Naval Intelligence Should Think in Purple

Naval intelligence is predisposed to looking outward. It is the job of the Navy’s intelligence specialists and officers to know the enemy and to deliver “accurate assessments of enemy capability and intentions, in sufficient time for the commander to take effective measures at the strategic, operational, or tactical level.” Since knowledge of the adversary is an imperative component of any operation’s success, it is self-evident that naval intelligence must maintain a deep literacy of red-force capabilities, limitations, and intentions.

However, understanding red forces is not enough to succeed in a war at sea, or in any kind of conflict. Conventional wisdom and the division of responsibilities of the Navy treat the opposite side of the coin—subject-matter expertise on the capabilities and employment of blue forces—as the domain of each respective community. This is not without good reason. Those who operate the Navy’s ships, submarines, and aircraft should know the strengths and vulnerabilities of the systems under their charge and how to best use them to defeat an adversary should a conflict arise.

But too often, the division of labor and the professional charge of intelligence to set its gaze toward the adversary come at the expense of a full understanding of what the United States brings to the fight. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding by the naval intelligence community of adversary threats and treats those threats as discrete data points independent of their relation to blue forces.

Maritime warfare is better understood as a network of mutual influence and interaction between blue and red and their constituent systems. A threat cannot be properly understood, assessed, and planned for independent of its relationship to the techniques and matériel blue forces turn to in wartime. Naval intelligence should rethink its analytical model. Incorporating a deeper understanding of blue forces and their interplay with threats will help it develop stronger finished intelligence and better recommendations for commanders in the field.

Training and Dogma in the Intelligence Community

From the outset of an intelligence professional’s Navy career, training is centered around developing an understanding of red forces. At the Naval Intelligence Officer Basic Course (NIOBC) and Intelligence Specialist A and C schools, significant portions of curricula are dedicated to visual recognition of adversary platforms, their capabilities and limitations, order of battle, and, at later stages, ideas such as pattern of life and historical trend analysis. This is necessary knowledge—without it, new intelligence professionals would be ill-equipped to analyze the adversary. But there is a relative dearth of instruction dedicated to blue forces outside concepts like the composite warfare commander construct that are essential professional knowledge.

Once in the fleet, intelligence specialists and officers are exposed to the wider scope of the Navy’s professional communities as well as to their methods of operating. It is thought, as with other communities, that on-the-job training and exposure through routine supplement the professional development of intelligence professionals and develop a sophisticated literacy of blue forces. But these factors are largely career-dependent, and cultivating such familiarity sits outside the scope of a sailor’s day-to-day responsibilities.

A sailor assigned to a P-8 squadron may well become fluent in antisubmarine warfare and naval aviation beyond the novice level, but any community with which they do not interact will remain a dark spot in their knowledge of blue-force capabilities. Further, on-the-job training’s inherent problem is one of latency: when training without a baseline knowledge is contemporaneous with professional duties, there will be a lag in the incorporation of gained knowledge into productive output. For every new assignment the process restarts, delaying the translation of new information into actionable expertise.

This knowledge gap reflects a peculiar dogma of the profession, summarized in the mantra, “We don’t do blue.” Assessments of blue forces’ intentions and activity are seen as unnecessary to the role of intelligence beyond a basic understanding of scheme of maneuver and schedule for planning purposes. This limits the analytical models and approaches of intelligence professionals because it assumes that other communities maintain that knowledge for their own use. Intelligence, it is thought, covers a knowledge gap about red forces that does not exist for blue forces. As such, there is limited need to understand what blue can do or what a commander’s thinking might be relative to red.

This approach fundamentally misinterprets the conceptual nature of the threat. Intelligence professionals hold detailed information—on launch platforms, sensors, communications paths, order of battle, and operational capability—that is vital to understanding the threat. But this says little about the relativity between those systems’ targets and the tactics, techniques, and procedures used to counter them.

Maritime warfare is not built on the aggregation of static information. It moves in a fluid terrain in which access to information and the interpretation of it drives operations for both red and blue. Threats cannot be properly understood absent the context of their targets, because how or why a threat system will be employed depends on interpretation of its efficacy and appropriateness relative to blue forces. A ship’s captain does not care about a missile just because they are in range of it, but also because of what they can do with the assets available to stop it.

A threat, then, is not best assessed as something that can reach out and attack blue forces. The true threat lies in the disjuncture or disequilibrium of advantage resulting from the relationships between systems and platforms in the battlespace; it is based on what each side brings to the fight. If this is the case, ignorance of blue forces is not merely a knowledge gap to be filled by others. It is instead a dereliction of intelligence as a process, with the result that the products that are analyzed, processed, and disseminated are less useful to the end user than they otherwise would be.

Intelligence devoid of an implicit blue-force understanding fails its recipients in several ways. It may lack sufficient context when a commander has specialized knowledge of maritime warfare in one area but is lacking in others.¹ It may also fail to identify particularly cogent threats by either inundating a commander with irrelevant information or missing threats that the analyst failed to understand relative to blue’s ability to defend against them. In either case, the commander’s decision time is compressed by the need to filter or compensate for poorly attuned intelligence.² This limited refinement of battlespace awareness places the burden of understanding on intelligence’s customers and represents a critical shortcoming in the community’s provision of full-spectrum all-source analysis for the force.

