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A BUMP IN THE ROAD TO WAR

The Bush administration, in a clear diplomatic signal, granted a last minute visa to former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami to attend not only a session of the UN, but the conference of the Islamic Society of North America in Chicago, where he delivered the keynote address ( conveniently, the Undersecretary of Defense was also in town). Khatami has also been invited to speak at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. and at Harvard University.

This was a win-win diplomatic move by the Bush administration. At one stroke, the opportunity for quiet, frank, unofficial but very high level dialogue was created; Khatami was given prominent public forums to insulate himself from hardline criticism at home when he returns with American messages; Some wind is taken out of Ahmadinejad’s sails by the deference shown to his predecessor; Critics of the Bush administration at home and in Europe are also disarmed by the gesture which doesn’t fit their political script, strengthening the U.S. position before the UNSC has to discuss sanctioning Iran for illegal nuclear activities.

Not sure who engineered this move, but they deserve a pat on the back.

WORLDVIEWS AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE

Adam Garfinkle writing at FPRI. argues that the worldviews created by different cultural precepts than our own can fatally undermine the logic on which our nuclear deterrence doctrine is based:

“…U.S. and Soviet caution in strategic relations stemmed from a fact we still tend to take for granted: Both leaderships actually cared about the well-being of those they ruled, even if in the Soviet case the population’s production capability rather than human value was uppermost. But we saw repeated demonstrations of mass murder inside Iraq by the Sunni ruling elite against Kurds and the majority Shiite population during Baath rule, without regard for the injury done the state, and it is not unreasonable to wonder whether the fragility of the civil bond between rulers and ruled in multiethnic and highly stratified Middle Eastern societies weakens significantly the fundamental social basis of deterrence.”

Worldviews are exceptionally powerful filters for perception and the integration of information. Much of the debate about problems in the intelligence community in the run-up to Iraq revolved around questions of “groupthink” and ” stovepiping” and that was an intra-societal question where everyone held the same overarching worldview as Americans, if not the exact same worldview as individuals. Inter-societal questions are far more problematic than the former kind.

The Russians may have been ( to quote a former Soviet MoD official active at the time) “shitting in their pants” during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that did not mean that Soviet leaders entertained the same concepts regarding nuclear deterrence as did Robert McNamara. The subsequent, “heavy” throw-weight ICBM nuclear build-up that was maniacally pursued by Brezhnev, indicates the USSR did not. “They” or ” the other” does not think like you do, nor could they reasonably be expected to do so, even if “they” are receiving perfectly accurate and timely information about our moves from unbiased sources. Which, of course, “they” are not (and neither are we, for that matter. An important point that frequently gets forgotten).

Which, to put it mildly, undermines some of the deterrence assumptions drawn from decision models like game theory.

ADDENDUM:

Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye has related post – “Why is Iran pursuing an indigenous nuclear fuel cycle?“

ON DECK

Warming up in my reading “bullpen” to be read as soon as I finish the Evans book:

Global Brain by Howard Bloom ( read a review by Dan of tdaxp )

Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century by Howard Gardner

Hmmm..looks like this is my ” Howard” edition post. Nothing by Howard Stern or Howard Rhinegold today…but I’m sure they’ll have something out soon.

ANOTHER WORD OR TWO

Jeff Medcalf at Caerdroia has added his own take to the discussion on abolishing the CIA that was initiated by Dave. An excerpt:

“The entire structure of our intelligence agencies — military and civilian, agency- (CIA, FBI) or department- (State, Defense) based — is structured to prevent an enemy from acquiring the capability, and acting on the intent, of using their military to attack an unprepared United States. At that function, our intelligence agencies are supremely good, probably unmatched except by the British and possibly the Israelis.

