The American intelligence community has suffered two blows to its credibility in the past three and a half years. First, intelligence agencies failed to detect al Qaeda's terrorist plans for September 11, 2001. Then, estimates of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs proved to be wildly off the mark. n the wake of embarrassing revelations about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Congress has been eager to reform America's spy agencies. However, it's a hydra-headed problem that lawmakers aren't anywhere close to solving. Bureaucratic re-organization isn't enough, and neither is increased recruiting of actual spies. We also need to look long and hard at how intelligence is analyzed. A tale of two failures: Spies and Bureaucrats: Getting Intel Right
Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Boeing: Flying Into a Mountain
James Cumes sent me an email last night pointing out that ‘the article below by Eamonn Fingleton deserves to be distributed more widely. I have been explaining the gutting of American industry - and its causes - for decades. That gutting has of course also applied to Australia. We have followed the tragically dysfunctional policies of the United States, plus some of the equally dysfunctional policies of Britain - in a Reagan/Thatcher pact of self-destruction - at least since the 1980s. Some of those self-destructive policies we have indeed followed from even earlier - from as far back as 1969, just before I wrote "The Indigent Rich. Fingleton does not give the causes of the degenerative economic disease with the definition that I have done; but his account can readily be accommodated by the analysis I have given. There are of course aspects of security in this degenerative process that must be of deep concern. The political and strategic environment to which we have become accustomed is being fundamentally eroded - but most of our closest friends, as well as ourselves, show no real awareness that any such climactic changes are taking place.
That we should lose our most powerful ally of the last sixty years - because it is no longer powerful in the guts of its being - must be acutely worrying. Alongside that is the evidence that we are suffering from the same degenerative disease and that our capacity to provide for our own security is dissipating. We too are a "hollow shell."
The Boeing company has now become so hollowed out that its next plane, the super-advanced 787, will be more a Japanese product than an American one. This article, by Eamonn Fingleton, was first published in the January 31, 2005 issue of The American Conservative. First of two parts. One evening a generation ago, several up-and-coming aerospace executives gathered to commune with the Boeing aircraft company's chief executive Thornton Wilson. The discussion turned to Boeing's vaunted expertise in making aircraft wings. Wilson evidently came across as boastful--so much so that a young General Electric executive named Harry Stonecipher suggested that Boeing was arrogant. "And rightly so," came Wilson's serene reply.
The exchange, which was recorded in Fortune magazine a few years ago, is worth recalling partly for what has happened to Stonecipher in the meantime--and partly for what has happened to Boeing. In a remarkable twist of fate, Stonecipher now fills Wilson's old job at Boeing. But whereas the Boeing that Wilson led in the 1970s utterly dominated the skies, today's Boeing is another matter. Its once masterful technological leadership is gone and, in an orgy of indiscriminate outsourcing, Stonecipher is presiding over the destruction of what remains of Boeing's erstwhile manufacturing greatness--not least the world-beating wing business that was the apple of Wilson's eye.
There is a joke told among military intelligence officers, often with some bitterness, that when things go wrong it is labeled an "intelligence failure," but when they go right it is called a "military success" (or in this context economic success)
• Note the link is in a PDF format As the American press has latterly come to realize, Boeing is an embattled company. [James Cumes (Thanks to Google) ; Unsustainable: How Economic Dogma Is Destroying American Prosperity Eamonn Fingleton (thanks to Google) ]
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