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One thing is clear: ARPA’s attempt to educate Iranian officials on weapons analysis failed to sway Iran’s ruler. When the shah came to the United States in 1973 to shop for a new fighter aircraft, Malcolm Currie, the director of defense research and engineering, was tapped to play host, taking him to Andrews Air Force Base for a private demonstration of American airpower. The air force went first, flying its new F-15 through a seemingly impressive series of air maneuvers. When the navy demonstrated its F-14, the pilot put on an even better show: he did a roll, circled around, and made a loop right over the shah’s head. After the performance, the shah said to Currie, “You know, I’ve always viewed Iran as kind of an island in the middle of an ocean.”
Currie marveled at the shah’s nonsensical statement. The F-14 was a fighter built for aircraft carriers, something that Iran did not possess. It was more expensive and had a shorter range than the F-15, but it was clear the Iranian leader’s mind was made up. Iran became the only foreign country to ever buy the F-14, a decision based on a thirty-minute air show. The results of Cordesman’s work, at least as measured by its impact on the shah’s spending spree, were also clear. As Precht, the American diplomat, summed it up, “He failed.”
By 1973, ARPA’s days operating abroad were numbered. AGILE’s field offices were an unending and unwanted source of troubles: In 1970, two ARPA officials, James Woods, a researcher, and Robert Schwartz, the head of the Thailand office, were held for two weeks in Jordan after their commercial plane from Germany was hijacked and diverted to the Middle East. Fearful of the hijackers’ finding his Pentagon documents, Schwartz attempted to flush the papers down the toilet and, in desperation, even swallowed some of them. Both men were eventually released unharmed, though Woods, the ARPA researcher, later groused that the government denied him per diem for the days he was held, because the hijackers had provided him with room and board.
The American embassy in Iran was also eager to show ARPA the door. Cordesman was brilliant but arrogant, producing thick analytical reports faster than most people could read them. “He projected an air of superiority over lesser beings, particularly Iranians who felt insecure to begin with,” recalled Precht. The ARPA office was becoming a liability; visitors to the embassy suspected it was somehow involved in intelligence operations, and the embassy worried about a congressional investigation. “This would be unfortunate for there are several classified, highly important operations which could be compromised by a general investigation,” Precht noted in a confidential memorandum to senior embassy officials.
Was the Middle East office a worthwhile endeavor, or a fool’s errand, operating in a part of the world where a science and technology agency had no business being? Charles Herzfeld’s argument to Congress in the late 1960s had been that ARPA was doing valuable work that no one else was doing, and sometimes he was right. In 1971, the Beirut office was asked to look into the little-known threat of “improvised explosive devices,” the technical name for homemade bombs. More than forty years before IEDs entered the popular lexicon and became the leading killer of American and coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, ARPA hired a contractor to study them and prepare a comprehensive report, which concluded that “there are limits to the benefits one can expect to derive from improved tooling and procedures, and technological development efforts devoted to exceeding those limits are unwarranted.” In other words, the report found there are ultimately a limited number of ways to detect and destroy crude bombs; no magic bullet exists.
It is unclear if the report had any resonance at the time, but it accurately predicted the outcome of what happened decades later, when, faced with a flood of IEDs in Iraq, the Pentagon invested in a new agency tasked to do precisely what the ARPA-sponsored report had recommended against: develop technologies to detect and destroy these bombs. After spending nearly $20 billion, the director of that agency, called the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, admitted in 2010 that the best method the Pentagon had for detecting bombs was still a dog. The 1971 ARPA report, in the meantime, sat in a box in the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland.
Those moments of neglected prescience aside, ARPA’s accomplishments in the region were limited. The problem in Iran was not whether the military forces could bake their own bread but whether a corrupt monarchy that used torture and fear to maintain power was worth supporting at all, though that was a question beyond ARPA’s purview. Systems analysis—or the idea of looking at all the parts and components of a problem—just was not feasible in a monarchy dominated by nepotism and corruption. ARPA’s work in Iran “was a neat idea,” Lukasik later said, “except the only organization that can take a systems view about a country is the country’s government.” In 1974, Lukasik canceled the systems analysis project, and the office in Iran was soon shut down completely, as were the rest of ARPA’s field offices.
