Protecting against the ‘millenium bug’

Excerpts of Remarks by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

At the ‘Protecting the Force’ ComDef ’98 Conference

The National Press Club
Washington, D.C.
30 March 1998

There are now only 641 days before the millennium — and counting. Given the topic of this conference, it is important that we understand what it might mean if the United States is not prepared for the consequences of the Millennium Bug — or "Y2K" — problem that will, all other things being equal, afflict us 641 days now.

Properly addressing the Y2K threat is a matter not only of protecting the "Force" but protecting the country that the "Force" is supposed to protect.

As a non-technical type myself — whose abilities in this field are limited mostly to turning on my computer — I was profoundly struck by the results of a recent sample of "400 of America’s most influential" computer industry executives conducted by CIO Magazine found that:

• "Nearly 70% are not confident the Millennium Bug will be fixed by the 31 December 1999 deadline."

 

• "When asked if they would fly on a commercial airline on 1 January 2000, more than 50% either said they would not fly or are unsure about flying on a commercial carrier."

 

• "A full 60% recommend that Americans need to investigate their bank’s Year 2000 compliance to ensure the safety of their personal assets."

These comments suggest a true national emergency in the making.

It is, of course, imperative that those charged with safeguarding the national security are at the forefront of developing and implementing comprehensive corrective actions. As the trade publication, Phillips C4I, put it on 18 December 1997, however:

"The Pentagon is among 14 of the 24 major federal agencies not on track to fix their Year 2000 computer problem by the millennium change….Only the Department of Labor and the Department of Energy lag behind the Pentagon according to data [prepared for Congressman Stephen Horn’s subcommittee].

We must not lose sight, however, of the larger problem: The Millennium Bug’s potential for devastation of an advanced, computer-dependent society like that of the late 20th Century United States is not confined to its national security apparatuses.

Scarcely any business, community or individual citizen will remain unaffected — some in minor ways, others in potentially catastrophic ones — if the Y2K problem is not universally corrected. In fact, unless the Millennium Bug is addressed on a truly national basis it could have much the same, devastating effect as a deliberate Information Warfare assault by a determined adversary. The implications for public order and safety, to say nothing of national security, can scarcely be overstated.

I believe that responsibility for ensuring that such a concerted, national effort is mounted at once lies squarely with the Clinton Administration and, most especially, with Vice President Al Gore — the Administration’s designated hitter on technology issues generally and computer technology in particular. Messrs. Clinton and Gore should be under no illusion: Whether fairly or not, they will be held accountable if, as a result of a failure to ensure that both the public and private sectors are induced to take corrective action on the Millennium Bug — and helped to acquire the means to do so — a long-predicted, well-understood and utterly avoidable cataclysm befalls the Nation, its people and interests.

It seems to me that nothing short of a Manhattan Project-style, emergency national program is in order. Its immediate objective should be to validate and bring to bear automated techniques for addressing in the most cost-effective and least time-consuming manner possible the most daunting challenge: Making the Nation’s civilian (government and private sector) and military mainframe computers Year 2000-compliant.

An innovative proposal has been offered by Dr. Morris Davis, the inventor of a program known as Transition Software that has demonstrated impressive capabilities to accomplish such corrective action on mainframe computers in a fraction of the time — and at far less cost — than is currently associated with human review of each line of code. Dr. Davis has offered to provide at no cost to the government the conversion of 100,000 lines of software code on a mainframe computer to demonstrate his program’s abilities.

While neither this, nor any other, software program is a panacea for a problem of the magnitude and complexity of the Millennium Bug (especially since some parts of the problem are hardware-related), it would appear that the government and the national interest have little to lose and much to gain from conducting such a test, together with competing automated software programs, on one or more mainframes operated by the FAA, the Air Force or some other priority government agency.

I hope that COMDEF ’98 will help promote this or other, concrete suggestions for ensuring that the next 641 days are spent in a way that will protect not only the Force, but the Nation as a whole.