Priority Intelligence Requirements

SUBJECT: Priority Intelligence Requirements

1. Sir: We enjoyed your visit immensely. As always, we learned a great deal from you. My officers thoroughly enjoyed your OPD; we talked about your points throughout the 12 days of UFL. I thought a lot about our interaction with you throughout UFL. Wanted to get back to you with a few thoughts about a subject you asked for our thoughts on -- priority intelligence requirements (PIR).

2. PIR problems. We agree with you that priority intelligence requirements present a very real challenge for the Army -- combat arms and intelligence alike. I fear we (corporately) remain in need of some repair in this area of thought and action. The intellectual process is simple to think about, but very complex to execute. I agree with you that we must do better. My thinking on the subject follows.

• The commander must have a vision of the fight, which becomes his concept of operation (eventually his intent and framework for scheme of maneuver). During the process of developing his concept and wargaming courses of action, the commander will come up with information gaps, unknowns, voids, information needs/requirements -- whatever he chooses to call information requirements.

• The commander and his staff also define the opponent's centers of gravity and friendly centers of gravity and how the two relate. Quite naturally, the commander will have cognition gaps and needs for information concerning enemy and friendly centers of gravity. These gaps/needs spring forth from thinking about the mission.

• Information requirements also come from wargaming that occurs during the IPB process.

• The information requirements identified during development of his vision, concept of operation, friendly and enemy center of gravity identification, and IPB become his PIR. From this initial analysis, the commander's S-2/G-2/J-2 refine the PIR, perform rudimentary analysis, and task the collection system -- HUMINT/IMINT/SIGINT. This tasking, and the process leading up to the tasking, constitute the collection manager's raison d'être.

3. Collection management and analysis/synthesis. The collection manager must depend on detailed help from analysts to provide specifics needed to leverage collection systems effectively. This is a crucial relationship -- we shouldn't separate analysis and collection management functions and organizations. Steerage of the collection system has to come from folks who know and understand the opponent's order of battle, communications, thinking, protecting activities, doctrine, warfighting ethos, and so forth. Moreover, the collection manager must search for and develop effective combinations of collection assets and synchronize them over time to achieve synergy, coherence among assets, and meet required timelines of operators.

4. Dynamics. The timelines come down to two dynamics. The first dynamic involves planning and executing the collection plan to obtain information at NAIs of the IPB process, to confirm or deny hypotheses, activities, actions of specific units over time, and to provide tactical/operational level of war indications and warning. The second dynamic is the most important -- collection managers must synchronize collection activities in space and time to answer the commander's questions, provide key reads, provide information for making decisions at decision points, and identify high payoff targets (HPT) in target areas of interest (TAI). Operational planning and execution must drive this process, which our Army calls the creation of combat power effects through execution of the DST or attack-guidance matrix. The commander's J3/G3 must not only understand but MUST OWN the DST/attack guidance matrix. The commander's J2/G2 provide information to assist in making decisions and confirming or denying hypotheses; however, the concept of how to employ combat power coupled with and pointed by information clearly lies within the lane of the commander and his operators. Very quickly, we can comprehend the relationship between the collection plan and satisfying PIR. This relationship serves as a vital aspect of setting and shaping the tactical and operational level of war conditions so essential to creating tangible and intangible combat power effects. So far in this discussion, some constants have surfaced as imperatives for satisfying information requirements. They include:

• well-stated, specific, relevant PIR tied to commander's concept, friendly and enemy center of gravity analyses, and IPB

• analyst-driven, coherent collection plans providing specific information about specific things at specific locations to accomplish specific effects

• synchronized collection assets in effective combinations to achieve synergy

• collection plan that produces information specific and timely enough to make a difference in answering the commander's PIRs

• well-thought-through DST/attack guidance matrix fueled by accurate, timely, relevant, and specific information

5. Our problems. Unfortunately, our system doesn't work as well as we would like. As we've found over the years:

• PIR often aren't stated specifically enough.

• PIR don't always directly relate to the concept of operation and commander's information gaps.

• Collection doesn't always relate to the commander's PIR.

• Combining collection assets to achieve complementary relationships and synergy rarely happens.

