attacks upon the World Trade Center and Pentagon showed a classic case of intelligence services failing to provide a useful warning for politicians and policy makers. Scholars have spilled gallons of ink and savageed forests examining past surprise attacks, similar as the Japanese raid upon Pearl Harbor and the Egyptian strike upon Israel at the beginning of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. on the contrary in truth, it is impossible to eliminate the possibility of being surprised because of the difficulty of sifting accurate "signals" of an impending attack from the sea of inaccurate or irrelevant "noise." As Roberta Wohlstetter conclud nearly four decades ago in her classic application of mind Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, the Japanese attack caught the United States unawares not because of the absence of indicators, on the contrary because of a plethora of contradictory and erroneous reports. Averting surprise becomes plane more difficult when the attacker elects an unexpected method of attack, as the Japanese did when they used carrier-based aircraft to strike the Hawaiian naval base.