Losing the Intelligence and Information War
BY Herschel Smith
17 years, 6 months ago
Sun Tzu — “If I am able to determine the enemy’s dispositions while at the same time I conceal my own then I can concentrate and he must divide. And if I concentrate while he divides, I can use my entire strength to attack a fraction of his
On June 26, 2007 at 3:14 am, Dominique R. Poirier said:
I understand your point, Herschel. Who wouldn’t, anyways? All those open discussions surprised me at some point in the past; but, as ar as I can see, it seems that nobody cares. I know of some other occidental countries that they just do the exact opposite; to the point that all they make publicly available rarely relates to more than boring hackneyed and dusty accounts of wartime intelligence and strategy backing to the sixties.
All this puzzled me and I wondered what could be the reasons justifying this American openness. For wants of further satisfying explanation I reached to the conclusion that the daily bulk of information publicly released on matters such as U.S. policy, strategy, military affairs and intelligence was too big to be read with all required dedication, filtered, properly analyzed, synthesized and understood. I acknowledge that the enemy is likely to reach to its own assumptions and to correctly identify and select the most serious blogs, websites, publications, and else so as to limit the bulk of open source to a digestible quantity.
Now, if I were in the enemy shoes I would wonder the same and worry; precisely because things that are of interest to me would seem much too open to be credible. Where is noise and how can I identify it? Is that deception or truth? Hmm, maybe half deception, half truth.
I have a good example that surges up in my mind while I am writing this comment, which is this polemic around a possible U.S. direct attack against Iran. Very contrary and contradictory opinions and strategies have been made publicly available about this question. For worse, if I may say so, in many cases those opinions, ideas and strategies originated in the minds of reputed and quite credible thinkers and scholars. I am pretty sure that the enemy knows all possible options about this question now; as I am pretty sure that he bloody doesn’t know which the right one is.
If ever the enemy truly holds this intimate knowledge of the American-Anglo-Saxon people, culture and society, then he has been affraid at some point when he found in some book that Benjamin Disraeli said once: “Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal you own mind and confuse the minds of others.