Perspective

Sun Tzu, the Chinese strategist and philosopher of war, had an approach to warfare that was based on the principles of superior intelligence, deception, and knowledge of the mind of one’s enemy. Modern military doctrines also give great importance to the application of intelligence. Information is the key commodity in the battlefield, so useful that it can even lift the fog of war. Military Intelligence (MI) services are able to provide the superior intelligence that is necessary to win armed conflicts. Some forms of intelligence are obtained through space, near-space, and ground-based sensing technologies.

‘Intelligence is knowledge’—about the enemy or the surrounding environment needed to support decision-making. Intelligence is not just information, it is secret information, a central component of the command and control process, which can be described by a simple model known as the observation-orientation-decision-action.

Intelligence strives to accomplish two objectives:

• It provides accurate, timely, and relevant knowledge about the enemy (or potential enemy) and the
• surrounding environment. It assists in protecting friendly forces through counterintelligence, both active and passive measures to deny the enemy valuable information about the friendly situation.

Intelligence: Classic Age
Sun Tzu’ book in this regard can be mentioned. In his The Art of War, he states that: “Supreme excellence lies in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting” and “what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge”.“And therefore I say: Know the enemy, know yourself your victory will never be endangered. Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total”.

About the use of Intelligence, Sun Tzu focused on five classes:

1. Local spies;
2. Inward spies;
3. Converted spies;
4. Doomed spies;
5. Surviving spies

When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called “divine manipulation of the threads.” It is the sovereign’s most precious faculty. Having local spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district. Having inward spies, making use of officials of the enemy. Having converted spies is getting hold of the enemy’s spies and using them for our own purposes. Having doomed spies is doing certain things openly for purposes of deception, and allowing our spies to know of them and report them to the enemy. Surviving spies, finally, are those who bring back news from the enemy’s camp. Hence it is that which none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies. None should be more liberally rewarded. In no other business should greater secrecy be preserved. Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity.

Intelligence: Modern Age

Modern Intelligence is extension to ancient Human Intelligence. Wars in 20th century are largely influenced by the sophistication of Intelligence Support System. It is mostly based on technological innovation aimed at JUST-IN-TIME WARFARE premised on c4, command, control, communications and intelligence.

The Intelligence Cycle

Types of Intelligence

There are three essential divisions of military intelligence. The first is strategic intelligence, general information about the enemy and the world in general. Strategic intelligence is gathered from a variety of sources, and includes information like the size of a standing army, available weaponry, and foreign policy standards. Within a nation, several agencies will often share strategic intelligence with each other.

Operational intelligence focuses on a specific operation. Data about the area in which operations may be carried out is collected, along with specific information about troop strength and movements, local sentiments, and other relevant material. Gathering accurate operational intelligence is a crucial duty of military intelligence, and will make the difference between a success and a failure. Tactical intelligence is an extension of operational intelligence, focusing specifically on factors which may influence tactics on the battlefield. Tactical intelligence is typically gathered by commanders in the field while operations are carried out, as opposed to operational intelligence, which is collected before the action begins.

In both peacetime and wartime, military intelligence is an important part of the security system for a nation. Intelligence officers receive special training to make them more effective, and can choose to work in the field collecting raw data, or in centralized offices interpreting and packaging the data. Office workers are an important part of military intelligence, because they filter through communications from other nations and analyze foreign newspapers, radio, television, and other material in order to gather clues. Other officers collate the large amounts of data collected and turn it into a briefing which can be read and understood.

Whatever, the concrete typology can be like this:

• Battlefield: Information relating to that particular local area or engagement.
• Tactical: Information relating to a particular battle or campaign, units, strengths of a particular unit in the area.
• Strategic Intelligence is of a bigger scale, relating to a whole theatre of war or a country, its intentions and capabilities.
  Tools of Intelligence
• Human Intelligence (HUMINT): Gathered by informants and agents – the traditional spies, in the form of documents, copied or stolen, or information passed on in person.
  Photographic PHOINT): aerial photography, use of photographs to provide accurate overviews of a battlefield, troops on the move and resources and specialized photo reconnaissance aircraft.
  Satellite Intelligence (SATINT): an Earth observation or communications satellite deployed as space telescope for intelligence pointed toward the Earth instead of toward the stars.
  Electric and Signals Intelligence: Collection of data from the interception of electronic data ‘leaking’ information, picked up by specialist equipment.

Intelligence: World War II
In WWII, cryptanalysis, the science of deciphering codes, contributed significantly to the Allied victory. World War II belligerents employed highly sophisticated ciphers. The cipher machine known as the Enigma was used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages of the highest security. The machine had been used commercially from the early 1920s, and was adopted by the military and governmental services of numerous nations, including Nazi Germany before and during World War II. It had been claimed that it would take thousands of years to crack the Enigma cipher. Building on smuggled Enigma machine components, the Enigma messages began to be deciphered by Allied code breakers. The intelligence gained through this source, codenamed Ultra, was a significant aid to the Allied war effort. Some historians have even suggested that the end of the European part of the war was hastened by a year or more because of the decryption of German ciphers. The cipher machine ‘the German Enigma’ was used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages of the highest security. “Purple” was a cipher used by Japan during the war to encode diplomatic messages to various embassies and consulates throughout the world. The U.S. created a ‘shadow machine’, a Purple machine of their own.

