more on Thinking the unthinkable, predicting the unpredictable

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Hitchens, Ralph" <Ralph.Hitchens () hq doe gov>
Date: September 19, 2005 11:20:52 AM EDT
To: "'dave () farber net'" <dave () farber net>
Subject: RE: [IP] Thinking the unthinkable, predicting the unpredictable


Dave, for IP if you like.

Richard Wiggins asks exactly the right question.  In the Intelligence  
Community, inductive reasoning dominates -- those in possession of  
the most facts, who have "sipped from the tsunami" of all-source  
information, dominate the interagency discussions where policy  
support is hammered out.  They write the PDBs.  But as we all saw in  
the declassified PDB of August 6th, 2001, it's not enough to put a  
lot of barely-connected facts out there nothing more than with a  
vague, nonspecific conclusion.  A lead paragraph announcing that Bin  
Ladin has been planning to attack the US for more than four years  
will not prompt the President to change his vacation plans.

Deductive reasoning in the form of scenario-based forecasting is not  
very much in evidence within the IC.  We really do need a "Red Team"  
or, as Wiggins suggests, a "Department of Thinking Like Terrorists."

Ralph Hitchens

-----Original Message-----
<snip>
Mr. Bray wants to confine any predictions of 9/11 type scenarios to  
obscure government reports and Tom Clancy.

It is astonishing that we are having this discussion.  We have an  
existence proof!  9/11 did happen.  It's therefore foolish on its  
face to say that "No one could have predicted this."

We don't need to debate whether anyone could have predicted using  
planes as missiles.  Al Qaeda not only predicted it; they conceived  
it, they planned it, and they executed it. Bray's argument implies  
that a desperately angry band in Afghanistan can out-think the best  
and the brightest in U.S. intelligence and defense.

Of course we cannot predict every possible disaster, or, more to the  
point, we can't predict which of many possible disasters may hit next.


But do we have a "Department of Thinking Like Terrorists" that is at  
least thinking through the scenarios?

What else is someone plotting that we cannot predict?


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