What if Sherman Kent Was Wrong?

Re-examining the Intelligence Debate of 1949

There’s little the United States intelligence community holds more sacred than the teachings of Sherman Kent. Widely considered the “father” of American intelligence, his stamp upon the profession is indelible. His name is practically synonymous with both the craft of analysis and the standard model of intelligence-policy relations. His book Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy remains “the text by which succeeding generations of fledgling analysts [are] schooled, a book that studs the footnotes of those that followed.”

But what if he was wrong?

What if the assumptions Kent’s model of intelligence was built upon are no longer sound? What if his emphasis on academic objectivity has done more to diminish the influence of intelligence than to enhance it? What if his positivist view of the world, in which effect follows cause and the future can be reasonably forecasted, is mistaken? What if his solution to inevitable intelligence failure — more collection — has left the intelligence community struggling to keep its head above water in a veritable ocean of data?

Nothing lasts forever, and models that were once sound can become harmful when conditions change. Kent’s approach, which left intelligence officers artificially removed from…