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August 07, 2005

Erik Dahl, PhD Candidate

For Fletcher PhD candidate Erik Dahl, choosing a dissertation topic was easy: after spending a career contributing to international intelligence failures, he decided it was time to begin looking for ways to prevent them.

“Not that I ever meant to screw up,” says Dahl, who arrived at Fletcher after serving 21 years as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy. “But I soon learned that there are a lot of limits to what we can know through intelligence, and to what sorts of information the intelligence community can provide to leaders and decision makers.”

As an example, Dahl cites the end of the Cold War—a watershed event in world history that was not foreseen by U.S. intelligence, even though it had spent billions of dollars watching the Soviet Union for decades. When the Berlin Wall came down, Dahl was serving at the headquarters for U.S. military forces in Europe, in Stuttgart, Germany.

“I was just a junior officer, but my job was to brief senior officials, including visiting members of Congress and other VIP’s, on what we called The Soviet Threat,” Dahl says. “As things started to change in the Soviet Union, such as when Gorbachev announced he was reducing the size of the military, I reviewed all the assessments put out by the various intelligence agencies, and proudly announced that the threat was, if anything, worse now, because the Soviet army would be leaner, but meaner.”

Dahl says he started suspecting there might be actual change going on inside the Soviet Union, but neither his bosses in Germany, nor senior intelligence officials back in Washington shared the same view. “The party line of the U.S. intelligence community was that these changes weren’t real, and that’s what I continued to brief, week in and week out—right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall. And then I watched, frustrated, as the American intelligence community, supposedly the best in the world, stopped and asked itself: Gee, could we have missed anything?”

That wasn’t the only intelligence failure in which Dahl has taken part—he later served as a more senior intelligence officer in South Korea in 1998, when the North Koreans surprised the world by firing a long-range ballistic missile over Japan, farther than anyone expected—and when it came time to think about retirement, he found himself wondering if it might be possible to analyze and understand why such mistakes could happen.

In his last active duty assignment, Dahl served for three years on the faculty of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where he taught U.S. and international military officers and civilian officials about military operations, national security, and intelligence. “That’s when I started thinking about going back to school,” he says. “I saw that most of the best-known professors at the War College were civilians who didn’t have military experience, but had studied national security for years and could talk about theories and concepts in an academic language I couldn’t understand. I decided I needed to combine my practical military and intelligence experience with academic knowledge. When I asked around in Newport, I heard that the Fletcher School was the best place to do that.”

Dahl arrived at Fletcher in the fall of 2002 as a MALD candidate, and loved the program from the start. “In order to really understand international security, I knew I needed to learn more about things like economics and law, which I’d never studied. But I’ve even enjoyed taking courses on things I do know something about, like military history and intelligence.

“As an intelligence officer serving overseas or on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, I never cared about what some professor once wrote about intelligence failures like Pearl Harbor. But now I’m learning that there’s value in combining my operational experience with the theoretical and historical research produced by generations of academics and civilian analysts.”

For his MALD thesis, Dahl examined the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983—which he notes was one of America’s first experiences with suicide terrorism. He found that many of the problems that led to that disaster remained misunderstood, and contributed to the failure of September 11th. Dahl recently published a version of his MALD as an article in The Journal of Strategic Studies, and in his dissertation he hopes to make a broader study of what went wrong in intelligence failures, such as in Beirut and at 9/11, and what went right in intelligence successes.

“The hardest part may be finding out about intelligence successes,” Dahl says. “The intelligence community is even more nervous about talking about what went right than what went wrong—because they don’t want to jinx it for next time.” But he adds that his time at Fletcher has convinced him that it is possible to study real-world policies and problems and help non-experts understand them. At the same time, Dahl believes, his studies won’t hinder, and maybe even help, the officials and policy makers charged with making sure those problems don’t happen again.

Article by Stephanie Lindenbaum, MALD '05

Posted by jessica at August 7, 2005 12:35 PM