Townshend's affiliation with the Army of India meant that he operated under peculiar administrative arrangements. India was a British Crown Colony, and its military authority centered upon the local Viceroy, not the War Office in London. As a consequence, Force D took its orders from the Indian Army's headquarters in Shimla, while the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), with its headquarters in Cairo, took its orders from the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in London. Although Force D and the EEF were both engaged against the Ottoman Empire, they regarded each other as rivals and often refused to share intelligence; this deprived the Indian Army of much information uniquely possessed by the EEF, which had more operatives fluent in Arabic and Turkish. The lack of good intelligence was to be a recurring problem for Townshend, whose briefings consistently underestimated both the quantity and quality of the Ottoman forces opposing him. If ill-informed, he nonetheless possessed considerable independence, since laxity among Indian Army commanders caused many decisions to devolve upon officers in the field.