Human Intelligence

It’s August 23 and I’m sitting in my last class of the day on my first day of class at San Francisco State University since transferring from 4 community colleges to finish my prerequisites. Now I was, finally, starting my major which I chose as International Relations in hopes of being a diplomat. Well the last class was called Intelligence and Intelligence agencies taught by a retired career diplomat for the State Department. As the small class was discussing terrorism he told a shocked, myself included, audience that it is a forgone conclusion within the intelligence community that the United States would be a target for a terrorist action in the next ten years. This floored me as I didn’t think about that scenario considering my American blanket of safety that I, as well as America, had before September 11th which happened just less than three weeks later. Our eloquent professor told us that reason for this was the lack of human intelligence in the Intelligence agencies. Since the 50’s and the emergence of satellite surveillance human intelligence was drastically cut in favor of satellite intelligence. This made sense as it’s not the same looking at satellite images as it is talking to people and getting first hand knowledge. In the new Quadrennial Defense Review Donald Rumsfield wants better human intelligence. This seems like a forgone conclusion. With the war in Iraq now seen as a quagmire of money and dead soldiers it seems that America needed to go back to the times of the beginning of the Cold War when human intelligence is much more accurate and dependable. Many instances, because of satellite imagery the United Sates has bombed sites that had no military significance weather it be a Red Cross tent in Iraq or a pharmaceuticals company in the Sudan. America’s answer to threats for the last 40 or so years has been build bigger bombs. As we have seen it’s not thwarting an enemy that is far from conventional. It’s seen that conventional warfare with a superpower such as ours will cease to exist as we can just wipe out anybody rather quickly, but there will always be guerilla warriors or insurgencies that are using the tactics that they are now in Iraq. What I’m trying to say is I believe some of the requested Defense budget of 439.3 billion dollars should be used differently and as I am skeptical I think we are moving in the right direction with the seen need for more human intelligence as well as, in the requested budget, a 15% increase in Special Forces budget up 81% from after 2001. The rules of war are changing as we should have learned more from our loss in Vietnam, to the Russia’s loss in Afghanistan, and the prolonged war in Iraq. No country is going to use weapons of mass destruction against us because they know we will wipe them off the map. The ones who would use them would be terrorist organizations and individuals. There is no way to weed them out by building bigger faster bombs as we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq. We spend billions on weapons that we will never use when the money could be better used within the military and the state department. Re-investment in human intelligence is a start but so are language and culture classes for soldiers as well as disbanding the reserves until it is domestically necessary. Winning the trust of an occupied proud people is key if trying to find insurgents that are housed by the people who we are supposed to “Democratize