Perspectives and Opportunities in Intelligence for U.S. Leaders

Threats to the international order from near-peer competitors and from rogue regimes, terrorists, and the proliferation of cyber weapons and weapons of mass destruction all challenge whether the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) will be able to fulfill its mission. It is unclear whether the IC is prepared to provide decisionmakers and warfighters with the intelligence they need and expect.

This Perspective presents five distinct discussions of changes the IC can make to meet these challenges in the areas of strategic warning; tasking, collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination (TCPED); security, counterintelligence, and insider threats; open-source information; and surging for crises.

Each of the five discussions in this Perspective provides analysis and recommendations that may be read, acted on, and implemented alone—but the authors believe that the IC has an opportunity to make a major leap forward by acting in a coordinated manner on all five of the topics together.