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

By John Keegan

A masterly look at the value and limitations of intelligence in the conduct of war from the premier military historian of our time, John Keegan.

Intelligence gathering is an immensely complicated and vulnerable endeavor. And it often fails. Until the invention of the telegraph and radio, information often traveled no faster than a horse could ride, yet intelligence helped defeat Napoleon. In the twentieth century, photo analysts didn’t recognize Germany’s V-2 rockets for what they were; on the other hand, intelligence helped lead to victory over the Japanese at Midway. In Intelligence in War, John Keegan illustrates that only when paired with force has military intelligence been an effective tool, as it may one day be in besting al-Qaeda.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 28, 2003
• ISBN: 9781400041930

Reviews for Intelligence in War

[k.g.budge · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Written shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and so a bit tentative on al-Quaeda and developments in Iraq. Otherwise quite good.Keegan starts with anecdotes, mostly about his occasional brushes with (more or less) friendly intelligence organizations. including the first female head of MI6 (England isn't what it used to be) and the CIA (in the person of William Casey, who invited him for a secret interview simply because he liked Keegan's books, but who Keegan found quite unintelligible -- he later learned Casey's colleagues called him The Mumbler.) Keegan also recounts an attempt at recruitment that he refused to touch with a ten-foot pole.Keegan is skeptical of intelligence, particularly when it gets confused with subversion. To be more precise, he does not think much of subversion; he thinks much better of intelligence, which he believes can be an honorable activity, but points out that good intelligence accomplishes a lot less than some folks suppose. You still need the mailed fist.His case studies are interesting. The first is the pursuit by Nelson of the French expedition to Egypt. Nelson got caught in a terrible storm, lost touch with his frigates -- the scouting ships of the age of sail -- astutely guessed that Napoleon was headed east, double back on Sicily after Napoleon seized Malta, raced east agaIn and managed to reach Alexandria before Napoleon, wondered if Turkey might be the target, contacted British diplomats who sent him back to Egypt, caught Napoleon's fleet and destroyed it. Not, however, before Napoleon's army was ashore, so while Nelson saved India, Napoleon still caused a lot of mischief. And history would have been quite different if Napoleon's 30,000 troops had been intercepted at sea in their transports, guarded by the weaker French fleet.The second case study is Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. Here the crucial intelligence was decent maps, and only Jackson had them. The U.S. was surprisingly poorly mapped in the 1860s, even in the East; the Army had concerned itself mostly with coastal mapping. Jackson took advantage of the much superior knowledge of the terrain given him by local mapmakers to keep the Union forces guessing. But, at that, he was nearly caught; intelligence is not a sure key to victory after all.Wireless intelligence gets a good share of the book, beginning with the Emden and Scharnhorst's forces in the First World War, continuing with Crete and Midway, and concluding with the Battle of the Atlantic. The British knew more or less just what was going to hit them at Crete but lost anyway; the intelligence was just confused enough that Freyberg guarded against a sea landing that was not, in fact, much of a threat, and didn't quite hold onto Maleme airfield. At that, the Germans won only through sheer recklessness that meant massive casualties among some of their best troops. Midway is the quintessential intelligence victory; yet it could easily have gone hte other way. Keegan makes the provocative suggestion that intelligence actually delayed victory in the Battle of the Atlantic by keeping the British from coming to grips with the U-boats, and defeating them, earlier. He points out that careful statistical analysis shows, not only that the British never came anywhere as close to being starved out as in the First World War, but were never really in any danger of being starved out at all. Huh.There is a fascinating discussion of the wealth of human intelligence that tipped the British off to the V-program -- and the great reluctance to believe the V-2 was for real. Fortunately for Britain; the V-1 was a surprisingly cheap and effective weapon, and the diversion of so much resources to the expensive and relatively ineffective V-2 was all to the benefit of the British.Keegan thinks SOE was a bad idea all around, being based on Churchill's experience with guerrilla wars in the Empire that simply wasn't applicable in Europe under the Nazis. I think he convinced me.al-Quaeda: Intelligence alone ain't gonna win that war. And we're really bad at that kind of intelligence. Well, it's interesting this was already clear to Keegan in 2003.Two thumbs up.Top Profile Display posts from previous: Sort by Post new topic Reply to topic Page 1 of 1 [ 1 post ] Board index » Primary Sources-the believers, the gullible and the greedy. » Books -- Good and BadAll times are UTC - 5 hours [ DST ]Who is onlineUsers browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests

