Deep click

Waiting for "Deep Throat"

Taking a cue from the spy trade, The Wall Street Journal has just launched its new website for tipsters and whistle-blowers naming it the WSJ SafeHouse. It comes with instructions and a set of legal disclaimers or Terms of Use.

This digitized approach to gathering news certainly lacks the drama of some of the more established methods known to reporters -- the strange package, the halting voice on the telephone, the ranting letter or the stranger in the lobby.

Alas, the news business has joined the ranks of e-commerce and created a user interface that's easy to use, which is particularly critical to the first-time user.

One can only imagine the kind of material that will come in over this digital transom. Our money is on photos -- real or fake -- of a certain late terrorist.

Opportunity cost

With the death of Osama bin Laden, we now begin the great opportunity cost debate. At the center of the discussion is the question: what has the war on terror cost us in terms of resources -- human and financial -- shifted from basics needs such as education and health care, to security and military expenditures over the past ten years.

Opportunity cost is an economics concept intended to give proper recognition to largely incalculable and intangible costs of a "road not taken", in the words of poet Robert Frost. It is a useful tool in all those circumstances where we have to make choices, usually big choices -- an acquisition or divestiture; targeting a market; making or buying a product or service; or expansion into less familiar territory. The common element in all of these situations is constraint; we don't have the people, time or resources to exploit every opportunity that comes along. We have to make choices.

While estimating opportunity costs has considerable value at the time a choice is made, it has zero value ten years later.  And who's to say that our education and medical care systems would be better today if we had invested more heavily in them for the past decade. In the case of medical care, for instance, the problem seems to be that we spend quite a lot -- more than any nation on earth -- but don't get full value for the investment.

Over the course of ten years, the choices change, whether it's in business or politics. Likewise, the opportunity costs have to be recalculated.

Philosopher John Stuart Mill, who first developed the concept of opportunity cost in the 19th Century, said this: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse."

Out of the ashes

Wreckage of Operation Eagle Claw

There is a saying among experts in dealing with setbacks of all kinds, that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. It should be a learning opportunity.

If the resounding success of today's news regarding the mission to take out Osama Bin Laden isn't an indication of the validity of this notion, then nothing could be.

The simple truth is that the three crucial elements of the mission -- special forces, organizational capability and intelligence gathering --  were born of total disaster.

They were:

The Bay of Pigs invasion.  Little more than a month after this flawed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, President Kennedy asked Congress to significantly increase funding for special forces, saying: "In addition our special forces and unconventional warfare units will be increased and reoriented. Throughout the services new emphasis must be placed on the special skills and languages which are required to work with local populations." In the very same speech, The President famously launched the mission to the moon by the end of that decade.

Operation Eagle Claw. This mission to rescue the Iran hostages in 1980 ended in a debacle in the desert with eight servicemen losing their lives.  The ensuing investigation, however, pointed to a lack of inter-service coordination in the planning of the mission and led to the creation of the Special Operations Command. That entity now oversees all special operations, service wide, and was instrumental in the successful mission in Pakistan yesterday.

The 9/11 Attacks. The widely-praised investigation into the root causes of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland revealed numerous holes in our ability to collect and act upon good intelligence in a part of the world where we had few assets on the ground.  It appears that at least some of those holes have been plugged, to say the least.

There is little glamor in leading the post-mortem of a crisis. Critics say that they can lead to useless finger-pointing and degenerate into witch hunts. Nevertheless, some of the best, game-changing, ideas come from just such exercises.