How the Defense Industry is Hosing Obama and the Taxpayer ... Again

Incompetence, Corruption or Both
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Monastir, Tunisa

On 3 March 2010, CounterPunch carried my critique of the Pentagon’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), which was released in February. QDRs have a long history of producing rubbish, and President Obama’s first attempt was no exception. Indeed, notwithstanding the expenditure of tens of thousands of man hours and over a year of preparation, Mr. Obama’s QDR set a new low for ducking the hard decisions needed to fix the real problems afflicting the military, and by extension, the taxpayers who pay the bill. Recent events, however, show why it would be a mistake to consign the 2010 QDR to the dustbin of history. The QDR serves a useful purpose for the gamesters inhabiting the hall of mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac.

The players in the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) regard hogwash like that produced in the QDR as essential weapons for waging their unremitting budget war to extract money from the American people. Sun Tzu would have recognized the QDR for what it is: a Cheng (a dazzle) to set up a Ch’i (a stroke). When I worked in the Pentagon, we had a more prosaic name for Master Sun’s timeless principle of using a distraction to set up a decisive maneuver: The QDR is part of a cape job to set up a phony debate over the need for ever rising defense budgets while putting the rest of the government on a diet (in a recession).

The 2010 QDR was one of the opening moves in a cynical budget battle that will probably end, temporarily at least, sometime before this year’s congressional election in November. The role of this particular distraction became clear at the end of July and in early August, when the congressionally appointed independent bipartisan QDR Review Panel, co-chaired by William Perry, a defense secretary during the Clinton Administration, and Stephen J. Hadley, a National Security Advisor during the reign of Mad King George, delivered its own sweeping critique of the QDR to the Armed Services Committees in the Congress. These committees established both the QDR and the requirement for a so-called independent review of the QDR for the unstated purpose of ensuring there would always be a head of steam to pump up defense budgets.

The Armed Services Committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate are the operational headquarters of the congressional wing of the MICC. Their members get reelected year after year, and with their increasing seniority, these members become ever more powerful and secure in their positions, because they use Congress’s power of the purse to shovel gobs of defense dollars to their home districts or states to pay for the vast array of contractors and military bases that sustain the domestic economic wing of MICC. Assignment to one of these committees, especially for a freshman, is one of the most sought-after plums on Capital Hill, because it provides a huge source of patronage that virtually guarantees reelection. As one highly moral congressional staffer explained to me years ago, the mission of the Armed Services Committees is to perform “overlook” not “oversight of” the torrent of dollars they unleash on their home districts.

The report produced by the bipartisan panel is aimed at helping the committees perform that mission.

It should be thought of as a follow-on effort to reinforce the original cape job by stating the obvious criticism, while also ducking the hard questions implied by that criticism: Namely, the obvious conclusion that the Pentagon’s QDR did nothing to head off the looming programmatic train wreck, because the QDR did not deal with the existing modernization, readiness, and force structure programs that are grossly underfunded. The only solution, according to the bipartisan panel: Send more money, and send it now.

Of course the committee’s report, like the QDR itself, said nothing about how this underfunding problem came into being, or why this problem is the inevitable result of the MICC’s deliberate gaming strategy to create a perpetual equipment aging crisis by the ubiquitous bureaucratic power games of front loading and political engineering. The panel cannot claim ignorance about these games, since one of its most prominent members, John Lehman, coined the term “front loading” at a Brooking Institution seminar in December 1982, when, as Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, he bragged that it was too late to stop Reagan’s naval buildup, which due to production lead times, had not yet begun, because in Lehman’s words, “we front loaded the budget.” Nevertheless, despite the intimate understanding of these power games by at least one of its most prominent members, the independent bipartisan review, like the QDR itself, provided no insight into how these bureaucratic games create a situation wherein the costs of ever more complex weapons always grow faster than the budgets paying for those weapons, even when budgets increase at stunning rates as they did in the early 1980s, and especially after 1998, when the defense budget almost doubled in real terms.

