Intel products

The Fog of Intelligence

...The question remains: If data almost beyond imagining flows into CENTCOM, what are those 1,500 analysts actually doing?  How are they passing their time?  What exactly do they produce and does it really qualify as “intelligence,” no less prove useful?  Of course, we out here have limited access to the intelligence produced by CENTCOM, unless stories like the one about top commanders fudging assessments on the air war against the Islamic State break into the media.  So you might assume that there’s no way of measuring the effectiveness of the command’s intelligence operations.  But you would be wrong.  It is, in fact, possible to produce a rough gauge of its effectiveness.  Let’s call it the TomDispatch Surprise Measurement System, or TSMS. Think of it as a practical, news-based guide to the questions: What did they know and when did they know it?