Thursday, May 8, 2008

Feeling I'm a bit played
Posted by Peter A. Stinson

Michael DeKort reports,

A source who wants to remain anonymous just contacted me and told me that the "uninstalled" C4ISR TEMPEST equipment was installed, failed TEMPEST tests and was removed so they could alter their story. I was told a significant amount of equipment was removed weeks ago. I am working to get the person to provide data or to come forward in some manner.

Wow. If that proves to be true... I imagine that folks even outside the blogosphere will be outraged. Removing the equipment and then claiming... Oh, were this to have happened...

Reminds me of a guy in Manistee, Michigan, who wanted to sink his boat to collect the insurance company's money. So, several days after the Coast Guard's boats went in the water, and right after the evening meal, the guy goes out, punches a hole in the hull and calls the Coast Guard to come save him. The station launches the UTB and heads out. There's one radar contact heading south along the shore, matching the UTB's speed. When they arrived to where they'd first seen the contact, they found the guy in the water. He was wearing a gumby suit and had a strobe light along with enough pyro to be seen in Chicago.

He claimed he'd hit something and started taking on water and had just enough time to get his survival equipment on.

The bad news is that he sank the boat in only 50 feet of water. Following a dive by the police, they raided the guy's home and found all the electronic gear from his boat boxed up in the garage.

He wasn't content with getting the insurance money. He'd planned on selling the electronic gear, thus adding to his income. The insurance company would pay for them to be replaces, and the folks buying the goods would get to double the take.

Had he only traveled another mile or two off-shore, he'd have put the boat too deep for a routine dive, and it wouldn't have been worth the cost.

So, I imagine all the C4SR stuff is boxed up and in some dilapidated old warehouse and ready to be paid for again.

Oh, and did I mention that I'm feeling as if I've been played?

Posted on Thursday, May 08, 2008
   

Labels: by Peter Stinson

10 comments:

At Friday, May 9, 2008 6:53:00 AM EDT Michael DeKort said...

My issue with the equipment removal wasn't that they would be paid again. It's about testing and fraud.

I believe they equipment (or most of it) was on the boat and it failed TEMPEST testing. Removing it allows them to say that the equipment isn't installed so final testing hasn't occurred or been completed. Then the DD-250 open items list equipment that is not installed not failures. This also allows them to not have to waive those failures prior to the DD-250 and to do so later with less fanfare. OF course this is all ridiculous and blown out of the water by the CG's own statements including yesterday. How did they know there were any issues at all if the equipment wasn't there? Was it in the boat "temporarily" just for testing? Blore said they recently ran 8 straight days of TEMPEST/IA testing - with 2 shifts. What equipment were they testing? What has been "installed" and what hasn't?

 

At Friday, May 9, 2008 7:51:00 PM EDT Peter A. Stinson said...

Figurative language; I don't expect we'll pay for the sh*t twice.

I do, expect, however, that we must get this information "out there."

I've submitted a FOIA request... we'll see what happens.

 

At Saturday, May 10, 2008 4:18:00 PM EDT Granite Island Group said...

Even a blind man can see what the Coast Guard is trying to do.

http://www.tscm.com/DeepWaterDooDoo/

The Bottom Line

These ships have since been decommissioned due to the hulls cracking and water leaks, due to a poorly designed modification and shoddy workmanship. There is good reason to believe they will never be in service again. Once the hulls cracked, all efforts to resolve the TEMPEST problems appear to have been completely suspended.

The Coast Guard now has eight worthless ships, for which they wasted $64 million dollars… how much money have they wasted on other assets that do not work, and will the new National Security Cutter be as equally a monumental failure… will it actually float, or will it too develop huge cracks in the hull and massive leaks of classified information?



Recommendations

Salvage all usable electronics, tactical, and mechanical equipment from all eight cutters.

Sell the stripped ships for scrap metal

Demand a partial refund of monies from ICGS, and consider DLA debarment proceedings the responsible contractors for fraud.

Immediately suspend all projects associated with ICGS and with Lockheed Martin in regards to the Deepwater program until all Coast Guard assets have been completely brought up to par, and completely re-inspected from scratch.