Like the QDR, the bipartisan panel ignored another self-evident question about underfunding: Namely how could today’s defense budget, which is clearly at its highest level since the end of WWII (after removing the effects of inflation), not be sufficient to pay for the modernization and support of what is clearly the smallest force structure since the end of WWII? Or by extension, how could such massive spending place the Pentagon on a pathway to what Mssrs. Perry and Hadley called a “train wreck” on page 4 of their 29 July statement to Congress?

Finally, like the QDR, the independent review panel was totally silent on the subject of how the Pentagon’s accountability and auditing problems make it impossible to sort out the details of the front loading and political engineering decisions that deliberately created the train wreck it now deplores. (Readers interested in these issues and their implications can find a comprehensive analysis of them in my June 2002 testimony to Congress.)

Therefore, by mirror imaging the data-free analysis and analysis-free logic used by the authors of the QDR, the bipartisan panel concluded the Defense Department (really the MICC) needs much larger budgets, both now and for evermore -- even though the auditing shambles means the Pentagon cannot tell Congress how wisely it is spending the money it already has. Instead, the panel’s report subjects the reader to the following vapid bureaucratese on page 61: “Meeting the crucial requirements of modernization will require a substantial and immediate additional investment that is sustained through the long term.”

What BS!

Of course, the authors of the QDR in the Pentagon could not mention the self-evident train wreck; nor could they make a recommendation for much higher budgets; nor could they mention the managerial implications of the bookkeeping shambles. How could they? To do so would be to undercut the budget and programmatic decisions they recommended to and maneuvered their boss, President Barack Obama, into approving. So the authors of the QDR took the greasy low road by simply ignoring the obvious, knowing full well that someone in the Congressional wing of the MICC or entity empowered by that wing (e.g., like the bipartisan Congressional panel), or in the mainstream media, would draw the Pentagon’s desired conclusion (no doubt with under the table help from operatives in the Pentagon) and do the dirty work.

That Mr. Obama is made to look like a fool is merely a cost of doing the MICC’s business, and perhaps he will learn the same lesson Bill Clinton learned: don’t mess with Mother MICC. In fairness, some of Obama’s political appointees, particularly those in the spectacularly incompetent policy shop charged with managing the QDR, probably did not know what they were doing and were merely duped by the far more seasoned military and civilian career operatives in the Pentagon. On the other hand, it is important to remember that placing incompetent political appointees into crucial positions is an artful part of the MICC’s gaming tactics.

Moreover, even though the report of the bipartisan panel exhibited no comprehension of the bureaucratic pathologies that created the train wreck it purported to deplore, it devoted Chapter 4 to a discussion of gaseous platitudes for reforming the acquisition system. Such disconnected promises of reform, based on a deliberate failure to connect cause and effect, are a staple of blue ribbon panels in the Hall of Mirrors that passes for a representative democracy with vigorous oversight and checks and balances. The promised reforms always embody the same shopworn snake oil to buy time as well as the acquiescence of the masses to a continuation of business as usual: Don’t worry about the past; history is not relevant, because the reforms we are putting into place will make the future different from the past. We urge patience, send the money, and trust us.

Of course, the unstated implication of this latest round of charades is that the Pentagon’s budget should be allowed to continue growing as usual ... forever. The underlying idea is to increase the political pressure on a hapless President Obama to take defense spending off the table in the negotiations to reduce the deficit, under the auspices of yet another Blue Ribbon Panel with yet another hidden agenda. With the Pentagon off the table, the effect will be to Hooverize Obama by maneuvering him into cutting back Medicare and Social Security expenditures, but not the regressive payroll taxes that pay for these programs, as well as any economic stimulus initiatives the President may be contemplating.

That William Perry, a leading “greybeard” of the MICC’s Democratic wing, a man who has made millions moving back and forth through the revolving door between the Pentagon and the industrial wing of the MICC, is a co-chairman of the review panel making this kind of critique is particularly brazen. As Deputy Secretary of Defense (1993 - 1994) and Secretary of Defense (1994 - Jan 1997), he approved the acquisition decisions that front loaded the defense program of the Clinton Administration with all sorts of new, more expensive weapons. Those decisions (e.g., like the decision to front load the JSF/F-35 program), coupled with front loading decisions made just before his tenure during the waning days of the Bush I administration (e.g, the F-22 and F-18E/F decisions), deliberately created the pathway toward the disastrous train wreck Perry now says we must throw money at to prevent.

