In a world flooded with information, some content—especially the kind dealing with national security—may be doing more harm than good.
There’s a song release in 1970 by Clarence Carter called “You Talk Too Much” with lyrics that go something like this:
You talk too much, you worry me to death,
You talk too much, you even worry my pet.
You just talk, talk too much,
You talk about people that you don’t know,
You talk about people wherever you go.
You just talk, talk too much.
You talk about people that you’ve never seen,
You talk about people, you can make me scream.
You just talk, you talk too much.
Talking too much is all about information. We’ve been in the age of content for years now as I wrote about over ten years ago in How Much Data can you Eat? Which is why I had to wonder reading the latest Imprimis from March/April 2025 entitled New Thinking Needed on National Defense, why would Stephen Bryen broadcast his observations about our national defense for all to see?
Stephen Bryen is one smart guy. The author of “Weapons and Strategy” on Substack and a senior correspondent for Asia Times, he has served as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense and as founder and head of the Defense Technology Security Administration among other accomplishments.
The piece is from one point of view an amazing “call to action” for what we need to do to shape up. Perhaps Bryen thought that we know all this and he wanted to just emphasize what we all know.
But I didn’t know all this. I may have felt it, but I certainly didn’t “know” it.
Which leads to the subject of the essay itself: information, or content.
Not all content is the same. There’s a value to content, as someone told me many years ago: you don’t make money by knowing what everyone else knows, you make money by knowing what no one else knows.
And that’s why, frankly, espionage exists. Some information has value. Google’s AI will tell you:
“Information’s value is determined by its utility to a decision-maker, meaning how much it helps them improve their decision-making compared to making the decision without that information. Essentially, information’s worth is based on how much a person or organization is willing to pay for it to better their outcome.”
Which brings me full circle back to Bryen’s piece: the information, at least to me, was stunning because it was free under the banner of Imprimis, which is free. Imprimis is a tremendous value in my opinion, but this particular essay, well, it left me wondering: why publish this information? To scare us into action?
The essay is 1,390 words, and he uses 571 of them—in my opinion—to tell me things that if I were the enemy of the U.S. would find valuable. 571 words means he devoted 41% of his content to making his point: we’re in bad shape in our defense.
But again, as I said, maybe that’s just my perception.
So you be the judge. Since the cat is already out of the bag, read the following statements not like a U.S. citizen, but as an enemy of our country and you tell me: am I over-reacting?
Loose Lips Sink Ships
16 statements from Bryen’s piece that, if I were the enemy, would raise my confidence:
- how we can spend so much on our national security but still have a military that seems so woefully underprepared for a major conflict.
- In World War II, we sent 16.8 million soldiers to fight in Europe, North Africa, and Asia—around four times more than in World War I. And we manufactured 2,751 Liberty ships in 18 shipyards, turning out three ships every two days. Such a feat of production is inconceivable today.
- Today, the total number of fighter aircraft in the Air Force, Navy, and Marines is 2,531, about 25 times fewer[than what U.S. made in Word War II].
- we deploy certain types of PGMs, such as anti-tank missiles or man-portable air-defense systems like Stinger missiles, it takes years to manufacture new ones.
- the tooling needed to produce various types of PGMs no longer exists—indeed, in some cases entire factories have been dismantled. This means that if we want more PGMs, we will have to start from scratch.
- we depend heavily on global supply chains. … When supply chains are disrupted or certain parts are no longer manufactured, defense production grinds to a halt. The U.S. must reverse this trend quickly if we are to remain dominant.
- there is a significant number of cheaters who produce substandard parts for expensive military platforms. In some cases, MILSPEC cannot be applied and only commercial parts can be purchased.
- our defense industry largely depends on global companies whose priorities do not necessarily include producing parts for defense manufacturers.
- Modern high-tech industries are designing, fielding, and retiring products in a much shorter time frame, and they have no interest in manufacturing products that they deem obsolete.
- defense companies are sometimes chasing the same innovations, there are no assurances they will succeed when outbid by Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, or even offshore corporations.
- the F-35 stealth jet runs on more than eight million lines of code.… New AI systems will make the kinds of decisions that are currently made by soldiers, pilots, and command centers and will have the ability to process information at astonishing speeds. This is an excellent opportunity to make the old equipment much better and more effective. One important question is whether our major defense companies will be able to recruit enough high-tech talent to do the job.
- our challenge is to upgrade our AI fighting systems rapidly. American defense companies are lagging behind their foreign competitors
- if a defense company is contracted by the government to produce a PGM, such as the Stinger missile, it will build a facility to do that. When the contract runs out, or there are no more significant exports, the special facility is shut down. This poses a serious problem if the U.S. urgently needs to surge production of that PGM
- One of the key vulnerabilities of our defense and high-tech infrastructure is that the technology on which it relies is routinely stolen by foreign countries, especially China.
- They are using all the tools of espionage at their disposal in an effort to replicate our most advanced defense and commercial technologies…We must take the steps necessary to protect our defense investments. If we don’t, we may one day find ourselves engaged in a conflict with an enemy who is much better prepared for the fight than we are.
- the incredibly expensive tanks we gave to the Ukrainians were defenseless against very inexpensive FPV drones… For each $30,000 Iranian drone we shot down, we employed two $2 million missiles.
His conclusion is: the defense budget is not inexhaustible.[1] Duh.
My conclusion: if I was the enemy, I can’t imagine feeling anything but “good” when I read this.
In this age of content, secrets don’t stay secret for long. In WWII, we broke the Fleet General Purpose Code of the Japanese which helped win the Battle of Midway. The Enigma machine was used by the German military for encrypting messages, and the Allies, including the U.S., successfully broke it using various methods.
But no one knew that until years after the war. Knowing you won a battle by knowing what the enemy’s plans were is very different than winning the battle without that information. Or as George C. Scott said when he played Patton and fought Romel, “I read you book you bastard!”
That’s what information is: intelligence. Some more valuable than others.
I hope that Bryen’s intention was really to scare us into action. Unfortunately, he also alerted the enemy of what’s going on. I think a confidential letter to the President would have been better.
But then, I’m sure our leaders know all this, don’t they? Which begs the eternal question: what are we doing to do about it? Which is always the question once you have a valuable piece of information, isn’t it?
If this information is already known, what’s the value in repeating it publicly? And if it’s not widely known, should it be? In an era where data is currency and information is power, who gets to decide what’s safe to say—and what’s best left unsaid?
Thanks for reading. And thank you Imprimis and Stephen Bryen for making us think!!!
[1] Bryen offers one solution that I could see: “One solution to this problem would be the construction of a single flexible facility that could produce a range of PGM products using the same labor force. In that case, restarting a production line could be done much more quickly and easily. This would require suppliers to agree to a consolidation plan to build their products in a common facility. In other words, we need a national security version of Elon Musk’s Gigafactory.”