Allison
"So all those changes you want to study... well, what are they? They're a goddamned forecasting system! That's what they are. They forecast enemy military intentions. Political changes forecast military actions. The bigger the military action the earlier the forecast. And the more you know about the correlations and patterns and periodicities of the structural and functional transformations you want to study, the more specifically you can predict the nature of the military action -- its scale, its target, its timing. Pattern activity analysis on bureaucratic variables! But try to tell that to the idiots over there in the building where we work.""Hmmmm. . . this dynamism in their bureaucracy really is different, isn't it?"
"SHE-it! If my sense of this is right, we're studying a revolution in bureaucratic function and nobody even suspects it. The communists themselves, I think, have not realized the fundamental nature of what they are sitting on. Something happened down here in the South in the early days of this war that allowed the VCI to evolve a system with some radically new features. I don't know what it was that encouraged it -- perhaps lingering Trotskyist and anarchist influences from the 30s -- but I sure wish I did. Not being a historian of political systems, I can't be positive, but I strongly suspect that there has never before in history been a bureaucracy geared for and driving toward structural change like that of the VCI."
"So give me some guidance. How do I go about studying those transformations?" asked Derek.
"The people deciding which documents have intelligence value and which don't are not, repeat NOT, hot-shot analysts. Their judgement criteria were written during the First World War, I think, and are off the map in terms of what you want to look at. Policy and briefing and committee report documents are the high priority exploitable items as far as they are concerned. From your point of view, these documents are so much kiem thao trash and red laterite dust swirling in the wind. So, much of what you want -- the daily nuts-and-bolts bureaucratic crap -- never gets translated, never becomes a bulletin or a log. And you are NOT GOING to change this fact because nobody will understand what the hell you are talking about -- people always assume you are as stupid as they are! -- and major man-hour shifts would be required to get what you want. So, you have to cultivate some Vietnamese translators at CDEC and create a backchannel way around the problem. You must realize, however, that this kind of thing will just be for your own damn undocumentable self... And I'll let you figure out the three dozen reasons why that is so."