CIA Visits Old Battlefields to Shed Light on Modern Warfare

David--no last names, please, we’re CIA--is a military analyst in the spy agency’s Near East Division. From his desk at agency headquarters in Langley, Va., he helped the government wage Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf six years ago.

But David’s real passion is for a bloody conflict on his native soil that ended more than 130 years ago. So when he’s not busy counting Iraqi tanks in satellite photographs, he’s dressing up as a Union soldier and joining hundreds of other buffs who reenact the Civil War on the fields of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania nearly every warm weekend. If you look very closely, you might even pick him out of the crowd of extras in the film “Glory.”

Now, David has managed to mix business and pleasure--modern-day military analysis and Civil War history--in a way that his CIA bosses not only tolerate but underwrite. Which is why David got to spend a recent workday here at Antietam National Battlefield, leading more than a dozen fellow CIA analysts tromping across cornfields and down country lanes that last saw military action in the days of cavalry charges and muzzle-loading muskets.

David is in charge of the CIA’s “staff rides”--detailed walking tours of Civil War battlefields. The aim of the field trips is simple: to give intelligence analysts who too often see war only from long distance a better feel for the human scale of combat.

The “staff ride” is part of a long-cherished tradition in the military of having officers studying at war colleges walk the terrain of past battlefields in the hope that the ground will yield the lessons of history. Retired Army officers brought the staff ride tradition to the CIA years ago, but their program fell victim to the budget ax in the early 1990s. David volunteered to keep the staff rides going as a part-time affair.

What the analysts learn from David and his lively sidekick, Brigham, a fellow military analyst, is that despite the modern technology available to today’s soldiers, the “fog of war” has not yet been lifted.

Certainly, satellite imagery and communication intercepts mean that U.S. military commanders of the 1990s are better informed than their counterparts of the 1860s. But the art of war is still a form of chaos that has consistently made fools of even its best practitioners, and those who fail to study the killing fields of the past may be doomed to be poor analysts of the combat of the present.

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“The basics of military analysis are the same whether you are talking about fighting in ancient Greece or fighting in a modern multidimensional 21st-century battlefield,” David said. “There are still issues of terrain, control, interior and exterior lines, training of troops, communications. Things move more slowly in older battles and there are now other dimensions, like air power. But new technology only means there is a different kind of fog of war, the fog of information overload and communications clutter.”

Antietam, in David’s view, may be the best place in the United States to drive home to analysts the humbling limits of military intelligence.

On Sept. 17, 1862, the Union and Confederate armies collided along Antietam Creek in western Maryland in what became the bloodiest single day of fighting in the Civil War.

Just days before the face-off, the Union commander, Gen. George B. McClellan, had been handed one of the war’s greatest intelligence windfalls when a Union soldier found a copy of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s battle plans. The so-called Lost Order disclosed to McClellan that Lee had dangerously divided his forces even as the Union Army was rushing to meet him. The road was open for McClellan to crush Lee and end the war.

But McClellan was more afraid of losing than he was committed to winning, and so he moved too cautiously and let the opportunity slip through his fingers. While the Union’s Army of the Potomac turned back Lee’s first Northern invasion at Antietam, McClellan failed to deliver the knockout blow against the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia that the Lost Order could have made possible.

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Antietam is pertinent to modern analysts, Brigham says, because “you can see that people make the difference in war, that the personality of the commander is very important.”

Still, it’s easy to see why CIA experts accustomed to tracking modern supersonic combat across hundreds of square miles of land, sea and air might find the study of a 19th-century set-piece battle such as Antietam quaintly irrelevant. It is a challenge David and Brigham confront head-on, as they seek to convince their colleagues that seemingly minor alterations in the landscape--undetected from space--can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

To win over any doubting analysts in the crowd, Brigham starts off the Antietam staff ride with a bit of tactical legerdemain. First he lopes a few hundred yards ahead of the tour group across “The Cornfield,” a gently rolling patch of ground that saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire battle. Then he suddenly lies down and disappears.

He finally becomes visible when the lagging band of analysts is only 100 yards away--well within the firing range of a Civil War rifled musket. Like the Confederate soldiers who mauled onrushing Union troops from the same spot, Brigham had taken advantage of a series of blind spots on otherwise open ground to hide.

Brigham stands up to caution his listeners that the satellite photographs they rely on so heavily are two-dimensional. Thus they often fail to detect slight changes in topography that can be critical to the commander in the field.

“Remember, we can look at a photograph and tell the commander that he should be able to see something in front of him, when in fact it is not visible to him at all,” he observed. “The commander on the field sees something very different, and so the way he thinks is very different.”

Continuing their lesson, David and Brigham point out “Bloody Lane,” where Confederate troops turned a half-hidden country road sunken by erosion and constant use into a veritable fortress, holding off thousands of Union troops.

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The staff ride hits all of Antietam’s landmarks but also stops to discuss trivia only a military analyst could love, like logistics. Question: How many supply wagons were required to support 1,000 men in the Army of the Potomac? (Answer: 30)

Sometimes, the Antietam story line needs no translation for the 1990s analysts. One of the first things McClellan did upon arriving at Antietam was to establish a telegraph line back to the War Department. By the book, it was the proper thing to do. But it also opened him up to second-guessing and micromanagement, the bane of commanders before and since.

“We can all sympathize with that,” said David. “Lee was lucky, he was cut off from Richmond.”

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A Battle for the Ages

The North’s Gen. George B. McClellan had an opportunity to crush Gen. Robert E. Lee and end the Civil War at the battle of Antietam, having received a copy of Lee’s plans before the first shot was fired. Instead, McClellan moved too cautiously. The Confederates retreated but survived to fight on.