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What is Accuracy?
THE PRINCIPLE OF ACCURACY
All intelligence products must be based on data that have been evaluated for technical
error, misperception, and hostile efforts to deceive. All data must be accepted as fact, meaning
“true statements.” 56 To understand what we mean by fact, we must clarify the meaning
of true, or truth. Without digressing through the many schools of thought on the subject of
truth, let us pragmatically combine Bertrand Russell’s view that truth is the “correspondence
of thought to the external world” 57 with William James’ view that “true ideas are useful
leadings; in that they lead us through experiences in ways that provide consistency,
orderliness, and predictability.” 58 This definition of truth is sufficiently practical.
The data useful to intelligence production, therefore, must qualify as useful leadings;
consistent with what we expect from a predictable and orderly world. Since human perception
and mechanical precision are both imperfect, some degree of variation is acceptable.
Any determination of Accuracy must consider the data available and where the data
fell within established limits of acceptability.
Importantly, the interpretation of data on an intelligence target is the responsibility of
the intelligence staff. The data attributes of consistency, orderliness, and predictability are
separately (and perhaps distinctly) defined by intelligence personnel as they process (analyze
and synthesize) the data. This does not, of course, mean that intelligence will have a
monopoly on truth; a commander, with even more sources of information, may perceive
another truth. But the most useful attributes of Accuracy, in doctrinal terms, are consistency,
orderliness, and predictability.
Limit Accuracy to Facts
Many scholars and critics mistakenly apply Accuracy to predictive estimates, usually
when espousing the so-called warning paradox to prove the inevitability of intelligence
failure. 59 The warning paradox occurs when analysts predict an attack and the attacker cancels
his plans to attack after learning that surprise has been lost. Rather than considering
the warning given by the intelligence service a success, it is argued that the absence of the
attack falsifies the prediction. 60 Aside from the fallacy of requiring accurate judgments
56 Monroe C. Beardsley, Practical Logic (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950), 5.
57 Shirley R. Letwin, “Certainty Since the Seventh Century,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of
Selected Pivotal Ideas, Vol 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 319.
58 Academic American Encyclopedia, Online Edition, under the word “Pragmatism,” downloaded from
Prodigy (Rockville, MD: Grolier Electronic Publishing, 1993), 12 July 1993.
59 Avi Shlaim, “Failure in National Intelligence Estimates: The Case of the Yom Kippur War,” World Politics
28, no. 3 (April 1976): 378; also quoted by Richard K. Betts, “Analysis, War and Decision: Why Intelligence
Failures are Inevitable,” World Politics 31, no. 1 (October 1978): 61-89.
60 Shlaim, 378; also see Richard Brody, “The Limits of Warning,” The Washington Quarterly 6, no. 3 (Summer
1983): 46.
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