military intelligence

1. Information relating to the armed forces of a foreign country that is significant to the planning and conduct of another country's military doctrine, policy, and operations.
2. An agency of the armed forces that procures, analyzes, and uses information of tactical and strategic military value.

Among the hoariest military jokes is that these two words are a contradiction in terms. Military intelligence means information, usually but not exclusively about the enemy, and without both information and the cerebral intelligence to make proper use of it, any commander is halfway to defeat. Among the obstacles that good intelligence must overcome in order to be applied are prejudice, as in US Secretary of State Stimson's statement that ‘gentlemen do not read each other's mail’, preconceptions in the commander's mind that will shut it out, as with Montgomery when planning Arnhem, and a sycophantic desire to reinforce those preconceptions and/or not to be the bearer of bad news, as with Haig's intelligence officer Charteris. But the most common problem is information overload, when so much undifferentiated intelligence pours into the decision-makers that they are unable to discern what it means. This may be deliberately exacerbated by the enemy through information warfare.

The main input categories are by direct observation, easily the oldest and most trusted, by the collation of a number of indications none of which by itself offers a true picture, by inference from past behaviour or known constraints upon the enemy's freedom of action, and by actually knowing what the enemy is going to do by intercepting oral or written communications or by having an agent placed in his headquarters. Apart from direct observation by the commander himself, certainly the mainstay of all generals until well into the 19th century, all the others require specialist staff to collect, corroborate, evaluate, and sythesize information before presenting it to the commander.

Throughout most of history generals themselves usually organized the collection of their own information, working through ad hoc means and a few trusted aides—European armies of the 18th and 19th centuries frequently assigned this task to their QMG. States sometimes created ad hoc bureaux to handle secret intelligence tasks for a decade or two, as the Admiralty did during the Napoleonic wars, but these vanished when the crisis passed. To a large extent, the essence of strategy and tactics has always been to force the enemy to react to your own initiatives, putting the onus of intelligence gathering and evaluation on him and thereby slowing his reaction time. Surprise in war is achieved by doing the unexpected and the avoidance of unpleasant surprises is what military intelligence is all about. Wellington put it exactly: ‘All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that is what I called guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’

The key word here is ‘guess’, something that less gifted or intuitive commanders hate with uniform passion. This fear of the unknown can produce paralysis, as in the case of McClellan during the American civil war, whose natural caution was fed by exaggerated enemy troop strength estimates from Pinkerton until at last, even when Lee's written plans and troop dispositions were found wrapped around some cigars in a field, and even when he had him backed up against the Potomac river, and even though he outnumbered him two to one, he was unable to deliver the coup de grâce. In war there can be too much intelligence of the cerebral as well as the informational kind, indeed Clausewitz argued that on the battlefield ‘most intelligence is false’, more likely to weaken a commander's will than to guide his actions.

Actually seeing what is on the other side of the hill was not something commanders could hope to do before the advent of aerial reconnaissance, from which have followed satellite surveillance and battlefield drones sending back pictures in real time. Before that, it was the province of the light cavalry both to report on enemy movements and to ‘screen’ the activities of their own army. Frederick ‘the Great’ complained that the Austrian cavalry covered his ‘army like a cloud and let nobody pass’, a service that the French light cavalry performed brilliantly for Napoleon in his campaigns. He could more easily replace the men he lost in Russia in 1812 than the horses, and part of his declining performance as a general thereafter can be attributed to loss of the light-cavalry dominance he had enjoyed previously.

Really accurate, detailed maps were rare until quite recently, but when available they provided an inestimable advantage to whatever side possessed them. Napoleon was always poring over large-scale plans with Berthier and the brilliant campaign waged by Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley was built upon the work of a local cartographer who enabled him literally to run rings around the larger armies sent to crush him. Again, the intelligence alone without a commander with the confidence and the will to use it would have been sterile. An eye for terrain has been the signature of great commanders from Alexander ‘the Great’ to Chief Gall of the victorious Sioux at Little Bighorn, and neither of them had maps.

