Caracristi Monographs
Caracristi Monographs are in-depth academic research on intelligence topics. Often, but not always, these works are authored by our Research Fellows.
Channeling Cassandra Humanitarian Intelligence and Decisionmaking in the Age of Complexity
Dennis King, US Department of State
Improving the analysis and intelligence techniques that inform humanitarian response, programming and policy decision making can save lives, reduce human suffering, and restore the security and the livelihoods of disaster and crisis-affected populations. Yet, the international humanitarian community, as well as the Intelligence Community, has undervalued the application of analytic intelligence techniques in humanitarian response, programming, and policymaking. This monograph examines the complexities and challenges that humanitarian organizations and personnel face when deciding how to respond to, mitigate, or prevent the catastrophic aftereffects of natural disasters and conflict emergencies. It examines decisions at the response, programming, and policy levels, as well as the techniques and technologies used for analysis.
Look or Leap? Unpacking Risk Propensity in Intelligence Professionals
CDR Kelly Tongol, US Coast Guard
Research on the topic of Intelligence Community (IC) workforce behaviors has long overlooked the potential influence of risk propensity in IC professionals. Risk propensity is defined as one’s natural tendency or willingness to take risks, also called risk orientation or risk attitude. Decades of research indicate risk propensity is a relatively stable trait providing insight into multiple behaviors. The private sector has realized how risk propensity within the workforce influences business operations and is beginning to employ risk psychology to its advantage. This Research Monograph draws from the risk psychology and cognitive heuristics literature and uses a mixed-method approach to examine risk propensity in intelligence professionals.
The Warning Renaissance: Advancing the Art and Science of Warning in the US Intelligence Community and Beyond
Johnathan Proctor
Joint Chiefs of Staff Directorate
for Intelligence (JS J2)
While warning has been written about for decades, surprisingly little consensus exists within the Intelligence Community (IC) about how to Defne and describe it. The use of terms such as strategic, operational, tactical, political, threat, and incident warning occurs across the scholarly and practitioner literature, often contradicting one another. Furthermore, within the field of intelligence studies, warning lacks an underlying theory of practice. This National Intelligence University (NIU) Research Monograph addresses the gap in this field by applying a data-driven research methodology to understand warning and then establish a foundational theory of warning through a two-step process. First, it employs grounded theory to explore the existing literature and practitioner perspectives on warning to identify seven foundational principles of warning.
Assessing the Global War on Terror: Measuring the Impact of U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization Designation on Salafi Jihadis Group Behavior
Amy Sturm
U.S. counterterrorism (CT) operations have prevented another attack on the scale of 9/11 but have they been truly effective? Academic and operational evaluations of the effectiveness of core CT tools—particularly foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designation—have not carefully compared terrorist groups’ activities before and after designation. To fill this gap, this study measures the effectiveness of FTO designation and designation-associated activities on Salafi jihadist terrorist organizations, specifically how and where effects were achieved. Using publicly available, national-level data from 2001 to 2018, this research takes a quantitative and qualitative mixed methods approach to characterizing the impact of FTO designation on Salafi jihadist terrorist groups’ behavior over time. The quantitative portion examines the impact of designation across three primary dependent variable behavior categories: number of groups/membership, number of attacks/lethality, and targeting. The qualitative portion looks at the range of possible outcomes for group attack behavior after designation to determine which, if any, designation-associated activities drove group outcomes.
The Devil You Don’t Know: The Need for Joint Human-AI Decisionmaking Outcomes Assessments for Human-in-the-Loop AI Models
Stephen Hood, Ph.D.
People have a love-hate relationship with artificial intelligence (AI) agents that must be addressed to successfully implement human-AI teams. On the one hand, AI agents have demonstrated the potential to improve the accuracy and speed of human decisionmaking. On the other hand, the agents are known as “black boxes” that produce recommendations based on inputs and processes that are not clear to end users and that have been shown to alter the decisions these end users might otherwise have made. Existing research on this topic focuses on two areas: identifying factors in the human-machine relationship that influence decisionmaking and identifying strategies to improve the joint decisionmaking environment. This NIU Research Monograph uses an empirical approach to explore the need to account for the human element in developing a constructive human-AI relationship. Specifically, this work contributes to the field of human-AI interaction in two ways.
Perceptions of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning in the Intelligence Community A Systematic Review of the Literature
Adrian Wolfberg, Ph.D.
Many voices have expressed their concerns about the state of artificial intelligence (machine learning) in the U.S. Intelligence Community. This study uses a systematic review methodology to collect, analyze, and synthesize the reasons for these concerns, the problems raised, and the solutions offered. A systematic review aims to provide an evidence-based management approach to identify what is known about a topic and provide practitioners with information to decide what action to take in the future. Using a systematic review methodology, this study appears to be the first of its kind and captures a holistic understanding of issues related to artificial intelligence in the Intelligence Community. The theory of organizational attention is used as a theoretical lens because the findings are very complex regarding the breadth and depth of the problems raised and the solutions offered.
In Pursuit of Insight The Everyday Work of Intelligence Analysts Who Solve Real World Novel Problems
Adrian Wolfberg, Ph.D.
The Intelligence Community (IC) has identified insight as a desirable outcome of its intelligence assessments, but the community does not understand the insight process well enough to consistently achieve such an outcome. This gap of knowledge places intelligence analysts and managers in a double bind and reduces their ability and motivation to comply with policymakers’ calls for insightful assessments. Theoretically, insight and creativity have been studied under very specific conditions: in controlled laboratory experiments, interviews,or historical reviews of either individuals who work in full-time creative positions that produce recognized creative outcomes, like Nobel Prize winners, or those who experience critical incidents. Little, if any, research has considered professionals not in full-time creative positions—e.g., intelligence analysts who apply analytical knowledge—who periodically are insightful.