America needs a good, functional intelligence community now more than ever. With the fiscal problems looming, there is cause for concern for instability and aggression from a variety of fronts. One only has to look back at some of the posts here to make a list: Russia, China, Israel, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc.

During a meeting today at work, GorT and several co-workers were discussing the near-term future of the Intelligence Community. One person brought up the latest nomination for the chair the National Intelligence Council – Chas Freeman. It’s timely given some of the recent blog posts and OpEds. Mr. Freeman has questionable ties and/or past prejudices with regards to China, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. But given the rash of tax dodgers put forward, I doubt much vetting was done by the administration to ferret this out. Luckily, the ranking republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) is calling this issue forward. Jamie Kirchick’s piece in Politico is worth reading today as well. You can read Rep. Hoekstra’s letter here.

Without going into detail for obvious reasons (#1 being that we’re not the NY Times so discussions of the Intel Community should be closely held), there’s lots of good stuff going on there and there are plenty of smart people. I just hope political appointments like this doesn’t derail the advancement of the American Intelligence capability. The landscape is changing – now we’re faced with gathering intelligence in a guerrilla warfare environment and I’d wager that a “cold war”-esque relationship is brewing between China and the U.S. We’re facing new challenges with the ever advancing technologies including Cyber Warfare, space-based weapons and improvements to technologies once exploited or cherised by covert operatives. Time to pull our trenchcoats a little closer around ourselves, don the fedoras and channel a little Nathan Hale.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.