"Wellington’s Spy Network" Topic

"There was a saying at the old army staff college in Camberley: amateurs talk of tactics, professionals talk of logistics. Not that it made any difference: ‘proper' officers continued to talk about tactics, leaving logistics to those in the transport and ordnance corps.

It was not an exclusively British phenomenon. One of Hitler's field marshals, Albert Kesselring, wrote after the war that instruction at the pre-1914 staff college in Berlin had been inadequate in too many practical fields, such as ‘anything to do with oil which soiled the fingers and hampered the tactician and strategist in the free flight of his ideas'. In his list of neglected subjects he included intelligence. Earlier, reflecting on the wars with revolutionary France, Carl von Clausewitz had also been sceptical: other than broad background intelligence on the country in which the army was to fight, ‘The only situation a commander can know fully is his own: his opponent's he can only know from unreliable intelligence', and that more intelligence would make commanders ‘more, not less, uncertain'…"
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