[IP] more on Thinking the unthinkable, predicting the unpredictable
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Hitchens, Ralph" <Ralph.Hitchens@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: September 19, 2005 11:20:52 AM EDT
To: "'dave@xxxxxxxxxx'" <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [IP] Thinking the unthinkable, predicting the unpredictable
Dave, for IP if you like.
Richard Wiggins asks exactly the right question. In the Intelligence
Community, inductive reasoning dominates -- those in possession of
the most facts, who have "sipped from the tsunami" of all-source
information, dominate the interagency discussions where policy
support is hammered out. They write the PDBs. But as we all saw in
the declassified PDB of August 6th, 2001, it's not enough to put a
lot of barely-connected facts out there nothing more than with a
vague, nonspecific conclusion. A lead paragraph announcing that Bin
Ladin has been planning to attack the US for more than four years
will not prompt the President to change his vacation plans.
Deductive reasoning in the form of scenario-based forecasting is not
very much in evidence within the IC. We really do need a "Red Team"
or, as Wiggins suggests, a "Department of Thinking Like Terrorists."
Ralph Hitchens
-----Original Message-----
<snip>
Mr. Bray wants to confine any predictions of 9/11 type scenarios to
obscure government reports and Tom Clancy.
It is astonishing that we are having this discussion. We have an
existence proof! 9/11 did happen. It's therefore foolish on its
face to say that "No one could have predicted this."
We don't need to debate whether anyone could have predicted using
planes as missiles. Al Qaeda not only predicted it; they conceived
it, they planned it, and they executed it. Bray's argument implies
that a desperately angry band in Afghanistan can out-think the best
and the brightest in U.S. intelligence and defense.
Of course we cannot predict every possible disaster, or, more to the
point, we can't predict which of many possible disasters may hit next.
But do we have a "Department of Thinking Like Terrorists" that is at
least thinking through the scenarios?
What else is someone plotting that we cannot predict?
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