Where’s the strategic intelligence?
By Sean Aqui | Related entries in Military, The War On TerrorismThe New York Times had an interesting article this Sunday about the CIA. It suggests that by responding to the huge demand for immediate intelligence, we as a nation have lost the means to generate strategic intelligence — the kind of stuff that gives a clear picture of the war we use tactical intelligence to win.
The greatest problem in the eyes of some C.I.A. and other intelligence officials who served before and after 9/11 is that the agency can no longer produce strategic intelligence. It can no longer advise the president on the wisest ways to use military and diplomatic force. Its ability to see over the horizon has dwindled until its thousands of analysts can’t see past the end of their desks.
The big picture has been bumped by spot news. Strategic intelligence is the power to know your enemies’ intentions. Spot news is what happened last night in Waziristan. Drowned by demands from the White House and the Pentagon for instant information, “intelligence analysts end up being the Wikipedia of Washington,” John McLaughlin, the deputy director and acting director of central intelligence from October 2000 to September 2004, said in an interview.
Such a scenario has broad implications: A weakened ability to provide a civilian counterpoint to the dominance of military intelligence, an inability to understand who we’re fighting and the best way to fight them. And it suggests a fundamental blunder by the Bush administration. Bush has spent five years reorganizing our intelligence agencies. But if he failed to ensure that the resulting structure would provide the kind of intelligence we needed, then those five years have been largely wasted.
I go into it in detail over at Midtopia.
This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 and is filed under Military, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 16th, 2006 at 10:52 am
I can see their point, but the CIA has never been great shakes at this in the past, either.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
That’s right.
Also, it’s not as if the entrenched bureacracy and rank-and-file have been, you know, exactly cooperative. There’s a real history of turf-war and other problems within the CIA, specifically, and in the intelligence community generally.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Which, of course, doesn’t take away from your point about strategic vs. immediate intelligence.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Thing is, this struggle in the IC (a friend of mine once called it “a crisis in middle management”) has been going on as long as I’ve had exposure to the IC, which started right at the end of GHWB and continued through Clinton to GWB. Calling it “a fundamental blunder by the Bush administration” distracts defensive conservatives and shark-minded liberals from what is not a partisanship problem, but rather a bureaucratic one.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Well, I call it a blunder because Bush set out (rightly) to radically remake the intelligence community. And if part of that remake didn’t include fixing that longstanding problem, that’s on his head.