Objective: Identify terrorists and terrorist organizations. "Know your enemy" is one of the most accepted maxims in warfare. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the inner workings of some terrorist organizations remains incomplete. The Intelligence Community and law enforcement agencies will therefore continue their aggressive efforts to identify terrorists and their organizations, map their command and control and support infrastructure, and then ensure we have broad, but appropriate, distribution of the intelligence to federal, state, and local agencies as well as to our international allies. While we will not ignore regional or emerging threats, our operational efforts and intelligence will focus primarily upon the most dangerous groups, namely, those with global reach or aspirations to acquire and use WMD.
We will prioritize our efforts based on the immediate threat and our national interests. Based on this prioritization and mapping of terrorist organizations, we will determine where to position forces and collection assets to identify terrorist ground, air, maritime, and cyber activities. Timely and advantageous positioning of these assets will be crucial for obtaining intelligence and developing options for decisive action.
A key component of this force and asset alignment will be our ability to understand the terrorist intent through technical and document exploitation. This will require a dramatic increase in linguistic support. Consequently, all government agencies will review their language programs to ensure adequate resources are available to meet this demand.
The Intelligence Community will continue to enhance its collection on terrorist WMD capabilities, including bioterrorism threats against agriculture and the food supply.
Objective: Locate terrorists and their organizations. The shadowy nature of terrorist organizations precludes an easy analysis of their capabilities or intent. The classic net assessment of the enemy based on the number of tanks, airplanes, or ships does not apply to these non-state actors. For intelligence to succeed in this war on terrorism, the United States must not only rely on technical intelligence, but renew its emphasis on other types of intelligence needed to get inside the organizations, locate their sanctuaries, and disrupt their plans and operations.
The Intelligence Community will review its current capability to gather human and technical intelligence on terrorist organizations and make recommendations, as necessary, to expand its recruitment, training, and operations. The Intelligence Community will continue its comprehensive effort to acquire new reporting sources, then use those sources to penetrate designated terrorist organizations to provide information on leadership, plans, intentions, modus operandi, finances, communications, and recruitment. The law enforcement community, using the leverage provided by our criminal justice system, will continue its efforts to identify and locate terrorist organizations operating at home and abroad.
Our regional partners are often better poised than the United States to gain access to information and intelligence. Therefore, the intelligence and law enforcement communities will continue to expand and improve their relations with their foreign counterparts in an effort to take better advantage of their source reporting.
Objective: Destroy terrorists and their organizations. Once we have identified and located the terrorists, the United States and its friends and allies will use every tool available to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy their capacity to conduct acts of terror. The final element to the Defeat goal is an aggressive, offensive strategy to eliminate capabilities that allow terrorists to exist and operate--attacking their sanctuaries; leadership; command, control, and communications; material support; and finances.
While divulging the details of this aspect of the strategy would be imprudent, we will focus our efforts on three pillars. First, we will expand our law enforcement effort to capture, detain, and prosecute known and suspected terrorists. Second, America will focus decisive military power and specialized intelligence resources to defeat terrorist networks globally. Finally, with the cooperation of its partners and appropriate international organizations, we will continue our aggressive plan to eliminate the sources of terrorist financing.
To synchronize this effort, the Department of State will take the lead in developing specific regional strategies for the defeat of terrorism. We will further leverage regional relationships, by ensuring appropriate allied participation with the regional Combatant Commanders as they prosecute the war on terrorism.