Special Access Programs: A Look at Secrecy Levels and the Pentagon's Missing Trillions

Contents

Intro

Although it took a lot of effort, it has been possible to collect quite a bit of information on organizations as the Pilgrims Society, the 1001 Club, Le Cercle the American Security Council, the AFIO, OSS Society and other very influential but low profile - or outright secretive - private groups. However, as soon as the official government bureaucracy enters the picture, getting information (luckily) becomes infinitely more difficult to find - and in most cases: impossible. Security is much tighter. Outsiders simply can't get to the story, while insiders cannot speak out due to national security laws. In the most sensitive military projects insiders intending to make unauthorized disclosures can find themselves in jail for life or risk assassination, certainly if these individuals are looking to contact enemy governments. All this is many times less likely to happen with people speaking out about civilian groups.

Superclass Index for DOD scientists: top U.S. individuals who, apart from certain cabinet members, senators and congressmen, should know a thing or two about the most secretive USAPs. Quite a few are deeply involved in defense corporations and institutes.

The majority of members in top-level supranational discussion groups as Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission only seem to have a limited idea of what is going on in black programs of the military, certainly when it involves a foreign government. The secretary of defense and some of his assistants know, a few members of Congress are supposed to know, the heads of various private military contractors know, national security veterans on the Defense Policy Board, Defense Science Board and a number of other top-level civilian advisory groups also seem to have a good idea of what is going, and one assumes that incoming presidents are fully informed of these projects whenever they desire to know the full military and technological capabilities at their disposal.

But what if they aren't? What if, for example, a sitting conservative Republican president and secretary of defense decide to conspire with certain private Pentagon contractors to keep a number of projects hidden from an incoming liberal Democrat president and his administration? Is that possible? One hopes not. One thinks Congress or someone in the know would speak up. However, as ISGP's Superclass Index, including the Superclass Index for DOD scientists, demonstrates, old boy networks in most key government positions are the norm. Even the idea that everything will be fine as long as the president is kept informed is very questionable based on the fact that no one becomes president who has not beforehand been vetted by liberal or conservative factions within the superclass, whether they are a tier 1 official candidate or a tier 2 or tier 3 controlled opposition asset. Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot and all his Reform Party boys (including Trump in 2000 and Nader in 2004) fall in the latter category. Nothing is independent. It all appears to be screenplay with actors who take their roles very seriously. And if their role is to be kept out of the loop, they'll most likely play that role throughout life.

Secrecy classification systems

To begin this new effort of looking into of the type of programs going on within the official bureaucracy of the military and its private contractors, let's take a look at the official classification system of the United States.

In the U.S. there are only three basic types of classification: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. That's it. But this doesn't matter, as the true power of the classification system is the famous "need to know" policy. Just because someone has a Top Secret clearance doesn't mean this person can gain access to all the different Top Secret documents of the intelligence agencies. Examples of all these different agencies would be the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, ONI, NRO, INSCOM, and AFOSI.

However, this three-tiered classification system is not enough to protect some of the more sensitive information. Therefore additional levels of compartmentalization have been created. After a very intensive background check, someone with a Top Secret clearance might obtain an additional Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) clearance, under which information is buried that needs to be restricted to even fewer individuals. This TS-SCI clearance has been introduced mainly to stop high ranking officers from looking into Top Secret files they don't have any business with.

But even the TS-SCI clearance doesn't provide the secrecy needed for some of the most sensitive projects. This is the reason why Special Access Programs (SAP) have been invented. In these cases only a predetermined group of authorized personnel have access to the project and additional security measures can be taken to keep outsiders away. Different congressional committees are informed about these SAPs, but very little time is reserved for questions and little to nothing is put on paper. Why? Because congress doesn't have the necessary security for storage of highly sensitive data.

Most SAPs start out as Unacknowledged Special Access Programs (USAP), better known as black projects. The F-117A Nighthawk and the B-2 Spirit are examples of projects that started out as Unacknowledged SAPs. A DOD manual describes a USAP as follows:

"Unacknowledged SAPs require a significantly greater degree of protection than acknowledged SAPs... A SAP with protective controls that ensures the existence of the Program is not acknowledged, affirmed, or made known to any person not authorized for such information. All aspects (e.g., technical, operational, logistical, etc.) are handled in an unacknowledged manner." [ 1 ]

If questioned about a particular USAP, the persons involved are under orders to deny such a program exists. They are not allowed to react with a "no comment", because that would immediately fuel suspicions that something is being hidden and is likely to cause further inquiries. Officers not accessed for a USAP, even superior ones, are to be given the same response. The more sensitive the program, the more protection the commanding officer can demand. He could even subject his personnel to regular lie detector tests to see whether or not a person has compromised the project. According to a 1997 Senate investigation:

"Additional security requirements to protect these special access programs can range from mere upgrades of the collateral system’s requirements (such as rosters specifying who is to have access to the information) to entire facilities being equipped with added physical security measures or elaborate and expensive cover, concealment, deception, and operational security plans." [ 2 ]

