E2A is worse than Y2K
By Les Earnest <les@cs.stanford.edu>
© 2000 Association for
Computing and Machinery
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Published in
Communications of the ACM, July 2000. Copying without fee is permitted provided
that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage and
credit to the source is given. Abstracting with credit is permitted.
Y2K was good for bottled
water sales, but the two-digit year bug had about the same impact as the overly
hyped non-appearance of Comet Kahoutek in 1973. What did you expect from a
shrinking acronym? As you may recall, when serious discussions of this problem
began several years ago it was called the "Year 2000" bug, which
quickly shrank to "Y2000," then "Y2K." It finally went
"Poof!" and essentially disappeared.
While that was going on, a
more insidious threat has been developing almost unnoticed. I’m talking about
an Ever-Expanding Acronym (E2A). [Actually,
calling it an acronym is a bit of a stretch inasmuch as most of the letter
sequences discussed below are unpronounceable – Ed.] Based on observations
of the last 45 years we can predict what the
This line of development
began in the mid-1950s when a tortured acronym was assigned to a project called
SAGE, for "Semi-Automatic Ground Environment." This alleged manned
bomber defense system was a technological marvel that integrated radar systems
with computers operating in real time that were supposed to direct manned
interceptors and ground-to-air missiles against any invading bombers.
However, SAGE was an
operational fraud in that it worked only in peacetime demonstrations and would
have disintegrated under a real bomber attack that employed radar jamming, not
to mention the ballistic missiles that were developed before SAGE was fully
deployed. The real threat that it was intended to deal with was the
concurrent development by the U.S. Army of a competing air defense system
called NIKE. Somehow, nobody figured out that SAGE was a fraud - not the U.S.
Congress or the media and certainly not the taxpayers. They were successfully
hoodwinked by collaborators from MIT and the Air Force, with help from IBM,
RAND and its spinoff, SDC.
Nevertheless, the elegant
lifestyle that SAGE provided for Generals in the Air Defense Command soon
induced envy in the Strategic Air Command inasmuch as a number of SAGE computer
facilities were placed at SAC bases. Not to be outdone, General Curtis Lemay
initiated development of his own computerized system, called the SAC Control
System. Given that transistorized computers had become practical just after
SAGE was developed, SAC managed to one-up the Air Defense Command by purchasing
a more reliable (though equally useless) system.
When the full name of SAC's
system was written out as "Strategic Air Command Control System," the
chance juxtaposition of the middle words "Command Control" somehow
took on mystical meanings in the Pentagon and elsewhere that convinced senior
officers that they had discovered a new paradigm that would transform warfare.
They set up new organizations devoted to developing additional
"Command-Control Systems," sometimes affectionately called
"C2."
The development of C2
Systems became a major growth industry even though they were nearly all
operationally inferior to the manual systems that they were supposed to
replace. The focus of those running these development programs was on spending
all funds allocated to them within each fiscal year, so that they would qualify
for an increase the following year. Nobody was expected to meet any particular
performance objectives inasmuch as everyone knew that computerizing their
command functions would improve performance (!).
By the early 1960s there
was a World Wide Military Command Control System (WWMCCS) being developed for
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who could not afford to be out-computerized by their
subordinate military units. By the 1970s a new generic term was created for
systems of this type, namely "Command-Control-Communications" or
"C3."
Though the military
intelligence community had been developing their own useless C3 systems from
the beginning and had been subject to even less congressional scrutiny than
others by virtue of getting some of their projects funded under the "black
budget," they felt left out of the mainstream until the Pentagon coined
the term "Command-Control-Communications-Intelligence Systems" or
"C3I," which I believe came into vogue in the 1980s. A major C3I
project of that era was called the "Strategic Defense Initiative" or
"Star Wars" and managed to surpass all of its predecessors by
expending several billion dollars without producing anything tangible, courtesy
of President Reagan's rampant imagination and reportedly the bogus advice of
Edward Teller.
In 1999 the
government announced the next version of their ever-expanding acronym, as
reported in the electronic newsletter Edupage on March 23:
TRENCH WARFARE IN THE INFORMATION AGE
The National Research Council has
issued a report warning that military forces are not giving sufficiently
serious attention to their Command, Control, Communications, Computers and
Intelligence Systems (known as C4I). "The rate at which information
systems are being relied on outstrips the rate at which they are being
protected. The time needed to develop and deploy effective defenses in
cyberspace is much longer than the time required to develop and mount an
attack." Military analyst Kenneth Allard says, "Twenty-first century
combat is the war of the databases, in which information flows must go from the
foxhole to the White House and back down again." (AP
It is interesting to note
that even though computers have been a central element of the E2A systems from
the beginning, the word "computer" was not incorporated into the
generic name until more than 40 years after this line of development began. The
fact that it is now included suggests that computers have somehow become respectable,
even though most modern C4I systems appear to be about as useless as their
ancient predecessors.
Based
on growth history, the next augmentation should have been at least a decade
away, but the terms "Surveillance" and "Reconnaissance"
were appended by the end of 1999 so that the acronym became C4ISR - see the official
government web site at http://www.disa.mil/D8/html/c4isr.html.This
rapid mutation suggests that the Pentagon may have been under some kind of
environmental stress, perhaps from Y2K concerns or from ozone depletion in the
upper atmosphere. I’m not sure whether the "S" and "R" were
added sequentially or all at once, but there appears to have been some careful planning
in view of the fact that they avoided the deadly "IRS" letter
sequence.
While it appears that the
augmentation rate is increasing, we can make a conservative estimate of future
developments by using linear projection. Given that the acronym has grown from
C2 to C4ISR over the last 40 years, the mean augmentation interval has been
40/5 = 8 years, which means that we can expect at least 125 augmentations
during the next millennium. While it is clear that there may be additional
letter mutations, in order to fix ideas let us suppose that from now on just
terms beginning with C, I, S, and R are inserted with even distribution, with
the next step being, say, the insertion of "Internet." On that basis,
by Y3K these systems will be called C35I33S32R32.
Writing out the full name
and explaining it will substantially increase the documentation required for
these projects, which will further enlarge the taxpayers' burden. However,
these projects will ensure full employment for our nation, so that our descendants
and their corporate employers can look forward to an increasingly prosperous
future as long as nobody attacks us with real weapons. However, if anything
goes wrong with this projection, Y2K will look like a picnic by comparison.
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