| View Larger Image | Analyzing Intelligence: Origins, Obstacles, and Innovations | Paperbackby Roger Z. George (Editor), James B. Bruce (Editor)
| List Price: | $29.95 | | Price: | $26.95 | | You Save: | $3.00 (10%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Georgetown University Press | | Edition: | illustrated editionth Edition | | Page Count: | 340 Pages | | Publication Date: | April 15, 2008 | | Sales Rank: | 63,562rd |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Drawing on the individual and collective experience of recognized intelligence experts and scholars in the field, "Analyzing Intelligence" provides the first comprehensive assessment of the state of intelligence analysis since 9/11. Its in-depth and balanced evaluation of more than fifty years of U.S. analysis includes a critique of why it has under-performed at times. It provides insights regarding the enduring obstacles as well as new challenges of analysis in the post-9/11 world, and suggests innovative ideas for improved analytical methods, training, and structured approaches. The book's six sections present a coherent plan for improving analysis. Early chapters examine how intelligence analysis has evolved since its origins in the mid-20th century, focusing on traditions, culture, successes, and failures.The middle sections examine how analysis supports the most senior national security and military policymakers and strategists, and how analysts must deal with the perennial challenges of collection, politicization, analytical bias, knowledge building and denial and deception. The final sections of the book propose new ways to address enduring issues in warning analysis, methodology (or 'analytical tradecraft') and emerging analytic issues like homeland defense. The book suggests new forms of analytic collaboration in a global intelligence environment, and imperatives for the development of a new profession of intelligence analysis. "Analyzing Intelligence" is written for the national security expert who needs to understand the role of intelligence and its strengths and weaknesses.Practicing and future analysts will also find that its attention to the enduring challenges provides useful lessons-learned to guide their own efforts. The innovations section will provoke senior intelligence managers to consider major changes in the way analysis is currently organized and conducted, and the way that analysts are trained and perform. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 6 reviews)
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Finished Intelligence by Retired Reader (New Mexico)  4 Stars
November 21, 2009
The `intelligence' that this book refers to is what was once known as `finished intelligence' that is intelligence designed primarily to inform the President and members of the National Security Council (NSC). It directly supports the executive level formation of national policies relating to national security and foreign affairs. In theory this policy level intelligence is produced by intelligence analysts who combine subject matter knowledge with research and analytic techniques to transform all source information into the most accurate intelligence possible. As the various contributors to this book sometimes make clear this level of intelligence is a matter of probabilities not absolutes.
Because finished intelligence is so closely associated with policy formation, the book includes a variety of thoughts on the relationship between the intelligence analyst and policy makers and national strategists. Since this level of intelligence often requires the analyst to make subjective judgments based on often inconclusive evidence, the book also has useful discussions of the dangers of politicization to sound intelligence products. These two threads appear to run throughout the book and are illustrated in concrete examples that highlight the thin line between informing policy making and politicization.
The first half of this book deals with what are by necessity fairly high level issues that impact the analytic processes, but not necessarily the intelligence analysts except indirectly. The second half of the book is a general, but serious look at the process of analysis and the analysts who execute that process. On this subject Jack Davis and Carmen Medina have some very interesting things to say about the analytic process (and those who execute that process). Also one of the book's editors, James Bruce, makes an observation on the relationship between epistemology and intelligence production. This relationship should be obvious, but until someone like Bruce makes it, the relationship is often ignored.
A good treatment of an important subject, but for details on what a finished intelligence analyst actually does for a living read "Lost Promise" by John Gentry.
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Exceptional read by Jesse Wilson (Tampa, FL USA)  5 Stars
July 29, 2009
This book was an exceptional read. Each chapter, written by a leader within the community, touches on a critical topic in the field of intelligence analysis. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is serious about broadening their understanding of analysis and ways to improve the discipline.
