1. 24 APR 2013
Dr. William Bradford, PhD, LLM,
JD
Strategic Intelligence: From
General Theory to a Simulation
Exercise

2. GENERAL THEORY OF
STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE
(1) All organisms—amoebas, animals,
humans, groups, organizations,
nations—have a primordial drive to
survive

3. (2) To maximize the likelihood of survival,
nations pursue power (military, economic,
political, etc.) as a tool to reduce threats
(military rivals) and seize opportunities for
influence (alliances, trade, exports)

4. (3) Grand Strategy: the protocol nations
reference to guide efforts to prevent threats
and seize opportunities; specifies tasks for
foreign policy, military policy, economic
policy, and diplomatic policy

5. (4) U.S. Grand Strategy
 Protect free exchange of ideas and markets and
goods
 Preserve common law constitutional republic
 Secure individual rights and liberties
 Layered defenses
 Preserve deterrence and leverage alliances
 Fight over there through proxies or technology

6. (5) In 4GW/WMD era, fighting total wars threatens
survival, so…
Deter major powers
Fight small wars
against small powers

7. (6) Deterrence: doctrine that the enemy can
be convinced that war initiation carries an
intolerable price because of the certainty
and cost of response

8. (7) Deterrence preferable to winning wars

9. (8) Deterrence assumes rationality
 Enemy cares about survival
 Enemy makes decisions that advance
goals
 Enemy has similar cost-benefit equation

10. (9) Problem: because not every foe is
rational, and because we do not know the
enemy’s cost-benefit equation, we need
information to prevent deterrence failure and
avoid surprise

11. (10) Surprise: “the occurrence of an
unexpected event or the nonoccurrence of
an expected event”(Pearl Harbor, 9/11, what
next?)
Objective of US intelligence community
since 1945 has been to avoid it

12. (11) Timely and accurate information about
aspirations, intentions, capabilities, and
plans of adversaries is necessary to avoid
surprise and prevent/anticipate/preempt
attack

13. (12) The more power a nation possesses,
the more decisional freedom it enjoys and
the greater its capacity to “shape the future”
(avoid surprise)

14. (13) The more decisional freedom a country
enjoys, the more information it can employ
to make the decisions that best avoid
surprise and support grand strategy

15. (14) The more information a nation can use
to support decisionmaking, the more it will
search for, collect, analyze, and use
information

16. (15) Strategic Intelligence [STRATINT”]
(a) Timely and contextualized information and analysis regarding
emerging threats and opportunities to the National Command
Authority, the most senior civilian policymakers and military
commanders, and allies
(b) Nonperishable, highest-level focus (geopolitics, foreign
leaders and parties, senior commanders, macroeconomics,
religious movements, echelons above reality)
(c) Collected and analyzed on long-term basis
(d) Reliant on all intel disciplines (OSINT in particular but all the -
INTs)
(e) Supports foreign policy and military decisions by estimating
capabilities, intentions, plans of present and future enemies
(f) Placing information in context
(g) Developing assessments of probabilities of threat action
(h) Creating conviction in the mind of the policymaker of the
need for action
(i) Presenting and evaluating courses of action

17. (16) Goals:
(a) “Early warning” about an enemy’s future actions
with sufficient time to ensure the possibility of action
to neutralize the advantage the enemy hoped to gain
from surprise; better to deter than defeat, better to
predict than explain, and better to prevent than
respond
(b) Ensure the force structure is appropriate to future
use of military power (peacetime draft in 1940 to
enable victory in 1944-45, SDI 1980s, FORCE 21
late 1990s?)
(c) Maintain secrecy of info, needs, sources,
methods

18. (17) Requirements:
(a) Exhaustively researched but still timely, accurate, objective
(include minority reports—much of value depends on belief in
political neutrality), readable, succinct, joint (all-source fused and
interagency), tailored to decisionmaker’s needs (relevant),
critical (not compilation of facts but provide analytic judgments
that enhance understanding of core issue and relation to other
issues), specific (supports judgments), suggest possible COAs
and alternatives, identify risks/opportunities
(b) Key is metaknowledge: tell what you know, what you don’t
know, and what you think with explicit articulation of
assumptions, what drives events, extrapolations of trends, what
might deflect current trajectory, how much confidence in
judgments
(c) Expansive vision of interactions between domestic and allied
intelligence and NATSEC communities

19. (18) tools:
 Inductive and deductive reasoning
 Social science methodological skills
 Critical and creative thinking
 Information retrieval
 Source evaluation
 Ability to tolerate informational ambiguities
 Cultural competence, understanding of contexts (historical, economic,
political, social, religious)
 Broad fields of substantive knowledge (military strategy, intelligence,
psychology, decision theory, strategic communications, statistics, law,
ethics, strategic linguistics, economics, history)
 Teamwork and solo skills
 Objectivity
 Understanding of mission (relevance)
 Discretion
 Ability to think like the bad guys
 Capacity to sift and synthesize incredible amounts of information
 Wargaming and modeling skills

