Confronting an Old Enemy: Terrorism and the Changing Face of Military Intelligence

This paper addresses the Department of Defense (DOD) all-source, analytic intelligence apparatus and assesses its efforts to combat transnational terrorism. Specifically, the author argues the DOD intelligence community requires a cultural shift to prosecute more effectively the war on terrorism and strengthen America's national security. Existing cultural biases, stove-piped operational processes, and limited analyst recruitment problems have weakened the DOD intelligence community's ability to face the twenty-first century terrorist enemy. Against this backdrop of improving American warfighting capability against terrorism, the author concludes with a number of prescriptions for the future. Key among these are improved information sharing between the various intelligence organizations within DOD; more aggressive and broad-based recruitment and training programs for the intelligence career field; increased utilization of non-traditional intelligence sources such as the Internet, American and foreign scholars, and other open-source materials; and increased and more in-depth exchanges with foreign government security and intelligence agencies.