Mr. Rossmiller presents an insightful look at the politicization of intelligence analysis in the Bush Era. It is a sad case where, over and over again, intelligence findings are tweaked so that reversals in Iraq can look appreciably better than they are. One will never hear the phrase, "too pessimistic," again without thinking of this book.

The book is essentially divided into two parts--Mr. Rossmiller's service in Iraq and then his time at the Pentagon. The latter portion of the book is much more damning; indeed, Rossmiller's service in Iraq seems to have been not all that bad. Certainly, unlike current episodes in the Green Zone venue where he lived and worked, he seems to have been in little jeopardy.

His service in the Pentagon, however, shows consistently how his otherwise prescient reports were altered so that both military and political operations in Iraq looked much better than they were actually playing out. The sad part of the book--and something that Mr. Rossmiller states repeatedly--is that he wanted his service to his country to be meaningful. Unfortunately, his superiors (and their superiors) would not allow this to happen.

Mr. Rossmiller is to be commended for his service to his country in working in Iraq and the Pentagon and--as importantly--writing this book which provides not only a description of the brokenness of the Intelligence Community, but realistic ideas on how to fix it.

This is a book you will not want to put down, and once you're done you won't be able to look at our "intelligence" community in the same way. Independent of your political views, you will find this book to be a very revealing look inside the most controversial war of this generation. You will get both a "ground level" view of the war in Iraq and an insightful look into the intelligence process from the pentagon itself.

Bottom line: if you have even a passing interest in the subject, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book - you will not regret it.

This is an insider's view about the Department of Defense and its propensity to make intelligence fit situations. Just the opposite of the ideal design of intelligence where policy is shaped from gathered information. The writing slows down slightly in the last quarter of the book but...the author writes from real experience and that's worth the read alone. The author was a member of DIA and assigned to Iraq for a 6 month tour and his description of the chaos he encountered is disconcerting at best and his story needed to be told. His story is especially noteworthy in light of the suspicions out there about bogus intelligence and the use of it to get the country behind an invasion of Iraq.

Rossmiller was a low-level DIA analyst in D.C. and Iraq. That, combined with the requisite compliance with DIA non-disclosure regulations and the inability of his unit to even define its purpose (let alone accomplish anything significant) severely limits "Still Broken's" value.

Rossmiller attributes his unit's limitations to bureaucratic incompetence (taking weeks to obtain an employee badge and computer password - even though his arrival was known long in advance; lack of feedback from users, or even knowledge that their reports were even used; attempting to gather intelligence from miles away from the scene - often thousands of miles; managers dumped from units required to slim down), and indiscriminate political editing of reports to reflect a more positive attitude. On top of all that, readers learn that Rosmiller and others found that a Univ. of Michigan professor's (Juan Cole) blog is the best source of Iraq information - ergo, their efforts were basically a total waste of time and money.

Rossmiller also tells us that the U.S. mission in Iraq is hopelessly undermined by broad-brush arrests and imprisonments of Iraqi's - with little understanding of their actual guilt. As for building schools in the midst of a civil war, he likens that to planting trees in the midst of a forest fire.

All undoubtedly true, and having volunteered for Vietnam only to find out it was similarly managed in an incompetent manner with U.S. actions largely wasteful and counterproductive, I am quite sympathetic to Rossmiller's complaints. Unfortunately, the result is a book with little or no information not already common knowledge.

On the other hand, if you ever wondered how the U.S. embassy in Baghdad could use 4,000+ personnel and still claim to be understaffed, "Still Broken" might help. Ditto for most of the rest of government.

Rossmiller was a low-level DIA analyst in D.C. and Iraq. That, combined with the requisite compliance with DIA non-disclosure regulations and the inability of his unit to even define its purpose (let alone accomplish anything significant) severely limits "Still Broken's" value.

