Jane DOE (0:00): The following podcast was recorded in the Fall of 2022. Thought leadership, titles, current events, legislation, and technology may have changed and evolved since it was originally recorded.

Josh Kerbel (0: 12.86): … to a world today that is completely unbounded … and not hierarchical, it's networked. And a system that is unbounded and networked tends not to behave mechanistically. It behaves organically. It behaves like a living being. The problem, of course, is that that requires you, therefore, in order to describe it with some degree of precision, to have metaphors that are organic metaphors. Metaphors that would be drawn more from, let's say, ecology, or biology or medicine … you know, more organic fields. But not engineering. Not Newtonian mechanics. And we haven't really changed, we're still using our traditional metaphorical menu. We’re comfortable with it. We don't even have to think about it. And this leads to problems …

Jane DOE (0:57.96): The opinions and views expressed in the following podcast do not represent the views of NIU or any other U.S. government entity. They are solely the opinions and views of Jane DOE and the speakers. Any mention of organizations, publications, or products not owned or operated by the U.S. Government is not a statement of support and does not constitute U.S. Government endorsement.

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Welcome back to the Intelligence Jumpstart podcast. I am your host Jane DOE. In this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with NIU’s Josh Kerbel about cognitive linguistics and metaphor. Josh is a Professor of Practice in NIU’s Office of Research, where he explores the increasingly complex security environment and the associated intelligence challenges. Prior to joining NIU, he held senior analytical positions at DIA, ODNI (including the NIC), the Navy staff, CIA, and ONI. His writings on the intersections of government (especially intelligence) and complexity have been published in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Studies in Intelligence, Slate, The National Interest, The Hill, War on the Rocks, Defense One, Parameters, and other outlets.

Jane DOE (2:36.54): Josh Kerbel, thank you so much for coming on the Intelligence Jumpstart.

Josh Kerbel (2:39.92): Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

Jane DOE (2:41.65): So, let's just dive in. At the National Intelligence University, we are the IC’s University and one of our greatest features is that we bring students together in a classroom and they get to learn from one another … building an IC Officer’s language … instead of just a DIA officer perspective or a CIA officer’s perspective. And one of the interesting things about you is that you didn't necessarily get that in the classroom, but you've kind of gained that IC officer’s perspective throughout your career. You've worked for many different agencies. So, I'm hoping you can speak a little bit about your experience and tell us, was that on purpose? Or was it more, dare I say, strategic?

Josh Kerbel (3:19.54): I'm not sure it was on purpose, or that it was strategic. Really, the long and short of my background is that I've been in the Intelligence Community for about 26 years. Twenty-one of those as an analyst or analytic tradecraft specialist. And then the last five, at NIU, on the research faculty.

As you mentioned, I've served in a multitude of agencies … CIA, DIA, the NIC, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and a previous stint in ODNI. So, I pretty much sort of covered the waterfront in agencies. None of those were rotations, they were all full-time jobs. And, and I think that you know, the reason that happened that way … I sort of didn't plan it. I'm an introspective person by nature. I've always been a person who's always asking, why do we do it that way? Why is that our approach? And I didn't mean it in a sort of rebellious sense. It was just in the sense that that's just how I've always been. I was like that at school as well. And the fact of the matter is, that can be annoying to people. It can be annoying to organizations. I get that. And I think that's sort of contributed to the fact that I have moved around the IC a lot.

It's just, you know, in some ways, it's a personality thing. But it's also been good for me to move around the IC because I've gotten, I think, a really a broad perspective from both the civilian and the DoD side. Which is probably unusual for most analysts. I don't think most analysts have the kind of perspective on the IC that I probably have.

I found out very quickly that while I'm a very introspective person, the Intelligence Community itself is not particularly introspective. And I say that because the Intelligence Community is so mission-focused … and this is a good thing about it … it’s so mission-focused, that it tends to see introspection, in negative terms … like sort of, navel-gazing. And most of all, it sees it as a distraction from the mission. As opposed to seeing introspection as a prerequisite to mission success, we tend to see it as a distraction from mission success, which I think is not one of our better characteristics.

And if you think about it, it's sort of like think about like having a doctor. If you had a doctor who all the time said, look, I have a ton of patients that need to be treated … I don't have time to read the latest literature on methods and so forth. That's not a doctor that you would want. And I think the same holds for intelligence officers. If you're so mission-focused that you don't have time … or you feel you don't have time to read and to sort of study all these other developments in the field. Ultimately, you're just going to be obsolete. Right? You're just not going to be state-of-the-art anymore.

