Saturday, July 10, 2004
Intelligence Failures: Is There a Way Out?
The papers the last two days have been full of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report. It condemns with exhaustive detail the failure of the intelligence community, especially the CIA, to obtain information on, analyze reasonably or report effectively on the major issues facing the country in the terrorism area, particularly as this relates to the decision to go to war with Iraq and what has happened subsequently. The Republicans want the blame to stop with the intelligence community; the Democrats want to see it as a more widespread failure involving the NSC and the White House.
It is clear that there have been failures here, partially as a result of the "business as usual attitude" that has characterized our intelligence and military efforts since Korea. The resources put into both Iraq and Afghanistan were minimal, a "just enough" approach that reminds me of the modern approach of businesses to stockpiling. An exception has been our willingness to fight from the air, in fact to do almost everything from the air. The major reasons: lower casualties and lower dollar cost. Our "9 to 5" approach was symbolized by a response of Mr. Tenet when asked why we had almost no human intelligence resources in Iraq before the war. His said it was "too dangerous to be in Iraq then". I cannot imagine this response in World War II. That war was taken seriously and we enlisted serious people in its fighting. (Incidentally, I am not personally a hero and do not mean to imply I would do any different. But this does not lessen the problem.)
In his Friday commentary on the Lehrer show, David Brooks made an apposite comment that somehow our system must take to heart. He said that whoever wins in November, the intelligence problem will remain as the biggest security hurdle we face. He reported that the ignorance appears to have not been lessened as the threat has grown. He was just back from a trip to Iraq where he had been startled to learn that we still seem to know very little about who we are fighting. He was amazed, for example, that our forces do not know if the insurgency has 5000 or 20,000 militants fighting for it.
My conclusion as I follow events from the sidelines is that the people we rely on in these areas are simply not intelligent enough to do the job that needs to be done. I do not want to say their IQs are not high enough, for intelligence useful in this business comes in many forms, some of which might not show up in an IQ test. But too often the obvious seems to be missed through reliance on SOP thinking, or reliance on computers to do the thinking. I suspect that there has been a long-term and continuing decline in the intelligence services due primarily to the quality of the people recruited to both these services and the Foreign Service. There was a time when these services recruited the best and the brightest. But this seems to be no longer the case. Two reasons might be suggested. First, young people are now more likely than in the past to see exciting and rewarding futures in other areas, for example, world business. Secondly, the attitude of one's peers toward services as the CIA, or even public service in general, has become so negative that persons choosing such a direction would be ashamed to admit it. After the gatekeeping function of recruitment, fossilized bureaucracies whose leaders seem less and less impressive are also unlikely to retain the better workers that they have managed to obtain.
Perhaps what we need in these areas, as in many others less critical, is a major effort to recruit better people, an effort that should be undertaken on many levels, including improving the environment and working conditions of recruits. Perhaps we need to develop new structures, new institutions, not so much because what we have now are organizationally inadequate, but because we need to offer new contexts where youthful idealism can be made to mature into lifetimes of effective service.
The papers the last two days have been full of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report. It condemns with exhaustive detail the failure of the intelligence community, especially the CIA, to obtain information on, analyze reasonably or report effectively on the major issues facing the country in the terrorism area, particularly as this relates to the decision to go to war with Iraq and what has happened subsequently. The Republicans want the blame to stop with the intelligence community; the Democrats want to see it as a more widespread failure involving the NSC and the White House.
It is clear that there have been failures here, partially as a result of the "business as usual attitude" that has characterized our intelligence and military efforts since Korea. The resources put into both Iraq and Afghanistan were minimal, a "just enough" approach that reminds me of the modern approach of businesses to stockpiling. An exception has been our willingness to fight from the air, in fact to do almost everything from the air. The major reasons: lower casualties and lower dollar cost. Our "9 to 5" approach was symbolized by a response of Mr. Tenet when asked why we had almost no human intelligence resources in Iraq before the war. His said it was "too dangerous to be in Iraq then". I cannot imagine this response in World War II. That war was taken seriously and we enlisted serious people in its fighting. (Incidentally, I am not personally a hero and do not mean to imply I would do any different. But this does not lessen the problem.)
In his Friday commentary on the Lehrer show, David Brooks made an apposite comment that somehow our system must take to heart. He said that whoever wins in November, the intelligence problem will remain as the biggest security hurdle we face. He reported that the ignorance appears to have not been lessened as the threat has grown. He was just back from a trip to Iraq where he had been startled to learn that we still seem to know very little about who we are fighting. He was amazed, for example, that our forces do not know if the insurgency has 5000 or 20,000 militants fighting for it.
My conclusion as I follow events from the sidelines is that the people we rely on in these areas are simply not intelligent enough to do the job that needs to be done. I do not want to say their IQs are not high enough, for intelligence useful in this business comes in many forms, some of which might not show up in an IQ test. But too often the obvious seems to be missed through reliance on SOP thinking, or reliance on computers to do the thinking. I suspect that there has been a long-term and continuing decline in the intelligence services due primarily to the quality of the people recruited to both these services and the Foreign Service. There was a time when these services recruited the best and the brightest. But this seems to be no longer the case. Two reasons might be suggested. First, young people are now more likely than in the past to see exciting and rewarding futures in other areas, for example, world business. Secondly, the attitude of one's peers toward services as the CIA, or even public service in general, has become so negative that persons choosing such a direction would be ashamed to admit it. After the gatekeeping function of recruitment, fossilized bureaucracies whose leaders seem less and less impressive are also unlikely to retain the better workers that they have managed to obtain.
Perhaps what we need in these areas, as in many others less critical, is a major effort to recruit better people, an effort that should be undertaken on many levels, including improving the environment and working conditions of recruits. Perhaps we need to develop new structures, new institutions, not so much because what we have now are organizationally inadequate, but because we need to offer new contexts where youthful idealism can be made to mature into lifetimes of effective service.
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