Understand What Intelligence is with LTG Mary Legere

LTG MARY LEGEREDEFINING INTELLIGENCE

LTG mary legere is a career intelligence officer in the united states army. She

was promoted to the rank of three star general in april of 2012 and has

served for four years as the principal advisor on intelligence and security

policy, programs and operations to the secretary of the army and army chief

of staff, overseeing the operations, modernization and oversight of the

army’s intelligence corps.

With 58,000 soldiers and civilians, the army intelligence corps is the united

states intelligence community’s largest intelligence organization, and its

mission is to provide timely, accurate, and relevant intelligence to support

army, joint and coalition operations and warfighters around the globe.

There does not seem to be a precise definition of intelligence that has been

widely accepted, even by experts on the subject. Writing on the CIA website,

martin T. Bimfort said that formulating a brief definition of so large and

complex a term “is like making a microscopic portrait of a continent...The

concept remains as sprawling and thorny as a briar patch.” Most definitions,

bimfort continued, are deficient in one way or another.

CIA historian dr. Michael warner said that the term is “defined anew by each

author who addresses it, and these definitions rarely refer to one another or

build off what has been written before.” But without a clear idea of what

intelligence is, he continued, how can anyone develop a theory that explains

how it works?

But informed opinions about the definition of intelligence, in the context of

international relations, do exist. Martin T. Bimfort said intelligence is “the

collecting and processing of that information about foreign countries and

their agents which is needed by a government for its foreign policy and for

national security, the conduct of non-attributable activities abroad to

facilitate the implementation of foreign policy, and the protection of both

process and product, as well as persons and organizations concerned with

these, against unauthorized disclosure.”

LTG MARY LEGERE SERVED AS THE ARMY’S SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICER

FROM APRIL 2012 TO MARCH 2016, THE LONGEST SERVING GENERAL

OFFICER IN THIS POSITION’S HISTORY.