A fight between spies and might

This may be John Keegan’s weakest book among the 17 he has published, but even Keegan’s least successful is worth reading. His subject is exactly as advertised -- intelligence in war, although the author gives us mostly war stories with bits of “intelligence” thrown in.

That is not accidental: Keegan insists that intelligence is not that important in war -- it is the hard fighting that matters, not knowledge about prior warnings of attack, detailed target information or anything else. In his trenchant conclusion, he illustrates his argument with a list of examples: Alexander the Great’s decisive victory over the Achaemenid army of Darius III at Gaugamela in 331 BC, the successful defense of Malta against the Ottomans by the Knights of St. John in 1565, the defeat of the last Japanese offensive toward India in 1944 by British and Indian troops in Kohima and Imphal and the conquest of Iwo Jima in 1945 by the U.S. Marines. In each case, according to Keegan, it was not any advantage in intelligence that determined the outcome but rather the elemental fighting virtues he lists as ferocity, tenacity, courage and self-sacrifice.

Keegan’s stance may be a useful corrective these days, when the proponents of “information warfare” often exaggerate what can be achieved with intelligence superiority alone -- as if a war can really be reduced to a computer game with no blood, sweat or tears. But Keegan in turn greatly exaggerates, because it is only in the case of grinding battles of attrition, fought by frontal tactics alone without any maneuver, surprise, ingenuity or generalship, that intelligence is not important. That was not even true of the notorious slaughters of Ypres, Verdun, Stalingrad and Guadalcanal in the two world wars.

In Stalingrad, for example, months of the hardest tactical fighting in recorded history -- kept up by the immediate execution of deserters -- were followed by the surprise Soviet convergence in the deep rear of the German 6th Army, leaving its 200,000 men stranded, besieged and starved. Intelligence was certainly important in that epic battle.

The Red Army knew where to find weak flanks to penetrate, whereas the Germans did not even know that Stalin had accumulated enough uncommitted forces to mount a large offensive. Seeing the Stalingrad defenders so poorly reinforced, the Germans concluded that all Soviet troops were already fully engaged from the Arctic to the Caucasus.

If the Germans had known about the Soviet plan in good time, they could have gathered their own forces to ambush the converging columns, turning the Soviet offensive into a total debacle of the Red Army -- and probably leaving a Nazi Germany victorious on land to be defeated by American fission bombs. Yes, intelligence can make a difference that changes the course of history, not just of a battle. That was also true of Pearl Harbor. Had the Japanese plan been uncovered, American battleships could have slipped out in the night to attack the Japanese carriers while their aircraft were far away, and the Pacific war might have lasted months instead of years. As it was, the Japanese did achieve surprise in December 1941, just as the Germans had surprised the Soviet Union in June 1941 -- Stalin was convinced that all the warnings he had received were British provocations. In both cases it took an immense amount of hard fighting to overcome the resulting damage.

Surprise is not merely one advantage among many -- it is an interruption in what makes war so very hard and so unpredictable in the first place: the presence of a reacting enemy. So long as it lasts, surprise reduces war to a straightforward mechanical action, in which the enemy is nothing but an inert set of targets. That is why military commanders throughout history have striven mightily to achieve surprise even if it has meant that their own preparations had to be curtailed to maintain secrecy. It follows that the intelligence that allows or averts surprise can be enormously important, even if it is perfectly true, as Keegan keeps insisting throughout this book, that fighting power is still essential to exploit the potential advantage that intelligence can provide. Even that becomes a trivial requirement in the case of a high-risk commando or terrorist attacks, which can succeed only with total surprise and are easily defeated given prior warning.

All other kinds of intelligence, starting with target analysis, are also more important than Keegan allows. In our era of routine precision bombardment, that much should be blatantly obvious: All the precision in the world in aiming bombs and missiles is worthless unless the right targets are selected for attack.

That calls for sophisticated analysis as well as the laborious identification and assessment of targets one by one. What are the vital nodes whose destruction can paralyze an air force? What targets must be threatened to induce a dictator to retreat? These are not questions that can be answered without a deep understanding of the enemy -- but given that kind of intelligence, a small amount of force can go a long way.

That Keegan’s overall argument is flat wrong -- or at least greatly exaggerated -- does not detract from the pleasure of reading his beautifully written and otherwise perceptive accounts of Nelson’s hunt for the French fleet that supported Napoleon in Egypt, Stonewall Jackson’s elusive operations in the Shenandoah Valley, long-range cruiser warfare in World War I, the battle for Crete in 1941 and the Midway naval battle of 1942 (in which the U.S. Navy’s weakness after Pearl Harbor was offset by prior knowledge of Japanese plans by decryption).

Keegan also writes of the longest of all World War II campaigns, the one fought to send troops and supplies across the Atlantic against German submarines. There one senses that even Keegan himself doubts the validity of his own argument, which is indeed stretched beyond reason in that chapter. After all, the biggest problem of the German U-boats was elementary target intelligence: to find ships to sink in the immense ocean without air surveillance to extend their view beyond the horizon. (As any long-distance sailor knows, one can go for days even in the busiest shipping lanes without seeing any ships.) As for the Allies, the entire battle of the Atlantic was a matter of avoiding U-boats and finding them to sink -- both objectives were conditioned, above all, on the ability to decode German signals. True, aircraft and warships were still needed to sink U-boats when found, but look at the ratios: One destroyer with good intelligence could achieve more than a hundred without it.

Finally, Keegan presents a chapter on the British intelligence effort to discover the truth about German secret weapons. To bomb them, it was vital to find out what they were, sorting out all sorts of fantasies, and to identify the location of their development centers and production facilities. For a long time, the greatest obstacle was not the sheer lack of information but the rejection of telling bits of intelligence by British scientists (including Churchill’s own favored scientific advisor) whose own calculations conclusively proved that a ballistic missile would have to be impracticably immense to reach Britain. They did not realize -- they could not even imagine -- just how far German rocket engineering had advanced by leaving explosive powders behind to develop liquid-fuel rocket engines.

Keegan’s point, once again, is that the intelligence work that uncovered the Peenemunde base would have been useless without the ability to bomb it and that intelligence was not good enough to prevent the successful launch of both V-1s and V-2s against Britain. No fewer than 10,492 of the ingenious and economical V-1s were launched, killing 6,184 and severely injuring 17,987 -- but in those days, of course, wars still inflicted casualties in such numbers that those losses were considered strategically insignificant.

Keegan’s version of this fascinating tale is succinct, accurate and well written as always, but others have told the story before him and in more detail. All in all, Keegan’s millions of devoted readers might want to wait for his next book. *