The explosive yield of the B-53 thermonuclear bomb, once the highest-yield nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, was 9 Megatons. “Effective 20 November, 2014, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy jointly declassified the fact that the yield of the B53/W53 Y1 was 9 megatons,” according to a notice posted on a DoD website last week.

This is less of a breakthrough in declassification policy than might be supposed, since the 9 Megaton yield for the B-53 bomb has been publicly reported for decades, including on this 1997 web page.

But it seems that this information had not been officially disclosed before. Now that it has been, it can be publicly acknowledged by government employees without penalty and it no longer need be painstakingly redacted from historical documents as they are processed for declassification.

The problem of nuclear weapons information that is both formally classified and readily available to the public has long been a challenge for the Department of Energy.

Last September, DOE updated its longstanding “GEN 16” policy which dictates a “no comment” response to classified information in public settings.

The newly revised no-comment policy “recognizes that it is possible to have incidental contact online” with a classified document and that “merely reading the document online does not constitute a comment.” See Classification Bulletin GEN-16, Revision 2, No Comment Policy on Classified Information in the Open Literature, September 23, 2014.

A DOE training package gives guidance on how to respond, and how not to respond, to public references to information that is classified, in accordance with the GEN-16 policy. The following exchange is offered as an example of what NOT to say:

Joe: “Can you believe there were weapons in X country?” [when that fact is classified]

DOE: “I thought everyone knew that”

Instead, suggested alternative DOE responses are: “I never really thought about it,” or “DOE doesn’t confirm or deny the presence of weapons in most countries.”

Another example of what NOT to say:

Joe: “Is it true you’re holding up publication of Jim’s book on his work in nuclear weapons development because of classification concerns?”

DOE: “It’s taking a long time to review, not just because there is a lot of classified information about thermonuclear weapons, but also because it’s boring.”

One should also not disconfirm the status or validity of published nuclear-related information, DOE advises. Thus, one should not say, “I hope terrorists read that article, because the [nuclear weapon] design was a joke.”

See DOE briefing on Classification Bulletin GEN-16, Revision 2, Classification Training Institute, October 2014.

The U.S. Army has updated and doubled the size of its lexicon of military terminology. This is a fluid and rapidly evolving field. In fact, “changes to terminology occur more frequently than traditional publication media can be updated.”

The new Army publication extends beyond words to the use of symbols, including “hand drawn and computer-generated military symbols for situation maps, overlays, and annotated aerial photographs for all types of military operations.”

Though intended primarily for military personnel, this work is also useful for others who are seeking to understand and interpret Army records and military culture.

A “clandestine operation,” the Army document explains, is “an operation sponsored or conducted by governmental departments or agencies in such a way as to assure secrecy or concealment. A clandestine operation differs from a covert operation in that emphasis is placed on concealment of the operation rather than on concealment of the identity of the sponsor.”

However, “In special operations, an activity may be both covert and clandestine and may focus equally on operational considerations and intelligence-related activities.”

An “unauthorized commitment,” which surprisingly merits its own entry, is defined as “An agreement that is not binding solely because the United States Government representative who made it lacked the authority to enter into that agreement on behalf of the United States Government.”

See Army Doctrine Reference Publication (ADRP) 1-02, Terms and Military Symbols, February 2, 2015.

In a pending lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the “no fly” list, in which the government has asserted the state secrets privilege, a federal court signaled that it would consider requiring judicial approval of “no fly” determinations involving U.S. citizens.

Judge Anthony J. Trenga, who presides over the case Gulet Mohamed v. Eric Holder in the Eastern District of Virginia, set a hearing on February 24 to allow the government to supplement its argument that the case must be dismissed on state secrets grounds. Judge Trenga has previously rejected government arguments that state secrets required dismissal of the case and concluded the case could proceed without the assertedly privileged documents. (Secrecy News, 10/31/14).

In a February 2 order, he told the government to be prepared to explain “how the under seal documents as to which the state secrets privilege is claimed preclude adjudication of the procedural due process claims without their use and disclosure.”

