When Pattern Recognition Outruns the System

Why Scale, Not Secrecy, Breaks the Analogy

Dec 17, 2025

Workable magnitude estimate for annual data volume:1
Israel approximately: ~300 EB yearly
United States approximately: ~15 ZB yearly

When Pattern Recognition Outruns the System
Why Scale, Not Secrecy, Breaks the Analogy
Robert J. Rei, December 16, 2025

A recent essay circulating widely makes a striking claim:2 that a proposed ‘ballroom’ at the White House may function less as a ceremonial space and more as an underground data facility, analogous to hardened Israeli intelligence infrastructure beneath Jerusalem.

At first glance, the comparison is compelling. The numbers line up. The contractors overlap. The infrastructure upgrades look suggestive. For a reader already alert to secrecy and consolidation of power, the narrative feels plausible—perhaps even necessary to consider.

But this is precisely where the problem begins.

The essay does not fail because it is reckless or unserious. It fails because it commits a structural category error: it treats physical similarity as systemic equivalence, and in doing so collapses two fundamentally different kinds of countries into one imagined model.

Buildings Are Not Systems

The core persuasive move in the essay is simple:
similar size + similar cost + similar depth = similar purpose.

This works rhetorically. It does not work analytically.

In governance, a building does not determine power. Authority flows from law, jurisdiction, and institutional structure—not from square footage, concrete depth, or architectural hardening. Two facilities can look alike on paper and still exist in entirely different universes of control and oversight.

Israel’s underground facilities are embedded in a national system built for centralized survival under constant existential threat. The United States is a continental, federated republic deliberately designed to prevent exactly that kind of concentration.

Treating those as interchangeable is not a small mistake. It is the mistake.

Scale Changes the Rules

What is plausible for a small, semi-closed society is often impossible—or dangerous—for a large, open one.

Israel can centralize sensitive data physically because:

its geography is compact,
its intelligence apparatus is unified,
its legal system permits emergency concentration,
and its security doctrine assumes constant attack.

The United States operates on the opposite logic:

power is fragmented across branches and agencies,
authority is intentionally redundant,
oversight is distributed,
and centralization is treated as a vulnerability, not a safeguard.

At U.S. scale, putting “the real work of government” in one physical location would not increase security. It would create a single catastrophic point of failure—technically, legally, and democratically.

The essay never grapples with this difference. It simply assumes that what works there could work here if the concrete is thick enough.

Why the Comparison Breaks Down: A Field-Level Civics Explanation

Some recent commentary suggests that because Israel can operate secure, underground data centers for its government and military, the United States could plausibly do something similar—perhaps even beneath the White House.

That sounds reasonable until you change the frame from mystery and architecture to everyday scale.

Let us talk about libraries, highways, and power grids.

Think About Libraries First

Israel’s government data is like a national research library for a small country.

It is serious.
It is sensitive.
It is tightly controlled.
But it is still one library system serving a population smaller than New York City.

The United States does not have one library.

The United States has:

the Library of Congress,
fifty state library systems,
thousands of university libraries,
millions of local libraries,
military archives,
intelligence repositories,
court records,
tax records,
regulatory databases,
election systems,
and private-sector systems legally intertwined with government operations.

Trying to put “America’s most sensitive data” in one underground facility would be like claiming you could move every major library in the country into one building, just because that building is very well fortified.

It does not matter how deep it is.
It does not matter how expensive it is.
The information simply does not fit—organizationally, legally, or physically.

Now Think About Highways

Israel’s national data flows resemble a dense city road network:

short distances,
centralized routing,
rapid coordination,
and direct control.

The U.S. data environment is an interstate highway system spanning a continent.

Data in the United States moves between:

states,
agencies,
courts,
contractors,
civilian systems,
military systems,
and international partners.

There is no single “intersection” where it all passes through.
That is not an accident.
That is the design.

If you tried to reroute America’s highways through one underground tunnel—even a very secure one—you would not gain control. You would cause a collapse.

