The Gold Coast

23

Dennis McPherson reads of the sabotage at Parnell on the morning wall news, shoots air between his teeth. A bad business. There have been several attacks by saboteurs on defense contractors recently, and it’s hard to tell who’s behind them. It’s beginning to look like more than intercompany rivalries. Every company’s security division, including LSR’s, is involved in some questionable activities, usually concerned with getting their hands on classified military documents or the plans of other companies; this McPherson is aware of, as is everybody. And in isolated cases a zealous or desperate security team may have gotten out of hand and done some mischief to a rival. It’s happened, sure, and in recent years, with the Pentagon’s budget leveling off a little, the competition has become more and more unscrupulous. But mostly it’s been confined to intelligence and minor-league tampering. This widespread sabotage appears to be something new. The work of the Soviets, perhaps, or of some Third World power; or of homegrown refusniks.

Dennis laughs without humor to read that the composite-compound solvents used in the attack were mostly Styx-90, made by Dow. Parnell is owned by Dow. And he laughs again when it occurs to him that these companies, whose main business it is to defend America from ICBM attack, cannot even effectively protect themselves from little field cruisers. Who anymore can possibly believe in Fortress America?

Certainly not the security men at the gate of the LSR complex. They look distinctly unhappy as they check to see if McPherson is the correct occupant of his car. They’re there to defend against industrial espionage, not guerrilla attack. They’ve got an impossible job.

And the people inside?

For the last several weeks McPherson has been whipping the informal Stormbee proposal into formal shape. Going from superblack to white. There are advantages to a white program that McPherson appreciates. Everything’s on the table, the specs are there in the RFP and can’t be changed by some clown in the Air Force who happens to come up with a new idea. And they’re forced by the intense competition to do a thorough job, including tests that are run until every part of the system has been proved to work, under all kinds of circumstances. And that’s good in the long run, as far as McPherson is concerned. He’s been out to White Sands seven times in the last month, working on further tests of the system, and in the tests they discovered, for instance, that if the target tanks were grouped in a mass the laser target designator tended to fix only on the tanks on the perimeter, leaving those in the middle alone. Some work by the programmers and the problem was solved, but if they hadn’t even known about it? Yes, this is the way McPherson likes to work. “Let’s get it right,” he tells his crew almost every day. In fact his programmers call him LGIR behind his back, pronounced “Elgir,” which has led certain music-minded programmers to speak of cello concertos, or to whistle “Pomp and Circumstance” to indicate the boss’s arrival on the scene.…

So, McPherson sits down at his desk and looks at the list of Things To Do that he left the night before. He adds several items that have occurred to him over the night, and on the drive in.

He lifts the phone, punches the button for Don Freiburg. The day begins.

Becoming a white program means that the Stormbee proposal is now part of the mainstream of public military procurement in America. This is a vastly complicated process that contains hundreds of variables, and very few people, if any, understand all the facets of it. Certainly McPherson does not; he concentrates on the part of the process that is important to his work, just as everyone else does. Thus he is an expert in the Air Force’s aerospace technology procurement, and knows little or nothing about other areas. Just learning his own little area is difficult enough.

It begins within the Air Force itself, like so: One of the operating commands, say the Strategic Defense Phase One Group (SDPOG), makes a Statement of Operational Need (SON) with a Mission Element Need Analysis (MENA) to the United States Air Force Headquarters (HQ USAF). If HQ USAF decides that the SON represents a major program, they make a Justification for Major Systems New Start (JMSNS), which is reviewed by the Requirements Assessment Group (RAG), and this review is then submitted to the Secretary of the Air Force (SAF). If SAF decides that the JMSNS represents an Air Force Designated Acquisition Program (AFDAP), he approves the JMSNS, and it becomes an AFJMSNS. The SAF then submits the AFJMSNS as part of the next Air Force Program Objectives Memorandum (POM) to the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF). If the SECDEF approves the POM, and thus the AFJMSNS, the HQ USAF prepares and issues a Program Management Directive (PMD), and Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS) action is taken. The Concept Exploration Phase (CEP) has begun. In this phase the various Preliminary System Operational Concepts (PSOCs) are explored, and altogether they constitute the Phase Review Package (PRP). From the PRP a System Concept Paper (SCP) is prepared by HQ USAF, and it is again reviewed by the RAG, and by the Air Force Systems Acquisition Review Council (AFSARC), after which it is submitted to the SAF. If the SAF approves the SCP, it is reviewed by the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council (DSARC), which recommends it to the SECDEF. If the SECDEF approves the SCP—a Milestone I decision—then HQ USAF issues another PMD and the program enters the Validation and Demonstration Phase (VDP).

