The Pentagon's Brain (22 page)

The Jasons produced a classified study called
Air-Supported Anti-Infiltration Barrier.
In it, they concluded that an electronic fence could in fact be built across and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The barrier would be constructed of the most advanced sensors available in the United States, including audio and seismic sensors, but also thermal, electromagnetic, and chemical sensors designed to detect fluctuations in body heat, engine heat, and even scent. Initially, these sensors would be implanted along the trail by being dropped out of aircraft, like the OP-2E Neptune, flying low over the trail. Some of the small, camouflaged sensor packages would be carried down to the ground by small parachutes, while others would be jettisoned into the earth like spears. The idea was that enemy troops moving down the trail would trigger these sensors with movement or sound. The sensors would in turn relay the information to overhead reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft, which would in turn relay the information to the “brain” of the program—a room full of computers inside a highly classified Infiltration Surveillance Center, most likely at a U.S. air base in Thailand.

Computers would play a key role, the Jason scientists imagined. The machines would analyze and interpret the sensor data. Technicians would then use the information to pinpoint the exact locations of communist fighters, trucks, and other transport vehicles, including bicycles and oxen carts. Military commanders would then dispatch aircraft to drop SADEYE cluster bombs on jungle fighters moving down the trails. These unguided, or “dumb,” bombs each carried a payload of 665 one-pound tennis-ball-sized BLU-26B fragmentation, or “frag,” bombs, each with a delay fuse that allowed the submunitions to blow up just above the ground, spraying razor-sharp steel shards in a kill radius of roughly eight hundred feet. Jason
scientist Richard Garwin, a nuclear physicist and ordnance expert who, years before, helped design the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb, held a seminar on the SADEYE cluster bomb and other munitions that would be most effective when accompanying the sensors on the trail. The Jason scientists determined that the trail should be seeded with button bomblets, small, “aspirin-size” mini-bombs designed to make a firecracker-like noise when stepped on, thereby triggering the air-dropped acoustic sensors. Two anti-truck bombs were also included in the design, coin-sized “Gravel mines,” and larger land mines called Dragontooth mines, so named because they looked like giant teeth. These anti-truck bombs were designed to damage vehicle tires, which would slow convoys down and give strike aircraft more time to hit their targets. When stepped on they were powerful enough to remove a person’s foot.

The electronic fence concept was a colossal undertaking with many moving parts. The Jason scientists were very specific regarding the numbers of bombs it required: “20 million Gravel mines per month; possibly 25 million button bomblets per month; 10,000 SADEYE-BLU-26B clusters per month,” the sum total of which made up “by far the major fraction [of what] has been estimated to be about $800 million per year” in operational costs alone. “It is difficult to assess the likely effectiveness of an air-supported barrier of this type,” the Jasons concluded in their written report. “We are not sure the system will make the [trail] nearly impenetrable, but we feel it has a good claim of being the foundation of a system that will, over the years.” Finally, a prescient warning: “We see the possibility of a long war.”

With the work complete, the summer study came to an end. On September 1, 1966, Goldberger, Deitchman, and several other Jasons flew to the Pentagon to brief Secretary McNamara on their final proposal for an electronic fence. The projected costs had risen to roughly one billion to get the fence up and running, they said,
and it could be constructed in about a year and a half. McNamara was impressed.

Meanwhile, that same summer, Secretary McNamara had assembled a second group of scientists on the east coast—made up of Jason scientists and non-Jason scientists from Harvard and MIT—also working on the electronic fence idea. This group, called Jason East, conducted its work on the campus of Dana Hall, a girls’ school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The two study groups were given similar information, classified and unclassified, and came up with likeminded ideas about what would work best on this fence project and why. Pleased with both sets of results, McNamara merged the two studies into one.

