Effective military intelligence follows six fundamental principles:
| Principle | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Objective | Free from personal assumptions; judgments are based on evidence, not wishful thinking. |
| Timely | Late intelligence has no operational value. Perfect but late is worse than incomplete but on time. |
| Relevant | Only intelligence that supports decision making has value. Avoid reporting for its own sake. |
| Accurate | Explicitly assess the reliability of the source, the information and the interpretation. |
| Predictive | Answer not only "what is happening?" but also "why?" and above all "what happens next?" |
| Continuous | Intelligence never stops: every operation changes the environment. IPB is therefore a continuous process. |
Note
Timely beats complete almost every time. An 80% picture that reaches the decision beats a 100% picture that arrives an hour after it.
The five functions: the Intelligence Cycle in brief
Intelligence work follows a fixed chain of functions: Direction → Collection → Processing → Analysis → Dissemination, closed by Feedback. Together they form the Intelligence Cycle, covered in full in Chapter 2.