Abstract
All modern states rely to some extent on their intelligence organisations, but the service they get from them is curiously uneven. Sometimes they are war-winners, as was the case in World War II: the British official historian has claimed that the Western Allies’ codebreaking successes shortened the war by three or four years.1 Yet on other occasions the possession of an apparently efficient intelligence machine seems no guarantee against misperception. This is specially true of warning of surprise attack. There have been a whole series of failures in warning of surprise military attacks, ranging from the North Korean attack on South Korea in 1950 through the Egyptian and Syrian attacks on Israel in 1973 to the Iraqi attack on Kuwait in 1990.2 Despite all the paraphernalia of modern warfare and the intelligence technology available to detect it, warning is evidently still a chancy business.
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Notes
C. Andrew and J. Noakes (eds) Intelligence and International Relations 1900–45 (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1987) p. 218.
M. Handel, ‘Intelligence and the Problem of Strategic Surprise’, in his War, Strategy and Intelligence (London: Cass, 1989)
E. Kam, Surprise Attack: The Victim’s Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); and
A. Levite, Intelligence and Strategic Surprises (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). For a debate on the inevitability of surprise see Betts,’ surprise, Scholasticism, and Strategy’ (a critique of Levite’s book), with a response by Levite, ‘Intelligence and Strategic Surprises Revisited’, in International Studies Quarterly 33 (1989) pp. 329–49.
James Rusbrldger, The Intelligence Game (London: The Bodley Head, 1989), p. 2.
For an introduction to deception see B. Whaley, Codeword Barbarossa (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973); and
D.C. Daniel and K.L. Herbig (eds), Strategic Military Deception (New York: Pergamon, 1982). The statistics are quoted by
R. Heuer, ‘Cognitive Factors in Deception and Counter-Deception’ in Daniel and Herbig, p. 60, and are taken from Whaley’s Strategic Deception and Surprise in War (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1969), p. 164.
R. Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 180.
T.L. Hughes, The Fate of Facts in a World of Men (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1976), p. 24.
S. Gazit, ‘lntelligence Estimates and the Policy-Maker’, in M. Handel (ed.), Leaders and Intelligence (London: Cass, 1989), pp. 282–7. For discussion of the problem of intelligence’s credibility with policy-makers and access to them, see also Handel’s Introduction.
Command 8787, Falkland Islands Review (London: HMSO, 1983). The picture of the British organisation in 1982 is taken from the Committee’s account, and from Sir Reginald Hibbert, ‘Intelligence and Policy’ in Intelligence and National Security, 5 (1990), pp. 110–27. See also M.E. Herman, ‘Intelligence and Policy: A Comment’, ibid.
For the role of a central staff in an interdepartmental system, see E. Thomas ‘The Evolution of the JIC System up to and during World War II’ in C. Andrew and J. Noakes (eds), Intelligence and International Relations (Exeter: Exeter University, 1987), pp. 219–34; and
D. McLachlan, Room 39 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), pp. 240–64.
For the German navy’s examination of the evidence of cipher insecurity see T. Mulligan, ‘The German Navy Evaluates Its Cryptographic Security’, in Military Affairs 49 (1985) pp. 75–9. For details see
F.H. Hinsley and others, British Intelligence in the Second World War Vol. II (London: HMSO, 1981), Appendices 1 (part ii) and 19; Vol. III part 2 (1984) pp. 51–2 and 230–1. •
M.E. Herman, ‘Warning: Some Practical Perspectives’, in J.N. Merrttt, R. Read, and R. Weissinger-Baylon (eds), Crisis Decision-Making in the Atlantic Alliance: Perspectives on Deterrence (Menlo Park, Ca.: Strategic Decisions Press, 1988), p. 7–3.
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© 1992 Alex Danchev
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Herman, M. (1992). Intelligence Warning of the Occupation of the Falklands: Some Organisational Issues. In: Danchev, A. (eds) International Perspectives on the Falklands Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21932-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21932-2_8
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