Riding the Red Horse (25 page)

Even so, the situation was still desperate.

“We've lost contact with Lieutenant Bosson. Do you know where he is, Sergeant?”

“He's dead, sir! I told you, we just had two bloody Code Blues!”

“Do you want to try another orbital?”

“Negative, Captain! Hell, no! I think they're inside our system and screwing with the artillery coordinates somehow. Lieutenant Bosson called the last one right onto his own HQ!”

“Inside our system? That's not possible, sergeant. Why do you think that?”

“Sir, all I know is they were counterattacking before we even got our heads out of the dirt! They knew it was going to hit us and not them!”

“After the last FFE?”

“Yes! Sir.”

Tower grimaced as he swept his plasma at a pair of Pandorians and saw them take cover before it struck. They were the only infantry targets now in sight, as the enemy had apparently abandoned the frontal assault and were now moving to flank their position. It was only a matter of time, and not very much of it, before he and the rest of the team would be overrun.

For lack of a better target, he aimed his purple crosshair at one of the Cobras and discovered it would lock. Apparently the Unity hadn't thought about ground-to-ground missiles. For good reason, he discovered, as the assault gun's anti-missile cannons shredded the Hellraiser's little warhead before it got within 100 meters of the vehicle. Then a thought struck him.

“Hey, Captain, this is Tower. Can you patch me through to the squids' big boys? I got an idea!”

“What's the idea, Private?”

“I can lock on their mobile guns with the X42. If the squids can get a read from that, I can maintain lock and sort of paint the target for them. I don't know what that Unity snake is doing to our systems, but I doubt it can interfere with a direct homing.”

“Hold that lock and don't go anywhere, Tower.” There was silence for a moment. “Good idea, son. They read your lock and we're going to try it. Just one shot for starters.”

“Incoming,” an unfamiliar voice said. Tower presumed it was the squid.

“Get down, y'all,” Sarge barked. “Except you, Tower.”

That reminded Tower to dim his screen. He did so just in time, because the Cobra he was targeting evaporated in a brilliant blue-green flash. The noise was loud, but the ground didn't shake more than momentarily and this time, he wasn't disoriented.

“Strike one Cobra,” he informed the Captain with satisfaction.

“Bravo Zulu, Tower. Find us another one.”

Another devastating bolt caused a vehicle to vanish. Then a third. The Pandorians quickly abandoned their flanking attempt and scurried back to the spaceport as orbital artillery took out three more Cobras in rapid succession. The surviving mobile artillery pulled back too, safely out of Tower's line-of-sight, before he could target them.

“They're falling back to the buildings,” Sarge reported.

“Can you give us a lock there, Tower?”

“No problem, sir.” He targeted the building into which the most troops seemed to be retreating. The crosshairs changed color and the familiar tone sounded. “We got lock. Bring the noise, Captain.”

“Firing for effect,” the squid said. “Incoming.”

“I reckon we can hold now, Captain,” Sarge said a few hectos later. Most of the spaceport's buildings were burning rubble, with huge gouts of flame shooting thirty meters into the air.

“Bravo Zulu, gentlemen. Fall back to Xray, Sergeant Nichols. The transport will be there to extract you in twenty.”

“Roger that, Captain.”

The retrieval transport, which was considerably squatter and better armored than its insertion counterpart, was already on the ground by the time they arrived at the extraction point. It was better armed as well; its high-intensity laser cannons drove off a pair of unarmed drones that had been following the Marines' retreat. In the interests of not leaving any men behind, Sarge had taken the time to examine the ground where the platoon HQ had been. But, as Tower suspected, the orbital bombardment had left no sign of human remains other than a few scraps of twisted metal that still glowed with heat, and quite possibly a little radiation to boot.

“What are we going to do with the prisoners?” Tower asked, looking at the collection of thirty or more bound men. And at the one creature that was not a man.

“Captain says to leave them,” the lieutenant overseeing the extraction said. “Pandorians don't mean jack and that cyberfreak will be more trouble than he's worth. The Duke doesn't want a diplomatic incident with the Unity.”

Tower walked up to the cyborg, which was watching the proceedings with a supercilious smile on its thin lips. “It was you, wasn't it.”

It said nothing.

“Look, you know our techs are going to figure out what you did sooner or later. I know you did it. I just want to know how.”

The posthuman shrugged. “You are correct. War is nothing but heightened selection pressure. By the time a counter is devised by your technicians, we will have ten new variants with which to take your unenhanced minds by surprise.”

“So tell me. How come the lieutenant's box-scrubber didn't work?”

“Let us explain it in terms even your selection-limited brain might be able to understand. Blue does not mean go. Yellow does not mean go. But put them both together, and, well, we expect even a fleshmind assembled through haphazard processes is capable of working out the rest.”

Tower nodded. “Yeah, I figured it was something like that.” He raised his right hand and blew off the posthuman's head with his laser. The nearby Pandorians cried out as they were splattered with blood, brains, and bits of bone and metal.

“Stand down, Private!” Sergeant Nichols screamed at him. “What are you doing, Tower? You can't kill prisoners of war!”

“He wasn't no prisoner, he was a damn Trojan Horse. Besides, we don't have no prisoners, right? We let them go.”

The sergeant shook his head. “I was going to put you in for a medal, kid. Now you'll be lucky if you don't get cashiered!”

“Tell it to the lieutenant, Sarge,” Tower said. And he walked up the ramp of the transport without looking back.

“Harry Kitchener” is a
nom de spook
for an intelligence operative who served for longer than he cares to recall in what he insists was a relatively comfortable role in a specialized arm of the British state apparatus. It is not entirely clear how he is defining “comfortable” in this case, since it is known that for substantial portions of it “comfortable” consisted of being slightly less cold, wet, hungry, and tired than a few minutes prior. During a career which he insists was almost entirely undistinguished, despite it not having been entirely without incident, he often found himself serving far from home and largely amongst foreigners. He wonders now, sometimes aloud, about his suspicion that someone was trying to tell him something. As it turns out, they were.

