Gathering good intelligence is not an easy task. Fortunately, there are clever methods to do it.
They just are not the ones that people are talking about right now.
On January 28, 2024, a drone launched out of Iraq by
an Iranian proxy group
snuck through US air defenses at an outpost in Jordan, along the border with Syria.
Three died and another 47 were injured.
Within 24 hours, President Biden had pledged to “hold all those
responsible to account at a time and in a manner of the United States’ choosing.”
Then the world waited for five days, until the United States finally struck back.
On February 2, the US Air Force went in with bombs a-blazing, using a pair of B-1B Lancer bombers
that took off all the way from Texas and headed to to Iraq and Syria.
Once there, they dropped their payloads on 85 targets over seven separate areas,
and set the tone for the next phase of the broader regional conflict.
But our focus today is on the discussion of how Biden “telegraphed” the retaliation.
Much has been made of it,
with some saying that five days gave the targets too much time to prepare
and others arguing that his patience was a masterclass in how
to get militant groups to break apart from the inside.
If only things were so simple…
Unfortunately, both of these takes often fundamentally misunderstand some basic
principles of intelligence and military strategy
while overlooking the more nuanced ways that governments can deduce what they do not know.
Specifically, today, we will discuss why the basic criticism of the delay falls apart,
why the basic praise of the delay is similarly misguided,
how tensions between a group’s leaders and its soldiers is something that Washington
could in theory exploit but is hard to do so in practice in this case,
and how public declarations can allow U.S. intelligence to make
strong inferences based on how the local population reacts.
And stick with me for these final two points, because that is where the action start to happen.
Brief point of clarification first.
Everything regarding the operation was done
in under a week. Really, think about that for a second.
Executing an operation requires first running through the options with the President,
usually from a list of pre-planned ideas,
and then actually moving all of the chess pieces into place.
And, in this case, also coordinating actions with Jordan, which joined in on the response.
So, five days? That actually is not that much of a delay.
But that aside, we begin with the poor logic of the criticism.
The argument here is that the United States military benefits from the element of surprise.
By going to the press and alerting the world that the United States would respond,
the surprise factor vanished.
Thus, the announcement gave forewarning the targets that they should prepare to be attacked.
This, however, is silly because Biden’s announcement
is like a sign in a Florida swamp that says “Caution: Gators.”
It is not new information if it is already common knowledge.
Oh, and for those of you who are not from around these parts,
Florida is the state that Ron DeSantis is governor of.
And if you do not know who Ron DeSantis is,
please leave me a comment to tell me how much happier your life is
given that you are not stuck here having to follow American presidential politics.
Anyway, the United States is already engaging the Houthis in Yemen for
attempted attacks on ships— including U.S. Navy ships—which have
so far resulted in a grand total of zero uniformed casualties.
(Not counting these here because they are slightly different.)
By contrast, three dead, forty seven injured in Jordan.
The only ones who were unaware that a response was going to happen are
people disconnected to the politics of the situation—
and the militant groups are about as connected to it as it gets.
On the flip side of this coin is the idea that this was a master stroke to
get tons of new information about the militant groups.
The logic here is that the president announces a forthcoming retaliation,
the groups panic that their bases are about to be hit,
and then they begin to chatter and thereby provide endless signals intelligence to the United States,
and then they start to move all of their stuff
and thereby provide endless intelligence from satellite photos.
Two major problems with this argument.
First, for anyone paying attention to the situation—
and, again, I think the militant groups qualify as such individuals—
U.S. strikes have already been happening for months!
Seriously, even just diving into the recent history,
we have October 27, November 8,
November 12, November 21,
Hold up, gotta clean this. Then we have November 22,
December 4, December 26,
January 4, January 23—
and, yeah, the group responsible for the attack over in Jordan
was the target of some of these earlier reprisals. They knew what was going on.
In other words, to whatever extent there was a need to move things around—
this was already happening before any announcement from the White House.
Put differently, everything is already priced in. The
conflict “market” already knew what was happening,
and the news is really only informing us filthy casuals.
