Tulsi Takes on the Deep State, Part 2

by G. Murphy Donovan (October 2025)

Every soldier knows this simple fact: If you don’t know your enemy, you will not be able to defeat him. –Tulsi Gabbard

 

Tulsi Gabbard may be the best choice for the worst job in town, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), spook czarina if you will.

A first glance, Gabbard might seem a sketchy choice to replace General James Clapper, USAF, but then again, given the Intelligence Community’s performance in the Clinton to Biden eras, the Intelligence bar was not set that high. And clearly, any DC establishment choice would have had to come from the usual Beltway suspects, a sure recipe for more deep state chicanery.

More of the same is seldom a solution.

In Donald Trump’s first term, his worst mistake was to think Beltway Intelligence and federal cops at the FBI would support his administration enthusiastically, impartially, or honorably.

Political naiveté is always expensive.

Gabbard comes to the job today with little Intelligence experience too, albeit not necessarily a handicap, given that partisans behaved so badly in Trump 1 and during the Obama/Biden years.

 

Indeed, recall that Gabbard’s stock fell with Democrats and rose with Republicans back in 2015 when she criticized President Obama for pandering to Islamism and Arabia.

So far, Gabbard brings intelligence, candor, fresh eyes, and common sense to the world’s second oldest profession.

What’s not to like?

And if the rap against Gabbard is that she is a political woman, recall that key liberal XX actors of yore were often the worst. Hillary Clinton, Fiona Hill, and Victoria Nuland come to mind, aided and abetted by the likes of toxic males like John Bolton, Alexander Vindman, and Christopher Steele, a British mole who was, as “coincidence” would have it, boy toy to Hillary Clinton, Fiona Hill, and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6), a three way Gordian cipher yet to be unraveled.

Put the Clinton/Hill/Steele troika on your to-do list, Tulsi. Inquiring minds and NATO gossips have yet to hear that story.

More to the point, if there is to be a clean up on aisle Intelligence, community goals and objectives need to be clarified.

Indeed, how much can a woman expect to do in just three and a half years? Without doubt, the largely liberal, Democrat deep state, at any threat of change or reform in the IC, will drop anchor and alternately play active/passive resistance until Donald J. Trump is gone from the White House

So for the Intelligence Community; time is short and not all things are doable. Inertia is always the loudest voice inside the DC Beltway. Indeed, “business as usual” could be the new national motto now that “In God We Trust” has bit the dust.

In short, Gabbard has three potent foes to deal with: inertia, a host of foreign threats, and passive resistance, if not sedition, inside the DC Beltway.

 

Tulsi’s To-do List

Big is a Big Problem

American Intelligence has grown like a virus since the end of WWII. At home and abroad, there is scant evidence that the IC deserves to be rewarded with perennial growth. There are now 18 major ODNI agencies in the IC merry-go-round; too many doing too little for the taxpayer or national security.

Indeed, 14 of the 18 ODNI Intelligence agencies were created since World War II, the last major or global conflict where America could claim a clear victory. One might argue today that the US and NATO are losing, albeit in slow motion, the global struggle against both totalitarian China and totalitarian Islam as we speak.

Many political apparatchiks who come to DC believe that the federal government is a jobs program. In fact, government at all levels is a net consumer, not producer, of wealth and prosperity.

Large complicated bureaucracies are also difficult to manage and focus, especially when shielded by draconian security barriers best designed to keep secrets from Congress and beleaguered citizens who pay the bills. The number of Americans involved the national security game today, including contractors and think tanks, exceeds the population of several small countries.

Nearly a million federal employees have TOP SECRET security clearances today.

Alas, size and excellence are not synonymous in personal or political health sagas. If we learned nothing from the Israeli Sayeret Matkal, IDF, and Mossad recently, we should know that small and agile beats big and bureaucratic every time.

Size seldom produces ground truth either.

Given the opportunity, every apparatchik in any government, at any level, will argue for “more staff and more dollars,” especially when neither equates to better outcomes or performance. The Intelligence Community is no exception.

After the last Defense Department reorganization, circa 1948, the Defense Intelligence Agency was created to eliminate the redundant and competitive military Service Intelligence agencies. DIA and all four Service agencies still thrive today, all surely much larger, but hardly more effective.

At the Pentagon, the admonition is to “fire for effect” whilst the ineffective are seldom fired.

Service HQ staff personnel like those at the USAF Assistant Chief of Staff/ Intelligence (ACS/I) are limited by law. Service HQs circumvent such manpower mandates by caching staff outside the Pentagon throughout the District/Maryland/Virgina (DMV) at sites like Ft. Meade, Fort Belvoir, and the Navy Yard.

