The CIA’s greatest failure: Intelligence

At 82 years old, strategic and military adviser Edward Luttwak has watched the CIA continuously fail at what the American people pay them to do. That is, use intelligence to protect the American people.

And he knows why they continue to fail.

“From my point of view, the horrible problem of the Central Intelligence Agency is its failure to collect intelligence about foreign countries,” Luttwak tells BlazeTV hosts Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson on “Blaze News | The Mandate.”

“I want to keep it very simple and simply say that everybody involved in the 2003 Iraq War — not the 1990 Kuwait War, the Iraq War — everybody involved now admits that the plan to go to Iraq and set up a democracy in Iraq of all places,” he says, “had to know nothing at all about Iraq.”

“Which meant that the Central Intelligence Agency did not supply — the National Command Authority, namely the White House — did not supply Congress, did not supply all of us with basic information about Iraq. Namely, that there is no worse place in the world, with a possible exception of Antarctica, where you could set up a functioning democracy,” he continues.

“We have gone through two long, enormously difficult wars, expensive wars, because there was no basic intelligence feedback,” he says. “They did actually less research than an average American who likes snorkeling or scuba diving does before choosing a destination where to go scuba diving.”

“So how did we get here?” Peterson asks.

“We got there,” Luttwak says, “simply because they were obsessed with security.”

“What they do is — first of all, they have a whole technical section of people who work out very ingenious ways of collecting information electronically, technically, by some means or scientific means,” he tells Savage and Peterson.

“The agency themselves has in the past shown great ingenuity technologically, but the most important thing for us is human intelligence, because we don’t need the war plans of foreign countries. What we need is situational awareness,” he adds.

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