Contemporary international policy on the fight against terrorism and cybercriminality, growing awareness of the issues involved in economic and competition intelligence and the development of a network logic in a transnational space are all indicators of the preponderant and strategic role of information in general, and intelligence in particular. In 1994 the Toffler brothers were already speaking of our societies’ progressive passage from the industrial era to an information one,⁽¹⁾ the iconic example of which was the first Gulf War, and more recently the 2003 conflict in Iraq. The development of new information and communications technologies poses novel problems concerning the mastery and control of information flows. In military strategy, the concepts of network-centric warfare in Europe, and of network-centric warfare and C4ISR (Command, Control, Computers, Communications, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) in the United States, which place information dominance at the heart of all command systems, constitute major applications of this, or at least the most publicised ones.

Knowledge still remains the fount of power; the ‘sinews of war’. But the world today offers a totally different configuration and distribution of this power, within which the seats of power are increasingly less visible and identifiable. How can the political and military authorities use this information dominance, this indigestion of intelligence from all sources, in a systemic international environment? How can these data be manipulated in an ordered structure and a vast system of actors connected to varying degrees? Possessing intelligence does not guarantee knowing how to use it and to exploit it in an effective, or at least a timely way. That now demands a new form of management, the management of intelligence, which requires envisaging a different mode of action: noopolitics.

The Processing of Intelligence: a New Form of Strategic Management?

The objective of intelligence is to collect data, or information, with the aim of increasing the probability of effective results from actions undertaken. The creation of intelligence, that is, information supported, verified and tested on the terrain or through other means, and its means of transmission, are the principal components of knowledge management. The real value added therefore does not reside only in the information, normal though that is in our society, but in intelligence, knowledge in general and the processing which allows the acquisition of an overall understanding of the issues. As absolute control is impossible, uncertainty is an integral element of the management of intelligence, especially in the process of generating information: it is the well-known phenomenon of intuition which is so often right. In the context of the fight against terrorism or serious crime, for example, the comprehension of the enemy as a system responds to a cognitive approach, centred on a set of images and perceptions gained from the statements and behaviour of the actors involved. This was demonstrated by US Air Force Colonel John A. Warden, the architect of the Gulf War air campaign, with his ‘five circle’ theory, the five elements of the adversary’s system. The issue today is the increasing investment devoted to the revolution in intelligence processing, in order to be able to predict an adversary’s reactions, using the logic of the influence resulting from a particular action.