MICHAEL LEDEEN: It’s Time for a Thoroughgoing Revamping of the Intelligence Community.

For decades, Congress and various special committees and duos (such as Robb-Silverman) have invariably responded to intelligence failures by adding more bodies to the agencies and expanding their budgets. The predictable result? Today we’ve got too many spooks collecting too much money, with predictably bad results. Among other bad consequences, intelligence is typically churned out by committees, guaranteeing that we don’t identify our best analysts. We need to drastically reduce the numbers of both budgets and bureaucrats, in order to figure out who’s good. Then we need to promote them, within a much smaller system.

It’s hard to imagine this happening under normal circumstances, but today’s circumstances aren’t normal. As the investigations of the intel malefactors go forward, there will be numerous opportunities to remove lots of bad and incompetent actors, and put the whole community on the cutting-room floor.

That would be nice.