funding the void

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Date Posted: 05-Apr-2006

Jane's Defence Weekly

US BLACK PROGRAMMES: FUNDING theVOID

Classified projects form a large and increasing proportion of the US defence budget. Bill Sweetmanlifts the lid on this secret world

* Despite an overall decline in US defence spending after the end of the Cold War, black budgetshave continued to grow

* The budgets are believed by some to support a range of classified projects as well as funding USintelligence agencies

* More than 40 per cent of USAF procurement is classified, as is 36 per cent of R&D

Black projects - considered so important and sensitive that their very existence is secret - are thestuff of drama, which is why 'Area 51' gets millions more Google hits than Edwards Air Force Base(AFB).

The reason for this is public fascination with anything mysterious, but black programmes are morethan a sideshow in terms of defence policy and the defence establishment. Since the late 1980s,secret efforts have expanded to form a vast proportion of the US defence budget.

Most defence budgets shrank in the post-Cold War era, but black budgets remained stable or evengrew slightly. In the Fiscal Year 1999 (FY99) budget, classified US Air Force (USAF) research anddevelopment (R&D) added up to around USD5 billion and 38 per cent of the USAF hardwarebudget - R&D and procurement - was devoted to classified programmes.

The current administration continued this trend after 9/11. In one section of the R&D budget -USAF operational systems development - classified spending in FY07 has grown to USD8.8 billion,which is more than twice the systems development and demonstration (SDD) cost of the JointStrike Fighter programme. In air force procurement, one line items - 'selected activities', tuckedaway in the same category as cargo pallets and medical and dental equipment - accounts forUSD12.6 billion. A quick calculation also shows that line items listed under USAF missileprocurement are some USD900 million short of the total. More than 40 per cent of USAFprocurement is classified, along with 36 per cent of R&D. In the operations and maintenancebudget, a single line - other programmes in the defence-wide operations budget - amounts toUSD9.1 billion; more than twice the budget for air force primary combat forces.

Special access projects

Black programmes are a subset of what the US calls special access programmes (SAPs). Aprogramme judged so sensitive that its existence is classified is an 'unacknowledged SAP'. Within

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this group are waived SAPs which are not briefed to Congress. In this case, only eight individuals -the chair and ranking minority member of each of the four defence committees - are notified ofthe decision. These waived SAPs are the blackest of black programmes.

A former USAF A-10 pilot, Brigadier General Paul Schafer, knows more about this than almostanyone else. As director of special programmes in the office of the Undersecretary of Defence forAcquisition, Technology and Logistics (Kenneth Krieg), Gen Schafer runs the Special AccessProgramme Co-ordination Office and is executive secretary of the high-level Special AccessProgramme Oversight Committee (SAPOC). He is also the Pentagon's stealth czar, as the directorof low-observables.

Otherwise, few people are cleared to oversee even part of the SAP world and those who are havelittle time to do it. How many of the SAPs are unacknowledged and how many are waived is aquestion that only a few people can answer: eight members of Congress (the 'big eight'), themembers of the SAPOC (including the deputy secretary of defence) and the secretary of defence.

Some analysts believe that much of the black budget funds the operations of intelligenceagencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency, NationalReconnaissance Office (NRO) and many new small units that have sprung up in the aftermath of9/11. Some of the identifiable items within the classified world are strongly linked to particularintelligence activities. The long-standing anomaly in USAF missileprocurement accounts fundsintelligence- gathering spacecraft; it shrank considerably from FY06 to FY07, reflecting therestructuring of the troubled Future Imagery Architecture (FIA) project for a new generation ofradar and electro-optical spy satellites.

The FIA is an acknowledged SAP. Like the B-2 was in its day, but unlike earlier generations ofimaging spacecraft such as the Kennan/Crystal optical spacecraft or the Lacrosse/Onyx radarsatellites, its existence can be mentioned in non-classified publications. Its budgets are concealed,alongside those of other continuing black spacecraft such as signals intelligence (SIGINT) systems,NOSS ocean-surveillance satellites and the Misty stealth spacecraft.