All clear? Well, it’s at that point that the program first connects with private industry. If the SAF and the SECDEF have agreed that the program must remain top secret, then the program becomes a superblack program and a single contractor or two is contacted by Air Force personnel directly in the Pentagon. At least usually. There are also the ordinary black programs, which are given directly to contractors like the superblacks; a few people in Congress are told about these as well, so they can think that they are in on all the Pentagon’s secrets.

But by far the majority of the programs are so-called white programs, and these require more complicated procedures. During the VDP, HQ USAF begins floating draft Requests For Proposals (RFPs) and Requests For Information (RFIs) to relevant defense contractors, asking for comments. The interested companies respond with technical suggestions based on their evaluations of the RFP, and these become part of the Decision Coordination Process (DCP). Eventually HQ USAF issues a final RFP, which is usually published in Commerce Business Daily. At this point there has already been an important tactical struggle between the interested contractors, as each attempted to get things written into the RFP that only they were competent to do. But now the RFP is out there for anyone to respond to, and the race is on.

Typically companies have ninety days to submit proposals to the Program Manager (PM), who is an Air Force colonel or brigadier general. After submission, the proposal evaluation process begins. Part of it is conducted by the Air Force Test and Evaluation Center (AFTEC), which is part of the Air Force Systems Command (AFSC) based at Andrews AFB; part of it is conducted out of HQ USAF in the Pentagon, or under the PM. From these units and others a Source Selection Evaluation Board (SSEB) is convened, under the command of a Source Selection Authority (SSA), who is usually but not always the PM. The various proposers are brought in and grilled over every detail of their proposals, and when that six-week process is over, the SSEB makes its evaluation, which is then summarized by the SSA, who uses his summary to justify his decision to the people above him. The decision to award the program to a bidder (or to award it to two bidders in a competitive development, or in a so-called leader-follower arrangement) is thus ultimately the SSA’s decision, but he usually follows the recommendations of the SSEB, and he also has to secure the approval of his superiors, up to the SAF or even the SECDEF.

All clear?

But meanwhile, at this point, all Dennis McPherson has to worry about is putting together a proposal that will stand up under the technical testing and budgetary demands that the SSEB will soon be making. Not too many days left; and so it is nearer five-thirty than four when he finally gets free for the first conference with Dan Houston about the Ball Lightning program, which Lemon has vengefully commanded him to work on, in his “spare time” from the Stormbee proposal.

McPherson can still remember perfectly the mistake that got him stuck with this. He was down in LSR’s executive restaurant, walking in with Art Wong, and in response to something Art said, without pausing to think (or look around), he said, “I’m damned glad I don’t have the job you guys do. The whole ballistic defense program is nothing but a black hole for money and effort if you ask me.” And then he turned around and there was Stewart Lemon, standing right there and glaring at him.

And so now he’s assigned to Ball Lightning. Lemon never forgets.

Dan is ready to quit for the day, and he’s about to go with some of his crew to the El Torito just down the road. He wants McPherson to come along and join them for margaritas, and McPherson hides his irritation and agrees to it. On the short drive over he calls Lucy to let her know he’ll be home late, and then ascends the office complex’s maze of exterior staircases to the restaurant on the top floor. Fine view of the Muddy Canyon condos, and in the other direction, the sea.

Dan and Art Wong and Jerry Heimat are already there at a window table, and the pitcher of margaritas is on its way. McPherson sits and starts in on the chips and salsa with them. They’re talking shop. Executives at Grumman and Teledyne have been indicted for taking kickbacks from subcontractors. “That’s why they call the Grumman SAM the ‘Kicker,’ I guess,” says Dan. This gets them on the topic of missiles, and as the pitcher of margaritas arrives and is quickly disposed of, they discuss the latest performances in the war in Indonesia. It seems a General Dynamic antitank missile has gotten nicknamed “the Boomerang” for persistent problems with guidance software or vane hinges, no one is quite sure yet. But they just keep on flying in curved trajectories, a weird problem indeed. No one wants to use these devices, but they’re ordered to anyway because the Marines have huge quantities of them and won’t acknowledge that the problems have gotten above an acceptable percentage. So soldiers in the field have taken to firing their GDs ninety degrees off to the side of the target tanks… or so the gossip mill says. No doubt it’s a pack of lies, but no one likes GD so it makes for a good story.

