Taking stock of the blogged literature of intelligence

Since starting this little project in January 2006, we have seen a frankly explosive growth in the blogged literature of intelligence – that is, the online discussion of the profession, its theory and its practice through texts circulated using lightweight publishing tools.

It has been a tumultuous time within the intelligence community itself, and also within the wider profession outside the boundaries of the traditional wheel of the sixteen primary agencies. This has very much been reflected in the literature that has emerged during this time period.

We are most heartened by the continued emergence of the practitioners – both retired and those currently serving – that reflect upon their lived experiences through this new and most accessible medium (recognizing, of course, the inevitable limitations of discretion required in such an open forum).

In particular, we are fascinated by the rapid development in 2008 of a large number of increasingly active bloggers addressing the private aspects of competitive intelligence and business intelligence. This community has never suffered from the same restrictions placed upon those in the service of the national interest, and had the means and history of rapidly adopting technologies to new ends. Yet these practitioners remained for the most part strangely silent until this year. Much credit for surfacing this growing community’s online writings should be given to the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), who now makes the highlights of this literature a centerpiece of the organization’s own online presence. And while the theory of these aspects of the profession has a long way to go before it can equal the more robust corpus of other elements of the field, both in national intelligence and homeland security / law enforcement intelligence, we are pleased to see great strides being made. We have also found that the experiential epiphanies reported by these individuals as they struggle with problems common to the practice of the art and science have great value as accessible (and unclassified) examples when teaching any new practitioners.

We have also remained cautiously optimistic regarding the emergence of the classified blogsphere, written within the restricted realms of other networks. For those practitioners who cannot discuss the subjects of their passions in open literature, it is essential – and is the only way many have to capture insights into theory and application that might otherwise be lost. And while one might view this material as useless to the academics and those private sector professionals outside of the classified realm, one must remember that much of the foundation of our current day literature is built upon those materials which were properly declassified in the fullness of time. So too will this material one day surface through the normal mechanisms of release and review – providing a rich trove for future historians and educators.

As much as we are pleased to see the development of a robust community of interest within the intelligence blogsphere, we would also wish for a greater level of original research to appear in this medium. Unfortunately, the incentive structure does not appear to be present for many academics, and there are far too many other pursuits conferring greater legitimacy to practitioners that serve to divert energies elsewhere. This must change, both for the sake of the blogsphere but also we believe for the sake of the profession itself. We are the first to recognize that blogging is not a public utility – it is the outgrowth of a personal passion; and it frequently must give way to other operational demands when it is solely a labour of love. This is perhaps the intelligence profession’s version of the eternal debate within the media blogsphere over primary news reporting versus punditry. However, we hold out hope – particularly example set by original research among the legal bloggers, who tend also to publish in more traditional channels, thus also proving the symbiotic relationship of these activities. Good blogging encourages good literature.

We also realize that starting – and maintaining – a good blog requires a tremendous commitment of time and energies, despite the many barriers which the lightweight publishing technology itself has already overcome. It is for this reason we re-iterate our offer to circulate the thoughts of those professionals – both those in practice or in the academy - who would wish to occasionally offer items of interest to the wider audience (respecting, of course, the requirements of non-disclosure agreements and the other sacred oaths sworn by those who still serve. In this, we follow the well considered lead of the Association for Intelligence Officers, reminding any contributors that “authors are responsible for compliance with restrictions and regulations regarding the publication and clearance of materials dealing with present or past employment”.)

