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Originally Posted by Botnst
Spill the beans on a SEAL mission and they will die, unless they know the beans have been spilled.
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I wrote in the next month. Obviously if you burn them while they are there, they will likely die. But, not to sound callous, the war is not lost if one SEAL team were to die. Naturally I would like to avoid that possibility, and I don't mind that SEAL missions (or any other operations) are kept secret. If their future missions are leaked, they will find another way. That's their job.
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An awful lot of classified intelligence is not due to operation considerations (though your example is an excellent example of how people mis-understand operational intelligence). We don't want enemies to learn anything about how or when we gather information. Once they learn our operational parameters, the enemy will adjust his own operations to thwart our means and methods. The taxpayers ultimately pay for the toys so compromising them costs us a lot of money, not to mention the information itself.
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Can you guarantee they will never learn our operational parameters? It occurs to me that eventually we will need to form new ones as ours will never last forever, even if nothing is leaked. Everything evolves. We don't just come up with a means and stick to it or give up.
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As an example, early in the invasion of Afghanistan a reporter asked one of the senators (a Republican, IIRC) how we were able to track Bin Laden. He said something like, "Oh, that's easy, as long as his satphone is on, whether or not he is transmitting, we can triangulate his position within a few miles." Within a day or so of that revelation Bin Laden's folks quit using satphones. You want to blame somebody for losing Bin Laden in Tora Bora? There's your boy.
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Did we stop trying to find Bin Laden because of that? Or was he simply a lower priority what with the new war started? Is the satphone thing the absolute reason why he isn't dead yet? I highly doubt that. I also highly doubt we hung our entire strategy on his satphone. Nor did we succefully terminate him when he was using it, so it's efficacy can be questioned let alone it's importance. Forget losing Bin Laden in Tora Bora. Clinton should've hit him while he had the chance. Because he didn't, that doesn't mean we give up. How would you have liked to know back when it happened that Clinton declined to fire?
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That was not the first time a member of Congress, or even a president, had revealed highly classified info. Jimmy Carter is the one who revealed stealth technology in order to make a point in a debate with Reagan. Reagan was pushing Carter on B1 bomber funding and Carter said we didn't need the B1 because we had aircraft that were invisible to radar.
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And we have the plane that is invisible to radar. Everybody knows we have it. Everybody has known about it. No one has shot one down because of Carter's alleged mention of it. We didn't have to go back to the drawing board and invent a whole new plane. The stealth planes are an example of my Earl Campbell analogy.
SDI is another one. Eventually it got out - did that kill the idea? Nope.