Intelligence assessment

Intelligence assessment is the development of forecasts of behaviour or recommended courses of action to the leadership of an organization, based on a wide range of available information sources both overt and covert. Assessments are developed in response to requirements declared by the leadership in order to inform decision making. Assessment may be carried out on behalf of a state, military or commercial organisation with a range of available sources of information available to each.

An intelligence assessment reviews both available information and previous assessments for relevance and currency, where additional information is required some collection may be directed by the analyst.

Contents

Process

Information collected can be difficult to obtain or altogether secret material gained through closed sources (see list of intelligence gathering disciplines), or it can be widely available but systematically researched through open source intelligence (OSINT). Traditionally, intelligence involves all-source collection, storage and indexing of data, usually in multiple languages, in the expectation that some small portion will later prove important. Intelligence gathering disciplines, or, more narrowly, and the sources and methods used to obtain them are often highly classified and sometimes compartmentalized, and intelligence officers need top level security clearance.

Intelligence is conducted on three levels:

The broadest of these levels is strategic intelligence, which includes information about the capabilities and intentions of foreign countries. Tactical intelligence, sometimes called operational or combat intelligence, is information required by military field commanders. Because of the enormous destructive power of modern weaponry, the decision making of political leaders often must take into account information derived from tactical as well as strategic intelligence; major field commanders may often also need multiple levels of intelligence. Thus, the distinction between these two levels of intelligence may be vanishing.

Depending on the national policy, some intelligence agencies engage in clandestine and covert activities beyond espionage such as political subversion, sabotage and assassination. Other agencies strictly limit themselves to analysis, or collection and analysis; some governments have other organizations for covert action.

Intelligence as used here, when done properly, serves a function for organizations similar to that which intelligence (trait) serves for individual humans and animals. Intelligence collection is often controversial and seen as a threat to privacy. Intelligence is essential for government policy formation and operations; it is a policy matter for individual governments whether While usually associated with warfare, intelligence can also be used to preserve peace.

The process of taking known information about situations and entities of strategic, operational, or tactical importance, characterizing the known, and, with appropriate statements of probability, the future actions in those situations and by those entities is called intelligence analysis. The descriptions are drawn from what may only be available in the form of deliberately deceptive information; the analyst must correlate the similarities among deceptions and extract a common truth. Although its practice is found in its purest form inside intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, MI6) in the UK, its methods are also applicable in fields such as business intelligence or competitive intelligence.

Intelligence analysis is a way of reducing the ambiguity of highly ambiguous situations, with the ambiguity often very deliberately created by highly intelligent people with mindsets very different from the analyst's. Many analysts prefer the middle-of-the-road explanation, rejecting high or low probability explanations. Analysts may use their own standard of proportionality as to the risk acceptance of the opponent, rejecting that the opponent may take an extreme risk to achieve what the analyst regards as a minor gain. Above all, the analyst must avoid the special cognitive traps for intelligence analysis projecting what she or he wants the opponent to think, and using available information to justify that conclusion.

See also

References

Surveys

World War I

World War II: 1931–1945

Cold War Era: 1945–1991

External links

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