Since moving to New Mexico I have been exposed to more “if I told you I’d have to kill you” people than I ever even knew existed.
One of those people would occasionally tell me funny stories about now declassified programs, like the atomic airplane, and just how screwed up these projects can be.
This person had actually briefed the president on several different occasions, which led me to ask the same question you did, “is the President privy to all classified material?”
“Oh, hell no.”
“Who decides what he gets told?”
“He is told what he needs to know when he needs to know it.”
“What if he asks about a classified program?”
“He is told as little as possible.”
“Do they lie to the President?”
“Lie?” He smiled. “We might withhold, but we don’t lie.”
““He is told as little as possible.””
I worked on a couple of civilian classified projects for government customers. The people on the program wanted to say as little as possible. I think there were several reasons. The less they said, to anybody, about anything, the less risk they were taking. This led to a high divorce rate, at 100% at the time I was on those projects. The don’t talk attitude drifted into their personal lives.
Another reason is, knowledge I have but you don’t makes me (better? more important? superior?) to you. Therefore, they default to not telling but, I think, feeling secretly superior as you go off and do something useless based on your flawed understanding and they do nothing to stop you. I imagine if you know stuff the President doesn’t know you are really, really superior.
There are lots of flaws in the system. However we can be assured that the flaws in our enemy’s systems are just as great and perhaps greater. Our culture is much more open and inclusive than that of any of our potential adversaries.
Whether it works comes down to individual personalities. As far as decision-making, I’d stack the average American soldier against the average Russian or Chinese soldiers any day.