*EPF202 01/04/00
Defense Department Report, Tuesday, January 4
(Hamre on DOD/Y2K) (780)
DOD PLANS TO CLOSE Y2K WATCH CENTER
The Department of Defense planned to dismantle its operations center set up for the Year 2000 rollover on January 4, Deputy Secretary John Hamre told reporters at the regular weekly Pentagon briefing January 4. Calling military preparedness for the Y2K rollover, "the most comprehensive effort the department has ever taken in the area of command and control -- literally tens of thousands of people were involved," he thanked all the uniformed and civilian men and women "who made such a huge difference in tackling this problem."
Hamre described the turn-of-the-millenium weekend as "remarkably successful," adding "We've had 2,101 mission critical systems that we had to repair. Everything worked fine. Of our non-mission critical systems, we had about 4,000 to 5,000 of them that we were modifying and things worked remarkably well."
Of the one widely-reported glitch, the momentary loss of one segment of the DOD's satellite-based intelligence capability, Hamre said that "for a period of several hours we were not able to process the information" from a reconnaissance satellite system. He called the failure an "anomaly...a significant event with insignificant consequences."
"We were in continuous control of the satellites...and they operated, but we were not able to process the information," Hamre said. He added that defense operations "were in an operational backup mode within several hours, which was not as efficient as the normal day-to-day operation but became increasingly efficient, so that by the end of the period when we had the final fix in place, which was Sunday afternoon, we were fully operational with the backup mode."
In generic terms, he described the event as "a minor loss of the normal sequence of things that we observe on an ongoing basis from this asset. It was not significant in quantitative terms" nor in military terms, he said "because the backup system took care of all the high priority military requirements."
Hamre said the momentary failure was "a huge success story even though we would rather have not had it happen, because you had the right people in place; they were able to do the diagnostics in a very short period of time. They were able to put in place the backup system....We had very, very little operational loss because we had prepared for this."
Normally the DOD doesn't report on the operational availability of any of its intelligence assets, Hamre said. "This was an exception on the first, to tell you that we had an anomaly, because it was related to Year 2000," and a commitment had been made to be transparent.
Hamre said that he did not intentionally mislead the press at a year-end briefing, because he didn't then know the extent of the problem. However, he added, "We were on a global alert for potential terrorist activities around the world," and had he known of the problem, he might not have mentioned it for fear of alerting "the bad guys around the world."
He also said the problem of hackers into the DOD computer network is "growing every month." During the rollover, he said, the department disconnected a number of potential penetration efforts before they could do damage, adding "I know we had four instances where we pulled the plug on some hackers that were trying to break in."
DOD has monitoring stations on all of its approximately 900 networks with special reporting information inside the software, 24-hour, seven-day-a-week watch centers, and the ability to remotely disconnect unauthorized people, he said.
Asked about the huge expense of the Y2K operation, Hamre said it was well worth the money. "This was an investment we had to make. We had to make sure that we could operate without any real loss of capability during this period," he said.
The failure of the reconnaissance system was a good case in point, Hamre added. "The backup system was there, the right people were on station at just the right place, within hours we were able to get a corrective action...and we had that for every one of our systems, whether it was a satellite system, a warning system, a tank, an aircraft carrier -- absolutely across the board, we were ready. Every one of our installations was ready. That costs money."
For the future, "a continuing investment in information security" can be expected, Hamre said, and the DOD budget will reflect this, including funds for computer systems and a much stronger encryption system -- all to be built on the foundation of theY2K preparedness experience.
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State.)
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