by G. Jack Urso
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| A scene from Patterns (1956). |
Patterns was Rod Serling’s first major teleplay,
later adapted into a film production of the same name in 1956. It told a story
of an older man in decline being pushed out of his long-time position in
business by a younger man on the rise. An age-old story, it brings to mind the
ancient Roman tombstone epitaph: “As you are now, I once was. As I am
now, you will be.”
For 25 years and
8 months I was what my employers reported to the IRS a “Defense Analyst.”
A catch-all and overly broad term, during my career I performed numerous duties
including communications specialist, multimedia content provider, database
sales, news reporter, website designer, and the job I did through all that time —
weapon systems profiler. I worked for companies in news, publishing, competitive intelligence, and on an independent contract basis.
Back in late 1997, a friend of mine, an editor at a military database in Washington D.C., was complaining to me about one of his stringers, a senior freelancer about 60
or so. A friend of the publishers, he had probably started off in the field in
the 1960s and his habits were still squarely set in the age of typewriters. For
example, his habit of pressing the Return key at the end of every sentence
created havoc with the HTML coding which read every Return keystroke as the
end of a paragraph, not just the line. Consequently, my friend had to go through the
old guy’s assignments line by line and remove each Return keystroke. It was a massive pain in the ass. I admit we had a
bit of an ungenerous laugh at the guy’s expense. A couple young bucks mocking
an old bull’s growing obsolescence.
I was hired to replace him; however, as I would eventually learn, if you live
long enough you become the punch line to your own joke.
Climbing
Up the Ladder
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| Database product name for a company I worked for. |
The company my
editor friend noted above hired me for is a proprietary online military
database located in the Washington D.C. area. The subscribers include
governments, industries, libraries, militaries, news organizations, etc. My work
mainly involved profiling weapon systems and tracking exports, transfers, and
sales, but also sometimes preparing news abstracts as well as a nation’s
order of battle — meaning what weapons it had, how many, how they were
acquired, where they were located, and with which units. Small arms were generally
considered beneath our concern. Rather, the focus was on large weapons
systems such as aircraft, artillery, armored vehicles, and electronic intelligence and sensor
systems.
The company
would recruit other stringers over the years, political science majors, pre-law
students, grad students, but the tedious, detail-oriented work, and low pay,
would eventually move them all on. After two and a half decades, I was the last
man standing, more out of stubbornness than talent, but in the end I was there.
Frankly, it was the longest relationship in my life.
Rung-by-Rung
As my career in
defense information grew, so too did my skills. I became proficient with
website design, HTML coding, using software like Dreamweaver and Sound Forge to
produce interactive maps and audio commentary. My work also expanded to other companies.
I worked several years as a freelancer for one Israeli defense information
company writing news abstracts and then moving on to sales, creating contact
lists of hundreds, and I do mean hundreds, of generals, admirals, majors, lt. colonels,
colonels, defense attaches, and military libraries. The following audio clip is
a background sound collage for an Israeli defense information database I produced and gives
a sample of my work during this time:
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| Image of the map for the China-Taiwan Air Power Monitor I prepared. |
Other work over
the years included designing a webpage for a behavioral modification company
run by a former Russian general (at least that’s what he claimed), as well as audio commentaries for a defense media reporting website (see below).
Despite all of
this, I should mention that I am a peace advocate and there's not one war in my lifetime that I have supported. Yet, while a peace advocate,
I am pragmatic. I live in a world with nations led by psychopaths who do not
share my sentiments. On the other hand, one thing I learned in nearly 26 years
of reporting on the weapons of war is that wherever weapons go, war
inevitably follows. While one may conjecture that a strong military deters
others from attacking a nation, the truth is that human history is replete with
examples of militarily strong nations going to war against each other. I
explore this conundrum in another essay on Aeolus 13 Umbra, “If You Want Peace, Prepare for War”: The Logical Paradox.
Not-So-Secret Reports
I also did work in competitive intelligence (CI). On the surface, CI is just gathering information
on what a company’s competitors are doing. Ostensibly, this is NOT corporate spying, according to the industry,
but it sort of really is. One company I worked for created shell companies to provide cover for researchers to approach competitor companies for information which they
would otherwise not share. The old pros quickly caught on to CI inquiries and
shut me down. So, I shifted tactics and called at 4:30 PM on Friday afternoons
before a holiday weekend. At that point, the only ones left in the office are
interns, receptionists, and junior execs who were more easily fooled and I
usually got the info I needed.
Special reports I prepared during this period of my career include:
Just a few years
ago, I completed my last such project, this one involving a company producing Resilient
Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) solutions and secure radar and GPS. These
are systems that ensure accurate navigation and protect aircraft and ships from
electronic attacks. The executive heading the effort was generally an absent leader and
when he was around he was a fatuous ignoramus. It reminded me of the empty
suits I worked with in public relations and why I left it. I was getting too old to have the patience for this shit.
Old Man
Out
As the decades rolled
by, the need for HTML tags and special hyperlink formatting was no longer needed, not that anyone would tell me. I would continue on with now-meaningless editorial tasks, sometimes for years, until I would find out by some accidental revelation they were no longer needed.
Nevertheless, how I did things had become engrained in me and it was
difficult to make the change when I did find out. So, I kept turning in assignments as I always had, HTML tags and all, which, as the old man caused my editor friend at the beginning of this journey, was just creating more work for the database editor. Eventually, I made the change as the evolution of the software eliminated about half the total time I spent working on an assignment.
Notably, this entire time, the new database editor said nothing to me. I was actually hoping he would and probably dragged it out longer than I should have just to see if I would get a reaction. I didn’t. Over twenty years younger than me, I could only surmise he was hesitant to disrespect the old man.
And that’s what I was. I became the old man.
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| Banner I created for the OSIS Pakistan OSINT page in the wake of 9/11. Posted Oct. 10, 2001. |
In the final few
years I was there, acquisitions, mergers, and partnerships with
other defense information companies brought with them real defense experts with journalism
degrees and military experience — not a peacenik slumming around an old beat. My pay hadn't changed in nearly 26 years, and taking into account inflation, I was earning a lot less than I was when I started. With each change of editors, my workload, in addition to my pay, gradually diminished until they
simply had no more use for me.
Last year, as I got the old
heave-ho, I thought about that old man whose obsolescence my editor friend and
I laughed at. I was 58 and a just a couple years younger than the old man was when he became the object of our derision. Rod Serling’s Patterns
haunts me now as a ghostly reminder of my own hubris and the whole experience brings
me back to that old Roman epitaph, “As you are now, I once was. As I am
now, you will be.”
As I learned, if you live long
enough, you become the punch line to your own joke — just be careful not to
choke on it.
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