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Of, By, and For USA Status Quo Bubbas--Essential but Very Partial by Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) 4 Stars
July 14, 2009
This is a very fine book, not least because of its inclusion of Jack Davis (search for as well as Carmen Medina (see her presentation to global audience via oss.net/LIBRARY), but in its essentials this is a book of, by, and for the status quo ante bubbas--the American bubbas, I might add.
If you are an analyst or a trainer of analysts or a manager of analysts, this is assuredly essential reading, but it perpetuates my long-standing concerns about American intelligence:
1) Lack of a strategic analytic model (see Earth Intelligence Network)
2) Lack of deep historical and multi-cultural appreciation
3) Lack of a deep understanding and necessary voice on the complete inadequacy of collection sources, the zero presence of processing and lack of desktop analytic tools, and the need for ABSOLUTE devotion to the truth, not--as is still the case, "within the reasonable bounds of dishonesty" aka "slam dunk"
4) Lack of integrity in so many ways, not least of which is the analytic abject acceptance of the false premise that the best intelligence is top secret/sensitive compartmented information--see the online CounterPunch piece on "Intelligence for the President--AND Everyone Else."
Below are ten books I recommend as substantive complements to this book:
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
Fog Facts : Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (Nation Books)
Lost Promise
The Age of Missing Information (Plume)
Informing Statecraft
Bureaucratic Politics And Foreign Policy
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America
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A Must Read for the Curious and Practicioners Alike by Patrick Devenny (New Jersey) 5 Stars
September 03, 2008
Writing in the introduction to their excellent new volume on intelligence analysis, editors Roger Z. George and James Bruce (who, in the interest of full disclosure, I am an associate of) point out that examples of vigorous scholarly work focusing on analysis are few and far between. "As of 2007, the body of scholarly writing on intelligence analysis remains...surprisingly thin." This dearth should come as a surprise even to those versed in analysis (it was to me), especially when one considers the important role played by faulty or strong intelligence analyses throughout recent American history along with the fairly extensive body of social science literature authored in parallel.
Analyzing Intelligence, featuring 18 chapters written by some of America's more accomplished analytical practitioners and theorists, does much to repair this deficiency. Its chapters reference analysis through several lenses, beginning with its origins, moving through its various facets and challenges, and concluding with "ways forward." The narrative pace of the book is engineered to maximize the reader's grasp of overarching and common themes, quite the achievement in such a wide-ranging and diverse work. Crisp editing and welcome section introductions help orient the reader to general themes and points of particular interest brought up by subsequent authors, lending the volume (whose cover features a far from accessible Rubik's cube) a more readable tone than one may expect.
As in any compilation, some chapters stand above others in terms of their impact and quality. This "favoritism" effect is heavily reliant on personal taste -- someone intimately familiar with the history of intelligence analysis in the American context may want to skip the first two chapters, while someone without a background in the policymakers' involvement with analysis should pay particularly close attention to John McLaughlin's definitive treatment of that dynamic featured in chapter 4. However, the following chapters, in my opinion, convey key insights that transcend personal or professional tastes and could easily be described as visionary.
Is Intelligence Analysis a Discipline? - Rebecca Fisher and Rob Johnston provide a welcome organizationally-based critique of the oft-proposed but rarely defined government campaign to "improve analysis" by comparing analysis to other regulated disciplines.
Why Bad Things Happen to Good Analysts - in a refreshingly honest chapter written by Jack Davis, we find out why good analysts -- including an extremely well-credentialed Iran analyst who spoke well of the Shah's stabilizing effect six months before his collapse -- can often make disastrous errors.
Making Analysis More Reliable: Why Epistemology Matters to Intelligence - in my favorite chapter of the book, volume editor James Bruce issues a clarion call to infuse the rigor of scientific procedure into the process of intelligence analysis.
The New Analysis - although one of the shorter chapters, author Carmen Medina uses her words well to predict the coming alterations to the US analytical community and its procedures, some of which Ms. Medina expects to be radical -- and welcome.
