New Directive Seeks to Bolster Air, Sea Intelligence
Ambitious new interagency structures that are supposed to provide an improved intelligence response to maritime and air threats to national security are described in a newly-disclosed Intelligence Community Directive.
The directive establishes what it calls Communities of Interest (COI) “to maximize intelligence collection and all-source analytic coordination.”
“IC stakeholders in the maritime and air COIs shall aggressively collaborate and share information to proactively identify and mitigate threats posed within these domains as early and as geographically distant from the U.S. as possible,” the new directive states.
A plan to maximize air domain awareness “directs development and improvement of new capabilities that enable persistent and effective monitoring of all aircraft, cargo, people, and infrastructure in identified areas of interest and at designated times, consistent with protecting civil liberties and privacy,” the directive says.
“Creating a shared common awareness among intelligence, law enforcement and operational communities is a complex task,” the directive notes, “and many associated policy and legal implications must be resolved to achieve success.”
The January 14, 2009 directive, signed by former Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell, has not been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News.
See “Global Maritime and Air Intelligence Integration,” Intelligence Community Directive 902, effective 14 January 2009.
The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons, and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987.. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]
On 14 April 2023, the Belarusian Ministry of Defence released a short video of a Su-25 pilot explaining his new role in delivering “special [nuclear] munitions” following his training in Russia. The features seen in the video, as well as several other open-source clues, suggest that Lida Air Base––located only 40 kilometers from the Lithuanian border and the […]
A photo in a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) student briefing from 2022 shows four people inspecting what appears to be a damaged B61 nuclear bomb.
In early-February 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) had informed Congress that China now has more launchers for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) than the United States. The report is the latest in a serious of revelations over the past four years about China’s growing nuclear weapons arsenal and the deepening […]