CIA Director David Petraeus, who won praise as the Army’s
out-of-the-box theorist, is quietly reshaping the CIA toward covert
paramilitary operations, and some agency hands say the continued
military focus is limiting efforts to improve CIA spies’ mission of
stealing secrets.
The retired four-star general—who rewrote the counterinsurgency field manual in the early 2000s and then saw it applied most effectively in Iraq and with less effect in Afghanistan—is considered one of the Army’s most innovative generals.
Now Petraeus has turned his attention to the CIA, one of the United States’ two major intelligence agencies that, post-September 11, has sought to reinvent itself as a premier human-intelligence gathering agency.
In addition to spying successes and failures in recent years, the CIA’s most significant work is its role in a relentless shadow war on terrorism most known for the ongoing covert operations involving Predator and Reaper drone strikes around the world, but mainly in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Petraeus, who was a surprise choice of President Obama to head the CIA in the fall of 2011, has continued the CIA’s drone war that began under Leon Panetta and has become in recent years the agency’s defining policy.
Typical of the agency’s paramilitary focus was last week’s successful drone attack in Pakistan’s tribal area that killed al Qaeda No. 2 leader Abu Yahya al-Libi.
Read more: http://freebeacon.com/petraeus-at-langley/
The retired four-star general—who rewrote the counterinsurgency field manual in the early 2000s and then saw it applied most effectively in Iraq and with less effect in Afghanistan—is considered one of the Army’s most innovative generals.
Now Petraeus has turned his attention to the CIA, one of the United States’ two major intelligence agencies that, post-September 11, has sought to reinvent itself as a premier human-intelligence gathering agency.
In addition to spying successes and failures in recent years, the CIA’s most significant work is its role in a relentless shadow war on terrorism most known for the ongoing covert operations involving Predator and Reaper drone strikes around the world, but mainly in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Petraeus, who was a surprise choice of President Obama to head the CIA in the fall of 2011, has continued the CIA’s drone war that began under Leon Panetta and has become in recent years the agency’s defining policy.
Typical of the agency’s paramilitary focus was last week’s successful drone attack in Pakistan’s tribal area that killed al Qaeda No. 2 leader Abu Yahya al-Libi.
Read more: http://freebeacon.com/petraeus-at-langley/
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