Advanced intelligence analysis: Strategic foresight for national security in an age of systemic threats

Today, national security operates in an environment defined by systemic rivalry, hybrid warfare, rapid technological diffusion, and cascading uncertainty. Conventional intelligence advantages—large datasets, surveillance platforms, or numerical superiority—no longer guarantee strategic foresight. Adversaries increasingly shape outcomes before crises become visible, exploiting ambiguity, fragmentation, and slow decision cycles.

Many countries and their leadership are caught sleeping.

So, I will be doing a three-part series that can aid national leadership with advanced security decision-making methodologies. I will argue that modern national security no longer hinges primarily on access to data, but on the ability to reason rigorously under uncertainty (i.e., where data may be lacking or unclear). That way, the leaders would be able to understand causal forces rather than surface indicators, and test strategic decisions before reality imposes irreversible costs on them and their countries or organizations.

In Part 1, I will revisit a pivotal seminar I attended in 2018, on Bayesian reasoning and expert knowledge elicitation. This workshop, which was held at the Virginia Tech Applied Research Center in Arlington, Virginia, USA, demonstrated how national security decisions can be supported even when reliable data are scarce.

Part 2 will examine why many countries—especially in the developing world—remain strategically vulnerable because leadership resists such advanced (and, yes, complex) methods, often with catastrophic consequences.

Part 3 will conclude by showing how developments since 2018—including advanced AI— now make it both feasible and urgent to institutionalize these methods into a standing Bayesian Intelligence & Security Analysis Capability (B-ISAC).

Together, the series would deliver a single message: strategic surprise is no longer accidental—it is the predictable outcome of analytic inertia. Nations that neglect these highly sophisticated intelligence analysis systems are the ones that would be caught sleeping.

Next: Part 1 (Revisiting Knowledge Elicitation & Bayesian Reasoning for National Security Decisions).