Col. Jones,

You've hit upon a big issue, one that I don't have a ton of direct experience with as a zoomie. Several infantry types (mostly Army) I've spoken with, however, have a lot of complaints about intel, which boil down to essentially this (which I'm paraphrasing):

"We know much more about our AO than intel does. They work at higher levels and spend their time making powerpoints based on information from even higher up the chain and theater and national assets, very little of which benefits us. They also don't understand our needs."

That sense is a couple of years old now, so maybe things have changed, but it seems to me the best intel assets are the guys on the ground doing the hard work of COIN and the intel folks don't appreciate that. I don't know, but maybe intel should be pushed down to lower levels. I know that doing that would probably help provide small units better assistance from CFACC and other theater ISR assets as well.