Intelligence: Cold War
The tools of Intelligence ranged from running single agents, to marshaling to deploy elaborate spy satellites. The cold war primarily fought by intelligence agencies, including the CIA (United States), MI6 (United Kingdom), BND (West Germany), Stasi (East Germany), and the KGB (Soviet Union).The critical roles of Human Intelligence and Photographic Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis were visible.

Before Cuban missile crisis 1962, the CIA had produced detailed Photo Intelligence identifying Soviet nuclear missile installations under construction in Cuba, 90 miles off the Florida coast.

Spies were used during the Cold War, but did not affect many events during those years. However, mutual espionage of both civilian and military targets caused the most casualties of the Cold War, since once they were detected, most spies were executed immediately.

The Cold War dominated U.S. and Soviet foreign policy for 44 years, from 1947-1991. The end of the war came on December 26, 1991, when the USSR was officially disbanded, breaking up into 15 constituent parts.

Post Cold War: New Threats New Intelligence

Post cold war Intelligence is guided by Precision Technologies such as laser, global positioning system(GPS), electro optical sensors, Inertial navigation. In post cold war period advances in material sciences with enhanced electromagnetic transparency in detection technology and Visible, infrared and ultraviolet sensors for spacecraft have changed the intelligence scenario.New radar system, with improvements in the transmit- receive function in terms of data processing revolutionized the post cold war intelligence eased the process of intelligence.

Exponential advances in computer processing power provides ‘spies in the sky’ to observe the Earth in cloud cover, inclement weather and darkness. Strategic roles of satellite are tactically supplemented by small pilotless Drone Aircraft, with stealth masking. Utilization of wireless frequencies for the transmission of telephone and computer data is absorbed into the antenna of satellites and relayed to ground stations on Earth.

The Internet, library of world knowledge, has become the repository of information with advanced networking to share information quickly, and massive computer power to analyze billions of bits of data. World Wide Web including social sites remains under the vigilance for detecting secrets.

Ground Surveillance Radar Applications.GSR systems can be used in a variety of applications, including urban warfare maneuvers, covert stakeout surveillance, counterterrorism, maritime surveillance, border patrol and security, observation and protection of remote areas, airport security, nuclear facility security, and tactical battlefield applications.

A battlefield commander requires much intelligence to command and control his assets proficiently. For ground combat situations, information that is useful includes: enemy troop concentrations, enemy vehicle concentration, enemy vehicle classification, enemy personnel & vehicle movement, movement of a possible counterattack force conducting a flanking attack, and information about avenues of approach and infiltration routes used by enemy. This information can be used as targeting data to support effective attacks, as early warning for force protection, or simply as surveillance to find the enemy. In general, GSRs provide timely surveillance and tactical near-real time data and are very versatile. GSRs are used to search for enemy activity on critical chokepoints, mobility corridors, and likely infiltration routes. They are used to observe point targets such as bridges, road junctions, or narrow passages to detect movements. GSR systems can extend the surveillance capability of patrols by surveying surrounding areas for enemy movement and survey target areas immediately after an attack to detect enemy activity and determine the effectiveness of the attack. Radars can assist in visual observation of targets partially hidden by haze, smoke, fog, or bright sunlight, and can confirm targets sensed by other types of sensors.

GSR systems have a few weaknesses that must be overcome by using other types of sensors in conjunction with the radar. Radars require line-of-site to the target area, and their performance is degraded by heavy rain, snow, dense foliage, and high winds. Also, they are active emitters, and are subject to enemy detection and electronic countermeasures (ECM). Finally, radars are unable to distinguish between friend and foe, only able to detect and classify moving targets by type.

Human Intelligence: Unending Reality

Again we can quote from Sun Tzu, Art of War, (500. B.C)

“Knowledge of the spirit world is to be obtained by divination; information in natural science may be sought by inductive reasoning; the laws of the universe can be verified by mathematical calculation; but the disposition of an enemy are ascertainable through spies and spies alone.” “Quantities like length, breadth, distance and magnitude are susceptible of exact mathematical determination; human actions can not be so calculated.”

Human Intelligence: Unending Reality:

One of the major reasons of the failures in the Global War on Terrorism is the human intelligence failure in the Afghanistan and Pakistan. Lack of intelligence has proven to be a major hurdle in the tribal areas of Pakistan where Pakistan army is engaged in bringing peace and stability. HUMINT is strong on transnational issues like terrorism, extremism, narcotics trafficking proliferation, and international economics. Modern technology like satellites, GPS, surveillance drones has their limitations which cannot be 100% accurate as compare to the HUMINT based on primary source.HUMINT has extensive strength to know about the enemy nature, character, strength, public support and its exact location. A satellite camera can pinpoint and photograph a group of suspicious buildings but, the pictures themselves have limited use to confirm the type and comment on nature of technology.SIGINT technology is capable of intercepting coded messages transmitted almost anywhere in the world. But it invariably requires a human agent privy to the structure of the code for considerable SIGINT efforts.