Beyond that, however, Judge Trenga hinted at a possible remedy to the constitutional challenge before the court involving independent judicial review of “no fly” determinations.

He asked the government to address “whether, and if so how, national security considerations make it impractical or otherwise undesirable to submit for ex parte, in camera judicial review and approval the placement of United States citizens on the No Fly List, either before a citizen’s placement on the No Fly List or within a specific time period after placement on the No Fly List.”

The upcoming hearing will be closed and ex parte.

The membership of the new Congress has set several new demographic records, according to a survey by the Congressional Research Service.

“One hundred eight women (a record number) serve in the 114th Congress: 88 in the House, including four Delegates, and 20 in the Senate. There are 46 African American Members of the House and two in the Senate. This House number includes two Delegates. There are 38 Hispanic or Latino Members (a record number) serving: 34 in the House, including one Delegate and the Resident Commissioner, and four in the Senate. A record 14 Members (11 Representatives, two Delegates, and one Senator) are Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders. Two American Indians (Native Americans) serve in the House,” CRS found.

“The average age of Members of the House at the beginning of the 114th Congress was 57.0 years; of Senators, 61.0 years. The overwhelming majority of Members of Congress have a college education.” See Membership of the 114th Congress: A Profile, January 22, 2015.

Other new or newly updated CRS reports that Congress has withheld from online public distribution include the following.

Latin America and the Caribbean: Key Issues for the 114th Congress, January 28, 2015

Nigeria’s 2015 Elections and the Boko Haram Crisis, January 28, 2015

Homeland Security Appropriations: FY2015 Action in the 114th Congress, January 30, 2015

H.R. 399, the Secure Our Borders First Act of 2015: Report in Brief, January 27, 2015

Same-Sex Marriage: A Legal Overview, January 30, 2015

Congressional Roll Call Votes on the Keystone XL Pipeline, January 22, 2015

In Re Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001: Claims Against Saudi Defendants Under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), January 22, 2015

Saudi Arabia: Background and U.S. Relations, January 23, 2015

Defense: FY2015 Authorization and Appropriations, January 28, 2015

U.S. Trade Concepts, Performance, and Policy: Frequently Asked Questions, January 30, 2015

Bitcoin: Questions, Answers, and Analysis of Legal Issues, January 28, 2015

Multilateral Development Banks: U.S. Contributions FY2000-FY2015, January 26, 2015

Who Regulates Whom and How? An Overview of U.S. Financial Regulatory Policy for Banking and Securities Markets, January 30, 2015

Oil Sands and the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund: The Definition of “Oil” and Related Issues for Congress, January 22, 2015

U.S.-Mexico Water Sharing: Background and Recent Developments, January 23, 2015

National Security Letters: Proposals in the 113th Congress, January 22, 2015

The number of people who hold security clearances for access to classified information has been reduced by ten percent, the White House said in budget request documents released this week.

“The Administration achieved its objective to reduce the total number of security-cleared individuals by 10 percent,” according to the White House/OMB budget request (at p. 51).

The security-cleared population has grown steadily for several years, with 5.1 million people eligible for classified access, according to the latest data from October 2013.

Taking the new ten percent reduction into account, the total number of cleared individuals should now be around 4.6 million. The actual figure is not available for public release, said Eugene Barlow, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But he said it will be presented in April in the next annual report on security clearances, as required by the FY2010 intelligence authorization act.

The security clearance system naturally becomes harder to manage — and more expensive — as it becomes larger.

A 2014 report from the Office of Management and Budget said that periodic reinvestigations had not been performed as required for around 22 percent of the people that hold that hold Top Secret or TS/SCI clearances. “This backlog poses unacceptable risk, leaving the U.S. Government potentially uninformed as to behavior that poses a security or counterintelligence concern.”

Executive branch agencies spent $1.6 Billion on the security clearance system in 2012. A background investigation for a Top Secret clearance cost an average of $3,959 each, according to OMB.

