Missing the Forest for the Trees: US Intelligence, Threats, and Inter-Agency Disunity

Present academic treatment of the US intelligence community (IC) tends to treat the IC as a singular unit, or focus only on intelligence collection and analysis behavior in the case of the Central Intelligence Agency. Yet, the IC often confronts inter-agency contestation over analytical conclusions. Beginning from the premise of this historical disunity, I examine patterns of intelligence analysis. I use 6 historical cases of inter-agency disunity to assess trends of reliance on certain kinds of intelligence data in the resulting analysis. I find that agencies advocating views likely to face political pushback rely heavily on quantifiable indicators in war-related scenarios and qualitative, discourse-based indicators in bargaining, or diplomatic, scenarios. However, when the agency's analytical conclusions are consistent with conventional wisdom at the time, individual agencies rely on a more balanced combination of quantifiable and qualitative data in their analysis.