So anyway, that focus on introspection led me to focus a lot on what might be termed metacognition. Basically, thinking about thinking. And that subset, a subset of metacognition really led me to this whole idea of cognitive linguistics. This whole idea of language and thought.

Jane DOE (6:04.10): Very cool that you have moved in that direction, and that you have that broad perspective that you talked about. I wanted to dive into your interest in cognitive linguistics …

Josh Kerbel (6:1.36)): Sure.

Jane DOE (6:14.78): … it's not a new concept, but it is kind of new for the IC. And I'm hoping you can touch on that a little bit. What is cognitive linguistics? What this really means for the IC? Well, separate from the IC, but all applied to the IC environment.

Josh Kerbel (6:29.56): In the broadest sense, cognitive linguistics is just the branch of linguistics that explores the relationship between language and the mind … between language and thought. Within the IC, I think it tends to be pretty neglected because we sort of operate on two really big assumptions. Number one is that we all know how to think. Right?

Jane DOE (6:48.41): Right.

Josh Kerbel (6:48.83): If nothing else, we've all gone to good universities. We've all got degrees. And the assumption, therefore, is that somehow we all know how to think. And the second assumption is that if we are indeed, cognitively challenged at all, the reason for that is mostly because of cognitive biases. We've all learned about cognitive biases. In recent years, it's been a big theme in a lot of training things. And one of the things we tend to learn about cognitive biases is that awareness of them does almost nothing to mitigate.

So, it's easy for us to sort of say, well, they're cognitive biases, nobody can get around them and they're inevitable. And if we have really cognitive failures, they're mostly … probably stemming from that. We've been introduced to things like structured analytic techniques and other things to try and help us with cognitive biases. But at the end of the day, we sort of accept them … and which is an important thing to you know … it is important to understand that you have them.

So, when we do talk about language … if we do … then we tend to talk about it ... and I would argue probably in two distinct ways. One, we talk about foreign language, which obviously, is a whole different thing. Or if we talk about language in our own IC context, we tend to think about it in terms of style. Right? … we teach new analysts what's called the, you know, what's called the … is … probably now they call it the … style. It's a, you know, an emphasis on brevity, and simple sentences with not a lot of adverbs and uncertainty. A focus is really on concision of language. This is interesting, because we … we like to talk about precision of language, you'll hear that a lot at various agencies precision of language, but the IC really doesn't say to spend much time concerned with precision of language. In reality, it concerns itself with concision of language. Say it in as few terms as possible.

And recently, when we've talked about language a lot that the language discussion stylistically, has focused on probability and confidence language. How do we convey our degree of certainty or uncertainty and that something's going to happen or in the strength of our, our logic and our information base? So, we tend not to think really about language in terms of how closely it is connected to how we think. And that's the thing about cognitive linguistics … the fact of the matter is, is language both reinforces and reflects how we think. And that's the essence of cognitive linguistics. But it's just not something that we spend a lot of time on in the IC.

Jane DOE (9:06.00): Right. So, you mentioned that language both reinforces and reflects how we think and you've written quite a lot about metaphors and how we use metaphors in the IC. What do you mean when you say that metaphors are key to our thinking? And to quote you … they are linguistic manifestations of mental models. You've touched on this a little bit already, but if I'm hoping you can dive in a little bit deeper.

Josh Kerbel (9:30.00): Absolutely. So, metaphors are obviously an important component of cognitive linguistics. There's other elements to it as well. I spend a lot of time in the realm of metaphor because it's such a huge part of what we do. We all communicate and write and think and speak in metaphors. But we often do it without really paying any attention to it. We do it by force of habit. We have metaphors that we're used to. And when I'm talking about metaphor, let me be clear, I'm talking about … most people, when they think about metaphor, they think about sort of a rhetorical flourish. Some kind of neat sort of turn of a phrase.

But when we're talking about metaphor, we're really talking about borrowing a term or a concept from one domain that we then apply to another domain to help us develop a better understanding of that domain that we're applying it to. They're not literally truly just hence the term figures of speech. Right? So that's what I'm really talking about metaphor.

