INTELLIGENCE PRIORITIES FOR REGIONAL TOPICS: ONE PIECE OF THE PUZZLE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP83M00171R000800130001-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 22, 2005
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: June 4, 1981
• Content Type: MF

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D/PAO
PAO
Intelligence Priorities for Regional Topics: One Piece
of the Puzzle
1. Attached is a short paper addressing the relative demand for
national intelligence as stated in the current edition of the DCI
Directive (1/2). Presumably, demand priorities are of some relevance in
deciding how to allocate the Community's finite resources, in which case
the paper could be generally useful in evaluating the programs'
submissions in the forthcoming ICS review. Whether the DCID is a valid
reflection of those priorities has always been of some'contention. But ii''
it isn't, what is?
2. . My principal purpose in drafting the paper was to demonstrate one.
small but essential analytical link in a resource allocation logic I've
been developing with advice from and others. 25X1
Simply put, the model is based on a no ion hat, when all is said and
done, the only objective criterion for measuring the Community's
performance lies with how well it has supplied its customers with the
facts and interpretations they need and want. Resource management is tre
job of manipulating what goes into the process, where, in such a way as to
promote the correlation between intelligence supplied and intelligence
demanded.
3. To do this really well, I'm convinced Community-level management
needs a regular flow of marketing and funtional cost data that isn't now
available. But the prospects aren't bright for emplacing the systems to
generate and forward this information anytime soon. Institutional
impediments are simply too great. Since there do seem to be some signs,
however,
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4. The model I'm working on now is that kind of method. It offers a
systematic alternative (supplement would, perhaps, be better) to pure
intuition in deciding how to allocate resources, but doesn't require a
whole lot of new data that the programs would be loathe to part with.
With'this method, reduced requirements for factual management informatior
are achieved by greater reliance on concept. In other words, the method
substitutes principle for data. This necessarily will make it seem
abstract (perhaps hopelessly so) to the pragmatic school. But if we want
to try for something more disciplined than the way we do things now, and
can't hope to get much new management data, there's no fourth choice.
5. I plan to write-up the model soon. Basically, it assumes a
production function (i.e., input-output relationship) of typical form,
having successive phases of increasing, constant, and diminishing returns
to scale. For a particular target (which could be a country-topic, or
some grouping of country-topics along mission or subject-region lines),
importance, current funding (with an option to distinguish fixed from
variable costs), and current level of achievement (from 0 to 1.0) must
first be estimated. These three variables establish the target's degree
of difficulty and allow an explicit estimate of its cost-benefits ratio.
That is the the marginal productivity of committing additional resources
against the target. Conversely, the benefit-consequences of a lesser
level-of-effort can also be estimated. These measures won't be precise
and can't be relied upon to provide automatic mathematical "solutions" to
resource allocation issues, but they could serve as consistent objective
indicators for comparing the attractiveness of alternative allocations of
both new and existing resources among competing targets. Of course, to be
useful in the budget preparation process, we need a budget format that
lets us find the targets in it? however roughly.
A. Hutchins
J. Fish
N. 'Albright
S. Bostwick
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4 June 1981
W. D. White
Demand for Intelligence as Reflected in DCID 1/2
.In the attachment to DCI Directive 1/2, U.S. Foreign Intelligence
Requirements, Categories and Priorities", the Director communicates to the
Community "... the relative importance of topical information on foreign
countries to the policy formulation, planning and operations of the
National Security Council, its members, and other Federal organizations.-a
The document is intended to provide .. guidance for the production of
national intelligence as well as . all other intelligence of common
concern." and "... to provide the basis for judging the relative emphasis:
to be given by the major types of collection activities
As with any productive process, the ultimate standard of the
Intelligence Community's performance in managing the resources placed at
its disposal rests in how well it relates the things it supplies to what
its customers demand. Under the arrangement most conducive to efficiency,
a competitive market would render this judgment unequivocally, and with
prompt regularity. Denied data on "sales", the Community has had to turn
to synthetic substitutes in the form of statements of "priorities" or
"requirements" to articulate consumer demand. While by no means unique,
or even necessarily dominant, DCID 1/2 represents the most authoritative,
comprehensive such statement. It tells Community managers about the
substantive demand for intelligence facts and interpretations by ordering
the relative importance of a nearly exhaustive list of country-topic
combinations. A descending scale of one through seven is used.
