Intel gathering

Intelligence Community Failures: Hidden Behind a Cloak of Secrecy

Turkey’s recent coup attempt epitomizes the immediate need to reform intelligence community tradecraft. Failures to predict events like the Arab Spring, Iran’s Green Revolution, the overthrow of Egyptian President Morsi, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are becoming the new norm. This is the result of systemic problems that prevent the intelligence community from being able to identify, forecast, and prevent social unrest, violence, and budding conflicts, which are attributed to three basic factors:

(1) Failure to effectively integrate rapidly changing, population-centric dynamics across the entire intelligence cycle

(2) Dependence on technical means for collection and intelligence production

(3) Internally-focused culture that requires classified information to validate analysis...