Moreover, Perry has the chutzpah to tell us that the only solution is to pump even more money flowing through all three wings of the MICC, although a doubling of the defense budget in inflation adjusted dollars since 1998 has clearly made the train wreck even worse than was predicted by the Pentagon’s own aging data assembled during his watch as Secretary of Defense. (An analysis, based on official DoD data, proving that Perry could and should have understood the long range implications of the “train wreck” problem while he was Secretary of Defense can be found in my 6 March 1996 report Defense Budget Time Bomb, which I produced as a member of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and submitted to my chain of command.)

All of this QDR nonsense goes to show that the name of the real game is to protect the MICC, or as the late American strategist and reformer Colonel John R. Boyd (USAF Ret) used to say, “People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy. They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy; it is: Don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.” The bipartisan review of the QDR, like the QDR itself, is merely a handmaiden to that strategy.

Recommendation

We tried throwing money at the Pentagon to fix its problems twice in the last thirty years, in the 1980s and after 1998. It is now indisputably clear that these spending sprees created conditions that worsened the pathway toward the deliberately self-induced train wreck. Adding more money simply repeats the process on a more destructive scale. When such behavior repeats itself over and over, it inevitably boils down to another of Colonel Boyd’s aphorisms: “The issue is now reduced to a question of incompetence, corruption, or both.”

On the other hand, there is one thing the bipartisan report on the QDR inadvertently proves: It is now time to clean out the MICC’s Augean Stables.

We know what does not work: Adding money

The only real alternative is to take away the money, and force the MICC’s decision makers to think before they spend.

We should freeze the defense budget, or better yet, reduce it each year on a glide path of one or two or three (or more) percentage points per year in current dollars until the Pentagon can pass an audit that provides decision makers with enough reliable information to sort out the mess deliberately created by the MICC’s front loaders and political engineers. This is hardly an extreme requirement; accounting for money appropriated and expended is an absolute requirement of the Constitution (re. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7), which every member of the federal government has taken a sacred oath to protect and preserve.

There are those who will howl that we cannot take such a drastic action in time of war.

This claim is a red herring that approves trashing the Constitution to defend a country defined by its Constitution. Moreover, even if we assume we want to continue pouring money into those unaccountable bottomless pits, we could continue the policy of throwing money at these wars with supplemental appropriations, while putting the core defense budget on a diet.

Just how much money does that leave us to work with?

On March 4, George Wilson, the dean of Washington’s defense journalists, and one of the few journalists who actually understands how the Pentagon and Congress operate, analyzed the President’s FY 2011 budget and reported in Congressional Daily that Obama’s annual national security expenditures would total more than a trillion dollars, if one adds to the Pentagon’s core budget: (1) the costs of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere; (2) the defense related expenditures in the Energy, State, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security Departments; and (3) the defense share of interest on the federal debt. Of course that is an optimistically low estimate, because as Wilson implied, it assumes there will be no more cost growth.

If we placed the war expenditures, Veterans Affairs, and the interest expenditures off limits, we are left with $713 billion to work on and make accountable to the American people, which is still a larger defense budget than the comparable budgets for the rest of world combined.

Surely, $713 billion is a large enough stall in the MICC’s Augean stable to warrant a serious cleaning operation.

