I can only speak to this from the historical perspective, but crossflow with intel has always been difficult for the Army. In Vietnam, to use one example, info usually flowed up the chain but often didn't come back down to the local units unless some sort of unofficial arrangement was made. There were cases (one occurred near FSB Ripcord) where a unit took serious casualties when they were hit by an NVA unit that a SigInt unit on Ripcord knew about but couldn't tell the local battalion about. After that unofficial arrangements were made, but officially intel continued to flow up and settle. This was a continuous problem with MACV/SOG intel as well, which went straight to the higher command levels and often never made its way back to units that could have acted on the information (later in the war some of the FOB commanders made the same accommodation with local units...and the fiction of a friendly guerrilla unit was created to facilitate the information shift).

It's great to talk about knowing the enemy, and in many cases units do. But their focus can be restricted by real or artificial terrain considerations (don't look behind the bamboo curtain...there are no NVA in Laos or Cambodia - just one example) or by operational concerns. Having a cell that focuses on just intel (be it local gathering, collating information, or what have you) might be worth at least trying. IMO, anyhow.