Critical Thinking In The Intelligence Community

In today’s intelligence community, one of the biggest issues is the lack of analysts with the skills of critical thinking. Through his work Critical Thinking and Intelligence Analysis, David T. Moore explains how “prospective new hires…generally fail to exhibit skill in critical thinking at any level of proficiency” (62). Within this issue is the fact that “analysts who become better critical thinkers will improve their analyses, helping [to] lessen the likelihood of intelligence failures” (7). However, when critical thinking was not a stressed skill within the intelligence community, several failures occurred and Moore explains how the modern intelligence community is working to train their agents with this mission essential skill. Critical thinking is vastly important to the success of the intelligence communities in that the ability to think critically and to think ‘outside of the box’ allows intelligence analysts to pursue leads they may have previously
During this state, HUMINT stating that Soviet SA-2 AA Missiles, SS-4 MRBM and SS-5 IRBM was generalized as false because it contradicted the theory that only Soviet ground troops were present to repel an American military invasion. The ‘old intelligence strategy of inductive reasoning’ led analysts to “prove” their theories and adhere to it until it was proven wrong by hard evidence. In the case of the Cuban Missile crisis, that hard evidence was the U-2 photos. This evidence confirmed that Soviet Missiles were being installed in Cuba. “The errors seen in the Cuban case – failure to question assumptions, to take seriously the evidence and the patterns they imply, to counterfactually examine analytic implication and consequences, in short to make reflective judgments” is, as Moore states, an issue that can be fixed with the proper training in the skill of critical