The modern age of intelligence began in 1914. Aerial imagery and radio interception, joined to greatly improved communications and the general staff system, produced more powerful means to collect, assess, and use intelligence. During August-October 1914, radio interception enabled the Germans to shatter the Russians at Tannenburg and the Masurian Lakes, but aerial reconnaissance revealing an open flank lay behind their defeat on the Marne. SIGINT twice gave the Royal Navy the opportunity to trap the German High Seas fleet, but on both occasions the execution by Adms Beatty (Dogger Bank) and Jellicoe (see Jutland) let them get away. At an even higher level, the British interception and decipherment of the ‘Zimmerman telegram’ in which Germany offered Mexico an offensive alliance against the USA may have helped to bring the Americans into the war, even if doubt as to its authenticity may make it a better illustration of information warfare.

British intelligence successes during WW II including ULTRA and FORTITUDE, the highly elaborate deception plan that preceded the invasion of Normandy, are now well known, as is the cryptographic intelligence that enabled Nimitz to deploy his remaining assets to such telling effect at Midway. But here again one may seriously doubt that a lesser admiral would have dared to risk everything on one throw of the dice in this manner. It gave him a chance to take the great Yamamoto by surprise, but his confidence in his own judgement and in the US navy's men, equipment, and doctrine did the rest.

In the final analysis, the one place not even the most modern and sophisticated intelligence systems can penetrate is the human mind. Sometimes, as in the case of the Falklands, so many better options are available to an opponent (blockade, hit and run, etc.) that when he does the only thing that delivers him into your hands, there is a perceptible pause while incredulity wrestles with the facts. Battalions of intelligence experts predicted that Saddam Hussein would not be so rash as to invade Kuwait when he could achieve his political and financial objectives by sabre-rattling, and they went on to predict that he would not be so stupid as to sit still while the Allied Gulf sledgehammer was built up. But he did both. The old saying ‘bullshit baffles brains’ might be modified to read ‘the human mind is unfathomable and for as long as it directs human affairs, there is no knowing exactly what is happening on the other side of the hill’.

— Hugh Bicheno

Intelligence on any foreign military or military-related situation or activity which is significant to military policy-making or the planning and conduct of military operations and activities.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Military and strategic intelligence includes the collecting, processing, analyzing, evaluating, integrating, and interpreting openly or covertly acquired information about foreign countries and areas, regions of actual or potential military operations, and hostile or potentially hostile forces. Military intelligence has to be related to and significant to military operations and planning; strategic intelligence is used in formulating policy on national and international levels. The intelligence community in the United States consists of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); the National Security Agency (NSA); the Defense Intelligence Agency; the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; the National Reconnaissance Office; the intelligence agencies of the army, navy, and air force; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).The Department of the Treasury and the Department of Energy have limited intelligence capabilities and missions as well. Almost exclusive reliance on data collected by human sources (HUMINT) was superseded in importance in the last decades of the twentieth century by signals intelligence (SIGINT), communications intelligence (COMINT), electronics intelligence (ELINT), telemetry intelligence (TELINT), and photography (PHOTINT).

Although intelligence was used in all military conflicts in which the United States was engaged as early as the Revolutionary War, the first sustained intelligence organizations were the Office of Naval Intelligence, created in 1882, and the Military Information Division (MID), established by the U.S. Army in 1885.In 1888, service attachés were appointed to U.S. missions abroad to collect information on foreign armed forces. Nevertheless, during World War I, American forces had to rely mostly on military intelligence supplied by the British and the French.

The advent of communications technology such as the telegraph in the late 1830s, the telephone in the 1870s, and the radio in the 1920s shifted intelligence collection to COMINT and to code-breaking. A Cipher Bureau was created within MID in 1917 that became the nucleus of the American Black Chamber, or MI-8, which was created in 1918 and headed by Herbert O. Yardley. It worked for the army and state departments to break the diplomatic codes of several nations. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) coordinated most of the intelligence work; integration with data compiled by other services through the Joint Intelligence Committee, however, was not satisfactory. The National Security Act of 1947 created a centralized structure with the establishment of the National Security Council (NSC) and the CIA. The NSA is responsible mostly for COMINT, cryptology, and decoding. The work of the FBI, responsible for internal security, bears on military and strategic intelligence particularly in its dealings with foreign intelligence services, and dissident or terrorist movements operating within the United States.

