Scientific and technical intelligence

Scientific and technical intelligence (S&TI), (STINFO) is a national-level intelligence discipline that involves from the collection, evaluation, analysis, and interpretation of foreign scientific and technical information that covers:

• foreign developments in basic and applied research and in applied engineering techniques;
• scientific and technical characteristics, capabilities, and limitations of all foreign

military systems, weapons, weapon systems, and materiel; the research and development related thereto; and the production methods employed for their manufacture.

Somewhat confusingly, technical intelligence (TECHINT) is, in United States intelligence community usage, different from S&TI. TECHINT is a more tactically oriented discipline. S&TI identifies basic new ideas, revolutionary changes in broad technologies, fundamentally improved manufacturing, etc. So, if a nation invented a completely new way to propel bullets, the S&TI analyst would define the method. A TECHINT analyst would investigate the use of the new "gun", and a materials MASINT analyst would evaluate what the bullets did to various materials.

History

Historically, the discipline was probably first formalized by R.V. Jones while he was a Scientific Officer for the British Secret Intelligence Service during World War II. One of the first and critical aspects has been called the "battle of the beams", in which the British scientific intelligence organization, under R.V. Jones, determined that the German night bombing attacks were guided by electronic navigation signals sent from occupied Europe. Once the systems were understood, it was possible to mislead the bombers, such that they bombed open country, or, on a few wondrous occasions, became so disoriented that they landed at airfields in the U.K.

"During the human struggle between the British and the German Air Forces, between pilot and pilot, between AAA batteries and aircraft, between ruthless bombing and fortitude of the British people, another conflict was going on, step by step, month by month. This was a secret war, whose battles were lost or won unknown to the public, and only with difficulty comprehended, even now, to those outside the small scientific circles concerned. Unless British science had proven superior to German, and unless its strange, sinister resources had been brought to bear in the struggle for survival, we might well have been defeated, and defeated, destroyed." — Winston Churchill

U.S. responsibilities

After the Second World War, and as the Cold War intensified, several external review commissions, such as the 1949 Eberstadt Report and 1954 Doolittle Report put an extremely high priority on S&TI, and were not pleased with performance to that date. Soviet nuclear progress was a matter of particular concern.