Re: What is left to hide?


Message posted by Andre' M. Dall'au on September 13, 2003 at 4:17:05 PST:

Interesting thoughts. Secrecy in a free society seems an oxymoron but we live with contradictions daily. Probably the obvious answer is to prevent foriegn powers (even the "friendly" ones) from knowing what were doing, spending, and developing. The most realistic reason in our politizized society is to keep the programs hidden so to lessen the impact of the vocal few (and there are always a few) that will oppose the project because it's expensive and they feel the monies should go elsewhere, none of the spending is happening in THEIR state, or they feel that the idea came from the wrong side of the isle.

Secrecy insures a quieter debate, more autonomy, less stupid questions, and more ability to try different options. That is if the projects are sound and the developers are ethical. Secrecy also means you can hide your mistakes, misspent money, and inept management, so from a quality perspective, secrecy is unsound. Since there are still a lot of things from Word War I that are classified as "SECRET", and I really think that not much that happened then would be threat now, the classification program is obviously imperfect. However, we did win the Cold War and so far have managed to keep our enemies away from our shores (9/11 the exception), so it may be working to our advantage.

What in undeniable is the lack of visionary leadership you mentioned. To listen to Kennedy's speech you reference, the 1961 speech to Congress on urgent National Needs, is a stirring example of national leadership at it's best. It not only was visionary regarding space, the same speech had the direction to begin to build the nation's Special Operations capability (Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs)to combat the forces we fight today. If Kennedy's less capable successors would have had the ability to maintain the pace instead of killing the space program we would have men on Mars right now, and probably have the ability to move off-world. Right now we seem incapable to launch and recover the programs we do have with any kind of effiency. A lot of the problems NASA has is that it is an open program - no secrets - so every politician with an opinion has a say. NASA is a good reason why it's better to do exploratory work without having to justify every nickel and satisfy every politician that has a say in your future. I doubt that many of the black projects would have been successful in a open environment that would have shut down the Skunk Works when they had failures such as Kelly Johnson's attempt to find the right materials for the SR-71/A-12, or the early crashes of the Blackbird. Without secrecy I think there would be no Blackbirds, no F-117, no predator, and all the spooky stuff that gives ours guys the edge they need to find, identify and kill those people that would duplicate the carnage of 9/11 because they hate us. We need that edge, and if we don't not know the details of something that we are simply curious of, well that's a small sacrifice to ensure those people in the air and on the ground pulling the triggers have the advantage. People kind of forget, sitting in their safe homes, that we are truly at war with forces that will kill any American they can, any way they can, and we'd better support the trigger-pullers because they are doing a service, also veiled in secrcy, that if they are successful now, maybe your children will not have take up arms to continue the battle.


In Reply to: What is left to hide? posted by Wanting to dream again on September 12, 2003 at 20:59:23 PST:

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