This is a review of "First In". The success of jawbreaker offers lessons for US intelligence, but it would be hard to codify them with regulations or formal procedures. Rather, it requires officials who can balance competing goals. For example, intelligence organizations need to reward initiative and innovation by individuals, but they also need to ensure that the organizations do not lapse into confusion. They need to turn over staff so the young, the eager, and the ambitious can find opportunities, but they must also avoid simply forcing good people out. Organizations need to be efficient, but they must also tolerate seemingly unproductive supporting activities that might provide big payoffs in the future. In short, taking advantage of these lessons requires that hard-to-quantify trait called leadership — the ability to identify clear strategic goals, articulate a vision to the troops, and then make the day-to-day decisions to strike a balance between competing objectives. No set of rules and procedures can guarantee success, but one can craft rules that give officials the authority and the responsibility they need to strike this balance and then hold them accountable for their decisions. Left to themselves, bureaucracies reward people who master the established process — that is, good bureaucrats. The challenge for intelligence organizations is to do the routine stuff while also stirring up the pot enough for innovators and risk-takers to have a chance to do their magic. This depends as much on leadership and imagination as it does on regulation and statute. Without them, there will be fewer Gary Schroens in service of their country, and the country will be poorer for it.
What they really need is jazz. About this book, Warren Bass, a former member of the 9/11 Commission staff, wrote in the Washington Post in 2005: The author is relatively laconic about battlefield blunders, but he is far less forgiving about what he sees as a massive strategic error: the Bush administration's shift of its focus to Iraq at the expense of the country he helped liberate from the Taliban. The only way to get bin Laden's head on that pike, Schroen warns, is to win full cooperation from Pakistan's balky military, beef up the CIA presence in the region, bring back the indispensable Special Operations units that had been pulled out "as early as March 2002" to prepare for the Iraq invasion, and launch a relentless, coordinated manhunt on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. This is deeply informed advice, ignored at American civilians' peril.
A Hero's Tale, Review by Bruce Berkowitz | 