Since World War I, and increasingly after World War II, technology has played a significant role in collecting data. SIGINT helped establish troop movements and naval operations during World War II. Relying on wireless communications, it did not, however, detect Japanese forces (who kept strict radio silence) advancing on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

In the 1960s, PHOTINT collected by overflights of U-2 spy planes, led to the detection of military activities and missile deployment in and by the Soviet Union and other nations, and confirmed the construction of missile launching sites on Cuba. Satellites later become a major source of PHOTINT, fulfilling the same functions better without endangering pilots or invading other nations' air space. With the advent of the Internet and mobile telephony, COMINT has become an increasingly important source for intelligence.

The volume of data to be handled by intelligence services increased enormously since the 1960s, threatening to overwhelm analysis. Raw intelligence, however acquired, must be collated, scrutinized, and processed; technically procured data may require translation, decryption, interpretation, and computer analysis. The National Intelligence Estimate is the highest form of finished national intelligence. It usually reflects the consensus of the intelligence community and often attempts to predict a potential adversary's course.

During most of the Cold War, intelligence focused on the Soviet Union. Since the 1990s it has shifted to international arms and drug trafficking, to transnational crime and concentrated on so-called "rogue state" (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea among them).After the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, international terrorism has received increased attention by the intelligence community.

Failures and Oversight

Intelligence estimates, however, have hardly been fool-proof. In 1962, the American intelligence community failed to predict the movement of Soviet missiles into Cuba. The CIA's large-scale involvement in Vietnam resulted in a major dispute in 1967 between the army command in Vietnam and CIA analysts about the number of enemy troops. Coupled with the CIA's pessimism about long-term prospects for military success, it undermined the army's claim to be winning the war. CIA appraisals did not alert government officials to the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979 or to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.In the 1980s, CIA Director William Casey was suspected of slanting CIA estimates for political reasons, especially with regard to the Soviet Union and Nicaragua. Given Casey's belief and that of President Ronald Reagan that the Soviet Union was bent on subjugating the world, it is not surprising that the CIA or the intelligence community rarely argued that Soviet capabilities were much lower than projected.

Oversight of U.S. intelligence began with the establishment of a permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1976 and the creation the following year of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. These committees were established following the investigations of previous congressional committees into intelligence community abuses including domestic spying and illegal and unethical programs, such as kidnappings and assassinations of foreign leaders. Both committees reviewed budgets, programs, and covert activities. The Iran-Contra investigations of 1986 and 1987, which revealed an elaborate Reagan administration plan to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon and the diversion of funds from these transactions to support the Contras in Nicaragua, shattered whatever progress the intelligence community had made toward regaining the trust of Congress. The Reagan administration promised a new era of cooperation with Congress, and the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton attempted to maintain cooperative relations. The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s also led to questions in Congress about the enormous cost of the U.S. intelligence effort. (Criticism that increased after revelations that optimal cooperation between the CIA and FBI might have prevented the attacks of 11 September 2001.)

Persian Gulf War

The administration of George H. W. Bush enjoyed over-whelming congressional support for the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and U.S. intelligence activities during that conflict. The Gulf War was the first major military conflict following the end of the Cold War, and U.S. intelligence, both strategic and tactical, played an important role. The primary focus of intelligence operations, particularly during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, was to provide the theater and component commanders with an accurate picture of Iraqi capabilities and intentions. Extensive use was made of both strategic and tactical intelligence, with U.S. commanders having access to a vast array of impressive intelligence capabilities. These officers, nevertheless, were often frustrated and dissatisfied with the intelligence support they received. Operation Desert Storm tended to blur the distinction between tactical and strategic intelligence, and commanders often found the intelligence furnished to them too broad. Frequently, tactical units were sent finished estimates rather than detailed, tailored intelligence needed to plan operations. The overwhelming military victory against Iraq during Operation Desert Storm was attributable, nevertheless, in no small part to accurate intelligence provided both to national policymakers and command theater-level decision makers. The same can be said about the Kosovo Conflict in 1999, where American intelligence provided the vast majority of military information for the operations of NATO forces.