The black budget is large enough to support a range of classified projects as well as funding USspy agencies. Moreover, one reason that the USAF budget was chosen as the conduit for CIA andNRO funds was that aircraft and spacecraft are the major hardware items in those agencies'budgets and are often supported by the USAF - so that 'intelligence' funding often translates intoUSAF programmes. The air force is the lead agency for developing satellites and when the CIA'sDirectorate of Science and Technology was in the business of developing aircraft (assuming that ithas stopped doing so), they were jointly operated by CIA civilians, active USAF people and USAFpeople who were temporarily 'sheep-dipped' and assigned to the CIA under cover.

Groom Lake activity

Tangible evidence suggests, too, that the non-intelligence black budget may be healthy. TheUSAF's secret flight test centre within the Nevada test and training range - which is not reallycalled Area 51 but is Detachment 3 of the USAF Flight Test Center, headquartered at Edwards - isactive, as is evident from the high-frequency air shuttle that ferries the engineering andmanagement workforce from Las Vegas to the base. The pace of operations, using Boeing 737sand Beech 1900 transports, suggests that as many as 1,000 people are commuting to the base onGroom Lake. The smaller base at Tonopah Test Range (TTR), originally built in the early 1980s to

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house the operational F-117A wing, is also active. It is not as secure as Groom Lake, being morevisible from public land, but can securely house more mature aircraft that can operate at night.

It is important to remember that the only reason for maintaining a site such as Groom Lake is totest aircraft that are visibly substantially different from non-classified military aircraft and embodycapabilities that are important enough and different enough from what an adversary might expectto be worth concealing.

The classic example is the F-117's predecessor, Have Blue. Had a foreign intelligence agency seenit, their analysts could have concluded quickly that the US was trying to build an aircraft with theradar cross-section (RCS) of a small ball-bearing. As it was, most of the world thought that wasimpossible, so they could not begin to design a countermeasure. Classified weapons ormodifications to existing platforms can be tested from a semi-secure facility like Edwards AFB'sNorth Base.

Kept from view

There has seldom been less reliable information as to what kind of aircraft, spacecraft andcapabilities may have been developed at Groom Lake, or elsewhere, with black-budget funding.

In 2002, the USAF unveiled the Boeing Bird of Prey flight demonstrator, which had performed 38flight tests out of Groom Lake in 1996-99 and was designed to prove both ultra-low RCS andvisual stealth technology. This moment of openness underscored the fact that the last black-worldaircraft project to be unveiled before the Bird of Prey, in 1996, was the Northrop Tacit Blue low-observable (LO) prototype. The Tacit Blue project was initiated in 1976, under the Fordadministration.

Tacit Blue pre-dated the modernisation of Groom Lake (funded by the defence build-up of theReagan administration), as did the F-117. By the time new buildings and runways appeared atGroom, and the Las Vegas shuttle (known by the callsign 'Janet') had replaced ad-hoc flights fromNellis, Burbank and Palmdale, the F-117 had moved to TTR. On the other hand, Reagan-eraprogrammes that operated in the 'grey' world - acknowledged to exist, but with tightly classifiedtechnology such as the B-2, Advanced Tactical Fighter and the Navy A-12 - were never intendedto be tested at Area 51 and the NRO's huge Lockheed/Boeing Quartz unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) never got close to flight test. The last 20 years of secret technology have been kept fromview, which, after all, was the idea in the first place.

However, it is possible to identify some of the programmes that feature in the black budget today.One example is the classified UAV programme disclosed in a US Navy FY07 budget document,which will apparently receive some of the funds originally destined for the USAF's share of theJoint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) programme.

Being developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works, the UAV is apparently descended from thePenetrating High-Altitude Endurance (PHAE) UAV which the Skunk Works started to promote afterthe RQ-3A DarkStar was cancelled in 1999. The termination of DarkStar reflected not onlytechnical problems with the design (the first vehicle had crashed on its second flight attempt) butalso the limitations of a vehicle designed to a tight cost goal: the result was an aircraft that couldcarry only a small sensor load, could fly no higher than 45,000 feet and had an endurance of justeight hours.

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By 2001, Lockheed Martin was talking about an aircraft with a 24-hour endurance, a U-2-class(1,800 kg) payload and a U-2-type altitude (above 70,000 ft), combined with a high degree ofstealth. At the same time, the company developed a smaller UAV - with DarkStar-like performance- which was tested over Iraq in 2003. Development of the larger vehicle continued, however, anda number of aircraft are believed to be on order, powered by General Electric J97 engines.

