Write a response paper on changes in intelligence collection.

1) One of the great issues facing the Intelligence Community today is the shift away from a counterterrorism focus that has defined this generation of intelligence professionals, back to the next foray into Great Power Competition. Economic intelligence played an important role in the past two decades in the form of illuminating how threat networks received and used their funding. This is not the traditional application of economic intelligence, which is to “collect, analyze, and distribute information to protect and promote national economic security” (Potter, 1998). Economic intelligence has taken a backseat in the intelligence community’s mission throughout the past twenty years.There is no guarantee that the next twenty years will have the same application in store for economic intelligence. Rather than being a competition between a thread network of terrorists/insurgents and international coalitions conducting personality targeting to thwart their efforts, the next two decades will involve the intelligence communities of the world providing their nation information contributing to a competitive edge against adversarial economies, even in partnerships. The United States has gone through this transition from one type of threat intelligence to another, with varying degree of success. The most recent major transition occurred at the end of the Cold War, when the United States no longer focused solely on the nuclear threat from a near-peer adversary, but had to arm itself to compete with emerging economies, especially in East Asia. Using content analysis, similarities and differences between how guidance is distributed from the Executive Branch to the Intelligence Community will emerge. Content analysis, “the systematic, objective, quantitative analysis of message characteristics,” (Neuendorf, 2017) is a method of quantifying messaging strategies to identify trends. The challenge involved in this line of research will be to narrow the lines of communication to sufficiently demonstrate the effect of each message. The point of origin, the National Security Strategy, is a logical starting point to understand the intent of the Executive Branch in providing guidance to the security-based organizations of the United States government. The challenge from there will be to identify clear pathways where each organization either follows or diverges from that guidance.