ABSTRACT
An understanding of the place of intelligence in the evolution of strategic thought is an important facet in the study of war. In seeking to gain some insight into these matters, this chapter will focus primarily on three great strategists: Sun Tzu, Clausewitz and Jomini.1 One of the major problems in the contemporary study of strategists, strategy and intelligence lies in the modern corruption of the word ‘strategy’ itself. As Hew Strachan has noted, ‘The word “strategy” has acquired a universality which has robbed it of meaning, and left it only with banalities’ (Strachan 2005: 34). Elsewhere Strachan has written that ‘Today the word “strategy”, used by governments to describe peacetime policies more than by armies to shape wars, has gained in breadth but has forfeited conceptual clarity’ (Strachan 2007: 106). Hannah Arendt (1906-75) also despaired of the manner in which the misuse, and deterioration, of language often seemed to inhibit thought. She believed that it was important to help people think in conceptual terms, to ‘discover the real origins of original concepts in order to distil from them anew their original spirit which has so sadly evaporated from the very keywords of political language – such as freedom and justice, authority and reason, responsibility and virtue, power and glory – leaving behind with which to settle almost all accounts, regardless of their underlying phenomenal reality’ (Arendt 1968: 14-15). This reasoning goes for strategy as much as any other field of human endeavour. In these circumstances Strachan advises that we turn to Clausewitz (Strachan 2007: 106).
