A Moment of Clarity

To begin, I am not a Luddite, I happen to love technology and see the potential that it has in our world. However, technology and all of its applications, dashboards, software, programmes, clouds, networks, codes…….do not replace the need to learn the foundational backbones from the ground up for many intelligence and information processes. In other words, it means doing things manually. 

When I first learned about link analysis it was by chance through a course run by a company called i2. At the time, I was recently inducted into the world of military intelligence and had no prior thoughts on the subject. The course was great and I learned a lot about how networks and the relationships (links) between nodes work and affect our lives. We used a program called Analyst Notebook and it made everything seem so easy. After a tour overseas I still never received any formal link analysis training. While preparing to go back on operations the following year I attended a course that actually taught me the theory behind link analysis and the manual methods involved. This was like a moment of clarity and I had wondered how I managed to get by the previous year.

On a separate occasion while deployed on a disaster assistance mission I was without a computer in the middle of nowhere. I had an entire area of operations to map and understand in order to contribute to the decision making process. How would I pull this off? It then dawned on me what I could do. Hey!! I have paper and a pen and go figure I used the manual methods to conduct intelligence processes to include link analysis, collection planning and analytic's, all of which fed into my understanding of the environment and the effective and relevant contribution to decision making. It was actually quite liberating and once I received a laptop I was able to manually input all of my information into the digital automated world. I then realized how much work I was actually able to accomplish with a pen and paper. 

All this to say is that I learned a valuable lesson and that is it is much more beneficial to learn your foundational skills through the “old school” ways before proceeding to any automated process. Don’t get me wrong, automation can be a great thing but if you do not understand the manual ways it becomes much harder to really maximize the effort. Additionally, people become too dependent on the tools and forget to use their noodle.