From today's Boston Globe
Military on Year 2000 alert
By Fred Kaplan, Globe Staff, 06/21/98
NEW YORK - Sometime in 1993 - memories
are hazy and nothing was written down for
the public - the North American Air Defense
Command in Cheyenne Mountain, Colo.,
conducted a test to see what would happen to all
their computers - the ones that warn of a nuclear
attack - on New Year's Day of the Year 2000.
As with nearly all computers, years were
designated only by their last two digits - ''98'' for
1998, ''99'' for 1999, and so on. A few engineers
were starting to speculate: When 2000 comes
along, the computers would read it as ''00'' and
think it was 1900. What would happen?
What happened was, everything froze - the
screens that monitored the early-warning
satellites and radars and other communications
systems that would detect a flock of missiles or
bombers coming our way. ''It all locked up at the
stroke of midnight,'' recalled Robert Martin, a top
computer specialist.
Martin was not present at the simulation, but his
life has been ruled by it ever since. At the Mitre
Corp. in Bedford, one of the leading Pentagon
contractors working to solve this problem,
Martin is the ''focal point'' for ''Y2K'' - the
cognoscenti's abbreviation for ''Year 2000.''
The problem is hardly restricted to NORAD. The
Defense Department has about 25,000 computer
systems - 2,803 of them classified as
''mission-critical systems,'' meaning that, without
them, the military could no longer carry out a
major mission.
These include computers for ''all kinds'' of
weapons, Martin said, ''the full spectrum,'' from
nuclear missiles to a sergeant's battlefield laptop,
as well as the various satellites, sensors, radars,
and communications networks that link them
into a unified fighting machine.
Asked what computers are not affected by the
Year 2000 problem, Martin replied, ''I can't think
of many.''
The Y2K problem is now a well-known bug - the
one demon in the bag of popular millennial
nightmares that is based not on Nostradamus or
other mythic apocrypha, but on hard science.
Every federal agency, bank, and major
corporation has teams devoting thousands of
manhours to solving the problem in the next 18
months, before the deadline inexorably strikes.
But the military may be the hardest hit, because
the consequences could affect not just paychecks
and power grids, but war and peace.
Pentagon officials are hopeful that they will fix at
least all the critical systems in time, but they
admit it will be a close call, at best.
''The Year 2000 problem is the electronic
equivalent of El Nino,'' Deputy Defense Secretary
John J. Hamre told the Senate Armed Services
Committee two weeks ago. ''This is going to have
implications in the world ... that we can't even
comprehend.''
Other countries' militaries could be especially
devastated.
''We at least have a program to deal with the
problem,'' noted Bruce Blair, a nuclear-weapons
specialist at the Brookings Institution. Most
countries ''have nothing.''
According to the Pentagon, only four countries -
the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia -
are doing anything to prepare their military
computers for 2000.
Hamre said the situation is so grim that the
Pentagon is developing a program to share data
from US early-warning satellites with other
countries, including Russia and China.
Otherwise, come 2000, such nations may find
themselves in the dark, uncertain whether an
attack is coming or not - which, in a crisis, could
provoke great anxiety.
Blair, who has interviewed several Russian
nuclear officers, said Russia faces particularly
dire straits. Since its army has collapsed, it is
relying far more on its nuclear weapons for
security. And, because of shortages in manpower
and money, its nuclear weapons are becoming
increasingly vulnerable and its early-warning
network more riddled with gaps.
''Y2K is just a piling-on of a whole nest of
problems,'' Blair said.
Top Pentagon officials did not become fully
aware of the problem until October 1995, during
an interagency meeting called by the Social
Security Administration. The agency had been
performing its own simulations, which showed
that Year 2000 glitches could cause millions of
citizens to stop getting their retirement-checks -
perhaps even expunge their names from the
records - because the computers, ''thinking'' it
was 1900 instead of 2000, would conclude that
all these beneficiaries were way too young to
qualify for Social Security.
That meeting resulted in a directive, sent to every
relevant office in the Defense Department, to
address Y2K as a top priority. By the end of next
year, $1.9 billion will have been shifted from
various weapons programs to prepare for 2000.
Of the 2,803 ''mission-critical'' computer systems,
the Pentagon reports that 812 - 29 percent - are
fixed, and most of the rest are being renovated.
However, Hamre testified, the program is four
months behind schedule - not a small matter,
given that 2000 is 18 months away.
The problem, Mitre's Martin explained, is that
some of the fixes are taking much longer than
anyone could have estimated.
The solution, for most computers, is for
programmers to go into the software code and do
one of two things. Either they change the symbol
for years from two digits to four digits (for
example, from ''00'' to ''2000''). Or, they change
the code so that the computer reads
year-numbers greater than ''50'' to mean the 1900s
- and smaller than ''50'' to mean the 2000s.
One problem, however, is many of these
computers are old and nobody who is still
around knows what the code is. ''That's a big
problem,'' Martin said, ''finding the code.''
Even once that problem is solved, Hamre warned
the Senate, ''there is no guarantee all ... systems
will be free of risk.''
First, the commercial computer industry might
not be able to supply the large quantity of
hardware - the communications hubs, routers,
and servers - needed to make the fixes.
Then, the fixes themselves need to be tested and
de-bugged - which, as anyone who has
purchased a software program during its first
weeks on the market knows, can take a while.
Finally, military computers interact with each
other and with civilian computers - and these
interactions could unfold in unforeseeable ways.
''There is a web of connectedness,'' Martin noted.
If even one connection in this web has a Year
2000 problem, the whole system becomes ''a
house of cards.''
Furthermore, it is not entirely predictable just
how any given house of cards might collapse.
When the Chrysler Corp. conducted a test of its
Y2K solutions at an assembly plant last year, the
time clocks malfunctioned, causing the security
system to shut down, making it impossible for
anyone to leave the building.
When the Phillips Petroleum Co. ran a simulation
onboard an oil vessel in the North Sea, a safety
system designed to detect a deadly gas, hydrogen
sulfide, shut down.
In some cases, real-life failures have taken place
that only begin to hint at how far-flung the
problems might be.
A preview of possible military disasters was the
incident in the 1991 Gulf War, when a Scud
missile blew up a barracks in Saudi Arabia,
killing 28 National Guard troops inside.
A post-mortem of the disaster revealed that the
Patriot air-defense battery failed to shoot down
the Scud because the clock in the Patriot's radar
system was not properly synchronized.
The radar had been designed to be left on for
only a short while. Its clock viewed a day as 23
hours and 59 minutes long. However, once this
particular Patriot arrived in Saudi Arabia, the
radar was left on continuously. So its clock
drifted away from the actual time by one minute
per day.
When the Patriot system's computer detected an
incoming Scud missile, it would see the missile
on two radar screens and send both blips to
another computer controlling its fire-control
system. But since the two blips were not
synchronized, the fire-control computer could
not connect them - could not see them as a target.
The Scud tragedy illustrates why the clocks and
calendars inside computers matter so much.
John Pike, a weapons specialist at the Federation
of American Scientists, explained: ''Systems
generally require time-synchronization in order
to talk to each other. A lot of systems use
time-synchronization as a way to establish data
links.'' So, if one computer says it is 1900 and
another says it is 2000, ''they can't talk to each
other.''
''It's kind of ludicrous that Y2K should be a
problem,'' Pike said. ''I mean, two digits in a
software program? Causing catastrophes of these
magnitudes?''
Hamre put it another way in his Senate
testimony: ''If we built houses the way we build
software, the first woodpecker to come along
would destroy civilization.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 06/21/98. |
