IW, and cyber-warfare in particular, poses several new challenges for the intelligence community. The centrality of intelligence collection and analysis is enhanced. Timeliness becomes even more critical; indeed, analysis and assessment become conflated with operations. New intelligence skills are required.

The intelligence collection and processing stations, the EW centres and the cyber-warfare facilities will effectively be integrated. The intelligence centres disseminate the processed intelligence, collated from all sources (especially SIGINT and imagery intelligence (IMINT)) in real-time to the high command, subordinate headquarters and staffs, and to field units. The EW centres maintain catalogues of electronic order of battle (EOB) data about radar systems and other electronic emitters in prospective areas of operations. This includes data on the location of the emitters, their signal strengths and frequencies, the pulse width and pulse length of the signals, and the physical descriptions of the emitting antenna system. The cyber-warfare centre is responsible for both offensive and defensive cyber-activities. It penetrates foreign computer networks, implants viruses, worms and ‘Trojan horses’, conducts DS attacks, defaces websites, sends misleading information, and disrupts or manipulates connected sensor and information systems.

These centres not only provide intelligence and EW and cyber-warfare capabilities to support the conventional functional and designated commanders; they are also integrally involved in the planning and conduct of operations. In future wars (including prospective phases in the ‘war on terror’), the winners in the long-term will not necessarily be those who enjoy military success on the battlefields but those who win the information war. In many (but not all) contingencies, the IO units could well play more determinate roles than the conventional force elements. They are the essence of ‘effects-based’ operations.

NCW and IO have fundamental implications for the role and place of the intelligence process, although this was ignored in the Flood inquiry into Australia’s intelligence agencies in 2004.^[46] In IO activities, the intelligence process is categorically conflated with the conduct of operations. The role of intelligence changes from a staff agency to an instrumental service. The intelligence cycle becomes the definitive sequence in the operations themselves. In exemplary cases, remotely-controlled sensor systems serve as both intelligence sources and shooters.

This conflation is greatly facilitated by UAVs. Its essence was demonstrated in the use of a Predator, armed with Hellfire missiles, to hit a car in Yemen on 3 November 2002, killing its six occupants, including the al-Qaeda leader responsible for planning the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000.^[47] The Predator was remotely-piloted from Djibouti, with the surveillance imagery relayed in real-time to a field user equipped with a remote video terminal and to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s headquarters in Virginia.^[48]

The Defence intelligence agencies will have to be drastically reformed, and in parts substantially augmented, in order to perform their central role in NCW and IO/IW. They presently lack important technical capacities, and are surely incapable of providing the timely, accurate and insightful intelligence necessary, when operationalised through IW and cyber-warfare activities, to manipulate the policy-making and decisional processes of notional adversaries.