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A great article in World Politics Review by Josh Kerbel, a 14-year veteran of the U.S. Intelligence Community ( Hat tip to Col. David Maxwell)

For the Intelligence Community, Creativity is the New Secret

It’s no secret that the increasing complexity of the international system — and in particular, its growing interconnectedness, integration, and interdependence — is eroding the fundamental business models of an ever-growing range of industries. Nowhere is this more evident than in the information industries, such as journalism, broadcasting, publishing, music and film, among others. More than a few entities have been swept to the brink of, or in some cases over, the precipice of irrelevance. And every information industry, it seems, is in some peril.

The U.S. intelligence community’s traditional model is similarly threatened by these transformations, but like so many other besieged industries, the IC is hesitant to deviate from it. In general terms, the IC’s model is a secret “collection-centric” one that:

– prizes classified data, with classification often directly correlated to value and significance;
– is driven by data availability, while analytical requirements remain secondary;
– is context-minimal, with analysis staying close to the collected data and in narrow account “lanes”;
– is current-oriented, since there are no collectable facts about the future;
– is warning-focused, emphasizing alarm-ringing;
– is product-centered, measuring success relative to the “finished intelligence” product provided to policymakers, rather than its utility or service.

This model ends up being highly “reductionist,” since secret collection leads to classification, compartmentalization and, inevitably, reduced distribution. Such a system, in which everything is constantly subdivided, was designed for the “complicated” — but not really “complex” — strategic environment of the Cold War. In that more linear environment, it was possible to know exactly where to look — namely, the USSR; access was severely restricted, making secret collection vital; the context of hostile intent and opposing alliances was well-understood; and the benefits of being forewarned, especially of imminent military action, was paramount.

Today’s complex strategic environment is vastly different. Now, there is no single focal point, as a threat or opportunity can emerge from almost anywhere; access is largely unrestricted, since the world is wide-open and information-rich; and context is much more ambiguous, because intent and relationships are fluid. In this more dynamic, non-linear strategic environment, reductionist approaches are, by themselves, a veritable recipe for systemic (i.e., strategic) surprise.

In practical terms, this means that it is no longer sufficient to just reactively collect data on how certain parts of the international system are acting in order to extrapolate discrete predictions. Rather, it’s crucial that such reductionist approaches be complemented by more “synthetic” approaches that proactively think about how the various parts of the larger system could interact, and consider how the synthesized range of possible threats and opportunities might be respectively averted or fostered. In other words, it is no longer enough to just monitor already identified issues. It is also necessary to envision potentially emergent ones. In short, it is time for the IC to use its imagination.

Read the rest here.

Comments, in no particular order of importance:
 
First, the underlying root problem is “political”. The IC is “collection-centric” primarily because the key “customers” for IC products have an implicit expectation of good intel as a higher level analytical journalism, just salted with some real-time “secrets” outside normal public purview. And some of them – George Schultz when he was SECSTATE is an example – want to be their own analyst, and are quick to complain about speculative,”edgy” analysis that clashes with their preconceptions. So IC senior managers are inclined to give the customer what they demand – current information which has a short shelf-life in terms of value. Educate the intel-consumer class of what the IC might be able to do given different tasks and they might start asking that new tasks be done.
 
Secondly, if the IC employed more programs that involved an investment in long-term “clandestinity” – it would both collect information of strategic, long-term value and offer the US opportunities to shape the responses of others through established networks of agents of influence. This is where imagination, speculation and synthesis would have greater play because of the need to create and seize opportunities rather than placing a premium on mitigating risk and avoiding failure.
 
The problem with analytical-reductionist culture in hierarchical institutions ( anywhere, not just the IC) runs deeper than a top-down, enforced, groupthink. Perceptive members of the org, even when compelled to parrot the party line “officially”, will often mock it privately and exchange more authentic critiques informally. The real problem is the extent to which this risk-averse, paralyzing, culture is psychologically  internalized by individual analysts to the point of creating lacunae. As individuals rise in the org they carry their lacunae with them and begin actively imparting them authoritatively upon their subordinates.
 
Ideally, a quality liberal education would be imparting a reflexive skepticism, a tolerance for uncertainty and a greater meta-cognitive self-awareness that would check the excessive certainty generated by an excessive reliance on the methodology of analytical-reductionism. Unfortunately, the emphasis upon academic specialization has been pushed down so hard in undergraduate and even high quality secondary public school education ( AP courses are the worst offenders) that generating good, insightful, questions is a cognitive skill that has been abandoned in favor of deriving “right answers” using “approved methods”.
 
Scenario-building is an  effective tool for breaking  analytical-reductionist  frameworks and freeing up our ability to synthesize and construct solutions. However, to be useful, scenarios require at least an internal logic or realism even if they represent improbable “blue sky” or “black swan” outcomes and they require more cognitively diverse inputs ( from “outsiders”, “amateurs” and “heretics”) to challenge what data the received culture considers significant.

