2023 National 

Intelligence 

Strategy

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From the Director of National Intelligence

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and in the wake of the Intelligence 

Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act passed by Congress in 2004, Director of 

National Intelligence John D. Negroponte signed out the Intelligence Community’s 

(IC) first National Intelligence Strategy. The strategy explained that the Intelligence 

Community’s clear charge was to:

• Integrate the domestic and foreign dimensions of U.S. intelligence so that 

there are no gaps in our understanding of threats to our national security;

• Bring more depth and accuracy to intelligence analysis; and

• Ensure that U.S. intelligence resources generate future capabilities 

as well as present results.

Now, almost twenty years after our first strategy was issued, the Intelligence 

Community’s charge remains just as clear, even as the strategic environment 

has changed dramatically. The United States faces an increasingly complex and 

interconnected threat environment characterized by strategic competition between 

the United States, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the Russian Federation, 

felt perhaps most immediately in Russia’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine. In addition 

to states, sub-national and non-state actors—from multinational corporations to 

transnational social movements—are increasingly able to create influence, compete 

for information, and secure or deny political and security outcomes, which provides 

opportunities for new partnerships as well as new challenges to U.S. interests. In 

addition, shared global challenges, including climate change, human and health 

security, as well as emerging and disruptive technological advances, are converging in 

ways that produce significant consequences that are often difficult to predict.

As Director of National Intelligence, I have the privilege of leading an Intelligence 

Community that provides decision-makers and citizens crucial insights on this diverse 

and complex landscape. Our support to policymakers, operators, and warfighters is 

critically dependent on our ability to look beyond the immediate horizon to ensure the 

Intelligence Community is well postured to address emerging threats, promote national 

resilience and innovation, defend our competitive advantage, and promote shared 

prosperity. This National Intelligence Strategy, therefore, lays out the Intelligence 

Community’s role in supporting the priorities outlined in the President’s National 

Security Strategy and serves as the Community’s direction for the next four years as we 

seek to better serve the Nation.

The six goals outlined in this National Intelligence Strategy have emerged as our 

understanding of the kinds of information, technology, and relationships needed to be 

effective in the future has expanded. Whether we are successful in achieving these goals 

will depend on whether we can maintain a talented and diverse workforce, and whether 

we can adapt, increase resilience, and sustain our focus on overcoming the challenges of 

a rapidly changing environment. I believe we have the capacity, will, and talent to do so. 

Avril D. Haines

Director of National Intelligence
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The National Intelligence Strategy 

of the United States of America

IC Vision

An Intelligence Community that embodies America’s values 

and is sufficiently agile, integrated, innovative, and resilient 

to inform national security and foreign policy decisions, 

resulting in a Nation that is secure and prosperous.

IC Mission

The U.S. Intelligence Community provides timely, rigorous, 

apolitical, and insightful intelligence and support to inform 

national security decisions and protect our Nation and its interests.
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Our success as a Community is measured as much by our defense of America’s 

values as it is by the execution of our intelligence mission. The 2023 National 

Intelligence Strategy recognizes that a purposeful and clear set of ethics serves 

as a cornerstone of the United States Intelligence Community’s mission.

Principles of Professional Ethics 

for the Intelligence Community

As members of the intelligence profession, we conduct ourselves in accordance 

with certain basic principles. These principles are stated below, and reflect the 

standard of ethical conduct expected of all Intelligence Community personnel, 

regardless of individual role or agency affiliation. Many of these principles 

are also reflected in other documents that we look to for guidance, such as 

statements of core values, and the Code of Conduct: Principles of Ethical Conduct 

for Government Officers and Employees; it is nonetheless important for the 

Intelligence Community to set forth in a single statement the fundamental ethical 

principles that unite us—and distinguish us—as intelligence professionals.

■ Mission

We serve the American people, and understand that our mission requires 

selfless dedication to the security of our Nation. 

■ Truth

We seek the truth; speak truth to power; and obtain, analyze, and 

provide intelligence objectively. 

■ Lawfulness

We support and defend the Constitution, and comply with the laws of the 

United States, ensuring that we carry out our mission in a manner that 

respects privacy, civil liberties, and human rights obligations. 

■ Integrity

We demonstrate integrity in our conduct, mindful that all our actions, whether 

public or not, should reflect positively on the Intelligence Community at large. 

■ Stewardship

We are responsible stewards of the public trust; we use intelligence authorities 

and resources prudently, protect intelligence sources and methods diligently, 

report wrongdoing through appropriate channels; and remain accountable to 

ourselves, our oversight institutions, and through those institutions, ultimately 

to the American people.

