The World Wide Military

Command and Control System

Evolution and Effectiveness

DAVID E. PEARSON

Air University Press

Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama

June 2000
Disclaimer

Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are solely those of the

author and do not necessarily represent the views of Air University, the United States Air Force,

the Department of Defense, or any other US government agency. Cleared for public release:

distribution unlimited.

 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pearson, David E. (David Eric), 1953-

The world wide military command and control system : evolution and effectivenss /

David E. Pearson.

 p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-58566-078-7

1. Worldwide Military Command and Control System—History. I. Title.

UB212.P43 2000

355.3’3041’0973—dc21 99-462377

ii
For

My Children
Contents

Chapter Page

DISCLAIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

DEDICATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xx

PART I

Conceptualization

1 Centralizing the Defense Establishment . . . . . . 3

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

2 Defense Communications Agency and System . . 19

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

3 National Military Command System . . . . . . . . 33

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

4 WWMCCS Is Born . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

5 Three WWMCCS Failures . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

PART II

Formalization

6 WWMCCS Automatic Data Processing Upgrade . . 95

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

v
Chapter Page

7 Centralizing Communications Management . . . . 117

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

8 The WWMCCS Council and the Modern

 WWMCCS Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

9 The WWMCCS Architect and Architecture . . . . . 163

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

10 WWMCCS Intercomputer Network . . . . . . . . 185

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

11 The Carter Administration and the Evolutionary

 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

12 Crises and Criticisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

13 Failures at NORAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

PART III

Implementation

14 Strategic Modernization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

15 The C3I Triad: Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298

16 WWMCCS Information System . . . . . . . . . . 301

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312

17 Defense Centralization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329

18 Defense Communications and the End

of the Cold War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340

vi
Chapter Page

19 Organization, Technology, and Ideology

in Command and Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358

EPILOGUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377

Illustrations

Figure

1 The Early Array of Sensors and Sentinels

 Forwarding Information to NORAD

Headquarters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

2 Cold War Vigilance: Texas Tower

Offshore Radar Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

3 SAC’s Underground Command Post . . . . . . . . 110

4 Defense Communications Agency . . . . . . . . . 110

5 AUTOSEVOCOM Switches . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

6 NMCS Personnel in Action . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

7 USS Northampton , National Emergency

 Command Post Afloat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

8 Artist’s Conception of the National Military

 Command System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

9 Responsibilities for Implementing the

National Military Command System . . . . . . . . 113

10 Conceptualizing a Command and

Control System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

11 The National Communications System,

Encompassing All Federal Assets . . . . . . . . . 114

12 World Wide Military Command and Control System

 as Described by DODD S-5100.30 . . . . . . . . 115

vii
Chapter Page

13 Conception of WWMCCS System Architecture,

 Given Revised DODD 5100.30 . . . . . . . . . . 273

14 WWMCCS System Relationships . . . . . . . . . 274

15 The Elements of WWMCCS . . . . . . . . . . . . 275

16 PWIN Initial Three-Node Configuration . . . . . . 276

17 WIN Configuration in the Early 1980s . . . . . . 277

18 New Organizational Structure for Defense

 Communications Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278

19 NORAD’s Missile Warning System . . . . . . . . . 279

20 Communications System Segment Connections . . 279

21 Land-based Ballistic Warning and Detection . . . 280

viii
About the Author

David E. Pearson, an Army veteran, graduated magna cum

laude from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,

r eceived his PhD from Yale University, and was a Fellow in

International Security Studies at Ohio State University. He

currently teaches sociology at the University of Texas at

Brownsville, which is Texas’s southmost college.

ix
Preface

Let me begin by saying what this book is not. It is not the

same as the books previously written on command and control

by Paul Bracken, Bruce Blair, C. Kenneth Allard, or others. The

World Wide Military Command and Control System (WWMCCS)

is constituted of four general types of elements: sensors, com -

mand posts, computers, and communications networks.

Whereas previous books dealt mainly with the first two types,

this book is concerned far more strongly with the second two.

Nor has any previous writer dealt with WWMCCS comprehen -

sively. Allard, for instance, devotes only about two pages to

WWMCCS, Blair refers to it on but three occasions, and Bracken

does not mention it at all. Here, addressing what the system is

and how it got that way are central concerns, and attention is

paid to a number of key system factors and elements that received almost no attention in these earlier works.

This book is also not another study of cold war deterrence,

nor is it an examination of the (hypothesized) interactivity

between the American and Soviet command and control sys -

tems under conditions of crisis or war.

Perhaps the best single way to summarize it is to view the

book as a bureaucratic or organizational history. What I do is

to take three distinct historical themes—organization, technology, and ideology—and examine how each contributed to the

development of WWMCCS and its ability (and frequent inability) to satisfy the demands of national leadership. Whereas

earlier works were primarily descriptive, cataloguing the com -

mand and control assets then in place or under development,

I offer more analysis by focusing on the issue of how and why

WWMCCS developed the way it did. While at first glance less

provocative, this approach is potentially more useful for defense decision makers dealing with complex human and tech -

nological systems in the post-cold-war era. It also makes for a

better story and, I trust, a more interesting read.

By necessity, this work is selective. The elements of

WWMCCS are so numerous, and the parameters of the system

xi
potentially so expansive, that a full treatment is impossible

within the compass of a single volume. Indeed, a full treatment of even a single WWMCCS asset or subsystem—the Defense Satellite Communications System, Extremely Low Frequency Communications, the National Military Command

System, to name but a few—could itself constitute a substantial work. In its broadest conceptualization, WWMCCS is the

world, and my approach has been to deal with the head of the

octopus rather than its myriad tentacles.

My initial interest in WWMCCS goes back—what seems like a

long, long time—to my graduate school days and a class in

national security issues taught at Yale by Garry Brewer, who

later became a member of my (non-WWMCCS related) disserta -

tion committee. I’m not quite certain whether to thank him or

denounce him for starting me on what has proved to be the

lengthiest research project I have ever undertaken. Now that the

project is completed, thanks, I suppose, is more appropriate.

Thanks also go to Charles Perrow, my former dissertation chair,

who, at an early stage of my career, introduced me to organiza -

tional theory and helped me to think analytically about complex

organizations. As to more recent history, this project was for -

mally launched during a postdoctoral fellowship year at Ohio

State University’s Mershon Center, and a subsequent junior faculty leave from Lafayette College helped advance it. Special

thanks go to Charles Hermann, Thomas Norton, and Howard

Schneiderman for their encouragement and insight.

xii
Introduction

In the late 1970s, in response to a lengthy series of failures

and snafus in various components of the Defense Depart -

ment’s World Wide Military Command and Control System

(WWMCCS; pronounced “wimex”), a remarkable and rather

unlikely team of consultants was assembled at the Pentagon.

Their job was to try to figure out how to make the vast,

multibillion dollar metasystem of sensors, command centers,

and communications links work better. The group included 30

anthropologists and sociologists, mathematicians, control

theorists and systems theorists, and representatives from a

variety of other scholarly disciplines—“academics with a philo -

sophical bent,” as one writer described them. In a series of

meetings with a similarly sized group of defense experts, the

academics considered ways to deal with WWMCCS’s many

problems. All sorts of recommendations were offered up, but,

according to one of the consultants, conspicuously lacking

was any “critical examination of the dominant paradigm which

condones the expenditure of vast resources without even a

semblance of a conceptual rationale for the effort.”1

However correct that assessment might have been, and

some certainly disputed it, the whole experience was, in a

word, unprecedented. The fact that academics had been in -

vited to the Pentagon in the first place could be read as an

admission that the vast assemblage of technologies and human organizations that was WWMCCS was not up to snuff as

the cold war moved into its final tense decade. The meetings

were also a not-so-implicit admission that the Pentagon’s tra -

ditional problem-solving method in this area, the so-called

evolutionary approach to command and control system development, had come up short; in fact, this approach itself might

have represented a major impediment to the formulation of a

coherent conceptual basis for the system. After some 20 years

of development, the World Wide Military Command and Con -

trol System, even in the eyes of some of its most enthusiastic

advocates, was judged to be less than effective.

xiii
The Pentagon’s concern with command and control effective -

ness was soon complemented by the concerns of defense ana -

lysts outside the government. By the early 1980s, these analysts

were pointing out how such traditional measures of effectiveness

as number of warheads, throw weights, damage expectancy, and

surviving equivalent megatonnage tended to selectively focus attention on only a few critical aspects of the strategic balance.

They pointed out that while the defense literature contained an

abundance of missile duels, it offered far fewer “serious inquiries

into the organizational, human, and technical requirements for

minimal, essential command and control.”2 They noted that

while the centrality of command and control in the implementa -

tion of US strategic policy was everywhere implicit, plans seldom

reflected key vulnerabilities and real-world system limitations.

Numerous efforts were made throughout the remainder of the

1980s to identify the key concepts in this area to evolve

unambiguous measures of effectiveness for WWMCCS. The result was an increasingly elaborate lexicon for articulating what

is meant by command and control effectiveness—elaborate, but

still far from adequate. Many of the terms that came to be

incorporated into this burgeoning conceptual list, such as standardiza-tion or end-to-end security, were superficial and far

from self-explanatory, and the requirement for them by no

means self-evident.3 The diversity and complexity of the con -

cepts was great, and thus revealing. Rather than serving as an

indicator of greater understanding, the proliferation of tenebrous

terminology could be interpreted as something quite different,

perhaps as nothing so much as a signal indicator of incomprehensibility and unmanageable complexity. 4

Amidst the confusion there were naturally some areas of con -

sensus. Among the generally agreed-upon criteria of effective -

ness that eventually emerged within the defense community, it

was held that command and control systems should be interop -

erable— meeting the demands of users, with a variety of interests

and emphases—at all system locations. As an obvious concomitant, equipment, computerized data formats, and other com -

mon-user elements must be compatible . The point was to do

away with the situation, endemic to large-scale military opera -

tions throughout the cold war era, in which the different mis -

sions of the services, their different requirements, vernaculars,

xiv
and assets, led to major problems when the services were

called upon to work together in joint operations. 5 Next, the

systems should be responsive, able to provide rapid, direct

connections and real-time relays whenever necessary with

adequate capacity. The systems must be flexible , able to meet

changing requirements in a dynamic environment. This in

turn suggests that they should be survivable in case of attack,

to be accomplished by emphasizing reconstitution of assets,

redundancy, and design of command nodes and communica -

tions links. That is, effective systems should permit an assessment of friendly and adversary residual capabilities in a postattack environment, and allow for variable response options.

Indeed, the Reagan administration’s strategic modernization

program of the early 1980s specifically highlighted the requirement that command and control systems be as surviv -

able as the weapons they supported.6 Given that conflicts

might persist for some time, effective systems should also be

endurable , degrading gradually rather than experiencing cata -

strophic failure under conditions of stress and damage. They

must be reliable , able to perform acceptably with imperfect

information and under severe time constraints. Finally, they

must be able to provide secure linkages between users under

a wide range of conditions.7

It all sounded fine, but as soon as these concepts were

considered in the context of WWMCCS, their meanings became problematical and contextual. Take, for example, the

apparently unambiguous criterion of survivability. Since resources are not infinite, it might well be appropriate for some

WWMCCS elements to be designed to function only in peacetime. Others might need to deal with minor emergencies, while

others might have to function through major conventional

war. Still others might have to function during a tactical nuclear war or throughout and even subsequent to a strategic

nuclear exchange. Which systems should be made more or

less survivable? How should this best be accomplished? Precisely who should make these determinations? The answers

that were offered often depended upon nothing so much as

who was asked the question.

Consensus on these and a host of related issues was necessary for the promulgation of clear and specific, broadly applixv
cable measures of effectiveness. But in the real world in which

WWMCCS programs were conceived and developed—one of

multiple users, competing organizational subunits, goal dis -

sensus, budgetary constraints, and a context of rapid technological change—consensus was difficult to achieve. Absent

agreement on specific definitions, the meaning of such con -

cepts as survivability, reliability, or any of the others became

possible only on a fairly general rhetorical level; that is, they

became official goals, necessarily lacking specific human or

technological referents to what the system was supposed to

accomplish.8 Who, after all, could possibly disagree with the

general proposition of having more survivable, reliable, or flex -

ible systems for the command and control of America’s military forces? But in practice, such measures were frequently

little more than sophisticated sloganeering of a politically ex -

pedient sort. In the end, these terms offered little guidance for

determining whether the World Wide Military Command and

Control System was an effective system, under what conditions, and from whose point of view.

Problems with properly conceptualizing effectiveness were

hardly unique to WWMCCS. Among organizational analysts,

interest in effectiveness had been persistent; it had also been

persistently frustrated by a similar conceptual ambiguity. 9

Since the 1960s numerous highly divergent models of effectiveness had been advanced. Almost as quickly as they appeared, they were subjected to pointed criticism by writers

who viewed their assumptions as either dubious or of limited

applicability. It was pointed out in the mid -1960s that most of

what had been written on the topic was highly judgmental,

filled with advice that “seems sagacious but is tautological and

contradictory.”1 0 But despite the doubts, the theoretical impor -

tance of the concept ensured an ongoing effort to promulgate

an acceptable operational definition. And not without reason;

after all, effectiveness represents the ultimate dependent variable in any organizational analysis.1 1

But as the literature in this area burgeoned, as alternative

definitions of effectiveness continued to be propounded, it became increasingly apparent to many analysts that this goal

was chimerical or simply misguided. One described it as a sort

of trudging after an “ever-shifting rainbow’s end.”1 2 By the end

xvi
of the 1970s, efforts to come to grips with the concept had

reached an apparent intellectual impasse. It was recognized

that the many shortcomings of effectiveness research were attributable to the fact that the concept being addressed was

ambiguous in the extreme. Two analysts lamented in summing

up the state of the literature, “There are no definitive theories.

There is no agreement on a definition for organizational effectiveness; the number of definitions varies with the number of

authors who have been preoccupied with the concept.”1 3

Things changed little with the passage of additional years,

and well into the 1980s scholarly journals continued to report

the confusion that characterized scholarly writing on the

topic, noting how “problems of definition, circumscription, and

criteria identification plague most authors’ work.”1 4 Indeed,

the intellectual hurdles presented by the issue appeared so

insurmountable and the distances separating perspectives so

vast and imponderable that some researchers fled the field

entirely, concluding that effectiveness is a retractably subjective phenomenon defying objective definition and analysis, not

unlike the notions of truth and beauty. 1 5 With efforts to define

the concept mired in and beset by numerous and apparently

hopeless contingencies, scholarly interest predictably declined.

The impasse represented by the increasingly widespread

recognition that effectiveness is a complex and multidimen -

sional concept can also be seen to represent a sort of water -

shed in the academic literature. Beginning in the late 1970s,

research began shifting away from the earlier emphasis on

conceptualization and operationalization. Its focus thereafter

turned more to what have been described as the “contradic -

tions” inherent in the concept, its emphasis on elaborating its

conceptual complexity and cataloguing the normative, temporal, organizational, and environmental constraints presumed

to render any definition of effectiveness of only limited utility. 1 6

What seems to have emerged as we move toward the present

is not consensus concerning any single model’s validity but

rather a more-or-less widespread recognition that dissensus is

the norm. For understanding WWMCCS’s evolution and its

many problems, it is a dissensus that will command our clos -

est attention.

xvii
Three principal themes, or, perhaps better said, historical

streams of action appear to have governed the development of

WWMCCS. They are summarized by such terms as technology ,

organization , and ideology . Technological changes throughout

the cold war dramatically altered the nature of warfare, and

technological push would be a defining process in the development of defense systems, including WWMCCS. These changes

in turn necessitated changes in organization, in particular the

movement toward a more centralized defense management

structure—something actively resisted by a number of power -

ful defense constituencies, most notably the military services.

To allay doubts and overcome resistance, considerable author -

ity for WWMCCS’s development was ceded to the services, who

proceeded to define system requirements in ways genial to

their interests—a sort of technological “user pull.”1 7 Thus, from

the outset WWMCCS has been a “subunit-dominated organization,” emphasizing the services’ needs and requirements

over those of other elements, over the interests of the system

as a whole, and, not infrequently, over the national interest.

A sense of WWMCCS’s subunit-dominated character, of its

fundamental ambiguity and fractiousness, was captured well

by a former deputy director for defense research and engineer -

ing who, in the mid-1960s, pointed out: “We are talking about

a picture which is constantly changing in different ways—in

the functions performed, the people performing, and the

equipment being used.”1 8 It was apparent at the end of that

decade in the remarks of a House Military Operations Subcommittee staff administrator who exclaimed to the director of

one WWMCCS subunit, “You have so many systems here, no

wonder you need a systems engineering analysis setup.”1 9 It

was clear when one defense journal described WWMCCS as

“somewhat of a Rube Goldberg concoction consisting of Army,

Navy and Air Force systems linked together with commercial

carriers.”2 0 It was clear in the 1970s when the Defense Com -

munications System, a key WWMCCS element, was described

as “merely an association of facilities tied together and attempting to act in concert, but with no central authority to

direct its actions.”21 In addition, it was apparent a decade later

in a General Accounting Office evaluation of WWMCCS’s auto -

mated data-processing program’s management structure,

xviii
when it was pointed out that things were so nebulous that no

one could be found who had a thorough general under -

standing of the program. The difficulties with defining what is

meant by WWMCCS are perhaps best summed up in the repeated references to it throughout the years as a “loosely knit

federation,” “more of a federation of systems than a single

system,” a “federation of subsystems,” and various similar

characterizations.

This condition of rampant organizational suboptimization

was validated and ultimately institutionalized by the “evolu -

tionary approach,” an increasingly pervasive ideology within

defense circles asserting that command and control system

development is best conducted incrementally, by system

subunits; and the reason it gained such wide currency probably lies more in its bureaucratic utility than in its ability to

create an optimal system for command and control. Those

interested in maintaining a decentralized defense status quo

embraced the approach because it maintains that the decision-making process is situationally contingent and unknow -

able in advance. Centralized decision makers thus cannot

adequately specify the sorts of information they require, with

whom they might need to communicate, or precisely what type

of system best suits their needs. In light of this ignorance at

the center, the logical course of action is to devolve authority

toward the periphery, thus providing greater flexibility for sys -

tem development to lower-level system subunits. Thus the

services, fully cognizant of the defensewide trend toward

greater centralization and acutely sensitive to the loss of

autonomy and authority it portended, perceived in the evolu -

tionary approach a way to maintain some (though surely not

all) of their earlier autonomy and authority. Unable to stop the

juggernaut of defense centralization, they saw in the evolu -

tionary approach a way to make the most out of a bad situ -

ation. Branch offices of the secretary of defense they would

not be, and, by embracing it, they were able in substantial

measure to co-opt the development of WWMCCS in ways they

considered advantageous.

For those interested in advancing the cause of greater cen -

tralization, the evolutionary approach also had its appeal, mollifying as it did the opposition of the services, who otherwise

xix
might be expected to vigorously oppose any centralizing initia -

tive. Whatever the other merits or liabilities of this approach,

it appears to have held a certain Machiavellian appeal to the

proponents of greater centralization (at least initially) because,

as with the services, it was perceived as a way to advance

their interests. But as things turned out, it also represented

the classic deal with the devil, for the price paid by the cen -

tralizers turned out to be disproportionately high. Adopting

the evolutionary approach certainly helped to diminish service

resistance; but the price ultimately paid was nothing less than

the very soul of the centralized WWMCCS concept.

The historical lack of any organizational center of gravity for

WWMCCS and the serious lack of coordination between its

constituent elements resulted in a multiplicity of problems

and occasionally major failures when the system was called

upon to function in coordinated, joint-service fashion. Focusing on process rather than on result, emphasizing what the

sociologist Max Weber called formal rather than substantive

rationality, WWMCCS’s subunit-dominated structure and the

evolutionary approach that validated it thus set the stage for

an ongoing series of falls. Those who enjoy ironies may find

this one especially delicious: the same conditions that cleared

the way for the establishment of WWMCCS and that permitted

its subsequent growth simultaneously guaranteed that it

would not be able to function effectively. In structural terms,

we might conclude that the World Wide Military Command

and Control System was born to fail. The remainder of this

work documents how this interplay of organization, technology, and ideology shaped the development of WWMCCS during

the cold war’s three final tense decades.

Notes

1. William J. Broad, “Philosophers at the Pentagon,” Science 210 (24

October 1980): 409, 412.

2. Garry D. Brewer and Paul Bracken, “Some Missing Pieces of the C3I

Puzzle,” unpublished manuscript, Yale University, 1983.

3. Van C. Doubleday, “WWMCCS in Transition: An Air Force View,”

Signal 30 (August 1976): 71.

4. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies

(New York: Basic Books, 1984).

xx
5. “Standardization: The Key to Increasing the Effectiveness of Tactical

C&C,” Armed Forces Management, July 1967, 44.

6. House, Committee on Armed Services, Strategic Force Modernization

Program, 97 t h Cong., 1s t sess., 1981 (Washington, D.C.: Government

Printing Office [hereafter cited as GPO], October/November 1981), 211.

7. General Accounting Office, The World Wide Military Command and

Control System—Major Changes Needed in its Automated Data Processing

Management and Direction, Report to the Congress, LCD-80-22 (Washington,

D.C.: GPO, 14 December 1979), 15–19.

8. Charles Perrow, “The Analysis of Goals in Complex Organizations,”

American Sociological Review 26, no. 4 (December 1961): 855.

9. Richard M. Steers, “Problems in Measurement of Organizational

Effectiveness,” Administrative Science Quarterly , 1975, 20.

10. Daniel Katz and Robert L. Kahn, The Social Psychology of

Organizations (New York: Wiley, John, and Sons, Inc., 1966), 149.

11. Richard H. Hall, “Effectiveness Theory and Organizational

Effectiveness,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 16 (1980): 536.

12. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald R. Salancik, The External Control of

Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective (New York: Harper &

Row, 1978), 8.

13. Paul S. Goodman and Johannes M. Pennnings, “Perspectives and

Issues: An Introduction,” in New Perspectives on Organizational

Effectiveness, ed. Paul S. Goodman and Johannes M. Pennings (San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 1–12.

14. Kim S. Cameron, “Effectiveness as Paradox: Consensus and Conflict

in Conceptions of Organizational Effectiveness,” Management Science 32,

no. 5 (May 1986): 539–40.

15. Renee R. Anspach, “Everyday Methods for Assessing Organizational

Effectiveness,” Social Problems 38, no. 1 (February 1991): 2.

16. Hall, 245.

17. Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, A Quest for

Excellence: Final Report to the President (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1986), 45.

18. “Dr. Fubini Stresses DDR&E’s Desire for System Compatibility,”

DATA (February 1965): 9.

19. House, Committee on Government Operations, Military Communications—1968, 9 0t h Cong. 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1968), 6.

20. “Defense Communications Agency—The Future: Analog to Digital,”

Armed Forces Management, October 1968, 154.

21. House, Armed Services Investigating Subcommittee, Committee on

Armed Services, Review of Department of Defense Worldwide

Communications, Phase I, 92d Cong., 1 s t sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, May

1971), 24–25.

xxi
PART I

Conceptualization
Chapter 1

Centralizing The Defense Establishment

During the course of World War II, the development of military communications tended in a specific direction—toward

systems that were common user. The phrase denotes generalpurpose systems—those that serve the needs of a host of

users at a number of geographic locations and can send message traffic of all types and precedences. The reasons for the

wartime growth of this type of system are not difficult to appreciate. The global scale and rapid pace of the conflict necessitated large-scale coordination within the armed forces as

well as between our forces and those of our Allies. Good communications naturally were vital to this coordination, and

common-user systems, with their associated networks of tape

relay centers and tributary stations, promised precisely the

sort of flexibility that the exigencies of global war required.1

Conversely, communications systems that were “dedicated” to

a single use or user were frequently viewed as inherently lim -

ited and inflexible.

While common-user systems had their advantages, they

were not universally lauded, and the reasons were equally

easy to understand. Many users, notably the military services,

were unhappy with them precisely because they were designed to serve the communications needs of others and were

thus not fully under one’s own control. In other words, common-user systems necessitated accommodation, and this was

viewed as undesirable. Consider that within a common-user

system the message’s precedence level determines how rapidly

it will be processed. Precedence level makes eminent sense in

the abstract, but in a world characterized by bureaucratic

parochialism, problems predictably arose. The messages of

some users, especially those transmitting large volumes of

lower precedence traffic, suffered substantial delays at times

of heightened communications activity. Such delays being adjudged intolerable, there ensued an inflation of messages’

precedence levels to speed up their transmission. This in turn

produced the serious situation in which genuinely important,

3
time-sensitive messages requiring immediate transmission

were slowed down because large quantities of precedence-in -

flated traffic were choking the system.

Following the conclusion of World War II and the emergence

of the United States as the preeminent global power, the military services assumed worldwide responsibilities commensu -

rate with the nation’s new role. Requiring worldwide commu -

nications capabilities, yet viewing the wartime regime of

common-user systems as inherently inimical to their interests, the services began to develop sets of dedicated communications networks to meet their own unique, mission-specific

requirements.2 Before long a whole new communications doctrine began to crystallize around the distinction between dedicated and common-user communications systems and technologies.3

Despite the apparent decentralizing tendency, the need to

create a centralized command structure was also recognized

early in the postwar period, at the time the National Security

Act of 1947 formally reorganized the defense establishment.

The act constituted the Air Force as a separate military department. The secretary of war was replaced by a secretary of

defense, who sought to exercise general direction, authority,

and control over the three military departments and to serve

as the principal assistant to the president in national security

matters.4 The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), established earlier as

the supreme military body for directing the Allied war effort,

was provided a statutory basis and designated the principal

military advisor to the secretary of defense and the president.

These new organizations, offices, and departments reflected

the war’s lessons and insights, preeminently that the advent

of revolutionary new weapons had rendered earlier concepts of

separate ground, sea, and air warfare obsolete and that future

conflicts would involve joint rather than separate operation of

forces.5

If the National Security Act can be read as a first major

attempt to institutionalize the new realities in a more centralized defense management structure, it simultaneously represented an effort to restrain the very centralizing tendencies

that it unleashed. It did this by guaranteeing that many of

the traditional responsibilities and prerogatives of powerful

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

4
constituencies within the defense establishment were preserved. The reason for compromise was simple and thoroughly

pragmatic: without such concessions, the powerful groups,

notably the services, would not support the act. Thus, the

National Security Act was less a revolutionary mandate for

change than it was a synthesis of the old and the new—a

“compromise between the friends and foes of centralization,”

as one observer phrased it. 6

The compromise, such as it was, was hardly symmetrical.

During the lengthy debates preceding the reorganization, traditionalists frequently held sway over those promoting greater

unification, and hence centralization, in defense decision

making. While the act gave the secretary of defense formal

authority over the defense establishment, the latitude for action was circumscribed by a provision giving the service secretaries the authority to separately administer their respective

departments. This provision included, perhaps more importantly, authority over budgetary matters, an arrangement that

in practice would decentralize not only day-to-day operational

authority to the military departments but practically all true

authority as well. The result was that the secretary of defense

and his small staff were soon held hostage to the three military services, with their separate secretaries and extensive

staffs, which retained the status of individual executive departments. The JCS, lacking a formal chairman and unable to

reallocate basic service combat roles and missions—a preroga -

tive of the strongly service-partisan Congress—was powerless

as well, able to do little more than attempt to adjudicate in -

terservice conflicts.7 Nonetheless, this decentralized national

military establishment, described later by President Dwight D.

Eisenhower as “little more than a weak confederation of sovereign military units,”8

 represented a tentative first step toward

greater centralized control of the military.

The 1949 amendments to the National Security Act corrected some of its deficiencies but perpetuated others. The

amendments redesignated the national military establishment

as the Department of Defense (DOD), over which the secretary

of defense was given authority, direction, and control. The

Departments of the Army, Air Force, and Navy were downgraded from independent executive status, with their chiefs

CENTRALIZING THE DEFENSE ESTABLISHMENT

5
cabinet-rank officials, to subordinate military departments

represented in the cabinet and National Security Council by

the secretary of defense alone. The amendments authorized

the appointment of a JCS chairman, senior in rank to all

other officers, to replace the existing post of chief of staff to

the commander in chief. The size of the Joint Staff was more

than doubled. 9 It appeared that the forces of centralization

were well on the way to achieving ascendancy.

The amendments also introduced into law a series of wellintentioned legal checks and balances against possible abuses

of military power that effectively blocked any genuine efforts at

unification, and hence centralization of control. The secretary

of defense was prohibited from exercising his budgetary power

if it interfered with the missions of the military departments.

The chairman of the JCS, rhetorically cast as the nation’s

highest ranking officer, was denied a vote in debates. He could

not make decisions in the name of the other chiefs even when

the decisions were supported by the secretary, and he lacked

even the ability to adjudicate disputes among his separately

interested colleagues.1 0 In addition, the law limited the size of

the Joint Staff, granted the services the right to make appointments thereto, and placed limits on officers’ tenures once

there. Collectively, these measures limited the continuity and

influence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization; they had

the effect of putting the JCS at a considerable disadvantage

vis-à-vis the individual military departments. Despite the

changes, then, relationships continued to be bound securely

to the earlier system of negotiation. 1 1

The consequences were predictable. The services used their

best personnel to satisfy their own priority assignments before

making assignments to the Joint Staff, which they considered

a relatively low priority. Recognizing that a tour with the JCS

was out of the service mainstream and thus not career enhancing, the best officers had a major incentive to avoid such

an assignment. Those who did receive JCS assignments, in -

cluding the chiefs themselves, were subjected to the pressures

of dual and frequently conflicting loyalties. While in theory

joint missions and responsibilities took precedence over the

parochial interests of the services, in practice loyalties remained strongly with the services from which officers came

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

6
and to which they would shortly return. Proposals articulated

by the service chiefs tended to come primarily from their own

staffs rather than from members of the Joint Staff, with understandable emphasis on service needs and favored positions. Additionally, the fact that the JCS had to make do with

officers “who remain in the Pentagon barely long enough to

find the cafeteria,” and for whom repeat tours of duty were

rare, meant that the ability of the joint-service organization to

develop the patterns of practices and understandings that

constitute organizational memory was severely impeded. 12 In

the absence of such memory, team formation was difficult,

and it was hard to bring newcomers up to speed regarding the

complex issues with which the JCS had to deal. In addition,

just when personnel had finally received sufficient exposure to

begin to understand, articulate, and advance joint-service

concerns, they were rotated out of Joint Staff assignments.

Perhaps most important, budgetary control remained with the

military departments. This meant that these departments pursued their own political and lobbying agendas with respect to

the Congress, from whom they won budgetary approval, and,

more generally, with the American public. The resulting structure inevitably was rife with fractiousness, competition, and

rivalries that impeded joint-service planning and operations.1 3

The National Security Act and its amendments, later characterized by President Eisenhower as “prescribing controversy

by law,” brought about no genuine unification of forces and

did little to advance the cause of greater centralization in

defense decision making. 1 4

The creation of a series of new organizational entities within

the DOD, with their own considerable communications needs,

also worked to complicate the picture during the 1950s. Moreover, the communications demands of these actors, perhaps

most notably the Strategic Air Command (SAC), were influ -

enced, and continually modified, by the development of a host

of new communications technologies. Advances in such areas

as ionoscatter and troposcatter transmission techniques, issu -

ing directly from the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment

(SAGE), the Air Force’s massive air defense effort, had a profound influence on the technologically possible and, by extension, on what was deemed desirable. Such new techniques as

CENTRALIZING THE DEFENSE ESTABLISHMENT

7
pulse code modulation—along with advances in automatic

message switching, storage, and retrieval—offered great promise not only for automating the existing communications networks then being developed by the services but also for im -

proving the linkages between them. Many of these advances

were conjured into being by new and increasingly sophisticated weapons systems whose use required ever-more-rapid

access to accurate weather data, air traffic control information, logistics, and other types of support information. 1 5

While there is little doubt that the services were thinking

globally (at least in their own terms) as they developed their

communications systems, the doctrine of dedicated communications they embraced worked to constrain a truly global capability. Since the services were the ones responsible for developing new communications technologies, the not-sosurprising result was a series of systems that were emphatically service specific. (The Army, for example, operated a large

number of dedicated, special purpose, point-to-point commu -

nications systems, each with its own terminals and manual

cryptographic equipment.) Most of these were incompatible with

the others, meaning that however good they might be individually, in the aggregate they constituted no coherent system

at all. While it was clearly necessary to do something about

this communications “straight jacket,” efforts to modernize

and automate things were resisted, sometimes quite fiercely,

by those with a stake in the status quo.1 6 If you change the

system, after all, the comfortable bureaucratic world would

rapidly devolve toward chaos; careers would be disrupted;

authority would slip away. Despite the ever-mounting need,

the joint-service philosophy necessary for a comprehensive

“systems” approach had yet to take hold. The systems that

were developed during the 1950s tended to be vertical, dedicated systems going straight to the top and unable to connect

users across different organizational structures. They were

ever justified as necessary for the services’ unique functions. 1 7

Given the prevailing nature of US strategic doctrine—which

emphasized deterrence and, in case of a nuclear attack, the

ability to launch a devastating reflex counterstrike—these

dedicated systems represented no serious national security

shortfall. The doctrine of massive retaliation imposed, first,

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

8
the need for a large nuclear force, and SAC bombers loaded

with high-yield nuclear weapons met this need. Second, there

was also a need for a sensor system capable of providing early

warning of attacks against the United States. A whole array of

new warning systems was put into place during these years.

These systems included SAGE and such components as the

distant early warning line (DEWLINE) of radars, the Ballistic

Missile Early Warning System, the undersea Sound Surveillance System, and others. Third and last, all of this hardware

called for a centralized command and control structure that

would permit the orders of the National Command Authorities

(NCA) to be received without a hitch. 18 But under the terms of

massive retaliation, the pressures for coordinating efforts were

not overwhelming. The services pursued their own preferred

ways of contributing to the nation’s defense, and there was

little reason to fault their separate and generally uncoordinated development of technologies. As a result, an entire generation of complete weapons and the command and control

systems appropriate to them were developed during this era,

systems which were in almost all important respects entirely

independent of one another. 19 In other words, the nature of

military doctrine, and by extension the organizations responsible

for implementing it, had profound implications for the types of

t echnologies that were conceived and developed during this era.

Yet by no means was it all an issue of technology push, of

organization driving technology. For a number of technological

changes occurred during this period, many of them involving

the strategic nuclear forces, that in turn would have profound

implications for change. Such advances as the hardening of

land-based missile silos and the later move toward the deployment of a ballistic missile submarine force would soon lead to

a reconsideration of American defense strategy. The new strategic doctrine that began to emerge stressed America’s ability

to react appropriately to the unique exigencies of a broad

range of crises—up to and including a Soviet nuclear first

strike. As this new brand of strategic thinking began to take

hold within the DOD, perceptions of military requirements

began to be altered in fundamental ways. The new thinking,

which later would acquire the appellation flexible response, at

first implicitly and later explicitly created the demand for a

CENTRALIZING THE DEFENSE ESTABLISHMENT

9
new generation of weapons more appropriate to the threat

that was seen to be emerging. The majority of these technolo -

gies would emphasize centralized command and control of US

forces to a degree unknown previously, necessitating in turn

more sophisticated systems that would permit that control to

take place. 2 0

Eisenhower’s belief that the military departments were the

primary obstacle to more effective, centralized defense management was the driving force behind his administration-long

effort to reform the Department of Defense. (Shortly after taking office, he moved to centralize decision-making authority by

enlarging the Joint Staff, augmenting the JCS chairman’s in -

fluence by giving him the power to control appointments to

the Joint Staff, and substantially expanding the Office of the

Secretary of Defense.)2 1 His major effort at reform came toward

the end of his administration, in April 1958, when he forwarded to Congress a far-reaching proposal described as essential if America were to meet its two “overriding tasks” of

ensuring US security through military strength and of working

toward a genuine world peace. 22 The proposal began by noting

how previous efforts to centralize defense functions had produced predictions of disaster and prompted vigorous opposition. Acknowledging that the desire to protect traditional concepts and prerogatives was sincere and well meaning,

Eisenhower then quickly pointed out that it had undercut a

fully effective defense. He then issued a resounding call for

change: “We must cling no longer to statutory barriers that

weaken executive action and civilian authority. We must free

ourselves of emotional attachments to service systems of an

era that is no more.”2 3

Given such a prolegomenon, it was hardly surprising that

centralization and the unity it was presumed to ensure were

basic to the proposal’s two main provisions. The first of these

involved giving the joint chiefs operational planning authority

over US military forces worldwide. These forces would henceforth be organized into “truly unified commands” instead of

the joint-service commands then in place. The unified commands would include personnel from each of the military

services coordinated under the operational control of a general

or flag-rank officer who would be designated its commander in

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

10
chief (CINC). Seven such commands were to be established

within the DOD, to which all military forces would be assigned. They would be under the auspices of the JCS and

independent of the military departments. Their missions would

be oriented toward a particular geographic area—the Atlantic,

for example, or the Pacific, or Europe. The age of separate

ground, sea, and air warfare was gone forever, Eisenhower

argued, and what was required was a new conceptual outlook—a

whole new philosophy—that took into account the growing

emphasis on nuclear weapons and other complex technolo -

gies, the fact that these were based at a relatively few fixed

sites, and the overarching emphasis on a more static (read

strategic ) version of warfare this implied. Given rapidly improving communications technologies, the time had come, he

said, to unify the military services so that during periods of

crisis they could function cohesively, as a unified command,

responsive to centralized direction. Activities and responsibilities unique to the individual services would, of course, continue, he said, but these would be of secondary rather than

primary concern, “the branches, not the central trunk of the

national security tree.”2 4 It was an ordering of authority and

priorities that most emphatically did not fall under the current

defense organization. It was a resounding call for centralization.

The second proposal involved further enhancing the authority of the secretary of defense, enabling the secretary to function as a fully effective agent of the commander in chief. This

clarification of the secretary’s role, as the president described

it, involved creating a number of several new positions within

the DOD and repealing all statutes giving responsibility for

military operations to anyone other than the secretary. It

would eliminate existing restrictions on the secretary with respect to the transfer, reassignment, abolition, or consolidation

of functions within the DOD. It included giving the secretary a

direct voice in appointing, assigning, and removing officers in

the top two military ranks; the logic being that only those

officers who had demonstrated the ability to deal with national

security issues objectively—that is, without undue service

partisanship—would have their promotions favorably reviewed. Finally and perhaps most importantly, the proposal

called for giving the secretary full management authority for

CENTRALIZING THE DEFENSE ESTABLISHMENT

11
directing budgetary expenditures both among and within the

military departments. While the secretary already had the

authority to place restrictions on the use of funds by the

military departments, this amounted in practice to little more

than a limited veto power over decisions already made by the

services, who actually determined how the funds were to be

spent. The president argued that implementing these changes

would go far toward unshackling the secretary from legal restrictions derived from the earlier, nonnuclear era. 2 5

Opposition to the president’s bill was vigorous and immediate. Key members of the Congress asserted that it would destroy the identity of America’s armed forces, constitute a complete surrender by Congress of its power over the purse, and

concentrate far greater power in the hands of a single individ -

ual (the secretary of defense) than was prudent. Carl Vinson of

Georgia, the powerful chairman of the House Armed Services

Committee, was perhaps the most vituperative. As he

sketched out the gloomy scenario of Eisenhower’s plan, Vin -

son noticed that it would turn the traditionally proud and

autonomous military departments into little more than supply

and service organizations for the new unified and specified

commands and make them mere “branch offices” of the secretary of defense. The service secretaries, relieved of responsibility for military operations, would become mere figureheads

who would be bypassed in important decision making. Vinson

ominously warned of the likely emergence of a centralized,

top-heavy defense department decision-making structure in

which various assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries would make unilateral decisions and impose them

upon the military departments without adequate consultation

within the military chain of command. Far from a coherent

management structure, he warned, Eisenhower’s proposals

portended a netherworld of blurred decision making where

responsibility was diffuse and lines of accountability were

weak. He hinted darkly that one or more of the services might

even be abolished altogether.2 6

Vinson and his Armed Services Committee colleagues

drafted several key changes to the reorganization bill explicitly

intended to counter its centralizing tendencies. These in -

cluded a provision that while the services would operate under

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

12
the authority of the secretary of defense, control would continue to be exercised through the secretaries of the military

departments. Another change would limit the authority of the

secretary of defense to transfer, merge, or abolish important

service functions if a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ob -

jected. Finally, language was introduced to make explicit the

right of the individual services to go to Congress on their own

initiative to make recommendations or to register complaints.

The revised bill, approved unanimously by the 37 members of

the House Armed Services Committee, was sent to the White

House for review, where the president promptly denounced it

as a “bad concept, bad practice, bad influence with the Pentagon.”2 7 Such vitriolic language, coupled with an unyielding

insistence that the offending changes be expunged from the

bill, quickly put the president on a collision course with the

Democratic-controlled Congress. The Defense Reorganization

Act of 1958 had become wholly partisan, an open political

test, and the stage was set for a showdown in the House of

Representatives.

“In the years that I have served in this body,” Carl Vinson

intoned before a packed House chamber on 12 June, “I have

witnessed many changes in the affairs of our government. But

I never thought that the day would come when the duly

elected representatives of the people would be asked to appropriate $40 billion to one man and grant him the sole power of

determining its expenditure. I never thought that the representatives of the people would be asked to maintain four military services and then surrender to a single man, not elected

by the people, the integrity and the justification for the existence of such military services. . . . But that day has come and

that is the issue which squarely faces this body today.” Vinson

opened debate by posing to his colleagues a stark, dichotomous choice: “By your vote you will either wash your hands of

your responsibility and abjectly surrender; or you will insist

that you have not only the right but the responsibility and

duty to have a voice in the defense of this Nation.”2 8

Even in a legislative body known for its dramaturgic posturing and rhetorical flourishes, this was heady stuff, and

enough of his colleagues ultimately agreed with Vinson to

allow the forces of decentralization to carry the field. The

CENTRALIZING THE DEFENSE ESTABLISHMENT

13
Armed Services Committee’s amendments to the defense reorganization bill would stay. As this reality became clear, Republicans tried to cut their losses by suggesting the amendments made no real difference anyway; they were merely

refinements in language and of no particular consequence.

Republicans then quickly threw their support behind the bill,

which passed overwhelmingly in both the House and the Senate. Eisenhower signed the bill on 4 August 1958, passing into

law a measure he described as “good, but not good enough.”2 9

As with earlier attempts at reform, the 1958 defense reorganization bill represented an uneasy compromise between

the forces of centralization and decentralization. The expanded role of the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of

Staff, coupled with the enactment into law of the unified and

specified command structure, established, almost by definition, a requirement for a command and control system capable of meeting the needs of centralized decision makers in

Washington. In most important respects, however, the military departments remained independent entities with consid -

erable bureaucratic power. Planning and force structure remained predicated on unilateral service views of priorities and

on how a future war might be fought. Views on training,

equipping, and supporting forces logically followed, not infrequently at the expense of joint missions and overall combat

capability. Each service retained separate responsibility for its

own budget and continued to compete vigorously to increase

its share of total defense dollars.3 0 Under such conditions, any

effort to create a command and control system truly responsive to centralized control appeared almost certain to be resisted by the services or subordinated to their unique, mission-specific needs.3 1

This was disconcerting to many both inside and outside the

Pentagon, since the existing system of communications appeared inadequate to the requirements of modern warfare and

the evolving demands of strategic doctrine. Even though the

communications systems of the services were in the broadest

of senses quite similar and often worked quite well, the fact

that the Army’s Strategic Communications System, the Naval

Communications System, and the Air Force’s Aerospace Communications complex had independently evolved to meet those

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

14
services’ unique mission requirements made them deficient in

several key respects. Since research and development efforts

were carried out unilaterally by the services, the result was

that in many parts of the world there was a duplication of

function in the form of a number of separate, essentially identical facilities. Some of these were located literally right next

door to one another, where one station could as easily have

served all. Such unnecessary redundancy was rightly viewed

as a driving force behind escalating costs.

A related area of concern was the lack of interoperability

between the services’ separate communications systems. Because of their independent evolution, the equipment and procedures employed by the services differed, often considerably

so. The result was incompatibilities in such key areas as the

modulation systems, frequencies, and message formats employed. 32 Essentially a communications Tower of Babel, the

overall “system” produced by this multiplicity of lower level

systems appeared to critics to represent considerably less

than the sum of its individual parts. There was also a problem

of reliability, especially during crises or other conditions of

system perturbation and stress. Although much of the time

the dedicated circuits of the services’ various communications

systems were underutilized, they had a tendency to become

overloaded during peak usage, when they were unable to handle the increased volume of message traffic. Should something

interrupt, damage, or destroy a circuit in a dedicated point-topoint system, there was little possibility for alternative routing

of messages; communications between the two points would

simply be terminated. Such a network of inflexible, load-sensitive

circuits obviously offered little hope for maintaining communications connectivity during major system outages or during

periods of degradation that would surely accompany general

nuclear war.3 3 This separate approach also meant that leasing

services from commercial carriers was undertaken in a fragmented manner, disallowing the cost efficiencies of scale that

otherwise could be realized. For those taking a broader,

d efensewide view, things appeared not far short of an organizational disaster.

Many of these problems were identified by an Air Research

and Development Command study group, a technical panel of

CENTRALIZING THE DEFENSE ESTABLISHMENT

15
experts assembled at the end of the 1950s to study ways to

integrate the separate communications systems then being

developed within the DOD. Not surprisingly, the group’s vision

of the future was technical in orientation, calling for a new

computer-based, fully automated command and control system that could serve a large number of users under a wide

range of conditions.3 4 But with the organizational as well as

technological shortcomings of the extant system increasingly

apparent, and with a growing level of dissatisfaction with the

existing state of affairs both inside and outside of the Pentagon, the need for some form of system consolidation under

centralized managerial control also appeared manifest.

Efforts to create precisely such a structure would begin in

earnest during the coming decade. Yet, even as the movement

toward command and control centralization got under way, it

was clear that it faced major challenges. One of these concerned the fact that there was no precedent, no available

model on which the centralizing effort could be based. 3 5 As

such, efforts necessarily would have to proceed in ad hoc

fashion, an approach that would invariably result in poor decisions and errors. Another challenge lay in the fact that centralization implied a loss of authority for some affected

subunits and groups, with corresponding restrictions on their

ability to carry out their missions as they saw fit. With resources and thus mission effectiveness at stake, centralization

could reasonably be expected to be a source of consternation,

tensions, and resistance.

As the decade of the 1960s dawned, the dynamic tension

between the forces of centralization and decentralization remained

unresolved. Despite an ever-increasing technical capability for

rapid global communications, the services—comfortable with

their traditional missions, conservative and resistant to

change—tended still toward ways of doing business that had

proven efficacious in the past. In other words, it was still very

much a question whether the best way to proceed was to take

a top-down approach, proceed from the bottom up, or to seek

some prudent combination of the two.3 6 It would fall to Eisenhower’s defense secretary, Thomas S. Gates, and to his Ken nedy

administration successor, Robert S. McNamara, to answer

that question.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

16
Notes

1. Geoffrey Cheadle, “Computerized Combat Communications: ‘Message

Handling Will Never Be the Same,’” Armed Forces Journal 108 (19 October

1970): 20.

2. Solis Horwitz, “National Communications for the Nuclear Age,” Signal

18 (July 1964): 35.

3. Cheadle, 20.

4. S. Rearden, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: The

Formative Years, 1947–50 , vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Historical Office, Office

of the Secretary of Defense, 1984), 24.

5. Dracos Burke, “SAC: The ‘Specified’ Command,” Air Force JAG Law

Review 10, no. 1 (January–February 1968): 4.

6. Vincent Davis, “Organization and Management,” in American Defense

Annual 1987–1988, ed. Joseph Kruzel, (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books,

1987), 179.

7. Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For The Common Defense: A

Military History of the United States of America (New York: Free Press, 1984),

480.

8. “Text of President Eisenhower’s Message on Reorganization of Defense

Department,” New York Times , 4 April 1958, 6.

9. Rearden, 54.

10. House, Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1958, 85t h

Cong., 2d sess., 1958, H.R. 1765 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing

Office [hereinafter cited as GPO], 22 May 1958), 27–28.

11. Millett and Maslowski, 480.

12. John M. Collins, U.S. Defense Planning: A Critique (Boulder, Colo.:

Westview Press, 1982), 58–59.

13. Ibid., 59–60.

14. “Text of President Eisenhower’s Message,” 6.

15. Albert Mark, “AUTOVON: Inception to Implementation,” Signal 2 0

(March 1966): 10.

16. Richard J. Meyer, “Army Support of the AUTOVON/AUTODIN

System,” Signal 19 (December 1964): 7.

17. George Weiss, “Restraining the Data Monster: The Next Step in C3,”

Armed Forces Journal 108 (5 July 1971): 29.

18. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 184.

19. “Electronics in Military Decision Making,” INTERAVIA 19 (June

1964): 850.

20. J. P. McConnell, “Command and Control,” Sperryscope 17, no. 2

(third quarter 1965): 1.

21. Millett and Maslowski, 522.

22. Jack Raymond, “Eisenhower Asks Drastic Revision of Defense

Set-Up,” New York Times, 4 April 1958, 1.

23. “Text of President Eisenhower’s Message,” 6.

24. Ibid.

CENTRALIZING THE DEFENSE ESTABLISHMENT

17
25. Ibid.

26. House, Congressional Record , 85t h Cong., 2d sess., vol. 104, pt. 8,

12 June 1958, H. R. 1765, 10891.

27. Russell Baker, “President Scores Congress Version of Pentagon

Plan,” New York Times , 29 May 1958, 1–8.

28. Congressional Record , 10894.

29. Russell Baker, “House Approves Bill on Pentagon; President Loses,”

New York Times, 13 June 1958, 1.

30. Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much Is Enough?

Shaping the Defense Program 1961–1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971),

10–11.

31. Lawrence E. Adams, “The Evolving Role of C3 in Crisis

Management,” Signal 30 (August 1976): 60.

32. House Committee on Armed Services, Armed Services Investigating

Subcommittee, Review of Department of Defense Worldwide

Communications, Phase I, 92d Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 10

May 1971), 18.

33. Albert Mark, “AUTOVON: Inception to Implementation,” Signal,

March 1966, 10.

34. I. B. Holley Jr., “Command, Control and Technology,” Defense

Analysis 4, no. 3 (1988): 276.

35. Brooke Nihart, “The Ungarbled Future: DCA,” Armed Forces Journal

107 (9 May 1970): 20.

36. Kenneth Allard, “History, Technology, and the Structure of

Command,” Military Review 61 (November 1981): 6.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

18
Chapter 2

Defense Communications Agency

and System

On 12 May 1960 Defense Secretary Thomas S. Gates put

defense communications under centralized management con -

trol. He issued Department of Defense Directive (DODD)

4600.2, which directed that all long-distance, point-to-point,

government-owned and -leased defense communications services be merged into a single, common-user Defense Communications System (DCS). 1

 In DODD 5105.19, issued simultaneously, Gates created a new agency—the Defense

Communications Agency (DCA)—to manage the new system, in

the process turning down an Army bid to become the Defense

Department’s single manager for communications. As the directive described it, DCA’s purpose was to ensure that the new

system would be “so planned, engineered, established, im -

proved, and operated as to effectively, efficiently and economically meet the long-haul, point-to-point telecommunications

requirements” of the Department of Defense. 2

Gates’s authority to establish the new DCA and the DCS

derived from the National Security Act of 1947, as amended

under the 1958 defense reorganization. As Gates and his boss

in the White House saw it, consolidating relevant communications facilities, personnel, and technologies into a single

worldwide complex under centralized management would go

far toward eliminating duplicate facilities, reducing manpower

requirements, and realizing significant reductions in cost

through economics of scale. In this spirit of hope the DCA and

DCS were conceived, intended as centralizing forces that

would couple more tightly the disparate and often contradictory communications elements and efforts of the military departments—creating in the process a more effective system for

the command and control of American military forces around

the globe. Given the vastness and complexity of the DOD, the

ambitiousness of this arrangement can scarcely be overstated.

As with many other major initiatives, an air of urgency

surrounded this creation. An announcement accompanying

19
Gates’s release of his two directives indicated that DCA would

assume its functions on a phased-in schedule over the following 10 months, a highly abbreviated period for setting up a fully

elaborated defensewide communications system. Not by coincidence, this arrangement allowed just sufficient time to have

the sys tem in place before a new administration arrived in

Washington the following January. Promoting this sort of dispatch within the Pentagon bureaucracy would require serious

bureaucratic clout. Directive 5105.19 provided this clout by

specifying that the DCA director would be a military officer of

flag or general rank directly responsible to the secretary of

defense by way of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 3 Keeping the bu -

reaucratic feet to the fire, the implementation schedule set

forth in the directive called for the appointment of the first

DCA director to take place within a month, a requirement that

was met when RADM William D. Irvin was named to the post

on 7 June 1960.

Irvin had his work cut out for him. According to the implementation timetable, he was to submit an organizational staffing plan to the secretary within a month. Working closely with

members of J-6 of the Joint Staff (communications-electronics), Irvin met this target date, and his plan called for a headquarters organization consisting of some two hundred military

and civilian personnel. Of these, military staffers would outnumber their civilian counterparts by a ratio of three to one, a

proportion, according to Irvin, deliberately contrived to ensure

that military perspectives would predominate within the new

organization. Gates approved the staffing plan on 21 July, and

the new agency was given office space in the Naval Services

Center in Arlington, Virginia, the site of the old Radio Ar -

lington. Irvin dryly remarked that this facility had not been

“platinum plated” in anticipation of his arrival. 4

Although the Defense Communications Agency was in -

tended to be the single management focus for the Defense

Communications System, a major problem was that nobody

yet knew just what that system would include. One of DCA’s

first tasks, then, was to prepare for Gates’s approval a planning document identifying DCS’s constituent elements. In response, some 79 major relay stations scattered around the

globe were designated as system assets, in addition to a variTHE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

20
ety of radio, landline, and undersea cable communications

circuits. At that time they represented a total plant investment

of $2 billion. DCA assigned responsibility for these elements to

the appropriate military service or defense agency. Secretary

Gates approved the DCA plan in early 1961, just before the

arrival of the new Kennedy administration. According to the

implementation schedule, the Defense Communications System would be set up by 7 March. With the organizational

wheels turning, that target date was met. In addition, on 6

March 1961, the Defense National Communications Control

Center became operational, initiating limited DCA control over

the newly identified assets of the DCS.5 The era of defense

common-user communications systems had begun.

In the Defense Communications Agency and the system it

managed, the compromise between the forces of tradition and

change represented by the 1958 reorganization bill found its

uneasy expression. The creation of the DCA was a milestone

in the effort to centralize authority within the Office of the

Secretary of Defense (OSD). Consider that DCA’s charter gave

the agency’s director operational direction over the DCS,

which was defined as the responsibility for assigning tasks to

the system’s operating elements, establishing a set of standards, practices, methods, and procedures for the performance

and operation of those tasks, and conducting ongoing analy -

ses of system performance. The director would exercise this

authority not through a specific military service, but through

the JCS under the authority of the secretary. This meant that,

for the first time, the chiefs were given day-to-day operations

responsibility, a major departure from the earlier notion that

they should serve solely as a planning and consultative body.

DCA’s charter additionally specified that the director would

exercise managerial control over those communication assets

of the military services, the unified and specified commands,

and various defense agencies that directly supported the Defense Communications System. Managerial control was defined as the authority to directly supervise, coordinate, and

review those organizational activities and subunits that were

relevant to DCS operations, including such things as engineering and programming, prescribing technical standards

and procedures, planning, and research and development.

DEFENSE COMMUNICATIONS AGENCY

21
Highlighting these points several years later, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara remarked how DCA’s goal in developing the DCS had been to achieve a network that makes use

of all available circuitry for meeting the priority needs of users. To create such a capability, he said, required the consolidation of existing manually switched communications resources, while moving toward their replacement by a

high-speed, automatically switched network. “Only by expeditious pursuit of this goal will it be possible to satisfy the

nation’s requirements for capacity, reliability, security and

survivability of communications at a cost we can afford,” he

concluded. 6

On the surface McNamara’s statement appeared to be a

strikingly broad mandate for centralization and change, and

yet from the very outset, it was clear that Gates’s directives

were not intended to establish a new communications network

separate from those of the services, but rather to provide for

the more effective coordination of existing service assets under

the overall direction of the DCA. Consequently, a number of

caveats were built into DCA’s organizational authority that

would severely circumscribe its ability to exercise control over

the system it had been created to manage. Consider, as the

military services promptly did, that the “operational direction”

and “managerial control” specified in DCA’s charter actually

constituted a general coordinating role in the development of

the Defense Communications System. Unfortunately for the

centralizers’ ambitious communications designs, such a coordinating function was conspicuously lacking in the bureau -

cratic muscle necessary for the new agency to enact its

agenda and enforce its will over the opposition of other major

actors. The services, jealously guarding their independent

communications assets as fundamental to the performance of

their military missions, saw the new agency and unified system as inimical to those missions. 7

 They voiced their serious

reservations, and, in various ways were able to erect bureau -

cratic impediments to limit Gates’s mandate.

The first impediment involved the types of communications

and associated facilities to be included under DCA’s administrative purview. To overcome the objections of the services, in

particular the Navy, to centralize functions which had forTHE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

22
merly been their exclusive province and to build a coalition

supportive of the new DCS and its managing agency, Gates

had found it necessary to exclude a number of key communications elements from his unification order. Excluded for this

reason were post, base, and local area communication systems. Also excluded were tactical communications systems

operated by field commanders, including the Navy’s fleet

broadcasts and ship-to-shore circuits, Air Force ground-to-air

and air-to-air communications, and certain types of Army tactical communications. 8 Thus DCA’s “operational direction” and

“management control” did not preclude the services from

planning for, even operating, their own individual communications systems. By design, then, the Defense Communications

System was not intended to include all DOD communications

assets. But it was by the services’ design, not DCA’s.

Another impediment involved existing organizational structures within the services relating to communications that were

almost completely unaffected by the arrival of the new Defense

Communications System and Defense Communications

Agency. Since the services continued to exercise complete control over those communications assets that had not been specifically designated as part of the DCS, their communications

branches, developed to meet their specific mission requirements, remained essentially intact. 9 Thus, when DCA was established, no service communications divisions or functions

were disbanded. The reason for this apparent organizational

lunacy was again bureaucratic pragmatism, an effort by Gates

to minimize the services’ resistance to the establishment of

the new system and agency. Unfortunately, this arrangement

also contributed greatly to a condition of perpetual tension

between DCA and the communications branches of the services, with the services almost always holding the superior

position.

DCA’s authority was additionally circumscribed by a provision in its charter explicitly stating that the secretaries of the

military departments would remain responsible for the facilities and resources that related to or supported the Defense

Communications System.1 0 DCA’s “direction” of operating elements thus did not extend even to the staffing or command of

actual DCS facilities, since the services retained responsibility

DEFENSE COMMUNICATIONS AGENCY

23
for training and assigning personnel who manned the facilities. They supplied and maintained those facilities, and they

were responsible for the operational activities necessary to

provide communications.

The services also were responsible for engineering, procuring, and other activities necessary for expanding and improving the DCS, with DCA merely to provide supervision, coordination, and review. 1 1 Not only were no personnel eliminated

under these arrangements, but the services soon found it necessary to expand, establishing entirely new organizational entities to coordinate their functions with DCA. Accordingly,

each military department promptly organized a separate communications command in the continental United States, with

field elements located in each commander in chief’s geographical area of responsibility—the Atlantic, Pacific, European, and

so on. Headed by a flag or general officer, each communications command reported through the chief of the service to the

secretary of the department. DCA’s “operational direction” was

thus severely limited. Not officially a part of the chain of command, it had little true authority over the personnel and facilities that made up the system.1 2

Perhaps the most important way in which DCA was limited

was in its ability to make and enforce budgetary decisions. As

in other areas, it was the services that furnished the funds to

secure personnel and procure equipment. In fact, the services

retained such complete financial control that it was possible

for funds programmed for the Defense Communications System to be reprogrammed unilaterally by one of the military

services without approval from DCA. 1 3

For these reasons, the Defense Communications Agency’s

arrival on the scene by no means represented the military

departments’ capitulation to the juggernaut of centralization.

Responsible for assigning and training personnel, operating

facilities, and making major budgetary decisions, the services

continued to exercise almost complete control over DOD communications assets. “We actually do not operate the commu -

nications which comprise the Defense Communications System,” DCA director Richard P. Klocko remarked several years

later. “There are three Military Department Operating Commands that actually run the communications. They have the

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

24
people who are sitting at the consoles and the communications instruments throughout the entire system. Our role is in

the management, the operational direction and control, the

planning for the communications systems, getting new systems in, and then monitoring the operation of the Defense

Communications System after it is in place.”1 4 The DCS was

thus essentially a collection of pieces made available by the

military departments, with considerable restrictions and under some duress, over which DCA could exert little in the way

of true authority. 1 5 The system’s performance, and perceived

effectiveness, would follow directly from this central organiza -

tional reality.

The services’ resistance to the centralization of authority

represented by the DCA and DSC was abetted by a Congress

that for both practical and ideological reasons viewed any

centralizing effort with considerable skepticism. On the practical side, the belief was that increasing centralization in DOD

decision making would reduce efficiency and produce an indecisive, “no decision” attitude conducive to mediocrity among

all personnel except for a select few decision makers at the

very top. Doubts were also expressed that the top-heavy, centralized defense agencies could be made sufficiently flexible

and responsive to function under conditions of stress, something that could seriously endanger America’s national secu -

rity during crises. 1 6 Other congressmen expounded the ideological thesis that Carl Vinson had articulated at the time of

the 1958 defense reorganization. He believed the trend toward

centralization represented by the recent rise of DCA and other

defense agencies laid the groundwork for a diminution of the

role of the military departments, even their possible dissolu -

tion, and the ultimate adoption of a single, monolithic “defense concept.” It was a condition they had tried repeatedly in

the past to prevent, and presumably could be counted on to

resist in the years to come.

In fact, congressional concerns over centralizing authority

in the OSD ran so high that in March 1962, Vinson, still

House Armed Services Committee chair, appointed a special

subcommittee to investigate a number of defense agencies

that had been created in the recent past, including DCA. The

subcommittee’s report, released in August 1962, identified as

DEFENSE COMMUNICATIONS AGENCY

25
its overarching concern the creation of a vast centralized bu -

reaucracy within the OSD, one rapidly devolving beyond

proper control by the Congress. To regain control, the subcommittee recommended that congressional review be mandatory both for expanding existing agencies and establishing

new ones. So that there would be no question about where

real authority resided, the subcommittee recommended

amending the National Security Act once again so that no

activities or functions then being performed by the military

departments could be transferred, consolidated, or assigned to

any defense agency without specific congressional approval.1 7

Although these recommendations never were formally enacted

into law, the informal consequence of such powerful opposition was a congressional predisposition to withhold from

agencies such as DCA the level of authority necessary to perform their functions adequately.

Nonetheless, the responsibilities of DCA were substantial.

Key among these was the establishment of three commonuser, defensewide networks that would be known as AUTOVON (Automatic Voice Network), AUTODIN (Automatic Digital

Network), and AUTOSEVOCOM (Automatic Secure Voice Communications Network). For each, DCA sought to determine its

overall system configuration and prepare the technical specifications necessary for the equipment for switching centers,

interconnecting transmission media, and subscriber terminals. DCA was responsible for monitoring the procurements

as they took place, developing test and acceptance criteria,

and performing the testing. It was also responsible for technical management of fabrication, installation, and checkout.1 8

Equally important, with the arrival of the space age, DCA

would be designated as the “strong focal point” for develop -

ment, integration, and op eration of the space and ground ele -

ments of a number of satellite-based communications initia -

tives. The most important of these would be DSCS

(pronounced “discus”), the DCA-managed Defense Satellite

Communications System.19 With these new responsibilities,

the influence wielded by DCA was, in theory at least, vast. It

extended into the territory of the unified and specified commands, the military departments, and numerous other defense agencies. Its responsibilities increasing, DCA saw a parTHE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

26
allel increase in the size of the staff at its headquarters. Less

than two years after Admiral Irvin and his two hundred staffers moved into their Arlington facility, they noted that the size

of the DCA staff had nearly tripled.2 0

To successfully exploit the diverse group of communications

assets now subsumed beneath the expanding umbrella of the

Defense Communications System, DCA planning documents

described an operational control hierarchy called the DCS Op -

erations Control Complex. Its design contained three distinct

levels of reporting responsibilities: national, regional, and

area. The first and most important of these, called the Na -

tional Defense Communications Control Center (NDCCC), was

dedicated in early 1961 by Admiral Irvin. This facility would

receive status reports on circuit readiness, message traffic

backlogs, and other problems from DCS’s various operating

elements. Data from the status reports would be entered into

the center’s Philco 2000 computer, where they would update

the database and automatically display the current status of

system elements as good, marginal, or poor. When problems

arose, NDCCC supervisory personnel could send instructions

either by telephone or teletype to the relevant facilities to initiate corrective actions. Operated on an around-the-clock basis

by DCA personnel, the NDCCC and its automatic data processing (ADP) equipment would keep the Defense Communications System up and running to the maximum extent possible. 2 1 Irvin and others had argued strongly for locating the

NDCCC in a survivable, hardened facility, but primarily for

reasons of cost, the decision was made to collocate the center

with DCA headquarters near Washington.

The second level of the DCA Operations Control Complex

involved three major geographic areas of operations: Europe,

the Pacific, and the continental United States. Within these

three general areas, four Defense Area Communications Control Centers (DACCC) were established to decentralize major

spheres of communications operations to important geographic areas of the world. The European Area Center, initially

located in Paris, was moved to Vaihingen, West Germany,

near Stuttgart, following France’s withdrawal from the North

Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) command structure. In

the vast Pacific area, there were to be two DACCCs. The first,

DEFENSE COMMUNICATIONS AGENCY

27
called the Pacific Center, was located at the headquarters of

the commander in chief of Pacific forces on the Hawaiian

island of Oahu. The second, the Alaskan Area Center, was

based at Elmendorf Air Force Base (AFB) in Anchorage. In

addition, an area center for the continental United States was

established at North American Air Defense Command headquarters in Colorado. Provided with substantial ADP capabilities, the centers were responsible for assessing the status of

circuits and message flow within their geographic areas of

responsibility, restoring circuitry during outages, and reallo -

cating and redirecting the flow of message traffic to reduce

backlogs. 2 2

Finally, six Defense Regional Communications Control Centers (DRCCC) were established, decentralizing communications control even further to more specific geographic regions

of concern worldwide. 23 To coordinate all of this, DCA designed

a formal system called 55-1 for reporting the status of DCS

elements and for making management reports. This system

included several basic types of reports, distinguished primarily by the speed with which they were delivered; near-real-time

reports, periodic reports made every four hours, and end-ofshift reports intended to provide data for subsequent computer analysis of DCS performance. Depending upon the nature of the problem, certain types of reports might be made by

way of telephone using AUTOVON or AUTOSEVOCOM, each of

which DCA was in the process of implementing. AUTOVON

was, in effect, the Defense Department’s own telephone system, a vast proprietary communications network serving most

major military installations in the continental United States

and abroad. It consisted of many elements, including the circuits over which messages travel, automatic switching centers

for routing those messages, a primary control facility serving

as the network’s focal point of control, and the system’s subscribers and the equipment they used. AUTOSEVOCOM, a

DCA-managed common-user secure voice system that operates over AUTOVON circuits, is perhaps more properly viewed

as a secure subsystem of AUTOVON than as an separate network in its own right. Far smaller than its parent network in

its number of subscribers, AUTOSEVOCOM is “larger” in the

sense that users are not restricted to the DOD, including, for

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

28
example, the White House, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),

State Department, and a range of defense agencies and offices.

Other reports and database file updates were designed to be

exchanged automatically by way of AUTODIN, DCA’s Automatic

Digital Network, which was also in the process of being imple -

mented.2 4 Like AUTOVON, its sister network, AUTODIN con -

sisted of a number of major system elements, including

switching centers, transmission trunks connecting the

switches, access lines leading into those trunks, and at the

very end, individual subscriber terminals. From its inception

intended as a central element of the Defense Communications

System, AUTODIN sought to make available to DOD and a

host of other government users fully automatic, high-speed,

high-volume, secure data, and teletypewriter (record message)

service.

All in all, it appears a classic example of rational bureau -

cratic design, involving the centralization of policy-making

authority and strategic planning, plus the decentralization of

operational authority, where operational direction and prob -

lem solving are accomplished at the lowest possible level of

the hierarchy. 25 Within DCS, if there was a problem at a single

switch, tech control, or other facility that did not impact on

the rest of the system, problem solving would take place

through the channels of the operating and maintenance

agency involved, usually one of the military services. But if the

problem implicated other system elements, the regional centers would be brought in. In case of circuit outages or other

conditions of system degradation, corrective actions would

normally be initiated at that organizational level, generally

involving one or two of the stations providing the circuit. Only

those message-routing problems that could not be resolved at

the regional level or ones that possessed some special interest

would be passed up the chain of command to the appropriate

area center. And only a subset of these would be of sufficient

seriousness or interest to warrant bringing in the national

center.2 6 This was the shape of DCA and the system it managed during the early 1960s, and despite numerous caveats,

proponents of centralization had cause to be sanguine.

DEFENSE COMMUNICATIONS AGENCY

29
Of course, what constitutes sufficiency, and by extension

effectiveness, might well turn on whether the system is called

upon to perform during crisis, war, or peacetime. Despite all

the talk of redundant communications assets, the Defense

Communications System, as it was then being developed, rep -

resented essentially a peacetime system that would likely not

fare well under conditions of stress. Disturbed by this trend, a

House Armed Services subcommittee noted prophetically in

1962 how communications assets that appear duplicative or

underutilized during times of peace might prove vastly inadequate under crisis conditions. While the subcommittee acknowledged that many of DCA’s initiatives then underway

would certainly help bring about a better utilization of existing

communication assets, the hope was expressed that those

assets would be tested under “maximum-use conditions” to

determine how well they might work in a crisis or war. 2 7 Saga -

cious advice, perhaps, but in a real world of budgetary constraints, it pointed out a dilemma that would confront DCA

throughout the years and decades to come; ensuring system

effectiveness under one set of conditions would often mean

having to compromise it under other conditions.

Analogously, the subcommittee pointed out the somewhat

schizophrenic organizational mission of the Defense Commu -

nications Agency. On the one hand, the agency had been

chartered to engineer and improve DCS to meet the needs of

its various user communities to the maximum possible extent.

This obviously suggested a drive toward maximum system

capacity and capabilities. On the other hand, DCA was tasked

by its charter to emphasize cost-effectiveness in everything it

did, to “obtain the maximum economy and efficiency in the

allocation and management of DOD communications resources.”2 8 In practice this often meant having to make some

hard choices, and coming up with an appropriate balance

between user requirements and available funding would prove

no easy task for DCA. This was especially true since, lacking

the extensive marketing capabilities of its commercial counterparts, DCA had to depend on the services and other system

users to provide requirements and indicators of trends. This

obviously implied that users knew what they wanted, both

then and in the future, and it required that they transmit this

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

30
knowledge so DCA could make appropriate communications

services available. But reliable indicators were difficult to

come by even for the highly market-oriented commercial telecommunications companies. To expect the Army or Marine

Corps, the Air Force or the Navy—entities with many other

things on their organizational minds beyond determining communications growth trends—to do a better job was, to say the

least, optimistic. DCA officials warned repeatedly that DCS

users should not assume the system would have the capabilities to meet their needs, but that was, in effect, precisely what

the services and other key-user communities always assumed.

This assumption set the stage for a series of problems in the

development of the major Defense Communications System

common-user elements, AUTOVON, AUTOSEVOCOM, and

AUTODIN, part of the communications infrastructure upon

which the World Wide Military Command and Control System

would later depend.

Notes

1. “Army Loses Bid for Single Manager Defense Signal Task,” Army,

Navy, Air Force Journal 97 (27 February 1960): 3.

2. William D. Irvin, “A Report on the Defense Communications Agency,”

Signal 15 (November 1960): 49.

3. “Adm Irvin Named Communications Agency Chief," Signal 15 (July

1960): 16.

4. Irvin, 50.

5. William D. Irvin, “Defense Communications Agency, A Progress

Report,” Signal 16 (November 1961): 8.

6. Albert Mark, “AUTOVON: Inception to Implementation,” Signal 20

(March 1966): 10–11.

7. “Message Control Unified by Gates,” New York Times, 13 May 1960,

14.

8. House, Committee on Appropriations, Department of Defense

Appropriations for 1970: Part 2, Operations and Maintenance, 91 s t Cong., 1 s t

sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office [GPO], 1969), 1005.

9. House, Committee on Armed Services, Report of Special Subcommittee

on Defense Agencies of the Committee on Armed Services, 8 7t h Cong., 2d

sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 13 August 1962), 6601.

10. Ibid., 6603.

11. Brooke Nihart, “The Ungarbled Future, DCA,” Armed Forces Journal,

107 (9 May 1970): 20.

DEFENSE COMMUNICATIONS AGENCY

31
12. House, Committee on Armed Services, Armed Services Investigating

Subcommittee, Review of Department of Defense Worldwide

Communications, Phase I, 92d Cong., 1

st sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 10

May 1971), 18–20, 22–23. (Hereafter cited as Phase I Report.)

13. Ibid., 23.

14. Senate, Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1969,

9 0t h Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1968), 2045–46.

15. Herbert A. Schulke Jr., “The DCS (Defense Communications System)

Today and How It Operates,” Signal 25 (July 1971): 22–24.

16. House, Report of Special Subcommittee, 6631–34.

17. Ibid., 6633–34.

18. House, DOD Appropriations for 1970, 999.

19. Nihart, 20.

20. House, Report of Special Subcommittee, 6597.

21. “Defense Communications Control Center Opened,” National Defense

Transportation Journal, May/June 1961, 11.

22. House, Report of Special Subcommittee, 6598.

23. House, Committee on Armed Services, Hearings before Special

Subcommittee on Defense Agencies, 87t h Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.:

GPO, 1963), 6760.

24. House, DOD Appropriations for 1970, 1009.

25. Philip S. Kronenberg, “Command and Control as a Theory of

Interorganizational Design,” Defense Analysis 4, no. 3 (1988): 232–33.

26. Schulke, 24.

27. House, Report of Special Subcommittee, 6623.

28 . Phase I Report, 22.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

32
Chapter 3

National Military Command System

The creation of the Defense Communications System represented in substantial measure an effort to achieve greater

economies by integrating the services’ separate long-haul

communications systems and placing them under a single

management authority. Yet almost from the outset, DCS was

itself considered to be but one element, albeit a central one, in

a larger worldwide system whose scope went well beyond

DCS. Crises, along with the accompanying perception that the

existing command and control structure was ineffective in

dealing with them, provided the impetus for this more extensive and ambitious system, both at the time of its birth and

through a number of subsequent developmental stages.

The process of crafting this larger structure began almost as

soon as the Kennedy administration arrived in Washington in

early 1961. The contradictory political impulses of this administration shifted between “hardheaded military pragmatism and liberal humanism.”1

 Within a week of taking office,

Defense Secretary McNamara had become a convert to counterforce, the idea that nuclear targeting could be employed

selectively and flexibly to limit damage to population centers

and other civilian targets. 2 McNamara’s White House boss,

President John F. Kennedy, underwent a similar sort of conversion shortly thereafter. The president’s conversion was the

result of a briefing in which advisors described to him the

probable human consequences of the full-scale nuclear spasm

attack called for in the Single Integrated Operational Plan

(SIOP). Repulsed, Kennedy publicly renounced the doctrine of

massive retaliation, vowing that America would never be the

first to strike with nuclear weapons. The search for options

was on, a search that would lead to a thorough review of the

nation’s command and control systems, to a host of new in -

itiatives, and, ironically, that would make nuclear war more

thinkable and rational.

33
The Partridge Report

The Bay of Pigs incident, coming less than two months after

Kennedy’s inauguration, was, to the thinking of many newly

arrived administration officials, exemplary of the problems

that resulted from an excessively decentralized military command and control structure. Intelligence and communications

difficulties had plagued the aborted effort to overthrow the

Castro regime from the outset; the new president and his chief

advisors were unable to keep track of troops and events as

they unfolded in the swamps of southern Cuba, and events

rapidly devolved beyond anyone’s control. The embarrassing

and costly debacle provided, in the minds of a host of administration officials from the president on down, a striking example of the need for better communications and for a more

centralized, coherent, integrated, and effective structure for

managing military operations.

The need having been established, in May 1961 Kennedy

called for the creation of a command and control system that,

although located within the Department of Defense, would be

responsive to the needs of central decision makers and remain

under ultimate civilian control at all times. The system must

be maximally survivable, he said, and offer protection both

from the effects of nuclear weapons and from electronic interference. “We propose to see to it,” the president declared, “that

our military forces operate at all times under continuous, responsible command and control from the national authorities

all the way downward, and we mean to see that this control is

exercised before, during, and after any initiation of hostilities.”3

 Survivability, interconnectivity, and endurance were the

essential criteria being called for, a distinct departure from the

past. Kennedy acknowledged that developing this kind of system would involve a major effort on the part of the United

States, but that effort, he said, “vital to the existence” of the

nation, was worth it. 4

In line with the president’s vision, Defense Secretary

McNamara directed that a study be conducted to assess the

ways in which this more centrally responsive command and

control system might be achieved most readily. The research

group that was assembled, called the National Command and

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

34
Control Task Force, included a number of military personnel,

some of them from the recently established Defense Commu -

nications Agency. Civilian participants included members of

the White House staff and a number of outside consultants

from such interested organizations as the RAND and MITRE

Corporations. Earle E. Partridge, a retired Air Force general

and former commander in chief of the Air Defense Command,

was recalled to active duty to head the study team. The task

force promptly set to work and received considerable impetus

to its efforts in August 1961, when the Soviets began the

construction of the Berlin Wall. During the Berlin crisis, the

national leadership considered a series of possible military

responses, ranging from an attack by conventional forces up

the autobahn linking Berlin with the rest of West Germany to

the firing of nuclear warning bursts over unpopulated areas of

the Soviet Union. With nuclear confrontation a distinct possibility, the need for an effective command and control system

appeared urgent in the extreme.

The top secret Final Report of the National Command and

Control Task Force , more familiarly known as the Partridge

Report, was completed on 14 November 1961. 5 Concluding at

the outset that the capabilities of US weapons systems had

outstripped the ability to command and control them, the

report provided the administration with a comprehensive

blueprint for the integrated, survivable, worldwide system it

desired.6 Although the conventional forces were by no means

neglected, the major emphasis of the report focused on the

strategic nuclear forces. But despite its expansiveness, the

report contained no radically new ideas and proposed few new

initiatives or systems. Rather, what it did was more along the

lines of describing an intellectual context, establishing a

framework for streamlining, modernizing, and centralizing

command and control that both reflected the new administration’s concerns and gave coherence to a number of military

command and control programs then in the planning stages,

under development, or already deployed. 7 This framework was

called the National Military Command System (NMCS).

Partridge’s task force envisioned that action to implement

the NMCS should proceed in a series of steps. Of foremost

importance was the need for a large, technically sophisticated

NATIONAL MILITARY COMMAND SYSTEM

35
National Military Command Center (NMCC) to replace the

Joint War Room at the Pentagon. Plans for upgrading the

small, overcrowded war room with its extremely limited dataprocessing capabilities had, in fact, already been drawn up by

the Defense Communications Agency. Partridge’s team drew

heavily from these plans as they considered ways to improve

this, the most important node of the proposed National Military Command System.

Recognizing the near certainty that the Pentagon would be

destroyed in the opening moments of a nuclear attack, Partridge’s team next recommended upgrading an alternate, more

survivable command center to which the national leadership

could repair during times of crisis. Called the Alternate Na -

tional Military Command Center (ANMCC), this backup “underground Pentagon” was intended to perform the critical

functions of the NMCC if the Pentagon facility was destroyed

or rendered inoperable. The ANMCC, the location of which

was originally shrouded in secrecy, (code-named “Site R” for

security reasons) was hardened against the effects of nuclear

detonations by being buried inside Raven Rock, a mountain in

southern Pennsylvania. This site was located within the

boundaries of the Fort Ritchie military reservation in Maryland, about eight miles from the presidential retreat at Camp

David. 8 The idea for the ANMCC did not originate with Partridge’s team, however, for the Raven Rock facility already

existed. During the 1950s President Eisenhower and his cabinet, on several occasions, had convened there, as well as at

other locations, to participate in nuclear war exercises.9 As

with the NMCC, the Partridge team’s point was to identify

existing resources that would serve as crucial elements of the

new National Military Command System.

