The Military Intelligence Shortage Rarely Discussed

Weapons, weapons, weapons. War needs weapons. If you shoot a lot of missiles, you need to build more. If you drop a lot of bombs, you need to build more. Weapons kill the enemy. Kill the enemy and you seize terrain and accomplish your objective. A straightforward concept, easy to understand for any citizen, business leader, politician, or warfighter.

But where do the weapons go? What targets do we employ them against? How are those targets found? How hard are they to find? What is the machine that finds them in time? These are the questions the military intelligence apparatus exists to answer. It is rarely discussed, poorly understood by the public, chronically underinvested, but possibly the highest ROI tool in the U.S. arsenal.

I have spent much of my adult life inside this world - seven years as a Navy SEAL and Surface Warfare Officer, with deployments to Afghanistan, the Pacific Theater, and the Arabian Gulf, and 11 years as Co-Founder and President of Shield AI. You can't have a serious conversation about advancing our military capabilities without addressing the most critical enabling function: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). That investment belongs on the same level as weapons.

At a recent change of command ceremony I attended, the outgoing commander thanked the intel team first: "Without our intel team, we couldn't do the operations we do."

No Target Package, No Ops

As we would say in the SEAL Teams: "No target package, no ops." A target package is the intelligence required to identify a target and plan an operation against it. That logic was a major reason every SOCOM branch invested in its own organic targeting and intelligence capabilities.

The same targeting problem has shaped conventional conflicts for decades. In the Gulf War, we had air superiority, precision weapons, satellites, aircraft, and special operations forces all looking for Iraqi Scud launchers, and we still struggled to find them. Why? Because mobile targets are hard. If you do not have the ISR asset in the right place, at the right time, with a weapon close enough to act, you miss the window. In Bosnia, NATO still had to find Bosnian Serb air defenses, radar sites, and heavy weapons before airpower could force results. In Kosovo, Serbian air defenses shot down an F-117. More recently, in Yemen, the Houthis have used mobile launch teams to fire drones and missiles at shipping, then disappear before the kill chain can close. These are the same structural underinvestments repeating across forty years of conflict. The problems were the same: if you do not find, track, and kill enemy threats, the ones you miss still get a vote.

Your intelligence picture drives every move. If you can see what the enemy is doing or will do, you can counter and defeat them. During World War II, breaking Enigma gave the Allies insight into German military movements. For anyone who grew up on split-screen multiplayer, that's the equivalent of screen-looking. For the sports fan, it's watching the opposing NFL team practice its plays before the Super Bowl.

What happens when you do not have a complete intelligence picture? You can strike strategic targets and still fail to secure terrain because you do not know where the tactical targets are moving, hiding, or preparing to shoot. The first wave of strikes may be decisive against fixed targets. The next fight is harder. It is small units, mobile launchers, decoys, civilian cover, tunnels, garages, fishing boats, trucks, and twenty-minute windows.

What does this look like in less esoteric terms today? It is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps coming out of caves and civilian compounds to launch Shahed drones toward the Strait of Hormuz, then immediately blending back into the population. If you do not have an intelligence asset or weapon on station during that brief window, you can do nothing to stop it. We saw the same problem in Afghanistan and Iraq. A Taliban or Al Qaeda fighter would pop out of a house, launch a mortar, and disappear before we could find, fix, and finish.

The Missing Middle Layer Is Persistent ISR

Military officers from platoon commanders to theater-level generals have said the same thing for decades: "We just need an all-seeing, unblinking eye." Some have joked they need "an eye of Sauron." An unblinking eye over the battlefield would let forces counter any enemy activity and put weapons on target at scale, well into the follow-on phases of war after the opening strikes.

We've tried to build it, combining satellites, Predators, Reapers, Tritons, Group 1, 2, and 3 drones, human intelligence, and signals intelligence. It's never been enough. Even with significant resources invested, over a 24-hour period we probably cover less than 10% of the critical terrain in each warzone. Many of those assets must be pointed at threats outside active warzones to watch other adversaries.

The "all-seeing, unblinking eye" doesn't exist because nothing sits between strategic and tactical. No layer that can loiter over a stretch of contested terrain for hours, watch the tunnels, the garages, the fishing boats, and hand a unit a real-time picture instead of a snapshot. That missing middle layer is why we're stuck at less than 10%. Fill that hole and the math changes. Persistent, scalable ISR between the strategic and the tactical is what turns "we need counter UAS" into "we just hit the enemy that was about to launch Shaheds." This is what Shield AI's Group 3 V-BAT is adding to the fight today across Ukraine and the Middle East. This type of persistent ISR is one of the highest-return investments the military can make, because it doesn't just add another sensor - it closes the seam every adversary since the Gulf War has been exploiting.

10x the Highest-ROI Asset

If we walk into the next major conflict with these same intelligence assets, we will fight the opening salvos with precision but get mired into a prolonged conflict because we can't find the targets causing dilemmas for our forces.

War isn't about the first 1,000 strikes against the most strategic targets. It's about the complete decimation of the enemy's ability to operate, the seizure of key terrain, and the accomplishment of the objective. Military intelligence is what makes all that possible. We have invested in the military intelligence apparatus, and that investment has paid off very well. Time and again, it delivers results. So why not 10x the investment in possibly the highest-returning military asset? For a long time, the military intelligence apparatus that drives our war machine has been underinvested in, and this needs to be fixed.

Brandon Tseng is President and Co-Founder of Shield AI. He served seven years as a Navy SEAL and Surface Warfare Officer, with deployments to Afghanistan, the Pacific Theater, and the Arabian Gulf. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy and an MBA from Harvard Business School.