Perhaps you still believe "national security" was behind the billion$ of taxpayer dollars that went to for-profit defense contractors between 1945 and Fukuyama's End of History?
Cold War Radar System a Trillion Dollar Fraud - Lester Ernest on RAI (1/4)
"Profit and deception drove cold-war militarization, says Lester Earnest, founder of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford; Earnest says the anti-nuclear bomber SAGE radar system never worked and carried on for 25 years."
Earnest refers to himself as a young man who was a right-wing Republican racist firmly committed to fighting communism in the mid 1950s.
His views began to shift when he went to work on Boeing's ground-to-air missile system called Bomarc, as he relates in this TRNN interview with Paul Jay:
"LESTER EARNEST: ...(Bomarc) was a series of radars all across North America that could supposedly track bombers. And then both manned interceptors of various kinds, like Lockheed and [Convair] aircraft. Boeing had a ground-to-air missile system called the Bomarc. And the idea was to then shoot down any incoming bombers.
"PAUL JAY: So it was essentially a radar system, is what was being created at MIT.
"LESTER EARNEST: Correct.
"PAUL JAY: And you get hired to be part of this.
LESTER EARNEST: Yes. They hired me specifically to design the guidance and control system for the manned interceptors and missiles that were going to shoot at the bombers. However, on my first day there, I was assigned to share an office with a fellow who was already working there.
"This was in MIT’s so-called Lincoln Laboratory in suburban Boston.
"And I asked him what he did. His name was Paul [Senase].
"He said, in a Boston accent, 'I work on rada datar.'... So I said, what do you do about radar jamming? He said, we don’t do that. I thought he was kidding, because if you can’t deal with radar jamming, since all bombers since World War II do it, you’re out of business as an air defense system.
"Well, it turns out he was not kidding, as I confirmed shortly.
"And I kept bringing this up to people in higher levels, and they started holding big conferences trying to figure out a way around this problem, with no success.
"The problem is that with radar jamming you get lots of radar data coming in; more than a computer can deal with. So it would just jam up and fail.
"Well, they carefully avoided this problem.
"They were giving demonstrations of this system over time, in which... they always used bombers that did not use jamming.
"And of course the Russian spies who were observing all of this with instrumentation would know that this was a fake system. But they kept it going for 25 years.
"PAUL JAY: This fraud for 25 years.
"LESTER EARNEST: Total fraud for 25 years."
Hundreds of billion$ over a quarter-century for corporate welfare fraud in just this one example.
Cold War Radar System a Trillion Dollar Fraud - Lester Ernest on RAI (1/4)
"Profit and deception drove cold-war militarization, says Lester Earnest, founder of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford; Earnest says the anti-nuclear bomber SAGE radar system never worked and carried on for 25 years."
Earnest refers to himself as a young man who was a right-wing Republican racist firmly committed to fighting communism in the mid 1950s.
His views began to shift when he went to work on Boeing's ground-to-air missile system called Bomarc, as he relates in this TRNN interview with Paul Jay:
"LESTER EARNEST: ...(Bomarc) was a series of radars all across North America that could supposedly track bombers. And then both manned interceptors of various kinds, like Lockheed and [Convair] aircraft. Boeing had a ground-to-air missile system called the Bomarc. And the idea was to then shoot down any incoming bombers.
"PAUL JAY: So it was essentially a radar system, is what was being created at MIT.
"LESTER EARNEST: Correct.
"PAUL JAY: And you get hired to be part of this.
LESTER EARNEST: Yes. They hired me specifically to design the guidance and control system for the manned interceptors and missiles that were going to shoot at the bombers. However, on my first day there, I was assigned to share an office with a fellow who was already working there.
"This was in MIT’s so-called Lincoln Laboratory in suburban Boston.
"And I asked him what he did. His name was Paul [Senase].
"He said, in a Boston accent, 'I work on rada datar.'... So I said, what do you do about radar jamming? He said, we don’t do that. I thought he was kidding, because if you can’t deal with radar jamming, since all bombers since World War II do it, you’re out of business as an air defense system.
"Well, it turns out he was not kidding, as I confirmed shortly.
"And I kept bringing this up to people in higher levels, and they started holding big conferences trying to figure out a way around this problem, with no success.
"The problem is that with radar jamming you get lots of radar data coming in; more than a computer can deal with. So it would just jam up and fail.
"Well, they carefully avoided this problem.
"They were giving demonstrations of this system over time, in which... they always used bombers that did not use jamming.
"And of course the Russian spies who were observing all of this with instrumentation would know that this was a fake system. But they kept it going for 25 years.
"PAUL JAY: This fraud for 25 years.
"LESTER EARNEST: Total fraud for 25 years."
Hundreds of billion$ over a quarter-century for corporate welfare fraud in just this one example.
