The End of an Era?
Gone are the days of gadgets, guns, and girls.
At least, that’s the way it seems to Cracked.com’s Robert Evans, author of this interesting article. In the fashion of cracked.com’s articles on lifestyle choices, celebrities, and pop-references, this article lists five reasons why modern espionage has made womanizing gun slingers like Agent 007 obsolete in the Global War on Terrorism.
Here are the 5 listed reasons:
#5: Secret identities are useless – In an advanced technological world, false names and disguises are no match for finger print scans, iris readers, and facial recognizers. But this one’s not a huge setback for Bond, since he’s cocky enough to use his real name all the time anyway.
#4: James Bond sits in a embassy while the NOCs do the work – “Non official cover workers”, or freelancers, do all the spying, since the actual government agents are too valuable to work in the line of fire. Personally, I’m not sure putting your trust in freelancers, while having your employees sit at desks and gain no field experience is a great idea. See my post on Ryan Fogle for an example of such consequences.
#3: Everything has been outsourced to private contractors – “The United States spends 70% of its entire intelligence budget on private contractors.” Sigh*, a problem the entire government is dealing with. The debate goes back and forth. But in the intelligence community is it really that smart of an idea? I don’t exactly know how the relationship between a government agency and its counterpart contractors works, but I”m not sure how much I would trust these corporations, who, in the past, have been notorious for getting rich off of fighting America’s wars.
#2: Almost all foreign spy work is done by locals. Okay, this one is the most fair point. When in a a place like Afghanistan or Pakistan, the biggest thing that sticks out is a tall, white, british dude wearing Tom Ford shirts and carrying a Walther PPK. What we do now is hire out locals to spy for us, and the agents sit behind a desk and manage them. But it still has its drawbacks, no matter how much money we give them, we’ll never completely have their trust, and our sources can just as easily be bought by the bad guys. Like I mentioned in point #4, it helps to still have officers working in the field.
#1: It’s more journalism than James Bond – So when we actually do send our own guys in to spy and analyze and stuff they’re supposed to go look for enemy intel like troop movements and how to stop their doomsday machine, right? Sadly, not anymore. As we learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, there isn’t much to report on in those fields. What we need is civilian intelligence. Who’s friends with who, how the local market is doing, how the crops are doing this season. Really, its more gossip than intel these days. But its all important to our mission to stop the bad guys. Its the kind of information we need to make more friends than enemies.
So maybe we can’t do as much with a super secret agent like 007 in the modern intelligence world anymore. But every now and then, we still need a blunt instrument.
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