Protracted Wars: challenges for Intelligence

Many articles have been written in recent years about the protracted nature of wars, and the illusion of short and decisive wars. Many of them, such as this one, or this one, and even this one, were written from an American perspective. They discussed lessons from the war in Ukraine, and offered recommendations for a future conflict with China.

The current conflict between the US and Iran, which has been taking place for 6 months, also illustrates the protracted nature of wars. Decisive and swift victories are hard to achieve. Technological and intelligence superiority enables successful operations, yet not necessarly swift strategic victories. The Israeli war in the Middle East, taking place since October 2023 with Israel fighting several adversaries in different fronts, is also a clear illustration of this.

In this post, I want to disuss some lessons and applications in the field of Intelligence. This might translate into a broader and more structured article in the future...

None of these issues are relevant only in protracted wars. But this type of war underscores their importance.

First, early warning from war. This was and still is a core mission of intelligence organizations. The surprise element still provides the attacker with an important advantage, even if this reduces over time, especially in protracted conflicts.

Second, resilience and sustainment of intelligence resources. This is often an overlooked topic, relating to intelligence management rather to intelligence collection or analysis per se. Think of personnel. Or collection assets. Or intelligence HQs. These efforts, just like standard military and national ones, must be sustained. A very salient illustration of this is intelligence systems able to produce tactical and targeting intelligence for long periods of time, at mass scale.

Third, operational-level intelligence aimed at identifying emerging adversary vulnerbilities and centers of gravity. Intelligence must always accomplish this mission. But since protracted wars often have at least some aspects of attrition wars, adversaries never have unlimited capabilities and resources. Some vulnerabilities do emerge: logistical, operational, or military ones. Intelligence must recognize such shifts when they only begin to emerge.

Fourth, intelligence enabling defensive and sustainment operations. Intelligence for offensive operations "comes natural" for practitioners. For articulating a strategy, or for implementing a campaign. For air strikes, naval operations, or ground maneuvers. But intelligence for defense is less straight-forward, yet not less important. This is operational and tactical intelligence enabling force protection, air defense, missile defense, and of course, cyber defense.

Above all, intelligence in protracted wars must be adaptive. This relates to each and every one of the topics I mentioned above. When a war starts, even if we are surprise, intelligence organizations enter this phase with robust analytical frameworks, with managerial conceptions, and with foundational assumptions about the environment. But in protracted wars, naturally, these must constantly change. Rapidly. And sometimes even drastically.