Challenges Facing the Intelligence Community Essay

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U.S. Intelligence Community

The nature of the work that is conducted by the U.S. intelligence community conditions some of the challenges it faces. The processes of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence locate members of the intelligence community in situations and relationships that, if not unique to the community, are certainly lodestones to controversy. The discussion will primarily track challenges that are related to improvements of the "intelligence product" and the building or rebuilding of "relationships with important external constituencies."[footnoteRef:1] The purpose of the paper is to increase the saliency of challenges that are fundamental to the business of the intelligent community, and that endure because they are, indeed, endemic. A review of extant documents and scholarly articles will support this author's discussion and conclusions. [1: "Making Intelligence Smarter: The Future of U.S. Intelligence." 1996. [Report of an Independent Task Forces] http://fas.org/irp/cfr.html]

Section II: Three Challenges Confronting the U.S. Intelligence Community

(a) Challenge #1: Keeping the Gate Open for Late-Arriving Black Swans

A substantive challenge of the intelligence community is to establish ways to imagine black swans and to determine the likelihood -- the weight, if you will -- of these black swans with respect to feasibility, likelihood, and susceptibility to critical path change. This imagining must occur without being trivialized by taking on attributes of gaming. Rather, to address this challenge the intelligence community must steep the concepts in historical perspective.

The term black swan is an umbrella term used to signal recognition that some event has occurred that was unexpected, perhaps unimagined, had an enormous impact, and is rationalized in hindsight.[footnoteRef:2] Although Nassim Taleb's 2007 book, The Black Swan, is esoteric and abstract, the concept of a black swan is readily accessible to general audiences. That said, it is apparent that Black swans are the stuff of intelligence. Intelligence is constructed one bit and byte at a time from sources as disparate as SIGINT, IMINT, HUMINT, and MASINT.[footnoteRef:3] Yet, the generation of intelligence as a product occurs against the phenomenologistic background of that which is perceived and experienced -- and to which meaning is attributed.

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Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used the phrase known-knowns as a tag for phenomena that are happening or appear to be inevitable in time. Known-knowns are the flip side of black swans, in that, they are perceptually different: the black swan phenomenon may exist but not yet be known, or it may not yet exist and has never before perceived or even imagined. From this, it can be argued that a primary objective of the U.S. intelligence community is to manage surprise[footnoteRef:4]. [2: George Galdorisi. Global Trends 2030. Defense Media Network: Faircount Media Group, last modified 2014. http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/series/global-trends-2030/] [3: Making Intelligence Smarter, op cit. The following interprets the acronyms used in the text: SIGINT) = the interception of communications and other signals, IMINT = satellite photography or imagery; HUMINT = reports from human sources. MASINT = measurement and signature intelligence, which enhances understanding of physical attributes of intelligence targets.] [4: ]

(b) Challenge #2: What's Man Got to Do With It?

The challenges presented by continually evolving technology are embedded in nearly every facet of the human experience in the developed world, and this can increasingly be said of the developing world as well. Disruptive technology has a way of taking man out of basic, tried-and-true formulas, and instead increasingly placing man in positions with different relations to technology -- as coders and developers, rather than operators. The word automation has an archaic feel to it, having often been displaced by words such as unmanned and autonomous. Covert intelligence gathering has been inexorably altered by technological advances used to establish less man -- centered activities.[footnoteRef:5] That is to say that technology information systems and technology information management have become so sophisticated that the role assumed by people tend to become marginalized into custodial and support functions, or shifted to research and development. The use of unmanned systems and autonomous capabilities pose unprecedented opportunities….....

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