I am reminded of a thing The Chieftain shared about his time in the Sandbox, where the intel weenie pulled him aside after one meeting and said “Sir, you need to ask for X capability.”
Chieftain’s mental gears grind for a moment and then he spits out “we can actually DO that?!?”
“Sir, you need to ask for X capability.” with a very large grin.
Thank you a thousand thousand times for elucidation!
It seems Admiralty Intelligence follows “typical” hierarchy of the IMS. How conventional hierarchy of the IMS is structured and organized, on the contrary to the Earth counterparts?
Do the First to Fourth Directorates have similar organizational structures with the Fifth Directorate?
What is relationship between the All-Seeing-Eye and the Black Box?
What are main differences between works of Athenaeum and Curatorial?
The basic structure of the Imperial Military Service wouldn’t appear too unfamiliar to someone familiar with Earth military structures, due to common requirements giving rise to common structures and systems. (It’s a more unified service under the Admiralty, of course, but the rank structure would at least appear familiar to an Earth observer.
It’s when you take a closer look that things get… weird.
On initial appearances, an Earthling looking at the Imperial Military Service would see an organization that appears to be, in trope terms, Mildly Military and stuffed full of Military Mavericks.
This is deceptive.
It looks this way because the sort of boot-camp break-'em-down-and-rebuild-'em discipline really doesn’t work well with eldrae psychology or culture, and because all the factors that militate quality over quantity means that the Imperial Military Service insists on exceedingly high levels of professionalism, self-discipline, and so forth from everyone.
(Those who dislike the Star Trek idea that every crewer goes through the Academy should be prepared to dislike the idea that every Serviceman there, by the time they become an E-3 - equivalent to an E-2 in Earth grades - their training amounts to a bachelor’s degree in military praxis, and that’s before any specialist training.)
And also:
…it doesn’t have a class/social distinction between officers and enlisted, merely a policy/execution one; there are Gentlemen Rankers as well as Officers and Gentlemen, and so it feels much more collegial than strictly hierarchical.
…the chain of command - which is the whole reason for the more formal structure - is more of a decentralized command web, the product of devolving authority, responsibility, and initiative as far down as it’s possible (taking Auftragstaktik to a degree that its wildest Earth enthusiasts wouldn’t have thought practical).
…and it has a very large percentage of, well, not “lifers”, but long-term careerists. It has to, given the quality-over-quantity emphasis and high degree of professionalism it demands.
All of which translates to it surprising the hell out of people when this laid-back, horrifyingly egalitarian, flashily-attired bunch suddenly pull out the kind of practical discipline and coordination in the field that would make the Wehrmacht say “Dear gods, tone it down a bit!”.
(Well, it used to. These days, it’s a galactic cliché and when someone falls into that trap senior officers across the Worlds place bets on just how kicked their asses are going to be before they realize the depth of their mistake.)
Where were we? Ah, yes, Admiralty Intelligence. So, anyway, it runs on a sort of hybrid model combining this more web-structured military semi-hierarchy with the working-group model used by other intelligence organizations. It’s still very flexible, but fits better into the overall IMS structure that way.
Yes, pretty much. There’s even some overlap with supporting working groups which belong to more than one Directorate, or cross-Directorate WGs where operations span their areas of interests.
You might say it’s the same as that between a ship and its captain, or a network and its administrator, except that when the network administrator is also an AI, the boundaries are a mite fuzzier than usual. 
The Athenaeum theme deals with the physical facilities - buildings, infrastructure, transport, networking and data storage, vaults, special storage/containment for unique artifacts, etc. - and all the other underlying necessities of running the Repository. The Curatorial theme, as their name would suggest, actually curate the collections.