Adaptive Intelligence for a Complex World

UNCLASSIFIED
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ADAPTIVE INTELLIGENCE FOR AN UNCERTAIN AGE
by
Zachery Tyson Brown
GG-13, Defense Threat Reduction Agency
NIU Class of 2018
Zachery.t.brown@gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/zacherytysonbrown
Submitted to the faculty of the
National Intelligence University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Science of Strategic Intelligence
June 2018
This document has been approved for public release by the Defense Intelligence Agency
and the National Intelligence University. All statements of fact, analysis, or opinion are
the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense
or any of its components, or the U.S. government.

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Adaptive Intelligence for an Uncertain Age
Thesis Accepted on Behalf of the National Intelligence University
Thesis Submitted by:
_________________________________________________________
Zachery Tyson Brown
Thesis Committee:
_________________________________________________________
Gerald Sherrill, Thesis Advisor and Chair
_________________________________________________________
Josh Kerbel, Reader and Committee Member

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ABSTRACT
TITLE OF THESIS: Adaptive Intelligence for an Uncertain Age
STUDENT: Zachery Tyson Brown, MSSI, 2018
CLASS NUMBER: NIU 2018 DATE: June 14th
, 2018
THESIS COMMITTEE CHAIR: Mr. Gerald Sherrill
COMMITTEE MEMBER: Mr. Josh Kerbel
The world has changed dramatically since 1947. Advances in the study of the humanities,
cognitive and informational sciences have revolutionized fields as diverse as sociology
and history to medicine and business management. But the United States Intelligence
Community looks much the same as it did nearly three-quarters of a century ago when it
was created, and more consequentially still thinks like it did then. To remain relevant in
the 21st
-century, the IC must undergo a paradigm shift—from a reductive, restrictive,
predictive and production-oriented industrial process into a holistic, accessible,
sensemaking, and knowledge-sharing service for the information age. It can achieve this
change by disaggregating centralized analytic bureaucracies and restructuring them as the
distributed, empowered nodes of a global intelligence network that communicates rapidly
via cutting-edge information technology. This would provide better service to American
policymakers, enabling adaptation at the forward edge of global competition. Distributed,
independent teams of intelligence experts can work more closely with the decision-
makers they support to understand their missions and what they want to achieve. The
analytic teams of the future must eschew the myopic view of the silo mentality and
embrace holism and synthesis to better advise their policymaking clients as they
formulate adaptive policies in response to the emergent crises of an increasingly complex
world.

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AUTHOR’s PREFACE
“Finally: to pose questions with a hammer,
and sometimes to hear as a reply that famous
hollow sound that can only come from bloated entrails.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche1
Nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is underappreciated in
America. His writings were purposefully opaque, anti-egalitarian, openly hostile to mass
movements of any sort, and deeply skeptical overall. In other words, a bit of a downer. Many of
his ideas were shamefully misappropriated by 20th
-century fascists and later satirically portrayed
in films like The Big Lebowski.2
Perhaps understandably, Americans have not given his works
the attention they deserve. Nietzsche, who wrote during an era of great political, social, and
economic upheaval, was an eyewitness to the effects of the industrial revolution rippling across
the world from what was then its center of gravity; the rapidly-industrializing Germany of
Bismarck and Wilhelm.3
The industrial revolution swept away old models and gave rise to new ones, eventually
leading to the killing fields of Verdun and the Somme. Nietzsche’s musings explored the
psychological and spiritual effects these rapid changes were having on the consciousness and
happiness of human beings. In his 1889 Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote:
“This little essay is a great declaration of war; and regarding the sounding out of
idols, this time they are not just idols of the age, but eternal idols, which are here
touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork: there are no idols that are older,
1
Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Richard Polt, Twilight of the Idols or Philosophizing with a Hammer (London, UK:
Hackett Classics, 1995, originally published 1889).
2
Scotty Hendricks, “How the Nazis Hijacked Nietzsche, and How it Can Happen to Anybody,” The Big Think
(December 16th
, 2017). Retrieved from http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/how-the-nazis-hijacked-nietzsche-and-
how-it-can-happen-to-anybody; Ethan Coen and Joel Cohen, The Big Lebowski (London, UK: Working Title Films,
March 6th
, 1998).
3
Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1974).

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more assured, more puffed-up—and none more hollow. That does not prevent
them from being those in which people have the most faith; nor does one ever say
‘idol,’ especially not in the most distinguished instance.”4
Sounding out idols is in essence the intent of this thesis. It is primarily a reexamination of
inherited taxonomies that attempts to unmask any fraudulent preconceived notions that exist, to
clear away the dust accumulated over the decades and to see what lies beneath. While its content
is often critical, it is not intended to be a polemic. Professional intelligence analysis is a critical
issue for the national security and broader geopolitical interests of the United States, and it is
worth arguing about ways to improve it.
When we focus on failure, we often overlook successes. The American Intelligence
Community does a lot right, and it is arguably the best-managed and most agile enterprise of its
size in the entire federal government. But Americans deserve more from a 70-billion-dollar
enterprise that employs tens of thousands of people. For what Americans are paying, they should
expect the very best intelligence service money can buy.
Sounding out idols is not, by any means, an exact science. Drawing out influences and
patterns, however, can inform and spark debates that lead to positive changes. In his book
Strategy: A History, Sir Lawrence Freedman quotes Raymond Aron’s observation that strategic
thought “draws its inspiration from each century, or rather at each moment of history, from the
problems which events themselves pose.” Intelligence, I think, must do the same, and the
inspiration of the last century has reached its sell-by date.
According to the philosopher Aristotle, everyone, by nature, desires to know. Sherman
Kent, the father of American intelligence analysis, agreed, stating that for intelligence analysts,
4
Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Richard Polt, Twilight of the Idols or Philosophizing with a Hammer (London, UK:
Hackett Classics, 1995, originally published 1889).

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in particular, knowing was their primary wish.5
But there are both practical and absolute limits to
what human beings can know. Mathematicians have shown that the proofs to some theorems, for
instance, would take longer than the lifespan of the universe to finish.6
This thesis claims no new
startling discoveries; at its most ambitious it finds connections that may be illuminating or
suggestive. My modest goal was to condense extant knowledge and suggest its implications to
produce a middle-range theory that avoids both the pitfalls of excessive abstraction and
excessive particularism. It was, above all, to generate discussion—and argument—about the
future of American intelligence analysis, I topic I care about deeply.
If the IC as it exists today were to be erased, and we created it again tabula rasa, we
would almost certainly change its design. People have been exhorting the IC to change one way
or another since its inception in the aftermath of World War II. In a very real sense, there is no
pleasing everyone. In 1992, at the height of the post-Cold War, post-Desert Storm aura of
victory, Senator David Boren, chair of the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence, said the
time for boldness in IC reform had come. "The world has changed, and the intelligence
community must change with it," Boren said. "Changes in the world have made the current
intelligence structure outdated."7
Senator Boren envisioned the IC becoming a “world-class think
tank” for the government.
Most recently the cries for change reached a crescendo after the dual body blows of 9/11
and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Richard K. Betts wrote of ‘fixing
intelligence’ in 2002. Deborah Barger called for a ‘revolution’ in intelligence affairs the next
5
Sherman Kent, “Estimates and Influence”, Studies in Intelligence (1968), 11-21.
6
Marcus Du Sautoy, What We Cannot Know (New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 2017).
7
Quoted in George Lardner, Jr. “Intelligence Overhaul Urged,” The Washington Post (February 6th
, 1992).
Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/02/06/intelligence-overhaul-
urged/53268c8d-f0a3-458a-a554-52f96f721bae/?utm_term=.1a4bbdc83395;

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year. Carmen Medina went so far as to call her early aughts coterie at CIA the ‘rebel alliance.’
They all wrote in an era rightly consumed with the failures of 2001 and 2003. There was no
Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. People still used Blackberries and watched movies on battery-
draining portable DVD players because there was no concept of streaming video. Intelligence
then was still about secrets, because such things still existed. They knew change was coming but
could not fully see the enormous consequences the digital era would have on the collection and
provision of intelligence. We are well into the 21st
-century now and can see a little, though not
much, further. What we see gives reason for deep concern, but there are also glimmers of
opportunity.
Barger wrote that the revolution would require three things of the IC: a willingness across
the workforce to question the status quo and seek answers that will accommodate alternative
futures; a style of leadership that encourages constructive criticism and promotes investigation of
alternative solutions; and a shared understanding of the value these efforts contribute to the
collective endeavor.8
As she wisely caveated, any vision of revolution absent physical change is
merely an academic exercise.
The research for this thesis has taken me into unfamiliar territory, providing an
opportunity to explore work in a variety of different fields. It is, then, a synthesis of the research
of many other scholars and authors over time. I claim little original contribution and no original
discoveries. I apologize to the reader in advance for my limitations, well aware of the inadequacy
of my own knowledge and imperfect discernment. While I have tried to read the original texts as
much as possible, it would be misleading to suggest I have not relied heavily on secondary
sources. I have drawn from the insights and ideas of a wide range of specialists in fields far
8
Deborah G. Barger, Toward a Revolution in Intelligence Affairs (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation,
2005), 3-4.