Computer Aided Analysis of Competing Hypotheses -- although the title may signal a dry narrative, author Richards Heuer's description of the ACH concept and the role played by commercially available software in its maturation is as accessible as it is fascinating.
Analyzing Intelligence is hopefully the first in a line of works that addresses the world of intelligence analysis in a more scientific and empirical fashion. In its role as a veritable pioneer, the book succeeds in putting forth a detailed and exhaustive treatment of intelligence analysis that is nonetheless accessible to a wide audience ranging from curious graduate students to veteran practitioners.
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An impressively articulate and scholarly body of work by Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) 5 Stars
August 09, 2008
Expertly compiled and deftly co-edited by Roger Z. George (a career analyst serving in the CIA, State Department, and Defense Department) and James B. Bruce (a retired career CIA intelligence analyst who served with the National Intelligence council, in the Directorates of Intelligence and Operations, as well as other intelligence community organizations), "Analyzing Intelligence: Origins, Obstacles, And Innovations" is a compilation of informed and informative essays and articles on the subject of intelligence analysis providing academia, professionals, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject with a comprehensive overview of the issues, tools, and resources that American intelligence services and departments have with respect to obtaining and understanding the information that they collect. Beginning with a basic introduction to intelligence analysis by James B. Bruce and Roger Z. George, the knowledgeable contributors cover analytic tradition and history, the role of the analyst, the challenges endemic to intelligence analysis, common problems and concerns associated with intelligence analysis, as well as trends and changes within the field of intelligence analysis. An impressively articulate and scholarly body of work, "Analyzing Intelligence" is especially recommended for academic, governmental, and community library reference collections, and the supplemental reading lists of students, journalists, and interested general readers with an interest in the subject.
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Psychology of Intelligence Analysis
by Richards J. Heuer Jr. (Author)
With intelligence now getting a front-row seat in governments around the world, this book is especially timely. Intelligence rains in, but without an understanding of the nature of the intelligence, it accumulates in puddles of obscurity. The problems therefore seem to be how to obtain it, how to understand it, and how to sell it to one's bosses. This book deals with how to understand it. Three fundamental points are at the heart of this presentation about the cognitive challenges intelligence...
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| Intelligence Analysis: A Target-Centric Approach
by Robert M. Clark (Author)
As Americas enemies have changed and evolved, the American intelligence community has been forced to find more effective methods of managing intelligence analysis. Old hierarchical models of collection and analysis must give way to horizontal, networked solutions. In Intelligence Analysis, Robert M. Clark explains that a collaborative, target-centric approach allows for more effective analysis, while better meeting customer needs. The new third edition has been comprehensively revised...
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| Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy
by Mark M. Lowenthal (Author)
Intelligence veteran Mark M. Lowenthal details how the intelligence community's history, structure, procedures, and functions affect policy decisions. With his friendly prose, he demystifies a complicated and complex process. Rich with examples and anecdotes, Intelligence also includes bolded key terms, an acronym list, suggested readings and websites, and a list of major intelligence reviews or proposals.
This new, fully-updated fourth edition highlights many crucial recent...
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| Transforming U.S. Intelligence
by Jennifer E Sims (Editor), Burton Gerber (Editor)
The intelligence failures exposed by the events of 9/11 and the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have made one thing perfectly clear: change is needed in how the U.S. intelligence community operates. Transforming U.S. Intelligence argues that transforming intelligence requires as much a look to the future as to the past and a focus more on the art and practice of intelligence than on its bureaucratic arrangements. In fact, while the recent restructuring, including the creation of the...
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| Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning
by Cynthia M. Grabo (Author)
Anticipating Surprise, originally written as a manual for training intelligence analysts during the cold war, has been declassified and condensed, in order to provide wider audiences with an inside look at intelligence gathering and analysis. Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America, intelligence collection and analysis has been hotly debated. Cynthia Grabo suggests ways of improving warning assessments which better convey warnings to policymakers and military commanders - who...
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