OSINT and faint indicators in the new cyber environment

For all of the sound and fury regarding the potential OPSEC implications of military and intelligence blogging, we must continually remind those mired in the old ways of thinking that there are far more pressing problems which inflict damage on the enterprise - be that enterprise government or commercial. While indiscretion will always remain a cardinal sin, the worst indiscretions are rarely committed by those that put pen to paper with proper foresight and consideration of the potential higher order effects of the discussion. The prohibition argument also rarely takes into consideration the kind of deliberate self-censorship that is routinely practiced by those with an active stake in the reputation market of the blogsphere – one that increasingly crosses into normal professional life in much the same manner as do one’s writings in an academic journal. The higher order benefits, on the other hand, of a robust and evolving literature, can be clearly shown to outweigh the actual problems identified in the kinds of studies which call for widespread prohibition of online writings on topics of relevance to the field. Worse yet, if such a prohibition would come to pass, the community will essentially have yielded the floor entirely to those who write without true understanding, and who increasingly lead the discussion further astray from the real issues and opportunities that today’s intelligence professionals face – as well as those critics which seek to deny entirely the legitimacy of the profession itself.

We have recently had occasion to note counter-examples which prove by comparison the vast gulf between the discretion of those current and former professionals engaged in active current debate in furtherance of the literature, and the kind of negligence and errors of the “official” discussion that if the shoe were on the other foot would provoke widespread (and justified) outrage. The first of these comes from the commercial world, at the Corporate Intelligence blog, where a case study examining the inferences which can be drawn from job vacancy postings is presented. We can recall quite a few similar issues emerging in the national security space, particularly with certain less than discrete contractors that tend to advertise in the major regional papers for rather explicit position descriptions, revealing rather more detail than one would like to see in public. These are rarely cited in prohibition discussions, however, but in the aggregate have likely done far more damage to the community than all of the public deliberative literature over the past sixty years.

We also recommend highly the analysis over at In From the Cold of a recent and much publicized incident involving the F-22 Raptor program, in which a pilot was less than discrete in online discussions. While we certainly feel that the individual responsible for disclosures deserves a long counseling session on appropriate standards for representing oneself in public, we take well the number of points in which supposedly “protected” information was previously disclosed through official public affairs channels. We also find observations of the interest displayed by certain parties more valuable than the information provided back to them, especially when the alternative pathways for those parties to obtain the same answers could have been used through entirely passive means, of which the community might never have been aware.

Of course, OSINT does have its dark side in that the adversary is always capable of using it against friendly interests. However, it requires a level of effort, understanding, and skill to parse through the overwhelming volume of noise to find those faint indicators – a task not unfamiliar to those that have ever worked with publicly available source information. In our view, it is better our adversaries waste that time – not knowing the wheat from the chaff – than they should spend efforts pursuing real collection against more sensitive activities that might yield a return on that investment that is more damaging to friendly interests in the long run.

The modern information environment is increasingly complex, and now that the genie of those technologies is out of the bottle, there is no chance of returning to a simpler era. It thus becomes all the more critical that the discussion regarding the effects of new media and online public discussions focus more narrowly on those areas which are truly essential elements of friendly information that must be protected with exceptional caution, rather than a blanket of prohibition that will harm our own side’s sensemaking and adaptation more than it will impair the enemy’s collection efforts.

123 Meme, with variation

Thanks to Mountainrunner, we have been tagged with one of these random interweb memes that seem to us to be a deliberate attempt to spark a convulsive degree of self-consciousness within the restless stirring of electrons that is the Parallel Universe. (And given the gentleman’s interest in all things UxV, one cannot discount his role as agent provocateur in welcoming the new robot overlords – after all, he is the individual that inserted reference to Cylons into a serious DOD briefing.)

For those that may have been thus far spared exposure to this particular viral idea

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag five people

Given that our group format by its very structure creates a different response to this question for each participant, we found ourselves internally cross-tagged. After some discussion, we also decided to introduce an additional element of randomness in the passages selected – within a moderate degree of ambiguity near to the canonical 123 meme segment – just to stir the echoes a bit more (and no doubt as further evidence of our contrarian nature). After all, intelligence professionals should not become accustomed to too high an artificial measure of certainty in anything.

Thus we offer a few of the more notable passages from the various and sundry texts offered by our contributors:

Ransom, Harry Rowe. Central Intelligence and National Security. Harvard University Press. 1958.

