Can you figure out why I’ve been thinking and reading about WWII for the past months? Sure you can. I want to comprehend the invasion and occupation of our executive branch of government by a fascist gang.<\/p>\n
As to football, well, training camp has begun, so some of my attention is focused there, quite properly. Gotta get ready for the new season. Back to war, though:<\/p>\n
Toward the end of his great history, Hitler’s Spies,\u00a0<\/em>David Kahn offered an analysis that took me by surprise.<\/a><\/p>\n In summing up the critical differences between the Axis intelligence and the Allies, he separated offensive war operations from defensive war operations, specifically in the collection and utilization of, need for and belief in intelligence.<\/p>\n Curious, I thought. His point was straightforward. Hitler’s offensive military operations were huge. As Hitler saw it, his offense was so monumental and so fast it would level any defense the countries he was invading could erect.<\/p>\n About that, Hitler was correct. He waltzed into a welcoming Austria, then powered into Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and France, which shocked the world by falling in six weeks.<\/p>\n Only Great Britain, under constant air and sea attack, remained wholly in the battle.<\/p>\n Kahn explains that a massive invasive force doesn’t require or value intelligence, in both senses of the word. Beyond a huge military, what it does<\/em> require Hitler had in abundance: paranoid grandiosity. (That’s my observation, not Kahn ‘s.)<\/p>\n On the other hand, defenses need<\/em> intelligence. Especially after America entered the war, Allied intelligence was fiercely active and superior to Axis intelligence — which was weak to begin with and further weakened by the dictator at the top; whatever actual intelligence scraps made it to Hitler’s desk, they had to conform with Hitler’s pre-convictions or they were tossed out, along with the messenger who brought them.<\/p>\n It seems to me that a blitzkrieg<\/em> offensive, such as the ones which put Trump in the White House and Hitler throughout most of Europe, gives a public impression of success because of unexpected speed and force in knocking over barriers, such as our body of laws and government. But, to borrow Kahn’s understanding, intelligence (of both sorts) doesn’t have anything to do with it.<\/p>\n Indeed, when defensive powerhouses like our civil rights organizations, use intelligence to take Trumpian edicts into courts, the presentations of Trump’s lawyers are so absent of both sorts of intelligence, they shock federal judges.\u00a0<\/a>They’d shock anyone who reads some of the, uh, I don’t know what to call it — testimonial lies? — of the various DOJ personnel representing the administration in these court appearances. There’s dumb, there’s intentionally dumb, and then there’s a blend of both. What there isn’t, is intelligence. Of any kind.<\/p>\n Someone may be able to invade and occupy without intelligence, but staying in power? I don’t think so.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n If you don’t like football or ingenious football metaphors, you can stop reading now.<\/p>\n In football, each team has an offense and a defense. Duh. During the week of preparation for the game, the offensive team works out the plays it will try to succeed in its purpose, moving down the field into the end zone.<\/p>\n But whatever the play is, the intelligence regarding the defense is limited to one player on the offense: the quarterback. Although the rest of the offense knows what the offensive play will be or try to be, only the quarterback will view the way the defense is spread over the field in its attempt to stop that play. And the QB has only a few seconds to decide which of his options is most likely to work against what he sees of that defense.<\/p>\n Now, the defense needs and utilizes intelligence. Indeed, certain defensive players are film room scholars: they spend each week watching game film covering the offense they’ll be confronting on Sunday. What they look for are, essentially, poker tells. When the offense is lined up in a certain way, it signals to the defense what the play might be.<\/p>\n Some offensive players individually (and involuntarily) signal — by the way they position their bodies — what they’ll be doing after the ball is snapped, and these suggestions tell the defense scholars how the defense can cover the play.<\/p>\n The defense coach calls in a play. But certain defensive players — my favorite, the Mike, a\/k\/a middle linebacker, and perhaps a defensive back, also<\/a> — study so much film that during games they can call out re-sets to the whole defensive team depending on the tells they’ve picked up. And the way they adjust and set themselves up creates the illusion of uncovered “holes” on the field, and the illusion of more players than there are.<\/p>\n Which reminds me. David Kahn wrote about a particular Allied defense mechanism, producing false defense secrets to trick the Nazis. (One recently in the news is Operation Mincemeat<\/em>, told by the master of spy non-fiction stories, Ben MacIntyre.) The grand deceit that thoroughly knocked me out — and of which I had known nothing — was how the Allies invented troop divisions, the numbers and “movements” of which were leaked to German intelligence:<\/p>\n It had the Signal Corps in the American Zone of the Interior radio messages about divisions that existed only in Allied minds. Through the ether they were transferred to <\/em>[German] minds. Thus at about the same time <\/em>[German intelligence] was discovering the 69th Infantry Division, it also “discovered the 49th and 59th infantry divisions, neither of which had ever existed. By December 1943, <\/em>[German intelligence] totted up 34 divisions that radio reconnaissance had ascertained. Eleven of these were pure fiction.<\/em><\/p>\n In a quick, encapsulated way, this is what good football defenses do: they deceive the offense.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Can you figure out why I’ve been thinking and reading about WWII for the past months? Sure you can. I want to comprehend the invasion and occupation of our executive branch of government by a fascist gang. As to football, … Continue reading