entire book - Chris Hables Gray

Military Computerdom [ 65 ]
was no chance of the Phalanx shooting down the Exocet missile because the
Phalanx system was not on automatic, but it should have picked up the
missile on its targeting radar and given off a loud alarm. Some analysts claim
it did not because the missile came from the blind side of the Stark where the
radar was blocked by the superstructure (M. Moore, 1987). There were also
reports at the time that the Phalanx was not even operational at all, although
the Pentagon denies this. The Stork's captain blamed these technical failures
for the death of his 37 crewmen (M. Moore, 1987; Associated Press Service,
1987).
In 1991, two suits by the relatives of dead crewmen against General
Dynamics, the manufacturer of the Phalanx, were dismissed on grounds of
national security. Before this cover-up a number of documents were released
to the press. They indicate that it was technical problems with the Phalanx
that led to the tragedy. Testimony showed that the Phalanx was on and that
the missile that hit the ship did not come in on its blind side. General
Dynamics engineers and Stark crewmen revealed that below-standard circuit
cards were used, which meant that the Phalanx system could only run 6-12
hours before breaking down. In 1986, Navy tests indicated only 71 percent
reliability with the Phalanx. Several General Dynamics employees admitted
that they had used "outlaw" software to override the Navy's circuit-testing
program, and they even turned over one such program to the Navy. David
Villanueva, a senior engineer for General Dynamics, said in a sworn statement
that "Workers, including myself, often discussed our hopes that the
Phalanx would never be relied upon by the Navy during a critical military
engagement." Thomas Amile, a top Air Force radar expert, said in a sworn
statement that, "the reliability of the Phalanx systems deployed on board
U.S. Navy ships is extraordinarily low." The former Stark captain, Glenn R.
Brindel, concluded that his ship "could have .. . avoided the tragedy ... if
the shipboard systems had performed to their represented capacities" (Webb,
1991).
The Navy, however, blamed the captain. This was certainly on the mind
of every U.S. Navy captain in the Persian Gulf from then on, especially Capt.
William Rogers III of the Aegis cruiser USS Vincennes.
The Aegis system is, as Congressman Charles E. Bennett (Dem., Fla.)
once said, the U.S. Navy's most advanced "shipboard defensive system
against attacks from aircraft and sea skimming missiles" (Congress of the
United States, 1989, p. 15). It is probably the most advanced such system in
the world, and it is almost certainly the most complex and advanced
computer system that has seen significant military action. In some respects
it is an expert system; in others, an autonomous weapon—in either case an
information and weapons control network of great sophistication.
The Aegis system takes in various kinds of electronic information (radio
and radar signals from other sources; radar reflections from the ship's own