Good vs. Evil Part 2

I’ve received a torrent of comments about my earlier post about The Lucifer Effect (ok, one comment and an email) and so I’ve figured that I should expand upon the subject, particularly, as the findings might relate to intelligence analysis.

First of all, let’s look at how situational factors might might influence the act of intelligence analysis using an obvious example. It’s estimated that upwards of 70% of the classified intelligence budget at the federal level goes towards private intelligence contractors. These individuals and companies are (and have been) making huge gobs of money since 9/11. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the government contract gravy train will stop if the threat from the “Global Jihadist/fascist/communist/Chavezist/vast right wing conspiracy” network disappears. So, just how likely to you think individuals and companies are going to be (even on an unconscious level) to provide assessments which indicate the threat to the United States is decreasing or low? That would be essentially like sending a memo to your boss explaining how your job is redundant and if they fired you they could realize big savings with no loss of productivity. It just ain’t gonna happen.

Even if it was so obvious that the threat was so small that it could not be denied (and let’s face it, that would be quite a feat…, apparently it’s possible for some people to believe that Cuba poses an existential threat to the U.S.) you could be rest assured that these contractors would have a long list of new threats that desperately require not only all the resources currently under contract but a host of new ones as well (all available at a very reasonable price, if you act now).

There’s an even more prevalent instance of how situational factors can negatively affect intelligence products. Every agency has its own culture and set of assumptions. Challenging those assumptions risks having your analysis marginalized or even damage to your career.  Paul Pillar wrote about these issues in his article about how intelligence was manipulated to lead us into the Iraq war:

Well before March 2003, intelligence analysts and their managers knew that the United States was heading for war with Iraq. It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. Intelligence analysts — for whom attention, especially favorable attention, from policymakers is a measure of success — felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious.

A clearer form of politicization is the inconsistent review of analysis: reports that conform to policy preferences have an easier time making it through the gauntlet of coordination and approval than ones that do not. (Every piece of intelligence analysis reflects not only the judgments of the analysts most directly involved in writing it, but also the concurrence of those who cover related topics and the review, editing, and remanding of it by several levels of supervisors, from branch chiefs to senior executives.) The Silberman-Robb commission noted such inconsistencies in the Iraq case but chalked it up to bad management. The commission failed to address exactly why managers were inconsistent: they wanted to avoid the unpleasantness of laying unwelcome analysis on a policymaker’s desk.

As Pillar and Zimbardo both point out (although in different ways), an even more subtle form of bias is the imposition of norms or standards that take on the equivalent of physical laws.  Those norms and standards make it difficult to do ‘macroanalysis’ of the system and even more difficult for such analysis (if done at all) to be accepted and acted upon.  For example, in law enforcement circles the common response to a criminal problem is suppression through the use of (or threat of) arrest and imprisonment.  The underlying assumption is that everyone (including criminals) make their decisions based upon cost-benefit analysis and the threat of arrest trumps virtually benefit.  If crime continues (assuming that’s the benchmark used to determine success), it’s not that the underlying assumption is wrong, rather it’s that the penalty isn’t stiff enough or we aren’t arresting enough people.  But what if that’s not how people make decisions? Or, if what is motivating criminals is more basic (a la Maslow) that the fear of imprisonment? 

That might prompt some analysis to look for alternate ways to deter crime but would require everyone to shift their perspective from the established current one that says “You fight crime by locking people up.”  That could be a scary idea for people who’ve made their career based upon that idea.  When ideas like that pervade an organization it’s difficult for metaanalysis to crack that mindset and so analysts are left with little option but feeding the organizational delusion.  From Pillar:

As any competent pollster can attest, how a question is framed helps determine the answer…On any given subject, the intelligence community faces what is in effect a field of rocks, and it lacks the resources to turn over every one to see what threats to national security may lurk underneath. In an unpoliticized environment, intelligence officers decide which rocks to turn over based on past patterns and their own judgments. But when policymakers repeatedly urge the intelligence community to turn over only certain rocks, the process becomes biased. The community responds by concentrating its resources on those rocks, eventually producing a body of reporting and analysis that, thanks to quantity and emphasis, leaves the impression that what lies under those same rocks is a bigger part of the problem than it really is.