There are two versions of the Unacknowledged Special Access Programs. The first one is the regular USAP. These regular USAPs are reported in the same manner as their acknowledged versions. In closed sessions, the House National Security Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the defense subcommittees of the House and Senate Appropriations committees can receive certain basic information about them. The secretary of defense, however, can decide to 'waive' particularly sensitive USAPs. These are unofficially referred to as deep black programs. According to Jane's in January 2000:

"Among black programs, further distinction is made for "waived" programs, considered to be so sensitive that they are exempt from standard reporting requirements to the Congress. The chairperson, ranking member, and, on occasion, other members and staff of relevant Congressional committees are notified only orally of the existence of these programs." [ 3 ]

This leads to the conclusion that only very few people are aware of these waived Unacknowledged Special Access Programs. Congress certainly doesn't get the information it needs to speak out against newly established waived USAPs and nowhere gets one the impression that their opinion is actually appreciated. You could also ask yourself if Congress is told the truth about many of the most sensitive Special Access Projects or if their successors are informed about previously activated (waived) USAPs. Even with regular SAPs Congress is ignored at times. Jane's again:

"Last summer, the House Defense Appropriations Committee complained that "the air force acquisition community continues to ignore and violate a wide range of appropriations practices and acquisition rules". One of the alleged infractions was the launch of an SAP without Congressional notification." [ 4 ]

Without being able to find any official sources, in addition there exists online speculation about Unacknowledged Special Access Projects being hidden in private corporations and/or behind seemingly legitimate deep black programs. So basically you're looking at USAPs within SAPs or USAPs. Or, alternately, one or more USAP subprojects with an existing SAP or USAP. If the secretary of defense or other covert operations are really worried about members of congress or other branches or groups within government of figuring out or exposing their program, it makes sense that they would start working this way. However, there exists no evidence for these programs. Then again, that's exactly the idea.

All levels of U.S. and NATO secrecy

Below a chart can be found of all secrecy levels described in this article:

Category Secrecy levels Additional levels of Compartmentalization



Existence is unconfirmed, but entirely possible. Would be illegal, because all checks and balances are gone. Of course, if the argument is that senior government posts might be infiltrated by the Russians, Chinese or other foreign power, probably anything is allowed. A USAP hidden behind another SAP or USAP, combined with the protection the private industry enjoys.



Existence only orally mentioned to a few key congressional members. Besides "need to know" it appears that it depends on the personal relationship between government officials and business leaders to what extent they are told about these programs - including the president. Waived Unacknowledged Special Access Programs / deep black programs



Congressional committees should still be notified on paper, but violations have been reported. Unacknowledged Special Access Programs / black programs (Acknowledged) Special Access Programs Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS-SCI) Basic secrecy levels Top Secret NATO Cosmic Top Secret Secret NATO Secret Confidential NATO Confidential Public or semi-public For Official Use Only NATO Restricted Unclassified NATO Unclassified

The Pentagon's missing trillions, defense contractors and cost overruns

A good start to get a sense if the U.S. government is properly managing its SAPs, USAPs, waived USAPs and maybe even its USAPs within USAPs, would be to take a look at its bookkeeping. As it turns out, especially for the Pentagon this is the biggest disaster ever. From 1998 to 2002 each year between $1 trillion and $3.4 trillion was reported unaccounted for. An oversight has been created below. Click on the source to read the original news report.

Yes, we're really talking trillions - not billions. In 2001 Insight Magazine put these numbers best in perspective when it wrote:

"Consider that if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush team at the Pentagon had that $1.1 trillion today, it could buy 244 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at a cost of $4.5 billion each, 19,298 F/A18-E/F Super Hornet Fighters at a cost of $57 million each or 343,750 Bradley fighting vehicles at a total cost of $3.2 billion. Furthermore, using a reasonable estimate of $3 billion, the $1.1 trillion that is unaccounted for could pay for the construction of 367 brand-new Pentagon buildings, or seven Pentagons per state." [5]

On average the Pentagon couldn't account for about 25% of its annual budget. This is a problem that has existed for decades. Remember that in 1985 the President's Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, better known as the Packard Commission, was set up after the Pentagon was found to have paid $285 for a screwdriver, $37 per screw, $469 for a wrench, $435 for a hammer, $2,200 for a monkey wrench, $659 for an ashtray, $640 for a toilet seat, $7,600 for a coffee maker and $74,165 for an aluminum ladder. Unsurprisingly, already in that period billions were getting lost in the Pentagon bureaucracy. [6]

Coffee maker at the Pentagon, apparently with stealth technology and heat-seeking missiles build in. With prices like this, what does having the biggest defense budget in the world mean?

Beginning in 1996, the first year the Pentagon was forced to audit its books, renewed criticism on DOD spending began to arise. This only increased when the War on Terror began, Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded, and the Pentagon received major budget increases despite continuing to report these scandalous trillion dollar gaps in its books.