[marshapetry · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Pretty interesting book, but it was a lot of history with some intelligence mixed in. That's OK - I guess the author felt he had to explain each situation setup before explaining what intelligence was involved but, as a book, it made it hard to stay interested when I really wanted to learn about intelligence. Oh well, still pretty good

[randystafford · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My reactions to reading this book in 2004.The thesis of this book is pretty straightforward: that intelligence is only valuable if you have the military strength to use it. A corollary is that you must have the will to use it and your strength. Keegan points out that wars are won by doing and not the thinking of intelligence work. (This book makes the distinction between "espionage" -- a peace time activity usually involving human agents and often directed at enemy agents -- and intelligence, the wartime gathering of information to be used in planning and conducting military operations.) I agree with Keegan that, between enemies of similar will, the militarily stronger will prevail no matter what the relative strengths of their intelligence work is. To prove his point, Keegan looks at several battles. Admiral Horatio Nelson worked as his own intelligence analyst in pursuing Napoleon's fleet before he eventually destroyed it at Aboukir. His intelligence was limited but eventually he found the fleet and destroyed it. In a chapter I must admit I didn't completely understand the relevance of, Stonewall Jackson uses detailed topographical knowledge, supplied by amateur cartographer Jedediah Hotchkiss, of the Shenandoah Valley in 1862 to keep a much larger force of three Union armies at bay. The increased speed of communications and intelligence brought by radio is examined in the struggle of the British and Germans in the waters of the South Pacific and South Atlantic in the latter part of 1914. That speed of communications and the vast web of British cable and radio communications didn't help them much in finding the East Asiatic Squadron. When they did, the German force defeated them soundly off the coast of Chile in the Battle of Coronel. It was only luck by which the British encountered that victorious force off the Falkland Islands and defeated it soundly. Two case studies from World War II provide Keegan's strongest evidence coming, as they do, from the Allied forces breaking enemy codes. The German invasion of Crete stands as almost the perfect possession of intelligence. The defender of Crete possessed advanced timing of the invasion, knowledge of the size of the enemy force and where it would land. The Germans still won, narrowly. Keegan thinks it was mostly because of a difference in the will of the forces involved. While the New Zealand forces were good (Rommel considered New Zealand soldiers the best in the world, bar none), their commander did not press the issue when he should have, thinking he could retreat from a disputed airfield, regroup, and retake it. He should have held it from the beginning. Keegan does say the German victory may have also been helped by General Freyberg (a respected, much decorated combat veteran) holding troops in reserve for a amphibious landing that never occurred. Ambiguities in intelligence analysis didn't make it clear if particular units would try an airborne or seaborne assault. The Battle of Midway comes across not as an American victory due to intelligence but luck. While the American navy used intelligence from code breaking to determine where the Japanese forces were and to bring battle to them, the battle itself was going quite badly for the American until, in the space of five minutes, various incidents and decisions worked together to allow the Americans to sink three Japanese carriers. Keegan argues that, even if the United States had lost the Battle of Midway, the Japanese would have still lost the war. The Battle of the Atlantic was shortened by Ultra intercepts, but it was not won. Keegan argues that the U-Boats were bound to loose because they had to take the battle to the convoys and numbers and tactics then worked against them. In terms of shipping tonnage and ships sank, the Battle of the Atlantic didn't put much of a dent in Allied war efforts though many lives were lost. In a chapter that is not about a battle per se, Keegan talks about the intelligence efforts of the British against the V-1 and V-2 rocket programs. Keegan says that the V-1 program could have mounted a serious threat against the staging areas for the Normandy invasion. The British had a wealth of human intelligence, some actual pieces from test flights, and photo intelligence. However, the very newness of the German programs (not only was the V-2 revolutionary, so was the V-1), personal disputes between the scientific advisors to Winston Churchill, and having to sort out two novel weapons programs kept the British from doing anything about the threat until the weapons actually started being used. Even then, British bombing raids on the launch sites only set the program back a bit. Ultimately, it was German decisions which doomed the program's to failure despite the brilliant innovations they represented. (Keegan makes the point that not only is the V-2 ancestor to today's ICBM, but so was its mobile launch vehicle which made the location of the V-2s much harder to pin down -- they only needed to be at a launch site for less than an hour. The V-1 program belonged to the Luftwaffe (the Luftwaffe was notoriously lax about its communications