Integrating Operational Intelligence Across Nations

Military operations often take place in conjunction with coalition forces in deployed environments. Examining operations, and operational intelligence, should provide insight into best-practice performance, so long as actions and assessments are constantly being reviewed, evaluated and improved in a timely manner. Part of best-practice includes efforts to ensure that intelligence is integrated with operations and across coalition nations. Where it is difficult to distinguish between operations and intelligence, this might actually be an indicator of successful integration. Challenges to integration within operations and across nations include access and sharing of information, increased complexity and the ongoing overabundance of irrelevant information. Despite these challenges, successful operations do occur, indicating that (at some level) these problems are being addressed in practice. Arguably, the most valuable opportunity for integrating operational intelligence across nations is the potential for genuine critique by diverse groups with shared problems and similar goals. Every interaction represents an opportunity to identify assumptions, recognise mindsets and define what is both known and unknown. These challenges and opportunities apply equally to interactions across services, organisations and agencies.