{"id":10141,"date":"2015-12-22T17:17:05","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T23:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=10141"},"modified":"2015-12-22T17:17:05","modified_gmt":"2015-12-22T23:17:05","slug":"the-truth-about-spywar-and-how-21st-century-espionage-really-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2015\/12\/22\/the-truth-about-spywar-and-how-21st-century-espionage-really-works\/","title":{"rendered":"The Truth About SpyWar and How 21st Century Espionage Really Works"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"1st<\/p>\n

Espionage is a constant in human civilization. Spying features prominently in theOld Testament<\/a> and it\u2019s often called the \u201csecond oldest profession\u201d<\/a> with good reason. The ancient Chinese sage Sun Tzu wrote eloquently about the strategic importance of espionage and counterespionage<\/a> fully 2,500 years ago. As long as people have lived in anything resembling societies, they have been stealing secrets from each other.<\/p>\n

Although America has the world\u2019s best-funded intelligence services, and our behemoth seventeen-agency Intelligence Community<\/a> is sufficiently vast to please any Beltway bureaucrat, there are persistent calls for our spies to do more. This has become a drumbeat of late, as the Obama White House fumbles aimlessly around the Middle East in its not-quite-a-war against the Islamic State<\/a>, the notorious ISIS.<\/p>\n

Beyond the politicization of our intelligence regarding ISIS, which is known to be a problem, with inaccurate good news being valued over more accurate bad news<\/a> by certain senior policymakers, many believe that we simply don\u2019t know enough about what the black-clad jihadist madmen in Syria and Iraq are up to.<\/p>\n

In particular, we\u2019re hearing increasing cries for more spies on the ground, what professionals term human intelligence or HUMINT. Ritualistic chants for \u201cmore HUMINT\u201d<\/a> occur any time Uncle Sam finds himself in a jam somewhere, and they usually come from people who don\u2019t know much about the spy business. They also find fault with our alleged overreliance on technical espionage, and their particular bugbear is signals intelligence or SIGINT.<\/p>\n

American spies work the embassy cocktail circuit, just like in the movies, hoping to land a golden source.<\/p>\n

Above all, the \u201cmore HUMINT\u201d crowd pretends our Intelligence Community doesn\u2019t do plenty of it already, when in fact we do more of it than almost anybody. This is often accompanied by implied criticism that risk-averse American spies are just sitting around in embassies worldwide, not doing much. They need to \u201cget in the fight,\u201d advocates state from their comfy chairs. Inevitably there will be cries to recreate the derring-do of the Office of Strategic Services of World War Two fame, when brave men jumped out of airplanes behind enemy lines and did\u2026 something. That the espionage track record of the OSS can be charitably termed mixed<\/a> is always omitted.<\/p>\n

Read the Remainder at The Observer<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Espionage is a constant in human civilization. Spying features prominently in theOld Testament and it\u2019s often called the \u201csecond oldest profession\u201d with good reason. The ancient Chinese sage Sun Tzu wrote eloquently about the strategic importance of espionage and counterespionage fully 2,500 years ago. As long as people have lived in anything resembling societies, they…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2770,3140,2908,475,1814,1725,1286,1189,65,10],"tags":[2907,179,3418,2462,2468,3419],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10141"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}