Cyberwar and Repression

Corporatist Synergy Made in Hell

Published on 04-26-2010

By Tom Burghardt Unfailingly, defense industry boosters and corporate media acolytes promote the disturbing hypothesis annunciated by former Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, that the nation is in peril. In a February Washington Post op-ed, the latest version of the "grave and gathering danger" big lie repeated endlessly by former President Bush during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, McConnell claims that "the United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing." Since leaving the secret state's employ, McConnell returned to his old beltway bandit firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, as a senior vice president in charge of the company's national security business unit, a position he held after "retiring" as Director of the National Security Agency back in 1996. Critics, including security system design experts and investigative journalists, question the alarmist drumbeat that promises to dump tens of billions of federal dollars into the coffers of firms like McConnell's. Indeed, Washington Technology reported two weeks ago that Booz Allen Hamilton landed a $20M contract to "foster collaboration among telecommunications researchers, University of Maryland faculty members and other academic institutions to improve secure networking and telecommunications and boost information assurance." While we're at it, let's consider the deal that L-3 Communications grabbed from the Air Force just this week. Washington Technology reports that L-3, No. 8 on that publication's "2009 Top Ten" list of federal prime contractors, "will assist the Air Forces Central Command in protecting the security of its network operations under a contract potentially worth $152 million over five years." Or meditate on the fact that security giant Raytheon's soaring first quarter profits were due to the "U.S. military demand for surveillance equipment and new ways to prepare soldiers for wars," MarketWatch reported Thursday. Chump-change perhaps in the wider scheme of things, considering America's nearly $800B defense budget for FY2011, but fear sells and what could be more promising for enterprising security grifters than hawking terror that comes with the threat that shadowy "asymmetric" warriors will suddenly switch everything off? As Bloomberg News disclosed back in 2008, both Lockheed Martin and Boeing "are deploying forces and resources to a new battlefield: cyberspace." As journalist Gopal Ratnam averred, the military contractors and the wider defense industry are "eager to capture a share of a market that may reach $11 billion in 2013," and "have formed new business units to tap increased spending to protect U.S. government computers from attack." Linda Gooden, executive vice president of Lockheed's Information Systems & Global Services unit told Bloomberg, "The whole area of cyber is probably one of the faster-growing areas" of the U.S. budget. "It's something that we're very focused on." Lockheed's close, long-standing ties with the National Security Agency all but guarantee a leg up for the firm as it seeks to capture a large slice of the CYBERCOM pie. The problem with a line of reasoning that U.S. efforts are primarily concerned with defending Pentagon networks reveals a glaring fact (largely omitted from media accounts) that it is the Pentagon, and not a motley crew of hackers, cyber-criminals or "rogue states" that are setting up a formidable infrastructure for launching future high-tech war crimes. This is clearly spelled out in the DOD's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). In that document Pentagon planners aver that CYBERCOM "will direct the operation and defense of DOD's information networks, and will prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum cyberspace military operations. An operational USCYBERCOM will also play a leading role in helping to integrate cyber operations into operational and contingency planning." The QDR promises to stand-up "10 space and cyberspace wings" within the Department of the Air Force that will work in tandem with Cyber Command. Last week, Antifascist Calling reported how the mission of that Pentagon Command is primarily concerned with waging offensive operations against "adversaries" and that civilian infrastructure is viewed as a "legitimate" target for attack. In that piece, I cited documents released by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), publicly available, though buried within a mass of Broad Agency Announcements, that solicited bids for contracts by the various armed service branches from private defense and security corporations for the design of offensive cyber weapons. Accordingly, the Air Force Research Laboratory-Rome issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA-10-04-RIKA) February 25, for "Full Spectrum Cyber Operations Technology" that will address issues related to "the integration and better coordination of the day-to-day defense, protection, and operation of DoD networks as well as the capability to conduct full spectrum cyberspace military operations." The BAA explicitly states that "research efforts under this program are expected to result in functional capabilities, concepts, theory, and applications ideally addressing cyber operations problems including projects specializing in highly novel and interesting applicable technique concepts will also be considered, if deemed to be of 'breakthrough' quality and importance." Unsurprisingly, "technical information relevant to potential submitters is contained in a classified addendum at the Secret level to this BAA." But the military aren't the only players leading the charge towards the development of highly-destructive cyberweapons. Indeed, the Cyber Conflict Research Studies Association (CCSA), a Washington, D.C. based