An assessment, declassified as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged US lawmakers to back additional funding, describes Moscow’s setbacks during its most recent offensive as ‘severe’
Battlefield analysis in this context would notionally be a product of signals intelligence, photo reconnaissance, and information sharing with allied forces. It’s still sources and methods stuff, and the people doing it are part of the US intelligence community. That includes the branch intelligence services, DIA, CIA, and other three letter agencies.
For something like Putin’s plan on invading on a certain date, those are more going to lean on CIA drawing on resources in the Russian government and military. They will also involve signals and imagery, which often belong to other agencies. In these cases it is still a multi source intelligence product that cannot (in theory) be reverse engineered to leak sources and methods.
Things do leak, of course. I remember a photo published in the congressional record (which made it into Aviation Week iirc) that showed a US Keyhole photo in which you could read the tail numbers on a parked plane. That leaked the resolution of that generation of satellite, which is among the most highly classified subjects.
You are right, though. Sometimes the US will publish otherwise highly classified info, such as was used to document the engineering of WMDs in Iraq. That didn’t work out too well in the end but the general idea was that making a conclusive argument for war justified the potential exposure of that information (and Curveball was I believe already in the US at that time, but it’s been awhile).
Battlefield analysis in this context would notionally be a product of signals intelligence, photo reconnaissance, and information sharing with allied forces. It’s still sources and methods stuff, and the people doing it are part of the US intelligence community. That includes the branch intelligence services, DIA, CIA, and other three letter agencies.
For something like Putin’s plan on invading on a certain date, those are more going to lean on CIA drawing on resources in the Russian government and military. They will also involve signals and imagery, which often belong to other agencies. In these cases it is still a multi source intelligence product that cannot (in theory) be reverse engineered to leak sources and methods.
Things do leak, of course. I remember a photo published in the congressional record (which made it into Aviation Week iirc) that showed a US Keyhole photo in which you could read the tail numbers on a parked plane. That leaked the resolution of that generation of satellite, which is among the most highly classified subjects.
You are right, though. Sometimes the US will publish otherwise highly classified info, such as was used to document the engineering of WMDs in Iraq. That didn’t work out too well in the end but the general idea was that making a conclusive argument for war justified the potential exposure of that information (and Curveball was I believe already in the US at that time, but it’s been awhile).