Obama Administration’s command performance in Silicon Valley: Was this trip really necessary?

[Commentary] Recently, the Obama Administration almost emptied the top levels of the national cybersecurity apparatus in Washington for a trip to Silicon Valley. Here are takeaways from the event.

First, the weekend cross-country pilgrimage and the plea for help on combatting Islamic extremists’ recruitment and calls to arms on social media signals a clear, though unacknowledged, failure of the US State Department’s assigned leadership in fashioning effective counter messages. (Maybe this is one reason Secretary of State John Kerry stayed away, sending his deputy.) The president has repeatedly called for action on this front, arguing to world leaders at the United Nations in September, “ideologies are not defeated with guns; they are defeated by better ideas — a more attractive and compelling vision.” Action accompanying the California confab hardly inspires future confidence. The Department of State will create yet another center to combat propaganda by jihadist groups, and the Justice and Homeland Security Departments will be tasked to head a joint task force to coordinate the government’s (unspecified) new efforts. Almost the entirety of US cybersecurity leadership traveled across the continent for this? In the end, given the meager results, wouldn’t a video conference have sufficed? It would have saved US taxpayers a good deal of money.

[Claude Barfield is a former consultant to the Office of the US Trade Representative]