Hendrik Hertzberg's commentary in the current New Yorker is excellent. Read it!
The same issue has an excellent piece by Jeffrey Goldberg on the unknown and the failure of intelligence - particularly the unimaginativeness of American intelligence. The more history I read on the subject the more I am convinced that getting additional data feeds will be counterproductive. Tools to help improve signal to noise ratios will help somewhat, but the fact that we have a fundamental lack of appreciation for cultures and have a difficultly thinking differently and accepting surprise is a fundamental weakness (along with various institutional weaknesses that have been well documented).
A physics prof friend of mine, then at Cal Tech, mentioned a class assignment he gave in the late eighties to a bunch of sophomores taking their first serious course in classical mechanics. They were to figure out the cheapest way to cause havoc and political problems. There were apparently two standard answers ... the first involved taking out telecommunications and the second involved targeting national monuments with fuel laden transport jets (or in the case of a couple of kids - heavy airliners). There were a few tunnel bombings and the like, but the kids quickly figured out the amount of energy they could pack into something readily available. It seems clear the terrorists used a similar analysis.
There seems to be a case for bringing in some of the tactics of science. Generally science is knowledge derived from the study of nature that is independently verifiable (experimentation comes into play here). It also involves creating and testing hypotheses. Some of these hypotheses are a large leap from linear extrapolations of current expectations and most of them are proven wrong and discarded. A few turn out to be correct (Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Einstein, Heisenberg, Feynman, etc etc...). It takes a very special type of thinking to make these leaps. The thinking needs to be wide ranging and often involves people slightly out of the mainstream of current work. It is too bad that similar approaches are not used to aid in the understanding of threats.
My guess is that it is much easier to think about and predict threats than it is to invent new Physics. Of course dealing with them is more difficult - particularly when you live in a nation that much of the world hates.
6:35:46 AM
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