Part of the pressure also came from the new online conspiracy community. Guests of the scammy million dollar radio show Coast to Coast AM network of national security scrolls had also picked up on these deficits, (falsely) claiming that hundreds of billions of missing dollars most likely were diverted to secret space programs. We're talking about unfortunate individuals as Steven Greer, Catherine Austin Fitts, Michael Salla, Richard Dolan and others. Starting around 2005, the 9/11 "Truth" community falsely began to claim that the Pentagon impact was carried out to hide the Department of Defense's financial misconduct. Catherine Austin Fitts, as a director of the secretive 911truth.org umbrella group may well have played a key role in the surfacing of this theory, which doesn't hold water at all. Why? Because only the offices of the Naval Operations Center and accounting/budget offices of the National Guard and Army Reserve were destroyed. That's only a small part of the entire Pentagon budget. Also, the problem has existed before and since 9/11. In March 2005 congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a favorite among 9/11 "truthers", famously confronted Donald Rumsfeld and new Pentagon comptroller Tina Jona about these deficits. [7]

McKinney's fringe congressional ally, the chemtrail-promoting Dennis Kucinich, another huge favorite of the Alex Jones and 9/11 "Truth" crowd, also criticized the trillion dollar gaps, explaining to "liberal CIA" outfit National Public Radio:

"As the ranking Democrat on a subcommittee which has jurisdiction over national defense, an oversight subcommittee, I know the kind of waste that goes on in the military. I know, for example, that the Department of Defense cannot reconcile $1 trillion in accounts. I know that they can't keep track of the cost of various contracts that go to the private sector." [ 8 ]

President Bush, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim all promised to integrate the apparently hundreds of different budgetary systems within the Pentagon. [9] But right from the beginning left-wing media outlets as The Guardian voiced suspicions that these individuals had no interest in fixing the budgetary problems, because private sector contractors as Lockheed, Northrop and General Dynamics these men and other government officials were linked to represent an important aspect of the problem. [10]

It really doesn't seem to matter how big cost overruns are within the defense industry - Pentagon nexus. Nobody ever goes to jail. Cost overruns actually are a very long-standing problem, going back further than the 1985 President's Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management and the $600 toilet seats it investigated.

Zumwalt class destroyer. Cost of individual shells for its advanced cannons went from an estimated "less than $50,000 each" to an incredible $800,000 a piece. Contractor responsible? Lockheed, the same corporation developing the F-22 and F-35, which suffered the same cost overrun issues.

Already in the mid 1970s the Pentagon's cost overruns were estimated at a whopping $355 billion. At the time it was reported that "overruns for Pentagon weapons have become such a routine item of military budgeting that many frustrated critics have turned [away] to other problems." The well known Admiral Hyman Rickover was "calling for for extreme measures against military contractors", claiming that "contractors deliberately spend more than estimated and then file overrun claims that also include enough for profit." Litton Industries, Lockheed and Boeing were all mentioned as examples of defense contractors running programs with major cost overruns, respectively 42%, 31% and 823%. Tellingly, it was found out that 95 top officials of secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld had taken illegal "gratuities" from defense contractors. An overlapping problem here was that "individuals with high level jobs in the defense industry ... love to take decision making posts at the Pentagon, and wind up buying equipment from their former employers." [11]

It appears little has changed over the years and may even have gotten worse, certainly when George W. Bush, once again flanked by a certain secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, initiated the War on Terror in 2001. In the post-9/11 world these defense contractors received huge contracts, with the Pentagon conveniently still not properly keeping track how much money they handed out. Dick Cheney's KBR Halliburton and Erik Prince's Blackwater Group, an admitted CIA front, are probably the most notorious examples from the Bush era of questionable defense contractor use, but many other companies benefited from the War on Terror.

How about the NSA having the in house-developed ThinThread spy program ready to go for just $3 million in 2001, but replacing it with the $3 billion Trailblazer boondoggle? Trailblazer offered little to nothing more, and even eliminated constitutional privacy rights, which ThinThread did not. Much of it appears to have been a ploy by NSA director General Michael Hayden - a superclass member - and other top executives to keep defense contractors as SAIC, Boeing and IBM happy. And where did these top NSA executives end up with? Exactly, at top defense contractors they earlier handed all kinds of contracts to. [12]

Or how about Lockheed developing a special ammunition round for the Navy's new Zumwalt stealth destroyer class that went from an estimated "less than $50,000 each" to an incredible $800,000 a piece? That's a 1,700% increase. It left the Navy with a $4 billion ship with no guns to fire as it simply would be too costly to do so. [13]

There are plenty of other examples of significant cost overruns. Take the new $13 billion U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford supercarrier, the first of its kind. It's an amazing and eventually necessary piece of equipment, but by the time it is fully operational about three years late and probably about 33% over the initially projected costs. It even prompted Senator John McCain, a notorious war hawk and absolute top superclass member, to proclaim:

"The Ford-class program is a case study in why our acquisition system must be reformed – unrealistic business cases, poor cost estimates, new systems rushed to production, concurrent design and construction, and problems testing systems to demonstrate promised capability.



"After more than $2.3 billion in cost overruns have increased its cost to nearly $13 billion, the taxpayers deserve to know when CVN-78 will actually be delivered, how much developmental risk remains in the program, if cost overruns will continue, and who is being held accountable." [ 14 ]

Sen. John McCain might be a top superclass member and deep state war monger, but luckily he is laughing here at Obama's clueless secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James and a bought general promoting the F-35 and even the B1 bomber (!) as "great" replacements of the A-10 for CAS missions.

