Yes, but it still is a good piece of information to build on.
Military intelligence is similar to trying to learn about far away stars and planets. You extrapolate as much as you can from very limited information. You can be pretty sure of anything you directly extrapolate from things you can prove. You can assume you are probably right, but not certain of anything you extrapolate from extrapolations. And anything beyond that is proposing multiple possibilities, and trying to filter between them.
If you can find direct proof of something you suspected three or four layers of extrapolation down, it shows that all those layers above are probably correct. Which frees you up to look down certain paths more confident you are on the right track, or tells you if you are looking in the wrong places. It also gives you the confidence to bet people's lives on that piece of intelligence being correct, which is what makes it useful and not just a classified circlejerk.
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Yes, but it still is a good piece of information to build on.
Military intelligence is similar to trying to learn about far away stars and planets. You extrapolate as much as you can from very limited information. You can be pretty sure of anything you directly extrapolate from things you can prove. You can assume you are probably right, but not certain of anything you extrapolate from extrapolations. And anything beyond that is proposing multiple possibilities, and trying to filter between them.
If you can find direct proof of something you suspected three or four layers of extrapolation down, it shows that all those layers above are probably correct. Which frees you up to look down certain paths more confident you are on the right track, or tells you if you are looking in the wrong places. It also gives you the confidence to bet people's lives on that piece of intelligence being correct, which is what makes it useful and not just a classified circlejerk.