The sun rises on Japanese intelligence

Further to the study of comparative intelligence traditions, we note the recent increased discussion of the role and activities of the intelligence profession in Japan.

The country’s WWII legacy has long made discussion of such matters extremely controversial within the context of the domestic political scene. Recent publications have however shed new light on otherwise neglected aspects of the country’s own intelligence community.

The National Bureau of Asian Research has recently reviewed two Japanese language books on the subject. The first, Nihon No Intelligence Kikan, was written by the former Chief of the Cabinet Secretariat Information Research Bureau – a position which seems very roughly analogous to a US counterpart of the NIC or even the old Office of National Estimates. The book describes the organization of the agency, its activities, and the role of OSINT in Japanese intelligence.

The second volume, Strategy on Intelligence Activity by the State, was authored as a dialogue between a former intelligence officer in the Japanese Foreign Ministry and a former intelligence officer from the South Korean Navy.

For those wishing to peruse more official sources as background before diving into such works, there is also a short briefing paper available from the Japanese National Institute for Defense Studies, which provides a concise overview of the country’s intelligence structure.

We are pleased to see the internationalization of intelligence studies amongst our allies, and hope to see additional similar works in the near future (as well as English language printings…)


(With our humble thanks to the reader who kindly brought this to our attention).

OXCARTs and ARCHANGELs in the night

With the installation of the new display up at the main campus, there has been a lot of interest and discussion of the old OXCART program. We think this comes about not only from the inherent technical coolness of the aircraft and its mission, but from the deep desire of the new generation to connect with their Cold War predecessors – and the more recognizable operations of the past. Today’s activities, even those conducted in the far flung corners of the globe, are more likely to involve commercial off the shelf items and kludged and duct-taped solutions than the things of precision and beauty that were the bespoke instruments of the community’s past.

To be sure, there is still – and always will be – a certain amount of specialized hardware, and a few new cutting edge platforms. But this new age is a very different one – dominated by Small Stuff, and dual use. The community as a whole has not yet figured out how to build monuments to those efforts. We do frequently wonder, for example, how the historians of tomorrow may look back to commemorate the major events of the present day, such as the detention and rendition program. But those are questions that can only be answered by another generation.

We have no doubt, however, that the historians – at least those inside the community - will do so to their usual standard of excellence. Thankfully, great efforts are being made to ensure the preservation of unique history regarding programs such as OXCART, including the recent release of an excellent study looking at the trials and successes of the unique aircraft, its designers, and its crews. In addition, we look forward to the eventual product of the oral history program that has been diligently recording the memories and observations of those that were there at the beginning.

There remains yet plenty of research for those in academic intelligence studies that would seek to assist the current generation in finding its roots in the community’s history. We hope to see more work soon emerge to serve this need – and particularly in the areas where there might not be a large or photogenic monument with which to start a story.

Backlash against conference season

Former Spook has an interesting item regarding political backlash against the long established tradition of the conference season.

While we are no defender of government waste and abuse, and can list a few dozen conferences which are nothing more than the fig leaf over vacations for senior managers with no real responsibilities of their own, we find ourselves troubled by the implications of this exercise – not of legitimate oversight, but of the continuing game of political “gotcha” that has so bedeviled DOD and the IC in recent years.

At the same time we are attempting to revolutionize both military affairs and the intelligence community through information sharing, and break stovepipes and fiefdoms through collaboration, we are not supposed to spend funds on travel and convention rooms to do it?

To be sure, VTCs have brought us a lot of benefits, as have more persistent collaborative environments such as Groove/Jabber, Intellipedia, and many of the various account specific portals created within the several classified and SBU networks. We have high hopes for similar benefits from virtual worlds such as Second Life. But we have found that collaboration in those environments works best when individuals periodically have a chance to meet face to face, and especially when they can have discussions on informal ground in less than official contexts.

The conference season for has some time been for us a time of renewal, in which we are energized by exposure to other issues and accounts, and through these exchanges find new ways of thinking and new players in the professional space. In many cases, it may be the first time that introductions are made that will later be of immeasurable import in a crisis – because the first time you exchange business cards shouldn’t be during or immediately after a major terrorist attack or other intelligence failure.

We know a number of good young analysts which count on a single conference a year (if they are lucky, and mission requirements do not suddenly interrupt) as a rare chance to get out of the office and meet others, both working similar accounts as well as those in unrelated but intellectually stimulating fields. Several may even use their limited leave time (and personal funds) to attend – or volunteer to perform administrative scut work far beneath their normal responsibilities simply for a chance to be in the room. We have seen firsthand the benefits to moral and productivity that these occasions create, and the damage over time that is caused to shops which do not encourage such interactions.

Frankly, the typical DC venues used in the conference season are one of the primary arguments in favour of the “centralized” community in the greater Metro area. But we have found that we greatly favour the offsites out of town, where other players from dispersed geographies can also come out to play, and where the temptation to head back to the office in the middle of the day to deal with “pressing demands” are reduced – and where participants are more likely to hit the bar after a long day, allowing for far better networking, than to head home and maintain their pockets of splendid isolation.

Nothing good comes for free, but the higher order effects of the conference season are well worth the investment required to bring it about. And after all, cramped economy class seating, less than favourable flight times, sub-economy class rental cars from off brand chains, dingy “government rate” hotel rooms, and a per diem that barely buys a decent steak dinner are hardly the luxuries of say a typical Congressional junket, let alone a normal function in corporate America.

Life at Google from an outside perspective

We continue our unbridled fascination with Google as one of the major players in the new information industries (of which we strongly believe have actually now grown to encompass the intelligence community itself – and in fact, are in danger of rendering much of the community’s traditional activities irrelevant, but that’s another discussion.)

The search engine for years was the intelligence community’s secret weapon in managing the vast volumes of raw information that was generated by Cold War collection activities. Massive early investments were made in cataloging and retrieval software – primitive by today’s standards, revolutionary then… but Google isn’t just another search engine, in our opinion. It is an enterprise structure driven by the interplay of information, communication, and intentions. The manner in which it choose to structure itself, to envision its own activities, and to propagate its activities are interesting not only as an example of how such an operation may be accomplished but also in how an intelligence community driven by the same imperatives might have been shaped given a blank slate. We view Google as a looking glass to imperfectly glimpse a part of the future intelligence community.

