Know nothings: U.S. intelligence failures stem from too much information, not enough understanding

According to the New York Times, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger met with the Indian Foreign Secretary ten days before the tests. ''In his conversation, Mr. Berger raised the issue of India's nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles only peripherally, stressing instead the need for the world's two largest democracies to build on the common agenda of health, economics, environment, and information technology.'' Berger and the majority of the foreign-policy elite are multiculturalists writ large. Their contradictory approach to the world intimates that on the one hand we're all different but equal, so no one should force his ideas on anyone else (except that everybody should force ideas on the West because it has been on top so long). But on the other hand we're really all the same deep down inside -- enlightened New York Times Magazine readers all. Surely all other countries will stop their macho national-interest games once they see how good it is to be like America? Hugs all around, everybody! It is this combination of arrogance and ignorance that cripples America's ability to read the cultural currents outside her borders. Of the $30 billion per year the U.S. spends on intelligence, less than a 10 per cent is spent on ''human intelligence.'' In general, this refers to the art of recruiting interesting talkers, listening to them, and working out what is important in what they said or did not say. The rest of the intelligence budget goes to feed an impressive and expensive array of high-tech sensors, spy satellites, listening devices, and the analysts and computers that digest all that is gathered. The CIA with almost 17,000 employees has only half the budget of the National Reconnaissance Office, which has fewer than 1,000 employees. And only 1 in 20 CIA staffers is in the business of looking on occasion at the people inhabiting the rest of the world. Old-fashioned spying, in the people sense of the word, is not where the action is, budgetarily or strategically.

This is nothing new. Year after year, the reports of the various intelligence oversight committees on Capitol Hill and elsewhere have criticized the overwhelming American reliance on technologically gathered intelligence data -- the limits of which have been demonstrated over and over again. But the technophiles are never deterred. An official Air Force document recently stated that ''in the near future, we will be able to find, fix, track, and target --in real time -- anything of consequence that moves or is located on the face of the earth.'' During the crisis in Central Africa, in which the U.S. intervened militarily, all our high-tech devices could not locate more than one million refugees in the jungle highlands, let alone gain insights into the plans or track the movements of the various warring factions. Satellites and sensors are important -- but often wrong, incomplete (monitors picked up only 1 of 5 Indian blasts), or irrelevant. A good conversation with any one of a thousand refugee workers in Rwanda or Zaire could have given a government operative half the information the U.S. needed to address the situation.