Introduction — Finding the Signal
Modern geopolitics unfolds inside a dense fog of information, disinformation, and competing narratives. States possess unprecedented surveillance capacity, yet strategic surprises, miscalculations, and self-inflicted failures remain common. The paradox is unavoidable: how can the most resourced intelligence system in history struggle so persistently to anticipate, adapt, and learn?
One answer comes from Fulton Armstrong, whose career spans more than three decades in senior roles at the CIA, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Drawing on insights from public lectures and academic forums, Armstrong offers a diagnosis that cuts past technical shortcomings and points instead to structural and cultural pathologies embedded deep within the U.S. intelligence system.
What follows is a synthesis of his analysis: five interconnected failures that weaken American intelligence not from the outside, but from within.
Why Smaller Intelligence Services Can Outperform a Superpower
Conventional wisdom assumes that scale, funding, and technological dominance translate directly into intelligence superiority. Armstrong challenges this assumption. He argues that size itself can become a liability when bureaucratic expansion outpaces analytic clarity.
To illustrate the point, he contrasts the U.S. intelligence community with Spain’s National Intelligence Center (CNI). Despite its comparatively small size, the CNI, Armstrong argues, possesses superior intelligence on the Maghreb—a region of direct strategic relevance to migration flows, terrorism, and regional stability.
The explanation is not resources, but organizational physics. Large intelligence bureaucracies generate friction: layers of management, risk aversion, slow decision cycles, and diluted accountability. Intelligence becomes process-driven rather than insight-driven.
Large bureaucracies do not necessarily do intelligence better; they often do it less effectively.
The Analyst–Operative Divide as a Structural Defect
Beyond size, Armstrong identifies a deeper internal flaw: the rigid separation between intelligence collectors and intelligence analysts. In the U.S. system, operatives gather information in the field while analysts interpret it from a distance. This artificial division produces silos, mistrust, and a distorted intelligence cycle.
Other services, such as Britain’s MI6 or Spain’s CNI, operate differently. Personnel rotate between operational and analytical roles, allowing them to understand not only what information says, but how and why it was obtained.
Armstrong illustrates the consequence with an episode from his time as a National Intelligence Officer. When he appointed an experienced operative as his deputy, colleagues reacted with disbelief. His reasoning was straightforward: only someone who has collected intelligence firsthand can reliably identify noise, exaggeration, and deliberate distortion in raw reporting.
Analysts without field experience often lack that filtering instinct.
Institutional Amnesia and the Refusal to Learn
When bureaucratic inertia combines with internal silos, institutions lose the ability to reflect on their own history. Armstrong considers this the most dangerous vulnerability of all.
He argues that U.S. foreign policy repeatedly reproduces the same strategic errors because lessons from recent history are neither institutionalized nor internalized. As an example, he points to parallels between U.S. handling of Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro and earlier policy failures in Panama under Manuel Noriega—failures so poorly processed that, remarkably, some of the same individuals were involved decades apart.
This is not coincidence but culture. A national tendency toward exceptionalism fosters a quiet disdain for historical self-examination. The result is a cycle of intervention, miscalculation, and surprise that appears novel only because prior failures were never fully absorbed.
The Real Threat Is Not Information Volume, but Information Weaponization
Public debate often frames modern intelligence challenges as problems of information overload. Armstrong rejects this framing. More data rarely resolves complex geopolitical problems.
The greater danger is deliberate information manipulation. State and non-state actors increasingly flood information environments with falsehoods, contradictions, and emotional triggers designed not to persuade, but to disorient. The goal is cognitive erosion: to make coherent analysis and democratic deliberation difficult or impossible.
An intelligence system already weakened by bureaucratic rigidity and analytic fragmentation becomes especially vulnerable to such strategies. Manipulation succeeds not because intelligence agencies lack information, but because institutional conditions prevent effective sense-making.
Political Decay and the Erosion of Analytic Independence
Armstrong’s most politically sensitive insight reframes recent U.S. politics. Rather than treating individual leaders as anomalies, he describes political disruption as a symptom of long-term institutional degradation.
In this environment, intelligence analysis becomes politicized. Objective assessments that challenge prevailing narratives are punished rather than debated. Analysts who fail to confirm political prejudices are sidelined, undermining the core intelligence principle of analytic independence.
The damage extends beyond any single administration. Once analytic integrity is compromised, rebuilding trust, culture, and institutional memory becomes exceptionally difficult.
Conclusion — Toward a Culture of Citizen Intelligence
Taken together, Armstrong’s analysis describes a system weakened by scale, silos, historical blindness, political pressure, and cognitive manipulation. None of these failures are technical. All are cultural and structural.
His response is not secrecy or expanded surveillance, but what he calls a culture of citizen intelligence. This is not espionage. It is the civic capacity to analyze information, recognize manipulation, reflect historically, and resist narrative shortcuts.
In an era where truth itself has become contested terrain, the skills once reserved for intelligence professionals have become prerequisites for democratic resilience. Separating signal from noise is no longer an elite function. It is a shared responsibility.
