The Intelligence Cycle is dead, long live the Intelligence Cycle: rethinking intelligence fundamentals for a new intelligence doctrine

Abstract

Introduction In the spring of 2009 the UK Ministry of Defence elected to undertake a review of the existing military Joint Intelligence Doctrine. Its doctrine, Joint Warfare Doctrine 2-00 (JWP 2-00) Intelligence Support to Joint Operations, had been promulgated in 2003 largely on the basis of coalition-oriented expeditionary and peace support operations in the Balkans, West Africa, Middle East and Afghanistan. This had replaced an earlier, first edition of JWP 2-00 issued in 1999. By 2009, the UK’s intelligence doctrine had escaped scrutiny for six years, two years longer than its predecessor and under conditions which had witnessed wide-ranging and accelerating changes in the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) environment and the longest interval of sustained, high-tempo operations by UK forces since the Second World War. Regardless of how sound a piece of work the 2003 doctrine might have been, by 2009 too many goalposts had moved too far and there was a widespread and growing dissatisfaction with it. Given the often radical transformations to ISR and the conduct of operational and tactical intelligence in the decade since the first edition of JWP 2-00, the view was also taken that an equally radical approach needed to be used in producing the new doctrine. First, the new doctrine would be compiled on the basis of widespread, cross-government consultation on key issues and concepts rather than worked up narrowly in-house. Second, that breadth of engagement was to be extended to include the comparatively recently established realm of scholarly intelligence and security studies. Within the UK, the principal team working on conceptual and policy issues in intelligence in the university sector (as opposed to historical work which dominates the so-called ‘British school of Intelligence Studies’) was the Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies (BCISS) based at Brunel University in London. After an initial approach by the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) followed by a preliminary, advisory memorandum on military intelligence doctrine produced by the BCISS team,1 a three-way partnership was established between DCDC, Defence Intelligence2 and BCISS to develop the new doctrine which would go forward under the NATO-and US-compatible designation Joint Doctrine Publication 2-00.