Hidden Truth/Hidden Truth.iso/data/ftp-stuff/arpa-symposium-report

Text File | 1996-05-24 | 9.5 KB | 154 lines

A visit to the 17th ARPA symposium
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by Paul McGinnis, November 13, 1994

After deciding that I needed a vacation, I decided to spend October 25 to
October 27, 1994 at the 17th ARPA Symposium in San Francisco, CA. ARPA is the
Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, the people who
gave the world both the Stealth fighter aircraft (HAVE BLUE program) and the
Internet. I went for 2 reasons -- to learn about new technologies (I'm an
engineer) and to see if there would be any leaks about classified military
programs, that would help in my fight against excessive military secrecy.

The first session started off with various ARPA officials explaining ARPA's
mission, followed by 2 senior Department of Defense officials, Dr. Paul
Kaminski, Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition and Technology), and
Dr. Anita Jones, DoD's Director of Defense Research and Engineering. Dr.
Kaminski talked about dual use technologies that could be used for
both military and commercial uses, and increasing DoD's use of off-the-shelf
commercial technology. Dr. Jones discussed developing new technologies to
protect soldiers in urban environments. She had some interesting charts
that showed that in 0602xxx and 0603xxx Program Elements in the RDT&E
(Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation) budget, 6% was spent for
aerospace vehicles, and 6.5% was spent for electronic warfare and directed
energy weapons (such as lasers). After their presentations, questions
were taken from the audience.

I stunned Dr. Jones and the crowd, by asking the question that no one else
there would have dared to ask -- Why does DoD still have so many classified
Special Access Programs, after the end of the Cold War? After an awkward
silence, she answered that "there are so many because of the technologies
involved." She expects the number to decline as more commercial technology
is used by DoD. It is accepted by people in Congress that security costs
for classified programs account for 14% of their cost.

This question led to a conversation with ARPA's security director, Matt
Donlon, who wanted to know why I was interested in classified programs. I
explained some of my activities trying to reform excessive secrecy. There
was an interesting disclosure - I mentioned Lockheed's secret radar cross
section (RCS) facility north of Helendale, CA, and he admitted that he
had been there and it "was a nice facility." Since he hasn't been in this
job for long, one wonders what ARPA has up its sleeve that requires the
presence of its security director at a remote airfield in California's
Mojave Desert. Perhaps this ties in with something mentioned during an
ARPA presentation on composite materials for aircraft, where the speaker
mentioned that Lockheed's Skunk Works (Lockheed Advanced Development Co.)
was a key provider of composite materials for a project. Composite materials
can be used in low-observable (Stealth) aircraft, and typically consist
of fibers (such as carbon-carbon or fiberglass) aligned in the same
direction in a matrix of material, such as epoxy resin.

The next day produced some more valuable information, during programs on
the recent ARPA/CIA Tier 2+ Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) program and
a program code-named WAR BREAKER, for locating and destroying mobile
ballistic missile launchers, like those used for Scuds. The Tier 2+ program
had a great emphasis on price, with Harry Berman from ARPA stating, "if
you turn the engine off at 65,000 feet, everything that hits the ground
must cost less than 10 million dollars." It was also revealed that the
Tier 2+ aircraft will produce 50 megabits per second of digital data, and
that needs to be compressed so that the aircraft only needs to transmit
at 1.5 megabits per second. Another goal is to use artificial intelligence
based software for automated target recognition and detection, with an
error rate of less than 1 error per square kilometer.

The WAR BREAKER program is a response to the inability of the U.S. to
locate Scud missile launchers during the war in Kuwait. One of the speakers
made a statement that would have made a great line in the Peter Sellers'
movie "Dr. Strangelove", by saying "we have to find the target before we
can put metal on it!". It was revealed that at any point in time, the
U.S. has 5 to 10 imaging satellites in orbit, with a spatial resolution
better than 1 meter, that image 40,000 square nautical miles [137,200 sq. km]
per day. Several imagery programs were also revealed, such as DRAGNET
(imaging of moving targets), EXPOSE (attempts to "see through" foliage"
with UHF signals), and MONITOR (automated target recognition). Since I've
been studying imaging techniques, for my own purposes, the material presented
during the WAR BREAKER program was quite interesting. For example, I've
been tinkering with digital airborne radar. Among the data sets that I have
is a SLAR (Side Looking Airborne Radar) set that covers a 1 degree by
2 degree section of southern Nevada, including part of the Nevada Test Site.
One of ARPA's digital radar programs involves signal processing of the data
to give a pseudo three-dimensional image. This could be useful in making
certain man-made features stand out.