Not particularly encouraging, I know.  If anyone has an idea of how to overcome such obstacles, I’ll buy ya a beer.

Good vs. Evil

I just finished reading The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo is best known from running the Stanford Prison Experiment in which a number of men were randomly assigned the roles of ‘prisoner’ and ‘guard’ and placed in a mock prison setting in order to see how otherwise healthy, well-adjusted, people would react.

The subtitle of the book is “Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” and Zimbardo uses the Stanford Prison Experiment to demonstrate that situations exert a great deal of influence over the actions of individuals. He then describes research (including the famous Milgram experiment) which further highlights the power of situation and authority to get people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t believe they would do. He then goes on to demonstrate how the events at Abu Ghraib mirror those of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Now, I know what you’re thinking and Zimbardo goes to great lengths to say that his argument is not an attempt to enshrine ‘excusology’ into our lives and or eliminate the concept of personal responsibility. What he does say is that despite how most of us read about the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda or lynchings in the U.S. and say that we’d never do such things the fact is that if placed in those specific situations many of us would pull that gas lever, pick up that machete or pull on that noose. As he often repeats in the book, the problem may not be (and often is not) that there are some bad apples who do evil but that there’s a bad barrel that can make virtually everyone do evil. In short, the potential is in every human being to engage in the most despicable and most heroic actions.

The implications for intelligence analysis (both in the military and law enforcement) are really amazing. Our culture is based upon the idea that situational influence plays virtually no role in individual behavior. Rather, as Zimbardo points out, virtually every aspect of our society (the medical, judicial, psychological, etc.) is based on such the assumption that all causes of behavior are dispositional (inherent personal factors like free will, genetic makeup or personality traits).   If we actually consider situational factors as motivators for specific behavior then we might consider a different set of responses to crime, terrorism or other negative behavior.

Lest you think this is all a bunch of namby-pamby, Nancy Pelosi loving, brie-eating nonsense  check this out:

Protracted popular war is best countered by winning the “hearts and minds” of the populace and separating the leaders, cadre, and combatants from the mass base through information operations, civil-military operations, economic programs, social programs, and political action. (FM 3-24)

In other words:  You win insurgencies through changing the situational factors for the population which (if successful) will make them less inclined to support your enemies.

It took the powers that be more than 3 years to figure out that while you can kill the number 3 man in Al-Qaeda, if you don’t change the environmental factors that created him you’re likely to only have a host of volunteers willing to step into his shoes.  It’s the old idea of winning ‘hearts and minds’ given scientific support.

While the DoD may have adopted this message the law enforcement community resists it strongly.  Virtually the only strategy offered to combat crime in the United States has been various schemes designed to ‘get tough’ on criminals.  Just as in our fight against Al-Qaeda however, you can arrest all the drug dealers, gang members and other criminals you want but if you maintain the same situational factors (social, economic, and cultural) you find that new ones spring up hydra-like.

There’s too much good stuff to continue in this post but I’m hoping to revisit this book in a future post and highlight some of the more revealing passages in it.

The only unfortunate part of the book is the author’s attempt to indict the Bush administration for ‘building the bad barrel’ and establishing the conditions that led to Abu-Ghraib.  It needlessly politicizes the book and, I fear, means that a lot of people might pass the book over.

4th Generation Warfare and Law Enforcement

I was over at the D-N-I website the other day and saw this post which talks about ‘4th Generation Warfare‘. From Wikipedia:

Fourth generation warfare (4GW) is combat characterized by a blurring of the lines between war and politics, soldier and civilian, peace and conflict, battlefield and safety…the fourth generation signifies the nation states’ loss of their monopoly on combat forces, returning in a sense to the uncontrolled combat of pre-modern times.