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different from either the profession of arms or intelligence in which I was trained, from
evolutionary biology to quantum physics. I have explored a wide variety of subjects outside of
my area of expertise, and as such, I am sure there are facts I have misstated or misinterpreted and
look forward to correction by experts in those fields or on those periods.
Choices had to be made about which thinkers to include and which to ignore, but even so,
there is a lot of history in this thesis. This dive into the deep currents of history is important
because the processes and procedures we rely upon today often trace their origins to prehistory.
It is my hope that Winston Churchill’s advice that the further back one looks the farther forward
they can see, holds true.9
Since theories ought to be inferred from facts, I do not confront the reader with a general
theory at the outset, merely the premise that something must change. What I believe to be the
facts are presented first, laid out as a series of threads that are hopefully gathered and woven
together in due course. For clarity, the same point has sometimes been made more than once, or
in more than one context across several chapters. A more practical treatment and
recommendations are presented at the conclusion. Of course, the factors driving international
security and the collection and presentation of intelligence are multiple, complex, and often
dependent on accidental or contingent events and personalities. There are no right answers that
remain right for long. The best we can hope for, I think, is to remain adaptive—hence the title of
this work.
There are many people that I wish to thank. Foremost my wife and partner Hayley
Moore, for her patience and invaluable insight as someone from the consumer side of the
intelligence-policy divide, who was quick to correct me when I was attracted to what I thought
9
Richard Langworth, ed. Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations (New York, NY: Public
Affairs, 2008), 577.

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were interesting rabbit holes off the beaten path. Second, my supervisors in the Department of
Defense, Mr. James McCarl and Ms. Kimberly Settelen, whose faith in my abilities allowed me
the opportunity to take a year away from their critical missions to pursue this research in the first
place.
Special thanks must also go to my thesis committee, headed by Mr. Gerald Sherrill,
whose encouragement and guidance were invaluable, and to Mr. Josh Kerbel, whose provocative
essays over the course of several years piqued my interest in the subjects and whose keen
intellect served as a sounding board for my often-incoherent ideas through the process. I have the
utmost appreciation for the staff and faculty of the National Intelligence University, particularly
the College of Strategic Intelligence’s Leadership and Management program led by Dr. Debora
Pfaff who introduced me to the fascinating world of organizational design and change
management.
I would also like to thank the following individuals; although there are certainly many
others that could be listed. Thank you, Dr. Michael Warner, Dr. Mark Stout, Dr. Stephen Marrin,
Dr. Mark Lowenthal, Dr. Gregory Treverton, Dr. Richard K. Betts, Dr. John A. Gentry, Dr.
Adrian Wolfberg, Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam, General (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal, Major-General Julie
Bentz, Mr. David Parks, Ms. Carmen Medina, and Mr. Paul Sturm. Lastly, special appreciation
goes to the many leaders across the community that were interviewed during the research
process, who wish to remain anonymous.
My hope is for this thesis to generate debate, and I close this introduction with a similar
hope from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. “But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither
should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions which embody

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any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for
genuine investigation.”10
10
Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (London, UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), 2.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
1. Chapter One: Introduction 1
2. Chapter Two: Building the Divide 25
3. Chapter Three: Librarians of Babel 135
4. Chapter Four: Connection or Coercion 177
5. Chapter Five: A Crude Look at the Whole 246
6.
7.
Chapter Six: An Accidental Profession
Chapter Seven: Towards a New Paradigm: Adaptive Intelligence
295
343
8. Chapter Eight: Conclusion 398
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LIST OF FIGURES
410
433

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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most
intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.”
- Attributed to Charles Darwin11
Alan Greenspan was appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987 and
served in that role for 20 years. Greenspan, a distinguished career economist dubbed the
Maestro by Bob Woodward12
, had trained at Julliard, New York and Columbia
Universities. He was a notorious hyper-rationalist and an icon of lassiez-faire, libertarian
economics. Greenspan epitomized a vigorous era of industrialist American capitalism.13
In Greenspan’s world, the US was at the core of both the global economy and the study
of economics, that most imperial of academic disciplines, a social science with no
obvious bounds that offered to explain, well, everything.14
When the market crashed in 2008, Greenspan was shocked. Presenting testimony
to the United States Congress in the midst of global economic crisis, Greenspan’s matter-
of-fact mea culpa was, “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent
it is. But I have been very distressed by the fact.” The senator questioning the Chairman
responded, “In other words, you found your view of the world, your ideology, was not
right, it was not working?” Greenspan replied, “Precisely, you know that’s precisely the
11
According to Quote Investigator, this quote originated with Louisiana State University business professor
Leon C. Megginson in 1963., who was summarizing Darwin’s Origin of Species. Over time, the quote was
misattributed to Darwin himself, and has so appeared in numerous books and articles. See
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/04/adapt/;
12
Bob Woodward, Maestro: Greenspan’s Fed and the American Boom (New York, NY: Simon &
Schuster, 2000).
13
Sebastian Mallaby, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan (New York, NY:
Penguin Press, 2016).
14
Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), 576.

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reason I was shocked. Because I had been going for forty years or more with very
considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”15
Change, the adage goes, is the only constant.16
So why are we so often surprised
when it comes? Once perspectives are established, they are very difficult to shift.
Strongly held beliefs are only abandoned with great effort. This reluctance to accept, or
even to acknowledge, change is in some ways inherent to our nature. As we become well
adapted to a particular paradigm, we invest the structures and mental frameworks that
support that paradigm with intrinsic value because they satisfy a need for order and
security.17
This results in reluctance to challenge inherited assumptions internally, and a
defensive reaction to any perception of an external threat to the established order.
The United States has entered an era of profound, persistent change that has been
called the Information Age18
, the Second Machine Age19
, the Networked Age20
, the Third
- or Fourth - Industrial Revolution,21
and the Age of Imagination.22
Histrionics aside, in
15
Neil Erwin and Amit R. Paley, “Greenspan Says He Was Wrong on Regulation,” The Washington Post
(October 24th
, 2008). Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/10/23/AR2008102300193.html;
16
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535-475 BCE) was perhaps the first to seek a ‘theory of
everything’ with his teachings on the logos, or universal reason. He originated the phrase ‘panta rhei’
(everything flows), the origin of the aphorism that you ‘can’t step into the same river twice’ and ‘change is
the only constant.’
17
Jeffrey Pfeffer, “You're Still the Same: Why Theories of Power Hold over Time and Across Contexts,”
Academy of Management Perspectives 27/4 (November 1st
, 2013). Retrieved from
https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2013.0040;
18
Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols. (London, UK: Blackwell,
1996-98).
19
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and
Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014),
9.
20
Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World,
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 9.
21
Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the
Economy, and the World (New York, NY: Saint Martin’s Press) 2011; Klaus Schwab, The Fourth
Industrial Revolution (Geneva: Crown Business, 2017), 12.
22
Charlie Magee, “The Age of Imagination”, Proceedings from the Second International Symposium on
National Security and Competitiveness, (1993)

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this new era, connections are becoming more important than conquests, and physical
geography is less about who owns it than who can exploit it. This is neither a new or
particularly insightful realization; no less an authority than the nation’s premier analytic
body, The National Intelligence Council (NIC) warned in 2017 that we are living through
an era that will “fundamentally alter the global landscape.”23
Director of National
Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats, in presenting his annual threat assessment to Congress,
described our era as “complex, volatile, and challenging,” characterizing it as nothing
less than a “race for technological superiority.”24
Wealthy countries are aging; impoverished ones are growing. For the first time in
the history of our species, more than half of us live in cities, a ratio expected to grow to
two-thirds by 2050. The fragile, interconnected global economy is continuously-shifting
like the inexorable movement of tectonic plates, and providing effective governance
anywhere is becoming more difficult.
People everywhere, from Silicon Valley to the Ferghana Valley, are more mobile,
more empowered, and simply more.25
Not only are there many more of us, but most of us
live longer, are better educated, have more time on our hands, and have more individual
and networked power than any other time in human history. The relentless diffusion of
information technology has prompted revolutionary demographic and economic
http://www.oss.net/dynamaster/file_archive/040320/4a32a59dcdc168eced6517b5e6041cda/OSS1993-01-
21.pdf
23
National Intelligence Council, “Global Trends: The Paradox of Progress,” published online by the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence (January, 2017). Retrieved from www.dni.gov/nic/globaltrends;
24
Remarks as prepared for delivery by The Honorable Dan Coats, Director of National Intelligence,
“Annual Threat Assessment Opening Statement,” Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, (February 18th
,
2018). Retrieved from https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/ATA2018-
asprepared.pdf;
25
Parag Khana, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (New York, NY: Random
House, 2016), 20-29.