Rossmiller attributes his unit's limitations to bureaucratic incompetence (taking weeks to obtain an employee badge and computer password - even though his arrival was known long in advance; lack of feedback from users, or even knowledge that their reports were even used; attempting to gather intelligence from miles away from the scene - often thousands of miles; managers dumped from units required to slim down), and indiscriminate political editing of reports to reflect a more positive attitude.

Rossmiller also tells us that the U.S. mission in Iraq is hopelessly undermined by broad-brush arrests and imprisonments of Iraqi's - with little understanding of their actual guilt. As for building schools in the midst of a civil war, he likens that to planting trees in the midst of a forest fire.

All undoubtedly true, and having volunteered for Vietnam only to find out it was similarly managed in an incompetent manner with U.S. actions largely wasteful and counterproductive, I am quite sympathetic to Rossmiller's complaints. Unfortunately, the result is a book with little or no information not already common knowledge.

On the other hand, if you ever wondered how the U.S. embassy in Baghdad could use 4,000+ personnel and still claim to be understaffed, "Still Broken" might help. Ditto for most of the rest of government.

This is a personal memoir of a former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) intelligence analyst of his experiences at DIA. As such it provides a snapshot of the professional life of a working analyst both here and in Iraq. Based on his experiences, Rossmiller has concluded that DIA is a dysfunctional organization suffering from incompetent management, inconsistent leadership, and a lack of a coherent mission plan, hence the title of his book. Rossmiller joined DIA straight from college, served only two years, and was familiar only with a small part of the Iraq effort mounted by DIA in support of Operation Iraqi freedom and its aftermath. So how accurate is his account and his conclusions?

Well to anyone familiar with DIA, his conclusions appear remarkably on the mark. Since its creation by Robert McNamara, DIA has been an agency in search of a mission. Although designed to be the military equivalent of CIA, DIA has never been able to acquire the cache' of CIA although it has also managed to miss most of the notoriety as well. The personal of DIA are an uneasy mix of military and civilian intelligence professionals under the often erratic management of military line officers and a few civilians of often dubious qualifications. DIA management is at best a mixture of competent and incompetent officers and civilians at all levels. This in large part is due to the Byzantine selection and promotion processes common to the IC as a whole, but exacerbated at DIA by the need to have a large number of military officers at field grade or higher in most senior positions whether or not they are qualified. Further, like the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), DIA makes the fallacious assumption that all analysts of a given grade are identical so fails to recognize good analysts from bad. And it is certainly true that analytic judgments are often warped by the pernicious practice of letting rank trump facts or by elephantine attempts to support often badly conceived policies.

Rossmiller's account of his assignment to a DIA counter-insurgency operation in Iraq is a classic example of inept managers who relied on the DIA team actually deployed to sort out a mess caused by their incompetence. But his account of his experiences in the `Direct Action Cell' under a Captain White (USAF) also explains why DIA is able to function at all. Rossmiller is an acute observer and a facile writer who has written a well crafted book.

In case anybody cares, this reviewer worked with DIA on and off over a career of 42 years in the IC and actually worked at DIA for two years as an integrated analyst a quarter century ago. From Rossmiller's account it appears DIA today is unchanged from those far off times.

Having worked in the IC for close to twenty years as a civilian, contractor, and military officer, I find myself shaking my head over this book a bit. The author worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency for less than two years (fresh out of college), and now, he's written a book that diagnoses the ills of that agency as well as the US occupation of Iraq. I can't help but think he must have an extremely high opinion of himself. Despite having a lot more experience in the IC than he, I would hardly profess to be an expert on more than several parts of several parts of it. I also have learned from hard experience that simple solutions or interpretations to enormous problems only exist in simple minds. So I would never pretend to be able to judge the overall performance of the IC...apart from saying that there's some that is good and some that is bad. Rossmiller, in contrast, does not feel similarly constrained.

