Understand What Intelligence is with LTG Mary Legere

1. LTG Mary Legere Defining Intelligence

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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?

6. 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.”

7. 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.