And really, in the last 50 years in the field of cognitive linguistics, the power of metaphor, as sort of an influence and a shaper of our thought, has really become apparent. Actually, the power of metaphor has been known for thousands of years. It went back even in ancient Greece … some of the Greek states … slaves were not allowed to speak in metaphor … not allowed to deploy metaphor … because the power of it was recognized. But really in, in … really in the last 50 years, has really been a huge amount of research in this field. And one of the things about metaphor that has come through … and like I spend a lot of time on is this idea of what we call the framing effect. Which is, in a nutshell, framing effect essentially is that … how you say that something is as important as what you say, in terms of shaping people's understanding and thinking about it.

And I'll give an example. There was a study done not too long ago, that explored crime, and the discussion of crime … if it was presented to people as being metaphorically as a beast, as opposed to being metaphorically treated as a disease. And depending on which of those terms, those metaphors was employed, people's perception and perceived response … proper response to crime changed radically. Right? If it was presented as a beast, their perception of and then their response to it tended to be quite punitive and aggressive in how to treat it. Whereas if it was presented as a disease, their response to it tended to be much more about preventative measures in even how to treat it.

So very, very powerful in terms of which metaphor is used in terms to how you might see or perceive it. Which, of course, has huge implications for us in terms of … depending on the metaphor we use may have a great influence on the policymaker’s perception. So, it's a model in that sense. You need good models. The bottom line is how you describe your world shapes, how you're going to respond to it, and how you're going to see it. So, if you describe the world as a machine, you're going to think of it as behaving like a machine. Which may be fine if you're in a situation, kind of like that. But of course, the world is changing today, and it behaves much less like a machine and more like an organism.

Jane DOE (12:26.64): Thinking about the framing effect you mentioned … and this machine versus organic, you've written quite a bit about dead metaphors, and the Cold War … using the Cold War to describe how we interact the People of China or with Russia. You've written that it is detrimental to how we perceive their threat to us but how we deal with it as well because of our mental models aren't able to really conceive the true nature of what the environment actually puts in front of us. I, I think I see why it matters but why does it matter that the IC’s reliance on Cold War metaphors hasn't changed?

Josh Kerbel (13:04.03): So, this is sort of fundamental to what I focus on, really. The Intelligence Community's formative experience … obviously, our community goes back to the founding of the Republic. I shouldn't say that. Intelligence goes back to the founding of the Republic, but the Community’s formative experience really was the Cold War. So, the post-World War II era, really late 1940s, up until 1991.

And that world was in many ways … what we would term in systems parlance is a complicated environment, but not a complex environment. Right? It was basically a two-body problem, it was highly linear. NATO. Warsaw Pact. US Russia, two hierarchies kind of confronting each other. And in that sense, it was, was very much sort of a mechanistic sort of environment, each side sort of responding to the other side. And it was quite mechanical. And our metaphorical menu, if you will, is basically built around that right terminology … like inertia, momentum, tension, leverage, trajectory. These are all metaphors that you see embedded … another metaphor that you see throughout our, our, products and have for a long time. And it made sense for the world that we were trying to describe that was our formative experience. Right? And it worked for us, we actually, I think, did a good job. Obviously, we had our failures. But I think it's fair to say that the Intelligence Community did a good job, in terms of its understanding of the Soviet Union. And we helped to usher that period into a peaceful grave.

The problem is, the world has changed an awful lot, since the Cold War … whether we want to admit it or not. And by that, I mean that it's gone from being really a two-body very closed, hierarchical system, where we could sort of fence out all that other complexity, and just focus on this complicated relationship between the US and the Soviet Union. To a world, today that is completely unbounded. and not hierarchical. It's networked. And a system that is unbounded, and, and networked tends not to behave mechanistically. It behaves organically. It behaves like a living being.

The problem, of course, is that that requires you, therefore, in order to describe it with some degree of precision, to have metaphors that are organic metaphors. Metaphors that would be drawn more from, let's say, ecology, or biology or medicine, you know, more organic fields. But not engineering. Not Newtonian mechanics. And we haven't really changed, we're still using our traditional metaphorical menu. We’re comfortable with it. We don't even have to think about it. And this leads to problems in dealing with what might be called the post-Cold War kind of environment.

And I would point out that this is a problem today because you know, we have, you know, with Russia and China today … a lot of people are saying, oh, we are back into the Cold War … or a Cold War. Or … and even, even in the period between 1991 and in our current era. We never really renamed it. We continue to call it … we just called it post-Cold War … after the Cold War … since the Cold War … in the wake of the Cold War. But our primary strategic frame … go back to that framing effect thing has been Cold War, and still is. In fact today, I think we're doubling down on it. And that's a problem because that particular metaphor and Cold War is a metaphor. If that becomes our frame, well … we have certain things that are associated with that. You know, just do certain things associated with the term beast or the term disease, we have certain ideas associated with this idea of Cold War.

Often very subconsciously, in particular highly militarized physical containment. And we have to ask ourselves that if that use of that metaphor drives us to a policy response … or you know, to an understanding that is primarily built around highly militarized physical containment … is that the proper approach to dealing with a challenge today that is much more organic?

You know … there's a danger that what happens is it boxes out all the other elements of national power and things we might employ. You know, and we could sit here and say, oh, we want … oh, that wouldn't happen. Metaphor is, you know … there's no way that a figure of speech like Cold War can be that powerful. But I think we've seen from the psychological research, some of which I've already mentioned, that, in fact, it certainly can be. And if you listen to the strategic debate that's taking place in the United States right now, in national security circles … you can hear that sort of subtext of the Cold War containment, kind of coming through, sometimes almost exclusively. And I think we just have to be cautious and aware that we could potentially limit our understanding and hence, our, our perspectives if we relied too heavily on that Cold War strategic frame and those Cold War metaphors,

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Manolis Priniotakis (17:38.81): I’m Manolis Priniotakis, NIU’s Vice President for Research & Infrastructure and this is this episode’s Manolis Minute.

The next episode features Stephanie la Rue from ODNI on diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and security clearance reform. She’s joined by Lawrence Pace from NIU.

Anybody who holds a clearance understands that it is tremendous responsibility and honor. And it is hoped that others who have not held a clearance understand that as well. The trust placed in clearance holders is weighty and important.

Classification of information is often in the news, and it is not unusual for reporters or commentators to discuss regulations surrounding these issues.

While there are plenty of laws pertaining to the treatment of Federal employees, there are surprisingly few laws related to the classification of government information, with Congress instead deferring to the judgment of the Executive branch on the handling of its information. Congress has done things like mandate terms of access, such as the measures in the Senate’s version of the Intelligence Authorization Act that address timelines for completion of clearances and reciprocity of clearances across agencies.
But, by and large, classification and clearances are the domain of the Executive Branch, largely exercised via Executive Orders, most prominently Executive Order 13467.

A separate Executive Order, 13526 addresses the classification of information and sets and defines the levels of which most interested listeners will be aware: confidential, secret, and top secret.
The Director of National Intelligence, who also holds the title of the government’s Security Executive Agent, oversees the implementation of these orders across the government, to include several internal intelligence community directives that further define the handling of this information.
The one exception to this pattern relates to provisions of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which defines restricted data. It addresses information related to the design, manufacturing and possible use of nuclear weapons and other related nuclear matters.

The law gave the Atomic Energy Commission (and now, its successor, the Department of Energy) the responsibility of overseeing this only place in Federal law where the security of Executive Branch information is clearly defined.

Thanks again for listening to Intelligence Jumpstart. For more information on NIU, please visit our website, www.ni-u.edu.

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Jane DOE (20:09.80): It's kind of fascinating how our language can actually affect how we do business and how we … well, like you mentioned, how it affects our policy responses. But to what extent do you think that the IC’s reliance on the Cold War language affects how we organize ourselves? And again, you've touched on this a little bit, but from a psychological standpoint … how does this affect how we operate our daily business?

Josh Kerbel (20:32.72): Yeah, well, so in, in organizational psychology, you know, I'm talking about cognitive linguistics … I'm talking about organizational psychology. And I'm not an expert in any of those. But I read a lot in these areas. But in organizational psychology, there's an idea called the mirroring phases. And basically, what that says is that organizations tend to take on the appearance of the things that they were created to address. And this is actually a good thing. Right? You kind of want to look like what it is that you're trying to deal with. And if you look at the Intelligence Community today, and this is a problem, in many ways, we are still a mirror image, organizationally, of the Soviet Union.

We are a closed, insular, hierarchical community that as you go down through the ranks. Right? You have very narrow account structures, with not a lot of horizontal integration because of need to know. Right? So, we look a lot like the Soviet Union and, and that's really problematic. It was fine when we were … our problem was the Soviet Union. But when we're dealing with that unbounded, networked world, that is not a closed, hierarchical world, it becomes problematic.
And so, the point here is, I guess is that our metaphors have contributed to that understanding. Right? Our thinking about the world as though it were bounded and hierarchical, it's sort of like mechanistic, as I mentioned earlier. Right? So, we want to change, organizationally, to look more like the problem that we're confronting, then our language is going to be an integral part of that effort. We're going to have to start to pay attention to it more than we do. So, I think that's really where language affects us.

And in many ways … this is, this is the danger here is, is we can look at … when we talk about let's sort of reorganizing the IC, we talk about, you know, our organizations. Right? We talk about certain things. We almost never talk about our language, our metaphors. This is one of the reasons why they can be incredibly powerful … they're also incredibly dangerous is because they're so deeply, kind of, in the subtext. Right? You really have to look for them. You have to make a conscious effort. And that's, that's one of the dangers is that they're hiding in plain sight. But they're powerful. We talk about these things, like how we should reform the IC … we almost never talk about our need to reform our use of language and terminology.

Jane DOE (22:40.10): No. It's very, very true. So obviously, a shift has to occur. So, who do you believe is responsible for making that shift happen so that we are accurately defining the strategic environment that we’re in today?

Josh Kerbel (22:53.18): So, on this front, there's plenty of blame to go around plenty of responsibility to go around. Right? I mean, obviously, within the analytic community, we have a lot of work to do. As I mentioned earlier, we're just not that introspective. We're not paying attention to our metaphors so much, you know, when we're talking about language, we're focusing on style. So, there's a responsibility there for us, for us to become aware of this, to recognize this and to respond to it, but it can't and won't work, just if we do it. Policymakers also have to be made aware of it and have to come to some understanding of it. Otherwise, if we start changing our metaphors, they're going to just look at them and say, well, that’s weird. That’s awkward. Right? It's not going to necessarily help us on a credibility basis. So, they too, have to become more attuned to this issue. And then I think in the middle and a lot of ways is the editorial community.

The editors in the IC are an incredibly powerful bunch, but when they edit, they tend not to pay a lot of attention to our metaphor. Because that's how they've been brought up brought up and trained. Their emphasis is our grammar, correct? And their emphasis is on style. A couple of years ago, after I wrote a piece on metaphor, I was asked to speak to a gathering of the Defense Intelligence editors. And when I started to talk about this point, it was interesting to me about how many of them simply hadn't thought about it. They didn't necessarily rebel against it, which often happens, I have a lot of analysts who will push back against me, and say, oh, this is much ado about nothing. You know. Or they'll say, oh, well, the edit of the metaphors worked just fine for Hans Morgenthau, or for Henry Kissinger, in their writings or whatever, you know. So, they work fine for me, or John Lewis Gaddis, whoever, because, again, they too are writing in this in this period and using these metaphors. So, you get a lot of pushback.

The editors weren't didn't push back against the idea. It was just something that they never really paid that much attention to. Because they were focusing again, on grammar, and style and clarity. And the metaphors were just kind of accepted. These ideas of terminology, like inertia … momentum … tension … leverage … trajectory … these are just common and embedded throughout our products. So, we need the editorial community to play a role here as well. Which is not just that, but actually, to think about it. And I actually think they are open to it, if we ask them to, in some ways, that maybe that may be a key point to push on, you know because at the moment, they just don't have that kind of a role.

One of the interesting things we did a number of years ago, we tried to write a product, using only organic metaphors. And the editors at that time pushed back against it, because their sense was that it read awkwardly. Even though we were very conscious of the metaphors we were choosing, it just read awkwardly, and they sort of reverted back to a more traditional, Newtonian, mechanical, Cold War kind of metaphor. Just because they weren't, they weren't used to this kind of new metaphor, we tried to explain to them, why, but when and when they had explained they were receptive.

But it is really, truly a challenge, just the organic metaphors in a lot of ways seem still awkward to us. So again, so I guess, what I'm saying is, is that there's a, there's a huge amount of responsibility spread across a large swath of people here, that are going to have to address it in order for us to sort of move this forward. And it's a heavy lift. By nature, I'm the kind of person who needs a windmill to sort of tilt at, I need something like that. So, it's great for me because I can continue to keep banging away at it. And always find people who, to whom it’s both new and some will push back. But it's, it's certainly not something that we're going to solve within the confines of the IC alone.

Jane DOE (26:14.72): Yeah. So, switching gears a little bit … You are a co-director of one of the Ann our Caracristi Institute’s Centers. In that position, I'm sure you would have an incredible amount of influence so that you could start normalizing … I guess is the word … these organic metaphors. Is this a consideration at all?

Josh Kerbel (26:35.63): Yeah, so … so within the Center, that I'm the co-director of the Center for Anticipatory Intelligence and Adaptive Influence. Wow, that's a mouthful. But essentially, that center is, is focused on this idea of the increasingly complex security environment and what we need to do to address it. And one of the things that I push on and continue to push on, particularly in writing, is this idea of metaphor, and it gets picked up. Academically, there’s been a fair amount of, of work, an increasing amount of work on this academically within the national security, educational structure.

But again, as I mentioned earlier, we do have this challenge and the IC of being very mission focused. And it's often hard to get people to want to spend a lot of time, focusing on something which they often just assume they know how to do. Right? I know how think and I know how to write. So, it's a theme that we're going to push on, continue to push on in the center. But just one of many themes or other things that maybe we have to push up on even more particularly modeling gaming and simulation, although metaphors, as I mentioned earlier, are a form of modeling. But, again, it's, it's one of those tough things. Right? It's like language. It's so fundamental and yet, it's something that people tend to kind of push to the side.

When I talk about this with analysts a lot of the time what I hear is, you know, I have so much to read about substance of my issue. And for instance, I came out of the … community originally. And you know, I know a lot of … analysts. And there's a huge amount of material out there on …. Just the academic material itself is overwhelming. Nevermind … nevermind, what's in the news, and other forms of reporting. So, if I talk to them about this, they will often say to me, I don't have time to spend reading about linguistics, or anything is esoteric as metaphor. Right? I just just too much stuff on … to read. If I were to split my time, I wouldn't … I would never get to so much of it … which they don't get to anyway, because it's just so overwhelming.

So, it's a hard sell. Right? They just don't believe that even if they do appreciate the idea of the power of language and metaphor, they often just don't believe that they have the time. And if they do, it'll distract from their substantive knowledge of the topic. And it's, I understand that you know, you can talk all day about how powerful it is and how it matters. And even if they're willing to acknowledge it. At the same time, you'll still see I simply can't I'll just fall behind even further from where I am on my topic.

Jane DOE (28:56.84): Gotcha. That makes sense to me. So, as we’re wrapping up here, I wanted to ask you … and we’re shifting gears again … away from the metaphor. You've written about this concept of emergence and how, over the past 30 years, it has become an overarching national security challenge. What do you mean by this?

Josh Kerbel (29:16.14): So, uh, there’s a, there's a lot of elements here. So here, we're stepping a little bit away from metaphor and more broadly into language, which is just as important.

So, emergence is a concept. It's sort of a, it's a defining characteristic of a complex system. This is actually a linguistic sloppiness problem we have not just purely a metaphorical issue. In the Intelligence Community, we tend to use the term emergent … emerging … emergence as just in many ways, a synonym for sort of what's coming. This is the thing that's coming down the pike. But it's actually a term of art of complex systems theory … complexity science. And an emergent phenomenon or emergence is as a phenomenon that grows organically. It's kind of a macro behavior out of the whole. It tends to be unpredictable, although it can be anticipated. And its emergent phenomena today that I would argue, in many ways are the main national security threats.

What kinds of things are emergent phenomena? Well, things like climate change, globalization, and deglobalization, urbanization, information war, cyber cascades, any kind of economic contagion, like inflation, deflation, supply chain disruptions, and of course, the biggie right now, I would say pandemics. These are all things … they're not directed from any central point. They're not directed from, from Moscow or from Beijing or from Washington or London. These are phenomena that grow organically out of this immense interconnectivity and interdependence we built with both the virtual environment and of course, the increasing physical connectivity we have in the world, particularly airfare. You know, it's now possible to get anywhere in the world in 20 hours, pretty much.

So, the physical connectivity is immense. But then when you add to that in a virtual environment today, like where it's possible for just about anybody to broadcast. Right? You only need a cell phone and internet connection and a social media app, which is new. Right? Thirty years ago you didn't have that. Thirty years ago information was pretty still top-down. Right? The ability to broadcast was purely the purview of the government and or pretty much media corporations, and in some cases, wealthy individuals. But now anybody has that capability.

