more things in Heaven and Earth
Reading Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis by Richards J. Heuer Jr. and Randolph H. Pherson. Way over my brain grade, but exhaustive and fascinating.
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Anyone involved in any serious forecasting of politics or other social disciplines must have, read, and use this book. Rather than an etherial, academic reflection on why analysis is relevant, or 'what is the role of intelligence analysis', or a mathmatical treatise on Games and Decisions, this is a working reference and practical guide to structured analytical techniques. Although the title specifies "for intelligence analysis", the methodology is applicable to problem sets that are only partially or non-quantifiable, and especially applicable to issues that are ambiguous and where only incomplete information is available.
In many ways, this is the sequel to Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, also by Richard Heuer. Where "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis" focused on analytical biases, with a limited discussion of rigorous approaches to intelligence analysis, "Structured Analytic Techniques" approaches similar issues from a more pragmatic direction. As valuable as the discussion of cognative biases is, the comprehensive set of analystical tools in "Structured Analytic Techniques" does more (when applied) to mitigate many of the biases than mere knowledge of their existance, and the analytical techniques will counteract many biases, even when those biases have not been identified.
Of particular interest is the emphasis on analytical teams and group analysis, both the strengths and weaknesses, and methods for maximizing the strengths and mitigating the weaknesses. (from Amazon reviewer, E.M. Van Court)
Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis - Amazon
More CIA Pubs & an earlier Heuer
The CIA Library - Books and Monographs - includes the 1999 Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, by Richards J. Heuer, Jr. (cited in post above); and the 2005 Curing Analytic Pathologies, by Jeffrey R. Cooper.
Regards
Mike
Counterinsurgency and PsyWar
For "leisure":Kilcullens accidental guerilla, who will be my holiday companion
for research: different texts from and about James Burnham and Psyops during the early years of cold war.
Regards
PB
Getting my "culture" fix pt. 2
B. M. Linn, The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War
An interesting and perhaps controversial book on many counts Linn examines the role of military intellectuals during a number of key inter-war periods (the war of 1812, the Spanish-American war, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, post-Desert Storm) in drafting the US Army’s “way of war”; “the wars the United States has actually fought are important less for what happened than for what military intellectuals believed they had learned from them after the shooting stopped” (p. 9). These intellectuals are divided into three groups;
1) Managers for whom...
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[...]war is fundamentally an organizational (as opposed to an engineering) problem—the rational coordination of resources, both human and materiel. [...] Should overwhelming resources, superior administration, and detailed planning fail to secure victory, the Managers’ response is to reorganize. Too often, this takes the form of what military personnel cynically term “moving the ravioli around”: drawing elaborate diagrams to rearrange (and “re-acronymize”) the chain of command, the force structure, and the budgetary priorities, while leaving the military institution and its fundamental problems virtually untouched. In the name of reform and modernization, Managers are perpetually engaged in the radical reorganization of administrative structures and tactical units, creating new concepts and buzzwords, and promoting their new, transformed military organization as superior to the one it replaced. Ironically, their reformist zeal is fed by historical lessons, so that an organizational scheme for the army of the future might claim as its inspiration a Roman victory two millennia ago. (p.8-9)
2. Guardians for whom...
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[...]war is best understood as an engineering project in which the outcome is determined by the correct application of immutable scientific principles. Strategic planning for future warfare is largely a matter of determining the correct national security policy and then totalling up weaponry and manpower and comparing it with that of potential enemies. Taken to extremes, this leads to the belief that the next war is predictable and its outcome predetermined. When conflicts do not turn out as planned, Guardians blame an irrational American society, through its political representatives, for refusing to accept the Guardians’ logical and informed defence policies or for failing to allocate sufficient human resources and materiel. They reproach the army as an institution for not acknowledging their primacy in strategic direction and for pursuing risky military goals. When confronted with a war that fails to meet their pre-existing convictions, their reinterpretation soon discovers that it actually confirmstheir beliefs. (p. 7-8)
&, 3 Heroes for whom...
