Predictive Intelligence: Policy Support or Spectator Sport?

Evaluations of the U.S. intelligence community commonly are framed in terms of whether or not the community predicted certain types of salient and visible events. This type of scoring of intelligence performance presents a very incomplete and misleading picture of how intelligence contributes to national security. Many intelligence predictions or would-be predictions are inherently self-negating, and, for several reasons, most of them simply have no effect on the national interest. Proper understanding of the role of intelligence must look to functions much broader than prediction.