“’New concepts’ earlier mentioned in State’s intelligence organization are partly the result of the influx of Foreign Service officers into intelligence – ‘Wristonization’ – and partly the result of a redefinition of intelligence requirements of the Department. Effort is being made to assure that the intelligence produced is attuned to the real needs of State’s policy makers and operators. Through various administrative devices closer daily operational contact exists between officials responsible for making and implanting policy and those supplying intelligence.”

Earley, Pete. Comrade J. GP Putnam’s Sons. 2007.

“Having tasted the reforms sparked by perestroika and glasnost, Soviet legislators were not willing to turn back the clock. This left the KGB chairman and his cronies with only one option. If they wanted to stop the Union Treaty, they had to remove Gorbachev with military force before the August treaty was signed.”

Sageman, Marc. Leaderless Jihad. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2008.

“Unlike traditional terrorist organizations that have physical sites and more territorial ambitions, there is no incentive for a leaderless virtual social movement to moderate or evolve beyond terrorism. Because there is no formal organization, with assets, sunk costs, physical commitments, or other stabilizing elements, participants who become more moderate in their views simply leave the forum and move on, or are banished from the forum by the webmaster. But their legacy lives on; their previous commitments and activities (writings, videos, and terrorist operations) are still archived in the forums and could continue to inspire new generations of dreamers to capture the glory that had inspired the old stalwarts in the first place.”

Anderson, Terence; Schum, David, and Twining, William. Analysis of Evidence, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. 2005.

“The logic is simple; the complexity lies in the materials to be analyzed and in identifying the relationships between the propositions in an extensive argument based on a mass of conflicting evidence. The logic is binary: every relevant proposition either tends to support or tends to negate a single hypothesis or conclusion (the ultimate probandum). The technique is dialectical: the aim of the chart-maker should be to construct the most cogent possible argument for and against the ultimate conclusion and to relate the opposing arguments within a single coherent structure.


But we do also wish to tag a few others, for we are far more interested in thoughts which originate outside of our little skunkworks. Thus:

• Deborah Osbourne, of Analyst’s Corner
• Jesser Wilson, should he resurface
• August Jackson, of SCIP
• Jeff Dexter, at the Ghost of Patrick Henry
• and Dr. Waller at Political Warfare

Hazards of blogging for intelligence professionals

August Jackson, most notably of the Washington DC chapter of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, reflects on the issues created by blogging with the same candor that one addresses intelligence assessments.

His comments raise interesting points from the perspective of professional ethics and the obligations of duty – perhaps something roughly equivalent to the concept of giri.

"In competitive intelligence you can't be a Kool-Aid drinker, and often you have to tell executives when they're on the wrong path. Companies make their moves in public, so it's only natural that management should expect to see criticism or praise in a public forum. I've had three different jobs and a number of different contracts since I have been blogging, and I have never disclosed proprietary information. Not once. Ever. I never will. Any time I've been involved in the formation of a business decision I've kept my opinions private whether I've agreed or disagreed. This, to me, is a more important measure of professionalism in blogging than never commenting on any company's policy."

It is interesting for us to see this discussion in a commercial intelligence perspective. Those in the public sector have a far more clear set of distinctions – and enforced by far more than mere civil tort – that bound words and deed. This by necessity limits to a much greater degree the range of topics we can address in public pages, and to avoid even the appearance of impropriety one’s opinions must be even more carefully circumscribed on any matter that might be seen as leading to politicization. Intelligence practitioners must be professionally apolitical, in all aspects of their public presence – something too often forgotten in the current Beltway atmosphere.

Most organizations simply do not permit an intelligence professional to blog in public at all. Some of those efforts which are allowed to exist may only do so under a high degree of restriction. (We suppose our humble effort falls into the latter category.) In government service, there are of course alternatives on other networks for those that wish to speak more freely about matters of more direct impact to their daily working lives. (As for us, we appreciate the chance to step away from the issues of the day and examine the craft in a more holistic fashion – but this is not for everyone.) But this is not the first time we have looked to this subject.

