by Sam Culper
We’re sitting at about 50/50 of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) exercise participants who “get it” and those who don’t. The 50% of those who don’t “get it” is the result of a failure on my part. Let’s talk about the Intelligence Cycle today.
I want to reiterate that we’re in the Planning, Requirements, and Direction phase of this exercise, and not the Collection phase. I’ve received numerous emails with information compiled through collection (research), which is not a bad thing in and of itself. The problem is that you’re working on the wrong step.
The reason we use the steps of the Intelligence Cycle is to ensure a methodical approach to solving a problem. (The problem in this case is our Primary Intelligence Requirement (PIR): What threat does the NBPP pose to my community? I can’t answer that question right now, which is why it’s an intelligence requirement.) Without the Intelligence Cycle, we skip steps or make errors of omission, which compromises our data and understanding of the problem, which invariably causes us to perform good analysis of poor or incomplete data, which causes us to provide a poor intelligence product, which causes our people to die, or we kill the wrong bad guys, or it negatively affects our national security or foreign policy objectives. In your cases, it negatively affects the understanding of your Area of Operations (AO), and leads to what’s called strategic shock. Strategic shock is the result of a strategic threat that you didn’t know existed, or a failure to acknowledge the strategic extent of that threat.
