The Treadstone 71 uses Structured Analytic Techniques from Richards Heuer as well as others collected over the years for use in preparing your analysis as well as documenting, tracking, and analyzing your evidence. Highly skilled intelligence analysts with anywhere from 8 to 15 years of experience develop keen skills in intuition. Many do not care to use structured techniques while others combine intuition and structured techniques for a balanced mixed based on available data, time available, and the situation at hand.
The ability to go beyond current intelligence during the Bush administration's efforts to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was limited at best. The inability to produce much more than daily news highlights named Current Intelligence continues today. Most cyber threat intelligence shops are forced to scour the previous night's news sites using various automatic tools that aggregate data. The data is examined to see if it even relates to cyber security (another mistake) just to delivery some sort of morning report called 'Daily Intelligence Summary.' There is little analysis, less relevance, and few who actually read the report. The worry that leadership will see something on the news, the internet, or in their email inbox scares intelligence teams into producing non-intelligence products.
Discoveries in the intelligence community that analysts were unable to set up estimates, forecasts, and long-range intelligence reporting were commonplace. The IC itself worked to solve that problem. Many intelligence analysts had exited the community leaving very hungry yet very green analysts to fill their shoes. Yet, they face commercial organizations where intelligence is rooted in cyber security with little understanding of what intelligence really is.
The mistakes made, the inability to properly analyze anything beyond short term daily assessments led to the creation of Structured Analytic Techniques. Intelligence analysts must traverse a minefield of potential errors. First, they typically must begin addressing their subjects where others have left off; in most cases the questions they get are about what happens next, not about what is known. Second, they cannot be deterred by lack of evidence.
As Heuer pointed out in his earlier work, the essence of the analysts' challenge is having to deal with ambiguous situations in which information is never complete and arrives only incrementally, but with constant pressure to arrive at conclusions. Third, analysts must frequently deal with an adversary that actively seeks to deny them the information they need and is often working hard to deceive them. Finally, analysts, for all of these reasons, live with a high degree of risk, essentially the risk of being wrong and thereby contributing to ill-informed policy decisions.
Heuer Jr., Richards J.. Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis . SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.
Learning Objectives
This class is for collectors, analyst, threat intelligence practitioners, managers, teachers, and students of intelligence analysis and foreign affairs in both the public and private sectors. Managers, stakeholders, collection managers, junior to senior analysts, planners, incident responders, SOC analyst, and threat intelligence professionals who depend upon input from analysts to help them achieve their goals should also find it useful. Academics who specialize in qualitative methods for dealing with unstructured data will be interested in this pathbreaking book as well. Many of the techniques described here relate to strategic, all-source intelligence, but there is ample information on techniques of interest to tactical military, law enforcement, counterterrorism, and competitive intelligence analysts as well as business consultants and financial planners with a global perspective. Many techniques developed for these related fields have been adapted for use in intelligence analysis, and now we are starting to see the transfer of knowledge going in the other direction. Techniques such as Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, Key Assumptions Check, and Quadrant Crunching developed specifically for intelligence analysis are now being adapted for use in other fields. Treadstone 71 applies the knowledge in the book as well as boots on the ground experience in the cyber arena to fill gaps in what is currently available for intelligence analysis are being published for the first time in this book and have broad applicability.
Heuer Jr., Richards J. Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis. SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.
Framework Connections
The materials within this course focus on the NICE Framework Task, Knowledge, and Skill statements identified within the indicated NICE Framework component(s):
Feedback
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