A third command post whose critical nature the Partridge’s

task force underscored was the headquarters of the North

American Air Defense Command (NORAD). Thinking as the

task force did of possible nuclear crises or conflicts, NORAD’s

missions were indeed critical ones: surveillance, detection,

and identification of aircraft operating over or near the North

American continent, and, by way of the Semi-Automatic

Ground Environment, operational control over US and Canadian air defense forces. With the coming of the space age,

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

36
NORAD’s mission would be expanded to include surveillance,

tracking, and cataloguing of all man-made objects in space

and the detection of missile launches and nuclear events

around the globe. In all cases, NORAD’s most important job

was to provide US and Canadian leaders with timely warning

that North America was under attack. Given the vital nature

of this mission, a major Air Force concern at the time was the

construction of a new, survivable NORAD headquarters. Planning for the new facility had in fact commenced years earlier,

and by the time the Partridge Report was issued, work on

Program 425L, NORAD’s new Cheyenne Mountain facility, was

already well under way. With NORAD, as with the other command centers, then, the Partridge Report broke no new

ground.

Finally, the Partridge Report underscored the need for a

survivable airborne command post. In February 1961, just

days after the Kennedy administration’s arrival in Washington, the Strategic Air Command’s first EC-135 “Looking Glass”

air craft, designed to provide control of the strategic nuclear

forces after a nuclear attack, took off from Offutt AFB in Nebraska. 1 0 SAC would keep one such aircraft continuously airborne for the subsequent three decades. Concerned that civilian leaders be accorded an equally survivable airborne

command post, McNamara directed SAC to station similar

EC-135 aircraft at Andrews AFB near Washington so that the

national leadership could rapidly board in case of crises. SAC

responded by deploying three of the planes, one of which was

kept on continuous ground alert,1 1 to Andrews the following

year, 1962. Here again, the Partridge Report simply underscored the importance of initiatives already well advanced.

Since the NMCS would be a system linking the national

leadership, both civilian and military, to the operating military

forces worldwide, it consisted not only of the various command posts but also of the communications media linking

them together. As conceived, the NMCS would not be a separate, dedicated communications system within the DOD.

Rather, it would constitute a collection of existing resources—some of which had been designed and provided in

response to national level requirements—that the NCA could

draw upon as necessary. These assets, which included the

NATIONAL MILITARY COMMAND SYSTEM

37
Defense Communications System as a central element, ensured that the Defense Communications Agency would be a

key player in NMCS design, engineering, technical supervision, and support.

It is worth underscoring Kennedy’s point that the NMCS,

while a military system, would remain under ultimate civilian

control at all times. To that end, the NMCS by necessity would

interface not only with a wide range of military forces but also

with a number of civilian agencies and offices. The NMCS

would provide direct connections to the White House situation

room, for example. The White House’s own command center,

the situation room was headed by a military officer and operated

by the CIA. NMCS would also be linked directly to the State

Department’s Operations Center, an element established in

1961 to deal with international crises. A third key civilian

interface would be with CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.1 2

The major emphasis of the Partridge Report, its cutting

edge, is found in the final word of the phrase “National Military Command System .” As the phrase denotes, the thing

being created was to represent an integrated whole, a body

with articulation among its constituent parts. If NORAD and

its sensors were the body’s eyes and ears, if SAC were its

muscles and its fists, the new command system would constitute its brain and central nervous system—the network that

permitted all of the parts to operate as a single coherent entity. The ensuing 30-year effort to create a more coherent and

centralized, interconnected, and survivable system for military

command and control, one with a strong and ever-increasing

emphasis on the control of the strategic nuclear forces, can be

traced to the criticisms and recommendations contained in

the Partridge Report.

Given the fierce resistance to centralization that had been

encountered during the 1958 defense reorganization, it was

hardly surprising that the Partridge Report and other similar

recommendations were greeted in some quarters with skepticism and even hostility. Many experienced military personnel

deeply resented the White House-to-foxhole approach to military

operations implicit in an increasingly centralized command

and control structure. To them, the White House approach

smacked of meddling, of a looking-over-your-shoulder sort of

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

38
micromanagement. Socialized to the merits of a bureaucratic

hierarchy as formally expressed in the military chain of command, they considered efforts to bypass or ignore that chain

injurious and potentially dangerous. These efforts, they believed, deprived those both at the top and the bottom of necessary advice and guidance. As one officer ominously cautioned,

“If the chain of command is not employed, it is not needed. If

it is not needed, it should be abolished. If it is abolished,

everything will have to be run from the top.”1 3 Of course, in

this judgment and the judgment of many other professionals,

attempts to run things from the top would only increase the

likelihood of errors and mishaps. In addition, diminishing the

importance of the chain of command would deprive those

therein of their prerogatives, even their reason for existence.

The result was that the NMCS concept was resisted from the

outset, often openly, but even more so in secret. “You didn’t go

to West Point twenty-five years ago and train your whole professional life to have somebody look over your shoulder,” after

all. 1 4

The new administration firmly believed in the merits of centralization, however, and with the Partridge Report in hand as

guidance, McNamara set out in late 1961 to establish the

operational framework for precisely such a centralized system.

The president reinforced the effort through his public statements, asserting how “we propose to see to it . . . that our

military forces operate at all times under continuous, responsible command and control from the national authorities all

the way downward—and we mean to see that this control is

exercised before, during, and after any initiation of hostilities.”1 5 Noting that America’s nuclear monopoly had ended,

Kennedy pointed out how this hard reality had forced defense

planners to consider new contingencies that in turn required

a new emphasis on improved command and control. Thus, the

development of the new National Military Command System

recommended in the Partridge Report a system that would

directly support the National Command Authorities under all

conditions of peace, crisis, and war.

NATIONAL MILITARY COMMAND SYSTEM

39
Implementing the National

Military Command System

On 2 June 1962 Secretary McNamara issued a memorandum directing that the NMCS be put into operation. The

memorandum assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff the responsibility for working out the user requirements and the functional design for the new system. To meet those responsibilities, the chiefs acted along two fronts. They immediately

began using the Joint War Room as a nucleus for the National

Military Command Center, designated the NMCS’s key node.

They then turned to their Joint Command and Control Requirements Group (JCCRG) for help. 1 6 The JCCRG owed its

existence to the 1958 defense reorganization, which had dramatically expanded the role of the joint chiefs and made their

role far more detailed and complex. With each passing day, it

became increasingly obvious to the joint chiefs that fulfilling

their new responsibilities required the development of some

sort of joint-service command and control system complex,

one that was global in scope and responsive to the needs of

the National Command Authorities.1 7 By the end of 1959, the

need was sufficiently acute that a number of major reviews

had been commissioned. (One of these, known as the Winter

Study, consisted of two dozen separate panels—some 140 Air

Force, industry, and other personnel in all. The study examined key command and control issues, mostly from an Air

Force point of view. 1 8 Another effort was the Navy’s Pangloss

research into ways to improve communications with the thenemerging ballistic missile submarine force.) The possible

forms that a national level command and control system

might take were myriad. The joint chiefs needed help sorting

through the possibilities, so the JCCRG was set up in January

1960 on an informal, advisory basis. Over the next few years,

the JCCRG would expand, both in size and in the number of

system strategies it considered.

These efforts were still in progress when the Kennedy administration arrived in Washington. Suspicious of the old Pentagon regime, Defense Secretary McNamara was not about to

accept the conclusions of these studies without a second opin -

ion. That was where General Partridge’s Task Force came in.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

40
But Partridge’s key conclusion—that a National Military Command System be established—proved to be almost identical to

the conclusions of the various other studies then under review

by the JCCRG. McNamara accordingly directed the joint chiefs

to implement the system, and to accomplish this task, the

joint chiefs turned to the JCCRG, their in-house experts. Already a substantial if informal bureaucratic presence, the

JCCRG was promptly formalized, its bureaucratic clout in -

creased by upgrading its chief to a two-star billet. 1 9

The tasks facing the JCCRG were substantial. The first was

to inventory available facilities and assess objectives. What

exactly was the system in question? Precisely what was it

supposed to accomplish? How could various system assets be

tied together to do this? As one officer assigned to the JCCRG

described the process, “As we look in detail we find we are

also looking at the broader view. And, as we work closer and

closer with the full worldwide system and its requirements, we

are able to more clearly define and refine the requirements of

the NMCS.”2 0 If it all sounds more than a bit ambiguous, this

is hardly surprising. From the outset, the thorniest of the

problems facing the JCCRG was the identification of requirements. What specific types of information do users require

across a spectrum of possible situations? 2 1 For only when

these problems had been specified could the most appropriate

communications, automatic data processing, and organiza -

tional technologies for meeting them be identified. And only

when all of this was done could the best arrangement be

devised for linking these elements together so that they could,

in fact, function as a coherent system. 2 2

Unfortunately, this quest for centralized coherence was im -

periled from the very outset by fragmented NMCS management responsibilities. McNamara had specified in his 2 June

1962 memorandum that the joint chiefs would work out the

new system’s requirements, and his rationale made considerable sense. The secretary understood that many military leaders felt they they did not have sufficient input into the design

of earlier command and control systems. These systems were

inappropriate, failed to meet their needs, and were consequently rejected by the very users they were intended to serve.

By implicating the joint chiefs, McNamara felt, military leaders

NATIONAL MILITARY COMMAND SYSTEM

41
would have input into the conceptual development of the system, making it more useful to them and lessening their resistance to its implementation.

But the major problem was that nobody knew precisely

what was needed, or what the appropriate requirements were.

The president had called on the new system to be survivable,

interconnected, and endurable; and defense journals were

now discussing how these were the key words for NMCS development. But precisely what did such terms mean in the real

world of proliferating nuclear weapons and limited budgets?

Did they mean redundancy, the use of a wide range of communications frequencies and system approaches, including

very low frequency and microwave systems, terrestrial and

undersea cables, ionospheric and tropospheric scatter systems, and, when they became available, satellite and rocket

communications systems? Did they mean internetting, the

ability to communicate between system elements even in case

of communications breaks or outages? Did they mean having

the ability to ride out a nuclear attack and still have the

means to assess what was happening and to pass launch

orders to the strategic nuclear forces?2 3 But the major problem

in virtually every case involved having little real-life experience

to go on and having no way to determine what sort of demands would be placed on the NMCS in the event of major

crises. The conceptual undertaking was thus ambiguous in

the extreme, for as director of defense research and engineering Eugene G. Fubini summed up the problem, “In the final

analysis, what we are really dealing with is a system whose

configuration depends on answers to the larger question,

‘What is the proper texture of a democratic government under

stress?’”2 4 This was a question for which there was no single

or simple answer.

But whatever that answer might eventually prove to be, one

thing was apparent to everyone from the outset: the NMCS-tobe would rely heavily on automatic data processing technolo -

gies. Along these lines, the first computer designated exclu -

sively for command and control support of the National

Command Authorities, an International Business Machines

(IBM) 1401, was installed in the fall of 1962 in J-3, the joint

chiefs’ operations area in the Pentagon, and another simultaTHE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

42
neously installed at the Alternate National Military Command

Center’s computer facility. Initially, these computers were run

by personnel attached to the Defense Atomic Support Agency,

but on 1 January 1963, they were transferred to the Defense

Communications Agency. At that time the Pentagon computer

facility was renamed the National Military Command System

Support Center and placed under DCA operational control. At

first, these computers were not considered “organic” elements

of the NMCS, since, as National Military Command Center

director Paul Tibbets noted, the NMCC did not deal with a

volume of data sufficient to justify automation. But Tibbets

and others knew well that this was soon to change, for in

terms of ADP support for national-level command and control,

the surface had only been scratched. 2 5

The search was on for an optimum computerized system,

one capable of providing the ADP support required at every

level of the military hierarchy while being able to feed information quickly up the line. Yet while providing unprecedented

ability to process data, the introduction of computers did little

to help clarify the fundamental issue of requirements. Since

nobody was really sure what information was needed, by whom,

or when, huge sums of money and countless hours of effort

would be invested by a staggering number of commands and

agencies (DCA perhaps chief among them), trying to identify

and specify the appropriate database that should be available

in the various NMCS command centers for decision-making

purposes. Nor in the absence of well-defined requirements was

it clear with precisely which systems, and under what conditions, the NMCS should connect. It was a circular problem, to

be certain, for only when requirements had been specified was

it possible to develop specific, appropriate supporting ADP

subsystems and the interfaces between them. 2 6 With the program thus wallowing in conceptual ambiguity, what was happening was that the system was essentially designing itself. 2 7

In the absence of a well-elaborated set of user requirements,

many officials believed that the best approach to the ADP and

interface problems, and by extension the best strategy to pursue with respect to the design of the NMCS, was the basic one

of standardization. Since the system required the capability to

exchange data among its constituent elements, and since this

NATIONAL MILITARY COMMAND SYSTEM

43
process by definition involved a large number of interfaces,

what was called for was the use of similar types of computer

hardware, associated equipment, standard data formats, and

standard software applications.2 8 One early effort along these

lines was the National Military Command System Information

Processing System (NIPS). Developed in 1963 to run on the

IBM 1410 computer, NIPS sought to achieve a measure of

compatibility in the areas of hardware and software, to reduce

the (even then) staggering costs of software development, and

to promote standardization of information, equipment, and

training among the various elements of the NMCS. But since it

was being forced down from the top, such compatibility would

not be accomplished immediately. 2 9 In the interim, the system

would continue to design itself.

By this time, several other defense organizations already

had developed automated command and control systems, and

it might seem that these could provide operational models for

the NMCS, thereby avoiding much, if not all, of the develop -

mental “ad hocery.” SAC and NORAD, for example, had computerized systems that were extremely sophisticated compared

to what was then available in the Pentagon. But although

some of the technologies developed under these programs

would later be drawn upon for use in the NMCS, they were far

from appropriate models. Consider that both NORAD and SAC

performed relatively clear defense functions. Knowing what

had to be done served to foster a climate of aggressive technological innovation, especially in fashioning automatic data

processing as an effective tool for command and control. In

contrast, nobody knew exactly what functions NMCS was supposed to perform. But even with the relative clarity of their

missions, NORAD’s and SAC’s problems with their automated

command and control systems were vast—indeed, the stuff of

which bureaucratic legends were made. For these reasons,

they were far from perfect models for developing a computerbased National Military Command System. As for the other

major commands, since they had absolutely nothing in the

way of ADP support for command and control, they provided

no examples at all, useful or otherwise. 3 0

So it was not the computer technologies themselves that

represented the major limiting factor in the birth and subTHE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

44
sequent evolution of the National Military Command System.

Rather, the problem was more in conceptualizing their usefulness to decision makers and their supporting organizations.

At base, it was a people problem, figuring out what information was required and then having the personnel adjust to the

technologies capable of providing it.

As McNamara’s memorandum laid out the responsibilities

for the new National Military Command System, the joint

chiefs and their in-house experts, the JCCRG, working closely

with the OSD, would generate policies, concepts, and requirements. The Defense Communications Agency was given responsibility for systems engineering. This engineering function

would be performed under the broad policy supervision of the

director of defense research and engineering, who would create the necessary NMCS support organization. The military

departments, for their part, would program, deploy, and support the operation of the various NMCS subsystems.3 1 That

was how things were supposed to work. The problem was

that, while the secretary’s memorandum seemed to clearly

establish the basic relationships and responsibilities within

the NMCS, the reality was otherwise. Many of the instructions

in the memorandum were quite general, and there were nu -

merous caveats, both stated and implied. Given the widespread resistance to anything that smacked of centralization

in military operations (resistance, that is, to the very thing

exemplified by the NMCS concept), and given the institutional

strength of any number of individuals and organizations who

“viewed the world from the castle walls on their manor lands

and fiefs,” the results were predictable.3 2 The ambiguities in

McNamara’s instructions were quickly exploited, interpreted

in terms of existing interests, and used as justification for new

programs and initiatives where specific guidance was weak or

absent.

This gave extraordinary latitude to powerful constituencies

to shape the form that the NMCS would take. To make certain

that their interests were represented, many of these—in particular the services—established staff sections to monitor the

development of the systems they were to use. When it came

time to deploy these systems, the services also accepted this

responsibility. For example, two mobile command posts, the

NATIONAL MILITARY COMMAND SYSTEM

45
National Emergency Airborne Command Post and the National

Emergency Command Post Afloat, were in large measure service

initiatives, actively pushed by the Air Force and Navy, respectively. (The Army was already in charge of the ground-based

Alternate National Military Command Center at Fort Ritchie,

and these mobile command posts assured that the other two

services would not be cut out of the NMCS action.) In other

words, some of the most crucial decisions concerning the design, capabilities, and evaluation of the new NMCS were determined by organizations whose interests ran in the direction of

keeping things decentralized. And things were made all the

easier since the JCCRG performed its advisory function with

one eye focused directly on service needs.

As things were supposed to work, once requirements had

been worked out by the JCCRG, the joint chiefs would turn

them over for approval to the secretary of defense. The approved requirements would then be passed along to the director, Department of Defense Research and Engineering

(DDR&E), whose agency was responsible for ensuring that a

system would be engineered to meet them. To meet those

responsibilities, McNamara instructed the DDR&E (at the time

Harold Brown, himself later a secretary of defense) to establish the position of director of NMCS technical support within

his office.3 3 By separating the functional roles of the Joint

Chiefs of Staff and DDR&E in this fashion, McNamara hoped

to eliminate the frequent and injurious power struggles that

had characterized the relationship between these two organizations, thereby allowing the groups most directly responsible

for national-level command and control system development

to work together more smoothly. DDR&E took its mandate

seriously, and during the system’s early years, a substantial

percentage of its funds would be utilized to establish the

NMCS.3 4

If DDR&E was given an overall supervisory function in the

technical implementation of the NMCS, the Defense Commu -

nications Agency had a more hands-on role—take identified

system requirements and turn them into a detailed set of

technical specifications. Specifically, DCA would prepare a detailed technical plan for the NMCS that would include both a

system design and a strategy for acquiring the system. It

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

46
would be responsible for preparing cost estimates, performing

technical analyses, and otherwise providing the joint chiefs

with the necessary systems engineering and technical support

for the system. So that his agency could do these things, the

director of DCA was tasked to establish an NMCS technical

support element within his agency, analogous to that already

established within DDR&E.3 5

The DCA promptly established its NMCS element at its Ar -

lington, Virginia, headquarters. It was headed by John B. Bestic,

an Air Force major general, who was given the title deputy

director of the NMCS. Staffing for this new NMCS headquarters directorate included a mixture of military and civilian

personnel, people whose backgrounds were mainly in the areas of communications, automatic data processing, and engineering, but who also represented, in Bestic’s words, “the

various disciplines contributing to the solution of command

and control problems.”3 6 In one of those dubious official accounts, (devoid of the black humor that makes stories memorable outside of a self-serving, bureaucratic context) when the

freshman staff of the NMCS assembled on its Defense Communications Agency “campus,” one exuberant young major

was supposed to have exclaimed, “What NMCS means, General, is No More Confused Situations. Right?”3 7

Using the plan drawn up by the JCCRG as its basic framework, Bestic’s group soon developed a detailed set of technical

specifications for the National Military Command System, effectively a master plan for its form and evolution.3 8 The MITRE

Corporation was awarded the contract for the technical planning, designing, managing, and integrating of the NMCS project, and its approach to system development was described

as “evolutionary.” MITRE’s reasons for taking this sort of approach seemed eminently reasonable. 3 9 Several existing major

com mand and control systems (such as those at NORAD and

SAC), designed essentially as “turnkey” systems, had proved

to be major failures in many respects. As the realization began

to sink in that command and control systems might not be

amenable to the usual acquisitions (weapons system) approach, and as it became clear that military requirements 10

or 15 years in the future could not be predicted with any

certainty, system designers at MITRE decided that a better

NATIONAL MILITARY COMMAND SYSTEM

47
strategy was to follow the lead of the commercial telephone

companies. Instead of “dropping a new system on top of the

others,” in the words of Esterly Page, DDR&E’s technical director for the NMCS, the system would be designed within the

state of the art, modified as necessary to meet changing requirements, and be flexible enough to exploit technological

innovations as they became available. 4 0 MITRE’s evolutionary

approach seemed fully consistent with the intent of

McNamara’s directive, which emphasized creating command

and control systems with steady-state learning and growth

bases, that could be continually improved without widespread

equipment obsolescence.

To those ends, the approach emphasized a close and continuous interaction between system users—commanders and

their staffs—and the engineers and technicians who designed

the systems for them. Through this interaction, requirements

could be evolved and new systems developed, but in a way

that permitted greater all-round understanding. Users would

become aware of the practical possibilities offered by new

technologies, especially in the area of automatic data processing. They would come to understand their limitations as well.

Engineering personnel at DCA and other agencies, for their

part, would learn to appreciate the complexity of operational

situations—in particular, the frequent lack of complete information and the need to deal with surprise and uncertainty.

The technologies that were recommended for the system

would presumably reflect this understanding and result in an

NMCS that could better cope with real-world situations.4 1

While the evolutionary approach sounded positive indeed, it

would prove to be the source of a great many problems in the

future.

Within a year and a half of McNamara’s order that the

NMCS be put into operation, more than 40 command and

control systems operated by the services, defense agencies,

and the unified and specified commands were tied into it with

varying degrees of success. Some of these, including such key

commands as NORAD and SAC, were rapidly moving toward

computer-based, fully automated reporting systems. The system also included such communication networks as AUTOVON

and AUTODIN that linked these facilities with the National

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

48
Command Authorities, the unified and specified commanders,

service headquarters, and other designated agencies, including the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence

Agency.4 2 With matters apparently proceeding well, enthusiasts were not shy to declare, with some hyperbole, that before

long the NMCS would provide, for the first time, a means by

which the National Command Authorities could maintain in -

stantaneous and detailed contact with all levels of US military

forces worldwide.4 3

Notes

1. Janne E. Nolan, Guardians of the Arsenal: The Politics of Nuclear

Strategy (New York: New Republic Books, 1989), 64.

2. Desmond Ball, “The Development of the SIOP, 1960–1983,” in

Strategic Nuclear Targeting, eds. Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson

(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 62.

3. Lawrence E. Adams, “The Evolving Role of C3 in Crisis Management,”

Signal 30 (August 1976): 60.

4. “The USA’s National Military Command System,” INTERAVIA 1 9 (June

1964): 854.

5. Final Report of the National Command and Control Task Force, 14

November 1961, attachment 2 to Joint Chief of Staff Publication 2308/64.

6. Lee M. Paschall, “The Command and Control Revolution,” Air Force

Magazine 56 (July 1973): 39.

7. C. W. Borklund, “National Military Command Control: The Problems

in Brief,” Armed Forces Management 9 (July 1963): 20.

8. “The USA’s National Military Command System,” 855.

9. Ted Gup, “The Doomsday Blueprints,” Time, 10 August 1992, 34.

10. Kenneth J. Stein, “E-4B Boosts SAC’s Communications Net,”

Aviation Week & Space Technology, 16 June 1980, 77.

11. Bruce G. Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the

Nuclear Threat (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1985), 110.

12. J. H. Wagner, “NMCS: The Command Backup to Counterforce,”

Armed Forces Management 9 (July 1963): 25.

13. William E. Burr, “Centralized Control,” Military Review 46 (May

1966): 82.

14. Daniel Ford, The Button: The Pentagon’s Command and Control

System—Does It Work? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 175–76.

15. Lee M. Paschall, “The Role of the Present and Future DCS in

Support of the WWMCCS,” Signal 2 9 (March 1975): 38.

16. Wagner, 23.

17. “Command and Control Spectrum: JCS to Battlefield,” Armed Forces

Management 14 (July 1968): 37.

NATIONAL MILITARY COMMAND SYSTEM

49
18. Peter Pringle and William Arkin, SIOP: The Secret US Plan for Nuclear

War (New York: Norton, 1983), 210–11.

19. Wagner, 23.

20. “Command and Control Spectrum,” 37.

21. Borklund, 20.

22. “Command and Control Spectrum,” 37.

23. “Can Vulnerability Menace Command and Control?” Armed Forces

Management 15 (July 1969): 41.

24. Borklund, 20–21.

25. Wagner, 25.

26. “NMCS: The National Voice of Command,” DATA 11 (January 1966):

24.

27. Leonard Maley, “NIPS—The System that Invented Itself,” Systems

Engineering Forum (n.d.), 32.

28. Borklund, 21.

29. Maley, 32.

30. Ibid.

31. “The National Voice of Command,” 24.

32. Maley, 32.

33. “The Search for Effective Command and Control,” Armed Forces

Management 8 (July 1962): 19–20.

34. Senate, Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Department

of Defense, Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1969:

Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 90t h

Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968),

2349.

35. “The Search for Effective Command and Control,” 20.

36. “Bestic’s Assignment: Define Command/Control For All Services,”

DATA 9 (October 1964): 32.

37. John B. Bestic, “No More Confused Situations,” Signal 21 (March

1967), 53.

38. Lee M. Paschall, “WWMCCS: Nerve Center of U.S. C3,” Air Force

Magazine 58 (July 1975): 54.

39. “The USA’s National Military Command System,” 854.

40. Borklund, 20.

41. Wagner, 25.

42. Hubert S. Cunningham and William Edward Kenealy, “The Joint

Chiefs of Staff and Command and Control,” Signal 29 (March 1975): 15.

43. J. S. Butz Jr., “USAF and the Computer Revolution,” Air Force

Magazine 4 7 (March 1964): 34.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

50
Chapter 4

WWMCCS Is Born

The effort to establish the various elements of the National

Military Command System had scarcely begun when the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis electrified the nation and the

rest of the world. The crisis highlighted a number of command

and control problem areas that remained unaddressed. It also

provided considerable additional impetus for creating the type

of comprehensive system, responsive to the needs of the national leadership, that President Kennedy and his advisors

said they required. And not without reason: for a few tense

hours, the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the

brink of the nuclear precipice, the first and most serious such

moment in the annals of the cold war.

A series of hard lessons were forthcoming from those tense

and dangerous October days. The first of these lessons underscored what had been abundantly and painfully obvious to the

administration during the Bay of Pigs debacle—the flow of

intelligence from the field to the national leadership needed

substantial improvement. The missile crisis now vividly posed

the question, “What price information?”—to which Kennedy’s

emphatic response was “almost any price.”1 The crisis again

made it apparent that in many instances it was not possible

for the civilian leadership to exercise effective control over the

operating military forces. In part, this was simply because the

necessary communications systems were not in place. But

even where they existed, administration officials encountered

a deeply ingrained military resistance to any effort to exercise

centralized direction and oversight of local operations. The

civilian-military tension had been especially palpable when

administration officials went outside of the usual military

chain of command to speak with the commanders of vessels

participating in the quarantine operation.2 To those in the

services, professionals steeped in a military culture where hierarchy and decentralization were considered both virtues and

necessities, this sort of supervision was anathema. 3

51
The Cuban missile crisis’s third lesson concerned the need

for improved civilian communications. Since the conduct of

operations during the crisis and its eventual resolution

r equired the use of both defense and nondefense communications systems, the importance of each for successful crisis

management was underscored for the administration. Deficiencies in existing civilian communications systems were especially

apparent when the president was unable to inform South

American leaders of his intended actions because the State

Department’s communication system was overloaded. They

were apparent again when US ambassadors to a number of

Latin American nations were unable to contact their governments because of international communications bottlenecks.4

These ostensibly nondefense systems clearly performed an

im portant defense function.

A closely related lesson concerned the need for linkage between the communications systems used by the military and

civilian agencies of government. The Cuban crisis amply demon -

strated the intimate relationship between these systems and

made explicit for the first time the need to link them together

into a single, integrated system.5 But linking them together was

obviously no small undertaking. As was already apparent to the

Defense Communications Agency and other entities then attempting to integrate military communications systems, the

problem was that different systems had been developed separately by different constituencies for different purposes. They

tended to be technically and procedurally incompatible, and, if

connected at all, connection occurred at only a few points.6

Adding a plethora of civilian communications systems to this

mixture would only compound the difficulties.

A final lesson administered by the crisis involved serious

deficiencies in communications security. The need to commu -

nicate orders and information to a number of US embassies

and military facilities abroad regarding the impending block -

ade of Cuba, coupled with a lack of secure communications

circuits by which to do so, had permitted the Russians to

intercept many of the messages, thereby gaining advance

knowledge of impending US actions. When President Kennedy

appeared on national television to inform the American public

of his decision to blockade Cuba, he did not realize the Soviet

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

52
Union had almost certainly known of the decision for several

hours.7

The Orrick Committee Report

The missile crisis was a nerve-shattering experience. In its

aftermath, the president, his National Security Council, and

the Department of Defense engaged in considerable soulsearching regarding the appropriate nature of crisis management and decision making in the nuclear age. Immediately

following the crisis, an interagency working group headed by

the deputy undersecretary of state for administration, William

H. Orrick, was set up to do a postmortem report and to make

recommendations for change. 8 Not surprisingly, the Orrick

Committee report focused on the overall effectiveness of world -

wide US government communications. It concluded that a

need existed for a flexible communications system to give the

president and other elements of the NCA control over the

n a tion’s total governmental communications facilities, both

military and civilian. Such a system must be highly capable,

the committee argued, with the ability to provide users with

fast, continuous, and reliable services. In addition, it should

be able to function during periods of high tension—even periods

of nuclear conflict—without suffering serious degradation, if

the prevailing counterforce doctrine of selectively targeting Soviet

military facilities rather than cities were to be anything more

than a theoretical promulgation.9 Emphatically so if, as

McNamara’s Pentagon was now promising, the United States

would be able to terminate a nuclear war on favorable terms

by threatening further attack, implicit in which was the ability

to communicate both with one’s own forces and with the

enemy. 1 0 Accordingly, Orrick recommended that this new system emphasize physical hardening, mobility of assets, and

circuit redundancy, ensuring the ability to transmit and receive message traffic under all conceivable circumstances.1 1

With the Orrick Committee’s recommendations as a call to

action, McNamara issued DODD S-5100.30, Concept of Opera -

tions of the Worldwide Military Command and Control Systems,

before the month of October was out. The secret directive formally identified two distinct yet related sets of requirements,

WWMCCS IS BORN

53
one military and the other civilian. At the same time, McNamara

assigned the director for operations of the Joint Staff, Maj Gen

Ferdinand T. Unger, the task of establishing a national level

command and control framework that was fully in accord with

both. From McNamara’s point of view, the need for a system

incorporating all government communications was obvious, and

his authority to establish it apparent. As secretary of defense, he

was, after all, ultimately responsible for military operations. Ordering those operations required adequate communications.

Since he was ultimately responsible for these as well, McNamara

was determined to direct them in the manner he deemed appropriate. The result was a decades-long effort to create a national

level command and control framework, one that would include,

but that went considerably beyond the mandate of the Defense

Communications System and the National Military Command

System.12 This framework was referred to as the National Communications System (NCS), and the director of DCA was designated system manager.

Theoretically, the NCS would provide the NCA with the crisis

management capabilities they desired, but the problem was that

the system came into being without a guiding conceptual ration -

ale. Was there a need for all of the communications systems

then in place? Which were duplicative? Of these, which provided

necessary redundancy and which were superfluous? Who

should make these judgments? What sort of organization was

most appropriate to manage this vast metasystem?1 3 There were

no precedents to draw upon, and no analyses had been con -

ducted to answer questions such as these.

The World Wide Military

Command and Control System

The NCS’s military component, its dominant and by far

most important part, took its name from a slight variant of

DODD S-5100.30’s title. It was called WWMCCS (World Wide

Military Command and Control System), and something new

and considerably more complex than just another defense system was being created here. Throughout this time, a number

of systems useful for command and control purposes already

had made their appearance or were then under development.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

54
Included were such command facilities as the National Military Command Center, the Alternate National Military Command Center, NORAD headquarters, SAC’s command post in

Nebraska, and the airborne command posts. There were sensor systems such as the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. There were vast, automated systems such as SAGE and

the then-under-development SACCS, SAC’s Automated Command Control System. Communications systems such as

SAC’s Primary Alerting System and the Joint Chiefs Alerting

Network had also made their debut. These were the tools of

command and control, to be certain, but for the most part,

they were viewed as unrelated military capabilities. If the DCS

had begun to change all of that, moving things in the direction

of larger scale and greater connectivity, the WWMCCS concept

would do so even more emphatically. With WWMCCS, no

longer would these systems be viewed in isolation. Instead,

they would be viewed as integral parts not only of a new defense-wide metasystem but of an entirely new military discipline and science—that of command and control.1 4

In many respects, and for a number of years, the World

Wide Military Command and Control System, like the NCS of

which it was formerly a part, would remain essentially a

bu reaucratic fiction, an organizational concept rather than a

hard commitment of funds, hardware, personnel, and managerial authority. On a theoretical level, at any rate, such an

organizing principle made perfect sense. There was a myriad

of command and control assets then in existence throughout

the defense establishment, and with proper organization,

these assets could provide the connectivity the administration de sired. The logic was described by an Air Force

officer who noted at the time how low-level tactical command

and control assets were properly viewed as subsystems of a

higher echelon system. These higher systems, in turn, were

themselves subsystems of the national level system serving

the president and other members of the NCA. 1 5 Therefore, the

assets were there, and the problems seemed to be ones of

design, connectivity, and coordination. If those problems

could be solved, the president’s vision of a system that would

permit the national leadership to electronically orchestrate its

military responses to crises could be realized.

WWMCCS IS BORN

55
To provide a centralized focus and coherence to the new World

Wide Military Command and Control System, DODD S-5100.30,

WWMCCS’s founding document, gave the Joint Chiefs of Staff

overall responsibility for the planning, implementation, and op -

eration of the system. Like the DCA’s mandate regarding the

DCS, however, the document would turn out to be an instance

of considerable formal responsibility with little real authority.

Since the joint chiefs were supposed to devise ways to merge the

command and control assets already in existence rather than

create a new system from scratch, they received no funding or

permanently assigned personnel to accomplish their mission.

Control over resources remained where it had always

been—overwhelmingly with the military services. Despite their

apparently substantial mandate, then, the joint chiefs’ ability to

integrate the military’s disparate command and control assets

into a single, centrally responsive entity called WWMCCS was

limited from the outset.

The impetus toward centralization, and yet the simultaneous endeavor to strike a balance with decentralized needs,

was made manifest during the days that followed in the form

of several additional DOD directives. In the area of centralized

control, one of these confirmed the National Military Command Center as the military’s principal command post. The

purpose here, in McNamara’s phraseology, was to ensure that

during times of tension and crisis, the NMCC would be the

“focal point to which the Joint Chiefs of Staff and higher

authority turn for an immediate review of the situation and for

advice as to the available course of action.”1 6 There, the

NMCC’s deputy director for operations and his staff continu -

ously evaluated the political and military situation around the

globe, anticipated problem areas prior to their becoming actual crises, and tracked the progress of crises then in progress. They were linked by way of direct circuits to all key

operational centers in Washington, including the White House

situation room, State Department, CIA, the services, and unified and specified commands.

But at a later press conference, McNamara dismissed the

notion that his purpose was to concentrate all decision making

at the top level of the defense hierarchy. Rather, he said, what

was being called for was a system that could reap maximal

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

56
benefits from both centralization and decentralization. On the

one hand, decisions should be made at the lowest possible

level, he said, “taking account of the political ramifications.”

Since centralized leaders by definition lacked the detailed understanding of local conditions possessed by the operating

forces, they believed those forces should be capable of acting

on their own initiative without becoming paralyzed by an absence of instructions from the top. More specifically, what this

arrangement implied was that routine matters, including the

day-to-day conduct of military operations and war, would be

left to the commander on the scene, since that was where the

situation was most clearly understood.

On the other hand, nonroutine situations, those “untoward

circumstances” with the potential for escalation, had to be

dealt with differently; they required that command take place

at the highest levels.1 7 For this to happen, there was a need for

a highly effective means by which the president and his staff

could receive, review, and respond to the most important subset of the information generated by various operating elements

worldwide. That was where the NMCS came in. The directive

designated the NMCS the principal subsystem of WWMCCS

and the hub of the national level command and control structure. In effect, the National Military Command System was to

serve as a command and control “bridge” linking the NCA to

the rest of WWMCCS, and in turn to the operating military

forces in the field. 1 8

A subsequent McNamara directive, issued on 26 October

1963, modified the basic responsibilities of the unified and

specified commanders concerning the command and control

systems they used. This directive charged the CINCs with

establishing their operational requirements and submitting

them to the joint chiefs and the secretary of defense for

a pproval. 1 9 The directive went on to direct the CINCs to participate in formulating plans for engineering, management,

procurement, facility construction, and operation to satisfy

those requirements. The view held that the CINCs were such a

fundamental part of the system that it was necessary to implicate them in the development and operational phases, to bring

them into the process in a more central way, to give greater

input into the command and control systems that were being

WWMCCS IS BORN

57
acquired for them, and to permit them to make ongoing

changes to that system as required.2 0

Throughout this time, McNamara’s explicit intention was to

move toward a new approach to command and control system

acquisition, something that would later become known as the

evolutionary approach. To create systems that were flexible

enough to keep pace with changes in technology, military doctrine, and the perceived threat, it was necessary, first, to

establish a core capability and, second, to improve it incrementally in response to changing conditions, emerging new

technologies, and changing military requirements.

While this approach had its shortcomings, it appeared to

many in McNamara’s Pentagon to be a vast improvement over

the dominant weapons system approach that had characterized command and control system development and acquisition through this time. This was the philosophy in which the

commander identified a population of system users, specified

their responsibilities as best he could, and then identified the

information required by each individual at each organizational

level under the full range of possible conditions. It meant

a n swering a series of questions a priori: Who were the likely

users? Who was responsible for the transmission of various

types of information? What quantity and quality of information were necessary? Which frequencies and formats were

most appropriate? How would the message be routed? Who

was responsible for receiving, processing, displaying, interpreting, and acting on the information once it was received?

Using the answers to all of these questions as guidance, a

technical agency would then piece together a development

plan. From that point on, as one defense journal described it,

the command and control system “might as well have been a

missile or an airplane.”2 1 The contractor for the system would

take over, often working closely with military experts in such

development organizations as the Air Force Systems Command. Performance specifications for the various equipment

subsystems would be prepared. For automatic data-processing equipment, for example, such specifications would include

processing speed, storage capacity, subsystem availability, reliability, and so on. Only when each of these concerns had

been resolved would the actual equipment be procured.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

58
Problems with this approach were many. Although the users for whom the system was being built would provide liaison

throughout this process, the arrangement frequently turned

out to be far from satisfactory. Commanders tended to have

the performance of their military mission foremost on their

minds, meaning, of course, that they would seldom appoint

their best people as liaison officers. The chain of events resulting from this was thoroughly predictable. Officers of lesser

caliber and expertise were appointed. These persons were, by

definition, less able to represent their organization’s command

and control needs competently. Their voices muted, commanders had little real input into the system being developed

for them, and they quickly became detached from the develop -

ment process.2 2 Problems of authority and a lack of clear lines

of responsibility resulted. Under the weapons system approach, problems would also result if the user’s requirements

changed while the system was under development. This eventuality was not at all unlikely, given the rapid and accelerating

pace of technological advance.

When systems were planned as a single (albeit relatively

inflexible) package, they at least tended to have coherence.

They also had the attraction of being developed as a unity by

an outside contractor and then turned over to the user, turnkey fashion, on a given day. But this approach had not

worked at all well when applied to command and control systems. Given the complexity of such systems and the continu -

ous appearance of new technologies, especially in the area of

automatic data processing, almost any set of requirements

was quickly rendered outdated, often before the system was

even brought on line. Changes in requirements obviously ensued, but not infrequently, these changes could be met only

by de sign changes that reduced or eliminated the coherence

that had been the primary attraction of the system in the first

place. Higher costs, impaired performance, and not infrequently

both, were the result. Two major examples of this process in

action were Program 425L, NORAD’s Combat Operations Center, and Program 465L, SAC’s Automated Command and Control System—“everyone’s example of how not to develop a command and control system.”2 3 And there was little alternative to

making the necessary changes, given the size and cost of

WWMCCS IS BORN

59
programs such as these: these systems could not simply be

ripped out and replaced every time technologies, military doctrine, or the nature of the threat changed.

What was called for was a new philosophy for planning,

developing, and acquiring command and control systems, an

approach that would recognize that defining user requirements was extremely difficult (not infrequently resulting in the

overstating of needs known as “gold plating”) and that would

permit the continuous evolution of systems in response to

direct and ongoing user participation. Most users don’t know

precisely what their needs are, after all, especially in a context

of rapid change where methods for improving a system often

become available even before it reaches operational status. In

other words, it appeared to McNamara that the only requirement that could be predicted with any certainty was that of

greater flexibility in system design at all levels. 2 4 And so under

his regime, each unified and specified commander would be

responsible for coming up with specific proposals for improving the effectiveness of his own command and control systems

in an evolutionary fashion. These proposals would be submitted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reviewed by the Joint Command and Control Requirements Group, and forwarded to the

secretary of defense for final approval.

Although the idea was sound, the problem once again

r evolved around the issue of authority. Because the CINCs

were charged with developing and deploying their own command and control systems, it was hardly surprising that the

systems that resulted addressed their specific needs as a first

order of business and were only secondarily concerned with

the larger issue of integration across systems. 25 This develop -

ment might not have been so bad had those systems truly

been designed for joint-service operations where integration

was implicit, but this was hardly the case. From the outset, it

was the services, not the CINCs or the joint chiefs, that controlled funding decisions. Money talks, and as a consequence,

the services made the key decisions with respect to how the

CINCs’ new systems would be designed, what assets would be

acquired, and how those assets would be deployed. The CINCs

would review the designs and specifications proposed by the

services, but they could not veto them nor initiate new programs.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

60
Whatever comments they might have had were to be submitted

to the service secretaries, individuals whose first loyalty was

always to their service branch, not to some new, rather diffuse, and frequently suspect concept of unification. 2 6 In short,

the CINCs’ role was essentially one of direction, guidance, and

validation. This way, no sooner had the parameters of a more

centralized command and control system been defined by the

creation of WWMCCS than centrifugal forces came into play.

Their effect was to decentralize decision-making authority

back toward powerful organizational subunits.

First Fruits: The RB-66

The benefits or liabilities of the new World Wide Military

Command and Control System were quickly put to the test.

On 10 March 1964 an Air Force RB-66 reconnaissance aircraft, attached to the 19th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron

at Toul-Rosieres Air Base, France, experienced what was later

described as “navigational trouble” and intruded into East

German airspace. Allied and US radars in West Germany had

observed the RB-66 entering the air defense identification zone

(ADIZ) near the Berlin center air corridor, the Air Force later

said, and attempts had been made to warn the plane, telling it

to reverse course. The RB-66 did not respond to the warnings,

however, despite standing regulations specifying that aircraft

within the ADIZ (within 50 miles of the East German frontier)

identify themselves. It continued its flight into East Germany.

American and allied radar operators watched as Soviet MiG

fighters were sent aloft to intercept the intruder. And they

watched as the intruder disappeared from their radarscopes in

the vicinity of Gardelegen, East Germany. 2 7 The time in Washington was 9:06 A.M.

Notification of the probable downing of a “U.S. or friendly

aircraft” was immediately flashed to the Pentagon, where

it was received in the National Military Command Center at

9:10 A.M. The on-duty watch team promptly informed Secretary McNamara and the White House, the State Department,

and the CIA. The team also informed DOD’s own International

Security Affairs and Public Affairs offices. Within the next

m inute, the commander in chief, Europe (CINCEUR), tele phoned

WWMCCS IS BORN

61
the chairman of the joint chiefs at the NMCC, confirming that

a shootdown had taken place. The identity of the downed

plane had not yet been established, CINCEUR said, but the

Air Force had intercepted a radio report by a commercial aircraft operating in the area saying that three people had been

sighted parachuting from an aircraft in distress.2 8 In short,

within six minutes of the shootdown, all the Washington prin -

cipals knew that the aircraft had been intercepted, fired upon,

and that three people had bailed out, apparently safely.

A few minutes later, the president’s military assistant in -

formed the NMCC that President Lyndon B. Johnson had been

advised of the incident, wished to know the identity of the

downed plane as soon as possible, and expected a full report

by noon. The NMCC relayed this demand to CINCEUR, whose

completed report was received in the NMCC by 11:15 A.M.

While all of this was going on, the NMCC representatives of

the State Department, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA),

and other agencies were reporting the facts to their agencies

as they became available. The US Military Liaison Mission at

Potsdam commenced efforts to recover any surviving crew

members.

At 12:30 P.M. the White House issued the first official press

release on the incident, stating that the Soviets had shot down

a US plane in distress. According to the official account, the

RB-66, which was admitted to be a reconnaissance aircraft,

had been on a low-level navigator training exercise. During

the flight, the navigator was said to have become disoriented

and had accidentally penetrated East German airspace. Official protests were subsequently filed with the Russians. Yet,

however poorly events worked out that day for the RB-66 and

its crew, everyone agreed that the National Military Command

System and the new World Wide Military Command and Control System of which it was a part had performed admirably

throughout the affair.

Automatic Data Processing

Incidents like the RB-66 shootdown created an insatiable

demand for information. In terms of sheer quantity of data, it

was a demand that would be met soon, indeed with a vengeance,

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

62
by the dramatically improved sensor and communications

technologies that were now coming on line. But if the quantity

of data available to decision makers was increasing each year,

quality was a different issue entirely. Raw data tend to be

meaningless and without value until they have been sorted,

processed, compared, interpreted, summarized, and dis played.

In short, they have no value until they have been transformed

into interpretable information. The problem for the new

WWMCCS, and the defense establishment generally, was that

the volume of data flowing into command centers was becoming

too large to handle. A solution to this problem would be difficult, indeed impossible, without the development of sophisticated high-speed automatic data-processing technologies—the

computer hardware, software, and associated peripherals.2 9

Many rightly viewed computers as the solution to a wide range

of military problems, calling them a panacea for command

and control, and it is no overstatement to say that automatic

data processing ranks equally with nuclear energy and the

rocket engine as the major revolutionary technologies of the

postwar period.

Concern for WWMCCS’s automatic data-processing capabilities began when the system was formally established. At

that time, the Pentagon solicited the help of Herbert Goertzel,

a computer scientist who would later earn the affectionate

appellation “Mr. WWMCCS” for his spirited advocacy of the

joint-service command and control system. He had worked

with UNIVAC 1, the first commercial computer, while on the

staff of the Atomic Energy Commission. Afterwards, he had

participated in the SAGE effort to integrate the US air defense

and missile systems. Recognized as one of the few people with

both the vision and the technical knowledge necessary to

develop the Pentagon’s envisioned global command and control network, Goertzel was invited to Washington and offered

the job of chief of the Information Systems and Standards

Division at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Such were the inauspicious beginnings of WWMCCS automatic data processing. 3 0

Goertzel’s first task was to develop the automatic dataprocessing requirements for WWMCCS’s key component, the

National Military Command System. Drawing upon plans already developed by Gen Earle Partridge’s National Command

WWMCCS IS BORN

63
and Control Task Force and working closely with the Joint

Command and Control Requirements Group and the Defense

Communications Agency, Goertzel and his colleague, Mal Billings, laid out the ADP support requirements for the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, for its backup site

at Fort Ritchie, and for the alternate airborne and sea-based

command posts. This was no small task, for one of the major

problems confronting the new WWMCCS, and the DOD as a

whole at that time, was the vast array of incompatible computing equipment then in operation. As things stood, most of the

major WWMCCS headquarters had already introduced com -

puters to support their command and control functions. Describing the existing state of affairs, Goertzel said it consisted

of essentially a “collection of autonomous subsystems which

provided little or no potential for fulfilling the command and

control requirements of the National Command Authority and

the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”3 1

If this was the case with the headquarters, it applied even

more strongly to the various lower-level WWMCCS elements

which, working within the acquisition framework of the past,

had separately determined their own ADP requirements, developed the systems to meet them, and then deployed and

operated those systems. The Department of Defense was still a

strongly ramified and decentralized organization, after all, and

acquiring technologies that dovetailed with existing decentralized organizational structures made perfect sense. And so all

government agencies, military and civilian, contracted with

outside companies to meet their specific data-processing

needs with little if any consideration as to how information

might be exchanged with the other services, agencies, and

commands. It was simply how things were done.

By the time WWMCCS was established, each of the services

and defense agencies had its own automatic data-processing

system up and running. Since these systems had been developed to meet individual needs and mission requirements,

in compatibilities were commonplace. Each of the services had

developed, or was developing, its own software programming

language. The problem was that software designed for one

computer type would not function with computers by another

manufacturer, and there were no common standards for data

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64
input, storage, or output.3 2 Most of the computer hardware

then in use had similarly been tailored to specific service

missions. 3 3 Since the machines themselves were essentially

custom made, their parts were not interchangeable. Operating

personnel trained in the use of one system required extensive

retraining to achieve proficiency in another. The situation was

analogous to people trying to communicate by telephone who

not only used technically incompatible telephones but who

also spoke different languages, a veritable communications

Tower of Babel.34 Goertzel’s task was to try to get these elements to play effectively together with common equipment,

computerized data formats, and other common user elements,

creating a system in fact as well as in name.

Goertzel’s initial standardization effort was called NIPS, for

National Military Command System Information Processing

System. Developed in 1963 and designed to run on the IBM

1410 computer, NIPS descended directly from the Navy’s Intelligence Data Handling System. It sought to achieve a measure

of compatibility in hardware and software, to reduce the staggering costs (even then) of software development, and to promote standardization of information, equipment, and training

among the various elements of the NMCS. 3 5

Despite these early efforts, things were not well with

WWMCCS ADP, and it was not long before they began to reach

crisis proportions. By the end of 1965, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the JCS recognized that the automatic

data-processing systems then in place or in the pipeline did

not provide adequate support for national level requirements.

They lacked growth potential. The systems employed incompatible hardware, software, and database structures, and could

not transfer data and information efficiently between the various WWMCCS sites. They also lacked the ability to provide

multilevel security access for users with different security clearances. Finally, these systems were costing the Pentagon far too

much because of the piecemeal way in which ADP assets were

being pursued and because of redundant, replicative software

development by members of the WWMCCS community. These

uncoordinated efforts also resulted in an inability to get discount prices for hardware through consolidated purchases. 36

WWMCCS IS BORN

65
Automatic data processing also presented a number of human

problems that extended well beyond the technical issues of

compatibility and considerations of cost. Computers were anything but familiar to many of the commanders who were then

being persuaded to acquire and take responsibility for them.3 7

Technical expertise was not abundant, and what existed was

spread thinly. When these mysterious machines arrived at a

command center, civilian technicians frequently accompanied

them, creating a situation not at all to the liking of many

commanders. Such programs as the Air Force’s back-to-thecockpit program that was responding to the escalating war in

Vietnam further exacerbated the situation, sending the nonetoo-subtle message to officers that computers should not figure

too prominently in their career plans. These and other influ -

ences had the effect of inducing considerable skepticism among

military officers regarding computers and conservatism with

respect to their deployment and use. With users unwilling to

take risks, the introduction of the new automatic dataprocessing technologies was slowed at least temporarily.

In short, with the individual members of the WWMCCS

community pursuing ADP technologies more or less as they

always had in support of their own unique needs and specific

missions, there was still no organizational center of gravity

with sufficient force and authority to cohere these disparate

pieces into a single coordinated system.

Problems of Definition

Perhaps the most basic problem with the new WWMCCS

was definitional, reflecting not only simple semantic differences

among involved constituencies but also more profound differences of interpretation and philosophy. Defense Secretary

McNamara and others had identified a number of major system effectiveness criteria to be actively pursued in WWMCCS’s

development—in particular, survivability, flexibility, standardization, and economy—but the problem was that nobody could

agree on exactly what any of these terms meant. Yet, agreement was essential to define what the system was and how it

should develop. 3 8 To the Pentagon leadership, then, reaching a

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

66
common understanding of what was in fact a part of

WWMCCS and what was not appeared urgent in the extreme.

The search for answers was on, and that search was conducted in several ways. On 31 March1964 Deputy Secretary of

Defense Cyrus Vance established a group under the leadership of General Bestic, DCA’s deputy director for the NMCS,

and charged it with the responsibility of coming up with a

definition of command and control. 3 9 (The group’s major task

was to review the assets and programs of the services and

defense agencies to try to determine which of these items

related to the command and control function.) Similarly, the

Joint Command and Control Requirements Group was in -

volved with the ongoing refinement of the WWMCCS concept

throughout this time. It was trying to determine the assets

involved, how these should operate, what interfaces should

exist between various WWMCCS elements, and how the system should be developed over time. Finally, in a related

move, Defense Secretary McNamara established an annual

Consolidated Command, Control, and Communications Program Review Panel, including representatives from the services and a number of defense agencies. Its major task was to

consider all proposals for program changes within WWMCCS

and to make appropriate recommendations. 40 The point of all

of this was to answer the nagging question: “What exactly is

WWMCCS?” Like the NCS of which it was a part, WWMCCS

was an ambiguous entity that had arrived on the scene without a coherent conceptual rationale for its existence.

Rhetorically at least, things were improving daily as the

decade progressed. In his 18 January 1965 defense message

to Congress, President Johnson described how the past several years had witnessed “dramatic improvements” in the ability to communicate with our forces. A national system for

commanding and controlling US military forces around the

globe had been established, he said, employing the “most advanced electronics and communications equipment, to gather

and present military information necessary for top-level management of crises and to assure continuity of control through

all levels of command.”4 1

Johnson should know. One of the most voracious consumers of information the Oval Office has ever known, he had four

WWMCCS IS BORN

67
telephones and two teletypes in his office. So that he would

not be out of touch while moving from place to place, and

decades before car phones became commonplace, two additional telephones were in his car. All of these were in constant

use. Of the approximately 120 independent nations in the

world at that time, Johnson was said to have had real-time

communications with about two-thirds of them. 4 2 During the

1965 Dominican crisis, Johnson had, and used, a direct telephone line to the US ambassador. As the president described

things at a subsequent press conference, even while the two of

them spoke, the ambassador was talking from under a desk

while bullets crashed through the window. Johnson said the

ambassador had with him a thousand American men, women,

and children “who were pleading with their President for help

to preserve their lives.”43 It sounded very much as if the White

House-to-foxhole variety of communications that had been

lacking during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban missile crisis had

finally been achieved.

Although in fact such a capability had not yet been

achieved, the impetus toward centralized command and control was pronounced during the Johnson administration.4 4

Johnson dramatically expanded the communications capability of the White House, indeed, to such an extent that one

defense journal noted how “a very real problem now appears

to be how much more communications equipment can be

squeezed into the basement of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Across the Potomac at the Pentagon, things proceeded similarly. Given the increasing seriousness of crises, the nature of

US operations in Vietnam and their potential for escalation,

the trend was directed necessarily toward circumscription of

decision-making latitude for the commanders on the scene. It

was a logical and necessary move, according to Defense Secretary

McNamara. (This statement stood in contrast to his earlier

claim that the president and the secretary of defense had

never usurped the role of the military commanders.) According

to McNamara, the ultimate command and control system would

provide a “standardized, highly survivable, non-interruptible

command capability for a wide range of possible situations,

and will provide the national authorities with a number of

alternatives through which they may exercise their command

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

68
responsibilities.”4 5 The question centered on whether the

World Wide Military Command and Control System that

McNamara had done so much to establish and advance would

be that ultimate system.

Notes

1. F. Boonham, “The Impact of Computers on Military Management and

Command,” Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies

117 (June 1972): 33.

2. Kurt Gottfried and Bruce G. Blair, eds., Crisis Stability and Nuclear

War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 183.

3. Bruce G. Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the

Nuclear Threat (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1985), 73–74.

4. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 207.

5. “Are the Assets of the NCS Responsive to National Needs?” Armed

Forces Management 12 (April 1966): 58.

6. Alfred D. Starbird, “NCS Today and Tomorrow,” Signal 21 (May 1967):

63.

7. “Assets of the NCS,” 58.

8. Starbird, 63.

9. “For DCA, A Strengthened Role,” Armed Forces Management 14 (July

1968): 75.

10. William W. Kaufman, The McNamara Strategy (New York: Harper &

Row, 1964), 74.

11. Solis Horwitz, “National Communications for the Nuclear Age,”

Signal 18 (July 1964): 34–35.

12. Paul W. Tibbets, “About Our Working National Military Command

System,” Armed Forces Management 10 (July 1964): 26.

13. “For DCA,” 76.

14. Irving Luckom, “Overview of WWMCCS Architecture,” Signal 3 0

(August 1976): 62.

15. Clifton L. Nicholson, “Command and Control and the

Decision-Making Process,” Air University Review 1 5 (November/December

1963): 77–78.

16. Tibbets, 26.

17. “Effectiveness, Responsiveness of National Command System Vital to

U.S. Security,” Armed Forces Management, July 1966, 43.

18. Hubert S. Cunningham and William E. Kenealy, “The Joint Chiefs of

Staff and Command and Control,” Signal 29 (March 1975): 15.

19. “Effectiveness, Responsiveness,” 45.

20. “How Not to Build C&C Systems Is Still an Unanswered Question in

Defense,” Armed Forces Management 12 (July 1966): 109.

21. J. J. Cahill, “Resource Management: A New Slant on C&C,” Armed

Forces Management 9 (July 1963): 71.

WWMCCS IS BORN

69
22. “How Not to Build C&C Systems,” 109.

23. Ibid.

24. J. S. Butz Jr., “USAF and the Computer Revolution,” Air Force

Magazine 47 (March 1964): 35.

25. Gordon T. Gould Jr., “Computers and Communications in the

Information Age,” Air University Review 21 (May/June 1970): 9.

26. Lee M. Paschall, “WWMCCS: Nerve Center of U.S. C3,” Air Force

Magazine 5 8 (July 1975): 54.

27. Arthur J. Olsen, “U.S. Reconnaissance Jet Downed in East

Germany,” New York Times, 11 March 1964, 1.

28. Tibbets, 28.

29. Butz, 33.

30. Carol Hamilton, “Worldwide C2 System Networks Strategic Data for

Joint Chiefs,” Defense Electronics 20 (June 1988): 50–51.

31. Herbert B. Goertzel and James R. Miller, “WWMCCS ADP: A Promise

Fulfilled,” Signal 30 (May/June 1976): 57.

32. “Electronics in Military Decision Making: The Need for Automatic

Aids," INTERAVIA 19 (June 1964): 851.

33. “NMCS: The National Voice of Command,” DATA 11 (January 1966):

22.

34. Edgar Ulsamer, “The Military Decision-Makers’ Top Tool,” Air Force

Magazine 54 (July 1971): 44.

35. Leonard Maley, “NIPS—The System that Invented Itself,” Systems

Engineering Forum, n.d., 32.

36. General Accounting Office, The World Wide Military Command and

Control System—Major Changes Needed in its Automated Data Processing

Management and Direction , Report to the Congress, 14 December 1979, ii–iii.

37. “How Not to Build C&C Systems,” 109.

38. C. Kenneth Allard, Command, Control, and the Common Defense

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 135.

39. Ibid., 33.

40. “NMCS,” 18.

41. John B. Bestic, “No More Confused Situations,” Signal 21 (March

1967): 53.

42. “Evolution and Compatibility: 1965’s Key Words in Tactical C&C,”

Armed Forces Management 11 (July 1965): 45.

43. “Transcript of the President’s News Conference on Foreign and

Domestic Affairs,” New York Times, 18 June 1965, 14.

44. Alexander Cockburn, “Press Clips,” Village Voice , 8 November 1983,

10–11.

45. “Evolution and Compatibility,” 46–47.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

70
Chapter 5

Three WWMCCS Failures

Despite problems of definition, standardization, and authority, the development of the World Wide Military Command and

Control System was accompanied by high expectations and

considerable fanfare from the proponents of centralization.

But during the decade’s final several years, three serious and

highly visible incidents cast considerable doubt upon the new

system’s capabilities and its effectiveness. Each of these incidents involved intelligence activities, each resulted in loss of

life to American servicemen, and all were subsequently attrib -

uted to communications breakdowns and delays in systems

that were designated as part of WWMCCS. A cacophony of

criticism was raised as a result, leading to calls for increased

standardization of system assets, greater centralization of

managerial authority, and a more formalized approach to developing a command and control capability responsive to the

needs of the national leadership.

Failure One: USS Liberty

The first of the three WWMCCS failures took place in June

1967, the time of the Six Day War between Israel and the

United Arab Republic. It involved the American intelligence

vessel USS Liberty , part of a worldwide fleet of electronic intelligence ships operated by the National Security Agency and

designed to intercept communications and other types of electronic transmissions. With tensions between Israel and Egypt

steadily building during the spring of 1967, Liberty was ordered

to sail for Rota, Spain, where she would take on supplies and

prepare to proceed to the Eastern Mediterranean area off Port

Said, at the mouth of the Suez Canal. 1 While in Rota, Liberty

received orders that she should approach no closer than 12.5

nautical miles to the coast of Egypt and no closer than 6.5

nautical miles to the coast of Israel, a position that would

permit the maximum collection of signals intelligence.

71
 The shooting war between Israel and Egypt began on 5

June, while Liberty was steaming toward the Eastern Mediterranean. 2

 At 2015Z on 6 June, the commander of the US Sixth

Fleet, Vice Adm William I. Martin, instructed all surface and

air units under his command to stand at least one hundred

nautical miles off the belligerents’ coasts. But Liberty never

received this message, and no subsequent action was taken

by Martin to ensure that the vessel complied with his one-hundred-mile standoff order. During the afternoon of 7 June, officials at the NSA also decided to reposition Liberty farther away

from the coast, and they sent a high-precedence flash message to this effect to the Joint Chiefs of Staff by way of AUTODIN. (Four separate precedence levels had been established

for AUTODIN: flash, immediate, priority, and routine. The JCS’s

criteria called for a flash message to be transmitted within 10

minutes, an immediate message within 30 minutes, a priority

message within three hours, and a routine message within six

hours.)3 The JCS responded by preparing a message to Liberty

that instructed it to approach no closer than 20 nautical miles

off the Egyptian coast and no closer than 15 nautical miles off

the Israeli coast. The JCS issued this message at 2230Z and

directed it to the commander in chief, Europe, for action. Information copies of the message were to be sent to a number of

relevant parties, among them Adm John S. McCain Jr., the

commander in chief of US Naval Forces in Europe (CINCUSNAVEUR); the commander of the US Sixth Fleet; and Liberty .

Eleven minutes after the JCS’s message was issued, it was given

to the Army Communications Station at the Pentagon for transmission by way of AUTODIN. The message was assigned a priority precedence and scheduled for delivery to its addressees

within three hours.

It was then that the problems began. Since there was a large

volume of higher-priority messages swamping the Army Communications Station, operators did not get around to transmitting the action copy of the message to CINCEUR for more

than 14 hours. The information copies of the message, including the one for Liberty , were transmitted even later. To make

matters worse, the information copies were incorrectly routed

to the Navy Communications Station in the Philippines. From

there, they were sent to the Navy Communications Station in

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

72
Asmara, where they were placed on fleet broadcast a full 23

hours after they had been issued by the joint chiefs. (This was

far too late to do Liberty any good, for the vessel had been

attacked nine and one-half hours earlier.)

This failure did not turn out to be of great importance, however, because long before the message was placed on fleet

broadcast, it already had been canceled by a subsequent JCS

message. During the hour following the release of their original message, the NSA and the joint chiefs became increasingly

concerned over the repositioning of the Liberty . It was decided

that the ship was still too close to the coast, and so one hour

and 20 minutes after the joint chiefs issued their original message, a JCS duty officer used AUTOSEVOCOM, the Automatic

Secure Voice Communications Network, to telephone CINCUSNAVEUR headquarters in London. The duty officer there was

given a verbal directive to order the Liberty to operate no

closer than one hundred nautical miles to the Egyptian and

Israeli coasts, and he was told that a written message formalizing the verbal directive would arrive shortly by way of AUTODIN. A message ordering Liberty to operate at least one hundred nautical miles off the belligerents’ coasts was promptly

prepared for transmission to Admiral Martin, Sixth Fleet commander, who in turn would pass it on to Liberty. Despite the

urgency implicit in the JCS verbal directive, the CINCUSNAVEUR staff did not release the message for transmission

until the formal written notification was received from Washington.4

 Ever bureaucratically cautious, they wanted written

proof that the instruction to move Liberty had originated with

someone other than the relatively junior staff officer who had

placed the call at the JCS’s Joint Reconnaissance Center.5

The JCS released the written confirmation about one hour

after the telephone call to CINCUSNAVEUR headquarters.

This delay itself should not have been of consequence, since

the joint chiefs had every reason to believe that prompt action

would be taken in response to their verbal directive. 6 The written

message canceled the earlier (and unbeknownst to the JCS,

hopelessly misrouted) message ordering Liberty to stand at

least 15 nautical miles off the belligerents’ coasts, and confirmed

that the vessel should remain at least one hundred nautical

miles offshore. This message was given an immediate prece dence

THREE WWMCCS FAILURES

73
suggesting a heightened level of concern by the joint chiefs

and requiring a transmission time of not more than one-half

hour. As before, following the chain of command, the action

copy of the message was addressed to the commander in chief,

Europe, with information copies going to CINCUSNAVEUR,

the commander of the Sixth Fleet, and Liberty .

The message was released by the JCS to the Army Commu -

nications Station in the Pentagon for transmission by way of

AUTODIN. But despite the message’s precedence level, the

Army Station took 44 minutes to transmit the action copy to

CINCEUR. The message’s information copies fared even worse,

with a delay of two hours and 23 minutes before they were

transmitted. The only valid explanation for such a delay would

be that messages of equal or higher precedence were awaiting

transmission; but a congressional subcommittee later pointed

out that the Pentagon was unable to furnish any evidence that

this had been the case. 7

The initial delay represented only part of the problem. Army

Communications Station personnel assigned an erroneous

routing indicator to the information copy of the message

intended for Liberty , which misrouted it to the Naval Commu -

nications Station in the Philippines. There the error was recognized and, within an hour, the message was retransmitted to

the Naval Communications Station in Morocco, from which it

was to go directly to Liberty . This should have solved the prob -

lem, except on the way to Morocco the message had the misfortune to be routed so that it again passed through the Army

Communications Station in the Pentagon. Rather than routing

the message on to Morocco, as should have been done, it was

sent instead to National Security Agency headquarters at Fort

Meade, Maryland, where it was filed without further action.

The explanation offered for the error was that the clerks in the

Pentagon had misread the message’s routing indicator.

The action copy of the message had made it to the headquarters of the commander in chief, Europe, however, arriving

at 0212Z on 8 June. CINCEUR took action a little over an

hour later, telephoning Admiral McCain, commander in chief

of US Naval Forces in Europe, to take immediate action on the

JCS message. CINCEUR followed up its verbal instructions

to CINCUSNAVEUR with a formal written directive, the action

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

74
copy of which was directed to McCain, with information copies

going to a number of parties, including the commander of the

Sixth Fleet and Liberty . The problem was that the written

directive was not released for transmission by CINCEUR until

0625Z, more than three hours after the immediate message

had been received from the Pentagon. An additional delay of

40 minutes occurred in the CINCEUR message center before

the message was finally transmitted.

As before, the initial delays represented only the beginning

of the problems. To ensure that the message would get through

to its addressees, CINCEUR transmitted it concurrently over

two separate relay paths. A good thing, too, since one of the

messages was promptly lost at the first station on its transmission path, the AUTODIN relay at Parmesans, Germany.

The explanation later offered was that the station was experiencing a heavy volume of communications traffic at the time

and that the number of qualified personnel at the station was

inadequate to ensure error-free processing of communications

traffic.8 The second relay path worked considerably better for

getting the message to CINCUSNAVEUR and the commander

of the Sixth Fleet, although not to Liberty, which never received it.

The information copy directed to Liberty itself did not fare at

all well, following a meandering route that took it through a

number of intermediate stations. One of these stations was

the Army Communications Station at Asmara, where a delay

of more than two and one-half hours occurred before the message was passed on to a Navy Communications Station lo -

cated less than one mile away. A garbled message was placed

on fleet broadcast at 1059Z, saying only that Liberty was to

act on other messages previously received from the joint

chiefs—messages which, of course, had yet to be received. By

the time the complete message was finally placed on fleet

broadcast at 1646Z, more than nine hours had elapsed since

the message had been transmitted from CINCEUR. By then,

the attack on Liberty already had taken place.

One imagines that Admiral McCain’s staff at CINCUSNAVEUR

should have been concerned about the messages they were

r eceiving. They should have acted to contact Liberty in response.

After all, CINCUSNAVEUR had received the AUTOSEVOCOM call

from the joint chiefs regarding the need to reposition Lib erty .

THREE WWMCCS FAILURES

75
Also received was the information copy of the message ordering

the vessel to stand off from 15 to 20 nautical miles from the

belligerent nations’ coasts. Finally, there was the telephone

call from CINCEUR concerning Liberty . It was only following

this final call, at 0325Z on 8 June, that CINCUSNAVEUR

established a direct teletype conference circuit with the commander of the Sixth Fleet, who was instructed to take action

on the JCS message. This directive was followed by a formal

message confirming the specifics of the teletype order.

After receiving these messages, Admiral Martin, the Sixth

Fleet commander, should have gotten word to Liberty ; yet,

inexplicably, he did not do so with any dispatch. Despite the

concern evidenced by the higher commands, more than four

hours would elapse before Martin released his action message

for transmission to Liberty . To make matters worse, he chose

not to contact Liberty directly by way of radio but rather to

use normal communications procedures. What this meant in

practice was that the action message was passed to the communications center on board the Sixth Fleet flagship, USS

Little Rock , for transmission, where an additional delay of

more than an hour ensued. The reason given for the delay was

that there were one flash and seven immediate messages being prepared for transmission, and the message from CINCUSNAVEUR was simply put at the end of the queue. It was finally

transmitted at 1035Z on 8 June.

This message arrived at the Army DCS station at Asmara at

approximately 1200Z. Instead of delivering it to the nearby

Navy Communications Station for fleet broadcast, the Army

DCS station sent it to the Navy Communications Station in

Greece. Aware that an error had taken place, Navy duty personnel there returned the message to the Army station. After

additional delays, the message was finally delivered to the

Navy Communications Station, arriving there at 1510Z, over

six hours after its release by Admiral Martin. The message

was put on fleet broadcast 15 minutes later, at 1525Z, more

than three hours after the attack on Liberty had taken place.

As all of these electronic vagaries were taking place, the

going was getting tough on board USS Liberty . Throughout the

night of 7 June and the morning of the 8th, the ship had been

reconnoitered by Israeli fighters and reconnaissance aircraft.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

76
Flying so low that the pilots were readily visible to ship

personnel, the aircraft crews could easily see the American

flag being flown on board the ship, according to Liberty’s crew,

and they had been overheard reporting the nationality of the

ship to ground headquarters. Members of the crew apparently

found the close surveillance reassuring. Israel was an ally,

after all, and dominated the sky. The nationality of Liberty was

unmistakable. Under these conditions, an Israeli attack on the

ship seemed unthinkable.9

This sense of assurance was rent asunder shortly after

1400Z on 8 June, when Liberty came under sustained attack

by Israeli Mirage jets and torpedo boats. When the attack

b egan, Liberty’s crew desperately worked to break through

Israeli jamming to transmit an urgent request for assistance

to the carrier Saratoga , operating some five hundred miles

away. The ship’s commander, Capt Joseph Tully, relayed the

message to the Sixth Fleet commander over the Primary Tactical Maneuvering Circuit, duplicated the message by teletype,

and sent information copies to Navy headquarters in Washington and London. Admiral Martin promptly directed the carriers Saratoga and America to launch aircraft to defend Liberty ,

but to little avail. America had apparently relaxed from an

alert posture and did not respond. Saratoga launched planes,

but these were quickly recalled by Rear Adm Lawrence Geis,

commander of the carrier task force, who had received orders

from the Pentagon that the planes should not engage in action

until permission was received from the White House. By the

time authorization was finally received and the aircraft

launched, more than an hour and one-half had elapsed.

Alone and unarmed except for a few machine guns, Liberty

found things going badly. Israeli jets began strafing runs and

bombarded the ship with napalm. The attack was soon joined

by Israeli torpedo boats. Several torpedoes barely missed, but

one hit the ship in its cryptologic spaces, blasting a 40-foot

hole in her hull and killing 25 NSA personnel. According to

crew members, the torpedo boat then sat nearby the crippled

ship for the next 40 minutes, machine-gunning any personnel

who tried to fight the fires or help the wounded. The Israelis

shot up life rafts that were launched to save the crew in the

water.1 0 In all, 34 Americans were killed in the attack, another

THREE WWMCCS FAILURES

77
75 were wounded, and the ship itself was damaged so badly

that it subsequently had to be scrapped.1 1

Did the Israelis know they were attacking an American

ship? The evidence is conflicting. A House investigating subcommittee concluded in 1971 that the attack was wholly delib -

erate on Israel’s part. In his book Assault on the Liberty , Deck

Officer James Ennes seconds this conclusion, arguing that

there was no possible mistake regarding the ship’s identity.

But why would Israel attack a vessel belonging to its benefactor and strongest ally? Perhaps, as Ennes suggests, the motive

was to keep the United States from learning of Israel’s intention to invade Syria. Only two weeks before, President

Johnson had informed Foreign Minister Abba Eban that the

United States would not tolerate such a move if it were initiated by Israel. With Liberty out of the way, the hostilities could

be blamed on the Syrians. 1 2 On the other side of the interpretive fence are those who say the attack was all a gigantic

mistake, the result of a lengthy series of erroneous reports

that indicated the ship was non-American and hostile. 1 3 Whatever the truth of the matter, there is little doubt that

WWMCCS performed poorly throughout the entire affair. The

incredible odyssey of messages that might have saved Liberty

as they were lost, misrouted, and delayed, constituted one of

the most serious failures of command and control to date.

Failure Two: USS Pueblo

Only seven months had passed since the attack on Liberty

when the second WWMCCS failure took place, this time involving the USS Pueblo—also part of NSA’s worldwide fleet of

electronic intelligence ships. Of the three incidents here recounted, the case of the Pueblo is by far the muddiest and

most ambiguous. The versions of events recounted later by

crew members were often utterly at variance, the official Navy

inquiry conducted afterwards was limited, and the entire incident was rapidly shrouded with a veil of secrecy so impenetrable that virtually nobody, likely not even top DOD officials or

the president himself, knew what had actually taken place.

In late January 1968 Cmdr Lloyd Bucher and his crew

departed for an area off the North Korean coast near the

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

78
mouth of Yonghung Bay, upon which is located the city of

Wonsan and its naval base. Pueblo apparently took up a position with-in North Korean territorial waters at the entrance to

the bay but hidden from coastal radars by Yo Island. Bucher’s

mission, which he repeatedly claimed to have carried out to

the letter, called for him to invite harassment by the Koreans

by putting himself in harm’s way. After enemy ships spotted

Bucher, he was to remain stationary rather than departing the

area. Throughout the harassment, onboard NSA personnel

would be intercepting communications to determine whether

the Koreans were getting instructions from the Chinese or the

Soviets, both of whom regarded North Korea as a client state

at the time.

On the morning of 23 January 1968, Pueblo transmitted a

number of routine messages to the Naval Security Group

facility at Kamiseya, Japan. At noon that day (0300Z) a

North Korean subchaser came from the direction of Wonsan

and circled the ship. Pueblo was asked by way of flag hoist

signals to identify its nationality, and Bucher responded by

raising the biggest ensign he had on board. NSA personnel

promptly intercepted a radio report from the subchaser to

its base giving Pueblo’s number, GER-2, and identifying it

as American. The North Korean ship then hoisted signals

informing Pueblo “heave to or I will fire,” to which Bucher’s

apparent response was “I am hydrographic,” and “intend to

remain in area until tomorrow.” From Bucher’s view, it was

not yet an emergency; harassment of US intelligence ships

was common, and his orders were to provoke the North

Koreans, then monitor their reaction. Nothing happened

during the next three-quarters of an hour. Several messages

of a routine nature were sent to the NSA facility at Kamiseya

during this period—routine except for noting that there was

“company outside.”1 4

Three North Korean torpedo boats were then spotted heading toward Pueblo. At 0350Z Bucher released the first of two

messages designated Pinnacle, identifying the message as of

great significance and requiring immediate delivery to the Na -

tional Command Authorities. The message reported the encounter with the subchaser and the exchange of flag-hoist

signals and affirmed Bucher’s intention to remain in the area,

THREE WWMCCS FAILURES

79
if feasible. The message was given a flash precedence, presumably guaranteeing extremely rapid delivery to its addressees.1 5

The NSA station at Kamiseya received the message almost

instantaneously, and, within six minutes, relayed it to the

commander of naval forces, Japan, where it was logged in at

0413Z. And there it sat for the next 47 minutes, despite its

Pinnacle designation and flash precedence. The explanation

later offered by the assistant chief of naval operations for

communications and electronics for this lengthy delay was

that much time was required for decision making, part of

which involved restructuring the message so it could be taken

out of dedicated NSA intelligence channels and transmitted

over the general-use AUTODIN network.1 6

Although the message left the commander of naval forces,

Japan, at 0500Z, things did not go well. The message was forwarded to the Naval Communications Station, Japan, where it

was transmitted to its Navy addressees by way of the Navy

Command Operational Network, a communications system

used ex clusively for Navy operational orders. This system was

not instantaneous, requiring one-half hour for all Navy addressees to receive their copies, that is, an hour and three-quarters

after its transmission by Pueblo. For all other addressees AUTODIN was used, and there things went even worse. The Naval

Communications Station in Japan introduced the message into

AUTODIN at 0508Z, but it did not reach the first of its addressees until 0600Z, almost an hour later. The message did not

reach the Joint Chiefs of Staff until 0624Z, an hour and 16

minutes later, and more than two and one-half hours after its

transmission by Pueblo.

1 7

Aboard Pueblo, things were increasingly serious. Shortly

a fter the first Pinnacle message at 0350Z, and with the torpedo boats approaching, Bucher ordered his engines started.

The subchaser responded by lowering its “heave to” flags, in -

structing Pueblo to “follow me—have pilot aboard.” Bucher

ignored this, as well as the frantic signals of a sailor on board

the subchaser ordering him to follow to Wonsan. The torpedo

boats arrived and formed a circle around Pueblo, and two MiG

fighters began making passes overhead. At 0415Z soldiers

aboard the subchaser were seen transferring to one of the

torpedo boats, which then began backing up toward Pueblo’s

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

80
stern in preparation for a boarding attempt. The faces of the

boarding party could easily be discerned and the cocking of

their weapons was clearly audible.

Bucher decided to make a run for it to the east, the direction of the open sea. But even as he did so, he transmitted a

second Pinnacle message. This transmission took place at

0418Z, some 28 minutes after the first Pinnacle, and like the

first, it was given a flash precedence. In that message, Bucher

reported that the torpedo boats had joined the subchaser, that

he had been ordered to follow the subchaser, and that instead

he was departing the area “under escort.” The gravity of the

situation should have been apparent now to those receiving

this message, since the Navy considered a second Pinnacle to

be a “trigger message” that required the most urgent attention.1 8

As before, this second critic from Pueblo was received almost instantaneously at Kamiseya, and within six minutes (by

0424Z), it had been relayed to the commander of naval forces,

Japan. There the delays were again substantial, and 39 min -

utes elapsed before the message was passed to the communications station for further transmission. At 0510Z copies of

the message designated for Navy addressees were again transmitted by way of the Naval Command Operational Network,

and all arrived at their destinations within 15 minutes. But

things again went far from smoothly for those messages destined for AUTODIN transmission. For reasons that could never

be determined, those messages languished for 18 minutes at

the Naval Communications Station in Japan before they were

introduced into AUTODIN, and almost another hour passed

before they reached all of their addressees. At the Pentagon,

the joint chiefs received the AUTODIN message at 0557Z, a

full hour and 39 minutes after its transmission by Pueblo.

