Designing intelligence
Jillian Wisniewski spent Thanksgiving 2009 at a U.S. Army base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, with just weeks until the end of her deployment and return to the U.S. Back then Wisniewski, now a student in the System Design and Management program at MIT, was an Army captain working in aviation intelligence. Her team was a motley crew, including an experienced soldier who had worked in armor, a recent college graduate who had studied criminology, and a helicopter pilot who contributed his programming skills to her intelligence section after he was grounded from flight due to migraines. “We had very diverse skillsets, but we worked together like a well-oiled machine,” she says. The team practiced threat modeling and risk analysis — for example, figuring out the safest flight routes, operational times, and landing zones, with life-or-death ramifications. The team deployed in December 2008; within their first month, an American helicopter was downed in the Korengal...