Don't get me wrong. A lot of what the author says about mindless bureaucracies and infighting rings true. But some of it doesn't...like when he talks about a captain (an O-3, not an O-6) he worked for who was still stuck at that rank in his forties. Well, having served at that rank in the Army, I can say that that couldn't have happened unless the officer entered the military at an age older than average (maybe he was enlisted first). My case was pretty typical...I pinned on captain's bars when I was 27 (and I was not a water-walker or anything). The idea that someone could stay stuck in that rank for over a decade is silly. He would have gotten separated from the service (particularly since his "time in grade" would have been in the 1990s when the services were contracting).

Also, I would dearly love to know what the people who the author served with and worked for think of him. Rossmiller provides redacted copies of his evaluations as proof that he was a very good employee. To an outsider, those might seem proof of exactly that. Yet I've been around long enough to know that they don't mean very much (someone who is incompetent, a jerk, or an oddball can still get an evaluation that sounds very nice). Maybe Rossmiller was a flake and a malcontent (I've met more than a few people like that in the IC). Maybe he was a dedicated employee who got roughly handled by the system. You can't tell from looking at personnel evaluation forms. You can only get that from people who have firsthand experience working with him and managing him.

This isn't to say the book is worthless. It gives an interesting "worm's-eye" raw recruit perspective of one office of one agency and one part of the intelligence war in Iraq. But for another reviewer to state "If the SecDef and DNI Could Read One Book, This is the One" is just plain foolish.

So "Still Broken" isn't a good title. If the book gets a paperback edition, I would recommend something like "Twenty-three months at the Intelligence Circus: a Raw Recruit's View." It would be a lot more accurate.

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I don't work at the DIA and I never worked with the author.

Coda: for people who are really interested in reading about the Intelligence Community's myriad problems I strongly recommend:

Spying Blind by Amy Zegart

Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11

The September 11 Commission Report

The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Indexed Hardcover, Authorized Edition)

The WMD Commission Report

The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction: Report to the President of the United States, March 31, 2005

And for a foreign perspective on intelligence failures, you can read

The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise Of Yom Kippur And Its Sources (Suny Series in Israeli Studies)

An inside look on how management and bureaucracy in an intelligence agency can greatly hamper the delivery of accurate intelligence to the administration. AJ shows how in his world at the Pentagon, bad news travels slowly (if at all), good news travels fast, and sometimes good news is, well, made up. It is evident after reading AJ's book that there are more people to blame than the administration--the defense complex is full of career-path-minded individuals who are so risk averse, the management stratigraphy collectively edits intelligence reports until they are "on message", which is a euphemism for optimistic. This behavior is rewarded, and often managers who play this game rise through the ranks, despite their reports lacking accuracy and candor. Hopefully AJ's book awakens US leaders to restructure the management machinery at the DIA and pentagon so they can craft sounder and more mindful policies, and so that the American warfighters overseas are better supported.

I will not try to summarize this book as that has clearly already been done. I will say that this book was the perfect balance for a book about Iraq. Rossmiller does a great job of illustrating how depressing and miserable the situation is in Iraq in all regards. At just that moment when you want to put it down and have a drink, he brings you back with a funny illustration of life that, in some way, everyone can relate to.

This book truly put me through all ranges of emotion. It also showed the underbelly of intelligence. The very intelligence that has blown this war. I came away from reading this book with a much better understanding of the intelligence process, bureaucracy, Iraq, the Iraq war, and Mr. Rossmiller as a person.

My only complaint is that Mr. Rossmiller is not out on a new adventure creating fodder for his next book.

DNI Mike McConnell is a good man trapped in a very bad pyramidal system that is inherently duplicitous. He is presiding over what retiring Defense Senior Intelligence Leader Rick MacKenzie calls, in this book, "the underlying insanity of our intelligence agencies."

As the author of the original strike, On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World, honored with a foreword by Senator David Boren, former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and several other books moving the ball forward in the public (since our government is broken, not just the intelligence community) I must confess that the author of this book pursues a path that is inherently attractive to me. I have a bias for the truth, and a bias against the $60 billion a year in insane waste that Mike McConnell is presiding over.

