"By 8:56 a.m., it was evident that Flight 77 [which hit the Pentagon] was lost. The Federal Aviation Administration, already in contact with the Pentagon about the hijackings out of Boston, notified the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, of American 77 at 9:24, 28 minutes later."

"'We Have Some Planes,' Hijacker Told Controller", New York Times, 16 October 2001

"I want to get though to the White House to reiterate that we need air cover."

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik
at the World Trade Center just after the second attack on the World Trade Center
Time Magazine, 7 January 2002

When you look at all of the different military security agencies that [Ptech has] as customers, it's very difficult to imagine how they would not be encountering sensitive information, classified information.

“The FAA recognized the need for leveraging its IT investment, with a means of centralizing activities and introducing consistency and compatibility within the operating systems environment. A Ptech consulting team was organized to use activity modeling to identify key functions that could be examined for improvement in network management, network security, configuration management, fault management, performance management, application administration, network accounting management, and user help desk operations.”

“ Ptech is Total Information Awareness . . .“Programs based on datamining are powerful analytical tools; finding meaningful patterns in an ocean of information is very useful. But when such a tool is driven by a high-caliber artificial intelligence core [P-tech], its power gets spooky. The datamining capability becomes a smart search tool of the AI [Artificial Intelligence] program, and the system begins to learn. . . . ’Neural Network’ programming is modeled on the computational techniques used by the human brain - an electrochemical computer that uses neurons instead of semiconductors; the firing or non-firing of neurons instead of ones and zeros. With neural networking, software has become much smarter than it had been . . .

“ . . . Ptech's Framework can exploit the patterns it detects and extrapolate future probabilities. Then it can integrate itself with the computers from which it's getting the information and intervene in their functioning. The result is a tool for surveillance and intervention. The program can identify suspect streams of cash in a banking network and allow a bank officer to freeze the suspect assets. Of course, a user could direct the same program to prevent detection. It can discover salient anomalies in a person's movements through a city and either flag those anomalies for further scrutiny, or erase them from the record. And it can find errant flights in an air traffic map and initiate an intercept response. Or not.”

“Gingrich had been out of the House for nearly 3 years, but he was an ally of Rumsfeld and a member of his Defense Policy Board, an influential advisory group. Gingrich was also one of a number of military theorists in the nineteen-eighties who tried to imagine a new American military suited to a world beyond the Cold War. Their intellectual patron was the late Air Force Colonel John Boyd, whose cardinal tenet was a concept that he called the “OODA loop”. (From http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/arti...030630fa_fact3)

Wood, Bradley and Schudel, Gregg, Modeling Behavior of the Cyber Terrorist, (pre-publication draft presented at various 1999 DARPA Workshops). This paper identifies an adversary cycle that leads to such a “packet of death”. This cycle consist of an Adversary Orient, Observe, Decide and Act (OODA) loop consisting of intelligence gathering, preparation, and development, live network discovery, test-practice-replan, attack and damage assessment processes.

“Information warfare, in its essence, is about…the way humans think and, more important, the way humans make decisions.” (Stein, 1996)

”Effective information operations entail some of the most extreme warfighter demands ever encountered. This is especially true for information operations, where the prospects include the fastest, most numerous, most anonymous, and most rapidly reconstitutable attackers in military history. The information operations mission must be accomplished in an environment (“cyberspace”) where “fog” is common and routine access can become pure “friction.” Moreover, the operations tempo is marked in milliseconds, and this makes information operations the warfighting effort most reflective of Col. John Boyd’s (1987) analysis in terms of adversaries’ OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loops.

High performance information operations entail global situation awareness (SA), efficient threat identification, and effective attack assessment. To achieve these ends watch center staff must monitor, manage, and manipulate data streams and information artifacts large in number, high in complexity, and dynamic in the extreme.”

From a paper published on March 23, 2000 entitled “CYBER WARRIOR: INFORMATION SUPERIORITY THROUGH ADVANCED MULTI-SENSORY COMMAND AND CONTROL TECHNOLOGIES” found here: http://www.hec.afrl.af.mil/Publications/n-101.pdf .

“Christopher Ryan Henry, SAIC's corporate vice president for strategic assessment and development, previously worked at the the Pentagon as deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, serving with Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith." In 2006, they were dropped from an Iraq war psy-ops project.

“… Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego, to assess the security of the company’s voting software.... Many SAIC officers are current or former government and military officials. Retired Army Gen. Wayne Downing, who until last summer served as chief counter-terrorism expert on the National Security Council, is a member of SAIC’s board. Also on the board is former CIA Director Bobby Ray Inman, who served as director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the CIA and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. During the first Bush administration and while on the board of SAIC, Inman was a member of the National Foreign Intelligence Board, an advisory group that reports to the president and to the director of Central Intelligence.

Retired Adm. William Owens, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who sits on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board, served as SAIC’s president and CEO and until recently was its vice chairman. He now is chairman of the board of VoteHere, which seeks to provide cryptography and computer software security for the electronic election industry. Robert Gates, ex-CIA director, former SAIC board member and a veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal, also is on the board of VoteHere.”

The Boydian approach tracks extremely well with the nonlinear dynamics of war. He advocates that we "Operate inside adversary's observation-orientation-decision-action loops to enmesh adversary in a world of uncertainty, doubt, mistrust, confusion, disorder, fear, panic, chaos,..and/or fold adversary back inside himself so that he cannot cope with events/efforts as they unfold." He refers to the Strategic Game as "A game in which we must be able to diminish adversary's ability to communicate or interact with his environment while sustaining or improving ours".

"Generate many non-cooperative centers of gravity, as well as disorient, disrupt, or overload those that adversary depends on, in order to magnify friction, shatter cohesion, produce paralysis, and bring about his collapse."

… At the same time, we deny the adversary the same ability by disrupting his interactions to create non-cooperative centers....

It is interesting to view Boyd's legacy to us in light of the role that new technology plays in our ability to wage war. It has become very vogue in some circles to invoke Boyd's OODA Loop as justification for new, superior technology to win "the information war". The idea is that we can be almost omniscient with regards to situational awareness, and become capable of replan and redirection at ever increasing speeds.