Defense Intelligence and Counterinsurgency
With its overwhelming emphasis on technical collection, U.S. military intelligence is poorly equipped to meet the requirements of the counterinsurgency mission, according to a recent study (pdf) by the Defense Science Board.
“Many, if not most, specific COIN [counterinsurgency] ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] requirements are population-centric and are not exclusively solvable with hardware or hard, physical science scientific and technical (S&T) solutions,” the DSB report said. “One senior intelligence officer with years of field experience pointed out that 80 percent of useful operational data for COIN does not come from legacy intelligence organizations.”
Among other things, “the defense intelligence community does not have the foreign language and culture depth and breadth necessary to plan and support COIN operations,” according to the DSB.
See “Counterinsurgency (COIN) Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Operations,” Defense Science Board, February 2011 (released May 2011).
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 […]