IDIOCY - Lockheed built Hainan Island's naval sureveillance system!

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I don't want to believe this. Human Events U.S. Contractor Won’t Say Whether It Would Expand System Into Taiwan Strait

Lockheed Built Naval Surveillance System for PRC

By Terence P. Jeffrey

The week of April 9, 2001 Lockheed Martin, which received more U.S. tax dollars last year than any other U.S. defense contractor, has built a naval surveillance system for the People’s Republic of China on Hainan Island–coincidentally the same location where a Lockheed built EP-3E surveillance plane was forced to land last week after being bumped by a Chinese fighter jet.

The system is capable of detecting, identifying, monitoring and communicating with ships moving through the Qiongzhou Channel, which Lockheed describes in its corporate literature as "the strategic straight separating Hainan Island from southern China."

Hainan, after Taiwan, is the second largest island off the coast of China. The "strategic strait" separating it from the mainland is narrower, but analogous, to the Taiwan Strait that separates the Chinese mainland from Taiwan.

The surveillance system, which Lockheed calls a "Vessel Traffic Management Information System (VTMIS)," is expressly designed to monitor and control commercial maritime traffic–but it in fact will track all surface vessels moving through its range, whether they are commercial or military.

‘Detection and Warning Systems’

"This is a commercial product sold all over the world for commercial use," said Lockheed Martin NE&SS spokeswomen Ellen Mitchell, in an e-mailed response to questions posed by Human Events about the system’s possible conversion to military purposes. "I can’t engage in speculation about any other applications for it."

In a series of e-mail and telephone exchanges, Mitchell declined to say whether Lockheed would rule out placing a similar ship-tracking system in the Taiwan Strait and stressed that the system did not need to be licensed for export by the U.S. government. (The system was completed in 1999, during the Clinton Administration, and approved by the Chinese government in 2000, while Clinton was still in office.)

"The equipment that makes up our vessel traffic control systems requires no special export license because it is made up entirely of commercial items such as maritime radars, routers, common computers and meteorological equipment," said Mitchell. "It has both domestic and international content that has no military value for surveillance including air defense, nor is it capable of military command and control functions."

But a layman’s reading of the system’s capabilities as explained on Lockheed’s own website raises obvious questions about the system’s usefulness as a military surveillance and warning system, and for command and control of naval assets. It also reveals that Lockheed and the Chinese intend to build more such systems elsewhere in China.

In a March 21, 2000, press release, announcing that the system at Hainan had been "fully accepted by the Chinese government," Lockheed said it was "the prime contractor, program manager and principal integrator for this system, assisted by the 28th Research Institute of the Ministry of Information Industry in China." It then added that it had "a teaming agreement with the 28th Research Institute to jointly pursue contracts to develop, produce and install marine traffic management systems for ports, harbors and waterways in China."

"This was the first of what we anticipate will be many more NE&SS-Syracuse vessel traffic management systems for China and Asia," NE&SS President Mike Smith is quoted as saying in the press release.

Materials posted on Lockheed’s website report that the "brains" behind the company’s VTMIS is "the Lockheed Martin MTM100 software."

An information sheet on this software says: "The MTM100 is the central command, control, display and processing software application for Lockheed Martin’s family of Ports and Waterways Systems and Services."

This software, Lockheed’s website says, can be used for applications other than "vessel traffic management." These include "Integrated Coastal Surveillance and Monitoring," which in turn includes, "Detection and Warning Systems."

The information sheet details how the software integrates data about ships at sea from remote radars and other sensing devices set up along the coastline, or on buoys or on the ships themselves. "Advanced processing integrates vessel tracks from radar sites as well as other sensors including transponders," says Lockheed. The transponders, which can be placed on Chinese ships, or built into laptops that are temporarily placed on authorized ships, precisely identify the ship for the system’s computer, and allows communications with the ship through the system.

No Military Value?

On its face, this would seem to provide the same capability as a military Identify Friend or Foe system: ships not equipped with identifying transponders by the Chinese could be considered intruders, or enemies.

Indeed, Lockheed’s website notes that the software has the ability to automatically detect "risks or intrusions."

"In addition," says the website, "vessels tracked by multiple sources are correlated by the MTM100 into a single fused system track to minimize ambiguity to the operator. The MTM100 Decision Support System, a hallmark of the Lockheed Martin design, continuously monitors all vessel activity to automatically alert the operator of traffic or safety rules violations, risks or intrusions in both real time and in a predictive mode."

All of this is processed onto a computer screen, or onto a large overhead projector screen, that presents the ocean area covered by the system in a way that resembles a video game.

Lockheed’s website includes what the company calls a "case history" of the particular VTMIS built on Hainan. "This turnkey system for one of China’s strategic waterways," says Lockheed, "includes a full-featured advanced information technology base, a set of remote sensors, highly reliable microwave communications links, a full compliment of operator workstations, large screen projection displays, a provision for expansion and exchange of shipping information and future VTMIS and port information systems."

"The Qiongzhou Channel VTS (QVTS) system," says Lockheed, "includes three remote sites each with a dual x-band radar; a remote VHF direction finder system; and a remote VHF communications system. At the main vessel control center, at Haikou, a fourth X-band radar, plus another set of VHF communications equipment will be installed at the Harbor Superintendency’s headquarters building."

What happens when the system is running? "Sensor data from remote sites is sent back over highly reliable microwave circuits to the main center for processing and display on six operator workstations incorporating 29 inch color monitors."

What happens if it breaks down? Will the Chinese be out of luck without American helpers on site? No. "Lockheed Martin is also providing . . . in-country service after sales through a trained local partner," says the website.

Maybe Lockheed is right. Maybe being able to detect and track ships at sea, being able to discriminate between those that belong to you and those that don’t, being able to communicate in real time with your own ships, and being able to monitor all this at one time on a single computer screen has no military value.

Maybe an admiral in the Peoples’ Liberation Army Navy would have no need or desire for a system like this on the Taiwan Strait.

Maybe if a U.S. submarine ever had to surface within range of this system during a time of tension between the United States and China, the ability of the Chinese to detect and track that submarine would have no military value to the Chinese.

Maybe if President Bush someday needs to send U.S. aircraft carriers and their escorts into the Taiwan Strait–as even President Clinton dared to do in 1995–it would make no difference if the Chinese had a system for tracking "commercial" shipping there just like the one they now have at Hainan.

Or maybe when the current crisis over our EP-3E and its crew is resolved, President Bush and Congress should seriously reexamine the type of trade that Lockheed is now doing with the Communist regime in Beijing.

© Human Events, 2001

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2001

Answers

Doesn't the NSA have to approve things like this?? :-(

-- Anonymous, April 06, 2001

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