Thus we note with great interest a new item, which if it were a national level service we were discussing, would probably qualify as a defector’s reporting – a recently resigned Google employee’s perspective on life at the ‘plex, written for his seniors at Microsoft. While the corporate world is by no means so harsh, we do find the tension of competitive forces interesting to observe in its own right.

But more importantly, we see in this account a number of things the community might do well to adopt itself. While the defector (er, former employee) highlights many of these as perceived weaknesses, by any means they are a definite step up from the typical vault dweller’s life.

It is simply inspiring to think of an intelligence agency transformed along such lines. How much easier would we find recruitment and retention if we could offer:

• A private MD-VA-DC area bus/van service for IC employees and contractors and not just the inter-building or metro shuttle, but an actual regional transport network)?
• A “tech stop” on each floor, with immediate repair and re-issue authority, and the ability to get networks immediately up and running for people transferring into a building?
• An “SSO stop”, modeled along the same lines, to help facilitate clearance transfers, meeting requests, and to act as an interface with investigation and adjudication processes for a team’s new hires and contractors on behalf of the team’s management?
• A chance for line level workers to do the kind of intel they want to do (versus the latest crisis they have been thrown into), at least part of the time? Or to contribute to the literature of intelligence? (Modeled along Google’s 20% time.)
• An environment that didn’t demand even the most junior level staff attempt to dress like they are going before congress every day? And in which those seniors (and junior briefers) which did have to dress well for external reasons could take advantage of laundry / dry cleaning services?

In short, the focus on the complete care and feeding of the line level worker is not only a model we have seen at Google, but also out in expeditionary environments. Small investments reap great rewards in relieving individual employees of the burdens of normal life (which are added exponentially onto the unusual nature of the community’s demands), allowing them to focus on the core business of doing real intel.

If this seems alien to the business of government, it seems natural that the IC would contract out these non-essential functions. And it just might save them the loss of the better and brighter among their new hires (and the related real dollar loss, clearance system burden, etc.) as they go contractor – or get out entirely.

We will address the other points regarding career progression, management structure, and other operational-level issues at another time, we think. Suffice to say even Google may not have all the answers when it comes to the other extremely difficult challenges of HR and functional management. But one must always take a defector’s statements with a grain of salt, especially as we are not certain of the individual’s history, reliability, nor current motivations given the unknown audience for which he was writing….

Regional versus functional issue accounts

One of the longest standing debates in the organization of intelligence as an activity (and the inevitable growth into a bureaucracy) was first addressed by Sherman Kent in his 1949 Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy. Even then, the division between regional geographically specialized organization versus functional, issue focused groups created tension between analysts – frequently reflected in finished intelligence production.

Sherman Kent diagnosed the problem as having its origins in “the customs of American education”, calling out the tendency towards regional specialization in the studies of historians, geographers, and political scientists; and the functional specializations in education of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and other “theorists” without applied studies targets. In his words, “which of the two groups should have command of a project is by no means so plain, nor is there a clear answers to the larger question as to whether the whole organization should be laid down along regional or functional lines.” To have the house divided along both lines is “an invitation, and one readily accepted, for major civil war” within the analytical community.

Little has changed since then. Of course, in part this is why we have coordination processes – to ensure that different regional and issue desks even within a single agency are represented in the debate, and to do so across all relevant contributing agencies. The processes of coordination are so closely tied to those of analysis and production that even in agencies and offices which do not have a formal requirement for coordination will usually introduce a “lite” version internally amongst themselves. (Such positions are one of the most powerful places one can be in the community in terms of impact in the introduction of new viewpoints and judgments, actually, even though these are usually among the most peripheral of organizations, focused on niche and specialty problems with a definitely limited organizational lifespan.)

Coordination does not always address all issues, nor does it often settle in the minds of those who have brought their issues to the table and felt their viewpoint “lost” in the process (even though it almost always reflects at least as a dissent if there is any body of evidence in support, and often even in the face of good evidence to the contrary.) Thus, the “civil war” between analytical houses may often spill out long after an issue has been put to bed for the historians to address in the fullness of time.

We are seeing this age old process play out in the recent media reporting regarding the division between NESA and the counterterrorism specialists on the question of Ba’athist Iraq’s ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Definitive evidence to answer the question most certainly exists, somewhere in the vast array of recovered documents, interrogation reports, and the physical evidence from the ground (in the form of the dead foreign fedayeen from the first fights of 2003 – as opposed to those foreign fighters that entered later as part of the evolving AQIZ structures). But it will take the judicious eye of an impartial scholar to judge the matter from a more comfortable distance of the future – say perhaps around the twenty five year declassification mark - and indeed, it is our personal opinion that the failings of both sides of the debate to appreciate the true nature and severity of the problem will be exposed.

But until then, it seems that the unseemly politicization of the debate in the public media – given impetus by figures such as Paul Pillar and George Tenet himself – will continue to attempt to re-write the first draft of that history (no doubt seeking to influence future hands as well as current reputations.) We fear it may unduly influence the intelligence studies academia – if it has not already – and would admonish our professional peers and new students alike to keep in mind the recurring nature of these debates as they look to examine past performance (in both successes and failures) in the popular case studies. Rarely in this world are we given issues to which a binary answer exists, and it is the grossest form of oversimplification to assume otherwise. Debates such as this also reinforce why it is more important than ever to seek alternative analysis through Red Cell and other methods, and to objectively consider those possibilities for which the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – for evidence may be forthcoming, both for and against any given set of theories as the realities on the ground rapidly change, if one has but the eyes and the openness of mind to look.

As for our opinions on the great divide between the two kinds of houses, we find ourselves veterans of uniquely transnational issues, having been subject to every manner of surge and task force and working group and crisis cell, in the most unusual of niches. We prefer to see small, aggressive, ad-hoc structures comprised of both analysts and operators from a wide range of issues and regional desks with interests and equities in the same target which overlaps their accounts. Only then, by throwing everything against the wall in a structure short lived enough to avoid its own bureaucracy, and disconnected enough to be (at least partially) immune from the day to day politics within a given agency or office, have we found the kind of answers we sought regarding the great questions of process.

We strongly believe such radically unstable and short lived environments are most effective because they are the very manifestation of Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction. It is certainly no way to create a sinecure, nor even to build a long term career path – but it is the best way we have found to generate new and innovative approaches and answers to hard target problems, and to the problems others have not yet begun to identify let alone address.

h/t and further at Haft of the Spear

Thinking in the dark

You’d figure after having been expeditionary so often in the Long War, the intelligence community would have figured out how to avoid sitting around with Tikkas and Surefires in a blacked-out vault. Because grease pencil sure beats geospatial visualization displays....

