While somewhat hard to believe, I started this series back in October when we hit the 20-year anniversary of the GAP Mitigation Study out brief to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet. My original intent was just to send an email focused on that specific-culminating event, as well as a second email I put together that touched upon a lot of program event “folly” that occurred during the period (covered by this series) that was styled along the lines of a Billy Joel song, his 1989 “We Didn’t Start the Fire” motif.
A lot of the people I sent the email to are civilians who are simply not engaged in these type affairs, have never held a clearance, mostly want to know what I know about Roswell, New Mexico, Aliens, Groom Lake and Area 51: I mean, what good is a clearance if you don’t have access to the “good stuff?”
But many others-who are witting-responded with comments about the magnitude of the task and the fact that the top intelligence official in our government must have felt extraordinary pressure to take such an action: and what an extraordinary action it was! The DCI tasker in effect put all the pressure for the outcome of this action-at least at this point in time-on the GAP Team to conduct the study activity that would determine future investments and the fate of the US government premier satellite acquisition program represented by the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) that was on contract to provide the capability the US government would depend upon well into the 21st century.
I never really thought about it in those terms before, as we were busy with the task at the time and then life afterwards. All I/we thought about was how much had to be accomplished in the time available. Consider that a task received post-fourth of July that has a suspense of 11 October 2022 to brief a consequential recommendation to the DCI has (1) every leader’s attention and interest in the community (2) program and political ramifications (3) and maybe about three weeks of work time available.
Briefing the seniors on the front end with the plan, and the back end to socialize and inform about the recommendations/results takes nearly 20 days on each end…that’s nearly half of the 95 days available: oh, and we were starting without a plan on an effort that many seniors who we briefed were convinced would not change anything.
In hindsight it is sobering to think that the US government-the IC-the DCI had reached such a desperate state by July 2002 that he committed to undertake action to get a definitive answer on this question, issuing the tasker somewhat jointly to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA,) rather than the CIA.
With the 20-year anniversary upon us I began writing to turn some of my email and my Billy Joel-like “rant”-fleshing out some of the aspects of the storyline-getting help from some of the heavy lifters involved in the effort, and we determined that the back-story was just as interesting as the front story when you consider the sequence of events.
The back story encompassed the declassification of the NRO, the murder of security guard Tina Ricca, the “discovery” of the NRO headquarters construction, the firing of NRO DIR Jeffrey Harris and DEP DIR Jimmie D. Hill: all somewhat events that invoked comparisons to Doc’s space-time continuum, in my mind.
There was also the issue of whether they-the NRO, but mainly Jeff Harris and Jimmie Hill-intended to fully recompete the contract (or not-e.g., that it was just a ploy to get LMC to reduce their prices,) and the details of the effort. The next thing you know-viola, here we are on number 22 and I haven’t fully covered the GAP effort yet.
Two groups were formed to conduct the study, one focused on FIA engineering, the master schedule and cost, while the other was tasked with determining what if any gap was possible and providing mitigation options.
The first was led by the acquisition, program and budget arms of the NRO and NIMA houses augmented by a few community players from cost, program and budget shops, consolidated into the FIA Joint Management Office (JMO.) While the other-the GAP Mitigation Study (GAP) effort proper-would be a community focused activity led by NIMA that would eventually have hundreds of personnel involved but the subsequent community award from the DCI named 67 military, civilian, contractor and Federally Funded Research and Development Center folks who did most of the heavy lifting.
Note in the above “blathery” article that is typical of this timeframe, there is scant mention of a gap and no mention of the GAP effort, nor the DCI tasker, and you get the impression-at least I do-that the government was dribbling out program dollars to the contractor-Boeing-and that was the biggest problem: from the article…
A reprogramming of about $625 million [and possibly as much as $900 million] from other intelligence programs in 2002 was intended to get the program back on schedule. Imagery coverage would be maintained without interruption, and the tradeoffs are not as bad as a gap in imagery coverage.
Tradeoffs “aren’t as bad:” Really? Gee, I’m not sure anyone else knew this at this point in the effort outside of the DCI’s inner circle and congress-the HPSCI and the SSCI. Going by the figures I walked through earlier in the piece, coupled with the dollars provided leading up to this, we were apparently in the billion, here, billion there-mode. I mean, what’s a billion among friends? If FIA was a ~$5B dollar contract as of September 1999 and there was an influx of 10-15% more dollars during a time period in which the schedule lost a year, that seems like a flashing red light.
There was somewhat of a CIA versus NRO message in these articles, where favored news outlets carried water for one side or the other. What was at stake was which programs would be the next bill payers once all the NRO seat cushions and couches were harvested…which was frankly not in our lane and none of our business.
