Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs

Throughout Imminent, Elizondo criticizes bureaucracy and red tape. He draws on his decades of experience in the military to critique the level of waste he sees in the US government. Elizondo appeals to ethos—the part of the rhetorical triangle associated with authorial credibility—by claiming that while his position entitled him to perks such as private jet travel, he refused these wasteful luxuries out of principle. Though he tried to avoid waste in his own government work, he could not escape the bureaucracy. For Elizondo, the complicated paperwork, the byzantine classification systems, and the inability to get direct answers from anybody are evidence of the way that bureaucracy slows the business of running the Pentagon. He castigates the bureaucrats in the Pentagon for being more interested in bureaucracy than actually protecting the country.

At the beginning of the book, Elizondo frames bureaucracy as the biggest threat to the United States. Complicated bureaucracies needlessly complicate the running of the military and get in the way of people who actually want to help, such as Elizondo himself. As he delves deeper into the UAP program, he portrays bureaucratic red tape as an obstacle to truth telling. This is a standard

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