How do we know this? This strikes me as an assertion without evidence. Are there examples?
It also strikes me that the secrecy more often gets used to conceal career-ending mistakes and cost overruns, at least in the USA.
Has anybody done an honest assessment of secrecy?
To be honest I don't really know too much about this. I've read Cryptonomicon, and that's basically it. But it would be hard to dispute that signals intelligence is useful in war and that secrecy is necessary for SIGINT to work.
I think equating it to war fighting is a little naive and an over simplification. There is strategic and tactical war intelligence and there are real historical examples of them making the difference, no disputing that. But today, especially for the United States and most other g7 type nations, it's a communication channel for things that it's unpopular to communicate, don't under estimate this. Could any military in the world practice without the modern intelligence gathering that all these nations have? Also regarding any negotiation for anything, knowing when the other side is bluffing or telling the truth is huge, it's everything. Those powerful nations routinely ask/demand other nations to do things, stop doing things, etc.. Information is incredibly powerful in those discussions and these aren't commonly war related things.
Whether or not we need it, I don't know, I seriously doubt it would change the results of most wars though. Another world war? It could be decisive but with the global economy I think just about every body capable for world warring has too much invested and to risk to let that happen.
In any case, SIGINT certainly helped a great deal, but what really won the war for the allies was the roughly order of magnitude difference between the size of the economy of the United States and those of the countries it was fighting.
I think it would be very hard to spin up on demand. There's not a catalogue of talented SIGINTs lying around. These people need to be found and hired. A whole organization as big as Google would have to be built overnight. It would be a nightmare. Not to mention that this organization would be starting from scratch while its counterparts might have taps into American society already.
As for the disparity in GDP, an order of magnitude is a bit of an exaggeration for Germany, only slightly for Japan at the beginning of the war and not at all by the end. Wikipedia has figures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Worl...
The US's advantage in the long term became enormous because it was so far removed from the fighting. Germany and Japan's economies were mostly flat, while the US's nearly doubled in that time period. By the end of the war, the economic disparity was almost 5x over Germany and over 10x for Japan. Even in 1941, the disparity between the US and Japan was well over 5x, which makes one wonder WTF they were thinking.
These questions can be answered with good-old fashioned spying, and nothing else. Russia is not going to give us their gameplan on a silver platter.
And when we do learn Russia's gameplan, it would be best if we kept that fact secret. We can't have Russia knowing that we know their gameplan during the negotiation process.
