The Pentagon is a larger organization which does have long-term goals around increasing it's budget and preventing it's budget from being reduced. It also has long-term goals around keeping certain parts of what it does secret that are threatened by DOGE sniffing around.
The Pentagon isn't deep state, it's just state.
So if I could prove that this is not just sloppy but intentional to reduce information being revealed to congressional inquiries and Freedom of Information Act requests, that would convince you and be a reason to update for you?
It would be interesting, sure. I can imagine some of these examples being cases of clandestine communication - as in, you want to say something that you know is illegal, you say it off the record in some channel that isn't monitored. I think it will probably vary case by case when that is the reason though, especially given that if you were doing that you'd still want to use secure channels, just private ones, and some of these instead were ridiculously insecure.
It's not what "I call Deep State" it's the criteria you proposed.
So what do you call Deep State? If you mean just "all the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus has in fact inertia and internal politics and does not immediately swerve at the whim of a new elected official" I say, yeah, no shit, that is true, it has been true throughout all of recorded history in every state entity to ever exist, and even better, it's a feature, not a bug, as far as I'm concerned. While the downside is that it'll slow down policies I'd like, it also has a healthy dampening effect against take-over risks. If that wasn't the case then installing a dictatorship would be a lot easier.
I'd say the probability of seeing some resistance or corruption in virtually any administration is damn close to 100%.
It's also not quite clear what you mean with those words. As far as intentional goes, I would say, that of course there are various people who intended to make Elon fail.
I guess like, a larger organization with some more long term goals? People having friends and associates, exchanging favours or looking out for their own interests is a thing that happens sort of spontaneously. It can lead to some bad outcomes but it's not a particularly interesting insight (if anything, the fact that some societies and organizations can somewhat depart from that is the strange and interesting exception in the landscape of History).
When it comes to "clandestine" you could say that whether someone illegally communicates about government matters in a way that makes their communication not subject to government record keeping is acting clandestine. That seems to be business as usual in the US government, see Hillarys email server, Signal gate and Fauci's misdeeds as recent examples.
I think that's just sloppiness, though. Just like no one in virtually any job environment I've ever been actually respects all the safety and data protection rules and norms. In the government obviously the stakes are much higher, but the people are no more infallible and no less lazy than the guy who sets his password to "password", then writes it on a post-it attached to the screen.
When it comes to "purposeful subversion" would anyone think that people who believe that the Trump administration is bad and work in government don't try to subvert it and prevent Trump from causing harm? Watching a bit Yes, Minister is useful. It's reflects the British environments of a few decades ago, but they did a lot of background research to capture subversion dynamics.
Yeah, I mean, obviously people will resist, they will do stuff like malicious compliance or weaponized incompetence to put grist in the gears at every turn if they don't like it. This happens all the time - where there are Republicans, Republicans do it against Democrats too. Again, you can find this frustrating or whatever (I think while a lot of it is frustrating, "anyone who gets in power gets to enact their agenda no matter how insane without any resistance" is also not a desirable condition), but if this is what you'd call "Deep State", then the term means nothing interesting or useful.
If something would be equally certain in two cases it can fundamentally constitute no evidence at all, even in the Bayesian sense. Suppose the three alternatives are Honest administrators, business as Usual, and Deep state. We observe some Bribes. Then and . Given appropriate priors then, . And therefore
We haven't really updated at all our odds of Deep state being the explanation instead of business as Usual. We have ruled out the Honest hypothesis but I didn't have many illusions about that. It's a fairly extreme perspective - you could get a tiny update if you posited that is slightly lower than 1 or whatever - but I think for all practical matters it does round up to this calculation.
I mean, another option here of course is "those people are full of it, have short attention spans, don't care that much, and/or are so dramatically incompetent at putting out an actual pragmatic plan that all their words are just hot air".
But even discarding that, to me the term "deep state" suggests the existence of something that is at least to some extent intentional, clandestine, and has an element of purposeful subversion. If all you mean is "established power structures, interests and practices have inertia and it's not easy to just take a sledgehammer to them as you please, if only because you suddenly realise it's a lot more complex to do that without bringing down the house than you foolishly believed", well, duh.
That people can get pressured or bribed is the normal state of things we all know about; if that's all the "Deep State" claim boils down to then it's not particularly interesting. You need to operationalize it to something more useful and also falsifiable if you want to take it seriously.
Now, if the claim is that these efforts are somehow coordinated and organized on a larger scale than that of interpersonal and/or business relationships, that would be interesting, and a proper conspiracy. But I don't think "people got bribed" is evidence of any kind for that. It's like seeing bank robberies and suggesting there must be a secret society of robbers who all agree to hit banks, rather than banks being the obvious target simply because they're where the money is.
I guess I have so much physicist-brain that to me it doesn't seem like there's a big difference - all I can spot is "thing has high free energy content, we can extract free energy from thing".
It just so happens that the densest free energy resources in our immediate neighbourhood hold it in either chemical or nuclear form. I really doubt there's any greater insights here to be found because anything that simply begs to roll to a lower free energy minimum will when given the chance. There's no large untapped reservoirs of low entropy stuff just begging to absorb heat from the environment so that it can undergo a phase change on Earth's crust or nearby space that I can think or speculate of.
I'm not convinced any of this makes a significant difference. The reason why the water didn't boil already is that it was pressurized. This is slightly less intuitive than the compressed spring because unlike that example, it involves also configurational entropy, not just energy. And the boiling is prolonged because of the inherent kinetics of the process. But once you remove the pressure, the thermodynamic equilibrium goes from "a lot of liquid water" to "a lot of vapour with less free energy"; and you can use the energy flow that moves to make it happen to exploit that difference for useful work, as long as it lasts.
Case in point: we use this kind of compression and evaporation mechanism to cool stuff all the time, just not with water, it's called a fridge. In that case it's made cyclical by the compression step, and overall uses up free energy and produces entropy.
"People can get pressured" or "people can get bribed" or "people sometimes once inside a system discover they are in fact subject to all the same incentives that applied to all the other people inside that system before them" is all you'd get from this, but that's not evidence for anything like a "deep state" unless you meant that term in such a loose meaning that then it would be a trivial discover.
Yeah, established organizations have internal politics we don't all know about from the outside. When push comes to shove, the rich donors who have stock in arms sales end up mattering more than Elon Musk or Pete Hegseth.
I mean, It's the Pentagon. It obviously has all sorts of leverage, as well as personal connections and influence. "If you cut our funding then we won't do X" is enough to put pressure. I'm not saying this is not the case, I'm saying this is... not particularly surprising. Like, anyone who thinks that the true challenge of politics is to figure out the precise orders to give once you're elected, then you can sit back and see your will be enacted as if the entire apparatus of the state was a wish-granting genie is deluded. Obviously the challenge is getting organizations that hold significant power to actually do the thing you want them to.
A leftist would talk about the military-industrial complex, or about corporate lobbying (I'm sure the influence of the various big suppliers also matters, as much and more as that of the Pentagon himself). Again, in this sense, if you want to call it "deep state", it's a trivially true thing, and a constant of all polities in history (the military especially! Consider how often personal loyalty of the troops to this or that commander was essentially all that the political stability of a country hinged on). I just don't see much the usefulness of the concept, and I think the word is misleading. None of this is secret or particularly hidden. It's not even just a property of the state. You see the same things play out on a small scale in everyday office politics - the CEO wants one thing, but Team A who's supposed to do it is already busy so they resist it, etc. etc. Organizations at all scales are made of people, people have goals and agency to pursue them. Politics is mostly cat-herding.