> Washington may need a CIA
For what? What have they EVER gotten right? This utterly failed 60 year experiment needs to be shut down. The actual intelligence functions should be absorbed into the pentagon with a much smaller budget.
For what? What have they EVER gotten right? This utterly failed 60 year experiment needs to be shut down. The actual intelligence functions should be absorbed into the pentagon with a much smaller budget.
Our national political leadership needs higher level political intelligence, like "what's this foreign leadership likely to do?" and so on, in addition to what they can do (based on e.g. their military resources).
There's also a selection bias in your comment "What have they EVER gotten right?" We hear all about many of their mistakes, but by definition we don't hear about most successes until they're declassified many decades later.
Please share all the slam dunks I'm unaware of.
> leadership needs higher level political intelligence
Subscribe to Foreign Affairs. The idea that you need a multibillion dollar agency to sound out the geopolitical landscape in today's world is absurd.
Let's be honest that their primary function is global agitprop and covert ops. Analysis is a bolt-on, and not better than what you can get in the private sector.
On the other hand I'll certainly agree that CIA analysis is poor at best, and note that it's particularly subject to politics (e.g. see the 2007 "Iran stopped their nuclear weapons program" analysis (not sure if it was from the CIA but the point holds)).
I'd close with noting that covert ops have their place. E.g. in denying the Soviets effective natural gas compressors (and therefore foreign exchange) for their pipelines to Western Europe. Technology embargoes forced them to roll their own, and we fed them bogus info which resulted in very poor results (as I recall a lot of failures and only being able to ship 1/2 the gas they'd intended).