An intelligence collection plan (ICP) is the systematic process used by most modern armed forces and intelligence services to meet intelligence requirements through the tasking of all available resources to gather and provide pertinent information within a required time limit. Creating a collection plan is part of the intelligence cycle.
While an ICP has no prescribed doctrinal format, it must use all available collection capabilities to meet the decision maker's priority requirements. It must be precise and concise, yet a working document that is flexible enough to respond to changes as they occur.
Famous quotes containing the words intelligence, collection and/or plan:
“Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters of opinion, and not fixed by nature.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“The Nature of Familiar Letters, written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided, must plead an Excuse for the Bulk of a Collection of this Kind. Mere Facts and Characters might be comprised in a much smaller Compass: But, would they be equally interesting?”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)