Intelligence Triage: What The 2016 Presidental Candidates Don’t Understand About The “Intelligence on the Ground"

The Bottom Line:  

The intelligence professionals on the ground are not to blame for the past decade of intelligence oversight, or the resulting disasters.

Watching the most recent democratic debate, it seemed that much of what was discussed in the foreign policy section was the need to “improve the intelligence on the ground.” This is a belief that seems to be shared by most candidates on both sides of the isle, not to mention a sizable portion of the American people. What the vast majority of these people fail to understand is that the people preforming intelligence operations and analysis on the ground aren’t the ones making misleading claims about weapons of mass destruction or missing the next big terrorist attack. The people making those claims are politicians who cherry-pick speculative and preliminary intelligence reports for politically advantageous conclusions. The intelligence professionals on the ground are preforming the equivalent of emergency room triage in an effort to predict and prevent attacks on troops and civilians. They look only at local incidents, patterns of attack, and identifying the individuals committing these attacks, in an effort to prevent as much bloodshed as possible.

The irony is, even though it is not their job to predict massive events like the rise of ISIS, the intense understanding of the situation on the ground they develop in the course of their work equips them to do just that. They quickly develop an understanding of how our actions affect things on a larger scale. These insights are not however, sought by the higher levels of the government, because the vast majority of them would make horrible talking points in a debate. For example, in 2013 I spoke with a veteran intelligence analyst who predicted, in startling detail, the rise of ISIS. He was far from the only person in the intelligence community predicting this outcome, including analysts who have been predicting our current situation since before we invaded Iraq. For anyone who has studied the region as intensely as the vast majority of these veteran analysts have, the outcome was predictable. We installed a government in Iraq that was supposed to be all inclusive, and failed to hold it to that standard. This resulted in breeding resentment among even the moderate Sunni people in the country, who felt betrayed by our promise that we would give everyone a seat at the table. Then, when the Syrian civil war broke out, it opened a window for extremists to capitalize on that resentment, resulting in our current situation. Do not be fooled by politicians who need a scapegoat for a war coming back to bite them in the ass. Every level of the intelligence community was well aware of this likely sequence of events. And do not believe for a second this assessment somehow never managed to cross the desk of the people responsible for these horrible events. They just weren’t what they wanted to hear, or what the American people wanted to hear.

So my response to the candidates, and the American people who have lost faith in the intelligence on the ground, would be to pay attention to what the intelligence community as a whole is saying rather than a small minority. And, to do what any credible analyst does before making a recommendation, verify that information from multiple sources.