Blue Fish in a Dark Sea: Police Intelligence in a Counterinsurgency

In his book, “On Guerilla Warfare”, Mao Tse- Tung stated that “the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea” . If the guerrilla is the fish in this famous dictum and the people are the sea, then police intelligence is the blue fish which lives and moves and hunts within that sea as easily as does the guerrilla. All modern counterinsurgency theories rely upon some form of separating the people from the insurgent. This book contends that the use of police intelligence will allow for a different approach; that of separating the insurgent head from the insurgent body with the result that the body is seen as an infection by the people and loses its protective camouflage.
The existence of police intelligence and its unique but all too often marginalized capacity for uncovering and destroying the prime movers of an insurgency must be re-examined in the study of counterinsurgency. It is by no means a panacea for civil strife but as an integral component of a combined counterinsurgency strategy, it provides a weapon which is more feared by insurgents than any number of missiles, armored vehicles or boots on the ground.
Knowing who they are and where they may be found renders the insurgent visible and touchable. This is the natural role of police intelligence as the ferreting out of organized criminal networks and the identification and apprehension of their members is a natural sub-set of intelligence led policing.
This book will explain and discuss the various elements of police intelligence ubiquitous to the trade while ultimately presenting the most efficacious means of employing this already well understood skill set in the environment of a counterinsurgency.