The Intelligence-Policy Disconnect

Do the two tribes even speak the same language?

An essential skill for any foreign policy expert is skillfully digesting intelligence. My colleague at fp21, Gary Gomez—a long-time participant, scholar, and teacher of intelligence processes—has done some illuminating research about this topic. A startling finding undergirds Gary’s research: policymakers often ignore intelligence. I’m pleased to share another one of his articles here to deepen our collective understanding of this complex issue.

The Intelligence Policy Disconnect

By Gary Gomez

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The Intelligence–Policy Discourse Disconnect

Thirty years ago, the renowned intelligence scholar Mark Lowenthal captured the essence of the communication dynamic between the producers of intelligence (analysts) and the consumers of intelligence (policymakers):

“A major problem is that the producer-consumer relationship resembles that of two closely related tribes that believe, mistakenly, that they speak the same language and work in the same manner for agreed outcomes. Reality, when viewed from either perspective, suggest something wholly different. Indeed, one is often reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s quip about Britons and Americans being divided by a common tongue.”[1]

It is still true today.

This communication disconnect can degrade the utility of intelligence analysis in the eyes of policy staff, leading to an adverse effect on foreign policy. Indeed, supposed instances of intelligence being ignored might instead be occasions when intelligence offered insightful analysis in a voice or discourse unfamiliar or confusing to policymakers. This dynamic is not an anomaly to be tolerated but a dangerous disconnect to be mitigated. This article will explore the characteristics of the tribal tongue phenomenon and suggest a strategy to alleviate its negative effects on the intelligence-policy relationship.

The Discourse Disconnect

One path toward understanding how organizations perceive, communicate, and use information is through the science of linguistic discourse. Discourse refers to the verbal or written exchange of ideas and the expression of thoughts on a subject. It also organizes knowledge, ideas, or experiences grounded in language and its historical or institutional contexts. Additionally, it influences both organizational and individual perspectives. Discourse is not limited to individual words and sentences; it also represents a form of interaction.[2]

One example of the intelligence-policy discourse disconnect is the 1990 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) about the breakup of the post-Warsaw Pact Yugoslavia. In a review of the impact of the U.S. intelligence estimate about the impending breakup of Yugoslavia in 1990, Gregory Treverton and Rennah Miles concluded that even though the estimates were remarkably accurate in assessing the internal chaos that would result from the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1990.^[3] The estimate had no apparent effect on policy, and policymakers were seemingly caught off guard when the ethnic killing began.^[4] The NIE assessed that Yugoslavia would break up violently, there was little anyone could do to stop it,^[5] and the Serbs would try to incite uprisings by Serb minorities in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina with the goal of absorbing disputed territory.^[6] Treverton and Miles note that, although intelligence accurately assessed the situation, policymakers did not feel that the assessment provided options for mitigating or addressing the potential chaos. The NIE did not explore any policy options and offered a pessimistic outlook, concluding that the U.S. would have little capacity to preserve Yugoslav unity.^[7]

The different discoursal perspectives were apparent in how the analysts and policymakers perceived the situation. Intelligence analysts assessed the situation and wrote the estimate from the perspective of Slovenian and Croatian self-determination, which had been simmering since the end of World War I. Intelligence discourse was grounded in a deep historical perspective of the region and an ethic of avoiding policy options. However, policymakers interpreted the NIE within the framework of popular concepts, viewing Yugoslavia’s collapse through the lens of Cold War-era Soviet politics and global strategy.^[8] Policymaker discourse expected solutions-based advice relative to Soviet and Eastern Bloc Cold War behavior.

Similarly, a review by Richard A. Best Jr. of the U.S. intelligence leading up to the 2004 invasion of Iraq suggests that policy did not take into account warnings about post-invasion unrest.[9] One assessment, Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq, concluded that the viability of establishing a democracy in Iraq would rest on the stability and success of a new Iraqi government and would require that Iraqi democracy be perceived as developing from within rather than imposed by an outside power.[10] And yet, the intelligence suggested that a U.S.-led war against Iraq would precipitate anti-American riots,[11] and that Iraq would be “a deeply divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so.”[12]

Despite the clear implications of the intelligence community’s analysis, Best concludes, “it cannot be demonstrated, nor is it probably the case, that senior policymakers read the assessments and made a conscious choice to build policy around them.”[13] The intelligence discourse was based on generational ethnic divisions, historical political structures, and a recent brutal regime. The policymaker discourse focused on the cumulative threat of a continued Saddam Hussein regime and assumptions of natural gravitation towards liberal democracy.

Discourse Communities

The tribal tongues phenomenon associated with the intelligence-policy relationship is not unique. Other specialized groups that routinely interact can have divergent terms and outlooks. The concept of discourse community offers a clinical approach to viewing organizational relationships with definable features and attributes and how they might interact more constructively.

Discourse communities are groups that share common goals or purposes and employ established communication practices to achieve these objectives.[14] They can use highly technical terminology and community-specific abbreviations, shorthand, codes, and acronyms to facilitate efficient communication between experts. Unique discourse ultimately influences how each community perceives the world and information from outside sources.

