Intelligence Engineering

Book excerpt: Intelligence continues to undergo significant changes at a remarkable pace, notably developments related to “Big Data,” surveillance, and cyber. Intelligence today involves multiagency, multinational, multidisciplinary, multidomain information sharing and sense-making, conducted by commerce, academic, government, civil society, media, law enforcement, military, and nongovernmental/nonprofit organizations. Increasingly complex systems, including interrelated technical dimensions, are central to modern defense systems. Intelligence Engineering: Operating Beyond the Conventional provides a new framework for generating analysis, exploring how systems to system-of-systems can be harnessed both for and into the future. Intelligence engineering (IE) involves the use of scientific and technical knowledge to artfully create, operate, maintain, and dismantle complex devices, machines, structures, systems, and processes that support and/or disrupt human endeavor occurring in the intelligence context. Spanning both human and technical intelligence realms, IE includes the collection and analysis of information that is of military and/or political value, and that relates to international relations, defense, and national security. Strategic Futures, risk management across to resilience concerns, are similarly engaged.