Dr. Itai Shapira published an article arguing that the demand for strategic intelligence was declining.
I liked it. And disagreed with parts of it.
Not because the observation was wrong, but because I think the problem goes deeper.
Shapira spent more than 25 years inside the Israeli intelligence system, operating across its three layers: tactical, operational and strategic. Today a Brigadier General in the IDF Reserves, he has seen intelligence as a system under pressure where analysis, policy, and operations collide.
His work sits at an unusual intersection: he is both practitioner and theorist. Close enough to operations to understand pressure, distant enough to study the system's blind spots.
His research on Israeli intelligence culture and intelligence theory converges toward one question: how does intelligence actually function when it meets power?
Like me, Shapira approaches intelligence as a discipline AND an epistemological problem. So we decided to push the discussion further.
If strategic intelligence is declining, then the only relevant question is: what is replacing it?
We started with October 7. Because it is a major event that will remain in the history of intelligence - in Israel, but also beyond.
I often say that Israel is a laboratory of the world. What happens there tends to appear elsewhere later. We saw it with counterterrorism, urban warfare, targeting systems and now, intelligence itself.
October 7 is an Israeli failure. But it also is an early signal. What it reveals is not limited to Hamas, Gaza, or Israeli doctrine. It exposes something more structural.
So what does this failure tell us about the future of intelligence?
Summary
- October 7th: what kind of failure is it?
- Beyond failure: the crisis of strategic intelligence
- AI and the integration of intelligence into action
- The private market of intelligence without any structure
October 7th: what kind of failure?
The idea that October 7th was an intelligence failure is repeated so often, it has lost all meaning. It compresses everything into a label, but it explains nothing.
It avoids the question that matters: where exactly did the system break?
Information existed, signals existed, even operational elements of the plan were known. Yet they were dismissed, because they did not fit.
During our conversation, Itai Shapira immediately reframed the issue:
October 7th is an intelligence failure, yes, but with many, many aspects… it is also a policy failure and a military failure.
Shapira adds:
The Israeli policy regarding the Palestinian arena was a policy of containment, of not initiating preventive wars, a policy of status quo. The focus was on Iran and Hezbollah, on trying to reach normalization agreements with the Arab and Sunni countries in continuation to the Abraham Accords, while not providing a dramatic solution to the Palestinian issue in the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip.
Built on a core assumption:
The assumption was that Israel is successful in deterring Hamas.
That assumption was wrong. Structurally.
The Israeli security doctrine is not codified in a single formal document. It's informal and unwritten, but in practice, it is highly coherent. It rests on a small number of non-negotiable principles: early warning, deterrence, battlefield decision or decisive victory and defense.
October 7th is a colossal defense failure because Israel failed on its most basic mission: defending the borders.
This multifaceted failure in policy, defense and intelligence reflects an issue of groupthink:
The policymakers, military leadership and intelligence leadership all shared the same assumptions. All had a similar assessment about Hamas. But not only about Hamas, also about the Israeli ability to understand Hamas, to deter Hamas, which was proved false.
It was a failure across the entire intelligence cycle. As Shapira puts it:
There was failure at each stage... in analysis and collection. Israeli intelligence obtained the original Hamas operational plan, but many analysts said "this is not really an operational plan… they do not have the capabilities."
The distinction between intent and capability was treated as stable. It wasn’t. As Shapira insists:
Capabilities and intentions are very much intertwined. The distinction between the two is artificial: adversaries build capabilities according to intentions, and intentions become real through capabilities.
The plan existed, it was seen, yet it was rejected. This is the main failure. A failure of acceptance, a failure of culture. Shapira says he was surprised:
Very important professional norms and values such as moral courage and contrarian thinking were absent. And these were traditional traits of Israeli intelligence culture. You cannot correct this through protocols and procedures. This is a cultural change.
Israel failed to recognize what it was seeing, systematically at the intelligence, military and political level.
All leaders shared the same false assumptions and wrong model of reality.
Beyond failure: the crisis of strategic intelligence
October 7 is treated as a rupture. It is. But not only.
What happened that day is also a compressed expression of a broader shift already underway across Western intelligence systems.
The disappearance of contradiction
October 7 revealed that intelligence systems fail when they cannot be contradicted.
Post-October 7, Israel is trying to rebuild early warning. But this may not be enough. Shapira warns that the renewed focus on early warning may itself be a post-traumatic correction:
I see renewed emphasis on strategic early warning from war. Although this might be an overcorrection, a post-traumatic correction.
Systems often correct the last failure, not the next one...
Traditionally, intelligence was designed to act as a corrective layer. Its role is to challenge assumptions, introduce uncertainty, prevent strategic surprise. But that function depends on one condition: distance from decision-making.
That distance is eroding.
From correction to integration
As intelligence becomes more integrated into operational systems, real-time decision cycles and targeting processes, it gains efficiency but loses independence.
Shapira captures this dynamic:
Once intelligence mainly supports a decision, and not just the decision making process, intelligence loses its ability to provide a contrarian perspective about the implications regarding the adversary. Groupthink is very natural when you are embedded in the operational process.
It is a consequence. The more intelligence is useful, actionable, and operational, the less it is critical, independent and disruptive. This creates a reversal:
Intelligence no longer acts as a friction against decisions, it becomes a component of their execution.
The compression of power
This is not only visible in Israel or the United States. France offers another version of the same movement: the concentration of intelligence closer to the executive.
Macron's approach illustrates the same shift towards intelligence:
- direct access to agency heads
- reliance on a small trusted circle
- daily operational immersion
This produces reactivity, but also compression.
Shapira saw this as part of a broader danger:
Many leaders think of intelligence as a tool for implementing policy. But this is not what intelligence is. It is first and foremost about informing to make the best policy decisions.
Which leads to a structural contradiction:
Think, for example, about the CIA in the United States. They should inform the President about which policy decision to make about Venezuela. But they are also an operational tool for conducting the special operations. This is what psychiatrists would call schizophrenia.
The politicization trap
In the U.S. tradition, intelligence presents itself as neutral, almost scientific. But Shapira points out the paradox: