Chapter Two: Defence and military analysis

Abstract

value will be questioned and it may be sidelined and have its level of funding reviewed (perhaps under the guise of an administrative reorganisation). At any time, but perhaps more so today than before, such organisations are faced with competing sources of information, ranging from domestic and foreign newspapers, magazines and journals and the output of think tanks to personal contacts, special advisers and meetings with foreign leaders. Accordingly, it may be tempting for ministers, senior civilian officials and military officers to question what extra value their intelligence organisation can offer. However, ‘open source’ (often referred to as ‘publicly available’) information is nothing new. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Vice Admiral Nelson’s multilingual chaplain, and effectively his intelligence officer, would go through and summarise foreign newspapers and pamphlets. More recently, in the UK, a key conclusion of the Franks Report on the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 focused on open-source material: