Senseless Secrets

Every American war and practically every battle has been marked by a failure of military intelligence, from Ticonderoga, Buena Vista, Fredericksburg, Little Big Horn, to the Ardennes, Pearl Harbor, Korea, Tet, Grenada, Panama, and Desert Storm. In all these instances, American lives were tragically lost as a direct result of intelligence breakdowns.
Senseless Secrets reveals how and why the United States spends $28 billion annually to operate its intelligence activities and another $6 billion to classify and safeguard the information gathered. However, little of this data trickles down to the military leaders, and perhaps that's fortunate since even less is accurate, making it a collection of truly senseless secrets; from Benedict Arnold to Aldrich Ames, spies and traitors have successfully infiltrated the U.S. military intelligence community; American forces landed on Grenada with useless tourist maps and incorrect information about the location of the students and government officials they were sent to rescue; many small-unit commanders in Vietnam, including the author, did not recall ever receiving a single piece of useful intelligence; While Operation Desert Storm had available the best intelligence of any war in U.S. history, military commanders who needed accurate information the most received gross overestimates of the numbers and capabilities of the Iraqi forces with little indication of their willingness to fight. Military intelligence compounded their failures by greatly inflating the estimates of enemy equipment and troop losses once the battle actually began.