"...seventy primary targets concerned with weapons of mass destruction had not been spotted because they were buried deep or cunningly disguised as something else."
-Frederick Forsyth, The Fist Of God (London, 1995), Chapter Fourteen, p. 386.
Avalon after attack:
"He sighed. 'Let us be frank, citizens,' he said. 'Our intelligence about this system was very bad. We had no idea what fortifications had been created for Avalon -'"
-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 437-662 AT IX, p. 544.
If you are going to get into a fight, be prepared. I have spent a lot of time blundering into conflicts with my eyes closed.
12 comments:
It's not the data, it's the interpretation.
Intelligence failures almost always take place at the level where data is put together and analyzed, and the cause is people believing what they want to hear.
That's why Stalin was caught flat-footed by the German invasion in 1941, for example; he'd been repeatedly warned about it, but attributed the warnings to Anglo-French disinformation efforts trying to disrupt his alliance with Germany.
As the saying went: "Comrade Stalin only trusted one other human being in his entire life -- and that one was Adolf Hitler."
On a level almost as important, the French General Staff was warned about the German intention to invade via a wide western swing through Belgium repeatedly before 1914 -- they got sold the entire plan (1908 version, IIRC) by a double agent.
They just refused to believe it.
Due to internal politics, the French generals refused to believe that reserve formations could be deployed in the front lines, and therefore estimated that the Germans didn't have enough men to do a swing-wide plan, even though it was fairly obvious that they -would- put their reserve divisions into the first line.
(Essentially, the French and German armies had the same argument about employing reserve formations, but in Germany the other side won.)
The French intelligence agencies and staff selectively interpreted statements by German officers and politicians to support their argument that the Germans wouldn't use reserve divisions at the front either.
As a result, Joffre, the French Chief of Staff, very nearly lost the war in the first 2 months by ignoring his left wing and repeatedly launching vain attacks into the teeth of entrenched German positions.
He wised up at the last possible moment, with just enough time to use interior lines and intact railways to shift reserves west to his left.
(The German plan was insanely risky, because it pretty much required the French to cooperate by ignoring the main German attack... which, for the opening weeks, is precisely what they did.)
I could go on and on. "Confirmation bias" is a force of enormous strength; it requires an almost superhuman degree of mental discipline to avoid it.
The problem is reinforced in a bureaucracy, where each level through which information has to pass is subject to it.
Incidentally, one technological development which helps is drone and other instant camera footage. It gives a chance for unfiltered data to make it to the top.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating comments! It's not just monsters like Stalin who could make catastrophic decisions due to confirmation bias, but also the French generals in 1914.
Maybe the French simply could not BELIEVE the Germans would actually do something so risky as that wide swinging attack thru Belgium? But their own folly so very nearly made that German plan a success!
I remember you suggesting elsewhere that a better plan for Germany would have been to stay strictly on the defensive in the west, and focus on quickly and decisively defeating Russia in the east. Let the French be tempted to try a wide swinging attack thru Belgium!*
I agree "confirmation bias" is a huge problem for a nation's military and political leaders. One possible corrective might be for some intelligence analysts to deliberately offer PESSIMISTIC interpretations of the information they get. That might help some of the top leaders make more objective decisions.
Ditto, what you said about drone/instant camera data.
Ad astra! Sean
*In this scenario, I assume the Germans would have fortified their Belgian border.
Sean: all the general staffs in Europe in 1914 underestimated -- in a semi-deliberate way -- the strength of the defensive vs. the offensive.
It wasn't that they were ignorant of the increases in artillery and small-arms firepower, but they'd invested their professional lives in ways to -overcome- that.
That was because they dreaded a long war (not least as potentially socially destabilizing and ending in revolution) and wanted a short, decisive conflict.
The French were (for various reasons, mostly internal political/cultural ones) the worst offenders, but everyone did it to some degree.
The Germans had flashes of realism; von Molkte the Younger and several other generals mentioned the possibility of a 2-4 year war, with dozens of battles, ending only when one side or the other was totally exhausted and collapsed.
But their planning was all aimed at -avoiding- that.
They all overestimated the extent to which morale and discipline could overcome the problem of the 'last hundred yards', and they failed to anticipate some other things, like the defender's advantage in falling back on intact means of resupply and communications, while attackers had to advance across broken ground, out of touch with their command echelons.
That was perhaps pardonable -- nobody had anticipated how artillery could chew up whole landscapes, because the guns were very new (almost all in 1914 were less than 20 years old(*) and nobody had deployed advanced industry in producing unlimited shells yet.
The British, who had the most recent exposure to modern weapons (Boer War) were possibly the best in tactical terms, dispersed formations and emphasis on fire supremacy, etc., but even they backslid a bit in 1910-1914, due to the pan-European cult of morale, spirit overcoming material things, etc.
