More on Team B & the roots of OSP (Warning: Academic Paper) [View All]

Team B from the Ford administration populates Geo. W. Bush's administration, the concept of Rumsfeld's OSP seems to come from this time, and the OSP seems to have made Team B's mistakes all over again, which I guess shows that when the same people do the same job you get the same results...here is an academic paper that looks at the problem of the break-away intelligence unit OSP and its influence within the Bush camp.

I have no idea if this author is conservative or liberal but the history of the Team B concept and its influence in the development of Bush Strategic Policy is interesting and informative:



http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonm/Pubapp/GRMalta7.htm

Team B Wins Again:
Competitive Intelligence Assessment in the Bush National Security Strategy1
Paper presented at the 2003 AFA/NCA Argumentation Conference
July 31-August 3, 2003; Alta, UT
Gordon R. Mitchell2

<snip>

One of the most infamous competitive intelligence analysis exercises took place in 1975, during a period of great turmoil for both the intelligence community and President Gerald Ford. With the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under siege after bruising congressional hearings on botched covert operations, and the Ford administration's conciliatory policy of d‚tente with the Soviet Union becoming a lightning rod for criticism from right-wing hawks, Ford reshuffled his cabinet on November 3, 1975, appointing Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, Richard Cheney as Chief of Staff, and George H.W. Bush as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Shortly thereafter, DCI Bush approved a novel study of Soviet Cold War strategy. In this exercise, a "Team A" group of "insider" analysts, drawn from the ranks of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was presented with intelligence data and asked to generate an assessment of the Soviet Union's strategic military objectives. Another group, comprised of academics, retired military officers, and other "outsiders," was designated "Team B" and tasked to generate its own independent assessment by sifting through the same data set (Lowenthal, 1992, pp. 47-49). Advocates of the competitive analysis exercise suggested that by engaging in dialectical clash, the competing groups could push each other to improve the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) process and produce a more reliable assessment of Soviet strategic military objectives.

<snip>

During the exercise, Team A and Team B reached dramatically different conclusions regarding the Soviet military threat

<snip>
Team B looked beyond "hard" evidence of Soviet military capabilities and focused more on "soft" evidence derived from perceptions regarding Soviet intentions. This methodological difference yielded dramatically more alarmist estimations of Soviet military spending, bomber production, anti-ballistic missile capability, and technical progress in non-acoustic anti-submarine engineering. The split on this latter issue is telling.

While Team A saw little risk of Soviet breakout in anti-submarine warfare capability, "Team B's failure to find a Soviet non-acoustic anti-submarine system was evidence that there could well be one" (Cahn & Prados, 1993, emphasis added).

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