The following epigrams have been extracted from the essays of G. Murphy Donovan. The author’s work has appeared in Strategic Review, the Air University Review, the Air Power Journal, Parameters, the Armed Forced Journal, the American Thinker, Family Security Matters, the Small Wars Journal, Studies in Intelligence, the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, the New English Review, the Chicago Tribune, the Jerusalem Post and other newspapers. He also writes at G. Murphy Donovan and Agnotology in Journalism online.
Donovan usually writes about national security, Intelligence, military affairs, and Agnotology in Journalism. Politics and culture make the cut occasionally.
Links to many of the original essays appear in the bibliography. No links available for CIA texts although the material is unclassified.
EDUCATION
If public school teachers, administrators, or unions could be sued for malpractice; the school house might improve overnight.
Randi Weingarten (of the AFT) might be the worst thing to happen to public schools since head lice.
Public school reform has been pretty much limited to removing chocolate milk from lunch menus.
If teachers applied the same rigor to academics as coaches do for athletic performance, public education would recover by Spring break.
Grade and high schools have become affirmative action programs for unionized nitwits.
The worst and the dimmest will never inspire the best and the brightest.
Nothing to admire, nothing to inspire.
The most notorious example of “black on black” crime might be the American public school system.
African American urban voters continue to vote against their own best interests.
The true “welfare queens” of the American economy are public sector unions.
Economics
Capital and markets are inanimate; only moral hazards are organic.
Spending you way out of debt is a little like giving up hookers for Lent.
European imperialists didn’t venture abroad to plant the Cross so much as pluck the goose.
Capitalism is like Chekov's gun, only a threat in the wrong hands.
A united Europe has proven to be a porous ideological target and a fiscal illusion.
Film
There are few aesthetic differences between propaganda and pornography.
Elmer Gantry’s hypocrisy is as American as apple pie.
Manly men have been cut by the soft focus of political correctness. Soft is the new hard. Pretty Boy Floyd is now just pretty. Men are weak and women are strong. Thelma might marry Louise!
Woody Allen has been making the same film for 40 years. His girls wear pants; quirky but capable; his men are flaccid and inept. The perennial urban putz is Allen’s most significant contribution to American cinema.
Humphrey Bogart could play any part because he was everyman – he looked to be the guy next door.
Hollywood artistic products cater to pornographic, politically correct, or pubescent tastes – the loathsome and the lonesome.
Adolescence and tumescence are the cash cows of the movie industry.
If Helen Hunt had a better agent, she might be Meryl Streep.
Casablanca would not enjoy iconic stature without the pairing of Bogart and Bergman. He was everyman and she was every man’s fantasy.
Foreign affairs
Sending billions to Pakistan is a little like sending air fare to Roman Polanski so he might date your daughter. It’s bound to end badly.
Israel is thought to be the canary in the coal mine; a better metaphor might be sacrificial lamb.
Pandering or conciliation makes conflict and violence more, not less, likely. Weakness is a stimulus, not a deterrent, for aggressors.
The Islamist threat in the Middle East is existential; Iraq and Afghanistan, in contrast, are merely troublesome.
In Iraq, Americans have managed to do what the ayatollahs could not do; reverse the sectarian poles.
Allowing Turkey to join the European Union would be like making Mexico the 51st state.
It’s hard to believe that any politician will bring the “nation building” definition of victory into another presidential election cycle.
Why does the West need to save Islam from itself?
If the devout do not modify the proper noun “Muslim” with the adjective “moderate,” why do Westerners persist with such nonsense?
Equating the passage of time with progress doesn’t explain regressions like the Dark Ages, National Socialism, or the irredentism of contemporary Islam.
If Iraq was a distraction from Afghanistan, we should ask also why Afghanistan is not a distraction from the existential threat from Iran.
Israel can not do anything about her geography or her history; and to be candid, Israelis have done more with their modest sand box in fifty years than Persians or Arabs have done in the last five hundred.
Government
The first job of government is security; the second is cheeseburgers with fries.
The statist argues for more government hands in every detail of life - until government fails; and then he blames everyone except the “managers” feeding at the public trough.
The "community organizer" model is one that sees governance as a public relations problem; i.e. managing crisis by controlling the spin.
Public sector unions are permanent ‘welfare queens.’
When achievements are lacking, credentials are meaningless.
There are no risk free solutions or silver bullets; only painful trade offs.
Most “hobby horse” technology is expensive wishful thinking.
The problem with our notion of “public service” is that only half of the phrase is true.
Guns and violence
Guns are closely related to a historical suspicion of intrusive government. Americans do not give police, soldiers and criminals an exclusive franchise on deadly force. Call it defensive lethality. Guns also represent a kind of portable fair play. From the beginning, a gun was thought to be the great equalizer – an instrument that levels the field.
Modern gun rhetoric on the right is just that; actual revolutionary and criminal gun violence has been the near exclusive franchise of big cities and the professional left.
Just as guns and violence are not synonymous; legality and morality are not equivalent either.
