I have lost a hell of a lot of respect for the U.S. military, and I am a vet.
The government seems to corrupt nearly everything.
The Secret Service corruption fiasco is off the charts and beyond disturbing. It’s a perfect example of what has happened to government at every level.
Kessler has a longish story about the problems within the Secret Service. He depicts an organization that is run by managers that are primarily motivated by achieving the goals and objectives of their annual appraisals. So what is new one might say? What is new in the last 20-30 years is the institutionalization of the Senior Executive Service management model which is quasi botomline driven by achieving certain metrics that frequently are focused on Delmore tasks with level staffing or frequently less staffing. The management culture of much of fed land has come to resemble a large mediocre business conglomerate. The top managers are oriented to competing for the significant bonus payments received for meeting the various management metrics they negotiate at the start of each
rating year. Loyalty to mission or personnel take a negligible position compared to manipulating statistics and rushing to sign your organization up for what ever the latest management craze is that the bureau chief is excited about. Kessler paints the current Director of the Secret Service as a man willing to swallow reduced staffing levels and reduced budgets while demanding his staff put in more and more hours on often silly and pointless bureaucratic exercises. This sort of ‘pretend to do what is necessary to check the boxes’ mindset is inherently corrupting and produces rank and file personnel who display a crassly cynical and thoroughly jaded and exhausted and psychologically depleted persona. This is the sort of internal institutional corruption that rotted the former Soviet Union. In the end few believed in anything and all knew that they were continually being sacrificed or the ambitions or caprices of those above them.
This is the reality of what is spreading through the national government and the armed forces are far from being uncompromised.