Impacts on Intelligence
U.S. culture, world-views, and mindsets impact our intelligence analysis and policy strategy decision making In ways that sometimes we cannot even tell are happening. Cognitive biases are natures way of telling our brain to take shortcuts when it is time to make quick decisions. Unfortunately these shortcuts happen when dealing with people and areas that we do not necessarily understand. A good example is the ongoing wars in the Middle East and our apparent ways to “fix” the region. Initially we thought the war would be quick and won with sheer power and force. Although this may be true in regards to small battles, the same cannot be said when dealing with a country like Afghanistan. Rather than win over the locals, we ran in there guns blazing and pissed everyone off, therefor creating more enemies than we sought to extinguish. This, combined with our obsession in trying to get the people to establish Democratic governments has led to long, drawn out wars with seemingly no end, and leaving failed states in our wake.
IC structure
The structure and function of the U.S. Intelligence Community shapes the analysis it produces in a couple ways. Gathering intelligence is a long, drawn out cycle that is complicated and goes through many hands before ending up on the desk of a policy maker. In the past, major oversight was established within the IC to prevent the abuse of power by the Executive Branch. As this oversight was established, a theoretical “wall” begin to go up between not only different intelligence agencies, but also Departamento within the agencies themselves. This wall got so big that it eventually led to one of the greatest intelligence failures in U.S. history, the attacks on 9/11. Following these attacks, the IC was overhauled and interagency communication got much better with the introduction of the Patriot Act any many others that sought to bring this wall down. No system is perfect, but today it seems to work. As long as policy makers keep politicization out of the picture.
decisions based on religion
When looking at how our foreign counterpart’s cultural views affect their strategic decision making and intelligence analysis, it is also important to view what their end goal is. Different cultures, especially in the Middle East, have deep seeded religious views that have led to wars and land disputes which go back many years. Unlike the Uniited States, most governments have no desire to keep religion out of decision making and actually make many decisions based on such. These religious and cultural beliefs drive the way they collect information, who they collect it on, and how they make decisions based on such.
think like the enemy
It’s one thing to look at what a enemy is doing from the outside and make quick decisions based on their actions. However, to make the correct decisions sometime it takes a bit deeper thought into not only their actions, but what they are thinking. It’s easy to see a enemy make a move and immediately respond, but getting in their head will lead to much more successful actions and decisions. A good example of this was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy was so wrapped up in his own little world and trying to make himself seem like the big man in charge he seemed to have lost track of what actually caused the entire conflict in the first place. As Khrushchev sent missiles to Cuba, Kennedy responded without even considering why he was doing this in the first place. He actually had to be reminded by one of his advisors that this was probably a responses to the Jupiter Missiles. So rather than taking a moment to breath and really think why Khrushchev made the moves he did, Kennedy made rash decisions solely based on actions which almost led to a Third World War.