Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information

Abstract

The world of intelligence has been completely transformed by the end of the Cold War and the onset of an age of information. Prior to the 1990s, US government intelligence had one principal target, the Soviet Union; a narrow set of 'customers', the political and military officials of the US government; and a limited set of information from the sources they owned, spy satellites and spies. Today, world intelligence has many targets, numerous consumers - not all of whom are American or in the government - and too much information, most of which is not owned by the U.S. government and is of widely varying reliability. In this bold and penetrating study, Gregory Treverton, former Vice Chair of the National Intelligence Council and Senate investigator, offers his insider's views on how intelligence gathering and analysis must change. He suggests why intelligence needs to be both contrarian, leaning against the conventional wisdom, and attentive to the longer term, leaning against the growing shorter time horizons of Washington policy makers. He urges that the solving of intelligence puzzles tap expertise outside government - in the academy, think tanks, and Wall Street - to make these parties colleagues and co-consumers of intelligence, befitting the changed role of government from doer to convener, mediator, and coalition-builder.

Should We Rely on Intelligence Cycle?

“…The most important thing for this cycle is that it is timely and responses are faster than old ones. Also interrelation during the whole process continues (Treverton, 2001). Treverton's cycle is short and distinct.…”

Leveraging the Past to Prepare for the Future of Air Force Intelligence Analysis

“…(p. Although JP 2-0 does not define analysis, it does associate analysis with the analysis and production step of the joint intelligence process, which we depict in Figure 1 However, many intelligence analysts with whom we spoke noted that analysis can be conducted in any step of the joint intelligence process besides the analysis and production step. In addition, alternative intelligence processes are worthy of consideration, including targetcentric analysis (Clark, 2010) and Gregory F. Treverton's real intelligence cycle (Treverton, 2001). For these reasons, we did not limit our attention to analysis conducted within the analysis and production step of the joint intelligence process.…”

Tracking and disrupting dark networks: Challenges of data collection and analysis

“…At the completion of the analysis, analysts are required to generate reports or other products that summarize their judgments (Tenet 1999: Waltz 2003Treverton 2001Treverton , 2009Treverton and Gabbard 2008;Treverton et al 2006). In essence, the analyst's charge is "the application of human judgment to reach conclusion from a combination of evidence and assumptions" (Thomas and Cook 2005, p. 6).…”