Three Core Challenges Facing the U.S. Intelligence Community

Introduction

The nature of the work conducted by the U.S. intelligence community shapes many of the challenges it faces. The processes of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence place members of the community in situations and relationships that, if not entirely unique, are certainly magnets for controversy. This discussion primarily tracks challenges related to improvements of the "intelligence product" and the building or rebuilding of "relationships with important external constituencies." The purpose of this paper is to increase the salience of challenges that are fundamental to the business of the intelligence community and that endure precisely because they are endemic. A review of existing documents and scholarly articles supports the discussion and conclusions that follow.

Anticipating Black Swan Events

A substantive challenge for the intelligence community is to establish ways to imagine black swan events and to assess their likelihood — the weight, if you will — with respect to feasibility, probability, and susceptibility to critical-path change. This imagining must occur without being trivialized by taking on the attributes of gaming. Rather, to address this challenge, the intelligence community must steep its 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 only in hindsight. Although Nassim Taleb's 2007 book, The Black Swan, is esoteric and abstract, the concept itself is readily accessible to general audiences. Black swans are, in a very real sense, the stuff of intelligence. Intelligence is constructed one bit and byte at a time from sources as disparate as SIGINT, IMINT, HUMINT, and MASINT. Yet the generation of intelligence as a product occurs against the phenomenological background of that which is perceived and experienced — and to which meaning is attributed.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used the phrase known-knowns as a tag for phenomena that are happening or appear to be inevitable over 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 been perceived or even imagined. From this, it can be argued that a primary objective of the U.S. intelligence community is to manage surprise.

The Diminishing Role of Human Agency in Intelligence

The challenges presented by continually evolving technology are embedded in nearly every facet of human experience in the developed world, and this can increasingly be said of the developing world as well. Disruptive technology has a way of removing human actors from basic, tried-and-true formulas, instead placing people in different relationships to technology — as coders and developers rather than operators. The word automation has an archaic feel to it, having been largely displaced by terms such as unmanned and autonomous.

Covert intelligence gathering has been inexorably altered by technological advances that establish less human-centered activities. Technology information systems and information management have become so sophisticated that the roles assumed by people tend to become marginalized into custodial and support functions, or shifted entirely to research and development. The use of unmanned systems and autonomous capabilities presents unprecedented opportunities for seamless coordination with manned systems, but it also creates opportunities for reduced human control and decision-making in those components of the force structure and the intelligence community that are unmanned or autonomous.

The days of worrying about a rogue operative have been replaced with concern about unchecked autonomous retaliation and war-making beyond any threatening scenario imagined during the Cold War. The question becomes pressing: Does this signal the beginning of an era in which programs utilizing more intensive covert and clandestine activities must — as a matter of course — prevail? Or will cyber intelligence become the pivotal practice that enables advantage in gathering and analysis? As information management systems enable operations to take place at increasing distances from sources or targets, the path to intelligence may lie at the nexus of cyber engagement.

Conclusion

At the core of each challenge discussed lies technology. The intelligence community can better equip itself to predict and prepare for black swans by ensuring that its technology, information, and communication systems are superbly developed and state-of-the-art. Autonomous systems, unmanned defense capabilities, and precision strike assets are inextricably linked to technological development, as are cyber instruments. The overarching challenge faced by the intelligence community will be to address the public response to the use of technology at the frontier of change — in order to effectively manage surprise, rather than be hamstrung by public ignorance and fear that lacks the perspective informed by the facts.