Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda - Hardcover

Keegan, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375400532 ISBN 13: 9780375400537

Publisher: Knopf, 2003

Synopsis

In fiction, the spy is a glamorous figure whose secrets make or break peace, but, historically, has intelligence really been a vital step to military victories? In this breakthrough study, the preeminent war historian John Keegan goes to the heart of a series of important conflicts to develop a powerful argument about military intelligence.

In his characteristically wry and perceptive prose, Keegan offers us nothing short of a new history of war through the prism of intelligence. He brings to life the split-second decisions that went into waging war before the benefit of aerial surveillance and electronic communications. The English admiral Horatio Nelson was hot on the heels of Napoleon’s fleet in the Mediterranean and never knew it, while Stonewall Jackson was able to compensate for the Confederacy’s disadvantage in firearms and manpower with detailed maps of the Appalachians. In the past century, espionage and decryption have changed the face of battle: the Japanese surprise attack at the Battle of the Midway was thwarted by an early warning. Timely information, however, is only the beginning of the surprising and disturbing aspects of decisions that are made in war, where brute force is often more critical.

Intelligence in War is a thought-provoking work that ranks among John Keegan’s finest achievements.

About this title

About the Author

John Keegan’s books include The First World War, The Battle for History, The Face of Battle, War and Our World, The Mask of Command, Fields of Battle and A History of Warfare. He is the defense editor of The Daily Telegraph (London). He lives in Wiltshire, England.

Reviews

The age of war with big armies is past; we live in the age of big intelligence -- secret organizations with huge budgets running vast infrastructures for collecting information, some of it stolen, and for confounding foes, sometimes violently. The Cold War was mainly fought on the intelligence battlefield, and victory in the new war on terror will depend little on the awesome American capacity to destroy the works of man, so evident in the first Gulf War, and depend much on outwitting a clandestine enemy who travels light and moves in secret.

Americans have a mixed record in intelligence warfare. We gave as good as we got in the struggle with the Soviet Union, which never fielded a big new weapon system that caught American intelligence by surprise, and never made a feint abroad -- in the Congo, say, or in Cuba -- that we did not soon contain. Exactly who won the counterintelligence war is still not quite clear; the Russians had an uncanny ability to recruit spies in the United States and at high levels in the governments of our allies, but it did them little good over the long haul, and our own feats of technical intelligence collection often reached deeper than even spies could go. The intelligence history of the Cold War is still unfolding, and a final verdict must wait.

The war in Vietnam, on the other hand, represented a stinging intelligence defeat. The CIA maintained a huge station in Saigon, was deeply involved in programs to root out the Vietcong cadres in rural villages in the South and worked closely with Saigon's intelligence arm to run operations against the North (useless and ineffectual) and to handle agents targeted on the National Liberation Front (few and paltry). The CIA's major contribution to the war effort was to monitor military progress in three arenas -- control of the population in the South, interdiction of men and supplies from the North and attrition of Hanoi's will to continue the war. The first two were largely a matter of compiling numbers, which were consistently interpreted at the White House level as looking good. Gauging North Vietnam's determination to fight on was anybody's guess because the agency never recruited a spy in Hanoi. Our opponents, however, recruited still uncounted hundreds of spies in the South -- so many that it is probable no American who dealt routinely with the Vietnamese ever went a whole working day without speaking to an agent for the other side.

The dismal performance of American intelligence in Vietnam ought to raise a warning about Washington's current plan to bring democracy to the Middle East at the point of a gun, but it receives scant or no attention from John Keegan in his interesting new book, Intelligence in War. It is the age of big armies (and navies) that fascinates Keegan, and his effort to weigh seriously the importance of intelligence in combat is original and provocative. He proceeds with a casebook method -- recounting a significant battle or campaign and analyzing the role of intelligence in success or failure. The range is wide -- from Lord Nelson's successful pursuit and defeat of a French fleet off the coast of Egypt in 1798 to Stonewall Jackson's brilliant campaign in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862 and the German assault on Britain in 1944 with a revolutionary new tool of war, cruise and ballistic missiles. In each case, intelligence played a key role, but in none, Keegan argues, was it decisive.

"Decision in war is always the result of a fight," Keegan concludes in characteristically vigorous prose, "and in combat willpower always counts for more than foreknowledge. Let those who disagree show otherwise." The pugnacity of this bald claim is breathtaking, and the challenge it poses to intelligence professionals -- writers and clandestine practitioners alike -- will make Intelligence in War an object of study and debate for many years to come. But having said that, I ought to add that rarely have I quarreled more, in the reading, with a book I admired, or admired more a book with which I have quarreled.