■ Excellence

We seek to improve our performance and our craft continuously, share 

information responsibly, collaborate with our colleagues, and demonstrate 

innovation and agility when meeting new challenges. 

■ Diversity

We embrace the diversity of our Nation, promote diversity and inclusion 

in our workforce, and encourage diversity in our thinking.
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GOAL
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GOAL 1: Position the IC for Intensifying Strategic Competition

Strategic competition from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a 

revisionist foreign policy is a principal challenge to a free, open, secure, and 

prosperous world. The PRC is the only U.S. competitor with both the intent to 

reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, 

military, and technological power to do so. Russia poses an immediate and 

ongoing threat to the regional security order in Europe and Eurasia and is 

a source of disruption and instability globally, but it lacks the across-thespectrum capabilities of the PRC. 

Leadership in technology and innovation has long underpinned our economic 

prosperity and military strength, and will be critical to outcompeting our rivals, 

advancing our interests, and safeguarding democracy. The United States must 

be able to identify the applications and implications of emerging technologies, 

understand supply chains, and use economic statecraft tools—in coordination 

with our allies and partners—to ensure strategic competitors are not able to 

undermine our competitiveness and national security. 

The IC must deepen and expand its expertise, strengthen its collection and 

analytic capabilities, and embrace new partnerships and external perspectives 

to address policymaker needs in this more competitive environment. The IC 

will invest in developing innovative methods and cultivating new sources, and 

work more systematically with allies and partners and public and private sector 

partners to facilitate a common understanding of technological and other risks 

and how to address them. Given the global nature of strategic competition, the 

IC will establish methods and systems that promote greater interoperability and 

understanding across traditional and distinct geographic and functional areas. 

These efforts are essential to the IC’s success as a key element of national power 

in this competition.

The IC will improve its ability to provide timely and accurate insights into 

competitor intentions, capabilities, and actions by strengthening capabilities 

in language, technical, and cultural expertise and harnessing open source, 

“big data,” artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics. The IC also must 

enhance its ability to understand how countries in every region of the 

world perceive, are implicated by, and seek to navigate this new landscape, 

and assess their opportunities to enhance strategic relationships with the 

United States. At the same time, the IC will improve its understanding of 

how non-state actors might use their growing resources and capacity to exert 

unilateral and collective influence in a way that could support or undermine 

U.S. national security. And above all else, the IC will use its authorities 

and capabilities in ways that strengthen our democratic foundations and 

principles as we seek to counter increasingly autocratic competitors.
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GOAL
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GOAL 2: Recruit, Develop, and Retain a Talented and Diverse 

Workforce that Operates as a United Community

The IC’s future success depends on its ability to attract and retain a highly 

technical and talented workforce that draws on one of our country’s unmatched 

reservoirs of strength: our diversity. Varied backgrounds, perspectives, and 

experiences strengthen our workforce, our ability to deliver on our Mission, 

and the trust of the American public. 

The Community must overcome long-standing cultural, structural, 

bureaucratic, technical, and security challenges to reimagine and deliver 

the IC workforce of the future.

The IC will modernize recruiting, hiring, and vetting processes to ensure its 

ability to competitively and rapidly recruit and onboard a diverse, trusted, 

agile, and expert IC workforce. The IC will also build on efforts to implement 

continuous monitoring and security clearance reciprocity so the Community 

can operate in new ways, rapidly redistributing and better integrating expertise 

where and when it is most needed, taking advantage of greater workplace 

flexibilities, and leveraging skills from across the Community regardless of 

organizational affiliation. 

Enhanced professional development opportunities at every level of the 

workforce are critical to building a shared strategic awareness of the IC’s full 

capabilities, its missions, and its challenges and ensuring greater literacy and 

expertise in emerging disciplines and fields. The IC must also incentivize, 

reward, and offer opportunities for regular joint duty rotations to produce 

officers more capable of formulating holistic and integrated solutions to 

intelligence problems. 

Diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and other human capital initiatives 

will only succeed if they are subjected to rigorous and continuous analysis, 

evaluation, transparency, and learning. These efforts will build a workforce 

that fosters a shared commitment to U.S. national security and enhance 

its resilience.
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GOAL
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GOAL 3: Deliver Interoperable and Innovative Solutions at Scale 

Promoting technical and tradecraft competitiveness and innovation for the 

Intelligence Community requires sustained investment and rapid adaptation 

of interoperable solutions at scale. 

