Iran-Navy Clash Raw Footage And Iranian Naval Strategy (Via Wired's Danger Room)

Wired's Danger Room has aggregated some of the most interesting coverage and provided some of the best commentary on the recent Iranian-US Naval incident (an incident that the Iranians are now saying was faked by the Pentagon). In a recent post they covered "How Iran Attacks At Sea" with numerous links to outside sources (including a very interesting observation from Michael Tanji of Haft of the Spear). This morning they posted some raw footage of the incident viewable below (from the AP hosted through ClipSyndicate). Danger Room's style is sometimes quirky, but I find it well worth the reading. They do an excellent job.

Firm's Arrival Underscores Area's Potential (More Shameless Self Promotion)

In case you missed it, there was a very positive follow-up editorial in the Erie Times News this morning to a news feature published last Sunday. While the editorial was more about the companies that are using intelligence to help their bottom line than about the Mercyhurst Intel Studies program, it was still nice to see that the editors of the paper realized the potential inherent in a strong intel studies program with respect to the local economy.

Part 6: Digging Deeper (The Revolution Begins On Page Five: The Changing Nature Of The NIE And Its Implications for Intelligence)

Part 1 -- Welcome To The Revolution
Part 2 -- Some History
Part 3 -- The Revolution Begins
Part 4 -- Page Five In Detail
Part 5 -- Enough Exposition, Let's Get Down To It...

Part 6 -- Digging Deeper

There are some disturbing trends in other numbers collected from the Iran National Intelligence Estimate. For example, 71% of the sentences in the Iran NIE contain one of the three statements “we assess”, “we judge” or “we estimate”. As you will recall, this is the way the Intelligence Community (IC) indicated it would preface its estimative conclusions. Compare this with the number of sentences with statements of confidence, i.e. 61%. I could see there being fewer sentences beginning with these three phrases (it would get tedious to constantly see “we assess", "we estimate" or "we judge” all the time) but how do you get more? That means that there are at least some estimates marked by the words that the community has stated it would use to mark such estimates that do not also contain statements of confidence.

Not that big of a deal, you say. OK, I agree, but consider this: Only 29% of the sentences in the Iran NIE contain Words of Estimative Probability (WEPs)! That means that there are some, perhaps many, sentences that indicate that they are estimative in nature but are missing one and perhaps both of the other two elements (WEPs or an assessment of confidence) that the Intelligence Community itself said it would use.

It makes my head hurt.

Let’s review the bidding: Up until the Iran NIE was released only several weeks ago, the IC was saying one thing and then doing another with regard to statements of confidence in their estimates. The Iran NIE dramatically reversed this trend and included statements of confidence in almost 2/3s of its sentences… but, while this is an undeniable improvement, there are still numbers that don’t add up.

Tomorrow: Part 7 -- Looking At The Fine Print

American SIGINT And The Indochina War (NSA and Secrecy News)

In case you missed it, Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News is maintaining a declassified version of the NSA's "Spartans in Darkness: American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975". Mr. Aftergood reports, "The author, Robert J. Hanyok, writes in a lively, occasionally florid style that is accessible even to those who are not well-versed in the history of SIGINT or Vietnam." I can see it as very useful in an intelligence history class either for the lessons learned or as supplemental reading material.

Part 5 -- Enough Exposition! Let’s Get Down To It… (The Revolution Begins On Page Five: The Changing Nature Of The NIE And Its Implications For Intel)

Part 1 -- Welcome To The Revolution
Part 2 -- Some History
Part 3 -- The Revolution Begins
Part 4 -- Page Five In Detail

Part 5 -- Enough Exposition! Let’s Get Down To It…

Having laid out this vision of a “theoretically complete estimate” (my words not theirs), how then does the Intelligence Community (IC) use it? To what extent do these carefully crafted words defined on page five (and in one case, page six) of the most recent National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) actually get used in these documents? The answer is really going to surprise you.

Let me start with the issue of confidence in assessments in the recent NIEs as this is the place where the change is most dramatic.

In order to benchmark the estimates, I started by counting the number of sentences in each of the last several NIEs. For comparison purposes, I included the 2002 WMD NIE and the 1990 Yugoslavia NIE as well. I only looked at the Key Judgments of each NIE. While I understand that there is a good bit more information in the NIE than in the Key Judgments, I am virtually certain that the bulk of the NIE is consistent with the Key Judgments whether they are made public or not.



As you can see by the chart above the numbers are fairly consistent across the NIEs. The minimum number of sentences is 25 with a maximum of 52. The average is 38. I don’t consider these differences in length to be important. They are likely explained by the nature of the subject matter and the level of detail of the full text NIE. I wanted, however, to be able to compare words and phrases defined in the Explanation of Estimative Language (EEL) pages (See Part 4 for more information on these) across multiple NIEs and I knew that mere numbers of uses of the word “likely”, for example, could be skewed by the length of the estimate (i.e. the longer the estimate, the more times a certain word would probably be used). I also considered it unlikely that Words of Estimative Probability (WEPs) and other special words (as defined by the EEL page) would be used multiple times in a single sentence. Number of sentences, therefore, while not perfect, seemed to me to be a useful denominator.

If the number of sentences is the denominator, what about statements of confidence, the numerator? I generated this number by searching each of the Judgments for each of the words or phrases highlighted in the EELs and then going back through and reading for words that might serve the same purpose but were not specifically mentioned in the EEL. Looking at the number of sentences with explicit levels of confidence in each of the identified estimates tells a startling story:

What immediately jumps out is the number of sentences that contain statements of confidence in the Iran NIE – 19 out of the 31 total sentences or almost 2/3 of the sentences in the Iran NIE – compared with other NIEs. None come even close and the majority of them (including the three other NIEs that contained EEL pages that specifically said expressions of confidence were going to be used) contain none. Not one.

Frankly (and abandoning any pretense of academic detachment for a minute) this stuns me. I have a good deal of respect for the the analysts in the NIC and throughout the IC but what were they thinking when they put the previous NIEs in 2007 together? That no one would notice? If that is the case, they were probably correct. Certainly I have not seen a single critique that highlights the absolute inconsistency of stating, “We intend to assess confidence” and then not doing it – three times in a row. That they never said they had to use statements of confidence? That is quibbling. The whole purpose of the EEL is to define “What We Mean When We Say...”. It’s like including a Spanish glossary at the front of a Chinese textbook and then saying, “We never said we had to write the textbook in Spanish.” Why make a point of including an explanation of statements of confidence and then not using them at all? That the expressions of confidence are in the classified but not the unclassified version? That makes even less sense and I don’t think the IC is that dumb. That they had never done it before? Nonsense. The Iraq WMD estimate contained explicit references to confidence. I'm sorry, but three times in a row is too strong of a pattern to ignore. The failure to do what the Intelligence Community said it would do was intentional.

The worst case scenario is that the IC suspects that no one is reading these things anyway or, if they are, they believe the readers are only going to cherry-pick the parts that serve their policy or political purposes. In this context, carefully nuancing your statements and enforcing strict consistency, indeed any consistency, in your use of words is just wasted effort. This is a cynics-eye view yet, sadly, the evidence seems to support it.

That is a shame. Many very smart, dedicated people work in the IC. Many of them are putting their lives on the line to collect, process and analyze the information our decisionmakers need to make good decisions. Certainly the taxpayer has borne a not insignificant burden funding it. The IC's work should be applause-worthy but saying one thing and doing another is not a cause for either confidence or approbation.

Water under the bridge, at this point, of course. The Iran NIE obviously fixed all that, you might say.

Not so fast.

Tomorrow: Part 6 -- Digging Deeper