INTELLIGENCE, MILITARY. Under this generally accepted designation may be considered the work of obtaining, collating and interpreting information about an enemy or potential enemy, and also the results of that work and the organization which performs it. In practice, " negative " or " defensive " intelligence, that is the countering of an enemy's efforts to obtain intelligence, is also included, as explained below.
(A.) Intelligence Generally. Up to the last few years before the World War the function of military intelligence was in no way separated from staff work in general, nor regarded as a specialty. Information as to actual or potential enemies has pf course always been required, obtained and interpreted by Governments and commanders in the field, and individual officers have won great distinction in the wars of the past in obtaining news of vital importance. The employment of spies and the questioning of prisoners date from the earliest times of military history. But such military intelligence was casual and ad hoc rather than systematic. Even in Napoleon's day the secret service of his empire was controlled by the Foreign Office in Paris, whose information sometimes took weeks to reach the army in the field. The more immediately useful information furnished by local agents in the theatre of war was indeed or- ganized and paid for within the army, and then, as now, it was the duty of every subordinate commander to collect all possible information and pass it to his superior. But of a regular intelli- gence service as understood to-day there was no trace in Napole- on's armies. The collection of information was the duty of soldiers generally and the profession of spies habitual or tem- porary, and its synthesis and interpretation were, in practice, the business of the commander-in-chief himself aided by those of his staff officers whom he chose to employ. Later, we find from time to time " intelligence corps " formed for the obtain- ing of information, but it still remains part of the functions of a staff and, when specialized, a general staff to collate and to interpret this information. Nevertheless, the very organization of such corps or agencies for collecting information implies that it is the business of some one, in charge of the corps or employ- ing the agents, to receive the information that is obtained item by item and to collate it, as well as to direct the efforts of his corps or his agents to those localities where, or to those subjects on which, special information (positive or negative) is wanted by the commander.
In this sense Napoleon was served by an intelligence officer of the first class Col. Bacler d'Albe, unknown to fame save as a cartographer, but in fact the one assistant who was present when Napoleon arrived at his great decisions in the field. Lying prone on the outspread maps, compasses in hand, with D'Albe at his elbow to inform him either as to topography or as to the enemy's dispositions and order of battle, 1 Napoleon could handle a changing situation day by day with all the certainty that the means of communication of his day allowed. It has recently been remarked that, to a Napoleon, an intelligence staff is more indispensable than the operations staff, and the remark is his- torically justified by the facts. For an operations staff is the product of a military system that of Germany in which the commander-in-chief is a sovereign who may not possess the qualities of command but yet must command, and it has devel- oped because the growing intricacy, of operations detail has compelled an increase in the number of workers who collab- orate with the normal commander-in-chief. A saying of Foch is illuminating in this connexion. The great French marshal, asked how Napoleon would conduct the western front cam- paigns, replied: " Were he to return he would say 'you have weapons, numbers, communications, aircraft, transport such as I never possessed. Stand aside, all of you, and I will show you.' But, now as then, he would have taken care to have his Bacler d'Albe at his side."
In so intimate a union between the master of operations and the intelligence officer, it may be assumed without direct evidence that a man whose military judgment was matured by the unique experience of watching Napoleon's brain arrive at
1 Bacler d'Albe kept a card index of enemy formations and units.
conclusions, and following his thoughts so as to be ready to supply the data on which they fed, must have added the func- tion of " interpretation " to those of collection and sifting.
In this word " interpretation " we reach the real differentia between the ordinary system of military intelligence work in the past and that developed in the World War.
Napoleon was his own operations staff, and Bacler d'Albe, in'J his own person also, was the intelligence staff. But while, as above mentioned, the operations work of a Napoleon came, in the middle of the igth century, to be devolved upon an organ known as the general staff there was no collateral development on the intelligence side. It is true that within the general staff a branch was usually set apart for intelligence work, and that such organizations of secret agents as existed were controlled by the general staff. Moreover, the study of foreign languages came to be regarded as a valuable element in a staff officer's equipment. But these things did not amount to providing the command (or the operations staff, which is often the command in commission) with the organ which should play Bacler d'Albe to their Napoleon. France, with its " Deuxicme Bureau," came probably as near to that ideal as any country, but the Deuxieme Bureau was discredited and shaken to its founda- tions by the Dreyfus affair. Moreover, a new doctrine of the relations between operations and intelligence, to be discussed presently, was set up about 1912, which tended to impair its usefulness still further. In Great Britain the reorganization following upon the Esher report in 1904 provided that the direc- torate of operations on the general staff should deal, section by section, with intelligence and operations together; thus, the section charged with preparing plans of operations against, say, Turkey was responsible for all intelligence concerning Turkey. In the field organization, both before and during the World War, sufficient officers were allowed on the staff of each forma- tion for one to devote himself principally to intelligence work, and at G.H.Q. there was provided a " brigadier-general intelli- gence " coequal with a "brigadier-general operations." But any real specialization of function which grew up in the war was due rather to the immense and unforeseen volume and complexity of the information to be handled than to any change of doctrine. If, in the higher staffs, officers were engaged on intelligence work to the exclusion of every other activity, on the lower staffs it was not so. To the very end of the war the theory that, in a division, a G.S.O. 3rd grade (Intelligence) was the understudy of the G.S.O. 2nd grade (Operations) was rigorously maintained, and an " intelligence officer " so called, who was expected to be nearly as familiar with doings on the German side of the wire as an operations staff officer with those on his own side of it, was looked upon as a technical assistant to the general staff rather than as a member of it. The fact that the subjects on which information was 'required were immensely extended in the war, did not, and quite logically did not, involve any change of doctrine any more than the appointment of a dozen extra foreign correspondents to a newspaper staff affects the distinc- tion between the news-getting and the editorial functions.
But the inclusion of " interpretation " as a function of the intelligence staff de facto if not de jure marks a difference in kind. Once this is admitted and carried to its logical conclusion, certain officers are told off to live, mentally, in the enemy's camp, to form and to convey to the commander working ideas of the opponent's life, mentality and routine, to vivify the specific facts gleaned by them or by others. An epigram current in the British intelligence service during the war admirably sums up the new r61e: "The intelligence officer's job is to command the enemy's army."
This is what interpretation implies. The facts have to be given not merely a meaning, but their true meaning, or as near an approximation thereto as possible. It is an old, but frequently misleading, maxim of war that a commander should ask himself what he would do if he were in the enemy's place. The real question is: How will the situation strike the enemy, given his organization, upbringing, habits of mind and predispositions. If, for example, in the third week of Aug. 1914 Hindenburg and