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transformation, shifting social norms and changing the expectations of people in almost
every country on Earth. Individuals today possess incredible computational and
communication powers in the palm of their hand, exponentially increasing both the
amount of data generated and how it is shared, captured, and used.
The International Data Corporation forecasts that by 2025, the global datasphere
will consist of 163 zettabytes of information, a ten-fold increase from 2016.26
In the same
period, there will very likely be more machine-to-machine communication taking place
on the world’s wireless networks than all human communication.27
For an idea of just
how much data that is, all of the words ever spoken by all humans throughout history
would constitute much less than a single zettabyte.28
Put another way; it would be like
watching Netflix’s entire digital catalog 489 million times (which, if you’re curious,
would take nearly two billion years). In stark contrast to the paucity of information
during the Cold War, we now are virtually drowning in it. Unfortunately, though the
pendulum has swung from information scarcity to information overflow, insight remains
in short supply.
All politics is local, admonishes another adage.29
Once, perhaps. But in this new
era, everything is connected. From global finance and energy production to healthcare
26
The term datasphere is defined as the sum of all data created, captured, or replicated in a given year
globally. See David Reinsel, John Gantz, and John Rynding, “Data Age 2025,” International Data
Corporation (April, 2017).
27
Kevin J. Obrien, “Talk to Me, One Machine Said to the Other,” The New York Times (July 29th
, 2012).
Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/technology/talk-to-me-one-machine-said-to-the-
other.html
28
See http://www.whatsabyte.com
29
Byron Price (1891-1981), the Associated Press’s Washington bureau chief and author of the newspaper
column “Politics at Random,” wrote “politics is local” and “all politics is local politics” in February
1932, and “all politics is local in the last analysis” in July 1932. Price likely coined and/or popularized the
saying which was later most commonly associated with House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neil (1912-1994).
See https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/all_politics_is_local/;

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and entertainment, nothing—especially politics (and its extension, war)—is merely local
anymore. In 2008, as Chairman Greenspan learned, a few bad banks sparked a cascading
failure that nearly brought down the entire global financial sector and caused $16 trillion
dollars to simply vanish.30
In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old Tunisian street vendor named
Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the marketplace of Sidi Bouzid, the spark that
lit the fuse on a cascading series of revolutions that brought down four authoritarian
governments and initiated massive disruptions in more than a dozen other states, a series
of events known collectively as the Arab Spring.31
Later that year, a political movement
that started in Malaysia eventually spawned ‘occupations’ by protestors of financial
sectors in 2,600 cities around the world.32
The character of war, too, is changing, if not its eternal nature.33
In 2014, the
Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) swarmed across much of Iraq, sweeping aside
a $17 billion US-trained Iraqi army on a fleet of illicitly-purchased Toyota Hilux trucks
and stolen American Humvees, an offensive that caught much of the world, including the
US, by surprise. By 2016, ISIS had established a global network of affiliates and a
supply chain that spanned continents. This network enabled the proto-state to establish a
rudimentary Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program while fighting on multiple
fronts against Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, the Russian Federation, the United States and a
30
S. Battiston, J. D. Farmer, A. Flache, D. Garlaschelli, A. G. Haldane, H. Heesterbeek, C. Hommes, C.
Jaeger, R. May, M. Scheffer, “Complexity Theory and Financial Regulation,” Science (2016). Retrieved
from http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aad0299
31
Robert F. Worth, A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 2016).
32
Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (New York,
NY: Harper Collins, 2012).
33
Carl von Clausewitz, On War ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, (New York, NY: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1984).

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coalition of more than thirty other nations.34
More than 40,000 foreigners from at least 85
countries joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq, thousands of whom are now returning to their
countries of origin.35
If the concatenation of local and global conflicts were not disruptive enough, the
world’s interstate relations are also more parlous today with the vigorous return of great
power competition, albeit in a different form than the 19th
-century chessboard of
geopolitics. A diverse range of threats both traditional and novel, including numerous
malicious cyber-actors, emerging disruptive technologies, the growth of transnational
organized criminal enterprises, and the continuing proliferation of WMD, altogether
amount to the most complex threat panoply our nation has ever faced.36
The United States Intelligence Community (hereafter referred to as the IC), the
constellation of federal agencies charged with collecting, analyzing, and disseminating
intelligence to provide decision advantage37
to American policymakers, is nearly three-
quarters of a century old. In its seven decades it has undergone cycles of expansion,
recrimination, and reform—often incrementally and incoherently, with such reforms as
34
Conflict Armament Research, “Weapons of the Islamic State,” Conflict Armament Research (December,
2017). Retrieved from http://www.conflictarm.com/download-file/?report_id=2568&file_id=2574; Brian
Castner, “Tracing ISIS Weapons Supply Chain – Back to the US,” Wired (December 12th
, 2017). Retrieved
from https://www.wired.com/story/terror-industrial-complex-isis-munitions-supply-chain/; John
Ismay, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, and C.J. Chivers, “How ISIS Produced Its Arsenal on an Industrial Scale,”
The New York Times, (December 10th
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/10/world/middleeast/isis-bombs.html?_r=0
35
Tim Meko, “Now That the Islamic State Has Fallen in Iraq and Syria, where are its Fighters Going?” The
Washington Post (February 22nd
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/isis-returning-fighters/?utm_term=.fca8cb680c59;
36
Remarks as prepared for delivery by The Honorable Dan Coats, Director of National Intelligence,
“Annual Threat Assessment Opening Statement,” Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, (February 18th
,
2018). Retrieved from https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/ATA2018-
asprepared.pdf;
37
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Vision 2015: A Globally Networked and Integrated
Intelligence Enterprise (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2008), 1.

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there were focused on what was ‘doable’ rather than what needed to be done.38
There
have been recommendations for wholesale reorganization from the very beginning,39
but
the combination of parochial political interests, budgetary obstacles, and plain
organizational inertia have always served to defeat these movements. Resultingly the IC’s
structural—and more importantly, its intellectual—framework has been remarkably
resistant to change despite revolutionary adaptations in analogous private sector
endeavors over the same period.
For its first several decades, the IC’s raison d'être was the threat posed by the
Soviet Union. The IC still arrays itself against a relatively static set of known entities—
more or less hostile states that are rank-ordered by a conjunction of their quantifiable
offensive capabilities and the perception of their aggressive intent. Analysis works
probabilistically to estimate the criticality and likelihood of each threat given a range of
options. But today there are a vast number of threats competing for limited intelligence
resources across our hyperconnected, complex world—threats which emerge suddenly,
often with little or no warning and are not susceptible to traditional analytic forecasting,
as we will see. As Former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said in his
2016 testimony to Congress, we are now living in an era of persistently “unpredictable
instability,” a veritable age of uncertainty.40
38
Michael Warner and J. Kenneth McDonald, “US Intelligence Community Reform Since 1947,” Center
for the Study of Intelligence, (2005), 6.
39
The Committee on the National Security Organization, “National Security Organization: A Report with
Recommendations”, prepared for the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the
Government, Washington, DC: (November 15th
, 1948).
40
Alex R. McQuade, “2016 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community,” Lawfare
(February 12th
, 2016). Retrieved from https://www.lawfareblog.com/2016-worldwide-threat-assessment-us-
intelligence-community

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The speed and scope of this transformation has begun to eclipse the ability of
maladaptive 20th-century organizations to keep pace. More agile startup companies have
leveraged disruptive technologies and innovative business models to aggressively carve
out niches that encroach on the established domains of the world’s largest corporations,
some of which have crumbled in response to this competition. Terrorist organizations like
ISIS have recognized the shifting currents of power and employed similar disruptive
tactics to level the playing field against the dominant powers of the age with remarkable
resilience. Even Russia, a formerly stolid superpower, has adroitly turned weakness into
relevance by employing disruptive technological innovations and an understanding of the
networked era in which we live to empower a complex disinformation campaign that has
helped to freeze its conflict in Ukraine, bolster its image in the Middle East, and disrupt
the internal political systems of a suite of adversaries.41
The IC is no exception to these trends. In fact, in some regards, the IC is lagging
behind comparable private institutions that have more responsive to change because of
competitive pressure, a motivator the IC has lacked in the past—but will not for much
longer.42
While the IC has paid lip service to the idea of innovative change, at best such
initiatives are, as Josh Kerbel writes, “tolerated as long as they don’t disrupt the
prevailing classified collection business model. At worst, these initiatives are
celebrated—erroneously—as evidence that the intelligence community has successfully
41
The National Intelligence Council, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US
Elections,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence – Intelligence Community Assessment (January
6th
, 2017). Retrieved from https://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/155494946443/odni-statement-on-
declassified-intelligence;
42
Brian Nussbaum, “Predicting Corporate Intelligence Agencies,” War on the Rocks (January 17th
,
2017).Retrieved from https://warontherocks.com/2017/01/predicting-corporate-intelligence-agencies-in-
the-1960s/; L. Elaine Halchin, “The Intelligence Community and its use of Contractors,” Congressional
Research Service (August 18th
, 2015). Retrieved from https://fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/R44157.pdf;

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evolved and innovated.”43
Automation is not innovation. 44
At best the IC has found ways
to perform its current model slightly faster, or slightly more efficiently.
The point is that these convergent factors reinforce one another with profound
implications for the IC, whether the community wants them to or not. The conceptual
paradigm that we were left with after World War II, though having faithfully served the
country for half a century, is on its last legs. By changing the environment in which the
IC operates, the targets against which it collects intelligence, the ways that it performs
analyses, and most importantly, how it delivers those analyses to policymakers, the
ongoing transformation will upend the status quo in every corner of professional life.
This thesis is primarily concerned with its effects on intelligence analysis—the
process of refining information into knowledge that gives American policymakers a
competitive edge with which they can make sound decisions and protect the national
security.45
Intelligence analysis is a relatively young discipline, created essentially on the
fly during World War II. Scholars and economists were drafted into public service for the
duration of the war. These were “carefully selected trained minds,” in then-President
Roosevelt’s words.46
Sherman Kent, one of those scholars and today widely recognized
as the father of intelligence analysis,47
modeled the work of his team in the Office of
Research and Analysis after the professions he most admired—the academician and the
43
Josh Kerbel, “The US Intelligence Community Wants Disruptive Change as Long as It’s Not
Disruptive,” War on the Rocks (January 20th, 2016).
44
Automation enables an institution to more efficiently conduct legacy processes by streamlining them
through information technology. While many people confuse this with innovation, true innovation is the
creation of novel processes that disrupt the older models completely.
45
See https://www.intelligence.gov/mission
46
John H. Hedley, ‘‘The Evolution of Intelligence Analysis,’’ in Roger Z. George and James B. Bruce,
eds. Analyzing Intelligence; Origins, Obstacles, and Innovations, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, 2008), 20; Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown, Scholars in America’s Secret War (London,
UK: Collins Harvill, 1987)
47
Ibid., 250.

