José Martín Juárez Blog

21 February 2007

Kent's Problem

The father of the North American Strategic Intelligence doctrine, which principles have been kept in effect for many years, established one of the problems that more motivates to investigators of Intelligence discipline to develop new approaches in the shape of procedures and methods. Sherman Kent, across his multiple works, established and dignified a frame of reference that allowed to turn Intelligence analysis functions into a knowledge workers' profession.In his studies around the intelligence "Doctrinal Corpus", that is, the Intelligence Cycle, he verified the problems associated with its structure and made it possible to unbind Intelligence from the cycle in strict sense, understanding this one as a procedural model of reality that can have more valid alternative models.
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20 February 2007

Antiterrorists Agencies: Missions and Functions on Intelligence

From the study of the main antiterrorist agencies we will enunciate the common elements that mark its daily activity from the point of view of Intelligence:

  1. A change in the "Need to Know" model, which has been guiding untill now the intelligence supply, in order to extend it to new processes. This processes are marked by safety and alert levels, by means of which all the accredited individuals could accede to the information that they need to be able to plan dissuasion, intervention and protection actions. This supposes starting notably different intelligence products and diffusion systems.

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05 February 2007

Terrorist threat and new approaches of Intelligence

The increase of international terrorism developed from the outbreak of Al Qaeda and more specifically from the successful large-scale attacks in New York, London and Madrid, focused the attention of Governments and citizens in the apparent Intelligence failures attributed to the organizations in charge of their development. Thus, Western Governments are promoting changes in the structure and function of intelligence services, while reflection and changing projects in the procedures and methods used in such services are conspicuous by their absence. This is certainly due to the profound ignorance of politicians about the body doctrinal and methodological discipline of Intelligence and its role of real utility, and at the same time to lack of innovation and dynamism in the adequacy of procedures and methods to new realities that put pressure in the form of new threats and demands of Intelligence.
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13 May 2006

Evaluation, Investigation and Judgement

Traditionally the analyst of Intelligence is considered to be an investigator, with competence for:
  • Determining the problem accurately.

  • Establishing questions and objective investigations.

  • Designing and developing an information obtaining plan.

  • Managing the planning for information obtaining and its process of execution.

  • Processing (analyzing and integrating) the information.

  • Spreading the intelligence- product in accordance with the client organization´s demand.

Lewins defines analysis as the process in which the constituent parts of what is being analyzed, are identified in their established relations, in order to understand how the totality and/or its parts are constituted and/or work.
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13 March 2006

Reflexive Government

It is necessary to remember that democracy is a form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people. This power is exercised directly by them or by representatives freely chosen by them. A part of the democratic ideal is that all the inhabitants of a state have the same rights, without arbitrary hereditary differences or of status or privilege order.
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13 March 2006

Intelligence. Basic definitions

In a blog dedicated to Intelligence studies and research, it is important to dedicate a post to define Intelligence according to the criteria used by the author, so in the next lines I am going to establish a few references that define Intelligence as a discipline and profession.
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08 March 2006

Information Obtaining - I

People at large, as the expert, the intellectual, etc. gather information and express judgments based on it. What does distinguish the procedures from one and the other? Bachelard stated that observation and primary experiences constitutes an obstacle for the scientific thought. From this we can conclude that, as opposite to common people, the expert will have to gather information based on an explicit enough project and a wide historicity to induce and produce meaningful results in accordance with certain criteria and techniques into a specific context.
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20 February 2006

Functional and Structural Approach for the Normalized Wide-Spectrum Intelligence System

Click to enlarge
In a previous article (A model for a Normalized Wide-Spectrum Intelligence System), I described the bases of a model for an Intelligence Production System. Now, I want to focus on the missions and objectives to meet and the functionalities that must be implemented by the system.
First of all, I want to recall that when we talk about "Intelligence Production Systems", we talk about an organizacional, methodological, educational and technological model that should be coherently integrated as a whole, that is to say, we talk about a human activity system built inside an organization.
Likewise, it is necessary to highlight that human organizations are created and work around missions that determines the aims, for which strategies, plans, etc. are set.

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20 February 2006

Knowledge Theory and Intelligence Analysis

In knowledge theory, it is highlighted two main elements or knowledge bodies, the so called Empirical Associative and Causal Mathematical, from which we develop intelligence representations in our minds. As a result of this, we can learn, that is, improve our cognitive capacities beared up to external influences, and we can imagine, surmise... these processes can be seen as the origin of new representations in the real world domain and that could lead to solve problems.
It is evident that both knowledge bodies are inherent to human being and also, it seems to be clear that the Empirical Associative one is fewer computable than the Causal Mathematical.

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20 February 2006

A model for a Normalized Wide-Spectrum Intelligence System

In the latter years there has been a remarkable improvement in the quality of the Intelligence products offered to the of safety and defense organizations deciding people. This implies the transformation and the rethinking of all the processes of the Intelligence Cycle. As a point of start for the proposition of a model for an Intelligence system, let's outline some lessons learned in this time:

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