---
uai: "1.0"
type: domain-memory
status: active
project: iarpg.com
updated_utc: "2026-07-19T05:00:00Z"
domain: operations
---
# Intelligence Operations
## Operation cycle

1. **Direction** — identify the authority, customer, decision, requirement, deadline, jurisdiction, and acceptable risk.
2. **Planning** — select roles, disciplines, access paths, source protections, communications, contingencies, and abort conditions.
3. **Access** — establish a plausible relationship, role, credential, technical position, liaison channel, or legitimate reason for presence.
4. **Collection** — gather observations and reports while protecting the requirement, source, cover, and future access.
5. **Processing** — preserve provenance, timestamps, transformations, chain of custody, and source separation.
6. **Analysis** — compare competing explanations, contradictions, deception indicators, confidence, and information gaps.
7. **Dissemination** — brief the customer with judgments, alternatives, confidence, gaps, implications, and reason codes.
8. **Extraction and debrief** — preserve people, access, evidence, and continuity; record what changed and what follow-on tasking is justified.

## Mission brief schema

- Tasking authority and office
- Customer and decision supported
- Intelligence requirement
- Known facts and source limitations
- Collection disciplines and assigned roles
- Jurisdiction and authorities
- Cover and access assumptions
- Exposure and counterintelligence risks
- Success, partial-success, abort, and extraction criteria
- Required evidence and dissemination format

## Outcome doctrine

An operation can succeed without combat. Warning, denial, verification, recovery, protection, controlled exposure, source preservation, or a justified withdrawal can all be valid outcomes.

## Deep links

- Covert action and social stealth: https://iarpg.com/docs/report/systemic-subterfuge-architecting-a-geopolitically-neutral-classless-espionage-mmo#architectural-pillar-iv-covert-action-social-stealth-and-environmental-subterfuge
- Social stealth and behavioral mimicry: https://iarpg.com/docs/report/architectural-and-narrative-design-specifications-for-a-vr-first-post-national-espionage-mmo#social-stealth-and-behavioral-mimicry
- Counterintelligence workflow: https://iarpg.com/docs/report/counterintelligence-directive-alliance-leak-investigation#investigative-workflow-and-timeline
- After-action continuity: https://iarpg.com/docs/report/after-action-report-operation-redacted