Chapter 6

Strategy and Intelligence

So far, technique and organisation were focused on, but the purpose of any system of defence and security decisionmaking is to set and implement policies. In the next few chapters, some of the subjects for which this needs to be done will be covered.

From what has been discovered so far, it is evident that there are many constraints on the freedom of action of even large states in the framing of defence and security policy. Among smaller states, the room for manoeuvre can be very limited indeed. Taking an average state, its national strategy will essentially be determined by:

its size and position;

its allies and neighbours;

the money available; and

domestic political factors.

For most nations, overall strategy is largely a process of accommodating the inevitable, and the purpose of defence policy statements and white papers is to provide a reasonably coherent justification of what has been, in most respects, already decided. Moreover, both strategy and posture have a great deal of inertia attached to them, and can take years to change. It is obvious that factors other than simple military potential play a role in the relative freedom to make one’s own policy. There are a number of factors which tend to have an inhibiting effect:

Formal allies: Obviously, being a member of an alliance involves giving up some degree of freedom. Where there is a single dominant state — as was the case in both major alliances in the Cold War — this is exacerbated. But, the fact that a nation is an ally can rebound in curious ways: a large state may support a small state in quarrels, or condone domestic abuses by it, because that state is an ally, and it is necessary to retain its support.



Large neighbours: Displeasing large neighbours may be difficult, and most small nations living near large ones have to be circumspect in what they do. This is not only a question of sheer size (tiny Finland retained much more independence from the Soviet Union than Mexico did from the United States, although Mexico was much larger). It is also a question of economic strength and political cohesion.



Political dominance: Much of the freedom or independence of a state is actually in the collective mind of its leaders. In practical terms, there is little that the United States can do to stop Japan if the latter wanted to pursue a high-profile independent foreign policy. But, guilt over the World War II has brought the Japanese to such a pitch of political self-castration that they reflexively ask themselves, before anything else: What will the Americans think?21 But, dominance is not always of the large over the small, as the political half-nelson testifies in which Israel manages to hold the United States.



Economic dominance: Trading nations will tend to be supportive, or at least neutral, about the foreign and even domestic policies of their major markets. Conversely, the ability to damage the economy, or the currency of another country is a good way of enforcing obedience.



Military assets: This is not just a question of numbers of things and people. Australia, for example, has a national command and control, and a force projection capability of its own, whereas South Korea, whose forces are vastly larger, does not. These do not only provide a national option militarily, but — as the French found in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation — provide a measure of political independence as well.

 What is strategy?

The limitations listed above are just limitations. They may indicate what cannot be done, but do not, except in extreme cases, write policy. Even the smallest, weakest and most allied state has a national strategy to define and implement. There will be a variety of questions to answer, of which the following will be some of the first:

Shall we try to have an all-round capability, or shall we specialise?

Shall we contribute to UN and other operations?

Should we consider military alliances, and if so, with whom?

Should we allow foreign troops to exercise or be stationed here?

Should we develop nuclear or chemical weapons?

Should we defend in all directions or only in one?

These questions do not, for the most part, arise as issues of principle: they always arise in the political and strategic context of the day. How should this context and what it means be understood?

On the whole, members of the military are not the best people to make the decision, and there is some evidence that they generally have had it wrong when they have tried to do so. Reliance on the military suffers from a series of institutional weaknesses in the area of strategic analysis, including:

Over-quantification: Being practical people, the military can be overly impressed by military hardware. As a result of the common progression, whereby what can be measured becomes important just because it can be measured, quantitative analysis of military power, often of a very crude kind, is a very important feature of the way that states look at each other. While this kind of analysis is often important, the military potential of a state can often be less important in a given situation, than its political situation, its economic strength, or half a dozen other things.



Worst-case analysis: The military tends to exist of professionally cautious individuals, aware that in any war, they, and not the politicians, will be the ones to die, and who will be blamed if it all goes wrong. The military’s relative ignorance of politics can lead it to postulate highly improbable scenarios for a combination of enemies, which are, nonetheless, arithmetically frightening.



Cost and complexity: The military will naturally tend to see a response to any strategic problem in practical, military terms. But, military responses are generally expensive, take time to put in place, and involve scarce resources and personnel. By contrast, a political or economic response may be much quicker and cheaper, as well as more appropriate in some circumstances.



Consequences: In a state which is too ready to resort to military force, the consequences of its use are often not expected, and may make the situation worse rather than better. Political initiatives can be stopped and reversed much more easily than expeditionary forces, and with less loss of public face.

To be fair, the military is not the only group unsuited to take sole charge of strategic problems. In any bureaucratic and political system, people will naturally latch on to aspects of a problem which they understand, and which enable them to claim ownership of it, thus increasing their own importance and giving them a voice in its solution.22 Indeed, one of the most difficult things for a government to do, is to arrive at a genuine interdisciplinary approach to problems. An example from Tungaru may illustrate the point.23

The country of Njedi, to the north of Tungaru, has been racked for several years by civil unrest. The outlawed Muslim Welfare Movement has been waging a terrorist campaign against the government, which has responded with a violent campaign of its own. In large-scale fighting around the capital, government forces have suffered many casualties, and there are reports of major units going over to the rebels. The economy is in free fall, and the rule of law has effectively come to an end in some areas. A large number of refugees are now making their way to neighbouring countries, including Tungaru.

The government is divided on how to handle the crisis. Christian politicians are complaining bitterly about the influx of Muslim refugees, and demanding that they be sent back. The (mainly Christian) army believes the border should be heavily reinforced and preparations made against what they see as a likely future conflict with an MWM-led government. They also suggest that Tungaran special forces should be used to help provide military support to the government. The navy and much of the air force are torn between sympathy for co-religionists, and dislike of their militant brand of Islam. The interior minister demands sweeping new powers for the border police and the arrest of Njedan Muslim dissidents now in Tungaru. The finance minister recommends cuts in welfare spending to make Tungaru a less attractive destination for refugees.

The foreign minister, however, reminds the cabinet of the sources of the problem. As part of its ‘internationalisation’ strategy, the government of Njedi has increased the range of imports allowed. The domestic agricultural sector, previously dominant in the region, has been devastated by imports of cheap wheat and maize and, at the same time, world prices for the cash crops produced by Njedi have collapsed. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has imposed an austerity regime involving large cuts in spending on health, education and employment. Unemployment and poverty have increased enormously. At the same time, the increasing urbanisation of the country and the educational expansion begun by the government have put traditional social and family ties under stress. The MWM, previously an obscure extremist group, has proposed throwing out the IMF, and returning the country to its earlier, protected state. The IMF itself has made further aid contingent upon what it describes as ‘firm action’ against the rebels.

After discussion, the cabinet accepts that a military response would not be useful, and begins to organise a regional political and economic support package. More police and troops are moved to the frontier, but are ordered to behave carefully. Diplomats try to negotiate local arrangements, which will enable at least some of the refugees to have the confidence to return home. The finance minister suggests that the services of American change management consultants should be secured to work with the tribespeople.

This is a slightly complex and rather abstruse example. Consider, by contrast, a very different type of national security decision: whether a state should develop nuclear, biological or chemical weapons — collectively, weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). There will be many arguments against this. The foreign minister will remind the government that, like any monopoly, the WMD states and their allies will seek to preserve their positions with threats and perhaps with violence. He or she will also be concerned about the consequences if the country has already signed, for example, the Chemical Weapons Convention. The military will often be against it, because such programmes are expensive and can detract from conventional capability. The finance ministry will be worried about the cost. Allies may quietly suggest rewards for not proceeding on this course.

It is the task of a national security bureaucracy to reach a sensible decision on issues of this kind. Sometimes, the kind of negative arguments set out above will be persuasive, especially when the state concerned has a security situation which is relatively benign. But, it will be obvious that, for a small state in a difficult strategic situation with a large and powerful neighbour and unreliable allies, the judgement might well be the opposite. It might be that there is no prospect of ever developing a conventional capability large enough to deter attack. The support of allies in a crisis, or even their displeasure if the state goes ahead with WMD, may turn out not to be worth very much compared to the assurance provided by weapons of this kind. Finally, a skilful state can adopt a policy of ‘neither confirm nor deny’, and thus exploit the uncertainty that such a situation results in for political profit. Without labouring the point, it is obvious that decisions of this kind are only possible when a wide range of institutions and skills are applied. For the military to be dominant in such debates is as bad as it is for it to be ignored.

Intelligence

It will be obvious from the above that nothing is more fundamental to the development of a national strategy than accurate information and assessments, particularly about the views and likely actions of foreign states. Indeed, there is probably no single capability more valuable to a state than skill in predicting the likely responses of other states to a given course of action. Most wars in history have been the result of miscalculations in this area. A good recent example is the rather naive Iraqi assumption in 1990 that Western support given during the Iran-Iraq war would continue once this war was over. This inevitably leads to the issue of intelligence.

