Vanguard Magazine

www.vanguardcanada.com JUNE/JULY 2018 25 inteLLiGenCe AnALysis Background "I am aware of no initiative in the last de- cade which has received more attention and applause than [Intelligence Prepara- tion of the Battlefield] … [It] was a win- ner from the starting gate. It satisfies a warfighting need. It gives structure to the desperately complex business of the battle- field. It begins the process of making finite the overwhelming possibilities of enemy disposition, capabilities, and intentions. Alas, it is too appealing." - COL Mark Hamilton Support to the tactical commander is, by far, the most prevalent work done by Ca- nadian practitioners of military intelligence (MI). With only one conventional HQ at the operational level and a focus on force generation (FG), or departmental gov- ernance, by strategic level organizations, the tactical commanders of task forces and units consume higher volumes of intelli- gence than their operational and strategic counterparts. Intelligence organizations working at the operational and strategic levels also produce a significant amount of intelligence to support the tactical fight through reach back. MI saw significant growth during World War Two. The "five eyes" community of intelligence partners was in its nascent stages through the efforts of Sir William Stevenson, and the need for specific col- lection methods to support the growing exploitation of the electromagnetic spec- trum was critical to achieve success. Com- partmenting this information to protect sources, methods, and emerging technolo- gies was critical to the success of the allied intelligence effort. Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Imagery Intelligence (IM- INT) came into their own in the 40's and 50's, leading to the exploitation of space for strategic collection in the 60's and 70's. Technical solutions for collection of information, to be processed into intelli- gence, captured the imaginations of mili- tary leaders, intelligence practitioners, sci- entists, and politicians. The compartments in which these advances took place became technical silos of excellence. The intel- ligence output from these single sources of collection were known as "tear-line re- ports" and passed to all source analysts for integration and processing. Those advanced collection capacities ar- rived on the battlefield in the 70's and 80's, giving tactical commanders more capabil- ity to determine enemy dispositions and to improve surveillance in the Area of Op- erations (AO). This increase in information from a plethora of sensors required that managing collection of information, from what asset and where, was critical to devel- oping a consolidated picture of the enemy from which intent could be deduced. The all source military intelligence analyst was instrumental to providing a clear, timely, and usable intelligence product to the com- mander. The intelligence estimate, the col- lection plan, and written assessments of the information collected were the tools of the trade. A key communication tool was the use of military symbols on maps to not only describe friendly and enemy dispositions, but to provide a sense of time and space. These were drawn directly on the map, on tracing paper, and eventually on clear plas- tic sheets, colloquially known as "talcs". Concurrent with the rise of technologies to collect information, there was an also a rise in technologies to process information. Knowledge and assessment of terrain and the operating environment is fundamental to military action. General purpose com- puter-based mapping was spurred by nucle- ar weapon research in the 1950's, and Can- ada deployed the world's first operational Geospatial Information System (GIS) in 1960 to support the Department of For- estry and Rural Development. Its develop- er, Dr Roger Tomlinson, became known as the father of GIS for his use of overlays for spatial analysis of convergent geographic data. Other data were becoming increas- ingly digitized and internetworking proto- cols were being developed to communicate that data over distance. The first successful message was sent on ARPANET, the pre- decessor to the internet, in October 1969. Technological advances were also driv- ing U.S. Army thinkers to reassess how A s technology steadily and rap- idly advances, it is in the best interest of the Canadian Intel- ligence community to adopt an active approach to pre- paring for the emergence of new ideas and tools. We are well into the "digital age" and have yet to seriously revamp the processes, organizations and structures that were de- veloped to support war fighting in the nu- clear and space ages. Our history is rich with successful innovation and adoption of for- ward-looking ideas, and the future demands that we continue. IntellIgence ProductIon

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