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This gave me so many flashbacks to the various histories of the Vietnam war that I've read. One key insight from John Ranelagh's histories of the CIA (pre-9/11

by cstross 11y ago

This gave me so many flashbacks to the various histories of the Vietnam war that I've read. One key insight from John Ranelagh's histories of the CIA (pre-9/11): the CIA was always famously crap at HUMINT. Reason: you don't get promoted for freezing your butt off on a mountaintop in Afghanistan, you get promoted for attending lots of meetings with managers in Maryland. The institutional set-up of the CIA was tilted heavily towards analysis and reporting by consensus. It was originally intended to be a Central Intelligence Agency, tasked from the late 1940s onwards with acting as a giant fusion center for intel from all the US government's external agencies and feeding it up the chain to the NSC: analysis and committees are its life-blood, and the spies were always a side-project, much as INFOSEC is a side-project to the NSA (whose primary focus is on ELINT and SIGINT). When the CIA began expanding again after 9/11, it looks like it carried its previous institutional culture forward -- and didn't really know how to use the grunts in the field effectively and retain their hard-won insights. Almost as if the OSS had never existed ...

jacobolus 11y ago
For other readers: HUMINT = human intelligence, human observers embedded somewhere. ELINT = electronic intelligence, e.g. radar systems. COMINT = communications intelligence, spying on human communication systems. SIGINT = signals intelligence, including both ELINT and COMINT. INFOSEC = information security, defending information from outside attackers. It seems to me that post-WWII, the US diplomatic apparatus and military (also including USAID, etc.) have also been pretty crap at human intelligence, at least judging from the outcomes of the policies they end up pursuing. I’m having trouble thinking up examples where the US intervened anywhere with good timing or good sense, whereas it’s easy to list dozens of terrible failures. Edit, this — “Mr. Laux said he was struck by how little the military seemed to know about Afghanistan after so many years in the country, and that many C.I.A. officers had developed little more insight. Soldiers and spies served short tours of duty — with much of that time spent just becoming familiar with their surroundings — and then turned their jobs over to new arrivals forced to make the same mistakes as their predecessors.” — sounds pretty similar to the normal practice in anthropology and other social sciences in academia, too. Scholars have a couple years during grad school and occasional 1-year sabbaticals to do field work, but spend the rest of their careers teaching and writing papers based on their out-of-date and usually misinformed remembrances. Also similar for a large proportion of journalists, who have only been in some particular place for a limited time before they’re expected to explain its intricacies in a few hundred words at a time.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  HUMINT after WWII apparently relied on existing spy networks - mostly Germans who were out of a job. They fed their masters anything that sounded good, to keep being paid. Result: they spun up the East and West continually, creating a thing called the "Cold War".
  - cstross 11y ago
    Partially true, but that's not the whole story. Speaking as a non-American, I'd attribute another chunk of it to the fact that most USAns don't travel outside their own continent (where they've got Canada and Mexico and the Carribean islands with which to engage with "the rest of the world" if so inclined). With the partial exceptions of Mexico (the war on drugs) and Cuba (the war on Fidel Castro's beard), there's not much call for spying in those countries; the pool of US citizens with some degree of acculturation to truly foreign societies is comparatively small compared to those folks who live in places where you can drive 100 miles and cross two borders and three language barriers.
    - tsunamifury 11y ago
      You can say the same of any large country, don't forget the US is the third largest. It's vastness statistically means most of the population will be insulated. I don't necessarily think the EU small country circle jerk of superiority is always applicable... And in many ways is as narrow minded and silly as the ideas the article accuses the CIA of
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    Well. Lets not forget that Soviet Russia had a nasty habit of killing millions of people, mostly IIRC its own inhabitants,-for all kinds of reasons. In fact I guess Soviet Russia has killed a few tens of millions more people than USA. Fear of the USSR was completely justified. (Sadly so was fear of USA in some countries.)
    - Zigurd 11y ago

by cstross 11y ago

jacobolus 11y ago

For other readers: HUMINT = human intelligence, human observers embedded somewhere. ELINT = electronic intelligence, e.g. radar systems. COMINT = communications intelligence, spying on human communication systems. SIGINT = signals intelligence, including both ELINT and COMINT. INFOSEC = information security, defending information from outside attackers. It seems to me that post-WWII, the US diplomatic apparatus and military (also including USAID, etc.) have also been pretty crap at human intelligence, at least judging from the outcomes of the policies they end up pursuing. I’m having trouble thinking up examples where the US intervened anywhere with good timing or good sense, whereas it’s easy to list dozens of terrible failures. Edit, this — “Mr. Laux said he was struck by how little the military seemed to know about Afghanistan after so many years in the country, and that many C.I.A. officers had developed little more insight. Soldiers and spies served short tours of duty — with much of that time spent just becoming familiar with their surroundings — and then turned their jobs over to new arrivals forced to make the same mistakes as their predecessors.” — sounds pretty similar to the normal practice in anthropology and other social sciences in academia, too. Scholars have a couple years during grad school and occasional 1-year sabbaticals to do field work, but spend the rest of their careers teaching and writing papers based on their out-of-date and usually misinformed remembrances. Also similar for a large proportion of journalists, who have only been in some particular place for a limited time before they’re expected to explain its intricacies in a few hundred words at a time.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
HUMINT after WWII apparently relied on existing spy networks - mostly Germans who were out of a job. They fed their masters anything that sounded good, to keep being paid. Result: they spun up the East and West continually, creating a thing called the "Cold War".
- cstross 11y ago
  Partially true, but that's not the whole story. Speaking as a non-American, I'd attribute another chunk of it to the fact that most USAns don't travel outside their own continent (where they've got Canada and Mexico and the Carribean islands with which to engage with "the rest of the world" if so inclined). With the partial exceptions of Mexico (the war on drugs) and Cuba (the war on Fidel Castro's beard), there's not much call for spying in those countries; the pool of US citizens with some degree of acculturation to truly foreign societies is comparatively small compared to those folks who live in places where you can drive 100 miles and cross two borders and three language barriers.
  - tsunamifury 11y ago
    You can say the same of any large country, don't forget the US is the third largest. It's vastness statistically means most of the population will be insulated. I don't necessarily think the EU small country circle jerk of superiority is always applicable... And in many ways is as narrow minded and silly as the ideas the article accuses the CIA of
- reitanqild 11y ago
  Well. Lets not forget that Soviet Russia had a nasty habit of killing millions of people, mostly IIRC its own inhabitants,-for all kinds of reasons. In fact I guess Soviet Russia has killed a few tens of millions more people than USA. Fear of the USSR was completely justified. (Sadly so was fear of USA in some countries.)
  - Zigurd 11y ago