?????: Analysis

What Kosmos 2612’s Approach to ICEYE-X36 Does and Doesn’t Tell Us

Plane changes in low Earth orbit are rare, because they are expensive. That single fact is the key to reading the Kosmos (Cosmos) 2612 story, and it is why the decisive signal in this episode appeared months before the close approach that drew headlines. In October, Russia maneuvered Cosmos 2612 (catalog 68762) into the orbital plane of ICEYE-X36 (catalog 59103), a commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite that supports Ukraine, and began closing the range. The maneuvering was deliberate, efficient, and precisely observable. What Russia intends to do from that position is not observable at all. Holding those two statements apart is the entire discipline of this kind of analysis, so […]

Training for the Next Fight: Why “A Good Analyst Is Still a Good Analyst”

As the tools of warfare change faster than the doctrine written to govern them, one question is quietly reshaping the intelligence community: are we training professionals for the fight that’s coming, or the one we already fought? In the third episode of The ISR Debrief, host Wesley Rose convenes three leaders with nearly a hundred years of combined experience to answer it — Chad Hartman, Jason “Stutz” Stutzman, and Jeff “Monty” Montgomery, all retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officers now leading training and solutions at Integrity ISR. The discussion begins with the intelligence cycle — the planning, collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination loop that has anchored analytical training for generations. […]