PENTAGON SPENDING GOES HIGH TECH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000100670049-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 8, 2010
• Sequence Number: 49
• Publication Date: April 28, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/09/08: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100670049-4
',;ASHIN:TON POST
28 April 1,?85'
High '~eel1
yes
S e~ndi Pentagor t)
ntinMass.
Gives Rise to a Non-Profit Defense Establishme
Shift
By Charles Stein
born Gk~be
BEDFORD, Mass.-People at
Mitre Corp. do most of their wor-
rying about nuclear war during the
day, at their desks and computer
terminals.
They worry, in the event of an
attack, whether U.S. radar will spot
it in time, whether the message will
be relayed to military commanders
and ultimately to the president, and
whether our missiles can be
launched in retaliation, even if
bombs have already fallen here.
For its worrying and its proposed
solutions, Mitre has been rewarded.
with a steadily increasing flow of
'.efense dollars. The company has
seen its sales double in the past five,
years (1984 sales: $287 million)
and its work'force reach 5,000 peo-
ple. In this suburb of Boston, where
3,000 of its employes are, Mitre
has outgrown its buildings and has
had to lease several others.
Mitre's success is part of.a broad
shift in defense spending toward
high tech and electronics, the
brains rather than the brawn of
weaponry. It is also part of distinct- .
ly Massachusetts phenomenon: the
rise of the nonprofit defense estab-
lishment.
-Five nonprofit institutions in'the
country last year received ;,more
than $225 million in Pentagon busi-
n
Recently, Dan Ford, a writer for
Mitre's s eciality is C31- or
c-cu ed, -an arcane but increas- the New Yorker Magazine, visited
in iv im octant art of the defense the headquarters of NoOspa D, Dthe
e
North icture. he three s 'tan for i
CO fence in a maountain which
mmand control and communica-
in Colorado.
Zion the I for intelligence. Tr Wh1N there Ford asked a general
whole network is frequently
(erred to as the brains or the ner- ' phone linkups ,t to the Pentagontelethat
vows systemsof weaponry.
lanes, centers the would
It consists of command
The general tTied the phone sev-
n ra the satellitcs that scan the eral times but got
nd l no
didn't
the communications er, he admitted to Ford, "Ie
battlefield and
'equipment that ties them together. know that I had to dial '0' to get the
The network serves both but it conven- Jack Ruina, an MIT professor and
.the la and nuclear seeing ore the greatest a long-time member of Mitre's
the latter that is s board of directors, thinks such-hor-
buIdup. ' ror stories have been blown out of
In October 1981, President Mea-
proportion. Still, he agrees that
command and
gan made improving command and control, must be im
control one of his top five defense proved. "The . system -has been
priorities. "The' system must be shortchanged in the past," said
foolproof in case of any foreign at- Ruina.
tack," Reagan declared, Since then, Some Pentagon critics say the
the budget for command and con- command buildup is an example of
trol has increased dramatically. For budgetary overkill. Retired Admiral
fiscal 1986, the administration has Eugene Carroll of Washington's
Information
asked for $22 billion, almost triple Center: for Defense
the amount spent in 1980. says the United States will not get
The money is being widely dis- much of a return on its investment
tributed among the country's top. -d and control.
defense contractors,. GTE Corp.'s in "Icoill
t is unrealistic to assume all this
operation in Westborough, Mass., equipment will work under war con-
has already received $500 million ditions," Carroll said.
to develop the command system for
the MX missile. Raytheon Co. of
Lincoln is competing to build part of
ness. Three of the. five were in MILSTAR, a large new communi-
I Massachusetts. They were Massa- i cations satellite.
chusetts Institute of Technology Wolfgang Demisch, a defense
and two MIT spinoffs, Charles analyst with First Boston Corp.,
Stark Draper Labs of Cambridge explains, the buildup in simple
and Mitre. terms:- "If we do.have a nuclear at-
Mitre broke away from MIT's tack, it would be nice to get the
Lincoln Laboratories in 1958 to word out," he said.' develop tht country's first modern There is some doubt, at the mo-
air defense system. Lincoln did the , ment, whether. the, word really
pioneering work on the system, but would get out. Over the last 15
MIT thought it was inapproriate for *years, there have been a number of
the school to be involved in putting well-publicized breakdowns in, the
the system into place. ciommunications system-blips
the radar screen that turned out to
be geese, not missiles, or the wrong
tapes put into the computer.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/09/08: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100670049-4