National Security Amateur Hour [View all]

[MineralMan]

That's what is going on right now. From the President and shadow President, right down to the Secretary of Defense, our national security is in the hands of rank amateurs. The President is a Vietnam Era draft dodger. The VP is a run of the mill National Guard amateur. Even the Secretary of Defense has almost no experience with the Intelligence community.

That is why military plans were openly discussed on a freaking Signals chat system. One of the participants was even in Moscow, in on the text chain from a hotel there. WTF were they thinking?

They weren't thinking. That's the simple truth. They don't know. They're amateurs.

When I was a kid of 19 to 23, I was an enlistee in the USAF. I enlisted in 1965. I was, frankly, a draft dodger. Faced with certain draft, I enlisted in the military branch least likely to send me to Vietnam with an M-16. In its wisdom, the USAF sent me to Russian Language school, gave me a Top Secret security clearance, and put me into situations where everything I did or touched had TOP SECRET (CODEWORD) at the top of the page.

I cannot even count the number of intelligence security briefings I attended. We were constantly reminded of the risks of exposure of the stuff we were doing to, well, the Russians. We worked in buildings with no windows because the technology even of that time made it possible to hear conversations by bouncing laser light off windows and listening to the conversations. Before I could work in that environment, FBI people visited my home town and interviewed people about my character. We had to read and sign multiple pages that explained what would happen to us if we gave classified information to people who weren't entitled to see it.

I could go on and on, but part of being in that environment meant learning the rules of security and safeguarding classified information. Then, we signed our names on those documents, verifying that we had read and understood them. The penalties for not doing what we were told were laid out clearly.

Was what I was doing all that important? Hell, I don't know. It was interesting, but I was just a lowly E-3 and E-4, playing with some fantastic technology in remote places. Still, I knew what I could and could not say and do. I knew that there were risks. I knew that my work affected things. I knew better than to treat security lightly, so I didn't treat it lightly. I was a professional in that area.

Then, I finished my four years of service, got the heck out of the military and returned to normal life. However, I was then, and am now, prohibited from talking about what I was doing back in the late 1960s. Some of it is no longer classified, but I don't know what is and what is not, so I simply don't talk about any of it in any detail at all. I can tell people that I went to a total immersion Russian language school for a year, and that I was stationed on the Black Sea cost in Turkey. I can tell people that I worked in the NSA building at Ft. George Meade in Maryland for a while. Those things are not classified. More than that I cannot discuss.

The point here is that almost all of the people on that moronic text chain, chatting about plans for an attack on people in another county are not intelligence professionals. If they were, they would never have done such a thing. They are amateurs, and that is freaking dangerous on several levels. Those are the people in positions of authority. We have amateurs everywhere now, from the White House to the pentagon.

It is not a good thing. Not a good thing at all.