and most of the Ultra intercepts were from them; the Gestapo had little if any of their communications intercepted), and the V-2 program belonged to the Army. They both competed for the same resources. The Germans should have invested their efforts into the V-1 program which was more effective and could have significantly delayed the Normandy landings. As it was, it was those landings which allowed the overrunning of the V-1 bases. The only post-World War Two battle Keegan covers is the Falklands War in which the Argentineans suffered from a lack of intelligence even worse than the British (who knew little about the Argentinean navy or air force). Keegan does mention the various SAS missions into Argentina itself. In relation to the special forces, Keegan does interestingly, if briefly, talk about the British being, via commandoes and the SOE, the fathers of all modern special forces. They derive from the British tradition of Englishmen going native and commanding local irregular forces (usually natives that were defeated by the British) in various Imperial provinces. Keegan sees them as effective. However, Churchill, particularly enamored with irregular and guerilla warfare after his Boer War experience (he was a great admirer of the Boers and a personal friend to some after the war), didn't realize that not every occupier would respond with the relevant restraint that the British did in that war. Keegan seems to imply that the British fostering of guerilla movements created a doctrine and body of practice to draw on that created the nasty, unrestrained guerilla wars in Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Israel, and other places. Keegan sees special forces as effective but limited in their knowledge of local customs and conditions. The fostering by the Special Operations Executive of resistance movements in various Nazi occupied countries was to rectify that, to "set Europe ablaze". However, in retrospect, it doesn't seem to have been militarily effective though it helped the morale of the occupied and their self-esteem. In fact, Keegan sees them mostly as arming Communist groups that eventually took over Yugloslavia, almost prevailed in Greece, and killed many in France after the country was liberated. He argues that intelligence and subversion techniques should not be coupled as they are in the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization influenced by its older British peers and the experience of the Office of Strategic Services. Keegan starts out the book with a handy five vital steps of intelligence use: acquisition, delivery, acceptance, interpretation, and implementation (an overlooked step -- people who can act on the information have to be persuaded of its worth). Keegan also talks interestingly about his own experience with the intelligence community -- which he tried to avoid lest it complicate his life as a journalist (He was a defense editor for the Daily Telegraph.) or be given misinformation. There are some things I would have liked covered better. I think Keegan is too hard on the lack of real significance of human espionage though I agree with the comments in his bibliography that many books on intelligence are filled with speculation, gossip, and self-aggrandizement. He never really says what he thinks about the link between intelligence and the war on Al-Qaeda though he says intelligence there will require a return to agents like those romanticized in Rudyard Kipling's Kim and not signals interception or code-breaking. Perhaps he takes it as evident that the West has the strength to prevail but that intelligence is needed to bring the shadowy, diffuse enemy to battle -- a battle in which they are bound to loose -- assuming our will holds. One of the advantages of Keegan being a defense reporter is that he keeps abreast of modern military developments and issues. I'd already wondered how Keegan's thesis affects the current U.S. plan to transform the military on the assumption that better intelligence and communication can justify a smaller force. Keegan alludes to that, seems to indicate a skepticism, but doesn't take the issue any further. Perhaps he has elsewhere. All in all, another good book from Keegan.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Keegan has written several fantastic books on war. This isn’t one of them, and it’s not aided by the attempt at timeliness which leads him to mention Al-Qaeda briefly at the end (nor the anti-Islamic posture he takes, which is that Muslims are sneakier and more committed to evil than non-Muslims); written before the second invasion of Iraq, he also denotes the failure of inspectors to find WMDs in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq a failure of intelligence rather than what it was, the absence of WMDs. So basically he has a string of stories from the age of sail up to the Falklands war, where he recounts particular episodes and then discusses whether “intelligence” mattered. He occasionally stops to distinguish human intelligence from signals analysis, imaging, etc., but doesn’t rigorously define “intelligence,” which helps his conclusions become even more mushy (though he does condemn the uniting of covert operations with intelligence-gathering). Takeaway: intelligence can help in a shooting war; it can decrease losses or improve gains. But force is force, and that’s what determines the ultimate outcome, whether you’re surprised by Pearl Harbor or not, especially since the military is made of people and therefore tends to misread, overread, or underread intelligence compared to the objective truth.

