Contemporary Intelligence Warning Cases: Learning from Successes and Failures
Introduction. Case studies have been a mainstay of intelligence education and research for decades, starting with and exemplified by Rebecca Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, published in 1962. However, in their 2017 series of case studies, Intelligence Success and Failure: The Human Factor, Rose McDermott and Uri Bar-Joseph pointed out what they perceived to be gaps in the literature of intelligence case studies. First, they argued these case studies, focusing primarily on failures, do not pay enough attention to successes. Second, they said that most studies focus on the US experience, specifically on Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
Contemporary Intelligence Warning Cases fills both of these gaps in the literature, while simultaneously providing a series of case studies recent enough to resonate with the current and next generations of intelligence professionals, many of whom served, or were at least alive, during the events explored.
Contemporary Intelligence Warning Cases is a compilation of 16 short studies written by a diverse group of scholars and edited by Bjørn Grønning and Stig Stenslie, the deputy research director and head of The Center for Intelligence Studies at the Norwegian Intelligence School, respectively.