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Peggy, you're a great writer and we love ya...but I don't think you could possibly have the information that the pentagon has with regard to base closings shifting of our troops here and world wide.
I'm sure there is a lot of redundancy that may actually put at greater risk as we are spread too thin...
Murphy, the real Murphy, was (is) Edward A. Murphy, Jr., an Air Force engineer (I think a Major at the time) working on the rocket sled tests at Edwards AFB in 1949. They had "a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days later." (from infosatellite).
What Murphy really said was:
"If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it."
What most people think of as Murphy's Law, "whatever can go wrong, will," is actually something popularized by (and perhaps invented by) "John W. Campbell, Jr., the influential editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later Analog)" (courtesy of Wikipedia). He used it frequently in the early 40s, years before Major Murphy became famous.
Campbell refered to this truism as Finagle's Law and Larry Niven, along with other SF writers and a large chunk of the techno geek and hacker community popularized that name, though not necessarily using Campbell's original formulation, since that had been hijacked by those pushing Murphy (against his will, I might add).
What has become known as Finagle's law is a particular framing of this unlucky constant:
"The perversity of the universe tends to a maximum." (also "the maximum")
Do a Google on finagle's law. You'll have a fun time. Pay particular attention to the InfoSatellite.com entry. It lists a whole bunch of variations, with a good background on the most significant ones.
Of course, they don't cover my favorite variant:
"Remember, Murphy was an optimist. "
Geting back to Noonan's piece, remember this variant and you realize that Noonan isn't thinking dark enough. And then remember Henry Kissinger's comment about Richard Nixon, "even paranoids have real enemies."
Or my favorite on this dark view of the universe, from Tom Sizemore' character Max Peltier in Strange Days (1995) ....
"The question is not 'are you paranoid?'"
"The question is, 'are you paranoid enough?'"
We need a few full goose bozo tin foil hat paranoids in charge of sussing out threats for Homeland Security. I'd even vote for chemically induced paranoids, ala Niven's ARM agents. Where are all the good paranoids when you need one?