The admiration is easily described. Keegan has a gift for narrative, and he is a master of his material. It is the big wars of history that interest him, with their classic encounters of big armies deciding the fate of nations -- especially World War II, which he seems to know as if he had himself fought in every theater. His tales are well-chosen, told with economy and filled with dramatic incident. The argument is temperate, reasonable and always raises questions of importance even where I find myself resisting Keegan's conclusions.

My quarrels are of two kinds. The first is that Keegan's own accounts sometimes seem to contradict his claim and argue for the primacy of intelligence in war. Finding the French fleet was the challenge facing Lord Nelson in 1798. Hard fighting was required to send the ships to the bottom, but finding them was the decisive thing -- how can the naval victory be separated from the intelligence victory? Much the same might be said of Keegan's treatment of the battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914. The German Admiral Graf von Spee was told on the night of December 6 that the British base on the islands was defended only by a single warship, the Canopus. The report was true when he received it, but the following morning when von Spee sailed to the attack he was met by a much larger, just-arrived British force that sank four German ships, killing von Spee and 2,000 German crewmen. How can von Spee's intelligence failure be separated from his defeat in battle? It wasn't British willpower that carried the day, but superiority of force -- something von Spee needed to know and could have known, but did not.

My second quarrel is with Keegan's failure to remember his Clausewitz, and in particular the axiom that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Winning battles while losing wars is common in history. World War II ended in a complete military victory for the Allies, but it was followed by a "peace" in name only after the Soviet Union planted its armies in a third of Europe. How we won the war but lost Poland for 50 years is best explained as an intelligence failure. A still clearer example is what happened to the United States in Vietnam, a disaster that ought to put us on notice of the real danger that the war on terror might end the same way.

The mastery of detail and the feel for his material that are so evident when Keegan is writing about the big wars and big armies of the 20th century disappear when he turns his attention briefly to al Qaeda at the end of his book. Success, he ventures, will require "brave individuals, fluent in difficult languages" who can "pass as native members of other cultures . . . and win acceptance by their own societies' enemies." What can Keegan be thinking? It sounds as if he's been watching old movies about British secret agents wearing berets and carrying baguettes while cycling through occupied France. The CIA would never dream of trying to penetrate al Qaeda with Ivy Leaguers wearing kafiyehs.

The real challenge in the war on terror is one we got right in the war against Nazi Germany and failed badly at in the war in Vietnam -- helping the locals do what they want to do on their own. The free French, the partisans in Yugoslavia, the Poles and the Czechs all desperately wanted the United States to win because our enemy was their enemy. In Vietnam, our locals were defeated by their locals, who just wanted us to leave. The war on terror is something of an afterthought in Keegan's book, added because he believes intelligence is likely to be the decisive weapon. He is surely right about that. But victory won't come from big intelligence, the kind Americans are best at -- gathering so much information and acting on it in so timely a manner that the terrorists will be nailed as soon as they step out the door. Winning this contest requires an older kind of intelligence: the kind that grows out of deep knowledge of place, language, culture and people, and then getting the basic question right -- knowing what the locals want to do on their own and putting that first.

Reviewed by Thomas Powers.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

According to Keegan (The First World War), there is a good reason why "military intelligence" is so often described as an oxymoron: inflicting and enduring destruction often has no room for reflection, just retaliation. But retaliation tends toward attrition, and attrition is expensive; thought, for Keegan, offers a means of reducing war's price, taking commanders and armies inside enemy decision-action loops, helping identify enemy weakness, warning of enemy intentions or disclosing enemy strategy. Keegan offers a series of case studies in the operational significance of intelligence, ranging from Admiral Nelson's successful pursuit of the French fleet in 1805, through Stonewall Jackson's possession of detailed local knowledge in his 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign, to the employment of electronic intelligence in the naval operations of WWI and its extension and refinement during WWII. For that conflict, Keegan expands his analysis, discussing intelligence aspects of the German invasion of Crete, the U.S. victory at Midway and the defeat of the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. To balance an account heavily focused on technology, he incorporates a chapter on the importance of human intelligence in providing information on the Nazi V-weapons. Keegan concludes with a discussion of post-1945 military intelligence that stresses the difference between a Cold War in which the central targets of intelligence gathering were susceptible to concrete, scientific methods, and more recent targets that, lacking form and organization, require penetration through understanding. That paradigm shift in turn is part of Keegan's general argument that intelligence data does not guarantee success. This book shows that the British need not have lost on Crete; that the American victory at Midway was not predetermined. At a time when armed forces tout the "information revolution," Keegan writes in the belief that the outcomes of war are ultimately the result of fighting.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Results in war, in the last resort, are an affair of body, not mind; of physical force, not plans or intelligence." This is renowned military historian Keegan's analysis of 1942's Battle of Midway. Discounting the value of military intelligence is just one of the paradoxical conclusions drawn in the eight case studies comprising this work. With his usual shrewdness about the highly confusing world of war, Keegan subtly weaves into his narrative the disruptions that seem to hex intelligence collection and analysis. In only one case does Keegan grant primacy to a commander's use of intelligence--Stonewall Jackson's 1862 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. In all of the other examples, Keegan ascribes the outcome to another factor: at Midway, it was luck; during the 1941 invasion of Crete, it was "berserk" German determination. Within each episode, Keegan uncovers a communication breakdown, an analytical mistake, or a tactical blunder that turned even golden military information to dross. Throughout, Keegan projects a deep empathy for battle victims, who were swept away by the thousands. This humane sensibility, on display in book after book, explains why the author is the most popular, and perhaps the best, contemporary writer of military history. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Knowledge of the Enemy
Strategic Intelligence