Several AI engines indicate that close to 150 federal agencies, including more than a few military Intelligence agencies, are represented at Ft. Belvior, Virginia alone.

All Military Service HQ’s play this ghost staff shell game. You can bet, especially with Intelligence agencies, in fact or on paper, following the “law” is merely just one of many options.

After all, remember; we train and pay our spooks to go mute or lie, even when testifying before Congress.   General Jim Clapper takes a bow here. Recall that Clapper claimed that NSA was not monitoring US citizens. Plausible mendacity, especially in front of Congress, is considered good tradecraft in the Intelligence business.

Professional standards are set at the top.

In short, nothing says “too big” like a bureaucratic circle jerk where the boss and the legislature, doesn’t seem to know who is doing what to whom. Think about the 9/11 disaster as an example of engineered incompetence. Still, our federal fails are seldom fired.

Islamic fascism is trending, although you seldom hear of that “social disease” from American Intelligence. Uncle Sam and the EU are late to the game with China and totally oblivious to the seditious threat from Mecca and the Ummah.

Smug insouciance has become a virtue within the American Intelligence Community.

CIA’s John Brennan takes a bow here for ignoring the Islamic threat, minimizing ideological and terror jihads, domestic and foreign, and ultimately creating a laissez-faire, pro-Moslem Intelligence culture that makes viral anti-Semitism possible at home and abroad. Under Brennan, any reporting or analytical language that associated Moslems with terror, violence, or theocratic political ideology was stricken from CIA, and ultimately IC, vocabulary.

Under John Brennan, Islamism became the screw worm in European, Commonwealth, and American politics.

Brennan had been CIA station chief abroad in Cairo and CIA Intelligence briefer for Barrack “Hussein” Obama here at home. In the IC, a briefer is ironically called a “talking” dog. To be fair, when the subject is Arab or Moslem behavior, John Brennan may just be ill, possibly a victim of Stockholm syndrome.

Alas, there may be 18 or more agencies under the ODNI, but CIA is still the big dog in the IC pound.

Some might argue that US Intelligence helped to avoid global war (see Deterrence). But taking credit for what does not happen is a perennial IC scam that incorporates a logical fallacy and ignores the plague of small wars, especially the ongoing “Clash of Civilizations,” between democracies and Islam; to say nothing of all those proxy military fails since 1945.

 

The recent Chinese sponsored summit in Tianjin included Russia, India, North Korea, Turkey, Vietnam and others representing a new twist on world order, a seismic political shift that received little attention from US Intelligence or the American press. If India, China, and Russia ever get on the same page about the Islamic menace, the carnage in Gaza, by comparison, will look like urban renewal.

China has labeled Islam a “social disease.” Nobody need fault Chinese Intelligence for lack of candor.

An infamous Secretary of Defense once said; “We don’t know what we don’t know.” Donald Rumsfeld might have all also said; not seeing, not looking, and not caring are brothers by the same mother.

 

A Contractor Conundrum  

The paper chase, the “Beltway bandit” phenomena, has grown apace with the US Intelligence Community since 1948, both now dip their beaks into the federal purse. RAND Corporation set the standard for think tanks, circa 1948, originally funded by the USAF (nee Army Air Corps) to retain a critical mass of Top Secret strategic contractor brainpower to deal with the Cold War and the emerging nuclear threat.

RAND has long since strayed from its strategic moorings, now a global purveyor of “research” and reports on any social meme a federal, state, or foreign client might care to fund.

Indeed, think tanks built on the RAND template now number more than 1,200 in the US alone, all selling paper products to government at all levels, including those 18 US Intelligence agencies under ODNI.

Beltway bandits and American Intelligence agencies, alike, kill a lot trees to earn their keep.

The question for the IC at this point is: as Intelligence personnel now approaches a million, why are contractors needed to think for federal employees? Indeed, why beatify the IC with the adjective “Intelligence” if the real “thinking” is done by contractors outside of government?

What, you might ask, do IC civil servants do if contractors are doing the heavy lifting?

Two explanations come to mind. The first involves “revolving doors.” Think tanks like RAND and Brookings serve as bullpens or holding sinecures for out-of work politicians between administrations and appointments to government jobs.

A second rationale is a tad more cynical.

Think tanks provide the intellectual, retroactive, or deductive gloss for policies and programs. Policy mandarins know what they want to do programmatically, but a deductive study from an “independent, non-partisan, objective” (sic) think tank always helps to backfill the funding.