Even with the closure of the field offices, there was one more move needed to distance ARPA from the fiasco of Vietnam: a second name change. Lukasik took what was left of AGILE, or Overseas Defense Research, and packaged it in a new division called the Tactical Technology Office. And then, for good measure, he swept into the office two more problem children: the Advanced Engineering Office and the Advanced Sensors Office.
The Advanced Engineering Office was doing some good work, but many of its projects, like a flippable barge that would serve as a mid-ocean military base and a ten-ton air cushion vehicle designed to battle the Soviets in the Arctic region, made little sense to Lukasik. More problematic was that its head, a Chinese-American scientist, had landed himself in hot water for speaking to Chinese nationals in Canada, raising security concerns. And then there was the Advanced Sensors Office, the spooky outfit headed by Richard Cesaro, whom Lukasik had fired. Those offices got wrapped up into the new office, with AGILE as its core. “I took a really bad dish and I poured in some crap and some shit, and it became the Tactical Technology Office,” Lukasik joked.
ARPA already had a Strategic Technology Office for nuclear warfare, investigating lasers and antisubmarine warfare technology, and now it had the Tactical Technology Office for conventional warfare, creating weapons, like drones, sensors, and bombs. It looked nice and neat, at least on paper, but it needed a larger purpose. The new Tactical Technology Office was populated by novelties that had grown up in Vietnam. Those technologies, from drones to sensors, had not always proved useful for counterinsurgency, but perhaps they might be better suited for a conventional battlefield. The problem was figuring out how to persuade the military services to use them. Or even more important, why they needed them.
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Most advances look obvious in hindsight, but it can often take many frustrating years to understand what new technology can do. When the inventor Nikola Tesla first publicly demonstrated remote control in 1898, operating a small boat using radio signals, it caught people’s attention, but it did not instantly spark a revolution. Whether it is trying to make people see how you could use networked computers or getting the military to understand why it might want bombs that can be guided to a specific location, one often needs to make a dramatic presentation to convince people, but even that may not be enough.
For seven years, the air force and the navy tried in vain to destroy Dragon’s Jaw bridge, a critical North Vietnamese supply line, dropping bomb after bomb, in hundreds of sorties. One pilot described 250-pound warheads “bouncing off” the bridge. Even direct hits did little more than minor damage to the bridge, which the air force historian Richard Hallion called “a notorious graveyard for dozens of strike aircraft and airmen.” It was not until 1972, when the air force struck the bridge with a barrage of newly developed laser-guided bombs, that it was finally destroyed. The era of precision warfare had begun, though in Vietnam it was too late to make any difference in the outcome of the war.
Fred Wikner, a physicist who worked for the Pentagon, was interested in precision weapons and in ARPA. He
had seen ARPA’s Southeast Asia work firsthand, in 1969, when he served as the army general Creighton Abrams’s science adviser. One of the problems Wikner saw in Vietnam was that the Pentagon, including ARPA, was employing high-tech solutions to what were often low-tech problems. Dragon’s Jaw bridge was actually the exception; most of the problems the military faced in Vietnam did not call for technological novelty. Wikner angered military officers because he would tell them they did not understand the science, and then he angered scientists, because he told them they did not understand war. Military officers took to calling Wikner the FSA, short for Fucking Science Adviser, a riff on Foreign Service Officer, or FSO, the formal name for diplomats (another group often derided by the military). If FSA was meant as an insult, Wikner wore it as a badge of honor.
By the time Wikner arrived in Vietnam, the majority of American casualties there were from mines and booby traps, the types of weapons later referred to as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly impossible to spot in dense jungle foliage, an invisible wire stretched across a jungle trail would trigger the explosive. Wikner, recalling his Boy Scouts training, devised a novel fix to the trip-wire problem. He went out on patrol with marines, showing them how a six-foot stick could be used in the jungle to feel for a possible trip wire without actually setting off the explosive. “That’s the greatest accomplishment of my life,” the physicist later recalled.