When we move over to the Air Force we see a similar pattern. The F-22 stealth fighter initially was supposed to replace the entire aging F-15 fleet. Over the course of a decade, development costs doubled from $13 to $26 billion and (real) unit costs from $149 million each to $412 million. [15] The number of produced F-22s went from a desired 750 with production beginning in 1994 to about 190 when production was shut down in 2012. This left the Air Force to rely on the old F-15 and F-16 for "air superiority". This is apart from a number of major technical shortcomings that weren't/aren't solved until the 2016-2021 period. [16]

Then there's the F-35, the so-called "successor" to the F-22. The initial estimated development and production cost of the F-35 in 2001? $233 billion for an estimated 2,500 planes. Cost by 2015? $379 billion, a 62% increase. Instead of having the first F-35 combat ready by 2010, that became 2016. Instead of having 1,013 F-35s combat ready by 2016, Lockheed only managed to deliver 179. [17] Then there have been - once again - the countless technical issues, some of which won't be solved until the 2020s. Others may never be solved, as the idea that the F-35 can replace the A-10 as a Close Air Support (for infantry) plane is just a fantasy. It's too expensive, too fast, doesn't have nearly enough rounds for that (with the gun not firing until 2019 anyway), appears to be missing all kinds of crucial up-to-date systems for CAS missions, which also appear to be too expensive to upgrade. [18] Oh, and ejecting from the aircraft at this point will probably kill or paralyze you:

"Pilots under 136 pounds aren't allowed to fly any F-35 variant. Pilots under 165 pounds have a 1-in-4 chance of death and 100 percent chance of serious neck injury upon ejecting, according to the testing office." [ 19 ]

F-35C flight testing on the USS Nimitz in November 2014. If the F-35 can remain invisible to radars into the early 2050s and also hold its own against late 4th generation and early 5th generation fighters without stealth, the program will have been a full success, even with the cost and time overruns. Those are two big "ifs" though at this point.

I actually happen to be sucker for ambitious projects and consider the creation of the U.S.S. Gerald Ford class carriers and stealth airplanes as the B-2, B-21/B-3, F-22 and F-35 to be the equivalent of producing some of the most beautiful art around. However, the F-35 in particular appears to be too high-tech (and therefore expensive and delayed) for America's good and too much a one-size-fits-all, with too many corporate and political interests attached to it. Also, you've gotta pay attention to your wallet, part of which involves making sure you're not being ripped off. Either American citizens need to start paying more taxes or they have to start spending less on the military. There's a reason the country has a debt exceeding $20 trillion.

It must be said, not all of these cost overruns appear to be due to the same reason. The most problematic version of all would be blatant corruption by scrapping cheap programs that work and replace them with giant boondoggles just for corporate profit. That's treason and parasitism and should result in lengthy prison sentences. A less severe version would be the scenario painted by Admiral Hyman Rickover in the mid 1970s, namely that defense corporations have a tendency to initially underprice programs and then compensate later on by disproportionally raising the price. It really depends on how large the profit margins are, and to what extent nepotism takes place between bureaucrats and defense corporation executives, to determine whether or not a crime has been committed.

Early 2002: Prime ministerial candidate Pim Fortuyn, soon-to-be assassinated, with F-35 lobbyist and apparent security state spook Matt Herben in the background.

We also have to take general lobbying and blackmail into account here, both nationally and internationally. I personally remember how the F-35 program already was extremely controversial in early 2002 - one year after receiving the go-ahead from the American government - at the time of the Dutch elections. Candidate Pim Fortuyn, who would have won the elections if he hadn't been assassinated a week before by a "liberal CIA"-backed environmental activist, for the longest time campaigned against Dutch participation in the program. Bizarrely, a certain Matt Herben managed to weasel his way into Fortuyn's party, amidst accusations of blackmail against Fortuyn, and became the dominant player after Fortuyn was killed. Herben used to work for the Dutch Ministry of Defense, was a rabid air force enthusiast, knew the chiefs of the air force very well, and had been pushing his party members relentlessly to vote in favor of the F-35 program. On top of that, he refused any contact with representatives of the Eurofighter or Dassault Rafale - two extremely capable jet fighters much better than the classic F-15s, F-16s and F-18s [20] - no matter how hard they tried. Needless to say, there were widespread suspicions that Herben was a plant of the security services sent into Fortuyn's party to insure it voted in favor of the F-35. [21] After Fortuyn's death, the entire party indeed voted in favor of the F-35, just before, predictably, disintegrating amidst infighting.

All of this is extremely reminiscent of the Lockheed bribery scandal of the late 1970s that cost Prince Bernhard his Bilderberg chairmanship and reached as far as Japan, where Lockheed managed to hire CIA asset, Black Dragon Society terrorist and Yakuza leader Yoshio Kodama as its chief lobbyist. The scandal, along with the parallel accusations against other defense corporations (Northrop and Grumman), also knew a number of curious deaths and assassination attempts, including one on Kodama.