And physical discomfort should be nothing, given that there are fighting men and women suffering in the heat, freezing in the mountains, or rotting in the jungles elsewhere. Why, the austerity campaign is really about solidarity – not about a failing infrastructure that cannot even keep a consistent environment for the machinery (people, as always being barely an afterthought.)

This is not the first time the issue has been raised, along with all of the other problems caused by the excessive push to build more, right here, right now, and fast that have come to light. If our scorn comes through, it is because of the absolute lack of vision displayed at so many levels of senior management within the community. For a culture in which warning is enshrined as such a key mission, we seem to do very badly at forecasting our own internal I&W problem sets – and even worse at heeding those that might have been concerned.

Well, there are a whole lot of civil affairs and reconstruction staff which would no doubt be very happy to come back and spend a little time adding capacity to a nice wooded location in Maryland. It sure beats yet another well, power line, or generator out in the Gap. That is, unless something else catches fire….

If nothing else, information assurance is made easier under such conditions. A box that is turned off entirely cannot be compromised…

Update: New link for the new Haft of the Spear site. Also, more at Former Spook.

The politics of the (old) NDIC

We are surprised to see that our post regarding the old National Drug Intelligence Center has apparently struck such a deep nerve in at least one of our readers. We knew it was a popular item in the Department of Justice – having been visited hundreds of times by quite a range of individuals there (as well as our usual wide range of readership). We did not realize it would provoke such venom – nor somehow create an assumption that our writing was for the political purposes of the Republican administration. (We are strictly and professionally apolitical, and amongst the various elements of our skunkworks you will find no greater variance than in personal political opinions… while this is likely hard to believe in the age where the personal is nearly always political, there you have it.)

We are also fascinated to see the interpretation of our writing posed by the new “intelligencer”. Needless to say, we shall not quibble details of traffic, fight over the method of counting billets, nor discuss how and why our opinions of the place were formed. Our intent was not to add to the clamor of the budget fight over the earmarks that fund the place – as we note, this is very small beer indeed in the real intelligence community. (We have spent more in a fiscal quarter in some programs than their entire annual budget; and frankly even on the same sized programs elsewhere seen performance and quality to better effect - routinely exceeding their total annual production volume on a monthly basis on almost any account with a far smaller staffs. But editing hell does tends to kill a shop’s production…)

We do not wish to see the place closed entirely but rather reformed and revitalized to its as yet unfulfilled existing purpose and missions. Our primary motivation for critique is that we were, and remain, appalled at the suggestion that some of the most critical programs in the counterterrorism community might be shifted in the political winds, particularly to a shop with such a poor performance record when compared to the ground breaking work done at places such as National Counterterrorism Center.

Our reactions to the old NDIC are not driven by envy, as our newfound critic might suggest (such envy as we might harbor is reserved for those with nice European or island postings assigned to small, out of the way accounts), but rather by disappointment in its failure to live up to its potential. There are few times when intelligence functions move outside the Beltway, and we have long encouraged the process in order to start the sea change required to make that happen as a realistic career option rather than the exile that it most certainly is now.

And for the record, we think this sort of debate is exactly what Sherman Kent had in mind when he first called for a literature of intelligence. A profession which cannot reflect upon itself and its activities in a robust and spirited debate - be they good or ill - is no profession at all.

For this reason, we welcome our new virtual colleague, and hope to see him/her contribute more to the literature beyond the narrow discussion of a transient politicized fight. Perhaps he/she can use this opportunity as a better chance to illuminate the discussion of new methodologies in counter-drug analysis, highlight new analytical software (but please, something other than the Microsoft driven abortion that is RAID or the utterly unused Orion packages), or debate DOCEX processes. If nothing else, we always appreciate new perspectives on future transformation of the community – and even if we might disagree on where NDIC currently stands, we might find common ground as to where it, and other decentralized components of the larger community, should be headed.

So, to our new counterpart, we offer the traditional benediction handed down to us from the days of SOE - merde alors.

Conference season

Our thoughts lately turn towards the perennial summer institution of the intelligence community conference – the time to travel (perhaps if only across town, and even to that most rare of luxuries - the world outside of the vault, the one with windows...), sit lightly (if long), and reflect upon the art and science rather than on the press of day to day events.

Our business side / competitive intelligence colleagues kicked off the season in the late spring, but then again vendors are always hungry for Q3 leads during the long doldrums of executive vacations and budget uncertainties.

The educator’s annual conference is currently going on, with a most interesting collection of heavyweights displaying great interest in the generation to which the Long War will be given.

A few of the more established intel schools are also hosting a small function of their own, as usual out in the boondocks of the Great Lakes.

And of course, there is the event everyone is waiting for: the DNI OSINT conference, where we hope to see something new, interesting, and definitive emerging from the movements within the open source side of the community. (Standing room only, already, we note.)

Let’s hope the powerpoint rangers practice better OPSEC for the remainder of the summer, based on the recent news.

We would also love to see a bigger push for paper submissions at these events. While it is nice to have a good lunch, and (hopefully) engaging speakers; these functions represent a unique chance to spur contributions to the literature in a manner that the longer production cycle journals do not. There are few other fields where conferences do not routinely include papers, and it has been a long time since the 2005 analysis conference.

Alas, in the meantime those seeking further reading from the conference literature must content themselves with the (sometimes overly) academic offerings from the International Studies Association’s past meetings.

We also await the emergence into the public light of the various indicators - which will (no doubt) manifest the trends of the ever-shifting currents of politics within the IC. These are troubled days, and much more will out before the season ends, we should think.

Exploring the vast reaches of the disconnected professionals

We often take for granted that intelligence professionals are part of a larger intelligence community, and often part of multiple overlapping communities of professional interest. It is thus with occasional surprise we are reminded of the vast legion of those who toil in the obscurity of offices entirely disconnected from their counterparts elsewhere in the field.

These may be the backwaters of the state and local law enforcement community, the culturally and organizationally distinct operational environments of watch offices (where intelligence officers are only one among many types of watch-standers), or the small and boutique level private sector consulting functions (who lack the staff-like access of their larger counterparts.) Then of course there is the entire business / competitive intelligence field, where one is as likely to encounter individuals whose cultural affinity and mindset ties them to the librarians as to the intelligence world.

