The arm chair generalist reminds us how intel was fabricated in the run up to Iraq:

What we do know now is that SecState Powell presented "evidence" of an Iraqi BW program based on graphics drawn by one U.S. contractor and perhaps butressed by another U.S. contractor's construction of a notional mobile BW lab. Whether or not the lab as drawn by Battelle or as constructed by SAIC could actually produce BW agent, even a simulant, is unknown.

The reason it is important to keep ahead of this is that we are rapidly approaching a similar fight or fright decision in Iran. Intelligence, particularly as supplied to decision makers in Washington will quite possibly determine the results of this vote.

The decision to go to war is often fateful, as Anthony Cordesman's first impressions on the Israeli-Hexbollah War underlines:

One key lesson is a familiar one: limited wars tend to have far more limited results and
uncertain consequences than their planners realize at the time that they initiate and
conduct them. It is difficult to know how many goals Israel achieved by the fighting to
date or can keep in the future, but both Israel and Hezbollah face major uncertainties in
claiming any form of meaningful victory.

He very carefully couches his analysis, but at every point notes that the Israelis have not achieved their states war fighting objectives. He notes that while they did manage to destroy or disable the longer ranged rocket launchers, this is virtually their only strategic success. One of the main reasons was that Israel's intelligence into the number, quality and morale of Hezbollah's fighters was far from adequeate. Poor intelligence into capabilities leads to tactical frustration and failure to achieve strategic objectives.

In fact, he lists intelligence problems as part of the Israeli "rush to accountability". Virutally every point touched on either intelligence failures, or failures of planning directly related to intelligence failures.

What is write small in the Levant is writ larger in Iraq. By constantly misstating Iraq's strategic and tactical capabilities, by laying out contradictory and even impossible war aims, the Bush executive undercut the very essential realism which must be front and center in any military campaign. A war to deal with an invented threat has a great deal of difficulty proving that it ended a threat that didn't actually exist. Conversely, it will not be able to deal with real threats that do exist.

Equivocal objectives, intelligence bent to already decided upon war aims, a playing to domestic audience have created the situation both in Iraq and the Levant where the superior military power has failed to reach a successful equilibrium. That is the essential problem: the major power needs business as usual, the insurgencies that they faced needed to thwart the establishment of order, and the acceptance of a counter order.

These combine with the reality, as Cordesman puts it of "Netcentric" warfare. That is, a different kind of social organization, where the distrubuted network of small cells allows considerable independence. This combined with the sphericalical quality of supplying high tech weapons means that what we see in Iraq, and what we have seen in the Levant, is a form of battle which at much lower cost is able to frustrate pyramid militaries with their heavy footprint.

"The lack of a formal and hierarchical supply system meant that disperse
weapons and supplies—the equivalent of "feed forward logistics"—accumulated over six
years ensured the ability to keep operating in spite of IDF attacks on supply facilities and resupply."

This is a crucial point. In looking back on military history, the logistical capabilities of armies are often as important for determining their structure as the actual combat. We get the word "impediment" from the Roman word for their baggage train. The German Wars of Unification featured the use of rail and telegraph logistics against traditional movement armies mounted by Austria, with shattering results. The shift from a hierarchical distribution system - which has failed in many places in Iraq - to a node to node system - where weapons are pushed towards danger - is an example of a similar shift in military planning and structure. From pyramid armies to spherical cultures of military activity.

This again returns us to the question of intelligence, and response. When dealing with distributed forces, the ability to correctly evaluate the capabilities available, and design effective counter measures. It is not that either the US Military or the IDF were incapable of dealing with the enemies presented to them, it is that they faced the combination of having to defend against a vague threat, while not understanding the web of military capability that had to be rooted out while doing so.

When intelligence becomes "about" selling the case for war, and when war becomes "about" removing short term political problems, this combination becomes deadly against enemies who are about intelligence and purpose. Hezbollah isn't a military problem per se, it is a political problem that has a military dimension. The "War on Drugs" hasn't ended drug use, demographics and economics is what caused any decrease in violent crime and drug use. The "War on Terrorism", which Israel's Lebanon adventure certainly is part of, is making similarly non-progress. Of course, the public isn't entirely ready to listen to this.

Yet.