The publisher should be spanked for failing to provide Amazon with proper information (e.g. the Table of Contents and copy of the cover) for this book, which is an instant best reference on intelligence for the English-speaking audience.This anthology brings together 36 world-class authorities on their respective domains to discuss in nine parts: Introduction to US Intelligence; Intelligence Collection; Intelligence Analysis; The Danger of Intelligence Politicization; Intelligence and the Policymaker; Covert Action; Counterintelligence; Accountability and Civil Liberties; and Intelligence in Other Lands.
The book is very strong on historical overviews of US intelligence, and is easily the single best collection of US-oriented materials available to the professional or students of intelligence. Absolutely recommended as a readings book for all university classes, both graduate and undergraduate, focusing on intelligence.
I was pleasantly surprised to see one of my very old articles on open source intelligence (from about 1995) in the book. It was sufficient for the book's purposes, but suffered from not having been sent to me for review–for example, on page 115 the practical example that was attributed to a Marine Corps wargame on Somalia is a repeat of an editorial error at the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. This performance was actually for the Aspin-Brown Commission, where 6 telephone calls, on an overnight basis, produced vastly more than the US Intelligence Community was able to find with its billions of dollars in capability. I hope and suspect that the other chapters do not have the same problem as OSINT is the most vibrant and newest aspect of intelligence, and the other articles and authors have a richer past and more stable story. To update on OSINT, Google for <Open Source Intelligence OSINT> without quotes or the brackets.
The book is weak in failing to properly criticize the US clandestine service, in failing to examine the complete lack of multi-disciplinary processing and lack of analytic toolkits and trade-craft (Jack Davis should have been in this book, Google for “analytic tradecraft”), and in failing to both examine other nations such as China and Israel and The Netherlands, as well as other intelligence tribes and the prospects for collaboration among national, military, law enforcement, business, academic, NGO-media, and citizen-labor-religious intelligence.
The book would have benefited from a tenth section focusing on intelligence challenges of the future, including special chapters on peacekeeping intelligence, medical intelligence, environmental intelligence, corporate and common crime intelligence, and religious or cultural intelligence.
The bibliography is weak and appears to have been thrown together, failing to list most of the top 25 books on intelligence that I have listed as essential reading for Amazon (see more about me should really say see my other reviews and lists–follow it for the lists on information society, intelligence, emerging threats, strategy & force structure, etc.).
The publisher should immediately correct the deficiencies in this book's listing here at Amazon, because this is a superb book that merits the respect of every professional and every professor teaching intelligence. It should be a standard reference in the military and law enforcement schoolhouses. However, the publisher should immediately begin planning a second edition with an improved bibliography, an index of relevant web sites, and the new Part X suggested above.
Kudos to Johnson and Wirtz for a job well done. The intellect and time that went into selecting each contributor is not to be underestimated. This is a magnificent effort and will be very valuable to all students in all seven tribes (all of whom are now using MeetUp to link up in cities around the world). I want the second edition, improved as noted above, out within the year.
Edited 23 August 2007 after a visit to the Middle East, and additional reflection on how Nations turn stupid. FOX News is, as we speak, leading a massive campaign to deceive Americans into thinking that we must attack Iran. Iran is Persian. They are running circles around us as our Army hollows out and our four carriers steam within range of Iranian Sunburn missiles. Adding two images and several hot links to books that make it quite clear that this book is by, of, and for idiots.
Edited after over a year to reflect the deep impression that “Civilization and Its Enemies” by Lee Harris has made on me. Amazon does not allow edited reviews to increase the star level, so I will say that after Harris, I would raise this book to two stars with the following obervation: having the right instincts–wanting to go after Iran in particular, and Syria–does not justify lying to the public or failing to do your homework.
Of the 3,000 or so volumes in my current library, I have only reviewed 950. I do not write negative reviews as a rule. This is my third exception to the latter rule. The most ignorant book was one on predicting revolution, the second most ignorant book was one on sources of conflict, and this is the third.
