BREAKFAST CLUB OF GRAND RAPIDS
Established 1936 – John A. Collins, President
EMBASSY SUITES BY HILTON, GRAND RAPIDS DOWNTOWN
Big E's Sports Grille
710 Monroe Avenue NW, Grand Rapids
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2026 – 7:00 AM
Throughout American military history, the quest to gain the upper hand by garnering additional intelligence about adversaries, provides guidance for military leaders. It also reduces uncertainty and can save countless lives.
The presentation is an attempt to look through an historian’s eyes and find faults in the past that have created undue difficulties, death and destruction. After the event, battle, or war, it is relatively easy to see the facts that might have altered the outcome, but the hope is to see and act of them prior to the action.
Invocation: Eric Nelson Introduction: Jeff Kissinger
Military Intelligence
“Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.” – Groucho Marx“
“If intelligence were a TV set, it would be an early black-and-white model with poor reception, so that much of the picture was grey and the figures on the screen were snowy and indistinct. You could fiddle with the knobs all you wanted, but unless you were careful, what you would see often depended more on what you expected or hoped to see than on what was really there.” – Madeleine Albright
“Do not spare any reasonable expense to come at early and true information; always recollecting, and bearing in mind, that vague and uncertain accounts of things [are] … more disturbing and dangerous than receiving none at all.” – George Washington
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” – Sun Tzu in The Art of War
