Decision-Making Quote by Thomas Smith

“Blame heaped on planners” is bureaucratic theater with a sharp elbow: it tells you a failure happened, but it refuses to name the failure directly. The passive construction does the real work. “Heaped” conjures a pile-on, a political scrum where accountability is less a moral reckoning than an available resource to be allocated. It’s not just that people are blamed; blame is redistributed as a management tactic.

“Planners” is a deliberately elastic target. It can mean policy strategists, military staff, agency analysts, or the faceless “they” that lets leadership keep its hands clean. That vagueness is the point: it invites public anger to land somewhere safe, away from the decision-makers who sanctioned the mission, the budget, or the timetable. The phrase “those said to be responsible” doubles down on that distancing. It’s hearsay language, almost legalistic, building a buffer between the speaker and the accusation.

Then comes the tell: “unreliable intelligence.” Not “wrong,” not “fabricated,” not “ignored,” but “unreliable” - a word that suggests technical malfunction rather than human motive. It’s the preferred euphemism in moments when intelligence was politicized, cherry-picked, or simply over-trusted because it served the desired narrative. The intent reads like a news brief from a crisis: contain the story, frame the failure as process breakdown, and preempt deeper questions about who wanted to believe what.

Contextually, it fits the postmortem language of war planning, counterterror operations, or major security incidents: a public searching for culprits, institutions trying to preserve legitimacy, and leadership eager to turn responsibility into a procedural footnote.