THE FRAILITY OF “CAPABILITY” IN INTELLIGENCE

It’s a very funny thing, for a man to write a 500-page book without saying anything, but that was accomplished by Eisenhower’s intelligence advisor, General Strong. For a man to have been in intelligence all of his life and not know any more about this I did pull out of this old datum of capability and this is a very important subject.

Capability is an intelligence word. It means: Will the enemy attack? Will he not attack? How many days will he attack? And so forth, estimated on the capability of his numbers, his ammunition, his this, or that or the other thing, it’s an intelligence action.

“The enemy could possibly attack this line because he isn’t going to attack three armored divisions and he only has one available, so therefore that would require three.” But it is so often wrong that when you’re vastly outnumbered you’ve got your neck out. Very few generals are rational. McClellan got out intelligence the Southern forces. The whole Union Army under him he’s free in armored divisions and you’re in guns and ammunition and he went for two or three years without ever daring to attack. And then some little cavalry company in the Southern forces attacks Washington.

So, estimating what the enemy will do by what he is capable of doing can throw you a curve.

For instance, I’m sure our enemy misestimates our capabilities and is in a state of amazement, right at the present moment, that as many horrible things are happening to him from our quarter. Because we would have to be an organization of hundreds of thousands of executives and revolutionaries equipped with millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars. He has had such a pushover with his technique and has wiped out so many groups, so many new ideas, so many improvements and so much decency in Man, that he’s overestimated his own capability and he thinks he’s marvelous and can’t lose. And he’s just going down, one after the other, like ten-pins.

So, the intelligence use of “capability” is very frail and I do not recommend it to you in the field of intelligence at all.