Historical Study of War

Historical Study of War

The Changing Role of Intelligence in Postmodern Warfare

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Nader Pourakhondi
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Khoramabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Khoranabad, Iran
10.22034/hsow.2025.2059684.1611
Abstract
The main function of intelligence is to recognize threats and provide necessary warnings about threats. The static nature of the threats of modern war made it possible for intelligence to predict potential threats using a problem-solving approach and using appropriate analytical tools. But after the Cold War, the nature of war and its actors and military strategies underwent a fundamental transformation, which is referred to as post-modern war. Therefore, the question is raised, what effect did these developments have on the main function of intelligence? The current article argues that the fluid nature of postmodern war and its actors caused the function of intelligence as knowledge, i.e. objective, actionable and predictive knowledge to be reduced to a large amount, and as in modern war, the main problem of intelligence is not data collection and resolution of uncertainty, but the problem The main thing is to understand a lot of scattered and complex data that are strategically and intentionally ambiguous. The findings of this article show that in postmodern war, as the fifth generation of war, objective ontological and epistemological approaches have lost their function, and intelligence needs new analytical and ontological tools to deal with the challenges of postmodern war.
Keywords
Intelligence
postmodern war
Ambiguous
Uncertainty
Warnings

Subjects

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