The Community will remove barriers by establishing unified IC procurement 

authorities, centralized solicitation systems, and a Community-wide contracting 

system, all bolstered by automation tools. A Community-wide, data-centric 

approach based on common standards is crucial to realizing the full promise 

of new capabilities. In response to changing mission needs, the IC will 

foster a culture that embraces innovation and the application of tools, data, 

processes, and standards necessary to transform labor- and time-intensive 

work into more efficient and productive human-machine partnerships. These 

efforts will include initiatives to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and 

standardization of our data.

The IC will also pursue complementary efforts to anticipate adversaries’ 

over-the-horizon plans, capabilities, and intentions to inform Community 

research and development initiatives, guide capability development decisions, 

and avoid strategic surprise. The IC will also maximize the chances for 

technical breakthroughs and enhanced mission effectiveness by sustaining 

predictable funding for the research and development of new capabilities. 

This will require enhanced integration between the Community’s science and 

technology enterprise and its collection and analysis communities to optimize 

resource allocation through coordinated investments.

The IC’s emphasis on enterprise-wide solutions will benefit from expanded 

and diversified partnerships that the Community will leverage to develop and 

implement solutions that identify and anticipate capability gaps. These 

relationships will also allow the IC to harness state-of-the-art technology 

deliberately, lawfully, and ethically, in service of the Nation’s security.
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GOAL 4: Diversify, Expand, and Strengthen Partnerships 

Our unmatched network of alliances and partnerships around the world is 

our most important strategic asset—and a force multiplier for our intelligence 

mission. Our ability to leverage and work in concert with a broad set of partners 

enhances our operational capabilities, sharpens our insights, and strengthens 

the foundation for strategic relationships and common action between 

our governments. 

That is why the Intelligence Community, like other members of the national 

security community, is committed to reaffirming, expanding, and enhancing 

our alliances and partnerships across regions and issues to meet the challenges 

and seize the opportunities of the future.

The IC has traditionally been organized and postured to understand the 

plans, intentions, and impacts of nation states and, following the 9/11 attacks, 

asymmetric threats from terrorist organizations. The series of interconnected 

and transnational threats facing the United States and its allies and partners 

requires a greater and more synchronized effort to enhance intelligence 

sharing across a broader swathe of issues and with a more diverse array of 

regional and local partners.

Even as we continue to invest in existing partnerships like those with our 

Five-Eyes partners and forge new ones, the evolving set of challenges—from 

cyberattacks and climate change to pandemics and foreign malign influence—

also require investing in new and more diverse partnerships, especially 

with non-state and sub-national actors. From companies to cities to civil 

society organizations, these actors’ ideas, innovations, resources, and actions 

increasingly shape our societal, technological, and economic futures. 

The IC must rethink its approach to exchanging information and insights with 

non-state actors that either have the responsibility to act or are the entities 

best postured to do so in defense of U.S. national security interests. This is 

especially true of non-state actors positioned to detect and defend against cyber 

threats to critical infrastructure. The IC must adopt new approaches that take 

full advantage of non-state actor expertise and insights that are necessary for 

the Community to fulfill its mission. To these ends, the IC must build new and 

restructure existing collaborative mechanisms with non-state actors and find 

ways to enhance the flow of information to and from these actors in ways that 

safeguard our national security and prosperity.
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GOAL 5: Expand IC Capabilities and Expertise 

on Transnational Challenges

A highly connected and complex world means that transnational and 

transboundary challenges are having increasingly broad implications for 

U.S. interests in every region and in multiple domains. The world is facing 

more frequent and intense crises due to the effects of climate change, 

narcotics trafficking, financial crises, supply chain disruptions, corruption, 

new and recurring diseases, and emerging and disruptive technologies. 

Moreover, these cross-border challenges are increasingly interacting 

with and compounding traditional state-based political, economic, and 

security challenges with unexpected second consequences, from food and 

energy insecurity to irregular migration, and civil unrest to conflict. 

The National Security Strategy makes it clear that these intensifying 

transnational challenges are at the core of national and international security. 

Accordingly, the IC is determined to improve its ability to understand, 

anticipate, and provide early warning about transnational threats, as well as 

identify opportunities for the United States, its allies, and partners. The IC 

will recruit, develop, and integrate expertise across a range of disciplines, 

such as climate and environmental security, global public health, biosecurity, 

science, and technology, to ensure it provides decision-makers actionable 

strategic foresight. 