So many myths have been propagated about intelligence — not least by its practitioners — that it would be useful to begin the argument from first principles. In doing this, however, a distinction is made between three phases of intelligence work, which are often confused. They are all fairly self-explanatory:

Intelligence collection: This is the raison d’être of intelligence organisations, and the best known and understood function. If no intelligence is collected, then nothing much can be done. In collection is included, however, what is made available by friends and allies.



Intelligence analysis: This is the process of making sense of what was learned, both in its immediate context, and more broadly in terms of what else is known about the subject.



Intelligence exploitation: This is the process of putting intelligence into the hands of those who can make some practical use of it, in the making and implementation of defence and security policy.

All governments devote a great deal of effort to the collection of information to enable them to answer questions of this kind. Information comes in a huge variety of forms, including:

The last of these begins to edge into the territory historically claimed by intelligence services, but is, in fact, part of normal business for foreign and other ministries, which may well exchange confidences with personal friends from another country, perhaps because they dislike their own country’s position, and, for whatever reason, want to undermine it. But this list (and it could be lengthened) shows the vast range of information available to governments without the need for the collection of intelligence. However, it is most unlikely that a state will expose everything that another might possibly wish to know. All states have secrets, and even the most open are unlikely to tell that, for example, the position of Minister X has been weakened by the latest devaluation, or that General Y is considered dangerously activist, and will probably not be made CHOD after all. Many states also have onerous secrecy laws, and make the discovery of even routine information difficult.

Reference has already been made several times to the need of a state for information. In English, the word ‘intelligence’ has been narrowed in its range of meaning so that, instead of signifying something general like ‘news’, as it did hundreds of years ago, it now means roughly the same as ‘espionage’. (In other languages, for example, French, a single word means both ‘intelligence’ and ‘information’.) It should be clear from what has already been said, however, that intelligence is only a special form of information. Thus, all intelligence is information, but not all information is intelligence. More specifically, intelligence collection is the collection of information which a government does not want another to have, in a way which conceals the fact that this has been accessed. Consequently, intelligence collection is an activity to which attention is not drawn. It may be covert, in the sense of recruiting agents, or it may be simply that it is not stressed to a neighbour that the movements of its air force are monitored.25

Means of collection

For the purposes of this argument, there are two broad tendencies in the collection of intelligence, which will be called the active and the passive.26 The first involves a conscious decision to take an active role in the gathering of intelligence, and may include the cultivation of agents, surveillance (including illegal overflights), bribery, blackmail and burglary. In general, it involves people in some form. The second involves, essentially, the use of technology in a covert fashion, such as communications interception or satellite reconnaissance.

Intelligence collection is divided in this way, because the first category involves political risk, and the second, in general, does not. The cultivation of agents, forcible entry and intelligence overflights all have the potential to go wrong, and have, indeed, often done so. In political terms, they would be regarded as unfriendly acts by the recipient power, in a way in which passive electronic surveillance, for example, would not be. This political dimension makes it especially important that the intelligence services of a state are under firm political direction, and that the government as a whole is able to take sensible judgements about whether, if things go wrong, the potential for damage outweighs the potential benefit of the information obtained.

What is clear, however, is that intelligence is complex, expensive and often politically risky. It may be that all that should reasonably be known about a target is readily available, and that it would make more sense to direct efforts at more difficult targets elsewhere. Intelligence collection is never an activity to undertake for its own sake, even though this is often the case.

Targeting

Obviously, there needs to be some discipline involved in the selection of intelligence targets. Collecting intelligence just because it is easy to obtain is pointless. Likewise, intelligence agencies themselves are seldom the best people to decide on priorities. Too often, these priorities will reflect what is currently available, or what is of interest to the agencies themselves. To be effective, the intelligence community of any state will need guidance on:

the most important targets;

the permissible methods; and

questions that must be referred for political approval.

Here, it must be remembered once again, that the collection of intelligence is not an end in itself. It should only be collected if there is a chance that it will make a real contribution to policy.

Any strategy for providing the kind of guidance listed above will need to be agreed upon across the government as a whole. The office of the head of state or government, the foreign ministry and the defence ministry will all need to be involved, but so will the trade ministry and the finance ministry. The questions that will be put to the intelligence community for answers will be fundamentally the questions which interest the government as a whole, and these will necessarily change over time. Intelligence agencies should be, in effect, the suppliers of intelligence to government departments, based on a request and under circumstances where the information cannot be obtained in any other way. No collection work should be carried out — except that which arises spontaneously — which is not justified and agreed to somewhere.27

Making sense

The key test of intelligence is whether it is useful in making and implementing policy. To become useful, it has to be interpreted in a way that makes it so. Because intelligence is only information, it is subject to all the uncertainties of information, and may not be more reliable than a rumour overheard in a bar. History suggests that agents have worked for all kinds of reasons, including the desire to influence history, to feel important, for revenge and to have lots of money. Even when there is no conscious attempt to mislead, an intelligence report may amount to no more than an account of how source A told officer B that General C had recounted a conversation he had with Minister D about policy towards country E.