We have also previously discussed the implications of academic blogging. However, for the most part, our comments (and those of others) have reflected upon the professoriat. Intelligence studies student blogging is another question entirely. To date, student participation in the intelligence blogsphere has been very limited – largely because they are struggling to master a learning curve that has been compared to a brick wall, and recognize that they have little of interest of their own to say. There are a few quite notable exceptions, however, that are well worth the attention invested. It is for this reason that we feel student bloggers should indeed be cultivated, but carefully so. They will have to make hard choices – many which might impact their future career for years to come – especially if they are overt intelligence professionals from a young age (precluding other activities in later years.) It is also due to these pressures that we have witnessed a number of blogs simply drop off, as their authors come under new publication policies as they take professional jobs.

We further view with grave concern the current fashion among academics of assigning blog writing tasks as class requirements, as most have been authored under true name (or readily identifiable associations thereof), and explicitly link the student to an area of study that as a professional they would likely never acknowledge so publicly, even as overt practitioners.

Against this backdrop, why does intelligence studies blogging endure? We think it is because the benefits that accrue to an individual author’s mind far outweigh the potential downside, as long as one adheres to the strictest standards of professionalism (and security). That these benefits result in a public good which advances (to whatever small degree) the intellectual discussion of the intelligence studies field, and its literature, is a happy higher order result – and one that should be encouraged within the boundaries of propriety and discretion.

The changing of the intelligence studies (public) blogsphere

It is against the backdrop of our continuing discussions of intelligence studies and the impact of blogging that we note the passing of two blogs which we have had occasion to enjoy over the past while. The World is Grey and Fast Squirrel have recently chosen to close up shop. We respect their decisions, and understand entirely – as much as we will miss their contributions to the public literature. They join the now defunct JMJ Blog, Intelligence Analysis & OSINT, and Robot Economist among those recent intel, and intel related blogs which have gone dark.

Blogging – especially the personal, hobbyist kind – has always been a dynamic enterprise, with a constantly shifting menagerie of new faces. Even among our own humble skunkworks here at KI, we have seen contributors come and go. The public side of intelligence studies blogging is perhaps more prone to this than other aspects of the distributed conversation, if only due to certain unique features of the constrained information environment. After all, some may find it difficult to accept that the interests which drive the majority of their day and professional energies must be totally ignored in public discourse, and that the focus of online writing must remain academic, historical, and high level. Doing so in a manner that maintains both relevance to the reader, and the satisfies the intellectual interests of the authors, can certainly be a challenge for some bloggers. (We are fortunate here at KI that our interests span such a diverse range that we find no difficulty exploring areas of the field in which there can be no conflict of interest.)

At the same time as our old (virtual) companions have closed up shop, a few other blogs have come to our attention that appear to be fellow travelers in the revolution in intelligence affairs. These include the Intel Fusion blog, and the AFCEA’s MAZZ-INT commentaries. It is not surprising that several others hail from overseas (allies), or the private sector’s competitive intelligence / business intelligence spaces, such as the Singaporean National Security Intelligence, the Italian Intelligence & Security Analysis, the Competitive Intelligence Marketplace, or Jens Theime’s weblog. This does not make these potential contributions any less valid, of course – but such material does perhaps fall into the nebulous category of comparative intelligence studies.

Given the difficulties of public blogging for many intelligence professionals, we do expect to see the expansion of the activity on other networks rather than public pieces by a number of those authors seeking to enter the conversation. But that is a discussion for another time and place entirely, we should think. Our only hope is that many of those choosing to blog in more rarefied atmospheres recall the original admonition in Sherman Kent’s call for the literature, in which he urges those with an inclination to write not merely on their target or issue, but on the nature of their shared profession and its tradecraft. It is all too tempting in an environment where the details of one’s accounts may be shared more fully to explore those details and their implications, rather than the higher level abstractions of process, patterns, and transformation. However, it is the latter concerns that will truly respond to the Imperative laid upon us all, and help to chart the unknowns of the profession’s continuing evolution.

