Pentagon says U.S. military will be ready for Y2K

WASHINGTON, July 22 (Reuters) - The Defense Department said on Thursday the U.S. military will be Y2K compliant by the end of the year and its nuclear forces will be "safe, secure and reliable" on Jan. 1, 2000.

"I am very confident the department will be able to carry out its mission as we cross over into the new millennium," Defense Secretary William Cohen told a Pentagon news conference.

Top Pentagon officials also said they were confident that other nuclear powers, including Russia and China, were working on making their arsenals resistant to any computer problems that might arise when the calendar shifts to year 2000.

Cohen noted there have been a number of cyberattacks on Pentagon Web sites recently and said the military effort to confront any computer glitches that might arise was being treated "as if it were a cyberattack directed at the very core of our military capabilities."

"In this sense, Y2K is an enemy attack of the rarest kind," Cohen said. "We know the time of his planned attack, we know the place, we know the consequences and we know we have absolutely no reason not to prepare."

He said the size of the military alone was daunting -- 10,000 separate computer systems with 1.5 million individual computers. Included in that number were 2,000 systems that are critical to any military action, he said.

Cohen said 94 percent of the system was Y2K ready and the rest would be by the end of the year.

Adm. Rich Mies, commander in chief of the Strategic Command, said that all but two of the vital nuclear systems were Y2K safe and they were to be ready by October.

"I am confident our nuclear forces will be as safe, secure and reliable after Jan. 1 as they are today," he said.

Mies said there was no danger of an accidental launch -- "Computers by themselves cannot launch nuclear weapons" -- and Russian officials had given similar assurances that there could be no accidental launch on their side.

Mies said the United States has tried to get assurances from other nuclear powers that they too are making progress in assuring their arsenals are Y2K compliant, and the Pentagon knows "they are addressing the problem."

Y2K is short for the glitch that may cause computers to mistake 2000 for 1900, the result of an old programming shortcut that used only a two-digit date field. Simulations have shown that some systems may crash or cause errors starting on Jan. 1.

What set the Defense Department apart from other computer systems was its size, Cohen said, pointing out the Defense Department is the largest operation in the nation with more than 3 million people stationed worldwide.

Cohen said with the Pentagon computer systems handling one transaction a second tests were run on military operations as well as simpler activities like procuring equipment.

For example, he said the USS Atlanta sent out an equipment request and it was tracked across the entire procurement system. Cohen said there was only one failure in 200 million lines of computer code and that has been fixed.

Mies said there were no Y2K glitches in tests of the strategic command systems.

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Ray

-- Ray (ay@totacc.com), July 22, 1999

Answers

"In this sense, Y2K is an enemy attack of the rarest kind," Cohen said. "We know the time of his planned attack, we know the place, we know the consequences and we know we have absolutely no reason not to prepare."

Yep. About sums it up.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), July 22, 1999.

Do they actually expect us to believe this?

-- Lane Core Jr. (elcore@sgi.net), July 22, 1999.

Lane, and what is your background or personal experience that would question the truth of this report?

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), July 22, 1999.

Maria, what does his background have to do with believing or not believing this report? Your Pal, Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), July 22, 1999.

Just questioning the thought process behind the question. Can I do that Ray or will the web police delete my question? Uh oh, time to don those foil antennae.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), July 22, 1999.

Lane, No, they probably DON'T expect YOU to believe it.

Maria, Yes, they probably DO expect YOU to believe it, along with most of the rest of the population.

Personally, I would take it with a VERY LARGE grain of salt. DOD isn't very different in many respects from any other large government agency in the way it processes (spins) information. Except that the perception of readiness is very much a national security issue. Think about it.

-- Spindoc' (spindoc_99_2000@yahoo.com), July 23, 1999.