Chuck Spinney: Patrick Cockburn on US Military Failure PBI: Without Intelligence with Integrity, Force Structure is Fraud

Can a Gold-Plated Military Counter ISIS? Lightly armed guerrilla/insurgent/terrorist forces are once again holding off the high-tech, heavily armed forces of the United States. War with Isis: Despite billions spent on weapons, the US has not been able to counter the militants’ gruesome tactics The West needs more than a ‘White Knight’ if it wants …

Tom Engelhardt: Failure is Success – How American Intelligence Works in the Twenty-First Century PLUS Robert Steele on Steps President Obama Could Take…

Failure Is Success: How American Intelligence Works in the Twenty-First Century “While taxpayer dollars flowed into your coffers, no one considered it a problem that the country lacked 17 overlapping outfits bent on preventing approximately 400,000 deaths by firearms in the same years; nor 17 interlocked agencies dedicated to safety on our roads, where more …

Berto Jongman: WSJ on US Intelligence Collection Failure In Relation to Russia, Ukraine, and Crimea

U.S. Scurries to Shore Up Spying on Russia In Crimea, Russia May Have Gotten a Jump on West by Evading U.S. Eavesdropping EXTRACTS: U.S. military satellites spied Russian troops amassing within striking distance of Crimea last month. But intelligence analysts were surprised because they hadn’t intercepted any telltale communications where Russian leaders, military commanders or …

Review: The CIA and the Culture of Failure: U.S. Intelligence from the End of the Cold War to the Invasion of Iraq

John Diamond 4.0 out of 5 stars Got the Obvious Right, Misses Everything Else, September 4, 2013 I regard Retired Reader as an alter ego and top gun in the field, so his review has my vote. If the book were current (it was published in 2008) I would be tempted to buy it but …

Chuck Spinney: Syria as a Case Study in the Failure of Democracy, Economics, Foreign Policy, Governance, and Intelligence

Attached is another excellent report by Patrick Cockburn on the disorientating nature of contemporary yellow journalism in the Syrian Civil War. Of course, disorientation is not a new problem in war: Sun Tzu said, “All war is based on deception.” But the ability to manipulate data and images with high-tech computing technology and then distribute …

Mike Lofgren: The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters – the Failure of American Public Institutions Enabled by the Collapse of American Public Intelligence

The Authoritarian Seduction “The sleep of reason breeds monsters.” -Francisco Goya The Gallup organization has released yet another dog-bites-man opinion poll which found that Americans’ confidence in Congress has fallen to a record low of 10 percent. This result is a continuation of a decades-long trend of declining approval ratings for Congress, and is justifiable …