INTELLIGENT, NOT INTELLIGENCE:

How America can win the intelligence war (Spengler, 6/15/04, Asia Times)

Every US intelligence assessment of Soviet military strength and morale available in 1981 was dead wrong. Washington learned better by putting Moscow under stress. How adaptable was Russian weapons technology? Start a high-tech arms race with the Strategic Defense Initiative and find out. How good were Russian avionics? Help the Israeli air force engage Syria's MiGs in the Bekaa Valley in 1982, and the destruction with impunity of Russian-built fighters and surface-to-air missile sites would provide a data point. How solid was Russian fighting morale? Instigate irregular warfare against the Russian army in Afghanistan and learn.

The United States lacks the aptitude and inclination to penetrate the mind of adversary cultures. In the so-called war on terror, it lacks the floating population of irredentist emigres who provided a window into Russian-occupied Eastern Europe back during the Cold War. But the best sort of intelligence stems not from scholarship but from decisiveness of command and clarity of mission. "War is not an intellectual activity but a brutally physical one," observes Sir John Keegan in Intelligence and War, published last year. President George W Bush might do well to read it carefully before choosing the next CIA director.

It was not the intellectuals but the bullyboys of the Reagan administration who shook loose the relevant intelligence. In 1981 the CIA enjoyed a surfeit of Russian speakers, in contrast to today's paucity of Arabic translators. But William Casey routinely ignored the legions of Russian-studies PhDs, reaching out instead to irregulars who could give him the insights he required.

Intelligence in warfare presents a different sort of intellectual challenge than academics are trained to address. President Reagan, no intellectual in the conventional sense, nonetheless formed a clear assessment of what the enemy was, what it wanted, and how it might be defeated. Without the courage to define and then engage the enemy, intelligence services will wander randomly in the dark. [...]

Bush might as well shut down the CIA and re-create something like the wartime Office of Strategic Services, for which Casey parachuted agents into occupied Europe. Most of the CIA amounts to a make-work project for second-rate academics, drawn from an academic environment generally hostile to US strategic interests. Even if US universities still produced strategic thinkers rather than multicultural mush-heads, and even if the CIA could recruit them, little would change. In spite of the academics, Bill Casey won his intelligence war because the US convinced enough players on the other side that it would win. To win to its side the best men and women of the Islamic world, the United States must make clear what it wants from them.

What the stupid Ronald Reagan understood was that Communism had to be more feeble than we could see clearly just because of the type of system it was. So while intelligence agencies well into the 90s still thought it viable economically and formidable militarily, he'd already destroted. His was the intelligence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

Yes, yes, of course, we all know you cannot poke a stick through the walls of a concrete tower, but here's something to think about: what if the walls are only a painted backdrop?

Today the stupid president understands that Islamicism too is just a painted backdrop. Confronting the world with that fact will do more than all the resources squandered on intelligence ever could.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 22, 2004 9:40 PM