Preface
Welcome to the Introduction to General Intelligence Analysis (IGIA), a book course designed for personnel who are newly assigned military analysts or who will soon work in a Department of Defense (DoD) Intelligence activity. The purpose of this course is to provide participants with an appreciation of the National Foreign Intelligence Community (NFIC), the five major Intelligence collection disciplines, and the analytical problem-solving process. Since many participants in IGIA will have had only limited, if any, exposure to Intelligence, IGIA will use a building-block approach.
The first third of the course will look at the National Foreign Intelligence Community, i.e., the fifteen Intelligence agencies which support the policy makers at the national-level and the military commanders at the theater-level. This portion of the course will also examine the role of executive and congressional oversight of the Intelligence Community, the value of Indications and Warning (I&W) in the decision-making process, and the importance of communicating Intelligence in a timely and understandable format.
During the second third of the course, the emphasis will look at the Collection Management process and its role in meeting the needs of the analyst. The course will also look at the five major Intelligence disciplines: Open Source Intelligence, Imagery Intelligence, Measurement and Signatures Intelligence, Signals Intelligence, and Human Intelligence. When addressing collection methods, the course will cover the strengths and weaknesses of each discipline, emphasizing the need to use all the disciplines when analyzing an Intelligence problem.
The final third of the course will shift to the analytical process. Included in this phase are the eight Components of Strategic Intelligence, Orders of Battle (OOB) analysis, problem definition, hypothesis generation, and several tools of analysis, i.e., the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, Link and Matrix Analysis, and Chains of Reasoning. During this phase, the class will participate in several problem-solving exercises emphasizing different aspects of the analytical process.
The organization of this book follows closely the sequence of presentations in IGIA. Some chapters or sections, however, may not exactly correlate with the instruction schedule, so you should refer to the course syllabus to determine applicable readings for each lecture. Please remember that IGIA is an introductory course designed for people with little or no background in the Intelligence Community or with the process of Intelligence analysis. Many participants, however, will have considerable military experience, or come from a scientific or engineering background. Please share your expertise with the class. The structure of IGIA is very informal, and personal experiences from class participants are always a welcomed bonus.
With 2012, IGIA is in its seventeenth year, but we are still enhancing the course with new topics. We encourage any comments, positive or negative, about the course. If you believe we have omitted an important subject, let us know.
Donald G. Hukle, Lt Col, USAF (Ret)