I found the concept of 4GW interesting because it seemed to mesh well with my experiences in Afghanistan. While there, I saw a number of parallels between the type of ‘warfare’ being fought there and the threats that seemed to be emerging in the law enforcement arena. For example:

• In the shooting wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, our enemies are non-state actors. They have wide ranging motivations such as political ideology, religion, economic interests or apolitical power grabbing. All however wish to erode or destroy the authority and power of the state.
• In the U.S., the biggest threats (at least, as described by the state system) have evolved from structured, hierarchical ones (the mafia, the Soviet Union and their clients) to unstructured, networked ones (street gangs, leaderless resistance terrorist groups, etc.)
• In both circumstances, it is quite clear that hierarchical structures (like us) don’t do well against unstructured ones. They are slow moving, reactive and have difficulty in understanding and fighting anything that doesn’t look like themselves.
• In many cases this lack of understanding results in situations where the ’structured entities’ (us) devolve into self promotion and institutional preservation. Look at the emphasis in Vietnam on body counts to demonstrate our inevitable victory there. Or today, the regular press releases about how many of Al-Qaeda’s ‘top leadership’ we’ve killed and captured to demonstrate we’re winning the War on Terror or in Iraq. Even worse, consider arguments which point to increases in spending or expansion of bureaucratic institutions as progress in the War on Terrorism.

The same holds true in the law enforcement arena. As organized criminal groups began to suffer from the superior organization and resources of the state system (RICO prosecutions, money for more cops and prosecutors, better information systems), a niche for criminal networks have arisen which make such tools less effective.

So, what is the typical response? In law enforcement at least, the trend has been to try to cram these groups into the ’structured organization’ mold. Therefore, when you see a press release for a big arrest of a street gang, you’ll usually see a chart demonstrating the organization of the gang that makes it look like it was run like a major corporation. Such organization is frequently more present in the minds of both the criminals and law enforcement than actually occurs. Dumb criminal organizations (usually the ones that get caught) try to emulate a highly structured and organized system, usually because they think such a system is the way it has to be done as well as providing an important sense of self worth (if every gang member spent as much time actually working at being a master criminal as they spend in trying to imitate one with images taken from Scarface, The Godfather and whatever else is discounted at Blockbuster this week we’d be in real trouble).

By trying to treat these 4^th generation threats as 2^nd generation we never make any real progress. Ever wonder why, when we have more people incarcerated than ever before in our history and despite almost constant trumpeting of “biggest drug seizure ever!”, “violent gang that terrorized city broken up” or “Number 3 Al-Qaeda man killed” we don’t seem to be making much progress either in serious criminal issues or the War on Terrorism? In many cases it’s because we still have difficulty in getting out collective head around the very nature of the conflict we’re engaged in.

Some point to street gangs (specifically MS-13) as examples of 4th GW in domestic terms but I’d have disagree. At least here in the U.S., they don’t constitute a significant threat to the existing state order. Like many other gangs, anecdotal tales of horrific violence are assumed to be normal behavior for the majority of members (which just isn’t true) and events that occur in other countries are assumed to be occurring here or ‘just around the corner’. So, while MS-13 and similar groups have a much greater influence in a number of Central American nations, and could potentially threaten the existence of the state, the same is just not true here in the U.S.

I discussed this with a colleague of mine and he thought that that one of the signatures of 4^th GW was the intent of the threat to destroy the existing system, which would exclude most of criminal groups existing today. Most criminal groups enrich themselves by acting as parasites on the existing system and require some form of stable system in order to operate efficiently. People need to be able to have jobs and make money in order to charge them for drugs, steal their possessions or con them out of their savings.

I don’t think intent is necessarily a defining characteristic of 4^th GW threats. Rather, it seems to me that so long as the threat, through it’s actions, has the capability of destroying the existing system (intentionally or not), it should be considered a 4^th GW threat. Do we care if network A wants to tear down the social fabric of our society and build another according to their ideology or if, for some other reason their actions destabilize our society? It seems to me the result is of the same severity which demands the same level of mobilization in order to eliminate the threat.

