Intelligence Failures

Admission requirements

This course is designed for the minor Intelligence Studies. It is not possible to follow single courses of this minor. You need to be enrolled in Usis for the minor to be accepted to this course. There are 150 places open for registration, on a first come first serve basis, where LDE students are given priority.

Description

During the past thirty years the so-called intelligence revolution that took place during the Second World War and the Cold War found its way into academic courses and literature. One of the aspects that has undergone the most post-mortem evaluations is that of intelligence failures. Intelligence failures often attract a lot of public attention. Whereas from the point of the intelligence community successful intelligence operations should remain secret as long as necessary, they often cannot help to prevent their failures from coming into the open. Some of these failures become national trauma’s, from the failure to act on available information about an impending Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor to the 9/11 2001 attacks. Such intelligence failures often become the object of national investigations and therefore produce a lot of source material that comes into the public domain and is therefore available for academic scrutiny.

In this course, besides discussing the historical aspects of different failures, attention will be paid to methodological aspects of the intelligence failure, including the β,(the chance that one doesn’t discover a relationship between two phenomena) Apart from these two elements, attention is paid how an effective warning could have been given. For this, the student will be taught on how to produce a so-called indicator and warning analysis. The student will write a paper, both dealing with a specific failure, and to develop indicators of how a warning could have been given in that specific case.

Course objectives

1. The student is able to interpret different biases in the field of intelligence;
2. The student is able to understand different examples of intelligence failures;
3. The student is able to identify the different aspects of a ‘warning failure’;
4. The student is able to characterize and classify an intelligence failure; and to apply the different concepts in the realm of a failure;
5. The student is able to formulate a research question as a warning problem in order to prepare an analysis.
6. The student is able to select relevant literature for his/her case; and to assess these sources;
7. The student is able to analyze a specific case of an intelligence failure; including critical indicators.

Timetable

The timetable will be displayed with a link on this course page, the website, blackboard and on the front page of this minor programma.
The schedule 2018 will be published asap.

Mode of instruction

7 lectures of 3 hours by instructors and guest lecturers.

Participation in lectures, discussions and exercises is required in order to obtain a grade. One lecture may be missed. Being absent more than once may likely lead to expulsion from the course.

Course Load

*On the basis of reading approximately eight pages per hour.

Assessment method

Mid term research design (25%)
Final paper (75%)

The Course and Examination Regulation Security Studies and the Rules and Regulation of the Board of Examiners of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs apply.

Blackboard

Yes

Reading list

TBA on Blackboard

Registration

Use both uSis and Blackboard to register for every course.
Register for every course and workgroup via uSis. Registration in uSis is possible from four weeks before the start of the course. Some courses and workgroups have a limited number of participants, so register on time (before the course starts). In uSis you can access your personal schedule and view your results. Registration in uSis is possible from four weeks before the start of the course.
Also register for every course in Blackboard. Important information about the course is posted here.

Contact

intelligencestudies@fgga.leidinuniv.nl

Remarks