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By Root 675 0

and data mining, and has examined many others, but no major breakthroughs have been made. Thus, to a large degree, the analysts’ daily task of sifting through the incoming intelligence germane to their portfolio remains a grind, whether done electronically or on paper. Sifting is not just a matter of getting through the accumulated imagery, signals, open-source reporting, and other data. It is also the much more important matter of seeing this mass of material in its entirety, of being able to perceive patterns from day to day and reports that are anomalous. There are no shortcuts. Sifting requires training and experience. Although some intelligence practitioners think of analysts as the human in the loop, the analysts’ expertise should be an integral part of collection sorting as well.

ANALYST FUNGIBILITY. When requirements change or when crises break out, analysts must be shifted to areas of greater need. As with collection, they are participating in a zero-sum game. The analysts have to come from some other assignment, and not every analyst can work on every issue. Each analyst has strengths, weaknesses, and areas that he or she simply does not know. Even though analysts far outnumber collection systems, analysts are less fungible—that is, easily interchanged or replaced—than the technical collection systems. A signals intelligence satellite that has been collecting against a French-speaking target will not plead ignorance or inability if redirected against an Arabic-speaking target. Significant issues of targeting, access, frequencies, and so on come up, but no language barrier exists per se. Streams of digital communications data do not have indecipherable accents. However, not every analyst has the requisite language, regional, or topical skills to move to an area of greater need. Very real limits exist on analyst fungibility, which is a major management concern. This is also sometimes referred to as analyst agility, again meaning the need for analysts who have more than one (or two) areas of expertise and therefore can be shifted to higher priority accounts during times of need. Fungibility or agility relies on three factors: the talents and background of the analysts when they are recruited; their training and education within the intelligence community; and the management of their careers, which should give them sufficient opportunities to develop this expertise in a few areas.

U.S. intelligence managers often speak about global coverage, which can be a dangerous and misleading term. By global coverage, intelligence officers mean their acknowledged requirement to cover any and all issues. Members of the intelligence community cannot say to a policy maker, for example, that they do not have much capability to analyze the current crisis in Fiji but they are very good on Finland. No bait and switch is allowed. If the situation in a country or region becomes a matter of concern, the intelligence community is expected to cover it. The pitfall in the term global coverage is the real possibility that it leaves the impression among policy makers of more depth and breadth than is available in the intelligence community. Intelligence managers understand the resource limitations within which they are working, but by using the term global coverage they may be misinterpreted as promising more than they can deliver.

Part of the problem stems from the limitations of the analyst hiring process. In the United States, recruiters go to colleges and universities looking for potential analysts. Other candidates simply apply on their own. But this is a seller’s market. The intelligence agencies can hire only those people who evince an interest. Certain schools may have programs that tend to produce more analysts of a certain interest or skill, but this does not appreciably solve the problem. Congress has given the intelligence community a limited ability to offer scholarships for analysts with particular skills, in return for which the analysts must work for the intelligence community for a set number of years. Although a valuable