Amazon.com: Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda: John Keegan: Books

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

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.

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

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