Lexicon

STRATINT

Strategic Intelligence — intelligence supporting national-level policy and long-range planning

STRATINT — strategic intelligence — is the level-of-analysis category covering intelligence directed at supporting national-level policy formulation, long-range military and political planning, and strategic-warning functions. The category is distinguished from operational intelligence (which supports a campaign or named operation) and tactical intelligence (which supports immediate combat or operational decisions) by analytical horizon and consumer rather than by collection methodology. Strategic intelligence is the analytical level at which the National Intelligence Estimates, the President's Daily Brief, and the longer-form national-security-policy products are produced.

The institutional articulation of strategic intelligence as a distinct level of analysis dates to the post–World War II re-organisation of US intelligence and the foundational policy work of Sherman Kent — the OSS Research and Analysis Branch chief whose 1949 Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy laid out what became the institutional template for the post-1947 CIA Office of National Estimates. Kent's framework distinguished strategic intelligence (long-horizon, policy-directed, predominantly produced through the integration of multiple-source inputs) from tactical and operational intelligence by its consumer (national-level policy-makers) and its analytical horizon (months-to-years rather than hours-to-days).

The principal institutional vehicles through which US strategic intelligence is produced are the National Intelligence Estimate framework (the National Intelligence Council producing community-coordinated estimates on subjects of national-policy interest), the President's Daily Brief (the daily current-strategic-intelligence product produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence), and the longer-form analytical products produced by the CIA's Directorate of Analysis (formerly Directorate of Intelligence), the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), and the other intelligence-community analytical bodies. The strategic-intelligence consumer base extends beyond the executive branch to the Congressional intelligence committees and (through periodic declassification or briefing arrangements) to the broader policy and academic communities.

The discipline's distinctive analytical demand is the integration of multiple-source inputs across long analytical horizons. A strategic-intelligence product on, for example, the trajectory of the Chinese strategic-missile programme draws on SIGINT, IMINT, MASINT, HUMINT, and OSINT inputs; on the academic and policy-research literature on Chinese military modernisation; on diplomatic reporting from State Department and embassy sources; and on the historical institutional record on the same programme. The analytical methodology is necessarily integrative rather than discipline-specific, and the strategic-intelligence analytical cohort is correspondingly characterised by long institutional careers within particular country, regional, or thematic accounts.

The historical record on strategic-intelligence performance is uneven. The substantial Cold War strategic-intelligence record on the Soviet Union has been the subject of post-Cold-War academic and institutional reassessment that found, on balance, more analytical strength than the contemporary critique of the period attributed to it (the National Intelligence Estimates on Soviet strategic-force development, particularly under the William Casey/Robert Gates leadership of the early 1980s, were retrospectively assessed as having been broadly correct on the principal trajectories of Soviet capability). The post-9/11 institutional record is less favourable — the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is the canonical post-Cold-War strategic-intelligence failure, and the institutional-reform record since (the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the establishment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the post-2005 reforms to NIE confidence-language convention) has been substantially driven by the institutional consequences of that single product.

See also