The DDG-1000 Zumwalt (navy.mil)

There was tension in the House of Representatives hearing room July 31 as Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) called to order a meeting of the Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee. “This may very well be the most important hearing this subcommittee has held since our hearing last January on the procurement of Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles,” Taylor said.

The MRAPs he referred to are specialized armored vehicles designed to protect U.S. troops from roadside bombs in Iraq, the biggest killer of Americans. Since 2006, the Pentagon has spent more than $10 billion in a rush to buy the 15-ton vehicles, which have reportedly saved scores of American lives.

The subject of the July hearing — the topic that had Taylor and his fellow committee members on edge — was a multibillion-dollar warship program that was an order of magnitude more complex than MRAP, five times as expensive and potentially as important. It’s called the DDG-1000 Zumwalt, a ship class that the Navy had hailed as the linchpin of a new military strategy.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But after more than a decade of development at a cost of billions of dollars, the Navy announced in July that it no longer wanted the new ship. Problem was, the sea service couldn’t come up with a coherent reason why.

The decision on DDG-1000 had come out of the blue. And it turned upside down the Navy’s expensive, delicate plans to boost the size of its fleet and improve its ability to operate close to resource-rich, heavily populated shorelines.

The decision sparked protests from shipyards and defense contractors that had started building DDG-1000s. The munitions industry looked to Congress for an explanation — but Congress had none to offer. The decision to kill the new destroyer had been made without consultation with elected representatives. Even now, five months later, the Navy’s rationale for ending the $50-billion DDG-1000 program seems full of contradictions, casting doubt on the Navy’s ability to manage complex weapons buys at a time when the financial crisis and a new administration might force defense budgets to shrink.

A Departure for the Navy

The new destroyer was intended to protect U.S. sailors fighting in the world’s most dangerous sea zones — shallow, rocky, near-shore waters called “littorals.”

The world’s littorals are rich in resources and home to a growing portion of the world’s population. Patrolling and fighting in littorals pose unique dangers. The water is shallow and turbulent, and the proximity to shore means warships can be threatened by land-based weapons and short-range high-speed boats.

Traditionally, the U.S. Navy has kept to deep waters — where big, expensive ships are safe from land-based threats and free to maneuver without risk of running aground. The Navy designed its ships to suit the deep.

That began to change in 1994, when the sea service launched the $10-billion design effort for the DDG-1000 Zumwalt. By 2006, it was time to build the first one, and the Navy had to tell congressional budgeters how many it wanted.

With the per-vessel cost projected to exceed $3 billion — and possibly reach $5 billion, according to one estimate — the Navy decided it could afford only seven DDG-1000s. Congress approved the plans and funded construction of the first two ships.

Then this year the Navy announced it wanted to buy only the two previously funded Zumwalts and cancel the other five. It was the first major shipbuilding decision by the Navy’s new top officer, Adm. Gary Roughead, who had taken command in 2007. It was a big one — an acquisitions program nearly 15 years in the making was scuttled.

Naval shipyards and other defense contractors were out tens of billions of dollars in projected revenue. And Congress — Taylor’s powerful subcommittee, particularly — was caught in the middle, befuddled by the reversal and left holding the purse strings for a Navy strategy that, suddenly, seemed to lack direction.

To be sure, the Navy had an alternate plan. In the place of the axed DDG-1000s, the sea service said it wanted to buy up to 12 more of its older destroyer class, the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke. The Navy has 62 Burkes in service or on order.

While the Navy’s announcement came as a surprise to elected officials and industry representatives, there also were strong arguments to ditch the destroyer. Zumwalt is expensive, with a per-ship price potentially exceeding $4 billion, not counting R&D. The most recent Burkes, by contrast, cost around $2.2 billion apiece, again not counting R&D (most of which was completed in the 1990s).

The Navy now has roughly 280 front-line ships and wants to boost that number to 313 in about 15 years by buying more than a dozen ships a year — double the average rate in the 1990s and early 2000s. Squeezing more ships out of the roughly $20-billion-a-year shipbuilding budget is therefore critical.

In that context, the DDG-1000 costs “a lot of money,” Vice Adm. Barry McCullough, the Navy’s top technologist, testified in March before Taylor’s subcommittee.

A Startling Admission

But when McCullough testified at Taylor’s July hearing, he said little about cost. Now the Navy was killing off its new destroyer project because the ship “cannot perform area air defense; specifically, it cannot successfully employ the Standard Missile-2, SM-3 or SM-6, and is incapable of conducting Ballistic Missile Defense,” McCullough said.

This was a big deal. Recent classified naval studies had found what McCullough called “increased war-fighting gaps, particularly in the area of integrated air- and missile-defense capability,” against ballistic missiles similar to ones that China could fire and against small cruise missiles like those used by the terror group Hezbollah against the Israeli Navy in the 2006 Lebanon war. Both missile types are particularly dangerous in near-shore waters.

As wonky as such technical details might sound, jaws practically dropped when McCullough made the assertion about the Zumwalt and its missile capability. For good reason. As recently as March, the Navy had stated — on the record — that Zumwalt was better at air defense than any other warship and less vulnerable in shallow waters.

McCullough’s pronouncement represented a startling — and, to some, seemingly absurd — 180-degree turn on a program costing as much as $50 billion over two decades.

Bigger Questions

The Zumwalt decision immediately raised questions about the Navy’s ability to plan, execute and rationalize complex weapons programs. There are indications that the shuffle is driven as much by the obscure preferences of the Navy’s top officer as by any careful analysis of U.S. defense needs.

