There are No “Intelligence Failures,” Only Failures of Trust

by Command Sergeant Major Sam Yudin

There are no intelligence failures—only organizational failures of accountability and trust. For military intelligence professionals, trust is vital to our profession, as it directly underpins accountability.

Leaders too frequently abdicate their responsibility and blame others for failures. The oft-heard refrain is that there are only operational successes and intelligence failures. All successes are attributed to the planning and execution of the operation while most failures are dismissed and blamed on the intelligence. This allows the commander, or decision maker, to hedge their bet by accepting credit for success but scapegoating any failure. As military professionals we are morally obligated to expunge the vernacular of “intelligence failure” from acceptable usage.  

Accountability must be much broader than just claiming credit for success- it also means that leaders take responsibility for failures. If organizations cannot rely on their leaders to be accountable for the full spectrum of good and bad decisions, their team members are unlikely to trust those leaders, which undermines the foundation of our profession and organizations. The trust is further eroded when the same leaders hold their team to account more stringently on matters of far less organizational consequence. To this end, “intelligence” failures can and should be more accurately described as “people” failures- those centered around accountability and trust.

The military is known to be a cross-section of our society in demographics, societal trends, and even downward trends in the national ethos. The trend of civilian leaders not taking responsibility and being held accountable for their decisions can certainly be reflected in the military. Civilian leaders, as politicians, are not held in the same esteem by the public as military professionals are which is illustrated in numerous opinion polls, but the gap is decreasing. Citizens can hold politicians accountable through the ballot box if they choose, but in the military, we have a different standard which has been reflected in historic esteem in public opinion. 

A corner stone of our profession, enshrined in Army command policy, is to hold commanders responsible and accountable for everything their command does or fails to do. Military professionals are committed and accountable to each other at the core of our ethic. Accountability is core to the character of a sentient being not devested to an inanimate process. The key difference is that civilians holding politicians accountable is a choice, while military professionals holding their leaders accountable is a moral responsibility and ethical imperative.  

The inanimate process most often chosen to scapegoat failed decisions made by a sentient being is the Intelligence process. Intelligence is a process designed to give leaders and staffs information informing decisions to plan and execute operations. Joint Publication 2-0, Joint Intelligence, defines intelligence as an activity or the product resulting from that process. Intelligence is therefore a process, an activity, a product, or an inanimate thing. 

Things usually only fail when people cause them to fail by their decisions, actions, or flawed designs.  Intelligence does not fail, people do. People fail to make proper decisions, follow processes, remove bias, and apply best practices. People fail ethically, morally, and cognitively.  People fail, unaccountable things do not. 

Blaming intelligence for a people failure is a violation of our professional ethics and undermines the trust needed to accomplish the military’s mission to win the Nation’s wars. More importantly, this also does not allow us to overcome these failures. When we mis-diagnose the problem, we cannot solve it efficiently or effectively.

When there are strategic, operational, or tactical failures, blaming the intelligence element is the disingenuous and convenient scapegoat that sidesteps accountability, disregards leaders’ moral obligations, and degrades our profession. This tactic is employed continuously and that is why the phrase “intelligence failure” is in common parlance. Intelligence was blamed for major failures like not catching the 9-11 terrorist plot and used to justify the invasion of Iraq. More recently, intelligence has been named as the culprit for failing to predict the rapid fall of Afghanistan during our withdraw or for predicting Russia’s spectacular tactical failure in the invasion of Ukraine.

Intelligence might be flawed because people failed to follow the intellectual standards, elements of thought, intellectual traits, tradecraft, best practices, structured analysis, and a myriad of other procedures. There might be a lack of intelligence or collection assets to answer an intelligence information requirement. A source providing information might have provided false information and it was not properly vetted. The logic, reason, or analysis might not answer intelligence requirements because it was not structured correctly. The intelligence might have answered the information requirements, but people might have drawn the wrong assumptions, come to the wrong conclusion, or made decisions not congruent to the preponderance of evidence. Regardless people are to blame in each example and in the end, someone made a decision. The decision maker must take responsibility for their decision and not blame the “intelligence.”    

An input or output should not break the system or process. The intelligence process or decision-making process is not flawed because of human error or miscalculations. The processes have mechanisms in place to identify and course correct errors, mistakes, or vulnerabilities before they cause systematic failure. The failure is therefore not of a process, information, or inanimate object but cognitive, character, or leadership failure of a person or group of people.

We must hold ourselves and others accountable for our decisions and actions. This is what our professional military ethic demands. It is what is necessary for the trust needed to win and fight our nation’s wars. We must hold officers and leaders responsible and accountable for everything their command does or fails to do. When we allow them to blame intelligence for their failure, we allow them to avoid responsibility, and we do not adhere to the Army profession and ethics. Most importantly we undermine the integrity of our institutions and organizations and the trust given to them by its members and the public. 

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Samuel Yudin is a command sergeant major in the California Army National Guard, serving as the senior enlisted member of the 224th Sustainment Brigade and as the California Army National Guard’s senior military intelligence enlisted servicemember. Yudin recently served with the 66th Military Intelligence Brigade as the United States Army Europe Federated Intelligence Program mission coordinator and is currently a Senior Manager at Boeing Space Mission Systems. He is a graduate of the US Army Sergeants Major Academy Class 67 and holds a BA in German from Humboldt State University and a master’s degree in leadership studies from the University of Texas at El Paso. He is also the president and founder of the Jewish American Military Historical Society and advises several other nonprofit organizations.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.