1 9

In one sense, the Defense Communications System’s torpid

performance hardly mattered, since the second Pinnacle message had also been twice transmitted to the joint chiefs by way

of NSA’s dedicated Critical Intelligence Communications

(CRITICOM) intelligence network. Recognizing the seriousness

of the situation upon receipt of Pueblo’s second Pinnacle message at 0418Z, the NSA facility at Kamiseya gave it a critic

format, introduced it into the CRITICOM network at 0440Z,

and dispatched it to the Pentagon, where it was received at

THREE WWMCCS FAILURES

81
the National Military Command Center six minutes later.

Similarly, the commander of naval forces in Japan gave the

second Pinnacle a critic format and sent it out at 0435Z; it

was received in the NMCC four minutes later. While from the

JCS ’s perspective AUTODIN’s poor performance might not

seem to matter much because the intelligence channels performed so well; there were other important addressees that did

not have the advantage of CRITICOM. For example, it took

more than an hour for Pueblo’s second Pinnacle message to

reach the two Pacific commands that might have been able to

send assistance to the beleaguered ship.2 0

Back on board Pueblo, things had gone from bad to worse.

At 0426Z, 11 minutes after Bucher decided to make a run for

it, the subchaser, which had not immediately taken up the

pursuit, received orders to fire on the intruder to make it stop.

The subchaser rapidly closed the distance between itself and

the American ship, lowering its “follow me” signal and replacing it with “heave to or I will fire.” Communications operators

in the secure NSA portion of the ship promptly sent a message

to Kamiseya, repeated three times: “They plan to open fire on

us now.” This was followed by another transmission of the

second Pinnacle message, which was interrupted to repeat,

“North Korean war vessels plan to open fire. . . .” Two minutes

later, at 0430Z, Pueblo transmitted five times, “We are being

boarded,” which was a bit premature. It was followed by “SOS”

and repeated more than 30 times. Throughout these tense

minutes, emergency destruction of intelligence materials was

under way. Bucher apparently made one last desperate effort

to evade the subchaser, which then opened fire at Pueblo’s

antennas, both to bring the ship to a halt and to shut down

its radios. Realizing his position was hopeless, Bucher

stopped his ship, which was boarded by 0437Z. At 0445Z an

NSA operator still at his station in the secure intelligence

portion of the ship transmitted to Kamiseya, “We are being

escorted into prob Wonson repeat Wonson [sic].”2 1

The escort, according to one analysis, was by the Red Chinese. In his book, The Pueblo Surrender, Robert A. Liston

argues that it was a contingent of Chinese soldiers, not North

Koreans, who actually boarded the ship. The Americans were

quickly subdued by the soldiers and their AK-47 automatic

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

82
weapons. The soldiers herded the Americans below decks and

blindfolded them. The boarding party broke out the ammunition for Pueblo’s several machine guns for protection (the ship

had been limited to one hundred rounds for each gun), and

got the ship under way toward Wonsan as rapidly as possible.

Why? Liston contends it was because a Soviet warship was

fast approaching from the east, something several of Pueblo’s

crew later reported having seen. Wanting to get hold of Pueblo

as much as the Chinese did, the Soviet ship fired upon it at

about 0500Z, killing one American seaman and wounding

three others. Recognizing that the Soviets might slaughter his

crew, Bucher somehow managed to bring his vessel to a halt

despite the Chinese infantryman at his side. At 0532Z Pueblo

was boarded for a second time—this time by North Koreans

acting on the orders of the Russians. It was some six hours

later that the ship finally sailed into Wonsan, where the crew

was held in captivity until the following December.2 2

Liston argues that the Pueblo surrender, unbeknownst to its

captain or crew, was engineered by two high-level NSA operatives to get a “rigged” cryptographic machine into North Korean

hands. Both the Koreans and the North Vietnamese used

codes devised by the Soviets, and the hope was that when the

Koreans used the rigged machine, it would help break the

North Vietnamese codes, allowing the United States to gain

information about the military buildup then under way. In deed,

in a few days this buildup would result in the Tet offensive.

How then was the NSA to make certain that the North Koreans

would seize the ship and its machine? Liston argues that NSA

leaked information to both the Russians and the Chinese that

Pueblo carried a highly sensitive piece of information of interest to both countries regarding Soviet preparations to attack

China. Thus, the desperate acts of both nations to board and

search Pueblo and their desire to have the world think the

seizure was the work of the North Koreans alone. If so, it was

a bold and brilliant operation: Liston tells us that NSA estimates were that three Americans would be killed, but if necessary the agency was willing to sacrifice the entire crew to save

thousands of American lives in Vietnam.

Whatever the merits of these speculations regarding motive,

the performance of WWMCCS during the Pueblo affair was

THREE WWMCCS FAILURES

83
hardly what many in the Pentagon, or the Congress, believed

was required for crisis management. A naval court of inquiry

later described the delays in relaying Pueblo’s Pinnacle messages as “grossly excessive,” saying they were at least partially

responsible for the failure of US forces to rescue the ship.2 3

The House Armed Services Committee concluded that while it

was essential for WWMCCS and other systems to be linked

together effectively, this obviously had clearly not been the case:

Donald T. Poe wrote that “because of the vastness of the military structure with its complex divisions and the multiple

layers of command and the failure of responsible authorities

at the Seat of Government . . . our military command structure is now simply unable to meet emergency criteria.”2 4 The

Pueblo incident had clearly shown that military facilities and

command centers lacked the necessary connectivity to give

and respond to top-level orders and requests for information.

Failure Three: EC-121

The third WWMCCS failure came in April 1969, when the North

Koreans shot down a Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane over the

Sea of Japan. According to the North Korean account, the American plane had penetrated deeply into their airspace, their interceptor fighters were scrambled in response, and one of them had

“scored the brilliant battle success” of downing the intruder with a

single shot. Officials of the new Nixon administration flatly denied

the intrusion charge, saying that at no time during its mission did

the EC-121 actually enter North Korean airspace.2 5 Whatever the

truth of the matter, all of the EC-121’s 31 crew members, 30 Navy

personnel and one Marine, died in the attack.

The EC-121 was a big, four-engine, propeller-driven Lock -

heed Super Constellation modified for military use. The EC121’s first electronic defense role back in the 1950s had been

as a radar picket in SAGE, where the mission of these “pregnant geese”—flying high-altitude patrols hundreds of miles

offshore and working in conjunction with radar picket ships—

was to scan the sky ceaselessly to detect the approach of

Soviet bombers.2 6 But as the years passed and far more powerful ground-based radars came on line, the radar pickets,

both airborne and sea-based, were phased out. Their mission

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

84
an anachronism but their airframes still viable, the EC-121

fleet was again modified during the 1960s, this time to serve

as platforms for the collection of electronic intelligence. In its

late 1960s incarnation, the EC-121 remained a sight to behold: two large radomes protruding “like goiters” from the top

and bottom of the fuselage, which was itself stuffed with six

tons of state-of-the-art electronic equipment.2 7

While the EC-121 was a newcomer to the air reconnaissance game, the game itself was of far longer standing. Every

year since the dawn of the cold war, thousands of reconnaissance missions had been flown by US aircraft just off the state

borders of Communist nations to collect intelligence. The Sea

of Japan was of particular interest, for there the borders of

North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, and the Soviet

Union drew together. During the first three months of 1969,

almost two hundred such missions had been flown in the area

by US military aircraft, without incident. 2 8 But incidents were

in fact far from rare, and the one involving the EC-121 was by

no means an anomaly, except perhaps in the large number of

American servicemen who lost their lives. Dozens of American

aircraft and crews had been shot down over the years in what

one author described as a “bloody electronic air war.”29 Why so

many, why so bloody, when reconnaissance planes are unarmed?

The answer turns on the very nature of airborne reconnaissance. Of particular interest is information concerning a target

nation’s electronic order of battle—the ways in which radar,

communications, and other electronic assets are employed

under conditions of stress. Such information is of critical importance to military planners during time of war, and the point is

to gather as much of this type of intelligence as possible.

The problem is that the targets of these intelligence efforts

tend to be unwilling to accommodate an adversary’s curiosity

by turning on their electronic equipment so its performance

can be assessed, and it is precisely at that point that the

passive nature of reconnaissance flights ends. For it is then

necessary to create situations of actual emergency, including

border penetrations to induce the adversary to react in a way

that reveals information of importance. 3 0 This explains the prodigious propensity of reconnaissance flights to stray from course,

and the sometimes deadly reactions their intrusions provoke.

THREE WWMCCS FAILURES

85
This occasionally bloody cat-and-mouse game reached its

zenith with the downing of the EC-121 in 1969, another tragedy that might have been averted had the World Wide Military

Command and Control System performed as advertised.

Responsibility for the EC-121’s mission was apparently

straightforward. The plane was formally under the operational

control of Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron I, itself attached

to the Seventh Fleet, which was under the control of the commander in chief, Pacific (CINCPAC). But final authority for the

flight did not rest with CINCPAC, for all such missions had to

be reviewed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and approved by the

Office of the Secretary of Defense. Throughout, however, NSA

was really in charge of these operations. When the missions

took place, they were monitored continuously at the NMCC by

relevant civilian and military personnel attached to the Joint

Reconnaissance Center, generally with the secretary and the

joint chiefs listed as “parties on the line” to receive data or

advisories of events and emergencies. In the case of the EC121, communications up and down the chain of command

would be far less clear-cut.

The EC-121’s mission was under the operational control of

the Naval Security Group, the Navy’s in-house intelligence

ser-vice, based at Kamiseya, Japan, which was in turn operating the flight under the direction of NSA. As with all reconnaissance missions, that of the EC-121 followed a carefully

prepared script. After it took off from Japan, the EC-121 was

to take a northwest heading until it arrived at a point off North

Korea’s Musu Peninsula, near the city of Chongjin. The pilot,

Navy Lt Cmdr James H. Overstreet, was then to begin flying a

series of slow elliptical orbits, each about 120 miles long, that

would first take the plane northeast toward the borders of

China and the Soviet Union, then back southwest toward

North Korea. Throughout the flight, onboard linguists fluent in

Korean and Russian would be eavesdropping on military radio

communications. At the same time, the plane’s electronic

equip ment would be busy intercepting and recording hostile

radar activity and a host of other electronic intelligence. 3 1

Thus far, this description makes it sound as if the EC-121

was a completely autonomous operator in the Far Eastern

skies, but that was hardly the case. The plane was followed

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

86
closely throughout its flight by a number of US facilities in the

area, the most important of which were the Naval Security

Group station at Kamiseya and an Army Security Agency facility in South Korea. Following standard procedures, all monitoring facilities received an advisory indicating the time of the

flight and its intended course. As the time approached, the

stations began gearing up for the activity that was to follow.

Linguists prepared themselves to eavesdrop on radio frequencies used by the target nation’s radar stations as they began

to track the plane, a procedure known as grid plotting. Other

intelligence technicians prepared themselves to monitor the

frequencies used by the radars themselves, with still other

technicians standing by to pinpoint those radars’ precise locations using high-frequency radio-direction-finding techniques.32 The plan worked. As President Richard M. Nixon

noted following the shootdown, there was never any uncertainty regarding the location of the EC-121. “We knew this,

based on our radar,” Nixon said. “We know what their radar

showed. We, incidentally, know what the Russian radar

showed. All three radars showed exactly the same thing.”3 3

The flight began at dawn on 14 April at 0950Z, local time,

when the EC-121 and its crew took off from Atsugi Air Base

(AB) near Yokohama, Japan. Eighteen minutes into the flight,

the EC-121 transmitted a routine radio voice message saying

it had reached its cruising altitude and was en route to its

area of operations. Given the relatively slow speed of the propplane, nothing more would happen for several hours, except

that the various US ground-based intelligence stations involved

in the mission would become increasingly alert. On 15 April at

0334Z, the Army Security Agency station detected North Ko -

rean aircraft activity, presumably in reaction to the presence

of the EC-121, although the North Korean planes were quite a

distance away. American personnel continued to track the

planes, Soviet-made MiG fighters, for almost an hour, until

0422Z, when they lost their track. This loss caused some

concern, perhaps, yet there was no sense of crisis, as evidenced by a stream of routine communications between the

EC-121 and ground stations throughout this period. 3 4

Fifteen minutes after their radar track was lost, the North

Korean MiGs were again picked up on radar. Concerned with

THREE WWMCCS FAILURES

87
the surveillance, the Army Security Agency duty personnel

issued a spot report to the Naval Security Group station at

Kamiseya. The report came in at 0445Z. It noted simply that

North Korean air activity had been observed and that such

activity was probably in reaction to the EC-121. In Kamiseya,

the message was reformatted, addressed to the JCS and three

other addressees, assigned an immediate precedence level,

and handed over to Defense Communications System personnel at 0454Z for transmission by way of AUTODIN. Despite the

fact that DCS criteria specify that messages with an immediate precedence level should be transmitted within 30 minutes,

the spot report was not received by the Joint Reconnaissance

Center in the Pentagon until one hour and 16 minutes later.3 5

Even as the spot report was being issued, it was becoming

increasingly apparent to the American military watchers in

South Korea that the North Korean MiGs were definitely approaching the EC-121. Communications between the ground

station and the reconnaissance aircraft were now ongoing. Commander Overstreet was warned of the approach of the MiGs,

and, following standard procedures, he immediately aborted

the mission, changed course, and headed back to base. But

the far faster MiG fighters closed rapidly on the lumbering

Constellation. The attack came at 0447Z. The Navy plane disappeared from radar screens about two minutes later. 3 6

The fact that a shootdown had taken place was not immediately

apparent to American intelligence. Presumably because of the urgency of the situation he faced and a desire to maintain radio

silence, Overstreet issued no radio call that he was under attack.

Nor was the fact that the plane had disappeared from radar screen

itself conclusive. A warning had been issued to the plane, and

many officials monitoring the flight believed that it had simply

dropped beneath the radar horizon to hide from enemy fighters—a

standard practice for planes aborting a mission. Extensive efforts

were made during the ensuing minutes to determine the EC-121’s

location and status, and, given the prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty, Washington was not immediately notified. 37

Although the fact of the shootdown was not yet known, the

situation was nonetheless one of increasing seriousness. The

Army facility in South Korea soon issued a follow-up to its

spot report, coming at 0503Z and informing Kamiseya and

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

88
other addressees that MiGs were approaching the EC-121. As

with the spot report itself, the follow-up message was received

at Kamiseya, reformatted, addressed to the joint chiefs and

other recipients, assigned an immediate precedence, and

given to DCS personnel for AUTODIN transmission. Although

the exact time the message was transmitted is not known with

certainty, it most likely took place within 5 to 10 minutes. The

Joint Reconnaissance Center at the Pentagon did not receive

this message until more than three hours later.

Confusion was now rapidly setting in. Since the EC-121 was

on a mission for the NSA, Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron

I (also known as VQ-1), the group to which the EC-121 was

nominally attached, was out of the operational picture altogether. It was not included as an addressee on any of the

messages concerning the plane’s situation. Nonetheless, in a

world of serendipity, VQ-1 personnel had somehow managed

to intercept and copy the spot report, giving them their first

indication that there was a problem with the flight.3 8 Concerned that the plane might be in danger, the VQ-1 duty

officer alerted the squadron commander. Within minutes, VQ1 had intercepted the Army Security Agency’s follow-up to the

spot report, although again it was not addressed to them. The

squadron commander’s concern increased, and at 0501Z he

scrambled a protective combat air patrol of two F-102s, which

was airborne within a matter of minutes. Well aware that

standing procedures called for the EC-121’s mission to be

aborted in case of hostile activity, the squadron commander

also initiated a series of calls to determine whether any abort

messages had been received from mission aircraft. No such

messages had been copied, he was told.3 9

When half an hour had passed since the EC-121’s disappearance, and yet no word from it had been received, the Army

Security Agency personnel in South Korea issued a second

follow-up report saying that the EC-121 had disappeared from

radar. This message came at 0520Z and was given a flash

precedence. The seriousness of the situation was now also

being felt in Kamiseya, where the message was copied, reformatted for AUTODIN transmission, and retransmitted six

min utes later. It promptly disappeared into the labyrinthine

channels of the Defense Communications System, and would

THREE WWMCCS FAILURES

89
not emerge at the Joint Reconnaissance Center at the Pentagon until 0558Z, some 38 minutes later.

Having failed to reach the EC-121 with repeated radio calls,

and with no sign of the plane on their radar screens, Army

Security Agency personnel were finally coming to the realiza -

tion that something serious had taken place. Although they

still had no conclusive evidence of a shootdown, when an hour

had passed since the plane’s disappearance, the decision was

made to release a critic message. This message was transmitted

by the South Korean station at 0544Z. Kamiseya received it

immediately, and, given its precedence level, the message was

promptly reformatted and retransmitted. The message arrived

at the White House six minutes later and at the National Military Command Center four minutes after that. When we recall

that the initial spot report would not reach Washington until

0615Z, the first follow-up until 0807Z, and the second followup, with its flash priority, until 0558Z, the critic message represented the National Command Authorities’ first indication that

a probable shootdown had occurred. This was more than an

hour after the EC-121 had in fact been shot down.

When the critic message was received by the Defense Comm unication System’s Pentagon station, it was automatically distributed to its six recipients simultaneously, including the

White House and NMCC. A Pentagon duty officer telephoned

National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger with news of the

critic, and Kissinger immediately went to his West Wing basement office in the White House to assemble a crisis-working

group. Two hours later Kissinger telephoned President Nixon

with the news concerning the EC-121. Nixon’s recommendation:

“No immediate action is required” against the North Koreans.4 0

Action would be taken concerning further reconnaissance

flights over the Sea of Japan; however, they were halted immediately following the shootdown. Yet as had been the case with

the Pueblo, within a week the flights were resumed. And this

time they were resumed on the direct order of President Nixon.

His intention was to avoid a direct confrontation over the

shootdown, yet at the same time not yield to the pressure to

cease reconnaissance flights in the area. Headlines in the press

described Nixon’s handling of the incident as an “exercise in

restraint.”4 1

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

90
The crisis had passed, and yet the poor performance of

defense communications during the incident would continue

to generate comment and criticism for years to come. Precisely

where had the communications tie-ups occurred? As the DCA

director pointed out, the ambiguity of the situation at the time

of the shootdown was such that it might reasonably account

for the South Korean facility’s delay in transmitting its four

reports regarding the EC-121. But this in no way explained

why the first three of these messages, once having entered the

Defense Communications System, required one hour and 16

minutes, three hours and four minutes, and 38 minutes,

r espectively, to arrive at the Pentagon. The problem, apparently, had to do with the various facilities through which the

messages passed. At each point, officials had to consider the

message and its implications before deciding whether to pass

it up the chain of command. Had a shootdown actually taken

place? Apparently, nobody wanted to take responsibility for

saying so while any doubt remained, leading to the delays.

The Liberty , Pueblo, and EC-121 incidents revealed a

number of serious inadequacies with the World Wide Military

Command and Control System as it had developed during the

1960s in particular, confusion within the system and a lack of

clear-cut responsibility. Perhaps more than anything else, the

three failures created a climate of criticism that in the decade

to come would result in a formal effort to transform WWMCCS

into a more coordinated, coherent system.

Notes

1. James M. Ennes Jr., Assault on the Liberty: The True Story of the

Israeli Attack on an American Intelligence Ship (New York: Random House,

1979), 17.

2. Greenwich Mean Time will be used throughout this discussion.

3. John E. Sobraske, “Check Your Communication Pollution,” Army

Digest, August 1970, 33.

4. House, Committee on Armed Services, Armed Services Investigating

Subcommittee, Review of Department of Defense Worldwide

Communications, Phase I, 92d Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.:

Government Printing Office [GPO], 10 May 1971), 7. (Hereinafter cited as

Phase I Report.)

5. Ennes, 33–34.

6. Phase I Report, 7.

THREE WWMCCS FAILURES

91
7. Ibid., 8.

8. Ibid., 9.

9. James M. Ennes Jr., “Israeli Attack on U.S. Ship Reveals Failure of

C3,” Defense Electronics 13 (October 1981): 61.

10. Ibid.

11. Phase I Report, 11.

12. Ennes, “Israeli Attack on U.S. Ship,” 64.

13. Hirsh Goodman and Zeev Schiff, “The Attack on the Liberty,” The

Atlantic, September 1984, 61.

14. Robert A. Liston, The Pueblo Surrender: A Covert Action by the

National Security Agency (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 248–49, 352.

15. Phase I Report, 11.

16. Ibid., 11–12.

17. Ibid., 12.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 12–13.

20. Ibid., 13.

21. Liston, 256–57, 355–57.

22. Ibid., 263–67.

23. Phase I Report, 14.

24. Donald T. Poe, “Command and Control: Changeless—Yet Changing,”

US Naval Institute Proceedings 100 (October 1974): 24.

25. “An Exercise in Restraint,” Newsweek, 28 April 1969, 28.

26. John M. Carroll, Secrets of Electronic Espionage (New York: Dutton,

1966), 115.

27. “The Varieties of ELINT,” Newsweek, 28 April 1969, 30.

28. “The EC-121 Incident,” Signal 24 (December 1969): 34.

29. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security

Agency—A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency (New York: Penguin,

1983), 239.

30. Edgar Ulsamer, “A Strategic Blueprint for the ‘80s,” Air Force

Magazine 61 (September 1978): 48.

31. Bamford, 239.

32. Ibid., 240.

33. Newsweek, “The Varieties of ELINT,” 30.

34. Signal, “The EC-121 Incident,” 34.

35. Phase I Report, 14.

36. House, Committee on Appropriations, Department of Defense

Appropriations for 1970: Pt. 2, Operations and Maintenance, 91s t Cong., 1s t

sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1969), 1033.

37. Signal, “The EC-121 Incident,” 36.

38. Ibid., 36.

39. Ibid., 36–37.

40. Newsweek, “An Exercise in Restraint,” 28.

41. Ibid., 29.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

92
PART II

Formalization
Chapter 6

WWMCCS Automatic Data

Processing Upgrade

Whatever else WWMCCS might require, one thing was certain: it needed computers that were responsive and secure,

compatible and capable of exchanging information between

sites, cost effective, and yet with growth potential. In short,

WWMCCS needed computers that could adequately support

national level command and control requirements. The prob -

lem was that the WWMCCS ADP assets in operation during

the latter half of the 1960s could do none of these things

effectively because of the uncoordinated, piecemeal way in

which they had been developed and acquired.

Even before the three major WWMCCS failures focused a

harsh critical light on the system, a series of informal discussions concerning WWMCCS’s automatic data-processing prob -

lems began between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of

the Secretary of Defense. These talks represented a tentative

first step in what would eventually become a comprehensive

effort to update WWMCCS automatic data processing. By the

second half of the decade, WWMCCS ADP consisted of some

158 separate computer systems, employing 16 different makes

of computers, in operation at 81 separate locations. Thirty-two

different program languages were then in use throughout the

system. Given the haphazard fashion in which these assets

had been acquired, and given the myriad problems this situ -

ation had occasioned, the words on everyone’s lips as they

considered a computer upgrade were compatibility , interoperability , and standardization. These concerns were all important new criteria by which effectiveness would henceforth be

assessed. 1 To many officials, developing standard automatic

data-processing systems that could meet these criteria represented the most challenging issue then facing the Pentagon.

The process of acquiring new computers for WWMCCS was

formally begun in January 1966 when Defense Secretary

McNamara issued a memorandum directing the joint chiefs to

assess the feasibility and desirability of a single, multiyea r buy

95
of standard computer hardware for WWMCCS. 2

 The chiefs, in

turn, delegated this task to their in-house command and control experts, the Joint Command and Control Requirements

Group. The JCCRG’s chief at that time, Maj Gen J. R. Russ,

described his group’s methodology for improving WWMCCS

ADP as a “straightforward process,” the first step of which was

to identify user requirements. Once the information required

by decision makers had been identified, he said, the next step

would be to develop performance specifications, that is, to

determine what the system was actually supposed to do.

Technical specifications plans drawn up by a service or DCA

would flow from this point and describe how to satisfy the

operational requirements. These plans would then be validated by higher authority and ultimately submitted to the

secretary of defense for approval. Only then would hardware

and software be developed, acquired, and installed.

The first step in developing a common set of defensewide

ADP standards was to specify what constituted WWMCCS,

which, in turn, called for thinking in broader system terms.

After all, the World Wide Military Command and Control System, in its broadest conceptualization, could be seen to in -

clude everything from the White House to the foxhole. It could

encompass the individual automatic data-processing and

communications systems of virtually every echelon of military

command, the services, and defense agencies—indeed, everything. In practice, however, the system was considerably more

restricted. Certain elements were more central and important

to WWMCCS than others. The participation of some system

elements was substantial, while for others it was minimal.

Some elements were WWMCCS on a full-time basis, while others

were emphatically part-timers, considered elements of the system only at certain times, such as during crises.

So in thinking through the problem of automatic data processing for the massive and complex system that was

WWMCCS, it soon became clear that the capabilities acquired

for its various elements should not be the same. Given the

diverse missions of the military services, for example, or of the

CINCs and defense agencies, what seemed necessary was a

system that would permit the free flow of information between

users and yet be flexible enough to allow a single user to

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96
conduct his own unique mission.3

 In other words, it was not

essential that each computer be identical, nor that its database contain everything, irrespective of its utility for a specific

commander and his mission. Substantial areas of overlap,

however, would obviously be required.4 So the idea that in -

creasingly received favor was that while both hardware and

software would be permitted to vary from site to site in response to specific user requirements, the range of that variation would be tightly circumscribed to a limited menu of

hardware and software options.

If the general point that not all WWMCCS elements required

the same information, and hence the same automatic dataprocessing capabilities, this by no means answered the question of what in fact each one needed. And, defining user requirements had always been one of the most slippery issues

confronting command and control system designers. “When

DOD decides what they want, we’ll stack the blocks the way

they should be stacked,” one industry computer expert had

remarked back in 1962. But at the moment, “They’re all over

the table.”5 To a significant degree they still were in 1966.

What was necessary before proceeding with any major

WWMCCS automatic data-processing upgrade, then, was a

comprehensive plan, one that defined system elements, goals,

and specific standards to allow those goals to be achieved. The

problem was that no such road map for arriving at a cohesive,

centrally responsive system of this sort then existed. 6

But if no road map was then available from national-level

decision makers, the military services were only too happy to

provide maps congenial to their interests. For example, for

some time the Air Force had been actively developing its own

computer systems for command and control purposes, which

it wanted the other services to adopt. If they would only do so,

Air Force experts argued, the sort of reporting-response capability the JCS had in mind for WWMCCS would take place.

The Air Force’s voice in these matters was especially eloquent

and powerful, its case articulated by its own experts and by

officials from the MITRE and RAND Corporations. In the bu -

reaucratic battle that ensued, the joint chiefs, represented by

Herbert Goertzel, fought for, and eventually won, a larger mandate. The technical specifications for the new computer system

WWMCCS AUTOMATIC DATA PROCESSING UPGRADE

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would be developed by the Joint Technical Specifications

Group (JTSG), not by the Air Force. That group would be

physically located in the Defense Communications Agency but

would work under the direct authority of the Joint Staff. 7

Authority to solicit bids would also come from the joint agencies, rather than from one of the military services. Goertzel’s

success in keeping system design and development within the

joint service community has been described as a major victory

for WWMCCS.8

As things were initially conceived, the WWMCCS procurement would come in stages. Phase I would involve the purchase of computer hardware for software development. This

hardware would not have the capacity or speed to satisfy

operational requirements after the development phase was

concluded. The DCA originally allocated some $3 million of its

fiscal year 1968 budget for this hardware, money that was

contingent upon receipt of system specifications from the

JTSG. The JTSG’s first draft of the WWMCCS road map was

completed in late 1967. But under heavy pressure to move

forward expeditiously with the program, the JTSG then modified the Phase I design, deciding that the fastest and most

economical approach would be to purchase computers that

would serve both the Phase I requirements for software development and actual operational needs during the subsequent

stage of the program, designated Phase II. 9

The JTSG’s specifications were based on four different work -

load models, each involving different data-processing tasks and

requiring its own distinct type, or combination of types, of automatic data processing equipment. The first model was called the

Force Control System. It was designed to control combat forces

under changing operational situations. Examples of this system

then in operation included NORAD’s Combat Operations Center

and SAC Automatic Command and Control System (SACCS).

The second model was called the Scientific System. It came with

a large-scale mathematical computational ability to support surveillance, data analysis and reduction, war gaming, and other

similar functions. An example of a scientific system then operating was NORAD’s Space Defense Center. The third and fourth

models were General Staff Support Systems that would provide a

wide range of computer support to a headquarters staff. These

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specifications represented a major milestone in the develop -

ment of WWMCCS ADP, and the joint chiefs gave approval to

proceed with equipment determination.1 0

The draft specifications for WWMCCS’s anticipated automatic

data-processing system were sent to computer manufacturers

for comment in 1967. Accompanying documentation made it

clear that the WWMCCS buy would be a unique one, the first

time that so large a computer purchase would be made from a

single source. Industry immediately began gearing up for the

competition.11 The potential future payoffs were considered to

be so substantial that, despite a series of subsequent delays, a

number of computer firms would spend as much as $100,000

a month to hold their project teams together.1 2

Another program milestone was reached in August 1968,

when the joint chiefs and the director of defense research and

engineering jointly submitted to the secretary of defense a

development concept proposal for the WWMCCS ADP program. For hardware, the proposal outlined a plan for purchasing a family of compatible computers for WWMCCS. For software, it described a policy of centralized and standardized

development and maintenance. Considering the magnitude

of the undertaking, the proposal also outlined an evolutionary

approach for system development under whose terms new

capabilities would be added as user requirements were clarified and experience with the system was gained. That is, both

hardware and software would develop incrementally, over the

course of several years, resulting, it was hoped, in the coordinated and integrated system desired by the Pentagon. To aid

in realizing the goals of system compatibility and standardization, a WWMCCS ADP program project manager was appointed.

Finally, the proposal provided a series of ideas for managing

the new system once it was in place.1 3

Concerning the actual WWMCCS computers themselves, the

development concept proposal reaffirmed the JTSG’s call for

four standard, generic computer types. For purposes of economy, it was recommended that they be commercially available,

general purpose machines. They would be located at such key

sites as Strategic Air Command headquarters, the National

Military Command Center at the Pentagon, NORAD headquarters,

at various elements of the ballistic missile defense system, and

WWMCCS AUTOMATIC DATA PROCESSING UPGRADE

99
elsewhere. They would replace the obsolescent systems at

those locations, since those systems required extensive main -

tenance and could no longer cope with the increasing work -

load. 14 The recommended number of computers to be purchased by the Pentagon was set at approximately one

hundred, and preliminary specifications for the new computing hardware were released to industry in 1968. The following

year saw the release of typical benchmark problems.1 5 As the

1960s ended, events had advanced sufficiently so that it was

finally possible to make a formal announcement on the purchase of WWMCCS ADP hardware.

Software was another issue altogether. An area inherently

more complex and confused than hardware, software was always the most important issue, the real pacing item in system

development. For major applications, it would often take years

of painstaking effort to debug the software, as the experience

with SACCS had shown. Two major consequences of this were

system utility and cost. As to utility, by the time the software

was finally debugged, users’ requirements generally had

changed, meaning that it was time to start all over again. As

to cost, the overall price tag for an automatic data-processing

system could easily double as expensive professionals tried to

figure out where the software errors lay. And because of the

software problems, costs might also increase because more

capable hardware would often have to be purchased to allow

the software to be written with less care. 1 6

The purchase of a family of commercial general purpose

computers for WWMCCS appeared especially attractive in

a ddressing the software problem. Bought essentially off the

shelf, these general-purpose computers, like all general systems, would be useful for a broad range of applications but

not for any specific one. In order that a broad range of users

could use them, manufacturers furnished these computers

with nonfunctional software—that is, a basic operating system

and means of organizing the computer’s memory. Users natu -

rally tended to have quite specialized interests, and these oftentimes required additional mission-specific functional software applications. To run on the computer, however, functional

software applications had to employ the same data elements a nd

codes as the nonfunctional software. Thus, if lack of soft ware

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100
standardization were a problem, one sure way to address it

was to do precisely what the development concept proposal

was suggesting—standardize the hardware.1 7

Standardization had other benefits as well. Given the military context prevailing at the end of the 1960s—that of an

increasingly large and accurate Soviet ballistic missile threat—

common equipment and personnel training procedures meant

that if some facilities were damaged or destroyed, the surviving

elements could pick up the pieces. Equipment from damaged

facilities could be cannibalized, surviving personnel formed

into new working teams, and the most essential functions

r estored. In theory, then, by allowing for the reconstitution of

the system, standardization contributed to its endurance, a

term that would later loom large as a criterion of WWMCCS

effectiveness. Looking to the future, standard hardware and

software held forth the promise that some day the computers

might be linked into an intercomputer network to share information and processing power. Work then being conducted by

the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in its ARPANET

project already suggested that users in different locations

could in fact share information and processing capacity. 1 8

In the organizational realm, it was hoped that the WWMCCS

purchase would help solve some of the persistent personnel

problems plaguing the system. Training and logistical support

were ongoing headaches in a system using different software

applications and employing a multiplicity of machines that

were of different types and generations. It was also hoped that

the purchase would solve the problem of finding programmers,

many of them civilians, who would be willing to work with the

older computers then in use throughout the system. The prob -

lem was that the best civilian personnel simply did not want

to work with older equipment because it restricted their learning

in a dynamic industry and their ability to find work on newer

computers.1 9 While this problem would be gradually reduced

through the expanded use of military personnel for ADP functions, it remained a serious concern at the time.

Most of these factors had positive implications for program

costs. Consolidating hardware purchases would eliminate the

need for a series of separate competitive bids for upgrading the

many WWMCCS sites and help to reduce overhead costs. The

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101
bulk purchase of computers would provide considerable cost

savings over site-by-site modernization, since a volume buy

raised the possibility for volume discounts, and hence lower

per-unit costs. Using standard software would eliminate the

considerable costs associated with converting the wide range

of individual software applications then in use at WWMCCS

sites.2 0 The new machines would result in higher-quality personnel being attracted and retained, and the problems involved

in extensive retraining of personnel would be eliminated, saving

thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars each year.2 1

Standardization, then, was viewed as overwhelmingly positive

in training, programming, operating, and maintenance.

The WWMCCS Automatic Data Processing Upgrade Program

(its formal name) was intended to address many of these concerns. It would do so in a single dramatic step. This step was

establishing the foundation for a coherent national-level command and control system from a disparate group of disconnected or only loosely connected ADP elements. But new

standard computers would provide only a foundation, not by

themselves create a centrally responsive WWMCCS. The system was simply too large for that, since it involved by this time

some 81 computers and 129 separate WWMCCS activities or

sites. More important was the continuing need for adequately

defining system requirements so that competitors could intelligently bid on an eventual request for proposal. But changes

were continually being made to the system design, owing to

ongoing deliberation and contentiousness regarding the rather

basic questions of precisely what the system was and what it

should do. Delays necessarily ensued, and the program timetable slipped.

On 12 November 1969 Deputy Defense Secretary David

Packard announced that he had approved a plan to purchase

a minimum of 34 standard computers to be used throughout

WWMCCS, with an option to buy an additional 35. The computers were to be of medium and large size, Packard said,

costing between $1 million and $5 million each, and they

would have an expected service life of about six years. Procurement responsibility for hardware and nonfunctional software was given to the Electronic Data Processing Equipment

Office at the Air Force’s Electronic Systems Division. Once the

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computers were purchased, the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be

responsible for allocating them to appropriate locations. Responsibility for developing functional system software was

given to the joint chiefs, who tasked it to the Joint Technical

Specifications Group. 2 2 In a bureaucratic move to enhance

system integration, general program oversight responsibility

went to the director of defense research and engineering,

rather than to the Pentagon comptroller, the normal bureau -

cratic focal point for computer acquisition.

The rhetoric accompanying Packard’s announcement was

relentlessly upbeat, with Pentagon spokesmen pointing out

how the WWMCCS procurement represented the first time the

ADP needs of a diverse community of users would be satisfied

by computers acquired from a single source. 2 3 Equally unique

was the nature of the procurement process itself. Whereas in

the past many of the Pentagon’s major computer contracts

had been sole source and without competition (with the sole

source generally being IBM), Packard, in announcing the

WWMCCS purchase, made a point of saying that in the current procurement, IBM, notorious for its reluctance to discount its prices to the federal government, would be given no

special consideration. The competition between major computer manufacturers would be “both extensive and equitable,”

Packard promised, and the excitement among the industry

competitors predictably ran high. 2 4

This excitement would undergo a measure of tempering in the

days following Packard’s announcement. For reasons of budgetary economy, the House Appropriations Committee ordered the

Pentagon to reassess a number of its programs then in progress,

among them the WWMCCS ADP Update Program, which was

conspicuous because of the scale of its computer purchase.

With the defense budget falling and with no end to the decline in

sight, Pentagon officials got the message. In a March 1970

memorandum to the secretaries of the military departments, the

Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the director of the Defense Intelligence

Agency, Packard solicited information regarding the number of

computers to be procured, the costs involved, and these users’

views on whether to proceed with the standardization effort.2 5

After reviewing the responses, Packard approved on 4 June a

substantially downscaled plan for WWMCCS. Rather than 34

WWMCCS AUTOMATIC DATA PROCESSING UPGRADE

103
computers with an option for an additional 35, the system

would now employ a minimum of 15 computers with an op -

tion for an additional 20. They were to be divided among the

WWMCCS sites and those parts of the Intelligence Data Handling System that worked intimately with WWMCCS.

The best possible bureaucratic face was put on the reduction, which was portrayed by Pentagon officials as a prudent

move to minimize the risks of a large-scale ADP conversion in

a time of tight DOD budgets. “With big chops coming through -

out the DOD budget,” one Pentagon official noted, describing

the mood, “we might not have enough budgetary support for

our program and we’d end up with egg on our face.”2 6 Another

concern was a predictable bureaucratic desire to limit liability

by avoiding overly strong commitment to a program whose

future was still in doubt, a program that might be in line for

further cuts and revisions. Specifically, the recommendations

of a blue ribbon defense panel were expected shortly; nobody

was sure how WWMCCS would fare in the panel’s report, and

in the interim a cautious conservatism prevailed. By some

accounts, this slowed the purchase of the WWMCCS computers by more than a year.

The reduction in the size of the WWMCCS procurement and

the associated delays sat poorly with industry, which saw its

own costs increasing even as the program’s profit potential

was being reduced. Limiting the scale of the WWMCCS procurement also raised industry concerns over the competitiveness of the procurement process, and the fears were not

u n founded. The 15 computing systems that were now slated

for purchase were not sufficient for all WWMCCS sites, and

because of this, David Packard had announced that he in -

tended to designate the third generation IBM/360 computer as a

“second standard” for 16 other sites. Many WWMCCS sites already used leased IBM equipment, and Packard noted that economic considerations would determine whether to purchase this

equipment, continue to lease it, or replace it with the new

WWMCCS computers.2 7 Leasing computer equipment as op -

posed to buying it for WWMCCS had been an economic consid -

eration for some time. Even when procurement funds are lim -

ited, money is generally available for a lease, with an option to

buy later. “If you lease,” one Pentagon official remarked, “it

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104
comes out of operating funds. You’re not asking for more

money. The guy who buys is in a hole. He’s asking for a big

new chunk of money.”2 8 For the industry competitors other

than IBM, this was bad news. The worry was that IBM might

offer to sell the Pentagon some of its leased equipment at a

discounted price, further reducing the number of computers

that eventually would be purchased and giving IBM the proverbial foot in the door for future leases and ultimately sales.

At stake was an enormous amount of money beyond the 15

computer systems themselves. The profit to be made by selling

the first 15 systems was not at all substantial; indeed, it was

hardly sufficient to offset the $3–$5 million that various firms

already had invested in developing benchmark WWMCCS software. But from that point on, the money would really start

rolling in. By one estimate, the Pentagon would have to spend

at least $159 million to convert present WWMCCS sites to a

common software standard. In addition, another $30 million

or so would be involved in providing software integration for

the essential WWMCCS sites. Finally, there was at least $62

million to be made selling additional hardware should the Penta -

gon exercise its option for the additional 20 computer systems.2 9

While this planning was in progress, the much-publicized

Liberty, Pueblo, and EC-121 incidents were taking place. To make

matters more urgent still, a number of specifically computerrelated command and control shortcomings contributed to an

already dour mood regarding WWMCCS. Some of these shortcomings concerned the need for additional computerization of

critical defense functions. For example, when the Pentagon

was planning Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign over North Vietnam, Defense Secretary McNamara had

needed an up-to-date inventory of available bombs. No such

inventory was available, and McNamara reportedly had to

o rder 14 general officers in the Pentagon to man the telephones, calling air bases around the world to get the necessary information. (By one account, the generals forgot to

check with the National Guard or to consider the materiel in

the nation’s war reserves.) Another story concerned the daily

r eport prepared by the Air Force Command Post on the world -

wide status of its forces. It took the Air Force all night to

prepare the report, with errors commonplace and timeliness

WWMCCS AUTOMATIC DATA PROCESSING UPGRADE

105
sacrificed as a small army of personnel scrambled to make the

morning deadlines. It was also reported that CINCPAC, the

commander in chief, Pacific forces, required some 32 hours to

produce an accurate tabulation of the status of forces in the

Pacific. 3 0 The rather obvious moral of these stories was that

there existed an urgent need for up-to-date automatic data

processing.

If anecdote suggested the value of computerization not yet

achieved, other stories concerned existing computers that

were inappropriate or ineffective. During the 1969 Tet offensive, incompatible ADP equipment resulted in it taking a full

hour for a flash message to travel between two offices within

the same facility, CINCPAC headquarters and its alternate

command post in the Kunia tunnel. Similarly, the computers

in CINCPAC’s main WWMCCS facility employed paper tape

while other WWMCCS facilities in the Pacific used magnetic

tape. The problems that existed were increasingly of this type.

They were no longer attributable to a lack of computers, but

instead to the opposite problem—a proliferation of different

ADP systems that all too often could not function together.3 1

Incidents such as these seemed to demonstrate the need for a

command and control structure that would permit high-level

decisions to be carried out in a timely fashion. Doubly so,

critics contended, since unlike the earlier incidents, the next

crisis might involve nuclear weapons. 3 2

Notes

1. Carol Hamilton, “Worldwide C2 System Networks Strategic Data for

Joint Chiefs,” Defense Electronics 20 (June 1988): 53.

2. John B. Bestic, “No More Confused Situations,” Signal 21 (March

1967): 56.

3. Gordon T. Gould Jr., “Computers and Communications in the

Information Age,” Air University Review 21 (May/June 1970): 9.

4. “Man and Machine Must Learn to Talk Together,” Armed Forces

Management 14 (July 1968): 111.

5. “The Search for Effective Command and Control,” Armed Forces

Management 8 (July 1962): 21.

6. Armed Forces Management, “Man and Machine,” 111–12.

7. C. J. LeVan, “WWMCCS Automation—A Team Effort,” Signal 32

(November/December 1977): 11.

8. Hamilton, 53.

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106
9. Senate, Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1969,

9 0t h Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1986),

2051–52.

10. “Command and Control Spectrum: JCS to Battlefield,” Armed Forces

Management 14 (July 1968): 38.

11. “WWMCCS: Report, One Year Later,” Government Executive 3

(January 1971): 19.

12. Benjamin F. Schemmer, “DOD’s Computer Critics Nearly Unplug

Ailing Worldwide Military Command and Control System,” Armed Forces

Journal 108 (21 December 1970): 24.

13. Herbert B. Goertzel and James R. Miller, “WWMCCS ADP: A Promise

Fulfilled,” Signal 30 (May/June 1976): 57.

14. Edgar Ulsamer, “The Military Decision-Makers’ Top Tool,” Air Force

Magazine 54 (July 1971): 46.

15. Joseph Volz, “Revamped World-Wide Computer Net Readied:

WWMCCS Slimmed Down to 15-System Program,” Armed Forces Journal

107 (27 June 1970): 21.

16. Edgar Ulsamer, “Command and Control is of Fundamental

Importance,” Air Force Magazine 55 (July 1972): 46.

17. Ulsamer, “The Military Decision-Makers’ Top Tool,” 46.

18. LeVan, 12.

19. Volz, 21.

20. Schemmer, 40.

21. George Weiss, “Restraining the Data Monster: The Next Step in C3,”

Armed Forces Journal 21 (5 July 1971): 29.

22. “DOD to Acquire New Family of Computer Systems,” Defense

Industry Bulletin 5 (December 1969): 31.

23. Volz, 21.

24. Schemmer, 25.

25. Comptroller General, letter to George H. Mahon, chairman,

Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 29 December

1970, 1.

26. Volz, 20.

27. Schemmer, 24.

28. Volz, 21.

29. Schemmer, 25, 40.

30. Ibid., 23.

31. Ibid.

32. Ulsamer, “Command and Control,” 43.

WWMCCS AUTOMATIC DATA PROCESSING UPGRADE

107
Figure 1. The Early Array of Sensors and Sentinels Forwarding

Information to NORAD Headquarters

Source: J.P. McConnell, “Command and Control,” Sperryscope, Third Quarter 1965, 4.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

108
Figure 2. Cold War Vigilance: Texas Tower Offshore Radar Platform

Source: Charles A. Zraket and Stanley E. Rose, “The Impact of Command, Control, and Communications

Technology on Air Warfare,” Air University Review, November/December 1977, 85.

WWMCCS AUTOMATIC DATA PROCESSING UPGRADE

109
Figure 3. SAC’s Underground Command Post

Figure 4. Defense Communications Agency

Source: Signal, March 1961, 29.

Source: House, Military Communications—1968 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, n.d.), 3.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

110
Figure 5. AUTOSEVOCOM Switches

Figure 6. NMCS Personnel in Action

Source: Senate, Fiscal Year 1978 Authorization for Military Procurement, Research, and Development, and

Active Duty, Selected Reserve, and Civilian Personnel Strengths (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing

Office, April 1977), 6822.

Source: “Effectiveness, Responsiveness of National Command System Vital to U.S. Security,” Armed Forces

Management, July 1966, 46.

WWMCCS AUTOMATIC DATA PROCESSING UPGRADE

111
Figure 7. USS Northampton, National Emergency Command Post

Afloat

Figure 8. Artist’s Conception of the National Military Command System

Source: Richard P. Klocko, “Communications—The Vital Link,” Signal, May/June 1969, 78.

Source: John B. Bestic, “NMCS Affords U.S. Full Control & Flexible Response,” Data, January 1967, 29.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

112
Figure 9. Responsibilities for Implementing the National Military

Command System

Figure 10. Conceptualizing a Command and Control System

Source: “National Military Command Control: The Problems in Brief,” Armed Forces Management, July 1963,

21.

Source: F. Boonham, “The Impact of Computers on Military Management and Control,” RUSI, June 1972, 32.

WWMCCS AUTOMATIC DATA PROCESSING UPGRADE

113
Figure 11. The National Communications System, Encompassing All

Federal Assets

Source: Emmett R. Arnold, “The Commander’s Control of His Communications,” Signal, March 1969, 32.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

114
WWMCCS AUTOMATIC DATA PROCESSING UPGRADE

115
Chapter 7

Centralizing Communications

Management

When the Nixon administration arrived in Washington in

early 1969, it discovered that criticism of WWMCCS and of

defense communications management generally was broadbased both inside and outside the Pentagon. Not only was

there considerable soul-searching by defense officials, but the

highly visible nature of the WWMCCS failures had drawn

in fluential new constituencies into the system in the role of

evaluators, most importantly the Congress. Their eyes opened

to the need for a command and control system responsive to

the needs of the national leadership, dismayed that such a

system was not in place and concerned with the system’s

tendency to emphasize the needs of its more influential

subunits, these evaluators looked at WWMCCS and judged it

ineffective. Addressing these issues both within the Department

of Defense and in the federal government more broadly quickly

became a priority of the new administration. In addition, a

report by the General Accounting Office (GAO) later that year

gave added impetus to the desire for change by calling for a

major restructuring in government communications management responsibilities. 1

 And so, even as David Packard began

his energetic efforts to standardize WWMCCS automatic data

processing, a series of changes was begun that would affect

the organizational and management side of things.

Office of Telecommunications Policy

These changes began in earnest on 9 February 1970, when

President Nixon sent to Congress a proposal to establish a new

Office of Telecommunications Policy. The plan took the old

Office of Telecommunications Management, gave it a new name,

and removed it from its home in the Office of Emergency

Planning. The old office had become a contentious forum that

somehow never managed to find a way to balance conservative

desires to make things work with the need to integrate new

117
technologies. 2

 As described in Nixon’s proposal, the new office

would better equip the Executive Branch to deal with the myriad

issues arising from recent, dramatic growth in the communications field. 3

 The proposed office would be bureaucratically

situated in the Executive Office of the President, headed by a

director who would be appointed by the president with the

advice and consent of the Senate, and elevated in rank so that

its director could report directly to the president. 4 The new

office would help formulate new policies to better coordinate

the myriad defense and nondefense communications systems

owned by the government. It also would allow the Executive

Branch to speak with a single voice in its policy discussions

with industry, other governmental bodies, and the public.5

Many experts believed that creating the Office of Telecommunications Policy was overdue. Every president since Harry

S. Truman had directed that studies of the communications

field be conducted, and each study had recommended the

establishment of such an office. A key problem, however, was

that communications always tended to be viewed more as a

support function than as a critical function in its own right.

This meant that policy was formulated essentially on an ad

hoc basis rather than as part of a coherent plan to meet the

nation’s requirements. Vision was required, for without it there

could be no “creative shaping” of the telecommunications future.6

That shaping process began in earnest under President

Nixon. In submitting his proposal to Congress, Nixon argued

that the changes being sought were necessary if the government was to respond to the challenges presented by the dizzying pace of change in communications. 7

 Congress agreed,

Nixon’s plan was approved that March, and the Office of Telecommunications Policy was established on 20 April 1970.

Clay T. Whitehead was nominated as its director. As described

in the Nixon plan and elaborated in Executive Order 11556,

which formally established the new telecommunications office,

the responsibilities were wide-ranging, and involved communications policy, broadcast and cable media, spectrum management, emergency preparedness, and numerous other areas.

This effort to coordinate government-wide telecommunications

would soon have its defense-specific analogue.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

118
Assistant to the Secretary of Defense,

Telecommunications

Inside the Pentagon, perhaps the most influential of the

in-house critics of existing defense communications was Dep -

uty Secretary of Defense Packard. Shortly after taking office,

Packard had become aware of serious problems in the way

defense communications were being managed. These included

a fragmentation of management authority, decentralized control of resources, and the lack of an appropriate means for

coordinating the various communications systems of the military services. Equally troubling to Packard’s thinking was the

fact that no matter how hard he tried, he was unable to

determine how much was actually being spent on communications. Packard found this intolerable, but, unlike most critics, he was very much in a position to do something about it.

On 21 May 1970 Packard issued a directive establishing the

position of assistant to the secretary of defense for telecommu -

nications, his explicit purpose being to further centralize control of communications policy within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. 8

 Through that time, managerial direction and

resource control within the OSD had been dispersed among a

number of offices. Four assistant secretaries of defense, in -

cluding those for installation and logistics, systems analysis

and administration, comptroller, as well as the director of

defense research and engineering, had responsibility for managing various aspects of defense communications. Responsibilities were divided along functional lines, meaning that each

office tended to emphasize those communications areas relevant to it. Even the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense

for Installations and Logistics, the designated staff “point

man” for communications, had little authority in many areas.

As Packard saw it, there existed no sense of managing the

Pentagon’s communications assets as an integrated whole.

This deficiency resulted in overlapping responsibilities, inefficient use of resources, and the system’s inability to perform

adequately. What Packard had in mind was a single office with

the power to coordinate all of the communications activities

carried on by the Defense Communications Agency and the

military services. The new assistant to the secretary position

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was intended to do precisely that, and its first occupant was

Louis A. deRosa, a former vice president of the Philco-Ford

Corporation. 9

On paper, deRosa had an exceedingly broad mandate. He

had overall coordinating responsibility for the Defense Communications System and the defense-related elements of the

National Communications System. He would oversee and coordinate areas of communications used for command and

control, including such critical WWMCCS subsystems as

MEECN (Minimum Essential Emergency Communications

Network). Exempted from this broad slate of responsibilities

were only those electronics and communications integral to

weapons systems. Packard’s clear intent was that deRosa

would play a central role in establishing policy and priorities,

serving as the focal point for coordinating and reviewing issues related to communications. Under his leadership, deRosa

said, the existing “federation of subsystems” would give way to

a more unified and coherent system, operating under a centralized management structure. 1 0

To combat what Packard and many others believed had

been years of loose management practices, the new assistant

to the secretary was to account for communications expenditures throughout the DOD; no small order since, as Packard

had found, even identifying relevant expenditures could prove

an impossible task. Prior to the Nixon administration, no defensewide cost accounting system had been maintained at all, meaning that even such basic information as total communications

resources and costs were unavailable. A formal accounting

system for communications costs had been established in

1969, but it would not be equal to the task for some time. One

of the key problems was an inability to find properly qualified

personnel to staff the relevant resource management sections,

a problem with obvious implications for reviewing the Byzantine budgets of the military departments. An inability to easily

break down the services’ operating and maintenance funds

meant that it would be necessary to get the services to conform to new budgeting procedures to accurately ascertain

communications costs. Even if the services agreed to the

changes, it would take years to determine with any accuracy

the amount actually spent on communications. In the absence

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of firm figures, “approximate levels of expenditures” were provided, figures that varied widely among defense officials.11 For

example, Packard estimated that the communications costs

for fiscal years 1970 and 1971 were $2.31 and $2.25 billion,

respectively. DOD deputy comptroller Thomas Moran estimated the costs for those same years to be $2.75 and $2.51

billion. Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird placed the 1970

figure at $3.06 billion. As Packard pointed out to Congress

with some exasperation, the budgeting and financial control

system within DOD did not bring together all of the costs

relating to communications in any systematic manner. “I can’t

assure you those [figures] would be within a couple hundred

million dollars to be correct,” he said. 1 2

Even adding Packard’s few hundred million dollars estimate

to these figures still would likely have resulted in a considerable understatement of the Pentagon’s actual communications

costs. The figures tended to refer only to costs for “classical

communications.” They did not include costs for communications systems related to command and control, or those that

were integral to weapons systems. Given these exclusions, a

more realistic figure for communications of all sorts would

probably have been at least double the estimates. A key task

of the new telecommunications position, then, would be to

bring these figures together and make them visible, an essential preliminary step in improving the management of defense

communications resources. But as deRosa told the Congress,

it would not be an easy task. His office would have to assess

outlays for research and development, procurement, operation, and maintenance for a large number of large systems.

These included the Defense Communications System, tactical

communications, and command and control communications

that were neither DCS nor tactical, including many elements

of WWMCCS.1 3

Another major barrier to identifying costs was the inability

to find qualified personnel to staff deRosa’s resource management sections. Understaffing had obvious implications for

r eviewing the complex communications budgets of the military

services. But even with a properly staffed office, the arcane

and frequently idiosyncratic manner in which the services

a ccounted for their operating and maintenance expenditures

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meant that it would be necessary to get them to conform to

new budgeting procedures. Even if the services accepted this

sort of conformity, an outcome that was by no means certain,

the imprecision of earlier accounting practices meant it would

still take years before the amount spent on communications

could be determined with any accuracy. Things went similarly

with automatic data processing, an area by now inextricably

linked to communications. Here, because of exclusion of the

cost of depreciation, personnel, and support from cost calcula -

tions and reports, the Pentagon could not make appropriate

management and budgetary decisions.1 4 So urgent did this

cost accounting function seem that some members of Congress recommended that the resource management function of

the new telecommunications office be staffed as expeditiously

as possible to identify total relevant expenditures and to calcu -

late defense communications costs on a year-to-year basis. 1 5

The way the defense budgeting process should work with

respect to command and control, it was felt, was that the

services would first address their priorities across the spectrum of expenditures: weapons, manpower, operations and

maintenance, research and development, logistics, command

and control systems, and other areas. The services would then

submit their appropriations requests to OSD for evaluation. In

its evaluation, OSD would strike a balance between the three

services and across their various mission areas, with the

a ssistant to the secretary of defense for telecommunications

striking a balance in communications. Since service-specific

command and control systems had never fared particularly

well in the budgetary process, and joint-service command and

control tended to fare considerably worse, it was up to the new

assistant to the secretary to make certain both did better. 1 6

Such were the hopes and the expectations. The very fact of

creating the new position represented a clear, highly visible

sign of changing priorities within the OSD. Similarly, some of

the language in Packard’s directive implied that serious bureaucratic muscle would be accorded its occupant. But while the

mandate seemed broad and the intention clear, the organiza -

tional reality of the situation was less auspicious. The reasons

for this were two: the nature of the position itself and the

language of the directive that established it.

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Consider first the assistant to the secretary position, where

the important limitation lay in the single word to.

1 7 In creating

the position, Packard was engaging in an artful bureaucratic

maneuver, anticipating the release of the president’s Blue Rib -

bon Defense Panel’s report, then still two months away.

Packard knew full well that the panel intended to recommend

the creation of a similar telecommunications post, and to create

it at the assistant secretary level. From the beginning, Packard

had wanted this new position as well, but an assistant secretary slot required legislative action, whereas an assistant to

the secretary position did not. By creating the new telecommunications slot at the lower level, Packard was covering the

bureaucratic bases. If Congress favorably received the Blue

Ribbon Panel’s recommendations, the already existing telecommunications position almost certainly would be upgraded

to an assistant secretary slot. No problem there. Indeed, the

fact of its existence might well aid in ensuring a warm recep -

tion; after all, the Pentagon had clearly identified a need and

taken steps to address it. If the congressional reaction to the

panel’s report was less favorable, however, all was not lost.

Packard had at least established the assistant to the secretary

position without congressional opposition while the getting

was good. So in the interim, Packard was prepared to settle for

the assistant to the secretary position, one with substantially

less clout than he in fact believed was necessary.

The second problem revolved around the language of the

directive, which stated that the responsibilities for management and operational direction of telecommunications resources

would remain with the services and defense agencies. In line

with many of the Pentagon’s unsuccessful centralizing initia -

tives, the new telecommunications post would serve a coordinating function only. Circumscribing its authority virtually

guaranteed the inability of the new post to effect basic system

changes.

In many respects, these restrictions were quite intentional.

“Stopping a juggernaut” is how one defense journal characterized

Defense Secretary Laird’s efforts during his first year in office to

turn back the clock of centralization that under McNamara’s

leadership had proceeded far beyond what many desired.

Laird immediately began decentralizing decision-making

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authority from DOD-level organizations, including the director

of defense research and engineering and various assistant secretaries, back toward the services. “It is simply foolhardy,”

Laird said, “not to make maximum use of the great talent,

wisdom, and experience available through the Joint Chiefs of

Staff and within the services.” The role of civilian elements of

the Pentagon, he said, himself included, should be one of

broad guidance and coordination. On the most important major programs the service secretaries would regularly report to

him, he would personally sign off on the programs, and a

similar role of oversight and coordination would be assumed

by other DOD-level elements. Far from limiting the civilian

leadership’s control over the military forces, Laird said, this

brand of decentralized decision making with periodic centralized oversight would only strengthen civilian control. 1 8 Making

certain that the responsibility for communications management and operational direction remained with the services

and defense agencies was thus fully consistent with Laird’s

desire to stop the centralizing juggernaut. It obviously put him

on a collision course with such proponents of centralization as

David Packard.

The Blue Ribbon Defense Panel Report

The Blue Ribbon Defense Panel’s report was released in

July 1970, the month following Packard’s downscaling of the

WWMCCS computer procurement. The report suggested primarily that the Pentagon effect a major reorganization of its

national-level command and control structure. The report went

on to blast the Pentagon for a wide range of computer prob -

lems and related management shortfalls. The panel pointed

out that of the approximately 2,800 computers then in operation throughout DOD, some 36 percent were obsolete first- or

second-generation machines running on vacuum tubes or transistors.19 Far too many of the computer files being maintained

were wholly independent and lacked the ability to be interconnected. Computer utilization was poor (they were used less

than 16 hours a day), whereas commercial firms had utilization

rates that were far better. Finally and predictably, the panel

noted the serious lack of ADP uniformity and standardization.

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As a result of these problems, the Pentagon was said to be

spending at least $500 million more each year than was necessary for its automatic data-processing functions. The Blue

Ribbon Panel scored the Pentagon for the lengthy delays that

generally occurred between the time a need for new ADP assets was recognized and the time those assets were finally

deployed. It also urged that greater management attention be

paid to the ADP function.2 0 To ensure that attention and to

provide a focal point for command and control generally, the

panel recommended the creation of an assistant secretary for

telecommunications within the OSD.2 1

WWMCCS’s Standard Computers

These changes and criticisms naturally provided additional

impetus for the purchase of standard computers for

WWMCCS. But standardization would not solve every prob -

lem, and might actually provoke some. This was especially

true in the organizational realm, where one of the program’s

most serious potential problems involved bureaucratic resistance to changes that almost certainly would cause a loss of

discretion and autonomy for major WWMCCS users. It is not

that the standardization process completely ignored the specific requirements of WWMCCS’s users for hardware configu -

rations, functional software, and peripheral equipment tailored

to each user’s needs. 2 2 The point, rather, was that those individual needs, however well met, were to be subordinated to the

primary objective of creating a system responsive to the needs

of central decision makers. By definition, a big standardization

effort like this meant that users would have to give up some

independence. Indeed, some grumbling and resistance among

system users was considered inevitable.

Inevitable it was, and it was not long before the grumbling

reached epidemic proportions. The program timetable for the

WWMCCS ADP update called for requests for proposal to be

issued to industry during the week of 17 August 1970. On 12

August, however, NORAD’s commander in chief, Air Force general Seth J. McKee, wrote to the Air Force chief of staff, Gen

John D. Ryan, to outline a series of objections he had to the

WWMCCS computers. Principal among these objections was

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that the program’s technical specifications called for equip -

ment that would operate in batch (sequence processing) mode

rather than in an on-line interactive mode. Batch processing

means that to run a software application, the computer’s op -

erating system has to allocate sufficient space in the main

memory for the entire program rather than simply the portion

actually being executed. Because entire programs are thus

constantly being moved in and out of memory, data-processing times are far slower than for computers with circuitry designed for interactive processing. In effect, the batch processing com puters “think” one step at a time, in a series of

preprogrammed steps, whereas more modern interactive com -

puters can perform many steps simultaneously. 2 3 While batch

processing is normally not a problem during routine operations, the concern was that it could create an internal electronic “traffic jam” during times of high-volume use. By limiting the computer’s processing speed and responsiveness at

precisely the time they are most needed, such as crises, batch

processing represented a serious bottleneck to the flow of essential command and control information. 2 4

Batch processing also meant that a commander could not

precisely specify the information he wanted. “Say the PLO

h ijacks a plane and lands it somewhere in the desert,” Col

Perry Nuhn, the Pentagon’s director for information systems

and command, control and communications, remarked. “If I’ve

got to provide help, I need to know where the nearest airfields

are, how much fuel they have on hand, how long their runways are, and dozens of other support questions.” Unfortu -

nately, he noted, computers designed for batch processing

cannot answer questions at that level of specificity. “They may

have to dump out information about a whole set of nearby

countries and all their airfields. And you’ve got to go through

the doggone things by hand.”2 5 General McKee was deeply

troubled by this, considering real-time capabilities to be essential for the performance of NORAD’s early warning mission.

He requested that the Air Force chief of staff give his personal

attention to the matter, and urged that the release of the

WWMCCS request for proposal be delayed until the computers

it specified met NORAD’s operational requirements. Officials

at the National Military Command Center articulated similar

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res ervations regarding the ability of the new WWMCCS ADP

equipment to satisfy critical mission requirements.

The release of the WWMCCS request for proposal was delayed

by these objections, but it was a delay without effect, for the

objections voiced by McKee and others were sternly overruled.

A response received later that August from the Air Force vice

chief of staff pointed out to McKee that the North American

Aerospace Defense Command was part of WWMCCS and that

WWMCCS hardware and software must therefore be used in

NORAD’s 427M Program, then being planned as an upgrade to

the computational and tracking capabilities at its Cheyenne

Mountain headquarters. While some merit was found in

McKee’s objections to the proposed WWMCCS equipment, and

while it was acknowledged that some satisfactory resolution

for these shortcomings had to be found, he was informed that

whatever the eventual fix might involve, it had to remain

within the overall WWMCCS framework. 2 6

Requests for proposal (RFP) for the first 15 WWMCCS computers were released to industry on 1 October 1970. 2 7 Originally, it was intended that RFPs would go to 34 companies,

which included all major computer manufacturers. Eventu -

ally, this number was cut into half, and 17 RFPs were solicited, although only seven of the companies (IBM, Control Data,

RCA, Univac, Honeywell, NCR, and Xerox Data Systems) were

considered serious enough contenders that they were expected

to submit proposals. 2 8 As outlined in the RFP, the purchase

was to take place in calendar years 1972–73. In what proved

to be another unique aspect of the program, one that reflected

recent declines in defense spending and David Packard’s own

cost-cutting emphasis, the request for proposal stipulated that

the price tag for the first 15 computer systems should not

exceed $46.2 million. If industry failed to abide by the price

ceiling, the Pentagon warned, the system’s requirements as

outlined in the RFP might have to be returned to the drawing

board, ensuring additional delays and the need to resolicit

proposals because of whatever changes resulted. 2 9 It was even

hinted, darkly and none too subtly, that a failure to adhere to

the price limit could result in the program being scrubbed

altogether.

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Proposals from the competing companies were due on 1

February 1971, and, as one military officer described the situ -

ation, “The computer industry waited with bated breath to

determine who would get the lucrative contract for computer

hardware that will be tied together with such sophisticated

software that all the computers will be able to talk with each

other.”3 0 Industry’s breath would remain bated for some eight

months, a delay that involved more than just the need to

properly evaluate the computer vendors’ proposals. Given the

Blue Ribbon Defense Panel’s recommendation that a sweeping

reorganization of WWMCCS be effected, it involved also the

need to evaluate the larger command and control context

within which the WWMCCS computer purchase would take

place. Specifically, David Packard wanted to see how the

panel’s recommendations would play out before making a final

commitment to the computer update.

He also wanted time to assess the fallout from a House

investigating subcommittee report, released that March, reviewing the effectiveness of worldwide defense communications

management, its goals, and the economy and efficiency with

which the communications network operated. The report described management as “inefficient and ineffective,” pointing

the finger of responsibility at the fragmented and overlapping

responsibilities that existed within the Department of Defense.

The subcommittee proposed a number of specific changes to

eliminate the fragmentation and lack of coordination. Leading

the list was a recommendation that the secretary of defense

centralize DOD communications, including the Defense Communications System and WWMCCS, under the authority of

the newly created assistant to the secretary of defense for

telecommunications.31 This office would then be responsible

for establishing a centralized accounting system to fully identify communications expenditures.

By the fall of 1971, the shape of the changes-to-come was

reasonably clear, and Packard was convinced that the new

computers would not be inconsistent with them.32 The

WWMCCS ADP Update Program could proceed, and on 15

October 1971 the Air Force Systems Command’s Electronic

Systems Division awarded the fixed-price, fixed-quantity contract to Honeywell Information Systems, Inc.

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Under the terms of the contract, the Pentagon would purchase 35 computer systems from Honeywell’s 6000 series

(models H-6060 through H-6080). 3 3 In fact, the contract in -

volved 76 individual central processing units, since some

WWMCCS sites were designed to employ two or more central

processing units (CPU) linked together for their enhanced

processing capability. The price tag for the 35 computers was

right on the Pentagon’s target, $46 million, some 35 percent

less than the General Services Administration’s scheduled

price and presumably reflecting a bulk discount by the manu -

facturer. Installation of all 35 computers was to be completed

by the end of 1973, within two years of the contract award. On

the surface it seemed like a good deal.

In fact, to many it seemed too good a deal. Skeptics at the

GAO viewed the Honeywell bid as unrealistically low, a “buyin” wherein the computers were intentionally offered below

cost so that the company could make its real profits when

additions to the system were made. 3 4 There was ample reason

for the skepticism. Consider that the Pentagon’s earlier development concept paper had estimated the price of 35 computers purchased in fiscal years 1972–73 to be $91.6 million.

Honeywell’s contract cost for the same system, however, was

much lower.3 5 Additional doubt arose because neither the Pentagon nor Honeywell seemed to want it known that Honeywell

had been selected as the prime system contractor. That fact

only became public when, in a Honeywell parking lot, Sen.

Barry Goldwater informally announced that the company had

been chosen to provide the WWMCCS computers. 3 6

Still worse from the perspective of many system users was

that the Honeywell computers already were becoming outdated. The 6000-series computers, first produced in May

1964, were the follow-on to General Electric’s GE-600 series.

(Honeywell earlier had acquired GE’s computer business, and

had designed the 6000 series with an eye both to retain GE’s

customer base and to appeal to new buyers.) The result,

a ccording to a computer industry publication, was a “strongly

GE-flavored product line that blazed no new technological

trails but exploited the current state of the art in a highly cost

effective manner.”3 7 That was in the mid-1960s, and by this

time the state of the art had advanced considerably.

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Specifically, and as critics had predicted, the problem was

that the computers’ circuitry was designed for batch processing. Because of this oversight, the hardware architecture—a

military version of Honeywell’s General Comprehensive Operating Supervisor—was also designed to operate in a batchprocessing mode. Batch-processing systems had, of course,

been specified in the program’s technical specifications, but

there was no technical justification for them. When Honeywell

was awarded the WWMCCS ADP contract, a number of computer manufacturers, Honeywell among them, already were

marketing comparable systems to operate in an interactive

mode. But despite the availability of more adequate alternatives and despite the deep reservations of many key WWMCCS

users regarding this type of equipment, including NORAD’s

commander and the JCS, the decision was not reversed. The

purchase of the Honeywell 6000s proceeded anyway, and it

was a decision whose ramifications would be felt within the

WWMCCS community for years to come.

The installation of the WWMCCS computers was completed

on schedule. Installation began in March 1972 at SAC headquarters in Nebraska and was completed in December 1973.

(An additional site was subsequently added at Taegu, South

Korea, which was completed in May 1975.) WWMCCS automatic data processing had become a reality, and it was in

many ways a reality without precedent. But because of the

novelty of such a large system and having to address and

overcome the host of technical and operational problems that

inevitably accompanied its implementation, considerable work

remained to be done. Training procedures had to be developed

for system users so they could understand and rapidly come

up to speed on the system. To discuss problems as they

occurred and to provide a forum for propounding possible solu tions, semiannual conferences were established. User support also was critical. In one particularly amusing example of

the support provided by the WWMCCS ADP community, one of

the major WWMCCS sites immediately began to experience

mysterious and apparently completely random signal interruptions. Analysts were rushed to the scene to examine possible

sources of the interference. Several exhausting and frustrating

months passed before someone discovered that the interfer ence

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was caused by helicopters passing through the microwave

circuit carrying the signals as they took off and landed. 3 8

Not all of the problems with the new WWMCCS computers

were resolved as easily, however, and almost as soon as in -

stallation began, major difficulties with the Honeywell 6000s

began to surface. To get around the problem of limited space

in the computers’ main memory, for example, additional memory capacity was added wherever needed, the amount depending upon the specific user’s data-processing requirements.

While this solved the immediate problem of capacity, permitting a single computer to handle larger blocks of data than

before, it introduced new difficulties when the computer was

called on to exchange information with other WWMCCS sites.

Because not all sites had made identical upgrades to their

computers’ memories, users frequently found that exchanges

could not take place unless the receiving site happened to

have the same memory capacity as the originating site. To

overcome this shortcoming and a host of other problems, Honeywell and other contractors were repeatedly called on to provide upgrades and fixes. Indeed, within the first few years of

the new computers’ operation, more than 60 changes to the

original WWMCCS contract were negotiated. 3 9 Almost all of

these were expensive, and many of them proved to be less

than completely successful.

Major problems also surfaced with system software, and not

all members of the WWMCCS community were using it. The

complexity and limitations of the WWMCCS standard software

had led many individual system users to feel, often quite correctly, that their command and control requirements were

being inadequately served. Therefore, many users found it

necessary to develop their own software applications to work

around the limitations of the system. Because this type of

software was developed locally by its users, consideration of

other users’ requirements was limited or nonexistent. Duplication of effort was frequent and excessive costs unavoidable. To

make matters worse, because locally developed software was

by definition not used throughout WWMCCS, the ability of its

users to exchange information with others was often severely

impaired. This was precisely the situation that had prevailed

during the 1960s, and precisely what the WWMCCS ADP

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Update Program had been intended to remedy. Years later

that remedy was still not clearly in sight. Thus, at precisely

the time that the star of centralized communications management was on the rise, just when national-level command and

control was assuming greater importance in defense planning,

WWMCCS (its recent upgrade notwithstanding) would continue to develop in ways inimical to the needs of centralized

decision makers.

Prototype WWMCCS Information Network

On 7 September 1971, more than a month before the contract for the 6000-series computers was awarded to Honeywell

Information Systems, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued JCS

Memorandum 593-71, “Research, Development, Test, and

Evaluation Program in Support of the Worldwide Military

Command and Control Standard System.” By this time, the

chiefs and other top-level officials were fully aware that the

computing capabilities called for in the WWMCCS ADP Update

Program’s technical specifications were inadequate. Something more was clearly required, and the joint chiefs’ memorandum proposed that a first step in getting it was to develop

what they called a Prototype WWMCCS Intercomputer Network (PWIN—pronounced pee-win). 4 0

The idea of computer networking was relatively new at the

time. Experience with actual network operations based on the

packet-switching concept was then being gained through the

ARPANET, the first of whose nodes came on line in 1969 with

spectacularly successful results. 4 1 The logic behind packet

switching was that a message from an originating host computer would be broken into a number of packets, each containing a maximum of 5,000 bits of information (625 characters). Each packet was then given a header by the computer to

identify the message’s sender, recipient, and other information. Using complex network control protocols, the computers

would then independently route the packets from their point

of transmission to a series of network nodes, called packet

switches, which were digital computers instead of the manual

or electromechanical switches used in other types of commu -

nications systems. After arriving at a switch, the packets’

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headers would be automatically examined, and, after that brief

delay, forwarded along any available path to the next node.

The technique was known as “fail softness,” since if some of

the network’s circuits or nodes were out of service, messages

would be routed another way. 4 2 This procedure was dramatically different from circuit switching, which involves the use of

dedicated circuits, and from store-and-forward switching of

the type used in AUTODIN; in the latter case, complete messages

had to be accumulated at each switch before retransmission.

When the packets arrived at their final destination, they would

be reassembled into a complete message by the computer and

forwarded to the recipient. At that time, acknowledgment of

receipt also would be automatically transmitted to the sender,

and, in the event the message was incomplete or otherwise

incorrectly received, the sender would be instructed to retransmit.

In principle, these characteristics made for a faster, more

capable network, and despite the circuitous routes the pack -

ets might travel and their numerous stops at the packet

switches, message delays in the ARPANET averaged only

about one-quarter of a second. 4 3 A network employing packet

switching also promised far greater communications security

than one in which entire messages were transmitted intact.

But however promising the technology appeared, additional

network experience more directly relevant to the operational

demands of WWMCCS was considered essential; after all, the

ARPANET linked the computer systems at a number of research institutes, laboratories, and universities, not command

and control facilities. 4 4 Precisely what command and control

functions should be supported by networking? How should

they be supported? What would the benefits and liabilities be?

No one was really certain, and that was where PWIN came in.

Creating PWIN as a test bed to determine the operational

benefits of networking for WWMCCS made abundant sense.

PWIN could determine the specific characteristics that an

intercomputer network would require to support the com -

mand and control function, and it could assess a method for

applying the technology of computer internetting to

WWMCCS—all without a full-scale advance commitment to

the networking concept.4 5 This development was definitely in

keeping with Deputy Secretary of Defense Packard’s “fly before

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you buy” approach to systems acquisition, whereby working

prototypes would be built and thoroughly tested prior to the

award of production contracts. His was a responsible approach to systems acquisition—one that had, for example,

given the Air Force two of its most successful aircraft, the

F-16 fighter and the A-10 attack plane. (It was also an approach that would be all but abandoned by the Pentagon after

Packard left office.)4 6 Following this approach, if networking

proved inappropriate for WWMCCS, things had been kept

small scale and not much was lost. But if the prototype proved

successful, as was hoped, it would constitute a baseline system, a foundation for the operational network that was to

follow. It was a plan that would be given considerable impetus

when, just three months later, Packard established the mod -

ern WWMCCS structure.

Notes

1. Brooke Nihart, “Coordination of C3 Giving Way to Tight Control?”

Armed Forces Journal 107 (17 August 1970): 22.

2. W. J. Baird, “The Office of Telecommunications Policy,” Signal 25 (5

September 1970): 5.

3. George A. Pappas Jr. and T. G. Adcock, “The Role of Satellite

Communications in the DOD,” Signal 27 (September 1972): 27.

4. “U.S. Telecommunications Reorganization,” Signal 24 (April 1970): 44.

5. Clay Whitehead, “On the New Office of Telecommunications Policy:

Where Communicators Communicate,” Signal 25 (22 February 1971): 20.

6. Charles E. Shepherd, “The Office of Telecommunications

Policy—Central Issues,” Signal 29 (February 1975): 18–19.

7. Ibid., 19.

8. House, Committee on Armed Services, Armed Services Investigating

Subcommittee, Review of Department of Defense Worldwide Communications, Phase I, 92d Cong., 1s t sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government

Printing Office [GPO], 10 May 1971), 17. (Hereafter cited as Phase I Report.)

9. Ibid., 20.

10. Hubert Summers Cunningham and William Edward Kenealy, “The

Joint Chiefs of Staff and Command and Control,” Signal 29 (March 1975):

16.

11. Phase I Report, 22.

12. Ibid., 20.

13. Ibid., 22.

14. General Accounting Office, Accounting for Automatic Data Processing

Costs Needs Improvement (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office

[GAO], 7 February 1978), 13.

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134
15. Phase I Report, 22.

16. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “The DCA—A Rock and a Hard Place,” Signal

34 (April 1980): 9.

17. Nihart, 22.

18. “Mel Laird: Coach, Quarterback, or Both?” Armed Forces

Management 16 (October 1969): 35.

19. “WWMCCS: Report, One Year Later,” Government Executive 3

(January 1971): 19.

20. Benjamin F. Schemmer, “DOD’s Computer Critics Nearly Unplug

Ailing Worldwide Military Command and Control System,” Armed Forces

Journal 108 (21 December 1970): 22.

21. House, Committee on Armed Services, Hearing before Subcommittee

on Investigations, Review of Department of Defense Command, Control and

Communications Systems and Facilities, 9 4t h Cong., 2d sess. (Washington,

D.C.: GPO, 1977), 29.

22. Joseph Volz, “Revamped World-Wide Computer Net Readied:

WWMCCS Slimmed Down to 15-System Program,” Armed Forces Journal

107 (27 June 1970): 21.

23. Frank Greve, “Pentagon Calls Super-Computer a ‘Disaster,’”

Parameters 10, no. 1 (March 1980): 96.

24. GAO, The World Wide Military Command and Control

System—Evaluation of Vendor and Department of Defense Comments,

LCD-80-22A (Washington, D.C.: GAO, 1980), 5.

25. William J. Broad, “Computers and the U.S. Military Don’t Mix,”

Science, 14 March 1980, 1186.

26. GAO, NORAD’s Information Processing Improvement Program—Will It

Enhance Mission Capability? LCD-78-117 (Washington, D.C.: GAO, 1978),

45–46.

27. Herbert B. Goertzel and James R. Miller, “WWMCCS ADP: A Promise

Fulfilled,” Signal 30 (May/June 1976): 58.

28. Nihart, 23.

29. George Weiss, “Restraining the Data Monster: The Next Step in C3,”

Armed Forces Journal 108 (5 July 1971): 28–29.

30. Carl J. Weinmeister III, “Command and Control Means Teamwork

and Responsibility,” Defense Management Journal 8 (April 1972): 41.

31. Phase I Report, 4.

32. “WWMCCS Report,”19.

33. Goertzel and Miller, 58.

34. Broad, 1186.

35. Goertzel and Miller, 58.

36. Carol Hamilton, “Worldwide C2 System Networks Strategic Data for

Joint Chiefs,” Defense Electronics 20 (June 1988): 53.

37. GAO, The World Wide Military Command and Control System—-Major

Changes Needed in its Automated Data Processing Management and

Direction , Report to the Congress, LCD 80-22 (Washington, D.C.: GAO,

December 1979), 38.

