Monthly WIN Short-Form Book Review

This is a worthwhile addition to the small pantheon of texts for those interested in Warning.  Gronning and Stenslie have assembled an impressive anthology for four reasons.  First, the case studies cover well-sourced discussions of Warning issues ranging from tactical to strategic to government to private sector.  The range of topics expands thinking on what constitutes a Warning matter.  Second (despite limited mention of HAMAS’ 7 October surprise attack on Israel), the chapters focus on events since the new millennium’s dawn.  This recency helps broaden scholarship beyond the classics (e.g., Wohlstetter on Pearl Harbor, a host of others on the Yom Kippur War). Third, unlike most Warning discussions--which tend to center either on the US Intelligence Community (USIC) or Israel--this includes ample discussion from the perspective of British, French, and Norwegian intelligence, among others, and so enriches understanding of how security services work (or don’t) across the globe.  Fourth, the chapters benefit from lessons and recommendations recaps, which provide useful normative narrative of what steps Warning professionals could or should have taken.

Chapters on Russia’s war with Georgia (notable for a good discussion of signal and noise), Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the run-up to Russia’s full-blown war with Ukraine are particularly salient in identify Warning successes and failures.  These are thoughtful, if orthodox, discussions of what various intelligence services did and did not catch.  Also compelling are stories of intelligence service disfunction (or at least a lack of coordination), as with Paris and the Bataclan attack in 2015, and the fall of Kabul in 2021.  

Chapters on the 2008 global financial collapse, the ISIS attack on Palmyra’s cultural heritage sites, and the 2022 Sindh Province floods are also thoughtful, but don’t quite work because they try to apply intelligence-centric Warning approaches to non-traditional issues.  Absent more discussion—which would have helped in framing Warning on novel topics—these don’t advance understanding Warning in the 21^st century.

This is not a beginner’s text.  Gronning and Stenslie have too little discussion Warning typologies:  their own Type A (failure to Warn) and Type B (failure of policymakers to heed Warning), and Gordon’s and Gentry’s Type I (false positive) and Type II (false negative) rubric.  Had they more consistently applied these categories throughout, they would have had a stronger body of scholarship.  As a result, this is likely a better read for those already well-versed in Warning who want to update their case studies rather than examine Warning issues through a new lens.  

There are a few other places for improvement.  Because this is a compendium of scholarly pieces by disparate international authors, each chapter likely uses more words than necessary to make key points.  (this could also be me trying to reorient after decades of reading and writing relatively terse intelligence analyses.)   The lessons and recommendations that close most chapters are too general for practitioners to incorporate.  This perhaps results from the authors—smart academics—operating without insiders’ perspectives of government processes.  Finally, the disparate examples (ranging from traditional Warning failure involving terrorist strikes to failure to anticipate the devastating results of a flood) make it harder to assess common best practices to incorporate across types of government (and non-government) agencies and across different countries.

Michael Coyne is a retired career FBI counterintelligence analyst, now a Visiting Fellow with George Mason University’s National Security Institute and an incoming Adjunct Lecturer for the University of Maryland’s Fellows Program. Coyne was formerly the FBI’s Senior National Intelligence Officer for Counterintelligence, the National Intelligence Officer for Counterintelligence at the National Intelligence Council, and acting National Intelligence Manager for Counterintelligence at the National Counterintelligence and Security Center.