Because of the failure of the intelligence services to predict and prevent the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush, on 6 June 2002, proposed a permanent cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security.

Bibliography

Andrew, Christopher M. For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush. New York: Harper Collins, 1995.

Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.

May, Ernest R., ed. Knowing One's Enemies: Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Watson, Bruce W., Susan M. Watson, and Gerald W. Hopple, eds. United States Intelligence: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1990.

Although the means have grown more sophisticated, the basic function of military intelligence (voyennaya razvedka) has remained unchanged: collecting, analyzing and disseminating information about the enemy's intentions and its ability to carry them out. Since the Soviet era, military intelligence has been classified according to three categories: strategic, operational, and tactical. Strategic intelligence entails an understanding of actual and potential foes at the broadest level, including the organization and capabilities of their armed forces as well as the economy, population, and geography of the national base. Operational intelligence refers to knowledge of military value more directly tied to the theater, and is typically conducted by the staffs of front and army formations, while tactical intelligence is carried out by commanders at all levels to gather battlefield data directly relevant to their current mission.

Before the Great Reforms (1860s - 1870s), Russian generals had three basic means of learning about their foes: spies, prisoners of war, and reconnaissance. Thus, at the Battle of Kulikovo (1381) Prince Dmitry Donskoy dispatched a reliable diplomat to the enemy's camp to study the latter's intentions, questioned captives, and personally assessed the terrain, all of which played a role in his famous victory over the Mongols. While capable commanders had always understood the need for good intelligence, until the early eighteenth century the Russian army had neither systematic procedures nor personnel designated to carry them out. Peter I's introduction of a quartermaster service (kvartirmeisterskaya chast) in 1711 (renamed the general staff, or generalny shtab, by Catherine II in 1763) laid the institutional groundwork. The interception of diplomatic correspondence, a vital element of strategic intelligence, was carried out by the foreign office's Cabinet Noir (Black Chamber, also known as the shifrovalny otdel), beginning under Empress Elizabeth I (r. 1741 - 1762). Inter-ministerial rivalry often hampered effective dissemination of such data to the War Ministry.

It would take another century for military intelligence properly to be systematized with the creation of a Main Staff (glavny shtab) by the reformist War Minister Dmitry Milyutin in 1865. Roughly analogous to the Prussian Great General Staff, the Main Staff's responsibilities included central administration, training, and intelligence. Two departments of the Main Staff were responsible for strategic intelligence: the Military Scientific Department (Voyenny ucheny komitet, which dealt with European powers) and the Asian Department (Aziatskaya chast). Milyutin also regularized procedures for operational and combat intelligence in 1868 with new regulations to establish an intelligence section (razvedivatelnoye otdelenie) attached to field commanders' staffs, and he formalized the training and functions of military attachés (voennye agenty). The Admiralty's Main Staff established analogous procedural organizations for naval intelligence.

In 1903, the Army's Military Scientific Department was renamed Section Seven of the First Military Statistical Department in the Main Staff. Dismal performance during the Russo-Japanese War inevitably led to another series of reforms, which saw the creation in June 1905 of an independent Main Directorate of the General Staff (Glavnoye Upravlenie Generalnago Shtaba, or GUGSh), whose first over quartermaster general was now tasked with intelligence, among other duties. Resubordinated to the war minister in 1909, GUGSh would retain its responsibility for intelligence through World War I.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin established a Registration Directorate (Registupravlenie, RU) in October 1918 to coordinate intelligence for his nascent Red Army. At the conclusion of the Civil War, in 1921, the RU was refashioned into the Second Directorate of the Red Army Staff (also known as the Intelligence Directorate, Razvedupr, or RU). A reorganization of the Red Army in 1925 saw the entity transformed into the Red Army Staff's Fourth Directorate, and after World War II it would be the Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoye Razvedivatelnoye Upravlenie, GRU).