CENTRALIZING COMMUNICATIONS MANAGEMENT

135
38. Ibid., 57.

39. Goertzel and Miller, 61.

40. The World Wide Military Command and Control System—Major

Changes Needed in its Automated Data Processing Management and

Direction, 81.

41. Stephen T. Walker, “Department of Defense Data Network,” Signal

37 (October 1982): 42.

42. Edgar Ulsamer, “Machine Intelligence Shapes Global C3 Nets,” Air

Force Magazine, July 1977, 72.

43. David C. Russell, “C3 Research at DARPA,” Signal 31 (March 1977):

39.

44. Richard Hartman, “Internetting and ADP Bolster Strategic C3,”

Defense Electronics 11 (September 1979): 55.

45. Lee M. Paschall, “Command, Control and Technology,”

Countermeasures, July 1976, 42.

46. Richard A. Stubbing and Richard A. Mendel, “How to Save $50

Billion a Year,” The Atlantic Monthly , June 1989, 56.

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Chapter 8

The WWMCCS Council and the

Modern WWMCCS Structure

A prominent aspect of Deputy Defense Secretary Packard’s

tenure at the Pentagon was his “personal crusade” to improve

communications, command, and control throughout the Department of Defense. In his many bureaucratic battles, Packard

focused considerable, specific attention on WWMCCS, and he

was the driving force behind efforts during the early 1970s to

rationalize its management structure. But his was a crusade

that continually floundered in a sea of Pentagon resistance to

his centralization efforts, and, having run hard upon the shoals

of bureaucratic intransigence, Packard abruptly resigned from

office in December 1971, improbably citing “strictly personal

reasons” for his departure.1 Immediately prior to his resignation, however, Packard took action. On 2 December 1971 he

issued a revision of DOD Directive 5100.30, WWMCCS’s

founding document. Working closely with JCS chairman Adm

Thomas Moorer, Packard sought to clarify responsibilities and

centralize authority within the system. In so doing, he defined

the modern-day WWMCCS structure. If Herbert Goertzel deserved to be called Mr. WWMCCS during the system’s formative years, Packard, more than anyone else, merited the sobriquet during his three years in government, 1969 through 1971.

Packard’s directive first redefined the overall mission of

WWMCCS. “The World Wide Military Command and Control

System,” the directive began, was the system that “provides

the means for operational direction and technical administrative support involved in the function of command and control

of U.S. military forces.”2 The directive delineated the system’s

major missions and ordered them hierarchically. WWMCCS’s

primary mission was to support the National Command

Authorities. It would provide strategic warning, intelligence,

and other pertinent information upon which timely and appropriate decisions could be reached. Once the decision-making

process had been completed, WWMCCS would constitute the

mechanism through which the decisions were implemented. It

137
would be used for applying resources to the military departments, assigning military missions, and providing direction to

the unified and specified commands. To this end, the National

Military Command System was formally designated

WWMCCS’s priority component. The directive went on to specify that the NMCS should be the most responsive, reliable, and

survivable system possible, given available resources.3

WWMCCS’s other purpose, one clearly designated as subordinate to the fulfillment of national-level requirements, was to

support the command and control systems of the unified and

specified commands, the military services and their individual

service commands, and several defense and nondefense

agencies—and pretty much in that order. The rationale behind establishing a hierarchy of importance among key organizational subunits, with the National Military Command System heading the list, was simple. As Packard put it, “Instead

of the local commanders now having as their first priority to

design their command system to meet the requirements of

their mission, they first have to have a design to meet the

requirements of the national command system.”4 Only then, as

a secondary concern and not to interfere with the primary

mission, could they design systems to meet their specific mission requirements. Now the emphasis was clearly on

WWMCCS as a national level system, particularly concerning

control of the strategic nuclear forces.

Shortly after the revised directive was released, Packard

elaborated on the need for setting priorities within the overall

WWMCCS mission at a meeting of the Aviation Space Writers

Association. Reviewing the evolution of WWMCCS over the preceding decade, he explained to the assembled journalists how

a series of directives concerned with national-level command

and control issued early in the 1960s had contained two major

emphases. The first was that the unified and specified commanders should have the authority to build their own command and control systems in ways most responsive to their

specific mission requirements. This they had done, and reasonably well, Packard said, particularly the Strategic Air Command, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the Navy. With regard

to the directives’ second emphasis, however, the linking of

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138
these various elements into a system responsive to the needs

of the NCA, things had not worked out nearly so well.

When WWMCCS was established, the hope had been for a

coordinated and organized system. The explicit intent in bringing the unified and specified commanders into the develop -

ment process had been to produce greater commonality of

command and control assets among those commands. The

plan was to allow the CINCs considerable latitude in develop -

ing their command and control systems while at the same time

exhorting them to be responsive to the needs of the nationallevel leadership. 5

 The problem with this approach to system

development was that it simply did not work. During the first

decade of WWMCCS’s existence, the forces of decentralization

held sway. The unified and specified commanders, responding

heavily to the demands of the military services of which their

commands were constituted, developed and deployed command and control assets to meet their individual needs. It was

a situation of developmental ad hockery in which command

and control systems that were tailored to the requirements of

system subunits proliferated without adequate consideration

for how they might interact, or fail to interact, with other systems. It was a case of subunit optimization at the expense of

the national leadership, of individual systems going their own

separate ways.6 During the 1962–71 period, the only element

of WWMCCS that seemed truly designed for national-level

decision makers was the National Military Command System

itself. 7 The overall system that resulted from this subunitdominated process was variously, and rightly, described as a

“command and control federation,” a “loosely knit federation,”8

a “loosely-defined, loosely-gathered federation of subsystems

with no clear central purpose,”9 and similar characterizations.

The inevitable consequences of this confederated approach,

according to Packard, were that “communications sometimes

didn’t work, that the messages generally got mixed up in coming out to [the] field, to the local command, and in some way

didn’t get into the central communications system, which in fact,

works very well.”1 0 Unscrambling this sentence, what Packard

was saying was that the decentralized service-specific systems

worked well. Many of the more centralized systems also

worked well. The problem was that none of them worked well

THE WWMCCS COUNCIL

139
together, a situation that many officials believed the nation no

longer could afford. They felt what was needed was some overarching rationale, some larger structure or architecture, that

would guide the development of command and control systems and ensure their interoperability and standardization.

In theory, the Defense Communications Agency was to have

provided the organizational focus that was lacking in command and control. But as an earlier congressional study of

the Defense Communications System had pointed out, DCA

had its own share of problems, ones that appeared to be a

microcosm of those found in the broader defense establishment. The problems with the DCS were more organiza -

tional than technological, and preeminent among them was

inadequate managerial control. Better management, the study

concluded, would go far toward addressing the widespread

confusion, unnecessary duplication, and fragmented areas of

responsibility that afflicted the system. What was needed was

a “proper mix” of people, cooperation between participating

organizational subunits, and dynamic leadership not only at

the DCA but also at the Offices of the Secretary of Defense

and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 11 And better management was

precisely what David Packard had in mind in issuing DOD

Directive 5100.30. He wanted to take this loosely knit confed -

eration and forge from it a truly responsive capability worthy

of the name World Wide Military Command and Control System . Whereas before WWMCCS had essentially been an in -

strument of the unified and specified commanders, who in

turn were heavily influenced by the military services, it would

now constitute a direct link between the NCA and the operating forces. To effect this change, the directive took WWMCCS,

formerly managed by the JCS as a corporate body, and made

it the sole responsibility of the JCS chairman.1 2

In light of the reorientation of WWMCCS’s mission, one of

the most important changes wrought by DOD Directive

5100.30 was definitional. Specifically, the concept of the NCA

was redefined so that it now consisted of only the president

and the secretary of defense, or their duly deputized alternates

or successors. Before this time, the NCA had included the JCS

and the unified and specified commanders. The new definition

did not change the formal chain of command, however, which

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ran from the president, through the secretary of defense, to

the joint chiefs, then to the commanders of the unified and

specified commands, and to the operational forces in the field.

Packard’s quite deliberate intent in removing the military commanders was to simplify the processes of decision making and

order execution. 1 3 To this end, the new definition created a

sort of bureaucratic loophole, a mechanism that could be employed at the highest levels of national decision making to

streamline the chain of command by bypassing the joint

chiefs and the unified and specified commanders.

Packard’s redefinition of the National Command Authorities

was not, however, designed to have decisions concerning every

minor incident or event made at the top of the military hierarchy. Rather, it simply emphasized that such capability should

exist, to be exercised at the discretion of the NCA. With this

sort of flexibility, the top leadership could examine the requirements of a situation and decide whether centralized or

decentralized decision making was more appropriate. The level

of control could then be adjusted, like a light switch. 1 4 The

hope was that the new arrangement would capitalize on the

advantages of both centralization and decentralization.

Given the crises and other time-sensitive situations that characterized the nuclear age, this sort of streamlined decisionmaking approach appeared to make abundant sense. During

peacetime, the flow of data to the national leadership would

take place in a routine fashion. But consider that military and

nonmilitary organizations tend to undergo structural changes

when confronted by conditions of uncertainty and stress, and

such changes tend to lean toward simplification. When crises

occur, central leadership wants to focus directly on the area,

requiring that those standing in the way step aside.1 5

Packard’s directive simply recognized this tendency and codified it. Now, in principle at least, all intervening levels of command between the top levels of government and the operational forces in the field could be eliminated, and central

leaders could have the same information as commanders on

the scene. (Those who were normally in the chain of command

but were cut out of the action in this way also would have the

same information available to them, but for standby purposes

only.)16 Indeed, the extreme case permitted under the directive

THE WWMCCS COUNCIL

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was precisely the White House-to-foxhole communications scenario derided by the military services and their congressional

supporters in times past. DOD Directive 5100.30 now made it

mandatory that a capability exist to communicate directly

with the operating forces, whether conventional forces in -

volved in a crisis in a remote part of the globe or, more importantly, the strategic forces responsible for executing the single

integrated operational plan. 1 7

All of this substantially blurred earlier distinctions between

strategic and tactical command and control. If indeed the

en tire communications capability was integrated to provide

national level leaders with detailed knowledge of the situation

and the ability to direct the military forces, existing strategic

and tactical command and control systems had to become

fully interoperable. If the old thinking held that strategic and

tactical systems were completely separate and unrelated functional entities, then the new thinking would remove all technological or organizational barriers between the strategic and

tactical worlds. 18 The idea was that these systems had to be

standardized and essentially transparent.

David Packard’s willingness to undertake what essentially

was, in effect, a frontal assault on the military hierarchy arose

from his conviction that the chain of command itself was to

blame for many of the communications problems of the past.

The way things stood, messages moving up or down the military

hierarchy necessitated multiple reformattings and retransmissions, making delays unavoidable. Packard and his supporters considered such delays intolerable during the critical,

time-sensitive situations that characterized the nuclear age,

and they were determined to do something about it. 1 9

A series of other substantive changes were also promulgated

in this revision of WWMCCS’s founding document. Major system responsibilities were allotted and roles were reassigned,

resulting in the establishment of the modern-day WWMCCS

management structure. The directive divided responsibility for

the system among several interested parties. The chairman of

the JCS was given responsibility for the operation of the

Na tional Military Command System, which included develop -

ing and validating requirements for the various elements of the

NMCS itself, ascertaining the command and control requirements

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142
for the unified and specified commands, and ensuring interop -

erability among all of these by developing an overall WWMCCS

objectives plan. The JCS organization was given responsibility

for ongoing evaluation of WWMCCS.2 0

Another star in the revamped WWMCCS management firm ament was the newly created post of assistant secretary of

defense for telecommunications. Recall that without legislative

action, David Packard had created the position of assistant to

the secretary of defense for telecommunications, providing a

bureaucratic springboard for a full assistant secretary position.

As Packard had anticipated, the Blue Ribbon Defense Panel

recommended the creation of the new assistant secretary position. Packard then moved swiftly to effect the upgrading, and

his efforts bore fruit when Defense Secretary Laird informed

Congress that consolidated management of defense communications created “an urgent requirement to upgrade his telecommunications manager to the rank of Assistant Secretary.”2 1

The Armed Services Committee responded favorably to Laird’s

appeal. Legislative action approving the change was completed

in December 1971, and the new assistant secretary of defense

for telecommunications was sworn in the following month. His

responsibilities included advising the secretary of defense on

all matters of telecommunications systems design, develop -

ment, procurement, and performance. The only area exempted

from his slate of duties was automatic data-processing equip -

ment, for this responsibility was assigned to the DOD comptroller. The new assistant secretary also would be a major

player in a brand new organizational entity created by DOD

Directive 5100.30: the WWMCCS Council.

The WWMCCS Council

The WWMCCS Council was intended to be a management

body that would act in effect as a WWMCCS board of directors.2 2 Like any other board, it would be a high-level decisionmaking body, and, as such, would not be concerned with the

details of day-to-day operations. Also, like any other board, its

members were heavyweights, consisting of the deputy secretary

of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the newly

created assistant secretary of defense for telecommunications,

THE WWMCCS COUNCIL

143
and the assistant secretary of defense for intelligence (a position also established by DOD Directive 5100.30, and given

responsibility for advising the secretary of defense on matters

relating to strategic warning and intelligence). The council chair

was given to the new telecommunications assistant secretary

to lend greater authority and prestige to his position.

The WWMCCS Council was the brainchild both of Packard

and Admiral Moorer, the JCS chairman, and their reasons for

creating it were several. First, the council was intended to

provide general policy guidance to the JCS regarding the operation and future development of WWMCCS. Second, it was to

serve as an agent of centralization quite deliberately intended

to “bypass most of the ants on the Pentagon log,” cutting

through bureaucratic red tape so that improvements could be

brought rapidly to the system.2 3 Third, it was to serve an

adjudicatory function, helping to resolve policy conflicts that

might arise. It was also intended that the council would review

the results of system testing, a clear sign that effectiveness

criteria would now be promulgated at the top rather than at

the subunit level. A fourth reason for creating the WWMCCS

Council was to facilitate work on a number of projects consid -

ered necessary for strategic command and control modernization. Opposition was viewed as inevitable because the shift

in emphasis toward strategic concerns necessarily implied a

shift in resources, and Packard’s intent was to have the council serve as a high-level advocate for these projects in future

budgetary wars. 2 4 In summary, Packard’s whole thrust was to

implement a centralized, top-down management structure

focusing on the needs of the NCA as a priority for crisis management. That structure would replace the existing bottom-up

approach in which the majority of initiatives were taken at

lower levels by the operating commanders whose projects currently received the lion’s share of resources.2 5

The increasingly strategic emphasis of WWMCCS and the

need for energetic efforts to improve it followed directly from

the strategic emphases of the Nixon administration. As President Nixon had rhetorically queried in a speech to the Congress in early 1970, “Should a President, in the event of a

nuclear attack, be left with the single option of ordering the

mass destruction of enemy civilians, in the face of certainty

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144
that it would be followed by the mass slaughter of Americans?”2 6 Elaborating on the implications of this strategic shift,

the president noted in a subsequent speech: “We must ensure

that we have the forces and procedures that provide us with

alternatives appropriate to the nature and level of the provocation. This means having the plans and command and control

capabilities necessary to enable us to select and carry out the

appropriate response without necessarily having to resort to

massive destruction.”2 7 Such capabilities would be enshrined

in doctrine in January 1974 with the issuing of National Security Defense Memorandum 242, which formally dispensed with

the earlier doctrine of assured destruction. This doctrine was

still in place, although increasingly disregarded since

McNamara’s days in the Pentagon. Elevated in its place was

flexible response, the United States’s de facto doctrine. With

flexible response, the United States was no longer bound to a

massive, reflex reaction to a nuclear provocation. Throughout

a range of crisis and wartime conditions, responses would

henceforth be calculated, modulated, and precisely controlled.

Providing such capabilities was now formally the job of

WWMCCS, further underscoring that command and control

would now be considerably more than a technical detail.

Deputy Secretary of Defense William P. Clements Jr. arrived

in Washington in early 1973, at the beginning of Nixon’s second term. A former chairman of the board of Sedco, Inc., an

oil-drilling firm, and a member of the Blue Ribbon Defense

Panel whose earlier report had called for major changes in

command and control, Clements quickly became baffled with

the World Wide Military Command and Control System. One of

his responsibilities was as chairman of the WWMCCS Council,

and in his words, “It took a year to get common understanding

of what we were talking about.”2 8 As his understanding grew,

so did his realization that a major system overhaul was required.

By the end of that year, Clements and the other council members agreed that WWMCCS, as it was currently being developed, lacked a coherent organizing logic. Its overall goals were

vague or undefined. Growth had occurred in a conceptual vacuum, in a context of managerial nebulousness and appropria -

tions ad hockery. As individuals concerned with total system

integration and coordination, the WWMCCS Council con cluded

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145
that WWMCCS failed to provide a responsive command and

control capability to the national leadership.

A good deal of the concern emphasized that WWMCCS was

not easy to define. What precisely is WWMCCS? During the

previous decade, two major schools of thought emerged, the

first and more general being that WWMCCS was really a

“concept”; less a system in its own right than a guiding set of

principles for how to use existing command and control assets.2 9

Such a definition is in obvious ways naturally genial to proponents of decentralized control.

The second view held that WWMCCS was in fact real, a

“system of systems” or metasystem, a vast assembly of nationallevel capabilities that cut across service boundaries and subsumed beneath its compass a large number of assets. These

included many, although not all, of the assets developed and

deployed by the military services, commands, and defense

agencies.3 0 They also included a number of WWMCCS-unique

circuits, equipments, and subsystems that permitted the NCA

both to communicate with subordinate commands and to execute time-sensitive operations up to and including the single

integrated operational plan.3 1 In this macrosystem view,

WWMCCS was far more than an organizing principle (although it was certainly that as well). It was real, however vast.

It extended from the White House to the foxhole, encompassing the individual communications systems of virtually every

echelon of military command, and it was devoted—although

by no means exclusively—to the command and control of the

strategic nuclear forces.3 2 For obvious reasons this view has

proved attractive to proponents of centralization.

The lack of agreement as to what WWMCCS actually was

can be attributed largely to the essential nature of the system,

to its size and complexity, and to the myriad technologies and

groups that, in whole or in part, fell within its compass. A

clear specification of boundaries, of who was in and who was

out, obviously was of central relevance for the WWMCCS

Council, for without this specification, “one man’s internal

system turns out to be another man’s external system.”3 3 At

first glance it might seem appropriate to include certain defense

agencies and groups—for example, the Defense Communications Agency—as WWMCCS subunits. DCA is, of course, a key

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146
WWMCCS actor both through its operation of the Defense

Communications System, a significant WWMCCS subsystem,

and its responsibility for a variety of WWMCCS support functions. But it is also responsible for a variety of non-WWMCCS

programs, systems, and facilities, meaning that it is not syn -

onymous with WWMCCS. 34 Determining where DCS ends and

WWMCCS begins is thus far from straightforward.

 Or consider the military services, which operate the

WWMCCS command centers, technical systems for early

warning, data-processing facilities, and other assets. At first

glance, it might seem appropriate to include them within the

boundaries of the system. Yet the services also have myriad

interests, missions, and obligations that have little or nothing

to do with WWMCCS. Additionally, the personnel, facilities,

and other resources they contributed to WWMCCS frequently

were called upon to do double duty, serving service-unique as

well as joint-service needs. Because of these characteristics, it

is probably most useful to consider the services in much the

same way as such defense agencies as DCA—as partially overlapping, rather than synonymous with WWMCCS. In addition,

it might be argued that a large number of agencies and organizations of the OSD and the JCS organization concerned

with joint-service operations should be designated a part of

WWMCCS. But what about defense-related industries, civilian

institutions such as research universities and think tanks,

and Congress, the group with ultimate power of the purse?

So in answering the question regarding which groups, systems, agencies, and so on, are part of WWMCCS, the answer

was “all of them” to some degree, under some circumstances,

at some times. The common-user switched networks of the

DCS, for example, while intended primarily to meet the rou -

tine needs of the operating military forces, could be used for a

variety of nonroutine functions also. That is, only part of them

was WWMCCS, or they were WWMCCS only part of the time.

Other subsystems were full timers yet infrequently used, special purpose elements committed to such unique functions as

the various elements of the Minimum Essential Emergency

Communications Network. Such was the lack of conceptual

clarity confronting the WWMCCS Council that at times it was

far from apparent where WWMCCS ended and other systems

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147
began. (Indeed, the scale of the system is potentially so vast,

its boundaries so all-encompassing, that virtually all Pentagon

elements, and myriad other elements as well, are possible

candidates for inclusion. WWMCCS rapidly expands to incorporate the world.)

The WWMCCS that confronted Clements and his fellow council members may well have been inevitable given its subunitdominated character and the evolutionary approach that had

governed its development. Many of WWMCCS’s varied subsystems had been introduced as a quick response to an increased

threat, because of individually perceived subunit needs, or to

take advantage of sudden advances in technology. But if serious

deficiencies existed with the system’s ability to serve the needs

of the central leadership, they did not pose a problem from the

perspective of influential system subunits, whose needs were

often served quite well. If WWMCCS resource acquisition failed

to take place in a context of clearly specified system goals,

guided by some larger vision or central plan, this is not to say

that goals did not exist. Goals there were, and in abundance,

but they tended to represent subunit needs and interests. More

specifically, they represented the needs and interests of the military services, whose missions were frequently at cross-purposes

with those of other subunits and with any broader system requirement for centralized control. Consequently, coordination

was problematical, and duplication was commonplace. That it

took Clements a year to understand “what we were talking

about” is thus hardly surprising.

The demands imposed by a truly functional WWMCCS were

considerable. Command centers, the strategic nuclear forces,

and the communications channels that linked them together

had to be survivable. There was the requirement that commu -

nications channels be secure, permitting discussions with

various force elements and with our allies as alternative courses

of action were considered. Flexible response also implied the

ability to change plans rapidly, to retarget weapons as conditions changed, and to withhold weapons for future use. Just

as Packard and others had anticipated, this indeed represented a substantial blurring of the boundary between strategic and tactical operations. The purpose of the WWMCCS

Council was to ensure that flexible response found expression

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in command and control technologies and organizational

structures, ultimately allowing the National Command

Authorities to control escalation, conduct nuclear war, and

negotiate termination of hostilities on conditions acceptable to

the United States. This meant that earlier emphases on cost

effectiveness, primarily by the Defense Communications

Agency, would now be downplayed. As DCA’s director put it,

for those assets implicated in WWMCCS, the criteria of effectiveness would be “survivability, reliability, security, and

cost—and in that order.”3 5

Given the revised doctrinal context, the WWMCCS Council’s

concerns focused on a series of projects. One of the most

important of these involved improving the National Military

Command System. Through this time, the NMCS had consisted of four major command centers: the National Military

Command Center in the Pentagon, the Alternate NMCC at Fort

Ritchie, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, and

the National Emergency Command Post Afloat (NECPA). Each

of these system elements was slated for improvement except

for the NECPA, the need for which had been eliminated, first

informally by the Navy, which wanted no part of the program,

and later by DOD Directive 5100.30.3 6

As a first step, the Pentagon facility was to be substantially

upgraded. Past crises had led many in the command and control community to conclude that the existing NMCC was sim -

ply too small to accommodate adequate staffing. In addition,

major technological deficiencies existed in the equipment used

at the center, including equipment being used for automatic

data processing, information display, and secure voice and

conferencing capabilities. To correct these shortcomings, the

council outlined an initial improvement project, to be undertaken by the Air Force, that would effectively double the size of

the facility and introduce a large number of technical improvements, including automatic distribution for incoming messages,

automated access to the WWMCCS computer database, and

televisual display of critical data.3 7 When these improvements

were completed, a follow-on phase would commence in which

a major element of the National Military Intelligence Center

(NMIC), operated by the Defense Intelligence Agency, would be

moved into the newly expanded facilities. The WWMCCS

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Council’s point here was to provide direct connections with

the NMIC for exchange of data, fusing the operational and

intelligence arms of the Department of Defense in support of

the NCA. A number of problems were encountered in meeting

these initiatives, including the purchase of equipment whose

usefulness had not been determined and resistance by the

military services to the centralizing tendency inherent in a

truly viable NMCC.

The Alternate National Military Command Center at Fort

Ritchie was also slated for an upgrade. The major effort here,

to be performed by the Army, involved providing the center

with a more survivable communications infrastructure. 38 Finally,

beneath the rubric of the National Military Command System,

the WWMCCS Council gave its priority concern to the Ad -

vanced Airborne National Command Post (AABNCP) program.

The council wanted to replace the current fleet of three Na -

tional Emergency Airborne Command Post planes and four

SAC Looking Glass planes—the modified Boeing 707s designated

EC-135—with seven reconfigured Boeing 747s designated E-4s.

Because of its far greater endurance, its ability to carry a

larger battle staff and additional electronic equipment, its

more powerful communications capabilities, and its hardening

against nuclear effects, the AABNCP program was a high priority of the council. In fact, one of the first actions taken by

the council was to recommend the acquisition of the new airborne command posts, the first of which was to be delivered in

December 1974. 3 9

Other WWMCCS-related improvements concerned the council, including the upgrading and expansion of various elements

of the Minimal Essential Emergency Communications Network. Relevant programs here included upgrades to the various very low frequency systems for communicating with the

ballistic missile submarine force and a more aggressive pursuit of an extremely low frequency (ELF) capability. Of interest

were efforts to expand the Air Force’s Emergency Rocket Communications System and a program to replace that service’s

aging Emergency Message Automatic Transmission System

(EMATS) with a modern space-based communications system

that would later come to be known as the Air Force Satellite

Communications System. 4 0 In addition, there were programs

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to upgrade the nation’s early warning system. Here, the

WWMCCS Council supported Air Force efforts to acquire several new phased-array radars for the detection of sealaunched ballistic missiles and for upgrades to the aging Ballistic Missile Early Warning System.

In light of the doctrinal shift then taking place, the

WWMCCS Council became concerned with the need to develop

a communications satellite capable of surviving a nuclear

exchange. Here, the council threw its support behind efforts

already under way to harden and otherwise enhance the survivability of the Defense Satellite Communications System.

With an eye to the future, attention was then given to develop -

ing an entirely new satellite intended from the first to perform

in a war-fighting context. A decade later this effort would

result in the extraordinarily ambitious Military Strategic and

Tactical Relay satellite program. Two experimental satellites

were then under development by the Massachusetts Institute

of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory that were intended as a

technical test bed for such a system (known as LES 8 and 9)

which would be orbited in 1976 after considerable delays.4 1

A final council concern was the WWMCCS ADP Update Program, already well under way at the time DOD Directive

5100.30 was reissued, but with the installation of the first

computer system, at SAC headquarters, still more than a year

away. Here, the council immediately assumed its intended

leadership and advocacy roles, facilitating the acquisition of

the standard WWMCCS computers and actively promoting the

development of standard system software to enhance interop -

erability. Interoperability of system elements was a concern of

long standing, of course, and numerous DOD guidelines had

been released to address it.42 What the WWMCCS Council did

was to take these issues and move them to the front burner,

making standardization and interoperability active considerations in future system development. The goal was a system in

which information and commands originating anywhere in the

system could flow unrestricted to any other point. A corollary

goal was to ensure that the council appointed a project manager to oversee WWMCCS automatic data processing.

Since computers communicate with one another in digital

rather than analog form, the council saw as a closely related

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concern the need to substantially increase the number of digital communications channels in the DCS to accomplish an

all- digital system. A majority of usable DCS channels at that

time was allocated for voice use, and many were either nearing the threshold of their capacity to carry data or had already

passed their limit. Additionally, many channels were not designed to carry the type of high-speed, high-quality data generated by modern computers, and digital transmission was

viewed as the only economical means of increasing the capabilities of WWMCCS. In addition to the higher data rates made

possible by digital transmission, there would be improved

transmission quality, lower error rates, greater resistance to

jamming, and enhanced communications security. 4 3 Digital

transmissions of all types—voice, record, data, and facsim -

ile—were considered inevitable for the communications systems of the future. The WWMCCS Council became the principal advocate for developing AUTODIN II, the planned follow-on

to DCA’s common-user AUTODIN, and, more importantly, a

new WWMCCS Intercomputer Network (WIN) that would make

use of the upgraded AUTODIN capabilities.

PWIN Design

Transitioning to the WIN of the future is where the Prototype

WWMCCS Intercomputer Network came in. Following the reissue

of DODD 5100.30, the joint chiefs had directed the Defense

Communications Agency to prepare plans for the prototype

network’s design and development. DCA promptly set to work,

establishing a PWIN element within its joint technical support

activity (JTSA—previously called the Joint Technical Support

Group). With more than one hundred assigned personnel, the

J TSA already had taken on several important tasks in

WWMCCS automatic data processing. It was responsible for

ensuring that the hardware and software acquired under the

WWMCCS ADP update were compatible with the assets of the

Defense Communications System. JTSA was also a major fo -

cal point for WWMCCS ADP activities, particularly in software,

hardware installation, and planning. It served as an ADP technical information clearinghouse for members of the WWMCCS

community. 44 These functions made JTSA an obvious choice to

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coordinate the development of PWIN, and the positions of

PWIN project director and operational testing director were

created therein.

Consistent with DCA’s coordinating function, the actual

development of PWIN was not done by the JTSA but by a joint

Honeywell Information Systems/Computer Sciences Corporation team. The PWIN design the contractors produced appeared

simple enough on the surface. It consisted of three interconnected WWMCCS computer sites, or nodes: the Atlantic Command in Norfolk, Virginia; the Command and Control Technical Center, Reston, Virginia; and the National Military

Command Center at the Pentagon.45 These PWIN sites contained a Honeywell H6000 host computer and its associated

front-end processor, a Datanet 355 computer. A number of

user terminals were connected to each of the host computers.

Some of these terminals were local, meaning that they were

physically collocated with the host computer at the PWIN

node. Others were remote terminals, located tens, hundreds,

even thousands of miles from the host computer. They were

connected to the host computer by one of a variety of commu -

nications media: microwave, cable, satellite, or landlines. For

example, a host computer in Virginia might support a remote

terminal in Germany. By simply “dialing up” the host computer, the European user would gain access to its databases,

even though he was thousands of miles away. 4 6

To provide this sort of interface between remote users and

host computers, the PWIN design involved a complex software

application called the Network Control Program that was resident in the host computers. This program provided the necessary protocols for establishing the interfaces and for performing security checking, statistics gathering, network flow

controlling, and other functions.4 7 Another PWIN feature,

called TELNET, allowed users to connect to any other network

site, access databases, and perform data processing on a timesharing basis. This interconnection capability increased the

network’s endurance, an important effectiveness criterion, since

if one’s own host computer was down, damaged, or destroyed,

any other site with the same databases and applications programs could substitute for it. In PWIN it was necessary for a

user to know the actual location of the databases he wished to

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dial into, but in the operational network to follow the relevant

databases would be accessed automatically. 4 8

Another key element of the PWIN design was what was called

its communications subnet, as direct a copy of the packet

switching design used in the ARPANET as was possible. In

this arrangement, a terminal user at one PWIN location

would in struct his host computer to send a message to a user

at another location, and his host computer would forward the

message to a Honeywell H716 minicomputer known as an interface message processor (IMP). The IMP performed the packet

switching function, breaking the message down into packets

of one thousand bits, which it then passed on to a cryptographic device. The encrypted message packets then would go

to a modem, and, finally, to the network’s transmission lines,

a series of secure, high-speed communications circuits. At

first these circuits were dedicated to PWIN use, but as the

network evolved, the plan was to make them compatible with

DCA’s envisioned AUTODIN II. At the other end, the reverse

process would take place. The received packets would be demodulated and decoded, collected by the IMP, reassembled

into a complete message, forwarded to the host computer, and

passed along to the recipient’s computer terminal.4 9

Although it sounded reasonably straightforward, it wasn’t;

and it was in PWIN’s complex design that many of the network’s subsequent problems had their genesis. Much of the

complexity arose because the Honeywell 6000-series computers in use throughout WWMCCS could not perform the

packet-switching function. To get the job done required additional hardware—the IMPS. On top of this, the need for communications security dictated that messages had to be coded

prior to transmission and decoded once they were received,

which caused the addition of even more hardware. 5 0 To make

all of this equipment play together, at least five different software applications had to be employed. Since a greater number

of components in a system invariably increases its complexity,

and since complexity increases the likelihood that some components will experience failure (a condition that appears doubly

true regarding computer software), the prospects for PWIN

reliability that resulted from this network design were not at

all propitious.5 1

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Communications Security

Support for PWIN represented one response by the

WWMCCS Council to an abiding concern with communications security, driven in substantial measure by the experience in Vietnam. By one account, the Vietcong had assigned

nearly five thousand men to their radio interception units in

South Vietnam, and the information they intercepted had

made possible practically all of their attacks and ambushes.

The cost in American lives had been substantial, but this cost

obviously paled in comparison to the price that would be paid

if sensitive communications were compromised during a nuclear

conflict. In determining the command and control system of

the future, then, encryption and such new technologies as

narrow beam broadcasting, the use of satellite cross-links,

and the utilization of the higher portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that would provide enhanced communications

security would be given central importance by the WWMCCS

Council. But the security of communications from external

penetration represented only one aspect of a broader set of

WWMCCS Council security concerns. Equally important in a

defense world increasingly dominated by computers was the

possibility that unauthorized personnel gaining access to sensitive, classified databases could compromise the nation’s

s ecurity internally. The hope of the council in this area rested

on a concept known as multilevel computer security. Under

this arrangement computer users with different types of secu -

rity clearances could use the same equipment in a time-sharing mode, gain access to the information for which they were

cleared, and be denied access to that information for which

they lacked the appropriate clearance.

The council was keenly aware, however, that the hardware

circuitry of the Honeywell 6000-series computers purchased

as part of the WWMCCS ADP Upgrade Program was not designed

to support a multilevel computer security requirement. The

council’s attention would thus be directed toward two types of

action. The first of these involved finding short-term solutions

and, more specifically, determining alternative approaches to the

multilevel security problem. Many of these approaches, including the use of dedicated computers and separate databases,

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would prove exceedingly costly and cumbersome, or unwork -

able in time-sensitive situations.5 2 For the longer term, the

council’s weight was thrown behind programs that promised

to provide a truly workable multilevel computer security capability, something that would prove frustrating since the capability being sought was well beyond the current state-of-theart software. 5 3

Most of the WWMCCS Council’s initiatives and concerns

involved programs already in the works or already well established. With the possible exception of conceptualizing a new

satellite system with nuclear war-fighting capabilities, the

council felt the modernization of WWMCCS consisted of build -

ing on the work of its predecessors rather than offering revolu -

tionary new ideas. Like the doctrine of strategic sufficiency,

these improvements in command and control were in many

respects simply putting a new spin on an old problem.54 The

overwhelming tendency was for goals to follow from actions

rather than to prescribe them. Extant technologies represented solutions in search of problems, and new programs

and new doctrine would be offered to make sense of an already

well-established reality.

How would the modern-day WWMCCS be evaluated? The

council identified two principal ways. First, exercises specifically designed by the joint chiefs would test the worldwide

operations of the system. These tests, which began in the latter

half of the decade, pointed up many WWMCCS shortcomings,

thereby provoking a chorus of criticism and providing impetus

for major system reform. The other means of testing would

come in the form of actual crises and emergencies, and they

were not long in coming. One “success story” in which

WWMCCS met the needs of top decision makers took place

during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. 5 5 As hostilities

between the Arabs and Israelis escalated, US intelligence became

aware that the Russians had alerted their airborne forces for

possible unilateral movement into the region. A series of emergency meetings were initiated at the White House, and President Nixon ordered Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger to

place US military forces on global alert, the first such alert

since the Cuban missile crisis. Schlesinger passed the alert

order on to the chairman of the JCS, who issued it through

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156
the facilities of the National Military Command Center at the

Pentagon. In less than three minutes, all of the unified and

specified commanders had received and acknowledged the order.5 6 But other accounts suggested that things might have

gone more smoothly during the war. Within the first two days

of hostilities, the Israelis needed several new canopies for their

F-4 Phantom jet fighters to replace ones that had been damaged in the fighting. They contacted the Pentagon, where officials, in turn, contacted the headquarters of the Air Force’s

Logistics Command, located at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio.

For an entire day, personnel there searched frantically and

unsuccessfully through the command’s enormous computerized inventory for the replacement canopies. A warehouse-bywarehouse search was subsequently conducted by hundreds

of personnel at a dozen Air Force facilities around the globe.

The canopies were eventually located, but by that time, the

war had ended.5 7

PWIN Expansion

The hope was that the Prototype WWMCCS Intercomputer

Network, then under development by the Defense Communications Agency, would solve these problems. But things were

not well with PWIN. DCA personnel were by no means blind to

the possibility that it might prove unreliable, and PWIN’s test

director informed DCA officials that the network’s complexity

might make it failure prone. When on 29 October 1973 DCA

approved the first comprehensive test plan for PWIN, the plan

explicitly emphasized that reliability was a major concern. In a

19 November briefing for top DCA management, JTSA officials

underscored the reliability problems and potential for network

failure. In response, DCA officials began distancing them selves

from the potentially flawed network by saying that PWIN was

not intended to become an operational network. This message

was not one other influential parties wished to hear, however,

and the joint chiefs quickly called top DCA officials on the

carpet for their lack of enthusiasm and programmatic commitment. Was PWIN not intended to be an operational network?

To the contrary, DCA officials were instructed, the whole point

was to develop precisely such an operational capability using

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PWIN as the foundation. Having received their marching orders,

DCA personnel were expected to fall in line, and most of them

quickly did so.

Most but not all, and one of the more vocal officials who

persisted in making the case for PWIN deficiencies was John

H. Bradley, a DCA civilian computer expert. He was so concerned that PWIN’s WWMCCS Honeywell computers might

never perform as promised that by the end of 1973 he was

ready to go over his superiors’ heads because they did not

appear interested in pressing the issue. But having received

specific instructions to proceed with work on the prototype

network—WWMCCS Honeywells and all—what were Bradley’s

superiors supposed to do? When serious concerns over PWIN

reliability were also raised in an April 1974 MITRE Corporation report, these too were downplayed by DCA. Bradley kept

up the heat, however, causing such irritation that one PWIN

project director wrote several letters recommending Bradley’s

removal from the project. Later that year Bradley was in fact

transferred to nonrelated clerical duties. Although removed

from direct work on WWMCCS, he continued to be a thorn in

DCA’s side, forwarding a series of memoranda on PWIN reliability to DCA higher-ups. 5 8 But as yet nobody was listening.

The next major PWIN milestone came on 4 September 1974,

when the joint chiefs recommended to the secretary of defense

that the prototype network be expanded from its current three

nodes to six. The reasoning behind the request appeared solid

enough: The current three-node PWIN configuration was quite

limited, a series of experiments and tests was being planned,

and including additional WWMCCS sites as part of the network would make the tests more realistic, meaningful, and

informative. The joint chiefs’ recommendation was accepted,

and on 4 December a memorandum was issued approving the

PWIN expansion. The new nodes included the Alternate National

Military Command Center at Fort Ritchie, Maryland; the Military Airlift Command at Scott AFB, Illinois; and US Readiness

Command headquarters at MacDill AFB near Tampa, Florida.

The memorandum also pointed out that requirements for the

expanding network had not been well defined, and it instructed

DCA to prepare both a PWIN development plan and a “concept

of failure” plan, specifying in advance what should be done if

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158
reliability problems arose during the network testing phase

that would begin shortly. 5 9

Notes

1. Peter Pringle and William M. Arkin, SIOP: The Secret U.S. Plan for

Nuclear War (New York: Norton, 1983), 140–41.

2. “Operations,” TIG [The Inspector General’s] Brief, no. 20 (1977): 21.

3. House, Committee on Armed Services, Review of Department of

Defense Command, Control and Communications Systems and Facilities,

9 4t h Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office [GPO],

18 February 1977), 5.

4. Congressional Record, vol. 117 (29 October 1971): 38381.

5. I. Cassandra, “C 3 as a Force Multiplier—Rhetoric or Reality?” Armed

Forces Journal International 115 (January 1978): 18.

6. Edgar Ulsamer, “The Growing, Changing Role of C3I,” Air Force

Magazine 62 (July 1979): 36.

7. Irving Luckom, “Overview of WWMCCS Architecture,” Signal 30

(August 1976): 62.

8. General Accounting Office (GAO), The World Wide Military Command

and Control System—Major Changes Needed in its Automated Data

Processing Management and Direction, Report to the Congress, LCD-80-22

(Washington, D.C.: GAO, 1979), 2.

9. Cassandra, 18.

10. “Remember the Pueblo,” Government Executive 3 (December 1971):

15.

11. House, Armed Services Investigating Subcommittee, Committee on

Armed Services, Review of Department of Defense Worldwide

Communications, Phase I, 92d Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO,

1971), 18.

12. Edgar Ulsamer, “Command and Control Is of Fundamental

Importance,” Air Force Magazine 55 (July 1972): 43.

13. Donald T. Poe, “Command and Control: Changeless—Yet Changing,”

US Naval Institute Proceedings 100 (October 1974): 27.

14. John P. Riceman, “National Defense Policy and Command and

Control Communications,” Signal 29 (January 1975): 32.

15. Poe, 27.

16. Ibid., 29.

17. Lee M. Paschall, “The Command and Control Revolution,” Air Force

Magazine 56 (July 1973): 40.

18. Lee M. Paschall, “USAF Command Control and Communications

Priorities,” Signal 28 (November 1973): 13.

19. Review of Department of Defense Worldwide Communications, 5–6.

20. The World Wide Military Command and Control System, 8–9.

21. Review of Department of Defense Worldwide Communications, 29.

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159
22. Hubert S. Cunningham and William E. Kenealy, “The Joint Chiefs of

Staff and Command and Control,” Signal 29 (March 1975): 16.

23. Cassandra, 18.

24. Thomas C. Reed, “Evolving Strategy—Impact on C3,” Signal 24

(March 1975): 10.

25. Cunningham and Kenealy, 16.

26. Janne E. Nolan, Guardians of the Arsenal: The Politics of Nuclear

Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 100–101.

27. Paschall, “The Command and Control Revolution,” 39.

28. “Pentagon Procurement Trends: For What and Why,” Government

Executive 7 (March 1975): 42.

29. James H. Babcock, “Defense Communications System Policy and

Fiscal Guidelines and Areas of Future Emphasis,” Signal 31 (August 1977):

79.

30. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “The DCA—A Rock and a Hard Place,” Signal

34, (April 1980): 8.

31. Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Hearings before the

Committee on Armed Services, Fiscal Year 1977 Authorization for Military

Procurement, Research and Development, and Active Duty, Selected Reserve,

and Civilian Personnel Strengths, Part 1, 94t h Cong., 2d sess., (Washington,

D.C.: GPO, 1976), 243.

32. “Man and Machine Must Learn to Talk Together,” Armed Forces

Management, July 1968, 111.

33. Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing (Reading, Mass.:

Addison-Wesley, 1969), 27.

34. Gravely, 8.

35. Lee M. Paschall, “The Role of the Present and Future DCS in

Support of the WWMCCS,” Signal 29 (March 1975): 39.

36. Ulsamer, “Command and Control,” 43.

37. Fiscal Year 1977 Authorization for Military Procurement, 245.

38. Lee M. Paschall, “Command and Control: Why the Air Force’s New

Systems are Revolutionary,” Air Force Magazine 57 (July 1974): 62.

39. Thomas C. Steinhauser, “Command and Control Improvements . . .

on the Front Burner,” Armed Forces Journal 109 (May 1972): 47.

40. Paschall, “Command and Control,” 62.

41. Steinhauser, 47.

42. J. P. McConnell, “Command and Control,” Sperryscope 17, no. 2

(1965): 5.

43. “Signal Interviews Lt Gen Richard P. Klocko, USAF,” Signal 26

(September 1971): 7.

44. Herbert B. Goertzel and James R. Miller, “WWMCCS ADP: A Promise

Fulfilled,” Signal 30 (May/June 1976): 60.

45. The World Wide Military Command and Control System, 43, 81.

46. Frank R. Dirnbauer, Gary Bowles, and Warren Mahaly, “A Milestone

in the Development of Data Management Systems for WWMCCS,” Signal 3 0

(July 1976): 36.

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160
47. Paschall, “Command, Control and Technology,” Countermeasures,

July 1976, 42–43.

48. Goertzel and Miller, 60.

49. Paschall, “Command, Control and Technology,” 42–43.

50. The World Wide Military Command and Control System, 42–43.

51. Ibid., 86.

52. Ibid., 28.

53 . Review of Department of Defense Command, Control and

Communications Systems and Facilities, 13.

54. Nolan, 101.

55. Cunningham and Kenealy, 20.

56. Lawrence E. Adams, “The Evolving Role of C3 in Crisis

Management,” Signal 30 (August 1976): 61.

57. Frank Greve, “Pentagon Calls Super-Computer A ‘Disaster,’”

Parameters 10, no. 1 (March 1980): 96.

58. Pringle and Arkin, 147.

59. The World Wide Military Command and Control System, 82–83.

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Chapter 9

The WWMCCS Architect

and Architecture

During 1973 Deputy Defense Secretary William P. Clements

Jr. and his fellow WWMCCS Council members had perceived

the need for some sort of framework within which the elements

of the worldwide military command and control system could

be melded into a coherent system, one cognizant of budgetary

constraints and the existing technological state of the art. No

such plan then existed, so in December 1973 the council

decided the time had come to create one. As Clements phrased

it, this framework would “put all of our worldwide military

command and control systems into proper perspective.”1 What

this meant in practice was that the council agreed, informally

at first but more formally later on, to undertake a comprehensive, soup-to-nuts review of WWMCCS which would serve as a

first step in producing a master plan for its development in the

years to come. 2 This review made eminent sense given the

1971 reorientation of WWMCCS’s priority mission as support

o f the National Command Authorities. The issues it would

address necessarily went far beyond any requirement for

standardization provided by the then-in-progress WWMCCS

Automatic Data-Processing Update Program. What was now

required was a systems approach in which the various elements of the WWMCCS “confederation” would be considered

in an integrated way, with an eye to future system development.

This was precisely where the master plan, called a system

architecture, came in.

The ambitiousness of this plan was considerable. Since any

effort to engineer major changes obviously required an understanding of what was inside of WWMCCS and what was not,

the architecture would begin by specifying precisely where the

system’s boundaries lay, what systems and people it included,

and what their responsibilities were. Since WWMCCS users

had a diversity of information requirements, the architecture

would then specify their needs. In that any system had to have

a purpose, goal, or set of goals, the architecture would clearly

163
define what these were. On the basis of the goals specified, the

architecture would define system interfaces and information

flow—normative prescriptions for how the various elements of

WWMCCS should play together. 3 All of this would permit subsequent acquisitions and growth to be orderly and coherent.

Architecture in hand, the ad hoc incrementalism that had

characterized the growth of WWMCCS would be brought to a

halt and the system’s effectiveness would be enhanced. The

WWMCCS Council’s decision to undertake this sort of basic

reevaluation was formalized in January 1974. But architectures do not materialize merely from the collective expression

of sentiments, however deeply felt. Something more was required:

specifically, a WWMCCS architect.4

The architect that Clements and the WWMCCS Council selected in February 1974 was IBM’s Federal Systems Division

(FSD), and the choice seemed eminently appropriate. FSD had

developed as a separate division within IBM because of the

company’s early work on several Air Force projects, including

SAGE, and its work included the development of militarized

computer hardware, software, and peripherals. Among its

many defense- and aerospace-related projects, FSD had developed the bombing navigation system for the B-52, pioneered

the application of airborne digital computers for the B-70,

played a key role in the Saturn space program, and developed

the FAA’s enroute air traffic control system. It also had participated in the development of the Airborne Warning and Control

System (AWACS) planes, and had responsibility for integrating

the command and control systems on the Trident submarine. 5

This experience would surely come in handy when dealing

with WWMCCS, perhaps the most complex information processing system in existence.

By agreement, FSD as WWMCCS architect was to provide

the WWMCCS Council with a comprehensive document, the

WWMCCS Architecture Planning Studies, within two years’

time, by the end of 1975. That document was to contain recommended architectural alternatives and plans for evolving

from the present system to each of these in the 1980, 1985,

and 1995 time frames. The plans were also to include recommended methodologies for reviewing and, if necessary, for changing the long-range architectural plans in light of budgetary,

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doctrinal, or other programmatic changes.6

 From IBM’s multiple alternatives, the council would then select its one preferred

option, after which implementation would begin. “Just as in

building a house,” Clements colloquially quipped, “once we

have got the architecture, we’ll go into the engineering phase.”7

Director of Telecommunications and

Command and Control Systems

The efficacy with which the WWMCCS “house” would be

constructed was soon thrown into serious jeopardy. In previous years, David Packard and other proponents of centralized command and control had fought hard, and apparently

held sway, against an entrenched bureaucratic status quo that

liked the current decentralized system just fine and resisted

any substantive changes. One of their major accomplishments

in this effort had been the elevation of the telecommunications

post to a full assistant secretaryship. The establishment of the

WWMCCS Council and subsequently the council’s expressed

intention to create a system architecture also seemed to portend the increased centralization to come. But these efforts

appeared to suffer a major setback when, in January 1974—

the same month that the WWMCCS Council made public its

plans to select an architect for the system—Defense Secretary

Schlesinger initiated an organizational shake-up with far-reaching

implications for WWMCCS.

Among Schlesinger’s moves, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Telecommunications was redesignated

the Telecommunications Office, and the assistant secretary

position that Packard had considered so important was downgraded to the position of director of telecommunications and

command and control systems (DTACCS). The formal mission

of the new office remained ambitious—to manage DOD telecommunications resources to support both the NMCS and the

individual services in carrying out their specified missions.

But as if to make those already daunting tasks more difficult

still, the new director was reassigned to the Office of Legisla -

tive Affairs, a completely political division. “Admittedly, legisla -

tive affairs are of great concern to the Department of Defense,”

the House Armed Services Committee would later dryly note.

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But the committee found it difficult to imagine any instance in

which legislative affairs should be accorded a higher defense

priority than command and control, “which is the very reason

for the Department’s existence.”8 Although less than two years

had passed since the assistant secretary position had been

created, the importance of the communications function apparently had changed drastically. With Schlesinger’s action, the

bureaucratic muscle that Packard had worked so hard to

in stitutionalize was noticeably relaxed.

Consistent with a venerable bureaucratic tradition, the best

possible public face was put on the situation. Defense journals

pointed out how the new office underscored the Pentagon’s

recognition that the command and control function needed

greater consolidation. According to Thomas C. Reed, a former

engineer with the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory who assumed

the duties of DTACCS on 19 February 1974, his directorate

was the result of a fundamental change in national defense

policy, a reference to the ascendancy of the doctrine of flexible

response.9 As Reed explained later, his office would concern

itself with system efficiency and effectiveness. On the efficiency

front, his office would work to increase system capacity even

as the per-bit cost of transmitting information was reduced.

Effectiveness would be enhanced through improvements in the

survivability, flexibility, security, and interoperability of its con -

stituent parts. Reed acknowledged that while such efficiency

criteria as channel capacity and cost were relatively easy to

measure, effectiveness criteria were not. But whatever the ob -

stacles, he said, his office would pursue its tasks with vigor.1 0

How well the new directorate and its director would be able

to do this was an open question. While Reed told members of a

House subcommittee that he did not feel the downgrading had

any negative impact on the authority of his office, he went on to

note that his authority was not structural but rather deriva -

tive of his personal relationships with higher-ranking officials,

such as the secretary and the deputy secretary of defense.

Reed then agreed that the management of defense communications was too important a function to rest upon the vagaries

of personal relationships, acknowledging that to work effec tively

with the military services, other Pentagon offices, and Congress,

the head of the telecommunications office required the statutory

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authority of an assistant secretary. But stepping deftly through

the rhetorical minefield he had just created, Reed quickly excluded himself from this requirement. Authority should be commensurate with responsibility, he opined, but this was something that could be achieved over the long term.1 1

The problem was that Reed’s weakened directorate had

r esponsibilities requiring substantially more than philosophical promulgation: it needed real authority and needed it im -

mediately. Since the directorate was responsible for supervising the work of IBM and its subcontractors in developing the

WWMCCS architecture, a WWMCCS Architecture Management Office was established within DTACCS to aid the new

director and the WWMCCS architect in their work.1 2 But real

authority was indeed lacking, and the tone of urgency that

had prevailed under Packard’s regime was discernibly muted.

Legislative Affairs was hardly the best bureaucratic location

from which to launch a major set of programmatic initiatives

after all, and the upbeat rhetoric accompanying the establishment of the new office did not accord with the obvious

reality of the situation.

The military departments, ever bureaucratically adept, were

quick to get the message that the star of command and control

was no longer in the ascendancy. Never comfortable with the

centralizing trend in command and control anyway, they followed Schlesinger’s move enthusiastically by downgrading their

own military communications functions and subordinating them

to organizations with little communications experience. The

bu reaucratic axe was wielded handily over the months to come,

cutting a broad swath across DOD’s communications landscape,

including the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization.

Schlesinger’s downgrading of the assistant secretary position and the associated moves by the military departments

had other predictable consequences. For the individual communicator, the fact that these actions eliminated a number of

two-star billets previously filled by communications specialists

seriously affected opportunities for promotion to the flag or

general ranks. Not unreasonably, this move was interpreted

as a clear signal that there was no future in the military for

communications specialists. 1 3 A decline in morale rapidly

en sued, and the best officers began departing from military

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service in droves, seeking the more hospitable career climate

of the civilian sector. Their accumulated technical experience

went with them, of course, and was lost to the DOD. Promoted

in their stead and placed in positions of communications management responsibility were officers who lacked the technical

background and experience necessary in the dynamic tele com -

munications field. In many ways this can be read as an

effort—ultimately a futile one—to turn back the clock to an

earlier, simpler military time. It was a brief revival of the

a rchaic notion of the “well-rounded officer,” an attempt to return to the practices of the past when only such officers had a

reasonably assured chance of reaching flag rank.1 4 With a system now in place that virtually guaranteed a lack of high-tech

expertise at the top, inefficient and ineffective communications

programs and procurements were also virtually guaranteed.1 5

With the creation of the new Office of the Director of Telecommunications and Command and Control Systems, the

decentralized needs of the services and the centralized needs

of the NCA again came into open conflict. To achieve the goals

for WWMCCS as outlined by Reed, the cooperation of the

services was crucial. Yet, with the devaluing of the command

and control function implicit in the creation of DTACCS, coop -

eration was increasingly less likely to be forthcoming, at least

in the short term. The main areas of contention, the related

issues of service autonomy and budgetary control, were pain -

fully familiar. The major concern of the services has always

been the performance of their military missions, which in turn

depended on the weapons systems they possessed. Therefore,

the services had always placed considerable emphasis on

planning, procuring, and protecting their weapons. Command

and control of those weapons was by no means neglected,

however, and each of the services had established independent communications commands and technical systems

they considered adequate for this purpose. The problem had

always been that the human and technological assets the

services deployed were not designed to satisfy requirements

generated at the national level, and any move that would alter

or reduce those systems, by the Telecommunications Office or

anyone else, was regarded as a direct interference with their

ability to perform their military missions. 1 6

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Then there was the issue of defense dollars. Since the services

continued to control WWMCCS’s budgetary purse strings, they

had to identify in their budgets and resources for any initiative

they planned to pursue, which would then be defended through -

out the budgetary process. The way it worked, the process typically began with a list of validated requirements far in excess of

the fixed-budget ceiling. Some of these would be for WWMCCS

upgrades, but a validated requirement by no means assured

that money would be available to meet it. Throughout the year, a

number of boards and panels would evaluate the competing

validated programs, a process that eventually would result in

decisions to fund some programs, defer others, and eliminate

still others. In this survival-of-the-fittest programmatic approach,

WWMCCS programs were granted no particular preference. So

as funding decisions were made, WWMCCS requirements were

forced to compete head to head with non-WWMCCS requirements, including major weapons systems, for the same budgetary dollars.1 7 While clearly an approach with a measure of merit,

it also guaranteed difficulties for major joint-service command

and control expenditures; after all, greater prestige and thus

better prospects for funding tend to adhere to high-value, highvisibility weapons systems that “belong” to a single service. Un -

derstandably enough, WWMCCS did not fare particularly well in

this process.

To make things more difficult still, even in the absence of such

prejudice, decision makers in the services often found it difficult

to see the need for WWMCCS-related programs. “Most people

will understand the requirement for a new bomber more readily

than the requirement for a new modulation scheme for an existing low-frequency communications system,” one Air Force official remarked, and for improvements in WWMCCS to be pursued, their service-specific payoffs had to be made much more

explicit. This was unlikely to occur by chance, and so each of

the services had been compelled to establish WWMCCS program

offices to perform as intraservice advocates for the joint-service

system, making clear their value to the services.1 8 But with the

downgrading of the assistant secretary position and the creation

of the Office of the Director of Telecommunications and Command and Control Systems the payoffs all seemed to run in

the opposite direction. Now that key defense officials from the

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169
secretary on down were de-emphasizing the command and

control function, thus implicitly emphasizing the ability of the

status quo to meet the nation’s military requirements, why

divert resources from the more desirable and visible service

programs? It was a context that naturally lent impetus to the

services’ natural tendency to resist centralization. The prob -

lem was that the decentralized status quo did not work well

when it came to WWMCCS, as would be seen during the

Mayaguez incident in May 1975.

The Mayaguez Incident

The Mayaguez incident occurred when military forces of

Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge government seized the Mayaguez,

an American merchant ship operating off the southern coast

of Cambodia. Diplomatic efforts to secure the release of the

ship rapidly ensued, but they failed just as quickly because

the Cambodians insisted they had the right to seize the ship

because it was inside their territorial waters. Frustrated, the

Ford administration decided to mount a joint Navy, Marine,

and Air Force rescue operation to free the vessel and its crew.

How successfully WWMCCS performed during the incident

depends upon who was asked. On the up side, contemporary

accounts described how, as the crisis developed, command

centers in Southeast Asia were linked together by secure communications capabilities, providing the national leadership

with a timely, almost blow-by-blow assessment of what was

taking place. The result, it was said, was positive and precise,

real-time Pentagon control, even as the incident developed.1 9

And control was something the Cambodians, by their own

admission, did not have. Ieng Sary, Cambodia’s foreign minister, later acknowledged how his government had been unable

to keep up with events, and that American technology had

enabled US forces to operate more effectively than Cambodian

forces. US officials later credited this command and control

advantage for the successful rescue of the ship and her crew.2 0

There was also a down side, for things surely did not work

as well as they might have. Indeed, some critics have described the incident as a major WWMCCS fiasco. They noted

how, early in the crisis, President Ford queried WWMCCS to

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learn how long it would take the nearest aircraft carrier, the

USS Coral Sea, to reach Cambodia. The information Ford

wanted was apparently quickly forthcoming, but WWMCCS

failed to determine whether the carrier could depart immediately or would have to remain on station to recover its aircraft

before steaming to Cambodia. In fact, it was the latter. The

Coral Sea had to wait around to recover its planes, and it

arrived off Cambodia several hours later than the president

and his puzzled military advisors had anticipated.2 1 And during the joint Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force operation to

free the crew, the WWMCCS computers, apparently unable to

keep up with the situation, crashed. Pentagon officials later

disputed this conclusion, claiming that the computers had

been little used and performed “adequately” during the rescue

operation. (A Pentagon spokesman did point out, however,

that in another, unidentified crisis that occurred about the

same time, the WWMCCS computers had been broken for

several hours because regularly scheduled maintenance had

not been performed.)2 2 Despite assurances from the Pentagon,

it is clear that not all went well with the operation to rescue

the May aguez. For as retired Navy Vice Adm Jon Boyes later

remarked, “The Marines were getting their butts shot off, and

the Navy couldn’t talk to the Marines.”23 Such was the ambitiousness and the uncertainty in which the new WWMCCS

architecture would be constructed.

The WWMCCS Architecture

Irving Luckom, IBM federal systems division’s manager for

WWMCCS architecture, recognized that two major uncertain -

ties existed when his company’s effort to define the WWMCCS

architecture began. The first involved the question that had

preoccupied the WWMCCS Council: “What is WWMCCS?” A

variety of definitions were available, some little more than general platitudes. Others were technological, emphasizing the

system’s various assets, its hardware and software. Still oth ers

were organizational in their focus, concerned with procedures

and with rules and lines of authority. “Depending on whose

definition you use,” Luckom observed, “WWMCCS could vary

from a relatively limited system involving the NMCS and the

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CINCs to a system including almost everything but the

forces.”24 For the architect to proceed, decisions obviously had

to be made regarding the precise nature of the system itself;

the location of its boundaries, and the human and technological elements those boundaries encompassed. These decisions

by necessity would often be subjective.

If arriving at a definition for WWMCCS was problematical,

an equally vexing second question facing the new system

a rchitect was “What is an architecture?”2 5 To answer this question, it was not sufficient to know what elements constituted

WWMCCS. It was also necessary to determine their functions.

This process began by asking what the information requirements of system users were to determine the most appropriate

systems for meeting them. 2 6 What equipment did users need?

What sort of connectivity to other system users did they

r equire? In practical terms, what all of this meant was determining whether a specific commander would be better served

by a cathode ray tube display, a facsimile machine, or a telephone sitting on his desk. It meant determining the types of

automatic data-processing support he would need. It meant

ascertaining with whom he might need to communicate, and it

meant determining these things for a variety of situations and

circumstances. And so on, for every commander. 2 7 The answers

to these questions would provide FSD, as architect, with a

basis for answering the central question for any architecture:

What are the goals of the system? What is WWMCCS actually

supposed to do? Once expected outcomes were described, once

goals had been identified and documented, a systems engineering effort could commence. It would be directed toward

acquiring the technologies and the organizational structures

most appropriate for goal attainment. In this way the architecture, a thoroughly normative formulation, would allow the

specification of a concrete set of performance criteria and the

acquisition of real-world assets. Architecture in hand, at long

last it would be possible to determine how effective the World

Wide Military Command and Control System actually was.

Or so it seemed. Lost on almost everyone involved in this

major effort to rationalize WWMCCS was its backwards, essen -

tially irrational basis. By the time IBM’s Federal Systems Division commenced work as system architect, WWMCCS already

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had been in existence for more than a decade. Billions of

dollars had been spent on it, thousands of military and civilian personnel had been involved with it, and numerous programs to improve it were in progress. Plans for still other

programs, including a WWMCCS Intercomputer Network, were

in the works. In classic solution-looking-for-a-problem fashion,

this vast system sprawled across the Department of Defense

landscape. Now it was time for IBM to answer a range of questions the indisputable fact of WWMCCS’s existence raised, time

to define some goals and objectives for it. The notion of organiza -

tional theorist Karl Weick that goals tend to follow rather than

precede actions, and to a large extent represent rationalizations

for actions already taken, has seldom received better press.2 8

IBM’s Scenario-Based Approach

The first step taken by the WWMCCS architect was to examine the nature of national defense policies, or doctrine. As it

concerned the strategic nuclear forces, that doctrine was flexible response; and flexible response was a tough taskmaster,

involving substantial expectations regarding survivability,

ca pability, and connectivity. The demands of doctrine firmly in

mind, the WWMCCS architect next examined the existing and

projected military force structures and weapons capabilities of

the United States and a number of potential enemies. After

assessing military resources, the architect examined the nationallevel decision-making process itself. To get a feel for actual as

well as formally stated lines of authority and communication,

the architect engaged in extensive consultations with officials

throughout the government. Who really makes the judgments

and the decisions? Who really talks to whom? Finally, and

only when all of this had been done, the architecture addressed

the issue of WWMCCS structure and boundaries: What was in

and what was out? What resources were available to be tapped

when needed? What were the interfaces with other systems? 2 9

The parameters of WWMCCS established, the next step was

to determine how all of these resources would play together.

IBM chose a scenario-based architectural approach that involved

identifying a representative set of likely military states, including

peacetime, low-level crises such as evacuations, then military

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buildup, conventional war, theater nuclear war, general nu -

clear war, and conflict termination. For each of these crises,

the architect evaluated exactly what types of information the

National Command Authorities would require to meet the

demands of the situation. The resulting lists were long and

varied. Information requirements might include warning times,

availability of communications channels, location of forces,

a ccuracy of impact predictions, damage sustained and inflicted,

and a wide range of other information.3 0 While admittedly a

highly judgmental process, the scenarios were grounded in

realistic expectations and devised to cover major geographical

areas in which trouble was expected during the upcoming

decade. 3 1

For each scenario, the architect’s approach was to consider

the entire range of military response options available to the

NCA. Not surprisingly, this list was also long and varied. At

that point, and only at that point, a series of WWMCCS

r equirements was identified to support the national leadership

for each situation/response combination. These requirements

were considered in terms of five major WWMCCS elements:

facilities, warning and intelligence, automatic data processing,

executive aids, and communications. For theater nuclear war,

for example, the national leadership might require its command centers to be able to withstand a certain level of blast

overpressure. Intelligence assets should be able to collect

strike results, identify new targets, and monitor the execution

of launch orders. Communications between key command

fa cilities and the operating forces should remain intact

throughout the conflict, and so on. These necessary capabilities were referred to as functional requirements.

When the functional requirements for each system element

had been established, the architect then directed attention

toward specific quantitative requirements—the actual capabilities that had to be acquired or developed for each of the major

states of crisis and conflict.3 2 This was determined by comparing

the functional requirements for WWMCCS’s five elements to socalled WWMCCS baselines. A baseline was sim ply a statement

for what a given WWMCCS element—automatic data processing, say—would look like in 1985, given existing capabilities

and those improvements already funded or in an advanced

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stage of research and development. If these baseline systems

would satisfy the functional requirements, well and good, for

no new capabilities would need to be acquired. If, as in most

cases, the comparisons pointed up shortfalls in capabilities,

then specific architectural solutions aimed at correcting them

would be developed. By intent, these were constrained to be

both technically feasible and to permit assessment of approximate costs. 3 3 Since it was not infrequently the case that several remedies were possible for any single deficiency, IBM

would develop a series of architectural alternatives, representing a range of WWMCCS capabilities and costs.34

Developing the architecture was conceived as an iterative

process, involving close contact and a great deal of give-andtake between the architect and the WWMCCS Council. The

architect would view each scenario state independently and

come up with a set of architectural solutions for each of the

five WWMCCS elements. The WWMCCS Council then would

review each of these with regard to its capabilities, feasibility,

and probable cost. As the review process proceeded, objectives, priorities, and cost estimates were progressively clarified, and the council would suggest modifications. The architect would then go back to work, ultimately proposing new

alternatives that would, in their turn, be reviewed. Because

the various states were considered separately and their architectural solutions presented sequentially, inconsistencies

between them were not infrequent, driving the architect to

come up with solutions that were consistent with the requirements of both.3 5

Developing the architecture was a highly judgmental process.

It was necessary to determine such general issues such as

priorities and likely threats. It was necessary for the architect

to specify values for many of the variables used in the calcula -

tions, including survivability, capability levels, and accuracies.

It was necessary to estimate future needs and costs. It was not a

process that could guarantee that actual future situations

would be perfectly addressed by WWMCCS, but rather one

that upped the probability that WWMCCS would be responsive. 36 WWMCCS effectiveness, like most human endeavor, had

been moved out of the realm of mathematical certainty and

into that of statistical probability. And yet however subjective

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this process to be, it is worth underscoring the point that its

specification was accomplished by the WWMCCS Council, an

organization whose primary concern was the needs of central

decision makers, not organizational subunits. Throughout,

the WWMCCS architect simply presented the alternatives

without recommending which solutions should be implemented.

Because of this developmental approach, the material and social technologies that flowed from the architectural effort

would, at least in theory, reflect those needs more adequately

than in the past, when subunit needs had dominated the

definitional process.

In August 1975, after many iterations between the architect, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the OSD, the commanders in

chief, and the military services, FSD presented the WWMCCS

Council with a preliminary document, the WWMCCS Architectural Planning Studies.

3 7 Further modifications ensued, and

FSD’s architectural alternatives for the first state, theater warfare, were presented to the council that November. The alternatives for the other states followed shortly, and the highly

classified final WWMCCS architectural plan was submitted to

the WWMCCS Council for formal review in June 1976.

The document began by describing in considerable detail

WWMCCS’s current shortcomings in crisis management, the

majority of which were identical to concerns voiced by the

WWMCCS Council at its formation. It then outlined a series of

specific improvements, to begin in fiscal year 1977, that were

considered essential for making the system more responsive to

the needs of the national leadership.3 8 Not surprisingly, many

WWMCCS shortcomings appeared in automatic data processing, which did not meet the full range of needs of its individual

users and was only marginally effective during times of crisis.3 9 Other needs involved the conversion of the Defense Com -

munications System to an all-digital system and the develop -

ment of new networks that could make full use of digital

capability such as Phase III of the Defense Satellite Communications System. There was the need to pursue programs such

as the Navy’s extremely low frequency system for communicating with the ballistic missile submarine force and a follow-on

to the Navy’s problem-plagued Fleet Satellite Communications

System that would be capable of using both the ultra high

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frequency and super high frequency portions of the frequency

spectrum. Air Force programs described as essential by the

WWMCCS architectural plan included the Emergency Rocket

Communications System, the Post Attack Command and Control System, SAC’s Automated Total Information System, and

AFSATCOM, the Air Force Satellite Communications program.4 0

Preeminent was the Advanced Airborne National Command

Post, a WWMCCS Council priority program. (Given the large

number of its programs that were affected by the architectural

effort, the Air Force established a WWMCCS program office at

the Electronics Systems Division’s headquarters near Boston.

This office worked closely with IBM’s Federal Systems Division

throughout the development process.) 4 1

Architectures must be realistic and take into consideration

not only the desirability of certain programs but also their

technical and fiscal feasibility. Some programs viewed as both

feasible and desirable were designated as WWMCCS priorities

for the 1977–85 time frame. Other programs were perhaps

equally desirable, but because of their cost or the existing

technological state of the art they were deferred until some

later time or relegated to the status of research and develop -

ment programs. One such scheme, desirable but far too costly,

was the development of superhardened command posts that

could survive direct hits by nuclear weapons. Another area of

considerable interest was the development of executive or decision-aid technologies. The Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency (DARPA) was heavily involved in this area, specifically

in those advanced computer techniques known as artificial

intelligence and expert systems.4 2 But because the application

of these technologies to the command and control area was

beyond the current state of the art, the WWMCCS Council con -

sidered them of lesser urgency and deferred their pursuit.

In a world of finite resources, a realistic architecture would

also have to allow for a reasonable period of transition from

the current state to the new one. The natural desire of some

interested critics, including Congress, was for a “turnkey” system, where improvements could be implemented all at once,

and the new system would begin to function, completely, on a

given day. The problem with this approach is its cost. Given

the vastness of the WWMCCS undertaking and the reality of

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budgetary constraints (since the Vietnam spending peak in

1968, the overall defense budget had declined, in real terms,

by almost 40 percent), the architectural plan prudently called

for the improvements to be introduced sequentially, such that

the most serious deficiencies were remedied first. The transition to the mystical WWMCCS city of the future, to an integrated and interoperable national-level system, would thus

occur as a process of evolution, not revolution. This approach

would guide the present efforts of those throughout DOD with

WWMCCS responsibilities and would continue to guide them

until the architectural plan was modified.

The architect recognized from the outset that modifications

of the plan were likely, indeed inevitable, for any of a number

of reasons, including advances in technology, changes in the

nature of the threat, doctrinal changes, or an altered budgetary

context. Therefore, the WWMCCS architecture was intended

from the outset to be a flexible instrument. What this meant

in practical terms, in the words of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, was that a “modest continuing design effort”

to promote the development of WWMCCS over the long haul

was built into the plan as an integral element.4 3 In other

words, FSD’s job was by no means finished with the delivery

of its architectural plan. As a natural follow-on, the company

would assist the WWMCCS Systems Engineering Organiza -

tion in defining specifications to implement that architecture. It

would aid the Office of the Director of Telecommunications

and Command and Control Systems in monitoring the architecture’s overall implementation. It would monitor environmental shifts and changes to determine their likely impact on

the plan so that appropriate revisions could be recommended to

the council.4 4

All in all, IBM’s effort was a vast one, its WWMCCS architecture plan representing the most complex and comprehensive

systems engineering effort the Federal Systems Division had

ever undertaken. Yet, everything was still on paper only.

Whether this architectural framework would actually produce a

worldwide military command and control system that responded

to the needs of the national leadership remained to be seen.

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The WWMCCS System Engineer

Once the WWMCCS Council had made its selections from

the architectural menu offered by IBM, the approved architecture

was to be implemented immediately. This obviously required

that a formal mechanism of some sort be in place to take the

architecture and translate it into appropriate system designs.

The council had recognized the need for such a mechanism

quite early in the architectural process and decided that the

best approach was to establish a general system engineering

entity for this purpose. Initially, consideration was given to

placing the engineering entity in a civilian corporation such as

IBM, hardly unreasonable given the Federal Systems Division’s

role as WWMCCS architect. But it was soon decided that the

nature of the task required the system engineering activity to

be located within the DOD. 45 Simply put, this was nuts and

bolts stuff, and the council judged that only those wearing

uniforms would be able to make the bolts turn properly. Consideration was then given to locating the activity within one of

the service organizations specializing in command and control, such as the Air Force’s Electronic Systems Division. This

idea was also rejected because of the not unreasonable fear

that it would lead to the ascendancy of service interests over

the needs of a truly joint-service, national-level WWMCCS.

To keep the engineering function within the DOD while at the

same time minimizing the possibility of WWMCCS being held

hostage to service parochialism, the council ultimately decided

that the best home for the new organization was the Defense

Communications Agency. DCA was tasked to draft a charter and

organizational chart for what was called a WWMCCS System

Engineering Organization, and the agency promptly began to

work. A 15-member WWMCCS system engineering task force

was activated in August 1975 to plan the work of the new engineering entity and to do whatever organizational work might be

necessary for its activation.46 Proposals for a charter and organizational chart for the new office were drawn up, along with

appropriate modifications by the WWMCCS Council. All in all,

the process reflected perfectly the council’s view of how the

system engineering effort should be conducted: while much of

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the work would be done by DCA, final authority would always

reside with the WWMCCS Council. 4 7

On 21 November 1975 the Pentagon formalized the entire

arrangement by issuing DOD Directive 5100.79, which initiated a series of important changes for WWMCCS. First, it

formally established the WWMCCS System Engineering Organization and located it within the Defense Communications

Agency. The original 15-member DCA task force was made

permanent, and additional personnel were authorized. To ensure that WWMCCS would be accorded an appropriate measure of importance within DCA, the agency’s director was formally designated to wear the dual hat of director of WWMCCS

system engineering. 4 8 Finally, to provide for appropriate technical expertise at the top levels of the new organization, the

WWMCCS system engineer, a new position, was created. The

directive specified that the holder of this position, who ranked

directly below the director and to whom he would report,

would be a highly qualified civilian government employee, not

a military officer, though he would be assisted by a general or

flag-rank deputy. Through this arrangement, the WWMCCS

Council hoped that service parochialism would be minimized,

appropriate technical expertise brought to bear on WWMCCSrelated problems, and a continuing emphasis placed on issues

affecting national-level command and control.

Despite his formal position as number two in the hierarchy,

the system engineer would function as the new organization’s

chief operating officer, the person who would actually run the

show. The responsibility of this “technical traffic cop” was considerable—to take the architecture approved by the WWMCCS

Council and translate it into specific plans, designs, technical

procedures, and standards. Once that was done, the system

engineer would be responsible for acquiring the capabilities

and assets necessary to realize the objectives and meet the

demands of the architecture. 4 9 It was also the system engineer’s task to ensure that the evolving WWMCCS was compatible with other command and control systems then in operation throughout the DOD. To this end, DOD Directive 5100.79

authorized the system engineer to specify where the boundaries lay between WWMCCS and related tactical command and

control systems (no small task in a system that expands or

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contracts depending upon the level of crisis) and to pursue a

technical issue to as low a level as necessary. 5 0 This meant

that he would have the authority to define performance criteria and specify standards and interface criteria so that service- and agency-unique command and control capabilities

were consistent with the WWMCCS architecture, an obvious

necessity if they were to be interoperable with, and utilized by,

the national-level system. To keep his finger on the tactical as

well as the strategic pulse, the system engineer would continuously monitor all WWMMCS-related programs of the services and defense agencies to make certain they were consistent with the WWMCCS architecture. 5 1

In addition, there was the issue of the future. As things were

outlined in the architectural plan, once the engineering and

implementation stages of the process had been accomplished,

the activities of the system engineer would by no means cease;

a recognition that changes in policy, threats, and technology

were an inevitable and ongoing process. The WWMCCS Council would determine the necessary architectural changes in

response but once these decisions were made, it would be

necessary to translate them into appropriate system designs,

and that is where the system engineer came in. In sum, DOD

Directive 5100.79 represented a major effort at centralization,

with DCA at the forefront of the action.5 2

The WWMCCS system engineer and organization began

work at the Defense Communications Agency in early 1976.

Their work began immediately, amidst considerable optimism,

and a number of WWMCCS-related programs were quickly

moved into the spotlight. Debate, however, soon arose over

how well the new WWMCCS engineering organization was

meeting, or could be expected to meet, its objectives in critical

areas, one of the most important of which was ADP. Here, the

fault was laid directly at the doorstep of DOD Directive

5100.79. Since the director of DCA was also the director of

WWMCCS engineering, divided and often conflicting responsibilities accrued to two separate organizational masters. With

respect to organizational and technical matters, the director

reported to the director of Telecommunications and Command

and Control Systems. But in matters pertaining to doctrine,

operational policies and procedures, development and validaTHE WWMCCS ARCHITECT

181
tion of requirements, and warning and intelligence, the director reported directly to the chairman of the JCS. This division

of management responsibilities held the potential to seriously

impede the coordination of ADP development efforts.5 3 Even

worse, the dual-hatted director of WWMCCS engineering/DCA

had no funding, budgeting, or management authority for the

WWMCCS ADP program. Funding authority remained overwhelmingly where it had always been—with the military services.

This arrangement represented a bureaucratic impediment to

change of almost insurmountable proportions. The services

continued to develop hardware and software systems individu -

ally under their own budget, and, not surprisingly, they

tended to emphasize their own needs and requirements.

Therefore, despite the considerable movement toward a coherent, centralized management structure for command and control, the reality was yet to be achieved.

Notes

1. William P. Clements Jr., “Command and Control of Our Forces,” Air

Force Policy Letter for Commanders, sup. no. 6 (June 1975): 15.

2. “Pentagon Procurement Trends: For What and Why,” Government

Executive 7 (March 1975): 42.

3. General Accounting Office (GAO), Computer Systems: Navy Needs to

Assess Less Costly Ways to Implement Its Stock Point System—A Report to

the Chairman, Subcommittee on Defense, Committee on Appropriations

(Washington, D.C.: GAO, December 1988), 7n.

4. “Pentagon Procurement Trends,” 42.

5. John B. Jackson, “IBM’s Federal Systems Division—A Technical

Overview,” Signal 30 (October 1975): 55.

6. Thomas C. Reed, “Evolving Strategy—Impact on C3,” Signal 29 (March

1975): 12.

7. “Pentagon Procurement Trends,” 42.

8. House, Committee on Armed Services, Review of Department of

Defense Command, Control and Communications Systems and Facilities,

9 4t h Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office [GPO],

18 February 1977), 29–30.

9. Edgar Ulsamer, “C3: Key to Flexible Deterrence,” Air Force Magazine

57 (July 1974): 45.

10. Thomas C. Reed, “Command & Control & Communications RDT&E,”

Signal 30 (October 1975): 6.

11. House, Committee on Armed Services, Review of Department of

Defense Worldwide Communications, Phase III: Report of the Special

Subcommittee on Defense Communications of the Committee on Armed

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

182
Services , 93d Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1977), 5. (Hereafter,

Phase III Report.)

12. Reed, “Evolving Strategy—Impact on C3,” 10.

13. Phase III Report, 30.

14. “To Moorer, the ‘Dom Rep Action’ Proved CINCLANT has Command

and Control,” Armed Forces Management 11 (July 1965): 70.

15. Phase III Report, 31.

16. Congress, Hearings before the House Committee on Armed Services,

Review of Department of Defense Worldwide Communications, Phase II

(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1972), 5.

