Conflict Analysis by the Book : Jane’s Guides Reveal the Answers--Except to Classified Wartime Secrets

COULSDON, England —  In a modern, red-brick office building in this south London suburb resides perhaps the largest array of commercial expertise available anywhere for authoritative comment on the Gulf War.

The telephones at Jane’s Information Group headquarters here ring continually with outsiders seeking advice, and a battery of editors processes a vast complex of facts concerning the warring forces in the Gulf.

“During the first two days of the war,” said Robert Hutchinson, 42, Jane’s publishing director, “about 25 experts here fielded more than 600 phone calls from Britain and abroad.”

Jane’s has established itself as the premier commercial company dealing in military and related topics--and in the process created a growing business that last year racked up $40 million in sales.

Perhaps its key publication is Jane’s Defense Weekly, which circulates to 30,000 subscribers in 165 countries.

The Weekly, known to its readers simply as JDW, provides inside information on a wide spectrum of international defense-related news, as well as a healthy amount of advertising in the armaments field.

The company also publishes the monthly International Defense Review, with heavyweight articles on military and strategic matters, and Jane’s Soviet Intelligence Review, also a monthly.

It was Jane’s, for instance, that learned that 59 Soviet officers were murdered on the streets of the country last year, compared to only three such deaths the year before--a reflection of ethnic unrest across the nation.

In addition to its periodicals, the company puts out the yearbooks that originally gained its international fame in the field: Jane’s Fighting Ships, Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, Jane’s Armor and Artillery, Jane’s Infantry Weapons and a score of others.

“We publish a list of the Soviet command that goes all the way down to the level of captain,” Hutchinson said.

Jane’s was founded by Fred T. Jane, who began by writing about and illustrating warships of the late 19th Century as a hobby. He went commercial with the publication in 1898 of Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Ships. The book quickly became a bible among naval officers, serving as a valuable ship-recognition and intelligence aid in naval conflicts to come.

In 1909, Jane published the first edition of what was to become his other flagship title: Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft.

Over the years, the company broadened and added more specialty titles. It is now owned by the International Thomson Organization, based in Toronto.

Jane’s publications have 260 employees and about 300 stringers around the world, plus enthusiastic amateurs who send in unsolicited information. A warship buff, for example, snapped a photograph of a new Soviet vessel traveling through the Bosporus. Samuel L. Morison, a U.S. Navy analyst who sent Jane’s a photograph of a new Soviet aircraft carrier--which it published--later was convicted of espionage for his trouble.

Jane’s stringers, in about 60 countries, are a mix of journalists, retired military men and diplomats, Hutchinson said, adding: “They are paid a linage fee, which is commercially competitive, but confidential.

“A lot of our people simply love their work, being expert in the field,” he added.

Reports from Jane’s stringers and other contributors are processed here by military experts and editors, then funneled to the various publications.

“We want military experts who really know the field,” Hutchinson said, “but we need the editors to make it compact and readable.”

Jane’s seeks the best authorities, whether academics or journalists or former military officers. Bill Sweetman, North American editor, is an authority on aviation and aerospace. Richard Sharpe, editor of Jane’s Fighting Ships, was a captain who commanded conventional and nuclear submarines in the Royal Navy. Christopher Foss, the military editor of JDW, is a specialist on tanks and artillery.

“Christopher Foss lives tanks, sleeps tanks and dreams tanks. He can give you an answer about armor before you’ve finished the question,” observed Hutchinson, a former journalist who specialized in strategic arms before taking over on the business side.

So authoritative are Jane’s reference works considered, said Hutchinson, that material from them was used as a database during the East-West arms control negotiations in Vienna that were concluded late last year.

JDW is often first with material, such as the information it recently published on the nature and extent of Iraqi military bunkers and the efficacy of the upgraded Patriot missile.

But Hutchinson noted that Jane’s has gathered much classified material that it will not publish during the current hostilities because of its policy of withholding information that could endanger operations or lives on either side.

“We piece unclassified material together in a jigsaw and sometimes come up with a picture that would be very classified,” Hutchinson said. “We don’t want to jeopardize operational security or endanger the lives of our customers.

“We keep our hypothetical colonel-reader in mind. Sitting in Washington, he may wish to read all the material we have on Iraq. But sitting on the Iraqi border, he may not wish to see us print material on allied forces that could give comfort to the enemy and get him killed.

“This puts us in a unique position in the media. We probably only print 20% of what we know during hostilities.”

Jane’s also provides a consulting service for specialized clients--estimating the collective hull surface of North Atlantic Treaty Organization warships for a paint manufacturer who intended to bid on a contract, for example.

In the future, said Hutchinson, there will be plenty of work for defense contractors, although competition will be fierce. “I’m not sure whether there will be a peace dividend,” he mused. “The world’s a much more unstable place than two years ago. Defense will remain one of the biggest businesses.”

That’s why Jane’s Defense Appointments and Procurement Handbook was introduced last year. It includes telephone numbers for procurement officers in Pacific Rim nations, for example.

“Basically, it’s a how-to-land-a-contract publication,” Hutchinson said.

Of his own view of the Gulf War, Hutchinson said: “Saddam Hussein’s only sensible strategy is to hold back and hope to inflict such awful casualties on the coalition that public opinion supporting the war will evaporate.”

FACTS ABOUT JANE’S The Pentagon receives 604 copies of Jane’s Defense Weekly, and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the U.S. commander in the Persian Gulf, gets his weekly copy delivered to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

45 copies of JDW went to the Iraqi Defense Ministry until a U.N. embargo went into effect after the Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait.

About 90% of the readers of JDW and International Defense Review are military, government or defense industry officials. Journalists represent most of the rest of the controlled, subscription-only circulation.

So authoritative are Jane’s reference works considered that material from them was used as a database during the East-West arms control negotiations in Vienna that were concluded late last year.