Putting the "Intelligence" back into U.S. Intelligence

From RapidRecon: Issues with Intelligence Analysis:

...the delineation point when we stopped attempting to do analysis and started to repackage intelligence reporting was shortly after Saddam’s regime fell to US and allied forces and it was noted that the road to Baghdad was not paved with artillery shells full of nerve agent. The fact that US intelligence analysts did their job – best conclusions drawn from incomplete, insufficient and occasionally inaccurate information – is lost in the midst of a grand blame-game. The response is typical bureaucratic short-sightedness mixed with a large dose of management philosophy of the moment: as long as we stick to re-packaging “facts” we can avoid being called “failures” in the future.

The fundamental problem of course is that you can train monkeys to sort documents and stack them into neat piles; humans have more highly developed gray cells and should be applying them accordingly.

Cited Rand report available for free from here.