Eg., after 1902, the British cavalry got equipped with an actual rifle (the SMLE) rather than a carbine, and they got really intensive training in riding to a fight and then dismounting and fighting on foot. They did much better than either the French or the Germans in 1914 as a "reaction force" that could ride quickly to a decisive point and then mix it in with enemy troops, horse or foot, on an equal/superior basis.
But even they were affected by the 'cult of cold steel' in the years just before the war -- bringing back the lance, for instance.
There hadn't been a major war in Europe since 1870. The Boer War caused shivers of alarm, and the Russo-Japanese War even more so, but confirmation bias swung into operation again. The French were the worst offenders, often interpreting attacks piling up in mountains of corpses in front of entrenchments and machine-guns as simply due to cowardice.
It's not a surprise the French army lost 250,000 dead in 3 and a half weeks in August-September.
(*) note that many of the weapons used today, like the M16 rifle, or the .50 cal machine gun, are generations older than the soldiers carrying them. The .50 dates from 1919, and nobody's been able to make anything better in that role. By contrast, the generation before 1914 saw a total revolution in infantry weapons; in 1914 the British rifle dated from 1906, the German from 1898, and the French, the oldest, from the 1880's.
Artillery was even newer in 1914. The British guns all dated from 1904-1910, the German ones were about the same, and the French field gun dated from 1897.
Nobody had ever experienced the range, accuracy and rate of fire which those weapons could generate.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Again, fascinating comments, which I've read at least four times. A general conclusion to be made was that in 1914 no major power understood, from hard actual experience, how much war was changing due to modern industry and weapons. Aside from those flashes of realism some of the Germans had and those "shivers of alarm" springing from the Boer and Russo/Japanese wars.
Again, that problem of confirmation bias! With modern industry and weapons, it should have become obvious that elan and fighting spirit alone would not be enough to win a war.
Ad astra! Sean
Wells predicted it.
Paul: Wells predicted aspects of it.
He predicted a tactical stalemate on the ground broken by the tank, which is not quite how 1914-18 worked out, though it -is- how 1914-1945 worked out.
That was very prescient, given the limited real-world evidence before THE LAND IRONCLADS was written.
And he predicted strategic air bombardment of cities, though like everyone before nuclear weapons, he overestimated its effectiveness in THE WAR IN THE AIR. He did have a hint on what was needed, though; his predictions involved the use of chemical poisons.
In 1939, everyone expected a strategic-bombing Armageddon, and it didn't happen, though there was plenty of destruction and death.
Oddly enough, it -might- have happened.
Everyone also anticipated the use of poison gas to bombard cities, but that didn't happen because of mutual deterrence. Both sides decided not to do it unless the other side did it first, because they were too afraid of the consequences.
Yet in 1939, the Germans had a monopoly of nerve gas, which is whole orders of magnitude more deadly than 'conventional' poisons like phosgene and mustard gas.
They could have produced something like nuclear levels of casualties on London in 1940, for example, if they'd used it; hundreds of thousands, probably over a million dead in a few days from a few hundred tons of payload, which their air force was capable of delivering.
(It -wasn't- capable of delivering the loads of conventional high explosive and incendiaries needed to destroy whole cities, the way we did Dresden and Tokyo a few years later; that required vastly more and bigger bombers and complete air control.)
They didn't use the nerve gas because they thought the British had it too.
Not only did the British (and French and Americans) not have it, they didn't know the Germans had it, and had no idea what it was. The discovery of nerve gas was more or less an accident, happening in the course of research on chemical pest-killers.
So it was an intelligence failure which prevented the German air attacks from causing the sort of annihilating destruction everyone feared in 1939, based in part on Wells!
That's what I used for the BLACK CHAMBER books -- the "poor man's nuclear weapon" discovered and used early. The Germans in WW1 were actually more willing to try out new weapons than they were in WW2.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
More fascinating comments! And I was keenly interested by how H.G. Wells seems to have affected strategic thinking. It reminds me of how Churchill himself was a science fiction with a strong interest in scientific advances. And Wells probably had a similar influence in France and Germany.
I had not known only the Germans in 1939-40 had the knowledge and capacity for using nerve gas weapons. I can see why they did not use nerve gas in WW II, because they thought the French and the British, at least, had it. What surprises me is how German Intelligence did NOT find out the Anglo/French did not have nerve gas weapons. It seems to me that some probing on what the Amglo/French were doing in chemical research would reveal they did not have nerve gas.
Given how ruthless Hitler was, I have absolutely no doubt at all nerve gas would have been used on the UK and France in 1940. With results as devastating to them (or even worse) as you show them in the BLACK CHAMBER books. And nerve gas would certainly have been used on the USSR in 1941, to smash major cities like Leningrad and Moscow.