One thing for certain is that the new UAV will be expensive. It will not be small, it will carry costlysensors like the U-2 and it will need to have very refined LO technology if it is to operate for 24hours over denied territory. Both the vehicle and its sensors will be produced in small numbers.

The same considerations applied to early black-world projects such as the Lockheed U-2, U-2R, A-12 and SR-71 and the Teledyne Ryan AQM-91 Compass Arrow. These provided a combination ofcapabilities that acknowledged programmes could not match; for example, high speed, highaltitude and low RCS. Their high performance went hand in hand with rather demandingoperational characteristics, high maintenance requirements and unique sensors and the customerusually required only a small number of aircraft. The result was that unit costs were high:Compass Arrow cost USD1 billion, an almost unimaginable sum for two dozen UAVs in the late1960s.

They were also operated in secret. As the CIA demonstrated with the U-2, U-2R, A-12 and the D-21 drone and as the F-117 showed in the first seven years of its existence, it is possible to operatea small number of aircraft without disclosing their existence. Lockheed Martin's UAV represents areturn to the black programmes of the 1950s and 1960s or it may indicate that projects of thatkind never stopped but have never been disclosed.

Where did the work lead?

If that pattern continued in the 1980s and 1990s, it would explain the central mystery of classifiedaircraft programmes: given the money poured into black programmes and the modernisation ofGroom Lake, where did all the work lead?

Military space systems have been funded in the black world since the 1960s and still are likely toaccount for a large proportion of black-world funds, but whether they include a massive two-stage-to-orbit re-usable space reconnaissance-strike system remains to be seen. Such a systemmight be technically feasible, but even in small numbers it would be hard to conceal and it wouldbe unlikely that it would be permitted to operate over metropolitan or suburban areas at lowaltitudes in daylight, as reports suggested.

The hypothesis, however, that a high-speed system of some kind was developed in the 1980s isstill supported by evidence, although much of it is circumstantial. Unusual sonic booms oversouthern California in the early 1990s, and over other places since, remain unexplained. A leadingsonic boom expert who has reviewed the California boom tracks believes that they were producedby vehicles following a Shuttle-type landing profile. Both the booms and the best eyewitnessaccount of what may have been a secret aircraft over the North Sea in 1989 are consistent withreasonable security measures. The booms were recorded in detail by a seismograph network thatthe USAF had no way of knowing was being used for that purpose and the sighting was far outover open water, where the risk of a chance encounter with a trained observer was minimal.

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Multiple sources, including a senior leader of European future-space efforts, have pointed out thatthe National Aerospaceplane (NASP) project, launched in 1986 and abruptly terminated in 1992,can be understood only if the vehicle is regarded as an extension of, and possibly a cover for, aclassified programme. For example, the NASP programme funded efforts to batch-producespecialty materials and to access foreign technology, including France's work on high-temperaturesilicon-matrix composites, at a point when the most basic details of the vehicle configuration wereunstable. Pentagon security regulations explicitly permit the use of cover and deception to protectblack programmes.

In the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union started development of enhancements to the MiG-31interceptor and to long-range surface-to-air missiles, increasing their capability against high-altitude targets. A detailed account of MiG-25 operations against SR-71s over the Baltic Sea,published in 2000, contains this comment: "Around 1980, the Warsaw Pact's air defence forcesintroduced a new alarm call -Jastreb[Hawk]. Later on, it became the standard alarm call for allhigh and very fast flying targets." However, as far as the unclassified world knows, there was novehicle in the 1980s that flew within 1,500 km/h or 6,000 m of the SR-71's cruise regime. As oneformer USAF director of special programmes responded: "Whatever could they have meant bythat?"

No direct evidence of such a project has emerged since the early 1990s, which means one ofthree things; it was cancelled soon after it was reported; or it has continued to operate on aspacecraft-like schedule, making very few sorties in response to high-priority nationalrequirements.

High-speed vehicle

Lockheed Martin continues to promote the idea of a high-speed, high-altitude vehicle, withcontinuing studies of a M6.5 vehicle. The first step would be a fighter-sized X-plane with two high-speed turbojets and a ramjet, in an over-under configuration, with inward-turning inlets like theHypersonic Cruise Vehicle (HCV). "The goal is to prove to people that it is doable, practical andworks like a regular aircraft," said Skunk Works Vice-President Neil Kacena. It would usehydrocarbon fuels (the USAF has been developing heat-tolerant jet fuels) and conventionalmaterials and would be launched and recovered from a runway and (unlike a pure ramjet design)powered at all times.

