The unusual geopolitical moment created by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and, now, by the shift in official US policy and tone present enormous challenges for Europe’s political leaders, national security officials, and intelligence professionals. But the troubling times also offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make rapid, significant improvements to the flow of analysis from intelligence providers to policymakers—applying lessons that have taken US officials decades to learn.
Good intelligence that reduces uncertainty for national security policymakers can be a game changer—enabling more optimal decision-making. Without such insight, bad policy becomes much more likely.
Especially during times of global transition, quality intelligence not only warns policymakers about enduring and emerging threats but also alerts them to opportunities that shifting grounds present. With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the aggressive rise of China, and the recent shift in policy and tone from Washington, the current international environment is more uncertain than it has been in generations.
European political leaders, national security officials, and intelligence professionals should recognise this moment for what it is: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turbocharge the intelligence-policy relationship. There already has been progress across Europe on raising military spending, and plans are in the works to increase such funding even more.
Investing in intelligence should not get lost in this process. Without healthy cultures of intelligence-policy relations to inform their efforts, European policymakers risk getting less from their historic defence spending increase than they now hope.
One way to improve intelligence is to identify and correct the places where it can go wrong. Errors can occur at each major stage of the intelligence cycle: collection, analysis, and dissemination.
At the collection stage, intelligence officers might fail to get information that is within reach and would inform a particular decision, they might collect such information but fail to process it, or they might gather and process incorrect information. Any of these leave decision makers with a less fully formed view of the situation at hand than they deserve, as the United States experienced with the lack of adequate raw intelligence about what was happening in Iran before the fall of the shah during the administration of Jimmy Carter, and with the inaccurate reporting from the source codenamed “Curveball” in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
But expanding intelligence collection is expensive and takes a lot of time to be done well, so policymakers can gain more in the short term by focusing on improving analysis and dissemination.
At the analysis stage, intelligence officers might fail to effectively analyse available information, either by trying their best but nevertheless presenting inaccurate judgments, by discounting incoming information and thus failing to alert policymakers about its implications, or by or weighing too heavily incoming information and thus issuing false alerts. One of the more striking failures from American intelligence history remains the failure to warn of the Egyptian attack on Israeli positions across the Suez Canal in 1973. Analysts might also err by presenting biased assessments, losing their objectivity as they tell policymakers what they think policymakers want to hear—or, alternatively, as they taunt policymakers with what they think those officials do not want to hear. Either one is a corruption of the analytic process. (My experiences match those of other observers that such politicisation plays out less often than conventional wisdom would lead us to believe—and, when it does emerge, it comes more frequently from subconscious processes than from deliberate choices.)
Thankfully, such challenges to analytic excellence can be reduced with a reasonable amount of training for analysts and managers, along with a culture of constant improvement.
The dissemination stage matters because even if intelligence officers get collection and the analysis right, suboptimal relationships with policymakers can render moot any benefit that otherwise would come. For a productive relationship to endure, intelligence professionals and policy officials alike need to become more aware of, and must strive to minimise, the most common obstacles to effective intelligence-policy relations.
The first such obstacle is a lack of timeliness. Analysts may successfully develop a judgment that is based on good collection and that proves to be correct, but the system nevertheless will fail if the assessment makes its way to policy offices only after key decisions have been made—or after an international development the assessment predicted has already occurred.
Another obstacle is a lack of emphasis. The most logical, information-rich, and timely judgment does little good if it fails to get a relevant policymaker’s attention. To the extent that an important judgment is not presented clearly to a principal recipient, intelligence falls short. This is more tricky than it may sound; the US experience shows that intelligence officers might think that a message has been delivered well enough, while a policymaker sees it differently. Henry Kissinger, national security adviser for two presidents—after acknowledging that analysts actually had briefed him on what proved to be a prescient intelligence warning—reportedly chided those officers by saying, “You warned me, but you didn’t convince me.” If a written assessment or oral briefing offers a valuable analytic bottom line but lacks the source material, logic, and argumentation to give the policymaker confidence to take it on board, such a policymaker reaction is understandable.
A third obstacle to effective dissemination comes from the other side of the relationship: a lack of receptivity to intelligence. Put frankly, quality assessments do no good if policymakers fail to make time to read intelligence reports or take briefings from analysts. The many demands on policymakers’ schedules can make this a significant challenge, especially in places where institutions of regular intelligence briefings—like the President’s Daily Brief process in the United States, developed across six decades—have not yet taken hold. But the current security picture demands it.
The good news is that intelligence officers can receive training on effective presentation skills and dissemination practices, and policymakers can learn to be better customers of analytic assessments after straightforward explanations of what intelligence can and cannot do for them.
A productive intelligence-policy relationship requires correct intentions and actions from the intelligence side as well as dedicated attention from the policymaking side. And this is the time for all European national security officials to invest seriously in getting it right.
This article was written for the Lennart Meri Conference special issue of ICDS Diplomaatia magazine. Views expressed in ICDS publications are those of the author(s).