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.  Here is part III. of a three part series by Charles, entitled “CONFLICT OF COMMANDS”.

Conflict of Commands III: Two pre-Hasan documents

by Charles Cameron

In my research on the topic of “conflict of commands” I ran across two documents from October and November of 2001 which make for interesting reading in the wake of Major Hasan’s slide presentation and the Fort Hood shooting.

The first is a MEMRI post, and hence both copyrighted and readily available on the web. It s titled Terror in America (23) Muslim Soldiers in the U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan: To Fight or Not to Fight? and dated November 7, 2001, and the intro paragraph reads as follows:

As soon as the U.S. geared up for the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Muslim military personnel in the American armed forces began to deal with the question of the religious permissibility of their participation in battle. Army Chaplain Capt. Abd Al-Rasheed Muhammad, the Imam of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. sent an inquiry on the matter to the North American Fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence) Council, which in turn referred the matter to clerics in the Arab world. The clerics issued a Fatwa permitting Muslim soldiers to take part in the fighting if there was no alternative, and the council delivered the ruling to Capt. Muhammad. But on October 30, the editor of the Arabic London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported that the clerics who signed this Fatwa had changed their minds and abrogated their previous Fatwa with a new one prohibiting participation of Muslim soldiers in the war in Afghanistan.

The rest you can read on the MEMRI site.

The second document was actually posted a little earlier on the State Department site, although it is no longer available there. Dated 16 October 2001 and titled U.S. Islamic Leaders Issue Fatwa on U.S. Muslim Soldiers Fighting Terrorists, as far as I can determine, it is currently only present (outside of archive.org) on the Department’s Jakarta site.

Interestingly enough, this document also includes a quote from another person whose name has been much in the news in connection with Islamism: Chaplain Yee — the Chinese-American US Army Chaplain who ministered to the Muslim inmates at Guantanamo Bay, was charged in 2003 with sedition, espionage and other crimes, and held in a Navy brig until all charges against him were dropped. Yee is quoted as saying back in 2001 that “Muslims on his base have come to him with worries about being ordered to fight Muslims overseas”.

I think this document is worth reposting in full, and would simply note my surprise that neither this official State Department statement nor the MEMRI document appears to have formed part of any discussion of the Fort Hood incident in open source materials that I have seen. I hope the IC is doing better in this regard — but if these materials have been overlooked by the relevant classified inquiries too, I wonder whether this might not be yet another result of the sort of thing Gregory Treverton comments on in his 2009 paper “Bridging the Divide between Scientific and Intelligence Analysis” from the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies, Swedish National Defense College:

Analysts do not have the freedom to explore issues by pursuing them down the rabbit hole, so to speak. There is a hard andfast process in place that determines what they look at, when, and in some cases, to what end.

*U.S. Islamic Leaders Issue Fatwa on U.S. Muslim Soldiers Fighting Terrorists:

*

U.S. Muslim soldiers need to defend their country and combat terrorism
By Phillip Kurata
Washington File Staff Writer
16 October 2001

Washington — Two prominent Islamic scholars in the United States have issued a fatwa, or legal opinion, on the importance of American Muslims serving in the U.S. military to defend their country and combat terrorism.

“All Muslims ought to be united against all those who terrorize the innocents, and those who permit the killing of non-combatants without a justifiable reason. The Muslim soldier must perform his duty in this fight despite the feeling of uneasiness of ‘fighting without discriminating.’ His intention must be to fight for enjoining of the truth and defeating falsehood. It’s to prevent aggression on the innocents, or to apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to justice,” the fatwa reads.

It was written by Taha Jabir Al-Alawani, President of the Fiqh Council of North America and President of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, and Sheikh Muhammad Al-Hanooti, a member of the fiqh council. The two Islamic scholars issued their legal opinion in response to a query submitted by Chaplain Abdul-Rashid Muhammad, the most senior Muslim chaplain in the U.S. military, who sought guidance on the permissibility of U.S. Muslim servicemen to participate in the war effort in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries.

“Muslims are part of the American society. Anyone who feels he’s fighting in a just war must fight,” Al-Alawani said.

“We abide by every law of this country except those laws that are contradictory to Islamic law,” said Sheikh Al-Hanooti. The sheikh added that U.S. Muslim military personnel may refuse to fight on the grounds of conscientious objection.

“If any Muslim serving in the U.S. Armed Forces has a conscientious objection to combat and believes that it is against Islamic principles to fight in any war, then that individual has the right to stand by his or her concience,” Al-Hanooti said. “They realize, of course, that they may be administratively separated from the military as a result of their choice.”

