The Army is working on a refresh of its open source intelligence strategy, a little more than one year after the service finalized an initial strategy that focuses on training and building up a premier open source “collection force.”

The Army has already completed more than 90% of the tasks in last year’s strategy, according to Dennis Eger, senior OSINT advisor for the Army. He said the Army will start the rewrite this fall and aim to have it finalized by next September.

While last year’s strategy looked out to 2030, Eger said the forthcoming document will take a longer view.

“I’m going to go bold this time,” Eger said on Federal News Network. “We’re going to look at, what do we think things look like in 2040? Which is kind of a lofty goal given how much technology changes, and how much the internet in this space changes in just days, let alone years. . .  but I think we have to.”

The Army’s embrace of OSINT comes amid a broader open-source renaissance across the intelligence community. Many different facets of the intelligence community are now pushing out their own OSINT strategies.

The Army’s new strategy will likely retain the same four broad “lines of effort” as the service’s current OSINT strategy: people, readiness, modernization, and allies/partners.

But the emergence of artificial intelligence and large language models will also be a “major portion” of the Army’s new strategy, Eger said.

“Where are we going with it? How are we going to leverage it? How are we going to use it to to our advantage?” Eger said.

He said the Army sees the potential for generative AI to help summarize and derive insights from existing OSINT reports. The capability could help Army analysts more quickly pull reports and query information about specific issues.

Eger said the Army could also use AI to help identify misinformation and disinformation.

“We’re going to have to look at industry, especially for the mis- and disinformation space, to say, how do we leverage it to help us crack that code?” Eger said.

But beyond technologies, the Army has already made strides in formalizing OSINT operations through many of training and personnel processes.

Army OSINT skills and training

One of the major signs of progress for the Army’s open source ambitions is the impending approval of an OSINT “skill identifier.”

Such identifiers are codes that the Army use to identify the training a soldier has gone through. Eger said the OSINT identifier is in “final staffing.”

“It validates that an OSINT collector position needs to exist,” Eger said. “ But it also goes to resourcing. So when you get those things on a manning document or a position document, it says that it is approved, and we actually need resources to get after it. . . .  that that position identifier is really, really a big win for us.”

The Army is building OSINT collection teams into many of its major formations. And Eger said the demand for OSINT collectors is growing across the service.

“We probably have more OSINT collectors doing true OSINT than anybody in the [intelligence community],” Eger said. The Army is now looking at the potential OSINT requirements for its civilian workforce, he added.

Virtual training has also been a major focus for the Army. Eger said the service’s OSINT basic training course is offered online through a partnership with the University of Arizona.

In January, the Army plans to establish an “Army OSINT university” that will offer more than 40 online classes next year, including an OSINT “leaders” course.

The Army has also opened its OSINT courses to rest of the intelligence community.

“We would like there to be one holistic solution for the IC that everybody can take advantage of, rather than all of us paying separately for training venues,” Eger said.

The Army’s new strategy will continue to focus on modernizing OSINT training, Eger added.

“How do I get OSINT tactical training, in a sense, at home station?” he said. “So that it’s fresh all the time, so that we’re not talking about waiting for a conflict or waiting for somebody to deploy.”

The service is also considering how OSINT training can be incorporated into the Army’s combat training centers.

“How do we get feeds and injects into there, so that when folks are going to the combat training centers and going through rotations, that they have full on OSINT as part of the scenario,” Eger said.

OSINT at the tactical edge

Another major goal of the forthcoming strategy is more quickly delivering OSINT to the so-called “tactical edge,” such as combatant commands.

“I would like OSINT reporting to hit the tactical edge almost instantaneously, meaning a collector writes their report, hits the button, and within 30 seconds to a minute, it is disseminated where a commander sees it populate their picture,” Eger explained.

Fulfilling that concept will require the Army to effectively integrate OSINT into its broader intelligence architecture.

At the same time, Eger said the Army wants to swiftly bring in new OSINT capabilities, as the technology in the open source space evolves quickly. He said the Army has whittled its technology adoption process down to 60 days. The goal is to eventually get that down to 30 days.

“It cuts out every bit of middleman,” Eger said. “It’s just this direct, point-to-point and that has really enabled us to look at things a lot more a lot more thoroughly and a lot more quickly.”

Key topics include:

• The key tenets of the Army’s OSINT strategy
• Progress made in the year since implementation
• Professionalizing the OSINT force and integrating teams into major formations
• Key skills required for Army OSINT professionals
• Addressing misinformation and disinformation in the OSINT space
• Collaborating with other military services and intelligence community partners on OSINT