Lessons Learned Project II - historical challenges to contemporary security issues

This is a proposal for AHRC funding of a further 'Lessons Learned Project'. The intention behind the project is to bridge the gaps and create engagement between the academic sectors and the closed intelligence community. Mutual benefit from engagement can be derived in several ways: (i) Engagement with academics who have conducted research on similar topics to those being investigated by intelligence analysts using open source data has the benefit of providing critical checks and balances, as well as enrichment of a fragmentary dataset; (ii) Engagement between academia and analysts from a closed intelligence community provides a forum for challenging conventional wisdom and assessments made largely on the basis of intelligence, and to reduce mirror imaging and group think in a unique forum; (iii) Engagement with academia provides a valuable analytical resource: it can provide trends analysis based on statistical data capture applicable to a range of thematic topics using both random and structured sampling; and (iv) Engagement with the academic community may serve to enrich knowledge and the intelligence picture; providing information and knowledge left gapped by intelligence coverage.