Would the Germans have tacitly encouraged millions of surviving French to emigrate en masse to French North Africa, as in the BLACK CHAMBER timeline? To make it easier to take over France proper? Maybe!
Hitler, of course, would have no hesitation using nerve gas for exterminating the "subhuman" Slavs!
The US, due to distance and the inability of the Luftwaffe to effectively attack her, had some time for catching up with the Germans in nerve weapons. Esp. with the dire fate of the UK and France to warn Americans of the dangers of not doing so!
Btw, the Germans were not totally averse to trying out new weapons in WW II, esp. as they became more desperate and the tide turned against Germany. They did invent the V rockets and the fighter jet in the end stages of the war, after all. The fighter jet seems to have been a real shock to the Anglo/American air forces, but they were too few to do Germany much good by then.
Fortunately, the Nazis had made only tentative and slow progress in developing atomic weapons. And none at all, at that time, by the Soviets. It was the US which got the jump in making nuclear weapons.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, that's it, pretty much. It was an interaction of willed optimism and lack of concrete experience. The lack of irrefutable experience (indications to the contrary below that level could be 'explained away') and strong institutional need to believe led to faulty analysis all 'round. Weapons were changing very rapidly, and industrialism was building up unprecedented productive capacity, in a period with few major wars between developed Great Powers. So nobody knew what would really happen. It was imagined -- but other outcomes were imagined too, and they were much closer to what the armed forces leadership, and the political leadership, desperately -wanted- to be true. Going to the politicians and saying: "Any war will involve a years-long struggle of attrition in which even the victor will suffer crippling losses" was not going to make you popular. And saying it within the structure of a Great Power's armed forces was going to make you a pariah too, because it threatened the military leaders with having to admit they couldn't carry out the political leadership's intentions at acceptable cost. Eg., General Petain was a prophet of the power of defensive firepower and said so loudly and often with very good backup in facts and deductions before 1914. His motto, long before the war, was "Le feu tue." Which means in English: "Firepower kills." All it got him was a reputation as a faint-heart and defeatist, and had him sidelined in the race for promotion. At the same time, bear in mind that a certain amount of 'willed optimism' is actually necessary. Nobody wins unless they believe they can.
(From SM Stirling.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling:
All the powers in 1914 had the same problem: willed optimism and lack concrete evidence got in the way of realistic analysis of what a war between industrialized great powers would be like.
Gen. Petain was virtually alone in stressing how strong the defensive war, but came with political and professional costs. Petain showed himself at his best in WWW I, before France's surrender in 1940 and the Vichy regime he headed disgraced him.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Petain shows the limits of pessimistic realism.
Eg., during the initial, very successful phase of the German spring offensives of 1918, he wanted to break contact with the British and retreat southeast to cover Paris.
In the event he did that, Haig intended to retreat west to a perimeter around Calais-Dunkirk.
This would have been an utter disaster.
The political leadership -- Lloyd George and Clemenceau -- and Ferdinand Foch, who was appointed allied "supremo" -- vetoed it and made him send French reserve formations to plug the gaps created by the shattering of the British 5th Army, and they managed to hold the Germans out of Amiens, which was the logistics hub for the whole BEF.
They managed it -just barely-. A delay would have been fatal.
Foch was one of the 'offensive optimists' of 1914, though much smarter than most of them. He'd been sidelined when his "my right falls back, my left is encircled, my center yields... situation excellent, I shall attack!" hubris was exposed.
(That's a quote from Foch, btw.)
He was brought back later, somewhat chastened, and oversaw the successful Allied counterattack of summer/fall 1918, the "Hundred Days".
Which never did succeed in breaking through the German front, but did succeed in pushing it back by a "rolling offensive" all along the front, with a new attack going in somewhere else whenever one ran out of steam.
But the Allied losses were horrendous -- greater than the Somme or Passchendaele.
It worked, but it explains why Germany was granted an armistice, rather than unconditional surrender. Pushing on to Berlin would have taken another full year, and 1-2 million casualties.
Petain was the sort of guy who looks at a situation, says, "this is hopeless" and asks for terms.
Which was exactly what happened in 1940.
Churchill was a deranged optimist, which is why Britain kept the war going in 1940 rather than making a deal, as Halifax wanted to do.
Sometimes that works out.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I think I can see that: if the Germans had succeeded in splitting apart the Anglo/French lines, they would have turned their flanks and broken thru to central France. Which is what happened in 1940.
And it's only to be expected for losses to become much worse for the Entente after Germany was forced on the defensive, fighting from in depth defenses. It wasn't worth trying to utterly crush Germany by invading the Fatherland.
And it's fortunate for us that Churchill was a "deranged optimist" in 1940!
Ad astra! Sean
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