Customer Reviews

Uncovering Ways of War: U.S. Intelligence and Foreign Military Innovation, 1918-1941 (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Part scholarly history, part political science and part policy document, Thomas Mahnken's "Uncovering Ways of War" - one of the latest editions in Cornell's distinguished Studies in Security Affairs series - is an important book for two distinct but related reasons: one historical, the other practical.

From an historical perspective, Mahnken makes a significant contribution by convincingly arguing that US military intelligence was much more competent and effective in the period between the two world wars than has previously been asserted by some of the most respected scholars in strategic studies. With an impressive attention to detail and exhaustive primary research, Mahnken demonstrates that the US attaché corps was better funded, better manned and better managed than most other major powers during that time. And far from being the career backwater it has often been depicted as, he shows that most of the officers assigned to the attaché corps were quite skilled and more than competent at their mission, with many of the services' top talents - such as Spruance, Halsey, Pershing, and March - having served in their ranks. Finally, and most importantly, Mahnken concludes that military intelligence was, on balance, successful in identifying, analyzing and correctly assessing the implications of new technology and innovative doctrine. For instance, Japanese amphibious vehicle design directly influenced the Marine Corps development of a similar craft, while German combined arms armored doctrine was recognized as revolutionary far before the Wehrmacht's stunning victories in 1939-1940. In short, the notion that the US armed forces were poorly informed on the dramatic changes to military equipment and operations that had developed since the First World War needs to be fundamentally reassessed in light of the findings clearly laid-out in this book.

From a practical perspective, "Uncovering Ways of War" makes a critical examination of the US intelligence agencies' "mixed record" during the interwar period and looks for clues to help uncover how and why the attaches succeeded in some cases and failed in others. For example, why was US intelligence able to accurately (and independently) track and assess British and German armored warfare doctrine, yet completely miss other important innovations such as the British development of radar and German advances in rocketry? Mahnken concludes that intelligence organizations are severely handicapped in their ability to detect concepts that have been ignored or already rejected by their own militaries or have yet to be employed successfully in combat or realistic war game maneuvers. However, when it comes to concepts or technologies that their parent services are actively pursuing, the intelligence apparatus has a remarkable track record of success.

As someone with an education and passion for strategic studies who has spent most of their career in strategy and analysis positions in a Fortune 500 software company, this book appealed to me on both a personal and professional level. The interwar period has long been recognized as the ultimate case study in the rapid and discontinuous change that can occur when military forces meld new technology into new organizations with an entirely new way of fighting. The fact that Mahnken has made such a dramatic and credible revision to the history of a period that has been so thoroughly researched is laudable and, indeed, impressive. As a practitioner of competitive strategy and analysis, I can attest to the fact that many of the insights the author uncovers are directly applicable to the private sector. The time-cycles in industry - especially information technology - are dramatically shorter and the nature and gravity of the competition is, needless to say, quite different; however, the framework of theorizing, experimenting and implementing new concepts or technologies is very similar. It is unfortunate that most people in strategy and analysis roles in industry avoid or are completely ignorant of books like this and others ("The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War" by James Wirtz is another excellent and highly relevant work in the Cornell series that is well worth reading). There is much to be learned from the experience - both positive and negative - of government and military intelligence and planning agencies throughout history as "Uncovering Ways of War" lucidly demonstrates.

What constitutes success and failures in military intelligence (M.I.), and why do military intelligence agencies succeed and why fail? These questions come to light in the public most often when there are apparently blatant intelligence failures, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the nuclear programs of India or Pakistan, and most recently and painfully, the terrorist attacks of September 11th.

"Uncovering Ways of War" addresses these and other questions by using the context of the interwar period (generally considered the twenty-year stretch, 1919 to 1939. between the two world wars) and builds a series of case studies that describe U.S. military intelligence efforts to study and learn from Japanese, German and British military experimentation and innovation.