17. Van C. Doubleday, “WWMCCS in Transition: An Air Force View,”

Signal 30 (August 1976): 70–71.

18. Ibid.

19. Lawrence E. Adams, “The Evolving Role of C3 in Crisis

Management,” Signal 30 (August 1976): 60.

20. Thomas C. Reed, “A Better Horse for Paul Revere: National

Command and Control Communications,” Strategic Review 4 (Summer

1976): 25–32.

21. Frank Greve, “Pentagon Calls Super-Computer A ‘Disaster,’”

Parameters 10, no. 1 (March 1980): 96.

22. Michael Putzel, “Pentagon Warning System Defective, Experts

Claim,” Washington Post, 10 March 1980, A10.

23. Richard C. Gross, “C 3: Fewer Mixed Signals,” Military Logistics

Forum 3 (June 1987): 20.

24. Irving Luckom, “Overview of WWMCCS Architecture,” Signal 2 4

(August 1976): 62.

25. Ibid.

26. Lee M. Paschall, “WWMCCS: Nerve Center of U.S. C3,” Air Force

Magazine 58 (July 1975): 56.

27. Ulsamer, 50.

28. Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing (Reading, Mass.:

Addison-Wesley, 1969), 63–71.

29. Irving Luckom, “Worldwide Military Command and Control System:

An Approach to Architecture Development,” Technical Directions (Autumn

1976): 11.

30. William P. Clements Jr., “DOD Command and Control Activities,”

Signal 29 (May/June 1975): 19–20.

31. Luckom, “Worldwide Military Command,” 11.

32. Ibid., 11–12.

33. Ibid., 12–13.

34. Luckom, “Overview of WWMCCS Architecture,” 63.

35. Ibid.

36. Luckom, “Worldwide Military Command,” 13.

37. Doubleday, 70.

38. Luckom, “Worldwide Military Command,” 10.

THE WWMCCS ARCHITECT

183
39. GAO, The World Wide Military Command and Control System—Major

Changes Needed in its Automated Data Processing Management and

Direction: Report to Congress, LCD-80-22 (Washington, D.C.: GAO, 1979),

62–63.

40. Doubleday, 71.

41. Edgar Ulsamer, “Machine Intelligence Shapes Global C3 Nets,” Air

Force Magazine 60 (July 1977): 68–71.

42. Ibid., 66.

43. Donald H. Rumsfeld, “A Command, Control and Communications

Overview,” Signal 30 (May/June 1976): 38.

44. Luckom, “Worldwide Military Command,” 13.

45. Lee M. Paschall, “WWMCCS in Transition: A WWMCCS System

Engineer View,” Signal 30 (August 1976): 64.

46. Ibid.

47. Clements, “Command and Control of Our Forces,” 15–16.

48. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “DCA’s Route to Readiness,” Air Force

Magazine 62 (July 1979): 87.

49. Lawrence E. Adams, “The Evolving Role of C3 in Crisis Management,”

Signal 30 (August 1976): 59.

50. Paschall, “WWMCCS in Transition,” 64, 66.

51. Reed, “Evolving Strategy,” 12.

52. Paschall, “WWMCCS in Transition,” 65.

53. GAO, The World Wide Military Command and Control System, 9–10. 

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

184
Chapter 10

WWMCCS Intercomputer Network

Throughout this time, results from a series of tests and

evaluations were creating doubts in the minds of defense officials regarding the reliability of the prototype WWMCCS Intercomputer Network. In the network’s first system integration

test, conducted in early 1975, communication failures had

been about 50 percent. The results of a study conducted for

DCA by the University of Illinois’s Center for Advanced Computation in May 1975 had concluded that PWIN’s ability to

operate in an on-line, real-time environment was seriously

limited. The WWMCCS ADP community had a strong “batch

orientation,” the researchers noted, whereas an intercomputer

network was an inherently interactive technology. 1 Two

months later, the General Accounting Office raised similar

concerns about PWIN’s response times, its ability to provide

fully interactive operations, and its ability to provide multilevel

computer security features. By September 1975 the concerns

had been such that Thomas C. Reed, director of telecommunications and command and control systems, was forced to delay

final approval of DCA’s PWIN development plan.

Serious PWIN reliability problems continued to be reported

as the new year began. A RAND Corporation report issued in

March 1976, “WWMCCS ADP Communications Interface Requirements,” highlighted the reliability problem and pointed

out how the WWMCCS standard computers were severely lim -

ited in their data-processing capacity. A key problem was that

the General Comprehensive Operating System software installed

in the Honeywell 6000s was designed for batch processing of

data and was unable to handle the increased communications

loads accompanying interactive network operations. As a consequence, RAND concluded, the network’s interrupt rate

would be higher than otherwise would be the case. Additionally, the WWMCCS architectural plan submitted to the

WWMCCS Council for formal review in June 1976 detailed a

series of system shortcomings relevant to network operations.

Included among these were the fact that several of the

185
WWMCCS software applications were so large that only one

could be loaded into memory at a time, that information was

too voluminous and difficult to extract under time-sensitive

conditions, and that users were not guaranteed availability

when they required it. Numerous indications were also being

received throughout this period that multilevel computer security, a key requirement for intercomputer networking, was

beyond the current software state of the art. Things were

looking bleak indeed as the summer of 1976 approached, the

time scheduled for the PWIN operational experiments. 2

The PWIN Operational Experiments

As part of the buildup for the experiments, a system demonstration (a sort of dry run) was scheduled for 24 June 1976.

PWIN personnel held practice sessions for several weeks before that date, but as the director of PWIN operational testing

pointed out, throughout that time not a single full run of the

planned demonstration could be completed because of system

hardware and software problems. Believing that a network that

functioned so poorly would seriously compromise the experiments, the director demanded that the joint chiefs’ Command

and Control Technical Center demonstrate the network’s reliability on 12 and 13 July, a week before the PWIN operational

experiments were scheduled to begin. If an acceptable level of

reliability could not be shown, he said, the experiments would

have to be delayed. As anticipated, PWIN lived up—or, perhaps better said, down—to its expectations, experiencing

several hardware and software failures and a serious instability in the communications links between network nodes.

Originally scheduled for 19–30 July, the PWIN operational experiments were postponed for several months.3

During that time, the scramble began among PWIN participants to find what was wrong with the fledgling network and

to fix it. Emergency “patches” were applied to WWMCCS’s

General Comprehensive Operating System software as engineers desperately tried to find a way to work around the limitations of the Honeywell 6000 computers so that the network’s

nodes could be effectively internetted. But the problem was so

vast, meaning that the patches proliferated to such an extent

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

186
that DCA officials were soon expressing almost as much concern with the fixes as with the problems they were intended to

fix. To make things more complex still, during this time a

number of additional WWMCCS facilities were added to the

network: Army Forces Command at Fort McPherson, Georgia;

Tactical Air Command at Langley AFB, Virginia; and the Pentagon headquarters of the military services.4

The rescheduled PWIN operational experiments took place

in September and October of 1976. In each of those months, a

major set of tests was conducted involving a different application of PWIN. In the September tests, known as Experiment 1,

PWIN was employed in a crisis scenario that already had been

used and carefully evaluated in a previous JCS exercise. This

experiment, it was believed, would provide a highly controlled

assessment of the networking concept. In the October tests,

called Experiment 2, PWIN was used during a military exercise called Elegant Eagle 76.5 The point in this far less controlled use of the network was to see how well it supported users’

demands, as operational plans had to be modified to meet the

requirements of an unfolding crisis.

How well PWIN performed during the operational experiments depended once again upon whom you asked. First, the

good news: According to some officials, use of the network

substantially increased the level of interaction among the network nodes. Because it allowed planning information to be

shared simultaneously, networking allowed for greater coordination among participating units. Computer internetting was

also said to have accelerated the transfer of databases between sites and to have increased the accuracy of the transfers. Therefore, PWIN was said to have provided its users with

an enhanced ability to identify and resolve problems.6 The bad

news was that not everyone had these positive experiences; or,

if they did, it was apparently only when the network happened

to be working. For as subsequent evaluations showed, PWIN

reliability during the operational experiments had been poor;

indeed, several commands had considered it a “critical prob -

lem.” As to the network’s ability to transfer databases successfully among the computers at the various nodal sites, some

accounts maintain that this had simply not happened. 7 Top

Pentagon officials were briefed on the progress of the prototype

WWMCCS INTERCOMPUTER NETWORK

187
WWMCCS Intercomputer Network during the first two months

of 1977. By all accounts it was a candid series of briefings,

pointing up the problems that had been encountered before

and during the PWIN operational experiments. Despite these

problems, the desire and hopes for the network were such

that the strong recommendation was to proceed apace with an

operational network.

Prime Target 77

During the period of 1–16 March 1977, the Joint Chiefs of

Staff conducted a military exercise called Prime Target 77.

This exercise provided PWIN’s next opportunity to prove its

networking mettle in an uncontrolled operational environment. Six PWIN sites participated in the exercise, including

the Atlantic Command, Readiness Command, Tactical Air

Command, and National Military Command Center at the Pentagon. Also participating were two recent additions to the expanding prototype network: the headquarters of US European

Command in Vaihingen, West Germany; and DCA’s Command

and Control Technical Center in Reston, Virginia.

The participating sites used PWIN primarily for teleconferencing and transferring data during Prime Target, and in both

cases the network’s reliability proved considerably less than

had been hoped. For example, the European Command attempted to use the network 124 times, but experienced 54

“abnormal terminations” due to hardware or software failures—a failure rate of some 44 percent. Matters went similarly

for the Atlantic Command, which logged on to PWIN 295 times

and experienced 132 failures, a failure rate of 45 percent. The

Tactical Air Command, for its part, tried to use the network 63

times and failed 44, a rate of 70 percent. The worst record by

far, however, was that of the Readiness Command, whose 247

failures in 290 attempts to use PWIN represented an 85 percent failure rate. Collectively for these four sites, the only ones

for which statistics were kept, 772 efforts to use PWIN had

resulted in 477 hardware- or software-related communications

failures. In other words, PWIN worked only about 38 percent

of the time. To make matters even worse, the duration of the

outages tended to be longer and more widespread than those

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

188
experienced the previous fall during the exercise Elegant

Eagle. Now, it seemed, if one PWIN site went down, the entire

network went down with it. 8

Both the operational experiments and exercises served to

underscore the earlier unfavorable comments of in-house

critic John Bradley, then still working at the DCA. Disturbed

that all the indicators pointed to the conclusion that PWIN

simply did not work and unable to get DCA officials to act,

Bradley decided to go over his bosses’ heads directly to the

White House. 9 He arranged a meeting with a National Security

Council official, Col Robert A. Rosenberg, and laid out what he

considered WWMCCS’s many flaws and shortcomings. Rosenberg expressed concern. He asked Bradley to put it all in

writing, which Bradley did in a two-page letter, dated 29 April

1977. 1 0

As might be anticipated, DCA officials were far from pleased

to learn about this. For a number of reasons beyond the

appearance of reports critical of PWIN, sensibilities were particularly raw at this juncture. After all, a new administration

with a suspected antimilitary bias had just arrived in Washington. An evaluative group called the President’s Reorganiza -

tion Project was just gearing up, and nobody expected praise

of WWMCCS to be one of its principal findings. The results of

the PWIN operational experiments and PWIN’s poor performance during the recently concluded Prime Target 77 exercise,

while known, had yet to be made public, and DCA had hoped

to limit the scope of their impact. Things were tough enough

without DCA insiders going around bad-mouthing PWIN to

officials in other departments and agencies. Bradley was fired

two months later. The reasons given were “inefficiency, resistance to competent authority, and making false and misleading statements” about the Prototype WWMCCS Intercomputer

Network. 1 1

Despite the efforts of critics such as Bradley, the thoroughly

counterintuitive consequence of Prime Target 77 was an im -

mediate demand to keep PWIN alive and move it toward operational status. 1 2 How can one explain this remarkable result?

On the one hand, a simple lack of information concerning

PWIN’s problems might be responsible. While major network

problems had indeed been experienced during Prime Target

WWMCCS INTERCOMPUTER NETWORK

189
77, the full scope of difficulties would go unreported for several months. In addition, the final consolidated report on the

earlier PWIN operational experiments had not been released.

In this view, the network’s champions were preempting, hop -

ing to muster support for PWIN before the bad news struck.

An alternative explanation for this support in the face of

adversity that should also be considered concerns the management philosophy of PWIN’s advocates. Many of these advo -

cates, the JCS apparently among them, embraced an evolu -

tionary approach to system development that was just then

becoming the rage in the Pentagon. This logic sought to discount problems with PWIN, even serious ones. The network

was experimental, after all—a prototype. No one denied that

there were problems with developing distributed database

technologies, with automating security, and with making network operations easier. Problems are to be expected with new

technologies. They can be fixed incrementally, as matters

evolve. For PWIN supporters, then, whether they were true

evolutionary believers or, as with many in DCA, bureaucratic

opportunists whose career stars had been attached to the

network, embracing the evolutionary approach made a great

deal of sense. No need to worry about the problems; they can

be solved, will be solved, or can only be solved by letting the

system evolve.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved PWIN’s operational requirements on 18 July 1977. Following the DCA’s develop -

ment plan, PWIN would be expanded to include a number of

other WWMCCS sites, becoming an operational WWMCCS In -

tercom puter Network, or WIN, in the process. And so despite a

number of documented procedural problems, and with no

changes having been made in its hardware or software, the

problem-plagued prototype network had been given approval to

move forward to full operational status.1 3

A lengthy shadow of doubt was promptly cast over the wisdom of the joint chiefs’ decision when the report on PWIN’s

reliability during Prime Target 77 became available. Thirtyeight percent reliability was hardly salutary, of course, and to

head off criticism as well as to advance their cause of moving

the network toward operational status, the joint chiefs directed

the Defense Communications Agency to conduct a series of

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

190
studies. Among other things, DCA was tasked to determine the

precise nature of the hardware, software, or procedural prob -

lems that had produced such poor reliability. The agency was

also to identify alternative ways for users to gain access to the

network in case of continuing hardware- or software-induced

abnormal terminations. In addition, DCA was to identify which

network elements required monitoring and then to determine

which monitoring methodologies were most appropriate to use.1 4

The problems that the DCA studies identified fell into several

general categories. First, there were problems with the network

design itself. For reasons of cost containment, each PWIN site

had been designed so that alternative access to the network was

not possible if the site’s computers failed. In other words, if a

WWMCCS host computer or IMP went down, the site was isolated from the network. DCA next identified a number of specific

problems with hardware, especially the IMPs, which proved to

be especially troublesome and prone to failure. Detecting the

cause of the failures was often exceedingly difficult, DCA noted,

meaning that once the IMPs went down, they were difficult to get

back on line. Making matters even worse, IMPs were quite fragile, going down during electrical storms and when voltage fluctuations occurred. An absence of adequately trained operators

exacerbated this problem by requiring that outside personnel be

brought in when problems arose. Another problem was a lack of

spare parts at PWIN sites; but even when parts were available,

they were often defective. These problems led to excessive computer downtime.

Then there was the software, a network area identified as

especially pernicious. DCA engineers found that PWIN’s host

software contained errors that frequently resulted in aborts

and loss of data when personnel tried to use the network’s

teleconferencing features. Functional software in the Honeywell interface message processors was also found to contain

errors, making it difficult for IMPs to perform their promised

interface function. In addition, the emergency patches that

had been applied to correct these and other software problems

were themselves filled with errors, resulting in repeated, and

often inexplicable, network failures.1 5 If these problems with

network structure, hardware, and software could just be fixed,

DCA engineers noted, the network’s reliability problems would

WWMCCS INTERCOMPUTER NETWORK

191
be reduced substantially. But this was no small task, and

would do nothing to address a final problem, a conspicuous

lack of computer security within PWIN.

Multilevel Computer Security

Networking was essential if WWMCCS was to perform its

mission adequately. DOD Directive 5100.30 had specified that

the system would provide a range of necessary information to

the National Command Authorities so that timely and appropriate decisions could be made. Consequently, there was a

need to collect a vast quantity of data, process it, and disseminate the resulting information to commanders at all levels. An

intercomputer network was the obvious way to accomplish

this objective, but a major concern was one of access. Many of

the WWMCCS databases contained highly sensitive information. The WWMCCS ADP community was large, diverse, and

distributed. Since by definition networks exist to facilitate the

movement of data among sites, the question was how to provide personnel with access to the information they required

while denying them access to information for which they were

not cleared.1 6 Answering that question was clearly necessary if

networking was to become a reality, and networking, in turn,

had already been judged essential for the successful performance of the WWMCCS mission.

Protecting classified information in a multi-access computer

environment was a concern of long standing. As early as June

1967, the ARPA had assembled a task force to study what

hardware and software improvements would be necessary to

achieve such a capability. 1 7 When the WWMCCS Council was

created in late 1971, computer security promptly became a

key council concern. The council’s efforts were channeled

thereafter into two streams of action. The first involved coming

up with interim solutions to the security problem that would

serve until a permanent solution could be found. For the

longer term, the council’s weight was thrown behind a concept

known as multilevel computer security (MLS), an arrangement

by which numerous users could access a computer simulta -

neously and run programs at several classification levels.

Throughout, the computer would provide them with access to

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192
those types of information for which they had the appropriate

security clearances while denying access to other information.

The benefits of such an approach—indeed, its necessity for

network operations—were obvious.

But it soon became apparent to the WWMCCS Council that

the WWMCCS Honeywell 6000-series computers simply could

not support a multilevel security requirement. Two reports

issued in June and October 1974 by the System Development

Corporation (SDC) helped to raise everyone’s consciousness in

this regard. Everyone was thinking “network” at this time, and

the Joint Technical Support Activity, DCA’s in-house software

specialists, had contracted with SDC to evaluate WWMCCS

ADP security as part of that effort. SDC’s dour conclusion was

that major security deficiencies at all WWMCCS sites seriously

affected future considerations for system internetting, including resource sharing and remote interactive processing—

precisely the capabilities deemed essential for the prototype

WWMCCS Intercomputer Network. 1 8

Based in large measure on SDC’s findings, the General

Accounting Office forwarded two letters, dated 21 July 1975

and 20 April 1976, to the secretary of defense expressing its

concern regarding security deficiencies in the prototype

WWMCCS Intercomputer Network. Judging existing hardware

and software inadequate for meeting security requirements,

the GAO recommended that major changes be implemented

before final approval was granted for an operational WWMCCS

Intercomputer Network. A specific suggestion in the hardware

area involved upgrading the WWMCCS Honeywell computers.

As to software, GAO suggested that an operating system software application then being developed by the Air Force’s Electronic Systems Division, called the Multiplexed Information

and Computing Service, be considered for use in the network.

Reed agreed in principle with the GAO recommendations,

promising to examine alternative means of achieving multilevel computer security before the prototype network was declared operational.1 9

The quest for a secure, truly workable multilevel computer

security capability for PWIN would be continually frustrated

and ultimately prove chimerical since the features being

sought for the network were simply not available for WWMCCS

WWMCCS INTERCOMPUTER NETWORK

193
or anyone else because they were beyond the existing state of

the art in computer software technology. 2 0 With no breakthrough in sight, many DOD programs requiring this capability would flounder on these same shoals, among them DCA’s

AUTODIN II. The goal of multilevel security was by no means

wholly abandoned, however, and a number of new programs

were soon initiated by MITRE Corporation, DARPA, UCLA, SRI

International, and others. But they found no workable solu -

tion to the multilevel computer security problem.2 1

Many defense officials were confident a solution would be

found in the future. Their concern was, however, what to do

about security in the interim. They were aware that if the

computers themselves could not restrict access to sensitive

information, environmental and procedural security controls

would have to serve. After all, a combination of physical and

environmental security protected the WWMCCS computers,

which were located in restricted areas in shielded rooms to

block transmission of signals through the walls. Uniformed

guards hovered nearby to prevent unauthorized use. 2 2 Such

controls could obviously be continued. Additionally, at least

three procedural techniques were used at WWMCCS sites to

protect sensitive information that could be continued or extended. Dedicated computers could be used for data at each

security level. This practice was used at the Alternate National

Military Command Center, which used two wholly separate

computer systems for its data processing. 2 3 This was obviously

an expensive practice and precluded the efficient sharing of

databases; and it was cumbersome, since it required manual

updating of files. At other locations, a technique known as

periods processing was used. As the name suggests, this practice involved processing data at different security levels at

different times. The major problems with this approach was

the need to sanitize the entire area each time the security level

was changed and the fact that it was fundamentally inconsistent with the simultaneous utilization of computing resources

that is the essence of time-sharing. Another technique was

system high operations, the technique of (necessary) choice

for AUTODIN II, where everyone and everything involving the

computer was simply cleared to the highest security level used

on the system. Taken together, these controls were indeed

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194
adequate to prevent unauthorized users from obtaining classified information from the WWMCCS computers, but they also

effectively precluded the sort of computer internetting that

was considered essential.

In PWIN the problem of multilevel security was similarly

addressed by using the system high approach. During the

PWIN operational experiments, for example, machines, terminals, and personnel were cleared to the highest security level

being used, Top Secret, to allow for data processing and for

teleconferences to be set up. Of course, this meant that even

personnel performing routine functions had to be cleared to

that security level. 24 Although this approach was inefficient

and costly, it did not prove to be a major problem when things

were limited to a relatively small prototype network.

But the lack of adequate provision for the security of sensitive information certainly would create substantially greater

concerns in the context of a fully developed WWMCCS Intercomputer Network. One major problem was that WIN would be

extended to Europe, and this would necessarily include headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe

(SACEUR). The problems arose because SACEUR’s headquarters was not an exclusively American-run show. All other

NATO countries had personnel there, and they used WWMCCS

to access command and control information relevant to the

European theater. This had not proved an especially serious

security problem when dealing with an individual WWMCCS

site, for sensitive databases could simply be withheld from

foreign personnel by using periods processing, that is, sched -

uling separate computer operating sessions for each of the

various security levels. But things became dramatically different when access to sensitive information had to be limited on

a network whose whole purpose was to permit ready exchange

of data between sites. The dominant concern focused on how

to protect sensitive information while permitting our NATO

allies to use WWMCCS. That was where multilevel computer

security was supposed to step in, but since it remained beyond

the state of the art at the time WIN was declared operational,

users had to find alternative techniques to protect sensitive

information. 2 5 The solution was to develop various types of

security filters, but these were costly and cumbersome stop gap

WWMCCS INTERCOMPUTER NETWORK

195
measures designed to serve only until true multilevel computer security could be brought on line.

Many Pentagon officials considered none of these shortcomings particularly serious. Problems always occur with any new

technology, and they can be fixed as they occur. So problems

and all, the prototype network was transitioned to operational

status. But as we shall see, two events at the end of the 1970s

underscored the many shortcomings of WIN: a full-scale mobilization exercise and an actual crisis, both of which produced

a cacophony of WWMCCS criticisms and subsequent calls for

reform.

Notes

1. Comptroller General, The World Wide Military Command and Control

System—Major Changes Needed in Its Automated Data Processing

Management and Direction, Report to Congress, LCD-80-22 (Washington,

D.C.: General Accounting Office, 1979), 64.

2. Ibid., 62–63, 83–84.

3. Ibid., 83–84.

4. Ibid., 43, 85–86.

5. C. J. LeVan, “WWMCCS Automation—A Team Effort,” Signal 3 2

(November/December 1977): 12.

6. Ibid., 13.

7. Comptroller General, Report to Congress, 51, 861.

8. Ibid., 51–52.

9. Michael Putzel, “Pentagon Warning System Defective, Experts Claim,”

Washington Post, 10 March 1980, A10.

10. James North, “‘Hello Central, Get Me NATO’: The Computer That

Can’t,” Washington Monthly, July–August 1979, 52.

11. Peter Pringle and William M. Arkin, SIOP: The Secret U.S. Plan for

Nuclear War (New York: Norton, 1983), 148.

12. LeVan, 12.

13. Carol Hamilton, “Worldwide C2 System Networks Strategic Data for

Joint Chiefs,” Defense Electronics 20 (June 1988): 57.

14. Comptroller General, Report to Congress, 87.

15. Ibid., 87–89.

16. Fred J. Shafer, director, Logistics and Communications Division, US

General Accounting Office, letter to the secretary of defense, 21 July 1975,

1–2.

17. Ibid., 5 April 1978, 1.

18. Ibid., 21 July 1975, 2.

19. Ibid., 5 April 1978, 2–3.

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20. House, Committee on Armed Services, Review of Department of

Defense Command, Control and Communications Systems and Facilities, 94t h

Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), 13.

21. Comptroller General, Report to Congress, 28.

22. House, Review of Department of Defense Command, Control and

Communications, 13.

23. Shafer, 21 July 1975, 2.

24. Modernization of the WWMCCS Information System (WIS),

(Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1981), 7.

25. Hamilton, 55.

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Chapter 11

The Carter Administration and the

Evolutionary Approach

Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger’s January 1974

downgrading of the assistant secretary of telecommunications

to the position of director, telecommunications and command

and control systems, and the associated moves on the part of

the military departments, had relegated communications to

essentially a support function. It seemed obvious that something had to be done to arrest this deterioration in authority,

and in 1977 a Command, Control, and Communications Panel

of the House Armed Services Committee outlined a series of

moves designed to effect an organizational about-face, putting

into place a more centralized management structure.

Assistant Secretary of Defense for C3I

The most important of the Armed Services Committee

panel’s recommendations was that the telecommunications

position be immediately restored to its previous assistant secretary level. Once that was done, the panel said, it was necessary that the occupant of the new position be given supervisory authority over all tactical and strategic communications

systems, as well as for all command and control programs,

including responsibility for related programs involving automatic data processing. Since in the hardball world of Pentagon

politics real managerial authority had to come with budgetary

teeth, the panel also recommended that the newly restored

assistant secretary be given budgetary authority for these programs. Indeed, things had deteriorated so badly that almost

no amount of authority, up to and including “absolute authority,” was adjudged excessive for the new assistant secretary if

that was what was required to compel the services to participate in joint-service programs. For until the existing fragmented authority structure was replaced with a radically revamped management structure of this sort, the panel

concluded, duplicative efforts were inevitable, and dollars and

199
efforts would continue to be wasted. 1

 It was difficult to imagine a stronger call for centralized control.

It was far easier to imagine that not all members of Congress would share the sentiments of their colleagues on the

Command, Control, and Communications Panel. After all, if

some congressmen were calling for dramatically enhanced

authority at the assistant secretary level, there were others

who believed that things already had devolved too far in the

opposite direction of centralized control. Their complaints centered around a management process that they felt gave

WWMCCS-related programs a sort of “special advocate” within

the Office of the Secretary of Defense, a brand of bureaucratic

preferential treatment that allowed these programs to avoid

the stringent, highly competitive budgetary reviews that were

the norm for most non-WWMCCS programs. 2

It was, in fact, the long-familiar face-off between the proponents of centralization and decentralization, just played out

on another stage at another time. Yet with the passage of each

successive year, the very terms of the command and control

debate were being altered. No longer were arguments cast in

the stark, dichotomous, either/or, yes/no terms of years gone

by. The overall trend was unmistakable by the mid-1970s: the

importance of effective national-level command and control

had been firmly established as part of the conventional wisdom, and it was difficult to overstate its importance.3

 That is,

command and control had moved rhetorically to center stage.

What remained was a sort of mopping-up exercise in which

the debate increasingly involved procedural issues: the best

way to go about doing what almost everyone now acknowledged had to be done, rather than the more basic issue of

whether it should be done in the first place. Despite their

short-term successes, then, those who deprecated the entire

WWMCCS concept found themselves increasingly on the defensive. As the decade advanced, they would find themselves

in full retreat.

The movement back toward centralization began, most visibly, in early 1977, with the arrival of a new administration in

Washington. Throughout his presidential campaign, former

Georgia governor Jimmy Carter had portrayed himself as an

antigovernment outsider, untainted by the Watergate scandal

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and uncompromised by any history of dealings inside the

Beltway. His victory over sitting president Gerald Ford was

perceived by many members of the new administration, as

well as by Carter himself, as a public mandate to bring organizational change and other basic reforms to a number of areas

of government. 4 Given Carter’s background as a Navy officer,

his personal abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and his campaign pledge to “banish” those weapons, it was hardly surprising that one of the key organizations he targeted for reform

was the Department of Defense. And given the criticisms then

issuing from the House’s Command, Control, and Communications Panel, the General Accounting Office, and a number of

other influential fora—most of which emphasized the need to

establish some sort of organizational center of gravity for the

Pentagon’s disparate command and control programs—a great

deal of the specific pressure for reform would soon be directed

toward WWMCCS.

The first major step in this effort came in the middle of that

same year, 1977, when, in a dramatic reversal of his predecessor’s actions, Carter’s new defense secretary, Harold Brown,

began an organizational shake-up at the highest levels of the

OSD. Brown ordered that two existing offices, the director of

telecommunications and command and control systems and

the assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, be consolidated. The resulting single new office, designated the assistant

secretary of defense for communications, command, control,

and intelligence (C 3I), appeared to be both a significant symbol

and a portent of things to come. It suggested, respectively, the

importance that the Pentagon’s civilian leadership attached to

the area of command and control, and it underscored the secretary’s intention to direct developments within it.5

 The person

Brown appointed to fill the new assistant secretary position

was an electrical engineer, Gerald P. Dinneen, and by all criteria he seemed an excellent choice. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dinneen had worked

on a number of major command and control projects at MIT’s

Lincoln Laboratory, including the Lincoln Experimental Satellite (LES) program. To complement his scientific and technical

credentials, Dinneen brought management experience to his

new position, having served as the Lincoln Laboratory’s director.

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Perhaps equally important, Dinneen was well acquainted with

the labyrinthine politics of the Pentagon bureaucracy, having

served on a number of defense advisory committees in the

past, including the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Scientific Ad -

visory Committee. 6

The new command and control assistant secretaryship was

pointedly intended to play a major role in the administration’s

effort to bring organizational coherence to the command and

control community, but it by no means completed the bureau -

cratic overturn. Simultaneously with the creation of the new

assistant secretary position, the undersecretary of defense for

research and engineering, William J. Perry, established a new,

parallel office within his organization. Its day-to-day management was to be given to a new deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering (C 3

I), who would also serve

as Perry’s principal deputy. While on the surface this new

position might seem to represent an even further fragmentation in command and control authority within the Pentagon,

it, in fact, was intended as quite the reverse. To consolidate

that authority, Dinneen was given the dual hat as Perry’s dep -

uty, thereby setting the stage for a more active involvement in

command and control issues by the Pentagon’s top civilian

officials.7 The hope was that the consolidation would produce

“a more effective and more efficient operation,” and Dinneen

lost no time in making known what he meant by effective.8 For

the strategic forces, it meant the unequivocal ability to deliver

emergency action messages during the pre-, trans-, and

postattack phases of a nuclear conflict. It meant maintaining

communications between the various nuclear commanders in

chief and the ability to direct the strategic forces under all

conditions. It also meant having a report-back capability so

that the status of one’s own forces could be continuously

monitored. In other words, Dinneen’s first set of criteria for

command and control effectiveness included survivability both

to physical and electronic attack and endurance.9

Equally important were concerns for compatibility and in -

teroperability. To achieve these goals, Dinneen announced

that his office would advocate and pursue the use of such

relevant technologies as digital operations throughout the

command and control environment. He would also pay careful

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attention to interoperability among the command and control

systems of the United States and its allies, especially among

the member nations of NATO. Responsiveness was another

important criterion given the time-sensitive nature of intelligence information. Reliability was also important, since critical information must not suffer degradation during transmission. Flexibility was also a must, and so Dinneen emphasized

the need for improvements in satellite communications systems. Naturally the security of communications, satellite or

otherwise, also had to be guaranteed. Finally, Dinneen forcefully underscored the point that the whole purpose of the

system was to serve the needs of central decision makers,

whether in managing crises, conducting war, or handling conflict termination. 1 0 The command and control centralizing im -

petus that had been reversed during the Nixon and short-lived

Ford administrations was now to be reversed again.

So that these ambitious goals could be pursued, a central

concern for Dinneen was to effect a tight coupling between

system requirements and acquisitions. To this end, he advo -

cated and aggressively pursued what he described as a “general systems approach” for command and control develop -

ment. To a very considerable extent, this approach paralleled

the logic of the WWMCCS architect in its recognition that

planning for command and control systems must begin by

identifying military capabilities, policy objectives, and the nature of the existing threat. Once these had been established,

Dinneen noted, general command and control requirements

for the military forces could then be generated for a series of

situations ranging from peacetime to general nuclear war.

These requirements, in their turn, would serve as the basis for

specifying technical requirements in automatic data processing, communications security, survivability, and other areas.

Only at that point could specific technologies capable of meeting the requirements be identified. Since more than a single

technology would presumably be capable of doing the job, a

range of alternatives would be developed, varying in capability

and cost, which would then be presented to Pentagon decision

makers for their consideration and selection. 1 1 How well then

was this systems approach currently being adhered to in the

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DOD? Dinneen and his boss, William J. Perry, proposed to

find out.

The Defense Science Board Report

In September 1977 Perry asked the Defense Science Board

(DSB) chairman Eugene G. Fubini to establish a task force to

review the ways in which various defense elements developed

and deployed their command and control systems. The task

force, chaired by Bell Laboratories vice president Solomon J.

Buchsbaum, was commissioned the following December. A

number of command and control luminaries were appointed

to it, including Clay T. Whitehead, who had served as director

of the Office of Telecommunications Policy during the Nixon

administration; Richard D. DeLauer, an executive vice president at the TRW Corporation, who himself later became assistant secretary of defense for C3

I; Charles A. Zraket, executive

vice president of the MITRE Corporation; and, a variety of

other academic and defense intellectuals and retired military

officers. Buchsbaum’s task force forwarded its final report to

Fu bini in July 1978.

The DSB task force identified a series of basic problems with

the Pentagon’s ability to develop and deploy command and

control capabilities, the most basic of which was that practically no commonly understood conceptual framework that

then existed for designing, analyzing, and evaluating command and control systems. Lacking any agreed-upon definition of what the system should do and how resources should

be organized—indeed, lacking any agreed-upon vocabulary for

articulating the issues specific measures of effectiveness were

obviously impossible to formulate. 1 2 The results of this were

the system’s inability to provide appropriate information to

commanders, a lack of responsiveness to the national leadership during crises, and the inherent inability to control the

crisis situations this implies. The task force report’s dour conclusion was that the United States had failed to deploy command and control systems “commensurate with the nature

o f likely future warfare, with modern weapons systems, or

with our available technological and industrial base.”1 3 It was

lan guage hauntingly reminiscent of earlier critical system

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evalu ations, suggesting that little material progress had taken

place in WWMCCS at all.

Several broad recommendations, described as a “useful conceptual framework” for action, were then presented to address

these problems. 1 4 First, to ensure the compatibility and effectiveness of joint-service programs, it was recommended that

the DOD charter a new centralized command and control

agency to manage their design and acquisition in a more coordinated way. This agency, working in conjunction with

DARPA, would also be responsible for undertaking a major

research effort to identify and develop the command and control technologies of the future. 1 5 The centralization that this

recommendation bespoke was, however, quickly qualified by

the next one, which was that the new agency establish general

programmatic guidelines only. Program specifics, as well as

the resources necessary to adapt and modernize their own

command and control system to meet specific mission requirements, were to remain with the military services. Another recommendation similarly intended to enhance user participation

in system definition and development was to strengthen the

power of the services and the unified and specified commands

to operate and evaluate their command and control systems.

The task force’s final recommendation, one also intended to

provide greater user input into system development, was that

the Pentagon issue new directives explicitly recognizing the

unique character of command and control systems, and thus

develop them in an evolutionary fashion. 1 6

The services and the joint chiefs were asked to formally

review the task force’s recommendations, and they were unanimous in their resistance to an expanded, more powerful command and control agency, despite the conscious effort to ensure input and influence by the operating forces.1 7 The

services, not surprisingly, believed that their traditional dominance in the command and control area would be diminished

if control were given to a central agency. The irony, of course,

was that it was precisely because of long-standing service

aggrandizement at the expense of joint-service functions that

there was a need for a review of the practices used in planning

and procuring command and control systems in the first

place. Responding to the pressure, Defense Science Board

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chairman Fubini endorsed all of his task force’s recommendations except the call for the creation of a new defense agency.

He suggested instead, as a compromise, that the functions the

new agency was to have performed could be accomplished

equally well by expanding the charter of the Defense Commu -

nications Agency.

The revised report was forwarded to Secretary of Defense

Brown in August 1978. The following month, Deputy Secretary of Defense Charles W. Duncan Jr. moved to implement its

recommendations by instructing Undersecretary William J. Perry

to take immediate action. Perry, in his turn, began with the

task he considered most important: the revision of two DOD

acquisition directives to account for the special evolutionary

nature of command and control systems. These directives, numbers 5000.1 and 5000.2, were titled Major System Acquisitions

and Major System Acquisitions Procedures, respectively. The

need to begin here was manifest, Perry felt, for all of the other

recommendations for enhanced user input into the planning,

development, deployment, and operation of command and

control systems was underpinned and justified by evolutionary logic. Because of its internal contradictions and the fact

that it would put the brakes on the movement toward greater

centralization, that logic merits a more detailed examination.

The Logic of Evolution

“I think it is time we faced up to the fact that command and

control systems are, by their very nature, impossible to completely specify at the time development is begun,” Albert Babbitt, the WWMCCS system engineer, remarked during the late

1970s. And even if by some alchemy it were possible to fully

specify them, he went on, the incessant pace of technological

advance and environmental change would preclude fielding

command and control systems that were completely adequate.

“We should accept this,” Babbitt concluded, “and develop our

systems in a way to accommodate growth and change.”1 8

As the Defense Science Board Task Force saw things, command and control systems possess characteristics not found

in other complex systems. They are “information rich,” the

task force said, meaning that they are highly dependent upon

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the information they contain and the demands placed upon

them. They require integrating a wide range of users with

diverse needs and perspectives and demand interoperability

with a number of other systems. These purportedly unique

features, it was argued, necessitated a special type of management structure, one in which command and control systems

could evolve naturally over time. Under such an evolutionary

approach to system development, users could identify their

requirements, then develop the systems to meet them in incremental fashion. They could test off-the-shelf and prototype

equipment in an operational environment and then select

what worked best. If changes in the technology, doctrine, or

threat occurred (and this was certain), commanders could redefine their needs and adjust their systems accordingly without having to begin again from scratch.1 9 Given the fluidity of

environmental conditions, why bother with exhaustive, and

necessarily imperfect, a priori considerations of what one

needs and what a system should do? When considered in this

fashion, the evolutionary approach appears to have its advantages and its logic.

Indeed, the task force argued that these unique characteristics were sufficiently compelling that command and control systems should be exempted from the usual principles of

life-cycle management, long recognized as a fundamental

tenet of effective program management. The point was to have

in place a management structure that could identify the roles

and responsibilities of key individuals throughout the system

and over time, emphasize management accountability for the

success or failure of system development, promote interoperability of system assets through such strategies as standardization, and establish some sort of cost-control mechanism. To many, command and control systems should bend to

this logic, but here was a distinguished task force saying that

such systems were somehow fundamentally different and suggesting that the logic should not apply.

If the recommendation to exempt command and control systems from the usual type of management oversight was unusual, it also appears suspect, and for several reasons. First,

the assertion that these systems are somehow unique, requiring a special type of management structure, is dubious on its

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face. Many systems are complex and information rich, have

extensive demands made upon them, require interoperability

among a variety of users, and still follow the principles of

life-cycle management. Examples from the commercial sector

include banking, aviation, and telecommunications. Many

other systems have to deal with high levels of environmental

uncertainty, and yet still engage in rigorous planning. The

sense of this effort has been captured nicely in discussions of

news organizations and their “emergency routines,” carefully

planned patterns of action explicitly designed to allow them to

deal with unpredictable occurrences in a routine way. 2 0 Law

enforcement, hospitals, and fire and rescue organizations appear to operate using similar routines. Private industry had

similarly developed comparable structures to facilitate management’s decision making in a world of volatile consumer

preferences and technological surprises.2 1 In this sense, there

appears to be nothing unique about military command and

control systems.

A second reason to question the appropriateness of the evolutionary approach was that it was unlikely to produce the

“best” or “most optimal” system. This is because evolution as

applied to defense systems operated in a different way from

evolution in the natural world. The defense version of evolu -

tion involved a series of choices made incrementally over time,

each decision at each stage of the process involving conscious

deliberation and trade-offs. If the level of analysis is the

subunit level, it is simply an iterative version of the standard

engineering approach, in which human foresight and knowledge of constraints are ever at work, directing the selections

that are made. It is a top-down approach, with direction proceeding from on high, imposing local rules and setting in

motion a series of projects. That is simply how things human

function, and, as philosopher Daniel Dennett has noted, this

top-down approach is so common to large-scale human projects that alternatives are difficult to imagine. This approach

stands in contrast to evolution in the natural world, which is

not top-down and purposive but bottom-up and lacking in

insight altogether. Whereas the evolutionary approach always

has involved making a series of choices between alternatives,

actual evolution is profligate and costly, throwing out and testing

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alternatives in countless myriads. “Mother Nature has no reason to avoid high-risk gambits,” Dennett notes, “she takes

them all, and shrugs when most of them lose.”2 2 Of the few

that succeed, most do so in ways that were impossible to

predict a priori.

The evolutionary approach thus misses the whole point of

actual evolution. Where attempts are made to minimize unforeseen consequences in the former, in the latter unforeseen

consequences represent precisely the stuff of evolutionary advance. In a world of limited resources, it is of course impossible for defense systems to be constructed in a similarly wasteful fashion. But if not all available alternatives are played out,

it is not possible to find out which one might work best, thus

severely restricting the possibilities for the serendipitous appearance of a better evolutionary form.

 The evolutionary approach also misses the point of the

standard engineering (weapons system) approach, which in -

volves the rational pursuit of a capability based on a clear

specification of user requirements and programmatic goals.

Neither fish nor fowl, the evolutionary approach thus reaps

neither the benefits of actual evolution nor those of rational

planning.

As a consequence of using the evolutionary approach, inappropriate technologies were acquired and ill-considered organizational changes made, resulting in inadequate system performance. So unless funding were somehow to become

limitless, this state of affairs appears to argue for a more

rational management approach of the sort called for in the

WWMCCS architecture. But the recommendation of the Defense Science Board Task Force was precisely the reverse: to

avoid adequate goal specification and to permit the system to

evolve “naturally,” formalizing the de facto strategy of ad hoc

incrementalism that had proved deficient in the past.

The notion of command and control system evolution approach was by no means original to the Defense Science Board

Task Force. Robert S. McNamara had championed the evolu -

tionary approach more than a decade before, describing how

“changes in the command and control systems will be, of necessity, evolutionary, and the systems must be flexible enough to

adapt to changes in the world situation and U.S. strategy.”2 3

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He believed that unlike systems whose designs had been frozen earlier, those which emerged from an evolutionary process

of development would be more effective, possessing greater

capabilities, better reflecting users’ needs, and more closely

aligned with the requirements of national military policy. In -

deed, many of McNamara’s ideas had been most forcefully

articulated by none other than DSB Chairman Fubini himself,

who, while wearing the dual hats of assistant secretary of

defense and deputy director of defense research and engineering (DDR&E), had emphasized flexible development over in -

flexible “standardization” of assets.24 His advocacy of an evolu -

tionary approach to command and control system

development proceeded directly from this logic.

Fubini’s advocacy also derived from his disenchantment

with such command and control products of the weapons system approach as Project 465L, the Strategic Air Command’s

Automated Command Control System. In Fubini’s view, in the

real world of national defense, a world characterized by incessant change, the whole notion of a fixed-system concept, the

“old idea that a command and control system could be developed, built, tested, installed, and finally turned over to the

users on some magic date,” had been rendered anachronistic.2 5 A different approach was called for, he believed, one that

not only would recognize the fact of change but also would

incorporate it as an integral element of the system’s management structure. The evolutionary approach surely did, and

Fubini had been one of its earliest, most forceful proponents.

The problem was that the evolutionary approach was at

odds with the sort of centralized control of forces that was

increasingly called for by recent changes in US strategic doctrine. Fubini himself had recognized this back in 1965, pointing out how the approach would likely result in a system that

was “at best, a harmonious conglomerate of elements of different size, loosely but effectively federated.”2 6 Many critics of the

approach would base their opposition on precisely this point,

contending that “loosely but effectively federated” was an oxymoron. But despite this limitation, or perhaps precisely because of it, the idea of evolutionary development became fashionable with the release of the Defense Science Board’s report.

All the rage, it became “one of the most widely used ‘buzz

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words’ of recent years” in the words of DCA director Samuel L.

Gravely Jr. 2 7 But unless one believes that illogic had all of a

sudden become epidemic within the halls of the Pentagon, it

follows that support for the evolutionary approach must reflect some other agenda.

In determining what that agenda might be, consider that

the evolutionary approach had its strongest appeal to those

who liked the notion of a “loose federation” just fine, those

who were interested in maintaining their own autonomy,

those whose interest lay in restraining the growth of centralized control. Whereas a firm requirement to name specific

criteria and goals up front would inevitably have led to greater

centralized control, the evolutionary approach worked in the

opposite direction—decentralizing authority for command and

control development to system subunits. It was a recipe for

suboptimization, and as such, it held considerable appeal to

self-interested subunits such as the military services, who,

pursuing their own programmatic interests, adopted and defended it with gusto; often at the expense of the larger organizational entity that was WWMCCS.

The approach was also appealing because it increased the

chances that favored programs would receive funding. After

all, if program costs were fully elaborated at the outset, they

might well scare cost-conscious members of Congress. But

with the evolutionary approach, it was necessary to identify

costs only for the relatively near-term, for a core capability,

obviating the need to identify other expenses until some later

time, when the system had “evolved.” It was in many respects

the services’ analogue of the contractor’s buy in, wherein an

artificially low price could be initially offered to get a contract,

with additional costs being added on later, after a major financial commitment had already been made to the program. The

evolutionary approach also set the stage for actual contractor

buy ins, with firms understanding full well that under the

evolutionary logic prices could be raised, and raised again as

the project evolved. 28

In other words, the evolutionary approach appears to have

been attractive because it allowed its proponents to have it

both ways: they could cast themselves as forward-looking

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innovators even as they advocated an approach which main -

tained a status quo that worked to their benefit.

This subunit mind-set, part self-interested pragmatism and

part Machiavellianism, was articulated well by one Air Force

general who complained that Congress always seemed to demand a complete system architecture in hand before work on

a program could proceed. The search for an optimal system

was obviously desirable, he noted, “but few are willing to address the resources necessary to transition to the ‘Mystical

City,’ the ultimate architecture, if the slums must first be

cleared.” So if the search for a perfect system resulted in

elevated costs and program delays such that some programs

were never initiated at all, the preferable approach, obviously,

was to engage in step-by-step evolutionary progress. 2 9 If users

could not identify their requirements with precision, nor contractors the types of technologies they could produce, no prob -

lem: “This will not prevent progress down the development

path,” remarked one Army general.3 0

 The enthusiasm with which the Defense Science Board

Task Force’s report was received, then, and the pervasiveness

of its subsequent acceptance, appears to have had less to do

with its appropriateness in the larger programmatic scheme of

things than with its usefulness to powerful WWMCCS

subunits. Perry moved expeditiously to implement the evolu -

tionary approach as the approach for command and control

development, and it quickly became the newest front in the

decades-old battle between the forces of command and control

centralization and decentralization.

Nifty Nugget

Nifty Nugget 78 was a secret governmentwide mobilization

and deployment exercise conducted by the JCS during the fall

of 1978. Essentially a massive computerized war game, the

exercise was, in many respects, a series of firsts: It was the

first exercise of its kind ever to be conducted. It was the first

time any mobilization effort had been mounted since the real

mobilization that had taken place during World War II. Nifty

Nugget was, finally, the first military exercise to test the

operational capabilities of the new WWMCCS Intercomputer

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212
Network, and, as such, it represented another opportunity for

the Pentagon to demonstrate the value of the networking concept in support of command and control during a major (albeit

fabricated) crisis. 3 1

The scenario that Nifty Nugget employed was ambitious, to

say the least: an all-out attack against Western Europe by the

Warsaw Pact nations, igniting a major conventional war with

NATO forces. The United States, as the senior member of

NATO, was drawn into the conflict from the outset. As the

scenario unfolded, US forces stationed in West Germany im -

mediately found themselves engaged in pitched combat with

vastly superior attacking Pact forces. Reinforcements were urgently required, and so some four hundred thousand American combat troops were to be mobilized and deployed to the

plains of Central Europe rapidly. That was the general framework provided to the more than one thousand military and

civilian Nifty Nugget players, located both in the United States

and abroad. But it was a context only. In the war game, just

as in a real war, things were not immutable or fixed. By

design, many of the situations that arose were unanticipated,

issuing from actions taken and decisions made earlier in the

game. These were the conditions under which the one thou -

sand players waged fictitious war for a full month that fall.

(Throughout the exercise, by some scenario-mandated magic,

the nuclear threshold was never crossed by either side.)

As it turned out, the war did not go well for the United

States. In fact, what happened was that in remarkably short

order, the mobilization plans of the United States simply fell

apart. Many of the fictitious troops and much of the equip -

ment that were to be deployed to the battlefront could not get

there because of logistical snarls. Of the soldiers who did

make it, most died, but not for want of proper training or

weaponry. To the contrary, under the terms of the scenario,

the troops were assumed to be highly trained and their weapons top notch. The problem was a lack of proper supplies and

support. One exercise planner described how the Army “was

simply attrited to death”: artillery pieces had no shells, tanks

had no fuel or spare parts, soldiers had no bullets or food. 3 2

By no means was WWMCCS the source of all these difficulties; serendipity also had a hand to play. In one particularly

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bizarre incident, a civilian game participant working for the

Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) retired

just before Nifty Nugget began. As in reality, during the exercise HEW was responsible for handling civilian evacuees from

the war zone after they arrived in the United States. But the

problem for the exercise was that this responsibility had been

invested in a single individual, now retired. He never had been

replaced, and the not inconsequential result of this for other

Nifty Nugget players was that right in the middle of the deployment operations they had to contend with almost a million civilian evacuees flooding into Army bases.3 3

Other problems were more directly attributable to the

WWMCCS Intercomputer Network. According to participants,

the response time of WIN was often unsatisfactory, in part

because of the semi-independent nature of many of the software applications in use throughout the system. They also

noted how the WWMCCS standard computers could not, in

effect, walk and chew gum at the same time; they were simply

incapable of keeping up with the simultaneous demands of

the exercise and routine operations and maintenance. Many

players were not provided with the level of automatic dataprocessing support they required. There also was a problem of

securing alternative computing capability if the computers at

one’s own site went down, because other sites were generally

operating near their limit, with little in the way of excess

capacity to offer to anyone else. 34

A final problem revolved around the issue of planning. One

of the major lessons that was quickly drawn from Nifty Nugget

concerned the lack of flexibility in the Pentagon’s computerized mobilization plans. WWMCCS computers were programmed so that once a decision was made, a whole series of

orders would be issued automatically and simultaneously to

combat, transportation, and support units. It made a great

deal of sense and speeded things up, provided that all eventu -

alities could be anticipated. The only problem was that Pentagon planners, like everyone else, were far from omniscient. So

when the unexpected occurred, when the war game diverged

from the scenario as originally scripted, the computers were

frequently caught flat-footed. In one example, an unexpected

decision to redeploy a Marine unit to Iceland resulted in the

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214
loss of six full days of airlift capability. The original plans no

longer valid, they had to be removed from the computer and

recalculated by hand. 3 5 Problems such as these resulted in

what Army vice chief of staff, Gen Walter T. Kerwin, the

game’s official overseer, described as “great gaps” in players’

understanding. “You wonder,” Kerwin mused ruefully,

“whether they were playing the same exercise.”3 6

Nifty Nugget was thus far from an unmitigated success, either

in general terms or for WIN specifically. It disclosed a series of

fundamental command and control shortfalls, including an in -

adequate ability to coordinate the use of transportation resources and difficulties in collecting the information necessary

for crisis decision making. Also noteworthy were the insufficient

automatic data-processing capabilities demonstrated by the

World Wide Military Command and Control System and its new

WWMCCS Information Network. And in much the same way

that the three WWMCCS failures a decade earlier had initiated a

series of critical assessments of the command and control structure and produced subsequent demands for reform, Nifty Nugget

signaled the beginning of a similar process a decade later. What

to do? One move in direct response to the deployment problems

identified during the exercise was the creation of a new joint

deployment agency within the JCSO to coordinate and manage

the actual deployment of forces. 3 7 Other exercise-inspired activities included a series of DOD workshops and the creation of

several new defense journals. 38 There was certainly reason

enough for all this: Nifty Nugget raised the sobering possibility

that the United States might just lose the next conventional

war.3 9 (Things proved little better two years later in Proud Spirit

80, an updated and much less ambitious version of Nifty Nugget. Despite the fact that it almost seemed that Proud Spirit had

been designed to prove a point about the capabilities of

WWMCCS, the performance of the WWMCCS computers contin -

ued to be considerably less than optimal. Indeed, in the words of

one exercise participant, WWMCCS “just fell flat on its ass.”)4 0

Notes

1. House, Committee on Armed Services, Review of Department of

Defense Command, Control and Communications Systems and Facilities, 94t h

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Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 18 February

1977), 31–32.

2. I. Cassandra, “C 3 as a Force Multiplier—Rhetoric or Reality?” Armed

Forces Journal International 115 (January 1978): 16.

3. Irving Luckom, “Worldwide Military Command and Control System:

An Approach to Architecture Development,” Technical Directions, IBM

Federal Systems Division, Autumn 1976, 9.

4. C. Kenneth Allard, Command, Control, and the Common Defense (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 194.

5. Edgar Ulsamer, “Machine Intelligence Shapes Global C3 Nets,” Air

Force Magazine, July 1977, 71.

6. Gerald P. Dinneen, “Industrial Luncheon Address,” Signal 31 (August

1977): 48.

7. ———“C3I: An Overview,” Signal 33 (November/December 1978): 11.

8. Dinneen, “Industrial Luncheon Address,” 48.

9. Dinneen, “C3I: An Overview,” 13.

10. Dinneen, “Industrial Luncheon Address,” 48.

11. Dinneen, “C3I: An Overview,” 12.

12. Kenneth L. Moll, “The C3 Functions,” in Selected Analytical Concepts

in Command and Control, eds. John Hwang, Daniel Schutzer, Kenneth

Shere, and Peter Vena (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1982), 23.

13. Gerald P. Dinneen, “C2 Systems Management,” Signal 34 (September

1979): 16.

14. Victor J. Monteleon and James R. Miller, “Another Look at C3

Architecture,” Signal 42 (May 1988): 82.

15. Comptroller General, The World Wide Military Command and Control

System—Major Changes Needed in its Automated Data Processing

Management and Direction, LCD-80-22 (Washington, D.C.: General

Accounting Office [GAO], 14 December 1979), 62.

16. Dinneen, “C2 Systems Management,” 16.

17. Ibid., 18.

18. Albert E. Babbitt, “New Communications and Technology in

WWMCCS,” Signal 31 (August 1977): 84.

19. Comptroller General, 14–18.

20. Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality

(New York: Free Press, 1978).

21. Thomas C. Reed, “Evolving Strategy—Impact on C3,” Signal, March

1975, 9.

 22. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the

Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 224–25, 259.

23. John B. Bestic, “No More Confused Situations,” Signal 21 (March

1967): 56.

24. “Dr. Fubini Stresses DDR&E’s Desire for System Compatibility,”

DATA, February 1965, 8–9.

25. Ibid., 9.

26. Ibid.

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216
27. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “The DCA—A Rock and a Hard Place,” Signal

34 (April 1980): 8.

28. Bernard L. Weiss, “Keys to Success in C3I,” Signal 36 (August 1982):

53.

29. Richard C. Henry, “Space Systems Communications,” Signal 3 4

(February 1980): 29.

30. Robert W. Zawilski, “Evolutionary Acquisition of U.S. Army Tactical

C

3

I Systems,” Program Manager 15 (May/June 1986): 8.

31. John J. Fialka, “The Pentagon’s Exercise ‘Proud Spirit’: Little Cause

for Pride,” Military Review 11, no. 1 (1981): 38.

32. Ibid., 38–39.

33. Ibid., 41.

34. Comptroller General, 54–55.

35. Fialka, 39.

36. William J. Broad, “Philosophers at the Pentagon,” Science 24

(October 1980): 409.

37. GAO, Deployment: Authority Issues Affect Joint System Development,

NSIAD-86-155 (Washington, D.C.: GAO, July 1986), 10.

38. Roger A. Beaumont, “Perspectives on Command and Control,” in

Principles of Command and Control, eds. Jon L. Boyes and Stephen J.

Andriole (Washington, D.C.: AFCEA International Press, 1987), 15.

39. Broad, 412.

40. Fialka, 39.

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Chapter 12

Crises and Criticisms

The fall of 1978 was a busy one for the World Wide Military

Command and Control System. Following the Defense Science

Board Task Force’s report and the Nifty Nugget affair, the ADP

battle was again joined, this time by the National Security

Team of the President’s Reorganization Project. At the outset of

the Carter administration several years before, a series of efforts collectively known as the President’s Reorganization Project had been initiated to improve the management and operation of a wide range of government programs. One of these, the

Federal Data Processing Reorganization Study, was an effort

to improve the acquisition, management, and use of computer

systems. Responsibility for the study was given to the Office of

Management and Budget (OMB), and OMB identified 10 general areas of interest with respect to government ADP. Ten

separate teams of experts were then established to examine

each of these areas, and one of these, the National Security

Team, focused on the computer systems used by the DOD,

particularly those used in WWMCCS and related systems. Its

final report was released on 25 October 1978, and its numerous criticisms fell into three general areas: the adequacy of

deployed ADP assets, ADP management within the DOD, and

the quality of the personnel employed in ADP-related functions.

The National Security Team first found quality and adequacy of deployed computing assets to be severely unsatisfactory. Many of the WWMCCS ADP sites were not hardened, the

team reported, and they offered little or no protection against

nuclear attack or sabotage. The system’s continued reliance

upon batch-processing technology meant that users were restricted in their ability to operate in an on-line, real-time environment. Many of system’s data-processing installations were

operating near their limit, meaning that there was little surge

capacity that could be drawn upon in the event of crises, when

an increased volume of communications traffic and greater

ADP load were inevitable. The situation was especially critical

219
in the logistics and supply areas, where the WWMCCS computers already were operating at their limit.1

Arguably, many of these limitations could have been overcome

by using backup computers, either on-site or at remote loca -

tions. The problem here was that existing arrangements for this

sort of fallback computer support were themselves woefully in -

adequate. For the Air Force, except for a few critical commands

such as NORAD and SAC, the availability of on-site backups

was almost nonexistent. As for the use of backups at remote

locations, some Air Force organizations had in fact entered into

agreements to have this sort of service provided on an emergency basis. But the organizations that were to provide this

service were themselves operating near their systems’ capacities,

meaning that they were unlikely to be able to satisfy substantially increased demands. In any case, the varying computer

configurations between ADP sites virtually guaranteed that a

backup capability, even if available, would likely not be fully

appropriate. And, if things were bad for the Air Force, they were

even worse for the Army, which had no surge or backup capacity whatsoever. The National Security Team noted that in discussing the backup issue with the military commands, a not

uncommon response was “a shrug and a comment that manual

procedures will have to do.”2 Such assessments were promptly

characterized as “alarmist” by such insiders as John M. Carabello, the Pentagon’s director of data automation, who claimed

that existing backup systems were more than sufficient to take

care of any shortcomings that might show up. When asked what

systems he was referring to, however, Carabello responded by

saying they were classified and could not be discussed with the

reorganization project members.3

Still another serious problem was that few of the major

WWMCCS facilities had uninterruptable power supplies or a

provision for auxiliary power. The National Military Command

Center in the Pentagon, the most vital WWMCCS installation,

was found to be totally dependent on commercial sources of

power.4 Other critical installations also relied on commercial

power, and often with serious consequences. During the

course of the review, team members learned that such key

commands as the Military Airlift Command and NORAD had

their computers go down every time the commercial power

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220
lines on which they relied were struck by lightning, something

that did not bode well for their ability to provide continuing

service during a nuclear war.5 While military officials were

quick to point out that both NMCC and NORAD had diesel

generators that allowed them to rapidly restore power in the

event of outages, concern was hardly allayed; after all, most

WWMCCS facilities did not have that capability.

The second general area addressed by the National Security

Team concerned the management of defense computer resources,

which it found to be fragmented and not managed as a coherent whole. Within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, for

example, a large number of officials had been given responsibility for various aspects of the automatic data-processing

function. These included the DOD comptroller, the assistant

secretary for communication, command, control, and intelligence (C3

I); the undersecretary for research and engineering;

and two of his deputies (research and advanced technology

and acquisition policy). And if the civilians were bad off,

things were even worse among the services. Lacking any central authority capable of setting guidelines and establishing

standards, the forms ADP management took were all over the

landscape. The Navy ADP program, for example, followed the

traditional Navy management concept of centralized policy direction and decentralized execution. What this meant in practice was rampant suboptimization, with users developing and

operating their systems essentially on their own without regard for the larger needs of the service. For the Air Force, ADP

management was essentially a part-time affair that resulted in

poor coordination, long approval cycles, and poor communications between the various agencies and individuals responsible for automatic data processing. Overall, it was concluded

that the ability of ADP to meet a variety of critical defense

functions was severely deficient.6

Another consequence of fragmented management was that

the hardware and software technologies that were acquired were

frequently obsolete. The National Security Team found the average age of DOD computing equipment to be some six years

older than comparable equipment used in private in dustry—that

is, a full generation behind. Many of the defense ADP assets

used were no longer in production, meaning that premium

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221
prices had to be paid to repair and support outdated technolo -

gies. Poor management also meant that it was often impossible for defense organizations and agencies to determine what

they were actually spending on ADP. The Army, for example,

had always treated automatic data processing as a support

service; costs were carried in other lines of its budget, and it

was virtually impossible to break them out to provide a comprehensive look at Army ADP expenditures. Obviously, there

was also no way to ascertain the total extent of the Defense

Department’s investment in ADP technologies and systems,

and only broad estimates were possible. 7 This was precisely

the situation that David Packard had faced at the beginning of

the decade, which he had hoped to resolve by creating the

position of assistant to the secretary of defense for telecommu -

nications, and instituting related changes in management

structure. But things appeared to have improved little with

the passage of the years.

It was a condition that had not gone unnoticed by Congress. If

the Pentagon was unable or unwilling to manage its automatic

data-processing programs itself, many congressmen reasoned,

Congress had no choice but to fill the vacuum. And fill it they

did, especially Rep. Jack Brooks of Texas, who used the investigatory powers of the General Accounting Office like a weapon in

his war against what he viewed as widespread Pentagon ADP

mismanagement. The results were civilian micromanagement of

military ADP and considerable military resentment. The only

way to put an end to this acrimonious situation, the National

Security Team concluded, was for the Pentagon to restore confidence by putting its managerial house in order.8

The final area of attention was the personnel who worked in

defense ADP, and here the major concerns were career advancement opportunities for ADP professionals and the quality

of personnel that those prospects engendered. As to the first,

from the beginning, one of the most serious impediments to

the utilization of ADP technologies had been widespread institutional resistance. In those early years, computers and those

who operated them were considered a sort of necessary evil.

Computer experience did nothing to enhance career opportu -

nity, and it was only the “well-rounded officer” who would

eventually get a shot at flag or general rank.9 The National

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222
Security Team discovered that things had not changed much.

There was severe and widespread dissatisfaction with training

and the prospects for career advancement, arising most notably from a conspicuous lack of flag or general rank billets to

be filled by officers with an ADP background and a considerable resistance to making any more slots available. “There are

three ways to make a career in the Navy: under the water, on

the water, and in the air,” one admiral remarked, exemplifying

the prevailing view, “I’d really wonder about an officer who

wanted to make a career in computers.”1 0

The results of such an atmosphere of professional disdain

were entirely predictable: Many of the brightest and most ambitious officers avoided the ADP area like the plague, and

others left military service during their peak years of productivity, while the quality of those who remained diminished. To

make matters worse, these conditions had their analogue

among civilian computer specialists. Why, after all, would the

best and brightest want to work with obsolete technologies

when private industry offered them the chance to do cuttingedge work? In addition, industry provided its ADP specialists

both with better career opportunities and considerably higher

salaries. In short, obsolescence in ADP hardware and software

translated directly into personnel whose ADP skills were

themselves obsolescent.1 1

Coming up with ways to improve this dreary situation was

the National Security Team’s final task, and recommendations

were quick to follow. The Pentagon should forcefully implement life-cycle management policies for developing computer

systems. The services and defense agencies should be required to make all information technology costs explicit in

their budgetary requests. The problem of obsolescent ADP

equipment should be given prompt attention. Adequate career

paths for ADP specialists should be established. A complete

reorientation of the Pentagon’s relations with Congress should

be vigorously pursued. The military had been rendered operationally vulnerable because of its ADP shortfalls, the team

concluded, and only such actions, vigorously pursued, could

begin to remedy the situation.1 2

A reorganization of ADP management was clearly called for.

Despite the warning at the outset, saying, “We do not recommend

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223
that some form of radical reorganization take place,” the report’s central recommendation was fairly substantial nonetheless. Noting that previous recommendations for change, including

the 1970 blue ribbon panel and a 1975 RAND study, had been

largely ignored, the team urged a vigorous restructuring of ADP

management both on the Pentagon’s civilian and military sides.

Along the lines of the Defense Science Board proposal submitted

just a few months earlier, what the team called for was a substantial centralization in ADP resource management—specifically,

the creation of the Office of Information Technology within the

OSD with responsibility for all defense ADP programs, including

those implicated in WWMCCS.1 3

Even before the National Security Team’s report was issued,

the services, anticipating its criticisms, began taking preemptive action. The Air Force formally increased the frequency of

the meetings of its ADP review board, established new equip -

ment acquisition programs to replace obsolescent equipment,

and implemented a new ADP career path. The Army, which

created an assistant chief of staff for automation and commu -

nications, was actively considering changes in its ADP acquisition

process, and was working on establishing new ADP career

fields for officers. As for the Navy, the service secretary issued an

instruction reorienting the Navy Automatic Data-Processing

Management Steering Committee to a more strategic oversight

function. A special project to develop a new Navy long-range

ADP plan was undertaken, and a number of efforts to replace

obsolescent ADP equipment were initiated.1 4 None of these

“good citizen” reforms addressed the team’s central recommendation for a new centralized ADP authority, of course.

Indeed, they could reasonably be interpreted as moves designed precisely to prevent the establishment of such an office

and to maintain ADP control at the subunit level. But as had

happened so often in the past, a crisis would cast doubt upon

the wisdom of decentralization.

Jonestown, Guyana

The prototype WWMCCS Information Network and its op erational successor WIN had experienced their fair share of difficulties during their initial period of controlled testing and

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224
u n controlled use in JCS training exercises. How well WIN

would perform under actual crisis conditions remained a

question mark as Nifty Nugget ground to its unhappy conclu -

sion in the fall of 1978. The WWMCCS community would not

have long to wait in having that question answered, however.

WIN would be put to the test that November because of the

actions of a religious zealot by the name of the Reverend Jim

Jones.

Several years before, Jones and more than one thousand

members of the People’s Temple, as his religious following was

called, had moved from San Francisco to Jonestown, Guyana,

reportedly because of the negative publicity Jones had been

receiving about his unorthodox preaching and his claims to

heal the sick and raise the dead. Moved is probably not the

most apt term to employ, however, for what took place was

more like a disappearing act on a vast scale. As one reporter

described it, “Spouses who were in the Temple left husbands

and wives who were not. Children dropped out of school.

Homes for the elderly, which were run by the Temple, were

suddenly emptied of patients and staff. Wealthy members sold

their homes and other possessions, or simply left them behind.”1 5 Even when worried relatives and friends discovered

where their loved ones had gone and attempted to contact

them by radio, all they got amidst the static were recriminations and demands to be left alone. For those left behind and

bewildered by this mass exodus, there was substantial cause

for concern.

The concern was particularly strong among a group of family members who, immediately following the Guyana relocation, organized themselves into a group called the Concerned

Relatives. Most of these people disliked Jones intensely, and

many of them publicly dedicated themselves to doing everything necessary to rescue their loved ones from his influence.

One element of their concern involved appealing to Rep. Leo J.

Ryan of California for assistance, with group members describing to him how their relatives were being held in Guyana

against their will. Ryan responded by organizing a fact-finding

tour of Jonestown on their behalf.

That tour began on Wednesday, 15 November 1978, the day

Ryan arrived in Georgetown, Guyana’s capital. Among the

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225
congressman’s entourage were two staffers, eight reporters,

and a 14-person delegation from the Concerned Relatives

group. Ryan and a smaller group left the capital for Jonestown

the following day. Things apparently started well enough, but

had clearly deteriorated by Saturday, the day Ryan departed

Jonestown, taking with him a small group of cult defectors.

Shortly after the congressman left, Jones broadcast a radio

message saying that Ryan had persecuted him, and that

“avenging angels” had been sent after him. The angels caught

up with Ryan and his party at the Port Kaituma airstrip, some

six miles from Jonestown. Ryan was killed by a shotgun blast

in the face, becoming only the second US congressman ever to

be assassinated. Four of those with him were also killed, three

of them members of the press, and 10 others were wounded.

The carnage had only just begun, however. Once word was

received that Ryan had been killed, everyone in the Jonestown

colony was ordered to gather at the colony’s pavilion. After

they had assembled, Jones ordered them to drink cyanidelaced grape Fla-Vor-Aid. Those who refused to drink it received injections. All except Jones, that is, who either shot

himself or had someone else do it for him. More than nine

hundred people died, 260 of them children.1 6

Sorting out the details of what actually happened that day

would take place only later. At the time, it was a real-life

crisis—a small one, to be sure—but the type of crisis that

WWMCCS had been designed to manage. As soon as the first

report of the attack on Ryan’s group reached Washington, the

JCS immediately assembled a crisis action team. Sending a

military force to Guyana was under serious consideration,

meaning that the chiefs needed information concerning the

availability of planes, troops, and medical aid. To help them in

their search, the chiefs turned to the Readiness Command, a

WWMCCS node located at MacDill AFB near Tampa, Florida.1 7

A Guyana crisis team was promptly created there, and a teleconference between the Washington and Florida teams commenced by way of the WWMCCS Information Network. And it

was with WIN’s teleconferencing software that the problems

began.

The lengthiest and most embarrassing WIN failure during

the Guyana crisis started with a typical Florida thunderstorm.

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226
At the height of the crisis, the storm created a power outage

that interrupted the teleconference. Power was quickly restored

but not the teleconference. When members of the joint chiefs’

crisis action team tried to rejoin the conference, the WWMCCS

computer in Florida, which was the host computer for the

conference, would not accept their request to sign on. The

reason, as a subsequent inquiry would determine, was that

despite the disconnect, the joint chiefs’ remained “signed on”

as far as the host computer was concerned, and the WWMCCS

software would not allow them to sign on again. A condition

bordering on panic ensued as automatic data-processing specialists at the Pentagon frantically tried to figure out what had

gone wrong. The solution they arrived at was to create a new

code name for themselves, one the Florida WWMCCS computer would accept, thus allowing the teleconference to be

re-established. The fix worked, but by the time all of this had

taken place, the joint chiefs’ crisis action team had been out of

touch with the Readiness Command for more than an hour.1 8

In a related incident, the National Military Command Center’s automatic data-processing liaison officer attempted to

use WIN to enter the teleconference. But when he tried to

access the Readiness Command’s computer by way of WIN,

the message “Remote Host Dead” appeared on his terminal.

The computer was clearly down, so he picked up the telephone

and called the Readiness Command to find out what was

wrong. He was told that there was no problem, the computer

was up and fully operational. Confused, the ADP liaison officer

spent the next 20 minutes making repeated, unsuccessful attempts to access the Readiness Command’s WWMCCS computer by way of WIN. The real problem was not the computer,

it turned out, but rather the dedicated communications lines

that were being used in WIN. When this possibility occurred to

the ADP officer, he switched his computer terminal to another,

non-WIN communications line and established contact with

the Readiness Command’s computer. But this was in spite of,

not because of, the WWMCCS Intercomputer Network. To

make matters worse, bugs in WIN’s software caused headaches for teleconference participants who attempted to log off

to perform data-processing functions; when they did so, unexpected computer failures occurred. Things got so bad that the

CRISES AND CRITICISMS

227
Readiness Command finally directed its personnel not to use

WIN’s teleconferencing capabilities until the problems could be

fixed.1 9

This was obviously not how things were supposed to work.

The problems experienced during the Guyana crisis and Nifty

Nugget seemed to represent a late-1970s analogue to the Liberty , Pueblo, and EC-121 crises of the late 1960s. But a key

difference was that many members of the press had heard of

WWMCCS by this time and knew at least in general terms

what the system was supposed to do, so when fresh word of its

failures began leaking out, they were ready. One critical press

account began by noting how the Guyana crisis had simply

overwhelmed the WWMCCS computers and went on to say

how their malfunctions had been so frequent “that the joint

chiefs were stymied.” Although the system was supposed to

have permitted the chiefs to manage the Guyana crisis, what

happened instead was a situation “just like an airline ticket

counter when all the computers go down.” WWMCCS was publicly denounced as a disaster, a system with apparently in tractable technical and managerial problems.2 0 Not surprisingly,

Pentagon officials were quick to disagree, dismissing the press

reports as “horror stories” and the situations they portrayed as

of dubious relevance for actual military operations. They pointed

out how throughout the Guyana crisis, the average availability

for WIN’s 12 network nodes had been on the order of 95.5

percent.2 1 However that may be, the 5 percent or so of nonavailability clearly seemed to have major ramifications for crisis management and would soon lead to some of the sharpest

criticism ever of WWMCCS and its automatic data processing.

DCA and Centralization

It was in a dour mood in January 1979 that Assistant

Secretary of Defense for C3I Gerald Dinneen instructed Defense Communications Agency director Samuel L. Gravely Jr.

to prepare a plan for expanding his agency’s charter along the

lines suggested by the Defense Science Board’s report. Gravely

was enthusiastic, and he consulted numerous experts both

inside the DOD and in the private sector. His report was

submitted to Dinneen and the JCS that February.

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228
Symbolic of the proposed expansion of his agency and its

functions, management responsibilities, and emphases,

Gravely’s plan began by recommending that the name of his

agency be changed to the Defense Communications, Command,

and Control Agency (DC3A). A series of specific recommendations

followed: First, the expanded agency would be given complete

control over the Defense Communications System, including

funding and actual operations. Second, the agency would assume budgetary and operational control for a variety of jointservice command and control programs, including TRI-TAC,

the Joint Tactical Communications program, and general program guidance over other tactical programs such as the E-3A

Airborne Warning and Command System program.2 2 DCA’s

previous responsibilities for program monitoring and technical

support for a number of national-level command and control

programs would be expanded similarly. The agency would assume sole responsibility for WWMCCS system engineering. It

would exercise management control and have funding responsibility for such priority elements of WWMCCS as the National

Military Command System and the Minimum Essential Emergency Communications System. It would assume control over

WWMCCS automatic data processing, secure voice communications, electronic counter-countermeasures, and a range of

other vital system functions. In a number of other areas in

which DCA had no previous involvement, including the Na -

tional Emergency Airborne Command Post program, the Precision Acquisition of Vehicle Entry and Phased Array Warning

System (PAVE PAWS) and Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radar systems, and the Navy’s Take Charge and

Move Out (TACAMO) planes, it was recommended that the

agency be given responsibility for general program guidance.2 3

Gravely was clearly suggesting an approach to the develop -

ment and operation of command and control systems in which

the activities of the military services would be more tightly

coupled to, and directed by, national-level requirements.

While to some extent the Defense Communications System

already provided the national leadership with this sort of topdown view, Gravely noted that as far as WWMCCS as a whole

was concerned, there was still a long way to go. 2 4 Truly a

clarion call for centralization, DCA’s plan was intended to help

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WWMCCS advance at least some distance in that direction;

and this, after all, was what Gravely thought Dinneen had

asked him to do. The plan also could not have been further

removed from the ad hoc incrementalism of the evolutionary

approach advocated in the Defense Science Board’s report.

Dinneen promptly asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the

military services to review the DCA plan. Their formal and

informal responses, coming in over the ensuing weeks, were

so blistering in tone, so emphatic in their recommendation

that an expanded DCA not be created, that Gravely found

himself questioning “our mutual understanding of what the C 3

community is really trying to do.” The services, specifically,

interpreted the DCA report as a power play, an illicit attempt

by the agency to strengthen its bureaucratic hand and feather

its nest at their expense. One officer typified this view when he

remarked sardonically how DCA would, no doubt, “happily

volunteer to take over the reins” of command and control, and

then “require some 300-plus additional billets and control of

service funds.” Although Gravely made it a point to say that

DCA was not on its own initiative seeking additional responsibilities for WWMCCS (he had, after all, been asked to prepare

his report), service suspicions were hardly allayed when he

went on to say that his agency would not shrink from any new

tasks that might be assigned to it. 2 5

Much of the resistance stemmed from the fact that many

service officials continued to consider the Defense Communications System to be strictly a general-user, peacetime system. By giving DCA a more central role in WWMCCS, by giving

it responsibility for key WWMCCS assets such as Minimum

E ssential Emergency Communications Network, by emphasiz -

ing such issues as survivability and a concern with command

and control counter-countermeasures, Gravely’s report clearly

suggested that DCA’s war-fighting responsibilities were to be

substantially expanded. But the services considered the conduct of warfare to be their exclusive province, and they jealously guarded that mission and the funds, personnel, and

hardware that followed directly from it.

A closely related concern from the services’ perspective was

that the changes Gravely advocated would result in a further

blurring of the distinction between the strategic and tactical

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230
worlds. Formulation of the next iteration of US strategic doctrine, countervailing strategy, was already well in the works in

the higher levels of the Carter administration (it would find

formal expression in July 1980, with the issuing of Presidential Directive 59). The doctrine’s central tenet, that the United

States should be capable of waging and prevailing in a protracted nuclear war, carried with it an obvious demand that

the NCA be able to communicate directly with commanders on

the scene for a protracted time under all sorts of conditions. It

implied that the intelligence traffic on which command and

control relies would flow unimpeded across both strategic and

tactical assets and whatever boundaries might formally separate them. Under this new set of rules, everything would in

effect become “strategic.”

There were major problems with this from the perspective of

many service officials. First, they believed countervailing strategy to be little more than the most recent in a series of in -

creasingly elaborate civilian doctrinal fantasies. Many of the

forces and technologies necessary to make it work either were

not in place or simply did not exist.2 6 Of those assets that did

exist and that could be marshaled in support of the new

doctrine, many were currently considered “tactical” assets and

the property of a single service. By redefining everything as

strategic, such control would presumably be lost, meaning

that the costs of pursuing the doctrinal fantasy would come

directly out of the services’ hide. So when Gravely called for a

more powerful Defense Communications Agency, one in which

the “needs of the national level take precedence over the parochial needs of the individual services,” one in which the traditionally distinct boundary separating service and agency

would be blurred (to the services’ detriment), it is hardly surprising that everyone balked. 2 7 Indeed, so strong was the resistance, so energetic the efforts to protect the bureaucratic

status quo, that Gravely would soon exclaim in dismay, “I feel,

at times, that we let management boundaries become the primary concern rather than national capabilities.”2 8

Thrown onto the defensive, Gravely would cause additional

irritation by publicly airing his view that many of the system’s

shortcomings could be directly traced to its subunit-dominated

character. The substantive issues addressed by the Defense

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231
Science Board Task Force, as well as the recommendations for

reform that it had proposed, were being lost in the shuffle, he

said, as the services hastened to protect their roles and their

missions. As for himself and the DCA, Gravely noted that by

calling a spade a spade he risked suffering the fate of the

Young Lady of Kent:

There was a young lady of Kent

Who always said just what she meant.

People said, ‘She’s a dear,

So unique—so sincere—’

But they shunned her by common consent. 2 9

Gerald Dinneen closed the matter, presumably sparing

Gravely that ignominious fate, by creating in March 1979 a

new command, control, and communications systems directorate within the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization (JCSO). Lt

Gen Hillman Dickinson, its new director, would serve as prin -

cipal advisor to the undersecretary of defense for policy and to

the chairman of the JCS for command and control matters.

