Review (Guest): The End of Intelligence

2 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)
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David Tucker

2 Stars Half-Baked Intelligence

The author of this book, David Tucker, appears to be one of those folks whose careers have often put them on the fringes of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), but who have only superficially been involved in any aspect of intelligence production. Tucker compounds this deficiency by an unwillingness to either research or reflect seriously on his chosen subject. The goal of this book presumably is to demonstrate the dynamic relationships between intelligence, the power of nation states, and the so-called information age. Because Tucker is unwilling to really think through what he means by these terms, the book utterly fails to achieve this goal.

Apparently the author does not feel it is necessary to distinguish intelligence information (i.e. evaluated and authenticated information) from unprocessed information. Nor is he particularly enlightening on why the dawn of the Information Age means the “end of intelligence.” More importantly he dose not distinguish between tactical, operational, and strategic intelligence nor does he appear to understand the various role intelligence has (or can have) in support of military operations, policy formulation, and high level decision making. Yet if he is concerned with the relationship of intelligence to “state power” it is important for him to identify what sort of intelligence can impact on the nation state. Although he devotes an entire chapter to counter-intelligence it is obvious that he has a very narrow and inaccurate understanding of counter-intelligence and no understanding at all of the role that intelligence and cyber security can have in enabling counter-intelligence operations. In the area of human intelligence (espionage), a central focus of this book, he seems to have little or no understanding of any aspect of it. In short this book offers a misleading and ill-considered discussion that fails completely to understand the relationship of intelligence with state power in the 21st Century (aka “The Information Age”).

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