The National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal is a decoration awarded for service to the United States Intelligence Community. The decoration is awarded to any member or contributor to the National Intelligence Community, either civilian or military, who distinguishes themselves by meritorious actions to the betterment of national security in the United States of America, through sustained and selfless service of the highest order.
The National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal was once considered junior to the older National Security Medal. With the establishment of the National Intelligence Awards (NIA) Program by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal was the highest decoration in the program, until succeeded by the Intelligence Community Medal for Valor.
As an authorized U.S. non-military decoration on U.S. military uniforms, the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal is worn after U.S. military unit awards and before U.S. military campaign and service awards.
Read more about National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal: Recipients, Recipients Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words national, intelligence and/or service:
“Ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments.”
—French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed Aug. 1789, published Sept. 1791)
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
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“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)