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Inexperience, Arrogance, Ignorance, And Criminality: The Four Horsemen Violate The Moose [1]
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Date: 2025-03-31
“MOOSEMUSS"
M.O.O.S.E.M.U.S.S. is an acronym for
the nine Principles of War:
Mass, Objective, Offensive, Security, Economy of Force,
Maneuver, Unity of Command, Surprise, Simplicity.
I learned this in Military History, the first course in the four-year ROTC program, which ran concurrently with my college
bachelor’s degree education. Some of you who are reading
this may be quite familiar with this elementary bit of Military Science, and others might find the list intuitively obvious.
I begin with it precisely because it should have been the
bedrock of the thinking of each participant in the outrageous
conference broadcast to God-Knows-Who on “Signal”.
It would have been obvious to people who care about the real successes of our military and not just the children’s version presented on FUXnews. The true assessment
of missions includes both an honest accounting of what
has been accomplished, which must be compared
with what was planned, and the evaluation of that result must include the costs in terms of lost lives, limbs, and equipment of our forces, as well as unnecessary damage to uninvolved civilians and their possessions.
People who know what’s going on (which probably includes just about everyone who reads this publication) understand that the Trump regime is a psychopathic mockery of a
real administration, and it has been populated by a combination of ignoramuses, men and women who have particular animosity toward the agency or department they’ve been put in charge of, and people who intend to use their office to carry out the very opposite of its intended purpose.
Nobody believes that Elon Musk is actually interested in “government efficiency” (nobody who is reading this !). I have no firm sense of what this crazy man wants. I do suspect that it’s not even the maximization of his hoard of money (as long as it continues to grow…). It might be…and this will sound nuts…the establishment of a colony in space, perhaps on Mars, that he would be in charge of, while chaos replaces
civilization on a ruined Planet Earth. Can you picture Musk’s “vision”: a Mad Max Earth, a sewer of riff-raff people living on an overheated rock, while he and his followers, all of them white geniuses, live it up on a miraculously “Terraformed” Mars.
But pardon the lengthy excursion caused by the Clinical Psychologist in me. Sometimes he feels like one of the characters in the film “THEY LIVE” who, if they put on the
special sunglasses, could see the alien monsters under the human facade. You can take this kind of speculation with
a couple of grains of salt.
Meanwhile, returning to this gross example of incompetence and contempt that is “The Signal Fiasco”, I shall share what I recall from spending a couple of years as a Communications Intelligence Officer in the Army Security Agency. And the first thing that I want to point out is that since my days in an intelligence service, the territory that such enterprises encompass has greatly expanded.
Now there is the world-wide cyber-network and literally billions of floating handheld devices connected to it. The job of monitoring such communications for foreign and domestic threats to national security (without stepping on the privacy rights of people protected by the American constitution) is nearly overwhelming. It has in fact resulted in the creation of an entire set of cyber-intelligence and security agencies that didn’t exist in the 20th century.
There are now complications that have made a difficult task an order-of-magnitude harder. Back before cell phones became ubiquitous a top-secret conference call from remote locations, with all potential participants using wired telephones would have been subject to a great deal of advance-scrutiny.
Nobody would have been included in such a “chat” if he or she had to call from a pay phone in the corner drugstore—unless everyone was speaking in code:A “Mr.Blue” (who is the Secretary of Defense) says “ You know, my cleaning woman says ‘A wet bird does not fly at night’. To which the man in the phone booth replies “Unless you put salt on its tail!”.
Of course it’s a whole different matter if one uses a text-based system. Those can be encrypted, which to the uninitiated sounds like it makes the conversation secure (unless someone has invited an unauthorized person to the party) but it doesn’t, necessarily. Which is because there are different levels of encryption, and even different levels of security around the “keys”. One can be pretty sure that several countries that do not have the best interests of the U.S. in mind are equipped to deal with various commercial users of cyber-encryption.
That is why it would have been wise for the White House security advisor, Mr. Waltz, who may have started this disaster, to have consulted the relevant experts in our own government on how to set up a proper communication system for this specific occasion. Waltz served on congressional committees involved with The NSA, which plays an important role in safeguarding cyber communications, and if they can’t answer specific questions they can certainly point to other agencies that can offer knowledgeable guidance.
Mr. Waltz is an experienced military officer, legislator, and executive advisor who appears to to have known until lately which countries are our real enemies in this new Cold War, but he has perhaps succumbed to trumpism, which is defined by contempt for our own government and the “alleged” (their characterization, not mine) expertise of its career staff.
