If the Clinton Pentagon Can’t Get Ready to Fight the Millennium Bug, How Will It Contend with Terrorism?

(Washington, D.C.): In the midst of what President Clinton would have us believe is a
serious
new effort to prepare the Nation for, among other things, terrorist use of information warfare
(IW) comes serious bad news: The Pentagon is unlikely to be able to ensure the
functioning
of even its most critical computer systems against the effects of the so-called Year 2000
(Y2K) crisis or “Millennium Bug.”

A recently released report by the General Accounting Office offers the latest warning that the
Department of Defense is seriously unprepared for what is a certain — if not fully
quantifiable —
threat: the potentially catastrophic failure of information systems vital to national security.
According to the GAO study, entitled Major Management Challenges and Program Risks:
Department of Defense:

“The most immediate challenge facing the Department is ensuring that its key mission
and business functions continue to operate after the year 2000….[Although] DoD has
an enormous effort underway to remediate its mission-critical systems and ensure that
its key operational missions will continue to function after the century date change, that
effort is at risk.” (Emphasis added.)

Weak management oversight of the Y2K conversion effort appears to be the principal
factor
in the Pentagon’s continued status among the Office of Management and Budget’s “Tier 1”
agencies — i.e., those euphemistically described as offering “insufficient evidence of adequate
progress.” The GAO report found that the Defense Department: “lacks reliable, timely
information of program status”; is working with “often inaccurate” reports on systems [Y2K]
compliance; has “contingency plans (developed in the event of system failure) that are frequently
non-executable”; and is providing “inconsistent guidance [that] has led to false starts and
uncoordinated efforts.” These failures “seriously endangers its chances of successfully meeting
the Year 2000 deadline.”

The Bottom Line

The Y2K shortfalls that have been identified in successive critiques by the Congress, the
General
Accounting Office and others threaten not only the timely delivery of Medicaid payments, the air
traffic control system and other civilian government functions. They pose a real
risk to the
national security.

These risks have been unnecessarily increased by the Clinton Administration’s unwillingness to
date to address this problem frontally and candidly for fear of creating panic, arousing controversy
— and possibly paying a political price for its dereliction of duty. Unfortunately, the failure on the
part of the President, the Vice President and their senior subordinates to prepare adequately for
the Y2K crisis may have the further, disastrous effect of compounding the Nation’s vulnerability
to Information Warfare terrorism — a threat that may be masked by or that may simply exploit the
chaos likely to arise in a government and country seriously unprepared for the Millennium Bug.