When Wikner returned to the Pentagon in 1970, he was appointed to head the newly created Office of Net Technical Assessment, an in-house think tank for the Pentagon. Wikner’s office was supposed to look at factors that might affect the future strategic balance between the United States and the Soviet Union, and come up with possible solutions. The Vietnam War was drawing to a close, and the Pentagon’s attention was back in Europe, where military doctrine called for using tactical nuclear weapons in case of a Soviet invasion. If the bang was big enough, precision would not matter. The Soviets, however, had a different strategy. With the United States focused on Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union had increased its conventional forces, introduced new weapons and technology, and modernized its military doctrine. The Soviets believed they could win a war in Europe “with or without nuclear weapons,” wrote the army general Donn Starry, who served in the 1970s as the commander of the Fifth Corps in Germany. “Their preferred solution: without.” American troops deployed in Europe, on the other hand, felt like “no more than speed bumps for Soviet forces en route to the Rhine and beyond,” Starry wrote. Wikner summed up the army’s attitude for facing off against the Soviets in Europe: “Nuke ’em till they glow.”
In 1973, James Schlesinger became the defense secretary, and he turned his attention to NATO, which had been relying on American nuclear weapons as a deterrent to a Soviet conventional attack in Europe. The Soviets outnumbered NATO conventional forces, but Schlesinger felt the nuclear deterrent had become an excuse for NATO not to modernize. In July of that year, he summoned Wikner and Lukasik’s deputy, Cotter, who was leaving ARPA to become a special assistant on nuclear policy. The defense secretary had an assignment for them. “What we want is to have a viable conventional response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe that doesn’t rely totally on nuclear weapons,” he said.
Wikner realized that ARPA and its high-tech gadgetry from Vietnam might now have a role to play in military strategy. AGILE had experimented with just about every imaginable newfangled battlefield technology, from armed drones and tethered balloons to laser-guided rockets and advanced radar. The newly created Tactical Technology Office inherited a wealth of technologies that had been percolating over the course of the Vietnam War and were directly relevant to precision warfare. “Steve, we have to do something about hitting things,” Wikner told Lukasik.
In good Washington fashion, Wikner proposed to Lukasik that ARPA fund a study that would bring together nuclear theory and conventional weapons. Wikner, who knew Washington’s national security bureaucracy, told Lukasik that ARPA would co-sponsor the work with the Defense Nuclear Agency so that the study could look at both conventional and nuclear forces, something ARPA could not do on its own. More critically, Wikner advised Lukasik to name the study something so bureaucratically obscure that no one would notice it. “If we had called this Project Smart Kill, it would have been dead in the water,” Lukasik joked. “I’m not sure whether Congress would have killed it, or the services would have killed it, or someone up in the Office of the Secretary of Defense would have killed it.”
In 1973, Lukasik signed off on the Long Range Research and Development Planning Program, or LRRDPP, an unpronounceable acronym tailor made not to appear in a Washington Post headline or be spotted by an eagle-eyed congressional staffer. Left unsaid was that it was a study meant to transform the technology of counterinsurgency into weapons for the modern conventional battlefield.
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In Washington, studies of conventional and nuclear warfare line bookshelves, fill cardboard storage boxes, and more often than most people would care to admit are eventually fed into shredders. Making a study influential in a city overwhelmed by wonk reports requires choosing the right person. That was why ARPA’s director tapped Albert Wohlstetter, one of Rand’s most influential nuclear theorists, to head the study. If Herman Kahn was the court jester of the nuclear world, Wohlstetter was its cardinal whose advice carried real weight with policy makers. Wohlstetter had been a mentor to Kahn, who often repackaged Wohlstetter’s ideas for his own popular writing. If Kahn could spin up a lecture hall with briefings that tallied civilian deaths like a football score, Wohlstetter by comparison “wrote as colorlessly about nuclear catastrophe as is humanly possible,” one historian noted.
