The Imagineers of War

by Sharon Weinberger

  Cooper approved $5.5 million to expand on duPont’s computer modeling and come up with an actual aircraft design. That was the beginning of Copper Canyon, a highly classified program to build a space plane. Soon, Williams and Cooper were making the rounds in Washington, briefing senior White House and Pentagon officials on DARPA’s plan.

  To this day, duPont will not divulge the secret mission for the theoretical space plane, but in an interview in 2013 he revealed details that provide strong evidence that Copper Canyon was intended to succeed the SR-71 Blackbird, a spy plane that could travel at more than three times the speed of sound. He confirmed that the secret mission required a polar orbit, which is the orbit typically used for spy satellites, because it allows them to image the entire earth. The secret mission would require two pilots “to be sure someone doesn’t have a heart attack or indigestion,” duPont quipped.

  DARPA began promoting the project to lawmakers. In a congressional hearing, Cooper, the agency director, described it as a potential “globe-girdling reconnaissance system, a kind of super SR-71.” Cooper said it could even be used as a “long-range air defense interceptor” against an incoming Soviet bomber. An SR-71 could travel at around Mach 3, an impressive speed, but that was nothing compared with a hypersonic space plane that could reach anywhere on the earth within an hour, de-orbit for ten minutes to spy, then re-orbit and return to the United States. The technology was nearly in hand, Cooper insisted, and an aircraft could be ready within a decade. “Over the past year we have convinced ourselves…that it is possible to operate at altitudes all the way up to 250,000 to 300,000 feet and at speeds of up to Mach 25, the speed required to exit Earth’s gravitational field,” Cooper told lawmakers.

  The phrase “convinced ourselves” was an unintentionally apt description. At that point, the scramjet engines that would propel the plane into orbit had never actually been tested in flight. Yet officials gripped by the technological optimism inspired by Reagan were enthused. George Keyworth, Reagan’s science adviser, recalled a 1984 briefing on Copper Canyon to the White House Science Council, where normally prolonged debate was replaced by declarations of immediate support, such as “Let’s do it.”

  The following year Williams briefed the space plane project to Weinberger, who, after listening without uttering a word, replied at the end with a one-word pronouncement. “Interesting,” he said. With Reagan’s defense-spending spree, interesting was apparently enough. In 1985, the Pentagon chief approved Copper Canyon as a major project, which would soon be designated the X-30 National Aerospace Plane. It became one of DARPA’s best-known—and most disastrous—projects of the decade.

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  In early February 1986, Ray Colladay went to visit Pat Buchanan, the White House communications director, to talk about the National Aerospace Plane. Colladay at the time was the associate administrator of NASA, which was working with DARPA on the project.

  Buchanan wanted to speak with Colladay about Ronald Reagan’s upcoming State of the Union address. Buchanan showed Colladay a section of the president’s speech, which included a key reference to the National Aerospace Plane. Colladay took one look and was horrified. DARPA’s original concept for Copper Canyon had been for two pilots, and even that was considered ambitious. Reagan’s draft speech referred to plans for a hypersonic passenger plane, something that was not anywhere close to what DARPA and NASA were working on, or even physically possible. “You can’t say that,” Colladay said. “That’s just nonsense.”

  “Well, we’re going to,” Buchanan told Colladay. “We’ve got to relate this program to the American people and in a way that they can understand it.”

  On February 4, Ronald Reagan delivered his State of the Union, beginning with a tribute to the victims of the recent Challenger disaster; the space shuttle had blown up seventy-two seconds after takeoff, killing all seven crew members. The president assured the nation that the tragedy would not prevent the United States from moving forward in space. He then made the astonishing announcement that the government was “going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within 2 hours.”

  Copper Canyon’s growth from a small space plane to an Orient Express was an appropriate reflection of Cold War excess under Reagan, whose vision of technology, whether space weapons or space planes, was never constrained by the laws of physics. The “Orient Express” announcement was greeted inside DARPA with pure dread. Most agencies would be happy to have their program singled out by the president in a State of the Union speech, but DARPA for years had benefited from operating under the radar, allowing its high-risk technology programs to succeed—or fail—without the risk of public humiliation and high-profile congressional inquiries. Now Reagan had put its small experimental space plane high on the national agenda.

  DARPA’s man in charge of the National Aerospace Plane was Robert Williams, who had also led the agency’s successful drone program. Williams felt that for the space plane to succeed, it needed to be a big program, with large defense companies and NASA participation. “It’s better to have them pissing outside the tent, than inside,” Williams told duPont, explaining that to have big companies and labs involved would help the program. Soon, DARPA was contracting with five major defense and aerospace companies—McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell International, General Dynamics, Rocketdyne, and Pratt & Whitney—to develop the vehicle and its engines. “That’s where Bob and I actually had a falling-out,” Allen Atkins, the head of the Aerospace Technology Office, recalled. “I said, ‘Don’t get involved with the labs. Don’t get involved with any other centers at NASA.’ ”

  The National Aerospace Plane became everything that the stealth aircraft was not: big, bloated, and involving multiple government agencies and several large companies. With the stealth aircraft, George Heilmeier fought to have the air force contribute funding to its prototype but insisted that DARPA maintain managerial control. Williams did almost the exact opposite, believing that having multiple agencies and companies involved would help maintain a strong lobby to protect the program from budget cuts. He was right at first, as evidenced by the president’s glowing endorsement.

