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The Attack On Pearl Harbor And 2001 Attacks On The World Trade Center

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The United States (U.S) Intelligence community has come a long way since the revolutionary war. After winning independence from England, the U.S would not invest much into intelligence or foreign policy until the 20th century. Foreign policy was simply not a priority for our young nation, having an ocean on eastern and Western boarders of the country severely limited potential threats. President Franklin D. Roosevelt would be the first president since Washington to understand the importance of intelligence and lay the groundwork for what we now consider national intelligence. Unfortunately, it has taken two catastrophic failures in intelligence for the U.S to realize the need for good intelligence and take steps to improve itself. The …show more content…

Unfortunately, due to the fractured state of U.S intelligence community, that was never a possibility. This major intelligence failure was a wakeup call, and the goal of the U.S intelligence community was now to prevent another such attack from happening. Cold War Intelligence The Cold War with the Soviet Union and its allies started almost immediately after the end of WWII, and would be the next step for the U.S intelligence community. The signing of the National Security Act of 1947 by president Truman drastically restructured the military and intelligence community, creating the Department of Defense (DoD) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) while establishing a clear chain of command (CIA, 2008). With the establishment of the CIA and director of central intelligence, The National Security Act of 1947 the U.S had a permanent and legitimized intelligence community, one that could start to develop and refine their own methods of operation and traditions (Lowenthal, 2017). The National Security Act of 1947 would go largely unchanged for 57 years, not being severely altered until 2004. After Pearl Harbor the intelligence communities primary function was to ensure that a catastrophe of that scale would not occur again. During the cold war, the largest threat to the U.S was a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, so an extremely large percentage of intelligence assets were focused on observing the Soviet nuclear program (Bukharin,

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