Assessing Assessments: How Useful is Predictive Intelligence?

Abstract

This article suggests that the UK must seek to replicate, expand, and institutionalize nascent efforts in the U.S. and Canada to improve the accuracy of intelligence staffs’ predictions. The first task must be to establish how good intelligence staffs are at making predictions. The second must be to make adjustments to training, processes, and procedures based upon what we have learned. Tetlock and Mandel have provided an invaluable pointer to where we need to go. It is up to the Intelligence Community to take the actions to get there.

Biography

Warrant Officer Class 2 John Hetherington serves in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps. Currently an Arabic and Pashto linguist, he has served in Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan, as an analyst in the combat and operational intelligence roles. He has a long standing interest in psychology and war, presenting on psychology’s application to tactical planning and execution. Wing Commander Keith Dear is an RAF intelligence officer, CAS Fellow, DPhil candidate at Oxford University’s Department of Experimental Psychology, and Research Associate at Oxford’s Changing Character of War Programme. His professional experience is in Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) analysing human behaviours and systems. His current studies examine the effect of surveillance on behaviour.