Decision Advantage
Authors: Sims Jennifer E. 
Published: November 2022

The argument of this book is that intelligence, or “competitive learning” is a measurable, buildable form of power that makes a predictable difference to outcomes in international politics. Employing skills in information engineering, its practitioners start with natural advantages and disadvantages in “knowing.” This “terrain of uncertainty” is simply the distribution of advantageous knowledge, including innovation, education, science and the arts. Sound intelligence strategy entails mapping the terrain of uncertainty, and then employing intelligence systems, including platforms, sensors, communications, and analysis, to learn and decide more quickly and usefully than one’s opponent does. An intelligence “opponent” is any competitor who threatens to defeat you by outwitting you, rendering you more ignorant, or deceiving you. Such a competitor may even be an ally whose intelligence is so flawed that he fails to understand that his best interests are coincident with your own. Intelligence power or “readiness” has four parts: the number, coherence, flexibility of collection systems; the capacity to deploy those systems against policy-irrelevant unknowns (the anticipation function, or finding black swans); the capacity to deploy them against policy-relevant ones (the “transmission” function that supports current strategy and operations); and the capacity for selective secrecy (the timely keeping and releasing of secrets). States maximizing these capacities will be better prepared for gaining decision-advantages than others, but whether this power is used correctly in any given moment depends on how the power is employed in service to decision-making. Of course, such is the case for all forms of power. Done well, intelligence has systemic effects because it contributes to the competitive unveiling of international politics-a form of transparency based less on good will than self-interest. Counterintelligence (CI), which uses the same instruments as positive intelligence but for the purpose of manipulating the learning of others (denial, influence or deception), may darken international politics from time to time, but it cannot in theory outpace competitive learning because it needs the latter in order to succeed. Counterintelligence cannot work-indeed creates dangerous vulnerabilities for the user-when the user’s positive intelligence is weak. So, as all states compete to improve their intelligence capabilities, the capacity to achieve advantages through manipulation often lags behind, and over time will tend to decline. The significance of this theory is three-fold: First, it suggests that battles can be won by seemingly weaker states if they are relatively empowered with intelligence, and so, are designed to fight on familiar terrain and with greater agility (faster, more precise and useful decision-making) than competitors can. Second, it suggests that states that build intelligence readiness into planning for diplomacy and war are more likely to achieve their objectives than those that do not. Third, it suggests that the process of competitive learning achieves a competitive unveiling of international politics that may reduce the likelihood of misperception while offering the surest path to global cooperation for the common good, such as remediating climate change, achieving stable reductions in armaments, and avoiding global black swans, including pandemics. Indeed, if one considers the business of arms control during the Cold War more as competitive learning than arms reduction or management per se, one sees the collective advantages that can be achieved-including their spill-over effects. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was the intelligence architecture, including both sides’ verification and monitoring systems, that helped “unveil” the process, reducing perceptions of threat. What this theory does not suggest, however, is that competitive learning is all that matters. Intelligence has a lot to do with establishing facts but little to do with truth-finding, which is the domain of science, arts and the like. Confusing the two can lead to serious mistakes, such as attempts to “unveil” international politics through the spread of religious or secular belief-systems, or the propagation of international institutions built on amorphous values, as opposed to competitive learning. That said, the capacity to know what institutions matter and to identify interests, requires having values and cultivating them. Those states that develop a rich cultural life and promote learning for its own sake, build the purpose, imagination and “knowing” that can tip the “terrain of uncertainty” in their favor. The case studies in this book helped distil the theory and, hopefully, help illustrate it for the reader. In each case, the author examines decision-making at critical moments during past conflicts and traces the informational basis for them. Cases include the Spanish Armada, the US Civil War, the hunt for John Wilkes Booth, and the pre-war diplomacy in 1914 and 1938. The penultimate chapter takes the lessons from these cases, develops the cross-case measures of intelligence success, and suggests how well the US is currently positioned in light of them. It concludes that the US has rich but insufficiently flexible collection systems, lacks a capacity to anticipate black swans, suffers from cultural disconnects between collectors and decision-makers, and is hopelessly entangled in secrecy.