Need the Wool

[Gage Silver 0]

Gage rubbed his weary face, scrutinizing the mock up again. “Baa, baa, ‘Black Sheep’, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir,” he muttered. “But in order to see it you'll need top-secret government clearance.”

 

Major Ishiiu’s half-committed ‘we don’t know’ bit hadn’t convinced Gage. If this had been the usual pre-deployment exercise, they would’ve received the usual brief. If it’d been pre-op practice, they would’ve been briefed on the mission: who, what, where, when, and how. Not given a half-baked speech about what they didn’t know. Unavoidable gaps in intel was ‘sketchy info’. Not giving your team the objective was just brass playing too hard to get with the need-to-know¹. Treat what like it’s real until it’s not? April Fool’s must’ve come early.

 

Right. Charades from hell. His imagination wasn’t this good. What were they looking at? Rescue? Extraction? Protective Security? Foreign Internal Defense? Unconventional Warfare? Counterterrorism? Counter-Proliferation? High Value Targets? Special Reconnaissance? They were looking at a lot of possibilities. Gage knew it’d involve a hostile force, at any rate. The second to last thing you’d mobilize a go-fast team for was a humanitarian mission.

 

They didn’t know much about the area. Solve that quick with a map and some intel, if he knew the location. But Cass had a point: they’d put a lot of detail into the interior. So their focus might be on getting inside. For an unknown objective. Gage took that at face value. Didn’t narrow down the nature of their mission. Nothing said the mission consisted of a single objective or that they were the only team with a role to play. Reality was they knew a lot of nothing.

 

No good. You didn’t withhold this kind of information from your go-fast teams. If you knew details this far out and expected positive results, you shared that information with those who needed it to operate. Training exercises and planning were both invaluable. But even the best made and executed tactical plans in history still had to contend with overlooked details, contingencies and the unknown. Sitting on pertinent data until the last minute just asked for something to go wrong. Sometimes you only had the basics, but you still gave your team an objective.

 

Major Ishiiu said to make a list of what they needed to know. Gage didn’t make a list. He gave them just one flippant word: everything.

 

 

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¹Need to know: Restriction of sensitive information limiting access to those who need to know in order to effectively plan and carry out their duties. With few exceptions, security clearance alone does not justify access to this type of data without a need to know.