A few weeks ago I introduced intel blog Kent’s Imperative. They kindly replied 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, said it best:
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.
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Younghusband added these pithy words on 24 May 07 at 11:03 pmKI replies:
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.
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