A second briefing took place on September 6, 1966, this time at the Cape Cod summer home of Jason East member Jerrod Zacharias. Secretary McNamara, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, and Director of Defense Department Research and Engineering John Foster (who, like his predecessors Herb York and Harold Brown, had served as director of the Livermore laboratory before working at the Pentagon as the liaison between ARPA and the secretary of defense) helicoptered in to the meeting on Cape Cod. Gordon MacDonald represented the Jason group at the secret briefing. “The occasion was highly informal,” he remembered, in one of the only known written recollections of the meeting. “Maps were spread out on the floor, drinks were served, a dog kept crossing the demilitarized zone as top secret matters were discussed. Even though the subject was the Jason study, I was the only Jason present.” Seymour Deitchman did most of the talking. “It was, you know, a typical social occasion,” MacDonald recalled, except the participants were “just… deciding the next years of the Vietnam War.”

But at the Pentagon, McNamara’s electronic fence idea was belittled by most of the generals. When McNamara sent the final Jason study to General Earle Wheeler and the Joint Chiefs of Staff
for review, they rejected the idea. General Wheeler thought it was too expensive and feared it would pull valuable resources away from the front lines. “The very substantial funds required for the barrier system would be obtained from current Service resources thereby affecting adversely important current programs,” General Wheeler wrote in his response. Admiral Ulysses Sharp, commander in chief of the Pacific Command (CINCPAC), saw the entire construction effort as “impractical.” The Joint Chiefs felt that McNamara’s electronic fence idea would require too much time and treasure, and relied too heavily on technology, some of which did not yet exist. “It [is] CINCPAC’s opinion that maintenance of an air supported barrier might result in a dynamic ‘battle of the barrier,’ and that the introduction of new components into the barrier system would depend not only on R&D and production capability, but would also depend on the capability to place the companions in the right place at the right time.” It was simply too complicated—not just to implement but to create. “CINCPAC concluded that even if the US were to invest a great deal of time, effort, and resources into a barrier project, it was doubtful that such a barrier would improve appreciably the US position in RVN [the Republic of Vietnam].” The commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, kept his opinion succinct: “It is necessary to point out that I strongly oppose commitment to create and man a barrier.”

On September 15, 1966, McNamara reviewed the negative opinions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the commander in chief of the Pacific, and others, and overruled them. The secretary of defense had the authority to move ahead with the electronic fence with or without the support of his military commanders, and he did, with the classification of top secret. That same day McNamara appointed Lieutenant General Alfred D. Starbird head of Joint Task Force 728. Starbird, an Army officer, was a favorite of the secretary of defense. He knew how to handle highly classified, highly
sensitive military projects that involved thousands of people and billions of dollars. Starbird had overseen the nuclear detonations in space, code-named Checkmate and Bluegill Triple Prime, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now he was in charge of developing the barrier and overseeing its deployment in the war theater. He had an impossible deadline of one year.

General Starbird was a master bureaucrat, soldier, government advisor, and engineer. Fast and thorough, he was a consummate athlete with a brilliant mind. He’d competed in Hitler’s Olympics in 1936, in the pentathlon. After serving in World War II, Starbird had served in Europe as director of the Army’s Office of the Chief of Engineers. During the development of the hydrogen bomb, he served as director of Military Applications for the Atomic Energy Commission, acting as liaison between the Defense Department and the AEC. He had a photographic memory and never lost his cool.

Joint Task Force 728, also called the Defense Communications Planning Group, was in charge of planning, preparing, and executing the electronic fence. Starbird got to work immediately, acquiring space at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., as his headquarters in the United States. He began outlining projects, designating assignments, and creating schedules. For his Scientific Advisory Committee, Starbird hired seven of the fifteen Jason scientists who had worked on the original Santa Barbara summer study, including Murph Goldberger and Gordon MacDonald. A skillful diplomat, Starbird pulled together leaders from the four services. He had an enormous task in front of him, just the kind of operation he was used to. Technology, munitions, aircraft, ground systems, and “high-speed” computers. In October, McNamara and Starbird traveled to Vietnam to meet with field commanders. When McNamara returned, he briefed President Johnson on the barrier program, officially, for the first time. On January 12, 1967, the classified National Security Action Memorandum No. 358
gave the top secret electronic fence, then code-named Project Practice Nine, the “highest national priority” for expenditures and authorization. For reasons not explained, Walt Rostow signed for the president of the United States. Starbird had a billion dollars at his disposal and the authority to get the electronic fence up in one year’s time. The program was the single most expensive high-technology project of the Vietnam War. It is nothing short of astonishing that the VO-67 Navy squadron was actually flying combat missions one year later, in January 1968.

