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During his Senate confirmation hearings, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked if he could name "one thing" that "kept him up at night" more than any other specific threat, terror, or trouble the Pentagon confronts.
Rumsfeld's answer was "intelligence."
Even if freighted with James Bond associations, as answers go, "intelligence" doesn't have a lot of Hollywood impact. The tv squawk shows didn't pick it up. If they noticed, Oprah and Geraldo yawned.
But Rumsfeld's response fingered what is the major American foreign policy and defense weakness, even in this era of extraordinary American economic, political, and military strength.
Faulty and inadequate intelligence is not merely a source of current SecDef sleep deprivation, it has loomed large in real world nightmares, from Pearl Harbor to Korea to Vietnam to the USS Cole disaster.
America's "intelligence vulnerability" is intricate, detailed, and complex. The penalty for intelligence failure, however, is often cruelly simple. In the defense business what you don't know will kill you. To draw an even finer bead, what you know but understand poorly, or what you know well but fail to use decisively, will also cost you in blood, money, and political capital.
Here's a quick sketch of Rumsfeld's worry. "Intelligence" isn't simply data, it's a dynamic process that includes: (1) creating and maintaining collection capabilities (with assets from human spies to spy satellites); (2) retrieving the info in a way that's timely and secure; (3) assessing source reliability; (4) assimilating often contradictory information into a meaningful "pattern," which means interpretation that is more art than science; and (5) convincing decision makers (whose minds may be less than open) to act on the assessments.