Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon

by A.J. Rossmiller and Alex Rossmiller

Book Overview

After 9/11, billions of dollars were spent to overhaul America's dysfunctional intelligence services, which were mired in bureaucracy, turf wars, and dated technology. But in this astonishing new... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0891419144
• ISBN13: 9780891419143
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

A well-written and important insider's take on Bush-era intel failures!

This is an incredibly important account of one DIA analyst's attempt to do good work in the midst of a Bush-politicized environment. More than just required reading for anyone in or contemplating being in this line of work, it also stands as a more broadly applicable case study of navigating one's personal principles and sense of duty to one's country when these clash with dubious policies and directives from authorities. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to engage with such ethical and moral gray areas in doing one's job (whatever it is). This book is an accessible and well-written means of reflecting on one's own line in the sand. It is also another piece of the disaster that was the Bush administration's blatant disregard for experts and academics of all types, whether working directly for them in the Pentagon or elsewhere. A great book that I strongly recommend!

Perpetually Broken

This is a personal memoir of a former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) intelligence analyst of his experiences at DIA. As such it provides a snapshot of the professional life of a working analyst both here and in Iraq. Based on his experiences, Rossmiller has concluded that DIA is a dysfunctional organization suffering from incompetent management, inconsistent leadership, and a lack of a coherent mission plan, hence the title of his book. Rossmiller joined DIA straight from college, served only two years, and was familiar only with a small part of the Iraq effort mounted by DIA in support of Operation Iraqi freedom and its aftermath. So how accurate is his account and his conclusions? Well to anyone familiar with DIA, his conclusions appear remarkably on the mark. Since its creation by Robert McNamara, DIA has been an agency in search of a mission. Although designed to be the military equivalent of CIA, DIA has never been able to acquire the cache' of CIA although it has also managed to miss most of the notoriety as well. The personal of DIA are an uneasy mix of military and civilian intelligence professionals under the often erratic management of military line officers and a few civilians of often dubious qualifications. DIA management is at best a mixture of competent and incompetent officers and civilians at all levels. This in large part is due to the Byzantine selection and promotion processes common to the IC as a whole, but exacerbated at DIA by the need to have a large number of military officers at field grade or higher in most senior positions whether or not they are qualified. Further, like the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), DIA makes the fallacious assumption that all analysts of a given grade are identical so fails to recognize good analysts from bad. And it is certainly true that analytic judgments are often warped by the pernicious practice of letting rank trump facts or by elephantine attempts to support often badly conceived policies. Rossmiller's account of his assignment to a DIA counter-insurgency operation in Iraq is a classic example of inept managers who relied on the DIA team actually deployed to sort out a mess caused by their incompetence. But his account of his experiences in the `Direct Action Cell' under a Captain White (USAF) also explains why DIA is able to function at all. Rossmiller is an acute observer and a facile writer who has written a well crafted book. In case anybody cares, this reviewer worked with DIA on and off over a career of 42 years in the IC and actually worked at DIA for two years as an integrated analyst a quarter century ago. From Rossmiller's account it appears DIA today is unchanged from those far off times.

Story so captivating one must finish reading once started.

An inside look on how management and bureaucracy in an intelligence agency can greatly hamper the delivery of accurate intelligence to the administration. AJ shows how in his world at the Pentagon, bad news travels slowly (if at all), good news travels fast, and sometimes good news is, well, made up. It is evident after reading AJ's book that there are more people to blame than the administration--the defense complex is full of career-path-minded individuals who are so risk averse, the management stratigraphy collectively edits intelligence reports until they are "on message", which is a euphemism for optimistic. This behavior is rewarded, and often managers who play this game rise through the ranks, despite their reports lacking accuracy and candor. Hopefully AJ's book awakens US leaders to restructure the management machinery at the DIA and pentagon so they can craft sounder and more mindful policies, and so that the American warfighters overseas are better supported.

Depressingly Funny--A great balance

I will not try to summarize this book as that has clearly already been done. I will say that this book was the perfect balance for a book about Iraq. Rossmiller does a great job of illustrating how depressing and miserable the situation is in Iraq in all regards. At just that moment when you want to put it down and have a drink, he brings you back with a funny illustration of life that, in some way, everyone can relate to. This book truly put me through all ranges of emotion. It also showed the underbelly of intelligence. The very intelligence that has blown this war. I came away from reading this book with a much better understanding of the intelligence process, bureaucracy, Iraq, the Iraq war, and Mr. Rossmiller as a person. My only complaint is that Mr. Rossmiller is not out on a new adventure creating fodder for his next book.

If the SecDef and DNI Could Read One Book, This is the One

DNI Mike McConnell is a good man trapped in a very bad pyramidal system that is inherently duplicitous. He is presiding over what retiring Defense Senior Intelligence Leader Rick MacKenzie calls, in this book, "the underlying insanity of our intelligence agencies." As the author of the original strike, On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World, honored with a foreword by Senator David Boren, former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and several other books moving the ball forward in the public (since our government is broken, not just the intelligence community) I must confess that the author of this book pursues a path that is inherently attractive to me. I have a bias for the truth, and a bias against the $60 billion a year in insane waste that Mike McConnell is presiding over. Out of the ten books that arrived today, this is the one I could not put down. Below are my summative highlights, and then other books that support this author. For a first time author and a young man at that, my first flyleaf note reads, underlined with exclamation marks: ABLY WRITTEN! By a MATURE Person! There is no index nor bibliography in this book. I absorbed it at face value, as a first-person narrative of a patriot who joined the intelligence community for the right reasons, and left the sinking ship after honorably pointing out the flaws to his bosses, who remain typical not invested here lifers (this is generally the case across the IC). + Analysts segregated, no inter-regional, issue, or agency integration and interaction. + High turnover (for the last decade more analysts quit FBI every month than can be recruited--the best and the brightest do NOT like idiot bosses). This results in an inexperienced middle management as the dead-beats move up. + Products rarely reached the intended audience, and products finally reaching Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff never ever resembled what actually started out as an honest pessimistic assessment. + Months of indiscriminate editiing resulted in drastic differences. I can attest from experience and the literature that CIA is just as ineffectual). + Many patriotic intelligence analysts as well as career military felt that the Administration and the flag officers took their eye off the ball, invading Iraq and creating infuriated nationalists, instead of focusing on a handful of terrorists. + Supervisors lied regularly to everyone. + Iraq was dust, mosquitos, heat, and constant organizational chaos and reorganization with virtually no real production that was actionable. The one exception was the "track and whack" group in which the author was fortunate to serve. + DIA failed to coordinate with the in-country Combined Intelligence Operations Center (CIOC) before it sent its single most significant contingent to Iraq. For that one right there I would hope Director of DIA figured out who embarrassed his agency and counseled the individual. * Instit