Wohlstetter’s writing might have been dry, but he was much more effective than Kahn at influencing politicians, a skill that eventually made him a confidant of Ronald Reagan’s and later a favorite of the neoconservatives. An unusual figure in his own right, Wohlstetter had honed his anti-Stalinist thinking in the 1920s as a Trotskyite before transforming himself into a darling of the conservatives at Rand, where he joined a critical set of rational thinkers who helped formulate Cold War nuclear strategy. Notoriously pompous but politically adroit, Wohlstetter knew how to synthesize technical information into jargon-free language that would appeal to policy makers. Kahn popularized the notion of second strike, the ability to survive an initial nuclear attack and retaliate, but it was Wohlstetter who first described it in morbid detail in a 1958 article, “The Delicate Balance of Terror.” The doctrine of mutually assured destruction, in which both sides could end the world, was not nearly enough to prevent Armageddon, he argued. “To deter an attack means being able to strike back in spite of it,” Wohlstetter wrote.
The LRRDPP was approaching a different aspect of deterrence: the ability to respond to a Soviet conventional attack without relying on nuclear weapons. To do that, however, required developing plausible scenarios of a Soviet attack. Most scenarios, according to Lukasik, “are one paragraph of bullshit,” but Wohlstetter and his colleagues bandied about a series of not-quite-apocalyptic possibilities, such as a Soviet invasion of Scandinavia through Norway and Finland or a surprise attack on Iran. Then they looked at what the American response to those attacks might be if the military had all the high-tech weaponry that ARPA had been developing, largely for Vietnam. This was dangerous ground for ARPA to tread; nuclear strategy was well outside the agency’s purview. “We put together what Albert called contingencies—nothing wrong with that, this is just long-range planning contingencies, right?” Lukasik said.
The real focus of the study was the high-value Cold War real estate known as the Fulda Gap, which extended from the East German border to Frankfurt, West Germany, and was pinned as the likely invasion route for Soviet conventional forces. The lowlands there were perfect terrain for Soviet tanks to barrel across on their way west. The Soviet Union enjoyed overwhelming conventional superiority, and American policy at the time was to threate
n to use tactical nuclear weapons, a sort of take-no-prisoners approach to the European battlefield. This dismal scenario had driven development of some of the seemingly more Strangelovian nuclear weapons, like the Davy Crockett, a tactical nuclear recoilless gun.
Lukasik’s theory was that ARPA for years had been funding technologies, many of them intended for Vietnam, that could, in theory, transform this battlefield, undoing the Soviet advantage. ARPA had developed drones that could operate autonomously, computer systems that could calculate targets, and precision weaponry that could destroy those targets. And none of it was being used in any meaningful way by the military. It was well outside the bounds of a “technology agency” like ARPA to tell the services how they should be fighting in Europe, or anywhere else. Even in Vietnam, ARPA had faced tough opposition from the military services, particularly the army, which did not want eggheads telling commanders how they should fight their wars. That was where the LRRDPP study came in. Ostensibly, it was just to demonstrate how some of the new technologies could be used in hypothetical war scenarios. “Look, we have something to accomplish, i.e., hit targets, and we have this load of technology around—space technology, airborne technology, infrared technology, radar stuff, we have computers, we have all this sort of thing. What do we do? How do we tie it together to solve the problem?” Lukasik explained.
In fact, the study was a blueprint for an entirely new type of war. Stripped of its wonkish language and pared down to its essentials, the study’s conclusions advocated using very precise conventional weapons in battle, in place of tactical nuclear weapons. Conventional weapons with “near zero miss may be technically feasible and militarily effective. If so, such nonnuclear weapons, under a wide range of circumstances, might satisfy the current United States and Allied damage requirements that now require the use of nuclear weapons,” a study report stated.
The Imagineers of War Page 25