The World Wide Military Command and Control System Evolution and Effectiveness

The World Wide Military Command and Control System Evolution and Effectiveness DAVID E. PEARSON Air University Press Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama June 2000 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pearson, David E. (David Eric), 1953- The world wide military command and control system : evolution and effectivenss / David E. Pearson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58566-078-7 1. Worldwide Military Command and Control System—History. I. Title. UB212.P43 2000 355.3’3041’0973—dc21 99-462377 Disclaimer Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Air University, the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other US government agency. Cleared for public release: distribution unlimited. ii For My Children THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Contents Chapter Page DISCLAIMER . ii DEDICATION . iii ABOUT THE AUTHOR . ix PREFACE . xi INTRODUCTION . xiii Notes . xx PART I Conceptualization 1 Centralizing the Defense Establishment . 3 Notes . 17 2 Defense Communications Agency and System . 19 Notes . 31 3 National Military Command System . 33 Notes . 49 4 WWMCCS Is Born . 51 Notes . 69 5 Three WWMCCS Failures . 71 Notes . 91 PART II Formalization 6 WWMCCS Automatic Data Processing Upgrade . 95 Notes . 106 v Chapter Page 7 Centralizing Communications Management . 117 Notes . 134 8 The WWMCCS Council and the Modern WWMCCS Structure . 137 Notes . 159 9 The WWMCCS Architect and Architecture . 163 Notes . 182 10 WWMCCS Intercomputer Network . 185 Notes . 196 11 The Carter Administration and the Evolutionary Approach . 199 Notes . 215 12 Crises and Criticisms . 219 Notes . 239 13 Failures at NORAD . 241 Notes . 255 PART III Implementation 14 Strategic Modernization . 259 Notes . 271 15 The C3I Triad: Programs . 281 Notes . 298 16 WWMCCS Information System . 301 Notes . 312 17 Defense Centralization . 315 Notes . 329 18 Defense Communications and the End of the Cold War . 331 Notes . 340 vi Chapter Page 19 Organization, Technology, and Ideology in Command and Control . 343 Notes . 358 EPILOGUE . 363 INDEX . 377 Illustrations Figure 1 The Early Array of Sensors and Sentinels Forwarding Information to NORAD Headquarters . 108 2 Cold War Vigilance: Texas Tower Offshore Radar Platform . 109 3 SAC’s Underground Command Post . 110 4 Defense Communications Agency . 110 5 AUTOSEVOCOM Switches . 111 6 NMCS Personnel in Action . 111 7 USS Northampton , National Emergency Command Post Afloat . 112 8 Artist’s Conception of the National Military Command System . 112 9 Responsibilities for Implementing the National Military Command System . 113 10 Conceptualizing a Command and Control System . 113 11 The National Communications System, Encompassing All Federal Assets . 114 12 World Wide Military Command and Control System as Described by DODD S-5100.30 . 115 vii Chapter Page 13 Conception of WWMCCS System Architecture, Given Revised DODD 5100.30 . 273 14 WWMCCS System Relationships . 274 15 The Elements of WWMCCS . 275 16 PWIN Initial Three-Node Configuration . 276 17 WIN Configuration in the Early 1980s . 277 18 New Organizational Structure for Defense Communications Agency . 278 19 NORAD’s Missile Warning System . 279 20 Communications System Segment Connections . 279 21 Land-based Ballistic Warning and Detection . 280 viii About the Author David E. Pearson, an Army veteran, graduated magna cum laude from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, received his PhD from Yale University, and was a Fellow in International Security Studies at Ohio State University. He currently teaches sociology at the University of Texas at Brownsville, which is Texas’s southmost college. ix THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Preface Let me begin by saying what this book is not. It is not the same as the books previously written on command and control by Paul Bracken, Bruce Blair, C. Kenneth Allard, or others. The World Wide Military Command and Control System (WWMCCS) is constituted of four general types of elements: sensors, com - mand posts, computers, and communications networks. Whereas previous books dealt mainly with the first two types, this book is concerned far more strongly with the second two. Nor has any previous writer dealt with WWMCCS comprehen - sively. Allard, for instance, devotes only about two pages to WWMCCS, Blair refers to it on but three occasions, and Bracken does not mention it at all. Here, addressing what the system is and how it got that way are central concerns, and attention is paid to a number of key system factors and elements that received almost no attention in these earlier works. This book is also not another study of cold war deterrence, nor is it an examination