From the editor - Editorial

Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin, Jan-March, 2003

The initial theme of this issue of MIPB addressed a single aspect of the U.S. Army's ongoing Transformation, "Intelligence Synchronization." However, in light of the number and diversity of changes affecting the Military Intelligence community, it was determined that we needed to broaden the issue's scope. The change to The Fundamentals of Intelligence" was designed to review the unchanging foundation of what we do in light of the ongoing Transformation.

These unchanging foundations can be distilled to three basic functions: collection, analysis, and production. While these functions capture the foundation of Army MI support to operations, we must expand upon their most basic form in order to reflect the greater specialization to support the full spectrum of Army operations from the six Intelligence tasks. These intelligence tasks reflect the unchanging foundations of what we do as MI professionals. However, they were neither codified nor aligned with the Intelligence Battlefield Operating System (BOS) tasks present in the Army Universal al Task List (AUTL).

The MI Doctrine Division seized upon the opportunity to not only ensure the Intelligence BOS AUTL tasks were synonymous with the Intelligence Tasks, but also to updated the Intelligence Tasks to reflect their support to the force, and MI's role in supporting the Army Transformation. As you will see, the Intelligence Tasks are now subsumed under the four new Intelligence Tasks--which are also the Intelligence BOS tasks listed in the AUTL (FM 7-15). 1 The Army's Transformation process has addressed every BOS and every branch which will lead many revisions to our doctrine FM 2-0, Intelligence (Draft) will serve as the Military Intelligence Corps' Tier 1 (Keyston field manual. This field manual identifies the fundamental Intelligence tasks:

* Support to Situational Understanding

* Perform Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB)

* Perform Situational Development

* Support to Force Protection

* Support to Strategic Responsiveness

* Perform Indications and Warnings (I&W)

* Intelligence Readiness

* Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR)

* Perform Intelligence Synchronization

* Perform ISR Integration

* Conduct Reconnaissance

* Conduct Surveillance

* Support to Effects

* Support to Targeting

* Support to Information Operations

* Perform Battle Damage Assessment

This issue of MIPB provides many articles addressing one or more aspects of the fundamentals of intelligence. We cannot, however, point to these fundamentals alone as the reasons behind our success. We must not forget the most important element, the soldiers and civilians who execute the Intelligence mission day in and day out. The fundamentals offer a road map on what they are to accomplish and how they will accomplish it. It is for the MI soldiers and civilians, however, to achieve success through their training, innovation, adaptive thinking, and increasingly capable enabling tools. This issue of MIPB provides many insights on how that may be accomplished.

Michael P. Ley