The level of detail to which DCID 1/2 reaches is explained on the
ground that specificity is needed if the document is to be useable by life
managers. At the Community level, however, there is far too much detail
to be analytically assimilated as is.* Both countries and topics must be
aggregated (i.e., "grouped") to reduce the DCID 1/2 matrix to a size that.
The October 1980 issue of MID 1/2, which this paper addresses,
identifies 105 topics and 160 countries, for a theoretical total of 16,800
topic-country combinati.ons. Approximately 9,400 of these combinations are
assigned a specific numerical (1-7) designation. The remaining 7,400
combinations are either very unimportant (i.e., carry an implied priority
of "8"), or simply not applicable (e.g., Beam Weapon Technology in Fii).
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can be digested by managers who must pick and choose across the entire
spectrum of Community activities. Unfortunately, there has always been a
methodological hitch to doing so: the document does not explicitly state
the amount by which priorities differ in importance (i.e., the reader is
only told enough to know that one priority is more or less important than
another--how much more or less important is left to the individual's
imagination). So long as the CC ID omits explicit quantitative weighting
instructions, analytical applications of any reduced, or condensed, mat_ix
will be subject to distracting secondary arguments over the particular
weighting scheme that the analyst has elected to apply.
The discussion which follows remains vulnerable in this respect,
although somewhat less so than earlier attempts to evaluate condensed
versions of the DC ID 1/2 matrix. While the document itself remains
"weightless", the-chairman of the committee responsible for its issuance
has suggested a specific weighting scheme for use in its interpretation.*
His suggestion is that the importance of a country-topic citation at a
particular priority level should vary inversely with the total number of
citations at that priority. Put another way, the concept is that the
collective importance of all of the citations at each of the seven
priority levels is equal.** The scheme leads to individual country-topic
citations carrying the relative importance indicated in Figure I on the
following page.
Memorandum from the chairman of the DCID 1/2 committee to the Chief,
Analytical Methods and External Research Branch, Office of Political
Analysis; 3 April 81 (ICS 81-6208). While the weighting scheme that was
suggested has certain negative technical features, and is probably not the
best that could be chosen, the need to have some explicit weighting
instructions is paramount.
** There is nothing intolerable about a "one over n" weighting scheme like
this, so long as the number of citations at a particular priority is
always less than the number at the next lower priority. This happens to
hold true for the DCID, although it does not for the NITs.
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Applying these weights to all seven priorities in the (160 x 105)
DCID 1/2 country-topics matrix produces the condensed (6 x 8) and
normalized (to "parts per thousand") subject-region matrix shown in Figure
II. As the data indicate, the military sphere, including weapons-relater
scientific and technical topics, receives the greatest emphasis among
subject groups (scoring 363 of the 1,000 total emphasis points postulated
in the analysis), followed closely by political topics (which scored 338
Economic interests, taken as a group, run a weak third (scoring 224).
Non-military scientific-technical topics, and interests in biographic
information, each receive only minor emphasis.
On La` regional basis, the greatest demand is for intelligence relating
to the USSR and its eastern European allies (score of 268), followed by
the Near East-South Asia-Arab States region (score of 185). Next come
Western Europe and the East Asia-Pacific regions, which receive roughly
equal emphases (scoring 152 and 148 respectively). Sub-Saharan Africa and
Latin America are the least emphasized regions (with scores in the 120's`.
The data also reflect pronounced regional differences in emphasis
among subject groups. Demand for political and economic intelligence is
driven by interest in what is commonly called the "Third World"*, which
accounts for nearly two-thirds of the total emphasis accorded these
subjects (364 out of 562 emphases points scored by political and economic
subjects came from the Third World). In contrast, Third World nations
account for only about one-third of the demand for intelligence relating
to military subjects (116 of the 363 emphases points claimed by military
subjects).