In these quieter eddies of the currents in our profession we are sure there lurks unique value, perspectives, and insights into some of the most pressing problems of the day. We are convinced that the range of customers these less well known functions serve, and the variety of situated products and processes that these (often very innovative and quite successful) professionals have created among themselves can offer new options for the larger body of analytic tradecraft.

We are however often perplexed at how to reach these disconnected professionals. Most do not participate in the major intelligence professional associations, nor are they interested in many cases in the conferences that they (often all too rightly) perceive as marketing forums for other vendors, and small worlds political networks from which they are too often excluded based on their position or firm.

In the hierarchies of intelligence accomplishments, it is those that are on the front lines that interest us most – especially as it is those individuals that are best positioned to evaluate and critique existing theory and literature, and to contribute new works to the growing corpus from a perspective that may never have been considered.

It takes effort to build and sustain a community. It takes outreach to extend that community’s ideas to the boundaries of its members. But the contributions those at the edge of the profession have to offer will most certainly make such efforts worthwhile. The only question is how best can such a task be accomplished?

Existential fights in other agencies

We have previously examined the issues of Beltway politics, pork, and the impact on major intelligence programs. While near and dear to our hearts, that issue was indeed small beer compared to the programmatic fight currently underway regarding a key space intelligence mission.

Former Spook has been on the case for some time, and updates with an insightful look at the players and partisans.

This is the real essence of the interagency fight, and a large part of the reasons why no transformation effort, and no restructuring – whether at the DNI level or anywhere else – will have any meaningful effect as long as the IC is viewed as just another jobs creation pork trough for someones’ home district.

Paper cuts

We note well, and with thanks, Coming Anarchy's point regarding the nature of good intelligence operations. It is merely the routine and (entirely understandable) reaction of our knuckle-dragger contingent – whose allergy to anything resembling desk work is well known - that prompted our earlier caveat regarding the multiple origins of our thought.

It is also for us somewhat ironic, though, and prompts us to a longer digression on related matters. For a number of years, not too long ago, we found ourselves often called upon to brief newly baptized young analysts (of exceedingly tender years and excitable sensibilities) on the expectations and realities of their newly chosen professional path – which was by all historical trends going to end buried in a small cubicle somewhere in the depths of a sub-basement vault. Our emphasis during these lectures was indeed very similar to the point raised by Younghusband, and for good reason (although regrettably not as well phrased due to the inelegance of the bureaucratic principles we also served.)

We often think of those lectures, however, now that we are several years into the Long War – and now that the usual mode of transportation for some of those “youngsters” may involve something armored (or at least very fast); and now that they may find themselves carrying their personal weapon far more often than their courier bag, or wearing 5.11’s more than they might their dinner jackets. We do not think they were wasted – nor the emphasis misplaced – but the culture is changing as more and more the roles between worlds blur.

We love the quote nonetheless, and think its message is well conveyed. Which brings us back around to what is perhaps the essential point of the entire debate - it is first and foremost a matter of perceptions. In the old days, one was either a boffin or at the sharp end, and the boffins were the boys which mattered most for eventual victory. We now seek to employ (for not all, but increasingly many positions) the warrior/scholar - a mixture of sage and adventurer, of the thinker and man of action. He must be capable in one day of shifting between the hallowed debates at the highest levels of academia to the most decisive of deeds in the streets of some foreign city. He must be comfortable with the diplomats as much as the mercenaries, and master not only the arcane technologies of information production and knowledge management but also a wide range of foreign and US small arms and other weapons systems. (In fact, the astounding variety of the latter requirement is in itself a fascinating microcosm of experience - perhaps something for comment later, with any luck including the photographic input of the gentleman at The Donovan.)

Some of the debate here at Kent’s Imperative is the playing out of tensions between those two realms. The old moulds of the Cold War and the False Peace have been irretrievably shattered – and in their stead the community is remaking itself. Perhaps the most visible signs of this transformation will be in the mystique and the manner in which it is cultivated and conveyed. We are not sure what the new ideal for a culture, and a shared sense of self, should be – especially in a community fast privatizing and scattering to the winds. But we know that it is the work of our days to shape it as best as possible, into what will serve most closely the needs of tomorrow.

To this end, we also note Verification’s recent comments regarding youth outreach by the community. We agree that most of the day to day business of the profession is far from glamorous – and indeed, even that which would be the stuff of fiction otherwise is fraught with the kinds of details that render the concept of glamour quite far from mind (dysentery tends to do that, likewise a lack of showers, or even the cramped confined of the typical windowless office stuffed with rapidly obsolete computing hardware.)

But this is not the manner in which we choose to remember such days and deeds – rather, it is a choice, in much the same manner as the dispatches of the British Empire, to gloss over the baser considerations (in such narrow contexts alone), in pursuit of a better expression to give meaning and merit to the lives spent in the service of that which will never be known to the outside world. This is equally important for the children of those who serve, as it is for those deciding whether or not to enter the field.

Their disillusionment will come in time, one way or the other – but perhaps in all of this, the seed of belief in a higher purpose can be planted firmly, to sustain them through the dark nights. Thus our lectures have changed, on the rare opportunity we give them these days, and our emphasis is on the rare and fleeting moments of individual exceptionalism and near legendary impact. For we have other means of cultivating intelligence professionals to excel in the day to day business of normal activities – but we must inspire them against the day when they will be called to perform above and beyond.

HR woes in the outside world

We often spend a great deal of time and energy considering the eternal dance of human resources within the intelligence community. Our previous ruminations on these issues have led to some interesting feedback and cause for greater reflection – none of it positive for the long term future of the community absent major and rapid change.

It is interesting therefore to note that even some of the biggest and brightest in the world outside the vault are having similar troubles. This recent account of the dysfunctional hiring process at Google mirrors other narratives that have been surfacing over the past few years.

We are personally aware of the case of one very talented, exceptionally qualified intelligence professional (with technological specialization in some areas Google was rapidly seeking to expand into), who liked the idea of trading in all of the black world for sunny California instead. This individual, whose particular expertise and background was more than simply unique, found out that the schizophrenia of the Googleplex in many ways mirrored that found in some of the worst community agencies.

In the end, Google lost a talented prospect based only on a few simple things:

• institutional arrogance (and when someone raised in the worst of all arrogant cultures in one of the biggest three letter buildings comments on this, you know it has to be bad)

• lack of coherence and cohesiveness in interactions with the individual. (To be sure, HR has many candidates to deal with. But from the perspective of the recruit prospect, each and every interaction matters, and matters a lot – especially given the uncertainty involved in waiting between contacts.)