Because of the presence of many former Imperial Army officers in the Bolshevik military, the RU bore more than a passing resemblance to its tsarist predecessor. However, it would soon branch out into much more comprehensive collection, especially through human intelligence (i.e., military attachés and illegal spies) and intercepting communications. Despite often intense rivalry with the state security services, beginning with Felix Dzerzhinsky's Cheka, the RU and its successors also became much more active in rooting out political threats, whether real or imagined.

Both tsarist and Soviet military intelligence were respected if not feared by other powers. Like all military intelligence services, its record was nevertheless marred by some serious blunders, including fatally underestimating the capabilities of the Japanese armed forces in 1904 and miscalculating the size of German deployments in East Prussia in 1914. Yet even the best intelligence could not compensate for the shortcomings of the supreme commander, most famously when Josef Stalin refused to heed repeated and often accurate assessments of Nazi intentions to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Bibliography

Fuller, William C. (1984). "The Russian Empire." In Knowing One's Enemies: Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars, ed. Ernest R. May. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Garthoff, Raymond L. (1956). "The Soviet Intelligence Services." In The Soviet Army, ed. Basil Liddell Hart. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Leonard, Raymond W. (1999). Secret Soldiers of the Revolution: Soviet Military Intelligence, 1918 - 1933. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Pozniakov, Vladimir. (2000). "The Enemy at the Gates: Soviet Military Intelligence in the Inter - war Period and its Forecasts of Future War." In Russia at the Age of Wars, ed. Silvio Pons and Romano Giangiacomo. Milan: Fetrinellli.

Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David. (2003). "Reforming Russian Military Intelligence." In Reforming the Tsar's Army, ed. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce Menning. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David. (1996). "Russian Military Intelligence on the Manchurian Front." Intelligence and National Security 11 (1):22 - 31.

—DAVID SCHIMMELPENNINCK VAN DER OYE

(DOD) Intelligence on any foreign military or military-related situation or activity which is significant to military policymaking or the planning and conduct of military operations and activities. Also called MI.

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Military intelligence, commonly abbreviated as milint, is a military service that uses intelligence gathering disciplines to collect informations that informs commanders decision making process.

This is achieved by providing an analysis of available data from a wide range of sources, including forecast environmental changes (meteorological intelligence), and information that is indicative of possible opposing force intentions.

In order to provide an informed analysis, the commander's information requirements are first identified. These information requirements are then incorporated into a process of intelligence gathering, intelligence analysis, protection of this information, and finally, the dissemination of information to decision makers.

Areas of study may include the operational environment, hostile, friendly and neutral forces, the civilian population in an area of combat operations, and other, broader areas of interest. Intelligence activities are conducted at all levels, from tactical to strategic, in peacetime, the period of transition to war, and during a war itself.

Most governments maintain a military intelligence capability to provide analytical and information collection personnel in both specialist units and from other arms and services. The military intelligence capabilities will interact with civilian intelligence capabilities to inform the spectrum of political and military activities.

Personnel selected for intelligence duties may be selected for their analytical abilities and personal intelligence before receiving formal training.

Contents 1 Levels of Intelligence 1.1 Strategic intelligence 1.2 Operational intelligence 1.3 Tactical intelligence 2 Intelligence tasking 3 The intelligence process 3.1 Collection 3.2 Analysis 3.3 Packaging 4 United Kingdom 5 United States 5.1 United States Army 5.2 United States Navy and Marine Corps 5.3 United States Air Force 5.4 United States Coast Guard 6 See also 7 External links 8 Footnotes 9 References

Levels of Intelligence

Military intelligence diagram of defence positions during the Battle of Okinawa, 1945.

Intelligence operations are carried out throughout the hierarchy of political and military activity.

Strategic intelligence

Strategic intelligence is concerned with broad issues such as economics, political assessments, military capabilities and intentions of foreign nations (and, increasingly, non-state actors). Such intelligence may be scientific, technical, tactical, diplomatic, or sociological but these changes are analyzed in combination with known facts about the area in question, such as geography, demographics, and industrial capacities.

Operational intelligence

Operational intelligence is focused on support to an expeditionary force commander and will be attached to the formation Headquarters.

