![]() ![]() Ironically, this effort may be best accomplished by Intelligence Studies going back to Snyder in the 1970s and his warning that culture should be used as the explanation of last resort for Security Studies. Intelligence Studies today needs a similar ‘intellectual intervention’ as it has almost unknowingly advanced in the post-Cold War era on the coattails of Security Studies but has largely failed to apply the same corrective measures. The argument leans heavily in many ways on the fine work of Desch and Johnston in Security Studies, who cogently brought to light over fifteen years ago how ultra-popular cultural theories were best utilized as supplements to traditional realist approaches and were not in fact capable of supplanting or replacing realist explanations entirely. This restriction brings about unintentional cognitive closure that damages intelligence analysis. In Area 51, Jacobsen shows us what has really gone on in the Nevada desert, from testing nuclear weapons to building super-secret, supersonic jets to pursuing the War on Terror. ![]() This is about how the conceptualization of ‘culture’ in intelligence studies, amongst scholars at first but subsequently practitioners as well, has taken on too powerful a role, one that has become too restrictive in its impact on thinking about other intelligence communities, especially non-Western ones. ![]()
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