• inability to distinguish relevant areas of emphasis. (They assumed they knew what they needed- and those assumptions were based on a mental model that may have matched their core search business but had nothing to do with the position under discussion - rather than looking at the individual in order to see

• inability to recognize the value of the individual’s existing intellectual capital. (Too often, big organizations assume that they are the sole creators and arbiters of the “good ideas” – even when practical and concrete evidence of executed innovation is staring them in the face.)

The intelligence community also suffers from all of these woes in its own way, but one expects better from a major player such as a Google. It is hard to hold up the example of the outside corporate world as a model for reform when even those entities are failing in this most basic, but most essential, of all organizational functions.

h/t Scoble

The existential fight over the old NDIC

For those that have been around the intelligence community since the pre-9/11 era - and we are an increasingly small number it seems – there is another older NDIC, not the National Defense Intelligence College (once the Joint Military Intelligence College), but rather the National Drug Intelligence Center. It is rare that we at Kent’s Imperative comment on any specific institution or mission, but the news of recent events is so striking as to demand our notice.

We are deeply ambivalent about the old NDIC and its work. On the one hand, it could have been the perfect example of the kind of de-centralization and distributed analytical production that we have long advocated. Pushing the work of the intelligence community to places outside of the Beltway is a major need if we are going to have the kind of workforce, and the kind of sustainability, that the Long War requires. Indeed, we are personally acquainted with a number of good officers and analysts which left other fast track DC jobs to head to that entity based on family concerns. After all, their GS salaries go a lot further there – even if they will never see an -11, let alone a -13, billet.

However, the organization is deeply and fundamentally flawed. The location – on paper defined as “acceptable” due to the supposed 6 hour drive to DC (in reality much longer due to traffic, weather, and constant construction) – is a depressed and failing industrial area with no substantial local talent pool of any description. Its staffing has been long considered exile by most in the counterdrug specializations in the intelligence community. True, some may choose exile rather than continue to be consumed by the intrigues in the belly of the beast – but most cannot accept the career-ending move that the assignment has historically meant, unless they were very close to retirement or otherwise no longer interested in having a career. So the bench of substantive expertise available to that entity is very thin indeed…

Nor can most good analysts tolerate for long an excessively incestuous bureaucracy, driven by political factors held over from previous administrations, and beholden to a party line rigorously enforced through a coordination process that is legendary as the “seven levels of editing hell”. And all to produce finished intelligence which is largely regurgitated materials culled from HIDTA reporting, presented with a kind of analytic arrogance that only a fusion of DOJ and DEA cultures could create.

So it is with no surprise that we see the budgetary battles to continue to fund the pork-subsidized existence of NDIC are playing out once again, with the usual suspects front and foremost. The letter itself however gives us great pause: “The NDIC also anticipates undertaking a new and vitally important mission in partnership with the National Counter Terrorism Center, including: assuming responsibility for the terror no-fly list, the terror incident tracking program…”

Needless to say, we believe that such a move would be the height of folly. These are programs far too important to entrust to a backwater group of second-rates and has-beens – even if there are a few true professionals hidden among them. The NCTC Worldwide Incidents of Terrorism program alone has commanded the attention of some of the finest minds in the community, and stands as one of the un-paralleled examples of analytic tradecraft and rigour applied to a nearly impossible problem set – one that is accomplished in a form that its primary products can be publicly released. And let us not even discuss the implications of a major shift in responsibility for the no-fly list...

The funding line for NDIC is small beer by any real community standards. We are not opposed to its continued existence – in fact, we would support continued funding contingent on robust management oversight and the transformation of the entity into a hub for virtual distributed analysis and production. Such transformation should focus especially on an expansion of its training and education mission in order to support the new state & local fusion centers, and other less connected law enforcement agencies. (Perhaps such an expansion could even be modeled along the same lines as similar efforts at the National White Collar Crime Center.)

But let us be very clear that such experimentation should not come at the cost of vital missions stolen from key community players simply to justify a single politicians’ pet pork barrel.


h/t to Instapundit, with our thanks for his continuing interest in the earmarks process. We are interested only in the outcomes, but are grateful that someone keeps track of the details.

Higher order effects of the Metro and the hinterlands

The intelligence community is not the only knowledge work field in which the deleterious effects of concentration in major metropolitan areas are surfacing. The legal community is also struggling to come to terms with the implications of new communications and collaboration technologies, and what they will mean for a business that has for centuries been conducted face to face – and by culture and convention, in a very specific sort of environment, much like the business of intelligence.

One of the most interesting counter-points to the seemingly inevitable virtualization of everything is the line:
Relationships mean everything, and when the majority of your workforce aren't virtual marketers, you bet on what your workforce knows.

The gentleman lawyer also makes a very interesting point that parallels our earlier questions regarding the potential evolving distributed structures of the intelligence community as more and more contractors seek to move core analysis and production tasks out to less costly locales in flyover country.

The trend of using high priced space exclusively for client meetings may come around, and the creation of 'client reception areas' in many recent firm renovations point in that direction. I could see a metropolis-hinterland kind of effect, where firms put the rainmaker partners in downtown offices, and farm 'the work' out to less expensive premises. That of course, would require a clear separation between lawyer classes. Another can of worms that would be very difficult to resolve within big firm cultures… If this concept was undertaken, I'd bet on the support roles leading the exodus.

The issues of “divided classes” of intelligence professionals are even more significant perhaps than might be faced in the legal field, as are the potential human resources issues created when the advancement of one’s career may also involve relocating to the greater Washington Metro area from the comparatively idyllic (and far more family friendly) environs of the south, west, or wherever the “alternate” community centers develop. The next generation of talent may find this lifestyle incompatible with their continued interest in the profession, especially when connectivity offers a great range of options on the outside than ever before.

We are also greatly interested in the higher order implications of divorcing production from client-facing activities, above and beyond quality of life, compensation, and other human resources issues. The software industry has had previous experience with the management issues that surface in such cases, but it is a far different thing to outsource specific tasks done by highly introverted and technically focused engineers and developers than it is to physically disconnect the subject matter experts and analysts (however introverted or not they may actually be) from the briefers and program managers which must maintain relationships with the policy-makers and other supported action elements. The primary questions when evaluating such structures will revolve around whether or not alternative workflows and processes, using new collaboration technologies and approaches, can support the robust level of interactions needed to ensure that both teams stay on the same page. After all, the history of intelligence producer – policy relations has never been easy, even when both sides are in the same room. Can mediated technologies offer solutions to older problems, and even if so, what new issues will arise in the future?

