2023 Summer Recommended Reading with Brigadier General Chad T. Manske, USAF (Ret.) Continues with a focus on Military History. Brigadier General Manske was the former Commandant of National War College, is a prolific reader, author and publisher of dozens of book reviews and articles, and is the Special Advisor to the NDU Foundation CEO (https://ndufoundation.org/bio/staff/manske_chad).
Interesting and timely new book about how the classification of our country’s intelligence and secrets work, and the outcomes it’s produced. Dating back to the birth of our nation, secrets have been kept and hoarded by those in power such that their classification would only be available to those properly vetted and trained. And their declassification is mired in overly bureaucratic processes unnecessarily, and often to the detriment of those who rely need to know. Failures of such processes led to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, by which the intelligence existed to uncover the potential of these events, yet because of the system the information is collected and segmented, no one can put it altogether with their limited credentials. 9/11 as a case in point led to the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) as a way to harness the disparate intelligence agencies (18 of them) in the US to help stitch the info of future catastrophes together before they happen. Author Michael Connelly and his team used algorithms to comb through voluminous and recently classified and redacted documents made publicly available to study code words and terms and determine their value as to whether they should have been classified or not—objectively subjective. Power, greed, and negligence are often drivers of this study of power, and the importance of a book like this helps us to see the blind spots in our ways to help preserve our very nation.
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Brigadier General, USAF (Retired) Chad Manske was the former Commandant of National War College, is a prolific reader, author and publisher of dozens of book reviews and articles, and is the Special Advisor to the NDU Foundation CEO (https://ndufoundation.org/bio/staff/manske_chad).