Some Classified DoD Assets Are Too Secret to Protect
In a stark illustration of how secrecy may undermine rather than reinforce security, the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Defense has omitted many of its most sensitive assets from critical infrastructure protection planning because they are too secret to be identified.
“DOD has not taken adequate steps to ensure that highly sensitive critical assets associated with SCI and SAPs are accounted for,” the GAO reported last week (pdf). SCI means sensitive compartmented information that is derived from intelligence sources. SAPs are special access programs.
Only critical assets that are classified at the collateral level — i.e. plain Secret or Top Secret, but not compartmented or special access — are being processed in the Defense Critical Infrastructure Program, the GAO found. But if they are classified as SCI or special access, they have been excluded.
The Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has withheld a list of over 80 critical assets because they are SCI and the infrastructure protection program is not equipped to receive such information.
“Unless critical SCI and SAP assets are identified and prioritized, DOD will lack sufficient information to assure the availability of the department’s most critical assets,” the GAO stated.
The Pentagon concurred with the GAO’s recommendation that critical SCI and SAP assets should be incorporated in infrastructure protection.
See “Defense Critical Infrastructure: DOD’s Risk Analysis of Its Critical Infrastructure Omits Highly Sensitive Assets,” April 2, 2008.
With summer 2025 in the rearview mirror, we’re taking a look back to see how federal actions impacted heat preparedness and response on the ground, what’s still changing, and what the road ahead looks like for heat resilience.
Satellite imagery of RAF Lakenheath reveals new construction of a security perimeter around ten protective aircraft shelters in the designated nuclear area, the latest measure in a series of upgrades as the base prepares for the ability to store U.S. nuclear weapons.
It will take consistent leadership and action to navigate the complex dangers in the region and to avoid what many analysts considered to be an increasingly possible outcome, a nuclear conflict in East Asia.
Getting into a shutdown is the easy part, getting out is much harder. Both sides will be looking to pin responsibility on each other, and the court of public opinion will have a major role to play as to who has the most leverage for getting us out.