• We don't understand well enough the notion of centers of gravity, relationship between friendly and enemy centers of gravity, and how friendly and enemy centers of gravity relate to the collection plan.

• Occasionally, operators don't take ownership of the DST or attack guidance matrix.

But there's more if we burrow down to the heart of the problem. The essence of our problem is that we, for the most part, don't think holistically. That is, we generally think about things or events in isolation rather than as being part of a larger or smaller whole. Instead, we must learn to think of things, such as PIR, as being related to other things or wholes, smaller and larger. We must learn to think holistically in our PIR development, collection planning, analysis, synthesis, and prediction to provide useful information on the modern battlefield. More specifically, we haven't synthesized the collection problem into a whole. Since the battlefield is a whole that we can break into discernible chunks for ease of understanding and management, the collection problem has to focus on the whole and its discernible chunks too. From the commander's vision and concept come information gaps. The gaps represent part of a battlefield whole. The intelligence system's role is to satisfy the information requirements, reduce the gap, and understand the whole.

6. The ideal state. In a perfect world, intelligence professionals want several characteristics to describe collection and analysis systems.

• Collection planning and execution must tie to PIRs and we must keep track of movement toward fulfilling the PIR.

• With the commander's PIR, we need to look at specific information requirements (SIR) and specified and implied collection tasks/requirements. All collection management shops, with the help of analysts, must perform at least a rudimentary indicator analysis to drive their thinking about whom to task for the information the commander requires.

• The collection manager must be very knowledgeable of all collection assets, the specificity of the information they provide, and the time it takes to move the information in relation to the specificity and timeliness requirements the commander and his operators articulate.

• The collection manager must be intimately familiar with the IPB process. The IPB process must drive the development and execution of the collection plan.

• The collection manager must search for the right combinations of assets to provide the timely, specific, and relevant information required. Linear programming on ASAS or PCs could help collection managers.

• The manager must ensure coherency -- e.g., ensure that the collection tasking correlates with the commander's PIR, priorities to IEW listed in paragraph three of the OPLAN/OPORD, coordinating instructions, and tasks listed in annex B.

• The collection manager must also seek and attain coherency among collection assets. Then, weaknesses balance with strengths so assets can work in combinations timed to achieve the greatest results and reduce the possibility of being fooled by an opponent's deception efforts.

• Commanders need to understand how they think. With such understanding, they can define, in explicit terms, their information needs, which turn into PIR. Some commanders, for example, are intuitive. They need information for confirming or denying what their intuition tells them. Other commanders are analytical. These commanders need lots of information to build toward conclusions -- inductive reasoning.

• Our commanders must understand the power inherent within information. Information itself isn't power, but it's the means to power. Information is crucially important in attaining commanders' combat-power effects. I fear our somewhat underdeveloped understanding of the information revolution and the direction warfare is moving in the information age contributes to the problems we have with defining information requirements so crucial to creating combat-power effects.

7. The hard part. We can accomplish the above with lots of mental work and practice through extensive training. But when collection agencies receive their tasks, the truly difficult part of the process begins.

• All soldiers involved must know and understand the PIR as they relate to friendly and enemy situations.

• Each discipline must perform a detailed indicator analysis and use the specific results of the analysis to form the basis for tasking the collection equipment they control. Specificity of this process varies among intelligence disciplines. SIGINT, for example, involves very detailed tasking by frequencies, type of radio, call signs, keywords, and so forth. Lots of detailed analytical work goes into SIGINT tasking. Collectors must task for bits and pieces of information that, when synthesized, describe the whole or parts of the whole they are looking for. Collected information must identify enough of a whole to answer the commander's PIR.

• We must develop ways to use automation to track taskings of collection systems and to audit the relationship of collection activities to fulfilling PIR. We need to use pie charts, or some other quantifiable, visual medium to show progress toward satisfying the commander's PIRs.

8. Related attempt to help taken from theory and put into practice. A little over two years ago I wrote an article proposing analytical and collection processes for satisfying commander's PIR for Military Intelligence magazine (January-March 1992 issue). We used the process to drill collection management execution in UFL. We found a break in flow (thinking and tasking) attributable primarily to three reasons.