Request that this Committee and the U.S. Department of Justice investigate the faulty workmanship that caused the hull cracks, and all other shoddy workmanship present on this project, and that criminal proceedings be undertaken should such be warranted.

Request the U.S. Department of Justice immediately initiate a counterintelligence investigation into the TEMPEST flaws on these ships to determine if these flaws were the result of the efforts of a foreign government, or merely just shoddy design and workmanship.

Request the U.S. Government, and more specifically the TEMPEST engineers and students from the National Security Agency be allowed to examine this ship as a “lesson learned” program before the ships are dismantled or stripped. By studying the problems (that still doubtlessly exists) in these ships, the national TEMPEST and TSCM can be enhanced as a whole by learning from these mistakes. This would turn these eight ships into a temporary training range for the TSCM and TEMPEST profession.

Conduct an investigation into the entire Coast Guard TEMPEST program to determine the extent to which the USCG was, or is issuing waivers in lieu of legitimate TEMPEST inspections, installations, maintenance, and repairs.

It appears that none of the ships has ever actually passed a TEMPEST inspection, and that a huge number of major flaws were found on all ships, and that after the first four of ships grossly failing that the stopped all TEMPEST testing for the second four ships.

In order to perform a TEMPEST, NONSTOP, and HIJACK testing you must have all operational gear installed and active. If the piece of equipment requires a key to operate (such as the ARC-210) you use a testing key or a simulator during the testing, and then once you have IATO authority to operate you can load up the real keys and software, and retest.

Your Committee also needs to request the work schedules of all USCG, and SPAWAR TEMPEST employees and contractors to see how often they went out to the shipyard before the instrumented tests, and then investigate their activities during the periods of interest. Essentially, you want to see all of their movements and activities during the entire deepwater program.

In my professional opinion none of the ships (all 8 of them) are capable of passing either a visual or an instrumented TEMPEST examination, but rather failed miserably, which required that the government hold back money until the failure points were corrected. There this minimal documentation that any of these problems were actually fully corrected after delivery (other then a few minor problems, when the major problems were ignored).

The bottom line, is that based on the documents I have reviewed these ships are all a major liability to our national defense.

It is possible that the USCG has corrected the entire problem, and has had the ships subjected to a new visual and instrumented inspection, but there is no documentation to even hope that they have done this.

The Coast Guard has been very obstructive to this inquiry, has not been reasonably responsive in providing information, and instead provides mere fragments. They seem to issuing glowing press releases about the Deepwater program instead releasing the documents detailing the TEMPEST and other problems. In a nutshell, the Coast Guard has been giving this committee nothing but lip service.

While the Navy did not actually certify the TEMPEST inspections, but were merely contractors that performed the instrumented tests, while the Coast Guard performed the visual inspections.

Instead, the Coast Guard “self certified” themselves, but lacked the technical competencies and equipment to perform the instrumented TEMPEST tests on their own. This is a tell-tale sign that the USCG should not have been involved in their own TEMPEST program at all. The Navy SPAWAR does issue "pass/fail" recommendations
on USN installations, but they specifically do not do that for the Coast Guard.

After carefully studying the documents relative to the Coast Guard Deepwater program I have become reasonably convinced that there has likely been criminal conduct and gross negligence on the part of one or more Coast Guard, and Navy employees or members, and that there has likely also been criminal conduct and gross negligence on the part of the contractor, and subcontractors in a secondary capacity.

In my professional opinion the bungling of the Deepwater 123' program (as least on the TEMPEST, COMSEC, Ciphering, and Technical Security side) has resulted in the "losing defense information" and the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, codes, ciphers, and related systems as defined by Title 18, Sec. 793, and Section 798 due to gross negligence.

It is my professional opinion that by the Coast Guard operating these ships absent proper TEMPEST inspections that they, the Navy, and the contractor have disclosed highly classified information to our enemies.

