Looking backward, looking forward on the SysAdmin function
■"Fighting The Last Hijackers: Who's Afraid of Pocketknives?" op-ed by John Tierney, New York Times, 15 August 2005, p. A17.■"Sorry Baby, this plane's leaving without you: Screeners stop infants for names on 'no-fly list,'" by Associated Press, USA Today, 15 August 2005, p. 2A.
■"Gauging Iraqi Readiness Centers of 'Feel': Beyond Metrics, U.S. Taps Battlefield Views to Assess Local Troops' Strength, Progress of War," by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 15 August 2005, p. A4.
Blistering op-ed by consistently strong Tierney, who's become my favorite NYT columnist after Kristof. He points out the essential mistake-within-the-mistake that was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security: the creation of the Transportation Security Administration and its entire closing-the-barndoor-after-the-cows-have-gone mentality.
There's a line I like to use in my talk know whenever TSA comes up: "Just be thankful Richard Reid didn't shove that bomb up his ass, because if he had, we'd all be taking off a lot more than just our shoes!"
It's a great punch line but a very sad commentary, one reflecting a backward-looking mentality that continues to afflict our response to 9/11: we think it's all about us when it's really all about them. It's not about raising our security practices but raising them abroad. America remains the most robust, distributed, resilient system in the world. To the extent that we need to tighten up, the private sector will take the lead far more than the public sector, which needs to set the rules only and let the private sector work the compliance issues voluntarily. That underlying philosophy is why The New Rule Sets Project LLC is moving toward a deep partnership with Enterra Solutions: I want my rubber to meet that particular road of rule-set automation. This is the big private sector response we've all been waiting for since 9/11, and its successful emergence will hopefully speed up America's movement from the "us" fixation to a new and far more consistent approach to "them" in the Gap.
And when DHS becomes the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century (progressively starved of capital by the federal government because it's utility is OBE), then we'll liberate all that rule-set talent for what it's really much better applied: extending the Core's rule sets into the Gap. DHS will be, in my preferred future, the future home of the SysAdmin function-one that serves the Core as a whole and not just the United States.
[Side note: scary stories about TSA pulling over babies and toddlers cause their names seem close to known terrorists on the watch list. My advice: spend some money and make the effort to get your child (each one of them) his or her own passport, and then never travel far from home without it. Seriously. All our kids have them (worth it when you have an Asian child whose skin tone doesn't exactly match yours and do-you-have-any-proof-she's-your-child-Mister?"). You're on vacation and your kid gets lost. What do you show the cops? ]
Much better example of forward thinking is how the Army and Marines on the ground in Iraq is thinking systematically about how to judge the progress of their training of Iraqi security forces. In many ways, both services are repeating "measures of effectiveness," or MOEs research that was done back in Somalia more than a decade ago, but it's great to see it happening. We need to think through this SysAdmin stuff like crazy. We need think tanks and workshops and exercises and experiments and lessons learned and simulations and training modules and anything else you can think of.