Description
Development of Strategic Intelligence Analysis and Products
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In this weeks forum you are asked to address one of two different questions. This is intended to allow you to have some control over what you want to focus on and learn this week. Strategic analysis is a vexing problem for the intelligence community. While useful and accurate in the vast majority of cases, the failures tend to be spectacular. Exploring the issues and problems in analysis and production is important to understanding the overall nature of strategic intelligence analysis and the products.
This week you will be introduced to a variety of points of view related to the purpose, problems, and issues facing strategic intelligence products and analysis.
For the Forum assignment choose one of the two topics:
1) Why is the development and presentation of finished strategic analysis products, primarily the NIE and PDB so complex, and often fraught with contradictions and nuanced conclusions?
-or-
2) What are the impediments to strategic intelligence analysis and why have they persisted for so long?
Be sure to be aware of and follow the guidance on forum postings as described in the Forum section of this class.
Each week, forum discussions should include: substantive 250+ word initial answer; initial answer posted by Thursday at 11:55pm ET; follow-ups of at least 150 words each to at least two (2) classmates or a classmate and an instructor follow-up question posted by Sunday at 11:55pm.
Initial Post Due: Thursday by 11:55 pm., ETResponses Due: Sunday by 11:55 pm., ET
Please see the attached rubric for the grading criteria for this forum.
Explanation & Answer
Attached.
CLASS: INTL443
Week 4: North Korea
North Korea experiences a bad economic situation under the leadership of the dictatorial Kim dynasty.
Due to this, most of her intelligence agencies are forced to fund themselves for the purpose of running
their activities. This encourages them to indulge in illicit economic activities such as money laundering
and drug trafficking. The dynasty employs restrictive social policies that limit the creativity and
independence of the students and intellectuals, leading to the poor economy (lesson 4). Due to this, the
dictatorial regime lacks necessary finance for funding her intelligence collection activities against South
Korea and the United States. Below is a brief analysis of the applicability of the various intelligence
disciplines in North Korea.
OSINT: Being open source intelligence, this is one of the tools that North Korea finds useful in
intelligence collection. This is mainly because the type of information obtained is free of any charges and
thus independent of the economic status (Park, 2014).
SIGINT: This is the information obtained from signals such as radio signals. From the lecture four
reading, we learn that the signal intelligence is limited to South Korea (lesson 4). This is due to the huge
financial requirements of setting up the radio systems for long distance transmission of signals, making
it unaffordable to North Korea.
GEOINT: This type of intelligent collection depends on satellite communication systems to transmit
information about human activities in the countries of interest. Due to the huge financial requirement of
sending a satellite in space, North Korea is not capable of accessing this type of intelligence collection
(Park, 2014).
HUMINT: North Korea mainly depends on HUMINT for collecting intelligence on nuclear weapons
technology in Canada and the US. The funding for supporting this intelligence collection come from
unscrupulous businesses conducted by the agencies responsible, such as the Reconnaissance Bureau
(REBU) and the Central Committee on South Korean Affairs (CCSKA) (lesson 4).
R...