All this begs the question how much has changed. Apparently nothing, except that Lockheed now has international governments working on its behalf, doesn't need to bribe anyone anymore, and can basically get away with anything. So, even if, let's say, defense corporations are underpricing projects to bring in contracts, it appears political leaders are fully aware of this, are cooperating in these schemes and putting pressure on foreign governments on behalf of these defense contractors. While performance and price play crucial roles in international arms sales, it has been said more than once that politics are the third major pillar. [22] Maybe no project signifies that better than the F-35, about which skepticism and outright false statements about its capabilities have existed since the very beginning.

Discussing the exact ins and outs of defense corporation corruption and influence on governments is not really the purpose of this article - it's more about bringing key issues to general awareness - but it is a no-brainer that these cost overruns (and extreme lobbying practices) need to be investigated and curbed. If Lockheed would have been able to deliver the F-22 and F-35 according to its initial promises, or at least close to it, the United States would today - anno 2017 - have a fleet of about 500 F-22s and 1,300 F-35s of all classes instead of 190 and 190 or so while paying $200 billion more for it. It is crucial that steps need to be taken to prevent these kinds of issues in the future.

At $600 billion annually, the United States has the biggest defense budget on the planet, but we have to know how much of this is wasted by inefficiency, incompetence and corruption, especially because the United States has a national debt that exceeds an incredible $20 trillion. If you can save $50 or even $100 billion every year from the defense budget by managing it very efficiently and bring down the national debt, in the long run that might well be the difference between economic prosperity or the economic destruction of the United States. Also, what if China, with its vastly larger population, matches the defense budget of the United States one day? And what if it can do so while preventing inefficiency, incompetence and corruption? Then maybe even a $500 billion budget would effectively be larger than the $600 billion today of the United States. Who really knows?

Clearly the Pentagon being able to fully account for its spending is a major step in the right direction. For the rest one would think the media is able to keep an eye on the influence of defense corporations. Although, it appears the War on Terror, how exactly we got involved in it (9/11) and what its ultimate (real) purpose is, has always been beyond reproach. Nobody really asks the important questions. And it appears the same is happening with regard to the so-called military-industrial complex that is thriving because of it.

As expected, a full 10 years after the Pentagon accounting issues came to light, new research revealed the problems remained the same, and may even have worsened due to the so-called implemented "improvements" of the Bush administration. Despite that, it seems change was slowly being implemented during the Obama administration, with pressure from Congress and various defense secretaries mounting. [23] Senator John McCain, a notorious war hawk and absolute top superclass member, has repeatedly stated he wants to clean up budget overruns. [24] So has Donald Trump, who in rather clear language stated that Defense Department bureaucrats "should never be allowed to go to work for these companies. You know, they make a deal like that and two or three years later, you see them working for these companies that made the deal. They should have a lifetime restriction." [25] Who knows, maybe things will change, to a degree... eventually, because, let's face it, what McCain and Trump are saying, has been said since at least the 1970s. We just demonstrated that.

Lockheed so corrupt, it's pushing UFO disinformation

How could I forget: in the past there has been speculation about the non-existent "death bed" confession of Lockheed Skunkworks founder Ben Rich about star travel technologies "locked up in black projects". The thing is, Rich never made that statement. It was simply invented, seemingly by Coast to Coast AM UFO "researcher" Timothy Good, who has a track record of this type of activity. Back in 1986 Rich did apparently make a written statement on his belief in both man-made and extraterrestrial UFOs, but that's about all he did. We can't really deduce much from this. Ask a Robert Bigelow, or a Prince Hans Adam II von Liechtenstein, or a Laurance Rockefeller, or a Senator Claiborne Pell, or a Mac McDonnell of McDonnell Douglas the same question and you get roughly the same answer - but this doesn't mean these men haven't been spreading boatloads of UFO disinformation. The devil is always in the details.

Speaking of which... corruption at Lockheed has taken a whole new dimension in recent years, because today the company is actively promoting UFO disinformation by working with Tom DeLonge.

The DeLonge case is extremely bizarre. Here we have a successful-but-totally-uneducated singer, who, as a UFO buff, decided to work with Dr. Steven Greer in his super-scammy Disclosure Project. Gradually Tom DeLonge has begun to take over from Greer as a leading UFO guru with a similar network of "deep state" contacts. Among his closest associates is Rob Weiss, the recently retired executive vice president and general manager of Lockheed Skunkworks. Together with Weiss in early 2016 he "briefed" Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta on all things alien, something that came out during the Podesta email leaks of Wikileaks. Podesta, a first-rate Soros agent, was one of the premier pushers of the disinformative Rockefeller UFO initiative as Bill Clinton's chief of staff back in the 1990s. One wonders how individuals with a background like this, could ever run for the presidency of the United States.

Obviously DeLonge has been repeatedly invited to Coast to Coast AM, but the disinformation he puts out is also reaching the mainstream media. And Lockheed is helping him do it. In fact, not just Rob Weiss is helping DeLonge. On the board of DeLonge's To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science - founded in October 2017 - we can also find Steve Justice, a former program manager at Lockheed Skunkworks. Other members of this board include ranking CIA anti-terrorism and biological warfare veterans, a member of the elite and CIA-linked Mellon family, and fellow Coast to Coast AM veterans as Hal Puthoff, the Scientologist who set up the CIA's remote viewing program, and Colm Kelleher, another one of the Bob Bigelow-affiliated scientists.

