I was talking with a new acquaintance about intelligence support to targeting and why I don’t say much about it or the targeting cycle. There may not be any good reason why I don’t talk about targeting so we’ll start with some practical homework that exercises the fundamentals of the Intelligence Cycle. (For a refresher on Intelligence Requirements, see Generating and Managing Intelligence Requirements and NBPP: Published Intelligence Requirements.) In one sentence, Intelligence Requirements direct collection and they’re absolutely critical to any intelligence operation.
The tactical intelligence needs in any shooting conflict are going to be two-fold: targeting bad guys in the immediate- and near-term and supporting operational planning and assessing the enemy’s degradation/disposition in the mid- to long-term. The most cherished three words for us in Iraq and Afghanistan – Find, Fix, Finish – have been around since at least Vietnam. Since the mid-2000s, those three letters have turned into a conglomerate of other letters that more accurately describes what actually happens – Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate (F3EAD).
Finishing the enemy is simply not enough. Through tactical site exploitation, we’re able to find potentially lots of information that leads to producing actionable intelligence. General Stanley McChrystal (USA, Ret.) has talked about the summer 2006 raid on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. (I’ve never screamed so loudly.) JSOC’s ability to exploit, analyze and disseminate the intelligence information discovered in that raid spurred 17 more operations on the same exact night – literally just pulling the string and hunting down guys, one after another based on the intelligence gathered during the first and/or follow-on raids. That could not have happened without very dedicated and skilled Intelligence sections (or without the door-kicking face-shooters with their lives out on the line). (By the way, if you’re interested in post-SHTF Intelligence operations and haven’t yet read McChrystal’s book, Team of Teams, DO IT!) It’s this incredible utility of quickly producing actionable intelligence that makes the EAD of F3EAD so crucially important.