The authors, who demonstrate how far one could get in the Cold War military without reading or thinking, call this a military assessment. It is not. It is a one-track discourse on why we need to use our heavy metal military to wipe out Syria and Iran and intimidate Libya and Pakistan. It avoids discussing Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Central Asia, Muslim Africa, and Muslim Pacifica. This is not analysis, this is flim-flam.
By way of context in my specific criticism of this book, let me just note that the bibliography does not reflect any appreciation for strategy, e.g. Colin Gray's “Modern Strategy”, or Col Dr. Max Manwaring and Ambassadors Corr and Dorff's “The Search for Security”, or Willard Matthias “America's Strategic Blunders” or Adda Bozeman's “Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft” or Jonathan Schell's “Unconquerable World.” I looked in vain for any sign the authors might comprehend the strategic context in which their specific beliefs and recommendations can only be seen as ill-advised. For example, a reference to Shultz, Godson, and Quester (at least one of whom is a neo-conservative), “Security Studies for the 21st Century”, or Robert McNamara and James Blight “Wilson's Ghost”, or Dean Jeffrey Garten's “The Politics of Fortune”, or Republican and conservative Clyde Prestowitz's “Rogue Nation”, or Ambassador Mark Palmer's “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil”. No cognizance of Kissinger, even.
Never mind all those *democratic* thought leaders, like Senator David Boren et al (and including Bob Gates), “Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century”, or Joesph Nye on “The Paradox of American Power” or William Shawcross (a Brit) on “Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict”, or Paul Krugman's “The Great Unraveling.”
I did not expect to find, but mention as a final setting of the stage for a very critical review, just a sampling of books relevant to getting the war on terror right: books like Chalmer's Johnson, “The Sorrors of Empire” or Derek Leebaert's “The Fifty Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory” or Ziauddin Sardar and Merry Wyn Davies on “Why Do People Hate America” (which could be sub-titled, most relevantly for the authors under review, “and why doesn't America understand the real world”), or any of the last 100 non-fiction books on national security that I have reviewed here, generally to very favorable judgements by Amazon visitors.
Finally, I contrast this book with Richard Clarke's book “Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror” which I recommend very highly. Clarke is real, these people are not.
I finally figured it out. This is a puff piece of, by, and for FOX Cable News viewers.
There are no footnotes in this book. It is a rambling opinion piece. Let us not confuse rank with brains, or opinions with thought. This is a double-spaced book that could probably be distilled to 30 pages of core reading, all summed up as “we're always right, no matter the cost.” This book also adopts the Richard Perle neoconservative game plan of using terrorism as a pretext to invade Syria and Iran. I assure each and every one of you, a universal draft is planned for after the election. Your sons and daughters will be sacrificed to the lack of strategic thinking that this book represents.
The book ends on two false notes. Although the authors demonstrate a semblance of balance in calling for better public diplomacy and especially the restoration of the US Information Agency, they continue to emphasize money for guns and the early use of the military in expeditionary mode, rather that a truly transformative strategy that begins with understanding the full range of threats facing us (bacteria are more dangerous than terrorists), devising a strategy for dealing with those threats by using *all* of the instruments of national power, and then a balanced budget that achieves all of that without sacrificing the earning potential of future generations.
Finally, we have thirteen pages of photographs where the authors proudly display their field trip photos, and what leaps out to the veteran's eye is that they were always in air-conditioned rooms and cars and never broke a sweat. As my good friend Robert Young Pelton likes to say (he is author of “The World's Most Dangerous Places”–you should all read it), these guys live and think in a bubble–they don't get into the gutter, they don't smell the shit, and they have no idea how close their fantasy world is to destruction from forces that are beyond their comprehension.
Iraq, and the planned war on Syria and Iran, are indeed a recurrence of Vietnam in the sense that ignorance and arrogance among the elite in power, and apathy among the public and within Congress, are creating a most costly global quagmire that will shortly explode in Australia, Thailand, Central Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The authors have learned nothing from history nor from the many non-partisan American strategists and scholars available to advise them.