Blogs and (intelligence) scholarship

Via the TaxProf Blog, we note the proceedings of a conference designed to examine the impact of blogging on the study of law. The parallels of many of the key arguments for the intelligence academy are quite striking indeed.

Recent years have seen not only the dramatic expansion of the intelligence studies field, but also attempts by a number of parties to impose their own control on the manner in which the field is evolving. These efforts have varied from proposed standards bodies to commissar style denunciation of new programs as mere “training” for vocational skills. Some are motivated by the best intentions of furthering professionalization, and some are regrettably little more than rent-seeking.

We have been greatly surprised that the expansion of the actual work of teaching intelligence has not led to nearly the flowering of the literature of intelligence that one might otherwise expect. For those most part, intelligence faculty simply do not publish – in the community’s own organs, or in the public journals that have arisen in the space. Now this may be in part explained by the moribund state of the field’s traditional publishing opportunities – but we doubt such an explanation complete, especially in this age of lightweight digital dissemination such as SSRN. Nor are we content to ascribe the lack of new material simply to the effects of tenure – though many a sleeping backwater might offer tempting distractions to those who enjoy lifetime employment, too few intelligence studies educators actually have their tenure in hand (not least due to the relative newness of many intelligence studies programs.) Likewise we find it difficult to assign blame to the consulting pathways that many intelligence professors also pursue, given the importance of networking and thought leadership in building intellectual capital for consulting assignments. (Indeed, we find that many of the scholar/bloggers of our acquaintance cite their blog as a more productive source of engagement opportunities than the institutions which supposedly provide them a place to stand respectably in the public square.)

There are many arguments both for and against blogging in pursuit of furthering the intelligence literature. In our opinion, not everyone is cut out to blog – and many, for reasons of classification and operational security, cannot (at least in public form) for entirely valid and understandable reasons. Yet this is no excuse for far too many intelligence educators – from those who work primarily if not exclusively in the unclassified, open source realm to those many now that focus on the pre-induction student pipeline at the university level.

We would strongly second the warning first given to the legal scholars as also quite fitting for those in the intelligence studies field: evolve or die.

The form into which intelligence studies evolves does not have to be a blog, but it has to be a mechanism which will advance the literature and the scholarship - and in a manner which has relevance to the native 21st century intelligence community, not merely the quaintly archaic exchange of dead trees that marked the industrial age era. Evolution does not come without risk – of professional differences and disputes, of public errors and their required corrections, or of the revision of one’s thoughts and writings in light of debate and further discourse. But in this it is no different than other forms of scholarship – merely conducted on a shorter timeline, with a self-selecting audience that is in many ways far broader in expertise, and often far more deeply studied, than the author might expect. Yet this is how the profession grows, and it is the imperative that was laid upon those who would make claim to its examination to pursue that growth.

State blogging – and not blogging

Mountainrunner has been providing excellent coverage and commentary regarding the new developments out of Department of State’s online diplomacy efforts, including DoS’s new blog. We are please to see the efforts of those at Foggy Bottom advancing into the new century. State’s efforts were often the kind one would damn with faint praise – let us hope that this new initiative does not travel the same path. They would do well to heed (and preferably, quickly hire the unique expertise of) the gentleman blogger on such matters, particularly as he explores subjects of key interest – unmanned systems, private military companies, and public diplomacy unfettered by incorrect interpretations of half a century old legislative arcania.

At the same time, however, State has silenced a different interesting voice in the intelligence and foreign policy space. Arms Control Otaku will be ending formal blogging at official request that came out of an ongoing background investigation. We have mixed feelings on the matter – not least of which because this is an area that can ill afford the loss of thinkers and bloggers in the public space. However, we are the first to recognize the inherent tensions between the effective performance of one’s official duties, and the academic pursuit of advancing the literature. That conflict was likely far more pronounced the Otaku’s case, given the essential overlap between what one would presume about the demands of a Presidential Management Fellow’s assignment and the published record of that blog.

