Handbook of Warning Intelligence : Assessing the Threat to National Security

Contents: Foreword/Jan Goldman. Author’s note to original edition. Book I: 1. Why warming intelligence and what is it? Some fundamentals. 2. Organization and tools of the trade. 3. Introductio0n to the analytical method. 4. Specific problems of military analysis. Book II: 5. Specific problems of political, civil and economic analysis. 6. Some major analytical problems. Book III: 7. Problems of particular types of warfare. 8. Reaching and reporting the warning judgement. 9. Conclusions.

"Handbook of Warning Intelligence : Assessing the Threat to National Security was written during the Cold War and classified for 40 years. The majority of this manual, however, is now finally available to the general public. An abridged version, Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning, was published in 2002 and 2004, but this original document goes into much greater detail about the fundamentals of intelligence analysis and forecasting. It includes military analysis, as well as the difficulties in understanding political, civil and economic analysis sand assessing what it means for analysts to have “warning judgement”.

Much of what Grabo writes in her book seems to have appeared in many of the numerous commission reports that emerged after the 9/11 attacks. However, this book was written in response to the “surprise” Soviet Union invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. According to the author, the event was no surprise. And while analysis have to take some of the blame for failing to strenuously present their case that the threat was real and imminent, what occurred was a failure of policymakers to listen to the warning-intelligence reports written at the time.” (jacket)