Sometimes the more opinions one seeks, the better his perspective might become. Not so with intelligence collection and promulgation in the sense of matters related to national security and potential enemy intentions and capabilities.
Yet the “more the better” intelligence seems to be the norm as exposed by a series of Washington Post articles.
The general public will never see a comprehensive intelligence community organization chart (or lack thereof). That is mostly considered classified information. Even the people with all the security clearances available don’t understand it. And when they try to find out, they are confronted with the “need to know” rejoinder.
So what to do about such secrecy that proliferates critical mistakes and costs a lot of money?
We believe the answer is in accountability.
How many individuals were actually fired as a result of poor intelligence concerning Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction? We have no idea, and frankly cannot pinpoint any major public figure in the entire intelligence community that left in disgrace as a result of that egregious error. Why did this gargantuan intelligence “community” miss the call on the Christmas bomber or the shooting at Fort Hood? How many heads rolled as a result of those mistakes? How high up in the organization did the blame go and what was done about it, publicly?
That is the way bureaucracies, particularly government bureaucracies work. If there are 2 million bureaucrats in the federal government, there are 20 million fingers pointing in who knows what directions when things go wrong. Now how is the public supposed to figure out who to blame, legitimately, in such a morass?
In any organization, bad things sometimes happen. That is human nature. But any competent organization finds out why those bad things happened and takes strong action to fix the problem. In the government’s case, the answer usually seems to be to hire more people. And thus far the government can afford to do that.
In private industry where funds are limited, companies find out who made the mistakes and either fire them or retrain them. Companies don’t have the money simply to add another layer of bureaucracy to further compound the problem.
Opinion
In our view: Accountable intelligence
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