Panel Charters

Panel III: The Intelligence Challenge--Understanding and Preventing Strategic Surprises

Co-sponsor: Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh

The policy road between Washington and an embassy officer in Laos, a military field commander in Germany, an information officer in Panama, a technical assistance worker in India, or a scientist in a top-secret weapons laboratory is tortuous and long. Elaborate and complicated mechanisms and processes are inevitably needed to translate the national will into coherent and effective plans and programs.

—Interim Report of the Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, January 12, l960

The publication of the 9/11 Commission Report in late 2004, followed by several other official and private analyses of U.S. intelligence capabilities, underscored the strong national consensus in favor of overhauling the intelligence community for its failure to anticipate terrorist attacks on American soil. There has been little discussion, however, about the need for reforms within the policy community to better prepare for rapidly changing international challenges.

Events commonly described as “strategic surprises” or “intelligence failures”—from the advent of the Soviet atomic bomb to the ascendance of the Islamic anti-Western radicals who masterminded the 9/11 attacks—seem often to be neither especially surprising nor failures of intelligence gathering. As is the case with the events preceding 9/11, such episodes can reveal systemic failures of decision makers to consider available information that could inform more effective policy choices. 

This panel will analyze the relative influence of intelligence and policy considerations in crafting key areas of national security decision making. The panel will offer a variety of perspectives presented by seasoned practitioners and scholars in the field who have grappled with these issues from within both the intelligence and policy worlds.

The panel will discuss the following questions:

  1. What are some examples of decisions commonly thought to be “intelligence failures” that, upon reflection, are as much or more the result of failures among policymakers to take new information into account?
  2. Are there systemic challenges facing the U.S. government in adapting to a rapidly changing world and competing sources of information and intelligence?
  3. Can we identify ways to promote a healthy “marketplace of ideas” in official discourse to ensure that policymakers can take advantage of the best possible information from all sources, and are fully informed of alternative implications? What structural changes, procedural reforms, or new bureaucratic incentives might improve the quality of expertise flowing into the decision-making process?