For example, the military and diplomatic communities have common expressions that convey how they conduct business and reflect a broader perspective on how they perceive the world. Each has its distinct mission, business language, and processes. Diplomacy employs terms such as "engage in constructive dialogue" and "we are committed to finding a mutually agreeable solution." At the same time, the military uses terms like "engage the target" and “commit additional forces.” Engage and commit are commonly used terms in both diplomatic and military communities. However, they mean something different to each.

Likewise, the lexicon of intelligence analysts can frustrate policymakers. Whereas policymakers seek quick, straightforward answers with high levels of certainty, intelligence analysis is often inconclusive, ambiguous, or contradictory.[15] To convey uncertainty and the possibility of various outcomes, intelligence reports frequently use phrases and words like ‘if/then,’ ‘on the one hand/on the other hand,’ ‘perhaps,’ ‘although,’ ‘however,’ and ‘maybe.’ Policymakers, in contrast, sometimes derisively refer to these as “weasel words” – intentionally vague or even cowardly. Lowenthal suggests that these constructions can create “octopuses” of sentences in which policymakers interpret expressions of uncertainty as pusillanimity on the part of intelligence analysts. Policymakers may also conclude that intelligence cannot clearly communicate the causes and nature of the uncertainty and ambiguity they are so fond of citing, ultimately alienating the policymaker audience.[16]

Additionally, intelligence analysis is often communicated in a detached, almost mathematical structure to convey objectivity, which can conflict with the concepts, metaphors, and rules of logic that policymakers can easily understand and apply in policy deliberations.^[17] This can contribute to the devaluation of intelligence analysis within the policy process.

Intelligence and policy are distinct discourse communities, each with its own daily goals, perspectives, and processes that reflect ordinary business interactions. They have different organizational worldviews and established vernacular. When presented with identical words, different perspectives and information may be interpreted. The intelligence discourse community communicates in terms of verifiable facts, knowledge transfer, and uncertainty. Meanwhile, a policy discourse community articulates in terms of goals, absolutes, and advocacy.

Narrowing the Discourse Gap

Intelligence and policy must improve their ability to communicate across the divide. Linguistics research suggests that if the communities spend more time in a common linguistic space at a macro level, they will learn to understand one another’s language better.[18]

An example of a macro-level venue is an intelligence-policy working group. The most prominent intelligence-policy working group is the National Security Council. This is a standing, high-level group that includes representatives from across the policy-intelligence spectrum. Other common models exist, such as temporary inter-agency working groups established to address a specific issue, country, or crisis. Examples include regional conflicts, hostages held by terrorists, and treaty or trade negotiations. Such working groups create what is known as a shared discourse community that enhances communication between different groups.[19] These highly-integrated forms of interaction allow for mutual understanding through common experiences, including developing shared mental models that support clear communication.[20] Policy staff can trust that intelligence clearly understands their policy goals and daily information needs in these environments. Intelligence assessments are seamlessly integrated into the mental models of policy staff and are constant components of an iterative policy formulation process. These venues facilitate ongoing discussions about intelligence sources and policy concerns, fostering a shared understanding of questions and answers that lead to the co-construction of knowledge.[21]

Such groups, however, provide only an incomplete solution to this discourse disconnect. Few formal working groups exist, and most are temporary, whereas the vast majority of interactions between intelligence and policy occur at the working level. As the interaction between intelligence and policy representatives proceeds deeper into each bureaucracy and away from venues like working groups, intelligence and policy's unique social and communication aspects become more pronounced and impactful.[22]

Thus, a new paradigm of sustained interaction between the producers of knowledge (intelligence analysts) and consumers of knowledge (policy staff) would improve the discoursal relationship between the two.[23]

The intelligence scholars Josh Kerbel and Anthony Olcott propose a concept that would establish a new framework for a sustained, shared discourse community governing routine interactions between intelligence and policy. They suggest that the intelligence community shift from analyzing for policymakers to ‘synthesizing’ with them, moving from a product-based relationship to a process-based one.

This offers an important contrast to the existing model. The current intelligence-policy paradigm is one in which intelligence analysts are intentionally kept at a distance from policymakers to maintain their analytical objectivity and prevent politicization. The result of this model is a product-focused process where intelligence is only an intermittent and distant contributor to the policy process – intelligence memos are transmitted across the transom with little expectation of feedback. However, this decades-old model has brought into question the relevance of intelligence analysis that is developed intellectually separated from the policymaker.[24]

Kerbel and Olcott envision a new relationship whereby intelligence and policy reimagined themselves in a “client-synthesist” relationship. This synthesis approach would create a series of iterative loops in which both sides would get smarter by making knowledge connections.[25] This framework establishes a virtual shared discourse community where intelligence becomes an integral component of the policy decision-making loop rather than an external, part-time participant. The relationship becomes knowledge-based and focused on inquiry. The synthesist approach is characterized by sustained engagement and information exchange, environments notably different from receiving detached context-free analysis through periodic engagement. Through this approach, both parties continue to converse internally and externally in their own tongues.