It is like when a blazing hot job report comes out,
and you check the stock market and are baffled to find out
that it has barely budged from the morning bell.
The market already suspected that the report would be good. Nothing
new was really learned. All of the gains had accrued earlier.
It is the same idea here but with more violence.
The only slight caveat to this is that the drone
attack was more successful than perhaps they had anticipated.
So there may have been some need for defensive readjustments in light of that.
However, any changes would be due to the security situation and not from an announcement from Biden.
Oh, and remember how there was that second issue? This was how winning and losing are zero sum.
If things being moved is good for the United States,
then it is bad for the groups, and vice versa.
Now, maybe there is some sort of 4D chess being played
where the United States knows something they do not know,
so that a trap can then be set.
But at the same rate, there may be issues like how they could know how
to get around intelligence revelations that United States does not know about.
So that is a bit of a push. Ugh, not a push up. Just a push, full stop.
Anyway, this is where things start getting interesting.
There are more complicated ways to gather the intel that you might
want to know about. Let’s start with principal-agent problems.
Winning and losing may be zero sum between the
United States and the militant groups as collective entities,
but any conflict is costly to participate in.
And it turns out that the humans who are involved on the frontlines—
be it the air crew or militants on the ground—
bear more of those costs than whoever is behind the curtain,
whether it is local leadership or a grander Iranian plot.
The reason, of course, is that anyone on the battlefield is liable to, uhh,
get caught in the middle of something like this.
So, in contrast to the “militant groups be dumb” argument,
here is a pathway to get meaningful intelligence:
first, scream from the mountaintops that you are going to strike any or all militant targets,
scare the living daylights out of some of the members of those targets,
induce them to deviate away from their operational security protocols
for their own personal be benefit, and reap the rewards of the new
information that you have. Simple enough, right?
Well, there are still two major issues with this.
First, again, the counter strikes have been ongoing for months now.
Whether a very loud public declaration would work on low-level militants is just
as unclear as whether it would work on the group as a whole.
The other issue, and one that my allegedly self-respecting academic
alter ego has worked on, is the average profile of a militant.
Unlike traditional militaries, militants within
militant groups do not live under high level of day-to-day oversight.
As a result, militant groups deliberately
try to screen out all but the most ideologically dedicated individuals.
The reason being is exactly because of times like these:
a single slip up due to laziness or fear can sink the entire operation.
Thus, it is not out of the question that the United States gleaned some
information through this mechanism, but I personally would not have banked on it.
Oh, and side note:
the whole Russian prisoner mercenary thing is basically this same argument in reverse.
Those troops have eyes on them the entire time,
so it does not matter much what their ideological commitment is.
They refuse orders at their own peril.
But if in-group betrayal won’t work, there is a final option: civilians.
A little bit of militant group 101: militants need local help to get by.
Yes, the bullets get all the attention. It
is war’s version of “the squeaky wheel gets the media following.”
But militants need civilian support for things like shelter and gathering provisions.
And at an even more basic level, the militants
need the locals to keep quiet about what is happening around them.
This often means that a government knows
that a civilian knows what the militant group knows,
which may very well include backbreaking secrets.
The problem is eliciting truthful information—
human intelligence has always been the key to countering militant groups.
So here is a new strategy.
Make it publicly known that there is about to be a major response.
Those civilians actually learn something here, because they are
not necessarily following the day-to-day situation like the main combatants are.
Now, the United States does not know where all of the militants are located.
But the civilians do not know which installations
the United States knows of and which U.S. does not,
or the civilians simply do not care about giving up secrets.
Thus, self-preserving civilians who live next to a potential target high tail it out of there.
The United States observes those departures and uses them to inform intelligence assessments.
It works much better this time.
And, as an added bonus,
now there are fewer civilians around who might wind up as collateral damage.
Did that actually happen here?
If it did, don’t expect anyone in the U.S. government to be bragging about it.
But indeed, prior to the bombing run,
there were reports of the aforementioned civilian evacuations.
If you want to learn more about the broader conflict in the Middle East,
check out this playlist on the topic.
And if you enjoyed this video, please like,
share, and subscribe, and I will see you next time. Take care.