Haft of the Spear

Where to start?

Well, to begin with, the article is wrong on one point: NSA has had a program like this for years. Of course no one liked the program at Meade very much because – shocker – you can’t get teenagers to focus on the job at hand (a broad brush to be sure, but it’s my blog). I had two working in my shop and they were never on time, always bailed early, and spent most of the day gossiping and jerking around. Meanwhile adults trained in essential skills PCSing to the Fort were languishing on casual status while security dealt with a backlog of polys and clearance paperwork.

Two, does anyone believe that these kids – deserving of a break though they may be – will actually do anything substantial in an agency that makes highly trained analysts empty garbage cans and perform wide varieties of scut work instead of their actual jobs?

C: Given that the summer break is about three months long, that a clearance costs several thousand dollars to complete (if expedited it probably only took a few weeks to investigate and adjudicate a 16-year-old), and it might very well be a single-use effort for a kid who decides the Bureau isn’t for him (especially after playing janitor all summer), what exactly is the ROI for this effort? Besides the fact that it makes people feel good I mean? How many actual Special Agents or analysts are not on the job because they got pushed behind the junior varsity clearance queue?

Lastly, there are plenty of students across the country that could spend a summer making a real contribution to national or homeland security; they’re going to college, they’re studying relevant issues, they’re already committed to a career in the field. If you are on the job who would you rather mentor for a summer; a Jr. from Mercyhurst who knows methodology and has done research or a 17-year-old who gets his knowledge about tradecraft from pop culture?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; no one in this business cares about how deserving you are, what genital equipment you carry or the melanin content of your skin. They want to work with people who are the best regardless of all of those aforementioned factors. Kids from what is arguably the worst public school system in the nation are unlikely to qualify.

Update: Yeah, teens, that’s the demo we should be aiming for.