  Yet as the number of companies and agencies involved in the National Aerospace Plane grew, so too did the size of the aircraft. What started as Copper Canyon, an idea for a 50,000-pound design, soon ballooned to a monstrous 250,000-pound vehicle, a size the defense companies insisted was needed to achieve orbit without multiple rocket stages. In the meantime, the costs swelled to $17 billion to build two prototypes. Tony duPont, the man behind Copper Canyon, blamed the major defense contractors. “If we stuck with [the original design], we’d be flying into orbit for $10 a pound,” he said.

  Perhaps, but plenty of aerospace engineers were dubious of duPont’s models. To save weight, his original design did not factor in landing gear. It packed just enough fuel to get to orbit, which meant the space plane would not be able to maneuver when it reentered the atmosphere. In fact, it could not maneuver period, because it had no rockets for maneuvering, let alone fuel to power them. As other designers addressed those shortcomings, the size and weight of the aerospace plane grew. So did the price tag.

  In the fall of 1987, Williams broke all protocol by writing directly to the White House chief of staff, Howard Baker, to protest budget cuts to the National Aerospace Plane. As usually happens when a mid-level government official breaks protocol, the letter ricocheted back to the Pentagon’s senior leadership, working its way down the chain until it landed on the DARPA director’s desk. Furious, Robert Duncan, the director, immediately removed Williams as the head of the program. Watching from outside government, Bob Cooper, who had approved the space plane, was horrified. “When I saw that happen, it was like having one of your children start taking drugs,” Cooper recalled.

  In February 1988, DARPA handed over the reins of the Nationa
l Aerospace Plane to the air force. The program would continue on for five more years, into the next administration, in part thanks to enthusiastic support from Vice President Dan Quayle, before being canceled. Almost $2 billion was spent trying to develop a prototype, making it one of DARPA’s costliest failures. Star Wars, the missile defense system that the space plane was initially funded to help, ended even worse, though DARPA was not directly involved. The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization pursued a variety of far-fetched schemes that ranged from bouncing lasers off space-based mirrors to sending kamikaze mini-satellites into orbit (reminiscent of DARPA’s “lunatic” BAMBI program). It would spend $30 billion of taxpayer money without ever deploying anything close to a shield that would render nuclear weapons obsolete.

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  By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was faltering amid its attempts to keep pace with American military spending, just as Caspar Weinberger had predicted. Consumer goods, always in short supply, were even harder to come by as the central government directed resources to its military. In the meantime, American Cold War defense spending peaked at more than $300 billion, and DARPA rode the military windfall, taking small prototype projects pursued during Vietnam, like drones, and transforming them into large-scale weapons projects. And yet it was not always the most ambitious or expensive projects that succeeded. Many of the aviation projects pursued during the Reagan years, like the forward-swept-wing aircraft and the oddly shaped X-wing aircraft (and its “black world” counterpart, the stealth rotorcraft), never even took flight, doomed by aerodynamics that confounded state-of-the-art technology. The long-endurance drone developed by the Israeli aircraft designer Abe Karem was a success, on the other hand, but that only became apparent years later, after DARPA was out of the picture.

  In just over a decade, DARPA had completed yet another transformation. In the early 1970s, DARPA had reinvented its jungle warfare work as technologies to fight the Soviets, and now those technologies were at the center of the Pentagon’s plans to develop a secret weapons arsenal. The agency benefited from generous funding and political support, and DARPA entered the latter stage of the Cold War seemingly stronger than it had ever been. There was just one problem: DARPA had helped build a phantasmagoria of weapons to fight an enemy that was about to collapse.

  CHAPTER 16

  Synthetic War

  In the mid-1980s, the Warsaw Pact had two and a half tanks for every one NATO had, a grim statistic that haunted military war planners. Analysts debated just how important the Soviet advantage was; after all, the Soviets tended to favor quantity over quality, and the United States had focused on deploying advanced technology, including DARPA-driven innovations like stealth aircraft and precision weapons. Even then, the Soviet numerical advantage was hard to ignore, and despite claims that superior technology could trump numbers, the United States for more than a decade failed to win a NATO tank competition, called the Canadian Army Trophy, held in Germany. The implications were stark: If the United States could not even win in a mock battle against its own allies, what hope did it have in a real war against the Soviet Union?

  In 1987, an American army armor officer at Fort Knox arranged to have new DARPA-built simulators sent to Germany, where the U.S. Army was training for the annual tank competition. The participants were not allowed to practice on the range ahead of time, but the contest did allow training devices. DARPA sent four new simulators it had developed, called SIMNET, over to Germany, and a complete graphic visual model of the range and targets.