“This whole thing is very strange,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.) said after hearing about the proposed Zumwalt cuts. Collins, a reliable Navy booster, counts one of the nation’s biggest shipyards in her constituency. She said she had not seen any documentation justifying the Navy’s sudden decision.

Neither had the chief Pentagon weapons buyer, John Young. He called the announcement “a little unusual” and said the Navy needed to do more analysis of the potential costs and benefits of a switch.

At least one firm involved in designing and building DDG-1000s is equally perplexed. “It doesn’t make sense,” Dan Smith, a vice president at Raytheon, told The Washington Independent. Raytheon makes Zumwalt’s radars. Smith said that “the pieces were all there” to make the Zumwalt class capable of using all the Navy’s missiles — and even using them better than any other warship, with just a little extra cash.

Smith said that for Zumwalt to fire SM-2s, the Navy needs only to fund the completion of an electronic data-link that allows the missile and the ship’s S-band radar to “talk” to each other. The Navy said that data-link would cost $80 million. With that addition, the DDG-1000 would be as capable as a DDG-51, which also has an S-band radar, Smith said. Indeed, the two ships’ weapons systems would be nearly identical.

With an extra few hundred million — “three times” the cost of the data-link, according to Smith — the Navy could link SM-2 missiles to the DDG-1000’s second radar, a futuristic X-band system, making the vessel an even better “air defender” than the DDG-51.

Smith’s claims weren’t the empty promises of a salesman. As late as March, Capt. Jim Syring, the Navy’s DDG-1000 program manager, was giving briefings that cited DDG-1000’s “significant capability improvements in every warfare area vs. DDG-51” — including air defense using Standard missiles.

As for Ballistic Missile Defense, Smith said it would cost $550 million to do the R&D to give Zumwalt BMD capability, plus $110 million per ship outfitted. That cost is consistent with an Navy plan to add BMD capability to 18 older ships, including DDG-51s, for a total of $1.2 billion, not counting R&D.

So if DDG-1000 really is as capable as DDG-51, if not more so, why did the Navy use capability as a rationale for axing Zumwalts? Smith said he doesn’t know. “They don’t connect,” he said of the Navy’s tactics for justifying shipbuilding decisions. Reached for comment, a Navy spokesman only repeated the major points of McCollough’s controversial July testimony.

To be sure, even if the upgrades for air- and missile-defense for the DDG-1000 are relatively affordable, the total vessel — including special long-range guns and a radar-deflecting hull — is pricey. For that reason, the Navy’s decision to curtail the program “made perfect sense,” according to Bob Work, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. But the sea service “kind of gooned up selling” its destroyer plans to Congress, Work told The Washington Independent.

The “gooned-up” salesmanship belies a year-long campaign by Chief of Naval Operations Roughead to end the Zumwalt program, sources say. Roughead apparently opposed the DDG-1000 when he took over the Navy’s top position last September. He soon began chipping away at support for the program. That meant dealing with four key Zumwalt supporters: Dep. Defense Sec. Gordon England;Pentagon acquisitions chief Young; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen; and Rear Adm. Charles Goddard, then the Navy’s top shipbuilder.

England, Young and Mullen are all senior to Roughead: changing their minds was a delicate process. “Behind scenes,” Work says, “Roughead was trying to convince those guys they made a bad decision” regarding plans to buy seven Zumwalts. In time, he succeeded.

The fourth key supporter, Goddard, was relieved of command for allegedly mistreating women while drunk during official travel. The path was clear for Roughead to end the DDG-1000 and switch to a vessel he preferred — the tried-and-true DDG-51.

Does the Navy Have a Littoral Strategy?

But if DDG-1000 is superior to DDG-51 in shallow waters, as the evidence indicates, does the switch to the older warship represent a shift in the Navy’s littoral strategy. In abandoning its potentially most powerful littoral warships, is the Navy actually abandoning littoral warfare?

The consequences of such a move would be enormous. After all, the Navy’s own Maritime Strategy, published last year, emphasized that “lifeblood” global trade “relies on free transit through increasingly urbanized littoral regions.”

The world’s littorals include Iraq’s national waters, a heavily trafficked area where the country’s only two oil terminals are located, and resource-rich Somali waters infested with hundreds of heavily armed pirates riding in speedboats. The Navy currently has only a handful of ships capable of maneuvering around the terminals or chasing pirates close to land. Under plans finalized in 2006, the Navy would have bought more than 60 new littoral warships — 55 lightweight “Littoral Combat Ships” plus seven of the heavier DDG-1000s.

Since the plans were developed, cost overruns on the LCS prompted Congress to cancel three of the first seven. Combined with LCS’s problems, the recent cuts to DDG-1000 might represent a gutting of the future littoral fleet at a time when near-shore threats are growing.

With anti-ship missiles, small gunboats and sea mines proliferating in littoral zones, the Navy seems to have decided to pull back its amphibious vessels, which carry Marines, and keep them at least 25 miles from shore, Gen. James Conway, Marine Corps commandant, said in September. The littorals are just too dangerous for existing Navy ships and their crews.

Without the right warships, the Navy might never “re-take” shallow waters. In that sense, the DDG-1000 perhaps occupies a similar position as other expensive weapons systems — like the bomb-resistant MRAP trucks — whose urgency trumps price.

Nonetheless, under Roughead’s leadership, the Navy does appear to be abandoning its littoral ambitions, as much for cost reasons as anything else. This despite the Maritime Strategy’s promise that “we will not permit conditions under which our maritime forces would be impeded from freedom of maneuver and freedom of access.” The mysterious destroyer shuffle that (publicly) started in July appears to be both a cause and a consequence of the littoral retreat.

