____________________________________________ 6 IICC Perspectives The key is the culture of intelligence How do we move forward? Roberta Wohl Stetter, in her 1962 book on Pearl Harbor, said we had to accept uncertainty as a fact and learn to live with it. Part of the challenge involves defining the purpose of the intelligence project. Joseph Nye, in a 1994 article in Foreign Affairs, said that the point was not to predict the future but to help decisionmakers think about it. As Nye explained, no one can predict the future, and it would be a mistake to pretend otherwise. The real lesson of October 7, therefore, deeply underscores the partial, fragile, temporary, complex nature of intelligence knowledge, as well as its dependence on multiple factors. Even the highest quality information and the most brilliant analysis cannot eliminate the uncertainty inherent in reality. This applies both to identifying attack targets and assessing the enemy’s capabilities and intentions. It is a lesson that intelligence personnel and decision-makers must learn, understand, and internalize. Yitzhak Ben-Israel, writing in 1989 and 1999, proposed an alternative approach to intelligence analysis which could serve as a framework for a more sober understanding of both the present and the future. He said intelligence should operate similarly to science by encouraging daring hypotheses, then freely criticizing and testing them to identify those which withstand the criticism. Ben-Israel refers to the method, but more than that, to an intelligence culture centered on doubt, uncertainty and debate. Voltaire said, "Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one." In its positive sense, intelligence skepticism does not reflect despair from lack of knowledge or lead to paralysis. On the contrary, skepticism is a powerful tool for fostering learning and developing knowledge. Its practical expression is in a critical, skeptical, systematic approach that questions the validity of the information developed or received by researchers, the possibility or explanation they have adopted, and the reliability of the information at their disposal. Debate makes it possible for different approaches to confront one another and helps expose weak points in the effort to clarify reality. It can help intelligence personnel reveal the many biases that hinder their ability to accurately observe and describe reality. In this sense, the idea behind the "Devil's Advocate" Department (and additional mechanisms related to lessons learned from the surprise of the Yom Kippur War, such as "pluralism" or the "personal duty to warn") is fundamentally correct, but its L.G. Prof. Yitzhak Ben-Israel (Wikipedia)
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