Editorial: strategic intelligence as process and product

Abstract

The journal "Perspectives in Intelligence" reaches its 14th volume (number 23), offering the academic and scientific community a selection of thirteen articles on intelligence and counterintelligence, economics, history, philosophy, management, finance and technological development. Several papers are highlighted for their use of statistical techniques and tools for quantitative and qualitative analysis, typical of data analytics, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and text mining. The research papers in this issue of the journal are the product par excellence of strategic intelligence, since, as José Gabriel Paz argues, strategic intelligence is analytical, provides results and findings based on the scientific method and basically has two main areas: National strategic intelligence and military strategic intelligence. National strategic intelligence is processed and specialised knowledge used in political-strategic decision-making, while military strategic intelligence studies the military power of those considered enemies or threats; it is the specialised knowledge that drives military strategy (UDGV, 2018). Expanding on the concept, the Spanish government also argues that strategic intelligence is the knowledge that civilians and the military should possess for the formulation of defence policies, plans for conducting operations at the strategic level and business competitiveness (Díaz Fernández, 2017, p.167). All of this is applicable due to the speed at which threats mutate, and it is from the scientific and strategic intelligence community that innovative perspectives must be built from which public or private entities anticipate the courses of action to be taken in a specific situation (Pirateque P. and Osorio I, 2021, p. 37).