Little good, it would seem, could come of Friday the 13th in the year 2020. So it's unsurprising that I would find in my inbox this morning a story from Tony Bertuca of Inside Defense, on a lamentable topic: "House lawmakers ask Biden to pick SECDEF with no history as a defense contractor" (12 November). There's nothing wrong with Tony; he just has the unenviable job of occasionally needing to report on buffoonery. In this story, he fields complaints from two so-called "progressives" in the US Congress (more on that at the bottom) and at least one gadfly group decrying the possible nomination of Michèle Flournoy as secretary of defense.
In a letter to incoming President Joe Biden (yes, he's incoming, kids), Congressmen Mark Pocan (D-Wisconsin) and Barbara Lee (D-California) complain about the "prior employment history" of former secretaries Mark Esper, Patrick Shanahan (acting), and James Mattis. They want Biden to appoint someone with no connection, every and whatsoever, to defense contracting. Making use of Biden's language, though rather out of context, these two allude that the three were creatures of 'the swamp,' amongst 'the worst of us,' and 'allies of darkness.' Seriously. Those aren't exact quotes, but it's all in there; really, read the letter! It's entertaining.
Bertuca then quotes Mandy Smithberger of the so-called Project on Government Oversight (really, they don't actually do any useful oversight over there) about Flournoy specifically:
As far as her work at [the advisory firm] WestExec goes, if she's nominated, one of the important elements of that process will be to learn more about who her clients were and what work she did for them, to make sure that she is appropriately recused to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.
No, no, no! Not merely "even the appearance"! That kind of sanctimonious posturing is so much of what is wrong with Washington DC these days. The outrageously long and intrusive vetting processes for officials from secretary down to GS-not-much have been driving good people away from federal service, or at least just unconscionably harassing them. In his memoir, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote of paying a law firm $40,000 to help him manage his security questionnaire, just to proceed to his confirmation hearing. Remember that at that point he had already been the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. If that is really what's required, then what's required is just plain stupid.
Now, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I am no Robert Gates, but I do have my own execrable experience to relate in this regard. While I was teaching at the National Defense University (a dumpster fire itself), I was told to apply for a security clearance. There was no reason for this; almost no classified teaching goes on there. But apply I did. I had worked at that point for years as a think-tanker, so I had a history to relate on my questionnaire. I asked a former Obama Administration official for some advice; she shared her previous pain on the subject, explaining that her own SF-86 (the standard reporting form for these things) was "a paperback book." She is now on the Biden transition team (and yes, it's a transition team, kids), so maybe she's about to relive all of that. Anyway, some months after mailing in my own tome, I was visited in my office by a security investigator, who wasn't exactly Dana Scully:
"So, I see here that you travelled to Lithuania last year. When you were there, were you approached by any foreign intelligence or counter-intelligence officials?"
Yes.
"You were??"
Yes.
"Who?"
I had a meeting with the head of Lithuanian counter-intelligence. He briefed me and some colleagues on suspected and known Russian intelligence activities in Lithuania.
"But," she asked, looking for reassurance, "you were doing this on behalf of the US government, right?"
No. I was there on work for the Lithuanian government.
Perhaps needless to say, I never got that security clearance.
As I told Marjorie Censer on Government Matters television last year ("Dealing with the revolving door inside the DoD," 12 August 2019), and as I wrote a bit earlier in an editorial in Defense News ("In Praise of the Revolving Door," 26 July 2019), connections between industry and government should be not strictly feared, but rather sought. Do not the French extol the virtues of their own revolving door? Yes, yes, in a moment of weakness in April 2019, French president Emmanuel Macron promised to shut down the École Nationale d'Administration, to placate the goons in the gilets jaunes, but that still hasn't happened.
More immediately, this gives me another opportunity to talk up our video seminar of last week, and the past service of one of our panelists, Shay Assad. In those press appearances of last year, I was decrying the effort by Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-California) and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) to legally ban what Pocan and Lee administratively oppose. As I said then on Government Matters, and actually wrote in Defense News (summarized here),
Speier and Warren also insist that “a former employee or executive of a defense contractor who joins the government would be totally banned from working on anything that could influence their former bosses.” Sometimes the best test of a new law is to consider how the statute might have changed history had it been enforced years earlier.
Consider just one person who went from business to government, taking with him a serious head for that business, to great acclaim by many in government. Shay Assad is a Naval Academy graduate who spent 22 years working for Raytheon. In 2011, the Obama administration made him director of pricing at the Pentagon... Politico magazine described him as “The Most Hated Man in Washington” for what, at the time, seemed a “personal vendetta” against defense contractors... Whatever the record will eventually show, no one could call Assad a patsy for the defense industry. Warren and Speier, however, would ban people like him—exactly the ones who know where the bodies are buried in the accounts.
And seriously—Jim Mattis? You're calling Jim Mattis a shill for General Dynamics? Show some evidence! Or, as Ronald Reagan once said, well, just watch it here. But whatever you do, quite assailing people who actually work in this business as necessarily corrupt. It's insulting, and it's getting tiresome.
As for Michèle Flournoy in particular, I hear almost nothing but good things of her. Under the Chatham House Rule, I cannot reveal the source, but the other day I heard a very senior Republican lawmaker extolling her virtues, and specifically as a possible defense secretary. "She gets it; she gets all this stuff," he said, as we were discussing the very serious technological and geographical challenges that may be unfolding presently for the US military.
I have one more point, for the record. I do hate the appropriation of the word "progressive" by some of these politicians in a certain wing of the Democratic Party. For what they seek is not universally what I would recognize as progress, and certainly not in this case.
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