Failure of Leadership
with Lots of Unexpected Consequences
I have been relatively quiet on Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden because I am very conflicted about what to think. Like a lot of folks who are reading this, I’ve had the clearance and the access and I remember the oaths I swore and the penalties. A lot of stuff then was pretty silly, but the primary reason for the BURN BEFORE READING stamps was fairly simple – releasing the information would reveal the source. Since I had a kind of obscure specialty for a while, I can recall being dragged out of the Fort Clayton Golf Course Bar by a CW4 who had been one of my students to read traffic that came in as HOTHOTHOT and reading, shaking my head and pointing out the problem. It was pretty funny, the chief went back and bought me another beer and we howled. But, I still can’t talk about more than 20 years later.
Nor would I. Someone got some information they probably should not have had and passed that along to someone else who somehow got it to someone else. The fact that in that chain of someone’s was probably a source just like Bradley Manning or Mr. Snowden is irrelevant. I don’t need to get cheap laughs. However, if you have a SCIF handy, read me back on and I’ll tell you the story.
So, you don’t talk about what you know. I taught at the INTEL School and that’s where I learned my SKIF etiquette but that training started a lot earlier. A boss of mine was reading one of Kissinger’s books where it referenced the clearance that he had, and the boss went ballistic – some things are incredibly sensitive even if you don’t care why. Henry the K didn’t care about a couple of 10000 grunts and a couple of 100000 Vietnamese and Cambodians or so; why would he care about something silly like the name of an access? The boss’ boss came in to talk to us about it, and said that “We are held to a higher standard.” You put on the uniform and you are held to a higher standard.
On the other hand, the stuff that Manning leaked through International Man of Mystery Julian Assange was primarily battle journals. In other words, the old DA 1594s or whatever they are calling them now, some SITREPs, some raw SPOT Reports and so on. He was a computer geek and a very junior Intel Analyst. He plotted stuff on maps. If he had access to a lot of highly classified stuff, that was really stupid.
But, the material is pretty damning. We were in a war that we should not have started, fighting a professionals’ war against the people – with the exception of the Kurds, at one time or another we were fighting everybody while they consistently were and are fighting and killing each other. We don’t get the culture, the religion, the climate the history. We still don’t, but that last time worked out so well that there’s really no reason not to do it again. I just don’t see a statue of Tommy Franks in the future of West Point.
Manning was getting a view of how silly that was, how insane, how brutal and how fruitless. I don’t know what motivated the guy. But, I do know that most of what he revealed was probably vastly over classified. And then we get to another problem, one that I realized last night at dinner with my wife who in her Army incarnation was a Documents Custodian in a Brigade S2 in Europe. The coin dropped; she worked as a civilian for DOD and DOT and I had been a contractor. Guess what – no way if any current security procedures were being adhered to could Manning have gotten the stuff he had to Wikileaks. We’re not discussing a highly trained intelligence operative here, we’re talking about a pretty flakey private in a combat zone., who appears to have been violating every principle of handling sensitive and classified material in the book; according to Wikipedia he told one of his biographers that he smuggled the stuff out on his data card.
When the coin dropped, I dropped my sandwich. My wife at best tolerates my jousting with windmills, but this one bugged her as much as it bothers me. This should not have happened. And it did – and it was not Manning who was the weak spot, but the supervision and leadership that let him do whatever misguided and deranged crap he did.
Manning was on a
secure DOD/ Army system, in a sensitive compartmentalized intelligence facility
(SCIF) of some sort and he was able to download highly classified materials to
either thumb drives, data cards or CDs. The military
banned all that stuff on its computers prior to the kid's enlistment. While it
might be possible to cheat if you were on night shift in a CP someplace with
just a normal Army computer and nobody checking on you, in a SCIF there are a
lot of people checking on you usually. When you enter the SCIF, you are subject
to search; brief cases, backpacks and similar things are checked as a matter of
course. HOW THE HELL DID HE BREACH THE BASIC IT SECURITY AND THE PHYSICAL
SECURITY PROTECTING THIS STUFF? This is a serious concern. Certainly, the
officers and NCOs running the place should be investigated for either
complicity or negligence or both. If they say him with a CD, they needed to act
immediately; if they saw him with a data stick, ditto. Slipping a micro into a
slot would be really disturbing. Either
they didn’t care, they allowed it to happen or they just didn’t bother to watch
this obvious candidate for Soldier of
the Millenniums. Somewhere, SGT Morales is crying.
The fact that somehow
this kid had access to TS and higher should bother a lot of us. Did DOD not investigate the guy prior to the
granting of the clearance? Was there no interview? How did he keep the
clearance after reprimands? WHO GETS REPRIMANDED FOR ASSAULTING AN OFFICER?
Maybe some hard corps grunt dealing with the problems of cooling down after a
fraught mission and being asked some silly crap; but, this guy was a REMF.