There is a danger in such an argument though. This certainly opens up the possibility to declare anyone who disagrees with goals of the state a mortal threat which should be silenced. We certainly don’t want to give aspiring Orwellian Big Brothers a justification to oppress citizens exercising their constitutional and human rights. How such a compromise could be reached is not clear to me but worth some more thought.

I’m also wondering if our current approach to threats might be misguided. Right now we tend to divide threats into categories based upon the type of threatening activity they are engaged in. So we have narcotics, terrorism, organized crime, and other specialized units to focus on those threats and rarely interact with each other, even when part of the same organization. It also tends to encourage law enforcement to focus on the threats they can easily disrupt rather than those that actually pose the most serious threat (and law enforcement certainly isn’t alone on this. Iraq had the misfortune of being the weakest and most easily invaded of the ‘Axis of Evil’ and so suffered the consequences. To argue it was a most significant threat to the U.S. and it’s interests of the three is just silly.)

The threats in 4^th GW, however, are likely to move in and out of these and other categories to suit their needs. I wonder if it would be better to focus on the severity (or potential severity) of threats rather than just what type of activity they’re engaging in. Apart from institutional self interest and bureaucratic inertia, does such a division of labor make sense given the declarations that we are facing ‘existential threats’? Perhaps these threats aren’t as serious to our existing order as we’ve been told but if they are it seems like the best course of action is to adapt to this new world we’ve found ourselves in rather than expecting our opponents to be concerned about making our jobs easier for us.

Personality types in the workplace

I few weeks ago I read this article in Slate, where the author attempts to classify the presidential candidates according to their Myers-Briggs personality types. It reminded me of my first job upon graduating from university as an ‘inventory coordinator’ at a container leasing firm (and yes, it was just about as fun as it sounds).

The company (long since bought out and sent to that great business cemetery in the sky) was really interested in cutting edge business ideas and they made me take the MBTI (a three hour process) before my first day on the job. The philosophy was that if everyone knew everyone else’s personality type (we had to post our types prominently in our work space) we’d be more productive. The example that was frequently used was that if we knew that executive ‘A’ liked to engage in small talk before discussing weighty business issues, you could tailor your approach when going in for a meeting. Likewise, some personality types prefer to take time and reflect on issues before making a decision while others prefer to make snap decisions. If you want the latter from someone who prefers the former, you’ll be in for a lot of frustration.

I thought it was kind of dorky when I was working there (what the hell did I know, I was only 23) but know on reflection, I’m starting to see the value of such a tool. One aspect of production in the intelligence cycle that doesn’t get a great deal of attention is audience analysis. It’s important to not only know what information a customer is looking for but also in what format they best absorb that information. Are they visually focused, do they like to fire off questions the minute they pop into their head, do they like ambiguity, etc., etc. The MBTI (or similar tools) would certainly help in such evaluations.

Of course, using such a tool really requires an organization buys into it and uses it on a widespread basis. Mentors would need to make sure new analysts are incorporating this sort of analysis in their production, senior personnel (customers) would need to have the assessment done so that analysts could target their products and all us worker bees would use the assessment in their collaboration efforts. At my company, it was deep in the culture and I don’t think I was in one meeting where a reference to someone’s personality type didn’t come up.

Me? I’m an INTP. I seem to recall being an INTJ when I took the full evaluation way back in 1993 but I don’t remember for sure. It’s pretty shocking how close the write ups are to what I see in myself. Some of the most notable…

“They like being the architect of a plan, because of the scheming and thinking involved, far more than being the implementer of that plan. Implementation tends to be drudgery. They are content to sit back and think about what might work, given their view of the situation. “

“the INTP will become quickly bored with anything that he has successfully analysed to the point of understanding it. Once understood, it has nothing left to offer, once the satisfaction which comes with achieving the goal of understanding diminishes. Indeed, most primary interests of an INTP are things which he cannot fully understand, usually because they are highly complex or have some exotic, mystical element that does not yield to analysis.”

