The Role of the Intelligence Community in Identifying Cooperative Opportunities

摘要

While a lot has been written about the Department of Defense's (DoD) ongoing Strategic Choices and Management Review and the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, far less attention has been paid to the role of intelligence and the Intelligence Community (IC) in both processes and, more broadly, in informing both defense and grand strategy. The IC has two primary responsibilities, broadly defined as threat and opportunity analysis, which can be viewed through the lens of the U.S. government's (USG) recent emphasis on identifying positive-sum, cooperative opportunities in the global strategic environment. For example, today's intelligence, national security, and foreign policy analysts note that an increasingly multipolar geostrategic environment and a rise in transnational issues demand more cooperation among strategic actors. As a result, being able to identify opportunities for building positive-sum, cooperative relationships with other actors will become more and more important. The current National Intelligence Strategy (NIS), in its description of the geostrategic environment, highlights the potential for identifying and building such relationships. Implicit in this recognition is also the assumption that its own analysts should be responsible for performing this function in order to support the policymaker. But the IC has a degree of bias, rooted in its historical origins, toward identifying and monitoring potential threats. Additionally, the individual analyst, some scholars argue, has certain micro-level, career-enhancing incentives to over-warn and avoid definite predictions. Thus, analysts in the IC might be comparatively ill-suited to perform this function.