A drunk driver, a criminal by definition, is more dangerous than any punk with a gun. The punk is just a potential criminal.
Intelligence
The nexus of Intelligence is warning. All other national security functions might be irrelevant if warning fails.
The Intelligence community is the product of Lincoln Log engineering, structured by events, not intelligent design.
Reason and religion are unique tests for contemporary warning and analysis.
A signal is not singular. Indeed, signals are irrelevant without receivers.
A secret world (of Intelligence) will always be at war with the free flow of information.
The space between analyst and process manager is often filled by talking dogs (the professional briefer).
Collection and targeting systems are impotent without a clear picture of the threat.
The hot wash-up is the rule, not the exception, in Intelligence and policy worlds.
National security analysis does not just support the policy process; it also sets the agenda for the Intelligence Community.
Internet
Social revolutions? The preferred use of the internet is porn, not politics.
Islamism
Moderation is not a movement. Unfortunately, Islamism is.
The wheels of imperial Islamism are lubricated by their oil and our debt.
The myth of moral equivalence is kin to the myth of the Islamic victim.
The Islamist’s bet is about will, or the lack of it; the willingness of infidels and apostates to resist the struggle, or jihad.
The Islamic justification for imperialism is no different than the obsolete and immoral rationalizations of European kings
In any armed struggle with Persia, the enemy of our enemy is not our friend.
Colonial Islam is not just another variety of imperial fascism, tempting as such analogies may be. Jihadists of the sword are not fighting for 50 Muslim varieties of nationalism; they struggle for a single transnational unity - religious, judicial, and cultural homogeneity.
The political motives for minimizing the Islamist threat are clear enough; fear, energy, and debt.
Whether by design or accident, Islamists have, at once, limited allied conventional options and lowered the nuclear threshold.
For Islamists, even in countries like Turkey and Indonesia, secularism is a target, not the aspiration, of jihad.
Islamism has the best allies that money can buy.
Politics
Nobody has good answers to stupid questions.
Democracy is a bit of an odd duck; sometimes we get what we want and, just as often, we get what we deserve.
No doubt every agency is born of good intentions, but over time the institution becomes the enemy of the idea.
When government at any level fails to deliver on promises it can not possible keep, “progressives” light torches and reach for the pitchforks.
The European Union is a porous political target and a very fragile fiscal illusion.
America was a business before it was a republic.
One of the great mysteries of modern times is the suicidal impulse to tolerate intolerance in the name of tolerance.
Only a lawyer or politician would suggest that safety is not a constant concern of those who take the risks.
No policy decision is well served by ambiguity or doubt.
Sanity is now the major domestic concern; “security” leaves the tent with new entitlements circus.
If the war of ideas is lost in the ambient noise of political correctness or politics, shooting wars may not matter.
Politics is the most persistent ambient noise surrounding Intelligence analysis and reporting.
For totalitarians, the first election is often the last election.
The rioters who torch police stations and public buildings are not the kind of citizens who will restore civility or rebuild infrastructure.
Since his retirement, Colin Powell postures like Arianna Huffington; a kind of political hermaphrodite – a chap who could play for either team.
Reason and Rhetoric
Science may be necessary for argument, but only art is sufficient.
Truth is what we believe; unfortunately, what we believe is not necessarily true.
Strongly held beliefs will often trump evidence and logic.
Believers do not suffer apostates gladly.
The chasm between analysis and acceptance is often unbridgeable.
Experts too close to any subject often develop blind spots, an unwillingness or inability to see new or contradictory evidence.
Inertia is often the loudest voice in the room.
Vacuums of ignorance are often filled by beliefs.
The great virtue of a briefing is the captive audience.
Peer review is too often confused with institutional consensus.
Terrorism
Only Muslims can save Islam from itself.
If the object of terror is fear, Islamism is an unqualified success.
Trying to speak or write about terrorism without mentioning Islam or Muslims is a little like discussing malaria without mentioning mosquitoes.
Tolerating intolerance in the name of tolerance is the first great cipher of the 21st Century.
Terrorism has become a cash cow for academics, think tanks, and government agencies.
Our inability or unwillingness to prioritize the targets in the Islamist threat matrix is an alarming and dangerous development.
“Cultural” exchange programs with the Sunni and Shia worlds are mostly one-way streets.
Threat analysis
Believing the worst about enemies is a no-lose wager. If we are wrong, and the worst does not materialize, nothing is lost; if we are correct, we are prepared for the worst.
Overestimates might be embarrassing, but underestimates might be fatal.
We can not use the possibilities of the future to discount the realities of the present.
Oil lubricates the wheels of contemporary Sunni imperialism.
The nexus of the Muslim Brotherhood and similar Islamic agencies is a common religious bond or purpose - not the propagation of Arab, Egyptian, or Persian culture.
Limiting the definition of jihad to “purification” is a little like comparing a ritual splash of water outside a mosque to an actual bath.
The sword is a standard feature of Islamic heraldry; its purpose is both symbolic and literal.
Sunni and Shia appear to make common cause when the subject is Israel.