Muhammad, who is stationed at the Walter Reed military hospital in Washington, says there is no conflict between being a loyal soldier and a loyal Muslim. He is helping some Muslim American servicemen deal with their qualms about fighting terrorists who claim to represent Islam.

“It is time now for us to not only wake up, but speak up,” Muhammad said in a recent interview. “The prophet said when we see evil action we are compelled to change it with our hand, challenge it with our tongue or at least hate it in our heart.”

Muhammad, an African American who was raised as a Baptist, became the first Muslim chaplain in the U.S. military in 1993. Until then, all the 3,150 U.S. military chaplains were either Jews or Christians. In 1996, a second Muslim chaplain was commissioned by the Navy. Since then the number of Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military has grown to 14.

Qaseem Uqdah, a Marine Corps veteran who is executive director of the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veteran Affairs Council, said the Muslim military chaplains include Muslims who were born into the faith in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Muslim converts, who include several African Americans, an Anglo-American and a Chinese American. Uqdah’s group has been selected by the U.S. military to recommend people as Muslim chaplain candidates.

U.S. military officials say a shortage of candidates with the required education limits the number of Muslim military chaplains. Three Muslim chaplains are currently being trained at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.

The newest Muslim chaplain is James Yee, a Chinese American and a graduate of the West Point military academy, who was born into a Lutheran family. He became interested in Islam while a student and later spent four years studying Arabic and Islam in Damascus, Syria. Currently he serves with the 29th Signal Battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington.

Chaplain Yee said that Muslims on his base have come to him with worries about being ordered to fight Muslims overseas.

“An act of terrorism, the taking of innocent civilian lives is prohibited by Islam, and whoever has done this needs to be brought to justice, whether he is Muslim or not,” Chaplain Yee said.

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.  Here Charles begins a three part series entitled “CONFLICT OF COMMANDS”.

Conflict of Commands I: Intro

by Charles Cameron

What happens when people in the military find themselves torn between the requirements of two chains of command?

I came to this question because two of the topics I have recently addressed here — that of Major Hasan and the Fort Hood shootings, and that of Major Luckert and his monograph on the risk of millennial beliefs driving US foreign policy — have this much in common: that in both cases the issue of obedience to military orders when they are perceived to be in conflict with divine commands came up.

Having stumbled on this correspondence between two otherwise fairly remote incidents, I began to notice similar elements cropping up elsewhere.

Aha, a pattern worth pursuing! I thought.

I have phrased my inquiry in terms of “two chains of command” without specifying that one of them is military and one divine, though that will be the general rule, because there are also instances where the potentially supervening command comes from international law or individual conscience .

I have decided to approach this issue in a three-post series.  This post introduces the issue, the second post consists of a series of quotes that illustrate it, the third post zeroes in on the issue as it affects Muslims in the US armed forces, and contains a link to a significant MEMRI post on the subject, and the full text of a US Department of State document, both of them dating from shortly after 9-11 — and as far as I can tell, not referenced previously in our post-Fort Hood thinking.

My overall purpose in this sequence of three posts is to show that the dilemma of a double chain-of-command is a prominent feature of a variety of different contemporary situations, some of them religious in nature, some revolving around other moral or legal concerns. 

*

The second post in the series deserves some commentary, but I wanted to restrict it to the body of the quotes themselves rather than attempting to comment on individual quotes.

I have culled them from a wide variety of sources — friend and foe alike, moderate and extremist, local and far-flung.  I have included sources from Iran, Israel, El Salvador, Pakistan, Burma, and within the United States from an Aryan Nations “archbishop” (in an appendix, see below) to the sitting President — and in some cases I have included quotes from opposite ends of a given political spectrum.  On the whole, I have tried to avoid any explicit patterning and just skip around from one nation, part of the globe or religion to another, although in the case of three different “takes ” on Maj. Stuckert’s monograph, I  have kept the three together for easier comprehension. I do not claim to have been exhaustive, and make no claims of sympathy or disapproval for the individual views expressed.

Indeed, my hope is that as we move through the different examples, many if not most of my readers will find themselves in sympathy with first one side then the other in terms of the need to obey military orders in general, and the need to disobey them in certain situations. 

I imagine, for instance, that the majority of my readers will in general disapprove of inserting a divine obligation between a soldier and his or her plain duty of obedience to orders from a superior officer — but that in the case of the current Iranian government ordering members of its military to attack crowds of protesters, our sympathies are liable to be on the other side of the equation.  In this way, the diversity of the instances may facilitate a deeper understanding of the nuances of the question.

I would also like to state quite categorically that I am not in the business of making “moral equivalences” here. The fact that I juxtapose a variety of quotations in which the issue of divided lines of command comes up in no way means that I equate the principled opposition to state brutality of one quotation with the wilder reaches of conspiracist rhetoric in another.