We are fortunate in the our humble endeavor suffers less from such potential conflicts due to a very deliberate series of choices to separate the stuff of our contributors’ professional accounts from the discussions on this blog. One can, given care and attention, find an acceptable way to further the academic conversation on larger issues of professionalization in a manner which does not come into conflict with one’s working responsibilities or one’s sacred oaths of secrecy. We are also fortunate to have had a favorable review which early on encouraged this effort (but of course, not as an endorsement), given entirely sensible and appropriate restrictions. Some of those peculiar features have drawn negative comment from others in the academic world - such as the lack of comment features - but overall it is a small tradeoff in return for the benefit of participating in the ongoing discussion regarding the future of intelligence. And since this blog generates no financial or other incentives, such intangibles are critical to our contributors.

Thus, we hope to see the Otaku’s writing some other time and place. We have enjoyed the work, even as we might disagree on occasion. And we were also pleasantly surprised to learn that once upon a lifetime, one amongst our number happened to be in the same movie theatre at the same time – despite being far from the usual stomping grounds - in one of those odd coincidences that marks life passing through the Beltway.

However, we also note that there are plenty of other outlets for creative energies in more professionally accepted fashion – though few so low-friction as lightweight online publishing. Perhaps an Intelink blog would be in order for the gentleman – and offer the Otaku the additional benefit of accruing professional respect within the community under true name, albeit within the more limited audience of the classified world.

This matter also provides a fascinating case study, one that we see as the leading edge of an issue that will increasingly come to define the role of the intelligence and foreign policy professionals of the next generation. Blogs and other online contributions will increasingly be a key part of their publication record – and increasingly will occur under true name (for good or ill). For some potential recruits to the community, the choice to accept the isolation of the vault, and abandon what may be their most significant professional contributions and activities to date, is one that they may be unwilling to accept in return for a low level GS position in some minor bureaucracy. This will be particularly an acute problem as other alternatives continue to become far more attractive than life as a blue badger as the privatization of intelligence continues apace. Better solutions have to be found.

What’s this (virtual) life for…

We have recently been intently focused on the utility and applications of this weird medium of the blog. For reasons beyond our ken, we have apparently touched quite a nerve in many of our readers, and we have been most gratified by the response that our humble efforts have drawn.

We are equally as interested, however, in the higher order effects our work appears to be producing. We continually encounter our own words, used in radically different contexts than we might have expected, throughout the community and its academic circles. (Ironically, more often without attribution in the latter context than in the former, in the exact opposite of our expectations. After all, plagiarism is not a vice in the intelligence community, especially in agencies built around the routine acquisition of things others might not willingly part with if they were aware, but it should always have remained a cardinal sin in the academic world.)

All of this, coupled with our observations of the efforts of others, has led to us to question what is the best potential set of outcomes from these sorts of activities. This is a question for which do not yet believe there is an answer. We have seen others attempt (successfully or otherwise) to parley their online writing efforts into new positions, or book deals, or promotion of day job business opportunities. We have seen egos rise, and charlatans fall – all the while seeing those with the most to offer continue to quietly promulgate new ideas and energy into a system desperately in need of both.

This has not always been a risk free activity for those in the community. While we here at Kent’s Imperative are fortunate to be able to operate under a rather favourable set of permissions (as much as others might complain about certain features, such as policy disabling comments which others might hold us responsible for) – we are by comparison the lucky ones. Others have recounted quite prominently their difficulties with entering the new online literature – including some of the more influential thinkers of the day, such as Thomas Barnett. (His experiences recounted here under the umbrella of “the blog bit back”, as accurate an expression as we have ever heard. Our thanks to Zenpundit for surfacing the discussion.) Others have simply vanished after brief flirtations with the technology and the tools proved not to be worth the investment for them.

