Beinhart's Body Politic: Secrets

by Larry Beinhart, August 24, 2007

The sun rises. The sun sets.

Some things that are plainly true are actually false.

It appears to be inarguably true that the United States needs secret intelligence services for national security.
So we spend $40 billion a year on it. And even though everything that Bush has done with his already vast secret powers—ignore terrorism before 9/11, fail to get bin Laden, a war with the wrong country, lose that war—has led to abject failure, when he asks for more secret powers, he gets them.

The basic concept has never been questioned.

We did not discover that the Earth rotates—creating the illusion that the sun moves—directly.

It was part of a whole perceptual system that put the Earth at the center of the universe, based, it should be noted, on realistic observations and sound reasoning. However, there were certain details where the model didn’t quite work.

Those anomalies nagged at few people who picked away at it. Some, like Tycho Brahe, who kept a pet moose and a clairvoyant dwarf named Jepp as a jester in his castle, gathered data, without changing the concept. Others, like Copernicus, searched for a new idea. Still others, like Galileo and Kepler, put the two together and developed concepts that turned out to be accurate when we ultimately got into space and were able to look back.

There are two parts: data and concept.

Common sense, certain events, and most of the great theoreticians make it seem self-evident that secrets are crucial in war.

The quintessential example is the Battle of Midway in 1942. Much of the American fleet had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Yamamoto wanted to draw what remained into a trap and destroy them, leaving Japan the sole naval power in the East.

Imagine two fleets maneuvering blindly in the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean.

Except that US Admiral Nimitz wasn’t blind. The Allies had broken the Japanese code. They knew the Yamamoto’s intentions. Nimitz grabbed every ship and plane he could get, even two heavily damaged carriers, and was waiting when Yamamoto arrived.

The Americans won. It was the turning point in the war with Japan.

That’s pretty convincing and damn hard to argue against.

After the defeat of the Axis, the world split in two again. The primary players, America and Russia, were unwilling to engage head-to-head.