Rand Corporation’s role in providing “research” to sell DEI, sexual ambiguity, and sex change surgery to the military and DOD at the Pentagon was the perfect example of how deductive analysis and cooking the policy books works for Beltway bandits and woke federal partisans alike.

Win/win as the gamers at RAND like to say!

If you start with the answer, evidence can always be found with a well written proposal followed by a pricey study, poll, or report festooned with a thousand footnotes.

Calling think tanks a Beltway racket might be a compliment. Bandit research is science in the same sense that DEI and sexual reassignment surgery improves combat effectiveness.

Indeed, RAND Corporation was a major player rationalizing new pronouns and gender bender DEI at the US War (nee Defense) Department, the military services, and in the Intelligence Community.

Some government auditor like DOGE needs to assess the funding and effectiveness of think tanks doing “research” for the War Department and especially the Intelligence Community.

Woke is now an internal national security problem.

In short, American Intelligence is not a self-correcting algorithm that improves with use, not yet anyway.

 

The Billion Dollar Petroglyph  

Speaking of algorithms, the biggest threat to better warning and threat analysis today may be the cloistered nature of the Intelligence cycle where protecting sources and methods are the excuses for redundant secrecy and classification. Indeed, unlike other agencies, Intelligence agencies deliberate in windowless secret classified Intelligence facilities (SCIFs) where acetate vugraphs flash on dark walls daily, like petroglyphs in a cave. The AM briefing for federal mandarins is the real currency, the stock and trade of daily life in the Intelligence Community.

These TOP SECRET daily IC gatherings are seldom achieved nor are they widely shared, surely not with AI.

Of course, there are a few highly visible fig leaf products like National Intelligence Estimates, the alleged “gold standard” of the community. The truth about NIEs is that they are programmatic boilerplate or justifications for Intelligence and DOD budgets. NIEs are annual or periodic written reports that are circulated to all agencies for coordination, where “happy” might be changed to “glad.”

A federal mandarin might read “Key Judgments,” of an NIE, but little else.

National Intelligence Estimates are inductive products, bean counts really, where evidence is manufactured, or selectively presented, to support existing or desired programs and policy.

There are no independent, expert or peer reviews of  IC “gold standard” Intelligence products. Unlike other federal agencies, American Intelligence Agencies get to write their own report cards.

Alas, from any perspective, the Intelligence lamb is servant to the policy lion. The Russian “bogeyman” and the “peaceful” Islamist are just two of many pernicious tropes sustained today by American and thus NATO Intelligence.

Clearly, any analysis of collected Intelligence data needs to be done outside of the Intelligence cloister by AI or civilian experts, or some mix of both. Intelligence Community efforts need to be limited to collection and clandestine operations, with the latter on a very short leash. Today, a government Intelligence report is to truth what a worm is to a fish hook.

 

An Amphibian Diet?

Mark Twain is alleged to have said that we need to eat a frog a day; then that one difficult daily swallow will surely be the worst thing to happen to us all day.

US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard needs to eat some frogs early in her tenure, doing what needs to be done before opposition and the usual DC inertia mobilizes inside the Intelligence Community and among the usual partisan Beltway suspects.

Beyond trimming the fat, miasma, and arrogance in the US Intelligence Community, Gabbard might ask the president to pardon Edward Snowden. The shock value alone in Washington would put deep state drones back on their heels for months.

Indeed, bring Snowden home to tell his side of the National Security Agency abuse story to Congress and the American people. We know now that the rot at NSA wasn’t just confined to Ft. Meade.

Clinton to Obama to Biden era corruption went as high as the ODNI in the person of James Clapper and as wide as John Brennan at CIA and James Comey at the FBI.

Snowden is not the traitor.

History may see Edward Snowden as the chap who took his finger out of the Intelligence corruption dike. There is no evidence he sought or received any personal gain from his revelations. Snowden didn’t seek exile, nor is there any evidence that he has cooperated with any foreign power.

Snowden isn’t a victim either.

By all accounts, he is simply one of those rare, yet genuine public servants with too much integrity or intelligence to work for an agency or political culture that had neither.

So again, Ms. Gabbard, eat that frog. Bring Edward Snowdon home to tell his side of his story and in doing so you may be saving another endangered species – and help to restore the integrity of American Intelligence.

Rehabilitating Snowden might seem to be just a symbolic gesture. Nevertheless, a well placed shot across the bow of indifference might also be an auspicious beginning for a smaller, better focused, and non-partisan Intelligence Community.

If you missed part 1 of this saga in September’s edition of  New English Review, catch it here.

 

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G. Murphy Donovan is a former USAF Intelligence officer who writes about the politics of national security and Intelligence. Follow him on X.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast