Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
Did anyone honestly believe we could fix Afghanistan when we went in? If so, those people should be anywhere near decisions.
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We will never have a govt run by truly useful experts because if you're a truly useful expert you're probably in the CIA, mopping up the fuck-ups of the policy experts working in elected offices.
Beltway lifers are limited. Their knowledge is blindered to anything outside the institution in which they're working. Everything is seen thru the prism of what their agency does. And they protect their lanes like a mother bear protecting cubs, as that's their job security. This is how you wind up with every agency operating like a disconnected tentacle rather than coordinating. Twenty years removed from 9/11, which in part was a failure of coordination, do you think anything has really changed? I doubt it. Instead of even trying to coordinate them organically, we instead developed a whole new bureaucracy - Homeland Security - to attempt to meld their resources to a common aim.
Covid was an earthquake where we really needed a Krakatoa level event. I walked away from the assessment that we needed a complete meltdown of our govt followed by a reboot from the ground up many years ago. I find myself reconsidering that position today. I may have been right early on, and complacent in the intervening years.
We're just so fucking stupid.
