Sometimes there are national security reasons why certain technologies or capabilities must be kept hush-hush, lest they slip into the hands of potential enemies. And then there are the occasions when the military services are trying to evade a very different sort of national security threat -- the Pentagon's own budget bureaucracy.
As Navy under secretary, Woolsey often sought secret cover for acquisition programs for the sole purpose of avoiding the program objective memorandum budget process, he disclosed at an aerospace conference in Arlington, VA, on May 5.
"I have a confession to make. When I was under secretary of the Navy I used to put programs into the black in order to be able to avoid the requirements of the POM process," Woolsey said while participating in a panel discussion.
Putting a program in the black enabled faster, more efficient development -- and less oversight, he noted.
"You had to have some shred of a rationale for a need to be secret, but you got to go an awful lot faster. You could put some smart engineers together and operational people and say do what makes sense. Keep the lawyers out. Have one big contract. Go do it," he said.
Of course, the strategy didn't pan out every time.
"And sometimes it didn't work out, and we had to take the heat. But more times than not, it worked," he said. That is the reason the National Reconnaissance Office has "worked so well over the years," Woolsey added.
Though some have proposed reforming the traditional budget process so it more closely resembles that of the super-secret NRO, quite the opposite has happened, Woolsey noted, eliciting laughter from the crowd.
"What's happened over the last few years is the NRO has unfortunately come to resemble more the regular POM process," he concluded.