  The simulator’s graphics were not particularly amazing; they were not much better than 1980s-era arcade games. Early on, DARPA had decided that in military simulation, fidelity—meaning essentially how realistic something looked—did not necessarily matter. Soldiers played video games; they could suspend disbelief. Instead, a simulator could have “selective fidelity,” focusing on those elements that were critical for training. The key to these simulators was that they were networked together, allowing soldiers to practice against each other, the way people would play against unseen opponents over the Internet years later in the world of online gaming.

  The networked simulators were the brainchild of Jack Thorpe, an air force officer with a PhD in industrial psychology. Thorpe had long been thinking about a way to get the air force to rely more on simulation. During the Cold War, the air force practiced for war, but rarely did it do so in the way that major battles would actually be fought, with hundreds of airplanes, which would need to coordinate and synchronize in ways that could not be planned ahead of time. Simulation had obvious benefits: it could save money by allowing pilots to train without paying for expensive flight hours; it would also allow pilots to practice tactics that might be too risky to carry out in a live exercise. What simulation had not done, however, was find ways to mimic the initial days of war, with large flight operations and a constantly changing battle plan.

  Back in 1978, Thorpe had circulated a white paper to colleagues, speculating on what simulation might look like some twenty years in the future. In it, he predicted, “Significant breakthroughs in numerical processing will provide the resource of computational plenty. Cheap, powerful computers will proliferate training systems and their associated inter-connecting networks.” The air force already had flight simulators, but Thorpe’s idea was to link those simulators on a network so that pilots could practice being in combat together. The reaction, he recalled, was positive but not concrete. “Well, that’s kind of a neat idea,” he was told. “But how would you actually do that? How would you build a network of simulators to allow that to happen?”

  Just a few years later, in 1981, Craig Fields, a longtime scientist at DARPA, recruited Thorpe to join the agency to work on simulation. The ARPANET, at that point, was in full swing, networking together computers across the country, allowing people to interact virtually. Fields, who was heavily involved in the agency’s computer science work, realized that the same technology could be used to link Thorpe’s simulators together. Simulators are fundamentally computers, and creating large networks of them was a computer-networking problem. In a single afternoon in 1983, Thorpe and Fields sketched out an idea for hooking together the simulators at different locations, creating a virtual world of combat. In the end, however, it was the army, not the air force, that signed onto DARPA’s idea. Rather than aircraft, the first networked simulators would involve tanks. That year, DARPA, together with the army, launched SIMNET, or Simulation Networking, a $300 million research project that used packet switching and computer networking—DARPA innovations—to link tank simulators in a virtual environment.

  The true revolution of SIMNET was not in creating an exact replica of the battlefield but in allowing people to interact in a virtual world. Prior to SIMNET, simulators had been like a one-player arcade game: you could practice warfare, but you were really just playing against a computer, with all of the limitations that entailed in the 1980s. Now tank operators could train on a simulated battlefield populated by other tanks, controlled by real soldiers.

  Years before online gaming entered the commercial market, SIMNET allowed army tank operators to “play” in a virtual environment, and, in 1987, for the first time in the history of the Canadian Army Trophy competition, American forces won. That same year, the first networked tank simulators were fielded to the U.S. Army, and by the fall of 1989 half a dozen SIMNET sites had been established at bases around the country. SIMNET was fielded and being used to train tank operators just in time to see the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the probable end of a potential tank warfare scenario in Europe. Yet SIMNET’s technical success paved the way for a new direction for DARPA, which now sought to use computers to create synthetic versions of real war.

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  In the spring of 1989, a series of revolutions swept across the countries behind the Iron Curtain, ending nearly five decades of one-party communist rule. The Berlin Wall that divided East and West Germany fell, and the Fulda Gap went from being the hypothetical b
attlefield of World War III to just another stretch of bucolic German lowlands. It was a watershed for the Pentagon, an institution that for decades had an almost maniacal focus on confronting Warsaw Pact forces on the European battlefield. No one in 1989 quite knew what was going to happen with the Soviet Union, but clearly its economic backbone was crumbling, and the Politburo was more preoccupied with reining in its increasingly raucous member states than trying to outpace the United States in technological weapons developments. The Soviet Union was still two years from its final collapse, but as a competitor to the United States in high-tech weaponry it was already dead.

  For DARPA, an agency that had been created to help match Soviet technology, the shifting strategic landscape sparked internal changes as well. In July 1989, Craig Fields, who had been at the agency since 1974 and helped create SIMNET, was tapped to be the head of DARPA. The new director had a way of evoking strong reactions—both positive and negative. “Brilliant” was the word most often used to describe Fields, who would often dazzle military and intelligence officials with his command of science and encyclopedic knowledge of DARPA’s programs. “Abrasive” was typically the second most common word used to describe him. Fields did not suffer fools gladly, and he saw fools all around him: in the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, and in the White House. Fields had been at DARPA for fifteen years before becoming director, but he had resided in the “science” offices, which did not interact as much with Pentagon leadership. He was happy to distance DARPA from the Pentagon. “Moving out of the Pentagon strikes me as a great success, being far away from filling out all those forms,” he recalled, in a later interview, of DARPA’s post-Vietnam-era exile. “What a wonderful success!”