The previous post recommended Angelo Codevilla’s book War: Ends and Means, in my opinion as
good a book, and as important a book for students of history and foreign
affairs as such classics as von
Clausewitz’s On War and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. This post recommends another of his books,
the 1992 book Informing Statecraft:
Intelligence for a New Century.
The US intelligence
system is massive and exorbitantly expensive, employing well over 100,000
people, plus tens of thousands more as contractors. Of course much of the
annual cost is invisible, hidden in “black” budgets, but informed estimates put
it at more than $50 billion per year.
Yet despite all that money and all those people and all the
expensive equipment, US intelligence has failed to anticipate almost every significant
world event since the end of World War II, starting with the Soviet Union’s
postwar plans in Eastern Europe, including the Korean invasion, both major
Arab-Israeli wars, the Eastern European “color revolutions”, the fall of the Communist
party in Russia, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and most recently the so-called “Arab
Spring”, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the rise of the Islamic State. US intelligence efforts have, for the most
part, been a failure. There have no
doubt been successes (which understandably are seldom publicized), but on the
major events, there have been a lot of failures.
There are many reasons for the ineffectiveness of America
intelligence services. There are too many competing services, and because of bureaucratic
turf battles and jalousies they don’t share information easily. They are too
big, so that communication paths are too long and too tortuous. They have
become too bureaucratic, with more of a focus on budget politics and career preservation
than on their primary tasks. They have a fascination with technical tools and
have neglected to develop enough human sources in other nations. They are too
insular in outlook; too wedded to American concepts to think out of the box.
They are short not only linguists who can read or translate the intelligence
they collect, but more critically they are short of experts who truly understand
the cultures they are trying to collect information on.
And of course, the politicians who get the intelligence
products they produce are mostly too poorly educated in history, comparative
cultures, and statecraft, and often too blinded by their own preconceptions,
ideologies and biases to make effective use of what they do get.
Codeville tallks at length about how to do intelligence work
correctly, with many real-world examples from both American experiences and
other nation’s intelligence services experiences of what worked and what didn’t
work, and why. He has a background in intelligence work, so he knows what he is
talking about. This is a very good book.
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