Left of “Boom”: Intel and AI

WASHINGTON DC 3OCT2026

LEFT OF BOOM INTELLIGENCE

Returning Intelligence to Its Original Purpose

How AI Can Help the Intelligence Community Remember What It Was Created to Do

The United States intelligence system was created to prevent strategic surprise.

Its founding purpose was warning.

Pearl Harbor was the lesson. Strategic warning was the mission. During the Cold War, entire disciplines were built around identifying threats before they materialized, most notably the warning tradition developed by analysts such as Cynthia Grabo and the U.S. Watch Committee.

Over time, however, intelligence increasingly became optimized for a different function:

Explaining events rather than anticipating them.

Reporting rather than warning.

Current intelligence rather than strategic warning. [onedrive.live.com]

Left of Boom Intelligence is a plan to reverse that drift. [onedrive.live.com]

Back to the Future

The paper’s argument is not that intelligence needs a completely new purpose.

It argues that intelligence has gradually moved away from its highest-value purpose and should return to it.

The mission is simple:

Help decision-makers understand what is becoming true early enough to do something about it.

Not:

* Reporting yesterday’s news.

* Writing longer assessments.

* Producing more briefings.

* Creating safer language.

But providing warning before the decision window closes.

As the paper argues, intelligence should be judged against the standard of Midway, not the standard of a morning newspaper. At Midway, analysts worked from incomplete evidence, made explicit judgments, and provided warning in time for action. That is the model the paper seeks to restore.

Why AI Makes This Possible Again

The irony is that artificial intelligence may allow intelligence to rediscover its oldest mission.

For decades, warning was difficult because analysts could not process enough information quickly enough.

Today, AI can:

* Search enormous information environments.

* Track weak signals.

* Surface hidden patterns.

* Generate alternative hypotheses.

* Deliver tailored warnings to different decision-makers simultaneously.

The technology finally exists to scale strategic warning.

The challenge is building the right doctrine around it.

Not Artificial Intelligence.

Anticipatory Intelligence.

The paper’s central proposal is a doctrine called Anticipatory Intelligence.

Its purpose is straightforward:

Expand decision space before events become obvious.

This means identifying threats, opportunities, escalations, and shifts in trajectory while leaders still have choices.

In short:

Left of Boom.

Before the crisis.

Before the attack.

Before the surprise.

Before the options disappear. [onedrive.live.com]

The Return of Warning

The most important idea in this paper is not technological.

It is institutional.

The authors argue that warning should once again become a primary intelligence function, with promotion systems, analytical tradecraft, AI tools, and performance metrics all organized around one central question:

Did this analysis help someone make a better decision in time for it to matter?

That was the purpose of intelligence when the system was created.

The paper argues it should become the purpose again.