I just remembered a story a DoD expert once told me, and I’m wondering if there is any basis for it. He was talking about waste in spending, and he mentioned a story in which Robert McNamara one day as his helicopter arrived at the Pentagon told one of his assistants to shut down all of the antennas on part of the building, just to see what would happen. According to the person telling the story, it was done and nothing happened.
Is there any account of this anywhere?
I’ve read pretty extensively on McNamara, Kennedy, Johnson and the Vietnam War era, and don’t recall that story.
I hope the story is true, because the idea of someone traveling around by helicopter and then complaining about wasteful spending is kinda funny.
How do you “shut down” an antenna? It’s just a hunk of metal. They generally don’t come with on/off switches.
“Do not rotate, radiate, or or otherwise activate this station. Men working aloft. That is all.”
I don’t recall there even being any significant array of antennas on the Pentagon.
Why would there be? It’s an office building, right alongside Washington DC. Far cheaper & easier (and more secure) to just run land lines into the building, just like all the other office buildings around the country.
The military certainly has lots of antennas for communications, but they are not generally located at the pentagon.
I’d expect there to be plenty of antennas on the Pentagon. It’s not just an office building; it’s the headquarters for the US military. If some massive attack wiped out most of the country’s infrastructure, you’d want to still be able to communicate with forces across the world.
I don’t see any in this post-9-11 pic: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/images/pentagon_010914-f-8006r-006.jpg
Might help if the resolution were actually high enough to show antennas. They are there. How does security there communicate? Yelling?
They probably use walkie-talkies, like security in any other building. Those have a little antenna about 6 inches long on each radio.
Pretty hard to image no antenae at the Pentagon at any time.
Any help is always appreciated. Links, pics, rumors.
Give us more background on your source. " DoD expert." He worked for them? Drove them around? Lived next door?
How did he know about the McNamara story? He was there? Heard about it from his wife who was a typing pool employee? Next door neighbor?
At one time when I lived in DC, there was alot of chatter about intercepting signals. I recallt there was a new Russian embassy being built somewhere, and there was a lot of concern that it was in an ideal location for grabbing signals. I dunno really know what happened, but it’s possible that for security reasons the Pentagon would send all it’s secure traffic via land line to an antenna farm in a less vulnerable location. Virtually every country in the world had a building in the vicinity that was packed with who knows what kind of electronic gear.
I had a friend who was part of this radio club that tracked what they could related to government radio traffic. He had a pretty lucrative business with his shortwave system – various embassies paid him to record the shortwave broadcasts of other countries. Not spying or anything, these werren’t encrypted. But he had tables and charts of spectrum allocation, and a bunch of radios that could cover virtually all of it.
He also knew the freqencies that most of the governments used for their encrypted transmissions. He couldn’t decrypt them, but he could tune them in. He did this for me a couple of times. The British had some kind of ‘famous’ encryption system that put out what sounded like musical notes. It had a cool name but I can’t remember it.
He and his buddies would also track major police and and also Secret Service operation just for fun. They could almost always tell when the President was about to travel, especially within the city, based on the radio traffic.
The British did that in WWII. Even without decrypting it, they could tell just from the increased volume of radio traffic that the German bombers were taking off from their air bases in France. So that gave them advance warning of bombing raids heading toward Britain.
Google Earth shows antennae at a couple of locations.
On the corner facing just south of East, (the corner opposite the side damaged in the al Qaeda attack), there is a very obvious dish facing SSW, a less obvious parabolic, (like a radar unit), next to it facing a bit more West, a very tall “tree” that looks like the world’s tallest TV receiving aerial, and a dark grey circle that might be a dish. On the corner to the North, there is are two dishes, facing SSE.
I do not see anything else that I recognize as antennae, but I am not an expert.
Two things occur to me:
the Soviet attempt to intercept messages could very well have resulted in the positioning of most antennae in a separate location, using underground cable to bring the messages into and out of the building.
At the time that McNamara was Secretary of Defense, the nature of electronic communictions was quite different (and the Soviets had not yet gotten their embassy built), and there might well have been more antennae at that time.
OTOH, I suspect that the story is an urban legend pointing out something like the government can’t really do anything correctly.
Stab in the dark: The Lincolnshire Poacher?
Mostly as analyst and researcher, but he was once a director of two programs in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs.
I don’t remember where he said the story came from, that’s why I’m asking. This was about six months ago. He might have even mentioned that the story was apocryphal.
His point wasn’t exactly that (that was a part of it). It was more along the lines of saying that things change so fast at the Pentagon because technology is continuously added and altered which often causes existing structures to be forgotten. Essentially, because the Pentagon is blessed with such generous funds, constant progress causes waste in that there is/was a lot of equipment on site that is/was essentially useless.
I lived in DC from 1980 through the end of 1991, and for a couple of years I worked at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was next door to the Soviet embassy. I know they had a big antenna array, whether for transmitting or receiving I don’t know.
Do you know if this new address corresponds to Mount Alto? I have no idea where that is.
