Everyone knows that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I’ve spent three decades in the defense and intelligence space, and I remain vexed at how the policies designed to protect America are actually making us less safe. I call this “insanity defense:” doing the same thing again and again and expecting it to enhance our security.
Consider the track record of the past 30 years. We slashed defense and intelligence spending at the end of the Cold War without a strategy for what the world would look like. We blew off multiple terrorism warnings and then created a homeland security apparatus neglected and misused by successive presidents and Congresses. We ran the intelligence community on a 1947 business model, reforming it after the Iraq debacle then undermining it through repeated purges of experienced career leadership. We ignored the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions when detaining and interrogating so-called enemy combatants. We adopted a massive extrajudicial domestic surveillance program. We allowed successive presidents to conduct military operations, drone strikes, and arms sales launched without congressional approval or oversight.
I was there throughout much of this period, as witness, legislator, exhorter, enabler, dissident, and eventually, outside advisor and commentator. I crafted key legislation with Republican counterparts. I also provided bipartisan support for some policies and approaches — on detentions, surveillance, and military intervention — that I later came to regret.
American leaders did not realize soon enough that the institutions and habits formed during the Cold War were no longer effective in an increasingly multipolar world transformed by digital technology and driven by ethno-sectarian conflict. Nations that became rising centers of economic and political power, freed from the fear of the Soviets, no longer deferred to America as before. Yet we settled into a comfortable, at times arrogant, position as the lone superpower, a self-described “indispensable nation.”
At the same time, our governing institutions, which had stayed resilient if imperfect through multiple crises, began their own unraveling. Our post–Cold War miscalculations and vulnerabilities were exposed traumatically on September 11, 2001, and some have not been fundamentally addressed in the years since.
Intelligence is not policy. It’s not science either. Intelligence is a set of predictions based on the best facts about human intentions and adversary capability. If intelligence is distorted, cherry-picked, or slanted to fit what the policymaker wants to hear, it will inevitably lead to poor outcomes. Good intelligence doesn’t guarantee good policy, but bad intelligence will almost certainly lead to bad policy. Iraq would turn out to be a toxic combination of both. These two systematic intelligence failures called out for a major reform of the U.S. intelligence community.
“Janie, that’s a lot of crap,” said Sidney Harman, my late husband, when I told him I was going to vote for the Iraq war. “How do you know that?” I sputtered. “You haven’t read what I’ve read or seen what I’ve seen in my travels to different intelligence services. You may be a brilliant businessman, but you don’t know the intel world.” He shrugged. “You’ll see.”
We are unlikely again to see failures similar to 9/11 and Iraq, where dots were left unconnected and bogus assumptions went unchallenged. But making certain the intelligence community stays true to its mission to speak truth to power requires constant vigilance. The good news is that the agencies that make up the intelligence community align priorities and share information in ways unheard of two decades go. Their analytical products are rigorous and vetted for alternative views. The career intelligence workforce is as professional, talented, and dedicated as ever.
The CIA has become remarkably effective in its covert and paramilitary role, surveilling, capturing, interrogating, or killing the most dangerous terrorists. Yet these tactical successes have not translated into overall victory against violent extremist groups, which requires defeating first their appeal and ideology. It is not helpful that under former President Donald Trump the motivations and loyalty of the intelligence community came under assault from the White House and its congressional allies. Top-level career officers resigned or were removed. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was politicized, and the rank and file were undermined.
Meanwhile, since the first draft of my book was completed, FISA extension legislation that permits lawful surveillance to protect America has remained stalled. ISIS leaders have begun indoctrinating a new generation of jihadists in Kurdish-run prison camps, while negotiations with the Taliban to end the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan are bogged down in a new wave of violence.
I did not set out to write a typical political memoir or retrospective. Arguably, the time for that book was soon after I left the Congress in 2011, when memories were clearer and passions ran hotter. This is a story of people — leaders who strove to do their best under complex circumstances but were too often undermined by personal, ideological, or bureaucratic blind spots. In many respects, it is also a story of institutions: their cultures, their processes, and, too often, their inability to adapt from an industrial-age analog mindset to our digital world. Fortunately, the new Biden team understands that the nature of the threats America faces keeps evolving, and so does the kind of intelligence capabilities we need.
A fourth decade following the end of the Cold War is about to begin in an atmosphere of crisis and recrimination. Can we do better? Yes. Will we? I would argue we don’t have a choice. Insanity is not destiny.
Jane Harman is Distinguished Fellow and President Emerita of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She served in Congress as a Democratic representative from California and was ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee. Her book, Insanity Defense: Why Our Failure to Confront Hard National Security Problems Makes Us Less Safe, will be released in May by St. Martin’s Press.
