Recommended Reading

Top Billing! Sic Semper Tyrannis – “Habakkuk on the neocons’ use of intelligence”

Habbakuk is a British journalist. I don’t always agree with how he interprets intel history in terms of context (his depiction here of the famous “Team B” incident is heavily spun) however Habbakuk’s command of the subject is very impressive and he can can always be read profitably.

Kent’s Imperative – “Arguments in intelligence history”

KI on Habbakuk. I agree with their take as the piece summarizing the in-house foodfights among Cold War era Soviet specialists – attitudes that largely remain intact today even when scholars have been forced to yield ground on specifics due releases from Soviet and American archives.

Pundita – “Iran has nukes, Iran doesn’t have nukes. Well, which is it, General Baluyevsky?”

Pundita summarizes the serpentine shifts of the Russian MoD under Putin on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. I haven’t commented on the NIE much because the  nine page declassified key assessments represents less than 10 % of the NIE itself. Years of watching historians arrive at starkly different interpretations of identical primary sources makes me chary of accepting or rejecting reasoning I cannot cross-check myself.

1 Raindrop – “Dhandho Infosec”

Gunnar’s post deals with attempts to manage Risk and Uncertainty in terms of information security – however, we can extrapolate here.

Kings of War -“the trojan horse of culture”

An offer of caveats on quickie anthropologization of warfare.

The Strategist – “Prince of Downfalls”

On Tacitus….the Roman historian, not the guy who used to blog under that name.

The NewsHoggers -“Government blocks public info on search engines ”

This is a huge problem and it’s partly deliberate, partly due to IT cluelessness and misdirected in-house priorities

The Jamestown Foundation -“WILL KREMLIN USE 1990S PRIVATIZATIONS TO STRENGTHEN ITS GRIP ON BUSINESS?”

Politically, yes.

Scientific American -“What ‘Psychopath’ means: It is not quite what you think”

“Some investigators have even speculated that “successful psychopaths”-those who attain prominent positions in society-may be overrepresented in certain occupations, such as politics, business and entertainment.” 

Figures.

That’s it!