Certainly Mr. Hegseth, the FUXnews pitchman and reported alcoholic, who heads up the DoD, which contains the NSA—so it’s part of his own remit—could have sought guidance on how not to give away precise information on an immanent military operation. Let’s remember principles 4 and 8 of MOOSEMUSS. How very basic!
Finally, regarding such paper thin excuses like the lack of officially “classified” info revealed during the chat, several obvious questions arise. First, one must ask why such a conference was not “classified”. Failure to classify something that ought to be so designated is a grave error, and depending upon circumstances might be considered criminally negligent. It is a more serious act than over-classifying.
Dishonest people, like Hegseth, can play all kinds of games with classification, including the present one of declaring a dangerous disclosure to be of no consequence because it wasn’t “classified” , or crucifying someone over careless handling of a document stamped classified that
actually contains no sensitive info and was either over-classified or routinely marked because it was part of a larger document that did somewhere contain something that shouldn’t be bruited about. (Mrs. Clinton’s technical violation of protocol in handling so-called “classified” material was of this latter kind.)
As part of my education in this field, a significant portion of a class at Fort Devens, the old ASA school, was spent on how just about any information under the right circumstances can provide a tip-off to an enemy that certain actions are contemplated or are already under way. For example, the food orders at the post where are combat unit might be preparing for a mission could alert the wrong people to an upcoming troop movement.
While “peanut butter” supplies might not be an item stamped “top secret”, when combined with certain other data this tally might be quite valuable to “interested” parties. That’s why “Loose Lips Sink Ships” became a popular warning to military and civilian personnel not to chatter idly about what was doing in your part of the war-effort even if you weren’t working on some kind of officially “secret” project.
Without developing a clinically-diagnosable obsessive approach to the matter, one might just think about the lengths that we went to at my duty station to protect the sensitive information that we dealt with in the Operations Building, out in Northern California, all those many years ago. While the building itself had no windows, and very limited entrance possibilities, and all the people who worked in it were quite diligent in keeping their activities and materials away from outsiders, there was concern that even the electrical “grounding” of the building itself could be leaking “signals”.
One doesn’t normally think about the electrical differential between one patch of land and another, but a metal stake driven into the ground at one point and a stake of the same metal driven in at another place to the same depth might
not be connected to the “earth” to quite the same degree. There could exist between the two points a measurable difference, and that could provide access to the electrical activities within the building. Electrical engineers reading this can do a much better job of explaining this than I can.
That’s the point, really. There are proper experts in things. They deserve respect, and should be consulted on matters that are beyond one’s own knowledge. When I worked for close to a year directly in “Ops” I was sent round every Monday to inspect the soldiers who were doing their jobs. I quickly learned that the lowest ranking soldier knew a whole lot more than I did, and so I took it as my first job to attempt
to understand what each person did and thought about his own work and how it fit into the larger mission. I did not tell them how to do their job. In fact, I asked what they felt they needed to do their job more effectively. If it was something I could do to change things or requisition for them I promised I would look into the matter.
It turned out there was something I felt I could do. A theme that ran across the whole workforce was the feeling that they lacked feedback on how they were doing. After extensive consultation with both the line-workers and their very experienced supervisors I was able to nail down some criteria by which we could measure the successful performance of the mission.
Because the men were assigned to three different groups that operated on rotating shifts, we could compare the groups and with one another. The men were very interested in these findings, and they believed me when I said that the results would not be used to pit the groups against one another. The data were much too contaminated with a host of spurious variables to allow conclusions about particular individual or even group performances. But there were suggestive patterns that were intriguing.
My knowledge of stats wasn’t great, and even though I went to the library and got some books on the subject, I still made mistakes in my choice of measures. I also had to deal with the local mainframe computer, and since I knew nothing about programming and the supervisor of programming knew nothing about stats we did “the best we could”.
It was early days in the world of computers. We often had a team up from the manufacturer to consult with us. I understood nothing. I have to hand it to the sergeant in charge of this area for his knowledge and patience with me. In spite of our limited resources, primitive computers and a primitive lieutenant for an assistant ops officer, we produced a ton of interesting data which we packaged in a detailed report and sent the whole thing up the chain to somewhere in ASA/NSA in Ft Meade and or Arlington Hall.
Unfortunately, my time was up on active duty, and I returned to civilian life except for a couple of years in the active reserves. I was no longer privy to what became of that report, which by now is perhaps in a dusty archive filed I hope under “quaint, but a good effort”.
Well, that’s my very personal take on one episode in an ongoing national tragedy from which this country may never recover. I hope that such a prediction is very wrong.
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