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

see, and to be able to destroy any target we can hit,” he told a senate committee in 1978. Pentagon officials began referring to Assault Breaker as “Bill Perry’s wet dream.” Comprehensive testing was deferred on the grounds that the system was urgently required in the field. On the few occasions individual components were tested, they tended to fail, and the whole system, with its many steps, was never tested all at once. The General Accounting Office, the watchdog agency that monitors government programs on behalf of Congress, reported in 1981 not only that the system could not tell the difference between armored vehicles and “lower value targets” (trucks or automobiles) but also that these distinctions were “not designed into the advanced development radar and is not part of DARPA’s planned testing.” In other words, the interests behind the program appeared not to care whether it actually worked.
    Assault Breaker was formally canceled in 1984, felled by a combination of ballooning costs, failed tests, and bad publicity. But in its dying days it garnered powerful endorsement from a gilt-edged source. “Precision weapons, smart shells, electronic reconnaissance systems,” commented a Soviet military writer in a Pravda article about Assault Breaker in February 1984, “could enable NATO to destroy a potential enemy which is still in its rear staging area.” The Soviets even coined a helpful catchphrase to describe this claimed ability to see everything, strike anything—the “military technical revolution”—and proclaimed their intention of producing their own versions. In no time, talk of this revolution was gathering momentum in U.S. military commentaries, largely thanks to assiduous promotion by an already legendary Pentagon official, Andrew Marshall. Trained as an economist, Marshall had spent his early career at the Rand Corporation, the famed Santa Monica–based think tank staffed with brilliant minds devising nuclear war strategies for the U.S. Air Force, which financed the undertaking. In retrospect it is clear that Rand’s core mission was to devise strategies justifying and whenever possible enhancing the air force budget. When, for example, the navy’s development of invulnerable ballistic-missile submarines threatened the air force’s strategic nuclear monopoly in the early 1960s, Rand quickly served up a rationale for a “counterforce” strategy. According to this theory, the Soviets could be deterred only by precisely targeted nuclear warheads, which would necessitate a crash air force program for new intercontinental missiles with an accuracy that the navy could not deliver.
    In 1973, under the patronage of Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger (a fellow Rand alumnus), Marshall moved to the Pentagon to head a newly created Office of Net Assessment. He was still there, forty years later, in the second Obama administration. In the intervening period he had evolved into an object of reverence, perhaps because his proposals, despite their iconoclastic flavor, somehow never threatened established interests—and often required lavish additions to their budgets. Marshall’s sharp eye for ambitious talent and his skill in the careful deployment of study contracts ensured that, while administrations came and went, generations of mutually supporting graduates of his office were seeded throughout the defense establishment, orbiting between corporations, the bureaucracy, and think tanks.
    The eye-catching feature of the revolution in military affairs as popularized by Marshall and others was the emphasis on “precision guidance.” This was a long-anticipated development. At the beginning of World War II the air force had claimed that its recently acquired Norden bomb sight, an instrument carried in the plane to enable the accurate launching of bombs, would ensure that 50 percent of its bombs would fall within 75 feet of their target. The boast went unfulfilled. On an infamous raid against