Relationship between the political system and causes of war (questions)

[wm]

(1) To what extent is strategic intelligence relevant to state decision making on war?

I suspect the degree of relevance has much to do with the personalities of the state decisionmakers. By this I mean, how much access to intel the decisonmakers demand and how much use (read "opennness of mind to being persuaded by 'facts' delivered by strategic intel") they actually make of the intel provided. Sports analogy--suppose a football coach had a scout who reported, with some provable degree of accuracy, what plays the opposing football team would run next. Further suppose the coach chose not to believe the scout, chose to ignore the scout's input in his decisonmaking, and/or chose not to inform his own defense about what plays to call to counter what the opponent called.

2) In what ways has technology transformed, or modified, the relevance of intelligence, if at all? Does an increase in capabilities generate a proportional increase in dependence on the effects it enables?

Because of the availability of near instantaneous imagery as combat information, I suspect that operators place less reliance on having a trained "intel" guy provide assessments of what the bad guys are up to or may be planning.

(3) What is the link between the causes of war and intelligence? Are states more likely or less likely to enter conflict with more effective information management?

The decision to go to war probably has little to do with a rational risk calculus and/or the kind of cost-benefit analysis that you learn about in classical economics and political theory/international relations courses. I suspect what makes it seem so rational has to do with all the "Monday morning quarterback/post mortem" analyses done after the shooting starts.

States act based on their perceptions of reality. Insofar as intel may alter that perception of reality (for good or bad), the "go-to-war-propensity" pendulum could swing either way. See my response to 1 above.

I suspect that you might want to review the thread on the the neo-con alibi here among other threads (like the one on Iran Nukes NIE) to get more grist for developing an answer to this question. The bottom line from where I sit is that a state's leadership makes a decision to go to war and then tries to come up with reasons that enables it to justify that decision in the moral/legal context defined by Just War Theory's jus ad bellum conditions.