But with a new administration about to take office in January, that might change. The Navy can only propose shipbuilding changes: Congress and the president hold the purse strings. Already, Congress has pressured the Navy to add back one of the canceled DDG-1000s, for an eventual total of three. The new administration might restore more.

“Anything could happen,” Work says.

David Axe is the author of “Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War.” He blogs at www.warisboring.com.

Coast Guard programs are overseen by LSIs. (Flickr: crosstrippin)

Budget cuts in the 1990s forced the Pentagon’s skilled contracting workforce to shrink by more than half. When defense budgets doubled in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, this workforce was overwhelmed. So the Pentagon handed the responsibility for overseeing lucrative weapons programs to industry teams called “Lead Systems Integrators,” or LSI – essentially allowing defense contractors to award government contracts to themselves.

One weapons expert says LSIs are like putting “a very juicy steak in front of a very hungry dog — and expecting the steak to still be there the next day.”

It took five years of waste and abuse for Congress to even begin trying to solve the problem. But efforts at reform have been thwarted by semantics, and by the difficulty in hiring and retaining government contracting experts.

In October 2006, for example, the Senate armed services committee tried to come up with new rules restricting systems integrators. But first, the committee had to figure out which defense deals qualified as LSIs. So it sent a query to the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, Kenneth Krieg, who wrote back: “Only one active contract actually used the term ‘lead system integrator.’” He was referring to Boeing’s and SAIC’s $160-billion “Future Combat Systems” family of robots and vehicles.

A year later, the Pentagon panel all but admitted that the earlier definition was way too strict. In reality, the panel reported, an LSI was any arrangement that “allows one or more contractors to define a weapon system’s architecture — and then manage both the acquisition and the integration.”

By that standard, there were around a dozen major Lead Systems Integrator projects, worth a combined $300 billion. Today more than 10 percent of the military’s weapons investment is entirely under the control of private companies. LSIs now represent the single biggest programs for the Coast Guard (the $25-billion Deepwater shipbuilding scheme) and the Army (Future Combat Systems).

The Air Force, meanwhile, is spending $20 billion on a delayed communications satellite managed by Booz-Allen-Hamilton. The Missile Defense Agency pays Boeing billions to handle a range of complex missile and radar programs — many of which have consistently failed tests. The Dept. of Homeland Security is paying Boeing up to $2 billion for a camera-equipped border fence in California that recently failed tests. In fact, most integrator-run programs have suffered major delays and large cost over-runs.

Despite this, government outrage was, for a long time, absent. Even when present, the indignation has been mostly toothless.

In 2005, Congress slightly tightened up cost reporting on Lead Systems Integrators; and the next year there was the new attempt at rules that was thwarted by Krieg’s letter. Several times, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has questioned the LSI concept — most recently in June 2007, when it warned that Boeing’s management of Future Combat Systems “posed significant risks.”

Still, the reliance on integrators continues, with results varying between somewhat acceptable and totally disastrous.

Thanks to former a Lockheed employee, Michael DeKort [[LINK TO PART I??]], and other whistleblowers, Deepwater’s massive failings were too obvious to deny or paper over. In April of last year Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen promised to begin phasing out the integration deal. “We’ve relied too much on contractors to do the work of government,” Allen said.

That was little comfort to DeKort, who was fired for pointing out the LSI’s problems.

In any case, with so many ships and airplanes already in production, and acquisitions staffs gutted, it was nearly impossible for the Coast Guard to untangle itself from Lockheed’s and Northrop’s management. More than a year later, flawed equipment is still rolling out of the factories and shipyards, including a $650-million patrol ship whose communications gear never passed a required Navy inspection.

That’s one of the problems with Lead Systems Integrator deals: it was a shortage of government workers that made them necessary in the first place. Railing against LSIs is meaningless until you hire a bigger acquisitions workforce – and that’s easier said than done.

It takes years and tens of thousands of dollars to train up a good contract manager. The average acquisitions worker is now nearly 50 years old, up from 40 years old in the 1970s. And the existing workforce is set to dramatically shrink, despite a renewed recruiting push, since experienced employees will retire faster than new ones can be hired and trained, according to the January Pentagon panel. “The DoD acquisition workforce must be strengthened,” the Defense Science Board reported in July.

Nonetheless, this year Congress passed legislation to ban LSIs beginning in October 2010. Whether the ban will work is an open question. As the Senate’s 2006 exchange with weapons-buyer Krieg proved, there’s always some wiggle room within the definition of “Lead Systems Integrator.” If a contractor can make a good argument why the term shouldn’t apply to them, then the ban probably won’t either — and it’ll be business as usual.

Some contractors insist that the problems in the LSI concept are a thing of the past.

“The major issues that have been raised with respect to the Deepwater LSI structure are the lack of government visibility and oversight,” said Regen Wilson, a SAIC spokesman. He says the Future Combat Systems integrator setup stacks the industry teams with soldiers and Army civilians, so that no decision gets made without a government employee in the know.

“Congressional scrutiny … is not something we fear – it’s something we welcome,” said Ralph Shrader, CEO of integrator Booz-Allen-Hamilton.

“You’ve got to have government engineers at the ground level,” one Future Combat Systems agreed. “It’s a constant reality check.”

But even adding some government workers to industry teams represents, at best, a partial solution to the problem. Total and sole government oversight was the way things were done before the dawn of the Lead Systems Integrator: the best anyone anticipates now is somewhat improved oversight — within a framework of greatly increased corporate power over government spending.

