MovieChat Forums > Independence Day (1996) Discussion > What was secretary of defense's problem?

What was secretary of defense's problem?


The secretary who wanted to just keep nuking everything, who didn't tell them about roswell, who thought the virus was stupid, etc. what was his problem? Even when nukes didn't work he just said keep nuking. he didn't tell the president about area 51 until the old man pressed them about it even after the aliens blew up cities. I never understood his problem.

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thanks but I found nothing to answer my question. I must have missed that part

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I think he's the type of guy who has his own agenda. He doesn't want to try something else because he thinks doing it a certain way or not doing it a certain way is the best way.

Basically, he's a guy who isn't going to think things through and accept change.

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My fault. I meant to post this as a new thread, but I'm using the worthless iOS app. Apologies.

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I think the general had called him out on it. As director of the CIA, he knew about the crashed alien ship and aliens at Roswell, and knew about the research being done on them. If he told them earlier about it, they could have evacuated cities sooner, maybe saved hundreds of pilots and moved viable aircraft to a safe location...

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I don't think I was against him until he wanted to go all nuke happy. Keeping the secret about Roswell I could forgive because it was probably classified info; then again seeing that huge thing in the air he should have said "classification be damned".

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Except the President has authority to see anything, regardless of its classification. I can see withholding the information prior to the alien's arrival. Plausible deniability is a reasonable position for deeply held secrets. But the moment it was clear that aliens had arrived he should have briefed the president. It may or may not have made any difference. But he should have told the president regardless.

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He's actually a fairly accurate caricature of a typical U.S. Secretary of Defense. For better or for worse, their expertise is only in military solutions to problems, so he was a hammer and everything looked like a nail to him.

I'll even share with you an related anecdote. I was at a training workshop once that involved a personality test, particularly with regard to how "structured" your way of thinking is. I and a couple of others from my team came out with very high scores for structure and the instructor told me that the U.S. military has a policy of hiring people with that kind of personality because they're disciplined and stick to the plan. But the trade-off is when faced with a new type of challenge, people like us find it difficult to adjust, which, from my own experience, is true.

So the Defense Secretary most likely had that way of thinking. Highly structured thinking and knowledgable in his particular field, but resistant to thinking outside of that box, hence his dismissiveness of David's unusual solutions.

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He always bugged me, too. I just figured the screenwriters needed a weaselly foil to the heroes.

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James Rebhorn is a really good character actor who has that presence to him that you just immediately distrust!

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This. The movie needed a dick, so they wrote one in

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Yeah the idea that he wouldn't have mentioned the Area 51 thing until prompted by Judd Hirsch's character is too ridiculous. Made for a funny scene though.

"Mr. Levinson, contrary to what you may have read in the tabloids, there is no Area 51. There is no spaceship..."

"Uh... excuse me, Mr. President? That's not entirely accurate."

"What, which part?"

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James Rebhorn’s character is one of my few legitimate gripes about ID4. He’s just a plot device obstructing the other characters in order to pad the movie out.

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It was to make the movie more interesting lol. Hollywood is real good at knowing how to make characters disliked or even hated. The secretary of defense sort of reminded me of that greedy stupid lawyer from Jurassic park, when upon seeing the brachiasaur could only say "were gonna make fortune off this place". How fitting it was too see him become dinner for the trex lol.

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