Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Abstract
I will begin this talk with a short discussion of the function of warning in the US national security community, and the analytic methodology used by US intelligence agencies (in 1941 and since) to address the problem of warning. I will then present a formal model for crisis warning consisting of a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) intended to assist an intelligence analyst in deciding when to issue an alert to a foreign policy principal decision maker such as the President. The lead time demanded by the principal is a key element in the model. I will spend the remainder of the talk illustrating this warning model in the context of the brewing crisis in the Pacific from July to December 1941, and present results from test runs of the model using historical raw intelligence data from that period. While a probabilistic approach to warning is not a new idea, this research addresses three outstanding issues left unresolved from past efforts to develop such an approach:
Together with my thesis advisor, Prof Elisabeth Pate-Cornell, I am currently writing a paper that covers the presented material, and I hope to incorporate feedback from this presentation into the paper. Because the paper is currently a work in progress, I am not distributing it at this time.
David Blum attends Stanford University, where he is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Department of Management Science & Engineering as well as a U.S. Department of Defense SMART Scholar. He is currently developing a probabilistic model of national security crises, with the goal of improving crisis early warning. His interests also include targeting in counter-terrorism, signatures of WMD proliferation, and models of decisions made by adversarial actors as games with incomplete information. He is a graduate intern in the Counter-Proliferation Operations-Intelligence Support program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Between 2004 and 2008 David worked at the U.S. Department of Defense as an operations research analyst. He deployed twice to Iraq, in 2007 and 2008, where, as member of Multi-National Corps Iraq, he provided direct analytic support to conventional and special operations units. He received his Master's degree from MIT in political science, concentrating in security studies, and his Bachelor's degree from Columbia University in history and physics.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C-327
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Thomas Fingar is a Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow from 2010 through 2015 and the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford in 2009.
From 2005 through 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Fingar served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2000-01 and 2004-05), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001-03), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994-2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-94), and chief of the China Division (1986-89). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including senior research associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control.
Fingar is a graduate of Cornell University (A.B. in Government and History, 1968), and Stanford University (M.A., 1969 and Ph.D., 1977 both in political science). His most recent books are From Mandate to Blueprint: Lessons from Intelligence Reform (Stanford University Press, 2021), Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security (Stanford University Press, 2011), The New Great Game: China and South and Central Asia in the Era of Reform, editor (Stanford University Press, 2016), Uneasy Partnerships: China and Japan, the Koreas, and Russia in the Era of Reform (Stanford, 2017), and Fateful Decisions: Choices that will Shape China’s Future, co-edited with Jean Oi (Stanford, 2020). His most recent article is, "The Role of Intelligence in Countering Illicit Nuclear-Related Procurement,” in Matthew Bunn, Martin B. Malin, William C. Potter, and Leonard S Spector, eds., Preventing Black Market Trade in Nuclear Technology (Cambridge, 2018)."
Abstract:
This paper explores how, in the two decades following the laser's invention, the popular image of the laser weapon was transformed from a terrifying "death ray" capable of contaminating large areas to a surgically precise tool and rationale for a major new defense program. Whereas previous histories of the laser treat its popularizations as irrelevant to real-world developments, this account emphasizes that mass media provide sites for scientists and engineers to vie for control over the meaning and direction of technological development. It shows how the laser as a symbol came to link two very different applications: the everyday use of low-energy lasers to increase the "precision" of technologies, and the experimental development of high-energy lasers that would be destructive. I argue that the symbolic appeal of laser weapons made the laser a central part of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative or "Star Wars" missile defense program.
First paragraph of the article:
In the wake of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, the United States launched a series of satellites under the name Vela (after a constellation in the southern hemisphere sometimes called “the sails” because of its configuration). The Vela satellites were designed to monitor compliance with the treaty by detecting clandestine nuclear tests either in space or in the atmosphere. The first such satellite was launched in 1963, the last in 1969. They operated by measuring X-rays, neutrons and gamma rays, and, in the case of the more advanced units, emissions of light using two photodiode sensors called bhangmeters (derived from the Indian word for cannabis). These satellites had a nominal life of seven years, after which the burden of detection was to be shifted to a new series of satellites under the Defense Support Program (DSP), equipped with infra-red detectors designed to pick up missile launches as well as nuclear tests. The Vela satellites, however, kept operating long past the end of their nominal design life and one of them, designated Vela 6911, detected an event on September 22, 1979, that has become a subject of intense interest ever since.
