January 23, 2005Rumsfeld's GameThe Washington Post reports today on an effort by the Pentagon to do what the CIA Directorate of Operations has been unable and unwilling to do in the War on Terror. Rumsfeld's efforts, launched in October 2001, address two widely shared goals. One is to give combat forces, such as those fighting the insurgency in Iraq, more and better information about their immediate enemy. The other is to find new tools to penetrate and destroy the shadowy organizations, such as al Qaeda, that pose global threats to U.S. interests in conflicts with little resemblance to conventional war. That the Agency has been woefully lacking in both strategic and operational intelligence gathering should be clear to anyone who's been paying attention for the last 3+ years. The Pentagon decided so early on that it needed on-the-ground assets that it could rely on, and that the best way to get them was to channel Bll Donavon rather than to try to reform his sclerotic heirs. The Left and Congressional Democrats will almost certainly howl, "end run," and want to know why, if this organization is so much better, it didn't know about the WMD. It also explains at least partly the disproportionate public hostility of the Agency to the President. Certainly it explains some of Rumsfeld's concerns about the intelligence reorganization, especially that one sentence about the new law's not impeding the DoD's own responsibilities. The President has noted a number of times that the War will consist of operations both public and private, and will take place on battlefields all over the world. As long as this new effort remains active and isn't allowed to degenerate into another bureaucracy, it should help to integrate real-time intelligence into large- and small-scale military actions. Such pro-activity may also explain the singular ineffectiveness of terrorist operations as time goes on. Posted by joshuasharf at January 23, 2005 02:52 PM | TrackBack |
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