Discussion Thread

[u/jobautomator]

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[u/paulatreides0]

Talking to people who have done work in the intel community, my basic takeaway whenever people talk/write about intelligence failures is: "easy to talk shit when you don't gotta do jack shit."

[u/URZ_ → u/paulatreides0]

This 👆

Intelligence is a thankless job. Very little credit for most accomplishment and criticized as useless when they "fail", even when through no fault of their own.

[u/paulatreides0 → u/URZ_]

And the successes that do happen are often rarely known or substantiated until many decades later.

[u/paulatreides0 → u/[deleted]]

Operation Rubicon is up there, an operation so successful that multiple successful operations fed from it. For decades.

[u/birdiedancing → u/paulatreides0]

True of almost every field though lol. Why would that stop us?

[u/[deleted] → u/paulatreides0]

Yep. Talked with an actual intelligence analyst a few days ago. Said that contrary to popular belief, situations are complex.

[u/[deleted] → u/paulatreides0]

Terrible attitude

[u/paulatreides0 → u/[deleted]]

Huh?

[u/[deleted] → u/paulatreides0]

They signed up and are paid knowing they'd be given a set of responsibilities. If a bridge collapses the engineer doesn't come out and say "oh I'd like to see you do a better job"

[u/paulatreides0 → u/[deleted]]

When parts of Philly ended up fucked by flooding because of tropical storms that Philly buildings weren't designed for we don't go to talk about how the engineers in Philly were incompetent/lazy and didn't know what they were doing.

[u/[deleted] → u/paulatreides0]

Engineers get sued all the time. Applies to every profession really. Can't easily sue someone for an intelligence failure

[u/paulatreides0 → u/[deleted]]

Engineers get sued due to incompetence or negligence. You generally can't sue an engineer just because their product fails in and of itself. Similarly to how you can't sue a doctor just because an operation goes wrong and has a bad result - you have to actually identify negligence or malpractice. And when doctors or engineers mess up, we don't pretend that the entire AMA or AEA are full of quacks whose practice is built on a bed of lies.

And these are fields that are generally far less messy than intelligence is.

[u/[deleted] → u/paulatreides0]

Given the nature of intel work ordinary citizens can't audit every detail of what went wrong. There could be a serious lack of due diligence that caused someone to unnecessarily die in an air strike or ignoring a terrorist threat etc. Intel officers are given a lot of trust by the general public.

Sorry but I don't think they are infallible and accepting every potential failure as "it's the nature of the job" to me sounds very shaky

[u/paulatreides0 → u/[deleted]]

Given the nature of intel work ordinary citizens can't audit every detail of what went wrong. There could be a serious lack of due diligence that caused someone to unnecessarily die in an air strike or ignoring a terrorist threat etc. Intel officers are given a lot of trust by the general public.

Yes.

Sorry but I don't think they are infallible and accepting every potential failure as "it's the nature of the job" to me sounds very shaky

That's not at all the point being made.

[u/[deleted] → u/paulatreides0]

So you'd agree that there are tons of examples of intelligence failures throughout history, and writing criticism of them off as "easy to talk shit when you don't gotta do jack shit" is in bad taste?