The Pentagon said Thursday it never lost the ability to monitor potential attacks despite a Y2K glitch that temporarily knocked out a significant system of US spy satellites over New Year’s weekend.
Taking strong issue with a report in the Chicago Tribune that the country’s image-collecting satellites were “all but blinded” for nearly three days, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said other satellite systems compensated for the temporary loss of data.
“At no time were we blinded,” Bacon said. “This has been a canard that’s been thrown around in the press from day one. At no time were our intelligence collection systems blinded. That is because we have redundant systems designed precisely to deal with a variety of situations.”
The outage was disclosed New Year’s Day by Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre who said a ground station was temporarily unable to process data from a system of spy satellites because of a Y2K glitch.
But Hamre said a back-up system was put in place within three hours on December 31 and operations were restored by midnight although at a lower level. The system was fully operational by January 3, a Pentagon spokeswoman said at the time.
Bacon said Thursday that the manual backup system operated at 50 percent normal capacity and was working at 90 percent by the time the automatic processing system was back on line.
But he said the data loss amounted to only “a little corner of part of our total intelligence take for several hours.”
“Let me explain it in the simplest way, in the way that most Americans would think of our intelligence systems, that is, the ability to monitor attacks, or potential attacks, or preparations for attacks against the United States,” Bacon said. “We never lost that capability.”
Ironically, the outage was caused by a Y2K fix that had been applied to protect the ground station’s computer from the feared millennium bug.
The patch had never been fully tested because that would have required stopping the system, Bacon said.
“They tested each section of the fix, but they never tested them all together, and it turned out that was the mistake, that one section of the fix didn’t operate compatibly with another section of the fix,” he said.
It turned out to be the only significant Y2K problem experienced over the New Year by the US military, which spent 3.6 billion dollars to fix its computer systems in time for the new millennium.
Copyright 1999 AFP. All rights reserved. The material on this page is provided by AFP and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
