Presented by Carahsoft
Delivering cyber intelligence at mission speed does not begin when a crisis erupts. It begins with a baseline built in advance. Steve Allen, Chief of the Cyber Intelligence Center at the Defense Intelligence Agency, says DIA is adding cyber information to the foundational military intelligence that commands already rely on for plans and operations.
Foundational military intelligence is a distinct DIA responsibility. It includes order-of-battle information about foreign military forces, the military and civilian infrastructure that supports those forces, and foreign military acquisition systems. Every combatant command needs that foundation to prepare for conflict, deter an adversary or win decisively if deterrence fails.
Cyber information adds another layer to that picture. Digital dependencies, network infrastructure, software and vulnerabilities can influence how a foreign force operates and how resilient it may be under pressure. Understanding those factors alongside traditional military information gives planners a more complete view of capability and risk.
That preparation matters because crises rarely occur exactly where analysts expect. DIA has a global overwatch mission, and it cannot afford to begin collecting and interpreting basic information only after a situation becomes urgent. A current baseline allows analysts to respond faster when a steady-state problem suddenly becomes warm or hot.
Secure collaboration is part of the operating environment. DIA and its mission partners work on classified systems with zero trust capabilities designed to protect information in transit and control access. But protecting the data does not solve the challenge of exploiting it.
For decades, intelligence analysts asked for more data. Now cyber professionals face the opposite problem: a volume of activity that no individual or team can absorb. Hundreds of millions of malicious cyber events may be reported in a day. Even if only a small portion matters to a specific mission, finding that portion is beyond human scale.
Allen sees AI, machine learning and automation as essential to reducing that noise. Machines can ingest large volumes, correlate events and bring a smaller set of relevant information to analysts. Without those capabilities, the community would struggle to keep pace with the scale of the cyber environment.
The greatest opportunity may be curation rather than discovery. Tools have long helped identify new organizations, facilities and information. Curation asks harder questions: Which event matters now? Which may matter later? Which can be set aside? Prioritization turns a flood of data into a manageable analytic problem.
Automation, however, cannot come at the expense of DIA’s all-source analytic rigor. Policymakers and warfighters need confidence, not merely an apparent advantage. A model that produces an answer without an understandable basis creates risk. The agency needs quality-assurance frameworks that allow analysts to examine how algorithms and models were developed and how conclusions were reached.
The analyst remains central. A professional who understands the problem set can ask the right questions, recognize missing context and challenge an implausible output. The machine contributes scale and speed; the human contributes expertise, reasoning and accountability. In consequential activities such as targeting, keeping a human in the loop is indispensable.
That human-machine relationship also shapes workforce development. Analysts need enough AI and data fluency to use new tools effectively while retaining the tradecraft that distinguishes intelligence analysis from an unreviewed query. Training must build both technical comfort and disciplined skepticism.
Mission speed is therefore the product of preparation, technology and rigor. DIA builds the baseline before the crisis, uses automation to reduce the data to a tractable problem and relies on expert analysts to create trusted intelligence. The result is not intelligence generated by machines alone, but a stronger partnership between machine capacity and human judgment.