His directorate would serve a master planning function, establishing priorities for research and development initiatives, as

well as for operational programs. In this, the directorate would

represent the military analogue to the Office of the Assistant

Secretary for C3I, with which its activities would be coordinated. In other words, if there was going to be increased centralization of the command and control function, the joint

chiefs wanted to make certain it would occur on their terms.

As a complement to the changes in the JCSO, Dinneen began

plans to reorganize his own office, and these were approved in

July of 1979.

As for the Defense Communications Agency, although

Gravely would not get his new, enhanced DC3A, his efforts to

enhance the authority of his agency would not be wholly in

vain. As bureaucratic recompense to the irate DCA director,

Dinneen and his bosses subsequently proposed that the World

Wide Military Command and Control System Engineering Organization be integrated into the DCA. When this occurred,

the WWMCCS system engineer would be given the additional

title of deputy director for command and control systems and

be given responsibility for providing architectural and systems

support for interservice command and control systems. This

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232
included responsibilities for establishing defensewide architectures for computer-to-computer communications, secure voice

communications, and the move to an all-digital world.3 0 Additionally, DCA’s current deputy director for command and control would be retitled deputy director for command and control

technical support, emphasizing his responsibility for directing

the Command and Control Technical Center that supports the

JCS organization. The center was given a series of WWMCCS

responsibilities, including developing and maintaining plans

for WWMCCS’s further development, managing WWMCCS

standard software applications, and providing an organizational

point of contact for database administration.31 Dinneen remarked

that all of these changes were the best way to pursue the DSB

task force’s recommendations to create a central focus for

command and control systems management, while at the

same time involving the unified and specified commands in

the process.3 2 All in all, the amount of organizational shuffling

and reshuffling had been considerable. Whether any of these

new arrangements would ultimately make for a more responsive WWMCCS was, of course, an entirely different matter.

The 1979 GAO Report

Of all the criticisms of WWMCCS that were mounted during

the 1970s, none was harsher or more unremitting in its attack

than a General Accounting Office report released just two weeks

before decade’s end. The report’s genesis was in John H.

Bradley’s firing from the Defense Communications Agency for

his persistent criticisms of PWIN reliability. Believing that the

Pentagon’s only interest was in sweeping WWMCCS’s problems

under the rug and outraged that his concern for the nation’s

security was earning him nothing but bureaucratic disapprobation and vindictiveness, Bradley decided to go public. Speaking

to reporters on the record, he had outlined PWIN’s many prob -

lems and shortcomings. His interviews resulted in a series of

articles in the popular press, all of them highly critical of

WWMCCS, which had the effect of focusing public attention on

the system for the first time since the command and control

failures of the late 1960s. Perhaps more significantly, congressional interest was aroused, and the watchdog GAO was directed

CRISES AND CRITICISMS

233
to conduct a full-scale investigation into WWMCCS’s automatic data processing. 3 3

The GAO report, titled The World Wide Military Command

and Control System—Major Changes Needed in its Automated

Data Processing Management and Direction , was released in

December 1979, and on almost every one of its more than one

hundred pages were calls for precisely such major changes.

GAO’s overarching criticism, echoing in many respects the

findings of FSD’s architectural studies, was that the Department of Defense had never adequately defined command and

control systems users’ information requirements. Various reasons for this were cited, one of the more important being that

WWMCCS’s ADP management structure was so complex and

fragmented that no single individual or organization had responsibility for such matters as budgeting, funding, and management. Responsibilities were all over the landscape, it was

said, and accountability hard to pin down. As a consequence,

nobody was responsible for ensuring the coordination and

operation of the system. Nobody was accountable for system

deficits or for making necessary changes when things went

wrong. Indeed, things were so diffuse and uncoordinated that

no one even had a thorough general understanding of the

program. It was this lack of centralized management, the GAO

concluded, that impeded defense efforts to design, develop,

implement, and operate a command and control system respon -

sive to users’ needs at the local level, or a national-level system

capable of meeting the declared policies of the United States.3 4

In other words, nobody was really in charge of WWMCCS

automatic data processing, and it showed. The GAO report

then proceeded to describe in graphic detail the shortcomings

of the WWMCCS standard computers and their associated

system software, noting how these failed to support the command and control function. Most of the computers were found

to lack independent and uniform sources of electrical power,

making them vulnerable to power outages. Nor were the computers survivable, and there was little provision for backup in

the event of accidents, acts of nature, or aggression. The computers’ main memory was limited and the machines relied on

batch-processing technology, both of which resulted in serious

difficulties when the system was called upon to operate in a

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234
real-time environment. It was these conditions, the GAO said,

that had produced the problems encountered in exercises

such as Nifty Nugget, and in real crises like Guyana. The

overall conclusion contained in the report could hardly have

been clearer: the objectives of the WWMCCS ADP program had

not been achieved, and there had been little, if any, improvement in the program since its inception back in 1966. 3 5

What should be done? To create a more effective system, the

GAO underscored the recommendation of virtually all past

studies: a single central organization should be given project

management authority for all WWMCCS and WWMCCS-related

computer-based information systems. This WWMCCS project

manager, as the GAO called it, would assist in the identification of users’ information requirements, prepare plans for the

development of ADP systems responsive to those needs, develop systemwide standards for WWMCCS, and implement

cost-accounting mechanisms throughout the WWMCCS community. Since much of this was frankly inconsistent with the

evolutionary approach to system development in vogue in the

Pentagon, the GAO urged that such an approach be immediately abandoned. For it was the evolutionary approach, perhaps more than anything else, that limited proper system development and impeded appropriate management practices for

WWMCCS ADP. In its stead should be substituted the principles of life-cycle management, emphasizing rational planning

and clear accountability. Finally, it was recommended that

Congress withhold funding both for WIN and for upgrading the

WWMCCS standard computers until these necessary reforms

were made.3 6

The GAO concluded with a discussion of how Pentagon officials had tried to restrict the scope of its investigation: “We

were unable to fully discharge our statutory responsibilities

because the Joint Chiefs of Staff denied us complete access to

documents we considered to be pertinent to the evaluation.”

For example, no information at all was provided about the

alleged WWMCCS fiasco that occurred during the seizure of

the American merchant ship Mayaguez in May 1975, when the

WWMCCS computers reportedly crashed. 37 Only partial information was provided about the Guyana crisis, it was said, and

funding figures for a number of WWMCCS-related agencies

CRISES AND CRITICISMS

235
and programs were not provided. All told, only about twothirds of the information requested from the Pentagon was

actually made available.

For the GAO investigators, it added insult to injury that

much of the withholding apparently took place on the flimsiest

of bureaucratic pretexts. Navy documents concerning Nifty

Nugget, for instance, were withheld because they did not rep -

resent the “official position” of the Department of the Navy.

The Preliminary National Military Command System Master

Plan was not provided because it was not an “official” docu -

ment—this despite the fact that it had been provided to FSD

three years earlier to aid in its work as WWMCCS architect.

Another set of documents, the Technical Support Requirements

for the Command and Control Technical Center, were withheld

because they were “internal working documents.” The clear

position of the Pentagon was that drafts, working papers, and

so on, would simply not be made available. To make matters

more inconvenient still, Pentagon officials stood firmly on bu -

reaucratic formality and required that all requests for documents

and interviews be made in writing. The result was lengthy

delays, many of which were doubly unnecessary because Pentagon officials apparently decided to sit on information for as

long as possible, for days or weeks after it was ready for

release. The GAO concluded that these sorts of actions, many

“without legal justification,” had adversely impacted its ability

to provide a thorough, timely evaluation of WWMCCS automatic data processing. 3 8 But given the extensiveness of the

WWMCCS shortcomings described in the report, it is difficult

to imagine what a more thorough evaluation might have revealed.

But criticisms there were aplenty that had to be addressed

by the Pentagon, and in so doing, the most common response

was the one used in the wake of the Guyana crisis: acknowledge that some problems exist, while shifting the ground of

argument from what is wrong with the system to what is right

with it. (Yes, there were some problems with WIN during Guyana, but the network had an average component availability of

over 95 percent.) General Dickinson, the newly appointed director of C3

 systems in the Joint Chiefs of Staff organization,

exemplified this approach by acknowledging up front that a

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236
number of improvements to the system were still necessary.

But he quickly followed this up by noting how significant

improvements in performance had been achieved in the recent

past, most of them as a result of better management. For

example, evaluations had shown that WWMCCS automatic

data processing was generally quite satisfactory for routine

operations. The computers were “doing more and more [of]

what they were designed to do,” Dickinson said. They performed “very useful functions,” and “no using command would

give up its WWMCCS ADP service.”3 9 A Pentagon document

leaked to the Washington Post defending WWMCCS similarly

claimed that the computers provided generally effective support to their users. If there were any problems, it was only

when extraordinary demands were placed upon the system.4 0

Throughout, the flap over WWMCCS’s deficiencies was attrib -

uted more to critics’ characteristics—their naivete, bias, op -

portunism, even maliciousness—than to any actual problem

with the system. The official view was that the system had

gotten a bum rap, when in fact “WWMCCS works.”4 1

But the glare of the media spotlight was relentless. Dismayed by what was interpreted as unfair press treatment of

WWMCCS, the Pentagon’s public stance soon became one of

defensiveness or silence. Irritated by the congressional med -

dling in defense automatic data-processing matters that the

criticism had provoked, suspicious of congressional motives,

the Pentagon began to experience increasingly strained work -

ing relations with Congress. It was a mistrust that cut both

ways, of course. The treatment of the GAO during its inquiry

had led not a few members of Congress to question the credibility of Pentagon officials’ motives and objectives in their

dealings with Congress. Indeed, things had deteriorated so

badly, relations with some congressional groups had become

so strained, that if another major incident involving WWMCCS

ADP occurred, it did not appear unlikely that the whole enterprise, budget and all, might become vulnerable to congressional reprisal.4 2

Such was the context when a team of 30 academics was assem bled at the Pentagon in 1979. These outside consultants—

anthropologists, systems theorists, mathematicians, and all the

rest—were not being turned to in a search for new technolo gies,

CRISES AND CRITICISMS

237
perhaps not surprising given the frequent inability of new

technologies to solve WWMCCS’s problems. Rather, what the

Pentagon was looking for from these “academics with a philo -

sophical bent” was an organizational solution; some new, nontraditional command and control management technique that

would be consistent with all other defense resources and functions. 4 3 At bottom, the difficulty was the complexity of com -

mand and control, its essential ambiguity—problems made

more difficult by the phenomenal growth that had taken place

since the time WWMCCS was established. The whole enterprise was now incomparably larger in quantitative terms:

more people, organizations, facilities, and assets. It had

changed qualitatively as well. Driven by changes in doctrine

and the strategic threat, there had grown up an apparently

insatiable demand for information, of new and different sorts,

that was needed ever more quickly. Both driving this demand

and a consequence of it was the explosive growth of automatic

data processing at every level of the system.44 The need was to

find a way to fuse the disparate elements of WWMCCS into a

coherent whole, and it had at last become clear to many officials that a technological fix was probably not the answer.

True reform would likely come hard, however, because of the

subunit-dominated nature of WWMCCS and the fact that change

would affect powerful constituencies in ways they found inimical

to the performance of their missions. The services tended ever to

go their separate ways, their efforts generally lacked positive

synergistic effects, and the Pentagon hoped the academics would

“find the means of orchestrating the cacophony now rampant in

the US command and control domain,” as one of the consultants who helped organize the meetings phrased it. But these

hopes would be quickly dashed; no easy answers were out there

just waiting to be discovered and implemented. To be certain, all

sorts of recommendations were offered up, some of them drawing upon elaborate biological models or theories from the hard

sciences. But in the words of the consultant, what was lacking

was “critical examination of the dominant paradigm which con -

dones the expenditure of vast resources without even a semblance of a conceptual rationale for the effort.”4 5 For without

such a rationale, a truly effective WWMCCS would likely

r emain chimerical, with additional system failures a virtual

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238
certainty. These were, in fact, not long in coming. The next

failure, or, more appropriately, series of failures, took place at

one of WWMCCS’s most important nodes, the Cheyenne

Mountain headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

Notes

1. President’s Reorganization Project, Federal Data Processing

Reorganization Study: National Security Team Report, 25 October 1978, 11.

2. Ibid., 11, 22.

3. Frank Greve, “Pentagon Calls Super-Computer a ‘Disaster,’”

Parameters 10, no. 1 (1980): 95.

4. William J. Broad, “Computers and the U.S. Military Don’t Mix,”

Science, 14 March 1980, 1187.

5. President’s Reorganization Project, 11.

6. Ibid., 4, 6, 40, 43.

7. Ibid., 6.

8. Ibid., 38.

9. “To Moorer, the ‘DomRep Action’ Proved—CINCLANT has Command

and Control,” Armed Forces Management, July 1965, 70.

10. President’s Reorganization Project, 36.

11. Ibid., 5, 9, 18, 22, 27, 30.

12. Ibid., 45.

13. Ibid., 48.

14. Ibid., 66–69.

15. Lawrence Wright, “Orphans of Jonestown,” The New Yorker, 22

November 1993, 69.

16. Ibid., 66.

17. Broad, 1183.

18. Comptroller General, The World Wide Military Command and Control

System—Major Changes Needed in its Automated Data Processing

Management and Direction, LCD-80-22 (Washington, D.C.: General

Accounting Office, 14 December 1979), 55.

19. Ibid., 55–56.

20. Greve, 94.

21. Comptroller General, 55–56.

22. Ibid., 17–18.

23. Ibid.

24. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “The DCA—A Rock and a Hard Place,” Signal

34 (April 1980): 8.

25. Ibid., 7–8.

26. Janne E. Nolan, Guardians of the Arsenal: The Politics of Nuclear

Strategy (New York: New Republic Books, 1989), 138.

CRISES AND CRITICISMS

239
27. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “DCS at the Crossroads,” Signal 33

(May/June 1979): 54.

28. Gravely, “The DCA—A Rock and a Hard Place,” 11.

29. Ibid., 7.

30. Gravely, “DCS at the Crossroads,” 54.

31. Comptroller General, 97.

32. Gerald P. Dinneen, “C 2 Systems Management,” Signal 34 (September

1979): 19.

33. James North, “‘Hello Central, Get Me NATO’: The Computer That

Can’t,” Washington Monthly, July–August 1979, 52.

34. Comptroller General, 12.

35. Ibid., 5.

36. Ibid., 17, 71–73.

37. Richard C. Gross, “C 3: Fewer Mixed Signals,” Military Logistics

Forum 3 (June 1987): 20.

38. Comptroller General, 67–69.

39. “Improving C3 Systems and Requirements,” Signal, May/June 1981,

75–76.

40. Michael Putzel, “Pentagon Warning System Defective, Experts

Claim,” Washington Post, 10 March 1980, A10.

41. Perry R. Nuhn, “WWMCCS and the Computer That Can,”

Parameters, September 1980, 20–21.

42. President’s Reorganization Project, 8.

43. William J. Broad, “Philosophers at the Pentagon,” Science, 24

October 1980, 409.

44. Ibid., 410.

45. Ibid., 412.

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240
Chapter 13

Failures at NORAD

Understanding the failures that brought to a close the second decade—and the second phase—of the World Wide Military Command and Control System’s operations requires that

we take a brief tour backwards in time.

NORAD and the Program 427M

The North American Air Defense Command’s Cheyenne

Mountain complex, a key WWMCCS node, became operational

in 1966. Although clearly a substantial improvement over the

systems NORAD had used in the past, it was apparent, even

at the time the new facility opened its blast doors for business, that major improvements would soon be necessary if

NORAD were to meet its mission responsibilities, which were

shifting away from atmospheric threats and toward space.

Implicit in this was an increasing flood of sensor data and the

need for modern automatic data processing to make sense of

it. The ADP capabilities of the second-generation computers

used in Cheyenne Mountain’s 425L Command and Control

System and the 496L Spacetrack System did not provide the

sort of computing power that NORAD’s changing mission in -

creasingly demanded, and an effort to provide a follow-on ADP

capability formally began in December 1968. 1 This effort was

designated the 427M computer improvement program, but a

major thorn in its side would prove to be the WWMCCS automatic data-processing upgrade program.

Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird had laid down two

WWMCCS-related conditions when he approved Program

427M. The first was that overall management responsibility

for the program would be given to the Air Force Systems

Command’s Electronic Systems Division (ESD). More than any

other Air Force entity, ESD had a central stake in the develop -

ment of WWMCCS and presumably could be counted on to

further the goals of the larger national-level system. The second condition was that NORAD use the standard WWMCCS

241
computer hardware and associated software then in the process of being procured. 2

As designed, Program 427M included three major elements,

or system segments. The first of these was the NORAD Computer System (NCS), which involved replacing the existing

computers and related equipment of the 425L command and

control system with new equipment. The purpose of the NCS

was to provide NORAD with missile-warning data, nuclear

detonation reports, weapons and sensor systems status, aircraft surveillance and warning reports, and other information.

The second system segment, the Space Computational Center

(SCC), the intended replacement for NORAD’s 496L

Spacetrack System, was the focal point for US and Canadian

efforts to detect, track, and catalog all man-made objects in

space from the moment of launch through the final moments

of orbital decay. In addition to generating impact predictions,

the SCC would provide an integrated system with enhanced

data-processing capabilities. The final segment of Program

427M was the Communications System Segment (CSS). If new

computers were to be the brains of NORAD’s new program, the

CSS would be its central nervous system. Consolidating a variety of currently separated functions into a single integrated

system, the CSS would provide complete message processing,

monitor relevant data circuits and equipment, supervise the

automatic rerouting and restoration of circuits, and provide

for message storage and record keeping. 3 This would include

the dissemination of aerospace defense warning to other command centers, including the NMCC, ANMCC, and SAC headquarters. 4 All of this would be done by the WWMCCS standard

computers, which were installed in Cheyenne Mountain in

1972 as part of the larger WWMCCS ADP upgrade program.

But all manner of computer problems quickly began crop -

ping up. In the area of hardware, it was immediately apparent

that the WWMCCS standard computers simply did not have

the data-processing capabilities necessary to meet NORAD’s

mission requirements. But being saddled with the Honeywells,

NORAD was forced to improvise. The contractor’s written

agreement was revised, and a considerable quantity of additional computer hardware and associated equipment for data

processing and communications switching was procured. This

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242
arrangement naturally added to system cost and complexity

and had a negative impact on overall reliability. 5 The primary

villain in the program’s escalating cost, however, was contractor overruns in the software area, where major difficulties

were surfacing. Because the WWMCCS computers’ standard

software was written to operate in a batch-processing mode,

complex software modification and retrofit operations were

necessary to make the computers operate in the real-time

interactive fashion demanded by NORAD. As with more complex hardware, more complex software both increased costs

and raised the likelihood of system failures.6

But the additional effort, equipment, and money by no means

resolved the problems encountered by each of Program 427M’s

three system segments. Consider the Space Computational Center, which was originally intended to host a large scientific computer. This plan had been abandoned when NORAD was in -

structed to use the WWMCCS Honeywell 6080 standard

computers—essentially business machines—that were incapable

of performing many of the data-processing functions that were

described in the baseline requirements for the SCC. A second

Honeywell computer was acquired, but by no means was this a

solution to all of the problems. With its computers unable to

meet specified performance standards, NORAD had no choice

but to downgrade those standards. Things appeared equally

dark for Program 427M’s second segment, the NORAD computer

system, where by 1977 NORAD’s deputy commander for operations was pointing out how—largely because of the limitations of

the WWMCCS standard computers–—some 49 NCS program

and modification requests were outstanding that were consid -

ered absolutely essential if the Combat Operations Center was to

perform its missions effectively.7

Finally, there was the Communications System Segment,

the linkage between NORAD and the outside world. Plans had

called for the CSS to use two WWMCCS-standard Data Net

355 computers, but serious reliability and interface problems

necessitated the incorporation of two Honeywell 6050 computers

as replacements. Still the problems continued. A variety of

additional equipment was added, increasing the likelihood of

breakdowns and lowering system reliability. In the area of

FAILURES AT NORAD

243
software, things were so bad that they appeared to preclude

the program’s ever achieving initial operational capability. 8

The problems themselves being intractable, the solution NORAD

eventually arrived at was simply to declare rhetorical victory and

move on. A new standard of acceptability was promulgated, a

so-called equivalent operational capability, and in September 1979

the 427M system was said to have achieved it. To many, however, equivalent operational capability was a grim reminder that

after years of effort, NORAD’s new system provided capabilities

to its users no better than the outdated, 1960s-vintage systems

it had replaced. For if the primary criterion for determining a

program’s effectiveness was whether the final product met users’

needs, the 427M Computer Improvement Program had to be

considered wholly ineffective. Something clearly had to be done.

The General Accounting Office recommended to Congress that

NORAD be exempted from the requirement to use WWMCCS

hardware and software, and that all Program 427M’s hardware

and software be replaced with modern, state-of-the-art ADP

equipment.9 This was certainly in accord with the wishes of

NORAD officials, who promptly requested the exemption. But as

had been the case almost a decade earlier, the exception was not

granted.1 0 Such was the context in which the next series of

WWMCCS failures occurred at Cheyenne Mountain, many of

them directly attributable to the problem-plagued 427M system.

Failures at NORAD

To understand the WWMCCS failures that occurred at NORAD,

it is necessary to consider both the way in which the command is linked to other command centers and the nature of

the information that passes over some of those linkages. All

US early warning radars and satellites feed their data to NORAD

headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, and for many sensors,

such as the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, that is the

only place data is sent.

But things operated somewhat differently with respect to the

data from those sensors designed to detect missiles launched

from submarines, including the defense support program infrared satellites and radars of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning

System and the then-under-construction PAVE PAWs radars

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

244
for submarine-launched balistic missile (SLBM) detection and

warning, the first of which came on line in mid-1979. True,

NORAD receives data from those systems, which it then processes and transmits in near real time to four key command

centers: the National Military Command Center, the Alternate

National Military Command Center, the Strategic Air Command headquarters, and the Canadian Federal Warning Center in Ottawa. But because of the short-warning times in volved

in a SLBM attack, the command centers also receive the raw

data directly from the sensors. Should SLBMs be detected,

duty officers at NMCC, ANMCC, and SAC would have two

separate displays of the same attack data. 1 1

The communications circuits linking NORAD to the other

command centers for this purpose were dedicated; that is,

they were used for no other purpose. One might also imagine,

missile attacks being rare, that the circuits would not be much

used, but this is not the case for two reasons. First, so that

the other command centers could continuously check that the

circuits linking them to NORAD were open and properly functioning, NORAD had to continuously transmit a routine message to the three command centers. This message, just filler

consisting of a series of zeroes, said in effect, “No missiles for

you today.” Second, while real missiles might indeed be rare,

possible missile threats were considerably more common. The

infrared sensors of the defense support program satellites, for

example, continually detect a wide range of phenomena—fires,

natural gas explosions, and reflected sunlight as well as burning rocket motors—that require identification and evaluation.

At such times, the zeroes in NORAD’s filler message would be

replaced by actual numbers, and the duty officers at the various command centers would go into action. All possible indications of attack, even those involving ambiguous data, were

sufficient to initiate a formal evaluative process.1 2

The first step of this process was known as a missile display

conference, and these conferences were remarkably common,

indeed routine. During the 18-month period from January

1979 through the end of June 1980, some 3,703 such conferences were held, averaging almost seven a day. During a missile display conference, duty officers at the command centers

would evaluate the situation, and, in virtually all instances,

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would quickly determine that no credible threat to the North

American continent existed. NORAD’s commander would then

terminate the conference. But if things remained in doubt and

the possibility of a threat persisted, the commander would up

the ante, convening a threat assessment conference. Its purpose was twofold, both to determine the nature of the threat

and to take preliminary steps to enhance force survivability.

With this type of conference more senior officers would be

brought in, including SAC’s commander and the chairman of

the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During the 18-month period just

mentioned, four such conferences took place. If the situation

could not be resolved during the threat assessment conference, the final step involved convening a missile attack conference. Here, all of the most senior military and government

officials would participate, including the president. As far as is

known, no missile attack conference has ever been held. 1 3

Of the four threat assessment conferences held during the

18-month period in 1979–80, two were attributable to an old

FSS-7 radar located at Mount Hebo, Washington. As one of

the six original “fuzzy sevens” designed to detect SLBM

launches, it was seriously outdated. The Mount Hebo radar

was slated to be replaced in the early 1980s by the new PAVE

PAWS radar at Beale AFB in California, but at the time, the

phased array radar was not yet fully operational.

The first of the threat assessment conferences took place on

3 October 1979, when the Mount Hebo radar picked up a

decaying rocket body in low orbit. Just like a live missile, it

showed up as a triangle on the “green monster” at NORAD, a

washing machine-sized green phosphor radar monitor—surplus from the FAA that had been designed in the 1950s to

track airplanes, not missiles.14 The Mount Hebo radar then

generated a false launch and impact report.1 5 NORAD’s commander was immediately notified, and a threat assessment

conference was convened before it was determined that no

real threat existed. Five months later, the Mount Hebo radar

did it again. On 15 March 1980 the radar detected four Soviet

SLBMs that had been launched from the Kuril Islands, north

of Japan, as part of a troop-training exercise. In this instance,

the radar falsely predicted that one of the missiles had an

impact point in the United States.

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Another threat assessment conference was convened before

the threat was cleared. 1 6 Arguably, data that is received from a

known offender such as the old Mount Hebo fuzzy seven should

be viewed with skepticism, but NORAD could not afford to

take chances. This was especially so since, beginning in the

late 1970s, Soviet Yankee-class ballistic missile submarines

had begun approaching to within a few hundred miles of the

US coasts, a position from which many command and control

facilities and military installations could be destroyed almost

without warning.

The other two threat assessment conferences were more

directly attributable to problems with NORAD’s computers.

The first of these, which took place during the morning hours

of 9 November 1979, was certainly dramatic enough. The

alert-code status board lit up as NORAD’s WWMCCS computers indicated that a massive Soviet attack was in progress. A

number of SLBMs had apparently been launched off the West

Coast of the United States, and a missile display conference

was immediately initiated. With the attack continuing, this

conference was promptly elevated to a threat-assessment conference; appropriately enough, since, by all indications, military commanders had only about five minutes to act before the

first missile detonated on US soil.1 7

Things were hardly unambiguous, however, and many conference participants quickly doubted that an actual attack

was in progress. Their reason was a good one: NORAD had the

ability to initiate instantaneous conferences with all of the

sensor sites; it had promptly done so, and none of them had

detected any missile launches. 1 8 With missiles being reported

at NORAD headquarters but not by the sensors, it just had to

be an error. But on the off chance that it wasn’t, prudence

dictated that precautionary actions be taken. SAC B-52 bomber crews were instructed to stand by and await further in -

structions, and the Minuteman missile force was placed on

low-level alert. Jet interceptors were scrambled from US and

Canadian air bases. The president’s National Emergency Airborne Command Post plane took off from Andrews AFB (by

one account, without having heard from President Carter). 1 9 To

clear the way for all the military air activity that might follow,

buzzers were sounded at air traffic control centers across the

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country, and controllers began radioing all commercial aircraft

to be prepared to land.2 0 But the skeptics had it right: the

missiles were not real. What had happened was that an Air

Force technician at NORAD’s Combat Operations Center had

inadvertently loaded a training tape into the on-line WWMCCS

computers. The tape’s scenario was a dandy, a Soviet SLBM

attack that, by one description, “annihilated the world in high

fidelity.”2 1 An interface problem had allowed the training data

to enter the operational portion of the missile warning system.

Given all the heat WWMCCS had been taking recently, the

incident was precisely the type the Pentagon would have loved

to have avoided altogether—or, at any rate, to have kept firmly

under wraps. The problem was that a Washington Star reporter,

working on an unrelated story, happened to be at an air traffic

control facility when the alert took place. The story

broke—and with a vengeance. However naive or exaggerated the

subsequent criticisms may have been, and military officials

suggested they were both, the implications of the incident

were sobering. One was the suggestion, reiterated endlessly in

the press, that accidental nuclear war could actually happen.

The strategic nuclear forces had been alerted, after all. The

title of a U.S. News and World Report article, “Nuclear War by

Accident—Is It Impossible?” provides a sense of what the Pentagon had to face in the public relations area.2 2 Another suggestion was that the WWMCCS was simply incapable of dealing with an actual crisis. In this “Six Minute War,” it was not

until a minute after the first nuclear warheads were supposed

to have detonated that Air Force technicians determined with

certainty that an error had taken place. Throughout those

minutes, President Carter and Defense Secretary Harold

Brown had never been contacted. What would have happened,

it was asked, if the attack had been real?

An official response was obviously necessary, and early Pentagon explanations attributed the incident to a “mechanical

malfunction” in the computer’s electronic routing of the war

game. Subsequent explanations invoked human error. But such

explanations did little but further fuel critics’ fears of accidental nuclear war. Unable to respond in any meaningful way to

such charges—after all, saying that “things don’t always work”

or that “the system is ninety-five percent reliable” is hardly

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248
adequate when nuclear war is at issue—the Pentagon quickly

resorted to silence. It was a silence that would be broken only

once, three weeks later, when it was announced that the prob -

lem had been fixed. 2 3 There had been no accidental nuclear

war, but the damage to WWMCCS’s public image inflicted by

NORAD’s Six Minute War had been considerable.

The major fix introduced by NORAD to guarantee against

the recurrence of such an incident was a prudent one. NORAD

established an off-site test facility in Colorado Springs so that

software development, testing, and training no longer used the

on-line computer system in the Cheyenne Mountain complex.

A “functional equivalent” of Cheyenne Mountain’s 427M system, the $16 million test facility featured leased Honeywell

computers and other equipment purchased from Ford Aerospace Communications Corporation on a delegation of procurement authority—meaning that the need for the facility

was considered sufficiently urgent by top Pentagon officials

that the normal approval and procurement process, which

ordinarily takes up to 18 months, was expedited to two

months. An operational capability was fielded within a year.

With their new facility, NORAD officials argued confidently,

the type of false alert that had occurred on 9 November 1979,

would never happen again. 2 4

NORAD was right: that type of false alert would not recur.

But an equally serious failure (indeed, perhaps an even more

serious one considering how US-Soviet relations had deterio -

rated as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) took

place at NORAD only seven months later. The time was 2:30

A.M., 3 June 1980, when SAC headquarters at Offutt AFB received warning that the United States was under attack. The

warning, transmitted to SAC over NORAD’s dedicated circuits,

showed that two SLBMs had been launched against the United

States. The indication was that the missiles had been fired

using a depressed ballistic trajectory, meaning that they would

strike the United States in as little as three minutes.2 5 Eighteen seconds later, the display showed that two additional

SLBMs had been launched. SAC personnel did not actually see

the missiles; what they saw was that some of the zeros in the

standard NORAD filler message had been replaced with the

number two. SAC duty personnel immediately turned to their

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249
other displays, the ones receiving data directly from the early

warning sensors, but no missile launches were indicated. It

was ambiguous, but things appeared sufficiently serious that

the SAC duty controller ordered B-52 and FB-111 bomber

crews and supporting tanker crews to go to their aircraft and

start their engines. Alert messages were also flashed to the

Minuteman and ballistic missile submarine forces. After another few seconds, however, the twos disappeared from SAC’s

display screen. SAC officers promptly got on the telephone to

NORAD to find out what was going on. They were told that

NORAD had received no indication of any missile launches

from the early warning sensors, and was not transmitting

such information to other command posts. The SAC crews

were ordered to shut down their engines but to remain in their

aircraft.2 6

This watchful peace would not last long. Within minutes,

the warning display at SAC again indicated that the United

States was under attack, this time by two land-based Soviet

missiles. At about the same time, the NMCC received indications that two more SLBMs had been launched. As before,

these indications came over the dedicated NORAD circuit, not

directly from the sensors themselves. Also as before, the alleged missiles were being launched in pairs, as twos replaced

the zeros in the NORAD-generated filler message. The duty

officer at NMCC promptly convened a missile display conference, the lowest type, which brought in personnel from SAC,

ANMCC, and NORAD. All of the command posts were convinced the attack data were erroneous, since there were no

indications of attack from the sensors, the attack did not

follow any logical pattern, and different command posts were

receiving different indications of attack. Had the system been

working properly, all four command posts should have had

the same data in front of them.2 7

The attack data appeared to be random, suggesting a computer malfunction of some sort at NORAD. But because its

source had yet to be ascertained, the duty officer at NMCC

decided to convene a threat assessment conference. His reason for making this apparently paradoxical move—raising the

level of seriousness to reduce it—was so that NORAD’s commander could personally inform all concerned parties that no

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

250
real crisis was in progress. NORAD’s commander promptly did

so, the NMCC duty officer terminated the conference, and

SAC’s bomber and tanker crews were sent back to their barracks. The threat had been cleared, but the threat assessment

conference had one final effect. As part of the programmed

responses to the conference, CINCPAC’s airborne command

post took off from its base in Hawaii, ready to help fight World

War III.2 8

NORAD’s missile attack warning system had again indicated that the United States was under attack, and again no

Soviet attack had taken place. Unlike the insertion of a war

game into the computer the previous November, however, it

would not be so easy for NORAD to determine the cause of the

error this time. It was apparently a random computer error,

its possible causes manifold, and tracking it down would be

difficult. What NORAD technicians decided to do was to continue to run their equipment in the same configuration used

on 3 June in the hope that the error would repeat itself. Sure

enough, three days later NMCC and SAC again received indications of attack over the NORAD circuit but not directly from

the early warning sensors themselves. As a precaution, SAC

bomber and tanker crews were again sent to their planes and

their engines were started. Duty officers contacted NORAD,

which again confirmed that no threat existed. Shortly thereafter, additional indications of missile attack were received by

both SAC and NMCC over the NORAD circuit. There being no

question of an error this time, SAC promptly ordered its crews

to stand down. Not in the business of sending false reports of

attack to the strategic nuclear forces, NORAD switched operations over to its backup WWMCCS computer. 2 9

A massive effort ensued by NORAD, government, and industry computer experts to try to locate the source of the error.

The conclusion they ultimately arrived at was that it had been

caused by a faulty integrated circuit—a computer chip—in one

of NORAD’s NOVA 840 communications multiplexers. The multiplexer in question, produced by the Data General Corporation,

was part of NORAD’s Communications System Segment, the

system that takes information from NORAD and puts it into

message form for transmission to other command posts.3 0 The

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251
false indications of attack had been caused by a computer

chip about the size of a dime, costing forty-six cents. 3 1

While in technical terms the failure was small, the political

ramifications were substantially larger. As soon as the incidents of 3 and 6 June became known, a flurry of press attention, a cacophony of criticism—international in scope—and

subsequent demands for system reform rapidly ensued. The

reason was exactly the same as before: in the minds of many,

the failures raised the specter of accidental nuclear war. Members of Congress publicly voiced their concern that incidents

of this type were precisely the sort of things that could trigger

such a war. The Soviet Union, for its part, accused the United

States of harboring a “nuclear persecution complex.”3 2 Through -

out, the Pentagon found itself on the defensive, unable to do

much more than provide lame-sounding assurances that the

United States had in no way come close to accidentally initiating a nuclear war. 3 3 But even stalwart Pentagon supporters

such as Sen. John Tower of Texas found such assurances

unpersuasive, and predictions were that a congressional in -

vestigation would surely follow.

Feeling the critical heat, NORAD promptly took steps to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents. New software was

added that could trace a message through the entire preparation phase, ensuring that what goes in is what comes out. New

displays were added inside the Combat Operations Center so

that NORAD could monitor its transmissions to other command posts. Had such a capability been in place earlier, NORAD

duty personnel would quickly have been able to see that they

were transmitting erroneous indications of attack to other

command centers. (In a related move, SAC duty officers were

instructed to compare NORAD data to those received by the

sensor systems themselves before ordering alert crews to their

aircraft.) NORAD also changed its protocol, so that now all

outgoing warning messages had to be approved by NORAD’s

commander. Finally, the format that NORAD used in its transmissions to the other command centers was changed. Instead

of a message consisting of numbers of missiles detected, with

zeros indicating an all-clear status, the filler message would be a

standard communications test pattern indicating the status of

the system.3 4

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252
Perhaps as well as any example from WWMCCS’s troubled

history, the responses to the computer failures at NORAD

pointed to one of the central ambiguities surrounding the concept of effectiveness—the fact that there were different constituencies with different sets of goals evaluating the system.

In this case, strikingly different sets of evaluative criteria were

applied to NORAD’s performance by those inside and outside

of the Department of Defense. For their part, NORAD and

Pentagon officials who dealt with the criticisms were frequently

bewildered by all of the controversy. After all, a few minor

failures in a highly complex system—failures that were easily

remedied—were of small consequence. They had no major

consequences and hardly warranted characterizing a vast,

multibillion dollar operation as ineffective. In this rational administrative calculus, effectiveness seems to represent a sort

of balance sheet upon which the positive and negative aspects

of organizational activity are added or subtracted, yielding an

overall sense of the adequacy of performance. If the failures

are small and the successes large, the logic runs, the overall

result will be gauged acceptable. NORAD performs its functions admirably most of the time, and, failures notwithstanding, the June incidents never had come close to unleashing

America’s strategic nuclear forces.

NORAD’s critics in the Congress, press, and public were

clearly wielding a quite different evaluative yardstick as they

considered these incidents. Implicit in their uproar was the

notion that these failures, indeed any failure at all at such a

critical facility as NORAD, were intolerable. To critics, even

minor failures demonstrated that the system intended to control the nation’s nuclear weapons was out of kilter, certainly

not effective, and possibly dangerous. Failure raised the specter of accidental nuclear war, and the very existence of that

possibility, however remote, was adjudged intolerable. For them,

effective performance necessarily connoted perfect performance.

Within two weeks of the June false alerts, Senate Armed

Services Committee chairman John C. Stennis asked two of

his committee members, Gary Hart of Colorado and Barry

Goldwater of Arizona, to investigate incidents at NORAD. Their

final report was released the following October, and its overarching conclusion, one that echoed earlier Pentagon statements,

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253
was that the United States had never come close to unleashing an accidental nuclear war. Yes, some actions had been

taken in response to the erroneous indications of attack, such

as SAC bombers and tankers crews being ordered to their

aircraft, but these were merely precautionary steps to enhance

force survivability. Despite the computer’s problems, the hu -

man part of the system had detected the problem. “In a real

sense,” the senators concluded, “the total system worked

properly.”3 5

What was found to work less well was the overall management of early warning assets by the Air Force, a condition the

senators described as “disturbing.” Specifically, management

responsibility was found to be divided among a number of

commands. The Strategic Air Command had responsibility for

managing, maintaining, and operating all of the nation’s early

warning sensors. The Air Force Communications Command

(AFCC) had responsibility for those related communications

and electronics systems used to transmit the sensor data. The

Aerospace Defense Command, the US portion of NORAD, was

responsible for operating and managing the Cheyenne Mountain facility and for interpreting the data made available to

them by SAC and AFCC. A final organization, the Air Force

Systems Command, had responsibility for developing new early

warning assets. Because of this fragmentation, the senators

found that the missile warning function was not being treated

as a “true overall system.” The organizational structure that

was in place, they said, fragmented management responsibility and led to less effective system performance. 3 6 Though

focused now on a single WWMCCS element, NORAD, it was a

criticism that had haunted the larger system since its inception.

Senators Hart and Goldwater found the shortcomings in one

other area sufficiently troubling to warrant comment: automatic data processing. In particular, they were concerned with

the way ADP systems were acquired and how this acquisition

process influenced the systems then in use by NORAD. The

problem, they said, was Public Law 89-306, the 1965 Brooks

Act, which assigned responsibility for ADP procurements not

only to the agency that would actually use the equip ment—here

the Department of Defense—but also to the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration.

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254
The problem with this arrangement for a critical command

such as NORAD was that it was simply too slow. A typical

ADP upgrade might take as long as seven years, and, given

the extraordinary pace of technological advance in the computer field, this meant that ADP equipment would often be

functionally obsolete before it was ever brought into operation.

To make matters worse, the need for multiple approvals specified in the Brooks Act had the effect of creating procurement

by committee, resulting in a least-common-denominator capability to satisfy all involved constituencies, not the best capability available. What was needed was a mechanism by which

critical commands such as NORAD could circumvent the act’s

cumbersome procedures when necessary, but no such mechanism was then in the cards.37 Thus, the second decade of

WWMCCS’s existence ended in much the same way it had

begun, with a series of system failures, subsequent criticisms,

and calls for reform.

Notes

1. Comptroller General, NORAD’s Information Processing Improvement

Program—Will It Enhance Mission Capability?: Report to the Congress,

LCD-78-117 (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office [GAO], 21

September 1978), 7.

2. Ibid., 13–14.

3. Comptroller General, NORAD’s Missile Warning System: What Went

Wrong?—Report to the Chairman, Committee on Government Operations,

House of Representatives, MASAD-81-30 (Washington, D.C.: GAO, 15 May

1981), 3, 9–10.

4. Frederick W. Eisele, “NORAD Updates C3,” Signal 29 (September

1974): 10.

5. Comptroller General, NORAD’s Information, 14–15, 26.

6. ———, NORAD’s Missile Warning System, 9.

7. ———, NORAD’s Information, 16.

8. House, Committee on Appropriations, Attack Warning: Better

Management Required to Resolve NORAD Integration Deficiencies—Report to

the Chairman, Subcommittee on Defense, IMTEC-89-26 (Washington, D.C.:

GAO, July 1989), 9–10.

9. Comptroller General, NORAD’s Information, 29.

10. ———, NORAD’s Missile Warning System, 17.

11. Senate, Recent False Alerts From the Nation’s Missile Attack Warning

System: Report of Gary Hart and Barry Goldwater to the Committee on

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255
Armed Services (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 9 October

1980), 3.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 4–5.

14. “U.S. Uses ‘50s Radar to Track ‘80s Missiles,” Washington Times, 1 6

June 1989, 5.

15. Senate, Recent False Alerts, 5.

16. Comptroller General, NORAD’s Missile Warning System, 3–4.

17. Richard Thaxton, “Nuclear War by Computer Chip,” The Progressive,

August 1980, 29.

18. “Nuclear War by Accident—Is It Impossible?” U.S. News & World

Report, 19 December 1983, 27.

19. Thaxton, 29.

20. William J. Broad, “Computers and the U.S. Military Don’t Mix,”

Science, 14 March 1980, 1183.

21. Bruce Gumble, “Air Force Upgrading Defenses at NORAD,” Defense

Electronics 21 (August 1985): 86.

22. “Nuclear War by Accident,” 27.

23. Broad, 1183.

24. Comptroller General, NORAD’s Missile Warning System, 13.

25. Thaxton, 29.

26. Senate, 5.

27. Ibid., 6.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., 7.

30. Ibid.

31. Thaxton, 29.

32. Ibid., 30.

33. Richard Halloran, “Senators Report False Warnings of Soviet

Missiles,” New York Times, 29 October 1980, A16.

34. Senate, 8.

35. Ibid., 8–9.

36. Ibid., 9, 13.

37. Ibid., 13.

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PART III

Implementation
Chapter 14

Strategic Modernization

The World Wide Military Command and Control System had

really taken a beating during the 1970s. It had failed to provide timely, reliable service during a series of military exercises and had broken down during actual crises. The failures

at NORAD had rendered problematical the effectiveness of

WWMCCS in what was certainly its most important role: providing the national leadership with accurate and timely information on nuclear attack. Many in the defense establishment

began openly expressing their dismay at the WWMCCS’s vulnerability, its marginal capabilities, its “gaping holes,” and its

“scary gaps” in coverage. 1 Others publicly and unfavorably

compared WWMCCS to the ostensibly more survivable and

enduring Soviet system with its hardened facilities and mobile

command centers, the suggestion being that these asymmetries undercut deterrence and threatened America’s national

security. WWMCCS “verges on a national scandal,” others

said, forcing commanders to “live in the dark ages.”2 Command and control was portrayed as a glaring military weakness, as America’s “Achilles’ heel.”3

Some criticisms came from the most authoritative of

sources: people who had seen capabilities suffer severely at

the hands of service parochialism and the evolutionary approach. DCA director Samuel L. Gravely Jr. pointed out how

the command and control establishment that had evolved under such an orientation was an “ill-defined and unbounded

monstrosity . . . an enigma with more people planning, programming, preaching and engineering it than we have understanding it or effectively using it.” This had, he said, resulted

in serious problems of interoperability and effectiveness when

the system was called upon to perform in a joint-service environment. Quoting the comic strip character Pogo, Gravely concluded gravely, “We have met the enemy and they is us.”4

 As if

to underscore his concerns, and even as the failures at NORAD

were in progress, an incident took place that underscored in a

dramatic and public way the disconcerting fact that jointness

259
in military operations, and by extension the capability for effective command and control, were far from a reality.

Operation Eagle Claw

That incident took place on 24 April 1980, when members

of the military’s elite Delta Force undertook an operation to

rescue 53 Americans held hostage in Tehran, Iran. The American Embassy there had been taken over by Iranian extremists

on 4 November the previous year, and President Carter had

promptly ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for a rescue

operation that could be put into effect should diplomatic efforts to free the hostages fail. 5

 That mission was given the

code name Eagle Claw. The plan called for six planes—three

MC-130 transport planes and three EC-130 tankers for refueling—to carry the Delta Force, its equipment, and fuel from

Egypt to Oman. There the aircraft would be refueled, and,

flying a ground-hugging route to avoid detection by radar,

then proceed to a secret landing strip in Iran called Desert

One, about three hundred miles from Tehran. There they

would rendezvous with eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters,

launched from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. The troops

would then transfer to the helicopters, which would fly to

Desert Two, a hide site located 50 miles outside of Tehran;

there they would rendezvous with two defense intelligence

agents who would provide them with vehicles. 6 Plans called for

Delta Force to be driven to the embassy compound that night.

The hostages would be freed and loaded on to helicopters for a

brief flight to a nearby air strip, where they would be transferred to C-141 transports and flown to Egypt. 7

Anyway, that was the plan. As it soon became known to the

world, what in fact happened was that the effort to rescue the

hostages came to a dismal and premature end. Only six of the

Sea Stallion helicopters ever made it to Desert One; one was

forced to land because its instruments showed that one of its

main rotors was about to malfunction, while another had to

turn back after flying through a severe sandstorm. Of those

choppers that made it to Desert One, one had hydraulic prob -

lems and was inoperable. The loss of three helicopters meant

that there was now insufficient airlift to carry Delta Force, and

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260
that 20 men critical to the mission would have to be left

behind. But even if the mission proceeded, were five choppers

sufficient? Perhaps, but what if some wouldn’t start the next

day, or were otherwise disabled? Delta Force ground commander Col Charlie Beckwith concluded that the margin of

error was now “just too close,” and he was forced to abort the

mission.8

The evacuation from Desert One added serious injury to

insult. One of the helicopters banked sharply to the left as it

lifted off, slicing into the fuselage of one of the fuel-laden

transport planes. Flames soared hundreds of feet into the sky,

joined by Redeye missiles ignited by the fierce heat. Five airmen and three Marines died in the inferno. The remainder of

the force boarded the transports and flew to safety, leaving

behind in the desert five intact helicopters, communications

equipment, weapons, secret documents, and the bodies of

their comrades.9

In the wake of Eagle Claw, the joint chiefs commissioned a

special operations review group headed by Adm James L. Holloway (US Navy, Retired), to examine the whole operation. The

group’s report, afterwards known as the Holloway Report, concluded that compartmentalization and “ad hoc arrangements”

had compromised the organization and planning of the operation. Highly placed observers would later acknowledge that a

driving force behind the operation had been to ensure that all

four of the services were given their piece of the action, and

what resulted was Marine pilots flying Navy helicopters carrying Army troops, all the while supported by the Air Force.

While it all certainly smacked of “jointness,” the participation

of all four services meant that parochial interests dictated the

nature of the force that was used, to the detriment of mission

cohesion and integration. Marine helicopter pilots were selected to join Navy pilots in flying the Sea Stallion helicopters

from the Nimitz into Iran, whereas Air Force helicopter pilots

experienced in long-range flying would have been a more logical choice. 1 0 The problem was succinctly summed up by Colo -

nel Beckwith: “In Iran we had an ad hoc affair. We went out,

found bits and pieces, people and equipment, brought them

together occasionally and then asked them to perform a highly

complex mission. The parts all performed, but they didn’t

STRATEGIC MODERNIZATION

261
necessarily perform as a team.”1 1 Until they could do so, many

believed, the problems so painfully apparent in Operation

Eagle Claw would recur in the future.

Corrective Actions

Despite the characterizations of the previous decade as one

of neglect of the command and control function, it had of

course been far from that. Despite the problems and the failures that in fact occurred, despite the lack of “jointness” evidenced by incidents such as the hostage rescue operation,

numerous changes had taken place in both the technological

and organizational areas. That shortcomings remained nobody

denied. As President Carter’s secretary of defense, Harold

Brown, pointed out, while WWMCCS’s ability to meet the doctrinal demands of survivability, flexibility, and endurance still

fell short, a broad-gauged effort to remedy the situation was

under way. 1 2 Defense journals seconded this, reporting how

command and control, while by no means the most heavily

funded defense area, had emerged as a key area of attention

for the National Command Authorities. 1 3 Thus, many of the

deficiencies the Reagan administration said it found upon its

arrival in Washington in January 1981—and which it went to

extraordinary lengths to remedy—had already been recognized, with corrective action in progress.

Corrective measures were also being pursued by Congress.

During the months following the new administration’s arrival,

Congress was taking action to improve the “necessary evil” of

command and control. In mid-1981 the Senate Armed Services Committee recommended on its own initiative—that is to

say, before the administration itself had proposed any im -

provements—that some $340 million be targeted for WWMCCS

enhancements and upgrades; thus anticipating many of the

administration’s recommendations that would come later that

year. The committee specifically recognized an urgent need for

hardening command and control assets against the disruptive

effects of electromagnetic pulse and for improving their resistance to signal jamming and interception. Relevant programs

were endorsed in the Senate/House authorization bill for fis cal

year 1982. 1 4

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At the same time, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)

was considering what to do about WWMCCS modernization.

The CBO presented three options to Congress, all of them

concerned with enhancing command and control responsiveness in the transattack period. The major emphases of Option

One involved improvements in attack warning and surveillance; specifically, upgrading the existing two PAVE PAWS radar

sites and deploying another two, fielding more sophisticated

airborne command posts, and upgrading communications

links. Option Two was directed toward system survivability

and endurance, particularly a need for greater mobility for

command posts and communications facilities that could be

met by installing them on trucks capable of avoiding Soviet

missiles by randomly and covertly roaming the countryside

during times of crisis. The final and most ambitious option

was to pursue the objectives of Options One and Two. 1 5 All in

all, it hardly seemed a case of Congress suffering from chronic

command and control neglect, and it was hardly surprising

that there was little debate or congressional resistance when

the administration presented its own plan to modernize America’s strategic forces that October. 1 6

This is not to say that anyone was particularly sanguine

about conditions as they then stood, and nobody denied that

serious problems remained to be solved. But many of these

problems had their origins as much in bureaucratic politics—

historical differences between the military services, existing

force structure, and the desire of the military services to main -

tain control over existing command and control assets—as in

any real or imagined period of neglect. If, as some claimed,

military commanders were in fact living in the command and

control Dark Ages, it was in large measure because their own

services had determined that was where they should live. Not

that any of this mattered much to the triumphant members of

the Reagan administration; they attributed their election to

Reagan’s characterization of their predecessors as “soft” on

defense. Self-confident and assured of its mandate and its

vision, the new administration publicly dedicated itself to mak -

ing America’s military capabilities second to none, with command

and control—especially strategic command and con trol—quickly

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assuming a new prominence within the overall panoply of

defense priorities.

The Strategic Modernization Program

On 1 October 1981 the Reagan administration issued Na -

tional Security Decision Directive 12, a document addressing

the total strategic forces program of the United States. The

following day, President Reagan publicly outlined a comprehensive strategic modernization program to improve the capabilities of those forces. The program had five parts, three of

which involved modernization of strategic weapons systems.

Examples included strengthening and improving the accuracy

of the land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)

force, including the deployment of the MX missile; modernizing and improving the penetrating capability of the strategic

bomber force, including the deployment of the B-1 bomber;

and pursuing new, more accurate SLBMs that would give a

hard-kill capability to US submarines at sea. The fourth item

concerned the modernization of US air defenses. The final

item involved major improvements in command, control, and

communications assets, most of them falling directly under

the WWMCCS umbrella. Whereas WWMCCS had previously

been an area lacking a strong constituency in the defense

establishment, and hence of relatively low priority, the administration planned to change that in a most visible and

dramatic way. Of the five concerns, command and control was

designated the “highest priority element,” equal in importance

to the much better known weapons systems it supported.

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger underscored the new

orientation when he told the Congress, “I can’t think of any

higher priority than improving the [command and control] aspects of this whole program.”17 Thus commenced the most

ambitious and far-reaching effort to improve command and

control since the dawn of the nuclear age.

Documents distributed by the White House provided specifics about the command and control improvements to be undertaken under the broader rubric of strategic modernization,

many of them deriving from a strategic connectivity study conducted by the Pentagon the previous April. These documents

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fell into four major categories, the first of which was a warning

and attack assessment. Here, the performance, survivability,

and coverage of the array of surveillance radars and satellites

that provided early warning of missile attack and subsequent

attack assessment were to be substantially enhanced. The

second area was command centers; and the initiatives here

involved upgrading the capabilities and survivability of the

three national-level command centers, the CINC’s 15 command

posts, and the airborne command centers that would direct

the strategic forces during crises up to and including general

nuclear war. Third was the area of strategic communications,

where the focus was on enhancing and restructuring a wide

range of existing assets, plus the deployment of new assets so

that commanders could be linked with the strategic forces

under all conditions of peace, crisis, and war. Finally, what

was described as a “vigorous and comprehensive” research

and development program would be undertaken with the goal

of fielding a command and control capability that could survive the first salvo of a nuclear exchange and endure for an

extended period thereafter. Specifics here included the hard -

ening of assets against the effects of electromagnetic pulse

and improving their resistance to jamming. 1 8

Administration officials were quick to point out how the

Strategic Modernization Program represented a quantum leap

forward in capabilities and how it had been designed to provide the National Command Authorities with a number of courses

of action not currently available. With the new capabilities in

place, it was said, the president would have a “launch under

attack” capability, allowing him to order a retaliatory nuclear

strike after detecting Soviet missiles heading toward the

United States but before they had detonated. Such an approach had never been considered feasible in the past because

the sensor and surveillance systems providing warning of attack were simply too fallible and error prone. Launching the

missiles before unambiguous evidence of attack was received

(in the form of actual nuclear detonations) ran the risk of

accidental nuclear war, a possibility dramatically underscored

by the recent NORAD failures. With the improvements in radar

and satellite sensor systems called for by the administration’s

program, the sensors would be made sufficiently reliable that

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evidence of an attack would be unambiguous and launch on

warning a viable military option.

The other goals of the program were equally ambitious. The

improvements would permit the United States to engage in a

protracted nuclear conflict over a period of days or even weeks,

it was said, and this was where the new, highly reliable and

survivable communications capabilities came into play. Among

others, initiatives in this area included communications satellites mounted on MX missiles that could be launched into orbit

to replace satellites that had been destroyed, plus mobile command centers and communications facilities that could escape

destruction and permit military action to continue after an in -

itial nuclear exchange. With guaranteed communications capabilities in place, the NCA could elect to fire only a limited

number of missiles, for example, while withholding the rest as a

negotiating chip or for use in subsequent strikes. Similarly, the

improvements would give far greater flexibility to the new B-1

bomber force, allowing bombers returning from an attack on the

Soviet Union to be directed to surviving air bases, where they

could take on additional fuel and weapons and receive orders for

subsequent missions. “Over the past decade, we have not mod -

ernized communications and control systems fast enough,”

White House officials said, “As a result, these systems are not as

survivable as we would like, and they could not operate reliably

over an extended period after a Soviet attack, if that proved

necessary.”1 9 The major criteria of command and control effectiveness being advanced by the administration in the Strategic

Modernization Program were thus precisely those that had con -

cerned the WWMCCS Council, the WWMCCS Architect, and oth -

ers: reliability, survivability, and endurance.

To these criteria must be added interoperability, one of the

areas “most neglected over the past ten years,” in the words of

James P. Wade Jr., principal deputy undersecretary of defense

for research and engineering. 2 0 Here, the administration’s point

was to ensure communications across network boundaries—

between military and civilian leaders, say, or between US and

NATO forces, the latter being an area where interoperability of

systems was considered especially deficient.2 1 To address this

need, Secretary Weinberger appointed Wade to head an execu -

tive committee whose purpose was take a systems approach to

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the issue of strategic connectivity throughout the Department

of Defense, an effort to view command and control as a totality

spanning traditional service and agency lines.2 2 In the past

there had been talk of such things, of course, but an administrationwide effort to actually effect it was unprecedented.

Donald C. Latham, the new assistant secretary of defense

for C

3

I, immediately began stressing the centrality of com -

mand and control in the overall defense equation by proposing

what he described as a “C 3I Triad.” Following the White House

lead, the first leg of the triad was a warning and attack assessment. It was concerned with early warning satellites, radars, and other assets used to unambiguously ascertain

whether an attack was taking place, and, if so, its precise

nature. Information from these sensors would be passed along

to various command centers, the second leg of the triad. The

final triad leg involved the supporting communications networks that provided connectivity between the NCA and the

strategic forces. All three legs were crucial, Latham pointed

out, and the nature of the Soviet threat and the requirements

imposed by US strategic doctrine required that all three be

absolutely credible under all possible military circumstances. 2 3

Latham underscored his point by noting the essential duality of WWMCCS. WWMCCS was a “two system concept,” he

said, one part concerning military needs through the level of

conventional war, while the other was oriented specifically

toward nuclear conflict. The requirements imposed by each

concept were often dramatically different. WWMCCS had been

designed and developed primarily with the first concept in

mind, Latham argued, and, as far as it went, the United

States had a better system than the Soviet Union. But in

Latham’s view such a system, one in which “you simply don’t

have to have it all,” was necessary but not sufficient.24 Many of

WWMCCS’s peacetime functions would not require prompt reconstitution in the event of damage or destruction, for in -

stance, whereas almost all of the wartime functions would

have to meet that requirement. Certain capabilities—high frequency communications, for example—were generally appropriate only as a System I capability, given their susceptibility

to disruption in a nuclear environment.

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The other WWMCCS, System II, had to be capable of supporting military operation during times of theater and strategic nuclear warfare. As such, it had to emphasize hardening, recon -

structing assets following a nuclear strike, and maintaining an

ongoing capability for force and status assessment. Examples of

strictly System II capabilities would be the proposed ground

wave emergency network, or the Navy’s extremely low frequency

and Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) systems for communicating with the ballistic missile submarine force. By far the

most serious deficiencies with WWMCCS were said to lie in its

System II capabilities. The Soviets had emphasized hardened

and mobile command and control facilities to a greater extent

than had the United States. The Strategic Modernization Program was intended to redress the imbalance, and this was

where Latham and his colleagues would focus much of their

considerable talents. As they articulated the rationale, America’s

nuclear deterrent was at last to be made credible, something

that in turn required a credible command and control system

with nuclear war-fighting capabilities.

Their interests were soon complemented by the concerns of

defense analysts outside of government, who began pointing

out with almost religious fervor that while the centrality of

command and control in the implementation of US strategic

policy was everywhere implicit, plans seldom reflected key vulnerabilities and real-world system limitations. Numerous articles and several books appeared during the early 1980s that

focused their attention precisely on the lack of survivability,

redundancy, flexibility, endurance, and interoperability that

characterized the command and control area. Almost without

exception, the point of these publications was to sketch out

the extraordinary disjunction between rhetoric and reality, the

gulf separating the requirements placed on the command and

control system and its actual capabilities. A sense of the interest and of the concern that prevailed is captured nicely in the

title of a Yale dissertation, “Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” by Paul Bracken, which, retitled The Command and

Control of Nuclear Forces, became one of the better-known

command and control books of the period. In this new thinking, command and control systems were absolutely central,

“force multipliers” in the buzzword of the time, assets that not

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268
only enhanced the effectiveness of other weapons and forces

but that made their use possible in the first place.

Such were the interest and the plans, but good intentions

had in the past frequently foundered on the shoals of resistance by the services and their supporters in Congress. The

way the Reagan administration endeavored to avoid this prob -

lem was by explicitly linking the funding for command and

control programs to the missiles, bombers, and other highvisibility weapons systems the services coveted. As Latham

pointed out, when the budget packages for the weapons systems were sent to Capitol Hill, they were accompanied by a

funding request “with a protective fence around it” for upgrade

of the relevant command and control systems. 2 5 But as the

administration was quick to learn, the timing was propitious;

the tide had changed. Whereas in the past the hardest task

was “making everybody believe the problem is real,” as Latham

described it, now—thanks to the WWMCCS failures and criticisms of the previous few years—there was remarkably little

debate over the command and control initiatives in Con gress. 2 6

For those in the command and control community, it was a

time of guarded euphoria and jubilation. Their area was at

last receiving the recognition they believed it deserved, and,

perhaps more importantly, a number of strong WWMCCS advocates were now in top government posts.2 7 But this did not

fully allay fears that the traditional antipathy toward command and control might reassert itself and begin to erode the

gains. Some feared that, like weapons systems, command and

control systems might become bargaining chips in future

arms control negotiations. Former DCA director Jon L. Boyes

summed up the concerns when he noted how “unlike weapons, forces, and platforms that can be laid on the bargaining

table, the central nervous-sensory system that holds them together and gives them their credibility cannot.”2 8 What to do?

True, command and control advocates such as Boyes began

pushing for a more substantial voice in policy formulation.

Command and control was finally being viewed as more than

a technical detail among policy makers, but this was seen as a

poor substitute for having people with specific expertise in the

area actually making the decisions. The Strategic Modern ization

STRATEGIC MODERNIZATION

269
Program had ushered in a new era, and what it demanded

were management changes.

A major effort along these lines involved the creation of three

new organizational entities to create closer cooperation between the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs

of Staff organization, and the military services. The first was

the C3 Executive Committee (EXCOM), a top-level group whose

purpose was to make recommendations regarding the allocation of resources for command and control programs. Top

level was indeed the way to describe the committee, for EXCOM consisted of the JCS chairman and the deputy secretary

of defense, with the undersecretary of defense for research

and engineering serving as executive secretary. The second

group was the C3 Review Council, a senior-level group chaired

by the assistant secretary of defense for C3I, and including key

officials from the OSD, the JCSO, and senior officers from the

military services. The purpose of the review council was to

provide senior-level resolution of important command and con -

trol issues, and to submit its recommendations to EXCOM.2 9

Finally, eight specialized panels were established to assist the

review council, their foci including military satellite communications, strategic command and control, the Defense Commu -

nications System, the WWMCCS Intercomputer Network, and

other major areas of concern. Another management initiative

involved reorganizing the Command, Control, and Communications Systems Directorate created within the Joint Chiefs of

Staff organization in early 1979. Whereas before, the directorate had been broken down into two principal elements, strategic and tactical, it was now expanded to three. The first was

the Unified and Specified Command C3 Support Element, established in substantial measure in response to calls from the

commanders in chief and intended as the JCS focal point for

command and control matters of relevance to them. Next was

the Defense Wide C3 Support Element, the purpose of which

was to pursue improvements in programs intended precisely

for broader defense use. Included among these were the Na -

tional Military Command System, AUTOSEVOCOM, and military satellite communications systems. Equally important,

this element was to serve as the JCS focal point for command

and control ADP programs, including WIN and its follow-on

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270
WWMCCS Information System (WIS). Finally, there was the C3

Connectivity and Evaluation Support Element, intended to

evaluate existing systems, identify shortcomings, and develop

specific programs to address them. 3 0

Would these technical improvements and organizational

changes prove sufficient? Surely not in the minds of many

officials, for whom sufficiency represented a sort of ever shifting rainbow’s end. But despite the ever-present need to balance capabilities with costs, even during the munificent early

years of the Reagan administration, the times would prove

rich indeed for WWMCCS. “We put our money where our

mouth is,” quipped Donald Latham. 3 1 And their money would

stay there throughout the Reagan years. Despite CIA reports

in the early 1980s describing a slowdown in the rate of Soviet

military growth, and despite a 1984 NATO report noting that

the rate of growth of Soviet military spending had been cut in

half, the spending on command and control would continue to

increase. 3 2 When Latham arrived in Washington, he inherited

the Carter administration’s FY 1982 command and control

budget of approximately $9.1 billion, or some 5.9 percent of

the total defense budget. By the time Latham departed the

Pentagon in 1987 to become a vice president of Computer

Sciences Corporation, the total for command and control

funding had increased to $21.7 billion, some 7.8 percent of

the vastly expanded defense budget; and it would remain

fairly constant for the remainder of the decade until the end of

the cold war.3 3

Notes

1. James W. Canan, “Steady Steps in Strategic C3I,” Air Force Magazine

70 (June 1987): 44.

2. Julian S. Lake, “C 3 Software Myopia,” Countermeasures 2 (8

December 1976): 62.

3. Tony Velocci, “C3: Strategy for Survival,” National Defense 6 5

(December 1981): 49.

4. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “The DCA—A Rock and a Hard Place,” Signal

34 (April 1980): 8.

5. Senate, Defense Organization: The Need For Change—Staff Report to

the Committee on Armed Services (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing

Office [GPO], October 1985), 359.

STRATEGIC MODERNIZATION

271
6. Charlie A. Beckwith and Donald Knox, Delta Force (New York:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 253.

7. Ibid., 254–55.

8. Ibid., 276–77, 283.

9. Senate, Defense Organization, 361.

10. Ibid., 359, 361–63.

11. Beckwith and Knox, 295.

12. Edgar Ulsamer, “Electronics Takes to the Offensive,” Air Force

Magazine 63 (July 1980): 42.

13. R. J. Raggett, “U.S. Defense Communications: Links to Everywhere,”

NATO’s Fifteen Nations, June–July 1979, 101.

14. House, Strategic Force Modernization Programs: Hearings before the

Subcommittee on Strategic and Theater Forces of the Committee on Armed

Services , 97t h Cong., 1 st sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1981), 113.

15. Harry V. Martin, “Communications Vulnerability,” Military Science &

Technology 2 (June 1982): 44.

16. Richard Halloran, “Nuclear Plans of Reagan Stir Capital Debates,”

New York Times, 5 October 1981, A1.

17. House, Strategic Force, 232–33.

18. “Background Statement from White House on MX Missile and B-1

Bomber,” New York Times , 3 October 1981, A3.

19. Ibid., A3.

20. House, Strategic Force, 211.

21. “Growth in Funding Yields Strategic, Tactical Benefits,” Aviation

Week & Space Technology , 9 December 1985, 46–47.

22. James P. Wade Jr., “The Two Requirements for C3,” Air Force

Magazine 65 (July 1982): 66.

23. Donald E. Fink, “C-Cube; So Far, So Good . . .,” Aviation Week &

Space Technology, 9 December 1985, 11.

24. House, Strategic Force, 236.

25. “Why C3I Is The Pentagon’s Top Priority,” Government Executive 14

(January 1982): 14.

26. House, Strategic Force, 226.

27. Bernard L. Weiss, “Keys to Success in C3I,” Signal 36 (August 1982):

52.

28. Jon L. Boyes, “The Maturing of C3I Policy,” Signal 38 (April 1984):

13.

29. Robert G. Lynn, “C3 Management Evolution,” Signal 39 (November

1984): 21.

30. Ibid., 22.

31. Edgar Ulsamer, “Top Priority for C3I,” Air Force Magazine 69

(September 1986): 137.

32. “NATO Cites Soviet Military Funding Slowdown,” Aviation Week &

Space Technology, 13 February 1984, 140.

33. Phillip J. Klass, “C3 Emerges from Budget Gauntlet with Funds to

Meet Inflation,” Aviation Week & Space Technology , 14 March 1988, 234.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

272
Figure 13. Conception of WWMCCS System Architecture, Given

Revised DODD 5100.30

Source: C. W. Borklund, “Military Communication: The ‘What’ is Much Tougher than the ‘How,’” Government

Executive, June 1976, 25.

STRATEGIC MODERNIZATION

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Figure 14. WWMCCS System Relationships

Source: The World Wide Military Command and Control System—Major Changes Needed in Its Automated

Data Processing Management and Direction, LCD-80-22 (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, 14

December 1979), 3.

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274
Figure 15. The Elements of WWMCCS

Source: The Marine Joint Staff Officer (Quantico, Va.: USMC Development and Education Command,

January 1987), 5–20.

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Figure 16. PWIN Initial Three-Node Configuration

Source: Lee M. Paschall, “Command, Control, and Technology,” Countermeasures, July 1976, 43.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

276
Figure 17. WIN Configuration in the Early 1980s

Source: Comptroller General, The World Wide Military Command and Control System—Major Changes

Needed in Its Automated Data Processing Management and Direction, LCD-80-22 (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, 14 December 1979), 49.

STRATEGIC MODERNIZATION

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THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

278
Figure 19. NORAD’s Missile Warning System

Figure 20. Communications System Segment Connections

Source: General Accounting Office, NORAD’s Communications System Replacement Program Should Be

Reassessed, GAO/IMTEC-89-1 (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, November 1988), 10.

Source: Senate Committee on Armed Services, Recent False Alerts From the Nation’s Attack Warning

System (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, 9 October 1980), 2.

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Figure 21. Land-based Ballistic Warning and Detection

Source: Harry V. Martin, “Communications Vulnerability,” Military Science & Technology, June 1982, 46.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

280
Chapter 15

The C3I Triad: Programs

If the 1960s had been a decade of WWMCCS conceptualiza -

tion and the 1970s one of system formalization, the 1980s

represented a decade of realization, a time for bringing to

fruition many of the programs judged necessary for a World

Wide Military Command and Control System in fact as well as

in name. The Strategic Modernization Program identified command and control improvement as its highest priority item,

and the programs that fell beneath this rubric, the majority of

them already under development, were overwhelmingly in -

tended to enhance control over the nuclear forces. But in one

sense most of the efforts took place at the periphery, focused

on sensor systems and other assets controlled by the military

services, rather than on core capabilities designed to merge

those assets into a more cohesive and effective system. Not

surprisingly, perhaps, given that key administration officials,

Defense Secretary Weinberger among them, believed that centralization had gone too far and that programmatic authority

should reside at the subunit level, with the military services.

But despite these caveats, and after years of second-class

status, it was during the Reagan administration that

WWMCCS finally came of age. Below are considered in brief a

number of the major WWMCCS initiatives, presented within

the compass of each of the three legs of Latham’s C3I Triad.

Early Warning and Attack Assessment

One key focus of the command and control modernization

program was to upgrade and enhance the capabilities of the

US radars and satellites that provided early warning of Soviet

attack. Broadly speaking, that attack could come either by

way of ballistic missiles or through such air-breathing threats

as cruise missiles and aircraft, and specific systems were in -

tended to deal with each type of threat. For the detection of

ballistic missiles, potential approach corridors were covered

by at least two different types of warning sensors, designed to

281
detect different types of physical phenomena. Radars such as

those of the venerable Ballistic Missile Early Warning System

were for detecting the presence of missiles by reflected radio

energy. Depending upon the radar’s power and capability,

analysis of the returned signal could provide information

about the location, trajectory, and speed of incoming missiles.

Additionally, sensors on board early warning satellites would

register the infrared energy given off by burning rocket engines, providing similar information. Working together, these

radars and satellites provided “dual phenomenology” coverage,

a critical redundancy for avoiding errors in the assessment of

ballistic missile attack against the United States. Three ballistic missile early warning-and-attack characterization systems

were identified as key elements of the Strategic Modernization

Program, namely, BMEWS, the Precision Acquistion of Vehicle

Entry Phased Array Warning System, and DSP satellites, the

first two of which are considered here.

The Strategic Modernization Program additionally focused

attention on upgrading the capabilities of the radar systems

deployed around the North American periphery for providing

early warning, attack assessment, and tracking of air-breathing

threats such as aircraft and cruise missiles. Two programs of

this sort were already in progress when the Reagan administration arrived in Washington, specifically, the Over-the-Horizon

Backscatter (OTH-B) radar and the North Warning System, an

upgrade for the antiquated distant early warning line (DEW

LINE) radars. These were accorded a high priority in the command and control modernization efforts of the eighties.

PAVE PAWS

The original US system for detection of submarine-launched

ballistic missiles was constructed during the early 1960s, a

series of six FSS-7 height-finding radars (the so-called fuzzy

sevens) deployed along the east and west coasts in the early

1960s as part of the Air Force’s Back-up Interceptor Control

System. Coverage to the south came later in the decade as the

original sites were supplemented by facilities in Texas and

Florida. Overall it was a limited system, capable of providing

only minimal warning in case of a mass SLBM attack. Most of

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282
the facilities had very restricted data-processing capabilities,

rendering them unable to provide detailed information about

incoming missile trajectories.

The replacement for the original SLBM detection system

was PAVE PAWS, whose radars were designed to detect

SLBMs flying minimum-energy ballistic trajectories at ranges

of approximately 2,000 nautical miles (NM), and at 3,000 NM

for missiles in higher, lofted trajectories. On top of this, the

radars’ computer-based attack characterization capabilities

would permit extremely precise prediction of launch and im -

pact points of multiple targets, with warning data automatically forwarded by way of redundant ground communications

links to the NMCC and ANMCC, SAC and NORAD headquarters, and other command centers. 1 A secondary function of

PAVE PAWS was to support NORAD’s spacetrack mission, and

it was for this purpose that the radars would be most frequently used, continuously cataloging the position and velocity of satellites and other objects in low Earth orbits, all the

while maintaining a constant watch for SLBMs.

The first PAVE PAWS radar, located at Otis AFB in Massachusetts, came on line in early 1979. The second site, at Beale

AFB in California, became operational later that year. In the

Strategic Modernization Program, one of the major priorities

was a PAVE PAWS expansion. Two new facilities in the southeast and southwest were to be added to the two already in

operation, providing dual phenomenology coverage toward the

south. Located at Robins AFB, Georgia, and Goodfellow AFB,

Texas, these two sites became operational in 1987. Even while

the new facilities were under construction, upgrades to the

original PAVE PAWS sites commenced to bring them into conformity in the areas of computer processing, displays, and

radar technologies.2 As the 1980s drew to their close, the four

PAVE PAWS radars, along with the Perimeter Acquisition Radar Attack Characterization System in North Dakota, provided

complete coverage of potential ocean launch areas around the

continental United States, closing earlier gaps and significantly

improving the US early warning capability.

THE C3I TRIAD

283
Ballistic Missile Early Warning System

The second ballistic missile program accorded a high priority by the Reagan administration involved modernizing the

three sites of the venerable BMEWS, designed to detect and

provide attack characterization information about incoming

intercontinental ballistic missiles from the north. The BMEWS

project began in 1958, when the Air Force contracted for the

development and installation of three separate radar sites, to

be located in far-northern latitudes to maximize tactical warning time of Soviet attack. Additional contracts were awarded to

develop a dedicated communications network to link these

remote sites to NORAD headquarters in Colorado. 3 Yet while

powerful, all of these BMEWS radars rapidly became outdated

as defense requirements shifted from detection of relatively

small scale attacks to detecting and tracking far larger numbers of incoming missiles with a high degree of precision.

Even before the Reagan administration arrived in Washington, some efforts had been made to improve BMEWS, although funding had proved a perennial problem. The Strategic

Modernization Program intended to accelerate the modernization effort, calling for the old BMEWS radars to be replaced

with far more powerful state-of-the-art phased array radars of

the type used in PAVE PAWS, and for the facilities’ 1950s-vin -

tage vacuum tube computers to be replaced with more mod -

ern and powerful ADP equipment. The new electronically

steered radars would provide far better detection and tracking

of ICBMs than the radars they replaced, permitting objects 10

square meters in size to be tracked at a range of 3,000 nautical miles. Initial operational capability for the upgraded

BMEWS would come in the early 1990s.

Over-the-Horizon Backscatter

To enhance America’s ability in detecting air-breathing

threats, a key initiative involved the deployment of a comprehensive OTH-B radar defense perimeter around the United

States, capable of detecting airborne objects at distances beyond the range of conventional line-of-sight radars; that is,

between 550 and 2,000 miles from the transmitter sites at

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altitudes from 100,000 feet right down to Earth’s surface.

OTH-B would additionally provide attack assessment information and permit airspace control over both the United States

and Canada.4

The origins of the program extend back to the mid-1960s,

but with the Reagan administration’s strategic modernization

program, developing an operational OTH-B capability became

a front-burner priority. Plans called for a comprehensive OTHB defense perimeter around the United States consisting of

four separate radars—an East Coast, West Coast, Central,

and Alaskan facility—each containing two or more integrated

sectors of 60-degree radar coverage. The way the system

worked, powerful high-frequency signals would be reflected off

the ionosphere back toward Earth beyond the horizon from

the transmitter. They would strike any airborne targets they

encountered, bounce back to the ionosphere, and be reflected

back in the direction of the radar’s receiving antennas, which

were located some one hundred miles from the transmitting

site to minimize interference. The raw radar returns would

then be subjected to advanced digital processing at the system’s operations control center, moving targets would be isolated, and the results would be transmitted to NORAD and

other locations.5

That, at any rate, was the intention. But as a series of tests

conducted during 1988 made clear, the radars did not perform particularly well at night or under poor atmospheric conditions. Worse still, their discrimination was poor, meaning

that they had difficulty detecting and tracking small targets at

long distances. 6 When these problems were coupled with a

declining defense budget toward the end of the decade, it was

clear that the number of deployed radar sectors would have to

be scaled back. But perhaps even more importantly, the end

of the cold war dramatically reduced the need for OTH-B, and

NORAD began looking for ways to justify funding for the notyet-completed portions of the system. Specifically, they began

emphasizing the radars’ ability to provide coverage over Mexico, a primary staging area used by drug traffickers.7

 Underscoring this new role for OTH-B in the post-cold-war era, the

program’s entire 1991 budget was transferred to the Pentagon’s Drug Interdiction and Counterdrug Activities budget.

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North Warning System

To complement the OTH-B coverage and to fill that system’s

gaps to the north (a direction where high-frequency signals

are susceptible to auroral disruption), a second initiative for

improving detection of air-breathing threats was the North

Warning System (NWS), a series of short- and long-range radars, which, along with their operations centers, support fa -

cilities, and communications links, would replace both the

aging SAGE radars in Alaska and the radars of the stretching

across Alaska and northern Canada.

Two programs were involved in NWS, aptly named SEEK

IGLOO and SEEK FROST. The first to get under way was

SEEK IGLOO, which called for the replacement of 13 SAGE air

defense radars in Alaska, operated by the Alaskan Air Command, with modern, highly reliable, long-range radars. The

replacement radar of choice was the FPS-117, which integrated into a single antenna a long-range surveillance radar, a

heightfinder radar for medium- to high-altitude tracking of

targets, and an Identification Friend or Foe System for automatically querying the transponders of aircraft. Unlike its

predecessors, the new rotating radar was solid-state and designed to be frequency-agile, capable of operating at 20 different frequencies and capable of distinguishing targets among

the calving ice, flocks of migratory birds, and the other radar

clutter of the Arctic region.8

The second NWS program, SEEK FROST, would replace the

antiquated DEWLINE with two different types of radars. First,

13 strategically located DEW LINE sites would be equipped

with minimally attended FPS-117s of the same type used in

SEEK IGLOO.9 But because these were designed for long-range,

medium- to high-altitude coverage, line-of-sight constraints

meant that there would be frequent gaps in coverage. To fill

those gaps, the 13 radar sites would be complemented by

another 39 short-range unmanned radars for low- to mediumaltitude coverage. 1 0 Depending upon terrain restrictions, between two to six of these “gap-filler” radars would be located

between pairs of the FPS-117s, creating an unbroken electronic fence to the north.

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The North Warning System was declared operational in the

early 1990s, scanning the sky ceaselessly for a threat that in

many people’s view no longer existed. But system proponents

put the best possible spin on the situation: “Just because there

are fewer burglaries in the neighborhood doesn’t mean you

throw away the burglar alarms,”11 one NWS operator remarked.

