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" A story in the New York Times today raises some provocative questions about the world we created for ourselves in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities, and the iron law of unintended consequences. Ostensibly an account of the Pentagon&amp;#039;s internal review of security procedures that resulted from the shooting rampage at the Washington Navy Yard last September, the piece has ramifications far beyond that one bloody day. At a Pentagon news conference on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel released the review along with an independent review that found that threats to military men and women were increasingly coming from within, including from colleagues with security clearances. In response to both reviews, Mr. Hagel ordered new security procedures at the Pentagon and at American military bases in the United States and overseas. The independent review called the overall security process at Pentagon installations outdated, with too much focus on keeping a secure perimeter against outside threats and not enough on examining the potential threats from people granted secret-level clearance to enter the installations. The review recommended that the Pentagon examine the number of people with security clearances and consider revoking at least 10 percent of them. This seems to me to be a rather significant change in emphasis. Instead of external threats, for which we&amp;#039;ve all been put on point for going on 13 years now, the nation&amp;#039;s military establishment is now saying that the primary danger to its personnel may come from the other people who work for it, including, one can assume, the million or so people with some kind of security clearance. (And, yes, there&amp;#039;s more than an oblique reference to the likes of Edward Snowden in this Pentagon review, too.) And that&amp;#039;s not the only consequence of the post-9/11 military to which the report makes reference. It also deals with the results of having so many damaged people still in the military -- people like Aaron Alexis, who shot up the Navy Yard -- and also how easily someone like Alexis can fall through the cracks of a system in which the actual military, and contractors who work for the military, are inextricably mixed. From 2007 to 2011, Mr. Alexis was a full-time reservist in the Navy, where he served as an aviation electrician&amp;#039;s mate and achieved the rank of petty officer third class. At the time of the shooting, he worked for a company called the Experts that was a subcontractor for Hewlett-Packard and serviced the Navy&amp;#039;s Internet system. He had a secret-level clearance. On the morning of Sept. 16, Mr. Alexis entered the base with a concealed, sawed-off shotgun, killed 12 people and wounded four others before he was killed by the police an hour and a half after he first opened fire. The Defense Department review found that both Navy officials and Mr. Alexis&amp;#039; employers should have raised alerts about events in Mr. Alexis&amp;#039; history that the review portrayed as red flags. In particular, the report took the contracting companies to task for not taking any action to deal with his &amp;quot;emotional, mental and personality condition, even when they had concerns&amp;quot; that he could harm others...In 2004, three years before enlisting as a Navy reservist, Mr. Alexis brandished a .45-caliber pistol and fired at the tires of a construction worker&amp;#039;s car. In September 2010, he was arrested by the police in Fort Worth after he fired through the ceiling of his residence. But commanders stopped efforts to force Mr. Alexis out of the Navy with a less-than-honorable discharge because the police declined to pursue the case, and it was not entered into his military file.In August 2013, a few weeks before the shooting, Mr. Alexis told the police in Rhode Island that he was hearing voices sent by a &amp;quot;microwave machine,&amp;quot; prompting the authorities to fax a report to a naval police in Newport, where Mr. Alexis was working temporarily as a contractor. But the naval police did not alert superiors in Washington. In a broken military filled with broken people, in a privatized military in which the line between civilian and soldier gets increasingly blurred, and in which security clearances apparently are handed out like souvenir pens, there are a thousand things that can go wrong. This is one of the deeper and more profound elements of the legacy of a decade in which an administration recklessly employed the military out of panic and geopolitical fantasy. Aaron Alexis is the product of the country&amp;#039;s lingering fever dream. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30884/navy-yard-shooting-review-031914/>