This is an essay that I originally wrote for the AFCEA Intelligence Essay competition but didn't get it finished in time to meet the 10/31/07 deadline. I'm posting it here for feedback and review. It's still a work in progress.

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Chaotic Dynamics: A Novel Approach to Intelligence Analysis in Asymmetric Warfare

By Jeffrey Carr

"Consider yourself lightly. Consider the world deeply." - Miyamoto Musashi

In 1999, Psychology researchers at Harvard University organized what has now become a very famous study . The participants were asked to watch a video of a basketball game, and count the number of times that a “white shirt” team member passed the basketball. At the end of the video, participants were asked to record their count…, and whether or not they saw the person in the black gorilla suit in the middle of the action. About 50% completely missed the “guerilla”. Researchers call this phenomenon “inattentional blindness”, i.e., the failure to see something that’s in plain sight.

May 11, 1998 (New Delhi):“Today, at 1545 hours, India conducted three underground nuclear tests in the Pokhran range.”

This announcement by the Prime Minister of India sent reverberations throughout the entire U.S. Intelligence Community, but particularly at CIA where analysts who had received satellite evidence 6 hours in advance of the test did nothing with it because no one believed that such an event was likely to occur. In the words of one official, “They would have been more vigilant if the policy community believed this was likely.”

Within 24 hours, DCI George Tenet named retired Admiral David Jeremiah to head an investigation into the IC’s embarrassing failure. According to Tenet’s letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:
“the site has been under periodic surveillance by photoreconnaissance and electronic eavesdropping satellites, which recorded increasing activity. But the images and activities they recorded in recent days were not interpreted clearly or quickly by the CIA.”

The evidence was there, but it wasn’t seen by the people who are responsible for applying objective clarity in the analysis of evidence. This is classic mirror-imaging, and Adm. Jeremiah addressed it in his recommendations :

Analytic Assumptions and Tradecraft
  1. Add rigor to analysts’ thinking when major events unfold. Two mechanisms would help:

a. Bring in outside substantive experts in a more systematic fashion.
b. Bring in experts (who)… would serve, together with substantive specialists, as “Red Teams” on major analytic problems and work with analysts to study assumptions, mirror-imaging, and complex analytic processes.

In 2001, Dr. Rob Johnston accepted a fellowship with the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. His mandate was to “identify and describe conditions and variables that negatively affect intelligence analysis … using an applied anthropological methodology that would include interviews, direct and participant observation, and focus groups.” Dr. Johnston’s research was published in 2005 under the title “Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic Study”. In Chapter Six, he writes about the problem of ethnocentric bias (a more precise term than “mirror-imaging”):

"Ethnocentrism is a phenomenon that operates on a conscious level, but it is difficult to recognize in oneself and equally difficult to counteract. In part, this is because, in cases of ethnocentric thinking, an individual does not recognize that important information is missing or, more important, that his worldview and problem-solving heuristics interfere with the process of recognizing information that conflicts or refutes his assumptions."

In other words, the mandate to “try to think like them” is doomed to fail because analysts who make the effort still have to address the biological facts about how they perceive information to begin with.

The Biology of Perception
The question about how information travels from “out there” to “in here” has been a subject of inquiry by philosophers and scientists for several thousand years. The Platonic view is that light carries shadows of the external world into the brain, and the brain then matches those shadows with its own ideal forms. For Plato, perception was passive.

Not surprisingly, Aristotle disagreed. The brain, argued Aristotle, received information through the body’s interaction with its environment. As the body moved, touched, tasted, and listened to its surroundings, it sent information back to the brain where it was shaped by expectation and experience. One of the obvious problems with this model is that, practically speaking, we see what we expect to see; the cold slap of reality notwithstanding.

A leading researcher in this area is Dr. Walter J. Freeman, Professor Emeritus of Neurobiology, UC Berkeley. Freeman’s research demonstrates how our brains interact with the world through a cycle of Intention-Action-Perception-Assimilation, with Socialization as the platform. Imagine an early version of the Etch-O-Sketch. By turning a couple of knobs, you could draw shapes and figures. When you wanted to erase your work, you just flipped it upside down, shook it a couple of times, and your old work disappeared, leaving a blank slate in its place.

In Dr. Freeman’s model, chaos attractors replace the aluminum dust inside the Etch-O-Sketch. The two knobs that a user draws with become Action and Perception. The urge to flip the Etch-O-Sketch over, shake it up, and begin anew occurs in the brain when a person wants to be accepted into a family or group environment (gangs, the military, fraternities, terrorist organizations); a desire that is prompted by the pressures of socialization. Dr. Freeman explains the science behind the theory:

“Multiple chaos attractors, each representing one component of the overall landscape that is our environment; and each a receptor of an external stimulus, assemble themselves into a replica of what our action/perception chain tells us is out there. We learn through action and perception, but knowledge is gained through socialization. If the artificial construct that a person’s brain has organized does not equate with a different person’s construct, how can different people share experiences? The answer lies in socialization as a feedback mechanism…. (T)he brain induces chaos that dissolves its intentional structure and enables the emergence of new habits, beliefs and values through cooperative actions with others.

“These techniques do not change individuals through forgetting or loss of memory. They restructure the intentionality of individuals. They induce deep, often dramatic, rarely catastrophic, changes in values and points of view that typically are life-long. They provide additional evidence, if any is needed, that brains are dynamical systems and not logical devices.“

Applying Chaotic Dynamics Theory to Intelligence Analysis
Yorim Wind, Colin Crook, and Robert Gunther of The Wharton School have written a business book based on Dr. Freeman’s work in chaotic dynamics and the brain entitled “The Power of Impossible Thinking (Wharton School Publishing, 2004). In it they discuss how ground-breaking ideas have launched innovations long thought to be impossible such as the 4 minute mile and IBM’s adoption of Open Source, among many others. The seemingly impossible problems plaguing the Intelligence Community, such as Mirror-imaging, may be solved with the same application of insight and awareness.

The first step is realizing that what we think we know about any situation is several steps removed from that situation’s authentic components, based on how the brain processes information coming from outside of itself. The solution is to consciously break down and rebuild the brain’s internal model of the environment in question (i.e., the cultural and societal influences of religious terrorists in the Middle East or Central Asia). Based on Dr. Freeman’s research, we know that the brain can be influenced to break down its “intentional structure” through the pressures of socialization; i.e., the desire to belong, to be accepted, by a particular social group. In the Long War that the U.S. is presently engaged in, religious fanaticism is the primary building block upon which all of the enemy’s actions derive from. Analysts who seek to discern the intentions of that enemy should strive to adopt a parallel mindset.

For example, a Red Team of intelligence analysts are deployed to a facility where they are immersed in an environment as realistically constructed as possible to simulate the daily experience of a member of Al-Qae’da in Iraq, or the Taliban in Afghanistan. This may include religious education in the Koran, daily prayers to Allah, all written and spoken communication done only in Arabic, and other like-minded activities. Any scenario that displaces the previous mindset of the analyst and replaces it with one more closely aligned with the terrorist would accomplish the goal.

Once the internal structures of the brain have been dissolved and rebuilt, these analysts will be able to discern and predict enemy movements and plans from a much deeper and richer foundation of knowledge than ever before. While the axiom that “we don’t know what we don’t know” will still apply, these analysts will be much better prepared to spot the guerilla in the center of the basketball court.