The Intelligence Cycle in Denmark: Unwinding and reconceptualising the Process of formulating Intelligence Requirements surrounding the Middle East in the Danish Defence Intelligence Service

How can the mid-20th century concept, based on the bipolar conflicts of the 20th century, be of any help for national intelligence organisations to stay reflexive and ahead in the world of increasing globalisation, technological innovation and the dynamic threats and hybrid wars of the 21st century? Is it advantageous? Or is it merely flotsam from the Cold War? The intelligence cycle is a paradox. This seven decades-old emblematic concept has been criticised for not capturing the principles of intelligence, for being practically inaccurate, and merely a representation of certain norms of intelligence. Nevertheless, at the same time, we still find it at the heart of international and national intelligence doctrines on both sides of the Atlantic.
This dissertation explores how the universalist conceptualist model for intelligence processes, the intelligence cycle, is used to structure the process of formulating intelligence requirements in the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS), with the Middle East Analysis Department as the case.
This objective was pursued by applying classic organisation theorist Wilfred Browns analytical distinctions of manifest, assumed, extant and requisite organisation. These analytical distinctions were put to use within an explorative single within-site case study of the Middle East Analysis Department, using multiple empirical sources of publicly available material in the form of biannual reports, the DDIS website and anniversary publications and nineteen qualitative, semi-structured interviews with senior civil servants within the DDIS and within two of the main national customers of the Middle East Analysis Department, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence. Through pattern matching between the manifest organisational process of formulating intelligence requirements in biannual reports, the DDIS website and anniversary publications, and the assumed organisational process in the words of the Middle East analysts and the customers in the ministries, an extant organisational process was distilled.
This study placed the concept inside a Danish context to make sense of the intelligence cycle. The main findings of this study are that the intelligence cycle in the DDIS is practically a label on a much more complex New Public Management framework, itself nesting a mixed bag of analytical tools for breaking down the intelligence requirements. This process consists of both a six months-long process of formulating the annual intelligence requirements through a negotiated dialogue with the customers while at the same time breaking down the annual intelligence requirements inside the DDIS, using different taxonomical tools. Also, the study shows how the external environment of the Middle East structures and disrupts the process of formulating intelligence requirements, creating new, ad hoc, intelligence requirements that challenge the agreed-upon allocation of resources inside the DDIS. These findings lead to the conclusion that the conceptualist model for processing intelligence falls short when it comes to an analytical approach to concrete national intelligence organisations. Instead, an analytical, conceptual approach should be attempted. This approach looks outside the field of Intelligence Studies and invites analytical frameworks from organisations theory to explore and analyse organisational processes to sharpen the reflexivity of a national intelligence organisation for the future.