Intelligence failures are quite common in the history of warfare. During the First World War, according to a new book by Arabist and author Eamonn Gearon, British intelligence failures at Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara (in what later became Iraq) against troops of the Ottoman Empire spurred the creation of the Arab Bureau, which Gearon describes as an organization that “revolutionized the way in which intelligence operations were conducted in complex cultural environments, and pioneered methods that would influence approaches to intelligence work …for decades, … even up to the present day.”