Well, this is interesting. President Obama is reportedly going to take General David Petraeus out of Afghanistan and have him take over Leon Panetta's chair as head of the CIA, while making Panetta Secretary of Defense to replace Robert Gates.
Fascinating...the CIA will once again be run by someone from outside the agency with no direct experience in the business of spycraft, something to remember the next time you start damning the CIA as incompetent. And Leon Panetta, a Democrat political hack who got his job as head of the CIA with no experience in intelligence whatsoever moves to head the Department of Defense, where he also has no experience at all with military matters or national defense!
Panetta's chief value, of course, is that he is a loyal Democrat with a fairly typical attitude towards our military. On President Obama's order, SecDef Gates came up with $400 billion in cuts to the defense budget over the next 10 years and that was only about half of what the president wanted. Panetta can be expected to deliver what Obama wants in terms of cuts to the defense budget,so the money can be spent in domestic spending President Obama sees as more worthy.
These changes are likely to take effect this summer, with Lt. General John Allen taking General Petraeus' place in Afghanistan. Allen is obviously an administrator whose chief responsibility will be to start pulling our troops out of AfPak starting in July of this year.
The CIA is incomptent. To point this out is not "damming" thmm. It is simply pointing out the truth. Now with that said the fact that tthe leadership is bad makes the problem worse. At least if we had good leadership at the CIA, the incompetent personnel could be developed into competence, if they are willing and able to learn. Those who can't learn or who won't learn should be shown the door.
ReplyDeleteAt last prior to the wikileaks fiasco, our best bet would have been to completely dismantle the entire edifice known as the CIA and other intellegence services and start from scratch. While we are developing competent services, we could rely on the assistance of our allies for workable intellegence. Also, we could have used their assistance in developing a competent intellegence community.
Now with the wikileaks fiasco, even these options are denied us!! I don't see anyone trusting us rnoug to share intellegence with us and the vilification of us that has been the result of this has made us even more univerisally despised. This makes getting the kind of help we need in all areas even more problematic than it already was. In other words, we've gone from few good options to virtually none. At this point the only real option is to redeploy all of our military and and intellegence assets to defensible positions along with our borders and pray for the best. Of course praying is always a good idea!!