J. Wolfsberger,

But I will stick to the assertion that however good the other sources are, they can never completely replace HUMINT.
I would take that further and suggest that, in general, the same can be said of any of the intelligence disciplines. Of course, much is situational and in a given situation one "int" may be inherently better at providing the needed information than another.

John Fishel,

For the most part I agree with you about the rational actor model in theory, but in practice it all too often results in failure. Even when we do have "a solid understanding of the explicit goals of the target" and use rigorous analysis failure is still frequent, but more often the model is simplistically used and is little more than a cover for mirror-imaging.

As a case study, we can look no further than Saddam and Iraq. Dr. Gerrold Post's psychological profile of him back in 1990 proves reslilient today with the benefit of hindsight, yet we still critically misjudged what he saw as his greatest threats and his WMD decisionmaking - two factors that directly lead to war.

So even if the rational actor model is judiciously applied huge errors in analysis still occur. The reason for this, in my view, is that analysts are inevitably forced to put themselves in an adversaries shoes to predict what they would do in given circumstances. The record of such prediction is not a good one unfortunately.

More often, however, the model is not applied rigorously in day-to-day intelligence production because most analysts (particularly current analysts) simply don't have the level of expertise and intimate knowledge of the adversary to make even educated guesses. In these situations mirror-imaging is most often the rule rather than the exception and the model provides a false sense of security and false analytical rigor.

This reminds me of Occam's razor, which is a dangerous tool for the intelligence analyst because of deception.

Finally, I agree with you completely regarding HUMINT reporting. Fortunately, the system no longer uses inappropriately precise designations like "F6" - instead using a plain-language source description, but it's still difficult for the all-source analyst to determine the strength of the information in HUMINT reports. I hope those producing HUMINT reports understand how critical their insights and source descriptions are to the all-source analyst.