The issuing of these TEMPEST waivers is the smoking gun, and I feel that they are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

If the Navy had even the slightest idea that waivers were being claimed and that the problems were not being corrected (bur rather falsified or the records doctored) they were duty bound to notify the cognizant authorities that the ships did not meet NSA TEMPEST standards, and hence to move to revoke any waivers.

I believe that the proper terminology is "accessory before the fact", as SPAWAR knew of upcoming illegal activities involving the disclosure of classified information, and while they may not have been the certifying authority for the USCG, he had full knowledge that at least one or more ships failed.

If the USCG is not qualified to perform these instrumented tests themselves, then they are not qualified to issue the waivers either. It is a bit of a double-edged sword of many excuses.

"TEMPEST waivers for any visual discrepancies" can also called "doctoring a TEMPEST inspection," since they could not get the ship to actually pass the inspection they covered the discrepancies with waivers and falsified documents. In some circles this is also called “pencil whipping” the inspection.

The results of the instrumented TEMPEST inspection are not classified, the actual report is classified, or more specifically 10% of the final report is classified. I would point out that during the DD250 that the USCG discloses that both the visual and instrumented inspections failed.

IATO and ATO can be granted if all of the TEMPEST visual and instrumented violations where falsified with "waivers". They could have also issued waivers for screen doors on submarines, but that does not mean that the submarines will be any safer or more secure.

The "Coast Guard 123 WPB class TEMPEST waivers" comments means that the Coast Guard just decided to abandon the TEMPEST standards and inspections right after PADRE failed (again), but gave PADRE Authority to Operate anyway (with falsified TEMPEST waivers). So discovered that the only way to get the ships to pass was to not inspect them in the first place.

 

At Saturday, May 10, 2008 9:23:00 PM EDT Mike said...

Holy Falsified Tempest Batman! (Caveat - FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE!)Ouch..! That about says it all...

If true, that was the most complete and succinct version of the story that I've read so far and aligns real well with my previous experiences serving my previous masters inside the beltway Robin... This really is National Security stuff folks, no kidding, its too bad others don't really see it that way.

Another reason I moved to the mountains. With these guys running things, we aren't safe near the coast... ;) MM

 

At Saturday, May 10, 2008 11:34:00 PM EDT Ken Talton said...

Admiral Rosa came and talked to our unit about Coast Guard issues a month ago and took questions.

Deepwater came up.

The admiral said that the aviation component was proceeding quite well but that there had been many expensive lessons learned on the maritime side.

We were told that the structural issues on Bertholf were vastly overblown and had been corrected and that the C4I issue was in fact the big problem. The ship will commission though it will take a long time to get the C4I stuff TEMPEST certified. The vessel is still a useful asset and will be capable of doing SAR and other ops without TEMPEST standards being met.

I would expect that the repair of the C4I system is going to be along the lines of George Washington's Axe.

Nevertheless, despite the expense and gravity of this procurement debacle, I see no reason to get the vapors over this. Getting the ship certified for sea duty sans its full C4I suite was IMHO the correct thing to do. I assume the ship can operate with bolt on encrypted radios from the Army if it comes to it.

Having a 500 million dollar "Building 750" sitting as a humiliation to the Coast Guard does not save any mariners in distress nor leverage any good out of this situation.

Regards the CYA operation:

The Coast Guard has not had much experience in procurement for the simple reason that we havent been able to buy a lot. The only recent experience was with the 87's, the buoy Tenders and the Healy. All went relatively smoothly as I understand it in part because the shipyards in question were small, civilian and generally ethically run....certainly in comparison with those who make money off the byzantine DOD procurement system.

The officers who took this job did not cover themselves in glory, but it is unclear that they were incompetent or negligent as opposed to simply being inexperienced and unsupported in these matters. The contractor in question successfully butt-raped the Navy with regards to the LPD 17. The USN has far more experience in dealing with defense contractors.

In the military, discipline and professional development is not about vengance, it is about correcting mistakes and preventing their repetition.

Throwing senior officers overboard because they got set up for failure might give David Axe a woody, but it is not good leadership. To the extent that the Commandant is standing by and protecting his officers, many of whom have had long and honorable careers in the service of their country, he is doing exactly what good chiefs do for their enlisted people every day.

