This blame-game ping-pong does nothing to make the intelligence community improve. It even prevents the long-term investments necessary to get better at forecasting.12 What would help is a sweeping commitment to evaluation: Keep score. Analyze results. Learn what works and what doesn’t. But that requires numbers, and numbers would leave the intelligence community vulnerable to the wrong-side-of-maybe fallacy, lacking any cover the next time they blow a big call.