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10
investigative journalist.48
It should concern IC leaders that these two professions are
struggling to retain their seats atop their proverbial ivory and glass towers in the midst of
the information revolution. As the barriers between traditional gatekeepers of information
and the knowledge they create have attenuated, these professions have become more
open, transparent, and disintermediated in general.49
Think of algorithm-enabled
aggregators like Facebook that select content for users based on their tastes and
preferences, or online medical platforms that provide customized care for every single
patient based on their history and specific genetic profiles. There is no ‘middle-man’
between the product and the consumer, as in the past.
The creation of knowledge is central to the profession of intelligence analysis, but
analysis does not create knowledge for knowledge’s sake.50
The purpose of analysis is to
turn knowledge into value—in other words, advantage—for policymakers. Customers of
similar knowledge-creating professions simply expect more today—more customization,
more insight, and more on-demand answers—and if it is not the case already, it will not
be long before policymakers expect the same from knowledge-creators in the IC.51
Since the beginning of modern American intelligence analysis—that is, for only
about 70 years—there have been three arguments at its core.52
The first argument is about
the holistic practice of intelligence, and just where within that whole analysis fits.
48
Anthony Olcott, “Peeling Facts Off the Face of the Unknown,” Studies in Intelligence 53/2, (June, 2009),
1-12.
49
Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it
Matters. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017).
50
Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1949), 180.
51
Courtney Weinbaum, Richard Girven, and Jenny Olberholtzer, “The Millenial Generation: Implications
for the Intelligence and Policy Communities,” The RAND Corporation (2016), 35-38.
52
Glenn Hastedt, “The Politics of Intelligence and the Politicization of Intelligence: The American
Experience,” in Revisiting Intelligence and Policy, edited by Stephen Marrin, (New York, NY: Routledge,
2014), 6.

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Whether it is depicted as a cycle or some other process, whether six steps or ten, whether
a circle or a matrix, many in the community judge that our inherited models are
unsatisfactory, overly normative, and unreflective of reality—while others view it as the
best we have, the least-worst option to depict a convoluted process into a rational
system.53
The second argument is about analysis specifically—what, exactly, is it? Is it a
profession or a skill? And, more misleadingly, is it an art or science?54
The last argument
concerns the often-contentious relationship between intelligence producers and
consumers and has been a chronic source of controversy. This argument was originally
known simply as ‘the intelligence debate.’55
Later, it became known as the ‘Intelligence-
Policy Divide,’ or the ‘Kent-Kendall Debate,’ after its two opposing champions.
The separation of intelligence and policy is an argument between advocates of
relevance and objectivity, access and independence, impact and bias. Sherman Kent put it
best when he wrote in 1949 that “intelligence must be close enough to policy, plans and
operations to have the greatest amount of guidance, and must not be so close that it loses
its objectivity and integrity of judgment.”56
Kent makes explicit the underlying
assumption is that more you have of guidance the less you have of objectivity.57
The
history and performance of intelligence analysis in the IC can be viewed on a spectrum
between these two extremes, and as with the Intelligence Cycle, there is dissatisfaction
53
Mark M. Lowenthal, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, Seventh Edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE,
2017), 80-88.
54
Josh Kerbel, “Lost for Words: The Intelligence Community’s Struggle to Find its Voice” Parameters, 38,
no. 2 (Summer, 2008): 102-112; John A. Gentry, “The ‘Professionalization’ of Intelligence Analysis: A
Skeptical Approach,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (2016), 643-676.
55
Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown, Scholars in America’s Secret War (London, UK: Collins Harvill, 1987),
250.
56
Press, 1949), 180.
57
Ibid., 200.

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with this construct. This thesis examines the predominant model of intelligence and
policy relations and will explain the causal factors behind its increasing unsuitability for a
complex, uncertain age. It will attempt to answer a central research question that asks
how can intelligence analysts maximize customer engagement while retaining their
analytic independence? To paraphrase Stephen Marrin, a professor of intelligence studies
at James Madison University and former CIA analyst—what should happen at the
intersection of knowledge and action?58
Two models dominate the thinking about the divide. The first is referred to here
as the Traditional Model.59
This model draws a strict separation between the intelligence
function and the policy function, between the ‘thinkers’ and the ‘doers.’60
It is the
Traditional Model that for decades has been the practice in American intelligence
agencies. It holds as almost sacred the notion that intelligence officers do not cross into
policy advocacy and potentially sacrifices relevance to policymaking in favor of
intellectual purity. The major alternative is known as the Activist (or Gatesian)61
Model,
which posits that intellectually pure intelligence is good if you can have it, but means
little or nothing if it does not positively affect decisionmaking. Both models and their
intellectual precursors will be discussed in-depth in Chapter Two.
58
Stephen Marrin, “Evaluating the Quality of Intelligence Analysis: By What Mis-Measure?” Intelligence
and National Security 27/6 (2012), 896-912.
59
Marrin refers to it as the Standard Model, but this term is avoided to prevent confusion with other
physics-related subjects within. See Stephen Marrin, “Intelligence Analysis and Decisionmaking:
Methodological Challenges,” in Peter Gill, Stephen Marrin and Mark Phythian (eds.) Intelligence Theory:
Key Questions and Debates (Abingdon: Routledge 2008), 131–50.
60
Press, 1949), 182.
61
Robert M. Gates, “An Opportunity Unfulfilled: The Use and Perceptions of Intelligence at the White
House,” The Washington Quarterly (Winter, 1989), 35-40.

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The final background piece to understand before our examination of intelligence
and policymaking in this revolutionary era is the evolution of the IC itself. The United
States built its intelligence institutions in piecemeal fashion beginning at the end of
World War II. For nearly three-quarters of a century, this institutional machine and the
many thousands of dedicated and talented officers that operated it have served the nation
with distinction; several high-profile intelligence failures being outnumbered by many
more unheralded intelligence successes.
When failures—real or imagined—did occur, blame was typically assigned to a
lack of collection, faulty analysis, or both, and the solution was usually more collection
and more analysis—which usually meant a new office or entire agency. For example, the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established in 1947 to serve as the coordinator of
national intelligence after the warning failure of Pearl Harbor. President Truman ordered
the creation of the National Security Agency (NSA) out of military service cryptologic
components in 1952 in no small part due to dissatisfaction with the performance of
signals intelligence in the run-up to and during the Korean War.62
The Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) was established in 1961 by Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara to provide his office and the Joint Chiefs with better military intelligence and
to distance the department from the CIA in the atmosphere of failure after the Bay of Pigs
and Berlin crises.63
62
Thomas L. Burns, “The Origins of the National Security Agency 1940-1952,” Center for Cryptologic
History, (1990). Retrieved from
https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/files/cryptologic_histories/origins_of_nsa.pdf
63
DIA Office of Historical Research, “A History of the Defense Intelligence Agency”, (2007). Retrieved
from https://www.fas.org/irp/dia/dia_history_2007.pdf

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There are other examples, but suffice it to say that the American answer for
intelligence failure has usually been to reinforce the existing apparatus—to add a new
cog to the machine, to rely on improving automation (vice innovation) to do more of the
same, albeit marginally faster, and leaving the larger system unchanged, the assumptions
that underlay it intact. In fact, the IC has been significantly reformed only four times in
its history—after the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report of 1949, the Schlesinger Report of
1971, the Church Committee Report of 1976, and the 9/11 Commission Report of 2004,
all of which stemmed from major crises or embarrassing revelations of systemic
malfeasance.64
For most of this period the IC fixated upon a single, seemingly monolithic
target—the Soviet Union. Throughout the Cold War (1947 – 1991), the United States
allocated the vast majority of its intelligence budget to programs that addressed Soviet
concerns, and most of that majority went towards counting Soviet equipment and
mapping the organizational structure of Soviet military units.65
But the Soviet Union was
a difficult target. Its closed, closely-policed society made traditional spycraft difficult,
and the vast, empty Eurasian plain had many hiding places for tanks and intercontinental
ballistic missiles. These problems necessitated the creation of hugely expensive technical
collection platforms that could search broad swaths of the vast Soviet landmass.
Accordingly, the IC spent much of its time during the Cold War developing better ways
to collect Soviet information, monitor Soviet activity, and estimate Soviet intentions.
64
Michael Warner and J. Kenneth McDonald, “US Intelligence Community Reform Since 1947,” Center
for the Study of Intelligence, (2005), 6.
65
Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (April,
1976), 347-348.

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The Cold War intelligence apparatus was well-suited to its task—indeed, it was
purpose-made for it—and over the decades, American intelligence analysts became
expert in numerous specializations of Soviet issues, from the number of T-64 tanks that
should always be found together, to the net annual Soviet potato harvest. Against the
internal security of Soviet state, and in an analog era of relative information scarcity, the
IC was in many ways the only game in town—when it came to figuring out what the
Soviets were up to, the IC alone had the equipment and the expertise to inform
policymakers. In this way, it held a virtual monopoly (or, if you prefer, an oligopoly) on
relevant information, and was positioned as a critically important gatekeeper of that
information, sustaining its pride of place in the American system.
The Traditional Model, too, worked well in this period. Since analysts were the
only ones who had access to verifiable information about Soviet capabilities and
intentions, their assessments were widely respected for authenticity and even-handedness
when others outside the IC relied on philosophical frames to fill in their information gaps.
As former CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence Carmen Medina explained, “analytic
detachment and neutrality are values bred of the Cold War when foreign policy observers
often compensated for lack of information with ideologically-based assertions.
Intelligence analysts correctly tried not to do that—they were reliably objective.”66
Of
course, there were arguments—some of them quite notable. But overall the IC’s record of
reliability and the lack of an alternate source of information earned the community an
overall positive and authoritative reputation as truth-tellers. It should be noted, however,
66
Carmen A. Medina, “What to Do When Traditional Models Fail,” Center for the Study of Intelligence,
(2001), 4.

