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CHAPTER 4 And neither did | in those first few weeks at the R&D Foreign Technology desk as | racked my brain to come up with a strategy | could recommend to my boss. Amidst the constant twenty four hour motion of an office building where someone is always working, | spent more time at my desk than | did at home. Evenings, weekends, early mornings before the sunrise set the windows across the river in Washington an orange blaze, you could find me staring at the four drawer file cabinet against my corner wall. I'd fiddle with the combination lock, sometimes so absorbed in coming up with a strategy for these strange artifacts that I'd forget the sequence of numbers and have to wait until my brain reset itself. And always, just outside my office was the pent up urgency of crisis, the cocked trigger of a military machine always poised to attack anywhere, anytime, at the sound of a voice on the other end of a scrambled phone behind the soft colored walls of an inner office along the miles of corridors on the inner or outer ring. You think of the Pentagon as something of an amorphous entity with a single mind set and a single purpose. It's probably the same way most people see the structure of the American military: one army, one goal, everybody marches together. But that's almost totally false. The American military - and its home office, the Pentagon is just like any other big business with hundreds of different bureaus, many in direct and explicit competition with each other for the same resources and with different agendas and tactical goals. The separate military branches have different goals when it comes to how America should be defended and wars fought, and it's not uncommon for differences to emerge even within the same branch of the service. | was plunged right into this in my first weeks back in D.C. Debates were still going on from World War Il, sixteen years before, and all of this formed the backdrop of Roswell. There was a huge wrangling within the navy between the aircraft carrier advocates from World War Il and the submariners under Adm. Hyman Rickover, who saw the big flat tops as herds of elephants, slow and vulnerable. Subs, on the other hand, running almost forever on nuclear fuel, could slip deep beneath the sea, lay a thousand or so miles off enemy territory, and blast away at his most vulnerable targets with multiple warhead ICBMs. No way our enemies would escape destruction as long as we had our submarine fleet. So who needs another aircraft carrier with its screen of destroyers and other escorts when just one sub can deliver a knockout punch anywhere, anytime, without enemy orbiting intel satellites snapping pictures of its every move? Look what our subs did to the Japanese in the Pacific; look what the German U-boats did to us in the Atlantic. But you couldn't convince the navy brass of all that in the 1960s. Like the navy, the air force had different advocates for different goals, and so did the army. And when there are competing agendas and strategies articulated by some of the best and brightest people ever to graduate from universities, war colleges, and the ranks of officers, you have hard nosed people playing high stakes games against one other for the big prizes: the lion's share of the military budget. And, at the very center of it all, the place where the dollars get spent, are the weapons development people who work for their respective branches of the military. And that's right where | was in the early days of 1961 shortly after John F. Kennedy came to town to begin his new administration. | had only just returned to Washington from the front lines of a war that nobody thought of as a real war except for us, the guys who were there. It was easier during a real war, like Korea. Your objective is to push the other guy back as far as you can, kill as many of his people as you can, and force him to surrender. You have a very pragmatic strategy: You try it and if it works you keep on doing it until it stops working. But on the front lines in Germany, where the battles were only fought with electron beams, threats, and feints, you had to assess how many soldiers might be killed or how many planes you could bring down if the shooting were to start for real. For Americans this was the Cold War, the combined military machines of two massive superpowers each capable of obliterating each other the moment either one perceived a material weakness in the other's ability to retaliate. So you had a chess game played and replayed every day around the world in scores of different war rooms where different scenarios were formulated to see who would win. It was all a game of numbers and strategies with different armed services around the world winning and losing battles on computers - very elegant and precise. But what very few people outside of government knew was that the Cold War was really a Hot War, fought with real bullets and real casualties, only no one could step forward to admit it because the front lines were within the very government capitals of the countries that were fighting it. | saw this with my own eyes right here in Washington, where the war had been going on since 1947. So with the sides drawn and tensions between the various bureaus and services within the Pentagon, it didn't take me long in those first few weeks to learn the politics of my new job. With the field reports, scientific analyses, medical autopsies, and technological debris from the Roswell crash | had under lock and key, my first rule was to 22 Inside the Pentagon at the Foreign Technology Desk the pentagon never sleeps.