"You want to keep intelligence separate from policy"
About this Quote
"You want to keep intelligence separate from policy" is the kind of sentence that sounds like a bureaucratic nicety until you hear the alarm bell inside it. Bobby Ray Inman isn’t offering a management tip; he’s drawing a hard boundary around reality itself. For a career soldier and intelligence leader, the line between what is true and what is desired isn’t philosophical. It’s operational, paid for in lives, budgets, and national credibility.
The intent is defensive: protect intelligence from being bent into a brief for decisions already made. When policy drives intelligence, the question stops being "What’s happening?" and becomes "What can we cite?" That shift turns analysts into advocates and uncertainty into a nuisance. Inman’s phrasing is tellingly plain, almost parental: you want to keep. Not you must, not you should. It’s the voice of someone who has watched the separation fail and knows how easily it fails when political timelines collide with ambiguous data.
The subtext is a warning about contamination. Once policymakers signal what they need to be true, intelligence collection, analysis, and even the language of assessment start drifting toward confirmation. The institution’s value - its ability to disappoint power with inconvenient facts - gets traded for access and influence.
Contextually, this reads like post-Vietnam and especially post-Cold War scar tissue, later vindicated by the Iraq WMD era: the high cost of letting policy launder itself through intelligence. Inman’s restraint is the point. He’s describing a firebreak, not a slogan.
The intent is defensive: protect intelligence from being bent into a brief for decisions already made. When policy drives intelligence, the question stops being "What’s happening?" and becomes "What can we cite?" That shift turns analysts into advocates and uncertainty into a nuisance. Inman’s phrasing is tellingly plain, almost parental: you want to keep. Not you must, not you should. It’s the voice of someone who has watched the separation fail and knows how easily it fails when political timelines collide with ambiguous data.
The subtext is a warning about contamination. Once policymakers signal what they need to be true, intelligence collection, analysis, and even the language of assessment start drifting toward confirmation. The institution’s value - its ability to disappoint power with inconvenient facts - gets traded for access and influence.
Contextually, this reads like post-Vietnam and especially post-Cold War scar tissue, later vindicated by the Iraq WMD era: the high cost of letting policy launder itself through intelligence. Inman’s restraint is the point. He’s describing a firebreak, not a slogan.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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