Product Description

Drawing on the individual and collective experience of recognized intelligence experts and scholars in the field, "Analyzing Intelligence" provides the first comprehensive assessment of the state of intelligence analysis since 9/11. Its in-depth and balanced evaluation of more than fifty years of U.S. analysis includes a critique of why it has under-performed at times. It provides insights regarding the enduring obstacles as well as new challenges of analysis in the post-9/11 world, and suggests innovative ideas for improved analytical methods, training, and structured approaches. The book's six sections present a coherent plan for improving analysis. Early chapters examine how intelligence analysis has evolved since its origins in the mid-20th century, focusing on traditions, culture, successes, and failures.The middle sections examine how analysis supports the most senior national security and military policymakers and strategists, and how analysts must deal with the perennial challenges of collection, politicization, analytical bias, knowledge building and denial and deception. The final sections of the book propose new ways to address enduring issues in warning analysis, methodology (or 'analytical tradecraft') and emerging analytic issues like homeland defense. The book suggests new forms of analytic collaboration in a global intelligence environment, and imperatives for the development of a new profession of intelligence analysis. "Analyzing Intelligence" is written for the national security expert who needs to understand the role of intelligence and its strengths and weaknesses.Practicing and future analysts will also find that its attention to the enduring challenges provides useful lessons-learned to guide their own efforts. The innovations section will provoke senior intelligence managers to consider major changes in the way analysis is currently organized and conducted, and the way that analysts are trained and perform.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95017 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 340 pages

Customer Reviews

A "must have" for the intelligence analyst's bookshelf
This is not an Analysis 101 book. It is a serious, insightful look at the important aspects of intelligence analysis as it is practiced and should be practiced. The contributors include the elite of the intelligence analysis business - Heuer, Kerr, Davis, Gannon, and Lowenthal, among others. They are people who speak with authority based on their expertise and experience in all aspects of intelligence. The contributors had the agenda of elucidating for readers the heart and soul of intelligence analysis, and they succeeded.

Several chapters by themselves would be worth the price of the book: John McLaughlin's chapter on dealing with the policymaker customer; Dick Kerr's chapter on the CIA analysis history; or Jack Davis' chapter on analytic pitfalls, among others.

The book reflects the political and military analytic background of the contributors. Consequently, it gives less attention to the economic and S&T/weapons systems analysis perspective - not a serious flaw, since these are rather specialized fields of analysis having a distinct customer set. The only chapter that could be substantially improved is the one of military intelligence analysis, which spends too much space lamenting the lack of respect accorded to military intelligence analysis and insufficient space in discussing what it really is all about. Overall, this book is a major contribution to the intelligence literature and should be on every analyst's bookshelf.

A Must Read for the Curious and Practicioners Alike
Writing in the introduction to their excellent new volume on intelligence analysis, editors Roger Z. George and James Bruce (who, in the interest of full disclosure, I am an associate of) point out that examples of vigorous scholarly work focusing on analysis are few and far between. "As of 2007, the body of scholarly writing on intelligence analysis remains...surprisingly thin." This dearth should come as a surprise even to those versed in analysis (it was to me), especially when one considers the important role played by faulty or strong intelligence analyses throughout recent American history along with the fairly extensive body of social science literature authored in parallel.

Analyzing Intelligence, featuring 18 chapters written by some of America's more accomplished analytical practitioners and theorists, does much to repair this deficiency. Its chapters reference analysis through several lenses, beginning with its origins, moving through its various facets and challenges, and concluding with "ways forward." The narrative pace of the book is engineered to maximize the reader's grasp of overarching and common themes, quite the achievement in such a wide-ranging and diverse work. Crisp editing and welcome section introductions help orient the reader to general themes and points of particular interest brought up by subsequent authors, lending the volume (whose cover features a far from accessible Rubik's cube) a more readable tone than one may expect.

As in any compilation, some chapters stand above others in terms of their impact and quality. This "favoritism" effect is heavily reliant on personal taste -- someone intimately familiar with the history of intelligence analysis in the American context may want to skip the first two chapters, while someone without a background in the policymakers' involvement with analysis should pay particularly close attention to John McLaughlin's definitive treatment of that dynamic featured in chapter 4. However, the following chapters, in my opinion, convey key insights that transcend personal or professional tastes and could easily be described as visionary.

Is Intelligence Analysis a Discipline? - Rebecca Fisher and Rob Johnston provide a welcome organizationally-based critique of the oft-proposed but rarely defined government campaign to "improve analysis" by comparing analysis to other regulated disciplines.

Why Bad Things Happen to Good Analysts - in a refreshingly honest chapter written by Jack Davis, we find out why good analysts -- including an extremely well-credentialed Iran analyst who spoke well of the Shah's stabilizing effect six months before his collapse -- can often make disastrous errors.

Making Analysis More Reliable: Why Epistemology Matters to Intelligence - in my favorite chapter of the book, volume editor James Bruce issues a clarion call to infuse the rigor of scientific procedure into the process of intelligence analysis.

The New Analysis - although one of the shorter chapters, author Carmen Medina uses her words well to predict the coming alterations to the US analytical community and its procedures, some of which Ms. Medina expects to be radical -- and welcome.

Computer Aided Analysis of Competing Hypotheses -- although the title may signal a dry narrative, author Richards Heuer's description of the ACH concept and the role played by commercially available software in its maturation is as accessible as it is fascinating.

Analyzing Intelligence is hopefully the first in a line of works that addresses the world of intelligence analysis in a more scientific and empirical fashion. In its role as a veritable pioneer, the book succeeds in putting forth a detailed and exhaustive treatment of intelligence analysis that is nonetheless accessible to a wide audience ranging from curious graduate students to veteran practitioners.

Of, By, and For USA Status Quo Bubbas--Essential but Very Partial
This is a very fine book, not least because of its inclusion of Jack Davis (search for as well as Carmen Medina (see her presentation to global audience via oss.net/LIBRARY), but in its essentials this is a book of, by, and for the status quo ante bubbas--the American bubbas, I might add.

If you are an analyst or a trainer of analysts or a manager of analysts, this is assuredly essential reading, but it perpetuates my long-standing concerns about American intelligence:

1) Lack of a strategic analytic model (see Earth Intelligence Network)

2) Lack of deep historical and multi-cultural appreciation

3) Lack of a deep understanding and necessary voice on the complete inadequacy of collection sources, the zero presence of processing and lack of desktop analytic tools, and the need for ABSOLUTE devotion to the truth, not--as is still the case, "within the reasonable bounds of dishonesty" aka "slam dunk"

4) Lack of integrity in so many ways, not least of which is the analytic abject acceptance of the false premise that the best intelligence is top secret/sensitive compartmented information--see the online CounterPunch piece on "Intelligence for the President--AND Everyone Else."

Below are ten books I recommend as substantive complements to this book:
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
Fog Facts : Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (Nation Books)
Lost Promise
The Age of Missing Information (Plume)
Informing Statecraft
Bureaucratic Politics And Foreign Policy
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America