Again, this sounds like an excellent area for the intelligence studies academia to begin to offer substantial contributions with practical application of theory to the field, especially if validated by experimental research…

Incompatibility with the vault

We have written before regarding the challenges the next generation of intelligence professionals will pose to traditional management structures – particularly when those young minds have become accomplished experts in their own right. The following interview with a young technologist, Aaron Swartz, is quite revealing in what it says about those coming management challenges. (He is profiled further here.) For where today goes the hyper-mobile, highly creative innovators of the wired world, tomorrow will be your average everyday sort of knowledge worker.

The money quotes, in our opinion, for understanding the future of the disconnect between talent and management:
“Heh,” I joked. “I bet the first time my boss finds out where I am is when he sees my photo on the front page of his own website.”
and
But the best punch line was that … he didn’t find out when it was on the front-page of his website – he found out when I posted that fact to my blog!

Organizations cannot afford to continually lose talent through the profound mismatch of employee expectations to organizational norms – which will be an increasing problem as two very divergent cultures collide in the coming years. And while we do not know any specific details regarding the case above, it is not uncommon for many in the community to accrue significant amounts of vacation (and comp time) – only to lose it rapidly due to human resources imposed caps and organizational culture which discourages extended (week or more long) absences. Of course, for overseas travel – especially involving any significant personal interest (or increasingly professional interests simply not funded by the organization) such as a conference or class – a week is hardly any time at all.

In fact, in today’s constantly connected, extreme op-tempo environment, a week is barely enough time to get used to being disconnected enough to relax. And given the increasing prevalence of 14, 18, or even 20 hour days many young community professionals are putting in, five to six days a week, when they are switched on and engaged, it’s hardly much time at all in comparison to the typical range of uncompensated overtime which has been an assumed part of many shop’s baseline activities.

These issues are key elements of the profound shift in the nature of work that are part and parcel of the revolution in intelligence affairs. The managers and seniors that will tomorrow be responsible for running shops composed of people accustomed to this dynamic are going to have to spend serious time, attention, and thought on how to deal with the “incompatibility with an office environment” that many of the best and brightest of the next generation will face – particularly when that environment is the hermetic confines of the vault.

As an interesting aside from the issues of management and talent, the interview also surfaces a fascinating potential thread of dissent regarding the conventional wisdom on how Wikipedia has been assembled. Hopefully, Swartz will soon publish more of his research findings on the more widely based nature of small contributions by a large number of low-volume participants (versus the conventional understanding of a small pool of high-volume contributors which are said to be the backbone of the encyclopedia effort.) This has the potential to have profound implications for how the intelligence community understands the actual performance of Wikipedia (as opposed to the mythos it has built around its activities and philosophy) – with the potential for understanding parallel behaviors in Intellipedia and other new wiki applications in the IC.

The analytical environments of others

The distractions of working in compressed, Dilbert-like cubicle farms in decaying buildings managed according to bureaucratic concepts of efficiency are well known, both inside and outside government. The intelligence community is suffering these effects more than most – and the effects on individual analyst performance are even more pronounced given the nature of the work, than in say the office of the second special assistant deputy undersecretary for agricultural subsidy ecological diversity and sustainability assurance.

Even the newest construction in essentially amounts to converted warehouses stacked with ranked cubes, or the sardine like rows of the typical watch floor (elaborate set design variants aside.) These are not environments naturally suited to creativity or contemplation.

This is a debate within the IC as old at the dot com era, however. We have seen attempts to impose every conceivable variant – from hoteling and hot-desking to flex space and bean bag chairs. Few have endured (although we occasionally miss the billiards and foozeball tables).

The high pace of deployments during the Long War have stripped us of the need for many of these externalized trappings that were once associated with energetic, productive shops. The best work of our lives, and of many of our counterparts, has been done in hellholes and safe houses scattered around the globe – and it goes without saying that none of these have air conditioning, and occasionally, not even working electrical systems or running water. (Although we certainly do not miss the terrible design aesthetic of Ba’athist marble monstrosities.) Perhaps this is not the way of life many of us would wish to lead – in fact, these experiences have greatly inculcated in many a deep longing for the quiet wood and leather atmosphere of many traditional academic settings. But this is the nature of the thing, it seems.

It is thus with some interest we follow the efforts of other highly intellectual professions to create the ideal environment for the incubation of brilliance. We are particularly interested in the rapid construction, pre-fab style highlighted here by Future Now – and we note markedly the contrasts to the other related regional facility they recently profiled.

For what it matters, we do believe that the analytical workforce benefits from a better environment than is typically found in most community facilities – overseas or domestic. But our adversaries and emerging competitors are nowhere near as pampered. It is something to keep in mind the next time facilities reorganization comes up for discussion.

Pay no attention to the body behind the curtain

From Rough Type comes a well timed, and well executed, critique of the overarching (and over-reaching) philosophy that is increasingly shifting Wikipedia and its successors from a tool of utility to an engine of epistemology.

There are too many great lines to recommend anything but to read it all (and as always we offer great respect to those who quote the Bard well in theme and principal). We are fascinated by both the post and its comments, as this is an explicit debate over similar questions that we have raised regarding the most effective use of wiki’s within intelligence community contexts. Intellipedia will face the same challenges (in addition to other more unique pressures based on the oddities of culture and technology within the environments which host it.) But we are also interested in how the philosophies and drivers being laid out in the arguments between the open source world’s major supporters, detractors, and the juries of technologist and creator opinion. (The public having already apparently voted with their eyeballs and clickstreams.)

That interest stems largely from our contention that Intellipedia will not be the only way to use the wiki as a tool within the intelligence community (hardly a unique idea, as new projects and environments spring up daily), but more controversially, that things like an encyclopedia may not be the best means to utilizing that tool within the community. And the distinctions between, and proof of success, for new attempts will be in understanding the reasons and drivers for positive results from this new social technology and its associated production methods.

Open source, community based production economies are further examined within a second post at Rough Type, which discusses the monetization of YouTube contributions against the backdrop of current academic arguments over the revolutionary nature of participatory systems (first outlined in the Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler.)

