Times Are A-Changin': The 60% Measure

As a former military analyst, one golden rule was reinforced continuously: no analyst has a crystal ball. We will make mistakes, and owning those mistakes—then learning from them—is what continually refines analytic rigor. In the schoolhouse, soldiers going through the intelligence pipeline are taught to strive for something around 60 percent. If you can consistently tip the odds of an intelligence product above random probability, particularly on difficult questions, that is a win.

As with any profession, take baseball. Batting .300 has historically represented elite performance, even though it certainly does not guarantee the Hall of Fame. It still means you fail to get a hit roughly seven out of ten times. The truly great players distinguish themselves when circumstances matter most. Statistics are not manipulated; rather, that .300 batting average matters because the player produces at the right time and in the right situation.

The 2002 Anaheim Angels provide the better example. Garret Anderson hit .306 during the regular season and, with the World Series tied in Game 7, drove a bases-loaded double into left-center that scored three runs and gave Anaheim a lead it never surrendered. Troy Glaus offered another example one game earlier, completing the Angels' historic Game 6 comeback with a go-ahead two-run double. The statistic establishes consistency. The situation establishes value.

The same principle applies to strategic assessments—or at least that is what military intelligence institutions try to teach. When an analyst makes an assessment, even knowing a meaningful percentage will prove them wrong quite often, the conclusion should generally remain within reasonable distance of what eventually occurs. That differential matters.

Truly exceptional analysts are not defined solely by generalized assessments of banal situations. Assessing that an existing situation will remain relatively stable is necessary work, and often the safest work. But exceptional analysis attempts to identify intangibles: social pressures, cultural movements, ideological fractures, personalities, historical grievances, and second- or third-order effects that cannot be reduced cleanly to established indicators.

Those are the assessments where analytic judgment matters most.

Change of Times

Sigcryptal's own retrospective identifies its largest strategic miss over the last three years as Europe—not necessarily the direction of European politics, but the speed at which political change would occur.

More specifically, the difficult variable was the cause-and-effect relational speed surrounding nationalist, national-conservative, populist, and anti-establishment movements across Europe.

Now don't get this wrong: a large portion of society is still burying its head in the sand around European nationalism. Go back to the beginning of 2023, and it is no surprise that even the Central Intelligence Agency could scoff at such open-source deductions. The indicators were fragmented, politically uncomfortable, and easy to dismiss as isolated movements rather than the beginnings of something broader.

Skip forward through an impossible Trump election, an impossible ousting of Gabbard, the intelligence and policy mess surrounding Iran, the growth of the DSA socialist movement, and finally arrive at today.