Why don’t political scientists study intelligence as part of other issues? That is a longer post for a different day and the subject of a paper that I currently have under review at a journal. For today, though, I am interested in the potential for politicization of intelligence processes.
This is in the news again. A few months ago a news story caught my eye about the fact that intelligence analysts at CENTCOM were being asked to change their assessments about ISIS (A good recap of the controversy is here). The story is in the news again after the Paris attacks and the new conflagration that is occurring in Syria presently.
Analysts assert that they were asked to tone down assessments that the Islamic State was growing in strength despite the coalition actions against them.
Among the complaints is that after the U.S. air campaign started in August 2014, the metrics to measure progress changed. They were modified to use measures such as the number of sorties and body counts -- a metric not used since the Vietnam War -- to paint a more positive picture.
Critics say this "activity-based approach" to tracking the effectiveness of strikes does not paint a comprehensive picture of whether ISIS is being degraded and contained.
President Obama has responded to the allegations and said that he doesn't think that the White House has been kept in the dark about the nature of ISIS, and that the administration didn't want intelligence "shaded by politics."
Whether or not President Obama was directly involved in ordering intelligence to be "softened politically" is not the question. The question is how any president can expect to get unvarnished intelligence when the incentives are built into the system to give information to the boss that things are going well.
In a recent book, Garthoff (2015)[1] explores the relationship between Soviet Leaders and Intelligence. One of the key points of his book is that Soviet leaders relied on their own conceptions of the main adversary (the US) in evaluating intelligence. Even if a system exists to funnel "pure intelligence" to a leader, his or her particular lens on the world will always affect the interpretation, and subsequent decisions based on that intelligence. One of the fundamental questions about foreign policy is whether or not states behave as rational actors. This depends on whether or not individuals act rationally. Theories of satisficing, of using heuristics to make decisions rather than carefully exploring all options helps us to understand behavior quite well. If we truly want to understand how intelligence works, we need to understand not only the processes by which it is produced, but the processes by which it is consumed.
In the case of the CENTCOM reports, if the President was given access to the raw intelligence, it is unlikely that the doctored reports made that much difference in national-level decision making. However, having reports that show success may change the calculus at the operational level, leading to poor strategic outcomes.
One of the other lessons from Garthoff was that Soviet leaders could not rely on intelligence assessment from the KGB and GRU precisely because those organizations were expressly ideological and their assessments were not objective enough to provide clear guidance for decision-making. If the US Intelligence Community (IC) becomes similarly politicized it will lead to marginalization of that government function.
From a bureaucratic survival perspective, then, it is is probably in the best interest of the IC to be (or at least appear to be) politically neutral and ideology free. The short-term gains in political favor will lead to long-term decline in the political power of the institution.
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[1] Garthoff, Raymond. 2015. Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War. Georgetown University Press.
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