Why U.S. Intelligence is Inadequate, and How to Fix It

Strategy and Policy

The faults of US intelligence in anti-terrorism come as much from the outside as from the inside. In 1993 the Clinton administration decided that individuals, not regimes, were responsible for terrorism. and demanded that U.S. intelligence comb through thousands of persons about whom we know nothing, while discounting the fact that terrorist activities breed in authoritarian regimes as expressions of those regimes. The Bush team has not reversed that judgment. And so, as wealthy Saudis spread the Wahhabi movement through oil billions and Syrian dictators and Palestinian warlords rail on TV with impunity against America and all its works, U.S. intelligence interrogators are “going after” the small fry. No problem can be dealt well if it is defined badly. No intelligence can save unintelligent policy or make up for lack of a strategy for victory.  Intelligence can light a path to victory if we make war on the basis of what we know for sure. Policy makers for whom the pursuit of victory is contingent on intelligence beyond their reach make intelligence a scapegoat for their own incompetence.

1 The US intelligence budget (some $35 billion) is divided into two roughly equal parts, the Tactical

Intelligence related Activities of The Defense Department – mostly for the purchase and operation of devices used for battlefield intelligence – and the National Foreign Intelligence Plan. This consists of the agencies, led by CIA, that do “strategic intelligence. All the agencies in the NFIP share CIA’s problems to some extent. Herein I refer to the CIA and US intelligence interchangeably because CIA is the epitome of NFIP intelligence, and as its politically most important part.