The End of Intelligence: Espionage and State Power in the Information Age
David Tucker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. 241 pp. Biblio. Index. Notes. $22.64.
Reviewed by Captain Steven E. Maffeo, U.S. Navy Reserve (Retired)
The title of this fascinating book is perhaps a bit overstated—for while there are indeed issues, challenges, and changes, we certainly have not reached the end. Intelligence remains important if not vital, and author David Tucker is quick to reinforce this as he presents an impressive and broad analysis of its vibrant history and current condition. He reaches back into the past—around 25 centuries—with Caesar invading and Sun Tzu philosophizing, and then comes forward to such immediate issues as the U.S. National Security Agency’s sweeping data-collection controversy and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Tucker discusses espionage specifically, and intelligence more generally, “as a way of examining the fate of state power in the information age.” He remains concerned throughout about secrecy (traditionally considered essential for government) and privacy (traditionally considered essential for “liberal citizenship”). Alluding to the current information “tsunami,” he concludes that even in our age of massive amounts of information widely available, secrecy will survive, and state-operated intelligence organizations will maintain most historical activities—and develop new ones.
Dr. Tucker brings considerable expertise to this impressive volume. He is a Senior Fellow at the Ashbrook Center of Ohio’s Ashland University, where he researches and writes on civic education, religion in American history and politics, and civil liberties in an age of terrorism and cyber attacks. Holding a doctorate in history, he has written five previous books on American history and on military and strategic policy. He taught for 15 years at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, served as a foreign-service officer in Africa and Europe, and worked in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict.
In the course of the book the author examines information and intelligence and their relation to power; espionage; counterintelligence and covert action; intelligence and warfare; and intelligence and irregular warfare. Focusing on espionage, he analyzes the relationships between professional “principals” and “agents,” and the power of information inside intelligence organizations. After a general conclusion, Tucker includes two appendices, where he discusses surprise and the importance of “information advantage” as well as information and the power of non-state actors. Throughout the text he draws an interesting cast into his presentation, including Sun Tzu, Julius Caesar, Francis Bacon, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Karl von Clausewitz, “Stonewall” Jackson, and Sherman Kent—this last considered by many the “father of American intelligence analysis.”
The author’s discourse on ancient versus modern intelligence is informative. Also very interesting is his emphasis on the roles of both luck and chance and how much we underestimate those roles—while we simultaneously overestimate how much we understand about the world. Equally noteworthy is Tucker’s examination of the military—in many instances a viable alternative to the Central Intelligence Agency—as an important covert-action arm of the U.S. government.
After reflection, Tucker believes that in our modern age of abundant information and transparency, privacy is definitely reduced (biometrics, data mining, ubiquitous surveillance cameras, and the like) but secrecy will survive. Moreover, the information revolution seems to have created new possibilities for traditional intelligence functions—particularly espionage and covert action—although “if any aspect of institutionalized intelligence has become redundant, it is not espionage . . . but [predictive] analysis.”
Tucker’s book is very much original and unique. It is more written for a scholarly rather than a general audience, and as a result it is not a book that’s easily read in one sitting. Despite the frequent clever turns of phrase, the occasional humor (I particularly liked the references to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock and comedian Woody Allen), and the lucid conclusions after each chapter, to receive full benefit the reader will need to give a significant commitment of time and a considerable amount of concentration.
Having said that, The End of Intelligence is a perceptive and thoughtful contribution to the literature, concluding that the information revolution is less revolutionary than commonly assumed. Dr. Tucker asserts that espionage (and intelligence overall), is “more than luck but less than science.” It is art; thus “the light with which we guide ourselves is dimmer than many suspect but . . . we are likely to make our way more steadily if we acknowledge the obscurity in which we move.” His argument that the information revolution has increased the power of states relative to non-state actors challenges the views of many, and pushes us to reflect on the fate of secrecy and privacy in the future.
Fire on the Water: China, America, and the Future of the Pacific
Robert Haddick. Naval Institute Press. 2014. 288 pp. Biblio. Index. Maps. Notes. $37.95.
Reviewed by Captain Dale C. Rielage, U.S. Navy
Many pivotal questions facing the U.S. Navy today hinge on the nature and intentions of the People’s Republic of China and its navy. Is the Chinese Navy a threat to the United States? How does it intend to operate and fight? What, if anything, should the United States do in response? Professional discussion of these questions has been informed by a number of excellent studies going back more than a dozen years. Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes’ Red Star over the Pacific and Bud Cole’s The Great Wall at Sea have examined the Chinese Navy from a deep reading of Chinese sources. More broadly, Andrew Scobell and Andrew Nathan’s China’s Search for Security and Larry Wortzel’s The Dragon Extends its Reach have placed China’s naval developments in the context of its overall military and security concerns.
In Fire on the Water, Robert Haddick joins this discussion with a picture of a Chinese military that is a profound threat to America’s international standing and security. Most critically, he believes that the United States has been slow to recognize and respond to the daunting pace of Chinese military modernization, and that the U.S. military has taken ineffective measures, hamstrung by military service cultures biased towards investments in the wrong weapons and approaches. The author contends only an urgent shift in strategic approach and budgetary investment will redeem the ground already lost.