• First, the thinking required takes great depth of knowledge and understanding of relationships of all kinds of things -- enemy, friendly, collection technology, automation, communications, etc. Unfortunately, not many individuals have such knowledge and understanding.

• Second, the process requires us to take wholes, fragment them, task for bits and pieces of information, receive bits and pieces of information back, synthesize these bits and pieces of collection systems, etc. This is a very sophisticated and difficult process -- it can be accomplished though, with lots of hard work and good thinking.

• Third, our analysis, tasking, and cueing organizations must do better in coordinating and working together.

Ideally, we've concluded very flat, no-boundary, matrix organizations and groups would work best for thinking about and collecting to satisfy priority intelligence requirements. We believe ASAS can help us in the mechanical process of fusing, which is to my way of thinking, an aid in the mental process of synthesis and tracking bits and pieces of information. Also, I believe human beings use only 10-15% of intellectual capacity but that we can get another 5% through good training and education. We're working the issues here and trying to inculcate what we learn into the fabric of the organization.

9. What MI can do. Doctrinally, the links among IPB, attack-guidance matrix, collection management, and analysis/synthesis are somewhat weak. We should have built a more obvious and stronger case for these relationships in FM 34-1. I haven't reviewed the draft manual on analysis/synthesis nor collection management and synchronization, but hope we have articulated a powerful, easy-to-understand relationship. I also believe those who manage collection assets don't understand the importance of good analysis, synthesis, and theory of wholes and that we don't do a good enough job in asking the customers who receive our information if it meets their requirements. We must do better. Along with answering the mail, so to speak, we must help commanders realize what our collection and information systems can and can't do. We believe there's a fine balance between what we must do to ensure we meet our customer's information requirements and educate them on the limits of technology. We don't want to exaggerate a capability or imply a widget can do something more than possible but also don't want to downplay the capabilities of widgets because we haven't figured out how to use them.

10. Abstractness of our approach. We realize the abstractness of a holistic theory of the battlefield and intelligence collection, thinking about wholes, and thinking through synthesis. Nonetheless, we still believe these notions accurately portray our environment and our universe. Our movement into the future, let alone our credibility as a BOS, depends on adapting our way of thinking to what the information age so vividly implies. With hard mental work, collection managers and analysts can understand and use such processes. We must work together to repair our collection and analytical linkages with the commander's PIR -- you from the training institution, and we from the field. ASAS can help with strengthening the nexus among collection management, analysis/synthesis, IPB -- attack-guidance matrix/DST. Systemically, we don't believe we should ever separate analysts from collection folks. If I had my way, they would sit side by side in a symbiotic relationship like Siamese twins.

11. Conclusion. Thank you for asking us to think about this issue. The experience has helped us think better and it also helped us improve the way we operate today. I'm not totally comfortable with the way we go about some of the processes of our business. PIR indicator analysis and collection to satisfy those PIR are two I'm particularly worried about. I've worked on the problem over the years, dabbled here and there, won some, lost most efforts to fix or repair in my lane. Regardless, I believe I'm correct in what I've discussed as a possible approach and a way to nudge our thinking into the next century. We have a plan to work the issue but certainly need your help from three perspectives.

• First, I need to know if you agree with what I've just discussed.

• Second, we need to encourage commanders to think about how they think, think about how their subordinates think, understand how information relates to vision and concept of operation, and decide how to explain information requirements to their subordinates.

• Third, we need more and better interaction with the school. We're willing to feed to the school what we're thinking, trying, and debating. We'll also be willing to experiment, participate in seminars, review doctrine. We can do a lot electronically.

The bottom line is that if we can't show MI's mission relates to commanders' information requirements, concept of operations, and center of gravity analyses -- PIRs -- we could become irrelevant. This is a danger the entire intelligence community has been discussing. Our very real need is to ensure that what we do relates to what our consumers want. In the case of Army intelligence, all of us must work hard to show an audit trail to PIRs and produce information useful to commanders. We wanted to provide our thoughts on PIR since you mentioned it during your visit. I look forward to hearing from you; we want to fix the problem and get on to other issues. This specific issue, though, is fundamental to our profession essence and thus deserves our serious thinking.