Ep 004 "Fixing Fight Club: Intelligence Failure is a Feature and Not a Bug"

Effective 20 June 2025, I did a major improved revision on the sound quality for all my WarNotes episodes retroactively thanks to the technology at Podsworth.

In this episode, I will examine what intelligence looks like from a professional perspective and why America and the West consistently engage in existential chaos avalanches that make the world a worse place.

The bureaucratic impulse in the West has been a significant factor in making the intelligence community (IC), like the military community, a paper tiger that is a far greater danger to the inhabitants of the west than an ally.

It's time to restructure and realign the IC if America is to succeed as a free and peaceful member of nations. It will consume roughly 100 billion a year to produce shoddy analysis, inform bad policy and a Keystone Kops foreign covert/clandestine operations history that is a national shame.

Time to level the entire national IC in a controlled demolition and don't replace cancer if found, kill it.

If you leveled the FBI, NSA and CIA tomorrow morning, made each of their budgets one dollar and fired all their employees, you would still be safe as a country.

References:

Randolph H. Pherson and Richards J. Heuer Jr Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis 3 Ed

Richard J. Heuer Jr The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

David Talbot The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

Roger Z. George (Ed, et al) Analyzing Intelligence: National Security Practitioners' Perspectives

Tim Weiner Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

John Prado The Ghosts of Langley: Into the CIA's Heart of Darkness

John Prado Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA

Mortimer Adler How to Read a Book

My Substack.

Contact me at cgpodcast@pm.me