Military intelligence

Military intelligence, commonly abbreviated as milint, is a military service that uses intelligence gathering disciplines to collect informations which may be of use in the decision making process of commanders.

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.

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.

Processing

Dissemination

The processed intelligence information is disseminated through database systems, intel bulletins and briefings to the different decision makings. The bulletins could also include consequently resulting informations requirements and thus conclude the intelligence cycle.

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

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 U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and commanded by a Major General. The U.S. Army trains the majority of its intelligence personnel at the U.S. 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 U.S. 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

See also

External links

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

Footnotes

References

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• 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.
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• 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.