Restructuring the intelligence community

Abstract

For a long time, there is always a debate on the effectiveness of intelligence in strategies and military operations. However, due to the nature of arbitrary and covert of terrorism attack, nobody suspect that the intelligence is the most important field among all the counterterrorism efforts during the anti-terrorism struggle, or so called War on Terror. For decades, intelligence community was operated for the Cold War. However, when the Cold War ended, the same approach could not apply to the new enemies. What we are seeing is not the more familiar state-supported terrorism, which has been in gradual decline for two decades. Rather, the terrorism we face is decentralized, self-generating, and tied to the existence of failed states and the battle for the soul of Islam. Therefore, the accuracy and in-time intelligence is the best weapons to protect and attack the terrorism activities; strengthen the collection and analysis of the intelligence regarding to terrorist is the best way to deter the terrorism attack in its initial stage. This paper would like to use US and UK as examples to find a best way of restructuring the intelligence community.