Forecasting through games

There is a long history of modeling, simulation, and gaming within the intelligence community, dating back to the Prussian General Staff’s Kriegsspiel, wherein the intelligence of the day, such as it was, would be used to determine the enemy strength and disposition to be set for the initial conditions of the map board. (An early American adaptation of the wargame – itself arising out of the intense interest in military professionalization in the latter half of the 19th century - can now be found in the digital stacks. It is worth a glance for those inclined toward matters historical but lacking either access to the original text or the German language skills with which to comprehend it.)

One can trace a direct lineage from such explicit gaming structures through the modern evolution of many forms of exercise and drill. Such efforts are increasingly reflected in new training and education efforts within the IC, such as the recently publicized virtual incarnations of several analytic exercises at DIA. The exercise materials themselves have a far longer history in more prosaic incarnations. The tanker war exercise that is the heart of Vital Passage, for example, has been used for teaching analysis of competing hypotheses for years using nothing more than paper and pen. The new immersive formats are clearly of value in capturing the attention of those students who have not yet been caught the more abstract means of envisioning crisis. It also serves as a good transition towards the application of the methodology in more complex, non-deterministic problems – particularly given the new emphasis on using assistive software to help track larger scale issues. (We unfortunately continue to encounter a number of younger analysts –products of the civilian university - that are unable to distinguish between ACH as an analytical methodology and the software used to automate that methodology. But that is another matter, and points to a failure of instruction at certain institutions rather than flaws in computer aided analysis or exercise).

For too long, though, gaming has stagnated essentially unchanged from its earlier incarnations. It has been left to the jesters and the speculators to push the boundaries of the tool, pointing the way to new directions and new uses. The most provocative of these suggestions – as is frequently the case – came from a jester at the futurists’ court, examined the potential utility of an alternative reality game structure as a recruiting and coordination mechanism for HUMINT operations involving unwitting participants.

A more immediate implementation has also now appeared, attempting to use massively multiplayer structures for long term analysis challenges. The Institute for the Future will launch its new project, Superstruct, on 22 September, which will attack what appears to be a catastrophic scenario using an alternative reality gaming architecture for distributed participation. It is a unique approach, described further through a FAQ here, and we can already see the benefits that the transparent and free form ludic design brings to the table. (We would note this to be a distinct difference from other crowdsourced analytic projects that we have recently seen attempted). We also have high confidence in the intellect and insights of the team that is executing the Superstruct project, having followed their work for some time, as well as having attended a fascinating discussion with other ARG designers from the original "I Love Bees" team at a Second Life salon hosted by The Electric Sheep Company a number of years ago.)

We have long been on record as highly skeptical of the efforts to use the intelligence community as the instrument by which to assess the uncertainties of future climate change, and have debated the issue with others of discernment who hold differing views. Yet the IC responded to the requirements levied upon it by Congress – as it always should. The resulting assessment, and public testimony, is a model of intelligence professionalism in the face of intense politicization. We find Dr. Fingar’s responses during questioning – clearly outlining the uncertainties of the scientific data, and the limitations of the IC’s resident expertise on the topic – a perfect teaching example of effective intelligence communication.

We think however that efforts such as Superstruct may be a better venue for exploring these questions, at least until the window of likely impact falls within the long range horizons of the intelligence community’s estimative views – be that fifteen, thirty or fifty years hence. It is also a fascinatingly cross-account and interdisciplinary issues – as well as a frankly lower priority intelligence problem – that is perfectly suited to experimentation with new analytic methodologies, novel analytic outreach, and new distributed production models.

We wish the project good fortune, and look forward to the after action assessment for any lessons learned that might be applied to future analytic tradecraft.

h/t Smart Mobs, and the Business & Games Blog

Revisiting Twelve Angry Men and legalism in intelligence analysis

For a number of years, the classic black and white film Twelve Angry Men has been a frequent teaching aid in introductory analysis courses dealing with the basics of evidence and argumentation. The conventional use of the film is to provide an accessible means of deconstructing a fictionalized scenario for students with little prior experience with formal debate. Given the current decline in public education, this helps remedy a basic skills deficit that is unfortunately and increasingly all too common.

However, it is with interest that we observe the controversy that has erupted once again over this fifty-one year old movie. The criticisms that have been leveled against the underlying premise of the film deserve some additional consideration – not the least of which because they point out the serious problems in applying much of what is taught as legal logic to the unique problems of the intelligence domain.

The Spectator’s argument surfaces one of the reactions common among many students, but in a far more articulate fashion than any entry level professional might be expected to voice. In essence, this criticism is based on the need to focus on the external worldview, rather than the tactical maneuvering in the courtroom that such kinds of arguments inevitably devolve towards. It is a quite valid point, and among the reasons that we have long decried the trends towards creeping legalism that have lately come to dominate intelligence work. The bulk of a lawyer’s litigative activities – and therefore a disproportionate degree of their education and professional experiences – are dictated by entirely tactical considerations that apply nowhere else but within the limited framework of the legal system. Too often this is easily forgotten, to the detriment of the strategic picture – and the accuracy and veracity of analysis. We have written on these problems before, but to be frank we had rarely considered the myriad of ways in which – by borrowing from the older legal profession’s traditions in teaching basic logic and rhetoric – the intelligence academia may continue to contribute to these unhelpful trends of cognitive bias. Among these, of course, are the kinds of ludic fallacy identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The folks at Volokh Conspiracy take a different tack, arguing for greater consideration of interdependencies within factors under examination in the film’s fictional trial. This is also a very useful approach for discussions with students, many who likewise tend to view evidence in isolation. It is particularly appropriate when covering structured analysis techniques such as ACH – and one that rarely touched upon, if only due to the frequently too shallow examples offered to illustrate the methodology, which are unable to support a more robust discussion.