A user of intelligence in a government ministry needs some method of interpreting and assessing what has been provided to make it useful. This takes place both in the immediate context of the report and also more widely. For example, as an official in the finance ministry, if a person is handed a report which says that a large neighbour, with whom the economy is directly linked, intends to devalue its currency, it would be foolish to react too quickly. Not only will individual views on the report’s credibility be formed, based on what is known, but some analysis will also be expected to have been done by the originator. What kind of source is this, and how reliable? Does it square with previous reports from the same source? How well-placed is the person to know, anyway? This is particularly important because of what can be called the red folder effect. It seems to be universal for intelligence information to be passed around in strikingly coloured files, often with some ceremony, and usually with important looking, but cryptic words printed on the cover. If these markings mean anything, they refer to the sensitivity of the methods of collection, and do not imply anything about the reliability of the information. But, the ceremony and secrecy surrounding the distribution of intelligence can result in the information, rather than its origin, impressing the readership the most.

This leads to the heart of the intelligence analysis process. If intelligence is to be useful, then it must not only be put in context piece by piece, but also in terms of what else is known. This can be called an intelligence assessment, which is an authoritative statement on an issue, making use of, but not limited to intelligence material. It may be very general (the political stability of a state), or very particular (who will be the next army commander next door?), or very technical and detailed (the output of another nation’s armaments industry). It may also be very topical (what are the chances of a coup next week?). This assessment is offered for the use of the government as a whole to make decisions. It was noted earlier that there is a need to ensure that tasking was done in such a way that the customers received what they wanted. The same is obviously true of assessments, which must be requested because there is an information gap somewhere, which intelligence can fill. There may also be recurrent tasks, often technical in nature and continually updated, such as:

the order of battle and training standards of neighbours;

exercises conducted by states in a region; and

arms deliveries to a region.

It was suggested earlier that it is bad practice to have competing streams of political advice going to ministers. The same is true of intelligence, where there should be only one agreed to assessment, subscribed to by all. This, in turn, suggests another principle, that intelligence should not be the product of a single agency.

An agency which produces an intelligence assessment frequently does so in a black box fashion, in other words, there is no clue in the finished product about what kind of intelligence has been used, how much is based on intelligence and how much on other issues. An agency can get an entirely unreasonable reputation for brilliance just by repackaging current wisdom in a bright shiny cover and calling it secret. The position is even worse if more than one agency is involved, since each agency will make similar claims, and decision makers will have to choose between them.

The process of producing a single assessment will not be easy, and will require some administrative machinery. Many countries have found it useful to set up a committee, perhaps in the president’s or prime minister’s office, charged with producing consensual assessments, and including not only various intelligence agencies, but also representatives of the user departments as well. It is generally helpful if the individuals concerned are seconded from their departments for relatively short periods of time. Here, the usual cautions against drafts produced by a committee have to be remembered: notably, that there is a continual tendency for cautious compromise language. It is often said, with justification, that committee assessments can be too vague to be of use, for example:

There is no unambiguous evidence of Iraqi preparations for an invasion of Kuwait in the near future. However, it would be wrong to rule out the possibility altogether.

Actually the problem is not with the system, as much as with the fragmentary and conflicting nature of the evidence, and the assumption that a lack of evidence can itself be significant. ‘We don’t know’ is a reasonable translation of the above, and may well reflect the reality of the situation. But, it remains true that any peer review process, where intelligence experts have to submit evidence and conclusions for comment by others, is likely to produce a better result than the work of a single authority, no matter how skilled.

Why intelligence is not always believed

Although history is full of presumed ‘great intelligence failures’, it usually turns out that the failure lies with the process of analysis, rather than with a lack of information. The main failing of analysis has been, quite simply, that those doing it, or those receiving it have been so convinced that they know what the truth is, that they have accepted or rejected intelligence according to these preconceptions: an example of what is called cognitive dissonance.

