I haven't been following the discussion since the beginning, but I fear the people arguing for sharing FOOM are overlooking a major warfare principle:
The more people know about FOOM, the more possibilities there are for information leaks. Letting an
institution learn is worse still, as the attack surface of the secret would grow in proportion to the institution's size.
Asuma will want to maximize the payoff, which means, ideally, FOOMing as many ninja as possible. Each ninja is an additional leak waiting to happen all by themselves, but it's much worse than just that. The process of training would be difficult to hide: a dozen instances of dozens of ninja, showing up somewhere every day and doing very visible activities. The infrastructure would be difficult to hide: all of them would need to travel to Noburi daily to refill chakra, and we'll need either to leech off genin or get a
massive koi pool to support that. The effects would be difficult to hide: ninja pay attention to each other's capabilities all the time, and statistically significant divergences from the norm, especially if spread across many of Leaf's ninja, would be noted.
Asuma knows all of this, and he and the Nara would do their best to conceal it, yes. But there is only so much that could be done, and there are inevitable tradeoffs between
scale and
security. The only way to put the inevitable INFOSEC breach as far into the future as possible would be limiting FOOM to a select few ninja, but I'm not convinced this is the decision Asuma will come to. What's better for Leaf: a few S-rankers in five years, or many elite jounin and a horde of jounin in
two?
And even if, somehow, it all stays well-hidden, the secret is
guaranteed to get out if Leaf gets embroiled in another major conflict once FOOM is well underway, because the FOOMed ninja
will use their full capabilities. (What's the alternative, after all? Not fight the war? Fight, but order your ninja to not use their full capabilities, to fail missions and die en masse in the name of secrecy?) The jig would be up, one way or another.
And then... Well, that depends on how far into the future this happens.
- If it's at the point where Leaf could take on the entire rest of the world, we'll need to immediately do that.
- If it's when we already have a solid number of FOOMed ninja, but not enough yet to steamroll over everyone at the same time, everyone bands together to steamroll over us. It will be worse than Whirlpool.
- If it's when we've only just begun FOOMing, the Shadow Clone Technique gets stolen and one or several other villages start FOOMing as well. It doesn't matter how well SC is being guarded, it will happen.
1 is less likely than 2 is less likely than 3. Outcomes-wise, 1 is okay, 2 is bad but manageable (we'll need to desert Leaf), and 3 is an utter disaster of unbelievable proportion.
The enemy intelligence services are not targeting the Gouketsu as heavily as they're targeting Leaf and Leaf's top brass, and the Gouketsu are plainly
smaller. Whatever measures Asuma may use, FOOM is more secure with just us knowing, and we should probably keep it at that.
(I suspect watching the cobweb be blasted apart during scenario 3 would be extremely entertaining, though. I'm totally game if we want to give everyone metaphysical nukes, as long as that's what we're deliberately doing.)