Westminster Wisdom rises in defense of the film, and illustrates the more important but also often overlooked value to the piece in the intelligence studies classroom – the discussion of uncertainty. The intelligence professional will always work within a framework of ambiguity, doubt, and frequently, deception. However, the role of intelligence is not merely to reach a lower standard of proof than that used in a criminal trial (or even the lesser civil threshold), as is commonly taught (and in particular, a tenant of faith within law enforcement intelligence). Rather, intelligence’s purpose is to provide accurate insights despite such uncertainty; and where absolute accuracy is not possible, to bound the space of uncertainties for the policymaker in a manner that supports informed decision-making.

In light of all of the foregoing, we continue to search for good alternatives to the film for use in the classroom. Our search is also driven by the simple fact that to the Millennial generation, the black and white format is very nearly entirely alien. It creates such a visceral negative reaction that the first ten to twenty minutes of the film are simply an orientation to the unfamiliar environment. The pace of the thing is also glacial by modern standards, and particularly so to minds attuned to rapid multi-tasking and immersive information environments. While one can make all the arguments one likes about the need for sustained single focus attention, their native preferences are indeed more suited for the kind of world in which they operate as intelligence professionals than the Industrial era conventions that black and white film represents.

The single set format, and the emphasis on argumentation, has however made it exceptionally difficult to find a substitute. Our best – but admittedly still imperfect – alternative has lately been the 1999 film Deterrence, which offered a President’s decision-making process in a nuclear crisis while snowed in at a small diner. Unfortunately, the film’s scenario is constructed around a fictionalized Iraqi dictatorship – which in the modern politicized climate often steers debate too far astray of the real purpose and into the debate over Operation Iraqi Freedom. It also pre-supposes a certain level of student knowledge regarding nuclear warfighting and mutually assured destruction strategy: something not always guaranteed in the post-Cold War cohort. This sometimes makes for quite interesting discussions, to say the least. These are the same problems that incidentally also led us to abandon using the old JMITC exercise that relied on the film version of Hunt for Red October as a notional scenario from which the students would develop practice analytical pieces. While, as a friend recently reminded us, that particular film ages very well as such things go, we recognize that writing intelligence on Soviet era ballistic missile submarines is an anachronism to which few students will respond well –and one that does not serve their real and current professional needs.

All in all, teaching intelligence with films – for as engaging as the technique might be for students bored with lecture – remains a difficult proposition. We hope that in time the development of newer tools for digital animation – and the kinds of interactive scenarios that new gaming engines permit – will render the question entirely moot. But the cultivation of young professional minds remains a terribly stubborn business, and one that is not frequently improved by new technologies. We do wish to see such improvements become effective, and preferably in the near future. But given that the same promises have been made since around the time black and white films first graced the big screen, we remain skeptical.


h/t Overlawyered

Epidemiological intelligence reconsidered

Some time ago, persistent virtual worlds made news for an unusual incident in which a plague spread widely through a massively multi-player fantasy game in an unanticipated fashion, due to the complexity of the system’s design. There was a great deal of speculation as the ramification of this event – some of it mirroring the longstanding discussions around self-replicating “gray goo” and other nanotechnological questions, some of it quite unique in its own right. The event even spawned serious scientific papers, and responses by other researchers.

The question of the potential utility of virtual worlds for examining epidemiological effects in simulation remains a fascinating area of study. It is a natural extension of other research attempting to track in a similar fashion the effects of viral ideas – memes – within simulated virtual populations for information operations / psychological operations studies. This is the sort of analysis which may dramatically alter the manner in which medical intelligence professionals approach their craft in the future. The watch desks of tomorrow, rather than being tied to a series of open source intelligence portals and medical information database feeds, might well also be linked to a shared situational awareness simulation, with the ability to rapidly generate scenario projections based on new reporting or analytical inference. Certainly, there has been enough cross-boundary interest in the problem that we expect to see surprising innovation in the near future. It is certainly long overdue given the need, especially in the face of recent exercises attempting to examine the impact of pandemic scenarios which were certainly less than robustly designed and executed.

In its own way, this is by no means a new problem. Among the most interesting books we ever had the pleasure to peruse on related subjects was Plagues, Poisons And Potions: Plague Spreading Conspiracies in the Western Alps c.1530-1640. We discovered this work once upon a time buried in the back shelves of the bookstore of the British Museum, and discovered it had a striking relevance for those interested in non-state actors’ motivations in biological terrorism / biological warfare incidents. The book is based largely on primary source records from Swiss city governments throughout the Savoy which were suffering through major disease outbreaks. A recurring series of cases are documented in which individuals deliberately attempted to spread disease to uninfected populations – motivated by cult conspiracy, simple hatred, and criminal profit. Given the evidence of other recent cases involving deliberate biological infection, it appears human nature remains little changed in nearly five hundred years.

We also note in a related vein the Swedes’ take on the potential dual use implications of some medical intelligence programs. While we differ with their analysis in that we are confident in the benign nature of US and allied programs, we would definitely see reason for concern in investments in such activities by some states (or their non-governmental organization counterparts) with proliferation interests.

Epidemiological intelligence remains a fascinating discipline in which the contributions of a number of different professions converge in a manner that is very rare in the community. There remains much ground for formal study to advance both the analytic tradecraft and the literature of the discipline, and perhaps to inspire similar interdisciplinary approaches in other areas of the profession.