![]() Other versions of the meeting agree that the president was given something like this range of probabilities, and that he struggled to interpret what this meant. In a key discussion that took place in March, for instance, the president convened several advisors to lay out the uncertainty about bin Laden’s location as clearly as possible….The CIA team leader assigned to the pursuit of bin Laden assessed those chances to be as high as 95 per cent, Deputy Director of Intelligence Michael Morell offered a figure of 60 per cent, and most people seemed to place their confidence level at about 80 per cent though some were as low as 40 or even 30 per cent. This question pervaded roughly 40 intelligence reviews and several meetings between President Obama and his top officials. Throughout Spring 2011, intelligence analysts and officials debated the chances that Osama bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Consider Friedman & Zeckhauser’s ( 2015, pp.77–78) account of deliberations preceding the ‘kill bin Laden’ operation: A prominent theme of this literature is improving probability estimation and communication and mitigating the type of decision-making biases identified by Tversky & Kahneman ( 1974). To make a start on such a research program, we focus on the emerging scholarship concerned with improving decision-making under risk and uncertainty within intelligence agencies, especially applications of behavioural decision theory. There is wide scope for the application of Austrian concepts in intelligence and counterintelligence. Hayek ( 1945) famously pointed out the function of institutions as communication mechanisms. The aggregation and dissemination of dispersed information has, of course, been a central theme in Austrian economics. But if we were to use price theory to evaluate non-price institutions, we would run up against serious limitations. In many respects then, it seems quite reasonable to speak of a market for intelligence and, from there, it seems but a small step to apply the straightforward economics of supply and demand to the intelligence product, its producers, and its consumers. And the ebb and flow of resource allocations to and within intelligence agencies are made in response to signals of various kinds. The institutional structures of intelligence networks are not dissimilar to the evolved routines that guide market participants and the day-to-day operations of all sophisticated organisations. The agencies themselves speak of ‘intelligence product’ and its ‘consumers’. ![]() After all, the acquisition and utilisation of information against one’s enemies involves multiple transactions, many of which have a monetary dimension. It might be said that intelligence agencies create the market for intelligence. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one-Donald Rumsfeld. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don’t know we don’t know. We also know there are known unknowns that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns there are things we know we know. Ultimately, those agencies that recognise the implications of intelligence agencies as non-price institutions and adapt their decision-making processes may find that they have the upper hand over their rivals. And governments have no price signals to moderate their appetites for the intelligence product. Intelligence agencies have no price signals to help them determine how much intelligence to produce. ![]() We conclude that the future strategic value of intelligence analysis is located beyond information acquisition, however fast and however vast. We explain how Austrian concepts can complement efforts to improve intelligence decision-making. From such a perspective, certain perennial challenges in intelligence and counterintelligence appear resolvable when in fact they are not, at least not when approached from the usual direction. Decision theory, both orthodox and behavioural, depicts decision rather narrowly as a prioritisation task undertaken within a delineated problem space where the probabilities “sum to one”. Such an undertaking is essentially lacking without the Austrian school’s concepts of knowledge, discovery, (entrepreneurial) judgement, ignorance, rational calculation and, more generally, its analysis of human action in the face of true uncertainty. Intelligence scholars are drawing on behavioural decision theory to improve decision-making under risk and uncertainty in intelligence and counterintelligence.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |