Designing intelligence

Jillian Wisniewski spent Thanksgiving 2009 at a U.S. Army base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, with just weeks until the end of her deployment and return to the U.S. Back then Wisniewski, now a student in the System Design and Management program at MIT, was an Army captain working in aviation intelligence. Her team was a motley crew, including an experienced soldier who had worked in armor, a recent college graduate who had studied criminology, and a helicopter pilot who contributed his programming skills to her intelligence section after he was grounded from flight due to migraines. "We had very diverse skillsets, but we worked together like a well-oiled machine," she says. The team practiced threat modeling and risk analysis - for example, figuring out the safest flight routes, operational times, and landing zones, with life-or-death ramifications. The team deployed in December 2008; within their first month, an American helicopter was downed in the Korengal Valley of northeastern Afghanistan. Intelligence work was difficult. There were tons of data and many opportunities to make mistakes, owing to the complexity of the analysis and errors in the data itself.