DeLonge's To The Stars Academy actually is privately-funded incarnation of the Pentagon's Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, a semi-secret UFO investigation project that ran from 2007 to 2012. Unfortunately, that program was inspired by Bob Bigelow, a major decades-long UFO disinformation financier, who received the majority of the $22 million Pentagon program. The Pentagon officer running UFO program, Luis Elizondo, "dissented" from the government to the To The Stars Academy, where today he is helping to push DeLonge's UFO disinformation alongside Lockheed, CIA veterans, elites, and already established Coast to Coast AM disinformers.

In December 2017 the New York Times and Politico jointly "exposed" the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program and its private To The Stars Academy successor. Along with the entire international media that copied the story, these outlets just portrayed the project as basic, honest labor with both supporters and detractors. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's a total and complete peacetime psywar program: bogus information, bogus conclusions, sketchy research, all leading to more controlled opposition debate to simulate a free and open society.

Clearly Lockheed is an extremely corrupt corporation that has been working hand-in-glove with the CIA for a long time. If it is okay with psyopping the public on UFOs, it problably has little issue with purposely overpricing its defense programs.

Truly effective military development USAPs might hardly exist

Northrop (top) and Boeing (bottom) concept designs of the B-3/B-21 stealth bomber. Already by 2015, a lot of details about the B-2 Spirit's replacement were known, including why the B-2 is slowly beginning to lose out to new generations of ULF radars.

One of the things that a lot of people may find worrying is that effective USAPs for military weapons development don't even seem to exist. These days anyone with an internet connection can see and read anything about the latest military technologies in development. A lot of people are fascinated by it, so a lot of them are keeping their eyes and ears out while big money is to be made in the form of advertizing revenue for news sites and documentary programs for television. Advanced new military concepts are also portrayed in movies and videogames. Literally within a few hours one can learn everything about exoskeletons, high-tech swimming gear for special forces, drones, lasers, railguns, stealth, anti-stealth long-wave infrared spectrum sensors, the theory behind stealth-defeating quantum radars, the intricacies of past and present carrier designs - you name it. We also know that the first new military stealth plane after the F-35, hopefully introduced in the mid to late 2020s, is going to be the B-21/B-3 bomber. We also know why: the B-2 is not stealth enough anymore against low-frequency radars.

Work on quantum stealth "radars" is a particularly interesting example of the state of "black programs". Back in 2011 a group of American scientists reported a breakthrough in this area to the press. It appears from that moment on research into the subject went "black"; secret research at Lockheed and DARPA was set up, but no details were reported. It wasn't until November 2016 when China all of a sudden claimed to have carried out a successful stealth radar test based on this very same quantum principle. Vain as the communists are, China made no mention of the 2011 U.S. discovery, but clearly paid a lot of attention to the article about it. To illustrate, the 2011 report on the quantum stealth radar breakthrough is comparable to China, Russia and every other adversary of the United States looking for a ship that is located at an unknown location somewhere in the world, and then telling them they should all be looking east of Madagascar. It made research a whole lot easier to focus.

So, is this the state of Special Access Programs and Unacknowledged Special Access Programs of the United States in the 21st century? Programs that just about anybody can guess because of super-extensive defense development reporting? It appears so, at least when it comes to weapons development.

Possibly the situation has always been this way. The hype around America's black programs first emerged in the early 1980s amidst Roswell UFO crash retrieval disinformation, later followed by the first evidence of revolutionary stealth planes as the F-117 and B-2. Even the controversy around the Pentagon's "missing" trillions - which we just debunked - has been hijacked by Coast to Coast AM-featured UFO and conspiracy disinformers as being evidence of secret space programs. Little to nothing of this is true. The most advanced spacecraft Lockheed is working on, in coordination with NASA and Airbus, appears to be Orion, which is meant to allow humans to explore Mars and asteroids.

The facts is that the white world of technology development is simply too large for the black world to compete with. We can all figure out the handful of companies producing the latest CPUs, GPUs, batteries, jet engines and heat resistant composites as hafnium carbide. Black programs have to make use of these existing "off the shelf" technologies. They can tweak them or incorporate them in some truly cutting edge military designs - which would be their area of expertise - but to develop them into a whole new generation of high technology is going to be next to impossible. How are a few dozen or even a few hundred Lockheed employees going to develop a CPU 10 times faster than what Intel or AMD is working on? Or how are they going to develop a nuclear fusion engine while countless billions of the white world have never been able to bring nuclear fusion efficiency above 65% at this point? That's right. They can't. The only way to have something truly unique is to carry out highly unique research in a black program or to suppress a scientific breakthrough in the white world from the very start. The latter is almost impossible, or at the very least very hard, and the former only entails a very specific piece of technology; everything else is still based on existing technology.

In short, most, if not all, of America's USAPs aren't nearly as interesting as people believe them to be. For the vast majority of cases, if not all, projects are based on well known white world technology.