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war is simply battle—an extension of combat between individuals on both the physical and the moral plane. The side whose commanders and soldiers exhibit superior courage, strength, discipline, martial skills, honour, and so forth will inevitably secure victory, unless betrayed by other factors. In the face of evidence that charismatic leadership, tactical skill, high morale, and martial experience does not guarantee victory, Heroes blame their enemy for failing to fight honourably and their own civil and military leaders for wanting sufficient will to win. They often accuse American society of lacking the physical and spiritual qualities needed for warfighting. They have a similarly bad opinion of the institutional army. In their view, it is a soulless corporation in which warriors are subordinated to technicians and careerists. In their criticisms of the army, Heroes tend to make no distinction between Guardians and Managers—they throw them all into the same bureaucratic pot. (p. 8)
In the post-WWII strategic environment...
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As with past visions of future warfare, military thinkers once again failed to anticipate either the location of the conflict that broke out in June 1950 in Korea or its nature. Army strategists had been convinced, as were their political superiors, that the primary danger was a Warsaw Pact attack on Western Europe. They had paid little attention to the Far East and even less to peripheral areas. Of the three martial traditions, the Heroes came closest to foreseeing the next war’s reliance on morale, leadership, and military skill. But even their vision of tank battles and paratroop assaults proved only marginally relevant. The Korean War soon became a struggle of attrition; the use of firepower in small battles for hills and ridges was more akin to World War I than to the rapid, decisive operations predicted by military theorists (p. 161).
Post Vietnam war...
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Like the Guardians and the Heroes, the Managers had to recast their assumptions. Their analysis taught them that “we did not manage the war in Vietnam efficiently or effectively. In the main, our organizational problems stemmed from the omission of basic management theories and techniques.” Between the all-volunteer force and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, their earlier industrial concept of war, predicated on mobilizing the nation’s materiel and manpower resources, was no longer relevant. But other aspects of the Manager way of war still applied to the new priorities. With an officer-to-enlisted ratio twice that of World War II—almost one officer for every five soldiers by the mid-1990s—the post-Vietnam army was increasingly committed to bureaucracy, to planning and process, and to measuring and quantifying. As one officer noted, “The leader’s close personal contact with his troops essentially ends at [battalion] command, and the executive managerial ability takes on added importance. The skilfulness with which managerial traits are exhibited will either limit or increase the officer’s potential for future assignments of responsibility within the military organization.” The Managers interpreted war as an immense organizational problem: how to coordinate “assets” (weapons, people) and “force multipliers” (intelligence, training) to achieve “total battlefield dominance.” Significantly, in the mid-1970s a new “Profession of Arms” course emerged at the Command and General Staff College (CGSC). Second only to tactics in course hours, it focused on force structure, training, personnel, communication and writing, and other managerial skills only tangentially related to the practice of war.(p. 200)
Linn’s discussion of the doctrinal imbroglio surrounding Depuy (a “Manager”) and FM 100, and its successors, is also revealing (pp.201-210) as is his examination of the NTC, Command and General Staff College and the SAMS programme. Fascinating stuff!
Getting my “culture” fix pt. 3
J. L. Johnson, K. M. Kartchner & J. A. Larsen, Strategic Culture and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Culturally Based Insights into Comparative National Security Policymaking
The authors have compiled a number of interesting and thought-provoking chapters on both the utility and validity of the concept of strategic culture and its application in analysing the policy of states such as Israel, Syria, Iran, and of non-state transnational organisations like Al-Qaeda.
On the US (Ch. 5 by T. G. Mahnken)...
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The combination of the rejection of power politics and discontinuity between policy and strategy has yielded a dichotomy in American strategic culture: although Americans are basically peace loving, when aroused they mobilize the nation’s human and material resources behind in the service of high-intensity operations. Samuel Huntington saw America’s ferocity in war as the flip side of liberal pacifism outside of war. As he put it:
“The American tends to be an extremist on the subject of war: he either embraces war wholeheartedly or rejects it completely. This extremism is required by the nature of the liberal ideology. Since liberalism deprecates the moral validity of the interests of the state in security, war must be either condemned as incompatible with liberal goals or justified as an ideological movement in support of those goals. American thought has not viewed war in the [European] conservative–military sense as an instrument of national policy”.
