Protection of Civilians Military Reference Guide, Second Edition Second Edition | Page 59

Protection of Civilians Military Reference Guide
I NTELLIGENCE M ANAGEMENT
a. Commanders and their staffs must manage collection activities to obtain the desired
information. These activities may include ground and aerial patrols, the employment of human
sources, unmanned aerial vehicles, monitoring of radio transmissions, and requests to higher
headquarters that may be able to allocate limited technical assets. The military force also
capitalizes on other activities of its units to support information collection. For example, a
logistical unit may deliver supplies to a remote outpost and while doing so may observe PoC-
related indicators that can satisfy some information requirements. This implies that intelligence
requirements should be systematically included in pre-mission briefings, and that post-mission de-
briefs can be a useful collection method. In this way, every soldier can become an intelligence
sensor.
b. As discussed later in this chapter, information obtained from open sources can also support
intelligence efforts and improve the military’s understanding of the local culture and perspectives,
to include whether civilians perceive that they are being adequately protected. Once a sufficient
level of mutual trust is established with the population, Community Alert Networks and other
mechanisms can expand the number of available eyes and ears that provide urgent information to
the military force.
c. Units should have an intelligence section that serves as a central point to receive information,
analyze it, and provide insight to the commander, the staff, subordinate units, and higher, lower,
and adjacent intelligence sections. The intelligence section should attempt to use multiple sources
of information to corroborate each other and build an accurate, comprehensive understanding that
cannot be obtained by reliance on a single source. Some situations may require that intelligence
sections should be created for units that do not normally have them, such as company-level
headquarters. Intelligence can be disseminated with briefings, websites, maps, and reports.
Periodic analytical reports can be useful to support overall understanding of the situation and
trends related to PoC. Intelligence should be predictive, with the recognition that it is really
addressing possibilities and probabilities which ultimately may not occur.
d. Intelligence centers should be closely integrated with the operations centers that manage all
information from a variety of higher, lower, adjacent, and other organizations. The intelligence
center must also be integrated with intelligence counterparts at different echelons and in other
organizations.
Task Challenges
a. Commanders must ensure that PoC is adequately reflected in their CCIR, as PoC will often
compete for attention with other mission considerations. CCIR can quickly become irrelevant if
they are not updated to reflect changing situational variables and operational requirements.
Adequate supporting resources are required to make CCIR effective, including collection,
processing and analysis, and interoperability, and units may have limited capacity to manage the
systems required to make CCIR effective. CCIR should not merely be a list that is developed and
subsequently ignored; rather, it should be instrumental in focusing information management and
operations. CCIR can generate political contentiousness, particularly if it is used to support
consultative decision-making.
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