21 January 2011

Third Thursday

It was Third Thursday yesterday, and the weather was supposed to be bad. The reports were ominous all day.

I looked at the schedule on the computer. The monthly soiree at the Capital City Brewery had died a natural death last summer. We picked the venue back when the Pentagon was still central to our working lives, and the Shirlington exit off I-395 seemed to make sense.

The significance of the day, the third Thursday of the month, diminished over time, but it remained an artifact of other times on the Microsoft Outlook calendar as a “recurring event.”

We moved the event to Willow one time last Fall, before Winter was going to lock Mac up in his fortress at The Madison across the street for the season. The weather guessers were predicting three inches of snow over night, and that was enough to put the kabosh on my scheme to work out of the office down south.

I learned my lesson last December about snow and Charlottesville, and had no stomach to replicate Snowmageddon in the fancy car with the high-performance tires that spin senselessly in the snow.

It seemed like a good opportunity to try to resurrect the celebration of the Third, and a small circle of the usual suspects made plans to gather at the L corner of Willow’s long bar whenever the business day was done.

I had been to a strange meeting that morning. It was the third in a series of three seminars sponsored by one of our local trade associations. I took detailed notes, but I won’t bother you with the details of the thing, nor the cast of characters.

That is not important, and the organization will put out a coordinated and vetted account of the deliberations. The point of it is simple enough. The Grown Ups do not want to replicate the disastrous mistakes we made in the budget cuts that followed the end of the Cold War.

I don’t know what we were thinking. I am not sure we do now, but some very smart people were in the room to talk about the future. I specifically except myself and assume I was invited by accident.

I had to walk to the headquarters in Ballston. I was way behind, and lucky to have thought to look at the calendar when I got up and realized I was supposed to be somewhere at 0800. Damn! The fancy car was in the garage at the office, a good place for it, and I was pleased I knew where it was. But it meant that I had to start the day on foot.

The walk through Buckingham was a breath of fresh air, and the skies were clear, belying what the forecasters said was going to come later.

I was puffing a bit as I ambled past the Ballston Mall and around the corner from Glebe Road to the high-density development corridor along Fairfax Drive. I went into the building that towers over the Metro station, wistfully looking at the Starbuck on the first floor. I wanted to stop and get a jolt of artificial alertness, but had to pass it by since I was already minutes late.

I took the escalator up a floor and the nice young lady behind the desk at the Association buzzed me in.

I was amazed by the level of intellectual firepower represented by the cast of characters who were gathered in the conference room.
 
My old Boss was chairing the panel. She is a senior VP and partner at one of the most famous of the consulting firms in town, and her charter on this bit of pro-bono work is to generate a paper with specific recommendations to avoid the catastrophic mistakes in personnel and acquisition we made the last time things got tight.

The going in position is that resource levels for the Intelligence Community are going to come down, possibly dramatically. The people who are supposed to manage the transition from two wars to an austerity budget work for a Director of National Intelligence whose authorities are still undefined.

The consensus was that the Administration did the office and the occupants of it no favors when Leo Panetta observed that he preferred to be Director of CIA and did not take the job as DNI. That is coupled with the grim outlook that the IC is going to take a 15-20% reduction in real terms over the Future Years budget cycle, if anything serious at all is to be done about the deficit.
 
That should come as no surprise to anyone in the business, or anyone in the larger Federal enterprise as a whole. The new Congress is muttering about an immediate return to 2008 funding levels, and my Boss noted that we need to plan ahead, and work backward from an end-state over which we will have little to no control and make the best of it.

That will require some authorities to pay people for performance and to terminate those who do not to avoid the "bathtub" void in the mid-grade workforce that resulted from the disastrous policies of the 1990s.
 
Some idle notions emerged from the give-and-take after the featured panelists made their introductory remarks. In no particular order, they went something like this:
 
Maybe the old DCI construct was not a bad thing
Does the DNI really have hiring and firing authority over the Directors of the Agencies
The budget is going to come down- maybe by 20%
We cannot permit the “bathtub” hole in the mid-grade workforce to happen again.
Program and Budget has to be managed in the context of mission.
Everyone expressed dismay at the National intelligence Program coming out of DoD
Acquisition has to balance capability against cost, schedule and maturity
Without accurate cost estimates there are no programs
Organization is important and re-organization may not be the answer
People are the most expensive commodity in the IC and the cost to keep them grows twice as fast as inflation.
Domestic intelligence is crucial and no one is talking about it.

Yike, I thought. It was all plain enough and it seems like a recipe for another disaster.

I took a bunch of notes that I won’t begin to bore you with. I will tell you this: it made that first glass of Willow happy hour white just that much better.

The downside was that Elisabeth-with-an-S was not behind the bar. I had an ominous feeling about that. People seem to vanish from the family at Willow when they get too popular.

Things are ominous enough as it is without losing anyone else. It is enough to drive you to drink.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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