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Major Mistakes By Declan McCullagh January 27, 1999 y2kculture's Declan McCullagh interviewed Bill Curtis on December 28, 1998. Once part of the problem -- he candidly admits to deciding to use only two digit-dates -- Curtis is now trying to fix these decades-old mistakes as the head of the US Defense Department's Y2K effort. Curtis, a former Army ranger and previous head of the Army's Decision Systems Management Agency, began his current job in April 1998. Following are excerpts from the conversation.
You have a tremendous number of systems scheduled to be fixed by the end of 1998. Is this in any way realistic? The Office of Management and Budget said you were moving too slowly to make the government-wide March 1999 goal. OMB changed their date to March 31, 1999. and DoD changed our date to December 31, 1998. We shortened it up. People have been working hard to make a much earlier date. Currently as of the end of November, we had 57 percent of our systems ready to go. You don't get credit unless the system is in place and in use. At the end of December, which is the DoD target date, we expect to be 77 percent complete. That is the current forecast. The deputy secretary of defense will be holding an all-day review on the 9th of January to see just how well we did against that target. We expect by March 31st, which is the OMB target date, to be about 91 percent complete. [We should be] about 95 percent complete in June. And pretty close to 99 percent by 1 January [2000]. People have actually moved systems out in the January 99 timeframe that we couldn't get done in December. We have high confidence that we're going to do fairly well. Some of the numbers -- especially for the Air Force and Navy -- seem pretty optimistic. We look at these numbers. We've watched it. We know it's a very tough target to make. We've had [executive officers] in the Department of Defense working this, as opposed to the [chief information officers]. That was a major shift for the Department of Defense. Some of your weapons systems aren't scheduled to be fixed until the second half of 1999. We have carrier task forces at sea. We know what the changes are that need to be done. We are not going to bring those carrier task forces that aren't done to get those Y2K things done. Some of those will go into the June or later timeframe before the changes are done. There are probably some aircraft that have that kind of issue. They are scheduled to go into depo maintenance. What are the most crucial tactical weapons systems that just plain wouldn't work if not fixed in time? The military doesn't rely on any one system to defend this country. We could probably defend this country just fine with the 57 percent we've got done today. You lowered your total number of mission critical systems from 3143 in November 1997 to 2642 in November 1998. We still have a little over 30 percent of the systems that are really tough and a lot of things need to be done. We feel we have a really well-scrubbed list. Recently there have been news reports of cabinet-level planning for Y2K war games. What's involved? The second side of that is the tabletop exercises, which are designed to bring in the leadership and let them work key problems and issues that could arise. We're all used to doing war games in the Department of Defense. The FEMA people are used to dealing with a problem down on the Gulf Coast with a hurricane. When you could potentially have a whole group of problems, then the leadership needs to know how to prioritize that. Do we have the policies in place to deal with these issues? For instance, in the FEMA case, most of their actions are authorized after the disaster happens. But if you know when the disaster happens, would it be prudent to get policy relief before the disaster? One of your internal reports says the Y2K readiness of 40 percent of your embedded systems are unknown or non-compliant. If you talk about embedded chips in weapons systems, the [project managers] that have been working the software have also been working the embedded chip issue. We have over 500 installations worldwide [that use water purification, electricity, sewage]. Close to 100 percent is commercial. That's not stuff we did with military specs. That's where we have worked the chip issue. And we've also come down to evaluating each of our installations on a set of criteria. What weapons have you tested under Y2K simulated conditions? The weapons test results [at White Sands Proving Grounds] were very good. They did the identification and tasking in 1999, in the last few minutes. They spoofed the GPS clocks. They put another device in there that told it was December 31, late in the day. They gave the target information in 99 and waited until the clock rolled over into 2000 to fire the rockets. The missiles were fired fine and hit their targets. [The systems included Apache helicopters, hellfire and stinger missles, and the multiple launch rocket system.] The Air Force seems to be having particular troubles, especially with Y2K problems in planes. The head people in the Air Force have been looking at those. The secretary of the Air Force level and the chief of staff at the Air Force level have had detailed reviews. Part of the issue the Air Force has been working is the air tasking software. There's a modification to that that deals with each aircraft. In many cases, once they get the air tasking system done it will take all the aircraft off the list How critical is it? It really is putting the mission together. It won't cause [the plane] to fall out of the sky. If it didn't work, we'd have a hard time doing the air tasking order in an automated fashion. Is the Pentagon worried about attacks -- both physical and cyber -- on January 1, 2000? For anyone that wanted to attack any system, a banking system, a transportation system, a military system -- anything that goes wrong around January 1, people would normally think it's a Y2K problem. It may not be. It could be an attack on your system. We are definitely looking at that. Some nuclear disarmanent advocates say nuclear weapons could misfire due to Y2K, or that false signals could appear on buggy early warning systems, causing someone to push the button. What's your response? We will be doing functional level testing... That's what we're about: Trying to mitigate as much of the risk as possible of problems. Nuclear weapons missiles have a great many human interventions that must take place all the way through the system. They're designed that way. That's the first safety factor. Humans have got to decide to do something to make the weapons go. The risk is not that something will go off. What about human reaction to possible false launch signals? We are working with the Russian Federation to ensure that our early warning and their early warning are working and no one has a miscalcualtion. [We are trading staff and having a series of meetings.]
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