As befits this line of argument, much of the book presents the hardware of the Chinese military. While adequate for a general reader, naval professionals will find in this discussion little new and much significant missing. Further, there is remarkably little discussion of the Chinese themselves. The nation is reduced to the sum of its weapons. This level of analysis would be limiting in a discussion confined to purely military issues. However, the author devotes significant attention to China’s gradual expansion of its maritime claims enforcement. In this effort, the book misses significant nuances in Chinese claims about maritime jurisdiction and authority—nuances that matter to both informed debate and actual naval operations. More important, the analysis misses the fact that the dilemma posed by China’s actions is fundamentally political. With maritime claims as a core interest, China is willing to escalate vertically and horizontally to ensure successful resolution of any confrontation. That dynamic, more than military hardware, is the wicked problem at the heart of the Western Pacific security challenge.
The crux of the book, however, hinges on China’s considerable anti-access/area- denial (A2/AD) capabilities. These, the author asserts, present a crippling threat to both U.S. air power operating from fixed bases and U.S. Navy surface forces in the region. This vision of a dead zone covering the Western Pacific is central to the author’s recommendations. To support this assertion, he dismisses the idea that maritime forces can create any kind of operational sanctuary in the face of A2/AD systems. While he grants that the United States faced a similar attempt by the Soviet Union to protect its coasts against the approach of U.S. forces from the sea, he dismisses this reservoir of experience because it was never exercised in combat. Rather, Haddick suggests the answer to this challenge is to remain outside the threat ring, penetrating occasionally with stealthy platforms to engage targets of high value to Chinese leaders. Ironically, having dismissed Air-Sea Battle as dangerously escalatory because of its perceived reliance on long-range strikes on A2/AD systems, he returns to a global strike model to selectively destroy targets he believes the Chinese leadership holds dear.
Rigorous, nuanced insight into China’s military development is essential to informing future U.S. Navy thinking. Fire on the Water gets the bumper sticker right—the scope and pace of Chinese military modernization, hand-in-hand with worldwide advances in A2/AD technologies, create an urgent need for the U.S. Navy to focus on access, survivability, and contested sea control. Professional analysis needs to go beyond the bumper stickers, and this work fails in the details in a discssion where details have strategic impact. With the growing number of excellent analyses of Asian security issues and U.S. strategy being produced, naval officers interested in the Pacific should invest their limited time on other works.
Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice
John A. Nagl. New York: Penguin Press, 2014. 288 pp. Index. Notes. $27.95.
Reviewed by Master Chief Petty Officer Dave Mattingly, U.S. Navy (Retired)
With the end of combat operations in Iraq, policymakers as well as soldiers have filled the shelves with books about the war. Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice recounts the service of retired Army Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, a career officer afforded the opportunity to lead soldiers, study at Oxford University, and apply what he learned to the battlefields of Iraq. He was also on the faculty at West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy.
Books written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan typically fall into two groups: those written from the position of senior policymakers and those written by “grunts,” the soldier on patrol, facing the enemy up close and personal, and seeing their buddies killed. Nagl uniquely writes from both perspectives—from his early days in the Kuwait desert to commanding an armor battalion in Iraq to being a staff officer in the office of the Secretary of Defense and a major contributor to the doctrine that would influence how U.S. ground forces fight the current as well as future wars.
In Knife Fights, Dr. Nagl aligns his Army career with the transformation of the service as it emerged from the Cold War and the tactics designed to counter the former Soviet Union’s military or the armies of its client states. He experienced the victory in Operation Desert Storm as an armor platoon leader, the peacekeeping missions of the ’90s, and the war on terrorism—in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
During Operation Desert Storm (1991), Nagl led a platoon of Abrams tanks against the Iraqi armored forces, which was considered one of the largest and strongest armies in the region at the time. Following his return, Nagl’s unit confronted a different “enemy” during exercises at the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin. He deployed his tanks according to current doctrine, just as he had done in the Kuwait desert, but the opposing force abandoned the Soviet tactics and instead attacked as if they were a militia or an insurgency group—the style of fighting in which the Army would later be engaged.
In 1997, he was given an opportunity to study at Oxford University in preparation for joining the faculty of West Point. Nagl studied the conundrum of how the Army would fight the next war. As a “soldier-scholar,” he joined an exclusive group of officers in the Social Sciences Department that included David Petraus and H. R. McMaster, among others.
His doctoral dissertation, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, the title a reference to T. E. Lawrence’s (Lawrence of Arabia) description of counterinsurgency operations in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was initially rejected by a number of college publishers as being irrelevant. The book was eventually published in 2005 and established Nagl as an authority on counterinsurgency operations. During this time the Army began to realize the war in Iraq had turned into a counterinsurgency operation. Its relevance was demonstrated when U.S. soldiers found the book on captured Taliban computers.
In 2003 Nagl deployed to Anbar Province, this time with Humvees, not tanks, and his soldiers would patrol as infantrymen to fight what had turned into a classic insurgency. Without formal counterinsurgency training, Nagl applied the academic theories he developed at Oxford to help turn the tide of the rising al Qaeda in Iraq threat in western Iraq. Returning to the states, his unit ordered coffee cups inscribed, “IRAQ 2003–2004: We Were Winning When I Left.”
Knife Fights is written as an autobiography, but it is also a critical review of the Army of the 1990s and how it reacted to combat operations after 9/11. Nagl states he did not support the invasion of Iraq, and throughout the book he illustrates errors made by both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations in planning, executing, and leaving Iraq and how they could be replicated in Afghanistan.
Now the headmaster of the Haverford School in Pennsylvania, Nagl continues to write on counterinsurgency and military strategy. His works, including Knife Fights, are a necessary read for any student of counterinsurgency operations and military strategy, as well as those who want to see how decisions made in the White House or Pentagon are implemented—or not—on the battlefield.