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that Medina goes on in the next sentence to caution, “being completely neutral and
independent in the future, however, may only gain us irrelevance.”
When the Soviet Union unexpectedly collapsed in 1991, the IC’s raison d’etre
went with it. Amidst the all-too-briefly dashed dream of a unipolar world, the IC was
neither significantly overhauled or intellectually reformed even as its Cold War machine
was applied against increasingly diverse problems—from the hunt for ‘loose nukes’ in
the post-Soviet space, to counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, and even ‘environmental
intelligence.’67
The quest for new dragons to slay, or if we are less generous—new
windmills to tilt against—happened concurrently with significant budgetary cuts justified
by the Cold War ‘peace dividend,’ that resulted in an intellectual ‘hollowing-out’ of the
IC’s analytic corps.68
The community prior to September 11th
was in some ways adrift.
Because of the IC’s relative success during the Cold War and its lack of serious
competition until then, there was little impetus to question the mental models and policy
relationships it employed. Crises came and went, but the institution—and the separation
between thinkers and doers—remained. Individual IC leaders came down on different
sides of the spectrum of traditionalists and activists over the years, but a creeping
movement towards Activism became apparent as the Cold War approached its
conclusion,69
a movement that accelerated with the shift of emphasis to supporting
military operations and counter-terrorism after 2001. In spite of this, the underlying
67
John Deutch, “The Environment on the Intelligence Agenda,” Remarks by DCI John Deutch at the World
Affairs Council in Los Angeles, CA (July 25th
, 1996). Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/news-
information/speeches-testimony/1996/dci_speech_072596.html
68
John A. Gentry, “The ‘Professionalization’ of Intelligence Analysis: A Skeptical Approach,”
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (2016), 643-649.
69
H. Bradford Westerfield, “Inside Ivory Bunkers: CIA Analysts Resist Managers’ Pandering – Part II,”
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (Spring, 1997), 27.

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doctrine—some would say dogma—of division between thinkers and doers endured,
especially within the culture of all-source analysis.
During the analog industrial era, the intelligence machine was usually sufficient.
But as the 21st
-century dawned, that machine began to wear. For a digitally-connected
information-based society, the Cold War enterprise’s rigid hierarchies, reliance upon
necessarily stove-piped technical collection systems, and reluctance to share relevant
information became hindrances that rendered it unsuitable for the more complex era of
persistent uncertainty.
It is not the case that these problems went undiagnosed. Amy Zegart documented
that between the end of the Cold War and the turn of the century, there were “six
bipartisan blue-ribbon commissions, three major unclassified governmental initiatives,
and three think-tank task forces” that addressed the role and purpose of the IC in a new
era. In these, “the common theme was the need for major change.” But barely 10 percent
of the 340 recommendations these panels made were implemented before the terrorist
attacks of September 11th
, 2001.70
Simply stated, the post-Cold War IC looked—and
thought—very much like it did at its 1948 inception.
Accordingly, repeated intelligence failures continued to occur, signals of the
discontinuity between structure and purpose: Iraq invaded its neighbor Kuwait in 1990
despite IC assurances it would not.71
India developed nuclear weapons in 1998 while the
IC looked elsewhere.72
Terrorist attacks grew increasingly brazen and lethal, culminating
70
Amy B. Zegart, “September 11th
and the Adaptation Failure of US Intelligence Agencies,” International
Security (Spring, 2005), 85-88.
71
Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas, “CIA Failed to See Iraq’s Attack Plans, Gates Says,” The Los Angeles
Times (May 9th
, 1992). Retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-09/news/mn-
1595_1_intelligence-agencies;
72
Interview with a former senior CIA official, conducted on January 3rd
, 2018.

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in al-Qaeda’s attacks of 2001. The IC staked its reputation on a non-existent WMD
program in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 and struggled to cope with the challenges of a
21st
-century insurgency in the aftermath of his forcible removal.73
Libya, Egypt, and
Syria descended into chaos in 2012. A revanchist Russia seized Crimea and launched a
barley-disguised hybrid war against Ukraine in 2014. North Korea developed an
intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to most of the
US mainland in 2017.74
Changes in the geopolitical environment and strategic surprises are of course
nothing new. George S. Pettee, an early intelligence theorist who will be discussed at
length in Chapter Two, wrote in the introduction of his 1946 jeremiad The Future of
American Strategic Intelligence a litany of global calamities and foreign policy failures of
his era that are very similar in tone to the opening of this thesis. Pettee concluded that
“such a record implies many things, one of which is a functional failure.”75
It would be both unfair and inaccurate to claim that the IC has not made any
progress towards needed course-corrections. The reforms undertaken by the IC since the
passage of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004,
under the leadership of the newly-created Director of National Intelligence (DNI), are
positive. Successive DNIs have led the IC towards further integration and standardization
by promoting a greater sense of community even in the face of powerful entrenched
bureaucratic interests, establishing common guidelines and standards for analytic
73
Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, (London, UK: Penguin Group,
2004), 194-195.
74
David E. Sanger and William Broad, “How US Intelligence Agencies Underestimated North Korea,” The
New York Times, (January 6th
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/world/asia/north-korea-nuclear-missile-intelligence.html?_r=0
75
George S. Pettee, The Future of American Strategic Intelligence (Washington, DC: Infantry Journal
Press, 1946), 2.

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production, and actively telling the IC’s story to the American public, the IC’s most
important and often overlooked stakeholders.
But the reforms of the last decade or so have been modest, proving insufficient to
the task of modernizing American intelligence for a new era. They equate to
accessorizing a car without opening the hood to examine the faulty engine. To mix
metaphors, the 2004 reforms, while needed, are as if a homeowner went about fixing a
broken window, putting a new coat of paint on a dilapidated wall, or added a new
bathroom extension to her home without considering the decaying foundations of the
building.
As the IC begins to adapt to the challenges of the 21st
-century, it must
aggressively question the status quo and reexamine old ways of doing things. What is the
value proposition of intelligence in an era of abundant information? How have
policymakers’ expectations changed in an age when nearly everything they could ever
want to know is available on demand? How have military decision-makers’ intelligence
needs changed after nearly two decades of war? Is the division of intelligence and policy
still a necessary safeguard? And if so, how effective is the division? Does the Traditional
Model provide the best balance between objectivity and relevance? How can the IC adapt
its mental framework to marry structure with purpose in the 21st
-century? The answers to
these questions should be debated vigorously as the IC works to both defend its heritage
and carve out new intellectual space in the contemporary national security enterprise.
This thesis examines the evolution of intelligence analysis using several broader
theoretical frameworks. Particularly informative are the twin aspects of modernization
theory developed by the founders of modern sociology, Max Weber and Emile

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Durkheim. Weber’s huge contribution of development theory focused on the
rationalization of modern society as all characteristics of life transitioned from organic
traditions to systemic practices of management via the expansion of hierarchical
bureaucracies that he famously warned could turn into an ‘iron cage.’76
Durkheim looked
at modernization through the lens of functionalism and the division of labor as
increasingly specialized sectors of labor formed in the workplace as society became more
complex.77
Both facets help to explain how intelligence organizations came about late in
the Industrial Revolution and why they were structured the way that they were at the
time.
Polymath Thomas Kuhn once wrote that an author who rejects a predominant
paradigm without offering another in substitution is like a carpenter who blames their
tools for shoddy work.78
Such being the case, it would be remiss to have critiqued the
current intelligence paradigm without offering at least a notion of something that might
take its place. Accordingly, this thesis will conclude with a sketch of the outlines of a
new conceptual framework for a more adaptive, Adaptive Intelligence service, and more
explicitly an explanatory and prescriptive model that takes lessons learned during the
research for this work and applies them to a more progressive theory of intelligence-
policymaker relations for the 21st
-century.
Before we begin, a distinction must be made between paradigm and theory. For
our purposes, historian Lynn Hunt’s definition of paradigm, in Kuhn’s sense of the term,
76
Max Weber, Weber: Political Writings – Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. Peter
Lassman (Boston, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
77
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in the Workplace, trans. W.D. Halls (New York, NY: The Free
Press, 1997, originally published 1893).
78
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1962).

