| Summary/Abstract |
This article looks at two ancient intelligence postmortems, one pertaining to intelligence failure in the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1666, the other from Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. Both documents deal with wartime naval intelligence, and allow to put the practice of intelligence failure into historical perspective, study the nature of intelligence in these times, and to see that not only were the difficulties of intelligence analysis similar to those encountered today, but that the investigation of what went wrong also bears some resemblance to present-day official inquests.
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