Government Agencies Books

i found this very interesting and accurate. I was stationed at Phu Bi 8th Field Station. Enjoyed reading this 100%. It also showed how difficult it is when intercepting traffice, very easy to misinturpret.

The entire contents of the following review are public domain, since I wrote them when employed by the U.S. federal government:

"Some officers could now spend as many as four years at a duty station before getting a new assignment.

The Air Force is now looking for ways to reduce the number of station-to-station moves for officers, particularly for those in the United States.

By extending the average assignment length for an officer from three years to four years, the Air Force believes it can reduce the number of yearly officer PCS moves. Any moves occurring before four years would primarily be for professional development reasons only, said Lt. Gen. Roger A. Brady, deputy chief of staff for manpower and personnel.

"We don't necessarily want to move people around as quickly as we may have in the past, if there is not a developmental reason for that," he said. "And there is a lot of development that can take place in your first few years of service, wherever you are."

The general said that for many young officers, lieutenants in particular, the greatest professional development comes from gaining expertise and experience at one stable location. For higher-ranking officers, professional development comes from attending schools or by taking a command position. Real professional development, the general said, does not come from simply moving to a new assignment.

"We have always been a force that wanted to develop people, and part of developing people is to give them different opportunities," he said. "But if you are not careful, you can confuse movement with development. So what we are looking at are policies that might create moves that are not necessarily related to development."

General Brady also said fewer moves for officers will put less stress on their families by allowing children to stay in a single school for a longer time and by allowing spouses to find more stable careers.

While the change to PCS policy will mostly affect officers inside the continental United States, it will also affect officers stationed overseas, especially at those assigned to European bases.

"We find that some of our traditional overseas assignments... are perhaps as stable as (in the Continental United States,) and so it begs the question as to whether or not you really need to have that disparity in how you manage units," he said.

Manning overseas units at higher levels increases PCS moves and the costs associated with them. The Air Force will now be more amenable to extending officers that want to stay longer at an overseas tour and will look closer than it has in the past at officers who want to shorten their overseas tours, General Brady said.

The Air Force has other reasons for limiting the number of officer PCS moves. One of those reasons is recouping the cost of the moves and applying that funding in other places.

"We have a budgetary issues in a lot of areas: fighting the global war on terror, high ops tempo, ageing aircraft fleets and growing manpower costs," the general said.

General Brady said more effective management of officer moves will better help their professional development, and will also free up funding so it can be applied to winning the war on terror and to recapitalizing ageing Air Force aircraft."

In 1950, Joe McCarthy started telling USAmericans that there was a Great Communist Conspiracy that had infiltrated the U.S. govt., the Press, the churches, you name it. One of his prime exhibits was the AMERASIA case, where what started as an espionage conspiracy suddenly, mysteriously collapsed. "It's true," said the Right and the Republicans. "Nonsense you're all paranoids," said Democrats, liberals, and the Left. Now, thanks to Klehr and Radosh, we have the truth, and it is stranger than anything either side ever suspected. There were multiple, independent, overlapping conspiracies, at AMERASIA magazine (to spy for Stalin),in the State Dept. (to undermine FDR's China Policy), in the Communist movement (to shape U.S. policy) in the Justice Dept. (to cover up political embarrassments) and in Congress (to cover up the other conspiracies). Had the truth been told then, we might have been spared some of the worst political messes of modern times. Highly Recommended.

Morse's credentials alone and the topic of breach of government security alone should be enough to get every American to peruse this book. But his writing style and pace will make every reader not want to put it down until they've read it cover to cover. The idea of having "spy-master" Walker write a beginning portion of the book was wonderful and very eye-opening.

It's scary to think of all the loopholes the government can stoop to. And the American people put their trust and faith in the government (usually). Of course, everyone working in government from the president on down puts their pants on one leg at a time and uses the bathroom just like the rest of us, but there's a certain sense of awe in Americans that people in these high positions, also CIA, Secret Service, etc., will be upstanding people. Simply checking if someone has ever been convicted of a felony before letting them in certain jobs isn't enough to tell that they won't be bought out once they take that job.

Morse shows readers that our fears are very justified about our government today and that we should take notice of what he has uncovered -- which is our history, now -- and how this applies to what we can do and expect in our future.

A very telling book, told by an author who, I hope, will keep on busting corruption.

Just when it seems that the government is once more wallowing in huge budget deficits and that a balanced budget is a thing of the past, this book by noted organization and fiscal administration expert Irene Rubin only gains more significance for the insights it offers about current condition. While the book recounts the struggle to balance the budget, it also gives a glimpse of the real problems agencies have experienced and will continue to suffer from because of hollow government and the mismatch between agency mission and workforce reduction. Rubin's book speaks to those who care about government and its public and how the market -- of contractors and clientele groups of government programs -- have caught agencies in games of survival. The book carries one of the emerging paradoxes of public administration today: that while agencies are beaten by mismatched personnel cuts and growing missions, they become less able to resist Congressional mandates. They learn to obscure quality reductions because lower performance might invite more cuts; yet hiding the pain only seems to prove the existence of slack and that reduction was deserved in the first place. It's amazing for Rubin to have captured this picture of government bureaucracy at this moment in time.

I am an International Relations grad. student. This book is a class assignment. It turns out a really good read: like watching a live debate in front of you, one gets a basketful of good ideas as well as personalities. Almost every author in the book brings with him/her a refreshing set of arguments and presents each with coherence and cogency. IMO, many articles are befitting for publications like the New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, the Economist and the NYT.

How J Edagar Hoover was allowed to be in charge of the FBI for as long as he did and under many presidents is astonshing. This book explores one part of the terror Hoover unleashed during his reign. The author notes,"although Bureau agents in the 1930s walked through submachine gun firestorms when going after John Dillinger,agents in the 1960s wouldn't take a baseball bat from a Klansman,even as the bat turned red with the blood of the person(black or a sympathizer)being beaten".FBI started the 60s passivly observing racist violence and ending by egging on racists.
The book documents the FBI's war on civil right well and I highly recommend.

Michael Moran's The British Regulatory State is a must read for all interested in questions about how our polities are being governed. Focusing on the UK, he identifies two types of regulation: 1) a club government of autonomous networks of policy makers, inspectors, professional, and bureaucrats, clearly elitist but disaggregated and 2) a post-1970 regulatory state replacing the old informal system with a pervasive and intrusive application of surveillance and performance evaluation. His analysis of the cancerous spread of this "high modernism" holds significant implications for the USA and all state's adopting the mantra of markets and the new public management. The work tends to be heavy going but is filled with pregnant insights. A survey of chapter six first and then the first chapter might help readers with key ideas and make the book easier to digest. But this is book is very much worth the effort and its content very important.

THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: SECURITY UNDER SCRUTINY edited by Athan Theoharis and others joins others in the 'Understanding Our Government' series to provide college-level readers with a primer on the CIA's history, purposes, and activities. Chapters describe its organization, intelligence operations, controversies and events, considering the changing role and perception of secrets and intelligence work over the decades and spying and interception projects fostered by the CIA.

Brillant insight of theoretical aspects related to the state and agency. In particular, I would recommend to look into chapter 3 which challenges the traditional conceptualisation of nation-states.