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21
is instructive. A paradigm, according to Hunt, is “an overarching account or meta-
narrative of development that includes a hierarchy of factors that determine meaning, and
that hierarchy, in turn, sets an agenda for research, that is, shapes the choice of problems
deemed worthy of study as well as the approaches considered appropriate to use to carry
out those studies.”79
Paradigms are macro-level models within which theories can be developed.
Paradigms are macro; theories are micro. Empiricism and Romanticism are paradigms;
relativity and transcendentalism are theories. In this sense, the standard paradigm of
intelligence today is that of the relationship between so-called ‘producers’ and
‘consumers.’ Intelligence is conceived of as a domain in which there are specific kinds of
knowledge (called intelligence) somewhat arbitrarily sub-divided into functional or
regional domains such as ‘signals intelligence,’ ‘counter-proliferation,’ ‘Western
Hemisphere,’ or ‘Middle East and North Africa.’
These strata are the purview of specialists who refine and package strata-specific
information as a type of economic good for all-source analysts, who, as essentially
intermediaries, further refine and package it into more easily-digestible form and market
it to the ‘customer.’ This normative framework is influenced by other paradigms that
were developed in the early 20th
-century, particularly that of scientific management, the
production cycle, and value chain theory—their influences best represented by the
Intelligence Cycle, which will be described further in Chapter Two. The standard
paradigm “involves decision-makers dispassionately reflecting on the information and
analysis available to them,” from “an equally dispassionate intelligence service—and
79
Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014) 13-14.

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then selecting a course of action based on that reflection.”80
Within this general
paradigm, the Traditionalist and Activist schools of thought might be called theories.
Theorizing is to generalize to explain. By collecting relevant data and discerning
relationships between the variables, inductive theorizing categorizes the phenomenon in
question and reduces it to its most essential characteristics. Kenneth Waltz, the prominent
international relations scholar, notes that the best theories explain things as simply as
possible.81
Any satisfying theory of intelligence and its utility to policymaking should
both simplify and explain. A theory of intelligence should be informed both by our
knowledge of human nature and our knowledge of how humans collect, process, and
transmit information, which is intelligence’s primary purpose. Mark Phythian notes that
the purpose of theory in this sense is to “facilitate understanding of the past and present,
and through its predictive capacity, act as a guide to the future.”82
To be useful, a paradigm and the theories within it must accurately reflect reality.
When they cease to reflect reality, they must be replaced, or the institution that relies on
them will surely fail. Throughout the 20th
-century, many paradigms containing numerous
theories arose and were debated in the other social sciences, such as international
relations, historiography, and political science. These theories either survived to produce
offspring, like international relations’ Realism and its various descendants or diminished
to irrelevance, like the traditional Marxist school of history.
80
Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2006), 3.
81
Kenneth N. Waltz, “Laws and Theories,” in Robert O. Keohane, ed. Neorealism and Its Critics (New
York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007), 27-46.
82
Mark Phythian, “Intelligence Theory and Theories of International Relations,” in Peter Gill, Stephen
Marrin, and Mark Pythian eds. Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates (Abingdon, UK:
Routledge, 2008), 154.

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Surely our understanding of intelligence has evolved just as much in the last
three-quarters of a century as has our understanding of international relations. Yet there is
nothing comparable to this volume of activity in the field of intelligence studies. Indeed,
such a field did not exist until recently. As American University professor Joshua Rovner
has noted, most of the extant scholarship relating to intelligence is inchoate, episodic, and
“strikingly atheoretical, contained in histories and memoirs, where retired intelligence
officials offer professional impressions as well as advice for their successors.”83
That
such a gap exists in the study of the profession of intelligence is one of the reasons the
National Intelligence University exists.
The thesis is divided into seven chapters. In Chapter Two, the history of, and
rationale behind the intelligence-policy divide will be explored at length, along with a
review of more recent literature debating the nexus between intelligence and policy.
Chapters Three, Four, and Five will depart from intelligence matters per se, and evaluate
the environment intelligence must operate through the lens of three revolutionary changes
ongoing in human society—the increasing complexity of our age, the effects of the
network revolution, and the ongoing revolution in information technology. How much
information is in a Zettabyte? Why do command hierarchies look like telephone
networks? What is Complexity? Is it new? So What? What’s different now than during
the Cold War? The answers to these questions will frame the discussion of how
intelligence analysts must change the way they interact with policymakers to help them
make wise national security decisions. Chapter Six will describe the transformations and
adaptations going on throughout the professional world, and how these changes are likely
83
Joshua Rovner, “Pathologies of Intelligence Producer-Consumer Relations,” in The Oxford Research
Encyclopedia of International Studies (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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to affect the practice of intelligence analysis and the interaction of analysts with their
customers. Chapter Seven will sketch some broad outlines of a new paradigm for
intelligence and policymaker interaction, moving the incipient profession of analysis
from a product-oriented workforce to a service-oriented and Adaptive Intelligence
enterprise, and Chapter Eight will bring these threads together into a conclusion.

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CHAPTER TWO: BUILDING THE DIVIDE
“Intelligence has a history; it also has a future. Its history
exhibits faults of understanding, of organization, of
administration and planning. We can rest on our laurels
and wait for future disasters to shock us into sporadic
correction. Or we can study the lessons of experience and
implement those lessons now.”
– George S. Pettee, 194684
Clifford Geertz, one of the most respected and influential anthropologists in
America, once told the story of an Englishman traveling in India to learn about its
mythology. “Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the
back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked ‘what did the
turtle rest on?’ Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the
way down.”85
Theory should, of course, derive from facts. But facts must be interpreted, and the
problem with stacked turtles is that any particular turtle you choose to begin your
research with inevitably rests on the back of another—a problem familiar to philosophers
as the cosmological argument.86
Why are things the way they are and not some other
way? What is the ultimate cause? Many social theories fail because they don’t account
for multiple independent dimensions but are reductionist in their attempt to abstract a
single causal factor out of a much more complex historical reality. They fail to push the
story back far enough to the conditions that explain their own premise.
84
George S. Pettee The Future of American Strategic Intelligence (Washington, DC: Infantry Journal Press,
1946), 24.
85
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1973),
28-29.
86
See “The Cosmological Argument” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (October 11th
, 2017).
Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/;

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That is not the approach of this thesis, which compares and generalizes across
many time periods and disciplines in the social and physical sciences, following a thread
of connection that links them through centuries to the present. The factors driving the
development of any political institution—and intelligence is a decidedly political
institution—are multifaceted, woven together over time, building one upon another. Any
single factor is itself caused by a prior condition that one could extend backward through
history in an endless practice of regression. This thesis pushes the story back very far. If
not all the way to the beginning, at least to a beginning. One of the central themes that
runs through this work, a thread that it follows across time, is that intelligence services
conform to the relationship between human societies and information. How it is captured,
who controls it, and who uses it.
This is, essentially, the same story told by science historian James Gleick in The
Information, a magisterial history of our species’ relationship with information from the
first stories told around Neolithic campfires to the earliest rudimentary forms of writing
and eventually the digitization of information with the quantification of the qubit.87
In
this frame, we should view intelligence as conforming to distinct ages that correspond
with the major means of human information technology in that particular era, an idea that
will be explored further later.
Intelligence, as we use the term today, is still a relatively new discipline, a
product of the Industrial Revolution, like most of the other modern professions. It has
received less historiographical attention than it merits, despite the best efforts of several
87
James Gleick, The Information: A Theory, A History, A Flood, (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2011).

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passionate scholars—most of whom are current or former practitioners.88
Historian
Walter Laqueur’s admonition that no one has succeeded in crafting a theory of
intelligence remains true today.89
While there exists a variety of intelligence literature,
most of it lacks general rules that can be applied across the board, unlike other social
sciences that came about in the 20th
-century, such as International Relations or Political
Science. This has left us without satisfactory causal theories that can be applied in other
circumstances.90
Most intelligence literature begins only at the conclusion of the World War II,
what might be considered a characteristically American—read: shortsighted—approach to
history. There are typically allusions to the exploits of the Office of Strategic Services in
the European theatre, and perhaps a reference to the even earlier development of
codebreaking and cryptology during the First World War. Intelligence practitioners, at
least, usually think of the division between intelligence and policymaking as a thoroughly
modern debate, even referring to it most often by the shorthand of the names of its two
opposing postwar champions, Sherman Kent and Willmoore Kendall.91
But as a
seasoned intelligence officer once remarked, ‘rock ‘n’ roll existed before you learned
about it,’ and the inherited traditions that led to Kent-Kendall debate were well-
established in practice by the time the modern American IC was established in 1947.
88
Including Michael Warner, Mark Stout, Mark Lowenthal, David Kahn, Michael Herman, and many
others.
89
Walter Laqueur, A World of Secrets: The Uses and Limits of Intelligence (New York, NY: Basic Books,
1985), 8, quoted by Michael Warner in “Wanted: A Definition of Our Craft,” Studies in Intelligence, 46/3,
(2002). Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-
publications/csi-studies/studies/vol46no3/article02.html
90
David Kahn, “An Historical Theory of Intelligence” in Peter Gill, Stephen Marrin, and Mark Pythian,
eds. Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 4.
91
Jack Davis, “The Kent-Kendall Debate of 1949,” Studies in Intelligence 35/2 (1992), 91-103.

