Intelligence After Next: Intelligence on the Battlefields of Tomorrow—The Challenge to Remain Relevant

Intelligence production and dissemination constructs, as they exist today, are insufficient to ensure critical and often perishable information can be delivered to battlefield decision makers in time to maintain operational advantage. While the essential requirement for intelligence analysis to be accurate and timely is not new, the speed of warfare continues to accelerate, placing new emphasis on sharing intelligence at the speed of need. 

The way information collected by the full array of Intelligence Community (IC) capabilities is ingested by the analytic corps, analyzed, placed in context, and shared for the operational user must evolve, driven by an increasing need for timeliness. Barring this, any human-in-the-loop ability to determine accuracy or place that information in context will fail, as information is delivered too late to impact the decision cycle. 

The lessons being learned in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine may shed additional light on the approach and solutions required to meet the challenge of rapid information analysis and intelligence dissemination. While approaches may differ on ways to improve timeliness, there is no doubt that we must hasten the pace of this evolution and be ready to fight at an intensity and speed previously unseen in conventional warfare.