In parts 1-8 I wrote about a number of firings and significant events germane to this story and the largely adverse impact they had on the future. I “whimsically” introduced Doc’s time-space continuum from Back to the Future as the best way to view what happened in the wake of these events. For those who struggled to follow-or put up with my digressions as I went through history that has now covered from about 1955 through 1992 or so, a little catch-up is in order, but this time somewhat chronological.
To take it back from somewhat the start, in 1955 congress considered separating out the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) because having two full-time jobs for one person, notwithstanding a fairly robust Community Management Staff (CMS,) was seen as increasingly too much of a responsibility for one person to do.
Nothing was done about this idea until after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, when the 9-11 Commission was formed and reported out with recommendations that included the establishment of a Director of National Intelligence (DNI,) supported by what turned out to be a very large office (ODNI) that was at least three times larger than the CMS supporting the then DCI.
Should I mention that many of the information sharing problems blamed as the failure of our government to ferret out this plot came about because an earlier Church Commission dictated that it be so? Nahhh. Or that the new report recommended, and the congress legislated a “need to share” among intel agencies as a first and best practice? Nahhh.
Neither did I get distracted by the details on the aftermath of the congressional legislation establishing the DNI (frankly, pretty disciplined for me,) but there ensued nearly ten years of infighting by the intelligence community over authorities, including preparation of the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB,) overseas Country Leads (which had been the province by law of the CIA for ~60+ years,) an effort to come up with a DNI sponsored IC reporting dashboard called Intelligence Today which some believed should replace the CIA wIRE (but did not survive,) and stuff.
For some (all right, for me) it was somewhat comical to see the CIA Director just basically thumb his nose at congress and the legislation and not comply, particularly when (1) they work for the president (2) congress had the power of the purse (3) it did not matter.
Lest you think that was unusual, a scant few years later as the IC moved out on the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (ICITE) effort that embraced Amazon Web Services and the Amazon Cloud, the original concept called for agencies to share information via a Campus Area Node-although the CIA Directorate of Operations said “no.” Now I agreed with this in the shadow of Snowden, but resolve it among yourselves with the need to share…
I also introduced my theory of the story of how Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld created the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (or Security and Intelligence, but best known as the USDI) position in the FY 2003 Department of Defense (DoD) budget, appointing Dr. Stephen Cambone who was subsequently confirmed by congress, while combining a number of program oversight offices into USDI. This was several years before the ODNI was established and a clear power play to have DoD rule the proverbial IC world-which would have brought to life the Cheney-Rumsfeld dream state of bringing the CIA down several notches …Although when looked at from the big picture perspective, the entirety of the DNI is not even 10% of the budget of DoD, with a fraction-rounding error-in terms of people (kind of like Russia compared to the US GDP.)
During this period the 1957 Soviet Sputnik launch was a very unpleasant surprise for the US-particularly the CIA who was losing the veneer of invincibility-if anybody else believed their story about it at this point-as a number of events unfolded in the 1950s and early 1960s that were strategic-and unpleasant-surprises.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) stood up in the wake of Sputnik to prevent any more such “strategic surprises,” and a few short years later the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) was established (1960,) remaining one of the few secret facts in government all the up to 1992.
What the US government did not do in the wake of Sputnik-very unlike what would have taken place in today’s woke, sensitive feelings and publicity savvy and image self-consciousness and defenders of the self-political overpaid grown-up babies, was make excuses: but they could have done so. There was a veritable plethora of thought already ongoing within our government about satellite reconnaissance capability and technology at the time: any Mongol aided by German Scientists could put a monkey in space, but what was the point, finding bananas?
My experience was in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR, although I speak SIGINT, as well,) and two audacious and bodacious platforms were created by the Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMC) Skunk Work’s Kelly Johnson in the mid-late 50s and early 60s, the glider performance-like Dragon Lady U-2, which flew nearly 8-9 hour missions in excess of 70K feet at a subsonic speed of maybe 450 knots with a tailwind, and the early 60s largely titanium plane the YF-12A, aka the 12A, and RS-71 Blackbird, which could achieve Mach 3+ speed (~2200+MPH) above 90K feet. When the RS-71 was introduced to the public by President Lyndon Johnson, for some reason he decided to call it the SR-71 and so it was from that point on. The SR-71 could be refueled from inception, a necessary mission element not only to allow it to perform extended missions, but also necessitated because of the design of the titanium fuselage. The engine nacelles did not fully seal until it was at altitude and this high-tech amazing platform leaked its unique jet fuel like a sieve and therefore took off with very little fuel onboard and typically hit a tanker within minutes of taking off.
