Tom Nichols is a former professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and is now a writer a The Atlantic. Here is his take on Donald Trump’s appointment of former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence:
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former Representative Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after 9/11 to remedy what American policy makers believed was a lack of coordination among the various national-intelligence agencies, and the DNI sits atop all of America’s intelligence services, including the CIA.
Gabbard is stunningly unqualified for almost any Cabinet post (as are some of Trump’s other picks), but especially for ODNI. She has no qualifications as an intelligence professional—literally none. (She is a reserve lieutenant colonel who previously served in the Hawaii Army National Guard, with assignments in medical, police, and civil-affairs-support positions. She has won some local elections and also represented Hawaii in Congress.) She has no significant experience directing or managing much of anything.
But leave aside for the moment that she is manifestly unprepared to run any kind of agency. Americans usually accept that presidents reward loyalists with jobs, and Trump has the right to stash Gabbard at some make-work office in the bureaucracy if he feels he owes her. It’s not a pretty tradition, but it’s not unprecedented, either.
To make Tulsi Gabbard the DNI, however, is not merely handing a bouquet to a political gadfly. Her appointment would be a threat to the security of the United States.
Read the rest here.
Both articles are from pompous in-breed people who hold this arrogant attitude, that unless you have been in the “deep State”
mud pit, you can’t be effective. A leader that can access experienced people with American Interest -First ideology, is way more beneficial.
These in- state bureaucrats, are exactly who needs to be edged out.