It’s no exaggeration to say that America’s involvement in Afghanistan was the work of a lifetime. For many of those my age and younger who work in national security, it’s been literally our entire careers. To see that work crumble to dust and turn to ash so quickly is bitter…
Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant caused a stir when giving testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, he said the “Department of Defense’s culture is a threat to national security.” Grant went on to describe that culture as one simultaneously overconfident and risk-averse, whose entrenched habits, values, and practices stifle…
U.S. Spy Agencies Must Adapt to an Open-Source World
For nearly three-quarters of a century, the United States intelligence community has supplied American military and political leaders with information and analysis intended to help them make better decisions about critical national security concerns. During the Cold War — when the United States and the Soviet Union went to extraordinary…
Five Traits to Cultivate
People ask me, every now and again, to give them a list of the top methods “good” intelligence analysts should use, or what subjects are most important for an aspirant analyst to study. The truth, however, is that there are no perfect methods to use or universal subjects. Intelligence analysis…
Agencies Must Adapt, or Risk Losing the Future
It’s often said that government work isn’t glamorous. But pre-pandemic government work in the national security realm was at least one step beyond. Back in the before times, tens of thousands of national security employees — both civil servants and their much…
American Strategy Needs to be Thawed Out
I hear a lot of people these days declaring 21st-century competition with China a new “Cold War.” …
Americans Must Learn Again to Make the Future, Not Fear It
For some, the future is terra incognita, foreign land that we cannot know until we arrive there — or rather, until it arrives here. But that’s not quite right, is it? …
Growing Competition and an Abundance of Information Negates the IC’s Founding Value Proposition
The U.S Intelligence Community needs a new business model, one that’s better suited for an era inundated with useful information and characterized by the demand for radical transparency. The next generation of national security leaders will, quite simply, expect more — more personalization, more collaboration, and more convenience.
Intelligence officers…
How to Think About the Future, Part III
“The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed. ― William Gibson
In the introduction to this series, I described how the future is created by a continuous interplay between forces of continuity and forces of change. ‘Forces’ may sound mysterious, but that’s really just a word I…
How to Think About the Future, Part II
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” ― Isaac Asimov
We all make assumptions.
We do so automatically, even unconsciously. Assumptions are the premises that we hold to be true, often without much evidence. Moreover…
