Intelligence Cycle Management - Representative Failures in Exercising The Cycle

Representative Failures in Exercising The Cycle

Any circular cycle is as weak as its weakest component. At one time or another, a national or organizational intelligence process has broken down, thus causing failure in the cycle.

Each of the four main categories has, in different countries and at different times, failed terribly. Policymakers have denied the services direction to work on critical matters. Intelligence services have failed to collect critical information. The services have analyzed data incorrectly. There have been failures to disseminate intelligence quickly enough, or to the right decisionmakers.

There have been failures to protect the intelligence process itself from opposing intelligence services.

A major problem, in several aspects of the enhanced cycle, is stovepiping. In the traditional intelligence use of the term, stovepiping keeps the output of different collection systems separated from one another. This has several negative effects. First, it prevents one discipline from cross-checking another. In World War II, both sides doubled clandestine agents and used them to send disinformation back to their own countries (Masterman 1972). While the content of the human intelligence (HUMINT) they sent might seem reasonable, direction finding, a discipline of signals intelligence (SIGINT) might have shown they were transmitting from Gestapo or MI5 headquarters. Measurement and signature analysis (MASINT) on the style of their radio procedure could have indicated that an impostor, or perhaps the real agent but under duress, was sending.

Second, a newer usage of stovepiping is bypassing the regular analysis of raw intelligence, and sending only raw intelligence that supports a particular position to the highest national leadership.