Conversely, while political and economic topics relating to the USSF
and its Eastern European allies count for relatively little (59 of 562
points), interest in military topics focuses- on this region, accounting
for more than half of the military intelligence demand (193 of 363 points
claimed). Much of the interest on Soviet military topics is explained bx
the USSR's status as the West's strategic military adversary. Soviet
strategic forces received many times the emphasis assigned to the bloc?s
general purpose forces (scoring 73 emphasis points, versus 13).
*Defined here as the nations of the Near East-South Asia-Arab States,
Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and East Asia-Pacific (less the PRC,
Japan and Australia-New Zealand) regions.
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Figure III on the following page displays the information from Figure
II in a different way. In Figure III, the subject-region combination that
receives the greatest emphasis in DCID 1/2 has been arbitrarily assigned a
value of 100, while that receiving the least DCID emphasis is valued at
zero. All of the other subject-regions defined in Figure II are scaled
between these extremes, and plotted accordingly in Figure III. The most
important combination, military topics relating to the USSR or Eastern
Europe, receives three times as much emphasis as that which comes next in
importance (political topics in the Near East-South Asia-Arab States
region). Clearly, insofar as DCID 1/2 is concerned, interest in
Soviet-bloc military developments continues to dominate the demand side of
the national intelligence resource management equation.
It is equally clear that the second tier in importance is composed
largely of Third World political topics. Demand for political
intelligence about Africa and Latin America join that for the Near East to
account for three of the five subject-region combinations at this tier.
Political topics concerning Western Europe, and military topics in the Far
East, complete the tier.. Index scores awarded the remaining, less
important regional subject groupings are listed in the Supplement to
Figure III (which also includes an explanation of the mathematics usec in
the analysis).
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The preceding conclusions were based on analysis that emcompassed all
seven of the priority classes DCID 1/2 contains. It has, however, been
argued that it is only the top classes that have any real management
significance, because resource scarcities bar managers' consideration of
any of the lower priority citations. Recognizing the possible validity of
this point of view, the analysis which follows addresses only the 553
citations at priorities one, two and three in the October 1980 edition of
DCID 1/2. The relative emphases that result from dropping all priorities
below level three are presented in Figures IV and V (which parallel
Figures II and III, preceding).
The general effect of disregarding priorities four through seven is
to boost the relative importance of military topics compared to all
others. Demand for military intelligence is twice that for intelligence
on political topics,_and more than three times greater than demand in the
economic sphere. Since the greatest military interests concern the Soviet
Union, the regional preeminence of the USSR and its allies also becomes
much more pronounced when only priorities one-three are considered. The
bigest regional losers are all in the Third World, with the relative
demand for intelligence on Latin America falling by two-thirds (from a
score of 121, to 44) while that for Africa below the Sahara almost
disappears (dropping to a mere 19 of the 1000 emphasis points postulated).
Combining subject with regional interests, Soviet and Eastern European
military topics account for roughly forty percent of the total demand for
national foreign intelligence if only the top three priorities on DCID 1/2
are significant.
Figure V adapts these data to the same zero (least important) to 1010
(most important) scale introduced in Figure III. Once again, military
topics covering the Soviet bloc emerge as the subject-region combinations
for which the demand for intelligence is greatest (by so overwhelming a
margin as to bring to mind the quip about there being no second place).
None of the next most important regional subject groups receive so much as
one-fifth the emphasis awarded Soviet military topics.
Three of the five subject-regions which constituted the "second tier
of importance" when all seven priority classes were considered
(Political-Near East, Political-Western Europe, and Military-Far East)
remain at the top of the pack when priorities four-seven are disregarded.
But the other two regional subjects (Political topics in Africa, and in
Latin America) are pushed far down in relative importance, replaced in the
now lagging second tier by non-military scientific and technical topics
(worldwide), and Soviet bloc political topics.
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