June 25,
2008: China's energetic efforts to
obtain U.S. military technology appear to be succeeding, so additional defenses
have been brought into play. One of the rarely noticed techniques is the "black
budget." This is the Cold War practice of developing, and initially building,
critical weapons and technology in secret. This method, which adds a few
percent to the cost of the "black" (secret) systems, declined after the Cold
War ended in 1991. But by the mid 1990s, it began growing again, and the amount
of money in the black budget ($34 billion for next year) is now twice what it
was 13 years ago. About 44 percent of the black budget is for procurement (14
percent of all procurement for the year), the rest is for Research and
Development (24 percent of all R&D).
If the
Chinese don't even know what is being worked on, or have to expend effort to
just find out that much, they end up with fewer resources with which to steal
really valuable stuff. There are other nations hunting for details on these
projects, as the tech often has commercial uses as well. So painting it black
isn't just to confuse the Chinese.
Another
reason the military likes black projects is that it keeps the media off their
backs until the projects are ready for service. During the R&D phase, there
are all sorts of spectacular failures, which the media loves to jump all over.
The pundits call into question the wisdom of projects because there have been
failures during development. The media is pretty clueless about how R&D
works, and don't really care. Scary headlines are all that counts. Most of the
black projects work out just fine, but without all the usual media drama that
accompanies non-black stuff.
Black
projects do not exist entirely in the black. Congress, or at least selected
(usually for their ability to keep secrets) members have access to details on
how these undertakings are coming along. Of course, you can't always depend on
elected officials to pay attention, but at least they don't always make stuff
up and shout lies from the rooftops.
Finally,
it's not clear just how much intelligence value (in terms of security) black
projects provide. Any data on that aspect is classified. When the Cold War
ended, and we could hear the Russian side of things on many Cold War era
events, it does appear that the black projects kept a lot of information from
the enemy. But part of that was because the Russians tended to be a bit
paranoid about American technological prowess. The Chinese are rather more
deliberate, and much less paranoid. It will be a while before we find out how
effective the current use of "black projects" is in protecting secrets.