WAPO's "Top Secret America"
Tuesday, July 20, 2010 at 12:10AM 
First chunk of what will clearly be a large series flow of information, and certainly an accompanying book from Dana Priest and William Arkin at the Washington Post.
The general theme is, "Be amazed at how big our secretive defense world is!" Also, "Look how big it has grown since 9/11!" Finally, "Much of this work is redundant, useless in its overwhelming flow, and no closer to dot-connecting than before 9/11!"
All valid points but all also painfully predictable and well known. So the charges aren't particularly new or revealing, even as the great flow of anecdotes are well designed to make you especially anxious and frustrated. I would expect tons of air time for the duo, lots of op-eds bemoaning the details revealed, and the usual congressional grumblings.
But not a lot of positive action in reply.
Two bits caught my eye:
The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don't dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency's analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.
This is why briefers ruled before 9/11 and it's why they still rule. The flow of info is too great for the system to handle. So the "just-tell-me-what-I-need-to-know-right-now" principal relies primarily on whomever does the all-purpose daily or weekly brief.
Second, befitting all "electronic-Pearl-Harbor-is-right-around-the-corner" media flow:
And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major military commands claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and least-defined frontier.
"Frankly, it hasn't been brought together in a unified approach," CIA Director Panetta said of the many agencies now involved in cyber-warfare.
"Cyber is tremendously difficult" to coordinate, said Benjamin A. Powell, who served as general counsel for three directors of national intelligence until he left the government last year. "Sometimes there was an unfortunate attitude of bring your knives, your guns, your fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf." Why? "Because it's funded, it's hot and it's sexy."
This is why the problem, which existed long before 9/11, gets worse inexorably over time: the latest crisis du jour becomes simply the newest layer of effort added on top of all the rest (in PNM, this was my explanation for how America's "national security interests" mushroom over time). Nobody and nothing ever get downgraded or truly eliminated because, once created, they take on a life of their own, with all sorts of bureaucrats and contractors protecting their programs. My favorite example is missile defense, which is now being touted in op-eds as our great response to North Korea and Iran. Not exactly how it started out, but heh, you work with what life gives you.
I don't mean to pooh-pooh the piece, which is very good and certainly rare enough in these days of tight budgets in the MSM. I just find the target too easy and too big, and, as I said above, I don't think this kind of reporting stands much chance of having any real impact because the whole long war mindset regarding transnational terrorism is too strong to crack right now, both for legitimate and illegitimate reasons. Everybody will decry all right, but nothing will be done. Even with the push to cut defense by untold billions over the next X years, a lot of this stuff will remain sacred.
And that's a shame, but the reporting here is all accurate. It's too big, too redundant, and too useless to justify the resource diversion. The investment should be in resilience in the face of bad things happening in this complex world, not intelligence fantastically tasked with preventing bad things from happening in the first place. There's real money to be made in the former, and way too much to be wasted on the latter.
Reader Comments (5)
All true, though some of the redundancy is built in to be exactly that. This seems like an extremely large target that doesn't necessarily need the scorn of the WaPo, though they probably got tired of doing Tea Party pieces.
On one note though, the piece breaks down all contingents of the Defense Department, which is a wild misrepresentation of the budget for the IC as a whole. Why not break down what every part of the Air Force does? Or Army? Or Navy? The DoD is a huge entity, that seems like adding a lot of substantial layers onto their argument that isn't entirely fair.
Thanks for the post however.
There seems to be the implication that anyone with a TS contract or TS facility clearance is actually doing TS work. That's certainly not true.
In my entire career in the military-industrial complex, I've only seen two things that were TS: One was my password for WWMCCS, which was a TS-high network, but I never saw anything on it at that level. The other was when I accidentally stumbled over a codeword, and was told "you can never say that word again here." That was tough, it was a word I used a lot as slang/jargon :-)
They didn't subcontract with Google search?
I remember my first experience with "intelligence" information. After much fuss and bother I was allowed to peruse some files that I hoped would be helpful to a working "field" guy. I discovered the files were full of bad information and unsubstantiated hearsay. It was then I realized that there were good reasons that some folks guarded access as fiercely as they did. They didn't want you to know that were actually guarding an "empty" vault so to speak.
I was in the security clearance game after 911. A Marine gunnery Sergeant can lose his "clearance" if he comes home drunk and punches his wife in the nose. But an engineer can travel to China as long as he assures us that he is just "sightseeing."
I think the article may do some good. Cut to the bone though it says that men who can't tell us what they do, sit in buildings we can't get into, and write reports for men who are too busy to read them. This is accomplished using my tax money...how much is a secret. Anyone see a problem here?
Reminds me of Joseph Tainter's book "The Collapse of Complex Societies".
The "Society" here is the intelligence community.
Clay Shirky summarized as follows: <http://www.shirky.com/weblog/>
"Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.
Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. "