20. (19) Rational adversaries seek to:
(a) Deny/deceive collection
(b) Confuse analytical process
(c) Reveal sources and methods
(d) Prevent early warning
(e) Preclude development of instruments of power
(f) Induce the U.S. and allies to make poor decisions
that undermine grand strategy and reduce
probability of national survival and prosperity
(g) STRATINT is a competitive, high-stakes
enterprise

21. (20) Decisions are the product of STRATINT and
decisionmaker effects:
(a) The better the STRATINT, the more likely any given
decisionmaker is to make decisions that support national
security/survival and capitalize upon opportunities, and the
worse the STRATINT, the less likely any given decisionmaker is
to make decisions that support national security/survival and
capitalize upon opportunities
(b) Good STRATINT is a necessary but insufficient condition for
good decisionmaking—the effects of the decisonmaker are
important
(c) Good decisions without the instruments of national power
mean naught—firepower is necessary, as is public diplomacy,
strategic communications, soft power; STRATINT alone lacks
value

22. (21) Only two possibilities with respect to national
security policy decisions:
(a) policy success
(b) intelligence failure: policymakers never admit bad
decisions and always blame bad intelligence (inadequate
warning, missed developments, misinterpretations of data,
faulty assumptions to fill gaps, too little collected, bad
analysis)

23. (22) Reasons for intelligence failures:
(a)“Intelligence-to-please” syndrome (feed war fever,
groupthink)
(b) Reliance on previous NIE, heavy perceived penalty for
changing
(c) Enemy disinfo/INFOWAR (Iraq pretending to have
WMD)
(d) Rushing (by managers and politicians)
(e) Ignored or absent language conditioning findings
(f) Inexperienced analysts (more than 60% joined post-9/11,
many in Iraq Group at CIA <25, tendency to understate
threats where there are gaps in substantive expertise, right
people have to ask the right questions at the right time to
prevail)

24. (g) Cognitive bias of analysts and decisionmakers: confirmatory bias (see what you expect to
see and very difficult to abandon a firmly established concept, even though that concept is
wrong), resistance to disconfirming information (want to avoid cognitive dissonance), historical
analogy, oversimplification, Type 1 and Type II errors, reverse mosaic analysis (form picture
first and then make pieces fit, instead of other way around), correlation does not equal
causation, availability bias (when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail), mirror
imaging (projecting values/beliefs/interests onto another of different cultural or historical
background in an attempt to explain their behavior)
(h) TMI (drinking from fire hose)
(i) Too little info (very reliant on HUMINT to determine intent and plans of adversaries e.g.
Saddam in 1990, AQ in 2001, Ahmadinejad 2013, Kim 2013)
(j) Underestimation bias (the greater the risk, the less likely it seems)
(k) Overestimation bias (tendency to overstate threats to ensure that IC is not blamed)
(l) Relationship between analysts and decisionmakers (strict no-cross zone between IC and
decisionmakers about policy recommendations, but it is hard to go from the raw intelligence to
the finished intelligence (analytic product) without developing a judgment about what policy
decision should follow, and there is a fine line between analysis produced to inform and
analysis produced to influence especially when policymaker rewards analysts who provide
what they want to hear)

25. (n) STRATINT is politics: when intel estimates/warnings support one political
position over another, the analyst is open to the charge that s/he has unduly
influenced the policymaker or is substituting his/her own agenda at the expense
of objectivity, and individuals who oppose findings adverse to their political
positions have to attack the objectivity of the intelligence process rather than
the validity of the analysis or leak intelligence (or even attack the analysts
themselves by berating and then ignoring them or outing them, e.g., the Pflame
Affair),
(o) Need for perfection: a .333 average in baseball gets you into HOF; in
STRATINT it can get you killed
(p) neglect of STRATINT, especially long-range intelligence collection and
analysis in favor of crisis-driven PIRs,
(q) Iraq 2003 case study: 13 of 16 intel agencies concluded Iraq had WMD,
limited HUMINT, poor vetting of HUMINT sources, early misestimation of
program in 1990, never produced full NIE on Iraq WMD because of belief there
would be internal dissent, may have spun intel to present the White House
view, did not release “Key Judgments” section until July 2003, DCI Tenet
allowed in 2007 that intel was “not sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable
doubt that Saddam had WMD” and that “more accurate and nuanced findings
would have made for a more vigorous debate and would have served the
country better.”

