I have to start at the beginning on this, which is a hard pace to get back to, since it was like thirty-five years ago. We are a tight little community, we spooks, and I think we are all grateful that we had a chance to do something we considered honorable in a dishonorable world, and stand our watch on the ramparts of the nation while we could.

That is a young person’s game, and my heart goes out to those who are serving now in an ocean of uncertainty, deployment after deployment, in support of something amorphous we can’t even name.

I liked it when things were less ambiguous.

The very soul of unambiguity is my pal Joe, and more about our plain-spoken shipmate in a minute. He walked into the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Center at Makalapa Crater in 1981 or ’82, put down his briefcase and set about saving the world. It is a bit of a blur now, what with all those Soviet submarines racing around the northeast Pacific at the time, some real saber-rattling going on between the Kremlin and Ron Reagan’s resurgent and muscular American military.

We did not know that it was all going to end without a bang in those days, and it was heady and more than a little scary stuff for young people, with very expensive and astonishing capabilities being demonstrated in a conflict that always hovered somewhere half up the scale to all-out annihilation.

And being young, and starting families and all the rest of it, we managed to have fun. A little cadre of us are still in touch, all the commands and jobs later, the through the end of our Navy careers, and then the alphabet soup of companies we all passed through, and the challenges of families in a changing world.

You have seen this week that the spirit of the analyst never gets out of our souls. I inflict The Daily on a select group of friends. Another pal writes a daily essay, highlighting the foibles of our society that I value highly. Another pal writes a column for his local paper in Tidewater, where he dwells near the Dismal Swamp, which is actually pretty cool. Our pal Jim travels and writes eloquently- with pictures you have seen this week- about events near and far, and then there is Joe.

Joe is our current thought lead. He does a monthly column for the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA, you have to have an acronym, right?) about the events in the intelligence community. Joe call’s his column “MazzInt,” a playful take on his last name, and the acronym for “Measurement and Signatures Intelligence,” or MASINT. That is one of the core disciplines of the trade, alongside HUMINT, SIGINT, GEOINT and the queen of analysis, All Source, which rolls them all together into something that is occasionally coherent and sometimes actually true.

Our conceit is that using every arrow in the quiver, fusing together all of them, will get you closest to the truth. Joe himself would be the first to tell you that our hardy band of analysts only missed a couple things along the way. The Fall of the Soviet Union being one of them, but hey, the old adage that intelligence officers- and weather forecasters- are the only two trades that can be wrong half the time and still get promoted.

Joe wrote a column two months ago that struck former Director of Central Intelligence Mike Hayden strongly, and was quoted extensively in a thought piece about the current state of affairs from a perspective of some gravitas. This month, his column “A Vortex of Violence and Fear,” touched on the reasons that a lot of the old Spooks have been feeling like a cat dropped on a hot stove.

Joe put it this way: “In a sound bite, everyone who has not “checked out” for the summer senses imminent danger but doesn’t know where the threat is coming from or how the government can protect them, so nobody feels safe. Some say this is just the new normal and we have to get use to any large gathering being a potential shooting gallery. The alternative is to use massive data collection (OK, surveillance) available to us in combination with high performance computing and machine learning to deter, detect, and disrupt those planning mass murder to advance some cause.”

The full column caught the attention of a man who was rumored to have been on Donald Trump’s short list for Vice President, and one of the most vocal critics of the conduct of American foreign policy around.

I personally liked Lieutenant General Mike Flynn. I used to sit in on the video teleconferences between the Pentagon and the International Assistance Support Force (ISAF) in Kabul. I never found him to be anything except a straight-shooter. When he was selected to be Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, he was determined to shake up the place, and he succeeded to the degree that he was essentially canned for not toing the party line.

It is perfectly fine to disagree with him, and I was always too politically sensitive to have dared to speak what I considered the unvarnished truth to power, for the perfectly rational reason that I am not completely sure what the truth actually is, from moment to moment. But Mike Flynn calls them as he sees them.

That is particularly true as we have Flynn and retired Marine General John Allen thundering at one another about who is qualified- and not qualified- to be the next president.

Anyway, I commend Joe’s column to you. It on-line at: https://mazzintblog.afcea.org

There is a lot to think about in it, and Mike Flynn thought so, too. He dropped a line to Joe, saying “This is an exceptional piece of writing. I just tweeted it out. Thank you for crafting this one. There is so much for a reader to consider.

Best

FLYNN”

That is pretty high praise coming from the General, and demonstrates Joe’s position as a major intellectual force in our community. I am honored to have pals like him who, retired or not, are never going to quit telling us what he thinks.

And the best part is that he is willing to listen, too.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsoccotra.com