Building a virtual cultural intelligence community

Abstract

The U.S. intelligence community is without peer in providing high-quality, detailed technical intelligence. Due to the intelligence community's efforts, the USG has a thorough understanding of its adversaries' activities. What we propose is to develop a means by which that same intelligence community can use cultural factors to answer the question "Why?" Although cultural intelligence plays a key role in many of America's political and military successes, the maintenance of a broad-based, detailed cultural intelligence capability has thus far proven elusive. With the advent of networked collaboration tools, the intelligence community now has the ability to deploy a virtual cultural intelligence community. Such a community, based on a wiki, would incur almost no monetary or bureaucratic overhead, and could be configured so that the loss of any single intelligence organization would have minimal negative effect on its mission.