The Intelligence Cycle
The first step of the intelligence cycle, where the need for information is formally identified.
What is Planning and Direction?
This technique helps analysts consider a wider range of explanations by intentionally challenging assumptions.
What is Key Assumptions Check?
The surprise attack in 1941 that led to major reforms in US intelligence structures.
What is Pearl Harbor?
Analysts may interpret ambiguous information in a way that reinforces their preferred hypothesis, a form of what bias?
What is confirmation bias?
This is the number of primary branches that make up the Homeland Security Division (HSD).
What is three?
This part of the cycle involves converting collected data into formats such as transcripts, geospatial layers, or decoded signals.
What is processing and exploitation?
A SAT used to break down a problem into actors, assumptions, drivers, and influences; often displayed in a diagram.
What is Mind Mapping?
The 1961 operation in Cuba that failed largely due to groupthink and inadequate challenge of assumptions.
What is the Bay of Pigs invasion?
Analysts who judge recent collection as more accurate than older information are exhibiting what bias?
What is recency bias?
Name three types of events for which HSD commonly produces situation reports.
What are elections, wildfires, SEAR-rated events (4th of July, NYE, etc)?
The phase in which raw information is turned into something meaningful for decision‑makers.
What is Analysis and Production?
This technique forces analysts to look at opposite or unlikely points of view to avoid mirror‑imaging.
What is Red Team Analysis?
Despite multiple indicators of terrorist intent, agencies failed to produce a unified strategic warning before this 2001 attack.
What is the 9/11 terrorist attack?
A bias causing analysts to anchor too heavily on initial information when making judgments.
What is Anchoring Bias?
The level of activation during major statewide emergencies.
What is Level 1?
A breakdown in this stage often results in intelligence “stovepipes.”
What is dissemination?
A matrix used to assess the likelihood and impact of events is known as what?
What is a risk matrix?
The analytic failure in 2002–2003 concerning Iraq centered around what type of weapons?
What are Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)?
This bias leads analysts to assume adversaries think the same way they do.
What is mirror‑imaging?
New interns are advised to never lose this item, which grants them access, credibility, and a sense of adulthood.
What is their badge?
Name the commonly accepted five phases of the intelligence cycle in the correct sequence.
What are Planning and Direction, Collection, Processing & Exploitation, Analysis & Production, Dissemination?
The advanced technique used to test the strength of competing hypotheses through systematic evaluation of evidence.
What is Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH)?
This 2014 event demonstrated failures to predict unconventional hybrid warfare tactics in Eastern Europe.
What is Russia’s annexation of Crimea?
The bias where analysts misinterpret information because they expect what they want to see, rather than what is actually present.
What is Expectation Bias?
Analysts joke that this software application is their “true life partner” because they spend more time with it than with anyone else.
What is Microsoft Excel?