There’s more but I won’t bore you with the details.  Pretty fascinating stuff.

You can take a free version of the test here.

Alternate views of reality

I just finished my latest class and so can finally get back to posting. It’s weird but when I’m enrolled in a class I can’t wait to be done with it and swear I won’t take another and as soon as I’m done I can’t wait to sign up for my next one. I feel like Charlie Sheen talking about Vietnam in Apocalypse Now.

Anyway…

One of the most important and often overlooked qualities of good intelligence analysts is the ability to view information from different perspectives. This is particularly rare in law enforcement circles where the culture really encourages new analysts to adopt the law enforcement perspective that there are only three types of people in the world: cops, criminals and people who will soon be criminals. I exaggerate, of course, but the culture does buy into a powerful narrative that looks at the world in a very specific way. It incorporates all sorts of assumptions about why criminals commit crimes, how they organize (and the fact that they organize), and the best ways to deter/catch them.

In an environment where numerous, untested assumptions are everywhere, it’s important for analysts to be able to provide alternative explanations for what’s going on in the world. Groupthink is fine if your biggest concern is making sure everyone is a team player and follows the party line but it can be dangerous if the party line is wrong and it will guarantee that you’ll always be surprised by changes in the operating environment (as in “What? People flying planes into buildings? Oh yeah, and maybe martians will come down and shoot us with ray guns too!”).

So, in that vein I submit two items, perhaps related. The first is this video by Robert Newman, a politically active comedian doing a show titled “The History of Oil”.  He gives a version of history and current events that’s a bit different from the conventional wisdom.  It’s about 45 minutes long but worth it…

I’d draw your attention to the latter part of the video when Newman talks about how oil is traded on the world markets for dollars and how changes in that system (for example, by changing the accepted form of currency in oil trade to Euros) could cause the American economy to go belly up.  Then check out this article from last week’s New York Times.

Russia, the world’s second-largest oil-exporting nation after Saudi Arabia, has been quietly preparing to switch trading in Russian Ural Blend oil, the country’s primary export, to the ruble from the dollar…Oil trading is nearly always denominated in dollars. When Middle Eastern oil is sold to Asia, for example, the price is set in dollars…As a result, companies and countries that buy petroleum products are encouraged to hold dollar reserves to pay for their supplies, coincidentally helping the American economy support its trade deficit.

I’m not saying Robert Newman’s analysis of the world is correct but it’s the sort of thing that analysts of all levels should be exposed to in order to check their assumptions.  Frequently, we look at information once and, once ‘confirmed’, we treat it as true for all eternity.   Good analysis should force us to reevaluate interpretations of the operating environment to make sure it still is the best available description of the world around us.

So, check out the video…his impression of Tony Blair as Goebbels is priceless.

Fighting Identity

I just finished reading an article by Michael Vlahos in the current issue of Military Review for the third time. It’s a great piece of work, do yourself a favor and read it.  I began highlighting passages so that I could include them in this post but there he says so many things so well you’re better off just reading the article.

He has two main themes that I find particularly interesting:

1)  We see war as “rituals of American religious nationalism”.  As a result, challenges to our national identity can lead to only one response, a “spiritual need to prove [our] battle-worthiness and warrior ethos”.  Such a response precludes nuanced responses and drives us to “seek affirmation that we have what it takes to win.  Hence, battle serves the same deep needs as any church liturgy.”

Further, the way we understand war manifests itself in what Vlahos calls ‘rule-sets’ which define how we conduct war and define success.  One reason we’ve been so successful in war generally is that most of our enemies were what he calls ‘kin-enemies’, those who share essentially the same rule sets about conduct and evaluation of conflict.  Therefore, according to Vlahos, “with Confederates and Germans and Japanese and Russians, victory was also very much their gift to us.”