Communications Initiatives

The second leg of Donald Latham’s C3I Triad involved the

upgrade or deployment of a series of communications systems

to permit the leadership to remain in contact with the strategic forces on a continuing basis under all conditions, up to

and including a strategic nuclear exchange. A number of

ground-, air-, and space-based communications initiatives

were pursued under the aegis of the Strategic Modernization

Program, many of them elements of WWMCCS’s Minimum

Essential Emergency Communications Network (MEECN). For

communicating with the ballistic missile submarine force,

plans called for upgrading the Navy’s fleet of TACAMO planes,

and for deploying a ground-based extremely low frequency

(ELF) communications system. Also called for was the development of the Air Force’s Ground Wave Emergency Network

(GWEN). Finally, attention was given to the deployment of the

third-generation Defense Satellite Communications System

and to the development of the exceedingly ambitious Military

Strategic and Tactical Relay Satellite. Several of these systems

are discussed below.

Extremely Low Frequency Communications

A number of independent, redundant systems have long

existed to provide communications to the strategic submarine

force, but all imposed substantial limitations in operational

flexibility. What was needed, in the Navy’s judgment, was a

system that was not only survivable and secure, but one that

was jam resistant and whose signals could be received even in

a wartime environment of multiple nuclear bursts, thus guaranteeing the submarines’ usefulness as a deterrent force.

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Since the late 1950s, the Navy had been examining the feasibility of a communications system utilizing the portion of the

electromagnetic spectrum between 10 and 100 Hertz, known as

the extremely low frequency or ELF band. On the theoretical

level, ELF offered many benefits. ELF signals are characterized

by low-propagation attenuation, meaning that they can be received over great distances, indeed worldwide. The signals have

low attenuation in seawater, such that they can penetrate to

depths some 20 times deeper than very low frequency signals.1 2

With ELF, submarines could operate well below the 200-foot

maximum detection depth for ocean surveillance satellites and

below noise-reducing thermal layers in the ocean, making them

less susceptible to antisubmarine warfare activity. Additionally,

the way ELF signals are transmitted makes them highly resistant to jamming and other forms of interference, including nuclear detonations.1 3 Finally, it was felt that an ELF system could

be survivable, since its transmitters and antenna arrays could

be geographically dispersed and hardened. 14

The original system design advanced by the Navy, known as

Sanguine, was exceedingly ambitious, covering approximately

41 percent of the state of Wisconsin. Over six thousand miles

of antenna wires would be buried six feet deep, checkerboard

fashion, on state and federal property and along public rightsof-way. The wires would be grounded at each end by an elaborate grounding configuration that, depending upon local conductivity conditions, could extend for distances of up to two

miles. Two hundred and forty underground transmitters, each

installed approximately at the center of an antenna cable,

would power the system. To ensure their survivability, the

transmitters would themselves be buried about 35 feet below

ground in reinforced concrete capsules. 1 5 The Navy estimated

that some 800 million watts of power would have to continu -

ally flow through Sanguine’s wires to maintain operational

readiness.

In the years that followed, unremitting criticism of the proposed system by various state and federal officials, concerned

citizens, and environmental groups resulted in an ongoing

search for alternative host sites and a progressive scaling- back

of the system’s dimensions. To increase the system’s acceptability among cost-conscious members of Congress, during the

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mid-1970s the Navy shifted its preferred ELF system from a

downsized, survivable Sanguine to a new nonsurvivable system called Seafarer. Despite many changes and adjustments,

however, the criticism continued unabated. The Navy’s response was to keep searching for new ELF designs that would

prove more publicly palatable, resulting in even further reductions in the proposed system’s size. The most promising alternative settled upon by the Navy involved linking its small

Wisconsin ELF test facility to another small facility to be constructed at Sawyer Air Force Base in Michigan. The Navy

called this far more restrictive system Austere ELF, and President Carter approved the plan in January 1979.

But congressional resistance to the cost of even an “austere”

ELF necessitated a further reduction in the size of the Wisconsin-Michigan system, halving the amount of antenna wire to

be used. As part of the Strategic Modernization Program, the

Reagan administration gave the go-ahead for this downsized

Austere ELF, which was renamed simply Project ELF. Work

proceeded throughout the decade, and in May 1989 the two

linked facilities went to full power. Full operational capability

was achieved the following October.1 6 So even as the cold war

ended and the 1990s dawned, the Navy had at last assured

itself of a real-time submarine communications capability.

Military Strategic and Tactical Relay Satellite

Given the substantial and increasing US reliance upon

space-based assets for communications, a major concern of

defense planners during the 1980s was satellite vulnerability.

The problem seemed particularly pressing, because in many

families of defense satellites, toughness had been deliberately

sacrificed to pack on board the maximum mission capability.

The result was highly capable but inherently fragile spacecraft

that were vulnerable, given the active pursuit of antisatellite

technologies by both superpowers. Consequently, much

thought was given to enhancing satellite survivability through

such means as hardening, maneuverability, the use of decep -

tive technologies, and proliferation.1 7

These concerns found expression in the Military Strategic,

Tactical, and Relay (MILSTAR) satellite communications sys tem.

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Representing the most ambitious and technically difficult

communications program ever undertaken by the Pentagon,

MILSTAR also represented the highest-priority command and

control element of the Strategic Modernization Program. In -

tended to employ an internetted constellation of satellites both

in synchronous equatorial orbits and elliptical polar orbits,

MILSTAR was intended to link the National Command

Authorities to surface ships, submarines, aircraft, ICBM

forces, Army ground mobile forces, and theater nuclear forces

around the globe.

Plans called for MILSTAR to incorporate a number of features to ensure its continued availability during crises up to

and including general nuclear war. The satellites would be

hardened against radiation from nuclear detonations and la -

ser attack. They would be maneuverable and incorporate onboard decoys to enhance their survival against physical attack. The satellites would offer enhanced resistance to

jamming, with much of the improvement arising from their

use of the extremely high frequency (EHF) band. EHF signals

travel in extremely straight lines and are relatively unaffected

by passage through the atmosphere. This means they can

focus more power on ground receivers, allowing for the use of

smaller antennas and avoiding jammers and interception.1 8 In

addition, the use of rapid frequency-changing burst transmissions and antenna-hopping techniques would make the transmissions even less vulnerable. Finally, the spacecraft would

be outfitted with satellite-to-satellite cross-links (hence the

term relay in MILSTAR), eliminating dependence on ground

stations for communications relay and minimizing the risk of

eavesdropping by hostile terrestrial terminals.

When fully operational, MILSTAR was intended to enhance

or assume the functions of a number of existing satellite systems. Critical emergency action message services provided by

UHF systems like AFSATCOM would be shifted to MILSTAR.

MILSTAR would augment and possibly replace the Satellite

Data System, serve as a relay for data from intelligence satellites such as the KH-12, and assume at least some of the

broadband communications functions performed by the Defense Satellite Communications System.1 9

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That, anyway, was the plan. But it was at the moment when

MILSTAR’s requirements had to be translated into reality that

the problems began. The ambitious and technically complex

nature of the undertaking was immediately apparent, and

within a very short time the program began running into a

series of technological roadblocks. These included the need for

reliable traveling wave tube amplifiers, fault-tolerant spaceborne computers, advanced adaptive antennas, nulling antennas, hardened electronics and high-speed data processors,

and low-cost EHF terminals.2 0 The Air Force assured critics

that the problems were not insuperable, but their large

number virtually guaranteed cost overruns that would in turn

force the program’s timetable to be stretched out. Complicating matters further was the catastrophic loss of the space

shuttle Challenger in January 1986, freezing shuttle launches

until the cause of the Challenger mishap could be ascertained

and corrected.

On top of all this, almost continuous interservice skirmishing

over technical requirements and bureaucratic prerogatives beset

the MILSTAR program. On the one hand, this led to one of the

most heavily gold-plated programs the defense establishment

had ever seen. The ability to satisfy everyone by adding capabilities was not unlimited, however—given the irreducible fact that

only so much weight could be lifted into space by existing

launch vehicles, and any decision to enhance one capability

(such as hardening) meant that sacrifices had to be made in

other areas. As the tradeoffs were made, it quickly became apparent that MILSTAR would likely have a low data rate, and

might have to limit simultaneous access to as few as 15 users.2 1

Such low capacity and flexibility strongly suggested that MILSTAR would never achieve its promise as a war-fighting “switchboard in the sky,” nor would it be able to assume the functions

of such satellite communications programs as the Defense Satellite Communications System or Fleet Satellite or meet intelligence relay requirements. By the mid-1980s program officials

were confirming these limitations to Congress, even as projections of program costs were ballooning. 22

Perennially over budget, in 1988 the plans for MILSTAR

were pushed back. Additional stretch-outs appeared inevitable

as the new Bush administration’s defense secretary, Dick

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Cheney, tried to meet near-term budgetary targets by cutting

$1 billion from the defense budget submitted by the outgoing

Reagan administration.23 In 1989 the House Appropriations

Committee called for termination of MILSTAR. Recognizing a

sinking ship when they saw one, the services began abandoning MILSTAR. The axe finally fell in July 1990, when Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee overrode the

unanimous objections of committee Republicans and voted to

kill MILSTAR. The reasons were clear enough: MILSTAR’s

sticker price had tripled, but for a less capable system that

would serve far fewer users than had been originally envisioned.2 4 But perhaps most important of all was the increasing

inappropriateness of the system. As congressional critics were

quick to point out, MILSTAR had been conceived in a period of

resource munificence and intense Soviet-American hostility,

when great emphasis was placed on fighting and winning a

nuclear war. But in the altered national security landscape of

the 1990s, it was said, neither of these concerns applied any

longer.

Ground Wave Emergency Network

The prevailing logic during the 1980s was that satellites

were inherently fragile, and hence a nuclear war might quickly

prove fatal to many key space-based communications systems, including MILSTAR itself, and protecting all of the satellites would almost certainly prove prohibitively costly. 2 5 The

response to this was to put in place additional MEECN systems utilizing the various frequencies of the electromagnetic

spectrum, so that the NCA could relay instructions to the

strategic nuclear forces should satellite communications be

disrupted. ELF was one such system. Another major system

was GWEN, which commanded a full two-thirds of the funding

devoted to MEECN improvements during the Reagan years.

GWEN was intended to provide assured transmission of

force direction messages in case of a surprise, “bolt from the

blue” Soviet nuclear attack and to provide an enduring communications capability thereafter. The characteristics that

permitted GWEN to accomplish its mission were several. First,

there was its use of ground-hugging, low-frequency radio,

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which resists disruptions of the ionosphere caused by nuclear

weapons. Second, there was its use of packet-switching, the

technique developed during the 1970s for use in the ARPANET

and later slated for use in several other WWMCCS-related

networks. Third, there was the system’s nodal redundancy,

enhancing the probability that messages would reach their

destinations.2 6 Plans called for developing GWEN in stages.

The first phase, called initial communications connectivity,

was intended simply to demonstrate GWEN’s technical viability. Phase 2 called for the construction of a thin-line commu -

nications connectivity (TLCC), consisting of 56 GWEN relay

stations arranged in a giant figure eight with SAC headquarters in Omaha at its center. Linking together a total of eight

command centers and 30 military bases, the TLCC by design

incorporated as many of the desired GWEN features as were

then within the state of the art, and it was intended to serve

as a foundation for the much larger Phase 3 system to come.2 7

Even as the TLCC was moving toward completion, the

number of relay towers to be included in the Phase 3 GWEN

system was undergoing a process of incremental diminution.

Plans called for between 400 to 500 towers at the time the

system was announced in 1982; but well before the TLCC came

on line, this figure had been reduced to 236 and then to 127.

Assistant Secretary of Defense for C3I Donald Latham noted that

for the current GWEN mission, 127 GWEN nodes were sufficient

but that “other missions and a more realistic threat could require additional nodes.”2 8 The Phase 3 GWEN was thus explicitly

viewed as an interim system, an unsatisfactory resolution to the

dilemma that an appropriately redundant system was prohibitively costly, while anything less could be easily destroyed, rendering it useless for its intended purpose.

These concerns with cost, coupled with strong public opposition to the construction of relay towers in some localities,

had the effect of slowing the construction of the GWEN. It was

not until the fall of 1987 that RCA, the prime system contractor, began testing the TLCC.2 9 By early 1988, 49 of the 56

TLCC nodes were undergoing initial operational testing and

evaluation. Work on Phase 3 was simultaneously in progress,

and in mid-1988 the Air Force approved an expansion of GWEN

from the TLCC’s 56 nodes to 96. 3 0 Despite the substantial

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reduction, Air Force officials claimed that the much-dimin -

ished GWEN would still constitute a “final operational capability” that would be operational within a few years.3 1 As it

turned out, those few years brought about not the completion

of the Ground Wave Emergency Network but rather the end of

the cold war, raising questions as to whether this element of

MEECN was simply an expensive anachronism.

Command Initiatives

The final leg of Latham’s C3I Triad involved improvements in

the command structure. This included substantial upgrades

to the capabilities of the ground-based command centers,

most prominently the Alternate National Military Command

Center, the National Military Command Center, and NORAD’s

Cheyenne Mountain headquarters. Major improvements were

also planned for various air-based command posts, including

SAC’s “Looking Glass” aircraft, the EC-135 airborne command

posts used by the nuclear CINCs, the National Emergency

Airborne Command Post, and the president’s personal plane,

Air Force One. Also falling beneath the rubric of command

initiatives were various initiatives intended to enhance the

national leadership’s ability to direct the forces: programs

such as the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS) and

the WWMCCS Information System and research into such

decision-making aids as artificial intelligence and expert systems. One of these command initiatives, NAVSTAR, is examined in greater detail below. The WWMCCS Information System is discussed in the next chapter.

NAVSTAR Global Positioning System

The Navigation Satellite Timing and Ranging (NAVSTAR)

Global Positioning System is a satellite-based radio navigation

system designed to provide highly accurate altitude, latitude,

longitude, velocity, and time data to properly equipped users

anywhere in the world. The global positioning system was long

recognized by the Pentagon as a research priority. The first

major milestone in the evolution of the NAVSTAR GPS came in

1967 when the Joint Chiefs of Staff conducted a comprehen sive

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294
review of all navigation systems then in use or at the stage of

advanced development to determine which would be most appro -

priate for meeting the criteria of worldwide coverage, redundancy, instantaneous response, continuous availability, and

the ability to resist enemy countermeasures. The study concluded that none of the systems then in use could meet all of

the military’s requirements and that of those options then being

considered, a satellite-based system for three-dimen sional

navigation offered the greatest potential to do so. The result of

the study was a JCS master navigation plan, a general guid -

ance document directing that a program to orbit such a system be established on a priority basis. 3 2

As originally envisioned, the system would serve over 27,000

individual American and allied users, which included fixedwing aircraft, helicopters, surface ships, submarines, land vehicles, and ground troops. Civilian use was also projected,

although likely more for the large external constituency it

would rally behind the program than out of any Pentagon

desire to improve the navigation systems then in use by the

maritime and airline industries. A major problem with the JCS

plan from the outset, however, was that no preliminary studies

were conducted to identify user needs; thus, there was no way

to know whether the capabilities proposed for the new system

would address specific unmet needs or identified deficiencies

of prospective users.3 3

NAVSTAR contained three distinct elements: a space segment, a control segment, and a user segment. The space segment consisted of 24 satellites, of which 21 were active and

three were on-orbit spares. They were divided into three

planes of eight satellites each, in circular orbits at an altitude

of approximately 10,900 nautical miles, that provided con tinu -

ous worldwide coverage. Each satellite was designed to transmit two ultra-high frequency signals that could be captured

by receiving sets, one for positioning and one for timing. Receiving the “composite signal” from four satellites was required

for achieving the expected level of accuracy in navigation, determination of velocity, and three dimensional positioning, by

some estimates to within 11 feet laterally and 12 feet in altitude. 3 4 The control segment, consisting of a number of ground

facilities scattered across the globe, was intended to track the

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satellites and provide updates to their position and timing

information. The user segment of the system included the

various terminals and devices that would capture the satellite

signals and convert them into navigation, time, and position

information, which in turn could be used for a variety of military and civilian purposes—including positioning air, sea,

land, and space platforms prior to weapons launch. 3 5

From the perspective of command and control, several sig -

nificant changes in NAVSTAR’s mission occurred during the

1970s. Under the original system concept, NAVSTAR signals

would be available to ships, aircraft, and some land vehicles.

Missiles were not considered prospective users because the

Pentagon was planning a dedicated satellite constellation for

in-flight missile guidance. But a series of technological advances resulted in the dedicated system being scrubbed and

its functions assigned to NAVSTAR. Most notably, these were

advances in the area of miniaturization, coupled with ener getic

efforts by the director of defense research and engineering to

have the new navigation satellite support the missile accuracy

improvement program. The implications of such a change were

far reaching. A traditional weakness of submarine-launched

ballistic missiles had always been their accuracy, a problem

arising from the fact that the launch platform itself is continu -

ously moving, if only slightly, with deleterious effects on gyroscope-based guidance systems. The possibility for midcourse

flight corrections changes things completely, giving the strategic submarine force unprecedented hard-target capability. 3 6

Of perhaps greater relevance from the perspective of command and control was the decision to put Nuclear Detection

System sensors on board NAVSTAR satellites. These sensor

packages were designed to detect the visible light, X-rays,

gamma rays, and electromagnetic pulse associated with a nu -

clear detonation, allowing for determination of bomb yield and

type. 3 7 Since the energy from detonations would arrive at different satellites at slightly different times, the locations of these

satellites could be precisely determined by NAVSTAR’s atomic

clocks, accurate to a few billionths of a second. 3 8 With this

information, the status of enemy military forces could be ascertained, allowing for the redirection of forces, the rendezvous

of nuclear-equipped aircraft with tankers without breaking

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296
r adio silence, the reconstitution of command and control assets, and a variety of other adjustments during the trans- and

post-attack stages of conflict. To ensure their usefulness in a

protracted war situation, the satellites would be hardened

against jamming, laser and nuclear weapons effects, and

other types of electronic interference. 3 9

Operational testing of NAVSTAR began in 1985. Acquisition

commenced in 1986, and NORAD’s Consolidated Space Op -

erations Center took over operational control of the system

that same year. But a series of production difficulties, coupled

with the problems afflicting the space shuttle program following the Challenger disaster, resulted in major program delays.

It was not until February 1989 that the launch of the first

production NAVSTAR satellite took place, and the cold war

drew to its close with the fielding of a fully operational global

positioning system still somewhere in the indeterminate fu -

ture. When it finally came on line, NAVSTAR would serve a

somewhat different set of constituencies than had been envisioned. SAC decided not to install GPS receivers on board its

aircraft, cutting the total number of Air Force planes slated for

receivers by more than half. Additionally, it turned out that a

whole class of small, instrument-stuffed aircraft like the F-16

had insufficient space for the receivers. In total, some 3,600

GPS receiving units were slated for platforms that could not

accommodate them. 4 0 The most visible benefits of NAVSTAR

were, rather, in the civilian sector. For example, when France

and Great Britain were constructing the so-called Chunnel

beneath the English Channel to connect the two countries,

they turned to NAVSTAR. Construction of the tunnel’s three

tubes proceeded simultaneously from the French and English

coasts; without NAVSTAR to correct errors in the measuring

instruments used, the tubes would not have been able to meet

at the channel’s mid-point at the same altitude. 4 1

These were some of the major command and control initia -

tives advanced by the Reagan administration under the rubric

of the Strategic Modernization Program. The importance and

centrality to the program of one additional command initia -

tive, the WWMCCS Information System, is such that it is given

a more detailed treatment in the next chapter.

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Notes

1. Edgar Ulsamer, “The Growing, Changing Role of C3I,” Air Force

Magazine 62 (July 1979): 36.

2. “Pave Paws, BMEWS Radar Site Upgrades Will Broaden Missile Threat

Coverage,” Aviation Week & Space Technology , 9 December 1985, 52.

3. “Surveillance and Control Systems,” Signal 20 (April 1985): 22.

4. House, Committee on Appropriations, Department of Defense

Appropriations for 1987 , 99t h Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.:

Government Printing Office [GPO], 1986), 441.

5. Jerry Mayfield, “Air Force Upgrading Radar Network,” Aviation Week

& Space Technology, 16 June 1980, 232.

6. House, Committee on Appropriations, Department of Defense

Appropriations for 1989, pt. 6, 100t h Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.:

GPO, 1988), 545.

7. General Accounting Office, Over-The-Horizon Radar: Better

Justification Needed for DOD Systems’ Expansion , NSIAD-9 1-61

(Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office [GAO], January 1991), 2, 8.

8. Bruce Gumble, “Air Force Upgrading Defenses at NORAD,” Defense

Electronics 17 (August 1985): 106.

9. Clarence A. Robinson Jr., “Soviets Test New Cruise Missile,” Aviation

Week & Space Technology, 2 January 1984, 15.

10. “What’s Happening in Electronics at ESD,” Air Force Magazine 66

(June 1983): 48.

11. Jon Bowermaster, “The Last Front of the Cold War,” The Atlantic

Monthly, November 1993, 44.

12. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, World Armaments

and Disarmament: SIPRI Yearbook 1979 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1979),

397.

13. William J. Ruhe, “ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) in Wartime,”

Signal 33 (January 1979): 19.

14. John Merrill, “Some Early Historical Aspects of Project Sanguine,”

IEEE Transactions on Communications, 4 April 1974, 359.

15. Lowell L. Klessig and Victor L. Strite, The ELF Odyssey: National

Security Versus Environmental Protection (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,

1980), 16.

16. Bruce Borcherdt, “Woodpeckers Tapping U.S. Submarine Radio

Network,” Chicago Tribune, 1 June 1989, 4.

17. William E. Burrows, Deep Black: Space Espionage and National

Security (New York: Random House, 1986), 321–23.

18. “Critical C3I Programs Emphasize Survivability, Jam Resistance,”

Defense Electronics 18 (July 1986): 92–94.

19. Edgar Ulsamer, “C 3 Survivability in the Budget Wars,” Air Force

Magazine 66 (June 1983): 38.

20. James B. Schultz, “Milstar to Close Dangerous C3I Gap,” Defense

Electronics 15 (March 1983): 52–53.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

298
21. James W. Rawles, “MILSTAR Soars Beyond Budget and Schedule

Goals,” Defense Electronics , February 1989, 67.

22. House, DOD Appropriations for 1987 , 615.

23. “Cheney Stretches Milstar?” C3I Report , 1 May 1989, 1.

24. R. Jeffrey Smith, “If The Cold War Has Ended, Why Is It So Chilly in

Here?” Washington Post National Weekly Edition , 19–26 August 1990, 15.

25. House, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1984, Hearings

before a Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, 98t h

Cong., 1s t sess. pt. 8 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1983), 504.

26. Ulsamer, “C3 Survivability in the Budget Wars,” 54.

27. Defense Electronics , 99.

28. House, DOD Appropriations for 1987 , 496.

29. James W. Canan, “Steady Steps in Strategic C 3I,” Air Force Magazine

70 (June 1987): 46.

30. Defense Electronics , 96–99.

31. House, DOD Appropriations for 1989, 468.

32. Comptroller General, Defense Acquisition Programs: Status of

Selected Systems, NSIAD-90-30 (Washington, D.C.: GAO, December 1989).

33. Comptroller General, The Global Positioning System—A Program with

Many Uncertainties (Washington, D.C.: GAO, 17 January 1979), 1.

34. D. Douglas Dalgleish and Larry Schweikart, Trident (Carbondale, Ill.:

Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 254–55.

35. Comptroller General, Should NAVSTAR be Used for Civil Navigation?

FAA Should Improve Its Efforts to Decide, LCD-79-104 (Washington, D.C.:

GAO, 1979), 1.

36. Dalgleish and Schweikart, 254–55.

37. John C. Toomay, “Warning and Assessment Sensors,” chap. 8 in

Managing Nuclear Operations, eds. Ashton B. Carter, John D. Steinbruner,

and Charles A. Zraket (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), 310.

38. Gerald Green, “C3I: The Invisible Hardware,” Sea Power 26 (April

1983): 113.

39. “Production GPS Satellites in Ground Tests,” Aviation Week & Space

Technology , 9 December 1985, 73.

40. House, DOD Appropriations for 1989, 548.

41. “Gran Bretaña Deja De Ser Una Isla,” Madrid, El Pais, 5 Mayo 1994,

6 .

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Chapter 16

WWMCCS Information System

By the middle of the 1970s the initial 35 WWMCCS standard computer systems had been successfully installed in 26

centers around the world.1 Users could access the computers

by way of local terminals in the immediate vicinity of the host

computer or by using remote terminals located hundreds,

even thousands, of miles away. The growth of the remote

terminals had been extremely rapid, such that by the begin -

ning of the 1980s almost every major American installation in

the continental United States, Korea, and Europe was connected to WWMCCS. It was the culmination of years of effort

to link the major command centers into a coordinated and

responsive whole. While the underlying concept was sound,

the practical deficiencies of WWMCCS automatic data processing were myriad, many of them directly attributable to the

Honeywell 6000-series computers. Additions of various sorts

were made as users endeavored to enhance their performance,

decrease response time, provide backup capability, and im -

prove compatibility with the new peripheral equipment that

continued to appear.2

Software problems also abounded. The Honeywell-provided

hardware architecture and database management system soft -

ware could not provide a full range of user support services,

especially in crisis situations. And since the software was

owned by Honeywell rather than the government, the Pentagon was constrained in the modifications it could undertake to

correct deficiencies and tailor the software to specific defense

needs.3 The result was a proliferation of software applications

as users tried to find ways to make the system perform more

effectively.

The Prototype WWMCCS Intercomputer Network—subsequently transitioned to operational status as WIN, the

WWMCCS Intercomputer Network—had been a significant effort to address these concerns. Additional experience with networking had been gained, to be sure, but again a major im -

pediment turned out to be the WWMCCS computers, which

301
were incapable of performing the necessary packet-switching

functions. Here too, additional hardware and software were

necessary to work around the shortcomings and make all of

the equipment play together. Nobody denied that there were

problems, and the growing consensus was that what was required was a “total system,” an intercomputer network capable of addressing all command and control requirements—one

in which data could be widely shared and one that would

degrade gracefully under conditions of stress rather than experience catastrophic failures. The result of these concerns

was a congressional order to prepare plans for the replacement of the faulty computer network.

Recognizing that any satisfactory solution to the WWMCCS

ADP problem would take a number of years to implement,

an interim program was begun in 1980 to enhance the existing system’s reliability and remedy some of its informationprocessing shortfalls. As part of this, an additional eight-year

contract was signed with Honeywell to maintain and support

the existing WWMCCS standard computers and associated

software, and more than $100 million would be spent on these

upgrades during the ensuing years. Nonetheless, the longterm prospects for such patchwork solutions appeared bleak.

Advances in automatic data-processing technologies had been

nothing short of spectacular since the time the Honeywells

were acquired, and the number of people still using the antiquated 1960s-vintage computers was rapidly declining toward

zero. This, in turn, had predictable effects upon system reliability; for as the number of systems dwindled, there remained no incentive for a commercial firm such as Honeywell

to continue its investment in the outdated technologies. Resources were directed elsewhere, resulting in a lack of spare

parts and trained personnel to service the older machines. It

was a situation with serious implications for WWMCCS main -

tenance, the costs for which were rising steeply, and it was

apparent to practically everyone that a definitive solution

would have to be found soon.4

The search for that solution became more aggressive upon

the arrival of the Reagan administration in January 1981.

Immediately upon taking office, Assistant Secretary of Defense

for C3I Latham began pointing out the many deficiencies in

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WWMCCS’s capabilities, especially its inability to support decision makers in time-sensitive situations and crises. He described how the rapid pace of technological advance had created a situation in which the Pentagon was locked into a spiral

of escalating costs for maintaining obsolete hardware and

software whose performance was in continual decline relative

to the state of the art. The system lacked a data management

capability. There was inadequate computer availability, response time was poor, capacity could not be expanded to support defined applications, and the system did not meet the

requirement for multilevel security. 5 Latham consequently issued a call for a major modernization of WWMCCS ADP, in

particular the pursuit of a reliable and secure, high-capacity

intercomputer network. But how this was best accomplished

was by no means clear. How should computing power be distributed within the system? Should ADP modernization take

place at each individual user site, or should it be concentrated

in fewer locations using a smaller number of more powerful

central computers? Should identical modernization take place

at all sites, or should hardware and software be tailored to

users’ specific needs? Should modernization occur simultaneously at all sites, or should attention be directed first to those

elements of the system considered most deficient? For questions such as these, there was often no obvious or easy answer.

As in other instances where efforts had been undertaken to

strengthen multiuser command and control systems, the services were less than enthusiastic supporters of Latham’s proposal. DCA Director Samuel Gravely pointed out how service

critics were charging that an upgraded WWMCCS ADP capability was not in their interests since it contributed mainly to

support of the unified and specified commanders, not the services. “I guess I do not understand service interests,” Gravely

acidly remarked, “if they are not coincident with CINCs’ interests.”6

 But the services’ resistance was actually not at all difficult to understand. Whereas existing vertically oriented systems were designed for service-specific purposes, an upgraded

WWMCCS ADP capability of this sort promised greater horizontal integration, and with it the possibility for increased centralization of control. 7

 What this meant for reformers was that

organizational dynamics and concerns—bureaucratic inertia,

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organizational loyalties, suboptimization, resistance to change,

and limited rationality—were issues that had to be dealt with

on top of the technological issues involved in the construction

of an upgraded WWMCCS ADP capability. With money and

bureaucratic turf up for grabs, the perhaps inevitable result

was contentiousness and confusion over the requirements the

new system should address, the hardware and software necessary

to do the job, and precisely who would make these judgments.

The Reagan administration was committed to command and

control modernization, however, and the “total system” it had

in mind was called the WWMCCS Information System (WIS),

an effort that would implicate to varying degrees the Defense

Communications Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office

of the Secretary of Defense, and the three services. What planners had in mind was something more ambitious than WIN;

they envisioned an interactive computer network that would

tie together a series of central computers and local area networks, permitting the sharing of databases and workloads

between command centers. It would be easier to use than its

predecessor and offer improved means for protecting classified

information. 8 The network would be reliable and redundant,

capable of functioning under a range of peacetime and wartime conditions, up to and including nuclear war. The development of WIS represented the most important aspect of the

command and control modernization effort, itself hailed as the

most important element of the administration’s vast and ambitious Strategic Modernization Program.

With respect to the new system’s structure, or architecture,

WIS system engineers opted for modernization of individual

sites as opposed to concentrating ADP functions in fewer locations, the operative assumption being that a larger number of

system nodes offered greater reliability and survivability than

putting more figurative eggs in fewer nodal baskets. It was

next decided that there was no need for similar modernization

at all sites. While hardware and software standardization was

considered essential for common functions among WWMCCS

sites, it was acknowledged that custom-tailored modernization

could take place where command-unique ADP functions were

concerned. This was termed a functional family approach, and

the hoped-for result would be a flexible, modular system in

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which smaller computers dedicated to specific functions could

be tied together into an integrated network, providing the possibility of graceful rather than wholesale degradation in the

event of failures. Finally, it was decided that the modernization effort should be phased in gradually, both to prevent

disruption of operations at the various WWMCCS sites and to

spread out the costs.9

As conceived, WIS would have two main emphases, the first

of which involved hardware. Here, the most important task

was the replacement of the outdated WWMCCS standard computers with more modern state-of-the-art ADP equipment, as

well as the upgrade of associated terminals, displays, and

peripherals. At the time, 83 of the Honeywell 6000-series computers were in operation at 49 locations. Of these, the WIS

modernization would affect 78 computers at 46 locations. (The

other five computers were operated by the Defense Intelligence

Agency (DIA) as part of the Intelligence Data Handling System

and would be upgraded by DIA as part of a different program.)

Also included under the rubric of hardware was the upgrading

of a variety of non-Honeywell computers then in use through -

out WWMCCS: for example, the UNIVAC 1100/42s at SAC,

NORAD, NMCC, and ANMCC.1 0

The second WIS component involved upgrading existing

software and developing new software so that WWMCCS could

more effectively perform its tasks of situation assessment, crisis management, rapid force deployment, and support. The

need for the upgrade was pressing. First there was the system

software. Because it was based on the batch-processing concepts of the 1960s, it simply could not provide a full range of

user support services, including adequate on-line software development and data management tools. Moreover, since the

system software was not owned by the government, the Department of Defense was constrained in the modifications it

could undertake to correct deficiencies and tailor the programs

to specific defense needs. Next was the WWMCCS standard

applications software, which was limited and in need of redesign and reorganization. Finally, modernization of much of the

command-unique software was urgently required. Many of the

difficulties derived from the fact that commercial software had

slowly begun to replace software written specifically for

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WWMCCS as users tried to meet their site-unique requirements, leading to a proliferation of such applications within

WWMCCS.11 To provide the sorts of functions required by

WWMCCS, it was clear that the operating system software was

in need of complete replacement, while between one-quarter

and one-half of all standard applications software and commandunique software was in need of upgrading. 1 2

The movement toward WIS was given additional impetus

when, in early 1982, Honeywell announced that it had decided

to phase out maintenance and support for the operating system software used on the WWMCCS computers. What this

meant in practical terms was that by the time the phase-out

was concluded, in January 1986, the Pentagon itself would

have to bear the full costs for software maintenance and modifications. A study was promptly initiated to compare the costs

and benefits of developing entirely new operating system software as opposed to maintaining and enhancing the existing

software, and the conclusion was that pursuing entirely new

software would be more cost effective. With the need clear for

both new hardware and software, Secretary of Defense Wein -

berger approved the development of WIS in July 1982. 1 3

Perhaps not surprisingly, new procedures and management

practices were put into effect to implement the new WIS, making the program an initiative for organizational as well as

technological change. The Air Force chief of staff was desig -

nated the executive agent for WIS modernization. To raise the

visibility of WIS and provide strong centralized management

for all associated activities, a WIS joint program manager

(JPM) was created and would report through the joint chiefs to

the assistant secretary of defense for C3I. To oversee the acquisition of new WIS hardware and software ordered by the JPM,

a system project office was established at the Electronic Systems Division in Massachusetts. Finally, and to facilitate the

modernization of the high-priority areas of tactical warning

and attack assessment, a systems integration office was established at the Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado. 1 4

In October 1983 the Air Force awarded GTE’s Government

Systems Division the contract to serve as the prime integration

contractor and systems architect for WIS. GTE’s responsibilities included system definition and development, including

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306
establishing standards for terminal-to-terminal, terminal-tohost, and host-to-host communications. The contract also called

for testing and integrating subsystems supplied by subcontractors and for modernizing WWMCCS’s extensive supporting

software with a high-order programming language. What was

perhaps most noteworthy about GTE’s approach was that, at

ESD’s insistence, hardware selection would take place after

software development. The point was to select a software approach that would allow the software to be machine-independent and portable across different types of computing

hardware, rather than locking it into specific types of hard -

ware as had been the case in the WWMCCS ADP Upgrade

Program. For this purpose all old software (written in COBOL)

as well as all new software would be rewritten in Ada, a language implemented by order of the undersecretary of defense

for research and engineering and explicitly designed to run on

different types of computing hardware. 1 5

Ada

The need for a programming language such as Ada goes way

back. By the middle of the 1970s, approximately five hundred

programming languages or different versions of languages

were in use throughout the DOD. A veritable electronic Tower

of Babel, in practical terms it was a severe limitation for support maintenance and training, since moving applications programs among computer systems required different tools and

expertise for each language. 1 6 It was hardly a recipe for effective performance, not to mention that it was extremely expensive. One obvious way to deal with the problem of software

proliferation was to use a single data format, or computer

language, to meet the requirements of the whole range of DOD

computer systems, including those employed by WWMCCS.

Nothing like this existed. While such defense organizations as

ARPA had been interested in computer science research for

years—in such areas as networking, artificial intelligence, computer image processing, speech recognition, and the like—the

vast bulk of software produced was emphatically system-specific.

There was no agreement, either within ARPA or externally, as

to precisely what elements a common computer language

WWMCCS INFORMATION SYSTEM

307
should include, and for good reason: there was no unambigu -

ous way to assess whether any given language was better

than another. Was ease of programming the criterion? Was it

the ease with which the program could be modified later? How

about ease of documentation or transfer? There was no easy

answer, no obvious way to strike a balance between various

concerns and criteria. What was clear was that the number of

languages then in use throughout the Defense Department

was far too large, making the pursuit of a single high-order

programming language a reasonable goal to pursue.1 7

And so in mid-1975, the Institute for Defense Analysis established a high-order working group whose mission was to

draft a series of initial requirements for a programming language that could be used on computers built by different

manufacturers and that could be transferred among them.

These requirements were reviewed by experts from the military services, defense agencies, industry, and the academic

world, and further modifications and revisions were made.

This iterative, multistage process was sufficient to convince

key officials that it was in fact possible to develop a single

programming language to meet defense needs.

A final set of requirements was approved in January 1976,

and contracts to develop a prototype standard language were

competitively awarded to four contractors the following year.

The contractors’ preliminary designs were then widely distrib -

uted within the defense community, and based on the comments received, the requirements for the new language were

finalized. Two contractors were chosen to continue the design

work to meet these requirements, and their designs were

again distributed for comment. In 1979 the Pentagon selected

the language designed by a team from Cii-Honeywell Bull. The

language, called Ada, was named for Augusta Ada Byron, the

daughter of poet Lord Byron and the world’s first computer

programmer, who had worked on Charles Babbage’s mechanical computing engine in the early 1800s. The Pentagon approved Ada as a military standard programming language in

1980. 1 8 Standardization was the goal, but unlike in the past

when it had taken place through the use of standard computing hardware, it would now be accomplished with Ada.

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308
To effect the transition to Ada and support it thereafter,

three organizations were established, the first of which was

the Ada Joint Program Office. Housed within the Office of the

Deputy Director for Defense Research and Engineering (Research and Advanced Technology), it had several responsibilities, the most important of which was to ensure that Ada was

implemented, maintained, and used throughout the Department of Defense. Another task was to support the develop -

ment of further Ada tools to improve productivity, and to that

end, an Ada Information Clearinghouse was set up to make

available information on all Ada-related projects, tools, conferences, seminars, and training activities. 1 9 Software module libraries were also established at a number of locations and

training films were released for program managers and

software engineers.

The other two Ada-related organizations were the Software

Technology for Adaptable, Reliable Systems (STARS) Joint Program Office, and the Software Engineering Institute, both of

which were managed by DARPA. The goals of STARS, which

was supported by the military services and defense agencies,

were to improve the quality and reliability of computer applications programs, promote the development and reuse of software modules, and reduce the time and cost necessary for

software development. The Software Engineering Institute, a

federally funded research and development center set up at

Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, would focus on general software engineering issues, using Ada as the primary

programming language. 2 0

The use of Ada on a WWMCCS-wide, even defensewide,

basis promised enormous advantages. With Ada, it would be

possible to capitalize on hardware advances made in the commercial sector while at the same time avoiding problems created by the use of multiple-software applications. Ada would

be portable, meaning that software modules written in the

language would be reusable in different applications. It would

reduce the costs of modifying and maintaining software and

for training personnel. 21 By all indications, Ada would be the

last new major language to be developed by the DOD prior to

the advent of automatic programming, and studies conducted

during the early 1980s indicated that by obviating the need for

WWMCCS INFORMATION SYSTEM

309
a large number of individual programming languages, Ada

would result in substantial cost savings.2 2

The Ada writing on the wall was clearly visible to all, and

with few Ada tools available from commercial sources initially,

the services initiated their own projects to develop the necessary tools for writing Ada application programs. The Air Force

was first, in 1979 initiating a project known as the Ada Integrated Environment. The following year the Army made its

move, initiating its Ada Language System project to support

software development, improve programming, and improve

management control over the software life cycle. Last came the

Navy and its Ada Language System project, the expressed

purpose of which was to limit the proliferation of serviceunique Ada language support systems and reduce the costs

associated with implementing Ada.

In June 1983 the Defense Department proposed a revision

to DOD Instruction 5000.31 (originally issued in November

1976), which had limited the number of DOD-approved computer languages to seven. The proposed revision, Interim List

of DOD Approved High-Order Programming Languages, went

even further, stating that Ada would become the single common computer programming language for critical mission applications. In a subsequent memorandum, the undersecretary

of defense for research and engineering directed the services

and defense agencies to implement the proposed revision im -

mediately, and they did so shortly thereafter. 2 3 The movement

to Ada was ultimately formalized by DOD Directive 3405.1,

Computer Programming Language Policy , which designated

Ada as the single defense programming language for general

purpose ADP systems. At the same time, DOD Directive

3405.2 established the use of Ada for computer systems that

were integral to weapons systems. According to the directives,

Ada would be used for all intelligence, command and control,

and other general purpose computer applications, except in

those instances where another approved language was demonstrably more cost effective. 2 4

While in principle the widespread use of Ada represented a

considerable improvement over the current situation of software profligacy, it did not guarantee a complete solution to all

D0D’s automatic data-processing problems. Part of the reason

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310
derived from the fact that higher-order languages such as Ada

themselves depended to an extent upon instruction-set architectures; that is, software programs, usually commercial proprie -

tary ones, associated with a specific family of computers. Depending upon the instruction-set architecture used, a high-order

language might require a substantially greater amount of computer memory, produce different results, or in some instances

even fail altogether. For this and other reasons, the services

fought hard and successfully for the right to be granted a waiver

for Ada use in specific programs, and a number of such requests

were subsequently granted. But by no means were the exemptions automatic. Criteria for being granted a waiver included

conducting a developmental risk analysis, which included technical performance, cost, and schedule impact as well as a complete life-cycle cost analysis. To meet that challenge, each of the

services designated an Ada executive. 2 5

There were other potholes in the road to an all or mostly Ada

programming world, including the “culture shock” resulting

from the transition to Ada. As one industry writer described

things, Ada was not simply a computer programming language

but rather the fount of a new and entirely different way of

approaching programming—a whole different software culture.

Whereas in the past software development had taken place in

an “artistic culture,”—a context wherein innovative approaches

were applauded and rigid development standards were the exception—Ada emphasized the reverse: an “engineering culture”

in which software development was subject to rigorous controls in much the same way as in any engineering project. One

consequence of this development was that Ada was an exceed -

ingly difficult language to learn, often requiring well over a

year for personnel to achieve full proficiency. 2 6 Still another

area of concern was the use of Ada for command and control

applications requiring real-time data processing. Earlier programming languages such as FORTRAN and JOVIAL had serious

deficiencies when used for real-time applications; but while

unfortunate, this was perhaps forgivable since they had not

been explicitly designed for that purpose. But Ada had been so

designed, and it did not work well in time-sensitive situations

either. While some software experts suggested that the prob -

lems were attributable to the compilers that implemented the

WWMCCS INFORMATION SYSTEM

311
language, others suggested that they might be inherent in Ada

itself, and opinion was divided as to whether the problems

could ultimately be resolved as the language matured.2 7

Throughout the remainder of the cold war, a number of issues

concerning Ada would remain unresolved. But the basic elements of the WWMCCS Information System were now in place.

Notes

1. General Accounting Office (GAO), Command and Control: Upgrades

Allow Deferral of $500 Million Computer Acquisition, GAO/IMREC-88-10

(Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, February 1988), 8.

2. Department of Defense (DOD), Modernization of the WWMCCS

Information System (WIS), Assistant Secretary of Defense for

Communications, Command, Control, and Intelligence, 19 January 1981, 5.

3. Ibid., 8–10.

4. Ibid., 13.

5. GAO , 13.

6. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “The DCA—A Rock and a Hard Place,” Signal

34 (April 1980): 9.

7. Julian S. Lake, “C 3 Software Myopia,” Countermeasures 2 (8

December 1976): 62.

8. GAO , 8.

9. DOD, 20–21.

10. Ibid., 12.

11. Carol Hamilton, “Worldwide C2 System Networks Strategic Data for

Joint Chiefs,” Defense Electronics, June 1988, 57.

12. DOD, 8–10, 14.

13. GAO, 2, 14.

14. DOD, vii–viii.

15. David A. Boutacoff, “WWMCCS (Worldwide Military Command and

Control System) Evolves to Meet Expanding Requirements,” Defense

Electronics 16 (November 1984): 84–85.

16. Len Famiglietti, “Ada ‘May Never Bring Savings,’” Jane’s Defence

Weekly , 29 April 1989, 761.

17. Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Fiscal Year 1976 and

July-September 1976 Transition Period Authorization for Military

Procurement, Research and Development, and Active Duty, Selected Reserve,

and Civilian Personnel Strengths, pt. 6, Research and Development, 94t h

Cong., 1s t sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office [GPO],

1975), 3349–50.

18. GAO, Programming Language: Status, Costs, and Issues Associated

with Defense’s Implementation of Ada, IMTEC-89-9 (Washington, D.C.:

GAO, 1989), 8–9.

19. Ibid., 16.

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20. Ibid., 11.

21. House, Committee on Appropriations, Department of Defense

Appropriations for 1989, pt. 6, 100t h Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.:

GPO, 1988), 494.

22. House, House Committee on Government Operations, DOD Should

Change Its Approach to Reducing Computer Software Proliferation: Report to

the Chairman, MASAS-83-26 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 26 May 1983), 5.

23. GAO, Programming Language, 18–20.

24. Ibid., 11–12.

25. House, DOD Appropriations for 1989, 494.

26. Susan Lorenz, “Ada Shock: A Computer Cultural Transition,” Signal,

May 1987, 147–48.

27. GAO, Programming Language, 3, 30.

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Chapter 17

Defense Centralization

Even while WIS and other C3I Triad programs were advancing the cause of centralization through new technologies,

events were taking place that would influence centralization

on the organizational and managerial fronts. Two incidents

during the early 1980s underscored in a dramatic and public

way the disconcerting fact that the existing command structure was imperfect and that despite a series of efforts over the

years to improve jointness in military operations, an effective

command and control capability had yet to be realized. The

first of these was Operation Eagle Claw, the failed effort to

rescue the American hostages in Iran. The second and more

influential incident took place on 25 October 1983, when a

multinational force led by the United States invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada, ousted its leftist government, and

demonstrated again the difficulties the services had in mounting joint operations.

Operation Urgent Fury

Grenada had been a thorn in the side of the United States

since 1979, when Maurice Bishop ascended to power in a blood -

less coup. When the Reagan administration took office in 1981,

Grenada was promptly grouped with Nicaragua and Cuba as a

threat to vital US interests, and the pressure on the Bishop

regime was turned up. Part of the pressure came by way of a

series of military exercises, practically dry runs for a Grenada

invasion. 1 Other pressures were political. For example, in announcing his Caribbean Basin Initiative in February 1982,

President Reagan tried to exclude Grenada from participation.

By early 1983 Pentagon officials were publicly declaring that

Cuban influence in Grenada had reached such a high level that

the island could now be considered a “Cuban prótegé.”2

On 14 October 1983 Grenada’s deputy prime minister, Bernard

Coard, staged a coup against Bishop, placing him under house

arrest. But Coard quickly lost the support of the military, and

315
power was seized by Army commander Gen Hudson Austin, a

self-described Marxist. 3 On 19 October a crowd of several

thousand people freed Bishop, who promptly marched to Army

headquarters to try to persuade the soldiers to rally behind

him. Austin responded by sending an armored troop carrier to

the scene. Gunfire broke out, a mob scene ensued, and

Bishop and three members of his Cabinet were separated from

the crowd, lined up against a wall, and shot. 4 With the island

in a state of political turmoil and a Marxist even more extreme

than Bishop now in charge of its government, the Reagan

administration was spurred to action. On 21 October a 10-

ship, fifteen thousand-man Navy task force bound for Lebanon was diverted toward Grenada. Operation Urgent Fury, the

invasion of Grenada, began four days later. More than a thou -

sand Marines and Army Rangers made the initial landings on

25 October; the Rangers’ objective was the airport at Point

Salines on the southern part of the island, while the Marines

concentrated their attention on Pearls Airfield north of the

capital city of St. George’s. Accompanying the invasion force,

known as Joint Task Force 120, was a token 300-man Carib -

bean peace force from seven Caribbean countries. 5

Much has been written about Operation Urgent Fury, its justification, and the extensive press censorship that accompanied it.

But the relevant point here is how well the joint task force performed, and despite the rapid and complete military victory, that

performance was considerably less than optimal. As with Operation Eagle Claw earlier, the Pentagon appeared to have subordinated the principle of unity of command, and hence maximum

effectiveness, to give each service its share of the action.6 The

Navy was in overall charge of the operation, but coordination

between the Navy and the Army was essentially nonexistent.

Control of the air units participating in the operation was divided

between the Navy and the Air Force. On the ground a similar

division of responsibilities was made between the Army and the

Marines. In defense of these arrangements, the commander in

chief of Atlantic forces, Adm Wesley McDonald, pointed out how

dividing a command is “not unique.”7 But unique or not, the

lack of joint air and land commanders resulted in delays and

serious problems of coordination.

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316
Communications between the various elements of the inva -

sion force were highly problematical, representing perhaps the

most serious command and control problem. Army forces frequently found themselves unable to communicate with the

Marines because they used different equipment and radio frequencies. Army troops were unable to contact Navy ships for

fire support because of incompatibilities in the communications security equipment used by each service. In what was

perhaps the most notorious incident, an exasperated Army

officer reportedly went to a pay phone and, using his AT&T

calling card, phoned 82d Airborne headquarters at Fort Bragg,

North Carolina, to ask them if they could raise the ship. On

several occasions Army officers flew by helicopter to the USS

Guam , the flagship for the invasion force, in an unsuccessful

attempt to coordinate naval gunfire. Even where communications were possible, Army officers found it difficult to request

fire support from Navy ships because they could not authenticate these requests using Navy codes.8

The upshot was that despite all of the high-technology

equipment available, problems of compatibility and procedure

produced a serious lack of communications during critical

stages of the operation. “The elite units and pilots sent in to

provide air cover may as well have been from different countries and speaking different languages,” one observer la -

mented. 9 Assistant Secretary of Defense for C3I Latham

agreed, noting that it was fundamental to “have a good communications plan before you mount an operation, and that it’s

an adequate plan.”1 0 Sensitive to the criticism and to the fact

that much of it was directed toward their stubborn parochialism, the services quickly initiated a number of corrective actions. But so serious had the problems been during Operation

Urgent Fury that they would soon be cited by Congress as a

key reason for reorganizing the Department of Defense.

Defense Centralization in the 1980s

In fact, the bureaucratic movement toward that reorganiza -

tion was already under way. In 1982 Joint Chiefs of Staff

chairman David C. Jones testified before Congress regarding

the many shortcomings of the existing JCS system, setting in

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motion a series of congressional hearings and reviews that

were still in progress when the invasion of Grenada took

place. Because of the many serious interoperability problems

highlighted by Operation Urgent Fury, several lines of action

were initiated. The joint chiefs organized a high-level Joint

Requirements Management Board, composed of the vice chiefs

of each service, to review joint aspects of service acquisition

programs and enhance interoperability of service assets. More

important for the shape of the defense future, however, were

two staff studies launched by the Armed Services Committees

of both branches of Congress: in the Senate under the chairmanship of Barry Goldwater and in the House under that of

Bill Nichols.1 1 Of the two, that of the Senate Armed Services

Committee, titled Defense Organization: The Need for Change,

was especially critical. Made public in October 1985, the report laid out the many organizational problems that had

plagued the DOD and continued to do so.

The first problem identified was limited mission integration

at the policy-making level. The three major Pentagon elements—the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs

of Staff organization, and the military departments—tended to

emphasize functional efficiency rather than substantive goals:

“In colloquial terms, material inputs, not mission outputs, are

emphasized.” The specific problems issuing from this efficiency orientation included the domination of program decisions by service interests and the neglect of those functions

not central to the services’ missions. They included the inadequate development of joint doctrine and the suborning of the

needs of the unified commanders to service needs. They also

included deficiencies in interoperability between service assets

and an inability to make trade-offs between competing service

programs when both contributed to a specific mission.12 It was

an old story, of course, dating back at least to the time of the

1958 defense reorganization.

The impetus behind this functional emphasis becomes

clearer when a second and related problem is considered—the

imbalance between service and joint interests. The committee

report succinctly summarized the decades-old problem, “Under current arrangements, the Military Departments and Services exercise power and influence which are completely out of

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proportion to their statutorily assigned duties.” They did this

by dominating the Joint Chiefs of Staff system, exercising a de

facto veto power over virtually all JCS decisions and actions.

They did it by dominating the unified command system, such

that the unified commanders remained dependent upon their

service components. They did it because the OSD lacked the

ability to effectively integrate service capabilities and programs. 13 There could hardly have been a better description of a

decentralized decision-making structure and the suboptimiza -

tion it fostered.

The overriding of joint interests by service interests created

a third problem: excessive emphasis on ongoing modern ization

to meet hypothetical future needs at the expense of present

operational readiness. The continual upgrading of capabilities

is, of course, the essence of the evolutionary approach, and

because it served their interests and enhanced their autonomy, the services were its strongest proponents. The services

adopted the evolutionary approach because they themselves

operated within a context of formal rationality. That is, they

were concerned with efficiency and operative goals and viewed

their modernization efforts as an ongoing process with no

clearly defined end state. Focusing on process, evolution itself

was the goal. To the contrary, the proponents of centralization

were more solution-driven, concerned with discrete end states

of capability and readiness. The problem was that these effectiveness criteria were often subordinated to service interests.

If it seems that the major dynamic within the DOD was less

the frequently mentioned rivalries between the services and

more the conflict between the services and the proponents of

centralization, it was precisely this point that constituted the

fourth problem identified in the staff report; what was characterized as “inter-service logrolling.” It is not that competition

and strife between the services was denied. To the contrary,

secretiveness, duplication, and lack of understanding between

the services were acknowledged as continuing problems. But a

more important problem, one whose origins seem to date

rather precisely to the centralizing fever of the early 1960s,

was the services’ tendency to provide a united front in their

dealings with the civilian leadership. The report suggested

that the intention as well as the effect of this tendency—one is

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tempted to say of this collusion—was precisely to stay the

juggernaut of centralization, isolating the OSD and weakening

civilian control over the military establishment.1 4

A final problem identified in the committee report involved

the inadequacies of the existing Joint Chiefs of Staff system.

Dominated by the services, with a bureaucratic structure that

emphasized committee decision making and consensus views,

the advice offered by the JCS to the civilian leadership was all

too often inadequate, irrelevant, untimely, or unclear. A key

reason underlying this was the conflict of interest that was

inherent in the “dual-hatting” of officers assigned to the Joint

Staff. Unable to subordinate the interests of their own services

to the larger national interest, the JCS was never able to

evaluate objectively the appropriate missions and division of

responsibilities among the services. What resulted was tepid

and cautious advice, reflecting “whatever level of compromise

is necessary to achieve the four Services’ unanimous agreement.”1 5 It was indeed a heavy dose of criticism and an expansive call for reform.

The Packard Commission Report

In July 1985, even as the staff of the Senate Armed Services

Committee was preparing its report, President Reagan established a blue ribbon commission on defense management to

study current defense organization and management. Headed

by David Packard, perhaps the most energetic proponent of

enhanced centralization of defense management during the

years he served as deputy secretary of defense, the Packard

Commission’s findings and recommendations were almost

equally sweeping. Many of those recommendations were first

released in an interim report, dated 28 February 1986. On 1

April President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 219, instructing the Department of Defense and other

relevant executive agencies to implement all of the commission’s recommendations that did not require congressional action. In a special message to the Congress three weeks later,

the president endorsed the remaining recommendations and

requested their prompt implementation. By the time the commission’s Final Report to the President was released in July,

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320
both the House and Senate had already passed some of the

requested legislation.1 6

The Packard Commission’s recommendations for change fell

into three broad areas: planning and budgeting, defense acquisition, and military organization and command. In the

planning and budgeting area, the commission took direct aim

at the prevailing means-oriented rationality, what it described

as the excessive attention focused on the question of “how

much,” with inadequate attention paid to the more substantive questions “what for, why, and how well.” To combat this

misplaced emphasis, planning would have to start with a clear

statement of defense objectives and priorities. After receiving

advice and reviewing options, the JCS chairman then would

frame broad military options, making explicit trade-offs among

various defense elements in the process. The president would

then select a specific option with associated spending. Budgets would move from annual to biennial, eliminating the current situation in which defense programs were in continual

flux, being constantly adjusted to shifting budgets irrespective

of the sense that the changes might make in terms of overall

military strategy. 1 7

The second major area was defense acquisition, a process

described as “overwhelmingly complex,” burdened under an im -

mense weight of regulations, and suffocating under myriad unproductive layers of management. Acquisition was fragmented,

with no single OSD official responsible for overall supervision of

the process; in the absence of such an official, policy responsibility tended to devolve to the services, whose own interests

almost always predominated over national-level concerns.

Authority was diluted and accountability rendered less precise

as a result. To counter this, it was recommended that a new

three-tiered acquisition management chain be implemented.1 8

In the area of military organization and command, many of

the areas of change recommended by the commission involved

the unified and specified commands and their commanders in

chief. The commission recommended that the unified commanders be released from the service restraints under which

they had previously been operating, giving them greater latitude to structure subordinate commands and joint task forces

in ways consistent with their missions. To give the commanders

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greater flexibility in operations that overlapped the geographic

boundaries of other commands, it was recommended that the

Unified Command Plan should be revised. To give the CINCs

greater voice in JCS decision making, it was recommended

that the position of vice chairman be created, a sixth JCS

member whose key function would be to represent the interests of the CINCs. It was further recommended that the

CINCs’ reports and orders be channeled through the JCS

chairman, to ensure their better incorporation into defense

policy. 19

Some of the most serious problems in the area of military

organization and command, however, were directly attributed

to the limited authority of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff. Where the civilian leadership required military advice

integrating the views of the combatant commanders, no single

military officer was responsible for providing such integrated

advice. While in theory the JCS chairman did this, in practice

under the current system he lacked the authority to do so. To

give the position greater bureaucratic clout, it was recommended that the chairman be designated the principal military

advisor to the president, the National Security Council, and

the secretary of defense. And rather than simply a committee

head, he should be able to present his own views in addition to

the corporate views of the joint chiefs. Further, the Joint Staff

and the JSC organization should be placed under the exclu -

sive direction of the chairman and existing limits on the size of

the Joint Staff should be removed so the chairman could better

discharge his responsibilities. Finally, the secretary of defense, following the advice of the JCS chairman, should be

given greater flexibility to shorten or bypass the established

chain of command should he see fit—a deliberate move in the

direction of the “White House to foxhole” model of centralized

command and control universally derided by the services.2 0

Thus did David Packard, our “Mr. WWMCCS” of the early

1970s, lay the foundation for the most sweeping piece of defense legislation since World War II, the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. And if there

was a single central theme to the vast centralization effort the

act initiated, it was precisely to eliminate the lack of jointness

and the problems in command and control interoperability

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that had plagued military undertakings throughout the course

of the cold war. 2 1

Goldwater-Nichols DOD Reorganization Act

The Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganiza -

tion Act of 1986 (Public Law 99-433) followed the recommendations of the Packard Commission in virtually all of its specifics. In the area of planning, the act required that an explicit

statement of national strategy and an accompanying statement of military strategy be provided as a means of measuring

the effectiveness of all defense programs. In this, the JCS

chairman would be responsible for a number of key functions.

These included, but were not limited to, preparing strategic

plans; performing net assessments to determine the military

capabilities of the United States, its allies, and potential adversaries; providing contingency plans that conform to the

policy guidance of the president and secretary of defense; preparing joint logistic and mobility plans to support those contingency plans; advising the secretary regarding the priorities

and requirements of the unified and specified commands; and

formulating doctrine and policies for the joint training and

employment of the armed forces.2 2

As the Packard Commission had recommended, GoldwaterNichols completely revamped the functions of the JCS chairman, continuing the postwar trend of increasing the authority

of that position. The act made the chairman a member of the

National Security Council and designated him principal military advisor to the secretary of defense and the president.

Now, rather than military advice coming from the JCS as a

corporate body, it would come directly from the chairman, who

would consult with and seek the advice of the other chiefs and

the unified and specified commanders “as he deems appropriate.” No longer would the JCS be constrained as it had in the

past, a committee striving to achieve a single consensus viewpoint. Now it was the chairman’s opinion that would weigh

most heavily, although the other members of the JCS could

submit dissenting opinions or advice differing from that of the

chairman. The bureaucratic clout of the chairman was further

increased by giving him personal authority and control over

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the Joint Staff, functions that had previously been in the

hands of the JCS as a whole. To further aid the chairman in

his work, and as the Packard Commission had recommended,

the Goldwater-Nichols Act created the position of JCS vice

chairman and designated the incumbent as the second highestranking military officer after the chairman himself. 2 3 The JCS

chairman now had the authority to play a dominant role in the

formulation and implementation of joint doctrine and in the

resolution of any doctrinal disputes.2 4

Goldwater-Nichols also directed the secretary of defense to

establish specific policies and procedures so that members of

the armed forces could be trained as joint specialists. It was

clear to congressional lawmakers that the joint area was not

working out as efficaciously as hoped: low-quality officers were

often assigned joint duty; it was used as a terminal assign -

ment for officers prior to retirement; and those high-quality

officers assigned such duty took few risks and left as soon as

possible. Promotions came from within one’s own service

branch, after all, and given the traditions and strong cultural

biases of the services, those assigned joint-service billets had

little incentive to emphasize “jointness” over the interests of

the services to which they would shortly return.2 5 To put an

end to this situation, Goldwater-Nichols directed that each

service develop specific career tracks for joint specialty officers

and promote them at a rate equal to that for officers of the

same grade and category. 2 6 This would represent “a startling

change to the historical prerogatives of the military departments,” and in terms of breaking down the decentralized and

subunit-dominated structure of the Department of Defense,

the efforts to promote jointness were in the long run likely to

prove the most potent agent of change. 2 7

In the most fundamental of ways, then, the purpose of the

1986 Defense Reorganization Act was to improve and

strengthen the command and control of joint forces. But at the

same time, the passage of the act by no means heralded the

demise of service influence or of the evolutionary approach

which in various ways sustained it. In many key respects vestiges of the old power relationships remained, and to an im -

portant degree the defense establishment would continue to be

bound by the earlier system of negotiation.2 8 Significant in this

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324
regard was the fact that, with the exception of small operational budgets for the CINCs, budgetary control remained

firmly with the services. Thus even the newest and most innovative of joint programs would continue to be funded the old

fashioned way—by defense subunits whose interests were in a

fundamental sense antithetical to the concept of jointness.

Implementing WIS

As these organizational changes were taking place, progress

on the technological front for WWMCCS was also in evidence.

The WIS modernization program was evaluated in May 1984

by the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council, which

determined that the system should be developed in three

clearly defined phases, or blocks, each of which would require

council review and approval to move into full-scale develop -

ment. Block A would provide the system’s technical foundation. This included an automated message handling system to

improve controls over message receipt, preparation, and dissemination; computer workstations to provide data processing

in user work areas; and a local area network to connect computer systems, automated message handling systems, and

work stations at the various WIS sites.2 9 Collectively, these

improvements constituted an interim WWMCCS computer upgrade. Block B, which would begin once software development

was sufficiently advanced, would involve competitive procurement of new state-of-the-art computers to replace the

WWMCCS Honeywells, plus the development of new application software, procurement of a database management system, and the development of new security controls for data

access. Block C would focus on improving joint mission planning and interfaces between the DOD, non-DOD agencies, and

NATO systems. Gradually phasing in the new system in this

fashion, it was believed, would allow the existing ADP capability to remain fully operational until the new capability was

brought on line. 30

In October 1984 the Electronic Systems Division awarded

IBM’s Federal Systems Division the contract to provide some

thirty-five hundred of its PC-based workstations for the in -

terim computer upgrade. 3 1 In September of the following year,

DEFENSE CENTRALIZATION

325
Defense Secretary Weinberger granted approval for the Air

Force to proceed with system design for all WIS blocks and for

full development of Block A. The Defense Acquisition Board

(which had by this time replaced the earlier Defense Systems

Acquisition Review Council) was expected to approve full-scale

development of Block B in early 1988. If the acquisition of the

new WIS computer systems was approved as planned, a contract would be awarded promptly, and the new systems would

be installed during the 1989–91 time frame. But as decision

time for Block B approached, it was by no means certain that

new computer hardware would have to be procured for WIS,

since the IBM computers involved in the interim WWMCCS

upgrade had remedied many of the problems that had occa -

sioned the initial decision to purchase new computing equip -

ment. These computers were meeting or exceeding the JCS

standards for availability during routine operations and simu -

lated crises and were also doing quite well in response time.

On top of this, they were seen as having substantial expansion

capabilities, enough to meet most anticipated future needs.3 2

The upgraded computers allowed for additional benefits to

be reaped as well. Where many of the operating system hard -

ware features had once been WWMCCS-unique, especially in

such areas as security controls, they were now part of the

commercially available version of the software. That being so,

DOD would not have to bear the entire cost of future software

maintenance if, as proved to be the case, it could run the

commercial version on the upgraded WWMCCS computers.

For those unique features that remained, Honeywell was

awarded a contract to incorporate them into future versions of

the commercial software. Honeywell’s contract to support the

WWMCCS software ran through September 1991, with company officials indicating that they would be willing to negotiate

an extension of the contract through the end of the century. 3 3

Another shortfall that had been identified in the early 1980s

was the lack of a data management capability that would allow

users to deftly retrieve and summarize information. One of the

key reasons for considering entirely new state-of-the-art computers for WIS had been precisely to support such a capability, which would also support high-order programming languages such as Ada. But as it turned out, the database

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326
management system for the upgraded WWMCCS computers

not only could support Ada, but also in all probability it could

support the Joint Operation Planning and Execution System

(JOPES), a software application intended to improve all aspects of conventional joint operation planning and execution.

JOPES was the primary application software to be developed

during WIS Blocks B and C and was itself to be developed in

two blocks, or increments. In Increment I, several WWMCCS

applications would be integrated and modernized, including

the Joint Deployment System, Joint Operation Planning System, and Unit Status and Identity Report System. By 1986 the

WIS joint program manager concluded that JOPES Increment

I could be fully supported on the upgraded WWMCCS computers. Since that increment could not provide automated support for joint mobilization plans and schedules, JOPES Increment II was intended to do so; by all indications, it too could

be supported on the upgraded WWMCCS computers, although

it was impossible to know for certain until the requirements

for Increment II were defined—something that would not happen until the system itself was up and running. 3 4

But as critics pointed out, basing the acquisition of new WIS

computers on ill-defined JOPES requirements would also run

the risk of acquiring computers with excess capacity and

hence unnecessary costs, or, of acquiring inadequate machines that would require additional upgrades or replacements

to meet mission requirements.3 5 With the interim WWMCCS

computers appearing increasingly attractive, the only remain -

ing deficiency involved the requirement for multilevel security,

whereby users with different security clearances could access

authorized information while being denied an avenue to information for which they were not cleared. At the time, all

WWMCCS sites practiced the “system high” approach to secu -

rity, in which all users were simply cleared to the highest level

of classified information used on the system. It was a costly

and inefficient approach, and so the joint chiefs had mandated

that the planned new WIS computer systems provide multilevel security. But although conceptually simple and eminently desirable, the software technologies necessary for multilevel security remained beyond the state of the art, meaning

that neither the upgraded WWMCCS computers nor the

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planned new computers for WIS would be able to provide it.

Once again, the upgraded WWMCCS computers appeared

competitive. 3 6

In short, most of the desired WIS capabilities were currently

supported by the upgraded WWMCCS computers, while others,

such as JOPES, most likely could be supported. The major

remaining requirement, for multilevel security, was beyond

the capabilities of both the upgraded WWMCCS computers or

new WIS computers. All of this appeared to obviate the need

for the new WIS computers, and, with potential savings on the

order of $500 million to be had, the General Accounting Office

recommended in February 1988 that the acquisition of the

new WIS computers be postponed until later, when the needs

of users and the need for entirely new computers to meet

them had been clarified. The Pentagon concurred the following

month, and for the remainder of the cold war, WIS would rely

on the upgraded WWMCCS computers. 3 7

By the end of the 1980s, this patchwork WIS involved more

than one hundred mainframe computers and 65 remote proc -

essors, linking together hundreds of sites and more than three

thousand individual workstations around the globe. System

reliability was estimated to be on the order of 97 percent. It

had as of that time cost some $800 million to create, with

annual expenditures running in the range of $160–$200 million.38 Things appeared to be working well, except perhaps with

Ada. Toward the end of the decade, the GAO examined the use

of that programming language in one hundred projects and

found that it was not possible to determine whether its use

was achieving many of its promised ends. How much had

been spent on the transition to Ada? Were software develop -

ment and maintenance costs being controlled as a result of its

use? It was in fact impossible to know since the total number

of projects using Ada was unknown and most of the known

user organizations had kept inadequate records.3 9 Moreover,

no programs to assess Ada’s costs and benefits over time had

been established. While there was optimism that such information would gradually become available as the system further evolved, anecdotal accounts suggested that such information, if and when it finally came, might be unwelcome. For

example, the undersecretary of the Army stated at an Ada

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

328
exposition in Boston that he had yet to see convincing evidence that the new language would in fact realize the Pentagon’s goal of reducing the ever-increasing costs associated

with software development and maintenance.4 0 Things had im -

proved, certainly, but after three decades of development, the

World Wide Military Command and Control System still remained part concept, part reality.

Notes

1. Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway, “America Invades

Grenada: The Making of a Counterrevolution,” The Village Voice, 8

November 1983, 1.

2. Philip Taubman, “U.S. Now Puts the Strength of Cubans on Isle at

1,100,” New York Times , 29 October 1983, 6.

3. “New Details Are Given On Coup in Grenada,” New York Times, 28

October 1983, A14.

4. House, Subcommittee on International Security and Scientific Affairs

and on Western Hemisphere Affairs, Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S.

Military Actions in Grenada: Implications for U.S. Policy in the Eastern

Caribbean (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office [GPO], 2, 3, 16

November 1984), 189.

5. Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Organization, Structure and

Decisionmaking Procedures of the Department of Defense, pt. 7 (Washington,

D.C.: GPO, 1983), 285–86.

6. John A. Wickham Jr., “Jointness and Defense Decision Making,"

Signal, February 1988, 17.

7. Richard Halloran, “U.S. Admiral Defends Dual Command,” New York

Times, 4 November 1983, A17.

8. Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Defense Organization: The

Need for Change (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 16 October 1985), 365.

9. Richard C. Gross, “C3: Fewer Mixed Signals,” Military Logistics Forum

3 (June 1987): 20.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 17–18.

12. Senate, Defense Organization, 3.

13. Ibid., 3–4, 6.

14. Ibid., 5.

15. Ibid., 6.

16. A Quest for Excellence: Final Report to the President (Washington,

D.C.: Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, June 1986), 4.

17. Ibid., xviii–xix.

18. Ibid., xxiv.

19. Ibid., 37–38.

20. Ibid.

DEFENSE CENTRALIZATION

329
21. Wickham, 18.

22. Congress, United States Statutes at Large, 99t h Cong., vol. 100, pt. 1,

Public Laws 99-241 through 99-452 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1986),

1007–8.

23. Ibid., 1005–9.

24. Don M. Snider, “DOD Reorganization: Part II, New Opportunities,”

Parameters , December 1987, 55.

25. Ibid., 57.

26. Congress, United States Statutes at Large, 1026.

27. Don M. Snider, “DOD Reorganization: Part I, New Imperatives,”

Parameters, September 1987, 95.

28. Ibid., 98.

29. House, Committee on Appropriations, Department of Defense

Appropriations for 1989, pt. 6, 100t h Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.:

GPO, 1988), 471.

30. David A. Boutacoff, “WWMCCS Evolves to Meet Expanding

Requirements,” Defense Electronics, November 1984, 84–85.

31. Ibid., 85.

32. General Accounting Office (GAO), Command and Control: Upgrades

Allow Deferral of $500 Million Computer Acquisition, IMREC-88-10

(Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, February 1988), 9, 15, 17,

21.

33. Ibid., 14–15.

34. Ibid., 10, 15, 19–20.

35. Ibid., 25.

36. GAO, Programming Language: Status, Costs, and Issues Associated

with Defense’s Implementation of Ada, IMTEC-89-9 (Washington, D.C.:

GAO, 1989), 22.

37. GAO, Command and Control, 2.

38. Carol Hamilton, “Worldwide C2 System Networks Strategic Data for

Joint Chiefs,” Defense Electronics, June 1988, 57.

39. Len Famiglietti, “Ada ‘May Never Bring Savings,’” Jane’s Defence

Weekly, 29 April 1989, 761.

40. GAO, Programming Language, 21, 24.

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330
Chapter 18

Defense Communications and the

End of the Cold War

Throughout the 1980s, the Defense Communications

Agency’s involvement in WWMCCS was heavy and ongoing. In

addition to the WWMCCS-related common-user systems it managed, the agency’s Command and Control Technical Center

supported the National Military Command System and its major command facilities. Its command center improvement program was intended to coordinate the application of state-ofthe-art technology for improving the CINC’s command centers.

It provided systems engineering support for the Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network. It was involved in

the development of standard software for the WWMCCS computers and had major responsibilities for the WWMCCS Information System. Implicit or explicit to many of the agency’s

efforts during the decade was the effort to craft the Defense

Communications System along the lines of doctrine—more

survivable, enduring, and secure, with far greater con nectivity— thereby eliminating the perception that the DCS was

strictly a peacetime system. There were a number of implications to this movement to a “wartime” DCS, perhaps the most

important of which was the pursuit of all-digital operations.

Digitization and Evolution

The advantages of digital communications were numerous;

indeed, to the thinking of many, even overwhelming. Digital

systems offered far greater flexibility for the communicator, since

any signal that could be sampled and quantified could be accommodated.1

 In the area of communications security, digital

encryption was both easier—bulk encryption of complete radio

links would be feasible—and far more effective. Going digital

meant that a high-quality secure voice capability, long an urgent

defense requirement, could be achieved at last. Regeneration of

signals was another digital plus, where at each terminal or relay

point distortion in the digital signal could be removed and the

331
signal retimed. The effect of this would be extremely highquality transmissions almost independent of distance. With

digital operations, communications channels could also be

given substantially greater transfer capacity, a characteristic

of major importance in computer-to-computer transmissions.

Then there was the issue of cost. While the actual conversion

from analog to digital would certainly be quite expensive, DCA

officials pointed out that the efficiencies to be gained were

such that the investment would be more than repaid.2 Indeed,

DCA was predicting a 50-fold increase in digital communications during the upcoming years, a veritable nuclear explosion

of automated computer-based information and management

systems.3 The expectation was that economies of scale would

bring down costs in direct proportion.

The inherent advantages of digital communications had long

been known to DCA engineers.4 Indeed, one of the agency’s goals

virtually from the moment it was established had been to integrate its general purpose switched networks into a single digital

network carrying both voice and data and employing some sort

of universal digital switch. But given the vast scale of the analog

plant already in place and the huge investment it represented,

officials also recognized from the outset that their desired alldigital system-of-the-future could not be achieved in a single

step. DCA engineers began considering strategies for transition -

ing the system over a period of years, and they subsequently

selected an approach to digitization that involved a so-called

hybrid system during the period of transition. As a first step in

this strategy, DCA was to begin a phased replacement of existing

analog voice channels with digital channels. This necessarily

implied that digital and analog capabilities would have to exist

side by side during the transitional period, and the key to a

felicitous hybrid marriage was pulse code modulation.

The key to pulse code modulation was the wideband modem.

The AUTODIN network already had a limited capability of this

sort, but it was based on the use of a single-voice-channel modem,

which gave it limited capacity and speed. In contrast, the wideband modem operated over a far larger number of voice chan nels

and as a result could accept digital data at rates up to one

thousand times greater.5 DCA officials explained how, using this

approach, a large number of analog and digital channels could

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332
be linked together without any discernible degradation, using

inexpensive conversion equipment readily available from commercial sources. Digital-analog transparency could thus be

achieved throughout the DCS even while channels were being

digitized. During this interim phase of operations, which DCA

officials estimated would last some 10 to 20 years, the system

would appear essentially unchanged; that is, users would continue to experience it as an analog system. And once all of the

system’s analog channels had been converted, it would be

possible to rapidly complete the move to an all-digital DCS

simply by replacing the system’s analog switches with digital

ones. 6 It was an ambitious effort, which DCA officials com -

pared to the conversion of aircraft from prop-driven to jet engines. For present-day communicators as for pilots during that

earlier era, what was in store was a costly period of transition

filled with considerable pain and trauma, but in the end it

would be worth it.7 To the thinking of many defense officials,

an all-digital future was as bright as it was inevitable.

All of this had the effect of even further blurring the distinction between tactical and strategic communications systems:

“No one really can tell where tactical communications and

strategic communications end or begin,” DCA director Win -

ston D. Powers noted. In bureaucratic recognition of technological reality, the Defense Communications Agency was

merged with the Joint Tactical C3 Agency (JTC3A) at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. This union, in Powers’ words, should have

taken place “eons ago.” After all, DCA and JTC3A had for years

cooperated in efforts to link tactical and strategic planning on

command and control, particularly through the provision of

interfaces between tactical systems and the various DCS components. “It will be a working, breathing organization,” Powers

said. And it was quick to adopt both the spirit and the logic of

Goldwater-Nichols, which called for the use of rapid prototyping

and staged acquisition of assets. 8

Although DCA officials were talking about how the DCS would

evolve in the years to come, they had hardly become converts

to the evolutionary approach to command and control system

development. Throughout the 1980s, they continued to point

out the evolutionary approach’s many serious limitations: the

fact that it did not specify the basis for subsequent evolution,

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that it lacked any notion of how to balance users’ requirements with budgetary constraints, and that it ignored how the

process actually worked and where subsystems were developed separately that then had to be interconnected to play

together as a coherent whole. 9 Implicit in the evolutionary

approach was a sort of flexible baseline, or programmatic

moving target, such that programs would never be completed.

As DCA officials were quick to point out, with programs kept

in the development phase essentially forever, the result would

likely not be savings but an open-ended, uncontrolled escala -

tion of costs.

In recognition of this, the Packard Commission report and the

Goldwater-Nichols defense reorganization had sketched out an

alternative way, a sort of middle ground between the ad hockery

of the evolutionary approach and the rigid closure of the weapons system approach. Known as a modular building block

(MBB) architecture, it was developed by a DCA team and

strongly supported by the assistant secretary of defense for C3I.

The MBB had as its underlying philosophy that systems acquisition would take place in a series of stages, or blocks. It was

evolution but with a twist; now, a system would have to achieve

specific goals in an identified developmental stage before approval would be granted to proceed to the next stage, something

that had not been the case with the evolutionary approach.1 0

But neither was it the weapons system approach, since the

staged nature of development permitted, within limits, the modification of requirements to keep pace with advances in technology. With the program now conceived as a series of stages,

unnecessary requirements could be dropped and new requirements added as the system developed.1 1 MBB represented a

compromise between centralization and decentralization and

would leave its mark on a number of key WWMCCS-related

systems developed by DCA during the 1980s. And so the cold

war saga of WWMCCS ends where it began, with the infrastructure known as the Defense Communications System.

Toward the Defense Information System Network

A major interest of the DCA during this time was to realize

its long-standing goal of transitioning to a single, integrated

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

334
Defense Communications System based on digital technolo -

gies. As DCA planned things, new technologies would be acquired incrementally, at first blurring the distinction between

and then merging completely, the still-separate DCS commonuser networks, all the while serving the voice and data requirements of the systems’ users. An integrated DCS implied

the use of a single integrated high-speed switch, which DCA

had pursued from its inception. But pressure to rapidly expand the common-user networks during the early years

meant that planning was necessarily oriented toward the use

of commercially available automatic switches. For DCA, this

meant a two-track approach: voice communications would use

commercially available analog switches, while record transmissions would use commercial digital switches. On repeated

occasions, agency officials had voiced the view that this was

an interim strategy only, useful until integration of the common-user networks could take place.1 2 But integration of AUTOVON, AUTODIN, and AUTOSEVOCOM required identification

of the switching technique to be used: circuit switched techniques, which had always been used for voice communications, or point-to-point circuits, generally used for the transmission of data. 13 Once that choice was made, the two-track

approach could be abandoned and the separate common-user

networks it had engendered would be history at last.

