Policy Lessons from Iraq on Managing Uncertainty in Intelligence Assessment: Why the Strategic/Tactical Distinction Matters

This paper focuses on how pre-existing policy priorities and goals among policy elites in the US, UK, and Australia encouraged the blurring of strategic and tactical intelligence assessment as a mechanism for legitimising the Iraq invasion. Through the selective use and interpretation of sometimes vague or unsubstantiated tactical and technical intelligence and the many uncertainties it contained, proponents of the war were able to undermine existing strategic assessments on Iraq by introducing a range of possible, but largely unsubstantiated, threat scenarios as justification for military action. The paper argues that in so far as intelligence reforms are needed, they should be focused primarily on the interface between analysis and policy making, and the issue of how policy makers interpret and understand the uncertainties that intelligence assessments necessarily contain.     

Between Franks and Butler: British Intelligence Lessons from the Gulf War

Lessons for the intelligence community were publicly identified in a 1983 report by Lord Franks and a 2004 report by Lord Butler. However, little is known of the lessons learned during the 20 years between the two. This article draws upon two newly released, previously classified, documents which examine British intelligence lessons from the 1990–91 Gulf War. It provides a previously untold account of the crisis, exclusively from a British intelligence perspective, and presents new evidence that intersects across many intelligence debates. This article also challenges whether identified lessons remained learned and begins to question the wider learning process within the intelligence community.     

Intelligence Learning and Adaptation: Lessons from Counterinsurgency Wars

Critics of US intelligence focus extensively on the alleged inability and unwillingness of intelligence agencies to learn and adapt. Analysis of eight counterinsurgency wars suggests instead that external factors largely influence the intelligence-related performance of whole governments, including organizational structures, unity of effort and command, adequacy of resources, and leadership quality. Assessment of the performance of US intelligence since 9/11 indicates that the same variables influence the performance of US intelligence, suggesting that the US intelligence reform debate focuses too narrowly and on the wrong factors.     

The Reckoning: Official Inquiries and the Iraq War

The moral and political reverberations of the Iraq War of 2003 are still being felt all over the world. In the belligerent democracies of the West, official inquiries of all kinds and conditions have probed and exposed the nature of government, the reflexes of the national security state, and, most extraordinarily, the sensitive relations between rulers and intelligencers. For all parties the consequences have been severe. Focusing on Britain, and especially on the inquiries led by Lord Hutton and Lord Butler - an odd couple but a revelatory combination - this article takes stock of the reckoning.     

Terrorism,Intelligence and Law Enforcement: Learning the Right Lessons

More than a generation ago, in the wake of investigations by the US Congress into improprieties carried out by US intelligence agencies, the United States, in effect, raised the wall between intelligence and law enforcement in order to protect the liberties of Americans. For similar reasons, its Cold War institutions enshrined distinctions between foreign and domestic, and public and private. The CIA was and is, for instance, enjoined from law enforcement and domestic activity.

Those distinctions served the country tolerably well during the Cold War but set it up to fail on September 11. Now, a rethinking of them is underway, as the balance between security and liberty is re-struck. It is imperative, though, to learn the right lessons on September 11. That means thinking carefully and proceeding slowly as changes are made. It also means carefully evaluating the effects of proposed changes, especially to avoid ‘pain for no gain’ measures that do inconvenience people, or even affect their liberties, for little or no gain in the war on terrorism.