(One of the Ford F-250s headed north from Lake Ana on Virginia Rt 29 after the holiday.)

The Holiday is over and the Red Wings could not put away the top-seeded Blackhawks last night, but damn, there was a lot of activity crammed into three calendar days. Motorcycles on Sunday, and the Great Rolling Thunder traffic jam. Last night it was the big husky pick-up trucks hauling pleasure craft and long camping trailers north on the Zach Taylor Highway and Route 29 north from Lake Ana.

It wasn’t a bad drive back up to the Imperial City, if you kept your wits about you and flowed with everyone else.

I have to deliver a proposal to the government this morning out in Reston, and I am pleased I have enough awareness to remember that I have to be there, sunny side up, at an improbable hour.

Now that the work-week is not only looming, but right here, I am pleased to be alert enough to navigate out to the wilds of western Fairfax County. There is a lot to consider, in terms of the immediate future. I have a pal who has warned me about trying to explain things like budgets and out-years, so I will take a light touch to that. Suffice it to say that “major policy addresses” have budget consequences if they are real.

It is hard to figure out what the President’s attempted ‘re-set’ on the whole Terror thing is going to mean for the industry. Not good, I imagine. It is sort of weird, the relation between Government and Industry, now that I think about it. My situational awareness- SA- is a little low on that.

“SA” is shorthand for the old fighter pilot contention that if you did not know exactly what is going on around you at all times, someone is about to put a missile up your tailpipe.

It is funny. My colleagues and I used to BE the Government. In my case, it was only 27 years of active service, but that should be close enough for Government work. We did all that periodic training: ethics and diversity and harassment training- all the stuff we were supposed to believe because they told us to. We had to sign it off, too, along with the random urinalysis tests, polygraphs and periodic investigations.

I signed documents saying I would not conduct medical experiments on my co-workers, something I thought was absurd, until I found out about MKUltra, the program under which clandestine LSD doses were passed out with wild abandon by a sister agency in the go-go days of Camelot and the grim times that came after it. That revelation was quite an eye-opener.

Our pal Mac was part of the answer to the abuses of the wide-open 1960s. All these things come in great sine waves. I mean, who would have thought that the intel bean-bags would be flying armed drones and blowing up American citizens? I had to sign a paper agreeing not to do that. Plus ca change, I guess.

Anyway, with retirement from active service came the hard adjustment to being mostly like everyone else. I avoid classified material like the plague now, unless the Task Order solicitation is issued by the Government at a classified level.

Some projects need to be protected, after all, and the Chinese are merrily hacking away at the companies, collecting everything they can. Without some sort of firewall segregation (normally stand-alone non-networked computers for production) we essentially would be transferring government proprietary information VFR direct to Beijing. If, of course, it wasn’t stolen direct from the Government in the first place.

The end of the Cold War and the ‘permanent wartime footing’ that the President decried left us all in quite a pickle. The Agencies had to cut the workforce by around 20%- they took care of their people as best they good with early-outs and no hiring for most of the 1990s to make the goals.

The slack in capability was moved off the personnel leger with a simple trick: the same people just given early retirement came back in the door the next morning wearing different colored badges as Contractors. It was a change from one pot of money to another. Presto Chango!

In the bad old days, the companies were viewed as a necessary evil. The Agency routinely badged a lot of us, with suitable continued investigations and polygraphs, of course, so we could drop by and talk about things- projects coming up, areas we might want to invest private money to keep the right people “on the bench,” ready to go when the Government needed something.

My favorite requirement was a Government task issued to industry for the provision of “3-4 TS/SCI-cleared sociologists, with a minimum of three years field experience in sub-Saharan Africa willing to work in Stuttgart and eligible to pass the stringent TESA standards for employment of the German Government.”

We read that solicitation and laughed. For a long time, the social scientists viewed the Spook world with deep and abiding distrust- in no small part because of things like MKUltra. The idea that we could find sociologists well versed in our field was frankly absurd. I felt a little like Alice, when she told the White Queen, laughing:

“There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Did I mention that the Government wanted it cheap? That is another function of what is going on. Now that the war is “over,” or the terms of reference have changed, the price the Government is willing to pay for services is coming way down. Dramatically way down, and you can imagine that is sending shock waves through the industry.

Anyway, it is a complex and arcane business as you well know, but the reverse of then-VP Al Gore’s ‘outsourcing’ initiative is going on today.

For the last couple years they have tried to just hire us all back into the Government, but there is neither world enough, nor enough Government cash to actually do it. They call it “in-sourcing,” naturally, and clearly, they are uncomfortable with our presence in sheer numbers.

The award of the new multi-task order omnibus contract I manage came with the stipulation that they would sponsor only a limited number of clearances- the key to the kingdom, so to speak, in that a badge meant you could actually visit the agency, have lunch in the cafeteria, chat up old colleagues or attend conferences in which the Government tried to explain what it was doing.

You should have heard them try to explain Sequestration, for example. Hahaha.

Anyway, in the case of one contract I know well, the total number of sponsored clearances was slashed by almost 90%. The panic of being cut out of the loop was palpable- knowledge is power, you know, and there is nothing more formidable than the certainty that something is going on behind closed doors that you don’t know about.

I felt it personally last week when I delivered a proposal- unclassified- to the Agency last week. The contracts people are now located in a big new refurbished building out by Dulles International. There is a huge amount of spooky stuff out there now- and the Contracting Officer met me in the lobby to countersign the receipt and take the package. That is the same drill for this morning.

All business conducted in a public place, on the public side of the guards and guns. No conversation that could even vaguely be considered sensitive. Public. It is getting to be a matter of routine.

It occurred to me that this is a direct function of the reduced access of business to Government. I could just take my package to the contracting officer’s desk, shoot the shit, maybe get a cup of coffee and collect some business intelligence about what is going to happen for planning purposes by my company and partners.

It is not a great deal different in nature than what I have been doing all my professional life, but we call it something different. I view it as a simple matter of SA.

But there is a lot less of that now, and I wonder if someone is going to launch a missile at my tailpipe. The Government folks don’t want to talk, and that is policy from the Director on down, and I assume someone told him.

We are flying blind, then, and thank God I am not in the time of life where I have little kids and a real requirement for a steady income. Blind is no way to go into the future we are facing. But that is the policy.

It is not going to work very well, but that is the way we do things these days.

Have a great week- four days and I am back down on the farm where my requirement for SA is confined to whatever that stuff is growing in the garden. Some of it might actually be edible, but I will have to have my situational awareness really tweaked up to try the right stuff.

(They claim dandelions are edible. That may be the only crop I bring in this year).

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com