of the (hypothesized) interactivity between the American and Soviet command and control sys - tems under conditions of crisis or war. Perhaps the best single way to summarize it is to view the book as a bureaucratic or organizational history. What I do is to take three distinct historical themes—organization, technology, and ideology—and examine how each contributed to the development of WWMCCS and its ability (and frequent inabil- ity) to satisfy the demands of national leadership. Whereas earlier works were primarily descriptive, cataloguing the com - mand and control assets then in place or under development, I offer more analysis by focusing on the issue of how and why WWMCCS developed the way it did. While at first glance less provocative, this approach is potentially more useful for defense decision makers dealing with complex human and tech- nological systems in the post-cold-war era. It also makes for a better story and, I trust, a more interesting read. By necessity, this work is selective. The elements of WWMCCS are so numerous, and the parameters of the system xi potentially so expansive, that a full treatment is impossible within the compass of a single volume. Indeed, a full treatment of even a single WWMCCS asset or subsystem—the De- fense Satellite Communications System, Extremely Low Fre- quency Communications, the National Military Command System, to name but a few—could itself constitute a substan- tial work. In its broadest conceptualization, WWMCCS is the world, and my approach has been to deal with the head of the octopus rather than its myriad tentacles. My initial interest in WWMCCS goes back—what seems like a long, long time—to my graduate school days and a class in national security issues taught at Yale by Garry Brewer, who later became a member of my (non-WWMCCS related) disserta - tion committee. I’m not quite certain whether to thank him or denounce him for starting me on what has proved to be the lengthiest research project I have ever undertaken. Now that the project is completed, thanks, I suppose, is more appropriate. Thanks also go to Charles Perrow, my former dissertation chair, who, at an early stage of my career, introduced me to organiza - tional theory and helped me to think analytically about complex organizations. As to more recent history, this project was for - mally launched during a postdoctoral fellowship year at Ohio State University’s Mershon Center, and a subsequent junior fac- ulty leave from Lafayette College helped advance it. Special thanks go to Charles Hermann, Thomas Norton, and Howard Schneiderman for their encouragement and insight. xii Introduction In the late 1970s, in response to a lengthy series of failures and snafus in various components of the Defense Depart- ment’s World Wide Military Command and Control System (WWMCCS; pronounced “wimex”), a remarkable and rather unlikely team of consultants was assembled at the Pentagon. Their job was to try to figure out how to make the vast, multibillion dollar metasystem of sensors, command centers, and communications links work better. The group included 30 anthropologists and sociologists, mathematicians, control theorists and systems theorists, and representatives from a variety of other scholarly disciplines—“academics with a philo - sophical bent,” as one writer described them. In a series of meetings with a similarly sized group of defense experts, the academics considered ways to deal with WWMCCS’s many problems. All sorts of recommendations were offered up, but, according to one of the consultants, conspicuously lacking was any “critical examination of the dominant paradigm which condones the expenditure of vast resources without even a semblance of a conceptual rationale for the effort.”1 However correct that assessment might have been, and some certainly disputed it, the whole experience was, in a word, unprecedented. The fact that academics had been in - vited to the Pentagon in the first place could be read as an admission that the vast assemblage of technologies and human organizations that was WWMCCS was not up to snuff as the cold war moved into its final tense decade. The meetings were also a not-so-implicit admission that the Pentagon’s tra- ditional problem-solving method in this area, the so-called evolutionary approach to command and control system development, had come up short; in fact, this approach itself might have represented a major impediment to the formulation of a coherent conceptual basis for the system. After some 20 years of development, the World Wide Military Command and Con - trol System, even in the eyes of some of its most enthusiastic advocates, was judged to be less than effective. xiii The Pentagon’s concern with command and control effective - ness was soon

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