Thank you. This is an important point, and one that I haven't seen nearly enough of on HN lately. It is very difficult to overstate the extent to which "government people" live in a bubble. In many ways, they are working from an entirely different set of first principles than those used by most of the HN-reading world. As such, it is difficult for "us" to understand why "they" do what they do, and very easy for us to come up with our own (usually incorrect, or at the very least, incomplete) explanations for their behavior.

Of course, the converse is generally true: the laughably incorrect explanations that "government people" always seem to come up with for "our" behavior often are the result of them interpreting events, statements, etc. through their lens- a lens informed by a completely different set of optical principles than the ones that we are used to using (to abuse the figure of speech a little bit).

In other words, when you read or hear about a "government person" doing or saying something head-deskingly stupid, the odds are very good that the statement or action made perfect sense in the context of that government person's world. It's not that they're (necessarily) stupid, or even ignorant- just that they're not living in our world, and so have dramatically different motivations, constraints, first principles, etc. etc. Their actions may be perfectly follow an internal logic- but it's not our logic, and so we have a hard time making sense of it.

And all of this goes double or triple when we're talking about military or IC people. The classified nature of their work, with its attendant organizational, cultural, technical, political, and psychological distortions, makes their "bubble" look more like a bathysphere.