UNDERSTANDING MILITARY INFORMATION PROCESSING - AN APPROACH TO SUPPORT INTELLIGENCE IN DEFENCE AND SECURITY

摘要

Decision makers in defence and security require timely and accurate understanding of the situation in their respective area of responsibility as well as a prediction of the likely intentions and capabilities of supposed or potential adversaries. To achieve this, intelligence cells have to process large volumes of information and data from all kinds of sources to deduce situation awareness. Particularly in the area of non-conventional conflicts, e.g. in the fight against terrorism, heterogeneous and complex non-military information factors are influencing the production of intelligence. To be able to support automatically the production of intelligence, a sound understanding of the principles of reasoning and the cognitive processes of the operators in the human dominated area of heuristic information processing and fusion has to be developed. The main information processing steps in intelligence are described and recommendations for automatic support are given. Semantically based flexible information structuring methods are a necessary precondition to provide the user with automated support for the exploitation and fusion of information from unstructured text. A second challenging aspect in the automation of information fusion is induced by the heuristic nature of the real human processing of imperfect information. The human method of default reasoning, based on knowledge about the behaviour or structure of adversary factions, can be used as an template based approach to support the Collation, Analysis and Integration of information in intelligence.