The parallels between the evolving structures of open source movement and the new architectures being implemented in the intelligence community are again strikingly clear. Within the walls of the IC, there is stronger evidence for the contention that there has not yet been a model for accurate valuation of the participation economy. Indeed, the entire literature of intelligence as a professional body has largely been a non-economic affair, from the earliest days of Studies to the present, where the bulk of serious contributions originate still from practitioners volunteering additional time and thought away from their primary accounts to help advance the state of the craft. (These volunteers, driven by their own muse or by the Imperative itself, also stand in stark contrast to the academic intelligence studies field in a manner which is outlined in the comments.)

The multi-player (government, contractor, inter-agency & task force) dynamics of contributions to these participatory architectures deserves further study. It is our belief that market type drivers can be identified and encouraged, which will allow for more robust and useful implementation of these new tools for intelligence specific applications.

H/t and our thanks to Zenpundit for pointing out both Rough Type posts

Failing HR processes in the IC

We have been greatly concerned with the issues of recruitment and retention of the kinds of minds that the intelligence community needs most in the coming years, and the development and cultivation of the next generation that will replace them in the out-years. Our concerns are motivated not only by the ever increasing demand for intelligence (and intelligence-like) services throughout government and corporate environments, but what appears to be a systematic failure of organizational structure and process to identify, interview, vet, and place qualified candidates in roles which will satisfy them now and provide longer term growth potential.

It is widely acknowledged that one of the greatest drivers behind the success of the privatization of intelligence has been that contractors offer a greater flexibility of salary, working conditions, target accounts, initial hiring, and advancement. These benefits often come at a cost of stability, as contracts come and go, but good companies – those that are not simply body shops or churn mills – usually are able to offer a broad enough spectrum of options that individual analysts and officers are not caught out in the cold in most cases. (There are a few sometimes horrifying exceptions even in the best shops, especially when these involve transfers of clearances between entities - but that is another post entirely.)

The sheer volume of billets available in recent years (hiring of new GS/GG employees, and corresponding movement of GS to contractor, and contractor to yet another contractor) has however served to mask some fundamental human resources issues that are degrading community capabilities.

We are not speaking of the quality of life issues – although these are not insignificant, especially in light of the ever-expanding geographic scope and growing density of the Washington DC metro area. And for now, forget about compensation issues, as painful as these can be for junior folk – and as misunderstood as they are by most dual-income SES’s with net worth enhanced immeasurably by the property boom. We are not even talking about the language gap, or any of the myriad thorns surrounding clearance system problems.

Simply put, we are finding more and more that many HR functions – even in the largest and best run shops – are simply inadequate to the task at hand. HR elements usually lack fundamental knowledge regarding the skills, competencies, and substantive expertise needed to successfully carry out any given assignment. They are forced to rely on buzzwords, “coolness” factors, and poorly written generic position descriptions – all of which typically devolves to the worst of all screening criteria - the simple notations of a specific clearance level coupled with a heartbeat.

While the utility of the latter approach is bluntly a requirement of inefficiencies in current approaches to positive vetting, it is also fundamentally flawed and tends to place unqualified individuals who simply have required accesses into assignments where they quickly and inevitably fail. There are endless tragic stories of individuals being asked to leave a billet within weeks of initial assignment based on mismatch of skills to need, or personality to team – and these are just the ones to which the system was capable of dealing with. All too often, these individuals stay in place, taking up space and producing nothing of value – and usually creating additional issues of morale, policy, and new workload (spent cleaning up after the poorly suited individual’s attempts to show that they are working.)

The number of bodies cycling through the system also means that specific attention is rarely paid to candidates based on their individual capabilities and contributions, but rather candidates are grouped into classes of consideration dictated by ease of transfer, diversity points, or a rough sorting of generic top level account types (regardless of actual target assignments.) In this shuffle, a lot of individuals are slipping through the cracks – and not all will stay in the community when there are many attractive private sector offers out there that involve none of the kind of existential stress that a move within the community can entail. The best and most adaptable find their own billets, and make their own futures – but this takes time and attention away from target issues and accounts where their skills are needed most by the community.

So instead, we are treated to the endless parade of position vacancy announcements flooding major metropolitan area newspapers – including ever more specific write-ups of desired abilities to access classified systems by name, by clearance types, and by target account (OPSEC concerns which are simply lost in the noise at this point, but have the potential to create serious longer term implications for the community as a whole). The HR shops at major contractors are in a constant state of churn, with paper passing across desks constantly in a nearly mind numbing flow of names and histories. And these are the better functions – with well compensated, well motivated HR professionals attempting to cope with the deluge.

Government HR fares far worse, typically dominated by low level GS employees ranked in thankless hives, driven by ever more restrictive attempts at imposing equality and diversity preferences without regard to knowledge, skills, or abilities. (And while we are great fans of true diversity – particularly in the critical areas of language skills, cultural awareness, and overseas experience – we find that current systems designed to identify and promote diversity usually fail utterly in bureaucratic fashion, producing the appearance of diversity but not its actual benefits.) This also assumes that vacant billets are even budgeted – in too many shops, active billets vanish from year to year not due to a decision to cut, but based on poor program management which fails to handle the longer term effects of poor retention.

In response, so far we have seen only a Human Capital Plan and a “Hundred Day” Plan at the policy level – the first of which is, in our opinion, largely unhelpful; and the latter as yet largely an unknown factor. On the ground, there are increasing numbers of back door attempts to create solutions – from one day career fairs designed to establish a candidate pool with immediate offers to a manageable number of new bodies, to ever shorter series vacancy announcements attempting to certify a small enough list so that the best qualified candidates have a chance of making it through the process at all before they are snapped up elsewhere.

These solutions are stopgaps which can only delay the reckoning for the systemic dysfunction which plagues the community. The community is not getting the right new blood that is so needed (despite the high hopes we hold for many of the amazing young up and coming entrants we have been encountering in ever greater numbers), and it is grossly failing to retain and re-assign the critically small pool of experienced (but not retirement age) professionals that are the backbone of most program efforts.

It’s a game of musical chairs, and the looming uncertainties of election year politics and related funding impacts means there are a lot of people anticipating that the music may stop very soon. It is going to take serious effort by serious people, using market-based approaches that take into account the true nature of today’s intelligence community, to solve the dilemma and provide for the next generation. Otherwise, the HR problem will be one of the most prominent rocks upon which intelligence community reform efforts will founder, and no amount of research papers, policy studies, or expert commissions will suffice to save it.