The new ten percent reduction in clearances “will allow agencies to better deploy resources to priority activities, such as completing periodic investigations for the most sensitive populations,” the White House said.

In 2013, the Director of National Intelligence (who also serves as “Security Executive Agent”) wrote to executive branch agencies directing them to validate the clearance requirement for each currently cleared individual. This validation process produced the desired reduction in clearances. A copy of the DNI’s letter to agencies is not available for public release, Mr. Barlow of ODNI said.

New and updated products from the Congressional Research Service obtained by Secrecy News include the following.

U.S.-EU Cooperation on Ukraine and Russia, CRS Insights, January 23, 2015

Who’s Your Mommy/Daddy? Citizenship Policy Evolves with Medical Technology, CRS Legal Sidebar, January 27, 2015

U.S. Solar Photovoltaic Manufacturing: Industry Trends, Global Competition, Federal Support, January 27, 2015

Information Warfare: Cyberattacks on Sony, CRS Insights, January 30, 2015

Biennial Budgeting: Options, Issues, and Previous Congressional Action, February 2, 2015

Sex Trafficking of Children in the United States: Overview and Issues for Congress, January 28, 2015

U.S. Natural Gas Exports: New Opportunities, Uncertain Outcomes, January 28, 2015

Health Care for Veterans: Suicide Prevention, January 30, 2015

Wartime Detention Provisions in Recent Defense Authorization Legislation, January 23, 2015

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiations and Issues for Congress, January 30, 2015

Following the 9/11 attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency was tasked to lead the campaign against Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan. There were some initial successes, as the Taliban was driven from its strongholds and a new Afghan government rose to power. Yet the process was often chaotic, confused and haphazard.

“Operating at full throttle, constantly improvising, we seldom had occasion to stop and consider what we were doing, or how.”

That sentence from the new Afghanistan War memoir “88 Days to Kandahar” by Robert L. Grenier, the former CIA chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, could serve as a summary of much of the book (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Although Grenier claims to find romance in the profession of intelligence, there is little or nothing romantic about the experiences he describes here. Instead, it’s one damn thing after another, often coming at an excruciating cost. Far from clandestinely orchestrating events, he and his fellow CIA operatives are mostly at the mercy of circumstances beyond their ability to control.

Miscommunication, petty jealousy, equipment failures, manipulative colleagues, bureaucratic rivals, and fickle allies all make an appearance in this blow-by-blow account of the opening CIA campaign in Afghanistan.

“The truth was that I was caught, once again, in the fog of mutual incomprehension between Washington and Islamabad.”

Mr. Grenier himself seems like a decent sort, competent, and well-intentioned. But his story is mostly sad, and disturbingly fatalistic.

“As I look back, I fail to see how the history of the past dozen-plus years could have been different,” he writes.

Those initial successes against the Taliban were both fortuitous and easily misunderstood. “There was hardly any genius at work in defeating a primitive army, employing primitive tactics, with uncontested airpower and precision-guided munitions.”

With the Bush Administration’s subsequent decision to go to war against Iraq in 2003, U.S. policy making became ever more incoherent and misguided, in Grenier’s telling.

As the CIA representative to the NSC Deputies’ Committee, “I had a front-row seat on some of the most disastrous foreign policy decisions in our history. It was a deeply disillusioning experience.”

“The meetings I attended at the pinnacle of the foreign policy bureaucracy were notable for what wasn’t said, rather than what was: mendacity and indirection were the orders of the day,” Grenier writes.

It only got worse as operations in Afghanistan dragged on. Yet the Obama Administration’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces on a fixed, predetermined schedule regardless of other strategic considerations is a fateful mistake, he says.

“The whole enterprise, in my view, was criminal:  Hundreds of U.S. servicemen lost their lives, their limbs, or suffered debilitating head injuries to IEDs while on patrol in Kandahar or Helmand, taking territory that their superiors should have known could never be held by Afghan forces.”

