In part 6 of my interview with Tom Barnett (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5) Tom discusses how he sees the intelligence services fitting in a highly networked world we call globalization. Tom Barnett's recent book is Great Powers (and you can read it on your Kindle).
GP: Your work encompasses many domains from security to technology to economics. One area you do not dwell much on is intelligence. I am curious if this is deliberate and what role do you see for intel in the 21st century? It seems that the same nations with large middle classes also have large intelligence services. Is intelligence a third rail to the big war vs. small war debate? Or is it something different altogether?
Thomas Barnett: When I've spoken about intelligence in my books, it's always been to argue for more open source and more openness within the Intelligence Community and between the IC and the real world. I've also advocated more focus on human intelligence versus technical means. In general, I find the National Intelligence Council stuff to be the most useful, and so I've held them up as the model of what the CIA should have become instead of what it is.
I don't spend a lot of time on the IC because I find them to be one source among many. I held top clearances for years and was thus able to compare what I could learn from that world and what I could learn from the open world and I simply found that networking among the universe of non-classified sources to be far superior to being captured by the secrecy of the classified one. I am, quite frankly, glad to be free of such clearances. I rarely found anything in that world to be useful for my analysis (and almost completely useless for vision work) and even when you came across something, your ability to use was severely circumscribed. So once you entered the cloistered world, you rarely escaped, and I just find that sort of narrow specialization quite dangerous to my way of thinking.
In general, I also tend to downplay what some consider to be the supremacy of "good intell" because I don't want to work within a system where the intell guys are the smartest (no worries there), because where I encounter systems where that is true (or was true, like in the USSR), I find a truly bad political and economic situation. I like my businessmen to be smarter than my politicians (sad world where the brains go into government) and my politicians to be smarter than my military (sad government when the reverse is true) and my generals to be smarter than my intell (or else, how can they contextualize the good stuff they get?). So when I rack 'em and stack 'em, I just don't view my country's needs as being topped out with "great intell." I would believe that, if I was living in some dysfunctional, vertically integrated political or economic system, but I live in a truly networked nation in every sense of the word, and so I don't worry about that like other thinkers may.
Do I want better intell? Always, but--again--I seek it from the widest array of sources as possible. I just don't believe you can stop scary vertical scenarios (the bolts from the blue) and I think that, in general, Americans tend to be too afraid of them. Instead, I like to focus on our resiliency in running down the subsequent horizontal scenarios.
But obviously, in a world of frontier integration, like the age we live in now, better local knowledge (call it intell if you must) is crucial, but even there, I tend to caution against "killer insights" based on local cultural knowledge, because, at the end of the day, the goal is connectivity, not preserving the pristine, because if the pristine was working so well, we wouldn't be there with troops.
Comments