Air Force Fellows Program Air University Counter - Bioterrorism Us Intelligence Challenges

This paper discusses challenges the US intelligence community faces in helping to counter bioterrorism—a real and emerging threat that has the potential to cause mass destruction in the United States. It includes background material on a number of issues related to the threat of bioterrorism to help the reader understand why the bioterrorism threat is real, why it may be growing, and why it could potentially inflict mass destruction. As part of this process the paper reviews key factors associated with bioterrorism threat analysis. This paper argues that US intelligence is at a crossroad, facing a number of challenges including the need to improve its foundation. To make the system more dynamic and efficient, the intelligence community needs to foster a more innovative customer-relationship management system and adopt more aggressive information management and human resource management strategies. Improvements in these key areas of the intelligence foundation will lead to enhancements in a wide variety of intelligence missions—not simply counter-bioterrorism. When faced with transnational issues like bioterrorism, this paper recommends that the community needs to be more focused on contributing to the success of specific mission threads, as opposed to a myopic focus on individual organizational success. A focus on applying organizational expertise and talents to specific mission threads, like bioterrorism, will serve as a catalyst to meaningful improvements in to traditional intelligence collection and analytical functions. It will also lead to smart incorporation of new intelligence procedures and ideas such as harnessing the potential of Open Source Intelligence.