The ARPA symposium discussed a number of advanced technologies, including
"Scalable High Performance Computing", "Mobile and Wireless Technology",
"Electronic Packaging & Interconnects" (ARPA is putting multiple ICs in
the same physical package), "Operations Other Than War" (the military is
developing technology to help the police, such as wall-penetrating radars
and a miniaturized solid state audio recorder for surveillance), "Uncooled
& Novel Infrared Detectors" (a vast number of military devices use
cryogenically cooled IR sensors - this area has a lot of potential), and
"Micro-Electromechanical Systems" (tiny valves and actuators embedded in
integrated circuits).

However, they didn't discuss ARPA programs that I know about, such as
BLACK LIGHT (PE 0605114E, a classified program with an unknown purpose),
HAVE FLAG (PE 0208042F, a tactical missile developed with the Air Force,
now going into production), or "Advanced Submarine Technology" (PE 0603569E,
that aims to make stealthy submarines through the use of active impedance
modification (AIM), special materials such as SUPRELITE, and the SDW (Stealth
Designer's Workbench) software.

It was an odd experience, being in "the belly of the beast" amongst all the
people in expensive suits. Like other subcultures, they have a jargon all
their own -- "leverage" and "paradigm shift" seem to be ARPA's favorite
buzzwords. I was also informed that I should be grateful for being allowed
to attend, since this was the first unclassified ARPA symposium. (The next
one will be in about 18 months.) These people don't see the threat to the
United States in realistic terms. They seem to have the view that if the
U.S. has a particular advanced weapon system, so will every other country.
For example, there was discussion about the threat of low-observable (stealth)
aircraft from foreign countries, while the U.S. is the only country that
has fielded such aircraft. I realize that the French and Russians are
working in this area, but it will be a long time before they go into
production. Stuck in the Cold War, they fail to see that the biggest threats
to the U.S. at present are not military, but economic, in areas such as
foreign trade, and the massive federal deficit. I wonder if they think about
the damage they've done to national security by adding at least a trillion
dollars to the deficit during the arms build-up of the 1980s.

While I gained a lot of technical information at the ARPA symposium, I have
to admit that the members of "the military industrial complex" started to
really get on my nerves. In some ways, it was like sitting among Pavlov's
dogs -- the audience would start to fall asleep during the presentations,
but as soon as ARPA mentioned that they would provide money, the audience
would snap to attention. Instead of salivating when Dr. Pavlov rang a bell,
the audience would salivate when ARPA would say something like "we expect
to spend $42 million next year..." I came away convinced that defense
contractors and the Pentagon are one of the biggest special interest
political groups in the United States. A MIT study suggested that the U.S.
defense could cost $70 billion per year, instead of $270 billion per year,
if our foreign allies would pay for their own defense and waste and
unnecessary spending were eliminated in the Defense budget. A prime example
of waste can be seen in the Navy's spending more than $1 billion for 24 new
Trident-II submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) in 1994, that would
probably have to be scrapped as part of the START arms control treaty. I was
disgusted by a conversation during lunch, where people from Boeing and
McDonnell Douglas were moaning about the decline in inflation adjusted dollars
spent on military procurement, and someone said, "What we need is a good war!"

My past experiences with the U.S. military, have convinced me that they don't
think I should raise these kinds of issues, because I'm just a taxpayer. But,
to use a line from California's anti-tax measure Proposition 13 a number of
years ago, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" I
intend to put more pressure on the military for accountability to the
taxpayers.

Paul McGinnis / [e-mail] / [e-mail]

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