Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community (PDF) - CIA

CHAPTER SIX
numerous domain matter experts, very few had first-hand knowledge of the
region of interest. Only one participant was from the area, had spent formative
years there, spoke the languages, and experienced the culture firsthand. As
this group was assembled to simulate the behavior and decisionmaking of a
foreign adversary, this aspect was more important than it would have been for
a substantive team developing threat assessments around a specific topic or
target. Consequently, the scenarios developed by the red team often reflected
an adversary whose behavior and decisionmaking resembled those of educated,
white, middle class Americans.
The one member of the red team who had been born in and spent formative
years in the region of interest regularly stopped the scenario development process
by saying, “They wouldn’t do that” or “They don’t think that way.” On
several occasions, he objected, “This scenario is way too complex” or “They
wouldn’t use that tactic; it requires too much direct communication.” His
objections were not usually based on military considerations; rather, they were
based on the cultural norms and mores of the adversary. He talked of kinship
relationships as a specific type of social network in the region and of the value
of kinship for understanding the adversary’s intentions. In short, he brought an
ethnographic perspective to the exercise.
Having no personal or professional experience with this region or its cultures,
I thought it appropriate to defer to his first-person experience. Ultimately,
however, it proved difficult to convince the group that this man’s
cultural knowledge was, in fact, an area of specialized knowledge that needed
to be factored into each scenario. This difficulty was born out of another type
of ethnocentric bias.
Inviting an anthropologist to a red team exercise presupposes that the red
team takes seriously the notion that cultural differences matter and that those
cultural factors ought to be made explicit in the analytic process. The problem
in this case was that the anthropologist was not an area expert for this region
and its cultures, and the one area expert who was there lacked the academic
credentials to be taken seriously by the other members of the group. Had I
been able to assert the same concepts that the other individual asserted, it
would have had a certain academic, or scientific, imprimatur because of my
training and experience. Because he lacked these credentials, many of the
other individual’s insights were lost, and the analytic product suffered as a
result.
The Red Team: Discussion
I am reluctant to fault the organizers for the ethnocentric bias in the demographic
composition of the red team. It is very difficult to assemble a truly
82