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While human intelligence is ideally suited to collect on non-traditional intelligence
requirements, the military’s initial lack of access to the crisis area makes collection very
difficult. The Defense Attache system offers a limited capability for overt collection, but
any new human collection requires extensive amounts of time — to develop sources —
that simply does not exist in a crisis scenario (Pelletiere: 11-12).
Force Protection and Intelligence Reporting
Unlike the UNHCR — where a capability to report intelligence information already
exists in the crisis area — the U.S. military builds an intelligence architecture to support a
new refugee operation. Thus, intelligence reporting from the crisis area tends to begin
later and be less incisive than similar reporting by the UNHCR. Analytical reporting is
typically called an intelligence summary (INTSUM) or an intelligence report (INTREP),
but the formats of these reports vary widely in practice.
Because of the natural inclination for military intelligence personnel to focus on
enemy “threats,” INTSUMs and INTREPs are dominated by force protection — rather
than situational awareness — reporting. In an environment where there is an ongoing or
latent conflict, this is certainly appropriate, but these reports do not provide the JTF commander
the intelligence necessaryto assess the effectiveness of his relief operations (Wilson).
In Rwanda, the JTF commander partially remedied this shortcoming by visiting UN
organizations and NGOs (USEUCOM a: 5).
In most recent refugee operations, U.S. military commanders have used Civil Military
Operations Centers (CMOC) to facilitate information exchange and unity of
effort with UN organizations and NGOs. The CMOC holds tremendous potential to
provide this situational awareness — or intelligence — to the JTF through a free and
frank exchange of “information” with non-military organizations (Wallace: 36-41;
U.S. DoD g: IV-4 to IV-7).
SUMMARY
As complex humanitarian emergencies proliferate around the world, the global refugee
population will probably continue to increase. Simultaneously, traditional countries
of asylum, like the U.S., will continue to tighten their immigration policies,
interpreting the status of refugees more narrowly. These trends will make strategic
warning of refugee flows more important, and they will require intelligence to plan
and conduct refugee operations.
Both the UNHCR and the U.S. military collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence,
but the UNHCR has not bureaucratized intelligence to the extent the U.S. military has. In
some ways, the comparison of intelligence in the UNHCR and the U.S. military is artificial
because neither organization operates in a vacuum and because each organization has
different objectives. Nevertheless, the U.S. military and the UNHCR each have a need for
strategic warning of refugee emergencies and a need for intelligence to plan and conduct
operations.
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