It’s telling that in 2006, at the height of Deepwater’s bad press, Dep. Dir. of Homeland Security Michael Jackson, a former Lockheed executive, stood up in front of hundreds of contractors and reporters at a trade show and practically begged for a bigger corporate role in the contracting for the “smart” California border fence, code-named “SBInet.” “We’re asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business,” Jackson said, “We’re asking you. We’re inviting you to tell us how to run our organization.”

The Lead System Integrator concept “has muddled responsibility,” said Nick Schwellenbach, an analyst at Project On Government Oversight, non-profit watchdog group. That muddled responsibility has resulted in wasted money, ruined careers, like DeKort’s, and — perhaps most gravely — huge delays in delivering equipment that the U.S. armed services need to do their jobs.

There’s no easy way out. Future LSIs might sneak in under slightly different names and clever PR — while LSI deals launched years ago will bear bad fruit for years to come.

Indeed, in April, Jackson’s border fence, built by Boeing, was revealed to be a technical disaster “because of its reliance on contracting practices that have led to severe cost and schedule overruns,” according to a House testimony by Laura Peterson, an analyst from the non-profit Taxpayers for Common Sense. Her explanation? “Two-thirds of the individuals that designed the SBInet acquisition plan were contractors.”

David Axe is the author of “Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War.” He blogs at www.warisboring.com.

The United States maritime fleet amounts to the oldest in the world. (David Axe)

It was August 2003 when a fellow engineer at Lockheed Martin’s Moorestown, N.J., facility dropped by Mike DeKort’s office with a seemingly absurd complaint.

He said that Lockheed, the nation’s No. 1 defense contractor, had been buying non-waterproof radios from a subcontractor to install on some 15-year-old patrol boats that Lockheed was upgrading for the U.S. Coast Guard. “My initial reaction,” DeKort said, five years later, “was that was crazy.”

DeKort’s reaction is understandable. Lockheed’s Moorestown team had built its reputation designing “Aegis” radars for the Navy that can track scores of targets hundreds of miles away with amazing precision. On the strength of its Aegis work, Lockheed, along with its shipbuilding partner Northrop Grumman, just a year earlier had won a contract to manage a wide range of “plug-and-play” Coast Guard equipment projects collectively nicknamed “Deepwater.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

They were aimed at replacing what amounts to one of the world’s oldest maritime fleets. The typical Navy warship is around 20 years old. After years of under-funding, Coast Guard vessels average 35 years.

The Deepwater projects included new airplanes, upgraded helicopters and patrol boats and huge, powerful new ocean-going cutters the size of Navy warships, all linked by an electronic network.

But it didn’t work. In addition to the non-waterproof radios, there were boats and ships with leaky, faulty hulls plus computers that seeped secret data. As DeKort quickly discovered in the course of his own informal investigation, Lockheed and Northrop had botched much of Deepwater, and no one in the government knew anything about it.

When DeKort complained to his bosses, he was fired — making him one of the earliest casualties of a controversial new way of military contracting.

Traditionally, the Pentagon — or, in the Coast Guard’s case, the Dept. of Homeland Security — itself issued separate contracts for each of its major pieces of equipment, say, a tank, a ship or a fighter jet. It would then assign government acquisitions officials to oversee the contract — from beginning to end.

But that was before today’s sophisticated “systems of systems,” where several different vehicles share common electronics, enabling them to swap data and automatically coordinate their actions.

It was also before government budget cuts in the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, forced the Pentagon acquisitions workforce to shrink by 50 percent, according to a Pentagon panel that convened in January. This atrophied workforce was overwhelmed when defense spending doubled after Sept. 11.

A new way of designing weapons -– and the new manpower shortages -– has given rise to a new way of buying weapons. Industry teams called “Lead Systems Integrators” would take a vague military requirement and a large pot of money — like Deepwater’s projected $25 billion over 20 years — and go to town.

Lead Systems Integrators were responsible for writing many of the detailed requirements and then for doing most of the contracting for actual design and production. Government managers would be thin on the ground, if not absent.

In other words, an industry team would dole out the taxpayer’s money as only the team saw fit, “perform[ing] functions that are usually performed by the contracting officer and other officials on the government’s acquisition team,” according to a March 2007 report from the Congressional Research Service. Systems integrators could even award government-funded contracts to themselves.

Northrop, for example, assigned most of Deepwater’s shipbuilding to Northrop shipyards. Lockheed gave itself much of the electronics work.

Private companies doling out taxpayer dollars on government’s behalf, sometimes to themselves, obviously represents a major oversight problem.

“It is the equivalent of putting a very juicy steak in front of a very hungry dog, and expecting the steak to still be there the next day,” said Jim Atkinson, one of a handful of engineers cleared by the National Security Agency to inspect complex communications systems like those in Deepwater.

Still, for years, no one really questioned the wisdom of those choices. Lead Systems Integrator, or LSI, deals spread like weeds. LSIs now account for the many of the biggest programs in the Army, Air Force and Coast Guard – to the tune of some $300 billion.

Occasional attempts to reign in the contractors were foiled by semantics. Only now is Congress even beginning to recognize the problem. The result in 2008 is a “coming crisis” in the Pentagon, according to a July report by the Defense Science Board, an independent advisory panel. “Much of the responsibility for managing … complex systems has shifted to industry … without effective government oversight.”

Reform “must begin now,” the report concluded. “The nation’s security depends on it.”

David Axe is the author of “Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War.” He blogs at www.warisboring.com.

Part 2 of this series looks more closely at some of the LSIs, and at Congress’ attempts to reign them in.

USS Russell (Chris van Avery)

This is the third and final installment in a series on social networking sites and the military.

Part One: How the Army Found Middle Ground

Part Two: How the Coast Guard Botched Its Online Start

Islamic extremists long have used Websites as their primary means of sharing ideas and recruiting new fighters. The Pentagon, by contrast, largely rejected the Internet as a networking tool. Last year the Air Force, as the military’s lead agency for Internet warfare, banned access to blogs from official networks. The ban coincided with a wider military crackdown on many “Web 2.0” Internet sites, like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.

The military was worried that U.S. troops might inadvertently reveal classified information. To many in the military, the need for secrecy outweighed the Internet’s potential for rapidly and widely sharing ideas.

But in the Pentagon’s tangle of agencies, there is rarely total consensus on any issue – the Internet included. For every move within the military to tamp down on free-wheeling Internet communication, there are grass-roots efforts to harness the Web for military purposes. This back and forth represents a sort of “civil war” within the Pentagon over the use of the Internet.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The Army appears to have found a middle ground between Internet proponents and skeptics, and is using this “no man’s land” to build a wide range of potentially powerful Web 2.0 tools locked behind password-protected portals. The Coast Guard, on the other hand, used its official blog in March to publish a fictionalized rescue account labeled as news.

When it comes to the Internet, the Army perhaps represents a prudent way forward for the military, while the Coast Guard might be the best example of what not to do. The Navy lies somewhere in between — if one group of Navy bloggers, and the official reaction to them, is any indication.

In March, the crew of the destroyer USS Russell essentially circumvented the Navy’s public-affairs machinery to launch an unofficial blog, “The Destroyermen.” Its aim: to “deliver an unvarnished, informative and entertaining account of life aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer; to report on USS Russell’s contribution to the ‘global war on terror’ and execution of America’s maritime strategy, and provide insight into the character of the American sailor,” according to Lt. Commander Chris van Avery, the blog’s editor and main writer.

The Destroyermen focused on the daily routine of Russell’s sailors as they ate, cleaned machinery, trained and went ashore on leave. Only occasionally, and vaguely, did van Avery venture on opinion on U.S. strategy. Even rarer were any mentions of Russell’s military missions and whereabouts.

By the modest standards of military Websites, The Destroyermen blog was an overnight sensation. It was getting hundreds of hits per day when, unexpectedly, the site went dead in late April — at around the same time that Russell entered Middle Eastern waters controlled by U.S. Central Command.

Van Avery explained in an interview that some public-affairs officers were more supportive than others. It seems Central Command’s flacks were wary of Russell’s grass-roots Internet presence. There were fears the warship’s blog might betray military secrets.

It apparently took intervention by high-ranking Navy officers to break the Internet blockade around Russell. “The Navy’s current policies are almost completely silent with respect to this new medium,” van Avery told The Washington Independent, “so we’re picking our way through the fog and trying to maintain a safe speed. I’ll also note again that many in the Navy have seen the potential of the medium and are working hard to find a way to adapt the policies and procedures to make it work. In the meantime, we’ve got a ‘learner’s permit’ to continue.”

The Army, by contrast, already has a working policy in place, however imperfect, and has been developing its Internet tools in leaps and bounds. By the spring ,the Army had a half-dozen password-protected Internet forums for sharing ideas and tactics, in addition to an online video-based ethics training site similar to YouTube and a blogging and networking site based on MySpace.

Army Maj. Ray Kimball, part of the Army’s small Internet advocacy office, attributes much of his organization’s successes to consistent support from the Army’s academic establishment at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan. Leavenworth’s top general, William Caldwell, even announced in May that blogging would be part of the formal graduate curriculum. But officers at Kimball’s “Center for Company-Level Leaders,” based in New York, also highlight their “compromise” approach to the Internet. Those Internet tools that run any risk of spreading classified data are contained within password-protected Army networks.

In one sense, it’s the unique missions of the Army’s Internet tools that allow such protection. The Army blogs, for example, aren’t intended for public outreach, as are the Coast Guard’s and Navy’s controversial blogs. It’s one thing to lock the Army blogging site behind a secure network; doing the same with the sea services’ blogs, on the other hand, would render them useless.

Still it’s telling that, as far back as a year ago, a key Army official was publicly touting the benefits of blogging — despite the continuing crackdown in other sectors of the military. Blogging “is a technology we are embracing,” Vernon Bettencourt, one of the Army’s top “information officers,” said in May 2007.

Not so the Navy, which has struggled to accept its own homegrown bloggers, despite their nearly overnight success as public outreach. The Navy’s soul-searching over the benefits and risks of blogging reflects the wider struggle inside the Pentagon over the Internet – a struggle that civilians and terrorists resolved years ago.

David Axe is a freelance journalist based in Washington. He is the author of “Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War.” He blogs at www.warisboring.com.

Rescue swimmer Karen Voorhees, left, was the subject of a fictionalized blog post on the Coast Guard's official website. (Coast Guard)

This is the second in a series on the military and online social networking sites.

In recent years the Pentagon has moved to ban many “Web 2.0” Internet sites like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. The Air Force, the military’s Internet point service, declared that blogs, in particular, were not “established, reputable media.” It blocked blog access from all official networks.

The military was worried that U.S. troops might inadvertently release classified information. To many, the need for secrecy outweighed the Internet’s value for rapidly and widely sharing ideas.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

By contrast, Islamic extremists have long used Websites as their primary means of sharing ideas and recruiting new fighters. On the online battlefield, jihadists have the upper hand.

That could change. For every move in the U.S. military to tamp down on free-wheeling Internet communication, there have been grass-roots efforts to harness the Net for military purposes. This back and forth represents a sort of “civil war” within the Pentagon over Internet use.

