Small world. I was right across the street in the IBEW building, wondering what the Russian Embassy could possibly need with all of those antennas.
Fortunately, the overt attempts at signal stealing are easy to counter, so don’t sweat all those antennae on any embassy. We expect them to do it, and they expect us to do it. No reason for any of us to get upset.
Are you sure he wasn’t talking about whimsical abuse of power?
I find this story hard to believe. I’m not by any means an expert, but a government official of McNamara’s stature would surely have considered that those antennas, being on top of The Pentagon, could have been in the middle of some kind of important task.
Anyway, if it is true, the fact that the antennas weren’t doing anything right then doesn’t mean they had no purpose. They could be emergency equipment.
I seem to remember there was a lot of blue and black on the front of that building – I remember it was a labor union, but I couldn’t remember which one. There seem to me a lot of covered windows – am I remembering right?
Was there, like a counterspy office in that building? FBI or CIA or somebody? There was a whole floor (the ground floor) in our building what we had no access to, except for the lobby entrance to the elevators. Nobody would talk about what went on there, and there were nothing listed in the building directory. I always assumed that there was some kind of listening post loaded with cameras and electronics to get whatever they could from the embassy. This was 1111 16th, and on the other side was some kind of old boys’ club whose name I can’t remember either.
Were you there when Gorbachev visited and they made 16th street a literal parking lot for limos?
These stories always tend to assume the truth of the teller’s subtext (in this case, gummint waste) as the reason driving the actors in the story. This story assumes that what was done occurred as a sudden whim. It seems to assume it was done without any warning to the end-users. The idea that this was a jape by a prudent boss exasperated by spendthrift generals appeals to our sense of joy at the pricking of pomposity, but I find it difficult to accept. I can, however, readily imagine that if Macnamara was looking for efficiencies, the antennae may have struck him as a place to find them.
I can easily imagine rapid technological advances resulting in plenty of superseded antennae on the roof that remained powered up as back-ups. The question then becomes one of whether the back-ups got sufficient use to justify the cost of their remaining in commission. Assessing that cost is a matter of determining how expensive they were in maintenance as opposed to how much it would cost to remove them.
We don’t know from the story whether they were sneakily powered down suddenly without any warning to the staff who used them or if it was part of a programmed downscaling that everyone was aware of happening. It is hardly likely that there was a central switch with a dial that said " north-west wing" that could be thrown powering down a random selection of antennae and nothing else without anyone of the users knowing about this.
I imagine it would take some complex planning to do this. And I doubt Macnamara was so irresponsible as to just do it suddenly and without warning, even if it were possible to just flick a bunch of the switches labelled “antenna - north west corner”. God knows what could be happening at any given moment. Obviously some of the antennae were in use and valuable. How to determine which ones to kill? As I say, this requires planning and management. Gummint (for all its faults) just doesn’t work the way the story assumes, if the story’s suggestion of sudden whim is what we are intended to believe.
If (as seems much more likely) Macnamara ordered a reduction in these things as part of a pilot program for a legitimate efficiency drive, staff merely worked around the reduction in antennae, getting by with fewer back-ups and perhaps more competition for antennae time that became a typical management problem to resolve. It is, after all, the eternal task of the military to cope with less resources than it wants.
Efficiency drives always result in decommissioning stuff. Computer upgrades, cars in corporate fleets, fuel budgets and so on are typical targets. The fact that the organisation gets by with fewer widgets than it had before does not necessarily mean that there was waste. It may just mean that the capital cost of having a larger number of widgets is transferred to the administrative cost of managing the demand for the now-reduced number of widgets, the costs of short-term hiring when demand exceeds availability, the cost of lost efficiency when widget availability is delayed, and so on. Those costs are less visible than the cost of a large number of widgets, but they can be just as real.
Having to fill in a form in triplicate and have a committee review your request and co-ordinate access every time you want access to a widget when if you had enough you could just grab it is part of the joy of working for goverment, and this sort of organisational crap is expensive.
In short, I can readily believe Macnamara ordered a reduction in antennae. I can imagine it was a staged and managed process, with reports about the various competing considerations in keeping particular antennae in commission as opposed to killing them and so on, and a series of internal committees co-ordinating the reception and consolidation of them across the various services.
Macnamara suddenly seeing a bunch of antennae, assuming then and there without evidence that some particular group of them must be useless, and, for devilment, ordering that a random chunk of them be turned off just to see what would happen - I don’t buy.
To the OP, I expect that trying to hunt this story down will kill it by turning it into the dull bureaucratic tale it almost certainly is instead of the entertaining Readers’ Digest “Humour in Uniform” style of tale that it presently is pitched as.
How is this different from any other department of government? I’d in fact suggest that DoD has an easier budgetary problem than many other departments.
Let me run to the roof of my building and check…
Nope. Nothing seriously noticeable. Certainly not an unusual amount of antennas. I can’t imagine it being any easier to spot them from a moving helicopter.
You are right, to a point. But a big budget is still a budget that has to be worked within, and decisions about what is and is not affordable have to be made.
I am a public servant, although not in the military. But the problem is, I believe, more acute in the military in that its prime mission is to do very suddenly massively decisive things in a way the general public service does not. The doability of these things depends on the accumulation and preparation of physical and human resources well ahead of time in an environment where the usefulness of these things at the time of accumulation is not immediately apparent. The accumulation thus becomes a fruitful target for people who would cry Waste! at every turn, and of course sometimes those people are right.
An example at the seemingly trivial end of the spectrum is the reduced availability of less viscous gun oil suitable for sandy environments during the early stages of recent wars in the middle east. Soldiers in life and death situations just had to learn to get by without it notwithstanding the risks to functionality if their weapons didn’t work properly. But on such trivial things have battles turned.
At a higher level, every general always wants more tanks, trucks, food, troops and time for preparation. I suspect this was behind General McLellan’sdelay and indecisiveness during the Civil War. The trick is to resist the lure of the perfect and to know when you have enough - to know that there is a time for begging and scrounging for resources, and a time to stop thinking like that and get on with it Right Now.
This is why I say the problem is much more acute for the military than the public service generally. If my office doesn’t have enough computers, people don’t die. We put in a bid for next year’s budget and get by. There isn’t a decisive moment when we all have to gather up our stuff and expend it in a paroxysm of effort, in an environment where for the want of a nail a battle could be lost, and some beancounter has said nails are a looxury.
None of this is a call for budgetless financing of the military, by the way. I am merely trying to say that the inevitable problem of getting by with less than you think that you need is more acute for the military.