Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy Read Free Page A

control of an opponent’s counter-espionage service. Even what they honestly offer may be wrong or only half true. Intercepts appear more dependable, but they may be bogus. Even if not, they can tell only part of the truth. Henry Stimson, American Secretary of State, rightly warned of the difference between reading a man’s mail and reading his mind.
4.
Interpretation
. Most intelligence comes in scraps. For a complete canvas to be assembled, the scraps have to be pieced together into whole cloth. That often requires the effort of many experts, who will have difficulty in explaining to each other what they understand by individual clues and who will disagree over their relative importance. Ultimately the assembly of a complete picture may require a superior to make an inspired guess, which may or may not be correct.
5.
Implementation
. Intelligence officers work at a subordinate level; just as they have to be convinced of the reliability of their raw material, so also they have to convince the decision-makers, political chiefs and commanders in the field of the reliability of their submissions. There is no such thing as the golden secret, the piece of “pure intelligence,” which will resolve all doubt and guide a general or admiral to an infallible solution of his operational problem. Not only is all intelligence less than completely accurate; its value is altered by the unrolling of events. As Moltke the elder, architect of Prussia’s brilliant victories over Austria and France in the nineteenth century and perhaps the supreme military intellectual of all time, memorably observed, “No plan survives the first five minutes of encounter with the enemy.” He might as truthfully have said that no intelligence assessment, however solid its foundation, fully survives the test of action.
    This book is a collection of case studies, beginning in the age of sail, when the supreme intelligence difficulty was to acquire information of value at any lapse of time which made it useful, and ending in the modern age, when intelligence of all sorts abounds but its volume threatens to overwhelm the power of the human mind to evaluate its worth. Its theme is that intelligence in war, however good, does not point out unerringly the path to victory. Victory is an elusive prize, bought with blood rather than brains. Intelligence is the handmaiden, not the mistress, of the warrior.

CHAPTER ONE
     

     
    Knowledge of the Enemy
     
    STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE
     
    N O WAR can be conducted successfully without early and good intelligence,” wrote the great Duke of Marlborough. George Washington agreed: “The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further argued.” No sensible soldier or sailor or airman does argue. From the earliest times, military leaders have always sought information of the enemy, his strengths, his weaknesses, his intentions, his dispositions. Alexander the Great, presiding at the Macedonian court as a boy while his father, Philip, was absent on campaign, was remembered by visitors from the lands he would later conquer for his persistence in questioning them about the size of the population of their territory, the productiveness of the soil, the course of the routes and rivers that crossed it, the location of its towns, harbours and strong places, the identity of the important men. The young Alexander was assembling what today would be called economic, regional or strategic intelligence, and the knowledge he accumulated served him well when he began his invasion of the Persian empire, enormous in extent and widely diverse in composition. Alexander triumphed because he brought to his battlefields a ferocious fighting force of tribal warriors personally devoted to the Macedonian monarchy; but he also picked the Persian empire to pieces, attacking at its weak points and exploiting its internal divisions.
    The strategy of divide and conquer, usually based on regional intelligence, underlay many of