Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [46]
Collection advocates argue, usually successfully, that collection is the bedrock of intelligence, that without it the entire enterprise has little meaning. Collection also has support from the companies (prime contractors and their numerous subcontractors) who build the technical collection systems and who lobby for follow-on systems. Processing and exploitation are in-house intelligence community activities. Although these downstream activities (the steps that follow collection) are also dependent on technology, the technology is not in the same league, in terms of contractor profit, as collection systems.
The large and still growing disparity between collection and processing and exploitation results in a great amount of collected material never being used. It simply dies on the cutting-room floor. Advocates of processing and exploitation therefore argue that the image or signal that is not processed and not exploited is identical to the one that is not collected—it has no effect at all.
No proper ratio exists between collection and processing and exploitation. In part, the ratio depends on the issue, available resources, and policy makers’ demands. But many who are familiar with the U.S. intelligence community believe that the relationship between these two phases has been and remains badly out of balance. The congressional committees that oversee intelligence have increasingly expressed concern about this imbalance, urging the intelligence community to put more money into processing and exploitation. This is often referred to as the TPEDs (pronounced tee-peds) problem. TPEDs refers to tasking, processing, exploitation, and dissemination. Tasking is the assigning of collectors to specific tasks. Of the four parts of TPEDs, tasking and dissemination are the least problematic for the intelligence community or for Congress. The processing and exploitation gap is of highest concern to Congress.
ANALYSIS AND PRODUCTION
Major, often daily, tension is evident between current intelligence and long-term intelligence. Current intelligence focuses on issues that are at the forefront of the policy makers’ agenda and are receiving their immediate attention. Long-term intelligence deals with trends and issues that may not be an immediate concern but are important and may come to the forefront, especially if they do not receive some current attention. The skills for preparing the two types of intelligence are not identical, and neither are the intelligence products that can or should be used to disseminate them to policy makers. But a subtle relationship exists between current and long-term intelligence. Like collection versus process and exploitation, a proper balance—not necessarily 50-50—should be the goal.
The U.S. system of competitive analysis—that is, having the same issue addressed by several different analytical groups—entails some analytical costs. Although the goal is to bring disparate points of view to bear on an issue, intelligence community products written within this system run the risk of succumbing to groupthink, with lowest common denominator language resulting from intellectual compromises. Alternatively, agencies can indulge in endless and—at least to the policy consumers—meaningless footnote wars, the only goal of which is to maintain a separate point of view regardless of the salience of the issue at stake. In the aftermath of critiques about intelligence performance on 9/11 and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the intelligence community has begun to put greater emphasis on collaboration, which usually means greater sharing among analysts both of their sources and their analyses. This new emphasis raises additional concerns as well, the most obvious of which is the potential for greater groupthink. (See chap. 6 for a fuller discussion.)
Analysts should have a key role in helping determine collection priorities. Although the United States