Sure, I'd love to think there's a nuclear-powered, vector-thrusted jet out there that can reach all the way into space. However, the funds to produce any working concept model for this most likely would immediately be diverted to more immediately important projects, such as the B-21/B-3 or the F-35. And looking at how much trouble Lockheed has been having with its $400 billion F-35 development program, including the planes' engines until as late as 2016, and one can't even begin to imagine how a small army of company engineers would be able to finish a larger, nuclear-powered, vector-thrusted version - and that in total secret. Let's face it, neither the Pentagon's "missing" trillions claim nor "rumors" of black project space programs are credible.

It's the economy, not black programs

The fact that black programs revolve around known white world technology combined with a free western media that reveals just about every detail on upcoming military technology there is to know, comes with the problem that it is rather easy for countries "competing" with the West to copy the technology or develop counter-measures against it at a very early stage. That is, if these countries have the financial and technical means to do so. Russia, with it's meager 150 million inhabitants and limited economy mainly focused on oil, gas and arms exports, has the technical ability, but not really the financial means, certainly not if Europe-based defense spending is also taken into account. China is the much bigger threat in this regard.

U.S.-inspired Chinese warships.

For more than a decade now, and in rather shocking fashion, China has blatantly been producing knock offs of America's Arleigh Burke class destroyers, the U.S. Navy Littoral Combat Ship, the F-22, the F-35, technologies as lasers and railguns, and even the earlier-mentioned quantum stealth radars. It's a very smart tactic. It saves China giant amounts of R&D costs. It also allows China to slowly learn from the master, catch up, and if all goes well, surpass it. If they're really lucky, the United States will continue to overextend itself in military spending in similar manner as the Soviet Union did, prompting it to drastically cut its defense spending in the future for several decades. China remains the major threat to the West, with India being another possibility.

The fact is, it doesn't matter how many black military development programs the United States has: if China gets it act together, the United States most likely is not going to win economically in the long run. The U.S. only has 320 million citizens, so as long as access to natural resources will not be an issue for China, it will overtake the U.S. economy as the largest in the world. And with that China will be able to outspent the United States several times over in military spending, research & development, black programs, political influence, covert operations and everything else.

China's J-20 (top) and FC-31 stealth fighter designs, the latter a virtual copy of the F-22. The designs don't rival their American counterparts, but this could well change in the future depending on economic fortunes.

On top of that, China maintains a large, tightly-knit and highly-educated population in America. Chinese are being educated by the thousands at MIT, Stanford and Caltech. Some take their knowledge back to China to help copy Russian and American military hardware. Many others remain in the United States where they can be loyal citizens, but just as well be used for industrial spying. Put a lot of foreigners in key black programs and leaks to the homeland are going to ensue. That's just a simple fact of life, whether it involves Jews, Chinese, or Arabs. With the Chinese, successful industrial spying, for example, happened with the F-35 program.

Luckily for the West though, due to the primitive and dictatorial nature of communist regimes, the economic policy of China is even more reckless' than America's. The country might well be heading for the recession of the ages. However, America's debt is also exploding. And over the decades China will still have the population numbers with high numbers of very educated individuals.

So, what is more important than efficiently running your country's black programs? That would be to have the biggest economy on the planet by a wide margin, so that no other country has the financial ability to reproduce domestically-produced high technology that came at a very high cost. The United States can't do this alone. Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Japan, South Korea and the European Union will all have to chip in. And even then China might be able to compete, not to mention India in the long run. Together these countries contain almost three billion citizens, more than twice that of the West.

The only "plus" here is that both the West and China, and soon India as well, are suffering from a graying of the population due to sharply declining birth rates, so much will come down to how they will be able to navigate this 21st century crisis, preferably without bringing in immigrants from the most religiously extremist, crime-ridden regions of the world - and certainly in case of Africa: the lowest genetic IQs on the planet. Even African-Americans, who are on average 27% white, are vastly underrepresented in the IT world and have never won a Nobel prize for the sciences, apart from a single one in economics - this while the Jews, at 2% of the U.S. population instead of 11%, make up 25-50% of these Nobel prizes. If you're looking to win a high-technology arms race with China or India, these are factors to take into account, because genetic IQs in most of North-East Asia simply are higher than those in the Middle East, Latin American and certainly Africa.

Most readers will have become very uncomfortable by now, but facts are facts. This is not a site that tries to survive by being politically correct. It's a site that is a gigantic money drain, because it only deals with the truth, or at the very least honest analyses.

So yes, political, economic and military integration, increasing the native birth rate, and a moderately imperialist agenda of the West are all much more crucial in staying on top of the world than the effective managing of black programs. In an ideal world China will turn fully democratic and become a partner of the West. It certainly is a country with a rich cultural history that has much to offer, especially when it turns back the clock by replacing strict Confucian and communist doctrines with more individualist Taoist principles. But even if all that is going to transpire, it's considerably better to remain the top dog.

