What, no sources? I'll cite one for you, from this purported seminar given to discuss problems with command and control at a guest presentation at the Center for Information Policy Research in July of last year. His authorization to make the following statement is unclear, and so is his source for the data. Furthermore, he does not stop to address the political implications of what he is revealing. It is still interesting:
Stenbit: He's younger than I am, so his first-hand data probably also come from back in the 1970s.What is clear is that we had a communications breakdown with the USS Liberty. Moreover, we had a policy of poor communication with Isreal. And we insisted on maintaining poor communications with Israel during the war, which clearly could have made conditions worse for the USS Liberty.Anyway, on the telecommunications side I do know what was happening. We were having a whole series of major failures. The North Koreans captured the USS Pueblo in January 1963. It took them thirty hours to get the Pueblo back to North Korea, but it took us thirty-six hours to find out that there were Marine aircraft on Okinawa that could have intercepted it and saved it. The fact that the Koreans were slow is interesting; the fact that we were slower is even more interesting.
The Israelis called us up one day and said, "If you don't get that ship, the Liberty, out of this place we're going to sink it in twenty-four hours."4 We couldn't tell the ship to move when we got the data back because it was already under the water, because it took more than twenty-four hours for the data to wander in through the system and come out at the other end.
A ton of such cases were going on, and there was a whole committee in Congress carrying out permanent investigations of the failures of Pentagon communications. The DOD telecom- munications and intelligence offices were formed at about the same time, and they were both formed because of these problems. Actually, the key for both of them was to get involved in the integration of acquisition, development, policy, and actual strategy. We were able to use computers--the environment was getting more automated--but in those days there weren't any networks. DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] was just thinking about inventing the ARPANET in 1969. I think Mr. Gore got caught up in this a little bit, but what he did was about ten years later. It was basically a 1980 phenomenon--before there was any rigorous and robust network.
On the intelligence side it was the same issue. It was highly compartmentalized. The NSA [National Security Agency] didn't tell anybody what it did; the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] didn't tell anybody what it did. We were taking pictures in those days, and the people who took them didn't tell anybody what they did, and so forth. The genesis was sort of "Let me have some places to go and work on this problem."
If we've learned anything here, it's to be more communicative with Isreal.
Awfully close to a "smoking gun" if true.