As laid out in Part I of this series, the Army appears to have found a middle ground between Internet proponents and skeptics. It is using this “no man’s land” to build a wide range of potentially powerful Web 2.0 tools locked behind password-protected portals.

While the Army perhaps represents a prudent way forward for the military, the sea services seem to be examples of what not to do. They take big steps back for every small step forward. The Navy tried to shut down a popular blog written by a warship crew, while the Coast Guard used its own official blog to publish fiction disguised as news.

The Coast Guard problem is one that a senior official described when addressing alleged inaccuracies in online news reports about the service’s over-budget shipbuilding program. “We are encountering an interesting phenomenon in the ‘blogosphere,’” Rear Adm. Gary Blore said in a Mar. 11 news conference. “A blog can be anything you want it to be,”

The next day, events unfolded that resulted in the Coast Guard publishing a faked first-hand account of an at-sea rescue on its official “Coast Guard Journal” blog.

That particular blog had been a centerpiece of a new Internet campaign by the nation’s fifth military service. In fact, Capt. Jim McPherson, the Coast Guard’s top public affairs officer, cited this blog in February, asserting his service was ahead of the pack when it came to the military services embracing the Internet.

But there were warning signs just weeks later that McPherson’s statements were mostly propaganda. In mid-March, Mike McGrath, a Coast Guard civilian employee, was fired, in part, for contributing in his spare time to The Unofficial Coast Guard blog, a website with no formal connection to the military, but which, nonetheless, strongly supports Coast Guard policy. McGrath had been posting updates on the blog about investigations into a controversial fatal diving accident.

“I was told that my position would have been downsized anyways within the next few months, [and that] my behavior on the blog sites just made it easier to make me the first to go,” McGrath said. “I was sort of encouraged — with some very strong negative overtones — to be careful about posting my personal information and my opinions on these blogs.”

McGrath’s firing raised eyebrows in defense and policy circles. The nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, based in Washington, featured McGrath’s story on its own blog. Peter Stinson, editor of The Unofficial Coast Guard blog, pointed out the Coast Guard’s lack of a clear, comprehensive blogging policy.

But the Coast Guard’s Internet problems were just beginning. A few days after McGrath’s firing, the Coast Guard admitted to fabricating a supposedly first-person “true story” on the service’s new official blog.

The story, published on the online Coast Guard Journal under the byline of the rescue diver Karen Voorhees, described the dramatic Mar. 12 rescue of several mariners from a sinking boat off the New Jersey coast. “As we hovered overhead near the survivors,” her account read in part, “I prepared myself and my gear and was lowered from the helicopter into a challenging nighttime sea, battling 10-foot seas.”

But the words were not Voorhees’s own. “I did not write that blog,” she said on a popular Internet forum a few days after the story bearing her name was posted.

According to emails leaked to The Washington Independent, McPherson had pressured his public affairs staff to come up with something “sensational.” When Voorhees’s actual description of the rescue turned out to be somewhat dull, McPherson told a subordinate to rewrite it, without Voorhees’s consent. One Coast Guard chief, objecting to McPherson’s order, called the rewritten account a “pulp-fiction drama novel.”

When challenged about the faked story, McPherson said the Coast Guard was still figuring out blogging. “We’ll do better,” he said. Yet he still defended the Coast Guard’s relatively progressive approach to the Internet.

In light of Blore’s criticism of blogs just a day before the rescue that McPherson’s staff fictionalized on their own blog, it seems that, even within the Coast Guard, the nation’s smallest military service, officials don’t agree on the value of Internet social media. For the service’s most prominent Internet advocate has used social media to publish exactly the kind of fabrication that another Coast Guard officer said he fears from civilians.

The Coast Guard, like the military in general, appears to be working at cross-purposes with itself when it comes to the Internet, while international jihadists move from strength to strength online.

David Axe is a freelance journalist based in Washington. He is the author of “Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War.” He blogs at www.warisboring.com.

Army cadets at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. (U.S. Army)

This winter, the Air Force, as the Pentagon’s point agency for Internet operations –“cyberwarfare,” in military jargon – banned access from official networks to many blogs, declaring that they weren’t “established, reputable media.” The Air Force didn’t seem concerned that America’s greatest enemies, international jihadists, had long ago latched onto websites as cheap, effective tools for sharing ideas.

Indeed, the Air Force’s ban was part of a widening military crackdown on so-called “Web 2.0” Internet sites, including blogs, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, all often grouped together as “social media,” because of their potential for easy, global communication. Mostly, Website-banning Pentagon officials were worried that U.S. troops, in using these popular Web 2.0 sites, might inadvertently release secret information on the Internet.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

To many in the military, the need for secrecy outweighed the Internet’s value for rapidly and widely sharing ideas. While jihadists built entire intelligence and recruiting machines online, huge swaths of the U.S. military were walling themselves off from the Internet.

But not entirely.

The Army cleverly dodged the bans, setting up its own versions of popular Web 2.0 sites, but hiding them behind password-protected portals. In that way, the Army appears to have found a middle ground between Internet proponents and skeptics. On this toehold, the land combat branch is steadily building new Internet tools that might help the United States catch up to Internet-savvy jihadists. In late April, the land-warfare branch even launched an official blogging service for officers. The blogs combine the best of the civilian Web 2.0 with old-fashioned military-grade security.

In the Pentagon’s tangle of agencies and advocacies, there’s rarely total consensus on any issue. So for every move to tamp down on free-wheeling Internet communication, there have also been grass-roots efforts to harness the Net for military purposes. This back and forth represents a sort of “civil war” within the Pentagon over the use of the Internet for sharing information and ideas -– both within the armed services and with civilians. The Army has emerged least damaged by this civil war; the Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard all take big steps backwards for every small step forward online.

