Four different young Air Force officers get tapped three or four times each year for a four-month mission to see if they can find a vulnerability, or not, for a given space system. They employ open source information available over the Internet, at a public library, or even through a telephone call. The taskings are part of the Space Countermeasures Hands On Program, known as Space CHOP, formed in 1999 and run by one Air Force civilian engineer—John Holbrook—and two contractor consultants at Kirtland AFB, N.M. The participants usually have engineering or physical sciences backgrounds but no specific space system experience. Space CHOP, says Holbrook, is the only government group using a non-expert team to simulate open source terrorism. Its purpose is not to “replace traditional vulnerability analysis,” he asserts, but to “complement it.”
A new report from the Government Accountability Office calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer to have budget certification authority over the military services’ research and development accounts—a move the services say would add a burdensome and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
