but we don’t see any purpose in killing each other just yet, and we’re kissy-kissy around Congress and the White House so’s the project will succeed. You being George’s boy, I expect you to go along one hunnerd percent. Right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Damn right. Let me tell you about Peacemaker. No! Let me tell you about intelligence. Intelligence and the modern battle. Now, you’re an intel guy. Wha’d you do in the Navy? Carrier intel—what do you guys call it, CAG AI? Right. You got lots of intel from this source and that, you patched it together and strained it and shaped it and you looked at the target lists and the briefing books that Uncle provided, and then you made up something comprehensible for the jet jocks, and they took off and did what B.F. Skinner tried to get pigeons to do, which is use your intel to carry a weapon to target. Now, that’s asinine.
“Here’s my theory of intelligence. Intelligence and force projection in the electronic world are the same thing. To have a thought should be the same as to use that thought. Idea is action. Stay with me here: the usual model, the model you used on your aircraft carrier, is pre-electronic. It’s all about the failure of intelligence that’s built into slow communication. The great example is the Battle of New Orleans. The British come up into the swamps and Andrew Jackson and a lotta people shoot the ass off them, and the British tuck their tails and go away. Only trouble is, the war had been over six weeks before they started.
“When you got slow communications, you in effect got no intelligence worth the name—everything happens the night before the battle, the day of the battle, the moment of the battle. The intel guy is just some no-respect major who can read maps. Who matters is the guy who has the muscles to carry the weapon.
“But come up to the 1980s. Now I can take a photo and have it come up simultaneously on a missile that’s already in the air. The missile don’t need any pigeon to drive it; it’s got the electronic brains to drive itself, using satellite positioning and my photo. I drive it to the target. Me—the intel guy. But do they let me do it? No—they turn it over to the guys who used to carry the weapon and still want to get their rocks off.
“Now come to the 1990s. What’re we doing, mostly? We’re giving jet jocks briefing books and briefings and kneepad maps and photos and satellite coverage, and they fly off and make the same fucking mistakes that they and the pigeon could have made without all that help. Who’s still the least respected officer in a squadron? The intel guy. But who’s the one knows the most about the target? The intel guy.
“So, here’s my theory of intelligence: cut the crap. Cut out the middleman. Put your intel guy where all the electronic fields come together, and give him the button.
“That’s what Peacemaker is—the world’s first intel-driven killer. War with an arrow and no archer. George tell you how it works?”
Suter shook his head. He was a little dazzled.
“See, the problem that we saw was, you put stuff into a high orbit, you got a major launch involvement, and still you got a hell of a weight problem. You can put up your electronics, sure, but conventional weapons are heavy stuff. So we come up with something out of a sci-fi novel, no shit. What makes a conventional weapon heavy? Fuel and explosive. Okay, do away with both a them, you got your problem licked. Whatcha got out there in orbit instead of fuel for your weapon? Gravity. Whatcha gonna put up there instead of explosives? Manmade meteorites. Like a goddam cafe-curtain rod, only made of either ceramic or spent uranium, we ain’t decided which—doing tests next month from the high-altitude research aircraft out in Nevada. I favor the uranium, because I know that at Mach 5 that stuff will explode hardened concrete, I mean not just knock pieces off it, but fucking explode it!
“With the weight problem solved, we conceived Peacemaker as a low orbiter so it can be launched any old place. But low orbit means it won’t stay up long, maybe five days. Long enough. Peacemaker 1 will carry forty rods and will be in-orbit maneuverable plus or minus five hundred klicks. Above the range of all known missiles and aircraft. It’ll carry an onboard computer not much shabbier than an early Cray, plus receivers direct for optical, side-look, satellite TV, infrared, or digital data. I won’t say the thing will be able to think, but it’ll be able to compare and prioritize, and it will always be in direct contact with here.”
“Expensive,” Suter said. What he wanted to say was, That’s the greatest thing I ever heard. “Awfully expensive.”
“There’s enough pork in the Star Wars budget to do this little old thing ten times over. There’s so much pork, I oughta get some hickory sticks and start me a barbecue place. ‘Touhey’s Hog Heaven’!” He laughed. He was excited, too, just talking about it. “That’s why I need George. George can carve a pig about as good as anybody in Washington.”
“How far along is the project?” Suter found that his voice was hoarse.
“We’re going to prototype in six weeks; legal is cleaning up the contracts. They got a model upstairs, I expect Jackie whisked you by that, but you’re welcome to see it. I want to test the end of this year.”
“But—”
“Go ahead.”
“It’s destabilizing as hell.”
Touhey grinned. “Direct contravention of the ABM treaty. That’s my view of it, although there’s controversy in-house. I’ll let the lawyers work that out. Frankly, I don’t give a shit. Neither does George, who’s in it—between you and me—precisely because it’s destabilizing. It fits old George’s ideology, and he ain’t exactly over there on the far left. But you hit the sore point, yeah, and that’s why the only word we’ve leaked on Peacemaker is that it’s an intel-comm satellite. Not a weapon. That’s the way it’s gonna stay for the public and part of the Congress for the foreseeable future. But sometime we gotta go public with the weapon part, because what this is, is a weapon of fear. It don’t do squat if people don’t know about it.”
“A deterrent.”
“Well, wouldn’t you be deterred if you knew somebody could position an untouchable machine over your house and drop meteorites on it at Mach 5?” Touhey leaned back and began to scrabble in a drawer, coming up with a pack of cigarettes. “That’s why we’re gonna sell this as a support to UN peacekeeping. Our likeliest demo will be Yugoslavia—pardon, the former Yugoslavia. We’re gonna put a Peacemaker up in the Mediterranean, current plans are the Gulf of Sidra, coordinate with Navy’s Sixth Fleet—I expect you to be a help there—and we’re gonna put it up and juke it around in orbit over some of their real estate and suggest—merely suggest, meaning we’re gonna do a little discreet leaking—that this little toy might be compatible with some kinda weaponry. We think it’ll get their attention. Meanwhile, in secret, we’re gonna drop some rods on a pile of rock in the South Atlantic and see what survives.” He fiddled with a ball of paper. “You can imagine the UN debate if it’s the UN that thinks it’s gonna benefit. They won’t know whether to shit or go blind.”
“Give it to the UN?”
“Now, you know we’d never do that. We may say we will, but we won’t. Remember Reagan’s offer to give Star Wars to the world? Like that. But we’ll use it in a good cause, you bet, and I for one am not at all happy about a set of tough guys kicking ass, including women and kids, in the name of what they call ethnic cleansing, when their ethnic ain’t much to look at to begin with. And we need the PR, ’cause this is gonna be one mother of a fight when it goes public.”
“I’m supposed to be part of that.”
Touhey
