TECHINT
The US military relies heavily on technology to complete its missions successfully. A significant amount of our offensive technology was developed in response to an increasing technological capability among real and potential adversaries.
For example, today's news is carrying a story about an apparently new Hezbollah missile, the Khaibar-1, that has penetrated deeper into Israel than other knows missiles. Though the Khaibar-1 is certainly of immediate interest to the Israeli Defense Force, it is also of great interest to the US and its allies. Learning more about adversaries' new technologies of all kinds, not just weapons, is the function of technical intelligence (TECHINT).
TECHINT includes the identification, assessment, collection, exploitation, and evacuation of captured enemy materiel (CEM) in support of national and immediate technical intelligence requirements. Generally TECHINT operations are conducted by the Captured Materiel Exploitation Center (CMEC) against enemy air, sea, and ground forces in combat and contingency operations.
TECHINT may not be the sexy stuff of spy novels that focus on human intelligence (HUMINT) operations, spy-versus-spy stuff, but in terms of force protection, the information gleaned from TECHINT operations does every bit as much to keep soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coast guardsmen alive.
Interested readers can get a more complete understanding of what TECHINT is and what it does by reading the June 2006 TECHINT field manual.
For example, today's news is carrying a story about an apparently new Hezbollah missile, the Khaibar-1, that has penetrated deeper into Israel than other knows missiles. Though the Khaibar-1 is certainly of immediate interest to the Israeli Defense Force, it is also of great interest to the US and its allies. Learning more about adversaries' new technologies of all kinds, not just weapons, is the function of technical intelligence (TECHINT).
TECHINT includes the identification, assessment, collection, exploitation, and evacuation of captured enemy materiel (CEM) in support of national and immediate technical intelligence requirements. Generally TECHINT operations are conducted by the Captured Materiel Exploitation Center (CMEC) against enemy air, sea, and ground forces in combat and contingency operations.
TECHINT may not be the sexy stuff of spy novels that focus on human intelligence (HUMINT) operations, spy-versus-spy stuff, but in terms of force protection, the information gleaned from TECHINT operations does every bit as much to keep soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coast guardsmen alive.
Interested readers can get a more complete understanding of what TECHINT is and what it does by reading the June 2006 TECHINT field manual.
posted by Bill McCrory | 11:45 AM
2 Comments:
Bill, I think this is the kind of thing US intel should be doing (versus things like selling crack in L.A. to finance the civil war in Nicaraugua, circa 1980's. See the late Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series here).
I like to read your reports, keep up the good work.
BRENT
Brent,
Thanks for reading this and leaving a comment. Thankfully, US intel does a lot of this kind of thing. In fact, most intel ops are very boring, very mundane, certainly not the sexy stuff of Ian Fleming's and John le Carre's novels. But the daily gathering of open source information, agent meetings, information collation, analysis, and dissemination just doesn't sell books or make for exciting movies.
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