“After a span of a dozen years, the longest war in American history, we had succeeded in killing Osama bin Laden and degrading the organization responsible for the attacks on our shores. But regarding arguably our most important objective—to deny South-Central Asia as a future safehaven for international terrorists—a combination of unwise policies, inept execution, and myopic zeal had produced a situation arguably worse than the one with which we started.”

“For all the billions spent and lives lost, there is little to show, and most of that will not long survive our departure.”

Mr. Grenier’s relentlessly grim tale includes a passing portrait of “Greg,” the newly appointed director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service (as noted last week in the Washington Post). It also provides various insights into CIA bureaucratic culture.

We learn, for example, that “the Directorate of Operations [now the National Clandestine Service] does not tolerate profane or abusive language in cable traffic.”

Updated (twice) below

U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan have partially rescinded their effort to classify previously public oversight information concerning the status of coalition operations in that country after the move drew sharp criticism.

The sudden reversal was reported in the New York Times (U.S. Declassifies Some Information on Afghan Forces by Matthew Rosenberg, February 2).

In a report issued last week, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) had called the classification action “unprecedented” and said that it left SIGAR “for the first time in six years unable to publicly report on most of the U.S.-taxpayer-funded efforts to build, train, equip, and sustain the ANSF.”

Some officials in the Department of Defense were said to be unhappy with this unexpected development, especially after its negative impact was magnified in editorials in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and in critical assessments in the Washington Post and elsewhere. And so a modification was made.

The specifics and the extent of the change in classification policy were not immediately clear.

Update (2/4/15): Here is a statement on the matter from Col. Brian Tribus, United States Forces-Afghanistan (USFOR-A) Director of Public Affairs:

“General Campbell [Commander, USFOR-A] has not changed his position in regard to the importance of protecting Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) readiness data, which remains classified.

The ANSF took the lead for providing security in June 2013 and have since assumed full responsibility for securing the Afghan people. As the ANSF have become more capable, we have transitioned to our new, non-combat role. With this transition, the ANSF are now playing a critical role in providing security for coalition forces. In August 2014, General Campbell made the decision to classify Afghan National Security Forces’ readiness data in order to prevent potential adversaries from gaining critical information that could be exploited — endangering the lives of our Afghan partners and coalition forces serving alongside them. Just as we classify our own armed forces readiness reports, it is prudent for us as a reliable partner to do the same for the ANSF — especially considering that ANSF commands are now our primary source for that data and it is provided to us in a classified format. The prudence of General Campbell’s decision was underscored when President Ghani assumed office and, in his role as Commander in Chief of the ANSF, he reiterated the importance of keeping ANSF readiness data classified. The Afghan Chief of General Staff, General Karimi, reinforced this request.

USFOR-A is fully committed to working with the SIGAR. We recognize that SIGAR provides a vital function ensuring transparency and oversight of the expenditure of U.S taxpayer dollars. We have and will continue to implement many of the SIGAR’s recommendations that have helped make us more effective stewards of American funding.

With respect to the SIGAR’s January 2015 quarterly report, the SIGAR was given full access to all ANSF readiness information as well as every other piece of information that was requested. This enabled the SIGAR to share the information with Congress, consistent with its mandate. A large volume of the data requested by SIGAR, when viewed alone, is suitable for public release. However, releasable information was combined with related classified information, requiring it to be published in a classified annex.

USFOR-A has since gone back and separated data releasable to the public from classified ANSF readiness data based on the SIGAR’s request to release more information to the public. USFOR-A provided the separated, unclassified data to the SIGAR.

Again, General Campbell has not changed his position in regard to the importance of protecting ANSF readiness data, which remains classified.

For specifics regarding the unclassified data provided, please contact the SIGAR.

USFOR-A remains committed to working closely with the SIGAR in order to strike the right balance between maximum transparency and prudent protection of information regarding ANSF readiness.”

Update (3/3/2015): SIGAR has released a Supplement to the January 2015 quarterly report reflecting the newly declassified data.

