Vanguard Magazine

26 JUNE/JULY 2018 www.vanguardcanada.com inteLLiGenCe AnALysis friendly forces interact on the battlefield. The speed and range of modern weapons required that the battlefield be "extended" to deal with the enemy's depth forces and to make best use of friendly capabilities. Concurrently, air planners were grappling with optimal use of airpower in support of the land fight. The result was a doctrine called AirLand Battle that emphasized close coordination between the Army and Air Force to produce an integrated at- tack plan that would use the land forces to counterattack invading Warsaw Pact forces while air power, artillery and spe- cial operation forces stopped the move- ment of the reserve echelons toward the front line. The result would stretch out the enemy advance in time, allowing the smaller NATO forces to continually defeat the smaller enemy force available on the battlefield. The planning methods developed to sup- port employment of this AirLand Battle were Intelligence Preparation of the Bat- tlefield (IPB) and the Operational Plan- ning Process (OPP). This approach was developed with the above noted emerging technologies in mind and was, therefore, heavily process oriented to take advantage of the advances in GIS, data processing, and communications. The importance of terrain drove the process to rely on layered data, often derived from information siloes. At higher echelons of command where computing power, advance processing ap- plications and staff resources were plentiful, the result was digitized layers of informa- tion. The result at the tactical level was hu- man application of a process designed for machines, resulting in more plastic layers. As desktop computing advanced, the result was amplified with people using machines to produce a human interpretation of a ma- chine process – hence the emergence of the "power point warrior". Extending the Practice. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the replacement of the AirLand Battle with Full Spectrum Op- erations, and Canada's Joint Interagency Multinational and Public (JIMP) approach to operations, IPB evolved and grew into Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Oper- ating Environment (JIPOE). Ever improv- ing collection capabilities, and the rich trove of open source data and information that was unleashed with the World Wide Web in the mid 90's, placed additional pressure on these methods, requiring increasingly complex approaches to integrating the data. Application of IPB and OPP to full spectrum operations, specifically peace sup- port operations, required additional layers to integrate information on the local popu- lation, governments, increasingly complex transportation and communications infra- structure, economic data, groups of non- state actors and rivals, criminal organiza- tions, justice systems, health care systems, and relationships between socio-economic and cultural groupings. Although a clear date cannot be placed on the start of the Global Islamic Insur- gency, the Soviet occupation of Afghani- stan and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union brought the issue front and centre with western nations and with the U.S., specifically. The defining attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 brought this fight into the public domain. Full spec- trum operations were now to be employed in a new atmosphere and styled "The War on Global Terrorism". The subsequent ad- aptations and developments, over the past two decades, in the Five Eyes and NATO Intelligence community were the most significant since the Second World War. Equally, in those 17 years, the world has seen the adoption of technology for uses that were not even conceived in 2001. Digital warriors One of the first paradigm casualties after 9/11 was "the need to know," without a corollary "need to share." This maxim is a key to maintaining a secure, compart- mented intelligence system that protects its sources and methods to avoid detection and infiltration by the enemy. The down- side is, of course, that an analyst doesn't know what she doesn't know. The realiza- tion that all of the information was avail- able to have prevented four airliners from being used as weapons was available, but not integrated, was a major wake up call for the U.S. intelligence community. Fur- ther realization that additional information existed with friendly nations increased the need to solve this problem. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in 2005 to address this, among other collaboration and intelligence stan- dards issues, but individual U.S. agencies and allies had already begun addressing them in the battle space. Rapid development of search engines and increasingly sophisticated search "bots" re- sulted in what amounts to a universal ability to find any type of information on the inter- net. Coupled with the increasing amount of information made available by corpora- tions, organizations, academia, and gov- ernments on the World Wide Web, there is little in the way of unclassified information that is not available using any device con- nected to the internet. The ability to pull information directly from the source, rather The subsequent adaptations and developments, over the past two decades, in the Five Eyes and NATO Intelligence community were the most significant since the Second World War. As part of NATO's Unified Vision 2014 trial, officers analyze data coming in from the field at the trial control room (TRICOM). Photo: NATO

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