During the 19th century, military (naval, and air) attachés were one of the most important diplomatic invention that offer many sources on military intelligence.

Since then, they had the advantage of relatively long tenures in their respective place of interest and thus were able to take into account mid- and long-term developments. Long tenures were also favourable for the establishment of interpersonal networks. As trained general staff officers, attachés were arguably the backbone of foreign military assessment before the First and the Second World War. They held a characteristic threefold function as trained collectors of military information, as the diplomatic representatives for military affairs, and as military advisers for their ambassadors.

The importance of the service attachés was considered so central that the Treaty of Versailles prohibited this institution for Germany between 1919 and 1933. During the Cold War and the development of intelligence services, in both camp to permit a transnational response to the new form of conflict, the attachés intelligence activities became generally less important, except perhaps in Soviet Russia and other similar places, where Western intelligence encountered difficulties to gather human intelligence.

The origins of the institution date back to 1816, when the Prussian General Staff first assigned officers to Prussian legations for temporary commands. However, a permanent establishment failed due to a lack of financial resources. In 1830, Prussia for the first time installed a permanent military attaché – in Paris. However, this decision did not initiate a transnational system immediately. France sent an attaché to Berlin not before 1851, Great Britain followed suit in 1865. Prussia, too, did not establish a second post before 1854 in Vienna; Florence and London followed in 1869. As a military diplomatic tool, the attaché system expanded rapidly. Above all, the upheaval of the balance of power in Continental Europe and technological innovations forced general staffs and war ministries to intensify their intelligence activities during the last third of the 19th Century. Reporting on military affairs, which until then many cases still been carried out by the ambassador, was now gradually professionalized as was its assessment within the military institutions. In 1889, the United States was the last great power to establish attachés. The appointment of naval attachés began in 1870 and was a further indicator for the rise of a new system of information procurement and management within the armed forces. In the 1920s, air attachés were also added.

The attaché service has been a topic in diplomatic and military historiography for many years, however with a national and often even a particular service perspective at best. The preponderance for the periods 1871 to 1945 is striking. The history of the attaché system during the Cold War (and here: in the Global South in particular) on the Intelligence’s point of view appears to be a promising field of research. The conference aims at presenting recent scholarship on the national cases and encouraging comparative perspectives. Key questions could deal with:

- the place of the attaché service within the emerging system of military intelligence since the late 19th Century
- the position of the attaché between the tools of military and diplomatic institutions
- the attachés as a transnational community
- social backgrounds, intercultural competence, and recruitment requirements
- the relevance of attaché assignments in an intelligence career
- the scope of intelligence, practice of espionage, and impact of attaché reporting
- the role of attachés in the international arms trade and industrial espionage
- the changing relevance of attachés since the advent of technology in the craft of intelligence

The organizing committee is made up of: Dr. HDR Gérald Arboit, ESDR3C, CNAM, Paris; Dr. Lukas Grawe, Universität Bremen; Dr. habil. Markus Pöhlmann, Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr, Potsdam.

Please send a summary of your contribution proposal (300 words maximum) as well as a short biography before November 15, 2022 to: fbunoust@hotmail.fr (local organization manager)

The conference languages are French and English.