VI. They Came From Outer Space
To get a feel for the layers of contracting involved in the shield, I visit the missile defense conference held each year in Huntsville, Alabama. More than 250 corporate booths stretch across three massive convention halls -- 150,000 square feet of exhibition. Navigating the sea of contractors requires a map identifying numerous presentations and lectures, each color-coded with a piece of red, blue or yellow tape on the floor directing the visitor to the proper room.

A few displays intend to be entertainment, like the photo booth where one can get a picture taken in a replica of Neil Armstrong's moon-walk spacesuit. Otherwise, the place is all business. Every hallway is crammed with tables; convention halls the size of sports arenas are overrun with displays by contractors that include portions of a jet wing, massive satellites and other impressively large chunks of space technology. The corporate layering of missile defense is on full display, and the cover story in a recent issue of National Defense magazine, the house organ of the missile defense industry, captures the upbeat mood: gold rush: companies worldwide battle for u.s. defense dollars.

I look at the list of talks being presented on the periphery of the hardware displays and informational booths. The title of one catches my eye: interplanetary defense. It's listed right after ufo: real or myth? I follow the color-coded tape on the floor and take my place in the audience, waiting for the talk to start.

Discussing interplanetary defense against aliens might seem premature to pre-Rumsfeldian thinkers, but this is where the true genius of missile defense shows itself. In 2001, when Rumsfeld took over the Pentagon, he wanted to streamline what he viewed as cumbersome military spending to get past red tape and other bureaucratic obstacles. So he turned to a new way of thinking about weapons systems -- one that meant no longer viewing missile defense as a product to be finished but rather as something that is routinely and infinitely updated, like a computer's operating software. The name for this concept is "spiral development." This means that you build a weapons system not with a fixed design and completion date in mind, but with a more flexible idea of what you are shooting for, one that is subject to endless change and revision. Rumsfeld and missile defense proponents defend this change by arguing that it creates new efficiencies. But it also means, according to the Defense Department's own Office of Operational Testing and Evaluation, that it is impossible to assess the progress of missile defense because spiral development no longer "produces a fixed configuration with which to judge a system's operational effectiveness and suitability or survivability against criteria based on military mission requirements." Or as Philip Coyle, the former director of the testing office, tells me, "It's like building a house without a floor plan. You can do it, but you get a real expensive house, and your spouse won't be happy."

At the interplanetary defense seminar, an astronomer named Doc Travis takes the podium and introduces himself as a "high-tech redneck" who has worked for the Defense Department and NASA. To make his case, he explains that one can use the Drake Equation to determine the odds of space aliens coming to our planet and encountering our missile defense shield. In case you want to run your own calculations, here is the formula: N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L

"The probability that there is an alien who could visit Earth," Travis says, "ended up being 0.0000000043 percent at the worst and 0.19 percent in the most perfect case." If aliens attack, he adds, we'd probably use a Directed Energy Weapon against them -- but there are problems. "Our weapons could probably hit them, but I don't think they would do any damage," Travis laments. "So my prediction is that we have to build new weapons and come up with new technology. That's eally the reality."

And that's the true beauty of spiral development. Theoretically, planning for an alien invasion is as much on the drawing board as the next upgrade to the SBX.

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