A paper that Stephen McCombie and I co-authored has appeared in a special issue of Library Trends which was dedicated to information behaviour – an interesting concept that is well worth attention of scholars in intelligence studies.
The paper – The Russian Gambit and the US Intelligence Community: Russia’s Use of Kompromat and Implausible Deniability to Optimize its 2016 Information Campaign against the US Presidential Election — aroused some interest that led the journal to make the paper freely available to the public at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/769145.
The paper argues that
“In the leadup to the 2016 US presidential election, Russia engaged in covert political action to disrupt the American political system and undermine candidate Clinton. Following Trump’s shock victory, Moscow swiftly pivoted to leverage its pre-election intervention in order to degrade the coherence of the US strategic decision-making. Specifically, through seemingly feckless denial, the Kremlin sought to assert the depth and success of its meddling in the election, thereby driving a wedge between the White House on the one hand, and US intelligence community and political mainstream on the other, and keeping both sides at loggerheads. The fact that the main axis of Moscow’s pre-election information campaign unfolded online helped it exploit anxieties over the unfettered circulation of information and enhance the effect of its postelection messaging.
After describing the contours of this Russian gambit, we elaborate on three specific issues. We analyse the stratagem of implausible deniability—Russia’s assertion of its role through seemingly feckless denial. We then ascribe the Russian intelligence community’s agility to its chaotic structure and function. Finally, we account for the strategic oversight that allowed the US intelligence community to become an unwitting useful tool of Russian manipulation.”
Two aspects stand out as particularly relevant to underdog intelligence. One is Moscow’s success in driving current and former seniors of the US Intelligence Community into a crippling conflict with the White House. For the Kremlin’s information campaign to turn some experienced intelligence executives into unwitting tools in degrading the Washington DC’s strategic coherence is remarkable.
The other relevant aspect has to do with the effectiveness and speed through which intelligence communities operate. USAF maverick theorist John Boyd’s concept of OODA loop would be particularly useful in this context. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, and the concept of the OODA loop helps theorise the iterative process through which agents adjust their action to reality. In competitive environments, e.g. dogfights, the capacity to successfully go through one’s OODA loop faster than one’s opponent can be critical to success.
In the lead-up to the 2016 election, and in its aftermath, Russian intelligence seemed to be able to move with great agility through its OODA loop, seizing the initiative and controlling the agenda, while the US intelligence community seemed to be lagging behind, chasing after and reacting to developments. But how did the Russian intelligence community – hardly a beacon of masterful professionalism – manage to outmanoeuvre the US intelligence community?
The answers are not surprising. The usual suspects of excessive bureaucratisation, managerial culture, organisational politics and the like seem to be involved here again. Already in 1967 Harold Wilensky masterfully described of the dynamics of intelligence dysfunction in his brilliant work Organizational Intelligence. It is a beautifully absurd situation that intelligence agencies – and not just American – continue to enact such dysfunctions of intelligence as set out in Wilensky’s book.
As it turned out, the chaotic Russian intelligence community seemed more agile than its highly bureaucratised US rival. The difference between the two intelligence communities is reminiscent of two contrasting instances in the Kennedy administration. The Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded very quickly, and the White House needed to move swiftly, suspending bureaucratic procedures, cutting through channels and improvising its way through unchartered waters. By sharp contrast, the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs was the result of a long process in which the bureaucratic structures of the US intelligence community worked as intended. Under what conditions is the bureaucratisation of intelligence detrimental? How should intelligence communities be organised so that they maximise the effectiveness of their OODA loop? Why is it that more than fifty years after Wilensky, and after so many intelligence failures, intelligence communities continue to repeatedly and predictably fall into similar traps? Thankfully, there appears to be more work ahead in the field of intelligence studies.
