The intelligence community fails to reward officers, analysts, and other professional staff who take greater risks to deliver more valuable intelligence products. To improve things, it needs to reward risk-taking and penalize those who play it safe.

There is hope. In his new National Intelligence Strategy on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats called for innovation in intelligence gathering and analysis. But Coats’ words are insufficient, betraying a comfort with the status quo of an overly bureaucratized, risk-averse intelligence cycle.