全球智库信息集成服务系统

The Team Identified Lessons About Building Analytic Foundations

• Many processes, such as critical thinking, can be employed across different missions and levels of intelligence.
• Knowledge required to provide context is lacking or limited to support Air Force missions other than irregular warfare.
• Success in operations depends on analyses conducted across multiple timelines, organizations, and levels of war. They build on one another and require integration.
• Roles and responsibilities for analysis activities to support phase 2/3 operations in air, space, and cyberspace are not well defined or practiced.

The Team Identified Lessons About Building Partnerships

• Joint, national, and partner analytic capabilities and capacities are not sufficiently leveraged.
• Guard and reserve contributions have been important but could be better utilized and are hindered by integration challenges.
• Integration of general-purpose and special operations force capabilities has resulted in more successes for both forces.

The Team Identified Lessons About Developing and Employing Skills

• The United States has repeatedly faced unplanned security challenges.
• It has been difficult to balance development of analytic expertise with career progression milestones.

The Team Identified Future Challenges

• The pace of future conflicts could stress needs for foundational intelligence and challenge readiness to conduct analysis during phase 2/3 operations.
• Analysts might need more expertise with intelligence from and for the space and cyberspace domains because operations in those domains might be more prominent.
• The volume of data and limitations on collection that anti-access and area-denial developments impose will challenge analysts.

This report describes steps the U.S. Air Force can take to help ensure that it has the capability needed to provide intelligence analysis support to a broad range of service and combatant commander needs, including support to ongoing irregular warfare operations, and to conventional warfare with a near-peer competitor. It describes lessons from past operations that have direct implications for Air Force intelligence analysis or that Air Force intelligence analysis could help to address. It also describes future challenges for Air Force intelligence analysis. It makes recommendations related to doctrine, training and career field development, analysis tools, and processes that can help to address the lessons from the past and prepare Air Force intelligence analysts for the challenges of the future.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Lessons from Past Operations

• Chapter Three

  The Demands of Future Operations and Implications for U.S. Air Force Intelligence Analysis

• Chapter Four

  Analysis Tools

• Chapter Five

  Training and Career-Field Development

• Chapter Six

  Findings and Recommendations

• Appendix A

  A Perspective on the Relationship of National Security Strategy and Intelligence — An Air University Paper

• Appendix B

  Analyst Survey