18 February 2004.

Senator Kerry has won the Wisconsin Primary, though apparently cross-over Republicans gave Senator John Edwards a strong second place. Howard Dean's last stand came in a distant third. He refuses to give up, or so he says publicly.  Edwards was only 6% back, which is either a win or another loss. I will have to wait for the news guys to tell me what to think about it.

But I am pretty sure we have the Democratic ticket. Now let's get on with the main event.

It is going to be cold and blustery today. I am carefully considering whether to wear a tie. I don't think I will be seeing anyone important, just the same people around the conference table for eight hours. Our moderator did not give us an afternoon break yesterday and I am still wary of drinking too much coffee in the morning.

Bladder management is a key issue. But that is for later. The summer is coming, you know, or at least Spring. The tips of the flowers are pushing up and seeking the light. The seasons change early here by the Chesapeake, and I am firm in the belief that the azaleas will be out in four weeks. There is so much about the cycle of life around us. We will hand power back to the Iraqi people in the summer. We will elect a President. New technology will fall from the sky.

I need to figure out what I am going to do when I grow up and where to live and how to protect my kids in this uncertain cycle. I''m tempted to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to help.

Walt Disney's Company is trying to buy the Muppets, and COMCAST Cable is trying to swallow Disney up whole for an unimaginable number of billions of dollars.

happens, I hope my cable company doesn't force me to go to one of the theme parks. I don't think I can fit it into this year.

There is too much going on, possibilities everywhere. I am besieged by other opportunities. What they all mean I don't know. I saw an old buddy at the military Commissary two weekends ago. All of us retirees spend part of our Staurdays there and it is a great place to network and do business since most of us are doing other things for the Government, or the alternate Government of the contracting world. My friend was still a Marine when I met him, them a Political appointee, and now an influential contractor. He was pushing one of those carts with a child seat, a retired guy with a tiny daughter with dancing black eyes.

I told him the business model of the company where I work sucks. I am being sold from job to job and never get enough time to think about what I am doing. I just started another assignment two weeks ago, and this one is huge. I have no idea what is happening with the other two fulltime jobs I had. I need to take some vacation time and go to the office and find out.

This being a small company town, word gets around. I got a call out of the blue from a friend of my friend about a job with the last mega-communications concern that is owned by Americans. They want to grow from $500 million to$1.5 billion in government business and are looking around for people to help. It is not enough money to buy the Disney Company, but it isn't chump-change, either. 

The compensation looks to be handsome. This is not anything I was seeking; I was looking more for the Desert, or a return to government service. There were two opportunities in New Mexico, and I let one of them go by. There is still one possibility out there, a move across the Continent to the high desert and leave this all behind. I am sorely tempted to do that, the most so when the Metro Train halts in a dark tunnel for no apparent reason and the commute stretches into the middle distance. I will seriously consider New Mexico if things break the right way.  I will let that one simmer as the leaves come out and the weather gets warm enough for roller-blading.

But what I am doing now makes me wonder about the Government. I am essentially doing a government job right now, sitting in endless meetings debating the "metrics" for "military merit" of the various activities we conduct in defense intelligence.

This is part of the Base Reallocation and Closure round requested by the Secretary to trim the footprint of the Department of Defense. The BRAC features several panels which will make recommendations to a Commission, which in turn will make decisions on what to close. They are looking to cut 25% of the bases in the Homeland, a truly breathtaking goal.

Our establishment is a sprawling hodgepodge of our history. We have base where there once were forts, an infrastructure derived from fighting British and Confederates and Indians. There is at least one that was built to fight the Spanish. The whole system makes little sense in today's world, but no one ever could muster the courage to close some of the obsolete facilities. It was politics, of course, since there were jobs on the bases and the people that had them voted and the Congress was four-square for fiscal responsibility except when it came to their own districts.

So the bases stayed generations beyond the Great Wars and cities grew up around them, making them impractical for training or conducting operations. They used to have simulated firefights right on the Silver Strand on Coronado Island, the SEALS storming up out of the surf between the luxury condos that have been built adjacent to the amphibious base. It was always startling to watch the frogmen racing by the young ladies in their bikinis.

So the whole enterprise was inefficient and wasteful. Which is no surprise. So the BRAC process was set up to provide the Department a way under law to send a list to the Congress, take it or leave it, no modifications.

In view of the extraordinary sensitivity of the deliberations this is a rigorously controlled process. Why the Intelligence Community is playing in this has been a topic of some debate. It is really quite stupid. We are trying to grow, not reduce, and better support the war that is dragging on and provide warning against the next attack against us, which is coming. We have no bases, just campus-like facilities for the three-letter agencies. We must hire new analysts and agents, since we did not get new blood for nearly a decade after the Fall of the Wall.

All of the people of our generation are getting ready to retire and we need to get new people. So, for a variety of reasons this is not the vehicle we need to do what we must do. But we all agree that what we are doing is not working well. There are at least 14 different organizations in the defense end of the intel community- nearly 80% of the grand total. It includes the intel bits of the five Services, their Guard and Reserve components, DIA and its three major parts, NGA and NSA, the Unified Commands, the Joint Staff and the Counter-intelligence Field Activity. That does not include the external partners in the Interagency community, the CIA, the Community Management crowd, State and the anti-proliferation spooks, Homeland Security and the FBI and Commerce and a cast of thousands.

This all could be organized more efficiently, one would think. That is the real reason we are sitting in endless conferences around a table in a secure facility too small too accommodate us all. The warm air blowing from the projector on me, the room hot and sultry, the corned beef sandwich from lunch lying heavy in my stomach, my eyes struggling to stay open, attempting to rank the utility of collection against analysis in priority, product against dissemination. Which is lunacy, and we know it. It is like trying to value the different parts on an internal combustion engine. Which part do you like the best? Up-stroke? Compression? Spark plug and detonation? Which is more valuable?

It is crazy. It is all just part of a cycle of tasking, collection, processing, analysis and dissemination. I suppose we could cut the administrative support again and make it harder to get our travel claims paid, but we have done that for years and that is why everyone is cranky. The system works well enough on the main jobs, but everything else is frayed.

What I think they want to do is use this process to do something bold. Combine agencies. Make dramatic change. But with a major investigation of the intelligence "failure" in Iraq going on, with the promise that this blue-ribbon panel will actually get to the bottom of things (unlike the last eight of them) I have serious reservations about this producing anything useful.

The flowers are going to come out anyway. They don't need a commission to change.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra