¶ … U.S. Intelligence Community
The nature of the work that is conducted by the U.S. intelligence community conditions some of the challenges it faces. The processes of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence locate members of the intelligence community in situations and relationships that, if not unique to the community, are certainly lodestones to controversy. The discussion will primarily track challenges that are related to improvements of the "intelligence product" and the building or rebuilding of "relationships with important external constituencies."[footnoteRef:1] The purpose of the paper is to increase the saliency of challenges that are fundamental to the business of the intelligent community, and that endure because they are, indeed, endemic. A review of extant documents and scholarly articles will support this author's discussion and conclusions. [1: "Making Intelligence Smarter: The Future of U.S. Intelligence." 1996. [Report of an Independent Task Forces] http://fas.org/irp/cfr.html]
Section II: Three Challenges Confronting the U.S. Intelligence Community
(a) Challenge #1: Keeping the Gate Open for Late-Arriving Black Swans
A substantive challenge of the intelligence community is to establish ways to imagine black swans and to determine the likelihood -- the weight, if you will -- of these black swans with respect to feasibility, likelihood, and susceptibility to critical path change. This imagining must occur without being trivialized by taking on attributes of gaming. Rather, to address this challenge the intelligence community must steep the concepts in historical perspective.
The term black swan is an umbrella term used to signal recognition that some event has occurred that was unexpected, perhaps unimagined, had an enormous impact, and is rationalized in hindsight.[footnoteRef:2] Although Nassim Taleb's 2007 book, The Black Swan, is esoteric and abstract, the concept of a black swan is readily accessible to general audiences. That said, it is apparent that Black swans are the stuff of intelligence. Intelligence is constructed one bit and byte at a time from sources as disparate as SIGINT, IMINT, HUMINT, and MASINT.[footnoteRef:3] Yet, the generation of intelligence as a product occurs against...
After September 11th, President Bush authorized the use of water boarding, as a way to gain knowledge of terrorist groups and their activities. The problem is that many of the civil rights-based groups believe that this is in violation of American law. When the people, who are interrogated (terrorists), are not American citizens and they want to do as much harm to the country as possible. Given the fact
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Unreached People Group Project (Iraq) Language Culture Economy Religion Family A Survey of Mission Work History of Mission Work Current Status of the Church Number of Known Believers Challenges Present Strategies Unreached People Group Project (Iraq) The history of Iraq parallels the antiquity of mankind; therefore, a more recent examination of Iraq's history will be more suitable for evaluating the needs of unreached people in this country. The country used to be part of the Ottoman Empire but Britain occupied Iraq during World
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