Lost for Words: The Intelligence Community’s Struggle to Find its Voice

Abstract

To be blunt, the intelligence community, which for the purposes of this article refersmainly to the analytic component, still does not “know itself.” That is to say, 60-plus years after its creation as a “community”—making the point that this identity crisis is not solely the product of post-9/11 and Iraq soul-searching—America’s intelligence analysts still cannot agree on an answer to thatmost fundamental question of analytic identity: What exactly is intelligence analysis?