think tank is top-heavy with former intelligence, military and corporate officials doing just that. The group's board of directors are flush with former officers or consultants from the FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Air Force, National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security and the CIA. Other board members are top officers in the spooky "public-private" FBI-affiliated spy outfit InfraGard, the Council on Foreign Relations as well as high-powered firms such as General Dynamics, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and Goldman Sachs. Demonstrating the interconnected nature of domestic surveillance, repression and military cyberwar operations, CCSA's Treasurer, Robert Schmidt, is currently a member of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Council on Domestic Intelligence and the secretive Intelligence and National Security Association (INSA). Additionally, Schmidt is the President/CEO of InfraGard and "leads the operational side of private sector involvement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's InfraGard program." How's that for a hat trick! What that "operational side" entails has never been publicly disclosed by the organization, but as I wrote back in 2008, citing Matthew Rothschild's chilling piece inThe Progressive, martial law is high on InfraGard's agenda. Members on CCSA's board of directors, like others whirling through the revolving door between government and the private sector were/are officers or consultants to the FBI, NSA, DHS and other secret state intelligence agencies. Others were/are key advisers on the National Security Council or serve as consultants to industry-sponsored associations such as the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) and INSA. Dovetailing with research conducted by the Pentagon and their Intelligence Community partners, one CCSA study will explore "the full spectrum of military computer network operations, defined as computer network defense (CND), computer network exploit (CNE) and computer network attack (CNA), and examines the potential synergies and tradeoffs between those three categories." As befitting research conducted by the Military-Industrial-Security-Complex (MISC), CCSA's study "will involve key academicians, strategists, military and intelligence community leaders and operational cyber practitioners to analyze key dilemmas of doctrine, organization, training, and planning, particularly with respect to integrating cyber warfare capabilities with kinetic operations." Key questions to be answered, among others, include "How can cyberwarfare capabilities be best integrated with other military forces?" and "How can leaders and personnel for conducting cyberwarfare be trained, educated and grown?" Clearly, these are not academic issues. DARPA to the Rescue The Pentagon's "blue sky" research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is chock-a-block with programs investigating everything fromNeurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts to Operationally-Focused Systems Integration (OFSI) "that align DARPA technologies with explicit opportunities for military operational impact." Certainly, given the precarious state of the global capitalist economy, the enfeebled nature of American democratic institutions, and with no end in sight to planet-wide imperial adventures to secure access to increasingly shrinking energy reserves and other strategic resources, technological "silver bullets" are highly sought-after commodities by corporate and military bureaucracies. Such technophilic preoccupations by the MISC all but guarantee that the "state of exception" inaugurated by the 9/11 provocation will remain a permanent feature of daily life. Several, interrelated DARPA projects feed into wider Pentagon cyberwar research conducted by the Army, Navy and Air Force. One component of this research is DARPA's National Cyber Range (NCR). The brainchild of the agency's Strategic Technical Office (STO), NCR is conceived as "DARPA's contribution to the new federal Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative (CNCI), providing a 'test bed' to produce qualitative and quantitative assessments of the Nation's cyber research and development technologies." While DARPA claims that it is "creating the National Cyber Range to protect and defend the nation's critical information systems," a "key vision" behind the program "is to revolutionize the state of the art of test range resource and test automation execution." While short on specifics, DARPA's "vision of the NCR is to create a national asset for use across the federal government to test a full spectrum of cyber programs." Many of the military programs slated for testing at NCR are highly classified, including those that fall under the purview of Pentagon Special Access or black programs. As defense analyst William M. Arkin pointed out in Code Names, such programs are hidden under the rubric of Special Technical Operations that have their own "entire separate channels of communication and clearances." STO's "exist to compartment these military versions of clandestine and covert operations involving special operations, paramilitary activity, covert action, and cyber-warfare." Arkin identified nearly three dozen cyberwar programs or exercises back in 2005; undoubtedly many more have since come online. As Aviation Week reported in 2009, "Devices to launch and control cyber, electronic and information attacks are being tested and refined by the U.S. military and industry in preparation for moving out of the laboratory and into the warfighter's backpack." But as "with all DARPA programs," the agency "will transition the operation of the NCR at a later date to an operational partner. No decision has been made on who will operate the final range." Amongst the private defense, security and