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By Root 742 0

the day-to-day competition that takes place among the intelligence publications of each agency, the intelligence community fosters competition in other ways. Intelligence agencies occasionally form red teams, which take on the role of the analysts of another nation or group as a means of gaining insights into their thinking. A now-famous competitive exercise was the 1976 formation of Teams A and B to review intelligence on Soviet strategic forces and doctrine. Team A consisted of intelligence community analysts, and Team B consisted of outside experts, but with a decidedly hawkish viewpoint. The teams disagreed little on the strategic systems the Soviets had built; the key issue was Soviet nuclear doctrine and strategic intentions. Predictably, Team B believed that the intelligence supported a more threatening view of Soviet intentions. However, the lack of balance on Team B largely vitiated the exercise, which could have been useful not only for gaining insight into Soviet intentions but also for validating the utility of competitive intelligence exercises.

Dissent channels—bureaucratic mechanisms by which analysts can challenge the views of their superiors without risk to their careers—are helpful but not widely used. Such channels have long existed for Foreign Service officers in the State Department. Although less effective than competitive analysis for articulating alternative viewpoints, they offer a means by which alternative views can survive a bureaucratic process that tends to emphasize mutual consent.

A broader issue is the extent to which competitive intelligence can or should be institutionalized. To some degree, in the U.S. system it already is. But the competition among the three all-source agencies is not often pointed. They frequently work on the same issue, but with different perspectives that are well understood, thus muting some of the differences that may be seen.

Competitive analysis requires that enough analysts with similar areas of expertise are working in more than one agency. This was certainly true during the zenith of competitive analysis, in the 1980s. But the capability began to dwindle as the intelligence community faced severe budget cuts and personnel losses in the 1990s, after the end of the cold war. As analytic staffs got smaller, agencies began to concentrate more on those issues of greatest importance to their policy customers. Thus, the ability to conduct competitive analysis declined. To rebuild the capability requires two things: more analysts and the time for them to become expert in one or more areas.

Although the intelligence community believes in competitive analysis, not all policy makers are receptive to the idea. Some see no reason that agencies cannot agree on issues, perhaps assuming that each issue has a single answer that should be knowable. One main reason that President Truman created the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) and its successor, the CIA, was his annoyance over receiving intelligence reports that did not agree. He wanted an agency to coordinate the reports so that he could work his way through the contradictory views. Truman was smart enough to realize that agencies might not agree, but he was not comfortable receiving disparate reports without some coordination that attempted to make sense of the areas of agreement and disagreement. Other policy makers lack Truman’s subtlety and cannot abide having agencies disagree, thus vitiating the concept of competitive analysis.

Finally, those who are not familiar with the idea of competitive analysis, and even some who are, may regard the planned redundancy as more wasteful than intellectually productive.

POLITICIZED INTELLIGENCE. The issue of politicized intelligence arises from the line separating policy and intelligence. This line is best thought of as a semipermeable membrane; policy makers are free to offer assessments that run counter to intelligence analyses, but intelligence officers are not allowed to make policy recommendations based on their intelligence. For example, in the State Department in