Tactical intelligence

Tactical intelligence is focused on support to operations at the tactical level, and would be attached to the Battlegroup. At the tactical level briefings are delivered to patrols on current threats and collection priorities, these patrols are then debriefed to elicit information for analysis and communication through the reporting chain.

Intelligence tasking

Intelligence should respond to the needs of the commander, based on the military objective and the outline plans for the operation. The military objective provides a focus for the estimate process, from which a number of information requirements are derived, information requirements may be related to terrain and impact on vehicle or personnel movement, disposition of hostile forces, sentiments of the local population and capabilities of the hostile order of battle.

In response to the information requirements the analysis staff will trawl existing information identifying gaps in the available knowledge. Where gaps in knowledge exist the staff may be able to task collection assets to collect against the requirement.

Analysis reports draw on all available sources of information, whether drawn from existing material or collected in response to the requirement. The analysis reports are used to inform the remaining planning staff, influencing planning and seeking to predict adversary intent.

This process is described as Collection Co-ordination and Intelligence Requirement Management (CCIRM).

The intelligence process

The process of intelligence has four phases: collection, analysis, processing and dissemination. In the United Kingdom these are known as Direction, Collection, Processing and Dissemination.

Collection

Many of the most important facts are well known, or may be gathered from public sources. This form of information collection is known as open source intelligence. For example, the population, ethnic make-up and main industries of a region are extremely important to military commanders, and this information is usually public. It is however imperative that the collector of information understands that what he collected is "Information", and does not become intelligence until after an analyst has evaluated and verified this information. Collection of read materials, compostion of units or elements, dipostion of the same, strength, training, tactics, personalities (leaders) of these units and elements contribute to the overall intelligence value after careful analysis.

The tonnage and basic weaponry of most capital ships and aircraft are also public, and their speeds and ranges can often be reasonably estimated by experts, often just from photographs. Ordinary facts like the lunar phase on particular days, or the ballistic range of common military weapons are also very valuable to planning, and are habitually collected in an intelligence library.

A great deal of useful intelligence can be gathered from photointerpretation of detailed high-altitude pictures of a country. Photointerpreters generally maintain catalogs of munitions factories, military bases and crate designs, in order to interpret munition shipments and inventories.

Most intelligence services maintain or support groups whose only purpose is to keep maps. Since maps also have valuable civilian uses, these agencies are often publicly associated or identified as other parts of the government. Some historic counter-intelligence services, especially in Russia and China, have intentionally banned or placed disinformation in public maps; good intelligence can identify this disinformation.

It is commonplace for the intelligence services of large countries to read every published journal of the nations in which it is interested, and the main newspapers and journals of every nation. This is a basic source of intelligence.

It is also common for diplomatic and journalistic personnel to have a secondary goal of collecting military intelligence. For western democracies, it is extremely rare for journalists to be paid by an official intelligence service, but they may still patriotically pass on tidbits of information they gather as they carry on their legitimate business. Also, much public information in a nation may be unavailable from outside the country. This is why most intelligence services attach members to foreign service offices.

Some industrialized nations also eavesdrop continuously on the entire radio spectrum, interpreting it in real time. This includes not only broadcasts of national and local radio and television, but also local military traffic, radar emissions, and even microwaved telephone and telegraph traffic, including satellite traffic.

The U.S. in particular is known to maintain satellites able to intercept cell-phone and pager traffic. Analysis of bulk traffic is normally performed by complex computer programs that parse natural language and phone numbers looking for threatening conversations and correspondents. In some extraordinary cases, undersea or land-based cables have been tapped, as well.

More exotic secret information, such as encryption keys, diplomatic message traffic, policy and orders of battle are usually restricted to analysts on a need-to-know basis, in order to protect the sources and methods from foreign traffic analysis.

Analysis

Analysis consists of assessment of an adversary's capabilities and vulnerabilities. In a real sense these are threats and opportunities. Analysts generally look for the least defended or most fragile resource that is necessary for important military capabilities. These are then flagged as critical vulnerabilities. For example, in modern mechanized warfare, the logistic train for a military unit's fuel supply is often the most vulnerable part of a nation's order of battle.