2)  We’re undergoing a time of significant change in which non-state actors are able to affect huge changes upon the existing world system.   He identifies two other times in history which, he says, are similar:  the collapse of antiquity (from the 5th to the 7th centuries) and the end of the Middle Ages during the 13th and 14th centuries. One of the ramifications of being on one of these fault lines of epochs is that we will find it increasingly difficult to maintain the old order and, in fact, the very way we see the world contributes to our difficulties and defeats.

I’m a bit hesitant about proclamations that we’re living in a radically new age and on the precipice of major changes that will fill the history books for centuries but he does make an interesting case.

By combining those two themes Vlahos writes that our enemies (and potential future enemies) will have no intention of fighting according to our rule sets and instead will use our inability to deviate from our established rule sets to further their cause.

Horror movies and intelligence analysis

A little while ago I sang the praises of the John Carpenter movie, The Thing. After thinking about the movie a bit and checking out an unofficial fan site (which made me realize that I’m not nowhere near the ‘big leagues’ of fandom like I thought I was) it occurred to me that the movie could serve as an excellent vehicle for teaching many of the principles of intelligence analysis. The traditional way analysis is taught (at least as I’ve seen it in military and law enforcement circles) is to give a block of instruction and then give a highly scripted practical exercise that gives participants little opportunity to make mistakes or any encouragement do anything other than regurgitation. Also, usually blocks of instruction are taught as self contained units with few examples of how different techniques can support each other and not even much discussion of how these isolated skills fit into a coherent, systematic strategy of analysis.

Most teaching is also heavily focused on skills (which is pretty easy to demonstrate competence in) and very light on critical thinking (hard to teach/demonstrate/evaluate) and production (which is time consuming and varies considerably between agencies).

I’ve often thought that training would be more effective if it revolved around a scenario and skills could be taught around the flow of an analytical process. If done properly, this would enable analysts to see how various skills fit into the bigger picture as well as demonstrating the need for critical thinking skills throughout the process. Of course, for a scenario to be effective it would need to be rich enough to allow analysts to take different paths and end up with different results. This can be really difficult to do in scenarios with a law enforcement or military focus because participants bring their knowledge and biases to the scenario which can tempt them to take shortcuts that circumvent the skills and processes you want them to learn. It’s very difficult to counter without making the scenario large, unwieldy and very difficult to create.

I’ve thought about using a historical event as the basis of a scenario but there are some difficulties with that as well. You can’t use something too well known (like 9/11) or people who know the outcome of the event will make their analysis fit the end result. In any case, if you do use a real event you’ll have to create a host of additional information to put around it so everything you hand the trainees doesn’t have a huge (virtual) neon light on it that screams “This is relevant to your scenario! Make sure you include it!” Some information should be relevant, some irrelevant and some intentionally misleading.

The movie would lend itself well to acting as a training scenario because it has the following characteristics:

• Multiple characters (12 humans and at least one ‘thing’)
• The movie does not provide a ‘god’s eye view’ of the situation so there is information hidden from viewers
• Ambiguous ending (so it doesn’t matter if trainees have already seen the movie)
• Extended time line (with breaks of unknown duration where activity is only hinted at)
• The subject matter is such that previous knowledge isn’t going to be of much help

In a 109 minutes therefore, you can have a complete scenario set up. At a minimum, the sorts of things you can teach from a scenario like this are:

• Analysis of Competing Hypothesis
• Link Analysis
• Event Flow Analysis
• Presentation

For those who haven’t seen the movie before I think there’s a natural break just before the blood test scene where the movie could be stopped and analysts could be asked to present their description of what’s gone on thus far as well as their assessment of who has been ‘infected’ by the thing.

The movie presents great opportunities for trainees to present the evidence for their hypothesis and argue their cases with others.

I don’t imagine we’ll be seeing any training like this though. I can almost picture the response such a proposal would get…

“Great, training for intelligence analysts! Just what we need. Wait…you want to show a movie? A horror movie? Uh, we’ll get back to you on that. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

That’s the ironic part. For a job that requires imagination, thinking from different perspectives and benefits from collaboration, training for such positions (when it occurs at all) remains stuck in the old lecture format with minimal interaction with instructors or classmates.