The conflicts in Ukraine and the Levant indicate a shift toward an age of transparent battlefields. The proliferation of sensors, along with rapidly improving digital capabilities to process and disseminate the data they collect, drive this change. Private corporations and non-state actors have seized the opportunity for profit and disruption. These entities are moving in on what was long the exclusive domain of secretive government agencies.
This change will reshape the way the U.S. intelligence community (IC) operates, but it does not necessarily make the core intelligence tasks of understanding adversaries, avoiding surprise, and predicting future events any easier. Rather, the explosion in open-source intelligence and commercially available information opens fresh opportunities to fall prey to deception and intelligence failure. The same analytical biases that have fueled past intelligence failures will continue to be present, and they could even be accentuated by the many new sources and new players in the field of military intelligence.
New Ways of Doing Business
Technological breakthroughs have led to new forms of datasets that new entities can collect and exploit, breaking the monopoly of traditional intelligence agencies. One prominent example is the emergence of a whole industry centered around commercial satellite imagery and overhead intelligence. Satellite imagery company Maxar has posted footage of a military exercise on its X feed and presumably has much more intelligence of interest available to its subscribers. Another commercial space company, Hawkeye360, offers space-based capabilities to geolocate and characterize electronic emissions. This is referred to in military terms as electronic intelligence. Until recent years, the cost involved with launching satellites into space was so exorbitant that only the most advanced governments had space programs; this cost has steeply declined in the past decade. Today, multiple companies—SpaceX being the most well-known—own constellations of thousands of satellites, rendering space-based reconnaissance a common source of public information.
This creates both opportunities and challenges for the IC. Commercial satellites, when added to government-owned satellites, reduce dilemmas in tasking often scarce collection assets. In other words, more satellites equals more collection. But this imposes a new challenge often found in contemporary intelligence analysis: data overload. The ability to image every square inch of the globe does not guarantee the ability to process and understand what that imagery portends. The abundance of information will always tempt analysts to cherry-pick the pieces of data that confirm their previous assumptions.
Still, the ubiquity of commercial satellites in space pales in comparison to the abundance of digital sensors back on Earth. The war in Ukraine has loosed a deluge of pictures, videos, and other media widely accessible on the internet. In the age of social media, every cell phone is a sensor whose data becomes available to all if, as Russian troops have done in Ukraine, content created from those phones is disseminated on internet platforms such as Telegram in near-real time. Groups such as Bellingcat and the Institute for the Study of War piece these fragments of information together to present a coherent picture of the war. Outside of kinetic war, cyber threat intelligence helps businesses understand the actors targeting them in cyberspace, what they are capable of, and how to thwart them. Cybersecurity firms also can use their widespread coverage of clients’ networks to aggregate data and identify trends in the targets adversaries work to exploit and the methods they use. Both on the ground and in cyberspace, it is increasingly private entities that have the best vantage point for understanding trends in modern conflict.
More Data, More Problems?
This transformed intelligence landscape—the murky underworld of secrecy now a chaotic ocean of potential indicators—brings with it the same risks that always have plagued analysts. Access to more data does not mean possession of greater knowledge. The danger remains that data abundance will reinforce analytical biases and yield faulty conclusions.
For instance, reliance on openly available sources of data may generate more opportunities for strategic deception. Writing on the psychology of deception operations, long-time CIA methodologist Dr. Richards Heuer wrote, “It is far easier to lead a target astray by reinforcing the target's existing beliefs, thus causing the target to ignore the contrary evidence of one's true intent, than to persuade a target to change his or her mind.”1
In theory, the abundance of readily available data should make analysts more resilient against deception or analytic failure. However, as Heuer noted, analysts often fail to properly adjust their assessments when they encounter discrepant information. Publicly available information seems primed to reinforce “availability bias” in which analysts conclude a future event is likely because previous instances of a similar event are easy to recall or discover.2 An adversary could therefore manipulate an analyst by injecting fake evidence to reinforce an already false conclusion. Another way to exploit the availability bias is by deliberately and repeatedly alerting watch officers who are already primed to identify a given event, such as a surprise attack. As their title suggests, watch officers are trained and dedicated to provide advance warning. This makes them more susceptible to such false alerts, which, if repeated often enough, will dilute the credibility of watch officers’ warnings.
Putting Together the Pieces
How should today’s intelligence officers handle the peril in these new sources of information? Even 80 years later, the intelligence failure that led to Japan’s surprise attack at Pearl Harbor offers some instruction. While no single piece of information would have signaled U.S. intelligence officers to expect an attack against Hawaii on 7 December 1941, hindsight reveals several indicators that could have informed a more alert posture.3
Then, as now, intelligence officers had to fuse intelligence gained from sensitive sources with information obtained from open sources such as newspapers. In some cases, intelligence officers in Hawaii had to rely more on the latter. Captain Edwin Layton, the Pacific Fleet intelligence officer, had requested additional intelligence related to the break-down of diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Japan, but the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington denied Layton’s request because it was merely considered “of interest” to theater intelligence and “not a matter of utility.”4 As Roberta Wohlstetter’s account of the Pearl Harbor intelligence failure makes clear, this diplomatic context was necessary to discern real signals from the general background of events.5 This task—discerning signals from noise—is especially critical when wrangling open-source and commercial data, some of which no doubt is affected by adversary deception operations.
The alerts and warnings leading up to December 1941 also show an anchoring bias. Estimates from the Office of Naval Intelligence heavily indicated a southward attack by Japan, which influenced subsequent analysis and how warnings were interpreted in Hawaii.6 One could argue a similar phenomenon is occurring in current U.S. policymaking and national-security circles with respect to China’s intentions to invade Taiwan. In 2021, U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Phil Davidson suggested before Congress in 2021 that China might move to annex Taiwan by 2027. In 2023, Air Force General Michael Minihan circulated a memo telling his subordinates, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.” These public warnings threaten to anchor future analysis to the specific timeframe of the mid-to-late 2020s and the location of Taiwan. While this may come to pass, intelligence analysts must heed Dr. Heuer’s warning, that deception is especially likely to succeed when it reinforces prior biases, and therefore thoroughly interrogate open-source data that seems to reinforce expectations of an attack on Taiwan in the next few years.
While intelligence officers and analysts will need new skills to make full use of revolutionary new open-source intelligence tools, the fundamentals of analyzing intelligence and communicating it to decision-makers remain the same. Intelligence professionals will need to be more transparent with their commanders and each other about how they conduct their analysis. When open-source-based judgments diverge from official estimates, intelligence professionals will need to explain how their methodology leads to a different conclusion, not forgetting that in today’s advanced media environment, a commander’s intelligence officers will not be his or her sole source of intelligence.
The proliferation of internet-connected devices has transformed the battlespace just as it has everyday life. This reality presents an array of opportunities for intelligence analysis, but those opportunities are attached to hazards that adversaries can exploit. The expansion of players and sources of military intelligence might obstruct the path to truth with new avenues for deception and denial. This is acutely serious in the near term, as fears rise that China will launch an invasion of Taiwan or undertake some other coercive operation aimed at annexing the island. New capabilities must not allow analysts to become complacent or hubristic. The cost of failure could be a new date, some year in the next decade, that becomes burned into the nation’s memory with the same infamy as December 7, 1941, or September 11, 2001.