A few months before the sensor-dropping missions began, General Starbird decided that he needed a liaison in Saigon, someone who could keep an ear to the ground inside CIA prisons and detention facilities to determine if the Vietcong had gotten word about what the U.S. military was planning on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was hard to find a qualified person. Starbird asked around at ARPA and was referred to RAND’s George Tanham, who in turn referred Starbird to Leon Gouré. After having been embarrassed during congressional hearings on the spurious nature of ARPA’s Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, Gouré had been keeping a low profile at RAND. Now General Starbird wanted Gouré to take the lead on an important new ARPA study for the Defense Communications Planning Group, this time related to the highly classified electronic fence project. With a new contract in place, in August 1967 Gouré returned to Saigon to conduct interviews with Vietcong prisoners being held in secret CIA prisons. According to Gouré, the enemy had not heard a thing about Americans building a high-technology fence.

McNamara’s electronic fence, which the Jasons called an “anti-infiltration barrier,” was constructed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at a cost of $1.8 billion, roughly $12 billion in 2015. It had very little effect on the outcome of the Vietnam War and did not help the
United States achieve its aim of cutting off enemy supplies. Most of the failures were technology-based. Sensors were temperature sensitive, and in the extreme heat of the jungle, batteries drained quickly and sensors went dead. The V0-67 aircrews were often unable to place sensors accurately along the trail. In 1968 there was no such thing as advanced laser-guided technology. Rip Jacobs and his fellow Navy airmen relied on an electrical device called a “pickle switch” to release sensors from the OP-2E Neptunes, hoping they would land where they were supposed to along the trail. Instead, many sensors landed hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet away. But far-reaching seeds were sown.

Gradually, commanders changed their opinions about McNamara’s electronic fence. In 1969, speaking to members of the Association of the U.S. Army at a luncheon at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., retired four-star general William Westmoreland, former commander of U.S. military operations in Vietnam, spoke of the power of the electronic fence. “We are on the threshold of an entirely new battlefield concept,” Westmoreland told his audience of former soldiers. “I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we locate through instant communications and the almost instantaneous application of a lethal firepower.”

In 1985, during a banquet to celebrate the twenty-five-year anniversary of the Jason program, Gordon MacDonald discussed how profound a moment in history the development of the barrier concept had been. “The most important element of the barrier study was its definition of a system concept,” he said. Tiny sensors covertly placed in a war zone acted like eyes, ears, and fingertips on the ground, then relayed information back to a computer system far away, which filtered and analyzed it for a commander who would in turn decide what tactical action to take next. This was the first time anyone thought of creating a “system of systems,” MacDonald observed. It gave birth to the “basic concept of unmanned sensors gathering tactical intelligence to be used for managing the
delivery of munitions.” As John von Neumann first imagined, and J. C. R. Licklider later discussed, this was the first truly symbiotic relationship between man and machine and the battlefield.

The electronic fence had initially been dismissed by a majority of defense officials, who saw it as newfangled gadgetry. But by the 1980s, the concept of the fence would be reinterpreted as visionary. And by the 1990s, the electronic battlefield concept would begin its transformation into the most revolutionary piece of military technology of the twentieth century, after the hydrogen bomb.

In a summary of the work performed by VO-67 Navy squadron, whose crewmembers dropped electronic sensors along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, U.S. Air Force colonel Warren H. Peterson wrote a top secret cable and a sixty-four-page report for the commander in chief. “It is worth observing that the program itself was visionary,” Colonel Peterson said. “From its outset, [the electronic battlefield concept] combined extremes of the technically sophisticated with the amazingly primitive. How would an ordinary, reasonably educated layman, for instance, be likely to react when told of a system that proposed to detect enemy troops moving along jungle trails, but using modern electric acoustic detectors, which had to be activated by the detonations of firecrackers which the troops were expected to step on? Yet it must be remembered that this report covers only the stone age of what may be a long era of development.”