Out of the ten books that arrived today, this is the one I could not put down. Below are my summative highlights, and then other books that support this author.

For a first time author and a young man at that, my first flyleaf note reads, underlined with exclamation marks: ABLY WRITTEN! By a MATURE Person!

There is no index nor bibliography in this book. I absorbed it at face value, as a first-person narrative of a patriot who joined the intelligence community for the right reasons, and left the sinking ship after honorably pointing out the flaws to his bosses, who remain typical big ego small brain DIA dead-beats (CIA, FBI, NRO, NSA and others are no better).

+ Analysts segregated, no inter-regional, issue, or agency integration and interaction.

+ High turnover (for the last decade more analysts quit FBI every month than can be recruited--the best and the brightest do NOT like idiot bosses). This results in an inexperienced middle management as the dead-beats move up.

+ Products rarely reached the intended audience, and products finally reaching Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff never ever resembled what actually started out as an honest pessimistic assessment.

+ Months of indiscriminate editiing resulted in drastic differences. I can attest from experience and the literature that CIA is just as ineffectual).

+ Many patriotic intelligence analysts as well as career military felt that the Administration and the flag officers took their eye off the ball, invading Iraq and creating infuriated nationalists, instead of focusing on a handful of terrorists.

+ Supervisors lied regularly to everyone.

+ Iraq was dust, mosquitos, heat, and constant organizational choas and reorganization with virtually no real production that was actionable. The one exception was the "track and whack" group in which the author was fortunate to serve.

+ DIA failed to coordinate with the in-country Combined Intelligence Operations Center (CIOC) before it sent its single most significant contingent to Iraq. For that one right there I would kick the Director of DIA down the parking lot.

* Institutional knowledge (retained knowledge that outlives turnover) is virtually non-existent.

+ The tactical units in the field could not handle Top Secret or Top Secret communications and computing technology. I have this image in my head of an elephant trying to blow his nose down a str4aw to a gnat.

+ "Disaster continued to be perpetuated by failed leadership and the absence of a coherent intelligence or military strategy."

+ Inter-agency choas in Iraq.

+ DIA complained about its analysts in Iraq working too hard because their overtime came out of its budget. This reminds of the message from CIA complaining about my asking to be reimbursed for hotel rooms when I had to go underground in El Salvador after an explicit by-name assassination threat from the Colonels running the country (they confused my effort5s to penetrate the extreme left with sympathy for the extreme left--I did not have it then, I certainly do now). The message said that since I was receiving a housing allowance, I could not have the hotel rooms approved. I had a very very good Chief of Station, a real talent, and as I like to recall the story, he sent back a one-liner: "What part of assassination do you not understand?" The DC-based officers tend to be pasty-faced overwight prima donnas with no real commitment to those in the field. This is true across all agencies, and especially FBI and DEA.

+ The author has the grace to include a snapshot of a more typical person in Iraq, a military reservist whose life has been essentially ruined by the cavalier manner in which Cheney and Rumsfeld decided to lie to the public, invade Iraq, let the contractors steal billions without doing the reconstruction, and now he comes back to a recession with no job.

+ The author says that many in Iraq, realizing they could neither complain nor repair their lot, "checked out mentally."

+ A very important part of his book discusses how units sent to capture targets would often come back with 50 people they snapped up in the general area, each of them presumed guilty, each sent to "Abu G" for three months. The author is morally shaken by this, as I have been shaken by Mike Hayden's two impeachable offenses (warrantless wiretapping and rendition plus torture).

+ The author posits that Iraq is not an insurgency, but rather a unique mix of a failed state (remember, Rumsfeld would not allow the troops necessary to keep good order while reconstruction proceeded apace), criminal opportunism, especially kidnapping for ransom, a few fanatics, and a majority of outraged anti-occupation nationalists in three flavors (Sunni, Shi'ite, Kurd).

