9/11 + 6

Remember the lost.

Never forget the righteous anger.

Do not lose the realization of the mission that came on the terrible day of aluminum rain.

Press on with the fight, no matter how dark the night may seem.

No end but victory, no rest until the enemy is no more.

In a generation

From tdaxp, we note with grim resonance the following:

“Within a generation of the enslavement of Europe and China to Stalinism, arrogant American liberals combined with comforatble American leftists to do their best to defeat American action in the Vietnam War, and make South-East Asia safe for Communism.

If history repeats itself, or at least rhymes, within a generation of 9/11 active support of al Qaeda inspired movements should be fashionable on college campuses.”

We fear we shall see that day sooner. That generation may well be on the timeline of Moore’s law.

And as the man once said, the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.

The milestone regarding contractor deployments to Iraq exceeding total nation-state forces should also be noted, as the fulfillment of a long-standing prediction. This has occurred even in the face of the surge – despite many predicting that a privatized war would only come about in the wake of the US “retreat” they had so hoped for.

As the shooters go, so follows the privatization of the intelligence community. The fight for the future of the Long War might soon pass from the hands of government and into the hands of those who own the infrastructure, and the human capital, which must be defended against the depredations of terrorism and non-state violence. If new government administrations in the US and abroad choose to walk away from the fight, they will surrender the last vestiges of the fraying fiction which is the Westphalian monopoly on the use of force. Then privatization will be seen in full measure.

They also serve, who only stand and wait

We have noted that there are a good many fine analysts and officers who come into this latest contremps rather late in the game. Most are in the process of proving themselves, daily and quietly, in a dozen different areas of the community. But many remember St. Crispin’s Day speech – especially on the occasion of our own national holidays, and count themselves less a part of the enterprise of the Long War than their companions who have seen it through since the dark days of September, and in harm’s way on strange foreign shores.

To this we hope our collective experiences in combat and in crisis will weigh enough to carry our admonition against such thoughts. We spare no words for those who have not had the stomach for the fight – who turned away when their chance came to step forward, or who deliberately chose the coward’s path. But for those whose skills and abilities lie in the vaults far to the rear in reachback, or those who have sought deployments but been given lonely outposts far from the core of the current conflict, we would extend our hope that they find stillness. Their hour may well yet come.

We recall the World War II story of a briefer for the Special Operations Executive, whose responsibility it was to instruct deploying officers and agents in the use of their assigned communications and code techniques. This was typically the final briefing given before clandestine insertion into enemy territory. On this particular day, he was assigned to give an extremely unusual group presentation to a large body of men, who would be tasked to direct action missions in support of SOE’s mandate to “set Europe ablaze”(a mission also shared by their sister service, the American Office of Strategic Services, who had contributed men to the group.) These men had been in training for what seemed an eternity, and were eager to join the fight. They had seen others come and gone from the schoolhouse – to unknown fates in Occupied Europe, or to return: harrowed, but covered in the glory of deeds of unimaginable courage and effect.

Their briefer gave them the final line of this poem as his own admonishment, in order that they might not hold their service so cheaply. They would go on to become among the most successful group of paramilitary operations officers in history, under the codename Jedburgh. And they would always remember their briefer, whose contributions to their survival were no less important than the men with whom they fought on those dark nights in the deep woods and mountains of France.

We would offer the same final line today, for the same reasons. There are future Jeds out there, and before this Long War is over we will need them most.


When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait

Milton (On His Blindness)

The future of the VTC

The Video TeleConference (VTC) is one of the little heralded advances which has so transformed the nature of command and staff decision making during this Long War, as it moved down from the most senior command ranks (as in Kosovo) to ever progressively more connected lower echelons. (For good or for ill is for the historians to decide, should there ever be a concerted effort to review this humble administrative technology amongst all of the other wiz-bang geek toys now given to us humble knuckledraggers.)

The future of the VTC may be emerging, however, from an unlikely spot. Virtual “actors working in real time from remote locations have been beamed onto a stage where they performed with live, in-the-flesh actors.”

As fascinating as this sounds from the futurists’ perspective, we cannot help but remember the old teleconferencing system originally established for nuclear command and control, for use by the National Command Authorities in the dark ages of the 1960’s. This older system was quite visually striking, involving the use of mannequins seated at a conference table, whose features were a transparent model of the individual designated to be virtually present. Into that shaped screen model was projected a video of the speaker from the remote location. All in all, for the time no doubt the very model of the modern virtual environment, and the think tank (RAND, we believe) and its government sponsors were undoubtedly and justifiably as proud of it as those actors are of their mediated creation. However, looking back, will we find such artifacts as quaint, and as disturbing, as their early warfighting counterparts?

Among the great unpublished historical images of the Long War will be any one of the number of rooms installed in numerous palaces throughout the theatre, marked by a high dollar cost plasma flat screens, with diligent staff clustered around the only faint light in the otherwise darkened room, the other circuits on overstressed electrical systems having blown out but the all important VTC still active… sic transit gloria mundi.

Competition and rent-seeking in the Intelligence Community

Aside from the horrors of being forced to listen to interminable discussion of bureaucratic procedure and the ego-stroking of committee structures, we have struggled to articulate our objections to the intermittent re-appearance of proposals that would seek to regulate our profession through some external standards body, usually academic or legalistic in nature. We have decried such attempts before, and asked that others “profess to me no profession”.

This item by George Will in the Washington Post well articulates the argument against such a process using the example of another industry. Unsurprisingly, it too is one of the creative professions, in which the distinctions between various kinds of tasks are blurry and frequently changing.

The key line, however:

“This is done in the name of "professionalization," but it really amounts to cartelization. Persons in the business limit access by others -- competitors -- to full participation in the business.
Being able to control the number of one's competitors, and to dispense the pleasure of status, is nice work if you can get it…”

When your humble authors here speak of professionalization, we speak of the cultivation of the analyst, the development of the individual officer. The definition of standards - and the efforts to meet them - is best done at the individual and small team level through performance review, mentoring, and the encouragement of individual development opportunities. The community has far too many barriers to the expression of talent, initiative, and superior performance already. It does not need additional measures to further distort the marketplace so that those less able to compete directly in the difficult world of economics and ideas can rest easy in their newly crafted sinecures.

And we say this as mid-career professionals who constantly look back on our younger, more brilliant and far better positioned counterparts nipping close at our heels. For while we might for a time enjoy the benefits of keeping such minds from taking our jobs, it would not serve the country’s interest, nor would it in the long term saving the community and ourselves from the death of irrelevance as change inevitably sweeps through. And change delayed is not evolutionary but becomes revolutionary – and there are already too many forces at work which stir the torch waving mobs to life, at least as far as that metaphor will carry a range of introverted pseudo-librarian personality types which make up most analytical ranks. (Your authors apologize, but lightly, for reliance upon the all too common but proven stereotypes, however please accept it as shorthand to preclude a longer discussion of Meyers-Briggs personality types and conditioned reactions under stress by individuals in varying environments and organizational cultures…)

This Long War is a generational war. Enacting hurdles to ensure that only those of the next generation who meet with some arbitrary stamp of approval are blessed entry into the war is among the ultimate foolishness; especially when that stamp is bestowed based on the conception of the profession understood by the older generation. While core analytic tradecraft remains the same, many of the other critical skills needed by intelligence professionals today are far different from what would have been considered standard or even appropriate for their counterparts even a short decade ago. (We know, having lived through the painful growth experiences of acquiring those new skills which we lacked, and which no one ever believed we would need until after we needed them, and needed them yesterday.)

It is this protectionist impulse also that one sees driving many of the commentators who rail against the increasing privatization of the Intelligence Community. But that, our dear friends, is a topic for another day….

h/t Instapundit, for the original Washington Post item