The IC must work across organizational boundaries and collaborate with other 

government agencies—both federal and local—to better integrate research, 

expertise, and data, and build the capacity to model and forecast potential 

cascading effects of these transnational challenges. The IC will build enduring 

partnerships with foreign partners, the private sector, academia, and others to 

leverage their unique capabilities and expertise and to augment its own ability 

to identify and prepare for challenges in both the near and long terms. The IC 

will leverage and enhance the tools, techniques, and procedures developed for 

other missions, such as counterterrorism, and apply lessons learned and best 

practices from these areas to evolving, transnational issues.
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GOAL 6: Enhance Resilience 

The IC has an expanding role in supporting the resilience of the Nation, 

its allies, and its partners, particularly in a world still emerging from the 

COVID-19 pandemic. In this increasingly complex environment, risk assumed 

by one is effectively assumed by all, resulting in the need for a multifaceted, 

layered, and distributed approach that adapts as the threat evolves. Protecting 

the IC’s and the Nation’s critical infrastructure from complex threats requires 

a deeper understanding of the implications of destabilizing trends, and 

improved early warning to improve the Nation’s recovery and response.

Resilience also includes defending the Nation’s economic security and 

prosperity. That is why the IC is expanding its role in understanding 

threats and vulnerabilities to supply chains and helping to mitigate threats 

to government and industry partners’ infrastructure. And it is why the 

Community will enhance transparency with federal, state, local, tribal, 

and territorial governments; non-state actors; and allies with a stake 

in the Nation’s critical infrastructure. The Community will normalize 

information exchanges and research and development collaboration with 

governmental and non-state actors responsible for safeguarding critical 

infrastructure and systems that are vital to the Nation’s prosperity. 

The IC’s resilience will be supported through modernization and hardening 

of its own infrastructure for adaptability, durability, redundancy, 

and interoperability. These efforts will ensure the Community has a 

continued ability to accomplish its mission and sustain its focus on the 

most important long-term threats in the face of inevitable crises such as 

pandemics, cyberattacks, climate shocks, and terrorist attacks. Equally 

important, the IC must sustain its counterintelligence capabilities and 

expertise against espionage and other damaging intelligence activities 

conducted by our foreign adversaries. Resilience will also involve 

safeguarding the IC workforce and upholding our sacred obligation 

to protect and care for officers and their families in harm’s way.
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Organization of the Intelligence Community

The Intelligence Community is an integrated enterprise comprised of 18 Executive 

Branch agencies and organizations (generally referred to as “IC elements”) that 

conduct a variety of intelligence activities and work together to promote national 

security. The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is the leader of the IC and sets 

IC strategic priorities through the National Intelligence Strategy. Each IC member 

contributes through the execution of its organization’s mission in accordance with 

statutory responsibilities.

The IC is Comprised of the Following 18 Elements:

TWO INDEPENDENT AGENCIES 

1. The Office of the Director of National 

Intelligence (ODNI)

2. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

NINE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE ELEMENTS 

The following elements also receive 

guidance and oversight from the 

Under Secretary of Defense for 

Intelligence and Security (USD I&S)—

1. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)

2. The National Security Agency (NSA)

3. The National Geospatial-Intelligence 

Agency (NGA)

4. The National Reconnaissance Office 

(NRO)

5. U.S. Air Force Intelligence

6. U.S. Navy Intelligence

7. U.S. Army Intelligence

8. U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence

9. U.S. Space Force Intelligence

SEVEN ELEMENTS OF OTHER 

DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES 

1. The Department of Energy’s Office of 

Intelligence and Counterintelligence

2. The Department of Homeland Security’s 

Office of Intelligence and Analysis and

3. The intelligence and counterintelligence 

elements of the U.S. Coast Guard 

4. The Department of Justice’s Federal 

Bureau of Investigation and

5. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s 

Office of National Security Intelligence

6. The Department of State’s Bureau 

of Intelligence and Research

7. The Department of the Treasury’s Office 

of Intelligence and Analysis

In addition to collection, analysis, and production, IC elements serve in other roles. 

Functional managers oversee and coordinate a specific intelligence discipline or 

capability and advise the DNI on the performance of their functions within and across 

IC elements. Program managers are IC element heads responsible for the execution of 

their element’s mission and budget. ODNI leads intelligence integration across these 

elements to deliver the most insightful intelligence and make the Nation more secure.
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STATE TREASURY INDEPENDENT AGENCIES

DEFENSE

JUSTICE

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