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Overview
The United States today faces new kinds of adversaries, armed with an array of sinister weapons and capable of communicating and coordinating actions around the globe with unprecedented ease. As The Future of American Intelligence demonstrates, this dangerous new world requires changes in how the United States collects and analyzes intelligence and translates it into policy. These essays from a diverse group of distinguished contributors deepen our understanding of the new national security threats posed by terrorism, by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and by the spread of Islamic extremism. They examine the obstacles-intellectual, governmental, bureaucratic, military, and technological-to making U.S. intelligence more effective and offer thoughtful recommendations for reform. Approaching the problem from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the authors stress how it is critical that the intelligence community revise its deeply entrenched assumptions and ideas about how to collect and analyze intelligence. They reveal how those assumptions led the United States to overlook the gravity of the threat posed by bin Laden and be dead wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq-and how they generally stifle creative thinking and independent judgment within intelligence agencies. Their recommendations include suggestions for reforming the management style and the organizational structure of the intelligence services as well as establishing more effective procedures for taking advantage of both current and future technological advances
Synopsis
The United States today faces new kinds of adversaries, armed with an array of sinister weapons and capable of communicating and coordinating actions around the globe with unprecedented ease. As the distinguished contributors to The Future of American Intelligence demonstrate, this dangerous new world requires changes in how the United States collects and analyzes intelligence and translates it into policy. They examine
The rise and nature of nonstate armed groups and the distinctive security threats they presentThe intelligence community's deeply entrenched assumptions and ideas about how to collect and analyze intelligence and how they caused the United States to overlook the gravity of the threat posed by bin Laden
The case for the new director of national intelligence position and why it will lead to more effective intelligence gathering and analysis
A proposal for restructuring the often ineffective clandestine service responsible for recruiting foreign agents and penetrating enemy organizations so that it can better target Muslim extremists
How U.S. intelligence can best take advantage of the extraordinary new developments in science and technology both for collecting information and for interpreting it more effectively