Samenvatting

Understanding the nature of the war, and the broader strategic and operational environment is of great importance for effective decision-making. However, most of today ’ s military missions are multidimensional having military, political, economic, and judicial aims. As a result, military organizations need comprehensive intelligence on a broad range of issues, including but not limited to security, governance, socio-economic and criminal challenges. Drawing upon situational awareness literature, this chapter analyses the efforts of the United Nations mission MINUSMA in Mali to acquire such comprehensive intelligence and effectively use it to inform decision-making. The main fi ndings of the chapter include that (1) a comprehensive scope jeopardizes the effectiveness of the intelligence operations in terms of overloading scarce resources — both sensors and analytical capabilities, (2) aligning the intelligence capabilities with the operational capabilities proves crucial for mission success, (3) organizing intelligence in a mission network is challenging (in the case of MINUSMA due to e.g. complex command and control structure, incompatible technical systems, as well as the changing security situation) and (4) the combination of high and low tech resources and working methods is of great importance.