I don't think this book is worth the purchase price, except as an example of the kinds of books, and kinds of people, that place loyalty to ideology above and apart from the public interest.
The authors have one thing right: this is a battle of wills. They do not appear to realize that there are not enough guns on the planet to execute their strategy, and that legitimacy is an intangible value that was lost to America from 2001 to date. This book is a blueprint for a nuclear winter in which America self-immolates. An Israeli tactical nuclear attack on Iran will kick off the end of the American Empire, and that may well be the best thing that could happen, to awaken the somolent Republic. We must indict and impeach Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Rudy Gulliani, and we must indict and sentence to death Larry Silverstein for his role in the controlled demotion of the World Trade Center including WTC 7 which was not hit by anything, it was also brought down to destroy evidence and complete the highly profitable elimination of asbestor at the cost of thousands of NYC lives. I am quite certain the insurance companies were part of the scam, because I have read and viewed more than enough evidence to be certain all the buildings were brought down by Larry Silverstean and his despicable little band of murderers.
This is a solid reference work, and expands and updates on the earlier work that was itself a classic. It examines structured corruption in which organized crime, organized politics, and secretive corporate conglomerates, all help one another become wealthy at the expense of the public.There are a number of fine points across the book that merit emphasis here, and one of the earliest is that of how the CIA and the Army G-2 deliberately nurtured Japanese criminal organizations during the occupation, because they were “anti-communist.”
There is an excellent section of the book that focuses on how the US government fostering of political corruption in Japan in turn led to US corporate corruption, to include the funding of separate US corporate foreign policies anti-thetical to those Congress was trying to foster in the days before Congress abdicated its responsibilities.
Lee Kuan Yew would like this book. He says the only antidote to organized crime is strong extended families–natural families whose kinship equates to ethics. The book documents the spread of crime in Japan to every aspect of life, and one can only be saddened to see how the concepts of samurai honor and loyalty have been turned upside down.
Three ideas keep running through my mind as I read the book, two of them from the author and the third my own. First, the authors focused on the importance of following the money. He knew and wrote about this in the mid-1980's, but today the US Government is still marginally able to follow money, especially informal money that the FBI only discovered in the late 1990's with help from Dick Clarke (see my review of “Against All Enemies”). Following the money is *the* intelligence challenge of the 21st Century, and it is not something CIA can do–we have to find means of integrating all seven tribes, and especially business and banks as well as law enforcement at every level. Second, the author documents the weakness of Japanese law enforcement in a manner that highlights the weakness of US law enforcement at the state and local levels. Think of this book as traveling back in time to Japan, and then forward in time to the US, where we are now suffering many of the same problems. Finally, being a fan of Special Operations properly done, I realized that 21st Century warfare is going to be about man-hunts. It is going to be about tribal and criminal orders of battle, and about decapitating terrorist and criminal gangs without mercy.
The book spends some time on how US forces overseas are in fact a major stimulant and catalyst for crime, especially drugs and trade in women and children. By sending our forces and their money into austere conditions, we have actually created 750 “crime magnets” all over the world. And if you think our secret bases overseas are secret from anyone other than the US public, think again–one has only to ask the prostitutes. There is another important aspect of GI (Government Issue) life overseas: too many of our naive GI's get sucked into crime, first from small loans, then being asked to smuggle small things, then big things, to pay off the loan, and then being tracked down, after returning home, to be brought into international crime within the USA. I realized from this that DoD needs a crime counterintelligence and amnesty program, and we need to out-brief every GI on how to handle criminal blackmail when they encounter it, both overseas, at home, and post-service.
The book ends with a fascinating and thoughtfully-selected series of vignettes on the spread of Yakuza crime to 21 countries. The study of their passports is especially interesting, and makes us wonder why the US Treasury is still spending most of its time, two years after 9-11, trying to harass those trading with Cuba, instead of going after terrorist and criminal money.
