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Military Intelligence: From Telling Truth to Power to Bewilderment?

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Perspectives on Military Intelligence from the First World War to Mali

Abstract

This introductory chapter discusses 100 years of military intelligence and outlines the main changes that distinguish the post-Cold war period from the preceding one. This is characterised by a blurring of the boundaries between civilian and military intelligence, between investigative services and the intelligence community, and the foreign and domestic realms. The chapter also discusses the rise of oversight mechanisms. All these combined with unprecedented technological change to produce a challenging environment for intelligence services that is more unpredictable than ever before, and at the same time requires adequate, even pre-emptive responses on the part of the intelligence community. The dazzling level of adaptivity required largely obscures the fact that such adaptations were required in earlier periods as well, and intelligence professionals could profit by studying them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Lt. gen. (ret.) André Ranson, keynote speech at the NISA/MIVD conference ‘Telling truth to power’, September 2014.

  2. 2.

    Vanden Berghe 2008.

  3. 3.

    Scholte 2000.

  4. 4.

    Cf. Fukuyama 1992. The UN critically evaluated its performance in 2000.

  5. 5.

    See Ferguson 2011. On some of these contenders: Kaplan 2010; Brewster 2014; Segers 2008; Kingah and Quiliconi 2016; Stuenkel 2015. For a contrary view: Beausang 2012.

  6. 6.

    Witness calls in Britain, France, The Netherlands and Switzerland to renege the European Convention on Human Rights, and such international treaties as the Convention on the Status of Refugees.

  7. 7.

    Witness A Human Right 2014 and Howard 2011. For a discussion of the threats and opportunities offered by new technologies, see Kalathil and Boas 2003; Klang and Murray 2005. See further Salih 2013, pp. 185–203; Soengas 2013, pp. 147–155; Etling et al. 2010, pp. 2–10; Safranek 2012, pp. 2–10. Similar claims have been made about the end of the Suharto era: Mahdi 2002. See also Conversi 2012, pp. 1357–1379.

  8. 8.

    Toffler 1980, p. 165.

  9. 9.

    For an insightful discussion see Cunningham 2002.

  10. 10.

    Gladstone 2015.

  11. 11.

    Ingram 2015. On the rise of cyber Jihadis: Berton and Pawlak 2015; Atwan 2016.

  12. 12.

    States may prefer to attribute damage to vital infrastructure and networks to bad luck, accidents and technical problems rather than admit weakness.

  13. 13.

    For Russia’s use of these means F-Secure Labs 2015. Cf. Bellingcat 2016; Gathmann et al. 2014.

  14. 14.

    MacAskill et al. 2013.

  15. 15.

    See for instance http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/06/us/politics/document-russia-hacking-report-intelligence-agencies.html?_r=0; Glaser 2016; Markoff 2016; Mozur and Scott 2016.

  16. 16.

    Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe 2006.

  17. 17.

    Hill 2016; Eijkman and Van Ginkel 2011, p. 16; Council of Europe. Commissioner for Human Rights 2015.

  18. 18.

    See, for instance, Metselaar 1997.

  19. 19.

    Kitzen 2016.

  20. 20.

    House 1993, p. 6.

  21. 21.

    Douhet 1921; for a discussion, see Hippler 2013. Cf. Black 2016.

  22. 22.

    Hancock and Wexler 2014; Immerman 2010; Olmsted 1996.

  23. 23.

    Lander 2004.

  24. 24.

    See Iliad, X, 195 ff and the Bible, Numbers, 13: 1–33.

  25. 25.

    Kaldor 2012 (1st edition 1999).

  26. 26.

    See for example Denécé 2014.

  27. 27.

    Cf. Kaldor 2012, pp. 4–5, 72–78.

  28. 28.

    Smith 2005.

  29. 29.

    See Cohen 2003.

  30. 30.

    For a discussion, see Duyvesteyn and Angstrom 2004.

  31. 31.

    Hoffman 2007. Compare Malis 2012, pp. 187–190; McCulloh and Johnson 2013.

  32. 32.

    Hoffman 2007, p. 36. See also Freier 2007.

  33. 33.

    De Wijk 2012, p. 358.

  34. 34.

    Thompson 2014; Manwaring and Corr 2008, pp. 75–77; Bunker 2012, pp. 45–53; Denécé 2014, pp. 29–30.

  35. 35.

    The description is based on Kuperwasser 2007, p. 4; Hammes 2006, p. 35 and Treverton and Agrell 2009, pp. 2–3.

  36. 36.

    Cf. UN 2000.

  37. 37.

    The tendency to ask for expanded competences does not only derive from the desire to become more efficient, but also from the administrative rationale to increase one’s power and as such to secure its administrative ‘lifeblood’ (Long 1949, pp. 257–264).

  38. 38.

    As Bob de Graaff once put it eloquently.

  39. 39.

    Engelhardt 2015.

  40. 40.

    Perrow 1999.

  41. 41.

    Engelhardt 2015.

  42. 42.

    Warrick and Wright 2008.

  43. 43.

    Merriam et al. 2012, p. 44.

  44. 44.

    Marsick and Watkins 2005, p. 357.

  45. 45.

    Farrell and Terriff 2002, p. 6.

  46. 46.

    Farrell et al. 2013, p. 1, 4 (quote).

  47. 47.

    Idem, p. 4.

  48. 48.

    Idem, p. 3.

  49. 49.

    Idem, pp. 305–306.

  50. 50.

    Baudet 2013.

  51. 51.

    Illeris 2004, p. 151.

  52. 52.

    Ferguson 2011, p. xx.

  53. 53.

    Murray and Sennreich 2006.

  54. 54.

    Idem.

  55. 55.

    Liddell Hart 1971, p. 27.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Netherlands Defence Academy, Breda, The Netherlands

    Floribert Baudet

  2. University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Eleni Braat

  3. Centre of Research and Expertise, Veterans Institute, Doorn, The Netherlands

    Jeoffrey van Woensel

  4. Enschede, The Netherlands

    Aad Wever

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  1. Floribert Baudet
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  2. Eleni Braat
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Correspondence to Floribert Baudet .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Military Sciences, Netherlands Defence Academy Faculty of Military Sciences, Breda, The Netherlands

    Floribert Baudet

  2. Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Eleni Braat

  3. Veteraneninstituut , Doorn, The Netherlands

    Jeoffrey van Woensel

  4. Saxion University of Applied Sciences, Independent scholar, retired Saxion University of Applied Sciences, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Aad Wever

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Baudet, F., Braat, E., van Woensel, J., Wever, A. (2017). Military Intelligence: From Telling Truth to Power to Bewilderment?. In: Baudet, F., Braat, E., van Woensel, J., Wever, A. (eds) Perspectives on Military Intelligence from the First World War to Mali. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-183-8_1

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