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

the greatest exploits of empire building. Not all; the Mongols preferred terror, counting on the word of their approach to dissolve resistance. If duplicity enhanced their terrible reputation, so much the better. In 1258, appearing out of the desert, Hulagu promised the Caliph, spiritual leader of Islam, ruler of the Muslim empire, his life if he would surrender Baghdad. As soon as he submitted, he was strangled and the horde moved on. The Mongols, however, as a wide-ranging nomad people, also knew a great deal and, like all nomads, when not on campaign, were always ready to trade. Markets are principal centres for the exchange of information as well as goods, and it was often a demand of marauders—by the Huns of the Romans, frequently by the Vikings—that they should be allowed to set up markets on the borders of settled lands. Commerce was commonly the prelude to predation. Trade may follow the flag, as the Victorians comfortably affirmed, but it was quite as often the other way about.
    Empires in the ascendant, to whom nomads were an irritation rather than a threat, adopted a different attitude. They gave and withheld permission to trade and hold markets on their borders as a deliberate means of local control. 1 They also pursued active “forward” policies. The pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty not only constructed a deep belt of forts on the border between settled Egypt and Nubia but also created a frontier force and issued it with standing orders. Its duty was to prevent Nubian incursions into the Nile Valley but also to patrol into the desert and report. One report, preserved on papyrus at Thebes, reads, “We have found the track of 32 men and 3 donkeys”; nearly 4,000 years old, it might have been written yesterday.
    Ancient Egypt’s border problem was perfectly manageable. The narrowness of the Nile Valley, amid the surrounding desert, necessitated the minimum of protective measures. The Roman empire, by contrast, was encircled on all sides by enemies, who might come by sea as well as land, and needed to be defended by elaborate fixed fortifications as well as mobile armies. At the height of their power, Rome’s rulers preferred active to passive defence and maintained strong striking forces at strategic points generally behind rather than on the frontiers. It was only as their power declined and that of the outsiders grew that the border defences were thickened.
    Whether on the decline or in the ascendant, Rome devoted great care to the gathering of intelligence. Caesar’s conquest of Gaul was as much the result of his superior use of intelligence as the legions’ superior fighting power. He took great trouble to assemble economic and regional intelligence, just as Alexander had done, and he was a coldly cynical assessor of the Gauls’ ethnic defects, their boastfulness, volatility, unreliability, lack of resilience; he was equally cold in exploiting the advantage his knowledge of their weaknesses afforded. He accumulated a detailed ethnographic knowledge of their tribal characteristics and divisions, which he used ruthlessly to defeat them. Quite apart from this strategic intelligence, however, he also had a highly developed system of tactical intelligence, using short- and medium-range units of scouts to reconnoitre up to thirty kilometres in advance of his main body, to spy out the land and the enemy’s dispositions when he proceeded on campaign. It was an important principle that the leaders of these units had immediate and direct access to his person.
    Caesar did not invent the Roman system of intelligence. It was the product of several hundred years of military experience. Evidence for that is already given, by the time of the Gallic wars (first century B . C .), by the existence of established terms for the different categories of reconnaissance troops:
procursatores,
who performed close reconnaissance immediately ahead of the army;
exploratores,
longer-range scouts; and
speculatores,
who spied