Human intelligence, gathered by spies, is usually carefully tested against unrelated sources. It is notoriously prone to inaccuracy: In some cases, sources will just make up imaginative stories for pay, or they may try to settle grudges by identifying personal enemies as enemies of the state that is paying for the intelligence. However, human intelligence is often the only form that provides information about an opponent's intentions and rationales, and it is therefore often uniquely valuable to successful negotiation of diplomatic solutions.

In some intelligence organizations, analysis follows a procedure, screening general media and sources to locate items or groups of interest, and then systematically assessing their location, capabilities, inputs and environment for vulnerabilities, using a continuously-updated list of typical vulnerabilities.

Packaging

Critical vulnerabilities are then indexed in a way that makes them easily available to advisors and line intelligence personnel who package this information for policy-makers and war-fighters. Vulnerabilities are usually indexed by the nation and military unit, with a list of possible attack methods.

Critical threats are usually maintained in a prioritized file, with important enemy capabilities analyzed on a schedule set by an estimate of the enemy's preparation time. For example, nuclear threats between the USSR and the U.S. were analyzed in real time by continuously on-duty staffs. In contrast, analysis of tank or army deployments are usually triggered by accumulations of fuel and munitions, which are monitored on slower, every-few-days cycles. In some cases, automated analysis is performed in real time on automated data traffic.

Packaging threats and vulnerabilities for decision makers is a crucial part of military intelligence. A good intelligence officer will stay very close to the policy-maker or war fighter, to anticipate their information requirements, and tailor the information needed. A good intelligence officer will ask a fairly large number of questions in order to help anticipate needs, perhaps even to the point of annoying the principal. For an important policy-maker, the intelligence officer will have a staff to which research projects can be assigned.

Developing a plan of attack is not the responsibility of intelligence, though it helps an analyst to know the capabilities of common types of military units. Generally, policy-makers are presented with a list of threats, and opportunities. They approve some basic action, and then professional military personnel plan the detailed act and carry it out. Once hostilities begin, target selection often moves into the upper end of the military chain of command. Once ready stocks of weapons and fuel are depleted, logistic concerns are often exported to civilian policy-makers.

United Kingdom

Intelligence requirements for the British Army are provided by the Intelligence Corps, the Royal Air Force being supported by an intelligence Branch. Whilst the Royal Navy does not have a dedicated Intelligence Branch officers from each of the professional branches are employed in intelligence roles, an Operational Intelligence branch does exist in the Royal Naval Reserve. Personnel are frequently employed in a joint environment, with staffs being formed from all three services.

Strategic level intelligence is provided to the Ministry of Defence and other government departments by the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS).

Training for all three services is carried out at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.

The abbreviation MI is used in the popular names of the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) reflecting an historical name in the 1920s when they were an element of the Directorate of Military Intelligence. Whilst the designation has not been used since the 1920s they remain common in the media and popular perception.

For a list of the numbers used in First World War British Military Intelligence, see MI numbers.

United States

The lead agency for joint United States military intelligence operations as well as strategic defense-related intelligence is the Defense Intelligence Agency. DIA unifies the Department of Defense in regard to intelligence analysis and collection.

United States Army

Main article: United States Army Military Intelligence

Within the military, the term military intelligence is specific to the intelligence components of the United States Army, not the other services or the armed forces as a whole. There is no standard nomenclature within all the services, which use a variety of different names to refer to intelligence sections. Army intelligence personnel belong to the Military Intelligence Corps.

The senior intelligence command within the US Army is the US Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and commanded by a Major General. The US Army trains the majority of its intelligence personnel at the US Army Intelligence Center and School (USAICS), Fort Huachuca, Arizona. USAICS conducts training in all disciplines and aspects of intelligence for Officers, Warrant Officers, Noncommissioned Officers, Enlisted Soldiers, and some Army Civilians.

United States Navy and Marine Corps

The U.S. Navy maintains its own intelligence center of excellence that oversees multiple intelligence functions, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). ONI is the oldest continuously operating intelligence service in the nation. While its mission has taken many different forms over its evolution, the main purpose has not changed from its inception.