The priority now is to learn what went wrong, apply those lessons, see that this doesn't happen again and get the ship and her sister operational.

If there WAS wrongdoing on the part of any USCG officers then there is always Leavenworth, but I think the Commandant is doing the proper thing trying to fix the problem rather than hunt for scapegoats.

I'm a third class enlisted and these issues are waaay above my paygrade, but the whole thing at this point seems to be beating a dead horse.

The ship has defective C4I.
Toatally...
It is not unseaworthy, it is new and there is a job it can do.
The USCG certified the ship as commissioned so they can use an imperfect asset to save lives and such. In order to do so they used "YN-fu" to bend the pencil so they could ignore the broken radios and yet still accept the ship.

This seems like a reasonable response to a bad situation.

 

At Sunday, May 11, 2008 10:20:00 AM EDT Michael DeKort said...

Ken Talton

You have swallowed so much cool-aid I am not sure I can help you.

Do you know what C4ISR is?

Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. Included in that are all sensors and navigation equipment. Take C4ISR away and the ship can do what? Guide by the stars? Communicate only in the clear? Navigate bad weather how? What condition will the other NSCs be in? Or the FRCs and OPCs? (Even if all that is wrong is secure comms relative to C4ISR they still have a severely minimized mission profile. Even SAR would be affected when it involved military or other government support missions.)

As for the Commandant, the other officers being put in a bad spot and the procurement experience gap - that was true a couple years ago - not since. While I agree the contractors are far more at fault and should never have put the CG in this position the CG has squandered their opportunity to pin it all on ICGS. The Commandant, his staff and anyone else in leadership in the CG had a chance to take that out, do the right thing and hold ICGS accountable during the 123 debacle. Instead they aided in the cover up and in doing so set the pattern for the NSC, FRCs, OPCs etc. (The Porter illegal and improper TEMPEST waivers from the 123s was the turning point. The DHS IG blew their investigation in this area and their report found no major discrepancy in the 123 TEMPEST area. Instead of admitting the issue occurred and taking responsibility for it the CG took advantage of the incompetence of the DHS IG in this area. They and ICGS actually began using the IG report to emphasize there were no TEMPEST problems. This was the beginning of the end). We are at the point where all of the leadership involved have to be removed and the entire program and leadership of the CG and ICGS turned on it's head. These people are dug in so deep they see no way out. They know that coming clean now would mean the end of their careers and probable criminal prosecution. As such there is nothing motivating them to do anything other than maintain status quo. Which for the most part has been working for them. Given the lack of follow though and intestinal fortitude of the majority of the oversight organizations it seems they may very well get away with it.

 

At Sunday, May 11, 2008 11:36:00 AM EDT Ken Talton said...

***Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. Included in that are all sensors and navigation equipment. Take C4ISR away and the ship can do what?

You must be an IT guy. :)

The answer to your question is "most of what it needs to do for non defense operations."


***Guide by the stars?"
Sadly no, that is a dying skill set.
******Communicate only in the clear?
Possibly...but we don't need super ninja stealth for SAR ops. Additionally the austere com systems from the 87's or even a small boat or an army radio could be bolted on and used for any encryption. We will make due.

***Navigate bad weather how?

With any commercial off the shelf navigation system bolted on and not tied into the defective main system.

This is seriously suboptimal of course, but it is VASTLY preferable to not having the ship and going back to square one. Coasties will extemporize and make due.

I am not suggesting that this is not a debacle. I am saying that having a temper tantrum and throwing away the whole ship is not the best of a bad set of choices..it is possibly the worst.

You make good points regards the rest of the program. Given the level of professionalism displayed by our contractors and our glorious DHS overlords, I would think that your and Axes' solution would be well applied to the last 6 of these lemons and possibly the Waeche as well. These ships cost 500 million apiece, we could buy 60 of the New Zealand OPVs for the cost of the rest of these ships....

Or icebreakers....

Or off the shelf patrol boat designs.

