Considering the seriousness of these mistakes, this seems a necessary and laudable undertaking. But…don’t expect the review and inevitable list of recommendations to greatly improve the complex process of collecting, analyzing and consuming intelligence products. So say two of the leading scholars of intelligence in the English-speaking world, Richard Betts and the late Robert Jervis, both of Columbia University’s political science department. After decades of studying the issue, these men concluded that always the recommendations of committees designed to improve the caliber of the intelligence process after American wars tend to create a new set of problems. As Betts put it in a widely cited paper on this subject: Treating certain pathologies with organizational reforms often creates new pathologies or resurrects old ones. Perfecting intelligence production does not necessarily lead to perfecting intelligence consumption. making warning systems more sensitive reduces sensitivity. the principles of the optimal analytical process are in many ways incompatible with the imperatives of the decision-making process. Avoiding information failure requires eliminating strategic biases, but leaders cannot operate purposefully without some biases. In devising measures to improve the intelligence process, policymakers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Strategic intelligence, which Betts defines with admirable economy as “the acquisition, analysis, and appreciation of relevant data,” is an extremely difficult business. It is a unique blend of science and art because it always involves political and psychological factors that are unique to a given conflict and subject to rapid change. And it must not be forgotten that senior intelligence officers must sell their product well if they are to have real weight with consumers, and that is an entirely separate skill from producing good analysis. Of course, serious students of recent American military history already have a basic understanding of what went wrong in the assessments of the final phase of the tragedy in Afghanistan and the first phase of the Russia-Ukraine War. In general, the US intelligence community—the 18 agencies involved in its collection, along with the primary consumers, the White House and the National Security Council—have become overly dependent on quantitative analysis derived primarily from technical and electronic sources (intelligence signals). at the expense of both human intelligence (agents and sources on the ground in the arena of conflict) and expertise about the political dynamics and cultural histories of foreign societies. What Clausewitz called moral or intellectual factors in his masterpiece, On War—the will to fight among the soldiers of an army, the level of popular support for the government, the creativity and intuition of the political leaders of the adversaries—these are things that says Clausewitz “they cannot be classified or measured. You have to see and feel these things.” On paper, the US-trained Afghan army of more than 300,000 troops, armed with far more sophisticated weaponry than the Taliban, including drones and fighter jets, should have been able to hold off the Taliban’s final offensive until 2022. No it happens, because apart from about 30,000 Afghan Special Forces, the rest of the “Army” had no interest in defending a government that they and their families saw as corrupt, ineffective and in the pocket of the West. The majority of Afghan Army units offered no resistance to the Taliban. They negotiated their own surrender or offered no resistance. As for the CIA’s predictions that the Russians would break the back of the Ukrainian resistance within days, it is clear that the analysts relied too much on their quantitative assessment of Russian units and weapon systems, while grasping Clausewitz’s “moral factors.” on both sides it was shaky at best. One of the most significant failures of US intelligence since Vietnam was the community’s inability to understand the swirling political and military developments surrounding the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In February of that year, a strange collection of liberal reformists, leftists, and Muslims Fundamentalist clerics overthrew the Shah of Iran, at the time the United States’ most powerful ally in the Middle East and a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Led by a brilliant, mysteriously charismatic cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, the clerics deftly outmaneuvered and marginalized their rebel allies and established the world’s first modern Islamic Republic. “The Carter administration’s responses to developments in Iran have been halting, contradictory, and in the opinion of every serious historian of US relations I know, depressingly incompetent.” Anti-Americanism was the glue that held together the disparate factions of resistance to the Shah’s rule. All the revolutionaries believed that the Shah, whose regime was becoming increasingly oppressive and corrupt, was in Washington’s pocket. Washington completely misread the dynamics of Iranian politics. Less than a year before the Shah’s overthrow, President Jimmy Carter had lavished praise on the Shah, calling his regime “an island of stability in a troubled corner of the world.” Turmoil and a rising tide of anti-Americanism in Iran had been visible for several years, but the American intelligence community had not developed contacts among the myriad opposition groups and was largely dependent on the Shah’s intelligence services. They told the Americans not what was really going on, but what the Shah wanted the Americans to know. The Carter administration’s responses to the rapidly unfolding developments in Iran before and after this event, including the infamous 444-day hostage crisis, were halting, contradictory, and in the opinion of every serious historian of US relations I know, depressing. right. Among the US intelligence community, noted military historian Lawrence Freedman says in his history of US Middle East policy, A Choice of Enemies, “there was little understanding of the internal power struggles that soon began in Tehran. The diplomats and intelligence specialists sent to try to pick up the pieces of US-Iran relations had no expertise in the ideological wellsprings of the Islamic movement… Because the clerics were not generally known for their lust for power or appetite for for government, the comforting assumption was that their role would soon be limited by the right politicians.’ Professors Betts and Jervis join a broad consensus of scholars in believing that the most egregious intelligence failures in recent American history have more to do with the top consumers of intelligence than with the CIA or the myriad other organizations involved in its collection and analysis. Here, the main villains, Betts writes, are “wishful thinking, disregard for professional analysis and consumer bias.” There was nothing impulsive about the series of decisions that committed the United States to fight a major war in Vietnam and then extended America’s commitment to winning that conflict even as the signs of failure began to pile up like magpies around a corpse. Between 1950 and the summer of 1965, three US presidents chose to expand America’s involvement in Vietnam, despite the ancient Asian country’s seeming irrelevance to vital American interests and the extraordinary level of dysfunction and corruption among America’s Vietnamese allies . If President Johnson had heeded the pessimistic CIA reports about American prospects in Vietnam, he would never have committed the country to a major ground war. While the Johnson administration’s “best and brightest” justified America’s growing military presence in Southeast Asia as an appropriate response to Kremlin- and Beijing-sponsored “wars of national liberation,” the CIA consistently pointed out that this was simply not the case. Hanoi ran its own show, skillfully playing off one communist superpower against another, and often decided to go its own way in prosecuting the war effort against the Americans. Agency doubts about the trajectory of American policy in the war were particularly acute in late 1964 and early 1965, when the Johnson administration crossed the Rubicon by deploying American combat units to fight the enemy in the South in March 1965. , Johnson took the management of the war from the South Vietnamese and put it in the hands of his own generals. Here’s a remarkably prescient assessment by CIA analyst Harold P. Ford, written in April 1965, just as LBJ was committing US Marines to offensive operations for the first time: This problematic essay stems from a deep concern that we are gradually breaking away from reality in Vietnam, that we are advancing with far more courage than wisdom – to unknown ends… There seems to be an innate American disposition to underestimate Asian enemies. We’re doing it now. We cannot afford such a precious luxury. Earlier, dispassionate assessments, war games and the like told us this [the communists in Vietnam] would persist in the face of such pressures as we are now putting upon them. However, now we seem to expect them to come running to the…