The final quote in the body of the second post is of particular interest, since it alludes to the theory of Preference Falsification — the only theoretical model for making predictive analysis of this type of conflict that I have seen.

Please note that as an appendix, I have attached two quotes that only indirectly address the issue of conflict of commands — a white nationalist quote, immediately followed by a principled quote about militia movement members “disgust at the genocidal fantasies in white supremacist discourse” — because I believe it is important to be aware just how far the rhetoric of hatred can go, and just how firmly it can be rebutted. 

*

The double trouble of Sgt. Hasan Akbar and his influence on Major Nidal Hasan is worth exploring in a little more depth, because Sgt Akbar, who tossed grenades into a tent in Kuwait killing two officers, seems to have been something of a research project for Major Hasan, who apparently asked about Sgt Akbar in an intercepted email to Sheikh al-Awlaki in Yemen:

One e-mail in particular is getting attention from investigators now.

In that e-mail – which the Washington FBI office didn’t see – Hasan mentioned the case of Sgt. Hasan Akbar. He is the Muslim soldier who threw grenades at fellow troops in Kuwait at the beginning of the Iraq war. The attack killed two soldiers and wounded 14 others.

In the e-mail to the imam, Hasan asked whether Akbar would have been considered a shaheed – or hero – for his actions. Given what happened later at Fort Hood, investigators say this e-mail now appears suggestive. But at the time it was not conclusive. Investigators in San Diego weren’t alarmed by the query because it appeared to be consistent with research Hasan was doing at Walter Reed. The Akbar case was thought to be at the center of his research.

For an Army psychiatrist counseling soldiers returning from, or about to enter, combat in Iraq and Afghanistan — and perhaps with a heavier than average caseload of Muslims, with whom he would share a common language — researching jurisprudential aspects of the Sgt Akbar case would be natural.

As Juan Zarate, Bush’s deputy National Security Advisor quoted in the article cited above pointed out:

It is very difficult in the moment I think for analysts and agents and his cohorts and coworkers to piece this together and see they had a ticking time bomb on their hands.

In fact, as we’ll see in the third post in this series, Major Hasan needn’t have troubled the Sheikh in Yemen for an opinion.  The State Department had posted a note on this very topic in October 2001.

But he did contact the Sheikh, and the Sheikh presumably eulogized Akbar’s action, as he was later to eulogize that of Maj. Hasan.

And as I suggested recently in a comment on David Ronfeldt’s fine blog, we can see with the 20/20 hindsight that Juan Zarate also mentioned, that whatever was true regarding the double chain of command that Sgt Akbar was under, which Maj. Hasan was on the face of it legitimately studying, might also hold true for Maj. Hasan himself — for whom the issue was both a research topic and a personal dilemma.

So the FBI gives a pass to the research topic — and the personal dilemma gives rise to the tragic shootings at Ft. Hood.

*

One final point:

The problem of conflict of commands has its origin in religion, so it makes sense to take quick note of the theological basics.

The shema or daily faith statement of the Jewish people states “the Lord our God, the Lord is one”, while the first Commandment in the Jewish scripture, the Torah, declares “You shall have no other gods before Me”.  The central tenet of Islam, similarly, is tawhid, the unicity of God as expressed in the first part of the profession of faith or shahada, “There is no God but God” — while to treat any person or other part of creation with the respect due to that God is shirk, the unforgivable sin.

From a secular perspective, these may seem high-flown philosophical and devotional matters, but for the believer they may also have “real-world” consequences, in a way that is prefigured in Christ’s observation, recorded in Matthew 6.24, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other…”

But here we are entering the terrain of Part II of this essay: the collection of quotes.

A big hat tip to John Robb for finding and posting this gem. I guess Nazism, the French and Russian Revolutions, the Spartacus Revolt and several world religions could all have been ignited by an inspired moment of interpretive dance:

Jamais Cascio explains the cognitive benefits of good futurist methodology:

Foresight exercises that result in a single future story are rarely as useful as they appear, because we can’t predict the future. The goal of futures thinking isn’t to make predictions; the goal is to look for surprising implications. By crafting multiple futures (each focused on your core dilemma), you can look at your issues from differing perspectives, and try to dig out what happens when critical drivers collide in various ways.

Whatever you come up with, you’ll be wrong. The future that does eventually emerge will almost certainly not look like the scenarios you construct. However, it’s possible to be wrong in useful ways–good scenarios will trigger minor epiphanies (what more traditional consultants usually call “aha!” moments), giving you clues about what to keep an eye out for that you otherwise would have missed.

Yes. I would add that such thought experiments also help to improve pattern recognition in analyzing reality. From teasing out logically sound, if fictional, consequences, we become more discerning about recognizing causation and potential second and third order effects of events or policy choices.

Useful.