Phi Beta Iota: Posted with permission. We strongly recommend the Intelligence Online offerings. We have received a number of commentaries around this topic, and they boil down to the situation being much, much worse than depicted here:
1. Budget weenies without substantive experience running entire agencies (e.g. NRO)
2. Nose-dive to the lowest common denominator, completely destroying regional and country expertise and having no linguistic capabilities or grasp of history and culture (CIA, DIA)
3. Completely out of control procurement, rotten requirements definition, no full life-cycle planning (e.g. buy collection, do not buy processing), and generally disconnected from reality (NSA/Cyber-Command)
4. We are reminded that there are 1,200 distinct “organizations” wasting money and going through the motions on counter-terrorism–meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security gropes little girls, confiscates aftershave, and is generally on the underside of institutionalized tyrannical idiocy.