This client-synthesis structure would support a discourse in which policymakers engage with intelligence, allowing a free expression of policy goals while intelligence adheres to its rigorous ethic of objective analysis. For example, through ongoing conversation, policy staff can become better informed about the historical context of particular analytic judgments. If a policymaker is uncertain about how to respond to an emerging threat identified by analysts, the intelligence analysts might quickly provide solutions support to policymakers with opportunity analysis that assesses how U.S. interests are affected by evolving circumstances and more precisely reflects the complex array of interests that policymakers are trying to juggle[26], and identifies opportunities or vulnerabilities that the U.S. can exploit to advance a policy. This sort of interaction is much harder under the existing model.

A new client-service synthesis paradigm could also enhance policymakers' trust in the intelligence analysis.[27] For policymakers, the issue is often not whether information is “objectively true” but more about how information is of value. In this client-service relationship, the policy perspective shifts from trusting data to trusting the service provider – the analyst. Analysts earn policymakers' trust when information and analysis are provided in context to understand how actions, events, and actors might intersect and interact to affect outcomes.

Conclusion

The tribal tongues phenomenon has been a well-known and impactful characteristic of the intelligence-policy relationship for decades. It has been accepted as a feature of the interaction between the two that has lessened the value of intelligence analysis to foreign policy. As Lowenthal suggests, certain aspects of the communication gap between intelligence and policy will never be bridged.[28] However, leveraging research in the social sciences can provide a clear understanding of the nature of this dynamic and provide methods to improve interaction. Approaching the intelligence-policy interaction through a discourse lens helps demystify the relationship and provides a framework for discovering modalities that enhance communication and mutual understanding.

Gary Gomez has over 20 years of experience in the U.S. intelligence community, in government, and as a consultant, working with DIA, NRO, NGA, DARPA, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. He also served as a Special Agent with the NCIS, working in counterintelligence and executive protection. Gary is a published author on intelligence, airpower, and national security technology. He has taught intelligence studies for five years, and his research focuses on processes associated with intelligence support to foreign policy.

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[1] Mark Lowenthal, “Tribal Tongues: Intelligence Consumers, Intelligence Producers.” in The Domestic Sources of American Foreign Policy, 2^nd ed. Eugene R. Wittkopf (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), 265.

[2] Teun A. van Dijk, News as Discourse, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998, 29.

[3] Gregory Treverton and Renanah Miles, “Unheeded Warning of War: Why Policymakers Ignored the 1990 Yugoslavia Estimate,” CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, October 2015, 13.

[4] Treverton and Miles 2015, “Unheeded Warning,”1.

[5] Treverton and Miles, 2015, “Unheeded Warning,”13.

[6] Treverton and Miles, 2015, “Unheeded Warning,”13.

[7] Treverton and Miles, 2015, “Unheeded Warning,”14.

[8] Treverton and Miles 2015, “Unheeded Warning,”4.

[9] Richard A. Best Jr, “What the Intelligence Community Got Right About Iraq,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 23, no. 3 (2008) 289-302.

[10] Best, “What the Intelligence Community Got Right,” 291.

[11] Best, “What the Intelligence Community Got Right,” 290.

[12] Best, “What the Intelligence Community Got Right,” 292-293.

[13] Best, “What the Intelligence Community Got Right,” 298-299.

[14] Erik Borg, “Discourse community,” ELT Journal vol. 57, no. 4 (2003), 398.

[15] Harry Jones, “Policymaking as discourse: a review of recent knowledge-to-policy literature,” Joint IKM Emergent – ODI Working Paper No. 5 (August 2009), 24.

[16] Lowenthal, “Tribal Tongues,” 269.

[17] Jones, “Policy making as discourse”, 14.

[18] van Dijk, News as Discourse, 26.

[19] J. M. Swales, “Reflections on the concept of discourse community”, ASp [Online], 69 (2016), accessed at http://asp.revues.org/4774; DOI:10.4000/asp.4774, and Jones, “Policymaking as discourse,” 24.

[20] van Dijk, News as Discourse, 107.

[21] Jones, “Policymaking as discourse,” 25-26.

[22] van Dijk, News as Discourse, 27.

[23] Gunilla Eriksson, “A theoretical reframing of the intelligence-policy relation,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 33, no. 4 (2018), 554.

[24] Gary Gomez, “Intelligence and Policymaking: The Opportunity for a More Collaborative Approach,”

September 18, 2023, fp21, https://www.fp21.org/publications/intelligence-and-policymaking.

[25] Josh Kerbel and Anthony Olcott, “Synthesizing with Clients, Not Analyzing for Customers,” Studies in Intelligence vol. 54, no. 4 (2010), 22.

[26] Fulton T. Armstrong, “Ways to Make Analysis Relevant but Not Prescriptive,” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 46, no. 3 (2002).

[27] Kerbel and Olcott, “Synthesizing with Clients,” 18.

[28] Lowenthal, “Tribal Tongues,” 277.