National Security Lessons on the Climate

By Michael J. Morell

During his 33-year career at CIA, Michael Morell served as Deputy Director for over three years, a job in which he managed the Agency's day-to-day operations, represented the Agency at the White House and Congress, and maintained the Agency's relationships with intelligence services and foreign leaders around the world.  Michael also served twice as Acting Director. Michael's senior assignments at CIA also included serving for two years as the Director of Intelligence, the Agency's top analyst, and for two years as Executive Director, the CIA's top administrator—managing human resources, the budget, security, and information technology. Michael was the only person who was both with President Bush on September 11th, and with President Obama on May 1st, when Bin Laden was brought to justice.

By Kristin Wood

During her 20-year CIA career, Kristin Wood served in the Director’s area and three Agency directorates – analysis, operations, and digital innovation – leading a wide variety of the Agency’s missions in positions of increasing authority. Among her key Agency assignments were Deputy Chief of the Innovation & Technology Group at the Open Source Center (OSC). She led OSC’s open-source IT and innovation efforts to extract meaning from big data.

“Lessons adopted” is a much more important concept than “lessons learned.”  Lessons adopted requires the learning of lessons, but it also requires a more important and more difficult step – the application of the lessons.  As we wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed, the coronavirus pandemic has retaught us a lesson from 9/11 – heed and act on the warnings of experts.  One of the key questions for our nation today is whether we will apply this lesson to one of the most dangerous threats we face – climate change.

The United States remains in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Some 100,000 Americans have died from the virus, with a potential of hundreds of thousands more to come.  Unemployment stands at its highest level since the Great Depression, with the potential to go even higher.  All this damage occurred despite multiple warnings from experts over decades that a severe pandemic was a certainty at some point in the future – warnings that generated little to no action to mitigate the risk and to prepare for it if mitigation failed.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Subscriber+


Related Articles

Search

Close