superpower stuff

You need to read the following conversation between two people in one of the ring corridors of the Pentagon to appreciate its significance. The Pentagon employs 23,000 people and occupies nearly 4 million square feet of office space. It's a thunderstorm of activity involving uniformed and civilian brains who are in charge of the world. They can send drones from one country to another and kill people travelling in a Toyota pick-up who were thought by someone in one of the thousands of locked rooms to be nasty terrorist types and worthy of being targeted by Hellfire missiles, there are people who do nothing else but draw up contingency plans to strike at potential enemies or react to scenarios not even imaginable by the average ordinary human being, there are political wonks who advise and whisper into the ears of President-selected politicians about what to do when to do it what to say when to say it how to do it why to do it why not to do it, there are meetings and meetings and meetings, and telephone calls. In fact someone once added up the phone calls made on an average day and it was 200,000, that ran along 100,000 miles of telephone cable. Someone actually had the job of going " one,two, three....." he must have been sick of Alexander Bell by the time his day was over. So that's a lot of blaa blaa blaaing, some of it so secret the blaa blaa has to be scrambled so it sounds like phswzzv$. 

To help the mindblowing amount of work and clandestine planning going on in the biggest office building in the world and the most famous five-sided construction in the history of the universe - by the way as part of the imminent huge cuts in the defence budget being contemplated because of the failure of the President and Congress to agree a deal on national deficit-reduction, planners reckon a lot of money can be saved by reducing the building to four sides - apparently 4,500 cups of coffee are drunk each day - yes, that little man has been at his adding machine again - and 6,800 soft drinks. No wonder half the vast Pentagon population are overweight.

 You enter this scheming complex for the first time like a man lost in a desert filled with dromedaries. There are A rings and D Rings and E Rings etc etc and there are 17.5 miles of corridors but whoever designed this mighty concrete beast thought of a way of ensuring that whichever colonel in  whatever room you wished to visit you would take no more than seven minutes to get from one place to another wherever it is in the building, thanks to those concentric rings, like being on a fairground roundabout, except that when the music stops at the fair you get off and run away to get candyfloss. In the Pentagon the music never stops. You just go round and round, and if you don't know where the hell you are, I can tell you it takes a darn sight longer than seven minutes to track down your colonel.

For a start there are 131 different stairs and 19 escalators. Get on the wrong one and you're in D Ring instead of B Ring. You stop and ask a passing uniform where Room 356 on B Ring is, he says, always says: "It's very easy. Take staircase 12, go down 18 steps, turn right, go down the long corridor, you'll see pictures of Second World War fighters on the walls, don't stop until you reach Staircase 15, then go up and you're in B Ring. The room you want is down on the left." "Thanks a lot." "By the way, who do you want to see? " "Colonel Wrisctfrdeinhio." "Oh, yeah I know him, I think he's moved to E Ring, do you know where that is? " SEVEN MINUTES HA!!!

If you don't know the time there are 4,200 clocks on hand to help you, all on Zulu time of course (look it up), and when desperate you can choose from the 284 "rest rooms" - if you can find them, that is.

Well, there we are, a brief glimpse inside the Superpower Machine that is the Pentagon. So taking all of that on board, here is the top secret conversation I overheard in A Ring the other day as I was hurrying to see some Marine colonel:

One official: "So, what's happening?"

Second official: "Nothing."