ARRC Journal 2018 | Page 58

ARRC JOURNAL BIAS – HOW CAN IT AFFECT INTELLIGENCE SUPPORT TO DECISION-MAKING? Maj Jim Buchan (GBR-A) “We had to arrange their minds in order of battle, just as carefully and as formally as other officers arranged their bodies; and not only our own men’s minds, though them first; the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them; and thirdly, the mind of the nation supporting us from behind the firing line, and the mind of the hostile nation waiting the verdict, and the neutrals looking on.” TE Lawrence As the character of war has become ever more complex and dynamic, there is now just as much a requirement for ‘brains’ as there is ‘brawn’. The technological capabilities that our adversaries now possess mean that NATO is no longer in a position where its equipment superiority can be guaranteed. In an operating environment characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity 1 , greater understanding provides a greater chance of success. Experience has shown that we can expect to operate within congested urban and littoral environments that will be cluttered, making it difficult to distinguish individuals, items or events. These environments will be contested, as land mobility, littoral and air access, and our use of cyberspace is challenged by rapid technological innovation and proliferation. The battlespace will be connected, with activity being increasingly vulnerable to attack and exploitation, and our operations will continue to be constrained by Western legal and societal norms that are unlikely to constrain the actions of our adversaries. 2 As such, we need to understand a much broader audience than just our adversaries alone. The level of understanding required in a complex and dynamic environment presents a problem for intelligence analysts due to the seemingly infinite amount of information that will have to be processed and analysed by a finite resource. Judgement provides a useful shortcut and is an analyst’s ally; it allows them to provide an assessment based on past experience, Dr Paul Latawaski sets the historical context for the region 1 Heuristics and Biases in Military Decision Making, Major Blair S. Williams, U.S. Army, 2010 2 Future Character of Conflict, DCDC, UK MOD, 2010 3 Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, 2011 58 ALLIED RAPID REACTION CORPS historical trends or even just a ‘gut feeling’. Whilst it is entirely appropriate to do so, it must be recognised that this can make it easy to create, sustain and project biases that misinform the decision-making process. The work of Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate and Professor Amos Tversky helps to explain this. They proposed that when facing an overwhelming amount of information, human beings reduce complexity by using their own judgement. Over a period of time, we inject cognitive bias into our decision-making from the unconscious errors that are generated by this mental simplification. Our decisions are not perfectly rational; mistakes are not only common but also completely predictable. 3 One of Kahneman and Tversky key concepts was that of ‘availability bias’. The easier it is for us to recall instances of something happening, the more likely we will assess it is to happen again. For instance, assessing that an event will occur because historically it has occurred 70 percent of the time, is a sensible approach for an analyst. If however, the same assessment is introduced repeatedly, we risk ignoring the 30 percent of other possibilities. Since it is