Week 3 Readings and Video
Strategic Warning: If Surprise is Inevitable, What Role for Analysis? Davis, Jack. The Sherman Kent Center for Intelligence Analysis, Occasional Papers: Volume 2, Number 1, Jan. 03.
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The Sherman Kent Center for Intelligence Analysis
Occasional Papers: Volume 2, Number 1, Jan. ‘03
Strategic Warning:
If Surprise is Inevitable, What Role for Analysis?
Jack Davis
Sherman Kent Center
The dramatic events of 11 September 2001 color this paper, but it is not about the devastating terrorist attacks per se, nor about the daunting challenges of tactical warning. The focus, instead, is on strategic warning.
Warning analysis is charged with applying all-source information, expert insights, and specialized tradecraft to help policy officials prevent or limit damage from threats to US security interests. Tactical warning, as defined in this paper, seeks to detect and deter specific threats to US interests; the objective is to avoid incident surprise and thus block or blunt damage. Strategic warning addresses perceived dangers in broader terms, in order to inform policymaker decisions on general security preparedness—again to prevent or limit damage.
US national security resources are limited. Tactical warning cannot be counted on to pinpoint defensive measures by providing timely notice of all specific attacks and menacing developments. In this context, the challenge of strategic warning is to help policy officials decide—in advance of specific indicators of danger—which of the many plausible general threats to US security interests deserve concerted defensive and preemptive preparations.
Strategic warning, to be effective, has to be credible in assessing contingent dangers and has to facilitate policymaker decision and action to protect against these dangers. This paper tables for consideration and debate several recommendations to advance two goals:
1. To reconstitute strategic warning as a collaborative governmental function by engaging policy officials responsible for effecting defensive measures in every step of the analysis process, including topic selection and trend monitoring.
2. To warrant a distinctive intelligence contribution to a collaborative warning effort by expanding dedicated analytic resources and sharpening requisite substantive expertise and specialized tradecraft.
Tactical and Strategic Warning Analysis
The central mission of intelligence analysis is to warn US officials about dangers to national security interests and to alert them to perceived openings to advance US policy objectives. Thus, the bulk of analysts’ written and oral deliverables points directly or indirectly to the existence, characteristics, and implications of threats to and opportunities for US national security.
Regarding warning of threats, the central analytic task is to peel back substantive uncertainty about the meaning of past developments and the prospects for future developments that could endanger US interests. Prescient,