The information Barber Pole: integrating white information and red intelligence in emerging conflicts

Abstract

Militaries operate increasingly in social terrain and must focus on civilian populations as much they do the belligerents that take refuge among them. Current intelligence and planning doctrine fails to meet the needs of the emerging information environments. Secret intelligence information and open source information must find a means of merging to generate a holistic view of the environment. The failure of the existing system leads to shortcomings in strategy development and operational design, which in turn yields imprecise applications of military power. To overcome this gap in structure and doctrine, this thesis explores a new methodology that merges information and intelligence where appropriate and develops a common understanding across levels of command. The Barber Pole process, as it is termed here, maximizes the use of existing structures, and capitalizes on resident professional military skills. The Barber Pole is a three-step process that flattens intelligence and information systems for the purposes of ensuring a common and shared understanding of the operating environment. These phases include the collection of information and provision of command guidance, the coordination and interpretation of collected data, and finally the production of plans tailored to the target population.