Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn Read Free Book Online Page A

enemy lines and detect suspicious movements of Soviet “second-echelon” reinforcements moving up behind the front line. An on-board computer would process the information and sort out which signals revealed a genuine target. On the basis of this information, missiles would be launched in the general direction of the enemy. At ten thousand feet above the targeted armored formations, the missiles would burst open and dispense a carpet of self-guiding bombs equipped with heat seekers and tiny radars that would drop down and then search out their armored targets. A variant added a further layer of complexity with “skeet” projectiles that would fly off from the bomb canisters at speed to impact on the tanks. Proponents claimed Assault Breaker could destroy “in a few hours” sufficient vehicles in (Soviet) reinforcement divisions “to prevent their exploiting a breakthrough of NATO defenses,” without—and this was an important selling point—anyone having to resort to nuclear weapons, all for a bargain price of $5.3 billion.
    Task Force Alpha had used powerful software programs to try and distinguish trucks from elephants, soldiers from peasants. Assault Breaker followed the same concept: ambiguous sensor signals were processed into coherence by massive computing power, thereby discriminating a tank army from traffic on the autobahn, tanks from East German tractors, and armored personnel carriers from Volkswagens. Even the bombs homing in on the final targets had to be able to decide if a hot spot was really a tank or a smoking bomb crater or some other distraction. Everything depended on recognizing preset patterns. A tank, for example, would be expected to have a distinctive pattern of hot spots to distinguish it from some other heat-emitting object, such as a bus. To disorient the weapon, an enemy merely needed to rearrange the pattern, just as General Nguyen had hung buckets of urine on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
    Presiding over the entire operation was a man destined to exert a potent influence on U.S. defense for decades to come. In 1977 President Carter appointed William J. Perry, an affable Californian defense contractor, to John Foster’s old job overseeing all Pentagon research and development. (Foster had moved to defense contractor TRW Inc. in 1973.) Like Foster before him, Perry loved esoteric weapons projects, and he outmatched his predecessor in his ability to charm all comers. He was soon a popular figure in Washington, conveying an air of deeply considered expertise in the mysteries of defense technology that served him well in selling his agenda while dispensing billions of dollars on development programs that might, if actually put into production, yield contracts worth multiples of the development money. Politicians appreciated his gentlemanly and patient explanations of technological mysteries. The military, though occasionally irritated by his interference in their prerogatives, appreciated his ability to extract money from the politicians. Liberals warmed to his unmilitaristic demeanor, not least his support for strategic nuclear arms limitation agreements.
    Before entering government, Perry had spent his career exclusively in the defense-electronics industry, initially for a firm deeply involved in the highly classified ballistic-missile early-warning system. In 1964, he founded Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory (ESL), Incorporated. Located close to Stanford University, the firm grew and prospered in the business of processing digital information from sources such as sensors, radars, and reconnaissance pictures for the U.S. military and National Security Agency.
    Perry thus arrived in office with an enduring interest in the ability of technology to cut through the fog of war. “The objective of our precision guided weapon systems is to give us the following capabilities: to be able to see all high value targets on the battlefield at any time; to be able to make a direct hit on any target we can