DCA’s plans, dating back to the end of the 1970s, first called

for the primarily analog Automatic Voice Network to be phased

out, replaced by a next-generation Defense Switched Network

(DSN). The proposed DSN would provide common-user telephone service throughout the Department of Defense, accommodate the transmission of data, offer a range of special command and control features, and do all of this in a cost-effective

manner.1 4 Whereas the majority of AUTOVON users at the

time were connected to a single backbone switch through a

single set of access lines, DCA engineers judged that the best

approach for the future network was an entirely different technological concept—a distributed network of numerous small,

powerful switches to replace the existing population of fewer,

larger switches. These new switches, collocated with their users

at bases, posts, and other military facilities around the world,

would be dual purpose, providing both local and long-haul

DEFENSE COMMUNICATIONS

335
communications services. They would be digital, since only

digital switches would permit the message control functions to

be distributed throughout the network in this fashion.1 5 Such

a network would be significantly more survivable and enduring than AUTOVON, it was believed, particularly in terms of

its resistance to nuclear effects. 1 6 It would also be more secure, and provide a secure teleconferencing capability, the

requirement for which had been identified by the WWMCCS

Architecture. Because this would eliminate the need for an

independent network for secure voice communications, DCA

developed a secure voice transition plan to provide the necessary guidance for integrating AUTOSEVOCOM into the Defense Switched Network. 1 7 As the cold war drew to its close,

considerable progress had been made toward implementing

the DSN, with antiquated AUTOVON switches in the continental United States and overseas replaced by state-of-the-art

digital-switching equipment.1 8

DCA’s plans also called for the replacement of AUTODIN,

the venerable Automatic Digital Network, with a new network

intended as the primary vehicle for creating the total integration of the Defense Communications System’s common-user

systems that DCA had so long desired. This AUTODIN followon would also be a distributed network, based on the packetswitching technique pioneered in the ARPANET. Specifically,

what DCA had in mind was taking a series of existing packetswitched networks—the ARPANET itself, the WWMCCS Intercomputer Network, the Intelligence Data Handling System, the

Strategic Air Command Digital Information Network, the Community On-line Intelligence Network, and others—expanding

and upgrading them, and then integrating them all into a

single Defense Data Network (DDN). 1 9

The schedule for integrating existing defense packetswitched networks into a single DDN consisted of several separate stages. First, the WWMCCS Intercomputer Network would

be upgraded to the WWMCCS Information System. WIS would

then be combined with the Intelligence Data Handling System,

and the result would be called the Command, Control, and

Intelligence (C2I) network. Next, the ARPANET would be partitioned into two parts. One of these would be a classified research and development network that would not formally

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

336
become part of the DDN. The other part of the ARPANET would

be designated an unclassified military-user network called

MILNET, a number of unclassified networks would be absorbed

into it, and all of these would then be fully integrated into the

DDN. Finally SACDIN (SAC Digital Network), which would in -

itially be served by a dedicated top secret network using DDN

components, would be fully integrated into the DDN. 2 0

With the end of the cold war, the planning and development

phases of DDN were essentially complete, and the network

consisted of several hundred geographically distributed

packet-switched nodes. The DCA’s principal remaining task, it

seemed, was to connect additional users to the network.2 1 So,

even as the international tensions that had spawned DCA receded, the communications infrastructure that it had worked

on for almost 30 years, and upon which WWMCCS depended,

was coming to fruition at last.

Postscript: The End of the Cold War

At the beginning of the 1980s, John Steinbruner observed

that if a “constructive stabilization” of the political relationship

between the United States and the Soviet Union could be

achieved, then efforts to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the United States’s communications, command, control, and intelligence system would contribute substantially to

overall security. Lacking such a political understanding between the superpowers, he argued, identical efforts might yield

opposite results as the Soviets simply allocated additional

weapons to new targets. In light of the acknowledged vulnerability of the US command structure at the time, political stabilization appeared to constitute a necessary precondition for

any effective program of command and control.2 2

The Reagan administration’s strategic modernization program was in large measure a consequence of, and response to,

the Soviet arms buildup that took place during the 1970s

under Leonid Brezhnev. Yet, that buildup, we now know,

sapped critical energies from the Soviet economy and polity,

cycled back to undermine the very military apparatus it was

ostensibly created to advance, and contributed to the dramatic

events of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As the curtain fell on

DEFENSE COMMUNICATIONS

337
the cold war, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pointed out in Komsomolskaya Pravda how the Brezhnev years “simply wasted our

last resources on unlimited and unnecessary armaments . . .

at a time when our own knees were trembling and we were

about to fall down exhausted.”2 3 Since the giant has now

fallen, since a constructive stabilization has been achieved, it

seems obvious that a number of US defense systems conceived before the fall—considered integral to the national defense in an international climate in which the Soviet Union

stood surrealistically tall in its ominous, artificial, and ultimately fatal final grasping for world influence and empire—would come in for review and reassessment. Such a

reassessment obviously included those systems that are part

of the World Wide Military Command and Control System. As

a result, the 1990s have witnessed the demise (at least in a

formal, bureaucratic sense) of several of the systems and

agencies that had helped define the cold war era.

The first to go was the Defense Communications Agency.

For just as the cold war had created the need for DCA, the end

of that era brought with it the agency’s end. On 25 June 1991,

acting under the authority of Title III of the Goldwater-Nichols

Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, the secretary of defense

redesignated the DCA as the Defense Information Systems

Agency (DISA). Although the new agency would operate under

the authority of the assistant secretary of defense for C3I, as it

did before, the change in name was intended to recognize its

broadened role in information systems management as well as

communications.2 4

The advent of DISA heralded the demise of the Defense

Communications System. DISA’s primary function was specified to be management and operational control over the Defense Information System Network (DISN), the successor to

DCS, and a formal definition for the new network was established by the ASD for C3

I in February 1994: “A subset of the

Defense Information Infrastructure, the DISN is the DOD’s

consolidated worldwide enterprise-level telecomunications in -

frastructure that provides the end-to-end information transfer

network for supporting military operations.” In other words,

DISN would include all of the assets that previously fell under

the DCS umbrella, which would serve as the baseline capability

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

338
from which future progress and programs would be measured. 2 5 As DISA explained things, the Defense Information

Systems Network would do it all, constituting a “seamless web

of communications networks, computers, software, databases,

applications, and other capabilities that meets the information

processing and transport needs of DOD users” under all conditions of peace, crisis, and war. 2 6

So that this could take place, the new network had to meet

a variety of effectiveness criteria. First, it had to be rapidly reconfigurable, capable of supporting joint task force requirements anywhere in the world. It had to provide fully interoperable communications between deployed forces and home

bases, and between the communications assets of all relevant

constituencies—the services, defense agencies, and America’s

allies. It had to provide the capacity to meet military needs,

including adequate surge capacity for times of crises. It also

had to provide a real-time management capability so that resources could be made available to users under all conditions

of peace and war. As DISA phrased it, the network would

permit war fighters “to ‘plug in’ and ‘push or pull’ information

in a seamless, interoperable, and global battlespace,” the point

being to “assure dominant battlespace awareness from the

warfighter’s viewpoint.”2 7

The DISN Joint Mission Need Statement, approved in early

1995, called for a smooth and incremental evolution away

from the current system’s reliance on defense-owned networks

and toward maximum possible reliance on commercial services and technologies. It called for the DISN to be structured

for modular and incremental evolution, allowing new tech nologies to be incorporated as they became available. 2 8 It called for

DISN to provide the majority of communications requirements

for WWMCCS’s post-cold-war successor.

In 1992 personnel from DISA and the Joint Staff reviewed

the WWMCCS automatic data-processing modernization program then in progress and found it wanting. That September

they presented a plan for its termination, which was subsequently approved by the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, and funds were made available to effect the transition

to a follow-on global command and control system (GCCS). 2 9

Like WWMCCS before it, and like the Defense Information

DEFENSE COMMUNICATIONS

339
Systems Network with which it overlapped and shared resources, GCCS represented as much a concept as it did a set

of assets; it was a sort of “umbrella strategy” intended to guide

the evolution of defense communications for the decades to

come. As DISA engineers described things, the GCCS would

“enable the principles and concepts of the Joint Staff’s C4I

[command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence] for the Warrior strategy” through of a set of evolutionary initiatives. Like the DISN, GCCS would emphasize maximum use of off-the-shelf technologies, its development

structured so that new technologies could be incorporated

incrementally, as they became available. In addition, like

WWMCCS before it, the new system was intended to be a

White House-to-foxhole system.3 0 Unlike the case of

WWMCCS, however, the GCCS might just be able to accomplish that goal, owing to the combination of the centralization

effected by Goldwater-Nichols and the breathtaking pace of

technological advance, especially in the area of automatic data

processing. By mid-decade, the services and defense agencies

had established GCCS program management offices to implement the new system, and the World Wide Military Command

and Control System, a product of the cold war, had vanished

along with the tensions of that bygone age.

Notes

1. James H. Babcock, “Defense Communications System Policy and

Fiscal Guidelines and Areas of Future Emphasis,” Signal, August 1977, 80.

2. Lee M. Paschall, “The Second-Generation DCS,” Air Force Magazine 6 1

(July 1978): 73.

3. Herbert A. Schulke Jr., “Digital Systems in the Strategic Context and

DCA Planning Activities,” Signal 2 6 (July/August 1972): 55.

4. John P. Walsh, “R and D Objectives for Future Defense

Communications System,” Signal 23 (September 1968): 12.

5. Lee Blachowicz, “Wideband Modems—Toward a Digital DCS,” Signal

26 (December 1971): 7.

6. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “DCS at the Crossroads,” Signal 33 (May/June

1979): 54–56.

7. Paschall, 73.

8. David T. Signori Jr., “The Command Center Improvement Program:

An Innovative Approach,” Signal 41 (March 1987): 65.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

340
9. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “The DCA—A Rock and a Hard Place,” Signal

34 (April 1980): 8.

10. Donald C. Latham and David R. Israel, “A Modular Building Block

Architecture,” in Principles of Command and Control, eds. Jon L. Boyes and

Stephen J. Andriole (Washington, D.C.: AFCEA International Press, 1987),

117.

11. Signori, 69.

12. Robert A. Bourcy, “AUTODIN—World Wide Automatic Digital

Network,” Signal 20 (March 1966): 16.

13. Robert R. Fossum and Vinton G. Cerf, “Communications Challenges

for the 80s,” Signal, October 1979, 20.

14. Martin A. Thompson and Tom M. Shimabukuro, “The Next

Generation CONUS AUTOVON,” Signal 34 (February 1980): 75.

15. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “DCA’s Route to Readiness,” Air Force

Magazine 62 (July 1979): 86.

16. “Encryption, Survivability Improve Defense Communications

System,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, 9 December 1985, 80.

17. Eugene F. Tighe Jr., “The Greatest Challenge to DOD

Communications is to Maintain a Worldwide System,” Defense Systems

Review 2 (June 1984): 12–14.

18. House, Committee on Appropriations, Department of Defense

Appropriations for 1989, pt. 6, 100t h Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.:

Government Printing Office, 1988), 472.

19. Stephen T. Walker, “Department of Defense Data Network,” Signal

37 (October 1982): 45.

20. Ibid.

21. House, DOD Appropriations for 1989, 472.

22. John D. Steinbruner, “Nuclear Decapitation,” Foreign Policy , Winter

1981–1982, 16.

23. “Excerpts From Solzhenitsyn Article,” New York Times, 19

September 1990, A8.

24. General Accounting Office, Defense Reorganization: DOD

Establishment and Management of Defense Agencies, NSIAD-92-210BR

(Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, May 1992), 3.

25. DISA, Strategy for the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN) –

Executive Summary ; and www.disa.mil:80/info/pao041.htm.

26. Emmett Paige Jr., “Management and Life-Cycle Support for the

Global Command and Control System,” memorandum, 26 June 1995.

27. DISA, Strategy for the Defense; and www.disa.mil:80/info/

pao041.htm.

28. Ibid.

29. Duane P. Andrews, memorandum to director, Defense Information

Systems Agency, 6 October 1992.

30. DISA Internet Home Page, www.disa.mil/gcss/execsum.html.

DEFENSE COMMUNICATIONS

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Chapter 19

Organization, Technology, and Ideology

in Command and Control

This work began by noting how three themes—(1) organiza -

tion, (2) technology, and (3) ideology—dominated the development of the World Wide Military Command and Control Sys -

tem during the cold war era. This final chapter examines the

influence of each of these themes in greater detail.

Organization: Subunit Domination

Of the three themes, organization appears to have been the

most influential force in the development of WWMCCS, since

from the very beginning WWMCCS has been an organization

dominated by subunit concerns, emphasizing services’ needs

and requirements and not infrequently working to the detri -

ment of the larger national interest. The result has been a

multiplicity of problems and occasional major system failures

when the system was called upon to function in a joint-service

context. Not surprisingly, this has led to the widespread per -

ception that WWMCCS is ineffective.

WWMCCS’s subunits are of two general types. On the one

hand are those WWMCCS entities, preeminently the military

services, for whom overriding importance was attached to the

fulfillment of their own missions. While themselves central to

WWMCCS, the perception of the system held by the services

has been that it is less than central to their own concerns and

at times even antipathetic to them. The performance of these

subunits and their pursuit and acceptance of command and

control innovations have thus tended toward an emphasis on

subunit autonomy and goals over the interests of the larger

organization of which they are nominally a part.

On the other hand are WWMCCS subunits, such as the

Defense Communications Agency and elements of the Office of

the Secretary of Defense, whose concerns (often whose very

existence)—were linked to the idea that WWMCCS is a central -

ized organizational entity—or at any rate should be. These

343
subunits also pursue courses of action and accept or reject

innovations, and their behavior in this is similarly selective.

For them, however, the emphasis tends to be on those things

that permit a higher degree of centralized control. Whether for

the decentralizers or the centralizers, then, success almost

invariably came at the expense of the other subunits’ author -

ity and autonomy. The result is that WWMCCS has histori -

cally been a locus of contentiousness, of goal dissensus, and

of competing definitions of what constitutes adequate system

performance.

In one sense this represents nothing more than a funda -

mental fact of organizational life: organizations have a division

of labor. According to the specific nature of its task require -

ments, any organization will be horizontally differentiated into

specialized subunits, and the requirements placed upon each

will differ. Some subunits will have an internal mission, di -

recting their attention toward intraorganizational matters,

while the mission of others will be focused more externally.

How well the organization functions will depend on the degree

of interdependence that exists between the subunits and the

extent to which they are linked into a cohesive whole. 1

The central argument advanced in this book has been that

WWMCCS’s historical lack of an organizational center of grav -

ity has resulted in a serious lack of coordination between its

constituent elements. Specifically, the criteria for system ef -

fectiveness have been promulgated by two competing organizational factions, one whose interests and concerns lie with

greater centralization of the command and control function

and the other’s in resisting that centralization. This structural

ambiguity has meant that system elements have frequently

worked at cross purposes, leading WWMCCS, an ostensibly

rational system, to irrational outcomes—periodic breakdowns

of control and even major system failures. 2

 With such problematical performance, little wonder the system has frequently

been viewed as ineffective.

The notion that apparently rational behaviors can produce

irrational outcomes has a lengthy history and a distinguished

pedigree in social scientific thought, and those who have wres -

tled with the issue suggest that different types of rationality

exist, even in a single organization such as WWMCCS. The

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

344
social theorist Max Weber posited two different types of ra -

tional action. First, there was the type he described as “for -

mal,” a means-oriented type focusing on procedure, emphasiz -

ing pragmatic, short-term calculations, and showing a

concern for the coordination of means. The concern here is

with efficiency, an entirely internal performance standard that

involves what the organization is producing and at what cost.

Efficiency is a standard that is relatively value-free, begging

the larger question of whether the organization should actually be engaged in doing what it is doing—like a soldier who

can rationally carry out an entire series of actions with no

idea as to their ultimate end or of the place of his actions

within the larger organizational framework.3

 Such actions are

in fact quite rational in the sense that they involve definite

goals that are appropriate to that level of action and organiza -

tion. But where formal rationality dominates, the appropriate -

ness of actions in some larger context is simply not consid -

ered. Weber contrasted this means-oriented formal rationality

with what he called “substantive” rationality, a goal-directed

type concerned with values that appealed to “ultimate concerns.” Substantive rationality deals with effectiveness, the

appropriateness of what is produced in light of some larger

end. Weber was quite clear that however formally rational

actions might be, they need not correspond to substantive

goals.4

 Quite simply, efficiency and effectiveness represent independent evaluative standards.5

The suggestion is that an organization can be efficient but

not effective, a place where a means-directed formal rational -

ity can exist and predominate, while failing to serve substan -

tively rational ends. For as Weber demonstrated, there is a

tendency for formal rationality to supplant substantive rationality, with the means replacing the ends they were ostensibly

designed to serve.6

 Indeed, the mantle of formal rationality

devoid of any higher substantive purpose became for Weber an

inescapable “iron cage.”7

 It is a view that finds circumstantiation in a number of organizational studies, including Herbert

Simon’s discussion of welfare agencies, 8

 Charles Perrow’s examination of high-risk systems,9

 and Robert Jackall’s account

of managerial decision making.10 In these studies we find a

way to conceptualize WWMCCS’s historical problems, its apORGANIZATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND IDEOLOGY

345
parently endemic inability to perform effectively: much of the

system was developed and deployed within organizational parameters where a practical “formal” rationality predominated.

Specifically, the system was in large measure developed by

organizational subunits whose missions and priorities never

were perfectly aligned with the more substantive concerns of

the broader WWMCCS macrosystem.

It is easy enough to understand why this was done.

Subunits are interest groups that act to enhance their power

and prestige relative to other organizational constituencies.

They collect information to enhance their own value and to

render other elements of the organization dependent upon

their expertise. The information extracted from the environment and subsequently made available within the organization will be far from neutral, serving political as well as utili -

tarian functions, while other information gets ignored

entirely.11 Certain external and internal constituencies will fig -

ure more prominently in each subunit’s evaluative calculus

than others, and these will be attended to disproportionately.

That is, a tendency develops for subunits and their members

to evaluate all actions, by themselves or with others, exclu -

sively in terms of their utility for the realization of subgoals,

resulting in a contentious us/them sort of mind-set wherein

the courses of action pursued are not at all rational or func -

tional from the perspective of the larger organization. This is

the phenomenon of suboptimization, a recipe for fractiousness

and ultimately failure if the subunits’ centrifugal impetus is

not somehow held in check.

Most organizations employ a variety of devices, both carrots

and sticks, to promote coordination between subunits, to se -

cure adequate contributions from them on reasonable terms,

and to see to it that whatever discrepancies exist between the

subunits’ goals and the larger organizational goals do not be -

come overly large.12 But what happens when these don’t work?

What happens when the organization lacks the ability to es -

tablish viable limits to subunits’ natural self-interest? What

happens when the influence of subunits becomes excessive,

and when centralized decision makers, the organization’s os -

tensible “dominant coalition,” cease to be the ultimate arbiters

of organizational performance? As the case of WWMCCS sug -

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

346
gests, what occurs in a world of relentless, uncontrolled

suboptimization is that the efficiency concerns of subunits

prevail. What occurs also is that organizational performance

can be judged decidedly ineffective when assessed by “sub -

stantive” criteria relevant to the organization as a whole, not

just the criteria of concern to powerful subunits. 13 An organization that exhibits these characteristics might best be de -

scribed as a “subunit-dominated organization.”

A subunit-dominated organization is a place where the goal

orientation of central decision makers does not determine

subunits’ orientation or actions with any precision or cer -

tainty. It is a place where the center is unable to impose

effective oversight and control over lower-level parts of the

organization. It is also a place where the idea of a centralized

decision-making apparatus is simply no longer descriptive of

the organizational reality that exists. Even more than loosely

coupled systems, which assume a modicum of coordination

and common purpose flowing from the top, subunit-dominated

organizations are not fully cooperative systems. This does not

describe a situation of the rational pursuit of optimal out -

comes. It runs counter to rationalist models of bureaucratic

functioning, which for military organizations involves centrali -

zation of policy making and strategic planning, as well as decen -

tralization of actual operations.14 Beset by an internal Balkanization, subunit-dominated organizations are political arenas

in which subunits compete to advance their interests and where

resources are distributed according to coalition bargaining power.

This work suggests that WWMCCS is a subunit-dominated

organization, a place where not only has operational authority

been decentralized but ultimate or true authority as well.

Throughout the cold war era, the military services in many

important instances remained independent entities with considerable bureaucratic power. Planning and force structure

were predicated on unilateral service views of priorities and on

how a future war might be fought. Views on the training and

equipping and the support of forces logically followed, fre -

quently at the expense of joint missions and overall combat

readiness. Each service retained separate responsibility for its

own budget and competed vigorously to increase its share of

total defense dollars.15 In other words, key WWMCCS system

ORGANIZATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND IDEOLOGY

347
elements have operated in substantial measure beyond the

influence of centralized guidelines or oversight. Their autonomy was such that they could often ignore or effectively resist

central initiatives. Central or hierarchical officials lost the ca -

pacity to exercise effective oversight over these subunits, or

they never had it to begin with. 16 What this meant was that

the effort to create a worldwide military command and control

system truly responsive to centralized control was resisted by

the services, and when the WWMCCs could not be resisted, it

was subordinated to the services’ unique, mission-specific

needs.17 A lack of centralized control guaranteed that from the

start WWMCCS would be more a locus of competition and

conflict than a coherent single organizational entity—thus, the

repeated characterizations over the years of WWMCCS as a

“confederation,” “loosely knit federation,” and various other

similar characterizations.18 It was a condition guaranteeing

that the system would have trouble, even experience major

failures, when called on to operate in a joint service context.

Technology: Technological Push and User Pull

The second major theme in WWMCCS’s development has

been technology—specifically, the dramatic technological advances that began early in the cold war era and that thereafter

never ceased to exert influence. WWMCCS was born within a

context of ongoing research and development, an almost ver -

tiginous pace of technological advance both in the military

and civilian sectors that was continually altering the nature of

warfare. What was the importance of technology in

WWMCCS’s evolution? Was its development driven primarily

by a conscious, rational process that has been described as

“user pull”? Or was it the result of the imperative of techno -

logical advance, of “technology push”?19

These questions are rightly seen as part of the larger debate

about the role of technology in society, a debate that contin -

ues today and that has been characterized by considerable

controversy. On one side are technological determinists who

view technology as a major social force, arguing that as sci -

ence marches onward, society necessarily follows. 20 In this

view, research scientists fuel the fires of technological ad -

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

348
vance, and by extension military requirements, through their

desire to pursue and bring to fruition interesting new techno -

logical concepts.21 Major technological advances provide the

impetus for their application to military systems, and military

requirements issue from the flow of change, rather than from

a priori assessments of requirements.22 Concluding that social

structures and their associated structures of belief are in part

or in whole derivative of a technological imperative, these de -

terminists represent one side in a wide-ranging debate about

the relationship of technology to society—specifically, that the

evolution of defense systems and policy are dominated by

technological advances, rather than conscious human design.23

Critics of this point of view argue that the technological

determinists have it backwards. Technology is not a social

force, they say, but rather a social product. From a wide range

of possible technical solutions to problems, those individuals

and groups with greater influence will choose the ones that

best serve their interests.24 Not only that, this perspective

holds that the range of possible solutions is circumscribed by

these elites. It is a social determinist view, where the develop -

ment of specific technologies is driven and shaped by power

relations rather than by an essentially neutral process of sci -

entific advance. Radical critiques from this perspective usually

focus on the profit and power goals of the military-industrial

complex.25 More conventional analyses view the selection of

specific technologies as the result of national strategic choice,

where rational decision makers select specific technologies on

the basis of precise calculations about national objectives,

perceived threats, and strategic doctrine, all the while cogni -

zant of budgetary constraints and other limitations. 26

Which view is correct? The answer in the case of WWMCCS

is a qualified “both.” After all, revolutionary technological concepts and techniques do appear on the scene from time to

time, affecting military relations. Witness the advent of atomic

weapons, the development of the intercontinental ballistic

missile, ballistic missile submarines, computers, and satellites

during the years following World War II. Arguably, each of

these new technologies revolutionized warfare, contributing

thereby to the drive for a more responsive and centralized

ORGANIZATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND IDEOLOGY

349
defense decision-making structure. Moreover, much of the

thinking in the area of command and control has been highly

technical, a hard engineering orientation, which resulted in

the overwhelming proportion of research attention and financial investment going toward system designs that were technologically advanced—often magnificently so—yet that ultimately failed to meet the requirements of actual users

because they failed to adequately consider the human and

organizational context into which they will be introduced. 27

In one way it all makes perfect sense. Given that the great

watersheds in the history of warfare have always involved the

application of new technologies, it is hardly surprising that a

basic military mind-set has evolved that newer, more techno -

logically sophisticated systems are by definition better ones.

This logic has been validated by a Congress that frequently

rewards the pursuit of more sophisticated technologies with

higher funding and underscored by an American cultural em -

phasis on progress and a pervasive belief in technology as its

guarantor.28 WWMCCS’s growth, then, as with the trajectory of

the arms race more generally, arose from an institutionalized

belief that a more capable technology is by definition a better

one. Technology push has thus been a key process in the

development of defense systems, producing most of the impor -

tant, revolutionary new technologies.29

If both perspectives contain a measure of truth, it can be

argued that the concept of revolution probably captures less

well the dynamic of change in the domain of command and

control, for few of the key developments in this area—the

transistor, for example, or the laser or automatic data process -

ing—truly revolutionized communications. Certainly each of

these was an advance, producing improvements in communi -

cations capacity, reliability, and economy, but their impact

was hardly as dramatic as the term revolution connotes. As

these and other technologies arrived on the scene, they were

assimilated into existing media, resulting in gradual, incre -

mental change. Thus, while many new technologies were initially hailed as revolutionary, their integration into the worka -

day world of command and control generally proved to be less

so, conditioned at every step by preexisting technologies and

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

350
patterns of organizational relations and goals. 30 If there were a

technological push, it was not necessarily an unqualified one.

Throughout the history of WWMCCS during the cold war,

then, much of the impetus for technological development appears to have been closer to the “user pull” of the social determi -

nists, “the institutional process by which users (notably the

services) assess the adequacy of existing [systems] to meet mili -

tary needs, and state the characteristics of the next generation

of equipment desired to overcome identified inadequacies,” as

the Packard Commission described it.31 All new technologies

naturally carry within them the seeds of organizational change.

But some types will be embraced as advantageous, whereas

others will be rejected, and it is of interest to determine which is

which. On the one hand, it has been suggested that innovations

posing no threat to organizational routines, strategies, or “es -

sence” are less likely to generate resistance and hence are more

likely to be adopted.32 Even innovations that challenge existing

routines and strategies might be embraced when they are seen

to promote desirable changes: for example, when an organization wishes to expand and when the innovation will permit that

expansion to take place.33 Obversely, technologies that presage

unwanted changes—such as a reduction in organizational

autonomy, or undesirable transformations in routines, customs,

or allegiances—are likely to encounter resistance, including active hostility, even if in some objective sense they are inherently

useful or appropriate.34 This selectivity has led to the adoption of

a wide range of new technologies, many of which have tended to

focus on the needs and priorities of system subunits. 35 It meant

that technologies were resisted if they were not perceived as

being in line with the requirements of the services’ military mis -

sions.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense has had only limited

success in its efforts to have the services pay for systems

designed in support of joint-service systems for strategic command and control. Funding for such high-priority programs as

the Defense Satellite Communications System and the National Emergency Airborne Command Post were resisted by

the services, for example, and received funding only under

heavy pressure from the secretary. Lower-priority initiatives

met with even less success. During the late 1970s the head of

ORGANIZATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND IDEOLOGY

351
WWMCCS Engineering recommended the acquisition of 10

different types of communications equipment to improve national officials’ ability to respond to urgent contingencies. Al -

though the items included such relatively inexpensive equipment as transportable satellite earth terminals, the services

declined requests to fund them. 36 In a subunit-dominated organization such as WWMCCS, it appears that social determi -

nism, user pull, will be the dominant influence in terms of the

acquisition of new technologies, although it will not determine

outcomes with absolute certainty.

Ideology: The Evolutionary Approach

A subunit-dominated organization such as WWMCCS sounds

emphatically ineffective. Its organizational structure, rife with

fractiousness, appears like nothing so much as a centrifugal

whirl straining to tear itself to pieces, subject to major system

failures. A key question is thus how such a discordant assem -

blage of elements manages to hold itself together. It has been

argued in this work that a major part of the answer in

WWMCCS’s case lies in a shared set of assumptions about the

physical and social worlds—an ideology, in other words, that

has permitted innovations to be pursued, technologies ac -

quired, and the system’s apparently implacably antagonistic

subunits to function together more or less amicably over time.

The ideology that has permitted these remarkable feats to be

accomplished, one that has gained increased rhetorical and

bureaucratic support with the passage of the years, is the

“evolutionary approach” to command and control system de -

velopment.

We have seen how the approach first gained a foothold in

defense thinking in the early 1960s as an alternative to the

then-dominant approach to system design and acquisition,

the weapons system approach, whose governing idea was that

all efforts should be directed toward the development of an

identifiable target system that could be turned over to its

users on a specific target date. 37 The problem was that by the

early 1960s, a number of influential defense constituencies

had concluded that the weapons system approach simply did

not work when applied to command and control systems be -

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

352
cause they possessed characteristics not found in other complex systems. Perhaps most importantly, they were said to be

dynamic, “information rich” systems highly dependent upon

the information they contain and the demands placed upon

them.38 In contrast to more static systems whose very nature

dictated that certain functions be performed repeatedly in a

fixed order, command and control systems were viewed as

characterized by an ever-changing configuration of individuals, functions, information requirements, and equipment that

was inherently resistant to any simple formulaic ordering.

Relevant actors could not always be identified, nor could op -

erational requirements, and even when they could, they often

did not remain fixed long enough to permit the development

and deployment of appropriate system capabilities. 39 In developing WWMCCS, then, flexibility appeared essential.

A second general reason advanced for the uniqueness of com -

mand and control systems was that they were considered more

“threat driven” than other military systems, meaning that they

had to be uniquely sensitive to both qualitative and quantitative

changes in enemy military capabilities.40 The problem with the

old weapons system approach was that by the time a command

and control system had finally achieved full operational status,

the military situation had frequently changed so much that the

system was no longer appropriate to the threat. Making matters

more difficult still was the rapid and accelerating pace of tech -

nological advance. With new and frequently competing technologies constantly being developed, locking in a specific system

design all too often meant locking its user into a system that

was obsolete by the time it was fielded. 41 Of course, it was

possible to try to design systems to meet future requirements,

but such exercises in prophesy proved to be expensive and were

not infrequently frustrated by unpredictable international events

and technological changes.42 In the minds of many in the de -

fense establishment, the unique fact that it appeared impossible

to fully specify a command and control system’s requirements at

the time its development commenced called for an equally

unique management approach.43

As we have seen, the alternative to the conventional model

of management and planning that appeared most attractive

allowed commanders to define, develop, and improve their

ORGANIZATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND IDEOLOGY

353
own systems “naturally” over time, as circumstances war -

ranted, as they were considered necessary to meet the chang -

ing requirements of their military missions. 44 “Changes in the

command and control systems will be, of necessity, evolutionary,” Robert S. McNamara had declared, “and the systems

must be flexible enough to adapt to changes in the world

situation and U.S. strategy.” Moreover, it was simply too ex -

pensive, indeed impossible, to develop complete stand-alone

systems only to have to rip them out and replace them from

scratch every time a new technology came down the pike or

each time modifications were made to US strategic doctrine. 45

By advancing the idea that command and control modernization was an incremental, user-oriented process conducted

under the broad cognizance of a central authority, the evolu -

tionary approach held forth the promise of greater flexibility in

a turbulent geo-political and technological environment.46

Adding new requirements and technologies as an ongoing

series of modest improvements obviously meant that command and control systems would take longer to develop and

thus cost more—but never mind. It was believed that unlike

systems whose designs had been frozen earlier, those that

emerged from the evolutionary process would possess greater

capabilities, better reflect users’ needs, and be more closely

aligned with the requirements of national military policy. The

result would be a “harmonious conglomerate of elements of

different size, loosely but effectively federated.” 47 Yet this

phrase surely raises more questions than it answers. Precisely

which elements should comprise this conglomerate? By what

criteria should their effectiveness be assessed? Who should

determine the answers to such questions as these? Far from

rhetorical questions, they proved to be eminently real-world

ones with real implications for system design, suggesting why

they have repeatedly surfaced in the lengthy defense debate

over the best way to develop, operate, and evaluate WWMCCS.

So the evolutionary approach had its down side, perhaps

the most serious aspect of which was that it encouraged a

lack of clear-cut responsibility. It permitted considerable laxity and carelessness in system specification. It did not require

a full accounting of who the system’s users would be, since

these could always be identified later. For users who were

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

354
identified, the approach failed to require a comprehensive

specification of their requirements, in the belief that whatever

deficits might exist could simply be addressed in subsequent

phases of system evolution. It also failed to specify a point

from which evolution would proceed, and it failed to demand a

clear statement of the goals the system was supposed to ac -

complish, thus countenancing a lack of clarity as to how the

system was supposed to function or be evaluated. 48 It was also

financially wasteful, keeping programs in the development

phase essentially forever, since all systems were to be subject

to constant review in terms of their relationship to changes in

the threat, to development of new weapons systems and other

technologies, and to modifications in command structures or

other organizational changes.49

Predicated as it was upon independence rather than inter -

dependence of subunits, the approach ensured that subunits’

actions would frequently bear little relationship to one another, resulting in unnecessary, costly duplication. 50 It also

created strong pressures for contractor buy-ins, wherein arti -

ficially low prices would be given up front for a project, the

contractor understanding full well that prices could be raised

and raised again as the project “evolved.” 51 To many critics

this was not evolution but rather a profligate and essentially

visionless process of ad hoc incrementalism, one whose end

products would almost certainly require extensive work to make

them play together as a coherent whole.

But if not evolution in fact, a key question is why did the

evolutionary approach gain such wide currency in the first

place? This work has suggested that the answer probably lies

more in the bureaucratic utility of the approach than in its

ability to create an optimal system for command and control.

To those individuals and groups interested in advancing the

cause of greater centralization in command and control, the

evolutionary approach appears to have been initially attractive

because it was a means to mollify the opposition to greater

centralization in defense decision making. The evolutionary

approach was also attractive to those groups, such as the

services, whose interests were naturally antipathetic to greater

centralization since it maintains that the decision-making process is situationally contingent and unknowable in advance.

ORGANIZATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND IDEOLOGY

355
Centralized decision makers thus cannot adequately specify

the sorts of information they require, with whom they might

need to communicate, or precisely what type of system best

suits their needs. In light of this ignorance at the center, the

logical course of action is to devolve authority toward the

periphery, providing greater flexibility for system development

to lower-level system subunits.52 With the evolutionary approach,

subunits were able in substantial measure to co-opt the devel -

opment of WWMCCS in ways favorable to their agendas and

their interests.

Therefore, the evolutionary approach was able to prosper in

the final analysis because of its bureaucratic utility and be -

cause it represented a way to meet the needs of both the

proponents of centralization and decentralization simultaneously. It allowed the centralizers to commence building the

defensewide command and control infrastructure they desired, something that might otherwise have been met with far

more vigorous opposition. For those whose interests lay in

decentralization, the approach offered a great deal of autonomy and considerable authority for WWMCCS’s development

and management, sweetening considerably the bitter pill of

centralization. But as this work has shown, the compromise

was hardly symmetrical, for the price of diminished service

resistance ultimately proved to be the soul of the centralized

WWMCCS concept.

In theoretical terms, the evolutionary approach allowed

WWMCCS to be redefined from what we might call a “solutiondriven” organization to one that was more “process driven.”

Solution-driven organizations are oriented toward the resolution

of specific problems, problems that in turn tend to be closely

aligned with an organization’s official goals. Such organizations

generally operate in a context of substantive rationality and are

oriented toward some specific end or “ultimate value” as enunci -

ated in public statements by their officials and as set forth in

their public documents.53 In the case of WWMCCS, the “ultimate

value” is to provide the National Command Authorities with an

ability to electronically orchestrate military responses to crises

anywhere around the globe. The weapons system approach of

command and control systems acquisition is consistent with

this, involving as it does a rational process of identifying a popu -

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

356
lation of system users, specifying their responsibilities, deter -

mining the various types of information they required, and

developing specific technologies to provide it.

Obversely, the key for understanding process-driven organi -

zations is that they are means-oriented, focusing on produc -

ing an ongoing stream of products or services. They are con -

cerned with operative goals, with actual operating policies,

and they reflect the actual needs of organizational constituencies.

Process-driven organizations engage in activities with no

clearly defined “ultimate” end state or specific solution toward

which the organization is tending. Their goals, such as they

are, turn on efficiency criteria with regard to the process itself,

and thus they function within a context of formal rationality.

With the organization’s purpose no longer tied to the attain -

ment of an ultimate goal or specific end state, any advance -

ment or achievement, however substantial, is seen as simply a

milestone on a road the length of which is no longer known

with precision; indeed, a road whose length has been inten -

tionally rendered imprecise.

It was in this way that the evolutionary approach subtly

redefined the criteria for WWMCCS effectiveness. For the ap -

proach’s proponents, the purpose of WWMCCS was no longer

to attain a specific goal state by developing and deploying

some identifiable set of command and control capabilities to

meet specific performance criteria. Rather, the purpose was

now modernization, evolution itself, with any technological or

organizational innovations viewed as simply a part of this

ongoing process. Proponents of the evolutionary approach

have long tolerated a level of WWMCCS performance that oth -

ers have considered marginal or substandard, and it is per -

haps only in this light that their tolerance is understandable.

To them, after all, WWMCCS’s job was not to exhibit perfect

performance, which is impossible in any case, but rather to be

evolving toward some higher, however imperfectly conceived

and understood, end state.

System Failures

Thus, we arrive at our final point of discussion: system

failures. We have seen how WWMCCS’s history has been

ORGANIZATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND IDEOLOGY

357
punctuated by a series of serious, often spectacular break -

downs and failures. WWMCCS has, in more sense than one,

truly been a child of crisis. The argument advanced here is

that a subunit-dominated organization such as WWMCCS,

focusing on lower-level interests and driven by concerns of

process rather than results, could not avoid failure when

viewed from a more substantive, systemwide perspective. To

those process-oriented types who embraced the evolutionary

approach, this was viewed as a regrettable but unavoidable

part of evolution. To them, things were perhaps a bit problem -

atical now, but the system was evolving after all, undergoing a

process of continual improvement and enhancement. To

them, the glass was emphatically (and at least) half full. But

to other influential individuals and groups with occasion to

assess WWMCCS’s effectiveness, the Congress being perhaps

the most conspicuous example, that glass appeared different.

Wielding as they did a different, solution-driven evaluative

yardstick, effective performance was viewed as perfect per -

formance, a criterion that WWMCCS would fail to meet. From

their perspective, the World Wide Military Command and Control System was not merely a child of crisis. In structural

terms it was born to fail.

Notes

1. Johannes M. Pennings and Paul S. Goodman, “Toward a Workable

Framework,” in New Perspectives on Organizational Effectiveness, eds. Paul

S. Goodman and Johannes M. Pennings (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,

1977), 146–84.

2. Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of

Formal Organization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 258.

3. Karl Mannheim, Man and Society: In an Age of Reconstruction

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 54.

4. Stephen Kalberg, “Max Weber’s Types of Rationality: Cornerstones for

the Analysis of Rationalization Processes in History,” American Journal of

Sociology 85 (1980): 1145–79.

5. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald R. Salancik, The External Control of

Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective (New York: Harper &

Row, 1978), 34–35.

6. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology,

vol. 1 (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968).

7. ———, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 181.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

358
8. Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior, 3d ed. (New York: Free

Press, 1976), 201–2.

9. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies

(New York: Basic Books, 1984).

10. Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

11. James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York:

John Wiley & Sons, 1958), 152–53.

12. Pennings and Goodman, 152.

13. Kim S. Cameron, “Effectiveness as Paradox: Consensus and Conflict

in Conceptions of Organizational Effectiveness,” Management Science 32,

no. 5 (May 1986): 549.

14. Philip S. Kronenberg, “Command and Control as a Theory of

Interorganizational Design,” Defense Analysis 4, no. 3 (1988): 232–33.

15. Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much Is Enough?

Shaping the Defense Program, 1961–1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971),

10–11.

16. Lawrence B. Mohr, Explaining Organizational Behavior: The Limits

and Possibilities of Theory and Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,

1982), 106-7.

17. Lawrence E. Adams, “The Evolving Role of C3 in Crisis Management,”

Signal, August 1976, 60.

18. Comptroller General, The World Wide Military Command and Control

System—Major Changes Needed in its Automated Data Processing

Management and Direction: Report to the Congress, LCD-80-22, 14

December 1979, 2; Jon L. Boyes, “WWMCCS in Transition: A Navy View,”

Signal, August 1976, 72; and Hubert S. Cunningham and William E.

Kenealy, “The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Command and Control,” Signal,

March 1975, 16.

19. A Quest for Excellence: Final Report to the President (Washington,

D.C.: Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, June 1986), 45.

20. For example, see Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and

Technology: The Origins, Grammar, and Future of Ideology (New York:

Seabury Press, 1976); and Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964).

21. Solly Zuckerman, “Science Advisors and Scientific Advisors,”

Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980): 250–51.

22. John Steinbruner and Barry Carter, “Organizational and Political

Dimensions of the Strategic Posture: The Problem of Reform,” Daedalus 104

(Summer 1975): 143.

23. Ralph E. Lapp, Arms Beyond Doubt: The Tyranny of Weapons

Technology (New York: Cowles, 1970).

24. See, for example, Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,

3 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1967); Harry Braverman, Labor

and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); and David F. Noble, Forces of

ORGANIZATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND IDEOLOGY

359
Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Knopf,

1984).

25. See, for example, C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1956); Seymour Melman, The Permanent War Economy:

American Capitalism in Decline (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956); and

James Fallows, National Defense (New York: Random House, 1981).

26. Graham T. Allison and Frederic A. Morris, “Exploring the

Determinants of Military Weapons,” Daedalus 104 (1975): 103.

27. I. B. Holley Jr., “Command, Control and Technology,” Defense

Analysis 4, no. 3 (1988): 270.

28. Warren G. Bennis et al., The Planning of Change, 4th ed. (New York:

Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), 17; and Gerhard Lenski and J. Lenski,

Human Societies (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).

29. Blue Ribbon Commission, A Quest for Excellence, 45.

30. Gordon T. Gould Jr., “Trends in Communications—Revolution or

Evolution?” Signal, May 1967, 60.

31. Blue Ribbon Commission, A Quest for Excellence, 45.

32. Matthew Evangelista, Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United

States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies (Ithaca, N.Y.:

Cornell University Press, 1988).

33. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and

Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,

1984), 47.

34. Elting E. Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times (Cambridge,

Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), 35–36.

35. Comptroller General, The World Wide Military Command and Control

System, 12.

36. Bruce G. Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the

Nuclear Threat (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), 59.

37. J. J. Cahill, “Resource Management: A New Slant on C&C,” Armed

Forces Management, July 1963, 70.

38. Comptroller General, The World Wide Military Command and Control

System, 14–18.

39. TIG [The Inspector General] Brief, “Directorate of Command Control

and Communications (AFOCC),” 14 March 1969, 2.

40. William Morrison and David M. Russell, “C3

I Programs Demand

Cost-effective Data Processing Solutions,” Defense Science & Electronics,

January 1987, 28.

41. Peter Grier, “Pentagon Arms Suffer From High-Tech Gap,” Christian

Science Monitor, 8 June 1989, 7.

42. J. P. McConnell, “Command and Control,” Sperryscope, no. 2 (1965):

4.

43. Albert E. Babbitt, “New Communications and Technology in

WWMCCS,” Signal, August 1977, 84.

44. Comptroller General, The World Wide Military Command and Control

System, 14–18.

THE WORLD WIDE MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL SYSTEM

360
45. John B. Bestic, “No More Confused Situations,” Signal, March 1967,

53–56.

46. TIG Brief, 2.

47. “Dr. Fubini Stresses DDR&E’s Desire for System Publication

Compatibility,” DATA, February 1965, 9.

48. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., “The DCA—A Rock and a Hard Place,” Signal

34 (April 1980): 8.

49. McConnell, 2.

50. Pfeffer and Salancik, 70.

51. Bernard L. Weiss, “Keys to Success in C3I,” Signal, August 1982, 53.

52. J. S. Butz Jr., “USAF and the Computer Revolution,” Air Force

Magazine, March 1964, 35.

53. Charles Perrow, “The Analysis of Goals in Complex Organizations,”

American Sociological Review 26, no. 4 (December 1961): 855–56.

ORGANIZATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND IDEOLOGY

361
Epilogue

Editor’s Note: The World Wide Military Command and Control System (WWMCS) was closed down in August 1996 and

was replaced by the Global Command Control System (GCCS).

To find out how the new system is currently working, the

author interviewed Dr. Frank Perry, technical director of the

Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR). Dr.

Perry is the chief technical authority within that command.

Interview with Dr. Frank Perry

20 March 2000

Pearson: Dr. Perry, please discuss your background and career, especially with regard to WWMCCS and its successor,

the Global Command Control System.

Perry: I have been at SPAWAR for about a year and a half. For

the previous three and a half years, I was the technical director—something like the chief scientist or chief engineer—at

the Defense Information Systems Agency. That was the interval when Global Command Control System was developed. I

had more than just a little bit to do with that whole develop -

ment process, beginning in May 1995, when I went to DISA,

on through August of 1998, when I left. So there was that

association. There was also an earlier association with

WWMCCS as well. In 1975 I spent a year as a programmer on

the WWMCCS system, as a young lieutenant junior grade in

the Navy, at what was then CINCLANTFLT, at an organization

called the Atlantic Command Operational Support Facility. It

basically ran the WWMCCS site there. So I had two encounters with WWMCCS, first in the mid-1970s, and then during

the 1995–98 time frame at DISA.

Pearson: Let’s go back a decade or so. In your view, what were

the major themes, the major issues, which set the stage for

the transition from WWMCCS to GCCS?

363
Perry: As I’m sure you know, WWMCCS was more than just a

technology. It was not just ADP, but it was an entire process

associated with deployment, planning, and execution—deployment meaning large-scale movement of forces in response to

contingency operations. There certainly was a WWMCCS system, the ADP system, interconnected by a network called WIN

(WWMCCS Intercomputer Network) that evolved back in the

1970s and went through the cold war era into the post-cold

war era, based upon some very early networking technologies

starting back in the mid-1970s. It started off with something

called PWIN, the Prototype WWMCCS Intercomputer Network,

and eventually evolved into WIN, predating a lot of the In -

ternet kinds of technology that we have today. So it was ADP,

plus the whole set of processes and people associated with

how one plans for and executes large-scale movement of

forces. So it’s a whole bunch of processes, people, computers,

and networks going all the way back to my earliest involvement with it in the mid-1970s.

The world began to change, especially with respect to technology. You talked a little bit about the world changing with

respect to the end of the cold war. Well the world changed in

perhaps as radical a fashion with respect to technology. As

intercomputer networking became much more recognized, and

Internet technology emerged on the scene, there was a very

fundamental shift for a lot of people dealing with military

technology. You went from the mainframe era, lasting through

the early 1980s, through the minicomputer era, all the way

down to the client server and desktop machines kind of architectures that we have today, leading off ultimately toward very

thin client web-based architectures. Throughout the late

1980s–early 1990s, as those technological changes were starting to gain a foothold, the technology of WWMCCS with its by

that time very proprietary and relatively low-performance

wide-area intercomputer network and the mainframe technology base was increasingly nonresponsive. It could not adequately evolve to meet the changing characteristics and needs

of command and control.

In the post-Desert Storm time frame as well, there was

recognition within the senior leadership of the Joint Staff that

364
one had to evolve this thing called WWMCCS into more than

just a deliberate planning tool. There was the realization that

one had to embrace more real-time execution aspects of command and control at the Joint Staff level, things like theaterlevel situational awareness—who’s where, when—with respect

to friendly forces, US and allied, as well as hostile forces.

Those were challenges that the mainframe WWMCCS system

never really had on its plate. And as you looked at the proprietary low-performing network and the mainframe-based hard -

ware architecture, you really could not evolve that into some

of the expanded missions dealing not just with deliberate

planning for deployment but also with crisis planning and

some execution-related functional capabilities.

Pearson: Does that mean that there is less of a “strategic”

emphasis to the Global Command Control System? In the

latter part of its history WWMCCS seemed to be moving in the

direction of greater emphasis on the command and control of

the strategic nuclear forces. Does GCCS continue that emphasis, or does it expand that emphasis to include theater and

tactical operations?

Perry: I wouldn’t say it is less of an emphasis on the strategic,

I’d say it is more an emphasis on other things in addition to

that. Certainly that major concern is something still there

with global command and control. But the scope of global

command and control has broadened to encompass support

to additional capabilities in additional mission areas in the

execution arena. If you look at warfare as defined in the joint

service parlance from the national level down to the theater

and down to the tactical level, you certainly start getting into

the operational and tactical levels of warfare.

Pearson: We’ve been discussing some of the technological

changes that gave rise to the Global Command Control Sys tem.

How does GCCS differ organizationally from its predecessor?

Perry: In terms of the elements of the military departments

that employ it?

365
Pearson: That, or have new organizational entities been created to administer the system? How does it look differently,

organizationally speaking, from how things were under

WWMCCS?

Perry: With respect to the mission of supporting command

and control in crisis planning, it really has the same sorts of

functional people in the unified and specified CINC organiza -

tions, who have the responsibility of putting those plans together. For example, supporting CINC organizations, like the

US Transportation Command, play a major role in assessing

transportation feasibility. For example, I want to move this

brigade from point A to point B in 72 hours, but do I have the

lift capacity to do that? You still have an awful lot of folks

within the military departments acting as force providers who

have to figure out, given a requirement for a light infantry

brigade with a specific set of characteristics, where across the

Army ground forces can I find such a brigade that meets the

appropriate readiness criteria? All these topics were issues

under WWMCCS; they all had constituencies that dealt with

them across the unified and specified CINC organizations and

the military departments, and none of that was substantively

changed with the evolution to GCCS. The replacement of the

technology was separated from any substantial re-engineering

of the business processes. That re-engineering is something

that is certainly of interest to the CINCs and Joint Staff, and

there are initiatives underway to deal with it. But there was an

overt decision not to tie fundamental re-engineering of those

business processes together with the evolution of the technology in global command and control. It was difficult enough

doing one without trying to do both at the same time. 

With respect to the institutions to run them, you used to

have, depending upon what point in time you looked at it,

anywhere from 21 to 26 mainframe computer sites internetworked around the world with WWMCCS. Now we have

shrunk down to a smaller number of GCCS major server locations internetworked around the world, and the size of the

staffing pool to administer them dropped fairly dramatically in

the process of moving forward to the more modern technology.

366
We also have slightly fewer locations, substantially fewer people required to keep GCCS running, but not a fundamentally

new paradigm for how to administer GCCS. So organizationally, given that one did not fundamentally change the business processes for deployment planning, organizationally

there was not substantial change. 

Given that GCCS did start picking up missions that it did

not previously support at the operational and even tactical

level of warfare, (for example, maintaining tactical situation

awareness), then you find evolution of doctrine occurring in

terms of establishing something like a common operational

picture. That doctrine addresses assembling a common operational picture across an area of responsibility such as the US

Central Command AOR in and around the Arabian Sea for

their forward-deployed forces, and how that whole picture

would get relayed back to Central Command headquarters at

McDill AFB in Tampa and then out to the stateside components in their service supporting organizations, like Ninth Air

Force at Shaw AFB. In the event that something happened,

everybody could be looking at the same picture and having a

discussion in context about what’s going on, rather than having a discussion with multiple independent mental images of

the situation.

Pearson: How about DISA? Have there been increased organization responsibilities for DISA since the time of the creation

of GCCS?

Perry: Yes. DISA produced GCCS and continues to evolve it to

this day, so there is more of an initial development effort and

an evolutionary development effort there than had been the

case with WWMCCS, where WWMCCS was largely in catastrophic maintenance from a software point of view.

Pearson: Throughout its history, some people considered

WWMCCS to be a “bureaucratic fiction,” an organizing principle, more than it was a real system with a hard commitment

of personnel, equipment, and funds. Give us an idea of why,

in your view, this is not true for GCCS?

367
Perry: I didn’t use the term bureaucratic, and I guess I

wouldn’t: it’s not in my own mental picture of it all, neither in

the earlier days of WWMCCS or in the later days of global

command and control. My mental picture of it is more a set of

business processes, a set of people to execute them, and ADP

support. I think that the major change that has occurred with

the introduction of GCCS is that the ADP support for the

previous mission of deliberate planning has improved fairly

substantially. And the evolved missions of crisis planning: since

things don’t happen on the same timelines any longer, the

technology support for those new missions has been enabled.

Pearson: Going back over WWMCCS’s history, one of the major dynamics shaping the system during the cold war era was

a tension between the forces of centralization, represented

primarily by OSD and such agencies as DCA, and the forces of

decentralization, represented in the main by the military departments. Is that sort of tension still apparent in GCCS?

Perry: To some degree—probably to a slightly lesser degree

than previously. I think that what you’re referring to is in no

small part a fundamental element of how we’re organized within

the Department of Defense. But as you look at the deployment

planning mission, there is really not a lot of tension there

because that really is a war-fighting commander in chief-focused

job, and it really can’t be done effectively in any other fashion.

I think that if you go back to some of the very early days of

WWMCCS, I would agree with you that a lot of that tension

was there, and that a lot of service-specific extensions to

WWMCCS were built. There are still some service-specific extensions built on top of Global Command Control System to

meet some of the service-unique requirements associated with

the deliberate or crisis planning process. But in my associa -

tion with it recently, I have not really perceived that to be a

tension. I perceive that to be more of a fact of life, that one has

to add some service-unique capabilities on top of the joint

capability in order to have it make sense to the independent

services as force providers. Given the very different characteristics of deployment across the services, with the Army and

368
the Air Force being garrison-based forces, and the Navy and

the Marine Corps being, if you will, perpetually deployed forces,

there are just some fundamental differences that must be

a cknowledged. 

When you begin to look at some of the new missions that

have been added to GCCS, and again I focus on things like

situation awareness, there has been a broad embracing of

those capabilities across the military departments. You will

find today a GCCS Maritime within Navy, that takes the joint

product one hundred percent and extends it where necessary,

but it’s not just a word game. The intent within Navy is to

embrace the joint system, extend it where necessary to support

maritime needs, and to deploy it as our mainstream GCCS

Maritime command and control capability. We will not deploy

something different and just anoint it, in bureaucratic faction,

and call it GCCS Maritime. We actually deploy the same identical software. To greater or lesser degrees I think many folks

within the services and service programs have begun to adopt

this philosophy.

Pearson: Let’s return to ADP for a moment. How have improvements in ADP technology over the past decade or two

impacted upon the need for standardization of both hardware

and software?

Perry: Well, the software for GCCS is standard, and with the

exception of the service-specific extensions to it, it is all produced by DISA. Standardization of the applications is very

important today to achieve the level of interoperability and

interworking that is necessary to support the mission. The

individual services don’t go off and build their own alternative

GCCS systems from the ground up. The philosophy is for

them to take the base system from DISA and extend it where

necessary. And some other technological constructs come into

play, such as the Defense Information Infrastructure Common

Operating Environment—DIICOE for short. In the early 1990s,

when the whole push to try and move from WWMCCS ADP to

GCCS emerged on the Joint Staff, the thinking was that there

would be a common software baseline for this thing called

369
GCCS and it would be adopted by everybody. One of the

things that changed in the 1995-96 time frame as we began

to implement GCCS was a recognition that that common software framework, and a common integration approach, wasn’t

unique just to command and control but was applicable in

other domains as well—for instance, in combat support and in

intelligence processing. So DIICOE got constructed to abstract

that away from the specific mission area of command and

control into a more generalized integration philosophy, looking

at where it’s important to have identical common software and

where it’s not. But now today, GCCS is built on top of this

environment called the DII Common Operating Environment,

and many of the other service command and control systems

are built on top of that same environment, to begin to achieve

some of that same level of commonality. 

Now with respect to hardware, you need to begin to differentiate between the commodity environment on the desktop and

the large-capacity back room data servers or application server

environment that an awful lot of the application software has

to reside on. Today, DISA and the services basically provide

the back end server architecture, but even that is fairly common at this point, and it has been constructed so that in many

cases when you get to individual client desktops, commodity

PCs are adequate to interact and accomplish the mission.

Pearson: Given those kinds of changes, what is the current

status of the WWMCCS Intercomputer Network? What happened to it and where is it now?

Perry: When WWMCCS was shut down in August of 1996, the

WIN was shut down as well.

Pearson: In what other ways has the computer revolution

affected the ability of GCCS to serve its users?

Perry: How well it does off into the future in serving its users

is going to depend upon how well it evolves. The new capability

was put into place when WWMCCS was shut down in August

of 1996. If you go back and look at the development process

370
that got us there, it really started in earnest in November of

1994. And going pretty much from a standing start through

worldwide deployment, to the point of being able to shut down

WWMCCS and the WIN in August of 1996—a period of 21

months—was no small feat. There were some efforts earlier,

but they didn’t really start coming together as a cohesive and

integrated development effort until about November of 1994. 

As you look at what has transpired since the initial operational capability in August of 1996, there have been several

incremental, and I believe one major, upgrades of the software

capability. GCCS, like most any command and control system,

is going to need to continue to evolve over time to meet evolving and in some cases expanding needs as articulated by the

user community. The Joint Staff is the major user community

representative, and that’s really centered with the Operations

Deputy on the Joint Staff, J-3. That’s a very good thing, because the operators are the ones served by the system. The

fact that the Joint Staff J-3 is engaged in managing and leading the requirements process, and in working with DISA and

with the services to prioritize those requirements for implementation on some evolutionary development scale, is a very

positive construct for GCCS to be viable. It will have to continue, and GCCS will have to continue to deliver.

Pearson: You have referred several times to the “evolutionary

approach” to command and control system development. This

approach holds that command and control systems are

unique, requiring an equally unique management approach in

which systems evolve “naturally” over time. What is the status

of evolutionary thinking in GCCS today?

Perry: Well, inside of GCCS, and inside of DOD overall, there

is a very recent revision to DOD 5000, which is essentially the

acquisition policy and regulation for the Department of Defense. I think that over the years there has been progressively

more and more realization that command and control is an

information technology-based capability, and building that is

fundamentally different than building a thousand Block 3

Tomahawk missiles, for example. In a lot of weapons programs

371
the acquisition mind-set has been that you define your requirements, you lay out a program, you reach initial operational capability with the program, you finish it out, you reach

final operational capability with it, and you’re done. With command and control and information technology as it’s evolving

in today’s world, you will never be done. In my view, the day

you think you’re done is the day you’re on your way to a

going-out-of-business plan. 

Because the information technology you and I see on our

desktops at home or in our office environment is changing so

dramatically, we must provide capability commensurate with

that in order to keep the users engaged and to keep it relevant. So the whole philosophy of “being done,” from an acquisitions perspective, is one that does not fit in the information

technology-based capability environment of command and

control. I think there is progressively more and more recognition of that even in the formal acquisitions structures of the

department. Change is always difficult, and this certainly rep -

resents change. So every once in a while there are assaults on

attempts at change. But GCCS is reflective of the way that a

lot of command and control and other IT-based acquisitions

are moving and evolving within the department. As I said, if

you look at some of the evolutionary and experimental features discussed in the most recent revision to DOD 5000, I

think you will see progressively more and more of that becoming formally articulated as the policy of the Department of

Defense.

Pearson: Effectiveness has always been considered the ultimate

dependent variable in any organizational analysis. Throughout

its history, WWMCCS was frequently characterized as “ineffective.” I wonder if you could comment on how effectiveness is

assessed inside GCCS, and, given the assessments, how effective is the system perceived to be.

Perry: I think as you look back over history, as WWMCCS first

began to emerge, the more conventional contingency planning

for deployments was fairly stationary. The geography of the

Fulda Gap in Europe is what it is. The array of forces that

372
were there in the cold war environment was pretty well understood. These days, a lot of the contingency operations that the

department finds itself responding to, like a joint task force for

a noncombatant emergency evacuation or something like that,

are “come as you are,” very short timeline events. The other

aspect of the overall structure of WWMCCS that was always

problematic is that you not only needed to plan for a largescale deployment of forces, you also needed the ability to mon itor

the execution of that deployment. And where the WWMCCS

process and technology had difficulty in the past was that

there were not closed-loop data feeds to permit monitoring of

the execution of the deployment. As you went into the first

several days or weeks of the deployment of 500,000 men and

women and all their associated materiel in support of something like a Desert Storm, you didn’t have the closed-loop

feedback mechanisms in place as a matter of course, either

from the processes or the technology, to support that monitoring. So that issue, plus the evolving nature of deployment

planning—going from less and less very deliberate planning to

more and more crisis emergent sorts of deployment plan ning—

those are certainly issues that affected WWMCCS and at least

in part led to some of the issues associated with effectiveness

that you have obviously heard about and are referring to.

As you begin to look at GCCS, the business processes haven’t

changed, and as a consequence those deployment execution

monitoring capabilities have not been added to it. So some of

those issues are in fact still issues, and they are in fact still

being worked by the Joint Staff in cooperation with the military departments. Folks are now beginning to use the capability

of the technology since the technology has changed in GCCS,

and folks are starting to use that capability to evolve progressively more and more capability for transportation visibility

and in-transit visibility of the various pieces of the deployment. So I guess as the bottom line, I wouldn’t attempt to

convey to anybody that we have achieved Nirvana in the deployment of GCCS, but I think that the evolutionary process

and the modern technology implementations enable people to

tackle some of the more fundamental process issues that were

at the root of many of the effectiveness problems that you

373
referred to in WWMCCS. Folks are starting to tackle those

issues now, whereas the nature of the mainframe technology

in WWMCCS made it next to impossible to tackle them in the

past. 

Pearson: Since the implementation of GCCS, what have been

its major areas of success, in your view, and what are the

major challenges that the system faces in the upcoming decades?

Perry: I think the major success was in the initial deployment

and the subsequent evolutionary upgrades, basically taking

something that had been in place since the early 1970s

through 1996 and actually replacing it. That was a monumental task given the fact that over those 25-plus years the old

system had extended tentacles throughout the military departments into so many different locations, in so many different organizational elements. I think it was a major feat to be

able to move off of that old, obsolete implementation base into

a more modern technology that permits addressing the issues

that we’ve been discussing here. 

Challenges for the future? As with any transition, change is

always difficult, and gaining user acceptance has been a bit of

a challenge because it’s not the same old WWMCCS everybody

was used to. I think most of those challenges are behind the

department at this point. We’ve been operating on it for three

and a half years now, since August of 1996 through today,

and progressively more and more people are coming to accept

the change, understand it, and, in many cases, embrace it

because of the potential empowerment. I think if you went out

and surveyed a whole bunch of former WWMCCS users you

could still find a little bit of discord given that it is change, but

I don’t think you would find a lot of that today. And I think the

real issues as we move off into the future are going to be the

evolution of business processes for the deliberate crisis planning,

deployment, and execution issues that we’ve talked about, as

well as extending its combat execution monitoring and awareness kinds of capabilities. I think that the more significant

374
issues are going to be those kinds of changes that are still

ahead of GCCS and its employment across DOD.

Pearson: Any final thoughts with regard to the changes that

have taken place, or any final concerns we should keep in

mind?

Perry: No, none that we haven’t already discussed, though as

an interesting footnote I’ll observe that you can now find pieces

of WWMCCS in the Smithsonian Institution. When it was shut

down in 1996, the department donated pieces of WWMCCS to

the Smithsonian as a fairly significant element of at least the

military side of national history, and they accepted it. Things

like some of the computer equipment and terminals, or elements of it. Things like shopping carts that were used to

wheel large stacks of WWMCCS printouts around the Pentagon were also a part of what was donated, and I’m not quite

sure what they’re doing with it right now. But as you indicated

in your questions, WWMCCS was a lot more than that.

Pearson: Dr. Perry, thank you very much.

375
Index

AABNCP (Advanced Airborne National

Command Post): 150

Ada: 307, 308, 309, 311, 312, 327, 328

ADP (automatic data processing): 27,

43, 44, 65, 66, 101, 102, 104, 106,

124, 125, 127, 128, 181, 182, 185,

192, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224, 227,

234, 235, 241, 244, 254, 255, 270,

284, 302, 303, 305, 307, 310, 325

Advanced Airborne National Command

Post (AABNCP): 150, 177

Advanced Research Project Agency

(ARPA): 101, 150

Advanced Research Project Agency

Network (ARPANET): 132

Airborne Warning and Control System: 229

Air Defense Command: 35

Air Research and Development

Command: 15

Alternate National Military Command

Center (ANMCC): 36, 42–43, 46, 149,

158, 194, 245, 294

ANMCC (Alternate National Military

Command Center): 36, 42–43, 46,

55, 149, 242, 245, 250, 283, 305

ARPA (Advanced Research Project

Agency): 101, 190, 305

ARPANET (Advanced Research Project

Agency Network): 132, 133, 154,

295, 336, 337

Assault on the Liberty: 78

Automatic data processing (ADP): 27,

41, 44, 47, 48, 59, 62, 63, 64, 66, 93,

94, 95–97, 99, 100, 117, 130, 149,

151, 152, 174, 203, 215, 228, 229,

234, 236, 237, 241, 301, 302

Babbitt, Albert: 206

Ballistic Missile Early Warning System

(BMEWS): 9, 55, 151, 229, 244, 282

Bay of Pigs: 34, 51, 68

Berlin crisis: 35

Bestic, John B.: 47, 67

Blue Ribbon Defense Panel: 104, 123,

124, 128, 143, 145

BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning

System): 229, 282, 284

Bomber: 

B-1 bomber: 266

Boyes, Jon: 171

Bradley, John H.: 156, 158, 187, 189,

231, 233

Brooks, Jack: 222

Brown, Harold: 46, 199, 201, 204, 206,

246, 262

Bucher, Lloyd: 78–83

Buchsbaum, Solomon J.: 204

C

3

I (communication, command, control,

and intelligence): 199, 201, 202, 338

Carabello, John M.: 220

Carter, Jimmy (administration): 200,

201, 219, 231, 247, 248, 260, 262,

271

Castro, Fidel: 34

CBO (Congressional Budget Office): 263

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): 28

Challenger: 291

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency): 28,

38, 271

CINC (commander in chief): 11

CINCEUR (commander in chief,

Europe): 61, 74, 75, 61, 62, 72

CINCPAC (commander in chief, Pacific):

86, 106

Clements, William P.: 145, 148, 163,

164, 165

Communication, command, control, and

intelligence (C3I): 201, 221, 337

Cold war: 51, 85

Command, Control, and

Communications Panel: 200, 201

Commander in chief (CINC): 10–11

Communications System Segment

(CSS): 242, 243, 251

Congressional Budget Office (CBO): 263

Coral Sea (USS): 171

Critical Intelligence Communications

(CRITICOM): 81–82

CRITICOM (Critical Intelligence

Communications): 81, 82

CSS (Communications System

Segment): 242, 243, 251

DACCC (Defense Area Communications

Control Center): 27

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research

Projects Agency): 177, 309

377
DCA (Defense Communications

Agency): 98, 146, 147, 149, 152,

153, 182, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190,

191, 211

DCS (Defense Communications

System): 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29,

30, 33, 55, 76, 89, 121, 140, 147, 152

DDR&E (Department of Defense

Research and Engineering): 210

Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency (DARPA): 177

Defense Area Communications Control

Center (DACCC): 27

Defense Communications Agency

(DCA): 36–37, 47, 64, 91, 98, 119,

140, 228, 231, 232, 233, 304, 331,

333, 338, 343

Defense Communications System

(DCS): 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,

29–30, 33, 35, 54, 55, 76, 81, 88, 89,

91, 120, 121, 128, 140, 147, 152, 176

Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA): 48,

149, 202

Defense Regional Communications

Control Center (DRCCC): 28

Defense Reorganization Act of 1958: 13

Defense Satellite Communications

System (DSCS): 26, 151, 176

Defense Science Board Task Force:

204–6, 207, 209, 212, 219

Defense Switched Network (DSN): 335,

336

DEWLINE (distant early warning line):

9, 282, 286

DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency): 305

DeLauer, Richard D.: 204

Department of Defense (DOD): 5, 7, 9,

10, 11, 16, 19, 28, 29, 30, 34, 37, 53,

56, 61, 64, 117, 128, 150, 165, 166,

173, 201

Department of Defense Directive

4600.2: 19

Department of Defense Directive

S-5100.30, Concept of Operations of

the Worldwide Military Command and

Control System: 53, 54, 56, 137,

140, 142, 143, 144, 149, 151, 152,

192

Department of Defense Research and

Engineering (DDR&E): 210

deRosa, Louis A.: 120, 121

Dinneen, Gerald P.: 201, 202, 203, 228,

230, 232, 233

Director of telecommunication and

command and control systems

(DTACCS): 165–66, 178, 185

Distant early warning line (DEWLINE):

9, 282

DOD (Department of Defense): 5, 7, 9,

11, 16, 19, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 37,

56, 61, 64, 104, 120, 121, 124, 137,

151, 167, 168, 178, 179, 204, 205,

215, 219, 221

DRCCC (Defense Regional

Communications Control Center): 28

DSCS (Defense Satellite

Communications System): 26

DSN (Defense Switched Network): 335

DTACCS (Department of Defense

Research and Engineering): 165,

166, 167, 168

Duncan, Charles W., Jr.: 206

EC-135: 37, 150

EC-121: 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91,

105, 228

EHF (extremely high frequency): 290

Eisenhower, Dwight D.: 5, 7, 10, 11, 12,

14, 16, 36

Electronic Systems Division (ESD): 102,

177, 179, 241, 306, 325

Elegant Eagle: 187, 189

ELF (extremely low frequency): 150,

287, 288, 289, 292

EMATS (Emergency Message Automatic

Transmission System): 150

Emergency Message Automatic

Transmission System (EMATS): 150

ESD (Electronic Systems Division): 241

Extremely high frequency (EHF): 290

Extremely low frequency (ELF): 287, 288

Federal Data Reorganization Study: 219

Federal Systems Division (FSD): 164,

177, 178, 179, 325

Fleet Satellite Communications System:

176

Ford, Gerald R. (administration): 170,

171, 201

FSD (Federal Systems Division): 164,

172, 176, 178

Fubini, Eugene G.: 42, 204, 206, 210

GAO (General Accounting Office): 117,

193, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237

Gates, Thomas S.: 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23

378
Geis, Lawrence: 77

General Accounting Office (GAO): 117,

185, 193, 233, 244, 328

General Comprehensive Operating

Supervisor: 130

Global Positioning System (GPS): 294

Goertzel, Herbert: 63, 64, 65, 95, 96,

135

Goldwater, Barry: 253, 254, 318

Goldwater-Nichols Department of

Defense Reorganization Act of 1986:

322, 323, 324, 333, 338, 340

GPS (Global Positioning System): 294,

297

Gravely, Samuel L., Jr.: 211, 228, 229,

230, 231, 232, 259, 303

Ground Wave Emergency Network

(GWEN): 287, 292, 294

GWEN (Ground Wave Emergency

Network): 287, 292, 294

Hart, Gary: 253, 254

Holloway, James L.: 261

House Armed Services Committee: 12,

13, 25, 30, 84, 199

ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic

Missile): 264

Intercontinental Ballistic Missile

(ICBM): 264

Irvin, William D.: 20, 26, 27

JCCRG (Joint Command and Control

Requirements Group): 40, 41, 45,

46, 47, 60, 64, 67, 96

JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff): 4, 5, 6, 7,

10, 11, 13, 14, 20, 21, 40, 46, 56, 60,

63, 64, 65, 72, 73, 74, 80, 82, 86, 97,

130, 132, 137, 140, 142, 143, 144,

147, 156, 182, 187, 190, 212, 225,

226

Johnson, Lyndon B.: 62, 67, 68, 78

Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS): 4, 6, 13, 14,

20, 46, 56, 60, 63, 64, 72, 80, 86, 95,

103, 124, 132, 143, 167, 176, 188,

190, 230, 235, 236, 246, 270, 304,

317, 319, 320, 322

Joint Command and Control

Requirements Group (JCCRG): 40,

60, 64, 67, 96

Joint Technical Specifications Group

(JTSG): 98, 103

Joint Technical Support Activity (JTSA):

152, 193

Joint Staff: 6, 7, 10, 98

Jones, Jim: 225, 226

Jonestown: 224, 225, 226

JTSA (Joint Technical Support Activity):

152, 153, 157

JTSG (Joint Technical Specifications

Group): 98, 99

Kennedy, John F. (administration): 16,

21, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 51, 52

Khmer Rouge: 170

Kissinger, Henry A.: 90

Klocko, Richard P.: 24

Laird, Melvin R.: 121, 123, 124, 143

Latham, Donald C.: 267, 271, 281, 287,

293, 294, 302, 303, 317

LES (Lincoln Experimental Satellite):

201

Liberty (USS): 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77,

91, 105, 228

Lincoln Experimental Satellite (LES):

201

Little Rock (USS): 76

Lower-precedence traffic: 3

Luckom, Irving: 171

McKee, Seth J.: 125, 126, 127

McNamara, Robert S.: 16, 22, 33, 34,

37, 39, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48, 53, 54, 56,

57, 58, 60, 61, 66, 67, 68, 95, 105,

123, 145, 209, 210, 353–54

Martin, William I.: 72, 73, 76

Mayaguez: 170

MEECN (Minimum Essential Emergency

Communications Network): 120, 287

Minimum Essential Emergency

Communications Network (MEECN):

120, 287, 331

MITRE Corporation: 35, 47, 48, 97,

158, 204

MLS (multilevel computer security): 192

Moorer, Thomas: 144

Multilevel computer security (MLS): 192

National Command Authorities (NCA):

9, 39, 40, 42, 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 57,

64, 79, 90, 137, 141, 144, 149, 163,

174, 192

National Defense Communications

Control Center (NDCCC): 27

379
National Defense Memorandum 242:

145

National Military Command Center: 36,

55, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64, 82, 86, 90, 99,

126, 149, 150, 153, 157, 188, 220,

227, 294

National Military Command System

(NMCS): 35, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46,

47, 48, 51, 54, 57, 62, 63, 67, 138,

139, 142, 149, 150

National Military Command System

Information Processing System

(NIPS): 44, 65

National Military Intelligence Center

(NMIC): 149

National Security Agency (NSA): 48, 62,

71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82,

83, 86, 89

National Security Council: 6, 53, 189,

322, 323

National Security Defense Memorandum

242: 145

National Security Team: 219, 220–24

NCA (National Command Authorities):

9, 53, 54, 55, 57, 144, 150, 168

NDCCC (National Defense

Communications Control Center): 27

NMCC (National Military Command

Center): 36, 56, 62, 82, 86, 149,

150, 221, 242, 245, 283, 305

NMCS (National Military Command

System): 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42,

43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 57, 67,

138, 142, 165, 171

Nifty Nugget 78: 212, 213, 214, 215,

219, 228

Nimitz (USS): 260

NIPS (National Military Command

System Information Processing

System): 44, 65

Nixon, Richard M. (administration): 84,

87, 90, 117, 118, 120, 144, 145, 156,

203, 204

NMIC (National Military Intelligence

Center): 149, 150

National Security Act of 1987: 4, 5, 7,

19, 26

NORAD (North American Aerospace

Defense Command): 36, 37, 38, 44,

47, 48, 55, 59, 98, 99, 125, 126, 127,

130, 220, 221, 241–55, 259, 265,

281, 282, 285, 305

NORAD Computer System (NCS): 54,

55, 67, 242

North American Aerospace Defense

Command (NORAD): 36, 127, 239,

241

NSA (National Security Agency): 62, 73,

77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 89

Nuhn, Perry: 126

North Warning System (NWS): 286, 287

NWS (North Warning System): 286

OMB (Office of Management and

Budget): 219

Office of Management and Budget

(OMB): 219

Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD):

10, 21, 25, 45, 65, 86, 93, 119, 140,

200, 221, 270, 304, 318, 343, 351

Operation Eagle Claw: 260, 315, 316

Operation Rolling Thunder: 105

Operation Urgent Fury: 315–18

Orrick, William H.: 53

OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense):

21, 25, 45, 119, 122, 125, 147, 176,

201, 224, 270, 319, 321

Overstreet, James H.: 86, 88

Packard Commission: 320, 321, 323,

334

Packard, David: 102, 103, 104, 117,

119–24, 127, 128, 133, 134, 137,

139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 165, 166,

222

PANGLOSS: 40

Partridge, Earle E.: 35, 36, 40–41, 63

Partridge Report: 34, 35, 37, 38, 39

PAVE PAWS (Precision Acquisition of

Vehicle Entry and

Phased-Array Warning System): 229,

244, 246, 263, 282, 283, 284

Perry, William J.: 202, 204

Precision Acquisition of Vehicle Entry

and Phased-Array Warning System

(PAVE PAWS): 229, 282

Presidential Directive 59: 231

Prime Target 77: 188, 189, 190

Program 425L: 59

Prototype WWMCCS Intercomputer

Network (PWIN): 132, 189

Proud Spirit 80: 215

PWIN (Prototype WWMCCS

Intercomputer Network): 132, 133,

152–55, 185–91, 195

380
Pueblo (USS): 78, 80, 81, 81, 83, 84, 90,

91, 105, 228

Pueblo Surrender, The: 82

RAND: 35, 97, 224

Reed, Thomas C.: 166–68, 185

Rosenberg, Robert A.: 189

Rumsfeld, Donald H.: 178

Russ, J. R.: 96

Ryan, John D.: 125

Saratoga (USS): 77

SAC Automated Command and Control

System (SACCS): 59, 98

SACCS (SAC Automated Command and

Control System): 98, 100

SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground

Environment): 7, 9, 36, 55, 63, 84

SCC (Space Computational Center):

242, 243

Schlesinger, James R.: 156, 165, 167

Semi-Automatic Ground Environment

(SAGE): 7, 36

Single Integrated Operational Plan

(SIOP): 33

SIOP (Single Integrated Operational

Plan): 33

Six-Day War (1967): 71

Space Computational Center (SCC): 242

Stennis, John C.: 253

Strategic Modernization Program: 264,

265, 268, 281–84, 287, 289, 290, 304

TACAMO (Take Charge and Move Out):

229, 268, 287

Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO):

229, 268

TLCC (thin-line communications

connectivity): 293

Thin-line communications connectivity

(TLCC): 293

Tower, John: 252

TRI-TAC: 229

Tully, Joseph: 77

Vance, Cyrus: 67

Vinson, Carl: 12, 13, 25

Wade, James P.: 266

Weick, Karl: 173

Weinberger, Caspar: 264, 266, 281,

306, 326

Whitehead, Clay T.: 118, 204

WIS Joint Program Manager: 306

World Wide Military Command and

Control System (WWMCCS): 31, 54,

55, 56, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67,

69, 71, 78, 83, 91, 95, 96, 137, 140,

172, 215, 219, 234, 259, 329, 340,

343, 358

World Wide Military Command and

Control System Engineering

Organization: 178, 179, 180, 181

WWMCCS (World Wide Military

Command and Control System):

95–106, 117, 120, 121, 124–34,

137–40, 142–56, 158, 163–65,

168–81, 185–87, 189, 191–96, 200,

201, 203, 206, 209, 211–15, 219–21,

225–29, 231–39, 241–44, 247–49,

251, 254, 255, 259, 262, 264,

267–70, 281, 287, 301, 302, 304–7,

309, 326, 327, 328, 331, 334, 339,

340, 344, 345, 346–52, 354, 356–58

WWMCCS Architectural Planning

Studies: 164, 176

WIN (WWMCCS Intercomputer

Network): 152, 270, 304

WIS (WWMCCS Information System):

271, 304, 305, 306, 315, 325, 327,

328

WWMCCS Information System (WIS):

271, 294, 297, 312, 331, 336

WWMCCS Intercomputer Network

(WIN): 152, 185, 187, 190, 195,

212–14, 214, 227

WWMCCS Upgrade Program: 151, 155,

163

Yom Kippur War: 156

Zraket, Charles A.: 204

381
The World Wide Military

Command and Control System

Evolution and Effectiveness

Air University Press

Chief Editor

Dr. Richard Bailey

Copy Editor

Carolyn J. McCormack

Book Design and Cover Art

L. Susan Fair

Composition and

Prepress Production

Mary P. Ferguson