Between Intelligence and Action
Going beyond the pure intelligence is the assessment of known capabilities of one's own resources versus the best estimate of opponent capabilities.
Clausewitz' book On War asks a simple question: How can the national leadership know how much force will be necessary to bring to bear against a potential enemy? Clausewitz replies, "We must gauge the character of . . . (the enemy) government and people and do the same in regard to our own. Finally, we must evaluate the political sympathies of other states and the effect the war may have on them.
Clausewitz warns that studying enemy weaknesses without considering one's own capacity to take advantage of those weaknesses is a mistake.
Many first heard of the term centers of gravity in the context of Desert Storm or COL John Warden, but Warden's contribution was adapting the idea, to air campaigns, of the Clausewitz idea of a "center of gravity," a feature that if successfully attacked, can stop the enemy's war effort. Assessment requires considering the potential interaction of the two sides. According to Clausewitz, "One must keep the dominant characteristics of both belligerents in mind."
Read more about this topic: Intelligence Dissemination Management
Famous quotes containing the words intelligence and/or action:
“Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people. I for one do not despair of the republic. I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imperative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.”
—Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958)