Shia nuclear weapons could be rationalized as the springboard to first world status and the lever that undermines Arab hegemony in dar al Islam.
Military Affairs
A thousand good captains will not compensate for one bad general.
The military arts (tactics, maneuver, and strategy) are the creative bridges that allow the military sciences to be orchestrated to successful ends.
Looking good seems to be the new being good; a heretofore merit based military culture is absorbing an ethic of political correctness at the expense of victory.
Flag officers seldom let military exercises interfere with protocol, bureaucratic, or budgetary duties.
Real warriors don’t need chest hair or fruit salad.
There are no military operations analyses which measure events which might or do not happen.
Any general who no longer believes in winning or victory ought to keep that sentiment to himself - or find another line of work.
The military is the blunt instrument of policy; it is not a “think tank” or a test bed.
No serving military officers should be asked, nor should they accept, any mission which asks them to campaign in domestic culture wars.
No flag officers should be asked to fight for, or front for, changes in foreign policy.
Military advice should not be confused with consent.
The Joint Chiefs and their subordinates execute national policy; they do not make it or approve it.
No soldier should believe that ambiguous delusions like “stability” are a substitute for victory.
Morality
Faith and trust are synonymous.
No civil society is possible without trust and regret.
Men drown in seas of self absorption - or as any New Yorker might see it, obsessive compulsive disorders.
Criminal violence often makes the present uncomfortable; abortion always makes the future impossible.
The Press and Journalism
Press scribblers prefer the comfort of lies to the discomforts of truth.
Absent security, freedom of the press is meaningless.
If you let the fox into the hen house, you know whose huevos are in play.
Featuring more liberals, to save a sinking “mainstream,” is a little like bailing water into the progressive boat.
A “progressive” newsroom has three building blocks; a 25% set aside for women who want to be men, a 25 % set aside for men who want to be women, and a 50% reserve for those who can’t make either team.
Most journalism isn’t the “first draft of history” as it might be the last draft of truth.
A news panel or reality (pardon any redundancy) show is incomplete today unless your team includes at least one bitchy or condescending representative of the British Commonwealth.
Alpha males are seldom appreciated among the girly men and khaki sniffers that frequent Pentagon press conferences.
Political myth and innuendo sell better than facts.
Violence
Just as guns and violence are not synonymous; legality and morality are not equivalent either.
For too many, abortion is just a more callous variety of birth control.
Every auto injury or death caused by a drunk is criminal violence by definition.
Since WWII, the deadliest weapon of choice worldwide is the machete. The angels of death in the Rwandan genocide were clubs and machetes.
Organized street violence and arson is tactic peculiar to left-leaning activists and unions.
If homicide is an arbitrary execution in the present, surely abortion is a premeditated crime against the future.
Epidemic rates of mayhem, legal or otherwise, are peculiar to large cities and their politically correct (mostly liberal) constituencies.
Compared to abortion, gun homicide occupies the moral high ground: Two of the three principals in abortion, the father and the child, have no say in the matter.
Big city crime and abortion, not guns, are the principal symptoms of any climate of hate or any cultures of violence in America today.
Writing
All literature is the search for a better metaphor.
There are three keys to better writing; fewer words, knowing what to throw out, and a good editor.
All you can ever say about the written word is who received it, not who read it.
A shot from the grave is any prescriptive, book or essay, written in retirement.
Euphemisms usually play two roles; masks for painful truths or attempts to change the subject.
Bibliography:
CIA:
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/index-of-declassified-articles/index-of-declassified-articles-by-author.html
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/index-of-declassified-articles/index-of-declassified-articles-by-title.html
Intelligence and Espionage
http://books.google.com/books?id=1K5vmRkpFskC&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254&dq=G.+Murphy+Donovan&source=bl&ots=xGL0qKv0kq&sig=UcNk_P7Jr4GFA8nzrqCaOk5JF_M&hl=en&ei=fLJnTZLKJ4XYgQfIhtHLCg&sa=X&oi=bo
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/08/signals-and-noise-in-intellige/
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/Articles/1989/1989%20donovan.pdf
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a914434063~db=all~jumptype=rss
New English Review:
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/74814/sec_id/74814
American Thinker:
http://www.americanthinker.com/g_murphy_donovan/
Family Security Matters:
http://www.google.com/search?client=gmail&rls=gm&q=G.%20Murphy%20Donovan,%20Family%20Security%20Matters%20archives
Jerusalem Post, Chicago Tribune, and others
http://www.airpower.au.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj88/win88/donovan.html
http://www.americanideologicalsociety.com/ais/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1068
http://www.airpower.au.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1986/jan-feb/donovan.html
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1992-10-25/entertainment/9204060759_1_gen-schwarzkopf-peter-petre-full-autobiography
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=162681
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/08/signals-and-noise-in-intellige/
Blogs:
http://ljpkjsah.wordpress.com/
http://agnotologyinjournalism.blogspot.com/
http://anacostiaangst.blogspot.com/2009/02/reform-and-accountability.html
