National intelligence: A tool for political forecasting and the forecasting of rare events

This article discusses national intelligence as a forecasting tool for political issues. The text presents political forecasting as a tool for test and calibration of technology forecasts where political factors may influence the evolution of science and technology. The essence of intelligence forecasting is presented as a “top-down” benchmark methodology that guides a “bottom-up” assessment work. The text details that methodology and argues that contemporary environment has created a risk-aversed culture which practically is a hybrid of traditional intelligence methods, soft quantitative analysis and risk management. The paper underlines several concepts characterizing contemporary trends in intelligence, most of them belong to counter-terror intelligence, which can be used for the creation of a new paradigm aimed for future trajectories and forecasting of broad political and societal questions. These questions often refer to the forecasting of issues that are related to limited number of actors and rare events. The text discusses methods of robust planning and scenario analysis as tools to handle the current highly uncertain political environment.