The case study approach that the book uses is a wonderful device for demonstrating both the good and sometimes poor performances of the U.S. military intelligence system. It highlights the adept work of a number of military attaches (who collectively were the strength of U.S. intelligence capabilities at that time) whose professionalism provided the United States with insights that contributed significantly to some of the concepts of operation that helped win the war (e.g., learning from Japanese amphibious operations shaped USMC concepts.) "Uncovering Ways of War" also highlights how institutional deficiencies can limit the effectiveness of military intelligence activities. For example, there was little institutional impetus for the United States regarding Germany's ballistic missile development, British use of radar and Japanese night time naval surface warfare concepts. The case study approach highlighting these "intelligence failures" gets the point across behind the old intelligence addage: "I can't tell you about things that you don't ask about," meaning that institutional preferences for certain things lead to other things being overlooked.

Subtly, the book describes for the reader how the military intelligence process works. Some of it is detective work - what you don't see is sometimes more important that what you do see. Another important task is sleuthing: piecing together the information that you have and don't have and assessing the possible outcomes. Some of it is flat-out spying; others is just "networking" amongst peers while abroad. The hardest part of learning about M.I. is how some activities fail and others succeed comes through to the reader in discussion of how the U.S. military institutionally processed the information received. In some areas, the U.S. had an inclination to learn and adapt based on what foreign militaries were doing because those areas tended to be ones in which the United States believed to be important to future warfare. In areas in which the U.S. tended to have limited success or perhaps outright failure, these areas were deemed of lesser importance. Mahnken correctly avoids addressing the question that naturally follows, which is "how do or should militaries determine which attempts at innovation are important and which are not?", but instead highlights the crux of the matter: the determinant of success or failure depends on the ability of the perceiving institution to adapt to changes in warfare.

Most historians have given the pre-World War II U.S. intelligence community a rough time. It is portrayed as primitive, secondary, and lacking influence. The author works to dismiss many of these perceptions.

By using hundreds of original documents culled from the national archives the author's attempts to paint a picture of inter-war intelligence that was more comprehensive and insightful then often given credit far. The book is very tightly structured as the author moves from covering the analysis of Japan, Germany and England. Each chapter has a pre-view and a review that sums up what has been said. The use of original sources is first rate, the author obviously spend hundreds of hours sifting through old intelligence documents. The only down side is the book tends to read a bit dry in parts, but everything is well cited.

The author makes a convincing case that the military services each had a robust intelligence collections system based on their attaché corps. What the author does not touch on is how there was little strategic intelligence above the military services and that the military services rarely ever worked together to paint a common picture of potential threats. The U.S. entered World War II without a strategic intelligence capability to conduct collection or analysis.

If you are looking for a description of the inter-war attaché system, this work can not be beaten.

In the period between WWI and WWII the U.S. Army and Navy struggled to maintain their military capabilities in the face of drastic budget cuts, manpower limitations, and, in the case of the Navy, treaty limitations. This book fills an important gap in the story of this struggle in its account of the efforts by the Office of Naval Intelligence (est. 1882) and the army's Military Intelligence Division to track military developments, especially technical innovations of selected countries. The most important countries singled out for such attention were Japan, Germany, and the UK. The U.S. largely chose to ignore the Soviet Union in this period.

That the both the Army and the Navy were able to acquire reasonably good intelligence on both Japanese and German technical innovations and military doctrine was do primarily to an extremely effective military attaché system supplemented especially in the case of Japan by Communication Intelligence (COMINT). Again especially in the case of Japan the intelligence that was gathered was often ignored or otherwise discounted by senior officers who allowed their own mindsets and ethnocentrism to override good information. As always intelligence is only as good as the system it serves.

To understand the drivers in this period of both U.S. intelligence programs and military innovations, this reader would recommend that these books should be read as well: Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge University Press 1996); Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers (Cornell University 1998); and Agents of Innovation (Naval Institute Press 2008). These readings will flesh out the background for the activities this book so well describes.