Editor’s Note: This piece on the War on the Rocks Hasty Ambush blog is published in partnership with the Hoover Institution’s Military History in the News.
At the start of the Second World War, Great Britain’s intelligence agencies were anything but impressive. Their analytic capabilities overestimated the Third Reich’s military potential through 1938. And then in 1939, they changed views and failed to see that the Germans were actually making effective preparations to that would enable them to wreck the European balance of power. This would bring the world close to what Churchill characterized so aptly as “a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
Confronting this great danger, Britain possessed minuscule intelligence agencies, underfunded throughout the interwar period and with only small cadres of agents and analysts. Yet over the next five years, the British assembled impressive intelligence capabilities that broke the Wehrmacht’s supposedly unbreakable enigma codes, deceived German intelligence as to Allied intentions throughout the war, and alerted Allied commanders as to emerging German technological threats such as the V-1 and V-2 weapons. It was indeed an impressive achievement that substantially shortened the war and saved innumerable Allied lives. Much of the credit rests on the fact that the British reached out to experts outside the government: mathematicians, German linguists, historians, and scientists. Age and profession represented no barrier. One of the foremost analysts of the Kriegsmarine was a twenty year-old Cambridge undergraduate history major; one of the foremost scientific analysts was a zoologist. The foremost analyst of the Battle of the Atlantic was a barrister, crippled by polio who could barely stand.
It is worth contrasting the culture and make up of Britain’s intelligence organizations with what passes for intelligence agencies in the United States today. The Washington Post recorded several years ago that less than 20 percent of the CIA’s analysts speak a foreign language. A general ignorance of history and culture characterizes much of the personnel who make up the American intelligence effort. The inane system of recruitment seems to aim at numbers rather than quality. And perhaps most significantly. the security barriers that are presently in place prevent most of those with the language skills and cultural knowledge to understand our potential enemies from being recruited, as many such individuals possess relatives in the targeted countries. Finally, in the depressing litany of how not to build effective intelligence agencies, my view is that these agencies rarely reach out to the extensive numbers of foreign area experts scattered throughout American academia, not because the intelligence agencies possess such brilliant insights into the external world, but most probably because they are afraid that the U.S. public might discover that the intelligence emperor has no clothes.
Williamson Murray serves as a Minerva Fellow at the Naval War College. A widely published historian and former Air Force officer, Murray was educated at Yale and taught there before moving on to Ohio State University as a military and diplomatic historian. In 1987, he received the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. He retired from Ohio State in 1995 as a professor emeritus of history.
Image: Danielstirland, Creative Commons
Is it really that the IC is afraid of admitting that for all its billions in yearly funding, there are things it doesn’t know?
I’m not an expert, but I’ve got to think three other reasons are bigger ones than that:
1. Security – the IC only gets more and more closed and difficult to work or interact with. Byzantine rules for would-be employees, contractors, etc. are more than enough to put off many who would otherwise want to offer their services. For goodness sake, the Brits actively took on communist sympathizers, knowing they were likely Soviet spies, and tracked them while letting them do their work for the UK, rather than blacklisted them all outright. That’s inconceivable today. Yet this is probably a fig leaf excuse relative to the next two.
2. Mutual skepticism – in WWII, the Brits could get all of the UK’s academic class, which at the time was probably pound-for-pound the brightest in the world in a host of fields, to join up to do their part. In the US, certainly since Watergate & Vietnam, and perhaps even more so now, the mutual suspicion on both sides of the IC/DoD and academic divide is prohibitive. Witness the Human Terrain System experiments. . .
3. Lawyers and the FAR. Along with the security challenges, the ridiculous standards for Federal contracting make impossible the kinds of informal relationships and support that I suspect many outside experts would prefer to give the IC. Instead, services firms get tons of money in exquisitely crafted open competitions to produce butts in seats, the exact same kind of inside-the-building non-expert butts those agencies hire in the first place, just with different colored badges.
Superb summary.
Sir;
The problem is worst than you think.
With the competitive analyses framework and lax leadership that is completely overwhelmed with the day-to-day, groups of people have established social cliques in the IC, just like in junior high school. These individuals and small groups have the same level of laziness, political agendas, and attitudes and mindsets. As such, the number one enemy of the US IC and informative Intel analyses is individual and group biases. Without the proper restraint, management skills, and adequate training, inappropriate biases drive much of what passes for Intel these days.
The end result, Intel gone wrong. The proof? Please see the links below. The last paper is perhaps the most damning. I challenge anyone in the IC to disprove the statements above.
https://www.academia.edu/16305376/The_Concept_of_the_Human_Terrain
https://www.academia.edu/15617653/_With_All_Thy_Getting_
https://www.academia.edu/9430551/Anti-terrorism_Counterterrorism_Combatting_Terrorism_
Take care.
