Ep 041 "Storming America: Intelligence Failure is Now and Forever"

Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast

This is a continuation of my "Storming America Series" where I will tease out and describe why the inevitable internal attack on America by external forces will be made real.

In this episode, I will examine what intelligence looks like from a professional perspective and why America and the West consistently engage in existential chaos avalanches that make the world a worse place.

The bureaucratic impulse in the West has been a significant factor in making the intelligence community (IC), like the military community, a paper tiger that is a far greater danger to the inhabitants of the west than an ally. Until the IC is restructured and made more effective, it will consume roughly 100 billion a year to produce shoddy analysis, inform bad policy and a Keystone Kops foreign covert operations history that is a national shame.

Like 9/11 and its existential failures, the next attack on America will have them simply asking for more money and more power.

If you leveled the FBI, NSA and CIA tomorrow morning, made each of their budgets one dollar and fired all their employees, you would still be safe as a country.

References:

Richard J. Heuer The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

David Talbot The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

Mortimer Adler How to Read a Book

Tim Weiner Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

John Prado The Ghosts of Langley: Into the CIA's Heart of Darkness

My Substack.

Contact me at [e-mail].