The less famous but very robust RB-47 reconnaissance variant of this venerable jet was a capable ISR platform as well, that was still doing risk reduction work such as Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) work, and testbed efforts for new and emerging sensors like the Bowtie radar system that was a risk reduction effort for a later satellite that-into the late 2000s-was hosted on MIT Lincoln Labs Speckled Trout platform that typically flew in most USAF exercises like JEFX (Joint Expeditionary Force Exercise.)
The government was deeply involved in trying to resolve the so-called bomber gap during this timeframe-that turned out to be a Soviet information operation or disinformation campaign, propaganda and mythology-but a data point that would drive discussions about the next generation of US intelligence gathering capability.
Called the Corona project, which began the “Keyhole” series of satellites (named for the particular “ramp” that must be hit to escape the earth’s atmosphere) as early as 1956 that returned film buckets from orbit every 45-90 days, the price of poker and sense of urgency went up bigly when Francis Gary Powers was shot down in 1960 by an S-75 Dvina (SA-2 “Guideline”) surface-to-air missile system purpose built and designed for that action.
Scientists and government technologists alike feverishly worked on alternatives to manned ISR platforms, and the Corona project satisfied the need for a long time. Under the Corona project there were companion or sister efforts known as Argon with a focus on collecting mapping, charting and geodesy quality photography/imagery, and Lanyard which was a short-lived program that focused on high resolution/quality photography/imagery. Throughout the Corona project life an emerging set of requirements was compiled based on best practices, timely missions, missed opportunities and technological breakthroughs.
The result of all these lessons learned grew into a tremendous body of knowledge, best practices, and ideas that resulted in a series of demonstrations. Many involved novel implementations of ISR capability, experiments in data linked imagery that would be processed by specially developed, moveable-but called mobile-shelters that would soon be capable of near real time processing and dissemination of collected imagery. One of the results of these increasingly sprawling compounds was the massive footprint they represented on the ground, prompting eventual DNI Clapper to describe what came to be known as the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) as one of the objects you could see from space.
The SR-71 High Resolution Radar (HRR) had a downlink or data-link capability, but the only time I ever saw it work was after it was technically retired, during a mission at Roving Sands in 1997 when it downlinked to an 18th Airborne Corps Tactical Radar Correlator (TRAC.) The Army OV-1 MOHAWK aircraft routinely downlinked to a Ground Surveillance Terminal, Side Looking Airborne Radar and infrared missions as early as the mid-60s in Vietnam.
One of the more amazing projects ongoing during this timeframe was the USAF Igloo White project. A pilot/Warrant Officer I later served with had great details on how the Army MOHAWK contributed surveillance information to this project in an attempt to interdict targets along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the eastern part of Cambodia, but I’ve never read an account that acknowledges the MOHAWK participation.
The tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) I applied during my tour in Korea in the late 70s to find North Korean tunnel activity and new construction efforts was based on some of the multi-intelligence Igloo White methodology, and contributed to the Helmut Study that was undertaken by 8th US Army in Korea to provide evidence that President Carter’s idea to draw down troops from Korea was “ill-considered:” at least in the opinion of US Army Gen John Singlaub, who fell on his sword over this issue and was fired. Singlaub was somewhat of a legend at the time, one of the founders involved in the establishment of the CIA. I did not cover the firing of Singlaub as one of those “Doc” moments, but he meets the criterion, and it is very hard for an Army-military-officer to recover from a POTUS firing….
Truth be known I later used a combination of the Igloo White methodology for what we called our “Optimum Battlefield Surveillance Plan” in Korea that tied together Ground Surveillance Radars, Night Observation Devices, Field Artillery surveillance radars and counter battery radars, the Israeli Rasit Radar (also EO and IR,) high powered electronically enhanced optics, and later concepts of operations based on US Navy P-3 maritime and submarine surveillance techniques executed by Predator and GH UAVS to put together the Moving Target Intelligence Proof of Concept (MTI POC) plan that along with very aggressive ground operations and “door knock downs,” would allow intel to start driving operations and enable us to start getting “left of the bang” in the counter improvised explosive device (CIED) battle in Iraq and Afghanistan starting in 2004 or so.
