Jerry,

You make an very interesting point wrt the value of the capture and is it akin to the “enigma” machine. You are in a much better position to judge such things. There is seemingly no way to keep modern equivalents of “Ultra” secret long enough to be useful let alone 25 years later.

And it wasn’t precisely like capturing Enigma. It seems more like capturing the guy who was responsible for creating and maintaining Enigma and known to be carrying it. The Germans never actually knew we had captured Enigma machines (a rather amazing failure of analysis on their part).

If you’ll play along for the sake of educating a knucklehead…

If an “Ultra” sort of discovery is made and it is known that it can’t be kept under wraps for long, how does one go about maximizing the benefits one can get from it?

The actual Ultra case is downright fascinating. We read the communications of the German High Command with amazing speed and regularity. But we were often caught between the proverbial “rock and a hard place”. Make too obvious use of the discovery and it risks making the discovery obvious and, ultimately, useless over time.

So there were cases where lives could easily have been saved but weren’t. Sacrifice some now to save more later (how would anyone like to be the decision maker in that context?).

Since we play by different rules today and it would be nearly certain political suicide to “sacrifice some now to save more later” it seems to me we could not legitimately play “Ultra” the same way we once did.

One other item I’d like to point out wrt to Ultra (although I don’t see how it applies in the current case) was how ineffective Ultra could sometimes be. Take the example of Rommel in North Africa. Despite Ultra he proved a constant sorce of dismay and consternation to the Allies. Why? Well, it doesn’t help all that much to know what your opponents orders from above are if your opponent is fully willing to discard those orders when he feels it necessary to do so. Rommel apparently could repeatedly get away with “disobeying” the High Command and he made some Ultra-enabled Allied commanders look downright foolish by doing so.