Forget about the Y2K Armageddon. The two digit year bug likely will cause minor inconveniences to some and will benefit others, who will have a paid vacation until their software gets fixed. Deaths or serious injuries? Not likely, aside from deliberate acts by terrorists or dimwits. The main Y2K threat is the absurd hype generated by the media, government agencies and "experts" selling fixes.
As you may recall, when serious discussions of the programming bug began several years ago it was called the "Year 2000" bug, which quickly shrank to "Y2000," then "Y2K." In a few days this shrinking acronym will go "Poof!" and disappear. The media will likely then turn on the "scientists" who they will claim misled them into believing that something awful was about to happen. More bogosity.
Though Y2K and other shinking acronyms pose no long term threat to mankind, there is a real threat from Ever-Expanding Acronyms (E2A). After tracking this phenomenon for the last 45 years I can confidently predict what the U.S. military-industrial establishment will be working on in the year 3000 if it doesn't self-destruct in the meantime. Unfortunately the picture isn't pretty.
This story begins in the mid-1950s when a tortured acronym was assigned to a project called SAGE, for "Semi-Automatic Ground Environment." This alleged defense system was a technological marvel that integrated radar systems with computers operating in real time that were supposed to direct manned interceptors and ground-to-air missiles against any invading bombers.
However, SAGE was an operational fraud in that it worked only in peacetime demonstrations and would have disintegrated under a real manned bomber attack, not to mention the ballistic missiles that had been developed before SAGE was fully deployed. However, neither the U.S. Congress nor the taxpayers figured out that they had been hoodwinked by collaborators from MIT and the U.S. Air Force, with help from IBM, RAND and its spinoff, SDC.
The elegant lifestyle that SAGE provided for Generals in the Air Defense Command soon induced envy in the Strategic Air Command inasmuch as a number of SAGE computer facilities were placed at SAC bases. Not to be outdone, General Curtis Lemay initiated development of his own computerized system, called the SAC Control System. Given that transistorized computers had become practical just after SAGE was developed, SAC managed to one-up the Air Defense Command by purchasing a more reliable (though equally useless) system.
When the full name of SAC's system was written out as "Strategic Air Command Control System," the chance juxtaposition of the middle words "Command Control" somehow took on mystical meanings in the Pentagon and elsewhere that convinced senior officers that they had discovered a new paradigm that would transform warfare. They set up new organizations devoted to developing additional "Command-Control Systems," sometimes affectionately called "C2 Systems."
The development of C2 Systems became a major growth industry even though they were nearly all operationally inferior to the manual systems that they were supposed to replace. The focus of those running these development programs was on spending all funds allocated to them within each fiscal year, so that they would qualify for an increase the following year. Nobody was expected to meet any particular performance objectives inasmuch as everyone knew that computerizing their command functions would improve performance.
By the early 1960s there was a World Wide Military Command Control System (WWMCCS) being developed for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who could not afford to be out-computerized by their subordinate military units. By the 1970s a new generic term was created for systems of this type, namely "Command-Control-Communications" or "C3."
Though the military intelligence community had been developing their own useless C3 systems from the beginning and had been subject to even less Congressional scrutiny than others by virtue of getting some of their projects funded in the "black budget," they felt left out of the mainstream until the Pentagon coined the term "Command-Control- Communications-Intelligence Systems" or "C3I," which I believe came into vogue in the 1980s.
A major C3I project of that era was called the "Strategic Defense Initiative" or "Star Wars" and managed to surpass all of its predecessors by expending several billion dollars without producing anything tangible, courtesy of President Reagan's rampant imagination, as reportedly stimulated by the bogus advice of Edward Teller.
Earlier this year the government announced the next version of their ever-expanding acronym, as reported in the electronic newsletter Edupage on March 23:
TRENCH WARFARE IN THE INFORMATION AGE
The National Research Council has issued a report warning that military forces are not giving sufficiently serious attention to their Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence Systems (known as C4I). "The rate at which information systems are being relied on outstrips the rate at which they are being protected. The time needed to develop and deploy effective defenses in cyberspace is much longer than the time required to develop and mount an attack." Military analyst Kenneth Allard says, "Twenty-first century combat is the war of the databases, in which information flows must go from the foxhole to the White House and back down again." (AP 22 Mar 99)
It is interesting to note that even though computers have been a central element of the Command-Control- . . . systems from the beginning, the word "computer" was not incorporated into the generic name until more than 40 years after this line of development began. The fact that it is now included suggests that computers have somehow become respectable, even though most modern C4I systems appear to be about as useless as their ancient predecessors.
Given that the C2 acronym expanded to C4I in just 40 years, we can calculate the average expansion interval as 40/3 = 13 1/3 years. Based on this history and assuming that the field continues evolving at about the same rate in the "C" direction, we can expect that by the end of the next millenium the generic acronym will be "C79I." Writing out the full name and explaining it will substantially increase the paperwork required to document these projects, which will further enlarge the taxpayers' burden.
Alternatively if there is a more balanced evolution involving the addition of both "C" and "I" terms, with the next step possibly being to append "Internet" to the name, then in another thousand years the military-industrial complex will be building C41I39 systems. These programs and their documentation will ensure full employment for our nation, so that our descendants and their corporate employers can look forward to an increasingly prosperous future as long as nobody attacks us with real weapons.
However, if anything goes wrong with this projection, Y2K will look like a picnic by comparison. Have a Happy New Year and a Marvelous Millenium!
Les Earnest (les@cs.stanford.edu) Phone: 650 941-3984
12769 Dianne Drive; Los Altos Hills, CA 94022 Fax: 650 941-3934
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