INTL410 Midterm Week 4

AMERICAN MILITARY UNIVERSITY COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CHALLENGES IN HISTORY Wk4 - Midterm Assignment by: Agustin Nater / 4030759 INTL410 - Counterintelligence Prof. Jason Hess Introduction While the United States (U.S.) Intelligence Community can celebrate a plethora of accomplishments, it's face has also been marred by numerous challenges. As the two examples below highlight, these challenges have been at the epicenter critical events that restructured and evolved the current U.S. National Security Strategy. WWI - WWII Era Background: Pearl Harbor All-out conflict between the U.S. and Japan had been looming for so long that each nation had developed plans for large-scale combat since the 1920s. however, tensions did not begin to seriously escalate until Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. Over the next ten years, Japan maintained its momentum in expanding into China, leading to major conflict between those nation states in 1937. Japan spent a considerable amount of effort attempting to isolate China and attain a sustainable flow of resources in order to achieve victory on the mainland; the "Southern Operation" was orchestrated to enable these efforts (Barnhart 1987). Early in 1941, the President of the United States of America Franklin D. Roosevelt re-positioned the U.S. Pacific Fleet to Pearl Harbor from its previous location in San Diego, CA. and ordered an enhanced forward presence in the Philippines as a means to discourage Japanese escalation of force. Since Japanese senior military leadership was wrong in assuming that any attack on the United Kingdom's Southeast Asian Colonies would draw the U.S. into war, a crippling preemptive attack seemed to be the only feasible course of action in order to avoid U.S. Navy involvement. Japanese war planners also considered invading the Phillippines as necessary. On the U.S. side, War Plan Orange, a series of Joint U.S. Army and Navy war plans for dealing with war in Japan in the years following the First World War, had envisioned using a 40,000-man elite force to safeguard the Philippines. GEN Douglas MacArthur opposed this planned and felt that he would need a force of at least 4000,000. U.S. planners forecasted that the Philippines would be vacated at the outbreak of war and those same orders were passed down to Admiral Thomas Hart, commander of the Asiatic Fleet by late 1941. This coupled with a series of other events ultimately led to the attack on Pearl Harbor, a major catalyst for World War II. This "surprise" operation was led by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service against the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaiia, on December 7, 1941 at 07:48 am. Imperial Japanese Military Leadership referred to the attack in different code names (e.g. Hawaii Operation, Operation AI, and Operation Z, etc.) during its planning (French 1999) testament to an attempt at counterintelligence practices of this era. Pearl Harbor: Counterintelligence Challenges Although, the Attack on Pearl Harbor is considered one the biggest intelligence failures in U.S. Intelligence Community's history, one could attribute this to counterintelligence challenges specifically from a National Security standpoint. The U.S. military failed to reinforce force protection measures associated with the U.S. Pacific Fleet although it had intercepted and deciphered Japanese Diplomatic Code in order to obtain an intelligence picture so unbearably complete that it was deemed unprecedented by military leadership of this time period, and with a week's worth of lead time. Also, a lead player in this catastrophic counterintelligence failure, were the intelligence sharing practices of this era, a time where information was divided, hoarded, blocked, and or scattered (Friedman 2012). Cold War Era Background: Tet Offensive The Tet Offensive, officially called The General Offensive and Uprising of Tet Mau Than 1968 by North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front, was one of the most sizable military offensives of the Vietnam War. This military campaign began on January 30, 1968, and it included highly coordinated attacks by forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic Of Vietnam, the U.S. Armed Forces, and their allies. This campaign was a coordinated series of North Vietnamese attacks on more than 100 cities and military bases in South Vietnam in an attempt to promote rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the U.S. Government to reel in its commitment in the Vietnam War. Although U.S. and South Vietnamese forces managed to fend off the attacks, media coverage of the massive offensive shocked the American public and took a toll on the populace's support for the war effort. Despite heavy casualties, a figure estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, North Vietnam secured a strategic victory with the Tet Offensive, as these attacks marked a significant turn of events in the Vietnam War and the beginning of the lengthy, painful American withdrawal from the area (History.com 2009). Tet Offensive: Counterintelligence Challenges A government inquiry shortly after the Tet Offensive concluded that U.S. and South Vietnamese military officers and intelligence analysts had failed to fully anticipate the “intensity, coordination, and timing of the enemy attack” — despite multiple warnings. Navy librarian Glenn E. Helm notes that disregard for intelligence collection, language barriers, and a misunderstanding of enemy strategy played particularly prominent roles in the intelligence debacle (Friedman 2012). Still, James J. Wirtz points out in The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War that the “Americans almost succeeded in anticipating their opponents’ moves in time to avoid the military consequences of surprise.”(Wirtz 1991) Compare and Contrast Throughout history, we have seen intelligence and counterintelligence organizations created during crisis and disbanded during peacetime. While the Attack on Pearl Harbor and the Tet Offensive are vastly different, both incidents forced policymakers to look at counterintelligence not just from a tactical perspective but from a National Security perspective. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and with the onset of World War II, the need for a full time intelligence and counterintelligence organization was finally identified and brought to fruition by U.S. Congress in the passing of the National Security Act of 1947. However, the ever changing environment including new threats to every war-fighting domain will force the U.S. Defense Strategy to continue to evolve. The U.S. Government’s approach to Counterintelligence will be at the forefront of those efforts. Efforts which will inevitably be geared towards not only “Deepening our understanding of foreign intelligence entities’ plans, intentions, capabilities, tradecraft, and operations targeting US national interests and sensitive information and assets” but as a means to disrupt them as stated in the first and second mission objectives in the National CI Strategy (Hess 2018). Select Bibliography Barnhart, Michael A. Japan prepares for total war: the search for economic security, 1919–1941, Cornell University Press, 1987. French, Howard W. “Pearl Harbor Truly a Sneak Attack, Papers Show.” (December 9, 1999), NY Times. _http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/09/world/pearl-harbor-truly-a-sneak-attack-papers-show.html?pagewanted=1_ (Accessed March 6, 2018). Friedman, Uri. "The Ten Biggest American Intelligence Failures." Foreign Policy. (January 3, 2012), _http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/01/03/the-ten-biggest-american-intelligence-failures/_ (accessed March 2, 2018). Hess, Jason. “Lesson 2: The National Counterintelligence Strategy of the United States of America” American Military University. _https://edge.apus.edu/portal/site/369699/tool/1b5514a2-c353-43ec-b7b7-4032f3e8600b_ (Accessed March 3, 2018). “Tet Offensive.” History.com (2009) 
_http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/tet-offensive_ (Accessed March 6, 2018). Weiner, Tim. “War of Secrets; Pearl Harbor as Prologue.” NY Times. (September 8, 2002),  _http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/weekinreview/war-of-secrets-pearl-harbor-as-prologue.html_ (Accessed March 3, 2018). Wirtz, James J. The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.