I agree with you. Frankly I try to look at it as the glass half full, but on sensitive contracts I don't question the point you're making.
In the course of assembling the sample, we did pick one area that was different from high sensitivity. This was secret/top secret. It has to do with protected information, which is different, as you may imagine. It was the same pattern, which is that a contract had been awarded, work had proceeded, and we screened the person to the right protected level: protected B.
The point I'm making is that in certain circumstances there's more risk tolerance. But in other cases, I agree with you. When you're talking secret/top secret, the margin of error for documents missing or not following procedures should be close to zero. Now, that does not bring risk to zero--that's another issue--but our procedure should be followed correctly.