Updated below

In a startlingly indiscriminate classification action that officials termed “unprecedented,” U.S. General John F. Campbell, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, ordered the classification of a broad range of previously public information concerning operations in that country.

How has the $25 million authorized by Congress for women in the Afghan army been used? What are the definitions of the terms “unavailable” and “present for duty”? What is the total amount of funding that the U.S. has expended on salaries for the Afghan National Police?

The answers to those questions, and more than a hundred others that had formerly been subject to public disclosure, are now considered classified information. The newly classified data was withheld from disclosure in the public version of the latest quarterly report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that was released today.

“The classification of this volume of data for SIGAR’s quarterly report is unprecedented,” the new report stated. “The decision leaves SIGAR for the first time in six years unable to publicly report on most of the U.S.-taxpayer-funded efforts to build, train, equip, and sustain the [Afghan National Security Forces].”

General Campbell defended his action (which was first reported today in the New York Times) in a letter to the SIGAR appended to the report.

“While I cannot comment upon the precise reason why certain information was considered unclassified in the past, I can advise that given the risks that continue to exist to our forces and those of Afghanistan, I have directed that sensitive operational information or related materials, that could be used by those who threaten the force, or Afghan forces, be classified at an appropriate level,” General Campbell wrote. “With lives literally on the line, I am sure that you can join me in recognizing that we must be careful to avoid providing sensitive information to those that threaten our forces and Afghan forces, particularly information that can be used by such opposing forces to sharpen their attacks.”

The General did not explain how budget and contracting information, among other routine data, could be used to sharpen attacks against allied forces.

The new classification action highlights the inadequacy of existing mechanisms for correcting excessive, abusive or mistaken classification decisions.

In principle, the director of the Information Security Oversight Office has the authority under executive order to overrule or modify General Campbell’s sweeping classification decision. But that authority, which has never yet been exercised in the 35 years of ISOO’s existence, may have finally atrophied beyond recovery.

Congressional complaints about overclassification, as in the case of the summary of the Senate report on CIA interrogation, tend to underscore the view that classification is an executive branch prerogative, and paradoxically to strengthen it.

A 2013 Department of Defense Inspector General report noted that out of a small sample of 220 DoD documents, at least ten percent were misclassified or overclassified, including documents based on public information. At that time, the DoD Inspector General generously concluded that “we do not believe that those instances concealed violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevented embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency; restrained competition; or prevented or delayed the release of information that did not require protection in the interest of national security.”

That deferential judgment will need to be amended in light of the expansive classification of oversight information concerning Afghanistan.

As a result of General Campbell’s decision, the Special Inspector General wrote, “much of the information SIGAR has used for the past six years to report on the $65 billion U.S. investment in the ANSF is no longer releasable to the public.”

Update: On February 2, the move to classify the relevant Afghanistan oversight data was partially rescinded, the New York Times reported.

The scope of the state secrets privilege is again a matter of contention, as government attorneys in an ongoing lawsuit told a judge last week that he had construed the privilege too narrowly.

Is the state secrets privilege applicable only to discrete items of evidence whose disclosure can be shown to harm the Nation? Or can the privilege be invoked more broadly based on the “context” in which litigation occurs? The proper parameters of the state secrets privilege have never been defined in statute, and so these questions recur.

In a pending lawsuit concerning the constitutionality of the “no fly” list (Gulet Mohamed v. Eric Holder), the presiding judge has taken a distinctly skeptical view of the government’s use of the state secrets privilege.

Judge Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia last fall denied a government motion to dismiss the case on state secrets grounds (Secrecy News,10/31/14), and he concluded that the government’s claim of privilege to withhold 28 specified documents was inadequately justified.

But last week, the government renewed its claim that Judge Trenga was “in error,” and that his ruling “may have been based on an improperly narrow construction of the scope of the privilege.”

Specific pieces of documentary evidence are not the only things that can be subject to the state secrets privilege, the government insisted.

