Israel’s Battle of the Bulge Problem

One of the things forgotten in the Battle of the Bulge is the fact that the Germans achieved complete operational surprise despite the continued use of Enigma.

As is well known now, the British at Bletchley Park cracked the Germans coding machine Enigma throughout the course of the war and struggled to put it to use. It was one thing to read your opponent’s mail, it’s quite another for you to hide the fact you’re reading their mail. Also, this intelligence didn’t always work out. The general in command of the defense of Crete was given a very thorough battle plan and order of battle by a ‘high-level traitor,’ but it didn’t prevent him from losing the island against overwhelming force.

The struggle continues during Operation Battle-axe in the fight against Rommel. Having cracked Enigma, the British learned the ‘status’ of the Afrika Korps tanks and that many were in poor condition. It didn’t occur to the Intelligence types that Rommel would lie to his superiors that his forces were weak to get priority of supplies from his superiors.

His orders of the time were to be defensive, and he wouldn’t get new equipment if he told them the truth.

By the time the Allies were sitting in the Hurtgen facing the Germans near the Rhine, Enigma was thoroughly integrated into the intelligence apparatus. It provided daily reports on the activities of the German military. It was the reliance on this that also blinded the Allies to what was going on behind the Rhine.

By 1944, Hitler had become convinced that he was being betrayed by a network of high-ranking traitors within his military. For example, during D-Day, many senior officers were called away for wargames in the south of France. This was investigated by German intelligence as a British plot. Later, high-ranking officers did try to kill Hitler during Valkyrie. Though the SS was able to get all those generals who didn’t flee or kill themselves and execute them, he was convinced that he didn’t get them all and proceeded to act on that idea.

As a result, during the planning of the Bulge campaign, all orders were sent via SS couriers who had them handcuffed in suitcases to their wrists. This had problems for the efficiency of the units involved, but it totally blinded US intelligence to the fact that the Germans were building a massive force upon the other side.

The German army continued to send out normal radio chatter and Enigma messages all the way to the start of the offensive. The Allies had gotten used to the fact there could be no offensive planned as surely Enigma would warn them.

Fast forward to today. All three Israeli intelligence agencies utterly failed to detect the build-up for this offensive. Several theories are out there. One such is the over-reliance on AI in the analysis of data. AI and Signals Intelligence now has become a giant vacuum cleaner of information. There are so many sources of information: radio, satellite, internet. It's all fed into supercomputers with AI generating keyword searches. The problem is AI’s lack of human intuition. They have no gut instinct. The analysis is dumped into the hands of people who have not been involved in the sifting of information.

Furthermore, a lot of data is available on AI research in the hands of the public domain. Foreign adversaries can do their own research and then learn ways to confuse, corrupt, or even flood the AI with so much data that it's impossible to sift through and get accurate results.

That combined with classic intelligence tradecraft. Whether that be SS officers with suitcases handcuffed to the wrists or Hamas sending things via written courier, or the GRU using typewriters you can achieve strategic surprise on your enemies.

Cellphones and computers are wonderful things, but our overreliance on using them to spy on our adversaries can blind us. And when we can’t see people die.

What is to be done? We need to end our dependence on electronics and return to the use of traditional spycraft. The recruitment and retention of enemy agents. This is a messy business that involves years of work, possible betrayal, and certainly nowhere near as easy as it was during the Cold War.

Until we do, we will continue to see disasters like the one in Israel this past weekend.