Armed Service Senate Comittee

[General Jack Ripper]

I was doing some research on defense spending and I happened across this report about the Littoral Combat Ship:

http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/16-12-01-oversight-acquisition-testing-and-employment-of-the-littoral-combat-ship-lcs-and-lcs-mission-module-programs

I don't know if anyone has ever sat through one of these committee meetings, but they're certainly an eye opening experience.

[John Kettler]

SLIM,

Never sat through one, but I've certainly read a bunch of testimony from both the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee. Not only that, but there was a time in my Soviet Threat Analyst days in which those records of proceedings saved my butt during a Grade One security panic resulting from the Richard Bell case. Bell was a radar engineer at our sister Radar Systems Group (was in Missile Systems Group myself), and his treason was of such magnitude it ultimately made it into DOD's Soviet Military Power. After being turned by a agent of the Sluzhba (Poland's KGB equivalent), Bell passed the secrets of the F-18's state of the art multi-mode look down/ shoot down radar usable for both air-to-ar and ground attack, together with Stealth radar material of some sort, too. The former saved Russia two years of development time, allowed them to discard two other development paths and saved I forget how much money as well. The above panic took the form of an abrupt order to--wait for it--cease all use of classified materials! The work still had to be done, so I had to depend totally on OSINT in the days before the Web existed or the Berlin Wall had fallen. You'd be amazed how much material got presented to the Pentagon's money masters, together with a prohibited activity known as stripping the scales off classified charts. But I caught a gaffe which others elsewhere noticed, too, and led to an uproar and considerable DOD embarrassment. Imagine my surprise when I'm going through one of the books and find myself looking at a satellite photo I knew to a certainty was SECRET/NOFORN/WNINTEL. How did I know this? It was in my classified docs and was of the Su-27/FLANKER prototype under tests at Ramenskoye Flight Test Center! Fortunately, the image was on bad paper and only an inch on a side or so, which hid much of what the already degraded at my level imagery revealed. Fortunately, I had to endure only three days of my forced decoupling from the classified world, after which management finally came to its senses.

Regards,

John Kettler