Bringing Intelligence about: Practitioners Reflect on Best Practices

by Russell George Swenson (Editor), Mark M. Lowenthal (Foreword)

Description from the This volume helps us move down the long and difficult road of helping identify how to produce good or better intelligence – by which I mean intelligence that is of huse to policy-makers and is better than other intelligence by being so used. The authors have – across a range of areas of interest – Identified some of the practices that work best to produce – or, more aptly, “to bring about” – good intelligence. Note that the preceding sentence said “some of the practices.” Few books could expect to identify all of the practices that work and, as the authors of each chapter would undoubtedly concede, there will always be some variables and intangibles at work in vagaries of time to perform collection and analysis; the quality of sources; the quality of the analysts; the nature and personality of the policymakers. Still, it is possible to identify the practices that work and the practices that have to be altered over time as conditions change.

145 pages, Hardcover