noteworthy wrote:
Decius:

We don't remove generals for battlefield failures? More context please.

Fresh Air:

His new book, The Generals, is about what he sees as a decline of American military leadership; it offers an argument about why the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been so long and so frustrating.

He says it boils down to one word: accountability.

We've had several terrorist incidents in the west in the past few years, and consistently it seems the people involved were already on watch lists. The Tsarnaev brothers, these people in France. They were already known to be dangerous.

The point is that nearly a decade and a half after 9/11 we're still not connecting the dots.

The whole problem was that the dots weren't getting connected, and instead of figuring out how to connect them, we've been busy building warehouses of additional dots.

How many hundreds of millions are we spending hauling meta-data in from all over the world? What if instead of collecting data on everybody's Grandma, we spent those funds looking more closely at the people that we already have some actual basis to suspect might be involved in Terrorism?

Successful attacks are battle field failures and should demand reconsideration of our approach. Mass surveillance may be draining resources away from the focus that is needed.

RE: disappointing, if not surprising