RP 3

When reading Useful Adversaries, I was struck by how many failures were attributed to poor communication between China and the US. To me, I kept thinking about how that type of policy failure is not that likely to be a problem today. In the reading when discussing how China attempted to deter the US from crossing the parallel, I was shocked at how discombobulated the entire process felt. Contrasting that with the present, even with an isolated country like North Korea, we are still able to see their internal media to gather open-source intelligence on what they are thinking. Our interconnectedness with the world, allows us to have a firmer understanding of our adversaries AND it allows us to convey our intentions with our adversaries. On a similar note, I spend a lot of time thinking about data and was shocked at the lack of available information that the US and China had on each other. It seems to me that we had more information on Russians, and I wonder if this is due to some of the same issues that we discussed last time we meant. I'm not entirely familiar with the state of intelligence in this era, but it definitely seems to be lacking.