Documents / FOIA release
This is Volume Three of the CIA Directorate of Science and Technology Historical Series on the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), 1949 to 1968, written by Karl H. Weber in June 1972 and approved for release in 2008. It holds three annexes, on OSI publications, OSI's external assistance and contracting program, and OSI's interaction with the National Security Agency. The released text covers production planning, review boards, current intelligence periodicals and future threat forecasting. It does not discuss UFOs.
“The Advance”10 pages
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## TOP SECRET XIII. Future Threat Forecasting The prediction of future scientific-technical threats to U.S. national security has been considered an important OSI mission from the time that the Office was organized. Despite its importance work on the problem was not pushed steadily and in the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of factors necessitated the shelving at times of analytical effort on future threat identification. Gradually, however, US awareness of the need for systematic consideration of long-range threats (5-15 years) has increased along with the increased importance of research and development in U.S. Government resource allocation, greater use of guidelines for long-term U.S. force-mix planning and, with increases in the cost of intelligence collection apparatus, greater recognition of the need for long-term planning of intelligence operations. These needs led OSI, beginning in 1965, to undertake a re-examination of the future-threat problem and various methods for dealing with it. A large part of the total OSI analytical effort from its beginning through the early 1960s was devoted to the study of topics that were supposed to provide bases for forecasting new developments. In connection with the preparation of national estimates and through TOP SECRET
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 243 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.