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‘Intelligence studies’ programs have proliferated across public and private
academic institutions in the last two decades,92
but a holistic history of intelligence has
thus far eluded academe. Such a history is both beyond the scope of this thesis and the
skill of its author, but an overview of how intelligence evolved, and how the relationship
between intelligence and policymaking was established over time, particularly in the
United States, is necessary. As the proverb says, you can’t know where you’re going
until you know where you’ve been. In order to understand where the IC is now, and
where it is going, we must know first where it came from, and where it has been before.
FROM GENES TO MEMES
“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he
himself has spun.”
- Clifford Geertz
The earliest modern theorists of human development, Thomas Hobbes, John
Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all took the primordial individual independence of
humankind prima facie, though they interpreted it in different ways. Hobbes called it the
state of nature a “war of all against all.”93
Rousseau believed prehistoric man was a docile
creature, pristine in their solitude. But they were wrong. It turns out, however, that like
our closest primate cousins, sociability is hard-wired into human biology. Humans have
been engaged in social networks since before we were human at all.
92
Stephen Colthart and Matthew Crosston, “Terra Incognita: Mapping American Intelligence Education,”
Journal of Strategic Security 8/3, (2015), 46-68. Retrieved from
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol8/iss3/3
93
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and
Civil, (Originally published 1651). Retrieved from Project Gutenburg.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm;

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Anatomically modern human beings have been around for at least 200,000
years.94
Our earliest ancestors go back around 2.5 million years. For the vast majority of
that time, across thousands of generations, nothing of much importance happened. For
most of our species’ existence, bands of close kin were dedicated primarily to hunting
and gathering to stay alive and rear children. Survival was their primary concern. The
exchange of information within the group was decidedly limited. But then, one day about
94
Though recent discoveries may push this timeline back much further. See Sarah Kaplan, “Scientists Find
Evidence of Paint, Complex Tools and Climate Chaos at the Dawn of Humanity,” The Washington Post
(March 15th
, 2018). Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-
science/wp/2018/03/15/scientists-find-evidence-of-paint-complex-tools-and-climate-chaos-at-the-dawn-of-
humanity/?utm_term=.3e86812143e3;
Figure 2-1: Perspective: In this chart of the 4.5 billion-year history of life on Earth, the earliest human ancestors do
not appear until the very bottom sections, at the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch. ‘Modern’ humans appeared
about 2.5 million years later.

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100,000 years ago, it all changed. Anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari, in his book
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind explains in fascinating detail how a relatively
small adaptation within our earliest ancestors’ brains led to everything we know today,
essentially giving humanity its first super-power during what scientists call the Cognitive
Revolution. The Cognitive Revolution is the period during which modern humans first
began to do interesting things like developing languages, creating art, crafting weapons
and tools, and building boats. It began at the latest about 70,000 years ago.95
It was
sometime during this period that modern homo sapiens developed the ability to imagine
and share an intersubjective reality.
An intersubjective reality simply means a shared paradigm. Any large-scale
cooperation requiring more than a handful of hunter-gatherers in a band requires a
common mental model—a shared sense of purpose. Our earliest ancestors invented these,
and we still use them to organize our societies today. Historical examples include
ancestor spirits and religious myths; modern examples are money, corporations, and
nation-states. None of these things ‘exist’ objectively in the physical world, but because
enough people within the intersubjective reality believe they do, they manifest as real as
anything else.
An intersubjective reality is not the same as a lie. Other primates can lie; various
species of monkeys have been observed tricking other monkeys in their band by giving
false warnings of predators, for example, in order to steal from them. An intersubjective
95
Although recently-published evidence suggests it began even earlier, as long as 300,000 years ago. See
Alison S. Brooks, John E. Yellen, Richard Potts, Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Alan L. Deino, David E.
Leslie, Stanley H. Ambrose, Jeffrey R. Ferguson, Francesco D’Errico, Andrew M. Zipkin, Scott
Whitaker, Jeffrey Post, Elizabeth G. Veatch, Kimberly Foecke, Jennifer B. Clark, “Long-distance stone
transport and pigment use in the earliest Middle Stone Age,” Science (March 15th
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/03/14/science.aao2646

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reality is not a trick; it is a shared imagination. “Unlike lying, an imagined reality is
something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief exists, the
imagined reality exerts force in the world. Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most
sincerely believe in the existence of spirits and demons. Most millionaires sincerely
believe in the existence of money and corporations. Most civil rights activists sincerely
believe in the existence of human rights.”96
Hariri explains the implications of
humanity’s intersubjective realities thus:
“Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, homo sapiens have been living in a
dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees, and
lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations, and
corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more
powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees, and lions depends
on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”97
The Cognitive Revolution and its intersubjective reality enabled the rise of
something new—sociocultural evolution. Sociocultural evolution, which proceeded at
lightspeed compared to the glacial process of biological evolution, allowed homo sapiens
to rapidly revise its behavior and organizational structures to suit their changing needs as
they adapted to different circumstances and environments, migrating across the world in
a remarkably quick span, eventually coming to dominate the entire planet. As a result,
homo sapiens were thrust into the fast lane of cultural evolution, far outpacing every
other species in history, and setting off a chain of events that fundamentally changed how
information is created, processed, and shared.98
96
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2016), 27.
97
Ibid., 32.
98
Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York, NY:
Penguin Press, 2006), 34-37.

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Historian Azar Gat explains how cultural evolution that proceeded in parallel and
competitively with biological evolution (Figure 4-2). “In biology, the replicators are the
genes, stored and transmitted between generations in the cellular nuclei. In culture, the
replicators are behaviors and ideas—memes in Richard Dawkins’ inspired phrase—
accumulated during life in brains and transmitted between them through learning (Figure
2-2).”99
Cultural evolution, then, is an early, strong example of the power of networks
when compared to unidirectional hierarchies. There will be more about that, later.
Cultural evolution, powered through network connections, has many advantages
over biological evolution. It is infinitely faster, for one. Genes can be passed down only
vertically, but memes are omnidirectional. But cultural evolution is affected by random
drift and mutation just as much, if not more than biological evolution, making them not
that different. “Biological and cultural evolutions are related by more than analogy. They
represent a continuum, not just a break, in human evolution—indeed, in evolution in
99
Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 150-151.
Figure 2-2: Biological and Cultural Evolution

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33
general. In the first place, the one originated from the other. Underlying the take-off of
cultural evolution was the perfection of one of the latest tricks of biological evolution: a
greatly enhanced ability to teach and learn.”100
The Cognitive Revolution was the first major epochal shift in how human
societies worked, fundamentally altering how information was captured, stored, and
transferred. It led to the growth of larger bands, and eventually the rise of everything else.
But it soon ran into a snag, and societal development reached a plateau, because human
processing power, it turns out, is inherently limited. While a shared imaginary reality led
to the growth of tribes that were not as closely as related as bands, who could tell stories
of their mythical ancestors and then share a common bond, there was a limit to how many
could share in this new organization.
There is a widely-accepted limit on the number of individual human relationships
an individual can maintain under natural conditions. Malcolm Gladwell calls this the
‘social channel capacity’ in his book The Tipping Point.101
Formally, it is known as
Dunbar’s Number, after British anthropologist Robin Dunbar and a team of
anthropologists who first discovered it by comparing the sizes of social groups in humans
and other primates.102
Dunbar and his colleagues demonstrated that as a primate’s brain gets larger, so
does the size of its social groups. Take any species of primate—that is, every variety of
monkey and ape, and the larger the neocortex of their brain, the larger the average size of
100
Ibid.,150.
101
Malcom Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York, NY:
Little, Brown & Co, 2000), 177-181.
102
Robin Dunbar, “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates,” Journal of Human
Evolution, 20. (1992), 469-493.

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34
the group they live and interact with. For homo sapiens, the most effective group size is
around 15-20, and the upper limit of cooperation comes out to about 150 individuals
(Figure 2-2). Most people can neither truly know, nor maintain effective relationships
with more than that. As anthropologist Yuval Noah Harari explains, “the amount of
information that one must obtain and store in order to track the ever-changing
relationships of even a few dozen individuals is staggering. In a band of fifty individuals,
there are 1,225 one-on-one relationships and countless more complex social
combinations.”103
Dunbar’s research has remarkable explanatory power for the most
effective teams even in modern life, from special operations teams to small business start-
ups. Beyond the immediacy of close kin and the extended network of up to around 150
individuals, crossing Dunbar’s threshold requires some manner of innovation.
103
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2016), 25.
Figure 2-3: Dunbar et al; Concept of Nested Social Networks

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THE WORLD’S SECOND-OLDEST PROFESSION
“It's the oldest question of all, George.
Who can spy on the spies?”
- John le Carré104
Espionage may really be the world’s second-oldest profession. Its essence is the
procurement and use of information to obtain an advantage over a competitor, something
we’ve been doing since the first alpha male saw something he wanted that someone else
had. National Security Agency historian Michael Warner recently published an excellent
historical survey, The Rise, and Fall of Intelligence. In it, he notes that before there was
history, there were spies.105
One of the most well-known examples of prehistorical spying
is the story of the Twelve Spies from Hebrew scripture. God had ordered Moses to send
men into Canaan to ‘spy out the land.’106
Upon their return, ten of the twelve exaggerated
the strength of their Philistine enemies, convincing many that victory was impossible.
Two of the spies, however—the faithful Joshua and Caleb, encouraged Moses that he
could easily conquer the land with the Lord’s help—in what is perhaps the earliest
example of policy advocacy in an intelligence report, though a minority view. The story
of the Twelve Spies is, of course, apocryphal. But it tells a story of organized espionage
from prehistoric times—that is, from an illiterate society that relied on oral tradition
rather than written records.
104
John le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (New York, NY: Random House, 1974).
105
Michael Warner, The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2017), 1-36.
106
Num 13: 1-33 (KJV)

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36
More tangible evidence of espionage comes along with the first information
technological revolution. Writing originated independently in several areas, but one of
the earliest was in ancient Sumer, present-day Iraq. The earliest evidence of writing
comes from Sumer in the form of a baked clay tablet that dates from 3400 – 3000 BCE.
The message it contains turns out to be a bit disappointing if a quintessentially human
banality. It is best described as an invoice or perhaps a packing list: “29,086 measures of
barley were received over the course of 37 months - signed, Kushim.”107
While it would eventually spawn literary icons like Shakespeare or Rumi, writing
originated with pseudo-anonymous clerks like Kushim as a way to keep track of produce
surpluses as civilizations underwent their second major epochal shift, the Agricultural
Revolution. Warner points out that some of these ancient messages were stored in hollow
clay bulla, meant to keep the contents safe, crucial for smoothly processing transactions
in a society that by that point was dependent upon agriculture.108
In pre-literate societies like those of the ancient Hebrews, information was
transmitted orally, and the word of a spy—or a dozen spies—would be accepted or
disregarded based on their face-to-face credibility, the social capital they had built up
with the individual or community they served. The invention of writing was the first great
revolution in information-processing, allowing the elite to segregate information to
specially-appointed handlers, kept secret from prying eyes.109
The literate became the
first specialists, eventually becoming very powerful because of their monopoly on
107
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2016),
123.
108
Michael Warner, The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2017), 1-36.
109
Ibid., 11.