Toward the end of the book there is a useful professional discussion of how inept governments are at identifying correct names and name variants when trying to spot and monitor criminals. This is a real problem. Within the US Intelligence Community, there is no standard for international names, each agency doing its own thing, with the result that even if we were to connect all the databases, the decades of unstandardized data entry across the archipelago makes many of our records too hard to use–almost as if we have to start from scratch.
One final point that really jumped out at me: the authors do a great job of identifying the real experts on Yakuza, across many countries, and what struck me was that they exist but no one has figured out how to create a virtual community of interest with the Internet such that all of them are security in touch with one another, sharing name databases, libraries, photograph archives, etcetera. The obsession with secrecy and national control remains the greatest obstacle to actually doing well against crime, and we appear to need regional information sharing systems that are NOT secret (just secure), and multinational regional “stations” against crime.
Closing comment: the book documents the incompetence of the US approach to manning its Embassies, especially in the law enforcement arena, where individuals are not language qualified, have no idea of the culture or history, and rotate every two years just as they are finally getting wise. We need a “long haul” manning strategy, and in my view should start thinking in terms of 10-year assignments with every second person coming in at the 5-year mark for solid continuity of intelligence and counterintelligence against these clear and present threats to national security and prosperity.
Outstanding book. A classic relevant to any country, any business, any government, at any level.
Distillation of Course Worth Thousands, a Real Gem,
April 29, 2004
Jerry Vass
I just took the executive sales training course that this book summarizes, essentially a “CEO to CEO” sales course but applicable at any level of direct sales, and I cannot say enough good things about the author, the book, or the training–my last twenty years literally passed before my eyes as I understood his key points: purchase decisions are made by individuals on an emotional “what's in it for me” basis, and then justified on a rational “what's in it for the organization” basis. Any sales effort that attempts to stress features and capabilities, as 99% of all of us have been doing, is destined to be lethargic and hit or miss.The author and his team have a formula and it is a formula that is already working for me: listen instead of talk, solve instead of sell, and a few others that are only offered in the course not the book.
The author is devastating in critiquing what he calls “puffery”, all those now meaningless phrases about “best in class” and so on.
Finally, the author is extremely effective in helping truly good executive sales people do a cost analysis that at its most brutal, makes it clear to the client that what they are buying or not buying now is costing them a great deal more than what you are offering as a solution to *their* problem, which in turn justifies your getting top dollar because the return on investment in your more expensive capability, with no hidden costs, is greater than the return on the cheaper or partial solutions.
I strongly recommend the book for a taste of how to do soft selling in a client-friendly manner, and I strongly recommend the three-day course which is where they walk you through the entire process of creating mission statements, benefits to the client, listening probes, and closing statements that pull it all together.
It will take more than one course to overcome 20 years of coming at it the wrong way, but if you are seriously interested in dramatically changing your tone, your approach, and your relationship with your best clients, start with this book and then go on to one of the courses.
This was, incidentally, as an executive, my first formal training since 1986–20 years ago, and as I finished it up, I could only wish someone had shown me this path ten years ago or before.
Zbigniew Brzezinski is considered by the Chinese to be one of America's top strategists (along with Steve Metz from the Army War College), and that is entirely his due. He is brilliant when it comes to state-centric strategy, but falls short with respect to emerging threats, sub-state threats, intelligence reform, and the roles of non-governmental organizations including religions, and civil networks instead of government-driven “command and control.”While it used to be fashionable, when confronted with a choice between, say, market economies and controlled economies, to cleverly say “some of each” and earn the top grade, today things have changed and the answer is more often than not, “none of the above.” This estimable author, whose wisdom must certainly be taken into account at all times, does not actually present a choice, only an opinion as to how a state-centric system–largely irrelevant in the 21st Century–might best be managed.
Especially troubling to me was the almost complete lack of attention to substantive books published in the last ten years, including those, most recently, of George Soros (abusive capitalism), William Greider (immoral capitalism), Herman Daly (ecological economics), Jonathan Schell (unconquerable world), Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs), Thomas Stewart (the wealth of knowledge as an alternative to violence), and so on. The author is not alone in this oversight–Joseph Nye, whose book on Soft Power I am also reviewing today, bases his work on Op-Eds, many of them not written by the people signing them, and has almost no substantive references either. The think tank culture has lost touch with true scholarship.
