S6 Ep 16 Dr. Anna Simons: The Anthropology of Mission Critical Teams (Recast)

But by the end, he comes to the same conclusion that I think anybody who is really honest about soft comes to, which is, He doesn't go as far as I would go, but it's got to be much smaller.

I would say it needs to be rethought again.

He talks about restarting sort of intelligence agencies and stuff like that.

Basically, restarting them is not, well, starting them from scratch.

But I think it's always an interesting thought experiment.

And I tried to get guys to write theses about this.

They will put scratchy schools.

If you were to construct a special operations entity from scratch today in the 21st century, post-Cold War, with the existence of jihadism and terrorism and transnational crime and all the rest of it, what would it look like today? If you started over from scratch, how different would it look from this legacy, I mean, this great legacy set of institutions, which after all now are 70 plus years old.

And I don't know if reconceiving things while they exist, you know, in other words, you're going to change the clue.

I don't know if that's going to suffice

for the future.

Yeah, I also think a great deal about this and get asked about it pretty regularly.

And I have many of the same sort of opinions that you have on this.

I think we're way, way too big, but it's not just the operators.

There's also just the sheer logistics footprint.

So if you look at some of the special mission units, for example, that started, no kidding, with 60 or 70 people, their compounds are up plus 1,500 to 2,000 people.

Not every one of those people are operators.

In fact, most aren't.

Most are logistics and enablers and supporters and government service folks.

But government service folks to the point where there's now a term for them, which is the GS Mafia, government service mafia.

And what we're seeing, and we've actually seen it come out in the public recently in some articles, whereas some officers and special operations who have tried to rein in the GS Mafia have been publicly taken down and leaked in newspaper articles.

And to your point, if we don't actually strip this down and get rid of not only the dead weight of operators that should have retired a while back or would never fit to be there, and all of this sort of, what do you call them, but the like functionaries that aren't actually adding to the fight, we're going to drown under the sheer weight of it.

Yep.

No, there's so many ironies in all of this.

So one of them is it's almost a parallel to what we're seeing with education systems.