A “Political General” at the CIA

On reading that the President-elect has chosen Leon Panetta, a 70-year-old career politician with no intelligence background, as the next director of the CIA, my first thought was, Well, nothing else has worked. . . .. My second and later thoughts were less sanguine.

To encapsulate the problem, suppose that Mr. Panetta were being named to replace General Petraeus as commander of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Would anyone suppose that “managerial skills”, however well honed, could make up for deficiencies in technical knowledge and practical experience?

The techniques of intelligence gathering and intelligence are, like the art of war, a specialized world, and the present moment is the worst possible for amateur sorties. It’s true that not every nonprofessional who takes up war late in life proves to be a disaster. There is always the counter-example of Justinian’s general Narses (but don’t read Wikipedia uncritically; the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium thinks that Narses may have been in his 60’s rather than his 70’s when he won his victories in Italy and had experience in lesser military commands). More typical is the parade of governors, senators and congressmen who secured high rank during the American Civil War and did nothing but good for the enemy.

We can hope that the director-designate will be the next Narses rather than the next Dan Sickles, but it’s hard to believe that he was the best available choice for what is probably the third or fourth most important job in our government. This appointment does not raise one’s confidence in the seriousness of the Obama Administration’s approach to the War on Terror.