Collect and save military information
Organize, direct, manage and control the intelligence resources of the Ministry of National Defense which are subordinate to or affiliated to the National Defense Intelligence Agency. Check and coordinate the intelligence tasks reserved or entrusted by the Ministry of National Defense to the military departments, and guide the implementation and management of these tasks. These tasks are put forward by the Director of Defense Intelligence and reviewed, approved and promulgated by the Minister of Defense.
Supervise the implementation of the military intelligence system plan.
Supervise the implementation of all approved plans, projects and policies and the action steps not assigned to the intelligence tasks of the National Defense Intelligence Agency.
Integrate information resources and coordinate departmental management.
Maintain the most economical and effective distribution and management of intelligence resources of the Ministry of National Defense. This includes the analysis of intelligence activities and facilities of the Ministry of National Defense, which can be merged and arranged in non-defense intelligence agencies. Directly respond to the key requirements put forward by the US Intelligence Committee to the National Defense Intelligence Agency.
Meet the intelligence needs of major departments of the Ministry of National Defense.
Additional task
Between 1964- 1965, the defense intelligence agency accepted several additional tasks:
1. To undertake the image information tasks previously performed by individual services at the national level; The new responsibility of the National Defense Intelligence Agency is to establish and manage facilities for processing, printing, interpreting and analyzing military images, and to establish library intelligence agencies serving the whole national defense system.
2. Strengthen information dissemination, so that the National Defense Intelligence Agency can exchange primary and "finished" information from the Ministry of National Defense to the whole national defense system and legal non-Ministry of National Defense institutions and international organizations.
3. Manage all automatic data processing projects and intelligence agencies of the Ministry of National Defense, including the planning of intelligence validity period, the allocation and priority determination of data processing tasks, and the formulation of policies and planning guidance for data processing with intelligence significance. Decentralize the plan to the executive units of the armed forces.
4. Responsible for the secret "special military action" plan.
Since its establishment, the National Defense Intelligence Agency has undergone many institutional adjustments (four times between 196 1- 1970) and has been criticized by many critics. These criticisms are aimed at the quality of its intelligence achievements and the failure to effectively supervise and curb the expansion of its intelligence department.
It is often suggested that the National Defense Intelligence Agency be abolished, and even the Parker Committee holds this opinion. But the results did not meet expectations. The defense intelligence agency remains the main agency responsible for strategic intelligence around the Ministry of National Defense.
For example, the National Defense Intelligence Agency participates in national intelligence assessment and special national intelligence assessment, and expounds issues related to Soviet strategic forces and terrorism. As a legitimate authority, the National Defense Intelligence Agency (NDIA) inspected a lot of work done by intelligence departments such as the Air Force Systems Command's foreign technical services. In addition, it is also responsible for making a target data catalogue, which is a database of all facilities that planners of strategic nuclear weapons in the United States expect to set targets. Target data cataloging is the data basis for formulating national strategic target projects and finally formulating individual M&A action plans.
The National Defense Intelligence Agency is also engaged in research and development, testing and evaluation projects related to information technology. According to the requirements of its 1982 fiscal year, the National Defense Intelligence Agency is committed to research in four areas:
Crisis management, scientific and technological information, automatic data processing ability and search management ability. In particular, it needs to invest in developing an automatic system that can analyze "monitoring and early warning information" in time, and develop a set of methods and databases to meet the additional information demand caused by the US policy related to PD#59 nuclear target. The National Defense Intelligence Agency also requested that $700,000 be used to develop "advanced image demand and utilization system" (including hockey -2 reconnaissance satellite technology in the sky). In the request of 1983 fiscal year, it obtained funds to develop a rapid technical data collection project named "Dawn" and an electro-optical collection project named "Keyhole".