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:
“... perhaps there exists only one intelligence from which the world sublets, one intelligence toward which each person, from the depths of his individual body, directs his gaze, as in the theater where, though each has a seat, however, there is only one stage.... But if it we all shared the same intelligence, [Bergotte] would, upon hearing me express [my ideas], remember them, love them, smile at them....”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Psychobabble is ... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It’s an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.”
—Richard Dean Rosen (b. 1949)
“The Lord wrote it all down on the little slate
Of the baby tortoise.
Outward and visible indication of the plan within,
The complex, manifold involvedness of an individual creature”
—D.H. (David Herbert)