The author's claim that Washington, D.C. is the center of the earth (pages 131-132) reflect in my view the last gasp of the Reagan-Smart Bush-Clinton era. While the author alludes to New York as the “other center”, I and my colleagues think instead of a loose network on “nodes”, some financial (Tokyo, London, Kuala Lumpur), some religious (Jerusalem, Rome, Salt Lake City, points in India), and so on. The author's emphasis on the Trilateral Commission and the now-dying World Economic Forum (Davos) as the bastions of a global elite that is in agreement struck me as being astonishing insular and inaccurate. The author says that “This elite is fostering the emergence of a global community of shared interest in stability, prosperity, and perhaps eventually democracy.” I do not think so. All the other books I have reviewed for Amazon suggest that this elite is doing all it can to plunder the world by enriching micro-elites through corruption, while disenfranchising the broader publics (e.g. Canadian companies displacing villages in Peru to loot the gold, French companies buying up the water in Brazil to increase charges to the public for the water they used to own, etc.).
The author is to be commended for at least recognizing that America is losing its moral standing in the world, and this is an intangible value that cannot be easily purchased nor replaced.
In passing, footnote 4 on page 38 is inadvertently incorrect. There are 175 violent internal political conflicts, not 38. There are also 32 countries engaged in complex emergencies, 66 with millions of displaced refugees, 59 with plagues and epidemics, 33 with massive starvation, and 18 genocides now on-going.
The book ends somewhat quietly, suggesting a transatlantic convention and what one other reviewer very appropriately called “baby steps.” My bottom line: Brzezinski is a solid citizen with a big mind and an old framework. He *must* be consulted for his wisdom as we move forward, but it falls to others now to define the bold new steps–faith-based diplomacy, ecological economics, public intelligence, global accountability of leaders–that are essential is we are save the world for our children.
Let's start with the award. I was so impressed with this book that it received one of the ten Golden Candle Awards for most constructive and innovative work in the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) field. It represents the second book in a body of work that may eventually be worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. The citation reads:To Dr. Douglas M. Johnston, president and founder of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, for his path-finding efforts with regard to Preventive Diplomacy as well as Religion and Conflict Resolution. Among his many works, two stand out for defining a critical missing element in modern diplomacy: Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 1994), and Faith-based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has restored the proper meaning of faith qua earnestness instead of faith qua zealotry, and this is a contribution of great importance.
With a foreword by no less than The Honorable Lee H. Hamilton, today a leader of the 9-11 Commission, the book drives a stake in the heart of secular “objective” negotiation and focuses on how faith (not zealotry, but earnest faith) can alter the spiral of violence in such places as Sudan, Kashmir, and the Middle East.
The editor and contributing author has assembled a multi-national and multi-religion cast of experts whose work in the aggregate completely supports the premise of the book: that the 21st Century will be about religion instead of ideology, and that what hopes we might have for reconciling “irreconcilable differences” lie in the balanced integration of religious dialog and conflict prevention, rather than in pre-emptive military action and unilateralist bullying.
I found two core concepts especially relevant to national security: the first is that we need an Office of Religious and Cultural Intelligence within the Central Intelligence Agency, and we need, as the authors suggest, to put religious attaches into every Embassy. The second, and this is a truly core concept, is “The price of freedom is cultural engagement–taking the time to learn how others view the world, to understand what is important to them, and to determine what can realistically be done to help them realize their legitimate aspirations.”
This is a brilliant, scholarly, practical, world-changing book. It joins Max Manwaring's various books, but especially “The Search for Security,” Joe Nye's earlier books on understanding the world and engaging the world with soft power, and George Soros as well as the several other books on my standard national security reading list. The conclusion of the book lists a number of means by which religion can impact on diplomacy and state-craft, and I for one have become a believer–this book completely altered my perspective on the role of religion as a peacemaker of substance and day-to-day practicality.
