But many intelligence analysts are frustrated by the emphasis on current intelligence. Having developed expertise in an area and analytical skills, they wish to write longer range analyses that look beyond current demands. However, few policy makers are likely to read papers with longer horizons—not owing to lack of interest but to lack of time and the inability to pull away, even briefly, from pressing matters. Thus, a conflict arises between what the policy makers need to read and what many analysts wish to produce. Current intelligence products also tend to be shorter by their nature and goals, further limiting the ability of analysts to add the depth or context that they deem valuable. An additional concern is that if current intelligence represents the majority of what analysts produce, then a risk arises that they will largely become reporters of that day’s collection instead of true analysts. Building true depth of expertise is difficult on a steady diet of current intelligence.
Some middle ground exists simply because the intelligence community does not make a stark choice between one type of analysis and another on any given day. A range of analysis is produced. But because of the limited number of analysts, managers have to decide where to put their resources, and the fact remains that the current intelligence products predominate in terms of resources and the way policy makers perceive the intelligence community.
The current versus mid-term or
long-term intelligence
conundrum is not the only way to think about allocation issues, although it is the most common. Instead of thinking about intelligence as a matter of time, think about it as a depth versus breadth issue, or a tactical versus strategic issue. By its nature, most current intelligence tends to emphasize breadth over depth. However, one’s analytical sights can be raised to create intelligence that is current as well as strategic. Intelligence may be current in that it is focused on issues on the agenda right now or in the near future, but it also may attempt to give the policy maker a broader look at the issues involved, for example by providing more context, more interconnection with other issues or possible solutions, and so on. A more strategic current intelligence is not produced often but it can be done without pushing the analysis into areas that policy makers are less likely to find useful.
The problem of current versus long-term intelligence also reflects yet another difference in outlook between policy makers and intelligence officers. Policy makers in the United States think in four-year blocks of time, the length of any presidential administration—which at best can be extended to eight years with reelection. Therefore, policy makers have difficulty thinking in larger blocks of time because of their more limited ability to influence events beyond their tenure. Another problem for long-term analytical products is the inherent “softness” of their judgments as their timeframe increases. Trying to gauge likely conditions or outcomes is always difficult, but as the period being examined gets longer, the judgments become much less reliable. Long-range analysis may be interesting intellectually but it is unlikely to be seen as useful by policy makers. Indeed, it could even have a negative effect on the intelligence community at large if some policy makers question why resources are being devoted to this type of work rather than to more pressing and clearly identified issues that are on the current agenda.
BRIEFINGS. Briefings for policy makers are a form of current intelligence. Many are routine and take place first thing in the morning. Briefings are one of the main ways in which current intelligence is conveyed. One of the main advantages of briefings is the intelligence officer’s ability to interact directly with the policy maker, to get a better idea of the policy maker’s preferences and reactions to the intelligence, thus overcoming the absence of formal feedback mechanism. Risks also are involved, though. Briefings, as their name indicates, tend to be brief. Given policy makers’ schedules, most briefings are limited by the time allotted for them. Moreover, the morning briefings usually must cover several topics. Thus, providing the necessary context and depth in a briefing can be difficult.
At their best, briefings can be a give-and-take between the policy maker and the intelligence officer. This sort of exchange can be stimulating, but it runs risks. The briefer must be sure of his or her information, some of which may not be in the material that was prepared for the briefing. Briefers have to be taught to say, “I don’t know” and offer to get the desired information later, not hazard guesses. Furthermore, the briefing has an ephemeral quality. The briefer may not be able to recapture all that was said after the fact.
Briefings raise issues associated with analysts’ more proximate relationship with policy makers, particularly the ability to and necessity of keeping some distance from policy to maintain analytic objectivity. The regularly assigned briefers have a two-way role, conveying intelligence to the policy makers and conveying the policy makers’ needs or reactions back to the intelligence community. The briefers must avoid slipping into a role of advocacy or support for the policy makers’ policies, either writ large or in bureaucratic debates.
An area of controversy that arose in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in 2001 was the nature of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) briefing for the president and senior officials. The briefing, which centers around the president’s daily brief (PDB), was a CIA publication, conducted exclusively by the CIA. Although senior officials in the executive departments and in the intelligence community are privy to the PDB, this group is very small. Thus, other intelligence agencies do not necessarily know what the president is being told. This engenders a certain amount of jealousy and can lead to a situation in which analytic components of the intelligence community are working at cross-purposes.
In the aftermath of the passage of the 2004 intelligence legislation, control of the PDB shifted. The PDB staff became part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, coming under the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis. For the CIA, control over the PDB was one of its crown jewels, giving it an assured level of access. However, responsibility for conducting the morning briefing has passed to the director of national intelligence (DNI). Under the DNI. the PDB is open to contributions from many analytical components. This makes it more of a community product and may also add greater breadth, but it highlights a problem in the DNI structure. When the DCI controlled the CIA and the PDB, the DCI had a greater sense of who was behind the PDB articles and, perhaps, a greater sense of ownership than the DNI. The DNI controls no analysts beyond the NIC, so the DNI is, in effect, presenting the work of other agencies. In theory, and in law, the DNI has responsibility for all intelligence components but has authority over very few of them.