“Did you hear about Johnson at Loral?” asks Art. “He’s in charge of the fourth-tier ICBM program, shooting down leakers. So, one day he gets a directive from SDC, and it says, Please assume that you will have to deal with twenty percent more than the total amount estimated to be launched in a full-scale attack!” They all laugh. “He almost has a heart attack, this is a couple of orders of magnitude more incoming than he thought the system was going to have to deal with, and all his software is shit out of luck. The whole system is overwhelmed. So he calls the Pentagon just before his ticker says good-bye, and finds out that whoever wrote ‘twenty percent more than’ should have written ‘twenty percent of. “…”

“He’s still got trouble,” Dan says when they stop laughing. “They can’t even knock down one incoming with more than fifty percent reliability, so they’re going to have to at least double the number of smart rocks, and the Pentagon is already threatening to dump him.” This reminds Dan of his own troubles, and with a grim smile he downs the rest of his margarita.

Art and Jerry, aware of their boss’s moods, sense this change of humor. And this is supposed to be a conference between the two managers. So they chat for a while longer, and finish their drinks, and then they’re up and off. Dan and Dennis are left there to talk things over.

“So,” Dan says, smiling the same unhumorous smile. “Lemon has stuck you into the Ball Lightning program, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“Worse luck for you.” Dan signals to a passing waitress for another pitcher. “He’s running scared, I’ll tell you that. Hereford is calling from New York and putting the pressure on, and right now he’s feeling it but good, because we are stuck.” He shakes his head miserably. “Stuck.”

“Tell me about it.”

Dan gets out a pen, draws a circle on the yellow paper tablecloth. “The real problem,” he complains, “is that the first tier has been given an impossible job. Strategic Defense Command has said that seventy percent of all Soviet ICBMs sent up in a full attack are to be destroyed in the boost phase. We won a development contract using that figure as the baseline goal. But it can’t be done.”

“You think not?” McPherson suspects that Dan may just be making excuses for his program’s problems. He sips his drink. “Why?”

Houston grimaces. “The necessary dwell time is just too long, Mac. Too long.” He sighs. “It’s always been the toughest requirement in the whole system’s architecture, if you ask me. The Soviets have got their fast-burn boosters down to sixty seconds, so most of their ICBMs will only be in boost phase for that minute, and half that time they’ll be in the atmosphere where the lasers won’t do much. So for our purposes we’re talking about a window of thirty seconds.”

He scribbles down the figures on the tablecloth as he talks, nervously, without looking at them, as if they are his signature or some other deeply, even obsessively memorized sign. tB = 30.

“Now, during that time we’ve got to locate the ICBMs, track them, and get the mirrors into the correct alignment to bounce the lasers. Art’s team has got that down to around ten seconds, which is an incredible technical feat, by the way.” He nods mulishly, writes tT = 10. “And then there’s the dwell time, the time the beam has to be fixed on the missile to destroy it.” He writes tD = , hesitates, leaves the other side of the equation blank.

“You told the Air Force we could pulse a large burst of energy, right?” McPherson asks. “So the damage is done by a shock wave breaking the skin of the missile?”

Dan nods. “That’s right.”

“So dwell time should be short.”

“That’s right! That’s right. Dwell time should be on the order of two seconds. That means that each laser station can destroy N missiles, where,” and he writes:

“However,” Dan continues carefully, looking down on the simple equation, one of the basic Field-Spergels that he has to juggle every day, “dwell time in fact depends on the hardness of the missile, the distance to the target, the brightness of the laser beam, and the angle of the incidence between the beam and the surface of the missile.” He writes down H, B, R, and 0, and then, obsessively, writes down this equation too, another Field-Spergel:

“And we’ve been getting figures for hardness of about forty kilojoules per square centimeter.” He writes H = 40 KJcm2. “Our lasers have twenty-five megawatts of power hitting ten-meter-diameter mirrors at wavelength two point seven nanometers, so even with the best angle of incidence possible, dwell time is,” and he writes, very carefully:

“What?” says McPherson. “What happened to this pulse shock wave?”

