By now, covert operations is a fairly old feature. Flugente’s original idea was that the player can use this to do a bit more in their games than just kill & loot sector after sector. Do more role-play. Sabotage things. Spy on the enemy.
Sadly, the game is still limited in that regard. Frankly, there isn’t that much spywork to do. Sure, we can nowadays disable SAMs by blowing them up or hacking, or try to give us a slight edge by killing of enemy generals. But overall, it’s not much. More often than not spies are used in combat, which given the underlying mechanics, can even work too well (sevenfm has done quite a lot in his releases in order to make covert killing a bit harder, among other things).
At the same time, there isn’t that much intelligence work to be done, honestly. This feature aims to begin to correct that. I have quite a lot of ideas in that regard. Coding them will take a lot of time, which is why I’ve decided to split some of the easier-to-implement ideas into this feature.

Anyway, this feature introduced a new resource: Intel. Think of intel as some sort of measure on all the spying and information gathering your forces have done.