It didn’t take long for Congress to take note of the tug-of-war over Internet use. The Pentagon’s social media ban prompted Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) to write Defense Secretary Robert Gates in May 2007 to express “concern that … the regulations may also inadvertently weaken what has proven to be a significant asset in our media age.” DeMint, a conservative, appeared to be acting on complaints from his large military constituency, the youngest of whom have grown up with the Internet always at their fingertips.

At the time, one low-profile team of Army officers, effectively siding with DeMint, was quietly working on an official military version of the popular social-networking site MySpace, with the aim of giving young officers a forum for keeping track of each other during widespread deployments.

This “military MySpace,” like the civilian version, would include “status update[s], private message[s], and [the] ability to add ‘members I value’ to your own profile,” according to Maj. Ray Kimball, one of a handful of officers at the Center for Company-Level Leaders, a sort of Internet advocacy group at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.

The military MySpace – call it “MilSpace” – would eventually include the previously mentioned blogging function, allowing officers to develop and share ideas and tactics without necessarily having to work through the military’s lumbering, labyrinthine and strictly hierarchical chain of command. MilSpace and its blogs are part of a network of online discussion forums, created by the Center for Company-Level Leaders, that Lt. Col. Tony Burgess, Kimball’s boss, called a “virtual front porch” for hosting soldiers’ conversations.

The forums have their roots in the late 1990s, when they were a private project overseen by several young officers. In 2002 the Army officially sanctioned the forums. After months of work, the MilSpace addition went live in January this year, and the blogging function launched in late April. With each successive new feature, this “virtual front porch” has gained new users, new admirers in the senior ranks and a more prominent position in the Army’s emerging Internet strategy. “I would definitely characterize it [the Mil-Space blogs] as a success,” Kimball told The Washington Independent. “Anecdotally, conversations are more vibrant than they’ve ever been.”

Kimball attributes much of his organization’s successes to consistent support from the Army’s graduate-level academic establishment centered on Ft. Leavenworth, Kans. The top general at Leavenworth, William Caldwell, even announced in May that blogging would be part of the formal graduate curriculum going forward.

MilSpace represents the kinds of long-term solutions likely to result from the Pentagon’s internal Internet struggle. The military will develop its own Net tools, similar to the civilian versions, optimized for spreading ideas and information more quickly. But the armed services may restrict access to some tools in an effort to keep the ideas and information out of the wrong hands.

A coherent military Internet strategy can’t come soon enough: America’s enemies continue to take huge leaps forward online. In May, The New York Times profiled a Belgian woman, Malika El Aroud, who runs Al Qaeda online recruiting campaigns from her home office, using popular Internet forums. Some critics have questioned whether such online campaigns work. They do, according to a January report from the Combating Terrorism Center, a New York-based policy organization. “People [were] deciding to pick up arms after spending time on the forums,” editor Erich Marquardt told The New York Sun.

“It is now possible for them [Islamic extremists] to communicate instantly with supporters (or potential supporters) in nearly all parts of the world,” the nonprofit EastWest Institute reported in February.

EastWest, which has offices in New York, Brussels and Moscow, also pointed out that “as powerful as the Internet may be for violent extremists, cyberspace is a neutral vehicle for the rapid transfer of ideas, beliefs and agendas. Thus it can, and must, be used by those seeking to counter violent extremism.”

That’s a lesson that many within the military have been slow to learn. Only the Army, with its compromise approach balancing the free exchange of ideas with the need for security, seems to truly appreciate the Internet’s value – something jihadists understood years ago.

Part One of Three

David Axe is a freelance journalist based in Washington. He is the author of “Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War.” He blogs at www.warisboring.com.

The Marcbot is designed to investigate suspected explosive devices.

The tiny four-wheeled robot made it halfway to the fist-size bomb before its battery ran out of juice. It was early January 2005 in Baqubah, Iraq, a hotbed of insurgent activity. The Army officers standing at a distance cursed the tiny robot, a 25-pound remote-controlled truck equipped with cameras for investigating suspected explosive devices. The captain who had been steering the so-called “Marcbot,” Scott Holland, tossed aside the remote-control device in frustration and walked right up to the bomb. His staff held their breaths. Holland leaned over the bomb, then kicked it. It was a dud.

Holland’s encounter with the botched bomb and out-of-juice robot is all too common as U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan adopt untried new technologies to defeat evolving insurgent tactics. In previous wars, enemy infantry and artillery attacks claimed the most U.S. lives. Today makeshift bombs are the biggest killer – and robots could be one of the safest means to confront them. If only the robots worked better.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Getting more reliable and capable robots to the troops in Iraq is a possible result of one congressman’s radical plan for the Army. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.), the powerful chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, is seeking to revamp Army technology plans to focus on current wars, rather than looking forward to some projected future threat, as some senior Army officials prefer

For example, one ambitious weapons program that could be killed off soon aims to produce a family of new hybrid-electric armored vehicles and other weapons, all connected by an electronic communications network. The so-called Future Combat Systems, which has cost taxpayers roughly $20 billion so far, has come under fire from the Government Accountability Office for exceeding cost estimates. Other critics say the electronics network is pure fantasy. Still others contend that the new hybrid vehicles – which are still in development and should enter production in 2013 – are modeled on an outdated style of firepower-heavy conventional warfare. But the program, co-managed by Boeing and consultants SAIC, has also produced some smaller technologies, like new bomb-defeating robots, that are clearly useful in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Murtha has proposed adding another $20 billion to FCS research and development this year, in an effort to speed up these more immediately useful technologies. But there’s a caveat: in exchange for the extra cash, the Army might have to cancel the rest of the program.

