Intelligence Failure Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Intelligence failure is a term used to describe situations when intelligence organizations, military commands, foreign ministries, or even law enforcement agencies fall short in providing accurate and timely warning to officials of nascent dangers or opportunities. The term is used to describe failures to predict specific events rather than failures to produce accurate risk assessments, which are more general estimates of the nature, severity, and likelihood of threats. Intelligence failures are often linked to strategic surprise, a type of event that can change the course of history by creating international or domestic crises or by initiating war. Examples of intelligence failures that contributed to strategic surprise include the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the 1968 Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War (1959–1975).

Type I And Type II Errors

Intelligence failures can involve Type I (false positive) and Type II (false negative) errors. The September 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon involved a Type II error because the U.S. intelligence community failed to recognize or respond effectively to signals of an impending attack. Intelligence and law enforcement officials recognized that al-Qaida was operating within the United States and was even plotting to hijack airliners, but they failed to piece together information within intelligence channels that might have derailed the plotters. The U.S. government’s inability to assess accurately the state of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s efforts to restart his chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons program reflects a Type I error that contributed to the decision of U.S. president George W. Bush and his administration to invade Iraq in 2003. A combination of international sanctions, U.S. surveillance over flights and airstrikes, United Nations inspections, and diplomatic pressure made it impossible for Iraq to continue significant efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Intelligence failure can occur at any or all points in the so-called intelligence cycle: setting requirements for data collection and analysis, collecting information, fusing and analyzing information, and deciding to respond by selecting and disseminating warnings to organizations and individuals. In addition, effective response plans must be available to field commanders, diplomats, or law enforcement officials, and warning has to be received in time to defeat the opponent’s plans. Officials sometimes have a good appreciation of what is about to transpire in the final hours before disaster, but they no longer have the means to communicate to field units or a realistic way to prevent what is inevitable.

Sources Of Failure

Sources of failure have been linked to several levels of analysis: factors that are inherent in the production of finished intelligence and warning, human cognition, organizational behavior, and relations between the intelligence community and officials. The cry wolf syndrome is an example of a problem inherent in analysis and warning. It occurs when analysts repeatedly sound false alarms that cause recipients to dismiss what eventually turns out to be a legitimate alert. Scholars also have identified several common cognitive biases that can impede both the analysis of information and the response to warning. For instance, mirror imaging—the tendency to interpret another actor’s behavior using one’s beliefs, experiences, values, or standard operating procedures—can cause fatal errors in analysis and response.

Organizational behavior has offered insights into the sources of intelligence failure as well. Compartmentalizaton, for example, is endemic in intelligence production because the need-to-know principle governs individual analysts’ access to information. But organizations are jealous guardians of information, and bureaucratic rivalry or differences in standard operating procedures can slow the flow of information within organizations or across the intelligence community. For instance, the inability to move information across the legal and cultural boundaries between intelligence and law enforcement agencies contributed to the intelligence failure associated with the September 11, 2001, attacks. A variety of problems also can emerge to bedevil relations between the intelligence and policy-making communities. Politicization emerges when policy makers place overt or subtle pressure on intelligence analysts and managers to produce estimates to support political preferences or policies. Adaptation failure—the inability of organizations, personnel, or procedures to adjust to a shifting threat environment—is another cause of intelligence failure.

Research indicates that intelligence failures rarely occur as a result of an absence of signals within the intelligence pipeline. Accurate information is often available; what is missing is an analytical framework that can place existing information in an appropriately alarming context. This explains why data and indicators that once seemed innocuous take on a clear and compelling significance in hindsight. Imagination also is generally not lacking among victims of intelligence failure. In the 1930s, the U.S. Navy repeatedly war-gamed a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; senior navy officers knew and told policy makers that the U.S. Pacific fleet was in an exposed position.

Future Of Intelligence Failures

Although intelligence failures can create crises or exacerbate enduring conflicts leading to war, it is unlikely that they can be prevented in the future. Intelligence failure might be a manifestation of the structure of conflict itself. The victims of intelligence failure rarely share the same worldviews, perceptions of risk, or incentives as those seeking to surprise their competitors with a fait accompli, creating a cognitive divide that is difficult to bridge beforehand. Even when detected by analysts and reported to officials, signals of impending threats tend to be dismissed as unrealistic or even harebrained because they are deemed to be simply too risky or ultimately counterproductive to be contemplated by even somewhat irrational individuals. Reforms adopted in the wake of intelligence failure also cannot guarantee future success because of the difficulties in making changes in organizations and procedures to anticipate threats that are impossible to discern in their entirety and detail. An additional frustration is that even effective reforms can create a false sense of security, setting the stage for new misperceptions, biases, or organizational pathologies that sow the seeds of future failure.

For instance, security at the World Trade Center was vastly improved following the 1993 detonation of a bomb in a parking garage. Thus, one might wonder why intelligence analysts failed to recognize that the center might be subjected to renewed attack by Islamic fundamentalists, but experts would have considered the site to be relatively well defended against attack. Following security upgrades, traffic was directed away from the buildings, trucks were no longer allowed to drive underground, and surveillance systems were improved. There was every reason to believe that there were easier targets to attack. But in the absence of an accurate perceptual lens, expertise alone cannot prevent failures of intelligence.

Bibliography:

Jervis, Robert. Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010.
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. New York: Norton, 2004.
Wirtz, James J. The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Wohlstetter, Roberta. Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962.
Zegart, Amy. Spying Blind:The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007.

This example Intelligence Failure Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.