Defense Technology International - March 2008 - (Page 50)

INSIGHT EDITORIAL I f the Pentagon’s secret budget were broken out from the half-trillion-dollarplus total, it would be the sixth-largest defense budget in the world. It is assumed to be worth $45 billion plus, and it only takes a few minutes to run through each year’s budget and ﬁnd more than $40 billion that is not listed or assigned to transparent cover names. No other open society maintains anything like this black-walled fortress, with multibillion-dollar secret projects, a locked-down ﬂight-test base and tens of Secrets and Lies thousands of people working behind codelocked doors. The black budget waxes fatter year by year, regardless of who is in Congress or the White House. There was a time when nations that had constitutions and a free press didn’t have secret weapons in peacetime. They might run a little covert codebreaking and spying, but it was up to H.G. Wells and Jules Verne to spin tales about secret airships, submarines and tanks. The black budget as we know it started with the Eisenhower administration’s response to a real problem: The Soviet Union was a sealed society, and that rendered coherent military planning impossible. If Gen. Curtis LeMay argued that the Soviet air force had 100 strategic jet bombers in 1954, there was no evidence to prove him wrong. The way to ﬁnd out the truth was airborne reconnaissance. Eisenhower absolutely did not want U.S. military aircraft or pilots over the Soviet Union. The job of developing the Lockheed U-2 spyplane was consequently assigned to the CIA, and originally, it was to be ﬂown by foreign pilots. The technical experts argued (quite correctly as it turned out) that any ability to penetrate Soviet air defenses would be transient, and the counterintelligence professionals knew that the Soviets and everyone else would know what was up as soon as the U-2 ﬂew on operations. And it might have been a one-o CIA classiﬁed project had it not been for the U.S. Air Force, which saw the U-2’s success and decided that USAF would develop its replacement in equal secrecy. No, not Blackbird, but the $250-million, liquid hydrogen-powered Suntan, a ﬂop that remained secret into the 1980s. The secrecy continued with the A-12 50 DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL MARCH 2008 Blackbird and its intended successor, Isinglass. When the U.S. developed spy satellites, not only were those projects black, but the Kennedy administration formed the National Reconnaissance Ofﬁce to run them—an o ce whose existence was, until 1992, o cially secret. The 1970s was the era of the Freedom of Information Act, Jimmy Carter and the repudiation of Nixonian skullduggery. But it was Carter, not Nixon, who expanded the world of secrecy to cover operational military systems, in order to preserve stealth technology as an operational surprise. The fact is that secrecy on today’s scale was nobody’s idea. It was never planned. Secrecy has its advantages. But there are countervailing problems. The cost of secrecy—reasonable people estimate it’s up to 20% of program costs—means so many billion dollars of other opportunities foregone. The wall of secrecy has protected many colossal failures, from Suntan to NRO’s Future Imagery Architecture. The latter has now reached the point where the Navy is desperately trying to destroy a half-ton ice cube of poison gas before it nails an orphanage and destroys the nation’s reputation as a force for peace. Can it be seriously argued that imaging satellites should still be o cially secret, when they can be tracked from launch and imaged from the ground, and when anyone who has read The Da Vinci Code can read a mission’s purpose from its shoulder patch? And whatever has been tested at Groom Lake since 1985 has yet to deliver any beneﬁt to the operational user. Conceptually, the Joint Strike Fighter shows no real change in the discipline of low observables since the F-22 design was laid out in 1985-87, on the basis of experience with the F-117. That’s not to say there may not be “silver bullet” operations and activities out there, supporting a secret war against a hard-to-find, easy-to-kill enemy. But there’s no evidence of that—and plenty to suggest that the black world, which nobody intended to grow to its present size, and nobody knows how to control or cut back, hides a multitude of sins. I —Bill Sweetman Read Sweetman’s posts on DTI’s weblog, Ares, updated daily: AviationWeek.com/ares AviationWeek.com/dti http://AviationWeek.com/ares http://www.aviationweek.com/dti

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Defense Technology International - March 2008

Defense Technology International - March 2008 Contents Sweden Cancels SEP; Israel Launches Imaging Satellite; Geotextiles Secure Ammo Dump U.S. Navy Taps Neural Architecture Software to Assure Job Satisfaction Shrapnel-Like Pieces of Reactive Materials Increase Explosive Force of Bombs Technology is Rapidly Closing the Gap Between Sensors and Shooters Italian Army Program Aims to Develop a Fully Networked Land Force Political and Military Uncertainties Plague U.S. Defense Budget Democrats Put Pentagon on Notice Over Spending and Policy at DTAR Conference Russian Combat Vehicle Protects Tank Formations from Anti-Armor Weapons European Battlelabs Use Simulation to Verify Technologies and Stretch Defense Funds Malaysia Accelerates Fleet Modernization to meet Long-Term Goals U.S. Navy Says Composite Raiding Boat May Reduce Injuries From Wave Shocks Seeing Isn’t Believing When it Comes to Deciphering Funds for Secret Projects Advances in Sensors and Propulsion Make Torpedoes Ever More Lethal FAA is in No Rush to Approve Rules that Let UAVs Fly in Civil Airspace USS Truman Carrier Strike Group Patrols a Rough Neighborhood 24/7 U.S. says Sino-Russian Space Disarmament Plan is Riddled with Pitfalls Hyperspeed Projectile; “Sound Cloak” Hides Subs; Improving Nuclear Forensics Dutch Air Commodore Theo ten Haaf Analyzes the Impact of Rotary-Wing Operations One Soldier’s War is a Behind-the-Headlines Look at Russia’s Campaigns in Chechnya Black Budgets are Huge and Growing, and Often Conceal Amazing Failures

Defense Technology International - March 2008

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