[resu_nimda]

Every national government in the civilized world needs an intelligence-gathering agency that can operate with some degree of operational secrecy.

What is the basis for this assertion? What would happen to a nation that didn't have that?

[tormeh]

It would lose wars, basically. Now, this matters less than it used to in this age of the nuclear bomb, but knowing what other nations are doing and planning is still useful in trade and technology. Knowing more about the market than others means you get better deals and China isn't the only nation doing industrial espionage.

Terrorism? It's a pretty pedestrian intelligence agency whose primary aim is to prevent terrorism. The NSA is stuffed full of paranoid people with information addiction. They don't care about terrorism; they just want all the world's secrets. An intelligence guy is just as likely to respect other's privacy as a security researcher is to accept other people reading his files. It's in their nature not to.

[resu_nimda]

China isn't the only nation doing industrial espionage.

Yeah, this is a common argument, the intelligence arms race. It's just...we had the nuclear arms race, which we eventually realized was folly and really could only result in negative impact to humanity, so we started moving towards disarmament...only to start the cycle over again with digital information gathering, which is a lot easier to hide than a nuclear weapons program (and weaves itself into the fabric of citizens' private lives, in that sense it's much more sinister).

Who has the fortitude to step up and lead us (by example) towards a healthier geopolitical climate? Collaboration, not paranoid xenophobic competition. It saddens me (but doesn't surprise me) that my country is driving full speed in the opposite direction.

[mpyne]

> It's just...we had the nuclear arms race, which we eventually realized was folly and really could only result in negative impact to humanity, so we started moving towards disarmament

We have not started moving toward disarmament. Just ask Iran and North Korea.

If anything, what happened to Libya and Ukraine after they gave up existing nuclear weapons will hurt nuclear non-proliferation even further. And that's not even to get into the possibility of a Russia generally hostile to the West, which is the best possible thing that could have happened to U.S. nuclear weapons labs.

[tormeh]

Russia isn't hostile to the west. It's easy to think that everything a foreign country does is about "us". Putin needs an external enemy and a national narrative to support him. It's all domestic policy. We're just annoying background noise. What Putin wants is to stay in charge of his kleptocracy for as long as possible. He doesn't give a shit about the US.

It's the Russian equivalent of American currency disputes with China. While there is truth to the claims of an undervalued yuan it's really overblown. It's about identity politics and feelings. China just happened to be a convenient target.

To the downvoter: Do you think Putin just now found out he is homophobic? That his claims that NGOs with foreign ties are foreign agents aiming to destabilize the country are real? No, it's all theater, scaremongering and scapegoating.

[mpyne]

> He doesn't give a shit about the US.

I didn't say hostile to the U.S. I said hostile to the West. That doesn't mean cutting off contact or anything so silly, but let's not act like Russia has not long been at odds with the general foreign policy of the West.

Even post-Cold War, it dates back to stuff like Bosnia and Kosovo. Remember reading the "TIL" about that singer who used to be in the British armed forces and claimed to have avoided WWIII by not attacking Russian troops at an airport in the Balkans during Bosnia?

The way Russia views it, the West has certainly been antagonistic towards them, between the NATO expansion, possible construction of missile shields in east Europe, intervention against their Serbian brothers in Bosnia and then Kosovo, open talk of friendship between the U.S. and Georgia, the difference in perception over what was authorized in the Libyan intervention, and later the EU trying to influence Ukraine away from Russia.

You are certainly right that there are domestical political reasons for Putin to play up an external enemy, but his behavior is certainly consistent with, at best, an antipathy towards the West. Sure, they'll play along in international politics as it becomes convenient to them, but the USSR did that too.

[bediger4000]

It would lose wars, basically

How do we know this? This strikes me as an assertion without evidence. Are there examples?

It also strikes me that the secrecy more often gets used to conceal career-ending mistakes and cost overruns, at least in the USA.

Has anybody done an honest assessment of secrecy?

[tormeh]

Nazi Germany and Japan partly lost WW2 because the Americans and the British broke their codes. Particularly the Japanese. Had the axis known their codes were broken they would have made new ones. Intelligence gathering would have been worthless without secrecy in this case.

To be honest I don't really know too much about this. I've read Cryptonomicon, and that's basically it. But it would be hard to dispute that signals intelligence is useful in war and that secrecy is necessary for SIGINT to work.

[Nelson69]

We won pretty handedly in Afghanistan and Iraq and we had bad intelligence. We were flat out wrong about a number of things, yet we prevailed..

I think equating it to war fighting is a little naive and an over simplification. There is strategic and tactical war intelligence and there are real historical examples of them making the difference, no disputing that. But today, especially for the United States and most other g7 type nations, it's a communication channel for things that it's unpopular to communicate, don't under estimate this. Could any military in the world practice without the modern intelligence gathering that all these nations have? Also regarding any negotiation for anything, knowing when the other side is bluffing or telling the truth is huge, it's everything. Those powerful nations routinely ask/demand other nations to do things, stop doing things, etc.. Information is incredibly powerful in those discussions and these aren't commonly war related things.

Whether or not we need it, I don't know, I seriously doubt it would change the results of most wars though. Another world war? It could be decisive but with the global economy I think just about every body capable for world warring has too much invested and to risk to let that happen.

[mikeash]

It's tough to dispute that this stuff is useful while in a major war, but I think the relevant question here is whether you need to have it all in place ahead of time, or whether you can spin it up on demand, as it were.

In any case, SIGINT certainly helped a great deal, but what really won the war for the allies was the roughly order of magnitude difference between the size of the economy of the United States and those of the countries it was fighting.

[tormeh]

The US didn't have that much of an effect. By D-day, Germany was already running out of people to feed the meat grinder. The Soviet Union, Britain and France basically won the war in Europe. I'm grateful for not being born in the Soviet Union and all, but won the war, the US didn't. Also, the US is about 2.5 times as big as Japan and 4 times as big as Germany today. I don't know what the historical data is, but "order of magnitude" sounds way unrealistic.

I think it would be very hard to spin up on demand. There's not a catalogue of talented SIGINTs lying around. These people need to be found and hired. A whole organization as big as Google would have to be built overnight. It would be a nightmare. Not to mention that this organization would be starting from scratch while its counterparts might have taps into American society already.

[mikeash]

Don't forget that the US extensively supplied the Soviets and other allies for some time before officially entering the war. They mostly used their own weapons, but a huge amount of Soviet logistical support was American trucks and trains.

As for the disparity in GDP, an order of magnitude is a bit of an exaggeration for Germany, only slightly for Japan at the beginning of the war and not at all by the end. Wikipedia has figures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Worl...

The US's advantage in the long term became enormous because it was so far removed from the fighting. Germany and Japan's economies were mostly flat, while the US's nearly doubled in that time period. By the end of the war, the economic disparity was almost 5x over Germany and over 10x for Japan. Even in 1941, the disparity between the US and Japan was well over 5x, which makes one wonder WTF they were thinking.

[dragontamer]

Is Russia planning to invade the Ukraine? What are their plans? Are the "protests" in the Ukraine Russian-backed or not? Do they have greater plans to push out west, or are Russia's plans legitimate in the region?

These questions can be answered with good-old fashioned spying, and nothing else. Russia is not going to give us their gameplan on a silver platter.

And when we do learn Russia's gameplan, it would be best if we kept that fact secret. We can't have Russia knowing that we know their gameplan during the negotiation process.

[gcb0]

It would be ...gasp... Following its own and iteration law.