[yeremenko_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of Keegan's best. In this book Keegan examines the value of intelligence in war and concludes intelligence has been over-rated in the histories of warfare. He uses examples from Nelson to the current War on Terror.

[davidpwhelan_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another excellent book by John Keegan, who remains one of my favorite military history authors. He looks at how intelligence is used in a number of military engagements, from Jackson in the Shenandoah during the U.S. Civil War to German naval battles in World War II and beyond. He looks closely at how the intelligence was gathered, the technology used, and what the units did with the technology. Keegan is a great story teller and each look at a particular point in military history is engaging. In particular, he is persuasive at showing how intelligence is important but not sufficient in and of itself to be determinative of military success.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'd broadly agree with the review by ben_a -- this isn't Keegan at his best, and whilst the central argument ("intelligence is useful, but can't be decisive in itself") is well-presented, there's a lot of padding in the case studies. Some of the chapters show evidence of recycling of material that he has used elsewhere -- there are sloppy edits, and unusual amounts of repetition within the chapters. The chapter on the V1 and V2 programme, in particular, looks very cobbled-together, and seems to go round in circles a few times.It also looks as though the sub-title ("...from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda"), presumably imposed by the publisher, has pushed Keegan into writing speculatively about the "war on terror", a role he clearly isn't very comfortable with. (To add insult to injury, I discovered, far too late to think about returning it, that my copy had been bound with two copies of the second set of plates and none of the first set!)It's probably worth reading this book as an antidote to the romantic idea of espionage as a war-winning activity, but it's a shame the author wasn't given time to do the job properly.

[rexton_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book examines how effective intelligence is in determining the outcome of battles and military campaigns. The writing is clear and effective, as are his arguments showing the strengths and weaknesses of intelligence and its ever changing roles.The history is fascinating. He starts with Nelson playing hide and seek witth Napoleon's Egyptian assault fleet. Then he shows how Stonewall Jackson uses local knowledge and manoeuvre to tie up a large part of the Union Army in the Shenandoah Valley. Then he uses the destruction of von Spees cruiser force in World War I to explain the development and early uses of wireless communications. In the Airborne German capture of Crete in the Seconf World War, it is demonstrated that even great intelligence without proper analysis can lose a battle. Midway was one of the great strategic intelligence coups of the twentieth century, but he shows how the tactical victory depended more on luck and chance than good information. The Battle of the Atlantic and the role of the wizards of Bletchley and their German opponents is carefully explained; it is shown that the battle would still have been won by the Allies, and why. Then there was the knowledge and scientific grandstanding that made the impacts of the V-1 cruise missile and the V-2 IRBM so much greater towards the end of the war; if the Germans had a nuclear weapon with these devices, he thinks Germany might have won. In the last two chapters the development and uses and misuses of intelligence up to modern times is discussed, followed by a detailed analysis of strategic and tactical intelligence. The conclusions are well considered and do not match the popular wisdom.

[ben_a_11 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

All Keegan is good, but this is not his best. The case studies, while fascinating, and replete with Keegan's usual exquisite selection of telling details, are longer than their illustrative purpose requires. I would have preferred shorter cases, more of them, and more synthesis. And, very rare for Keegan, there is evidence of writing in haste. The basic hypothesis -- intelligence as a uninformly insufficient condition for victory -- is unimpeachable, but also obvious.