Editor’s note: In December 2015, two Army intelligence officers set out on a trip to explore the mysterious remnants of the Soviet Union in the Baltic States. This article is the first in a series detailing their journey.   A few hundred miles southwest of the Latvian capital of Riga, near the Lithuanian border, lies …

On January 12, the spokesman of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) announced the resignation of Brig. Gen. Eli Ben-Meir as head of the Research Division due to differences of opinion with the chief of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate, Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevi. According to several prominent Israeli media channels, the dispute revolved around disagreement …

Intelligence personnel tend to have a view of events that differs from historians, even other people in government, and certainly from the general public. They are often accused of being realpolitikers or just plain cynical. Although crude jokes are made about the lack of morality in the intel game (the world’s second oldest profession — …

The senior defense department official walked up to his whiteboard and made a bunch of scattered black marks on it. Addressing the intelligence officers seated at his conference table he said, “This whiteboard represents my area of responsibility. And those black marks represent what you have collected data on.” His tone increasingly revealed his frustration …

As I write this, Russian military intelligence doesn’t have a chief. Perhaps more perplexingly, no one seems entirely sure what it’s called, either. And yet this matters. On January 3, director of military intelligence Colonel General Igor Sergun died suddenly of congestive heart failure. He was a relatively young 58, but had been suffering from …

As American families dined on turkey and stuffing, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) was hard at work in Beijing hammering out military reforms. These reforms were then announced to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) by President Xi Jinping, who also serves as the CMC chairman. The proposed organizational changes may make this round of reform …

Editor’s Note: This piece on the War on the Rocks Hasty Ambush blog is published in partnership with the Hoover Institution’s Military History in the News. At the start of the Second World War, Great Britain’s intelligence agencies were anything but impressive. Their analytic capabilities overestimated the Third Reich’s military potential through 1938. And then in 1939, …

Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from a journal article in the new edition of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.   One of the more charming and frustrating aspects of American life is the endless pursuit of perfection. We tend to believe, as a people, that things can always be improved. For many …

The American intelligence community is once again under scrutiny, this time for the perceived “politicization” of intelligence reporting by senior officials. Fourteen years after the 9/11 attacks called into question the ability of the U.S. intelligence community to identify and respond to the al-Qaeda threat, allegations have surfaced that senior Central Command (CENTCOM) officials altered …

While the long list of recent U.S. military operations involving airpower was impressive, the real insight in a widely read article on the virtues of airpower by Colonels Pietrucha and Renken did not land until their conclusion.  In their last paragraph, they state: In the irregular wars America has actually fought, and remains likely to …

Discussion of China’s intelligence threat often seems over-hyped if not disconnected from reality. Apart from cyber intrusions, little evidence suggests Chinese intelligence deserves the credit for quality that it has received. The most common anecdote of Chinese collection, repeated since the 1990s, is a Chinese official dipping his tie in a chemical solution to get …

The Chinese intelligence threat is set to change dramatically as hackers believed to be linked to China’s civilian intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), acquired millions of personal records from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Although the full extent of the damage remains unknown, fears have emerged about the compromise of data …

For some reason, the idea hit me on a chilly afternoon in northern Virginia while I was heading out to a DC United match with my oldest son. The boy loves his sports, for sure, and I started thinking about how much awareness he had already acquired on the topic. For months, when he got …

David Drugeon, a high-ranking French member of the al-Qaeda-linked Khorasan group in Syria, has been little known by English speakers. That is beginning to change: On October 29, CNN reported that the U.S. intelligence community believes that both Muhsin al-Fadhli and Drugeon had survived the September strikes against the Khorasan group, and described Drugeon as …

President Obama’s now infamous assertion that the U.S. intelligence community underestimated the threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) brought to mind the adage attributed to Sherman Kent, a former professor at Yale recruited into the Office of Strategic Services and widely regarded as the father of CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, …