A world of sound-bite news and increasingly compressed attention spans is great for adventurers. They find themselves unfettered by having their ideas and initiatives gauged by results. For those of us who inhabit a more responsible world that obliges us to pay for results and live with consequences, this situation is more curse than blessing. Consider the serial misfires of national intelligence that have informed debates on America's security. They hardly inspire confidence.
Exhibit 1: As expressed by the 9/11 Commission, a constipated intelligence bureaucracy failed to connect detectable dots that painted a pointillist picture of the impending 9/11 attacks. Ten years later, the national intelligence apparat superimposes new organs and jargon. Fusion centers abound in an intelligence sharing enterprise -- structures from which occupants of old silos now peer at each other and occasionally wave while perpetuating old resentments and insularity. How do we react to the original criticisms? Do we overhaul or purge failed functions and entities? No, we enlarge them and invite more participants onto the playing field, so as to diffuse accountability and blame next time. The net result routinely surfaces in pre-holiday warnings about vague, unverified, "possible" terrorist threats. What value do such trite, nonspecific alerts offer? To the public, none. To their purveyors, however, they offer the comforting insulation of being able to answer future criticisms with, "You can't accuse us of not warning our citizens."
Exhibit 2: CIA Director Tenet, evoking a National Intelligence Estimate calling on the best analytical minds and supporting data, told the President that it was a slam dunk that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. What consequences attached to him and his analysts for inaccuracy? None, or none to rival the public backlash against the President who relied on these experts.
Exhibit 3: A 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, again calling on the best intelligence and great minds of intelligence analysts, concluded that Iran was not pursuing the path of developing nuclear weapons. Today, with Iran on the brink of agonizing over the wording of its press release to announce entry into the province of global nuclear weapons bearers, that 2007 analysis appears more than a little flawed. After all, arriving at this capability is a marathon, not a sprint. Are there any consequences for missing the mark on such an important assessment, however? No, unless the consequences are latent, classified, unmuttered -- for reasons of national security. Indeed.
Hypothesis: Hit-and-miss strategies are unacceptable to business and alien to personal responsibility. Your business plan wins over no investors if the best you can offer is to try and then see what happens. Nor can you keep your house, cars, and recreational equipment if you promise to pay for them but don't quite manage to actually meet your obligations consistently. Why? Somebody on the other end, whose risk and livelihood are tied to these investments, notices and gauges viability. Constantly. Unrelentingly. Only in the large bureaucratic sanctuaries of government-supported experts does it appear that promises outweigh results. Attention spans there are short, and there are no readily identifiable consequences for serial failures. So, getting it wrong becomes not only commonplace. It threatens to become a default setting. Some things won't change until they have to change, it seems, particularly where mediocrity reigns. Are these factors conspiring to give mediocre intelligence a bad name? The next debacle will tell us more than the next analytical intelligence estimate.
Hopeful Sign
Then again ... battlefield commanders have certainly managed to harness tactical intelligence to produce results, as might concede the late bin Laden and any number of drone targets. Their metrics aren't so vague or nuanced, however. Striking the target is what counts. All else is effort, not progress. Is this lesson communicable, one wonders?
-- Nick Catrantzos
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Nick Catrantzos + Tom Goff
- All Secure
- NICK CATRANTZOS is the lead author of the All Secure website and is the emeritus security director for a large public organization. He has also managed security aspects of corporate takeovers, response to international hostage situations, and finding and keeping secrets. He has been board certified in security management, licensed as a private investigator, and certified as an incident commander. He worked as a case officer for a discreet branch of public service. He protected stealth technology at Lockheed and, later, as a consulting security director for both Kroll and Control Risks, he assisted executives with workplace violence cases and with protecting VIPs and critical assets globally in volatile areas. Nick's partner, TOM GOFF, was a captain in the Military Police Corps, U.S. Army Reserve and has a law degree from the University of California at Davis. He is a former reporter for Fortune Magazine, was senior editor at New York Magazine and Esquire, and has provided crisis and communications counsel to senior executives at Fortune 500 companies, including Lockheed, ARCO, Microsoft, Nissan, and Sony Pictures.