Clandestine operation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2008) |
A Clandestine operation is a military or Intelligence operation carried out in such a way that the operation goes unnoticed.
| “ | Clandestine Operation: An operation sponsored or conducted by governmental departments or agencies in such a way as to assure secrecy or concealment. A clandestine operation differs from a covert operation in that emphasis is placed on concealment of the operation rather than on concealment of the identity of the sponsor. In special operations, an activity may be both covert and clandestine and may focus equally on operational considerations and intelligence-related activities. See also covert operation; overt operation. (JP 3-05.1). From The U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms - Joint Publication JP1-02 dated 05 January 2007 | ” |
The bulk of clandestine operations are related to the gathering of intelligence, typically by people and by hidden sensors. Placement of underwater or land based communications cable taps, cameras, microphones, traffic sensors, monitors such as sniffers, and similar systems require that the mission go undetected and unsuspected. Clandestine sensors may also be on unmanned underwater vehicles, stealthy satellites or low-observability unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or unmanned detectors as in Operation Igloo White and its successors or hand-emplaced by clandestine human operations.
There is a delicate line between clandestine and covert when using concealed remote sensors or human observers to direct air and artillery strikes. Clearly, being bombed tells the target that he has probably been located by the other side, although "harassing and interdiction" or "free-fire zone" rules can cause a target to be hit for purely random reasons. The exact method that was used to locate the targets, however, can remain clandestine. Sometimes, the real method is covered by another method. In World War Two, targets found through cryptanalysis of radio communications, were attacked only if there had been aerial reconnaissance in the area, or, in the case of the shootdown of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, where the sighting could be attributed to Coastwatchers. During the Vietnam War, trucks attacked on the Ho Chi Minh trail were completely unaware of some sensors, such as the airborne Black Crow device that sensed their ignition. They could also have been spotted by a human patrol, staying clandestine.
It can reasonably be said that a covert operation can have clandestine components within it. To go back to the US military definition of clandestine, which includes "concealment of the operation" as the primary consideration, the targeting component can be covert, while the attack is overt.
Until the 1970's, clandestine operations were primarily political in nature, generally aimed at assisting groups or nations favored by the sponsor (e.g., secret political subsidies to Japanese politicians). Today these operations are more numerous than ever before, but are swamped in percentages by the shear number of technology related clandestine operations.
The term "clandestine" is frequently misused, even within the military. Popular literature and poor journalistic standards often create confusion on the term. The above-named quote has been the accepted definition for the US and NATO since World War II. Clandestine is to mean "hidden", and Covert is to mean "deniable." Stealth is a tactic and a technology, used as an adjective, and is not used to formally describe a type of mission.
