Can a Republic be a Superpower Part 3: Operational Security, Transparency, and Security

When I looked at the question, Can a Free Republic be a Superpower?, the conflict between transparency and security troubled me. I set the series aside for a bit and was reminded of it when I wrote a post on LinkedIn, Truth is the First Casualty of War. This is Part 3, and it looks at the balance of security and transparency.

A free Republic requires transparency and a free flow of information. Citizens need this information to make informed decisions at the ballot box. But from a security perspective, some information may need to be protected and not shared. The phrase, “loose lips sink ships” epitomizes the requirement to protect information. Therefore, there is a balance between transparency and security.

The greater the national security challenges, the more information potentially needs to be protected and not shared. As a superpower, these challenges may be quite large and varied. There, a republic needs to take even greater responsibility for an effective balance…or lose the republic.

The balance is hard to strike for a variety of reasons:

• People withhold information because they think it gives them power within the organization.
• People do not understand what can be shared and what must be protected, so they err on the side of caution, so they do not get into trouble.
• People withhold information they think may damage themselves or their organization.

While there may be some variations, these three motivations span the range of reasons to withhold information.

The second reason, lack of understanding may be the most common and, hopefully, the easiest to address. It also has the least to do with the balancing aspect of transparency and security. While it certainly reduces transparency, the intent is protective rather than malicious. The individual, seeing the operant conditioning that surrounds classified material, with its overwhelming emphasis on punishment, causes people to err on the side of caution and over classify information. Education is the key to asserting an effective balance to teach citizens critical thinking and logic.

The first reason is less about national security than it is about personal power, but the effect is the same—it hides information from the citizens. This is as much of a cultural issue as it is a security issue. Effective organizations shape their culture to frown on this behavior and encourage sharing rather than hoarding.

The third reason is the crux of the transparency versus security challenge. People may hold information back because they legitimately think it is a threat to the organization or because they are behind some activities that are antithetical to a free republic. This may be especially true in governments that have large, unaccountable, unelected bureaucracies that seek to perpetuate themselves. See The Rise of the American Bureaucracy and Regulatory Capture and other Bureaucratic Problems.

The problem is compounded when organizations deliberately hide the truth and report highly shaded versions of it, if not outright lies. Examples are the explosion of the Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, both of which led to war. The same may be said of Pearl Harbor and WWII, according to At Dawn We Slept. When truth is the first casualty of war, the citizen owners cannot trust what they hear and their ability to make effective decisions is impaired. At Dawn We Slept may be fabrication, but in a world where political elites manipulate events and provide misinformation, it receives an audience.

The disinformation problem is both a subset of the third reason and a bit of an issue itself. Political elites cloud transparency and upset the balance of transparency and security when they distribute disinformation to further their own objectives. The difference is that with disinformation, they not only hide the truth; they lie about it. It is even worse than simply hiding the truth because it corrupts the truth and destroys confidence.

It may not be an accident that the disinformation with the Maine kicked off the Spanish-American War, which kicked off America’s Imperial Age. We can even see the beginnings of the disinformation age with the Indian Wars and Manifest Destiny.

If the above is correct, then there is a natural tension between the citizen requirements in a Republic and a massive government and superpower status.

Hypothesis: The larger and more powerful the government, the less likely that it will be a free republic.

Corollary: Entrenched political elites and a large, unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy threaten a free republic. Citizen control is anathema to these two groups. The amount of power these two groups exert is proportional to the reduction of freedom and citizen control.