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| 1 |
ID:
178299
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| Summary/Abstract |
The deployment of special forces in hostile or politically volatile environments in search of strategic/operational intelligence, though not a 21st century novelty, appeared as a distinct military activity in literature only in the early 2000s under the label ‘Special Reconnaissance’ (SR). This article argues that the concept of SR (a) originated in the biblical Israelite military tradition and is depicted in the Bible as the lapis angularis of military strategy and a practice capable of dictating military and political norms; (b) has been used as a key element of the Israel Defence Forces’ (IDF) modus operandi since 1948 thenceforth functioning in an analogous manner. To support these arguments, the theoretical and practical characteristics of Moses’ intelligence mission to Canaan as well as the IDF’s proclivity to SR are scrutinised under the general theoretical framework of political realism that assumes rational and pro-state interest course of actions. Accordingly, SR emerges as a distinctive common instrument of biblical and contemporary Israeli strategy, a fact that underlines the uninterrupted socio-political and cultural links between the past and the present of the Israeli ontology, this time via the wider concept of the Israeli military ethics.
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| 2 |
ID:
072668
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2006.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Wellington is well known for his understanding of the importance of intelligence, but so far history has recorded that he presided over a one-man intelligence department, himself being the only analyst of what proved to be a massive quantity of raw information. New research highlighted in this article reveals that this has been an inaccurate interpretation. The British government also acted to establish a civilian network of correspondents and agents communicating with the British ambassadors to Spain and Portugal. Wellington's main priority was to integrate the 'strategic intelligence' collected by government agents with his own 'operational intelligence'. Instead, analysis was conducted more by Wellington's subordinates in the field, applying their personal localized expertise to the information they received. In this way, an early and primitive form of the staff system later developed by the Prussians was created in the Peninsular War.
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| 3 |
ID:
123947
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Mentioned in memoirs by a few former military intelligence officers, operational intelligence has had little attention in academic writing on the Second World War before Ultra's decisive contributions began in 1941-2. Especially neglected has been the fighting provoked by the German offensive in 1940 that cleaved through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg and drove Britain off the Continent. This article tackles this gap, analysing the military intelligence/military operations interface on the French side. It assesses the contributions and shortcomings of radio-intercept intelligence, along with intelligence-gathering by air and ground reconnaissance (demonstrating that German air superiority imposed a 'battle blindness' on Allied commanders wanting intelligence on approach marches and formation switches more than a dozen kilometres into the German rear). It reveals that frontline infantry raiding - redolent of intelligence-gathering techniques familiar to veterans of 1914-18 trench warfare - was again widely employed. This proved a highly effective recourse, particularly during the positional battles on the Somme, Aisne and Oise in June 1940, filling intelligence gaps left by more technologically sophisticated but more fragile sources. The factors that kept formations fighting so as to inflict significant delays and heavy losses on the German assaults were robust communications networks (to convey operational intelligence fast enough to permit counter-manoeuvres based on it), and the preservation of French chains of command and control. When these key nodes collapsed, preventing the hard-won operational intelligence being deployed to coordinate French military resistance, the latter declined into a series of disjointed, directionless and unavailing acts of courage that could not exploit the several instances during the campaign when the Germans, too, were afflicted by battle fatigue, re-supply bottlenecks and morale wobbles.
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| 4 |
ID:
133875
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
There is a story that, following the decision to send a task force to recapture the Falkland Island, a librarian was woken in the early hours of the morning and ordered to open Plymouth Central Library.
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