Stardate 20040101.1135

(Captain's log): Jamie writes:

I thought I would try to spur an article regarding the cost benefit of offensive operations in the WOT as opposed to defensive ops alone. I spent eight years in the Army as a counterintelligence (CI) agent during the era of "The End of History". CI's responsibilities are countering "espionage, sabotage and terrorism directed against the army". Countering anything is a thankless task as a successful day means nothing happened.

There really isn't any such thing in that kind of activity as a success. What you get is lack of failure, and ongoing non-failure is an example of the dog that didn't bark in the night-time. When CI does its job well, as Jamie says, nothing exciting hits the news and the majority of us don't notice anything.

They're far from alone in that. We only notice the electric power system when the lights go out. We curse at the power company when the power fails, but don't think about it the rest of the time. But the consequences of a counterintelligence failure are potentially much worse.

The vast majority of counterintelligence activity involves gathering of information and analyzing it. They try to determine if there are threats, and if so to try to learn as much as they can about the nature of the threat and who might be involved and what their plans might be.

When I said that there were only non-failures, that wasn't really true; there can be direct successes. We've seen a few of them hit the news in the last year or two. But most of their successes have to be kept secret, so even when they win most of us never know it.

The worst case for counter-intelligence is that an enemy plans and launches an effective attack without being detected.

But short of that kind of complete failure, there can be partial successes where a threat is detected and a specific attack is prevented. The ideal outcome, the perfect success, is to figure out who is planning the attack and to wipe them out before they launch it, but that's rarely possible. But preventing a particular attack from being launched is still worthwhile. If the information available is sufficiently specific, it may be possible to prevent it without headlines. Unfortunately, it usually isn't.

I've done quite a lot of reading about intelligence in war. One thing that most people don't realize is just how hazy it all can be. There are occasional cases where you get a total penetration of the enemy's secrets, such as the way that American code-breakers intercepted and decoded the entire Japanese operational plan for their attack on Midway Island, but usually the information is much less complete and often far more ambiguous. Sometimes attacks have been predicted based solely on what is known as traffic analysis, which plots changes in the characteristics of messages being sent by various enemy units even if those messages are encrypted and can't be read.

So if there's a rising suspicion of a threat but nothing quite specific, then you might have to go public and increase security measures broadly, which happened a few days ago.

And if there was really a plan for an attack, and if you do prevent the enemies from even making the attempt, then nothing happens. Unfortunately, that also makes the public suspect that you were crying "Wolf" and that there was really no threat at all.

Nor can the CI people necessarily persuade the public otherwise. Most of the time the CI people can't reveal the information that led them to believe there was a risk, because that would tip off the enemy to how CI is observing them.

When counter-intelligence succeeds, nothing interesting happens. And as Jamie points out, that can potentially make many outside the intelligence community wonder if counter-intelligence is actually doing anything at all, and wonder if there even is any threat.

It appears that another "victory by nonevent" has occurred this Christmas and New Year's Eve. The Islamists were unable to hit us on a symbolic day or location for yet another year as we continue to hammer at them in the ME. Unfortunately these kind of victories aren't as dramatic as an episode of "24" so few will notice. So many successful anti-terror activities can appear to be the punch line about elephant repellant, 1st guy: "But there aren't any elephants around here." 2nd guy: "See, it's working". How much would 1 year of effective terror repellant cost if we had not conducted our successful offensive operations the last couple of years? I intuit that we would have spent much more creating Fortress American rather than the actual Whip-Ass America of 2004.

As I write this, we aren't actually fully through the window of vulnerability. I think that the juiciest target for our enemies would be today's football bowl games, where as many as a hundred thousand people will be gathered into big stadiums around the country. A hijacked airliner crashing into the Rose Bowl could kill upwards of 30,000 people and injure tens of thousands more.

But I don't expect that to happen, and as Jamie says, this will be another non-event. On the other hand, I don't think that the public is as blasé as Jamie suggests.

I don't think that the majority of Americans believe that there was actually no risk. After September of 2001, the majority of Americans fully understand that our enemies fully intend to keep attacking us, and i