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by hga 5945 days ago
Except it's never as long as "20 years from now". Carter's desire for regime change in Iran certainly didn't take into account any reports on possible downsides (including external ones, like Sadam deciding Iran was vulnerable and starting a war that killed a million men), and he dearly needed serious HUMINT after the hostages were taken (which was probably #2 after the economy in ensuring his defeat in 1980).

Does anyone remember how totally surprised he was by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? We'll never know if the CIA could have helped avoid that blindness (probably not, too much of it was willful or just not understanding simple realities like the nature of the Soviet Union and its leaders), but by deliberately gutting its HUMINT in favor of "national technical means" (SIGINT and TECHINT (e.g. spy satellites)) he all but ensured he'd be flying blind afterwords.
1 comments
DanielBMarkham 5945 days ago
In all fairness, just to take the other side, there has been a push for a long time to replace people with machines, both in intelligence and the military. Satellites don't need the constant care and feeding that people do, and pictures don't lie (supposedly)

Looking back, of course, it's been blindingly obvious that there are situations which people are critical -- counter-insurgency, to use a military example. But still technology has always been seductive as a "clean" way to get things like intelligence done.

If I remember correctly, when we axed so much of HUMINT, one of the justifications was that satellites could do most anything a person could do. Totally crazy, of course.

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hga 5945 days ago
While you certainly have a point, one that might be particularly attractive to one of Rickover's nuclear engineers, I'd counter by pointing out the long and storied history of "spies" and how they made critical differences in war throughout the ages up into the Cold War in the '60s (at least).

On the other hand, ULTRA was officially declassified in 1974 and in 1977 one might still have the conceit that the NSA could break ComBlock ciphers.

All in all, though, I would suspect that the greater motivation was neutering the icky parts of the CIA that the Democratic party turned on post-1968. Insane on its face "satellites could do most anything a person could do" sounds more like a justification and/or rationalization.

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