Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 3, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2018 | Page 39

Global Security and Intelligence Studies
surprise. Rather, the goal of strategic warning within the intelligence community
is not to prevent surprise, but anticipate it and provide policy-makers with timely
enough information to shape policy choices (Davis 2003). Although strategic
warning is a discrete subset of the broader analytical field of intelligence analysis,
the analysts’ training and education do play a key role in enabling them to think
critically about future threats, or “global trends” which will impact policy formulation
and decision-making (DNI 2017).
Literature on Intelligence Analysis
Much has been written about the need for professionalization of intelligence,
to include intelligence analysis (Marrin 2012; Bruce and George
2015). The arguments offered are that through a more rigorous professional
development program which includes education, training, certification,
credentialing and a continual reevaluation and reassessment of one’s own competencies,
biases, or prejudices, the intelligence community will produce better
intelligence programs, processes, and products, to include strategic warning. As a
result, intelligence professionals will be less likely to politicize intelligence, or succumb
to their own cognitive biases in producing analytic products. Yet, as Hastedt
(2013) notes, intelligence is based on the need for the intelligence community to
respond to consumer demands and thus has been and will always be politicized.
To this end, a key factor in teaching intelligence analysis is understanding the relationship
between the intelligence professional and policy-makers. This is particularly
important for those analysts who do produce strategic assessments, offering
long-term forecasts of future trends and threats the nation faces.
As a result of the intelligence failures surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks
and the reorganization of the intelligence community mandated in the Intelligence
Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004, the newly formed Office
of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) became the chief advocate for further
reforms in the intelligence community. As Bruce and George (2015) note, the
ODNI, as a result of the IRTPA legislation, mandated certain analytical tradecraft
become standardized across the IC, to include the use of Structured Analytical
Techniques (SAT). These were codified in the CIA’s Tradecraft Primer (2009) and
expanded on by Heuer and Pherson (2014). Yet, SATs are not as methodologically
rigorous as their proponents argue (Artner, Girven, and Bruce 2016). And,
as Coulthart (2017) notes, the jury is still out on the effectiveness of SATs as an
analytical tool in producing intelligence products which have provided accurate
threat assessments, much less anticipated strategic surprise.
There is a growing amount of literature concerning the best ways to teach
and use intelligence analysis; however; most of it tends to fall into two camps
based on the previous views of whether intelligence analysis is an art or a science.
Those who advocate it is an art fall within the analytical tradecraft literature which
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