There’s a (likely apocryphal) story about a country tracking subjects inside the pentagon, and being completely convinced that one building near the center was absolutely the most important in the complex. Every single head of staff, general, admiral, etc would visit the building for 10-20 minutes at a time, so it must be some major communication hub. They devised plans to infiltrate this building, to see what was inside.
Well the point is more to poison the source of information with bad indicators for anyone watching.
Trying to remove the indicator is one strategy, and it might work partially, but it can also just move the problem somewhere else. To use your example, serving the food in house shifts the problem from takeout delivery to food delivery to the in-house kitchen.
Of course the best strategy would probably be to do both - increase the availability (and quality) of in-house food to encourage its regular use, and also order takeout in large-ish volumes sometimes when nothing is going on.
It would be the same issue wouldn’t it? Instead of the Dominoes guy knowing something is going down it would be the Aramark, or whatever food vendor the Pentagon uses, people getting extra shipments for the additional staff.
Freezers and refrigerators exist. Unmarked trucks are an option. The Pentagon has so many vehicles coming and going every day logistics could easily bring in 10x the normal amount of food without any outside observer being aware.
They have infinite money dude, they can just hire every single person needed for it full time. They could start their own food business and it wouldnt even be noticeable on the spendings.
Or just fucking offer good an cheap food to your employees in house but thats probably too expensive for the richest developing nation in the world.
There’s a (likely apocryphal) story about a country tracking subjects inside the pentagon, and being completely convinced that one building near the center was absolutely the most important in the complex. Every single head of staff, general, admiral, etc would visit the building for 10-20 minutes at a time, so it must be some major communication hub. They devised plans to infiltrate this building, to see what was inside.
It was the coffee shop.
TIL “apocryphal”
Well the point is more to poison the source of information with bad indicators for anyone watching.
Trying to remove the indicator is one strategy, and it might work partially, but it can also just move the problem somewhere else. To use your example, serving the food in house shifts the problem from takeout delivery to food delivery to the in-house kitchen.
Of course the best strategy would probably be to do both - increase the availability (and quality) of in-house food to encourage its regular use, and also order takeout in large-ish volumes sometimes when nothing is going on.
It would be the same issue wouldn’t it? Instead of the Dominoes guy knowing something is going down it would be the Aramark, or whatever food vendor the Pentagon uses, people getting extra shipments for the additional staff.
It’s a bit easier to vet the contractors working at the Pentagon than it is to vet all the restaurant employees nearby.
Vetting the employees isn’t really important when an observer can just watch a higher-than-usual volume of delivery trucks showing up.
Freezers and refrigerators exist. Unmarked trucks are an option. The Pentagon has so many vehicles coming and going every day logistics could easily bring in 10x the normal amount of food without any outside observer being aware.
They have infinite money dude, they can just hire every single person needed for it full time. They could start their own food business and it wouldnt even be noticeable on the spendings.