So, emergence is now this kind of major theme in terms of what we're dealing with is a national security structure. It's not just dealing with a nation-state anymore. These are things that transcend nation-states. And you're never going to understand them if you don't have the language to describe them downright. So, our habit of just using the word emergent or emerging in a sloppy form without understanding sort of the systemic, real meaning of it does end up hurting us.

It's the same thing … when we talk about sloppiness in terms of how we use the terms, complicated or complexity. We use them interchangeably. But in reality, they mean two different things. Most people just, you know, if they want to reiterate what they just said, something was complicated, they might use the term complex. We use them synonymously in idiomatic speech. But in reality, there are different things. Right? A complicated system is a system that tends to be closed and has consistent relationships between the parts, and the parts don't change that much. Right? It can be a lot of them. And it can be quite intricate, you know, my wristwatch is complicated. But it's not complex, my car is complicated, but it's not complex.

Complexity, you have, open systems pieces, adding pieces going away. The system can be rapidly evolving and behavior is not consistent over time, because the relationships between the pieces are always changing, and you have feedback loops. So anyway, complexity is really a much better descriptor in system systems language for the world that we're dealing with today. But you have to understand the distinctions, and we often don't. So, this way, we use our language emergence … complicated … and complexity … this kind of sloppiness, I think, contributes a great deal to our often misunderstanding, of the nature of the challenges that we're trying to describe, and hence understand.

Jane DOE (33:01.09): This is truly interesting stuff. Do you think this is a U.S. Intelligence Community problem? Or do you think it's a global problem of using and/or not evaluating language?

Josh Kerbel (33:12.63): It's a great question, I haven't spent a lot of time sort of exploring, you know, the way I have, American Intelligence Community products … looking for metaphors. I haven't spent much time looking at other countries. But the bottom line is, is that these linguistic characteristics apply to everybody. So, you know whether or not other countries are using outdated metaphors, I have less insight into, but the fact of the matter is, is metaphor affects them the same way that it affects us. And in this way, this can be played to our advantage or disadvantage. Right?

If other countries are using metaphors, more accurately, and precisely, then we are well, then we're at a disadvantage. And that’s something that we ought to keep in mind, you know, we don't really think of language in that playbook so much, and metaphors in that playbook of, of strategic advantage and decision advantage, but in fact of the matter, it is something that is important.

Jane DOE (34:04.00): Yeah, it is important. So, last season, we had Anna Puglisi as one of our guests. She talked about the people of China and innovation. And she mentioned that the way we define innovation and how we perceive and apply that term to China … really determines our way of dealing with them. You know our policy and its perception of what they bring to the global scale. So, this language … this is really interesting stuff. I’m really fascinated by this topic.

Josh Kerbel (34:29.45): I know Anna, and I think that's a great point. I think it's powerful. And it's really important. Right? But when you start talking about these within the IC, it's funny, you get a lot of people saying, oh, well, it's, you know, it's dancing … you know, how many angels dancing on the head of a pin kind of a question. It’s … we often just tend to dismiss it. Right? It’s … as, oh, you define it your way, I’ll define it… it's more fundamental than that. And I think we dismiss this whole idea of language, and its influence on our thought, at our peril.

Jane DOE (34:55.63): Right. Right. I want to mention that if our listeners want to read your articles and research, they can visit our website at www.NI-U.edu/research. You’ll find Josh Kerbel’s articles under Research Shorts and Notes and the Caracristi Institute tabs. Can you give our listeners a preview of what's coming up? What they should look for in the future from you?

Josh Kerbel (35:18.89): So, I'm always writing, you know, and there's always, you know, pieces that kind of appear both in … within the IC alone and also within the open, you know, so can find them just by typing my name and intelligence or metaphor, whatever into Google. And some of this will appear. But yeah, that's it.

Jane DOE (35:35.69): Great. Thank you. Thank you so much for having this conversation with me today. I enjoy speaking with you because I always learn a lot.

Josh Kerbel (35:41.82): Thank you. I appreciate it. You know, it's not something that a lot of people often want to talk about, so when I can find somebody who does … I’m there.

Jane DOE (35:49.34): Well, thank you.

Josh Kerbel (35:51.63): Thank you.

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Jane DOE (35:55.20): Thank you for listening to the Intelligence Jumpstart podcast We’d love to hear from you about what you like and what you’d like to hear more of. If would you like to learn more about a specific topic or issue … send us a note at NIPress@niu.odni.gov. To learn more about NIU visit our website at NI-U.edu.