The dark secret of the black budget - Pentagon's defense budget

Washington Monthly, May, 1987 by Tim Weiner

THE DARK SECRET OF THE BLACK BUDGET

Rep. Larry Hopkins walks alone to a leadlinedchamber in the Capitol they call "the vault.' There, a uniformed officer briefs Hopkins about an expensive defense program. He's not allowed to take notes. When briefing papers are shown to him, he can't have copies. When he leaves he's allowed to talk to hardly anyone about what he's heard.

For about $35 billion worth of defense programs,this is what is known as "congressional oversight.' "You just sit there and get the hose treatment for several hours,' Hopkins says.

There have always been programs and weaponsthat were so top secret that public hearings were deemed inappropriate. But the Reagan administration has tripled spending for "black budget' programs that receive no public scrutiny at all. Spending on secret weapons has jumped nearly tenfold and spending on intelligence activities has doubled. The black budget is now more than federal spending on education, transportation, or the environment and roughly equal to all federal spending on health care. In fact, it is the fastest-growing major sector of the federal budget.

Obviously some of those programs should notbe debated on C-SPAN or analyzed in The Washington Post. But today, more than an dime of every defense dollar is concealed. If the few black budget projects we do know about are any indication, it has become a hiding place not just for weapons and operations that should be secret but for those that are poorly managed or conceived.

As Thomas Amlie, a civilian who works forthe Air Force as a financial watchdog and who has high security clearance, put it, the military has three reasons for having black projects: "One, you're doing something that should genuinely be secret. There's only a couple of those. Two, you're doing something so damn stupid you don't want anybody to know about it. And three, you want to rip the money bag open and get out a shovel, because there is no accountability whatsoever.'

Kamikaze dolphins

Putting a program in the black budget doesn'tjust mean Congress can't check up on it, but that its very existence won't be acknowledged, and that its price tag generally won't be revealed. Black programs are usually classified as "sensitive compartmented information.' There are more than 10,000 compartments, each with a specific codeword; someone who has the codeword for just one compartment cannot have access to information about a black program in another compartment. About 50 members of Congress know bits and pieces about particular programs. But only a handful of members and congressional staff--too few to enable serious congressional oversight--have broad access to information about the whole black budget.

Black programs include the Navy's advancedtactical fighter; the Stealth bomber, the most expensive military project in American history; and Milstar satellites, the new global switchboard for nuclear war, designed to relay the launch orders for nuclear weapons from 70,000 miles in space. These three programs together may wind up costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion. Black programs also include 155 mm nuclear shells, a host of covert special operations units, the neutron bomb, the advanced cruise missible, and gadgetry to make submarines quieter.

More than two-thirds of the money is hiddenin the Pentagon's research, development, and procurement budgets--which include operating funds for intelligence. At least half the Pentagon's black budget funds the CIA, the global listening posts of the National Security Agency, and the super-secret satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office. The rest of the money is distributed among Defense department operations, maintenance and personnel budgets, NASA, and other agencies. All these--and only God and Weinberger know what else--are shielded by the cloak of secrecy once reserved solely for the intelligence agencies.

Do these programs and weapons work? Arethey on schedule" Will they be ruinously expensive? Will they be destabilizing? To the public, and to the great majority of Congress, comes the Pentagon's reply: None of your business.

Caspar Weinberger says they are being keptsecret because exposing them to outside scrutiny would truly endanger national security. What evidence we have, however, does not inspire confidence in Weinberger's assertion.

For example, the black budget includes thenavy's Marine Mammal Project, a program to train dolphins as underwater kamikazes. It also includes the Pentagon's $40 billion plan to prepare for World War IV. Four? Four. Since the Reagan administration came into office the strategy has been to fight a six-month long nuclear exchange and still have enough left over to fight the next round. Since there may be a shortgage of people to run such a conflict, the strategy calls for computers to manage it, orchestrating space satellites and nuclear weapons over a global battlefield. Part of the program is the Defense Communications Agency's Island Sun, a project to create mobile ground terminals in the form of lead-lined trucks, enabling generals to dodge Soviet nuclear attacks as they speed down the nation's interstate highways. Also classified are related funds for the robots that could gallop like horses and walk like men and would carry out computerized orders as they roamed the radioactive battlefront.