This book, divided into two volumes, is intended to bring intelligence analysts and others abreast of current scholarship, from many disciplines, on the process of drawing conclusions from a mass of incomplete, inconclusive, and unreliable evidence. Volume I contains seventeen chapters on various evidential and inferential issues; though they contain some symbols and diagrams, the chapters in this volume contain almost no mathematics.

This unique book on intelligence analysis covers several vital but often overlooked topics. It teaches the evidential and inferential issues involved in 'connecting the dots' to draw defensible and persuasive conclusions from masses of evidence: from observations we make, or questions we ask, we generate alternative hypotheses as explanations or answers; we make use of our hypotheses to generate new lines of inquiry and discover new evidence; and we test the hypotheses with the discovered evidence. To facilitate understanding of these issues and enable the performance of complex analyses, the book introduces an intelligent analytical tool, called Disciple-CD. Readers will practice with Disciple-CD and learn how to formulate hypotheses; develop arguments that reduce complex hypotheses to simpler ones; collect evidence to evaluate the simplest hypotheses; and assess the relevance and the believability of evidence, which combine in complex ways to determine its inferential force and the probabilities of the hypotheses.

This National Defense Intelligence College publication defines critical thinking in the context of intelligence analysis, explains how it influences the entire intelligence process, explores how it toughens the art of intelligence analysis, suggests how it may be taught, and deduces how analysts can be persuaded to adopt this habit. "David Moore has added his powerful voice to those calling for America's intelligence analysts to be more self-conscious about their methods and more venturesome in applying more formal methods." - Gregory F. Treverton, Rand Corp. "...a valuable initiative on behalf of the Intelligence Community" - Francis J. Hughes, National Defense Intelligence College.

In this seminal work, published by the C.I.A. itself, produced by Intelligence veteran Richards Heuer discusses three pivotal points. First, human minds are ill-equipped ("poorly wired") to cope effectively with both inherent and induced uncertainty. Second, increased knowledge of our inherent biases tends to be of little assistance to the analyst. And lastly, tools and techniques that apply higher levels of critical thinking can substantially improve analysis on complex problems.

Recent enhancements in modeling and simulation techniques offer significant improvements for intelligence analysts to increase their inference and prediction skills. Architectural and programming improvements in techniques known as agent-based models offer analysts opportunities to increase their capabilities to deal with complex masses of evidence. These models demonstrate how the process of discovery may be improved through empowering information observations that compose evidence to interact with each other and with the analyst to drive toward more meaningful lines of inquiry - to increase the likelihood of asking more important questions in situations traditionally thought of as complex and opaque. Biologically inspired models of self-organization motivate the construction of forms of agent-based models that encourage analysts to interact more directly with the evidence they observe and to improve inference and inquiry, as well as prediction.

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on United States soil, the intelligence community has been scrutinized on how it performs its functions. Consequently, the 9/11 Commission made several recommendations on how to improve the quality of intelligence analysis. Those charges and the United States' involvement in a war in Iraq have spawned additional charges of the politicization of intelligence. All this is being played out as the Intelligence Community has reformed and reconfigured itself with newly created departments supported by an expanded and inexperienced workforce that was never envisioned when the intelligence community was formally established in 1947. First published in the 1970s, the classic book An Introduction to Intelligence Research and Analysis was used by intelligence analysts to track and monitor the Communist threat. Although today's environment has changed considerably since the Cold War, intelligence analysts still need to understand the basics of intelligence analysis. The book focuses on how to do research, what qualities are needed to be an intelligence analyst, and what methods can be employed to help in producing products. To avoid politicization, intelligence analysts should strive to become more transparent in their methodology of how they arrived at their conclusions. Intelligence Research and Analysis provides several methods to assist in that end.

Quantitative Intelligence Analysis describes the model-based method of intelligence analysis that represents the analyst’s mental models of a subject, as well as the analyst’s reasoning process exposing what the analyst believes about the subject, and how they arrived at those beliefs and converged on analytic judgments. It includes: Specific methods of explicitly representing the analyst’s mental models as computational models; dynamic simulations and interactive analytic games; the structure of an analyst’s mental model and the theoretical basis for capturing and representing the tacit knowledge of these models explicitly as computational models detailed description of the use of these models in rigorous, structured analysis of difficult targets; model illustrations and simulation descriptions; the role of models in support of collection and operations; case studies that illustrate a wide range of intelligence problems; And a recommended curriculum for technical analysts.