Some believe that too much emphasis has been placed on the PDB, which has had a negative effect on overall analytic efforts. Spending time with the chief executive on a regular basis and being able to put an intelligence product before the president routinely are valuable assets. No intelligence manager would decline these opportunities. But decisions still have to be made about how much effort to put into preparing one discreet entity (the PDB) and how much goes into broader and perhaps deeper products. Analyses that go into the PDB or any other morning intelligence publication are nonurgent enough to wait until the next day. If the items reported on were crucial, they would be briefed to the president and other senior officials at once. DNI McConnell has instituted “deep dives” as part of the PDB process, where time is set aside on a regular basis to go into some issue in depth. But given the fact that the PDB is crafted to the personal preferences of each president, a major change in the PDB process is not likely to happen until the inauguration of the next administration in 2009.
CRISES VERSUS THE NORM. One way in which requirements are set is in response to crises. Crisis-driven requirements represent the ultimate victory of current over long-range intelligence needs.
Given the limited nature of collection and analytical resources, certain issues inevitably receive short shrift or even no attention at all. And, just as inevitably, annual or semiannual requirements planning regularly fail to predict which of the seemingly less important issues will erupt into a crisis. Thus, the planning exercises are to some degree self-fulfilling—or serf-denying—prophecies.
Analytical managers must find a way to create or preserve some minimal amount of expertise against the moment when a seemingly less important issue erupts and suddenly moves to the top of policy makers’ concerns. The intelligence community has only a small collection reserve, no analytical reserve, and a limited capacity to move assets to previously uncovered but now important topics. Assets therefore move from hot topic to hot topic, with other matters receiving little or no coverage.
Despite the problem of defining requirements and the vagaries of international relations, the intelligence community is on the spot when it misses an issue—that is, fails to be alert to its eventuality or is unprepared to deal with it when it occurs. In part, the high expectations are deserved, given that one function of intelligence is strategic warning. But strategic warning is usually taken to mean advance notice on issues that would pose a threat to national security, not regional crises that might require some level of involvement. Such crises strain the image of the intelligence community as well as its resources, because policy makers in both branches and the media tend to be harsh—sometimes fairly, sometimes not—in their view of misses.
One difficult aspect of dealing with crises that has arisen in recent years has been the demands of the combatant commanders (called CoComs—the four-star officers who command U.S. forces in Europe, the Pacific, and so on) for intelligence support from national intelligence collection assets. The issue is one of conflicting priorities. The CoComs are responsible for huge swaths of the globe and react to unrest in any of the countries in their area of responsibility (AOR). However, policy makers and intelligence officers in Washington. D.C., may not have the same sense of urgency about events in some of the smaller states and those that have less affiliation to the United States. Thus, there is a difference of perspective and perception. Efforts have been made to wean the CoComs off their desire to call upon national assets for any and all emergencies in their AOR and to rely more on their own, admittedly less capable, theater intelligence assets.
THE WHEAT VERSUS CHAFF PROBLEM. The wheat versus chaff problem, although part of collection, ultimately becomes an analytical issue. Although much that is collected does not get processed and exploited, the amount that does is still formidable. Even in the age of computers, few technical shortcuts have been found to help analysts deal with the problem. The intelligence community has adopted some software programs to assist in parts of information management, such as text mining and data mining, and has examined many others, but no major breakthroughs have been made. Thus, to a large degree, the analysts’ daily task of sifting through the incoming intelligence germane to their portfolio remains a grind, whether done electronically or on paper. Sifting is not just a matter of getting through the accumulated imagery, signals, open-source reporting, and other data. It is also the much more important matter of seeing this mass of material in its entirety, of being able to perceive patterns from day to day and reports that are anomalous. There are no shortcuts. Sifting requires training and experience. Although some intelligence practitioners think of analysts as the human in the loop, the analysts’ expertise should be an integral part of collection sorting as well.
ANALYST FUNGIBILITY. When requirements change or when crises break out, analysts must be shifted to areas of greater need. As with collection, they are participating in a zero-sum game. The analysts have to come from some other assignment, and not every analyst can work on every issue. Each analyst has strengths, weaknesses, and areas that he or she simply does not know. Even though analysts far outnumber collection systems, analysts are less fungible—that is, easily interchanged or replaced—than the technical collection systems. A signals intelligence satellite that has been collecting against a French-speaking target will not plead ignorance or inability if redirected against an Arabic-speaking target. Significant issues of targeting, access, frequencies, and so on come up, but no language barrier exists per se. Streams of digital communications data do not have indecipherable accents. However, not every analyst has the requisite language, regional, or topical skills to move to an area of greater need. Very real limits exist on
analyst fungibility,
which is a major management concern. This is also sometimes referred to as
analyst agility,
again meaning the need for analysts who have more than one (or two) areas of expertise and therefore can be shifted to higher priority accounts during times of need. Fungibility or agility relies on three factors: the talents and background of the analysts when they are recruited; their training and education within the intelligence community; and the management of their careers, which should give them sufficient opportunities to develop this expertise in a few areas.
U.S. intelligence managers often speak about
global coverage,
which can be a dangerous and misleading term.
By global coverage,
intelligence officers mean their acknowledged requirement to cover any and all issues. Members of the intelligence community cannot say to a policy maker, for example, that they do not have much capability to analyze the current crisis in Fiji but they are very good on Finland. No bait and switch is allowed. If the situation in a country or region becomes a matter of concern, the intelligence community is expected to cover it. The pitfall in the term
global coverage
is the real possibility that it leaves the impression among policy makers of more depth and breadth than is available in the intelligence community. Intelligence managers understand the resource limitations within which they are working, but by using the term
global coverage
they may be misinterpreted as promising more than they can deliver.