No. 2 Military Officer Bemoans Pentagon’s Excess Classification
No. 2 Military Officer Bemoans Pentagon’s Excess Classification
(Bloomberg) -- The No. 2 U.S. military officer is revealing a Pentagon secret as he retires: The Pentagon keeps too many secrets.
“You actually can’t deter your adversary if everything you have is in the black,” Air Force General John Hyten said Thursday, using the military’s term for secret programs. “The last element of deterrence that we don’t do is communicate it credibly to our adversaries. Communication is talking. Communication is demonstrating capability. It’s not not talking and hiding capability.”
“We’re going to have to change the classification structure,” he said. It would be foolish to declassify everything, Hyten, 62, who’s retiring next month, told the Defense Writer’s Group, “but it’s so highly classified now that you can’t talk about anything, and that’s a mistake.”
Overclassification occurs for multiple reasons, including both a legitimate need for secrecy and “bogus” bureaucratic ones based on the assumption that “if you’re in the open you actually can’t move fast because everybody and his brother is checking your homework.”
But when Hyten was asked why his boss, General Mark Milley, called China’s recent hypersonic tests “concerning” in an interview with Bloomberg Television, he replied, “I can’t answer the question because it’s classified.”
In October 2017, then-Secretary Jim Mattis issued a memo that Pentagon officials still cite as creating a climate of nondisclosure. “All hands must be alert to prevent unauthorized disclosure of non-public information for any reason, whether by implied acknowledgment or intentional release,” the directive said. “Misconduct cannot be tolerated and suspected or confirmed disclosure must be reported at once.”
More recently, the undersecretary for intelligence and security implemented a new information restriction category in a March 2020 memo called “Controlled Unclassified Information.” It’s being used widely by the military services and Pentagon offices to restrict the public release of information.
©2021 Bloomberg L.P.