Does Military Intelligence Always Fail?

Summary of Bertil Johansson's article in RSAWSPJ no 3 2001.

A British author, Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, a former intelligence and UN officer, has published a book with the title Military Intelligence Blunders (Robinson Publishing, London 1999). The book deals with military failures caused by sheer blunders on the part of military intelligence officers. The author bases his presentation on case studies of military operations in which, according to him, grave miscalculations by the intelligence service played a crucial role in determining the course of events.

The book’s nine case studies stretch from the early years of World War II to the Gulf War in the the early 1990s. John Hughes-Wilson can be quite harsh in his criticism and doesn’t even hesitate to criticize such prominent Anglo-American figures as Lord Mountbatten or Dr Henry Kissinger. Nor are ministries or intelligence organizations exempt from criticism irrespective of whether they represent the intelligence service, the receivers of their advice, or the decision makers themselves.

It is true that Hughes-Wilson doesn’t assert that military intelligence always fails. But he raises a warning finger reminding us that the human factor will always play an important role irrespective of the availability of any kind of information gathered and the reliance on the most modern technical state of the art. Even in the future there is a risk that analysts and decision makers will interpret received information in such a way that it will be seen to correspond to an accepted doctrine, conventional political opinion or their own ambitions. Hughes-Wilson stresses the fact that it may well be relatively easy to get quite a clear and reliable conception of a possible aggressor’s resources, whereas it might be considerably harder to form a true notion of his intentions. In this case only a well-placed source can give us a definitive answer, even though a detailed analysis of today’s enormous information flow should prove helpful.