before he could afford Luis Vuitton luggage.
Occurs to me that the CIA has reached the end stage of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, i.e. they are far more concerned with protecting the organization than with accomplishing the mission. So OF COURSE they’ll do anything the pResident asks them to do. There are BUDGETS at stake!
Was just reading last night that this was the state of Britain’s MI6 before WW2. If it hadn’t been for the Czechs and the Poles they would have accomplished nothing right through to the end of the war, and even in it’s aftermath.
Solution obviously is to do a cold reboot - eliminate the top layers of management entirely, replace with people who believe in meritocracy. (’course that begs the question: where in America today do you find ANYBODY who still believes in meritocracy....)