Watching the wiki grow

The following fascinating video illustrates the growth of the Wikipedia entry on the VT shooting incident over the first 12 hours.

The intelligence community still has not entirely come to terms with the impact of new tools such as the wiki, although it is making great progress in at least some forms through early adopters and the younger generation which natively embraces such technologies. We have however been disappointed by other experiments in wikified intelligence production, as much as we continue to believe that the medium offers promise in creating better options for virtual distributed collaboration in analysis and authoring.

We strongly suspect that one of the reasons Intellipedia works well is because it is essentially duplicates the functions of the now vanishing “shelfware” products and mentoring processes that previously functioned to tie together new analysts and their more experienced counterparts on specific accounts and targets. Both of these essential functions have been largely overtaken by the recent upheaval in the community, aggravated by factors including the state of permanently high operations tempo, the creation of new players of interest who lack other key connectivity to the established community, and the major demographic changes within many agencies.

Other wiki applications are not yet so clear. There have been strong arguments, and some moderate demonstrations, that the tool can play a role in replacing smartbooks, watch logs, and other “pass-down” shared documents, particularly in environments where there may be significant temporal distance between analyst shifts. Wikis have also reportedly been experimented with in coordination of exercise events, and would seem to offer promise in presenting a shared “reality” framework for simulated material.

The VT incident above highlights the potential utility of the wiki in incident management and shared situational awareness roles. The increasing proliferation of intelligence operations and fusion centers throughout the community has created unique analytic tradecraft requirements for watch officers and analysts - who typically are only taught skills and TTPs developed by their cubicle-bound counterparts.

The wiki as a tool may offer new options for the evolution of more unique tradecraft better suited to rapid analysis under crisis conditions. Interestingly, one of the first areas in which wikis might be used to contribute to such a new subspecies of the tradecraft may be in enabling structured argumentation and analysis between multiple contributors in a more explicit and transparent fashion. (Whether structured analysis methods are best suited for the operations center environment is another question entirely, but a question that has seen at least some initial attempts to examine in a systematic manner. See the JMIC Occasional Paper “Intelligence Analysis in Theater Joint Intelligence Centers: An Experiment in Applying Structured Methods”.)

Not all problems can be solved by the same kind of hammer. However, we are fascinated to watch the results of the continued trial and error of beating new objects against the wall. At least it saves the pain we would encounter when the only options we had was the pounding of our heads.

h/t to Bitter

Industry’s “intelligence collection effort” targeting USG

“Industry hires our alumni, and runs an extensive and effective intelligence collection effort targeting us.”

The quote from Navy Secretary Donald Winter comes in the context of a different struggle by the government to come to terms with increasing privatization – one much further along in is transition of key roles to the private sector; and in which issues of control, expertise, and the effects of years of decreasing expenditures are much more evident.

Once upon a time, government contractors were praised for attempting to understand their key client organizations, and rewarded when they accumulated expertise and personnel which allowed them to rapidly and flexibly meet that client’s articulated (and even proactively anticipated) needs. Senior leadership tacitly expected to be able to find a comfortable post-retirement position within those contractor organizations, earning large salaries at less stress and risk. But at every level of government, contractors were considered second class members, there to provide a specific service but never “good enough” to truly belong – and as long as that remained the case, were kept almost as favoured pets.

Those days are long past, even if the illusions remain. The screams you hear are the realization that the old command and control model within the defense industrial economy – and its intelligence community counterparts – has been shattered forever.

The post 9/11 environment surges are most responsible for these changes, but they are rooted in the nearly intractable problems of systemic failure to invest in human capital, to motivate and reward individuals, and to face the current realities of life at the junior level in a major urban metro area.

Contractors perform almost every function conceivable within the community – and often far better than their government counterparts, based on the private sector’s ability to attract more qualified and experienced individuals at better pay and better quality of life. To be sure, not every shop actually does so – there are many stories of disillusioned contractors going back to the blue badge world. But when one looks at the next generation of analysts and collectors coming out of the university and out of their initial tours of military service, it is overwhelmingly contractors who are making the most attractive offers – not only financially, but in terms of sheer speed of the process and the quality of assignments. The idea of waiting nine to eighteen months for a position as a civil service employee, when one could have the same job – and the flexibility to quickly move to another in the field – is simply absurd. More and more, one looks around to see the best and the brightest of the up and coming are advancing in structures outside of the traditional community’s boundaries.

Current dysfunctions in the utilization of contractors, cited by SECNAV and others across the private military industry, are less a result of the shift of the command and control model to a privatized marketplace than the essential irrationality of that marketplace due to structural issues created by government decisions. Most are decisions which impose substantial burdens in the marketplace, enacted by those without any clear idea of how that marketplace operates and reacts. The clearance bottlenecks are but the most famous in the intelligence community, yet there are many others: issues of arming contractors in forward deployed areas, the ability of contractors to attend needed specific job related training available only through the major agencies (and usually offered only to their government employees), schizophrenic styles of contract award and re-compete cycles, and the increasing moral and operational impacts of efforts to segregate contractors from their identical government counterparts. These are issues caused by poor management (on both the government and contractors’ part), lack of coherent strategic vision, and the vast gulf of ignorance between competing community philosophies.

The SECNAV’s statement re-conceptualizing what have been long-standing efforts of the defense industry to understand its client, and communicate key decision support information to its senior management, are but the latest in a troubling trend. It is a line of thinking that seeks to assign blame for the end results of a series of specific choices to those that have apparently benefited from the outcomes, rather than those responsible for making the initial choices in privatization and contracting.

We have seen such thinking before, most notable in the ill fated “Intelligence Community Strategic Human Capital Plan” released under the previous DNI’s tenure, which sought to declare a “talent war” on contractors rather than facing the hard issues driving the comparative imbalance of contractor successes in recruiting key candidates.

To this “talent war”, the SECNAV now apparently wishes to add an “industry counterintelligence problem”.

It is a dangerous philosophy, and one that does not serve either the government or the intelligence industrial base. Taken to its logical progression, these concepts would lead to decisions which will inevitably destroy accumulated expertise, innovation, and professionalization in favor of politicization and deeper rice bowls.

These are troubling days. Let us hope that cooler and wiser heads will prevail.


Post-script:

For those that need additional reinforcement of the lessons of failure of centralized planning approaches versus marketplace realities, we note the following item from North Korea.