We firmly believe that this new medium, through both the technology and the changing social conventions associated with its use, offers the ability to radically change the literature of intelligence in ways that will greatly benefit the intelligence community. We are not sure how this evolution will take place, nor what eventual form will emerge.

As we have said, we do not do this for money or for fame. We are deliberately anonymous to preserve professional discretion and to ensure that it is our ideas which receive attention, not our positions or associations. But we are glad to be in the flow of this new thing, and we intend to see it out as best as we are able – and hopefully to contribute as we might to the larger forces that will shape the revolution in intelligence affairs.

Intelligence activities in the native medium of the blog

We are not prone to navel gazing regarding the now unremarkable magic of the world of lightweight web publishing tools. (That’s so 2002, as the cool kids might say…).

However, we find ourselves occasionally drawn into the ongoing distributed conversation regarding the growth of blogging within the intelligence community itself, particularly as the idea spreads within the walls (thanks in large part to some visionary efforts and some hard work to create acceptance and adoption.) From time to time, we find ourselves writing on such matters as reflections emerge in open publications, much as we have when discussing related issues of wiki technologies.

In this case, we find ourselves once again welcoming the end of another academic year for many intelligence studies programs, and the deluge of new student publications, term papers, and theses has begun right on schedule. We happily expect that between the major universities, and the military service schools, that we will have much reading to last us through the idyllic evenings we intended to spend relaxing in a hammock this summer.

This year, we are fascinated to see the continuation of a trend towards the use of blogging tools to publish these student efforts on the open net. We are not yet certain of what to make of this – for sure, it is a far better means by which to ensure readership and availability of material which might otherwise slip unnoticed into the great gray literature slush pile. But there are also systemic concerns, especially when the content of certain papers (even though they may be drawn entirely from open sources and presented in an unclassified academic context) may offer our adversaries advantages in concealing, denying, or deceiving the community’s efforts to understand their intent and behavior.

This is a subtle issue, but it does have the potential to influence the willingness of the community to engage academia in the long term – if only by giving fuel to the arguments against sharing discussions of methodology, target interests, and conceptual standards. (We do think that in most cases benefits outweigh potential risks – especially if a keen eye towards OPSEC and counter D&D concerns remains foremost in mind, and the selection of topics chosen with care and deliberation. Regrettably, this is not always the case.)

We also have not decided if the blog format is entirely the best manner in which to see new academic papers and longer term study type products presented. The native strengths of the blog, much like the cable, are in the short form; but this tends to obscure the levels of supporting detail and nuanced argument which are critical to more robust intelligence products – and particularly to those efforts exploring new dimensions of methodology and analytic tradecraft. Blogging also tends to encourage a very different tone than is normally appropriate for finished intelligence or academic pieces, but this may not entirely be a bad thing given the predominance of lengthy, dry tomes of no particular redeeming value which so characterize other segments of the community’s output – and unfortunately also large parts of the field’s literature.

This however begs the question: which then are intelligence activities that have a native affinity for the medium of the blog? Blogs, while created initially as a publishing and distribution tool, have much more to offer than merely functioning as an advanced dissemination system (as much as we like RSS for that purpose when dealing with short, recurring product streams.) They also by convention and customary usage occupy a unique niche between the formalized rigidity of finished production and the otherwise uncaptured ephemera of working notes, partial drafts, non-papers and coordination commentary.

Blogs can function to foster social growth and interactions within communities of interest – whether within their comments pages or (as we prefer) through the distributed effects of common linkages between multiple independent authors. In this, they do so more slowly than the rapid, transient connections of sametime (or the physical world counterparts of conference asides and deskside chats); and frankly the process tends to produce a higher quality of intellectual result much more closely aligned with Sherman Kent’s original vision of the interactions which would produce the body of intelligence literature. The only difference is the technology, which brings with it levels of speed and accessibility that could not have even been conceived in his day.