ONI’s primary mission remains to keep the fleet, national leaders and decision makers informed with critical war fighting information to assure a winning margin over any navy that would challenge this country’s interests. Located in the Federal Center in Suitland, Maryland, the National Maritime Intelligence Center, or NMIC, is the home and nerve center of ONI.

The NMIC also supports the Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center (USCG ICC), the Navy Information Warfare Activity (NIWA), and a component of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA). USN and USMC military intelligence officers and enlisted personnel are trained at the Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center at Training Support Center Hampton Roads.

United States Air Force

The Air Force's intelligence operations are designed to contribute primarily to air superiority, special operations, mobility, ground support, force protection, Search And Rescue (SAR), Battle Damage Assessment (BDA), and Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW), such as disaster relief.

The Air Force refers to its intelligence assets as air intelligence. These assets include satellites, U-2s, E3 AWACS (Airborne Warning And Control System), UAVs like the Predator, Darkstar, and Global Hawk, and RC-135s and many derivatives of the RC-135 (often focusing on a very specific discipline, like ELINT or MASINT).

The Air Force's intelligence fields focus on intelligence applications, SIGINT, ELINT, IMINT, Communications Security (COMSEC), HUMINT, OSINT, and cryptologic linguists. The Air Force trains intelligence officers and enlisted intelligence operators at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas. The other services also send personnel to Goodfellow for specific training.

United States Coast Guard

Main article: Coast Guard Intelligence

See also

Battlespace Aesopian language Cryptography Counter-intelligence Defense Intelligence Agency Defense Language Institute Disinformation Document Exploitation (DOCEX) Doublespeak Edmund Charaszkiewicz Electronic warfare Espionage

GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) Intelligence cycle Intelligence (information gathering) Intelligence gathering network Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance Interrogation Inter-Services Intelligence Irregular Warfare MAD (German Military Intelligence) Medical intelligence

Meteorological intelligence Military secrets Propaganda Reconnaissance Scenario planning Spy satellite Strategic intelligence Technical intelligence United States Army Intelligence Center World Basic Information Library (WBIL) Admiralty code

External links

• Office of the Director of National Intelligence
• Intelligence Resource Program of the Federation of American Scientists Reference

Footnotes

References

This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2009)

• N.J.E. Austin and N.B. Rankov, Exploratio: Military and Political Intelligence in the Roman World From the Second Punic War to the Battle of Adrianople. London: Routledge, 1995.
• Julius Caesar, The Civil War. Translated by Jane F. Mitchell. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1967.
• Cassius Dio, Dio's Roman History. Translated by Earnest Cary. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1916.
• Francis Dvornik, Origins of Intelligence Services. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1974.
• J.F.C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World, Vol. 1: From the Earliest Times to the Battle of Lepanto. New York: Da Capo Press, 1987.
• Richard A. Gabriel and Karen S. Metz, From Summer to Rome; The Military Capabilities of Ancient Armies. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
• John Keegan, Intelligence in War. New York: Knopf, 2003.
• Charles H. Harris & Louis R. Sadler. The Border and the Revolution: Clandestine Activities of the Mexican Revolution 1910-1920. HighLonesome Books, 1988.
• Henry Landau, The Enemy Within: The Inside Story of German Sabotage in America. G.P. Putnam Sons, 1937.
• Sidney F. Mashbir. I Was An American Spy. Vantage, 1953.
• Nathan Miller. Spying for America: The Hidden History of U.S. Intelligence. Dell Publishing, 1989.
• Ian Sayer & Douglas Botting. America's Secret Army, The Untold Story of the Counter Intelligence Corps. Franklin Watts Publishers, 1989.
• Barbara W. Tuchman, The Zimmerman Telegram. Ballantine Books, 1958.
• "Coast Guard Intelligence Looking For a Few Good Men and Women." Commandant's Bulletin (Jun 10 1983), p. 34.
• "Coast Guard Investigative Service." Coast Guard (Dec 1996), pp. 24–25.
• The Coast Guard at War: Volume XII: Intelligence. Washington, DC: Historical Section, Public Information Division, U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters, January 1, 1949.
• Hinsley, Francis F. "British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations". Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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