ABSTRACT
Can a correlation be established between the effectiveness of an army's performance and the quality of the intelligence supplied to its commander? It would seem obvious that there can (St. Thomas Aquinas might have begun like this, could he have been persuaded to extend his discussion of the just war 1 to include intelligence as well as deception), for otherwise an ignorant general is as good as a well informed one. But, following the method of the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas would at once have objected that such a correlation would degrade strategy into mere reaction to known enemy intentions and preclude the seizing of the initiative, which is absurd. The truth, as so often, lies somewhere in the middle. There is such a correlation, but it can never be very close. The most prominent of several reasons for this is the need to leave room in the theory for considerations of policy and resources, space and time. To say this is not blindly to accept Clausewitz's disparagement: ‘Most Intelligence is false’, so that ‘for lack of objective knowledge one has to trust to talent or to luck’ 2 – a view which was no doubt scarcely an exaggeration in his time but one which Sigint has substantially discredited today–but rather to emphasise anew his best-known dictum of all: ‘War is the continuation of policy by other means’. The policy of a state, or the policy mutually agreed between a state and its allies, will specify objectives to be sought. The presence or absence of the means to achieve them will be the first qualification, the first guideline to action; intelligence about the enemy comes next, but it can seldom or never dictate the objective. The single greatest decision of the Second World War – at any rate apart from the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan – was the ‘Germany first’ decision taken by Allied agreement at the Washington conference in December 1941, and that owed nothing to intelligence. The same holds good for TORCH, the invasion of North Africa, which was the British Gymnast plan of the previous year turned through 180° to meet the new circumstances of the American alliance, and for the later invasions of Italy and France. Not even the choice of particular landing beaches in Sicily, at Salerno or in Normandy derived from knowledge of enemy locations, which could and did change long after plans for HUSKY, AVALANCHE and OVERLORD were firmly settled. It might even be argued that the Baytown landing in the toe of Italy in September 1943 was conducted – though perhaps not planned – quite contrary to the available intelligence, for Ultra 3 had shown that all the major German troop formations had been withdrawn from the southern tip well before 8 Army's bombardment opened. 4