Since leaving Her Majesty’s service, he has mainly been offering advice to foreign folk on complicated matters and is amazed that they appear to value it. No one else is amazed by it. No one.

What Harry brings to the table here is “The Limits of Intelligence: Why It’s Nowhere Nearly as Important as the Spooks Would Have You Think”. That, one might think, is an odd claim from someone whose life work has been intelligence. On the other hand, who would be better qualified to make that claim than someone who spent most of his adult life in intelligence?

If you haven’t guessed it yet, I am a pedantic SOB as a matter of course. Indulge me a bit for the moment. When you read Harry’s essay on intel, I want you to think about these principles of war: Economy of Force, Security, Simplicity, and Surprise—don’t worry, I’ll explain them later—but I want you to think about them in an intelligence context. Those concepts are what he’s talking about in a positive sense. But he’s also talking about another principle of war, Mass, and how very difficult, if not impossible, it is to achieve real mass, real concentration, and real weight of effort in intelligence.

In the military and political context, intelligence has been a fetish for years, now. The popular fascination with spies and spying, technical intelligence collection—and recent revelations of the sort of thing nation states get up to—have fuelled an insatiable curiosity about intelligence generally and created some rather exaggerated ideas of what it’s capable of delivering. Fiction, whether TV, movies, or written, only exaggerates the exaggeration. “Non-fiction”, often more than a little fictive itself, seldom helps put things in proper perspective.

To correct for some of that, for the benefit of the interested reader, this piece will briefly introduce the concept of intelligence, discuss the process which underpins it, and address the significance of both intelligence and its role in the formulation of policy and the execution of operations.

Let’s start with some definitions. Intelligence, for the purposes of this paper, we will take as meaning: “information, assessed for accuracy of content and reliability of source, interpreted to derive meaning to the customer”. The customer, here, is the organization or individual who has tasked the production of the intelligence.

All intelligence works in roughly the same way. In the West, we refer to the Intelligence Cycle, which represents the various stages through which the process of tasking and acquiring intelligence works. For the purposes of this paper, let’s use the CIA’s definitions:

Planning and Direction:
the definition by the customer, of his interests and needs. These are often referred to as his Intelligence Requirements (IRs). This stage completed, the intelligence organization tasks its assets to begin:

Collection:
the actual process of acquiring the raw information which matches the IRs. The means vary, but can include open source (i.e. reading newspapers, magazines, websites, watching TV and so on), technical (i.e. intercepting radio, Internet or telephone traffic), human (i.e. obtaining information from spies and agents), imagery (i.e. satellite or other photography, including covert) and a range of other sources. This is the part of the process which is often seen as being the sexiest aspect of the process and often involves field operations. Collection being achieved, the process moves on to:

Processing:
the creation of intelligence spot reports on the individual nuggets of information derived from the material collected. Part of this process involves weighing both accuracy of the intelligence and reliability of the source, so A1 intelligence is known to be truthful from an absolutely reliable source, while F5 is drivel from a known imbecile. These spot reports, together with other reporting from other sources, including from friendly and not so friendly nations and agencies, are used in:

Analysis and Production:
the production of detailed and informative consolidated intelligence reports which set out to answer the classic intelligence question: “so what?” That is, they set the material in context and attempt to tease out what the meaning, import and implications of the intelligence are. These reports go to customers as part of:

Dissemination:
is delivery to the customer of the intelligence report, discussion of the content, confirmation that it is relevant to the customer’s IRs, feedback from the customer and, if necessary, modification of the IRs, before starting the whole process over again with Planning and Direction.

This is a pretty mature model and it’s known to work well. Some points to bear in mind, however. Intelligence agencies and organisations are generally built around their sources, so the average nation will usually have a foreign intelligence organization such as the CIA in the USA or SIS (also known, incorrectly, as MI6) in the United Kingdom, which largely concentrates on human intelligence, a technical intelligence organization, such as the NSA in the USA or GCHQ in the United Kingdom, which largely concentrates on communications interception, an internal security organization, such as the FBI in the USA or the Security Service (also known, incorrectly, as MI5) in the United Kingdom, which, together with the police, concentrates on human and technical intelligence operations inside the state in question and a military intelligence organization, which provides specialist intelligence support to the armed forces using its own human, technical and other intelligence collection assets.

What all this means is that the average modern nation has intelligence coming out of its ears. Generally, the people in the intelligence business work very hard and put a huge amount of effort into doing the best job they can and generally they succeed in producing enormous volumes of the stuff.

And therein lies the rub. A modern intelligence agency produces huge amounts of information – not intelligence, yet, it hasn’t been assessed, or analysed, and much of it doesn’t get looked at. Assuming that the old truism that “90 percent of everything is dreck” applies, this means that looking for that elusive nugget of insight in a truckload of noise, to mix a cunning metaphor, is incredibly hard to do, especially since technical means of discrimination are difficult and generally not reliable . For example, you can do word searches, or even quite complex Bayesian natural language analysis, on large volumes of intercept data, but one runs the risk of pulling out too many false positives, which is not particularly helpful, or worse, discarding the one genuinely relevant thing.

Thus we’re stuck with plain old humans in the loop. Now, bear in mind that not everyone is well suited to the wacky world of intelligence analysis and there are a number of usually incompatible skill sets involved in doing this properly, and it rapidly becomes clear that the manpower requirements are huge. “Manpower” here, is taken, of course, to also include “womanpower”, and quite rightly too, as some of the finest analysts are women.