No abstract

As part of the infrastructure for monitoring the movements of Private Security Companies (PSCs) in Iraq, a unique intelligence interface has been constructed to enhance cooperation between the military and PSCs. Using a wide range of existing intelligence-sharing agreements and guidelines for handling classified information, PSC contractors working with the US military have been able to provide unclassified intelligence products to the wider PSC community. Using lessons learned in Iraq as a contractor building this interface, the author explains how institutional difficulties were overcome and argues that the US military should be better prepared to share intelligence with the wide range of organizations it can expect to work with in future unconventional warfare or nation-building operations. Some of the lessons learned in Iraq can also be applied to the US Department of Homeland Security's Regional Fusion Centers, where many of the same difficulties with intelligence-sharing and integration with commercial organizations are being encountered.

The need to define intelligence, as a product and an activity, is understandable because the secrecy surrounding it can almost make it appear too amorphous to study. In most definitions, the authors not only attempt to define that intelligence is but also who does it. Until very recently the focus has been on the state as the principle focus of study, with occasional focus on sub-state actors such as law enforcement agencies. After 9/11 in particular there was a shift from the study of inter-state intelligence to the use of intelligence against non-state actors such as Al Qaeda. The literature still treated these non-state actors as something to be acted upon rather than intelligence actors in their own right. By examining the North Vietnamese use of intelligence during the Second Indochina War, albeit as a hybrid state/non-state actor, this article will take a small step to redress that oversight. This article will discuss the North Vietnamese use of intelligence in the context of definitions of intelligence and intelligence actors, and will use John Gentry's proposed model of violent non-state actor intelligence as the analytical framework.

No abstract

No abstract