What do we make of the Wiki-leaks and the Washington Post series on the growth of the “Classified Industry”?

First, the big news on the wiki-leaks is that our journalistic embed program is working very well precisely because the Wiki-leaks produced no big news. Of course the Pakistani ISI is helping the Taliban and certainly our top secret special forces operators are over there to kill and capture enemy leaders. Naturally there’s frustration with humanitarian assistance getting to the people who need it most and assuredly there is corruption in the Afghan police and military.

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But there is no breaking news with the Wiki-leaks other than the fact that we have an enemy of the state, Wiki-leaks, seeking to steal top secret and secret information to publish it for its own financial gain. Some have argued that the non-story that emanated after review of the Wiki-leaks means that DoD over-classifies information. There may be some truth to that, but what is missing from that argument is a timeliness factor. If a report from five years ago is revealed that U.S. forces are attacking an Al Qaeda hideout, that is less likely to be damaging to national security, though perhaps not, than a report released from yesterday’s intelligence brief.

These documents cover some of the time I was the deputy commanding general for the 10th Mountain Division and the Combined Joint Task Force in Afghanistan. Essentially:

  • They are thousands of daily spot reports sent from field units around Afghanistan.
  • They are unconfirmed, but important, reports. A squad can see 10 “enemy personnel” moving along a ridge line and report that only later to find out it was a local Afghan unit. Maybe the report is corrected, maybe not.
  • The two most interesting aspects of the reporting are the assertion that the ISI is deeply involved with the Taliban and the confirmation that the Taliban have surface to air missiles. Both have never been in doubt, but the surface to air missile part was tightly held. These are not the same Stinger missiles that we provided the Mujahidin, but SA-7 Strelas that come from Russia or former Soviet Bloc nations.
  • The key is that these reports are human, electronic, and signals intelligence reports, when analyzed and triangulated, that may provide proper evidence to go to the Pakistan government to force their hand or increase our search for SA-7s, which we did on occasion as the intelligence merited it.
  • The discussion of the special operations task force was revealing in that it gave an unvarnished glimpse into the raw nature of their kill/capture mission, confirming that we are aggressively killing the top tier targets. Again, not new, but not often confirmed either.
  • Examples of frustration in passing along humanitarian aid are commonplace and not surprising. The civil affairs team that reported finding wasted or stolen aid products is one report against perhaps many others where the aid went to exactly the right people
  • Likewise, the payments to “ghost” soldiers in the Afghan military happens on occasion, but efforts to automate the payments via online banking deposits have eradicated much of this.

In an associated story, there has been an ongoing series in the Washington Post contending that we have too many contractors with top secret clearances and that the post 9-11 world has spawned cottage industries of analysts upon analysts working in their stovepipes producing reports and attempting to prove their necessity, a cycle of the military-industrial complex iron triangle.

My view is that it’s time to take a look at all of these organizations, our force structure and what we really need. The Quadrennial Review usually addresses some of this, but many organizations have added layers of security experts in order to attempt to penetrate into enemy finance networks, or IED networks,, or weapons networks, or you pick the network.

At this stage in the game it is better to have too much than too little, though budget pressures will certainly winnow some of that down.

After the Rolling Stone incident with Gen. McChrystal and now the Wiki-leaks, you can bet that commanders are conducting full scale reviews of their media and security processes. Whether it is a weasel like Michael Hastings, who lies his way into the embed program and abuses off the record comments, or a charlatan like Julian Assange, whose mission is to reveal secrets to our enemies, or the actual identified enemies of Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, they all want information to be used to their own advantage and to harm those who are trying to protect us from the evils of Islamic extremism.

To me, there’s no difference between any of them.