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MEDIA MATTERS |
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| Betting on the RSGs |
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By Jed Babbin
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Published 8/5/2003 12:06:00 AM
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So
what's wrong with the futures market? Hillary did pretty well with it,
so why shouldn't the Defense Department try to use it for a legitimate
purpose? The stentorian senatorial chorus -- from those national
security stalwarts Byron Dorgan (D-Corn) and Ron Wyden (D-Whining) --
was enough to draw the normally level-headed Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS),
chairman of the Intelligence Committee, into the fray, lining up with
those two jokers. But the idea -- as goofy as it may sound -- was a
good one. And it came straight from the RSGs.
You have to
understand what DARPA is. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
has a charter that looks like the orders for the Starship Enterprise.
Its only job is to push past the boundaries of science to increase the
effectiveness of our combat forces. And DARPA is the bunch that the
term "RSG" -- real smart guy -- was invented for. Remember Dr. Tzap
from the comic strip "Tank McNamara"? He's the wild-eyed scientist
who's always trying to invent something like a rocket-propelled,
radar-guided baseball guaranteed to nick the outside corner of the
strike zone, and usually winds up with something that performs to
order, but has the unfortunate side effect of making a hole in the
catcher. The DARPA RSGs are not only a bunch smarter than Dr. Tzap, but
they have the world's most powerful computers. And a few lasers, and
all sorts of world-vaporizing toys.
They are capable of some
amazing things. When I was in the Pentagon during Gulf War 1, in the
first day or two of the campaign, dust storms prevented our fliers from
positively identifying vehicles on the ground. As a result, some of our
troops were killed when our aircraft struck what they believed to be
bad guys.
About two mornings later, the director of DARPA -- who
shared a boss with me -- dropped in on the way to see the big guys. In
his hand was an object the size and shape of a coffee can. Gen.
Schwartzkopf had sent a handwritten note to Mr. Cheney asking for a fix
to the vehicle identification problem, and it was passed to DARPA. The
fix -- which was designed and the prototype manufactured in about 24
hours -- was a powerful IR signal emitter, fitted with a sort of velcro
fastener. Pull the tape backing off the velcro, stick it on your
Bradley fighting vehicle, turn it on, and suddenly every fighter and
strike jock above sees a very bright spot on his infrared detectors
that says, "good guy." If the air war hadn't ended in just a few more
days, thousands of these things would have been produced and shipped to
Kuwait. This is one side of DARPA. The other is the spooky scientists
who you lock in a lab, and open the door once every few years to see
what they're doing. And they're always doing something.
Who
would you bet on to apply awesome brain power to devise new ways to
predict terrorism: the U.S. Senate or DARPA? If you have to stop to
think about the answer, please stop reading now. We need to get past
the strange and funny side of the DARPA proposal, and to the serious
side.
Our intelligence community lacks the ability to forecast
pretty much anything, including terrorist attacks. We keep hearing
about intelligence failures before 9-11, but the failure to detect and
prevent terrorism is nothing new. From the Marine barracks bombing in
Beirut to the first World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy
bombings in Africa, and every other attack including and since Pearl
Harbor, our intelligence community has failed to protect us. Judging by
Rainbow Tom Ridge's color-coded alerts, the information we seem to be
getting lately is no more specific -- and no more accurate -- than a
weather forecast. So why not apply the tremendous amount of cranial
capacity at DARPA to the issue? Answer: we damned well ought to.
DARPA
has been working at improving the intel game for years. And one of the
places they have been looking is the computer simulations of markets
and other aspects of the real world that many top colleges such as the
University of Chicago develop. So when the idea of a futures market in
terrorism came up, DARPA took a hard look. What they came up with made
some sense. Stock markets are pretty good prognosticators of political
and economic events. If terrorist acts are anything, they are intended
to be harmful economically and achieve political ends by violence. When
DARPA's little program was set up, it was intended to capture the
wisdom of the marketplace in helping forecast terrorist events. As
DARPA's initial announcements put it, the advice of the market is often
better than advice from experts.
Called "FutureMAP," the DARPA
program would have allowed one thousand people -- later up to ten
thousand -- to buy and sell "futures" contracts, betting on whether
certain events would happen in the Middle East, or on specific
terrorist acts. Because the real futures markets can be manipulated by
real terrorists, FutureMAP could have helped DARPA learn how that could
be done, spot those manipulations and turn them into two kinds of
useful information. First, the information could have been used
directly to help predict terrorist acts. Second, the DARPA program
could have been the basis for devising new intelligence methods to
discover terrorist plans. Both objectives were worthwhile, and should
have been continued. And then Byron Dorgan and his pals started
shouting that it was "unbelievably stupid."
Many senators know
very well that we can trust DARPA with a whole stack of things that --
handled badly -- will result in an Earth-shattering "KABOOM." Yet they
made the instant judgment for the television cameras that we couldn't
trust DARPA with FutureMAP. Maybe they thought it wasn't expensive
enough. At $8 million over two years, the DARPA program cost less than
Congress spills on its shirt any given day. (And a great deal less than
any number of Federal nuisances. NEA cost us $115 million last year,
and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting stings us for $300 million
every year.)
For now, at least, FutureMAP is an idea as dead
as French honor. It was a decent idea, which could have been tried
without a huge dent in the public coffers. It's interesting to see how
quickly Congress shot it down, and how slowly it will be to come up
with a better idea to help predict terrorist events. Don't hold your
breath.
Jed Babbin was a deputy undersecretary of
defense in the first Bush administration, and now often appears as a
talking warhead on MSNBC.
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