Dumbed Down, Inexplicit, Good for the General Reader,
April 29, 2004
Joseph S. Nye Jr.
If you don't read a lot, and especially if you did not read the author's two extraordinary works on “Understanding International Relations” and “The Paradox of American Power,”, this is the book for you. This is a dumbed down inexplicit version of his more carefully documented ideas from the earlier books, and especially the second one.I do want to emphasize that this book is worth reading if you only have time for one book (or you could read all my reviews instead–they are free), because I am going to be severely critical of the book in a professional sense.
First, this book does not focus at all on the most important soft power of all, that of a strategic culture. Others have documented how North Vietnam whipped the United States, not with firepower, but with political will deeply rooted in a strategic culture that was superior to that of the United States of America.
Second, despite the author's earlier service as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the book gives cursory attention to intelligence reform, and does not mention, at all, open source intelligence (disclosure: my pet rock). It is especially weak in failing to point out that the Department of State's one chance to be effective within US politics and the US policy arena lies with its potential dominance of legally and ethically available information in 29+ languages. The Department of State has chosen to be ineffective and ignorant in this area of collecting, translating, and interpreting to the American public all that we need to know about the real world, and if and when Colin Powell goes to the World Bank, which has transformed itself into a knowledge organization (see Stephen Denning, World Bank KM manager before he became world-famous story-teller, “The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations”, he is going to rue the day he failed to kick off a $125M budget for OSINT under State control.
Third, the book lacks substance in the sense of effective examples. A simple illustration: $100M can buy a Navy ship of war or an Army brigade with tanks and artillery (two forms of hard power) or it can buy 1,000 diplomats or 10,000 Peace Corps volunteers or a water desalination plant capable of distilling 100M cubic meters of fresh water a year (three forms of soft power), or it can buy one day of war over water (the typical failure cost of hard power).
The book has exactly one paragraph on corporate misbehavior, which as William Greider has documented in “The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy”, is the most evil and destructive form of “soft power.” This is a severe oversight.
The book neglects foreign aid in a strategic context, and shows no appreciation for open spectrum, open source software, and open source intelligence, the triad of the new global open society. There is no hint of how a Digital Marshall Plan might be the most powerful “soft power” device every conceived.
The book neglects non-governmental organizations, with no mention of the organizations that are giving soft power a whole new dimension today (the European Centre for Conflict Prevention or ECCP, for example) and the book makes no mention of the “good” side of religious activism, the soft power so ably articulated by Dr. Doug Johnson in his two seminal works on faith-based diplomacy and religion as the missing dimension in statecraft.
Finally, while the book makes useful reference to some Pew polls on global attitudes, they struck me more as space fillers than core reference material–four pages where one would do–and do not reflect the more valued-based and multi-dimensional near-real-time direct citizen surveying such as characterizes the next generation of surveying instruments (e.g. Zarca Interactive, whose DC area chief describes it as a tool for real time democracy).
This leads to my last comment: this book, perhaps deliberately so, but I suspect not, is out of touch with mainstream scholarship such as the last 50 books I have reviewed for Amazon. It is one massive “Op-Ed”, and its sources are virtually all “Op-Eds” (a number of them not written by the purported authors), with the result that this book gets an A for a good idea and a C-, at best, for scholarship. One simple example: the sum total of the author's references on “virtual communities”, one of the most important ideas of this century, is one Op-Ed from the Baltimore Sun. There is no mention of the book by the same title written by Howard Rheingold, arguably the most talented chronicler in America if not the world of how this non-state communitas is changing the world.
Joe Nye has my vote as the new voice of reason within the Democratic circles, but he needs to be balanced by the Jonathan Schell, William Greider, Herman Daly, Paul Ray, and other European and Asian scholars. The world has gotten too complicated to be addressed by Op-Eds out of Harvard. It is time we got serious about harnessing the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth, and we can start right here at Amazon, where most of the books not cited by this book have been reviewed by many people whose views, in the aggregate, are vastly more informed than the views of either the White House or its intelligence purveyors.