“The literature I have in mind will, among other things, be an elevated debate. For example, I see a Major X write an essay on the theory of indicators and print it and have it circulated. I see a Mr. B brood over this essay and write a review of it. I see a Commander C reading both the preceding documents and reviewing them both. I then see a revitalized discussion among the people of the indicator business. I hope that they now, more than ever before, discuss indicators within the terms of a common conceptual frame and in a common vocabulary. From the debate in the literature and from the oral discussion, I see another man coming forward to produce an original synthesis of all that has gone before. His summary findings will be a kind of intellectual platform upon which the new debate can start. His platform will be a thing of orderly and functional construction and it will stand above the bushes and trees that once obscured the view. It will be solid enough to have much more built upon it and durable enough so that no one need get back in the bushes and earth to examine its foundations.

Now if all this sounds ponderous and a drain on time, I can only suggest that, so far, we of the Western tradition have found no faster or more economical way of advancing our understanding. This is the way by which the Western world has achieved the knowledge of nature and humanity that we now possess.”

We are very interested in the continued exploration of the matter, and will continue our own humble examination of the subject as we may. We wish the new crop of intelligence studies graduates well in their own endeavors in this area, and hope that they will continue to contribute in accordance with the original Imperative.

For those of our colleagues and readers which would wish to offer commentary, advice, or encouragement, the following are a few of the new student papers-as-blogs in the field.

Content Analysis Technique
Terrorism Social Network Analysis
Qods Force Targeting Methodology

In this case, all are out of Mercyhurst, but others are no doubt coming soon and we expect we shall write on those presently enough. Do not be shy, nor spare the full weight of judgments in order not to offend - for few things are worse than the unjustified ego of young analysts who have never received adequate critique due to the diplomacy of their seniors (a thing we have observed all too often as of late in many an intelligence studies program.) Analysts develop in the competition of ideas, and learn from the hard realities of failure. If they do not fight for it, they do not grow.

Comments policy revisited

On a side note, the comments policy of this blog is in place due to the unique distributed nature of our production team, and is exceptionally limited given the extraordinary but required constraints under which this effort is conducted. We are, as we always maintain, by no means acting in any official capacity in this blog. Who we are and what we do simply does not matter – we rely upon the force of our arguments and the persuasiveness of our writing to carry this effort, not any appeals to authority or the community’s enterprise experience. For those familiar with the substantive matters we raise, this is (or should be) more than enough for the purposes of this informal virtual conversation on matters of theory and academics.

Our opinions and statements do not reflect the position of any agency, organization, entity, or structure – and will never discuss any matters which would raise classification, operational security or other related concerns. And while we are never responsible for what any commentator might post on this blog, we simply cannot at the present time assume the burden of moderating a comments system in light of those restrictions – particularly as one may note that this blog may from time to time go dormant as other priorities for one or more of the authors take precedence over this effort. We have happily thus far found that a robust discussion is still possible given such necessary limitations, thanks to the continuing interest of others in the blogsphere.

While we have received criticism from others regarding this policy since the inception of the blog, we note firstly that this is a not a financially motivated venture for any of us, nor is it a democratic enterprise in which others may directly vote as to its conduct. (Indirect feedback through the marketplace of ideas and the attention economy is vote enough, we should think.)

This effort is rather a specific and narrowly tailored attempt to pursue a muse, and in so doing to hopefully inspire those among the community of interest to new approaches and new ideas. We have gratefully noted that interest in the subject remains high, and that many of the ideas floated here (and elsewhere in the growing related conversation) have begun to find manifestation in the community – and for this reason alone we will continue our humble attempts at advancing this conversation for as long as circumstances permit.

And perhaps someday, once the Long War is won - and like the Cold War relegated to the dustbin of history, and the life of academic ease or some other intellectual patron's grace is even an option for some old operators and analysts - we may be able to engage more fully and openly. To borrow the oft-quoted wish: faster, please.