Senseless Secrets: The Failures of U.S. Military Intelligence from George Washington to the Present

by Michael Lee Lanning

A unique insider's survey of the many failures of U.S. military intelligence spans the course of American history to show how intelligence blunders have cost lives and money, looking at the blunders of Desert Storm, Grenada, Vietnam, and others.

324 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1995

About the author

Lieutenant Colonel Michael Lee Lanning (USA, Ret.) is an American retired military officer and writer of non-fiction, mostly military history.

After spending his early life in Texas, in 1964 Michael Lee Lanning graduated from Trent High School (Trent, Texas) and entered Texas A&M University (College Station, Texas), where in 1968 he earned a BS in Agricultural Education.

Upon graduation from Texas A&M in 1968, Lanning was commissioned a second lieutenant and received infantry, airborne, and ranger training at Fort Benning, Georgia. After serving as a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he was ordered to the Republic of Vietnam where he served as an infantry platoon leader, reconnaissance platoon leader, and rifle company commander in the 2d Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade. During subsequent tours of duty he served throughout the United States and Germany, as (among other things) an instructor in the U.S. Army Ranger School, a mechanized infantry company commander in the 3rd Infantry Division, and executive officer of an infantry battalion in the 1st Cavalry Division. He also served in several non-command assignments, including positions as public affairs officer, serving in that role first for General H. Norman Schwarzkopf and later as a member of the Department of Defense public affairs office. In 1979, he earned an MS in Journalism from East Texas State University (Commerce, TX); he was selected to attend the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (Fort Leavenworth, KS) that same year.

Lt. Col. Lanning's first book, 'The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader's Journal of Vietnam' was published by Ivy Books/Ballantine Books/Random House, Inc. in September 1987.

Reviews

[Sean Loveland · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book seems to be a jaded account from a veteran's experiences in Vietnam that drove his disdain towards the intelligence processes. While there is no doubt intelligence failures throughout America's history, my perception of the author's distrust is due to either not fully explaining or understanding the complexities of intelligence processes. In today's asymmetric environment, the enemy is not always known. That makes finding accurate, timely, and relevant intelligence like find a needle in a needle stack. While it is supposed to show enemy intent, that relies on the enemy knowing/sharing their intent for us to exploit. This is not as easy as he makes it seem in the book. The book is also littered with examples of where intelligence agencies accurately predicted things, but were ignored by national/military leaders. The author does provide some well-thought improvements, but they are highly improbable due to the very history and pride of each service's and agency's stubbornness and rivalry discussed throughout the book. I was looking forward to a more researched, documented, and unbiased look at intelligence failures than what was presented in this book.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 3 out of 5]

" from George Washington to the Present " makes for a very wide, ambitious scope. As such, this ends up being a thin military history of the U.S. with a focus on and point of view of military intelligence. One point well made is that military intelligence did not emerge institutionally until the pre-detective agency fumbling of Pinkerton and a bunch of unreliable balloons during the Civil War. The book could have started there after some introduction. In looking back with a view that most military failures and successes have an intelligence cause, the author calls for inter-service cooperation and greater coherence between the military branches. It is depressing how often in the field even just radio tech differences were crucial.