Dan shakes his head. “Won’t work. The missiles are too hard. We’ve got to burn them out, just like I used to say we’d have to, back before we got this development contract. The mirrors are up there and they won’t be getting any bigger, the power pulse is already incredible when you think that over a hundred and fifty laser stations will have to be supplied all at once, and we can’t change the wavelength of the lasers without replacing the entire systems. And that’s the whole ball game.”

“But that means that dwell time is longer than boost time!”

“That’s right. Each laser can bring down about eight-tenths of a missile. And there’s a hundred and fifty laser stations, and about ten thousand missiles.”

McPherson feels himself gaping. He takes the pen from Houston, starts writing on the tablecloth himself. He surveys the figures. Takes another drink.

“So,” he says, “how did we get this development contract, then?”

Dan shakes his head. Now he’s looking out the window at the sea.

Slowly he says, “We got the contract for Ball Lightning by proving we could destroy a stationary hardened target in ground tests, with the sudden pulse shock wave. They gave us the contract on that basis, and we were put in competition with Boeing who got the same contract, and after three years we have to show we can do it in boost phase, in real-time tests. It’s getting close to time for the head-to-head tests. The winner gets a twenty-billion-dollar project, just for starters, and the loser is out a few hundred million in proposal and development costs. Maybe it’ll get a follower’s subcontract with the winner, but that won’t amount to much.”

McPherson nods impatiently. “But if we could do it on the ground?”

Dan polishes off another glass in one swallow. “You want another pitcher?”

“No.”

He pours foam and ice into his glass. “The problem,” he says carefully, “is that the test wasn’t real. It was a strapped chicken.”

“What?” McPherson sits up so fast his knee knocks the table and almost tips his glass over. “What’s this?”

But it’s clear what Dan means. The test results didn’t mean what LSR said they did.

“Why?”

Dan shrugs. “We were out of time. And we thought we had the problem licked. We thought we could send a beam so bright that it would create a shock wave in even the hardened skins, the calculations made it look like all we needed was a little more power and the brightness would be there. So we simulated what would happen when we did solve the problems, and figured we could validate the tests retroactively, after we had the contract. But we’ve never been able to.” He stares at the table, unable to meet McPherson’s gaze.

“For God’s sake,” Dennis says. He can’t get over it.

“It’s not like no one has ever done it before,” Dan says defensively.

“Uhn.”

In fact, as they both know, the strategic defense program has a long history of such meaningless tests, beginning under its first R&D PM. They blew up Sidewinder missiles with lasers, when Sidewinders were designed to seek out energy sources and therefore were targets that would latch on to the beams destroying them. They sent electron beams through rarefied gases, and claimed that the beams would work in the very different environments of vacuum or atmosphere. They bounced lasers off space targets and claimed progress, when astronomy rangers had done the same for decades. And they set target missiles on the ground, and strained them with guy wires so that they would burst apart when heated by lasers, in the famous “strapped chicken” tests. Yes, there’s a history of PR tests that goes right back to the beginning of the whole concept. You could say the ballistic missile defense system was founded on them.

But now—now the system is being produced and deployed. It’s the real thing now, sold to the nation and in the sky, and with a strapped chicken in their part of the system, they’re in serious trouble. The Pentagon is not as lenient with private contractors as they were with their own research program, needless to say. The company could even be liable to prosecution, though it seldom comes to that. It doesn’t have to to ruin the company, though.

And here Lemon has put him into this program! McPherson already knew that Lemon gave him the task out of malice; it complicated his primary work quite a bit; but this! This! It goes beyond malice.

“Does Lemon know?”

“… No.”

But McPherson can see in Dan’s face that he’s lying, trying to cover for his boss, his friend. Amazing. And there’s no way Dennis can call Dan on it, not now. “My God.” He stops a waitress and orders another pitcher of margaritas.

They sit in silence until the new pitcher arrives. They fill up. “So what do you think we should do?” Dan says hesitantly. There’s a certain desperation in his voice; and he’s drinking the margaritas as fast as he can.

“How the hell should I know?” Dennis snaps. The question makes him suddenly furious. “You’ve got Art and Jerry’s people working on the pulse problem?”

“Yeah. No go so far, though.”

McPherson takes a deep breath. “Would more power help?”

“Sure, but where will we get it?”

“I don’t know. I suppose…” He is thinking to himself now. “I suppose the best thing to do is try jamming all the power we do have into as short a burst as we can manage. And focus it to as small a space.” He sighs, picks up the pen and starts scribbling formulas. The two of them bend their heads over the table.