Expanding the Aperture

Fixing this issue will require a systemic overhaul of training for all intelligence officers, from new accessions to senior personnel. It will also mean changing the approach professionals take to the intelligence cycle and related processes.

The future professionals of the community should understand U.S. capabilities at least as well as they understand red forces. Beginning in A School and NIOBC, significant instruction should be devoted to U.S. naval platforms and capabilities, as well as joint systems of interest to the war at sea. This training should encompass all U.S. naval systems and the platforms that carry them, the context and basic tactical considerations of their employment, and, most important, what targets they are used against. Intelligence professionals would then know how to assess the threat red poses relative to the capabilities U.S. forces have and what they lack in each tactical or operational context.

Subsequent instruction should be focused on two areas. To prevent the intellectual inertia that comes from assignment and reassignment to dissimilar billets, gains to a command from the intelligence community should be required to complete an additional professional qualification standard related to their platform, area of responsibility, and duties prior to or in tandem with the start of their professional responsibilities.

A newly minted assistant intelligence officer on an amphibious assault ship might see the basics of amphibious warfare and associated platforms; a watch officer at Naval Forces Central Command might learn about surface ship weapons and the tactics for combating fast attack craft in the Arabian Gulf. The purpose is to provide mission-specific knowledge to make the intelligence professional cognizant of blue forces at a level akin to an individual of a similar rank from the Navy’s other communities. This way, intelligence personnel can better support their customers by sharing a common language and intellectual approach, knowing their planning considerations, and understanding how they employ the assets at their disposal to accomplish their mission.³

At the conclusion of each tour, follow-on courses of instruction should be added to an intelligence officer’s normal pipeline to refine and expand their understanding of blue forces in concert with their analytical skillset for studying the enemy. This is not dissimilar from other training schemes currently in place in the Department of the Navy. Officers are expected to complete Joint Professional Military Education in phases to inculcate the ability to think in terms of the joint warfighting environment. Schooling refines ship driving and warfighting knowledge for Surface Warfare Officers (SWOs) specific to their mission between division officer tours, as well as for department heads and prospective commanding officers. 

Intelligence officers do not need the same platform-specific expertise as SWOs, submariners, and aviators, but they should understand how their peers operate. Crosspollination encourages a deeper understanding of the warfighting process and advantages intelligence personnel as they analyze the enemy’s behavior relative to the United States.

Purple Force Analysis

With this baseline understanding in place and solidified with follow-on instruction, further attention must be given to how intelligence professionals conduct analysis. Expanding knowledge of blue forces and applying that knowledge to intelligence will improve the usability of the finished product. It will strengthen interoperability between intelligence teams and their peers in other communities. It also will make the intelligence cycle more holistic and its outputs more refined for every task.

At the stage of planning and direction of intelligence, knowledge of blue-force capabilities not only helps to better satisfy a superior’s requirements, but also to catalyze critical thinking about the next stages of the process. Understanding the composition of one’s forces reinforces the anticipatory character of intelligence and deepens inquiry into related topics. Understanding how the sensors, platforms, and other systems at one’s disposal work enables unity across multiple lines of effort in the conduct of information operations. It sharpens the focus on targets and broadens understanding of collections as they relate to operations.

Knowledge of blue forces becomes essential during processing, analysis, and production. As data points become actionable intelligence, understanding their relation to blue forces enhances their utility to the warfighter. Consider intelligence support to a ballistic-missile defense (BMD) mission as an example. If the ins and outs of an adversary missile are paired with consideration of blue-force capabilities and limitations in countering it, a litany of follow-on questions can be answered before dissemination: What organic sensors can collect on the missile, and what other sensors are available inorganically? Is interception possible with an SM-3, or an SM-6? Is there a BMD asset available organically, or would interception be dependent on other platforms such as Patriot or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense? The answers help make analysis specifically relevant to the commander.

While other communities may be able to glean what is significant for their role, an intelligence professional with commanding knowledge of both red and blue forces is able to define significance to the whole force. This not only enhances analytical rigor, but it also tailors generally usable information into vital, specific intelligence. It transforms the intelligence professional from red-force analyst into an integral component of the command and decision framework, placing blue-force planners and commanders well ahead in the decision curve. If the intelligence analyst can think like the commander, it leaves more time to plan and decide operations. This also holds true during dissemination. The greater the scope of the analysts’ understanding, the easier it is to know where intelligence findings connect. Information reaches relevant parties without the need for them to seek it out. 

Know the Enemy, Know Thyself

It is easy to levy the responsibility to understand blue forces on operators, but doing so at the expense of developing the professional expertise of naval intelligence neglects the full power of intelligence. Compartmentalization limits the scope of available information, and it leaves intelligence professionals without critical information to understand the context and implications of threats. As Sun Tzu once said, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” To succeed as a community, and to ensure victory for the United States and its allies, it is time for intelligence professionals not to think in terms of blue and red, but purple.