The New York Times had an interesting article ("Challenging the Generals") in today's magazine talking about how lower ranking officers in the U.S. Army do not believe that there superiors understand the reality of the conflict that is being fought in Iraq.

To me, this has eery parallels to the 9/11 Commission Report, who found that the CIA, State Department, NSA, FBI, etc. (amongst other shortcomings) failed to turn the reports of junior filed officers into a comprehensive analysis of the terror threats facing the United States.

I'm starting to think that a lot of the problems facing today's government are driven almost entirely by a failure to adopt to a post-Cold War, globalized society.  As a result, the bureaucracy is facing more complex challenges whose roots it does not understand and applying the logic of a generation ago to solve them.

In this context, the recent problem of tainted products originating from China would be seen as a failure of authorities to align their base of enforcement efforts with the manufacturing footprint of America's retailers (i.e., everything's imported).

Let me know if you've an opinion on this; I'm going to try and expand it and turn it into a predictive model: what's the next part of the bureaucracy to be hit...