“The Attorney General’s assertion of the state secrets privilege in this case is not limited to certain physical documents that Plaintiff seeks to compel through discovery, but rather covers evidence and information that would be needed to litigate the claims presented in this lawsuit in whatever form it appears,” the government argued.

Nor is the privilege simply limited to “information” rather than “documents,” in the government’s view.

“An assessment of the privilege assertion encompasses not just the information set forth in the four corners of a particular document, but also the broader context of the privileged information which that document reflects,” the government asserted in its January 23 pleading.

By contrast, the government said, Judge Trenga’s order to the contrary “appears to circumscribe the scope of [the government’s] assertion of the state secrets privilege… by focusing on the specific documents” sought by the Plaintiffs in discovery, and then finding those documents insufficiently sensitive to be privileged on state secrets grounds.

“The privilege also protects information that may appear innocuous on its face, but which in a larger context could reveal sensitive classified information,” the government argued.

In other words, the government seems to say here, the state secrets privilege has no limiting principle by which it can be circumscribed and objectively constrained.

The State Secrets Protection Act, a bill repeatedly introduced in Congress but never enacted into law, would have made clear that “the state secrets privilege is an evidentiary rule, not a justiciability rule, and can only be asserted with respect to items of evidence that plaintiffs seek in discovery or intend to disclose in litigation.”

It would also have set “a standard of review designed to give appropriate respect to the executive branch’s institutional expertise and constitutional role, without undermining the judge’s duty to make an independent determination on each privilege claim.”

Essentially, according to a 2008 Senate report, “the bill rejects the  expansion of the state secrets privilege into any manner of justiciability doctrine, and demands that it be applied as a purely evidentiary privilege.”

But in the absence of legislative action, the asserted scope of the privilege continues to drift.

*          *          *

Under the terms of a 2009 policy, the Department of Justice committed to provide periodic reports to Congress with respect to all cases in which the state secrets privilege was invoked.

But it has failed to do so, observed Sen. Dianne Feinstein yesterday at the confirmation hearing of Loretta Lynch, the Attorney General-nominee. Only one such report has been transmitted, in 2011, and it does not cover all current state secrets proceedings.

“I believe that the Department plans to submit another report in the near future,” said John Carlin, the head of the Justice Department National Security Division, in a written response to questions prior to his confirmation hearing. But that was in February 2014, and no subsequent report to Congress has been produced.

Nor have any of the 2009 policy’s other provisions been implemented in a way that could be externally verified. No narrowly tailored uses of the privilege have been asserted, as far as anyone knows, and no disputed matters considered subject to the privilege have been forwarded to the Inspector General for review.

National security secrecy can be an impediment to veterans who are seeking treatment for traumas suffered during military service yet who are technically prohibited from disclosing classified information related to their experience to uncleared physicians or therapists.

The problem was epitomized by the case of U.S. Army Sgt. Daniel Somers, who participated in classified Special Operations missions in Iraq. He returned with significant physical, mental and psychological damage. He killed himself in June 2013.

Secrecy, among other factors, appears to have exacerbated his condition, according to Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ).

“One of the struggles Daniel faced was as an individual who had served in classified service,” Rep. Sinema said at a hearing last July. “He was unable to participate in group therapy because he was not able to share [what] he experienced while in service.”

To address this problem, Rep. Sinema last week re-introduced the Classified Veterans Access to Care Act, HR 421.

“The Classified Veterans Access to Care Act ensures that veterans with classified experiences have appropriate access to mental health services from the Department of Veterans Affairs,” she said in a release.

The bill itself would require the Secretary of Veterans Affairs “to ensure that each covered veteran may access mental health care provided by the Secretary in a manner that fully accommodates the obligation of the veteran to not improperly disclose classified information.”

The Classified Veterans Access to Care Act was originally introduced in October 2013 (as HR 3387). But although it had, and has, bipartisan support, it was not acted on in the 113th Congress. Nor are its prospects for passage in the new Congress clear. Still, there is nothing to prevent the Department of Veterans Affairs from addressing the underlying issue, and fixing the problem, without awaiting the formal enactment of Rep. Sinema’s legislation.

