Forums dedicated to South African security contractors seeking compensation for injuries sustained in Iraq or Afghanistan have long complained of the underhand tactics they say insurance companies are using against them. Recent posts have warned about the activities of a private detective allegedly working for one of the insurance companies involved. This man is Kevin…
There’s an interesting development reported here. The article suggests that General Odierno has established a cell to look at better coordination of operations across the Land environment, citing lack of visibility and understanding across organizations with a stake in land warfare. I hope the cell also look at a concomitant and integrated coordination across the…
Picture the scene: Night time, somewhere in a desert. 15 heavily armed men gain entry to a massively fortified and defended location by wearing enemy uniform. It is a pitch black night (this date has been chosen for exactly this reason) and the group split into 3 teams, each with a different target. The enemy…
I’ve posted a piece over on standingwellback about the two interesting stories coming out of Iran this morning. I’d like to start exploring here a little more comment about the intell related aspects to the stories. To recap: a. An electronic surveillance device hidden in a rock near the telephone lines running from an Iranian…
Post by Andy Green, IMSL CEO. Roger has hit on a truly significant issue regarding the dissemination of intelligence to consumers. Powerpoint has become the de facto medium, replacing lengthy, wordy analyses presented as text documents. However, I would challenge the assumption that Powerpoint must be the only way to do it. We have found from experience…
Tom offered up the below as a comment to the original post but I think he makes some good points so I’m upping it to the front. Thanks Tom, appreciated. Thanks for posting this article and your comments – very interesting. I can’t disagree with the central tenet of the report – namely that long-term…
At IMSL we pride ourselves in developing new and innovative ways, as well as effective ways to present intelligence. Presenting/disseminating intelligence is one element of the intelligence cycle and just as important as all the others. And like organizations the world over, this forces us to grapple with Powerpoint. Of course, in principle, Powerpoint can…
Great article here about intelligence analysts trying to predict 15 -20 years in advance. The lesson – don’t bother. Intelligence should be about explaining current actions not long range forecasting (aka guesswork) . The article also quotes my favourite psychologist, Daniel Kahneman saying “ The world is vastly more complicated than our mental models of…
Although it’s pretty straightforward, there’s a danger I’m teaching readers to suck eggs. Along the same lines that with a little knowledge on google you can get remarkably good results with a few extra qualifiers, here’s a useful link to getting great OSINT from google maps
It might be more important than you think – a great article here in the NYT blog. I was particularly fascinated by the report on the handwriting of the Crimean war casualty.