Improving Intelligence Analysis by Looking to the Medical Profession

Abstract

Intelligence agencies might benefit from assessing existing medical practices for possible use in improving the accuracy of intelligence analysis and its incorporation into policymaking. The processes used by the medical profession to ensure diagnostic accuracy may provide specific models for Intelligence Community use that could improve the accuracy of analytic procedures. The medical profession’s way of accumulation, organization, and use of information for purposes of decisionmaking could also provide a model for the national security field to adopt in its quest for more effective means of information transfer. Some limitations to the analogy are inevitable due to intrinsic differences between the fields, but the study of medicine could provide intelligence practitioners with a valuable source of insight into various reforms with the potential to improve the craft of intelligence. A LITTLE-EXAMINED ANALOGY The analogy between medical diagnosis and intelligence analysis has been a thin thread running through the intelligence literature. In 1983, historian Walter Laqueur, in ‘‘The Question of Judgment: Intelligence and Medicine,’’1 examined the analogy at a general level. He argued that Stephen Marrin is a doctoral candidate in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, specializing in the study of intelligence. He previously served as an analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency and subsequently with the Congressional Government Accountability Office (GAO). JonathanD. Clemente,M.D., is a physician in private practice in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is currently writing a scholarly history of the United States medical intelligence program and medical support for clandestine operations from World War II to the present