“The V.A. welcomes criticism but also needs constructive ideas to succeed,” wrote Drs. Marsden McGuire and Paula Schnurr in a letter to the New York Times last week. “The V.A. is actively engaging community partners, academia, advocates, the private sector and, most important, veterans and their families, to improve services.”

The parents of Sgt. Daniel Somers described his experience, and theirs, in “On Losing a Veteran Son to a Broken System,” New York Times, November 11, 2013.

According to the latest Department of Defense annual report on suicide, “The suicide rate per 100,000 [military personnel] in 2013 was 18.7 for active component service members, 23.4 for reserve component and 28.9 for National Guard.”

That is a decline from the annual suicide rate year before. But the figures from the first quarters of 2014 indicate a further increase in suicide among active duty service members.

The emergence of unmanned aerial systems, or drones, as an instrument of war is often referred to as a “revolutionary” development in military technology. Thus, a new history of the subject is entitled “Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution” by Richard Whittle (Henry Holt, 2014).

But if it is a revolution, it is more like a turning of a wheel that will continue to revolve rather than the permanent transformation of all that has come before it. Armed drones represent an innovative response to a particular threat, but they are themselves bound to inspire other innovations and reactions from adversaries.

The development of drones as an ongoing process of adaption and response is the animating idea behind “Sting of the Drone,” a thriller by former National Security Council official Richard A. Clarke (who was a leading advocate for arming drones in the Clinton and Bush Administrations).

“This is not a static environment,” says a character in the novel named Dugout. “It’s more like classic two-player game theory. We each learn about the other’s behavior and adjust.”

In the novel, the terrorist targets of U.S. drone attacks adjust by deciding to attack the individual drone operators, who believe — mistakenly, as it turns out — that they are far removed from the battlefield.

One of the least believable features of Clarke’s novel, which is perfectly readable by the standards of airport fiction, is the character of Dugout, a super-skilled hacker and what-not who can accomplish technological feats that are beyond the imagination of his hidebound, boringly conventional colleagues.

So it comes as a surprise to read in Richard Whittle’s history that there was in fact at least one such real-life character associated with the weaponization of U.S. drones, who is identified only as “Werner” (“not because he is a covert operative, for he never was, but because he prefers to remain anonymous”). Werner, an imagery scientist and all-purpose technologist, was able to swiftly conceive and implement solutions to problems that left others completely stumped.

The Whittle history is an impressive tale of aeronautical innovation, led in its early years by Israeli expatriate Abraham Karem, that would encounter technological obstacles, bureaucratic resistance, and policy barriers. The ensuing struggles are rendered more lively and interesting by the author than might have been expected. Is an armed drone equivalent to a ground-launched cruise missile barred by the INF Treaty? Is targeted killing precluded by the ban on assassination? Under what conditions can or should a drone’s weapons be fired by the CIA?

Eventually, as Whittle recounts, all of these obstacles were overcome, at least for the moment. (In an echo of the last issue, a bill was introduced in the House just last week by Rep. Michael C. Burgess [R-TX] “to prohibit the Central Intelligence Agency from using an unmanned aerial vehicle to carry out a weapons strike or other deliberately lethal action.”)

One thing that “the drone revolution” did not do was to establish a pause in the continuing process of technological adaptation and the development of countermeasures.

To the contrary, the U.S. Army recently developed a mobile High Energy Laser that it can use against an adversary’s Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), and told Congress it will demonstrate a Counter-UAS capability in 2017.

At a March 2014 hearing, the U.S. Navy noted that it is developing its own Laser Weapon System to defeat drones.

“We feel energy weapons, specifically directed energy weapons, offer the Navy and the Marine Corps game-changing capabilities in speed-of-light engagement, deep magazines, multi-mission functionality, and affordable solutions.”

“They are capable in defeating adversarial threats, including fast boats, UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] and other low-cost, widely available weapons.”