Kacena points out that a high-speed, high-altitude vehicle complements subsonic stealth: a "fast-mover" is easy to detect and hard to hit, while a subsonic stealth vehicle is the opposite.Defeating the fast-mover requires long-range, high-speed intercept missiles and platforms tolaunch them; detecting an LO target requires unconventional sensors designed to see very smalltargets at medium range and neither system provides any advantage against both target classes

Less effective oversight

The increasing size of the black-world budget translates directly into less effective oversight. Inthe last year for which statistics are available, 1999, the defence subcommittee of the HouseAppropriations Committee scheduled half a day of hearings to review 150 very diverse SAPs.Another issue, related to time and security, is that the reporting requirements for SAPs arerudimentary and could technically be satisfied in a couple of pages.

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As long-time secrecy observer Stephen Aftergood commented late in 2005, the number of SAPshas increased but the number of outsiders cleared into them has not.

Another challenge to effective oversight is the fact that the economics of black programmes maybear no relation to the normal world. The Defence Science Board (DSB), while criticising themanagement of FIA, pointed out that the problems in many high-tech space programmes could betraced to underfunding and to a 'can-do' mentality, in which contractors ousted incumbents withunrealistically low bids and service programme managers were reluctant to acknowledge or reportproblems.

In the DSB's view, delays and overruns were good. They indicated that problems were not beingdenied and that the programme managers would rather launch late than risk total failure and theloss of a spacecraft.

Another factor is emphasis on performance: the U-2's sensor packages are considered uniquelyvaluable, but - considering their development costs and the fact that only a handful of systemsneed to be acquired, because the U-2's sensors are interchangeable - they cost in the region ofUSD100 million each.

The U-2 itself is on the verge of being retired and it is possible that the reason that the USAF isnot objecting is that its functional replacement, the PHAE, is proceeding well and offers thedecisive advantage of better endurance.

It might be a working hypothesis that Lockheed Martin's new high-speed vehicle could replace anunacknowledged programme operating today, but adding great flexibility compared to somethingrocket-like. However, if that is the case, it's unlikely that we will hear about it. If there is oneconclusion that can be drawn from attempts to analyse the black budget, it is that security doesits job.

Budget document discloses existence of secret US Air Force UAV programme(idr.janes.com,17/03/06)

More funding for classified items(jdw.janes.com, 15/02/06)

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US BLACK PROGRAMMES: FUNDING the VOID (STScI/L Zanardo/Jane's)1132479

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Officially non-existent, the USAF's classified flight test base on the edge of Groom Lake in Nevadais clearly visible on open-source satellite images (Space Imaging via Federation of AmericanScientists)

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Titan IV launch vehicles were almost exclusively used to launch classified spacecraft until therocket was retired in 2005, with observers studying the booster configuration and the size of thepayload fairing for clues as to the rocket's mission (USAF)

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Lockheed tested this F-117-like cruise missile, codenamed 'Senior Prom', in the early 1980s. Itwas abandoned in favour of the General Dynamics AGM-129, which could be carried on internalrotary launchers (Lockheed via Jim Goodall)

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The most recent secret test aircraft to have been declassified is the Boeing Bird of Prey, evaluatedfrom 1996 to 1999 at Groom Lake. It was used to demonstrate visual stealth technologies (Boeing)

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Nicknamed the Whale, Northrop Grumman's Tacit Blue experimental stealth surveillance aircraftcompleted its tests in 1985 and was disclosed 11 years later. Although it originated under the Fordadministration, it is one of the newest secret aircraft programmes to have been disclosed (USAF)

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Built as a brand-new operational base for the F-117, Tonopah Test Range has been officially outof regular use since 1992, but remains active, quite possibly in support of classified programmes(Bill Sweetman)

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Secrecy has fostered bad decisions in several programmes. The US Navy's A-12 attack aircraftwas behind schedule and overweight when it was cancelled, but its massive weapon load and longendurance would have been useful in Iraq (Lockheed Martin)

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Classified aircraft designs are protected in many ways. Lockheed Martin's radar cross-section(RCS)

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US BLACK PROGRAMMES: FUNDING the VOID

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