Types of Intelligence

Intelligence can be categorized in many ways. We just saw how it one can speak of it by the sources upon which it is based. However, that is not the general way to categorize intelligence. In fact, one always wants to have as many different sources as possible confirming one's intelligence assessment. When many different sources are combined in this way to produce one final assessment, this is known as "fused", "multi-source" or even "all-source" intelligence. Really, the sources used are a technicality, of more concern to the intelligence personnel producing the assessment than to the end-user. The end-users' primary interest in the sources used will simply be to reflect how certain the conclusions are. The more different sources there are indicating a conclusion, the more certain we can be about that conclusion.

If not by source then, how is intelligence generally categorized? As the above discussion about what matters to the end-user suggests, intelligence is generally categorized on the basis of how the end-user will actually make use of it.

On that basis, there are two ways by which intelligence is generally categorized: by timeliness or by level. Let's look at each of these in turn.

Timeliness

No intelligence should be so untimely as to be out of date. But some intelligence is more focused on whats happening right now than others. Some intelligence is more about background information. In this sense, it is common to speak of two types of intelligence: "current" intelligence and "basic" intelligence.

Current Intelligence. This is intelligence focused upon what is happening right now, or at least as close to right now as we can determine. Continuous monitoring of sources, good reconnaisance and surveillance, and reporting as quickly as possible are all important for current intelligence.

Basic Intelligence. This is intelligence on the background situation, or general reference on capabilities. A target nation's industrial capacity, or the calculated range of one of their weapons are examples of basic intelligence.

Obviously, these are general categorizations rather than water-tight compartments. For instance, that country X has a total of ten submarines in its fleet would be an example of basic intelligence. Where exactly all of those submarines are at any given moment would be an example of current intelligence. But suppose that country secretly bought an eleventh submarine from some third party? The moment this were discovered it would be current intelligence, but this would be current intelligence that would change our basic intelligence about that country's fleet.

In essence, basic intelligence is reference material that is kept filed away, rather like an encyclopedia, so that it can be looked up when needed. Current intelligence is the continuous reporting of new developments.

Level

"Levels" of War Strategic. The highest level of decision making, at the national or alliance level. For example, during WW II, when Churchill and Roosevelt met to discuss their long range plans, they were considering strategic level issues. Operational. This is the "in-between" level, where senior military commanders must turn higher level strategic decisions into concrete military plans. An example from WW II would be General Eisenhower, who was supreme commander of the D-Day campaign to invade France and drive across North-West Europe. Tactical. This is the level of individual battles or combat actions. To continue with our WW II example, the men who actually landed on the beaches on D-Day, and had to fight their way ashore, were engaged at the tactical level of war.

The concept of "levels" of intelligence is a bit more abstract than the concept of timeliness of intelligence. Military affairs generally are usually considered on three "levels": strategic; operational; and tactical (see the sidebar at left). So too is intelligence. Strategic intelligence, therefore, is intelligence meant to answer the sorts of questions that come up at the level of strategic decision making: is country X going to turn hostile towards us? If they did what would their overall capability to attack us be? At the other extreme, tactical intelligence is intelligence about the things of concern at the tactical level, for example how many troops does the enemy have behind such-and-such a hill or what is the range of their artillery in that area? Operational intelligence is intelligence about affairs in between those two levels, for instance where in such-and-such a theatre is the enemy concentrating his reserves?

Conclusion

So, these are two general ways of categorizing intelligence: by timeliness and by level. It is important to note that these are not mutually exclusive categorizations. They are complementary. Intelligence is not either basic/current on the one hand or strategic/tactical on the other. It will usually be categorized by both criteria at the same time, for instance current strategic intelligence, or basic tactical.

The following matrix is a simplified example to show the possible combinations and permutations of intelligence types. In our example, we are considering the types of intelligence that could arise in a situation like that of 1999's NATO air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.