There's a lot to be concerned about here, but Manning's actual leaks are the
least of it. He was a computer GEEK and gee, the Army
needs those for places like Fort Meade and various Field Stations. Was he in a
Field Station? No, he was in the SCIF in a Forward Operating Base in Iraq. The
Army knew he needed help; they were going to discharge him during Basic for
unsuitability. Instead of washing him out, they sent him on to AIT and he got a
TS/SCI clearance. The unit wanted to leave him behind instead of taking him to
Iraq but they were short analysts so... Where the hell were the Counter-Intelligence
people who were supposed to be there? He was acting out all over the place in
all sorts of ways…and nobody noticed until a hacker reported him?
Seriously. In a combat zone, prior to
the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the guy was openly gay, disrespectful and
out of line.
Now, many years ago there was an Army Security Agency analyst
we’ll call Randy. Randy was at Field Station Augsburg and was very, very gay.
Openly gay. Blatantly gay. He cross-dressed and hung around the Bahnhof
according one guy who knew him. Nobody cared, he was really good at his job. The
MI community was always very tolerant of a lot of deviance, up to a point. One
story had the Politzei catching him
at the Bahnhof along with the MP liaisons and there he went. How do I know the
story is true? One of my officer students at the INTEL school told me about him;
then others told me about him; and then, when I was facilitating course with
the Warrants and the subject of stress and reactions to it was on the table,
one of the Warrants started saying that none of that was problem in the old
ASA, none of their soldiers had issues and this was a waste of everyone’s time
to consider. “Chief,” I asked, “Were you ever in Augsburg?” “Yeah, Sarge, I
spent most of my enlisted in Augsburg.” “Chief, did you ever know a guy named
Randy?” Silence…followed by laughter. “Oh hell, Sarge, Randy was my squad
leader…” “Were the stories true?” “Oh Shit! You had to be there…”
So, yeah, Manning is guilty of a lot of stuff.
However, given the obvious questions and the way the guy was treated while
awaiting trial -- Marine Stockade as opposed to Army Stockade? Solitary
confinement because he was suicidal? Naked? -- make me think that justice could
be best served in his case by sentencing him to reduction to E-1, a Less than
Honorable Discharge, and a couple of years in Leavenworth. I'd actually prefer
the reduction, a General Discharge under Honorable Conditions and time served.
And then, the Army needs to start asking some hard
questions about what the hell happened to common sense and adherence to basic
procedures safeguarding materials. Manning's Chain of Command needs desperately
to have a bunch of their careers ended so they can move on to their true
calling of asking if you want paper or plastic. If they'd been doing their
jobs, this wouldn't have happened. Everything about Iraq that went bad, down to
the way we found out a lot about it was due to a failure of leadership at a
really existential level.
I’d also like to turn to the helicopter footage that has gotten so much attention. Why would that have been TOP SECRET? I wonder why it would have been more than CONFIDENTIAL – where was the serious harm to the nation in that footage? It was sad, tragic, reflected poorly on the rules of engagement and all the nonsense we’ve been told about how carefully precise everything is on the digital battlefield. It’s not, and we know. Reuters knew the stuff existed and asked for the material. They submitted a Freedom of Information Act request and were rebuffed. The FOIA request should have been granted, with some redaction, and then de-classified.
Soldiers in combat cause collateral damage. Soldiers in combat do a lot of things to block the horror. We know that. But, the American people need to know that. They need to have their noses rubbed in it so every time some yahoo decides to start demanding we go off to some war some goddamned place, there are no surprises. Bradley Manning broke the law, broke his oath as a soldier and did it irresponsibly and almost blithely. No Luther-Ellsberg existential “Here I am, I can do no other…”anguish there. But, he needed help, guidance and the attention that soldiers, especially weak soldiers need and deserve all the time, not just in combat.
I had soldiers like Manning. Any NCO or Officer who led troops had to deal with people like Manning. Too smart for their MOS, too smart for their duties, not fitting in, not a lean mean fighting machine – just a kid who needed his ass kicked and his shoulder patted. Instead, he was ignored, not mentored, not helped and this is what happened. I had 200 soldiers in my last company, and I knew all the flakes and made a point of watching them. I didn’t bully them, I didn’t berate them, and I sought ways to help them grow and adapt. I know my last company was at Fort Lewis and this was in Combat. I don’t care; the way you operate in garrison is the same way you need to operate in the field. If you take care of you soldiers, they’ll amaze you when the chips are down. If you don’t, well, this is what happens.
Manning appears to have had other problems. He lived an openly gay life prior to enlisting in the Army. While If you can salvage a marginal soldier, you might create a superstar. But if you can’t, and it appears his chain of command had figured out he wasn’t going to hack it, you don’t take them Iraq, you don’t cut them slack for acting crazy, you don’t look the other way. You get them out of combat, away from the unit and let the psychiatrists and JAG determine what needs to happen next. YOU DON”T SHOVE THEM IN A POORLY SUPERVISED SKIF for fifteen hours a day. But, “ Farrell, we were short analysts in the worst way”. To which I can only respond, “Yeah, and look what that kind of short term thinking got you.”
Recent Comments