Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy Read Online Free PDF Page A

been an Imperial victory into a defeat. 8
    The European armies of the eighteenth century had become much more professionalised than those of the Thirty Years War. Even so, they found real-time intelligence hard to acquire. Frederick the Great’s campaign of Hohenfriedberg in 1745 was exceptional. The Imperial (Austrian) army was concentrating against him to wrest back the province of Silesia, which the Prussian king had illegally seized in 1740. He got general word of its movement but needed to put himself in a favourable position to resist its attack, by tempting it down into the Silesian plain from the surrounding hills. His first move was to use a double agent he had, an Italian clerk, in Imperial headquarters, to spread the word that the Prussians were retreating. He then concealed his army in broken ground and waited for the Austrians to appear. They made no effort to disguise their movements, and so he was able to make use of rules of observation (
indices
) which were known to provide rough-and-ready real-time intelligence when the enemy was in view. Dust was an important indicator. “A generalised cloud of dust usually signified that the enemy foragers were about. The same kind of dust, without any sighting of the foraging parties, suggested that the sutlers and baggage were being sent to the rear and that the enemy was about to move. Dense and isolated towers of dust showed that the columns were already on the march.” There were other signs. The gleam of the sun, on a bright day, on swords and bayonets was open to interpretation at distances of up to a mile. Marshal de Saxe, Frederick’s great French contemporary, wrote that “if the rays are perpendicular, it means that the enemy is coming at you; if they are broken and infrequent, he is retreating.” 9
    Frederick, on 3 June, had positioned himself at a lookout point which commanded the level ground in front of Hohenfriedberg. Towards four o’clock in the afternoon he saw a cloud of dust, through which gradually resolved eight huge Austrian columns advancing towards the Prussian positions, illuminated by bright sunshine. As darkness fell, Frederick ordered a night march. Next morning the Battle of Hohenfriedberg began.
    Despite his enjoyment of advantageous intelligence, Frederick did not win an easy victory. His army was outnumbered, and the Austrians and their allies had manoeuvred during the night to outflank him. As so often in war, it was superior fighting power that carried the day; Frederick’s preliminary intelligence success was soon negated. It was his own quick thinking in the heat of action and the fierce reaction of his soldiers which turned the tide of battle. 10
    The same would most often prove to be true in wars yet to come. In their wars outside Europe, particularly in the North American forests, where Indian allies knew the ground intimately and were masters of the arts of scouting and surprise, European armies were to suffer shocking defeats in the depths of the woods. General Braddock’s disaster at the Monongahela, near modern Pittsburgh, where a large British force was wiped out in a few hours in 1755, was entirely the result of walking blind into an ambush prepared by the French, led by their Native American allies, in uncharted and unscouted woodland. In what both sides came to call “American warfare,” intelligence remained at a premium and usually provided the basis of victory or defeat. In the familiar campaigning grounds of Europe, during the great wars of the French Revolution and Napoleonic empire (1792–1815), intelligence rarely brought victory solely by its own account. That was true even during the British Peninsular War against the French in Spain and Portugal, 1808–14. Intelligence, however good, moved too slowly to bring a real-time advantage. Indeed, Wellington in the Peninsula depended upon exactly the same means of intelligence as Scipio in his campaign against Nova Carthago (New Carthage) in Spain in the third