Haft of the Spear

For starters, [Rossmiller’s intelligence] team’s arrival was a surprise, “and nobody knew what to do with us.” The counterinsurgency intelligence operation they were supposed to set up was already in place.

… The captain commanding the unit was infuriated by the analysts’ practice of rolling over to each others’ desk on their chairs. They ignored his requests to stop it.

One day he bellowed, “I order you to get up out of your chair when you want to talk to somebody!”

“The entire aisle erupted in laughter,” Rossmiller writes.

Analysts jumped up and began mocking the captain, yelling, “I order you!” at each other.

But the CIOC’s real problem was that it was “a self licking ice cream cone,” Rossmiller writes.

“Products were written … and then read by other people in the CIOC. Good analysis was done … and never seen by anybody who could do anything about it. We rarely received feedback, and we never had a solid conception of who our customers were or what missions we were serving.”

Thousands of hours of training, tens of thousands of dollars in labor to screen, clear, train, deploy and employ the “best and brightest” to essentially j***-o** in a war zone? I could fill a couple of volumes of absurdity in this vein.

Two, it would likely get lost in the growing list of similar books, all of which share some common themes:

1. In an intelligence-driven war, even our intelligence agencies are not on a true war footing.
   
2. There is no significant difference between what you trained to do seven years ago, and what you train to do today.
3. Flooding the zone with bodies is considered just as good as actually doing meaningful work.
4. No one is sharing.
5. No one in authority is paying a price.

Successes? Sure, but on a scale that matters strategically? The data points that say “no” are growing. Just remember I called for a moratorium on surprise at future failures.