Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda - Hardcover

In fiction, the spy is a glamorous figure whose secrets make or break peace, but, historically, has intelligence really been a vital step to military victories? In this breakthrough study, the preeminent war historian John Keegan goes to the heart of a series of important conflicts to develop a powerful argument about military intelligence.

In his characteristically wry and perceptive prose, Keegan offers us nothing short of a new history of war through the prism of intelligence. He brings to life the split-second decisions that went into waging war before the benefit of aerial surveillance and electronic communications. The English admiral Horatio Nelson was hot on the heels of Napoleon’s fleet in the Mediterranean and never knew it, while Stonewall Jackson was able to compensate for the Confederacy’s disadvantage in firearms and manpower with detailed maps of the Appalachians. In the past century, espionage and decryption have changed the face of battle: the Japanese surprise attack at the Battle of the Midway was thwarted by an early warning. Timely information, however, is only the beginning of the surprising and disturbing aspects of decisions that are made in war, where brute force is often more critical.

Intelligence in War is a thought-provoking work that ranks among John Keegan’s finest achievements.

JOHN KEEGAN is Britain’s foremost military historian. As the Defence Editor of The Daily Telegraph, John Keegan has commented on the Iraq war over the past year. He is the author of many bestselling books including The First World War, A History of Warfare, Intelligence in War, and others. For many years Keegan was the Senior Lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst,and he has been a Fellow at Princeton University and Delmas Professor of History at Vassar. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, received the OBE in the First Gulf War honours list and was knighted in the Millennium honours list. He lives in Wiltshire, England.