Extra cash – with a catch

Future Combat Systems was launched in 2002, before the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program was designed for a U.S. Army that would be fighting high-tech battles similar to those of the 1991 Gulf War: tank versus tank on open terrain. By contrast, low-tech insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan move on foot, blend in with the civilian population and prefer ambushes, sniping and roadside bombs to any stand-up fight. For this reason, some critics contend, FCS is outmoded before it even enters service.

“FCS is yet another iteration of attempts since the 1950s, if not earlier, to automate human conflict,” Elise Szabo and Ana Marte, from Center for Defense Information, a Washington policy organization, wrote last year. “These multiple efforts have resulted in repeated failures and frequent defeats for the side attempting to employ them … FCS, if ever deployed, is more likely to impede U.S. military mental and physical agility on the battlefield, rather than facilitate it.”

But the $160-billion, 20-year program does have a number of secondary technologies that might be useful for current wars – provided they’re finished fast enough. FCS, which has already eaten up about $3.5 billion per year and growing, features improved robots plus new sensors and a family of “universal” radios that can connect robots, armored vehicles and airplanes in a single network. Murtha wants to know if any of these technologies are good candidates for fast-tracking. “If the subcommittee gives the Army an extra $20 billion, what can they do with it?” said Matt Mazonkey, a Murtha staffer. “He [Murtha] wants to get stuff out.”

Budgetary concerns are one reason for Murtha’s proposal. “It’s a $160-billion program that, like all military programs, continues to grow [in cost],” Mazonkey said.

The escalating price of repairing vehicles worn out in Iraq and Afghanistan has added to the military’s cash crunch. The Government Accountability Office recently estimated the repair bill – “reset,” in Army parlance – at $120 billion over 10 years.

While paying for reset is a major priority for Murtha, Mazonkey says, the chairman is willing to “downsize on reset” in the short term in order to “get FCS [technologies] out faster.”

Army representative Paul Mehney says it is considering Murtha’s proposal and will issue a report on which technologies can be accelerated for service in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Army has asked Congress to redirect $250 million of the service’s research budget this year to speed up some FCS research. It’s a move that can be read as a tacit endorsement of Murtha’s proposal — or read as the Army facing the reality of FCS’s eventual cancellation.

The (robotic) shape of the future

Current war operations, and Army experiments on the Texas plains, hint at what aspects of FCS the Army might salvage, and how the service will equip itself in order to fight Iraq-style conflicts in coming years and decades. Early incarnations of the FCS robots – bigger and better than Holland’s Marcbot – have already begun trickling down to combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan. At Fort Bliss in Texas, the Army is testing out 1990s-vintage M-1 tanks with new sensors and radios, called “B kits,” that have been “spun out” from FCS.

If FCS and its fleets of hybrid-electric armored vehicles get cancelled, as Murtha’s plan might require, the M-1s will have to soldier on for decades to come. But some observers contend that the “old,” 70-ton M-1are actually better suited to current conflicts because they have the heavy armor to resist most roadside bombs. The new FCS hybrids weigh only half as much and rely on “situational awareness” – that is, all-seeing sensors – to avoid attacks.

“So many of these future concepts are predicated on very, very high levels of situational awareness in the future,” RAND analyst John Gordon told GovExec reporter Greg Grant last year, “but there’s precious little evidence we’re going to get there from here, particularly in a cluttered ground environment.”

But with the B kits, the M-1s and other older vehicles “were able to share information [more] quickly” than before, according to FCS official Charlie Wilson. These old vehicles with the B kits perhaps represent the best of both worlds. They’ve got the old Army’s thick armor, and some of the new Army’s smart communications, thanks to FCS. What they don’t have is the diesel-electric hybrid engines that are at the heart of the new FCS vehicles’ designs. It’s these engines that FCS supporters often point to when defending the program.

Armor versus sensors

Mehney says that FCS’s hybrid engines aren’t just intended to save fuel, but are required to power the program’s full range of new sensors and communications gear. Without a hybrid’s power boost, much of FCS’s new technology is useless. While some FCS components, like the radios, can be ported to older vehicles, hybrid engines cannot, according to engineers at the Army’s Detroit-based engineering command.

For this reason, there’s ultimately a limit to how much new gear can be “kluged” onto the Army’s existing tanks and other vehicles: the B kits pretty much are the upper limit. But if Gordon is right, and “situational awareness” is no panacea, then the B kits’ modest improvements might be all that U.S. forces need – or can afford.

Army officials, for several years now, have walked a careful line between pushing for more armor and advocating high-tech sensors and communications (“the network,” in Army-speak) — all against the backdrop of tightening budgets. Last year the Army rushed new heavily armored trucks into production for the Iraq war, at a cost of up to $20 billion.

Maj. Gen. Charles Cartwright, the FCS manager, urged caution. “If all we’re doing is piling on armor, where does that stop?” He said an FCS-style network was the only way to end the potentially endless cycle of heavier and heavier armor. But it’s not clear that the network and situational awareness are viable replacements for armor. So FCS remains a hard sell, especially with the reset bill now topping $100 billion.

Murtha is due to get his report soon, and shortly thereafter FCS might see a quick injection of cash that, ironically, could also spell its ultimate demise. Canceling FCS could mean that the Army is focusing more on helping soldiers like Holland fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on repairing gear worn out in those wars, and less on some imaginary future threat that can be defeated solely with high technology.

David Axe is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. and the author of Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War. He blogs at www.warisboring.com.