Is Intelligence A Success Or A Failure

Intelligence is one of the most valuable aspects of the United States’ to the national security. It provides a foundation for the national policy and decision makers within the United States government, and Intelligence Community (IC). The five basic collection components are (HUMINT, SIGINT, IMINT, GEOINT, and OSINT) which, allows for a variety of different forms of the collection in order to execute the overall mission. In order to understand how intelligence is important to the national security and policy makers, one must understand the intelligence process and the collection components.

Intelligence is all the information gathered by a country regarding political issues, both internal and external. Intelligence is collected through spies, special agents, internet data collection, pictures and many other sources.

Throughout the seventy-three year history of the Central Intelligence Agency, there have been mistakes and successes. Both the achievements and failures of the CIA have greatly influenced the history of the United States. Although intelligence activities have occurred since the birth of the United States of America, it was not until WWII that intelligence activities first became part of a centralized organization. “The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor highlighted the need to separate “signals” from “noise”.” Even though the United States had managed to break the Japanese top-secret code, the United States underestimated Japan’s capacity to follow through with such a bold attack. The failure of Pearl Harbor in 1941 emphasized the need for a

Intelligence failure is not a phenomenon which is new. Over the last hundred years there have been repeated cases of Intelligence failure. When the Intelligence community failed, it often led to significant repercussions for the political side. Sometimes the failure led to massive loss of life like in the example of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the attacks on the twin towers on September 11, 2001. Most of these cases have been well analyzed and have led the policy makers to adopt reforms to prevent future attacks. The Intelligence failure of Pearl Harbor even led to the creation of the Intelligence community in the United States as we know it today. However, despite policy makers’ best efforts to make reforms to increase the effectiveness of the Intelligence community, failures continued to occur. With each reform it seemed like a new hole was discovered which led to a new failure and then had to be patched up. The attacks on September 11 are one of these examples. Because the Intelligence community was still geared towards threats of states like in the Cold War, it had not yet recognized the problem Islamic terrorism would play in the future (Travers 1997).

The United States intelligence community (IC) has changed tremendously over the years primarily due to the various intelligence failures throughout history. Since the IC was officially created following the National Security Act of 1947, which was enacted as a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, it is fitting to explore the massive intelligence failure that led up to the attack that was carried out on December 7, 1941. First, we will explore the many events that led up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor by providing a brief background and deep look at why intelligence failed during this point in history. Then we will dive into what intelligence practitioners could have been done differently from a critical thinking stand point to mitigate the Japanese attack. Followed by an

The intelligence community of the United States is a large, robust and bureaucratic system. From this community though, the national objectives of the United States are supported through their gathering and analytical capabilities. The following paper will highlight the intelligence agencies of the Federal government as well as state and local agencies that make up the intelligence community. Within these entities are programs that develop intelligence for use in protecting the homeland as well as analyzing intelligence from across the broad intelligence community spectrum. Along with this information, an overview of the 9/11 Commissions report on intelligence sharing recommendations will be looked at. Finally the domestic and foreign intelligence issue will be defined and addressed. From these discussions the overall capabilities and limitations of intelligence and the intelligence community will be seen through the aspect of supporting the efforts of securing the homeland.

This paper will focus on the Intelligence Communities lessons learned prior to September 11, 2001 and what changes have occurred through to present day; regarding specifically information sharing. The review of literature in this paper focused to two questions: (1) Has the Intelligence Community improved its information sharing since 9/11? (2) What changes have taken place and what has been the impact of those changes?

