Senseless Secrets: The Failures of U.S. Military Intelligence from the Revolution to Afghanistan

Michael Lee Lanning

2022 aza. · Rowman & Littlefield

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From the War for Independence to the War on Terror, American military intelligence has often failed, costing needless casualties and squandering money and materiel as well as prestige – and all too often it has failed to learn from its mistakes. Senseless Secrets covers more than 200 years of intelligence breakdowns in every American war, including not only how intelligence has been wrong, but also how good intel has failed to make it to battlefield commanders, how spies and traitors have infiltrated the military intelligence community, and more.

Here are stories of Benedict Arnold’s turn in the Revolution, George McClellan’s reliance on the Pinkertons’ inflated estimates of enemy strengths in the Civil War, Custer’s flawed intelligence prior to the Little Bighorn, the controversy over Pearl Harbor, the surprise German attack that started the Battle of the Bulge, the failure to convey useful intelligence to small-unit commanders in Vietnam, overestimates of Iraqi strength during Operation Desert Storm, the bad intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear arsenal in 2002-03, and the chaos surrounding the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

Senseless Secrets is a military history of the United States through its intelligence operations. It should be required reading inside the U.S. military and beyond.

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Michael Lee Lanning served more than twenty years in the U.S. Army, where he commanded an infantry platoon, a recon platoon, and a rifle company in Vietnam and went on to serve as public-affairs officer for Norman Schwarzkopf. He has appeared on NPR, CBS, and the History Channel and has written more than twenty-five books, with more than a million copies in print. His previous books include the classic Vietnam, 1969-1970, which the New York Times called “one of the most honest and horrifying accounts of a combat soldier’s life to come out of the Vietnam War.” With Stackpole, he has published Tours of Duty: Vietnam War Stories, Inside Force Recon: Recon Marines in Vietnam (2017), The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson, and The Blister Club. Lanning lives in Lampasas, Texas.