Joe C.
No, the US IC is not really that bad–although there is significant room for improvement.
There is, of course, a tendency of commentators to focus on the well-known failures and overlook the daily successes (what, in the social sciences, is known as “selecting on the dependent variable”). There’s also a tendency for both critics and defenders to focus on the cases that buttress the points they want to make (confirmation bias).
We do actually have one rigorous study of how accurate current IC prediction is, albeit based on a Canadian agency rather than a US one: the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat of the PCO, which does something akin to the synthesis role of the UK JIC and the strategic/political assessment done by INR at the US State Department. It turns out that they do quite well (http://pubs.rddc-drdc.gc.ca/BASIS/pcandid/www/engpub/DDW?W%3DAUTHOR+%3D+%22Mandel%2C+D.R.%22+sort+by+repdate+descend%26M%3D1%26R%3DY%26U%3D1). It could be, of course, that Canadian analysts outperform CIA or INR analysts, but I doubt there is a very large difference among the three.
Also, while language skills and historical/cultural background is certainly important for analysts, it pains me as an area specialist to admit that most current research on predictive accuracy suggests that cognitive style (and associated training) is at least as important. An analyst with a rich array of background knowledge who is prone to premature cognitive closure is usually less accurate than a generalist open to new information, critical thinking, a willingness to update beliefs, and openness to the analysis of competing hypotheses (Philip Tetlock’s book on Expert Political Judgment and his recent volume with Dan Gardener on Superforecasting are essential reading in this regard).
Is a WaPo article of 2007 on he CIA enough to criticize the US IC as a whole more than 8 years after. 1) There is a problem of validity, 2) the auhor does not consider evidence to the contrary, including the intelligence community’s efforts (agreed their success is debatable) to fund academic programs which seek to develop more well rounded professionals, including professionals with greater regional expertise. On the question of reaching out, there are some significant exceptions, see for example the involvement of the chairman of the NIC at the ISA convention, the involvement of a host of experts in the ODNI global trends documents, or Bob Jervis’ book on intelligence failure. Perhaps just anecdotal evidence, but this is already more evidence than was provided by the author of this article, as far as I can tell.
The US IC has some extraordinarily capable analysts in it and I think it is easy to overstate the importance of language capability. In general, at least at the national level agencies, I think the quality of analysts is very high.
However, it is also true that the Intelligence Community makes it far too difficult to reach out to outside experts. There are some good short term/tactical security reasons for doing this. However, they come at a steep long term/strategic cost.
Sorry Professor, but this is a complete load of bunk
“The Washington Post recorded several years ago that less than 20 percent of the CIA’s analysts speak a foreign language. A general ignorance of history and culture characterizes much of the personnel who make up the American intelligence effort. The inane system of recruitment seems to aim at numbers rather than quality. And perhaps most significantly. the security barriers that are presently in place prevent most of those with the language skills and cultural knowledge to understand our potential enemies from being recruited, as many such individuals possess relatives in the targeted countries. Finally, in the depressing litany of how not to build effective intelligence agencies, my view is that these agencies rarely reach out to the extensive numbers of foreign area experts scattered throughout American academia, not because the intelligence agencies possess such brilliant insights into the external world, but most probably because they are afraid that the U.S. public might discover that the intelligence emperor has no clothes.”
First off, if you’re basing your opinion of the entire U.S. intelligence community on one snippet of an outdated article from the Washington Post, then you have completely lost your mind. The modern IC isn’t just the CIA (although they like to think they are the center of the universe).
Just because someone is in an analyst role in the CIA or any of the agencies for that matter, that doesn’t mean they need to have foreign language skills. While Foreign Area Officers/Analysts and Case Officers with language skills are an important part of the community, they are just one small piece. There are literally dozens of different analyst roles in the community, everything from imagery analysts to military order of battle analysts.
There are thousands of linguists, translators and interpreters working in the community, stateside at the various agencies and throughout deployed locations around the world. To say the community lacks any language or cultural knowledge just shows your complete ignorance of what’s going on in the community today.
As far as recruiting, if you really don’t understand why the process involves security screening and vetting because the positions will require a security clearance, then you simply have no business commenting on the issue at all. This isn’t the academic community; you can’t have anyone walking in off the street coming to work on projects. Everyone needs to meet the same standards as far as background checks and being granted a security clearance. That’s the nature of the business its not for everyone and it doesn’t mean the process is inane. As far as academic outreach, it happens all the time in the community, just because you’re not aware of it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.