Intelligence/The Sense of siege

There’s no one thing that keeps the Pentagon’s chief of intelligence up at night. There’s half-a-dozen things — terrorism, cybersecurity, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China — but Mike Vickers has a six-point plan to counter them.

“The big challenge we face is really in the aggregation of challenges,” the under secretary for intelligence said this morning at the Atlantic Council. “It’s not that any one challenge is so daunting, it’s that there’s six of them. [They] are diverse, they’re all significant, they’re likely to be enduring.”

“Unlike the Cold War, when we had one big enduring threat and then a series of episodic threats, we have several that are likely to be enduring now,” Vickers added, “[and] all of them over the past few years have gotten worse.”

6 Threats, 6 Changes, & A Brave New World: Intel Chief Vickers