By an odd coincidence I'm reading a book called "How To Make War" and got to the chapter on intelligence this evening. This is the fourth edition of a book on war gaming and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the militaries of the world. I'm not normally that interested in military normally but the first edition was so facintation 20 years ago when I was devouring all the history I could, I picked it up for old times sake.

Before going into the current state of intelligence, the book describes all the problems that beset the area. It describes the inevitable conflicts and silos of information between competing intelligence agencies (something I've seen noted in materials that go back to the Civil War and beyond). It describes how often intelligence people are wrong, how much people over the years and years have complained that what they provide is vague and impossible to act on. It describes how relatively easy it is for an enemy to completely mislead our intelligence.

BTW, the book agrees analysis is the crucial element in intelligence, but it's staggeringly difficult to do. It also describes how it is the intelligence community's duty to summarize the billions of bits of information we receive each week and present it in a useful way to decision makers. If they put the wrong information before the decision makers, you get bad decisions.

Amazing.