The United States has thus displayed a strong and long-standing predilection for waging war for unlimited political aims. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant fought to utterly defeat the Confederacy. During World War I, General John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, favoured a policy of unconditional surrender toward Imperial Germany even as President Woodrow Wilson sought a negotiated end to the conflict. During World War II Franklin D. Roosevelt and his commanders were of one mind that the war must lead to the overthrow of the German, Japanese, and Italian governments that had started the war. [...] Just as Americans have preferred a fight to the finish, so too have they been uncomfortable with wars for limited political aims. In both the Korean and Vietnam wars, American military leaders were cool to the idea of fighting merely to restore or maintain the status quo. Indeed, Douglas MacArthur likened anything short of total victory over communist forces on the Korean peninsula to “appeasement.” Similarly, the standard explanation of American failure in Vietnam—and the one most popular among U.S. military officers—is that the U.S. military would have won the war were it not for civilian interference.(p.72)
On North Korea (Ch. 12 by Joseph S. Bermudez)...
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At the time of the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Kim and his fellow guerrillas had been fighting the Japanese for five–ten years. As the reality and the rumours of the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki spread throughout the world, the nuclear bomb was viewed as the ultimate “doomsday” weapon. This attitude was reinforced by the experiences of those Koreans returning from Japan who had been in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the bombing. This fear became even more pronounced among Communist guerrilla leaders such as Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung. By the end of World War II, both Kim Il-sung and a number of soon to be influential Koreans had an uneducated appreciation of, and indirect exposure to, the effects of nuclear, chemical and biological warfare. This awareness shaped their developing views of the world, warfare, and politics. Combined with these early appreciations of WMD, four additional factors during the subsequent Fatherland Liberation War (i.e., Korean War) would help coalesce both Kim Il-Sung’s worldview and form the foundations of the strategic culture then developing within the nation.
1. The U.S. intervention in the Fatherland Liberation War was interpreted by Kim and his contemporaries as the prime reason the war of reunification failed. From this point forward the United States would be viewed as the primary enemy and as a bully “kicking the door in” and interfering in the purely internal affairs of nations of which it did not approve.
2. During the war both the DPRK and People’s Republic of China (PRC) suffered from repeated, and to them, unexplained outbreaks of infectious diseases such as influenza, Dengue fever, and cholera. These outbreaks caused large numbers of civilian and military casualties. While the leadership knew that it was untrue, they fabricated the story that the United States was employing biological, and to a lesser degree chemical, weapons against their units in Korea and against villages within the PRC itself. Furthermore, they claimed that former Japanese soldiers [who had use Biological and chemical warfare against the Chinese during WWII] were cooperating with the United States in perpetrating these attacks. For the uninformed masses of the DPRK it became a bedrock of “truth” and these claims are still repeated.
3. The United States on numerous occasions (the earliest being President Harry S. Truman’s public statements on 30 November, 1950) threatened to employ nuclear weapons against Korean People’s Army (KPA) and “Chinese People’s Volunteers” (CPV) units in Korea, and if necessary against the PRC proper, to end the war.
These threats struck a raw nerve since the leadership of both nations remembered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and neither the PRC nor DPRK could withstand a nuclear attack or had the capability to respond in kind. In combination with other factors the desired effect was achieved and a truce agreement was reached, thus ending the hostilities.
4. While appreciative of all the support received from the Soviet Union and PRC, Kim expressed disappointment with the Soviet Union’s pressure to sign the Armistice Agreement. This would provide a context for Kim to view future Soviet actions (e.g., the Soviets backing down during the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc.) and fostered the belief that the DPRK must become self-sufficient. (p.191-2)
Getting my “culture” fix pt. 4
T. E. Ricks, The Gamble: General Petraeus & the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008
An exemplar of what war reporting should be. I could quote from it but I think I’d end up putting the whole thing on here. Despite the title the book examines the roles of a large number of principals and some who have remained sidelined who shouldn’t have. The detail and insight is better than most books I’ve read and the author doesn’t; do a bad job at being objective either. Just read it if you haven’t already. I you have, read it again!