26. (23) Positive and normative theorizing in
STRATINT:
(a) Leadership is vital—actions flow from decisions
and not the other way around, and the decision to
use force is made by an individual: requires
incorporation of decisionmaking theory, with special
consideration of the personalities of decisionmakers
(b) Formal modeling: number of variables is large,
everything is dynamic, have to select the most
important variables to make models manageable
and determine where and when tipping points or
thresholds exist and why change occurs

27. ASD
(1) Threat develops when enemy marries
capacity and intent

28. (2) You can go when you shouldn’t go, and
not go when you should: strategic
preference for the former unless law,
reputational sanction, or something else
constitutes a big cost

29. (3) Domestic analogy: Your next door
neighbor is an ex-con who murdered his
previous neighbors, and he’s threatened
your family for months. You live in the
woods, with no law enforcement within 100
miles. He calls to tell you he’s loading his
shotgun and he’ll be at your door to carry
out his threat in an hour. What do you?

30. (4) international law of ASD
(a) Article 2(4) of UN Charter: prohibits use of force against
territorial integrity or political independence of any state
(b) Article 51 recognizes the inherent right of states to engage in
individual or collective self-defense “if an armed attack
occurs”
(c) Custom: states have not waited to be attacked before self-
defending (Caroline Case, Nuremburg Tribunal
(d) Scholars: restrictivist position (have to wait to absorb first
blow), pragmatists (don’t have to be a sitting duck especially
in the area of instant deliverables and there is a “reasonable
state standard,
(e) No authoritative pronouncement on the law—open, and in
large measure a political question

31. Applied Theory
(1) Decisionmaker personalities are IVs:
militarism, anomism, hostility,
adventurism

32. (a) Militarism: ideal typic is nationalist patriot
with prior military service who views use of
power favorably, competes aggressively, is
keenly ambitious, authoritarian, dogmatic,
introverted, isolated, low-self-esteem

33. (b) Anomism (ignorant of law, regards legal
compliance in purely instrumental terms,
complies only to serve self-interest, amoral)

34. (c) Hostility (self-absorbed, delusional,
amoral, distrustful, suspicious, ethnocentric)

35. (d) Adventurism (impulsive, risk tolerant,
male, anxious, high stress)

36. (2) ASD outcomes are DVs:
 Consider ASD
 Select ASD
 Defend ASD
 Defend ASD on legal grounds
 Regarded as lawful by others at time of exercise
 Regarded as legitimate at time of exercise
 Legal sanctions
 Lawful or legitimate in retrospect
 Make same decision again
 Contribute to world order

37. (3) STRATINT is an intervening variable
(future research will operationalize using
subvariables--quality, coherence, timeliness,
etc)

38. (4) Assumption: if there were no intelligence
gaps as to the intentions and capabilities of
foreign decision makers, there would be no
need to assess or estimate what decisions
they would make regarding attacking or not
Ergo, the study of enemy military forces and
foreign decisionmakers is crucial part of
STRATINT

39. (5) Historical data: Stalin (BARBAROSSA, 1941),
FDR (Pearl Harbor, 1941), JFK (Cuban Missile
Crisis, 1962), Eshkol (Six Day War, 1967), Golda
Meir (October War, 1973), Begin (Osiraq, 1981),
Reagan (Libya, 1986), 41 (Panama, 1989), Clinton
(bin Ladin, 1998), 43 (Iraq, 2003)
0000

40. Decisionmaker
Profile
Consider
ASD
Exercise
ASD
Defend Legal
Grounds
Lawful Legitimate Sanction Lawful/Legitimate
in Retrospect
Repeat
Decision
Contribute to
World Order
Josef Stalin:
ABCD
1 0 NA NA NA NA NA NA 1 1
FDR: ABCd 1 0 NA NA NA NA NA NA 1 1
JFK: aBCD 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1
Levi Eshkol:
abcd
1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1
Golda Meir:
aBcd
1 0 NA NA NA NA NA NA 0 0
Menaham
Begin: ABCD
1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1
Ronald
Reagan: Abcd
1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1
George Bush
(“41”): Abcd
1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1
Bill Clinton:
aBCD
1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
George Bush
(“43”): ABcD
1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1

41. (6) Analysis: Boolean algebra, comparative
method

42. Findings of note
 Militarists tend to be satisfied with ASD decisions,
while nonmilitarists tend to regret ASD decisions
 Use of ASD supports world order and militarists
thus are more supportive of world order
 Anomists less likely to engage in ASD
 All decisionmakers justify ASD with reference to
law
 Hostile decisionmakers do not engage in ASD and
are satisfied with these decisions
 Other actors regard adventurists unfavorably
although their decisions in time are viewed as
legitimate
 Very difficult to implement a decision to engage in
ASD that is viewed as lawful and legitimate at the
time and also satisfies the decisionmaker

43. (6) Formal
model

44. Are counterintuitive results the effects of
STRATINT on mediating the relationship
between decisionmaker and outcomes?
Does perfect STRATINT lead to perfect
decisions and perfect outcomes? Are
decisions independent of STRATINT (if so,
fold up the tents)?

45. Simulation Exercise: Central
Asia
To Be Distributed