Extraordinary rendition and JSOC assassinations

It might be important to note that USAPs, or (deep) black programs, not always have to involve the development of new cutting edge technology. Back in 2004, for example, Seymour Hersh reported on a USAP that was set up to circumvent national and international humanitarian laws:

"Rice and Rumsfeld know what many others involved in the prisoner discussions did not -- that sometime in late 2001 or early 2002, the President had signed a top-secret finding, as required by law, authorizing the Defense Department to set up a specially recruited clandestine team of Special Forces operatives and others who would defy diplomatic niceties and international law and snatch -- or assassinate, if necessary -- identified 'high-value' Al Qaeda operatives anywhere in the world. Equally secret interrogation centers would be set up in allied countries where harsh treatments were meted out, unconstrained by legal limits of public disclosure. The program was hidden inside the Defense Department as an 'unacknowledged' special-access program, or SAP, whose operational details were known only to a few in the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House." [ 26 ]

Since this 2004 exposé, the world has learned a lot about the CIA's extraordinary rendition programs to torture terrorist suspects, about JSOC drones and assassination teams, the role Blackwater USA in it, and how the Bush administration secretly set it all up. [27]

It's an interesting detail to have that these programs too began as unacknowledged special access programs.

Summary

So, are Unacknowledged Special Access Programs out of control in the United States? Good question. The term "Special Access Program", let alone "Unacknowledged Special Access Program", is only very seldom mentioned in the media. For example, these terms have not been mentioned at all in relation to the NSA spy revelations in recent years of William Binney and Edward Snowden, even though one would expect that many of the NSA spy programs as PRISM, Stellar Wind, Boundless Informant and JTRIG fell into this category. The term "Special Access Program" did recently surface with regard to the Hillary Clinton email scandals. As Obama's secretary of state, Clinton, against protocol, maintained a private mailbox full of information on all kinds of Special Access Programs. No details on these programs have been provided.

Up until the Clinton email affair in 2015, it appears that the U.S. government has been quite capable of shielding the whole concept of Special Access Programs from the public. The mainstream media have never been too particularly interested in delving into the subject matter, most likely for fear of being perceived as "anti-patriotic", while the fringe network of Coast to Coast AM guests have been clogging up the internet with bogus information on these programs as involving crashed alien vehicles and secret space programs.

In other words, nothing much can be concluded about these programs. Do any of the USAPs, especially highly questionable ones, never make it to the public? Most likely, but we don't know that answer for certain. I'd say, it doesn't even really matter that much at this point. SAPs and USAPs should continue to exist. It's much more important to make sure that the Pentagon is able to properly balance its books, so that the only questions that remain revolve around officially allocated black budgets of the Pentagon and CIA. All the apparent waste, inefficiency and corruption going on at the Pentagon - much apparently linked to defense contractors - only weaken the United States. It's quite stupid to allow it to go on. Then again, the Pentagon is very Republican and very conservative by nature, so it's hard to expect much cooperation from its bureaucracy. What's really needed is strong, honest president, or maybe just a secretary of defense with similar character.

In other words, maybe we need to stay away from protesting the concept of SAPs and USAPs and instead focus on the Pentagon cleaning up its books and severing the ties between the Department of Defense bureaucracy and the boards of major defense contractors. Ultimately we should be focusing on building a transparent, stable society with economies so large that no undemocratic country in the world will be able to compete with us militarily - and thus threaten our existence.

Appendix A: Articles about the missing Pentagon (DOD) trillions

[1] April 1, 1999, Washington Times, '$3,400,000,000,000 Of Taxpayers' Money Is Missing' [link] [2] January 5, 2000, Jane's Defense Weekly, 'In Search of the Pentagon's Billion Dollar Hidden Budgets' [ link ] [3] November 6, 2000, Insight Magazine, 'Why Is $59 Billion Missing From HUD?' [link] [4] June 25, 2001, Insight Magazine, 'THE CABINET - Inside HUD's Financial Fiasco' [link] [5] September 3, 2001, Insight Magazine, 'Rumsfeld Inherits Financial Mess' [link] [6] *) July 30, 1986, Los Angeles Times, '$37 screws, a $7,622 coffee maker, $640 toilet seats; suppliers to our military just won't be oversold.'

*) September 28, 2001, Insight Magazine, 'Wasted Riches' [link] [7] January 29, 2002, CBS News, 'The War on Waste - Defense Department Cannot Account For 25% Of Funds — $2.3 Trillion' [link] [8] April 29, 2002, Insight Magazine, 'Government Fails Fiscal Fitness Test' [link] [9] May 18, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle, 'Military waste under fire - $1 trillion missing -- Bush plan targets Pentagon accounting' [link] [10] May 19, 2003, CBS, 'Pentagon Fights For (Its) Freedom' [link] [11] May 22, 2003, The Guardian, 'So much for the peace dividend: Pentagon is winning the battle for a $400bn budget' [link] [12] June 28, 2003, NPR's Morning Edition, Congressman Dennis Kucinich mentions the missing trillions: "As the ranking Democrat on a subcommittee which has jurisdiction over national defense, an oversight subcommittee, I know the kind of waste that goes on in the military. I know, for example, that the Department of Defense cannot reconcile $1 trillion in accounts. I know that they can't keep track of the cost of various contracts that go to the private sector." [13] April 6, 2004, USA Today, 'NASA costs can't be verified, GAO report says' [link] [14] March 2005, Senate Armed Services Committee, FY 2006 Defense Dept. Budget (congresswoman Cynthia McKinney asks some hard questions) [link]

Notes