Give Leon Panetta a break. Imagine that you’re the CIA director. You’ve heard, for years, armchair critics berate the agency for not being sufficiently forward-leaning. But you’ve been launching drone strikes against al-Qaeda’s senior leadership in Pakistan’s tribal areas. How good an idea is that? Not a great one, sure; but ain’t nobody invading Pakistan, so this is what we’re left with, you grumble. But one of your spotters — someone you bring all the way out to Khost Province in the hope of penetrating AQSL operational security — turns around and murders your operatives in one of the most horrific one-day losses in the CIA’s history. And you’re immediately hit with those same armchair critics grousing that your tradecraft is faulty. So you write: “That’s like saying Marines who die in a firefight brought it upon themselves because they have poor war-fighting skills.” You’re venting. We get it. And you should stick up for your people.

But Abu Muqawama raises a good point — one that’s on my mind as I finish up a piece on the U.S. intelligence community that I think you’re going to like. I’ve been reporting on the intelligence community since 2003, and I think I might know a few things about it by now. And one of the most glaring absences is that I’ve never heard of a lessons-learned process in the intelligence community as rigorous as you’ll find in the military. Which is doubly strange considering that the Defense Department owns nearly 90 percent of U.S. intelligence assets and many CIA people come to the agency from the military. CIA has its Studies in Intelligence journal (which at its best — and I mean this in a philosophy-nerd way — can present fascinating epistemological questions). But that’s not the same thing as a rigorous review of what went right and wrong after each particular operation or analytic product.

This, by the way, is something that I think asshole journalists like myself should be subjected to as well. What did I do correctly in this or that story? What did I do wrongly? Where did my procedures for acquiring or interpreting information succeed, and where did they fail — or where did I fail them? Etc. Intelligence analysis isn’t so different from journalism, and I don’t want anyone to think I’d propose an onerous standard for one community while exempting a comparable one that I, uh, belong to. The easiest way to let our standards drop is to not be attentive to their use. And the easiest way to ignore their use is to not have to institutionalize their review.