A few weeks ago I “introduced”:http://www.cominganarchy.com/2007/05/11/towards-more-rigorous-analysis/ intel blog Kent’s Imperative. They “kindly replied”:http://kentsimperative.blogspot.com/2007/05/welcome-coming-anarchy-readers.html with a welcome message that made reference to a comment I made about “paper-pushing spooks.” In many other fields being a paper-pusher is usually considered ineffectual, but not in the intel business. I think Neil Burnside, a character from the best damn television show you’ve never seen, “The Sandbaggers”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandbaggers, said it best:
bq. If you want James Bond go to your library. But if you want a successful operation sit at your desk and think… and then think again. Our battles aren’t fought at the end of a parachute, they are won and lost in drab, dreary corridors in Westminster.
About Younghusband
Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (1863-1942) was a British explorer, army officer, military-political officer, and foreign correspondent born in India who led expeditions into Manchuria, Kashgar, and
Tibet. He three times tried and failed to scale Mt. Everest and journeyed from China to India, crossing the Gobi desert and the Mustagh Pass (alt. c.19,000 ft/5,791 m) of the Karakoram mountain range in modern day Pakistan. Convinced of Russian designs on British interests in India, Younghusband proactively engaged in the nineteenth century spying and conflict over Central Asia between the British and the Russians known as the Great Game.
"Younghusband" is a Canadian who has spent a number of years bouncing back and forth between his home country and Japan. Fluent in Japanese and English with experience in numerous other languages from Spanish to Georgian, Younghusband has travelled throughout Asia. He graduated with an MA from the War Studies Department at the
Royal Military College of Canada, where he focussed on the Japanese oil industry and energy security issues. He has recently returned to Canada from Japan, and is working in the technology sector.
KI replies:
bq. In the old days, one was either a boffin or at the sharp end, and the boffins were the boys which mattered most for eventual victory. We now seek to employ (for not all, but increasingly many positions) the warrior/scholar – a mixture of sage and adventurer, of the thinker and man of action. He must be capable in one day of shifting between the hallowed debates at the highest levels of academia to the most decisive of deeds in the streets of some foreign city. He must be comfortable with the diplomats as much as the mercenaries, and master not only the arcane technologies of information production and knowledge management but also a wide range of foreign and US small arms and other weapons systems.
Adventurer/academic/mercenary/diplomat? Sounds like the int version of the strategic corporal.
“Read the post in its entirety”:http://kentsimperative.blogspot.com/2007/05/paper-cuts.html.