"No 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 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 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 deeper within enemy territory. The Roman army also made use of local informers (indices), prisoners of war, deserters and kidnapped civilians.2 If not the inventor of the system, Caesar may, nevertheless, be credited with professionalising it and institutionalising some of its most important features, notably the right of direct access by scouts to the commander in person. He also, when necessary, went to see for himself, a dangerous but sometimes essential intervention. Ultimately, the crisis of the empire in the fourth century required the almost continuous presence of one of the emperors (there were latterly two, sometimes more) with the army, a contingency that, at Adrianople in 378, led to his death on the field, progressive disaster and the empire’s collapse. The emperor Valens had been in close touch with his exploratores on the morning of the catastrophe, and they had correctly reported the enemy’s strength and dispositions. What ensued substantiates a profound and enduring truth, that “military and political survival does not depend solely on good intelligence.”3

Systems do not, however, much change, unless circumstances change, and there was little circumstantial change throughout the five centuries of the Roman Empire’s greatness (first century b.c.–fourth century a.d.). Reconnaissance throughout the period was by hearing and sight, communication by word of mouth or written despatch, speed of transmission at fastest by that of a fleet-footed horse. What was true of Rome remained true of the world for another 1,500 years.

The collapse of imperial government in the West in the fifth cen-tury a.d. entailed also the collapse of organised intelligence services and such ancillary services as the publication of guidebooks and cartography (though Roman maps are strange to us, since they usually took the form of route-charts rather than two-dimensional displays of territorial features, their disappearance was a serious loss to campaigning commanders). Worse by far were the progressive degradation and eventual and complete decay of the road system. The Roman roads were built primarily for the purpose of rapid all-weather military movement and were maintained by the legions, which were as much engineering as fighting units. The dissolution of the Roman army led rapidly to the cessation of engineering work on such key elements of the Roman transport system as bridges and fords. The road network, of course, had not existed during the period of Roman conquest; Caesar had made his way through Gaul by interrogating merchants and locals and impressing guides. It was the roads, however, that had allowed Rome to defend its empire for five centuries and the break-up of their solid surfaces made long-range campaigning at speed impossible.

That was not important to the barbarian rulers who succeeded the Romans, since they sought no more than to maintain local authority. When, however, the attempt began again, under the Carolingian emperors, to reestablish wide imperial domains in the eighth and ninth centuries, the absence of roads was a serious impediment to reconquest. Things got even worse with the attempt to penetrate the Germanic regions which lay beyond the old Roman borders. In those wildernesses there were neither roads nor easily obtainable intelligence.

Some picture of the difficulties confronting medieval campaigners is conveyed by the experience of the Teutonic Knights in their effort to conquer and Christianise the Baltic shore in the fourteenth century. The Teutonic Knights, a crusading order dedicated to the conversion of the Prussians and Lithuanians, were wealthy and highly organised. They operated from a chain of strong castles built on the Baltic coast, in which they were secure from attack and could organise crusading expeditions into the hinterland. One of their principal campaigning grounds was a belt of unsettled land a hundred miles wide between East Prussia and Lithuania proper, a maze of marsh, lakes, small rivers, thickets and forest through which it was almost impossible to find a way. Local scouts were recruited by the Knights to blaze trails and report. Their intelligence was collected in a military guidebook, Die Lithauischen Wegeberichte (The Lithuanian Route Guide), compiled between 1384 and 1402. It explains, for example, that Knights wishing to get to Vandziogala from Samogitia, both near modern Kaunas in Lithuania, a distance of about thirty-five miles by today’s roads, had first to cross a patch of scrub, by a track, then a large ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375400532
• ISBN 13: 9780375400537
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 387