Consider the Power Grid Analogy

Israel can meaningfully harden a small number of critical facilities because its grid is compact and centrally managed.

The U.S. power grid is deliberately fragmented:

regional grids,
independent operators,
overlapping authorities,
built to prevent cascading failure from a single strike.

The same principle applies to data.

In American systems, distribution is security.
Concentration is risk.

A single underground data center holding “the real work of government” would be the digital equivalent of putting the entire national power grid behind one substation—no matter how reinforced it was.

Why the Numbers Mislead

Much is made of square footage, cost, and depth:

“Ninety thousand square feet.”
“Three hundred million dollars.”
“Nine stories underground.”

Those numbers sound big.
They are not big for the United States.

America processes:

orders of magnitude more data,
across orders of magnitude more institutions,
under orders of magnitude more legal regimes,
than a small, centralized state ever could.

What fits underground in Jerusalem does not even begin to represent the volume, diversity, or jurisdictional complexity of U.S. government data.

The mismatch is not political.
It is mathematical.

The Core Mistake, in Plain Terms

The argument fails because it treats the United States as if it were:

a single organization,
with a single command structure,
that could move its brain into one bunker.

But the United States is not a single brain.
It is a networked organism.

Its memory, decision-making, and authority are spread out on purpose:

to prevent capture,
to prevent coercion,
to prevent collapse.

That messiness is not a flaw.
It is the safety mechanism.

Why This Matters for Everyday Citizens

When people start to believe that:

real power lives in hidden buildings,
secrecy proves intent,
and centralization is how modern states work,

they stop understanding how their own system protects them.

That misunderstanding makes citizens easier to scare and harder to orient.

Field-level civics is about restoring the mental map:

libraries stay distributed,
highways stay plural,
power grids stay redundant,
and government stays fragmented because freedom requires it.

Closing Thought

You do not need to trust or distrust any particular administration to see the problem here.

All you need to do is imagine trying to move:

every library,
every highway,
and every power station in America
into one very secure hole in the ground.

No matter how strong the concrete is, the idea collapses under its own weight.

That is not secrecy.
That is scale.

And scale changes everything.

Contractors and Coincidence Are Not Conspiracy

Much of the essay’s force comes from familiar names: the same contractors, architects, and firms that build classified facilities elsewhere also appear here.

This feels ominous—until you remember a basic fact of federal construction: there are only a few firms qualified to do this work.

Repetition does not imply secret coordination. It usually implies specialization in a narrow market. Treating contractor overlap as proof of hidden intent confuses scarcity with conspiracy.

Infrastructure Capacity Is Not Proof of Function

Power upgrades. Cooling systems. Water usage. All are presented as evidence that a data center must be the real purpose.

But infrastructure planning routinely overbuilds:

for contingency,
for future flexibility,
for worst-case scenarios,
and for bundled risk reduction.

Capacity does not equal intent. The ability to support something does not mean that something is being built.

The Quiet Risk of This Kind of Argument

The real concern is not this essay alone. It is what happens when this style of reasoning scales to tens of thousands of readers.

The danger is subtle:

buildings start to feel like power,
secrecy starts to feel like proof,
centralization starts to feel plausible,
and democratic friction starts to feel naïve.

None of this is argued outright. It is absorbed implicitly.

That is how misframed ideas spread—not as falsehoods, but as reasonable intuitions.

A Better Question

The right question is not:
“Is this really a ballroom?”

It is:
“What would it mean for the United States to try to function like a small, permanently mobilized security state?”

The answer is not architectural. It is constitutional.

And once that frame is restored, the analogy collapses on its own.

Closing

The essay is thoughtful, sourced, and well-intentioned. But it mistakes coincidence for equivalence and architecture for governance. In doing so, it invites readers to imagine a version of American power that cannot actually exist without fundamentally altering the system itself.

At scale, that kind of mistake matters.

Not because it alarms people—but because it teaches them to misunderstand how their own country actually works.

Thank you for reading,
Robert J. Rei, December 16, 2025

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