There is, of course, a natural tendency for intelligence agencies to tailor their reports to give their customers what they want to hear. This was spectacularly the case in the Vietnam war, when battalions of analysts, even including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was often sceptical about these things, produced estimates of impending victory for much of the late 1960s.28

In fairness, it must be added that there are certain cases where a forecast, which eventually proves to be accurate, could not have been justified analytically at the time, because of a lack of hard evidence. For example, any respectable process of analysis should have concluded, by about 1987, that something fundamental had changed in the Soviet Union, and that the Cold War was in its terminal stages. But, the fall of the Soviet Union, on the other hand, was unpredictable, precisely because it came about as the result of unforeseeable decisions by a small number of individuals. By 1989, it could perhaps be said that Gorbachev had started a process he could no longer control, but it was impossible to say how it would turn out.

Putting it about

The collection and analysis of intelligence material have been reviewed, and its exploitation must be discussed briefly. Intelligence is pointless if it is not useful. There is probably no greater challenge than that of taking intelligence assessments and turning them into useful policy instruments. The essential (if unglamorous) need is for sound liaison and a degree of mutual respect. Relations between intelligence agencies and those with whom they work abroad are often strained: professional diplomats often regard intelligence officers as dangerous cowboys (sometimes, it has to be said, with justification).

Government will generally accept specialist advice if it is couched in a form which is useful and comprehensible. This applies to intelligence advice just as much as it applies to advice from scientists or accountants. Intelligence has to be disseminated promptly, it has to be combined with other information in the form of assessments, and it has to be offered as part of the debate, rather than the whole truth. Most government systems greatly limit the distribution of intelligence material and, while this is no doubt necessary for security reasons, it does make it more difficult to derive the maximum value from it. In practice, however, the sensitivity surrounding intelligence information is much more a question of the protection of sources and techniques than of the information itself, which may be incomplete or even wrong. There is, in fact, everything to be gained by widespread dissemination of the essence of intelligence material.

The involvement of the military

It may seem strange that, in all these pages, little reference was made to the military, and issues which are mostly not relevant to its affairs were discussed. After all, the words ‘military’ and ‘intelligence’ are directly linked, are they not?

In fact, they are not. The association is largely an historical one, and partly accidental. For much of history, armies on campaign have collected intelligence about one another’s dispositions and whereabouts. As armies became more organised, and nation-states more common, it became more important to collect information, not only about the military power of a potential adversary, but about the terrain which might have to be traversed and the kind of weapons which might have to be faced. As usual, the Prussians were there first, with their foreign armies sections in the general staff. Soon, as warfare became more complicated, there was interest in dockyards and factories, in mobilisation plans and new equipment under development. And, there was a growing, parallel need to know more about the political intentions of other states than they would willingly tell themselves.

Although much of this work was given to the military in the early days, they were always amateurs at it. The careful cultivation of weak individuals, who might, in time, spill secrets, is not a skill necessarily expected of the military. While some nations still entrust much of their intelligence-gathering to the military (such as the French), it is more commonly undertaken by civilian organisations, such as the CIA, or the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Indeed, there is a danger (borne out by historical examples) that the military, because of its background and ethos, will tend to take a robust approach to the gathering of intelligence which might gravely embarrass government later. Moreover, the active involvement of the military tends to bias intelligence targeting too much in one direction. In practice, the nation’s main concerns about other countries may not be military at all. The hierarchical briefing structure of the military has been found, in practice, not to be very helpful for keeping secrets, nor is the military always politically aware enough to know how best to deploy the information.

With these caveats, then, what should the role of the military in intelligence be? Firstly, it has to be borne in mind that defence intelligence exists as a separate function. Scientists, engineers, economists and so forth, working for the ministry of defence, will be involved in the production of intelligence analysis. In countries where these posts are held by military officers, these officers, perforce, will be heavily involved in areas of study which are related to defence, but are not necessarily military. Beyond this, there are three broad areas where military expertise, in the narrow sense, can often be extremely useful:

The military will often operate assets for the collection of intelligence by technical means and, indeed, many of the targets of this kind of attack will be military anyway.



Defence attachés in different countries are invaluable sources of information about defence and military affairs. Their behaviour — and their use in gathering intelligence — will vary with political relations between the countries concerned, but everything they report will add to the general picture.



The military will often be of great value in intelligence analysis. It has the best people, for example, to track the movements of senior officers in other countries. They will produce analyses of orders of battle and training patterns in other countries. But, they do not have to be involved in every area of defence. For example, if a large neighbour is building a secret factory, perhaps to produce missiles under licence, military experts will be involved in trying to identify what is produced. But, if information can be obtained from inside the factory, civilian scientists and engineers will be the people to comment on things such as the manufacturing process, the type and provenance of machine tools, and so on.