+ While in Iraq, occasionally commuting by helicopter to the Green Zone, an oasis in the desert, the author comments that US leaders, both in DC and in Iraq itself, were totally oblivious to the "turmoil and dissatisfaction in daily Iraqi life." I am reminded of the exposes of how Blackwater and others have indiscriminately killed civilians, rammed cars driven by old men off the road, and so on.

+ DIA's Office of Iraq Analysis "had a veneer of control, under which minor anarchy raged."

+ The DIA Way: Kiss Up, Kick Down.

+ Idiocy of DoD priorities--too many flat screen TV's, not enough desktop computer terminals and screens.

+ In Iraq, US officers and media both seduced by English-speaking Iraqis, and totally oblivious to the deeper nuances available in indigenous language about domestic views, concerns, and links.

+ In the Pentagon, personally witnessed the politicization of analysis that continues to this day. Senior officers including the Navy J-2 Admiral now heading to CENTCOM J-2 as I understand it, always deleting pessimism and squelching reports on how badly reconstruction was going.

+ The real star in this book--but I totally respect this author and his good judgment in leaving the ship of fools--is DISL Rick MacKenzie. SecDef Gates and DNI McConnell would do well to read pages 176-177 of this book. For the rest of you, here are the highlights from MacKenzie's parting note to all that began with the underlying insanity quote above:

- Unified honest warning works, edited disparate warning is idiocy

- Human behavior is predictable, yet we like to count things and ignore the human factors

- We have no clue how alien we are to other cultures

- The indicators are never wrong. If we are true to the evidence (we are not) we will be right more often than not.

- Analysis is not the same as synthesis, diagnosis, or prognosis (nor would I add, is propaganda, deception, active lies to the public, or fabrication)

- Intelligence analysis is a profession in its own right. I am reminded of Jack Davis (search for .

The author concludes his book by dismissing most of what the US Intelligence Community accesses, and states that he has found useful truths in non-traditional online media, which he calls a "true meritocracy."

I put this book down enormously impressed with this author's intelligence, balance, gifted writing, relevant observation, and total honesty. This is precisely the kind of patriotic committed person we are recruiting, and sadly, he is one of the few with the courage to leave. Those he left behind, absent a remarkable turning of the secret world right-side up and right-side in (search for ) will, if they do not leave now, become the very bitter, narrow, inept, egotistical fools they now report to.

WOW. See also (I am limited to ten links, see my own books and the lists of hundreds of intelligence books I have reviewed, most of which support both my original 1988-2000 reclama, and this author's current reclama. NOTHING HAS CHANGED--WE'VE JUST POURED GASOLINE ON THE FIRE.

These books are intelligence books. I have an entire other list on political and falg officer malfeasance, high crimes, and misdemeanors. the first two books on the list below was not widely disseminated, but precisely matche the author's book, only for the CIA.

Lost Promise
Informing Statecraft
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
War Without Windows: A True Accout of a a Young Army Officer Trapped in an Intelligence Cover-Up in Vietnam.
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Denial and Deception: An Insider's View of the CIA
Creating the Secret State: The Origins of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1943-1947
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency

The last book, after summarizing all that NSA is trying to do, spending tens of billions of dollars very foolishly, ends by hoping the might one day achieve the ultimate computing device, weighing virtually nothing, powered by a tiny battery, able to make petaflops of calculations per nanosecond: "the human brain."

Our government, and our secret intelligence community, are so totally screwewd up as to defy belief. I certainly would like to have a chance to restore the honor and intelligence of the secret world, but the chances of either (me or them) happening is right up there with the Second Coming. Our Nation will go down in flames because our government is clinically insane. See Running on Empty for why 2008 needs to break the backs of the two branches of legalized organized crime in this country, namely the Republican and Democratic parties. INDEPENDENCE!

See the images I have loaded above, the tell the story in pictures.