Intelligence in War

John Keegan's recent work, Intelligence in War is a remarkably good book-- wise, readable, and timely.

As a military historian he brings a sense of perspective to the realm of intelligence:

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 problems. Not only is all intelligence less than completely accurate; its value is altered by the unrolling of events.

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It has become part of the conventional wisdom that intelligence is the necessary key to success in military operations. A wise opinion would be that intelligence, while necessary, is not a sufficient means to victory. Decision in war is always the result of a fight, and in combat willpower always counts for more than foreknowledge.

Understanding this is critical to the war on terror. Since 9/11 we have acted as though good intelligence alone is all we need to defeat al Qaeda. But we define "good intelligence" as that "which resolves all doubt" and will produce "infallible solutions." In short, we are looking for a chimera.

Keegan also has some perceptive things to say about the practical realities of HUMINT in general and the obstacles we face in penetrating al Qaeda in particular.

Human intelligence may suffer from different limitations: including, first, practical difficulty in communicating with base at effective speed; and, second, inability to convince base of the importance of the information sent.
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The ability to communicate, quickly and securely, is at the heart of real-time intelligence practice. It is rarely enjoyed by the agent, that man of mystery who figures so centrally in the fictional literature of espionage. Real agents are at their most vulnerable when they attempt.... to reach their spymasters. The biographies of real agents are ultimately almost always a story of betrayal by communications failure. A high proportion of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents in France during the Second World War were discovered by German radio counter-intelligence; the same was true of those operating in Belgium.

It was one thing to get an agent into a cave in Afghanistan or a village in the Philippines. It is even harder to get his messages out in a timely fashion without blowing his cover.
The British has some success with undercover work against the IRA and other Irish terrorists. But Keegan points out that these were comparatively soft targets (!) compared to al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists.

Undercover work within the terrorist groups of Northern Ireland... has equipped British security and specialist police bodies to understand how such undercover operations are best conducted, but the practice is always more difficult than theory and will prove particularly so with religious fanatics. Even ideological terrorists, such as the extreme nationalists of the Irish republican tradition, are sometimes susceptible to temptation or threat; republican fund-raising by blackmail and extortion has drawn the movement into crime, with corrupting effect, while its 'military' ethos excludes the taking of risks that threaten the lives of "volunteers." Muslim puritans, by contrast, seem resistant to financial temptations, have demonstrated their readiness to commit suicide in furtherance of their violent aims, are committed to a code of total silence under interrogation and are bound by ties of brotherhood which have religious
strength.