There ain’t no such thing as an intell failure on 9/11
Let me be upfront with my conclusion: I knew all along that there was no such thing as an intelligence community failure on 9/11. But I will also say there certainly wasn’t any success either. Let me explain what I mean.
First off, you have to understand that the intell community—when all the agencies are considered—is huge. There is basically an intell analyst for every possible threat and/or scenario out there, and these guys are—by and large—talented and devoted people. They are also quite certain, down to the very last one of them, that the “threat” they’re working on is basically the most important one out there—and simultaneously the most ignored by higher-ups.
As soon as 9/11 happened, I predicted this “stunning revelation”: within weeks investigators would uncover several “smoking memos” that warned about the very attack that was unleashed on 9/11. In fact, let me go on record as guaranteeing this outcome for every “unforeseeable attack” this country ever suffers in this global war on terrorism. The real question isn’t whether or not some analyst in the vast universe of the intell community saw this one coming, because they always do. It’s what the national security establishment does in terms of prioritizing such analytic flows over time.
The reality of the defense community is that they spent the 1990s basically ignoring the terrorist threat. They did so because they saw nothing in such threat analysis that got it what it really wanted: giant, very expensive and very lethal platforms (ships, aircraft, tanks, etc.) for its preferred mode of war, otherwise known as great power war. Our system of national security planning was set up to counter the Soviet threat, and it has changed very little since that threat’s demise. Instead of adapting to the changed strategic security environment, we ginned up a hollow replacement—the near-peer competitor concept, or the threat to-be-determined.
Now, if you know anything about all the “secret” wargames we plan and play, there’s no mystery about who the preferred candidate for the near-peer has long been—China. China is basically the Pentagon’s desired replacement for the Soviets. So we’ve reoriented much of our threat analysis and the intell collection that supports it to that new target. We prefer that new target in the Pentagon because it matches our definition of preferred war: against a large opponent with vast resources and high technology. This is what we know, this is what we want.
The reason why I say there was no intell failure on 9/11 is because we continue to focus our long-range force structure planning and all the threat analysis that goes with it on the fabled near-peer, not on those pesky “lesser includeds,” a category to which terrorism has long been assigned—and frankly still is. The intell system worked just fine on 9/11 in terms of collection and reporting, by and large. What was wrong was a national security strategy and long-range threat/force planning bias against processing and prioritizing such warnings. Simply put, all the memos and warnings in the world would not have made us ready or able to prevent 9/11. They simply did not compute in our existing strategic mindset.
That mind-set was everyone’s fault in the national security business: the White House (both Clinton and Bush), the Congress, the intell community and the military community. We all asked for and got from the intell community a strategic threat analysis that emphasized what we wanted emphasized: a “rising” China. In short, we spent the entire post-Cold War period planning for an enemy who will not rise and a war that no longer exists. To pretend we can point fingers ex post facto on 9/11 is self-serving and meaningless, although it certainly makes Richard Clarke feel better about his career.
The real question is how much our strategic mindset has changed since 9/11.
Out in the field, I would say much change has occurred. And I would say that the Office of Secretary of Defense has definitely undergone a serious transformation, seen in their new thinking on how to wage wars, where we’ll wage them, how we’ll plan for them, and what forces we’ll need for them. Where I do not see the change yet is in the long-range force structure planning, or the system by which we plan and buy the platforms that define our force-in-being over time. There the bias toward the “few and the very expensive” continues to dominate the needed movement toward the “many and the cheap.” Greg Jaffe’s recent WSJ article on the armored Humvee shortage in Iraq is a good example.
My bottom line is this: until we break up and reconfigure the antiquated, Cold War-style long-range force structure planning system, all our strategic analysis inside the Pentagon will remain a slave to this process, thus preventing any serious reordering of our intelligence structure, its collection methods, and the processing and prioritization of analysis. The end product in this vast Pentagon planning pipeline remains a high-end, great power war-oriented force, and so the system continues to feed a view of the world that fits that desired end product. Check out the current threat analysis that justifies the Pentagon’s long range acquisition plans, and you will see China looming behind every “big bet” analysis. Al Qaeda and the GWOT are really nowhere to be found in this vision of the future, because they do not justify the preferred force structure.
Until the Pentagon and the political administrations that rule over it change our definition of real wars worth waging today as well as potential threats worth hedging against tomorrow, it will not matter one whit how much we reform the intelligence community, for it will continue to speak to an audience predisposed to ignore its analysis.
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