What I would suggest as an organizational model is a broadly-distributed network with minimal bottlenecks and control nodes. There should be small agencies geared to particular methods of intelligence gathering (electronic intercept, covert spying, reading the newspapers of the world, etc) or particular types of information (military construction, equipment design, agricultural output, talking points in negotiations, etc). These agencies should feed the information and the source of the information into a single agency whose job it is to evaluate the intelligence’s credibility based on past experience with that source or method rather than on how “believable” the intelligence is, and to sanitize the information to include the evaluation of reliability, but remove any information that would identify the source or method used. This evaluated information could then be used by analysis cells attached to every policy decision maker, as well as feeding into certain field operations (most notably, the military). Organizations with particular needs (battlefield and theater intelligence for the military, political intelligence for an embassy) would retain the ability to gather intelligence themselves, and use it directly, while also feeding it into the evaluation agency for the rest of the government to use. “

I would add the suggestion that an analytical unit dedicated to the alternate methodology of scenario forecasting, which could be housed in the NIC, would be a useful addition. In particular, for problems in which there rests a high level of uncertainty. Another one, would be to build more thorough metacognitive practices into the analytical process, as suggested in this substantive, yet very readable, CIA monograph:

The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

ADDENDUM:

Art Hutchinson of Mapping Strategy stopped by to offer a clarification in the comments section. As Art is a nationally known consultant on strategic thinking, I thought it would be useful to highlight his remarks here:

“Scenarios and forecasts are fundamentally different animals, though they share the quality of being subject to rather easy manipulation by those responsible for architecting the process. The one (scenarios) imagines possible futures, some of which may be well outside the realm of what one might call a “forecast” for the purposes of getting groups to think outside a conventional frame. The other (forecasts) are IMHO useful in the current geopolitical context only to the extent that they incorporate dynamic, highly distributed opinion-forming mechanisms (of which highly distributed sources are a necessary but insufficient component)… which brings the whole thing back ’round to prediction markets – those clever devices that Tradesports is using to precisely forecast things like presidential elections better than polls or pundits, but which died an ugly death in the public square with the tarring and feathering of Adm. Poindexter and the Policy Analysis Market 3 years ago.

Net/net: Yes, the CIA could benefit from both interactive scenario-based thinking processes and prediction markets. They will not benefit if they seek simply to divine a single “most probable” future scenario. Once birthed, those behemoths tend to live on for decades in big institutions and reduce rather than facilitate the clear synthesis of unexpected data.”

Thanks Art !

A KIND WORD ON BEHALF OF CIVILIAN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES

Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye had an interesting post today “Understanding the problem” regarding an op-ed by former Reagan administration Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. As is usual, I find myself in agreement with Dave on the majority of his points, however, on one part of Dave’s post I must register a dissent:

“I have always found the idea that you can reform a bureaucracy farfetched. You can eliminate a bureacracy, navigate around it, or put another layer in; you can’t reform a bureaucracy.

I’d also like to point out what the “MI” in MI-5 stands for: military intelligence. I don’t believe that the CIA has the attitude, culture, or, frankly, the ability to execute its nominal mission. Consequently, I think that the CIA should be abolished and its functions placed completely under the Pentagon (as it used to be”

While Dave’s criticisms regarding the recent performance of the CIA and the difficulty of reforming a bureaucracy may be on target, the suggestion of dropping the CIA’s statutory functions into the lap of the Pentagon is a really, really, bad idea. That the CIA has failed to carry out a number of its major functions with effiiency does not mean that the military is well suited to execute them in Langely’s stead. In actuality, the reverse may be true; the historical record of military intelligence is a narrow and parochial one. And not just in the case of the United States either.

Intelligence activities have a number of facets, including:

Clandestine espionage

“Overt” espionage under diplomatic cover

Open source intelligence collection

Covert operations (sabotage, assassination, coups)

Strategic Influence

Analysis

Counterintelligence

The military, for demographic reasons as well as those of institutional culture or focus, is not the ideal candidate for all of these missions. A few of them might be bettter placed in the hands of State Department personnel than in those of, say, the Marines. Even in the case of covert operations of a paramilitary nature that the military is better equipped to handle than is the CIA, it is useful in certain situations for diplomatic and legal reasons for these actions to be carried out under the aegis of the CIA instead of the United States military. Aside from issues of the UCMJ, what might otherwise be an act of war under international law, if performed by a member of SOCOM or the DIA, becomes plausibly deniable if done by a deep cover member of the CIA’s Special Activities Staff. Or better yet, a contract employee.

Nor am I, for reasons of bureaucratic checks and balance, eager to place all of America’s foreign intelligence in the hands of a single member of the Cabinet. That is simply asking for trouble down the road. Bureaucratic competition is an inefficient way to allocate resources but it provides at least minimal incentives not to screw up too badly. And it functions as a comparative check on the productivity and reliability of an intelligence agency as well.

The CIA may well be resistant to reform but I’m not ready to junk the idea of a civilian intelligence agency just yet.