academic "partners" involved in NCR's development are the usual suspects: scandal-tainted BAE Systems; General Dynamics-Advanced Information Systems; Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; Lockheed Martin; Northrop Grumman-Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems Division; Science Applications International Corporation; and SPARTA. The aggressive nature of what has since evolved into CYBERCOM is underscored by several planning documents released by the U.S. Air Force. In a 2006 presentation to the Air Force Cyber Task Force, A Warfighting Domain: Cyberspace, Dr. Lani Kass unabashedly asserts: "Cyber is a war-fighting domain. The electromagnetic spectrum is the maneuver space. Cyber is the United States' Center of Gravity--the hub of all power and movement, upon which everything else depends. It is the Nation's neural network." Kass averred that "Cyber superiority is the prerequisite to effective operations across all strategic and operational domains--securing freedom from attack and freedom to attack." Accordingly, she informed her Air Force audience that "Cyber favors the offensive," and that the transformation of the electromagnetic spectrum into a "warfighting domain" will be accomplished by: "Strategic Attack directly at enemy centers of gravity; Suppression of Enemy Cyber Defenses; Offensive Counter Cyber; Defensive Counter Cyber; Interdiction." While the Pentagon and their embedded acolytes in academia, the media and amongst corporate grifters who stand to secure billions in contracts have framed CYBERCOM's launch purely as a defensive move to deter what Wired investigative journalist Ryan Singel has denounced as "Cyberarmaggedon!" hype to protect America's "cyber assets" from attack by rogue hackers, states, or free-floating terrorist practitioners of "asymmetric war," CYBERCOM's defensive brief is way down the food chain. Indeed, "options for the Operational Command for Cyberspace" include the "scalability of force packages" and their "ease of implementation" and, as I wrote last week citing but two of the fourteen examples cited by the Senate, "research, development, and acquisition" of cyber weapons. This is attack, not defense mode. Americans' Privacy: a Thing of the Past Situating CYBERCOM under the dark wings of U.S. Strategic Command and the National Security Agency, is a disaster waiting to happen. As we now know, since 2001 NSA under dubious Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) findings that are still classified, and the despicable 2008 FISA Amendments Act, the Executive Branch was handed the authority the spy on American citizens and legal residents with impunity. During his confirmation hearing as Cyber Command chief on April 15, NSA Director Lt. General Keith Alexander sought to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) that "this is not about the intent to militarize cyber-space. My main focus is on building the capacity to secure the military's operational networks." He told the Senate panel that if called in to help protect civilian networks, both NSA and Cyber Command "will have unwavering dedication to the privacy of American citizens." Alexander was far cagier however in his written responses in a set of Advanced Questions posed by the SASC. While corporate media like the dutiful stenographers they are, repeated standard Pentagon boilerplate that the secret state has an "unwavering dedication" to Americans' privacy, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding answers and the release of the classified supplement. Alexander stated in his written testimony that although "U.S. Cyber Command's mission will not include defense of the .gov and .com domains, given the integration of cyberspace into the operation of much of our critical infrastructure and the conduct of commerce and governance, it is the obligation of the Department to be prepared to provide military options to the President and SECDEF if our national security is threatened." He also defended the statement that "DOD's mission to defend the nation 'takes primacy' over the Department of Homeland Security's role in some situations." "Of greater concern" EPIC wrote in their brief, "may be the questions that Lt. Gen. Alexander chose to respond to in classified form. When asked if the American people are 'likely to accept deployment of classified methods of monitoring electronic communications to defend the government and critical infrastructure without explaining basic aspects of how this monitoring will be conducted and how it may affect them,' the Director acknowledged that the Department had a 'need to be transparent and communicate to the American people about our objectives to address the national security threat to our nation--the nature of the threat, our overall approach, and the roles and responsibilities of each department and agency involved--including NSA and the Department of Defense,' but then chose include that the rest of his response to that question in the 'classified supplement'." "Most troubling of all" EPIC averred "is the classified nature of the responses to advance questions 27b) and 27c). After responding to the question of how the internet could be designed differently to provide greater inherent security by describing vague 'technological enhancements' that could enhance mobility and possibly security, Lt. Gen. Alexander responded to 'Is it practical to consider adopting those modifications?' and 'What would the impact be on privacy, both pro and con?' by referring the Senators to the 'classified supplement.' No answer to either question was provided in the public record." But in considering these questions, perhaps the SASC should have referred to ex-spook McConnell's February Washington Post op-ed: "More specifically, we need to reengineer the Internet to make [it] more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same."