An Intelligent Theater

• Main Author: Stavridis, James G.
• Other Authors: NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIV WASHINGTON DC INST FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: Military Forces and Organizations; Military Intelligence; *MILITARY INTELLIGENCE; *ORGANIZATION THEORY; *MILITARY ORGANIZATIONS; *THEATER LEVEL OPERATIONS; MILITARY COMMANDERS; MILITARY TACTICS; SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES; ORGANIZATIONAL REALIGNMENT; DECISION MAKING; MILITARY STRATEGY; DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE; ALIGNMENT; COMBATANT COMMANDS; COCOMS(COMBATANT COMMANDS); SPECIAL OPERATIONS; THEATER INTELLIGENCE; ORGANIZATIONAL ALIGNMENT; North Pole; Pacific
• Online Access: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA515149; http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA515149

Operationally, the U.S. military is essentially organized geographically. The world is divided into six combatant commands with wide-ranging responsibility for Department of Defense (DOD) activity across a defined theater. At U.S. European Command, for example, our area of focus is the 51 countries that make up the European continent, stretching from the Bay of Biscay in the Atlantic Ocean to the far Pacific shores of Russia. Our area runs from the Mediterranean to the North Pole, and includes Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Israel outside of Europe. It is an area with close to 800 million people, more than 10,000 nuclear weapons, and the most powerful collection of armed forces and the highest gross domestic product among the half-dozen combatant commands. We are, of course, enormous consumers of intelligence. Our dedicated intelligence apparatus runs above 1,800 people, all focused on our particular theater of operations. Yet I often ask myself the question, and no pun is intended: Is this the most intelligent way to organize ourselves in the area of intelligence? I think we can save resources, operate more efficiently, and provide commanders at the theater level and below better intelligence by organizing ourselves better. As we look into the next decade, expending the time and energy to rethink the shape of theater intelligence structures and organizations is an investment worth making. Balancing analytic agility needed to support commanders against their demands to enable operational forces puts our defense intelligence enterprise on the horns of a dilemma: where and how should it create analytic agility and at the same time maintain functional alignment over the long haul? The key is agility: we should apply some of the principles of special operations to our theater intelligence approach. Pub. in Joint Force Quarterly (JFQ), n56 p104-108, 1st quarter 2010.