Intelligence is a dependable instrument of its own to generate information that establishes the base of National Security in the United States. Intelligence has been used since the beginning of history to provide information on enemy threats and how to prevent a mass disasters. It has been used for wars, national security, military tactics, etc. Intelligence has been available since the revolutionary war and our first president George Washington and other leaders of the world have used intelligence to protect their countries. Intelligence is the dominant and the backbone of homeland Security and it is ceaseless learning about it. National Intelligence agents train tirelessly to fight and create

In the post-Cold War eras, the US intelligence community saw many crises and transient threats as the U.S policy makers raised questions about the need and the role of the U.S. intelligence community. This thing made the effort of defining the priority of the U.S. intelligence more difficult and further complicated. Intelligence became an area “where the government could reap savings.” (Ibid, Para 2) The government resource savings in the US intelligence community resulted in cutbacks from the intelligence collections such as HUMINT and technical, including cutbacks in analytic resources. (Ibid) They all had significant U.S. policy issues in the U.S. intelligence community at that time. One example, talking about the Iraqi intelligence failures, carefully drafted national intelligence failed in its singular mission “to accurately inform policy deliberations.” (Ibid, Final Thoughts, Para 1) In this term, we can consider how the case of Curveball’s fabricated story of Iraq having weapons of mass destructions tricked the U.S. intelligence community and American foreign policy in Iraq operations. The U.S. intelligence community and policy makers spent long hours and carried out intense debates on the Iraqi intelligence cases/issues, yet they both could not ignore and mitigate the U.S. intelligence failures in Iraqi operations. (Dorgin & Goetz,

?The Evolution of the U.S. Intelligence Community-An Historical Overview.? U.S. Government Printing Office. 1 Mar. 1996. ?Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence; Appendix A.? http://www.access.gpo.gov/intelligence/int/int022.html, accessed 6 Mar.

The United States Intelligence community draws on advanced technology and analytical techniques. An intelligence process that sets objectives, collects, analyzes, and report findings, with feedback loops integrated throughout. Explicitly, the intelligence community advantages technology and tradecraft within a proscribed process. However, estimation of threats and decision-making are outcomes of human thinking. Analysts and policymakers create mental models, or short cuts to manage complex, changing environments. In other words, to make sense of ambiguous or uncertain situations, humans form cognitive biases. Informed because of personal experience, education, and specifically applied to intelligence analysis, Davis

This paper will analyze the different elements that compromise the intelligence communities (IC) from local law enforcement to national agencies and how each of those entities contributes to security intelligence. Secondly, this paper will evaluate the lessons learned from the attacks of 9/11. Lastly, the issues of domestic intelligence vs. foreign intelligence will be examined.

Individuals can vary in multiple ways in regards to their personalities, mental abilities, emotional reactions, skill sets, etc. (Bauer & Erdogan, 2012). These differences in people are referred to as individual differences (IDs) and have been a significant area of study in Industrial/Organizational (IO) psychological research due to their presumed effect on work related outcomes (Bauer & Erdogan, 2012). However, focus on IDs greatly declined due to the lack of research supporting the predictive power of IDs in regards to work related variables, such as job performance, as well as, adverse impact caused by the inappropriate use of ability testing (Daus, 2016; Bauer & Erdogan, 2012). Despite these reasons for the decline in studying IDs, many arguments exist to support the importance and practicality of once again studying IDs. Rationales for studying IDs are discussed.

Intelligence is something meant to be share within the proper channels. If you are in the know, with a need to know, then you should be able to view it. Even after the towers fell, we were scrambling through seas of information and trying to figure out what we knew. Everyone was used to doing their own thing and working within their agency. There were no clear lines of communication between the different agencies and this led to gaps in our intelligence. Everyone had their own way of doing things; they had their own networks to work with, and had their own sources of information for intelligence gathering. It almost seemed like a competition of

The gathering of intelligences goes back to the Egyptians, Romans, and other early civilizations that used spies and secret practices. Therefore, intelligence refers both the practice of collecting information and the special information itself. For example, when George Washington was fighting the British during the American Revolution, he tried very hard to find out all about the enemy’s military forces-how strong they were and when and where they planned to attack. Because he was at war, Washington tried to collect his “intelligence” secretly so that the British would not know how much he had learned about them.