UNCLASSIFIED
37
information. Thousands of years later, as writing became more common, elaborate codes
and ciphers were developed to control who had access to the information writing
contained, and the desire to acquire and understand what competitors were up to
developed along with them leading to all manner of deceptions and schemes to steal
codebooks.
Nearly every culture throughout history has practiced espionage. Some left great
works on its utility, such as Kautilya in India and Sun Tzu in China. In the west, with its
cultural heritage of the straightforward, decisive battle, spying was viewed less
charitably, an ultimately distasteful, if sometimes necessary evil. Odysseus has been
called the “protagonist par excellence of the shadows,” the archetypal western spy—but
he was not much favored by Agamemnon or the rest of the Achaeans, was distrusted and
even despised for his cunning and metis (craft).110
The Romans had cadre of
speculatores,111
agents who would venture into barbarian lands to skulk about and report
back to Caesar, but there was nothing romantic or heroic about them. The Norman and
Angevin rulers of medieval England were well-versed in the use of spycraft.112
Across
various places and times, the job of the spy was the same: to report on distant or hidden
things, to steal secrets, to misinform, or even, sometimes, to assassinate. The interaction
between spy and spymaster was transactional, making spies hardly different than
mercenaries, who were similarly disdained.
110
Mera Joan Flaumenhaft, “The Undercover Hero: Odysseus from Dark to Daylight,” Interpretation 10
(1982), 9. Retrieved from https://www.scribd.com/document/133750918/Interpretation-Vol-10-1;
111
Rose Mary Sheldon, Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust in the Gods, but Verify (New York,
NY: Routledge, 2005); John Keegan, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al
Qaeda (New York, NY: Alfred a. Knopf, 2003), 9.
112
J.O. Prestwich, “Military Intelligence under the Norman and Angevin Kings,” in G. Garnett and J.
Hudson eds. Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).

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38
Spycraft had its utility. But for many centuries, this utility was of a mostly local
and tactical variety. The speed of information during this period was only as fast as the
swiftest horse or strongest oarsmen, and geography, both the physical and political types,
served to dilute and distort information transmission over long distances. Messages of
exquisite intelligence could almost evaporate as they were passed from one courier to
another, in a pre-modern version of what we today call ‘the telephone game.’ Even
written messages had to be recopied by rare scribes, only as reliable as human error.
While spies could set up an effective ambush or warn a military commander of an
impending surprise attack, its strategic effects were decidedly limited. All of this began to
change in the 15th
and 16th
-centuries, as new IT, the printing press, spread concurrent
with the emergence of pre-modern nation-states.
Michael Herman, a British intelligence practitioner-scholar, points out in
Intelligence Power in War and Peace that by the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603),
‘intelligencers’ had appeared in the English court, and one of the chief functions of
ambassadors, who also emerged in this era, was to feed information and news back to
their home government.113
One of the responsibilities of the English Secretaries of State,
of whom the most famous is Sir Francis Walsingham, was to manage ‘the intelligence’ of
the kingdom. “The term denoted not only the provision of extraordinary information
concerning enemy countries or domestic plotters but also a regular, settled supply of
every kind of news from abroad,”114
Herman notes that nowhere in this period was there
a separate function for what we would today call analysis. In fact, for monarchs and their
113
Michael Herman, Intelligence Power in Peace and War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 8-10.
114
Paul Frazer, The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State and their Monopolies of Licensed News 1660-
1688 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 1.

UNCLASSIFIED
39
ministers, intelligence was simply another part of statecraft, something they did
themselves as part of their daily routine. Even Walsingham, who fancied himself an
‘intelligencer,’ found his espionage network subsumed into his offices of Secretary of
State. In sum, the use of espionage was still very personal for those who had power, even
in what we call early modern times.
A REVOLUTION IN INTELLIGENCE AFFAIRS
“There is nothing a government hates more than to be well-
informed; for it makes the process at arriving at decisions
much more complicated and difficult.”
- John Maynard Keynes115
Intelligence, as distinct from—or really, an evolution of, espionage—as process,
product, organization, and activity116
—is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. It could only
have developed after the 18th
-century Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment because
intelligence bureaus, ministries, and agencies could not exist until the state had fully
emerged, and themselves become administrative, could not exist until enough of a state’s
citizens were literate and liable to professionalization, and could not exist until the state
had sufficient organizational and communication structure to manage their citizens’
efforts in a complementary manner. It was not until the rise of modern nation-states, with
their organized, mass armies and extensive road and post networks that facilitated faster
communication that espionage activities could evolve into what we would today call
115
Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Savior: 1920-1937 (London, UK:
Macmillan, 1992), 630.
116
Mark Lowenthal, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, 7th
Edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Press,
2017), 10.

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40
intelligence. The administrative monarchies of the era established code-breaking offices
and far-flung information-gathering networks of diplomats and spies (often one in the
same person) that in turn metastasized over time into coherent intelligence institutions.
In the early 1800s the revolutionary armies of Napoleonic France, swollen by the
levée en masse, were at the leading edge of military modernization. Napoleon himself
was a voracious consumer of intelligence of all types, both operational and tactical from
his commanders, and strategic and political from within the offices of the Emperor’s
Cabinet and the more infamous Black Cabinet. Peter Jackson goes as far as to say the
Section Statistique, the Cabinet office responsible for aggregating political, diplomatic,
and economic intelligence, was the first modern example of a permanent organization
charged with the collection and dissemination of strategic intelligence.117
In this period,
the commanding general was the primary, if not sole analyzer of intelligence, choosing
and discarding information as he saw fit.118
Napoleon’s archrival, Arthur Wellesley, first
Duke of Wellington, adhered to a similar mechanism for intelligence analysis. During the
Peninsula War (1807 – 1814), “all intelligence came to Wellington…and the appraisal of
it was his alone…nor do these reports appear to have been summarized, abstracted, or
collated before they reached him. What collating was done was almost certainly done by
himself.”119
By this period, the role of the decision-maker as the sole arbiter of truth was
already well-established.
117
Jay Luvaas, “Napoleon’s Use of Intelligence: The Jena Campaign of 1805,” Intelligence and National
Security 3/3, (1988), 40-54; Gunther E. Rothenburg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978), 147; Peter Jackson, “Historical Reflections on the Uses
and Limits of Intelligence,” in Intelligence and Statecraft, Peter Jackson and Jennifer L. Siegel, eds.
(Westport, CT: 2005), 22.
118
Martin Van Creveld, Command in War (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 38-39.
119
S.G.P. Ward, Wellington’s Headquarters: A Study of the Administrative Problems in the Peninsula
1809-1814, (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1957), 119-120.

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41
A decade after Napoleon’s death in exile, the Prussian military theorist Carl von
Clausewitz, who spent his youth fighting the revolutionary military machine, was more
dismissive of intelligence in On War (1832), his unfinished, often self-contradictory, and
nonetheless brilliant book that went on to form the foundation of the Western art of
modern warfare.120
Clausewitz devoted a scant two pages to ‘Intelligence in War’, which
he helpfully defined as “every sort of information about the enemy and his country.” He
apparently had little use for intelligence, which he saw as mostly inaccurate, suitable only
for generating fear and rumor within the ranks because “most men would rather believe
bad news than good.”121
His views are summarized in one of the most-quoted phrases in
On War: “Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and
most are uncertain…in short, most intelligence is false.”122
Clausewitz’s dim view of
intelligence was informed by his personal experience with the flailing Prussian army in
the early years of the Napoleonic era. Victor M. Rosello at the United States Army War
College theorized that had Clausewitz been on the winning side, his views on the utility
of intelligence may have been different.123
The other dominant military theorist of the age was Antoine-Henri, Baron Jomini.
Jomini, a Swiss officer who served in both the French and Russian militaries during the
120
Hew Strachan, Clausewitz’s On War: A Biography (New York, NY: Atlantic Books, 2007).
121
Victor M. Rosello, “Clausewitz’s Contempt for Intelligence,” Parameters, United States Army War
College, (Spring 1991), 107. Retrieved from
http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/Articles/1991/1991%20rosello.pdf
122
Carl von Clausewitz, On War ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, (New York, NY: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1984), 136. Other translations of On War use the term information instead of intelligence. (cont.)
Grognards will probably always argue over the translation of Clausewitz, literally arguing semantics. While
it is true Clausewitz had no access to intelligence as we use the term today, the intent of his wording is
clear.
123
Victor M. Rosello, “Clausewitz’s Contempt for Intelligence,” Parameters, United States Army War
College (Spring 1991), 105-108. Retrieved from
http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/Articles/1991/1991%20rosello.pdf

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