Open Government

Chapter 26. Transparency Inside Out

Tim Koelkebeck

A surprisingly regular experience in the Pentagon is what I call the boomerang email. You email a question to a colleague. Not knowing the answer, he forwards the email on to someone else, restating the question in his own words. Through subsequent forwarding, the email passes through government offices and military bases across the country, and the question is rewritten several times over. Days later, someone forwards you an email with a question similar to yours, asking if you have any insights. The sender never scrolled to the bottom of the long thread to see that you were the original person to ask the question.

While the Pentagon is notorious for its opacity to the public, one would assume we are transparent to ourselves. Yet an insider, not knowing where to find necessary information, can email an inquiry to a colleague and a few days and dozens of people later get nothing in return but an echo. I’ve spent three years at the Pentagon as an on-site contractor in an organization that oversees the acquisition of all major military systems, including ships, planes, tanks, and satellites. We don’t have a secret dashboard with all key information ready for analysis. We certainly collect data and generate a lot of reports, but too often the information is either out of date, incomplete, scattered across dozens of databases, or all of the above. In some cases, the desired information is simply never captured. In my world, it’s implicitly ...