The emphasis on relays, communications, computers and data processing grew more and more technical as the Corona film return systems flew out, with nuances and ever more sophisticated techniques implemented with each payload. By the late 1960s breakthroughs in charge-coupled devices and digital storage technology motivated designs for satellites with advanced telescopes that accommodated large designs and greater weights that enabled significant resolution enhancements that just about peaked with the wide area search/surveillance, synoptic capability of the KH-9, and the near breathtaking resolution and crispness of the KH-8: but the nirvana near term end state was designing a system that could transmit images in real-or near real time, vice bucket return systems.
As these concepts came to fruition as systems, other engineers were working on the concept of so-called softcopy exploitation, where a photo interpreter would exploit digital imagery via a cathode ray device-or terminal to display the imagery and perform rudimentary photogrammetry, mensuration and identification functions.
Soft copy exploitation of digital pixels was a significantly different task than downlinking the digital imagery, producing hard copy roll imagery and basically exploiting as had always been done. The exploitation tools would now reside in software, including zoom functions, mensuration options of objects and distances, viewing of stereo to enable height determination: all facets that analysts accomplished through physical aids to analysis would now have to be replicated and performed via computer.
I mentioned the effort by a fairly small number of analysts to help shape how these systems would work and to kick the tires on the emerging software capabilities destined to run in the US Army Digital Imagery Test Bed Demonstration System (DITB DEMONS,) which was the prototype for Army softcopy exploitation.
Old habits are hard to break and in my 20 or so visits to see the system, I only witnessed softcopy exploitation a handful of times. When I later was involved in a test of the system that was fielded to Germany after the Tactical Imagery Exploitation System (TACIES) was canceled by Richard Armitage, the only reason we were able to test softcopy exploitation performance of system and analysts was that the Hard Copy Reconstruction Unit-the Electron Beam Laser Recorder I’ve mentioned previously-broke and there were several days where the unit had to exploit soft copy imagery: it was not the choice of analysts to do so voluntarily.
The bottom line thus far in my story is we-the Army-and the IC community in general wasted an awful lot of time over the years between the secret squirrel treatment of everything associated with the satellite developments, the exploitation systems, the training of the analysts and the relatively small segment of the user population that was witting and who eventually interacted with these systems.
The cancellation of TACIES by Armitage in 1984 did not help these efforts one bit, and there would be an entire FYDP worth of time elapse to when the next fielded system landed in Europe.
I mentioned way long ago that the Army had a Joe Girardi-the world’s greatest salesman-problem. His theory was that everybody knows at least 250 people. Every time you make a good impression with a sale and send away a happy customer, he felt like you just made a favorable impression on those 250.
In light of Doc’s time-space continuum theory, none of those analysts who did not get to work in a softcopy exploitation system environment in Europe for those five years got to learn and share their experiences with those 250 in their sphere of influence. By the time the new system deployed-and it didn’t work-we did not realize we were on the verge of War with Iraq, and it would be too late to make up all those lost years of training experiences that did not happen when the TACIES system was canceled.
Not to go anal on my analogy, but troops in most units rotate in about 26 months max for education, training, professional development-myriad reasons. In the timeframe we’ve discussed where 46 relatively new troops should have been exposed to the TACIES, you could expect over one hundred imagery analysts to have become proficient on the system over the course of the lost FYDP: at a minimum. It would have been much more just based on the fact that most of the initial fills were going to be done from within Europe, so those troops would have turned over much faster than normal troops starting out brand new.
The Army soon cashed the peace dividend upon the drawdown of the Soviet Union, with many of these analysts separating from service and going to work for the government as NIMA stood up and they were eventually positioned to learn some of these same lessons all over again as the FIA procurement played out.
One metric that emerged from the drive to go digital with these systems was the consistent-and pervasive-accounting for savings through obviating the need for hard copy film that was produced in staggering numbers and sent around the community to satisfy user needs. The first projections I saw were circa 1992 or so and the numbers were staggering. But like most other pipe dreams, this remained a goal for at least another 20 or more years, with threats each year that “no more hard copy film will be produced except upon special requests:” there always seemed to be a lot, every year!
End of Part 9.
Max Dribbler
17 November 2022
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