Ken:

Two comments.

First, about secrecy. As I scurried about Iraq in 2008 to collect huge amounts of data, I always heard criticism from others that secrecy would prevent it (they'll never give you that). In fact, everybody I went to (short of a small bunch of spooks) was bending over backward to get civilian=ized declassified versions of things to me. NGA sent a team over to work the whole civilian shapefile/imagery declass and licensing process.

Scrubbing national-scale metadata is a huge undertaking, but they did it, and Al Faw was 100% behind us.

The spooky characters, as I realized later, were the ones who had little to offer, just their own "secret crap" that they didn't know what to do with, and by lack of reciprocity, didn't get anything else. Not productive players, for whatever team they were working with(?).

Second, some of the big obstacles from folks I was working with fell into two categories: Budget and staffing. There was never a time that people didn;t try like crazy to accommodate, but, where they couldn't, it was budget and staffing.

What I did learn, however, was that between reach-back and field, there were huge duplications of service. A lot of work was being done, but of the wrong kind (duplicates) that could have been systematized, freeing up those same people to don more creative and better work.

Lately, what attracts my attention for Afghanistan is how to susbstantially reduce unnecessary deployed staffs, and the obnerous supply chains that go with it. If we get strangled, it will be by logistics and budgets, so why not optimize unity and synchronization of efforts. Less reports, meetings and staff time on duplicating the SOS and PPT, and more point spear stuff (Civil or mil).

Steve