Or.....you know...stuff

This ship however, is in hand. It is not perfect and really less than we would want.... much like our other large utters that are obsolete, worn out and yet do their job.

It is foolish to throw it away. The Coast Guard is a military organization, we don't retreat into harbor upon receipt of a hangnail. This ship can be put to good use by sailors, of which we are not exactly short.

That is not Kool Aid sir...that is the unpleasant reality.

Thank you for your prompt response to my post.

 

At Sunday, May 11, 2008 7:08:00 PM EDT Michael DeKort said...

Mr. Talton

Good points. I am not advocating throwing away the ship. I should think 8 useless 123s headed for reef duty is plenty.

However - I did hear that the TEMPEST problems involve interior ship design and construction issues so severe it may not be cost effective to fix.

I also take exception to you "temper tantrum" comment. I do not think my actions over the past 4.5 years amounts to a "temper tantrum". I think the trivializes my efforts and family's sacrifice.

Your point about Bolting" things on is accurate but only to a point. And while it may help them in a pinch it is a band aid.

The real problem here is that ALL of the C4ISR/TEMPEST issues were avoidable. The CG was warned on many occasions - well before the NSC final design. I know because I was the one who warned them starting in 2004 through the hearings etc. Jim Atkinson and I both predicted the NSC TEMPEST debacle at our hearing last Arpril. It happened because the CG made some very bad and illegal decisions relative to the 123s that set a design pattern for every ship after that. (The DHS IG erring in the report and giving them cover didn't help). This is not first in class or edge of technology stuff. Those involve understandably unavoidable issues. The C4ISR/TEMPEST issues were caused by incompetence and ethical bankruptcy. Both of which have not only not ended but look to carry on through every NSC, FRC and OPC.

 

At Sunday, May 11, 2008 7:09:00 PM EDT Michael DeKort said...

Latest article - new information

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=39988&dcn=todaysnews

Here they mention for the first time they have been
testing TEMPEST for about a year. Apparently it will
take "several months" to work out the bugs and then
the Navy runs a 21 day test.

How is it that this is not a trial card? The CG said
all the trial card will be fixed in several weeks yet
TEMPEST issues and the final testing of TEMPEST and
secure comms is months away and that is not on a trial
card? As a matter of fact there are no C4ISR trial
cards? Was this because they don't want the issues
logged? Are they on a separate list - like they were
with the 123s? Wonder what the DD-250 open items say?
How much money was held back - and for what?

(Remember when the CG's own blog said TEMEPST issues
may delay delivery in February? then they puled back
and said TEMEPST would not delay the boat? Looks like
they managed that by minimizing the importance and
impact of the C4ISR systems and TEMEPST so they could
take delivery of the ship. If there is no money held
back or the money held back is not significant it
would appear the CG let ICGS slide again. Remember
the 123 refund of almost $100million is still not
resolved)

 

At Sunday, May 11, 2008 9:30:00 PM EDT Mike said...

If I may gentlemen, jump into the fray... C4ISR, in today's CG, and in today's world of operations, is a deal killer if done incorrectly.

SAR, while one of the CG's missions, is not our only mission - we are a multi-mission organization. When our assets sail or fly, we undertake a responsibility to execute the various missions we are being paid to execute by congress, as reps of the "American Tax Payer". Therefore we would never undertake SAR only, and never without our latest and greatest equipment or training - if we did, we would be held liable legally if we screwed it up.

Couple that with the fact that our enemies (drug lords, communist bloc countries, rogue threats of all kinds, among many others), watch every move we make and record and use that information to try and counter our efforts. Any transmissions 'in the clear' would seriously compromise our security and possibly give the bad guys a free advantage over us, or others in the game as well.

The short version, while I like the can do attitude, the senior folks know better how complex this game is on many fronts. Without somebody finding a solution to all this C4ISR stuff, these vessels are very expensive fishing charter vessels at best, not USCG assets... I hope that this all works out, in the meantime, we are all at risk until this is all figured out - time is ticking and the bad guys are looking for opportunities to exploit; wonder what they are thinking about all this..? MM

 

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