A Disputation on Intelligence Reform and Analysis: My 18 Theses

摘要

Eleven years later, the United States Intelligence Community (IC) has yet to recover from the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks on the Pentagon and New York City-and from the decade old-issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), at least in terms of how its member agencies do analysis. Many words have been said and written, and many changes have been put into place but the country's leadership has gone down as many blind alleys as it has found ways to make improvements. Indeed, much of the current thinking about analysis arguably spends much too much time on what might be called mechanical issues-especially the search for ever better programs to parse more and more data-and much less on the intellectual core of analysis.