Later in the piece there is this detail that followed up the 2002 report from this group:
In May 2003 the Defense Science Board / Air Force Scientific Advisory Board Joint Task Force on Acquisition of National Security Space Programs found the FIA program under contract at the time of their review to be significantly underfunded and technically flawed. The task force believed that the FIA program – thus structured – was not executable.
My emphasis above (first passage) highlights a true nonsense phrase in light of the schedule having slipped more than a year at this point in time, akin to applying a bandage to a sucking chest wound (more money will save the day!)
While the second passage relates a classic government study effort-with frankly a number of pure egg-heads-that were briefed at least twice on the GAP study results presented to and approved by the DCI. They were initially astounded to hear the “news” that the funding levels approved and allocated only bought a little better than a 50% probability FIA schedule, while addressing none of the root cause issues that caused the program to slip in the first place: the GAP side of the effort was not about fixing Boeing or FIA.
Note this was May 2003, coming up on another year gone by where the influx of money from the DCI action had not resolved or delivered the promised breakthrough. It was surprising to hear the “Defense Science Board/USAF Scientific Advisory Board Joint Task force” yada, yada, ding-dong, take issue with the FIA JMO, which was largely doing overview actions and tracking budget at this point, with their commentary that the JMO was “an example of the dilution of the authority of the program manager.”
We asked a rhetorical question or two (I believe it was Tom Young leading the effort) when provided an opportunity to go off script in the question-and-answer period following the formal briefing presentation. The bottom line was the Money Ball-like question that had no good answer, the issue being that if Boeing simply needed more money to get the program on track, how come more money had not put the program back on track?
If Boeing could have solved the calibration issues and brought the telescopes into compliance with the contract specification with more dollars, why were we here? I related the calibration issue and the impact this issue was going to have on intelligence reporting and targeting, as well as the attempt to produce one telescope to answer two complex requirements and detected what I perceived to be disinterest in the technical aspects of the procurement problem on the part of a number of this group.
They were also working the SBIRS Nunn-McCurdie issues (previous article) at the time and the somewhat rhetorical question that was germane was if they believed a 5B dollar program that was bid by a contractor and accepted by the government wasn’t enough money, then, okay, let’s go with that as a given. And the amount had just about basically doubled during a timeframe where the contractor had fallen initially one and then nearly two years behind schedule as of spring 2003-which was now the problem-while never achieving much more than a 50% chance of making the existing-two-year delayed schedule-keeping in mind this was a vendor that lacked any previous experience delivering such a capability.
The logic followed within GAP simply asked, “What was a reasonable amount?” Boeing had yet to prove they had taken the measure of the task of getting on top of the target location error key performance parameter (KPP) by solving the calibration and multi-function telescope design issues. But was another doubling of program dollars to-in effect-20B reasonable?
And immediately heard a “sermon” from a person who shall remain nameless on cost, national security priorities, complex acquisition programs, a little humma, humma-and my question to him was-do you not believe that LMC could meet the requirements within two years for under half that amount for two vehicles? In-line with previous satellite deliveries in the block-line completed up though recent fly-outs?
How about the fact that it was potentially less than a year if we assumed risk and went with a Frankensat (spare parts that did not make it into previous satellites, a common bus, a residue telescope carried forward and a less complex design) option? Our group had actually rejected the Frankensat option out of hand except in the worst-case scenario. But doubling down on the Boeing design-which had yet to close-after nearly four years-seemed desperate.
He had no idea: the group had not looked at that aspect-those options. Let me repeat that slooowwwly: this expert group who had gone public with a funding proposal to an 80% schedule probability level-which would more than double the more than doubled amount of the current FIA contract, had never looked at or considered an alternative of bringing in the only vendor that actually had prior experience in this type of satellite engineering-for the US government.
As we wrapped up and I was thanking them for their time, my last comment was they should read and go through the GAP Study recommendations, because we had looked at the funding issue in terms of the schedule in detail: there were a number of Pert or Gant charts that walked through the necessary gates or milestones to achieve mitigation: and none of them reflected Boeing in the near term because there was no contribution.
Also, the group was not cleared for the “special part of the briefing” that provided additional details on alternatives that might be important to consider in their work, and that nobody in their right mind should be advocating for doubling the funding for Boeing when their inability to deliver to specification had in effect precluded them from being a solution to the GAP.
This next article is telling just to answer the question of “how did this whole thing end,” considering that I previously reported that DNI Negroponte canceled the Boeing FIA optical component in 2005 (two years and how many dollars later,) while approving award to Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMC.)
The headline is somewhat intriguing, as are the questions and potential storylines touched upon:
NRO gives NASA two hand-me-down telescopes.
The story is dated June 7, 2012. Speculation and conspiracy theories are good for the soul and spirit, but a thinking person wonders: I have questions…Where did these telescopes come from? Also, if it takes nearly a million dollars to store a telescope in a clean room at ITT/Excellus, then-I don’t know-how long have they been there???
27 December 2022
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