So what’s wrong with the futures market? Hillary did pretty well
with it, so why shouldn’t the Defense Department try to use it for
a legitimate purpose? The stentorian senatorial chorus — from
those national security stalwarts Byron Dorgan (D-Corn) and Ron
Wyden (D-Whining) — was enough to draw the normally level-headed
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), chairman of the Intelligence Committee,
into the fray, lining up with those two jokers. But the idea — as
goofy as it may sound — was a good one. And it came straight from
the RSGs.
You have to understand what DARPA is. The Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency has a charter that looks like the orders
for the Starship Enterprise. Its only job is to push past the
boundaries of science to increase the effectiveness of our combat
forces. And DARPA is the bunch that the term “RSG” — real smart
guy — was invented for. Remember Dr. Tzap from the comic strip
“Tank McNamara”? He’s the wild-eyed scientist who’s always trying
to invent something like a rocket-propelled, radar-guided baseball
guaranteed to nick the outside corner of the strike zone, and
usually winds up with something that performs to order, but has the
unfortunate side effect of making a hole in the catcher. The DARPA
RSGs are not only a bunch smarter than Dr. Tzap, but they have the
world’s most powerful computers. And a few lasers, and all sorts of
world-vaporizing toys.
They are capable of some amazing things. When I was in the
Pentagon during Gulf War 1, in the first day or two of the
campaign, dust storms prevented our fliers from positively
identifying vehicles on the ground. As a result, some of our troops
were killed when our aircraft struck what they believed to be bad
guys.
About two mornings later, the director of DARPA — who shared a
boss with me — dropped in on the way to see the big guys. In his
hand was an object the size and shape of a coffee can. Gen.
Schwartzkopf had sent a handwritten note to Mr. Cheney asking for a
fix to the vehicle identification problem, and it was passed to
DARPA. The fix — which was designed and the prototype manufactured
in about 24 hours — was a powerful IR signal emitter, fitted with
a sort of velcro fastener. Pull the tape backing off the velcro,
stick it on your Bradley fighting vehicle, turn it on, and suddenly
every fighter and strike jock above sees a very bright spot on his
infrared detectors that says, “good guy.” If the air war hadn’t
ended in just a few more days, thousands of these things would have
been produced and shipped to Kuwait. This is one side of DARPA. The
other is the spooky scientists who you lock in a lab, and open the
door once every few years to see what they’re doing. And they’re
always doing something.
Who would you bet on to apply awesome brain power to devise new
ways to predict terrorism: the U.S. Senate or DARPA? If you have to
stop to think about the answer, please stop reading now. We need to
get past the strange and funny side of the DARPA proposal, and to
the serious side.
Our intelligence community lacks the ability to forecast pretty
much anything, including terrorist attacks. We keep hearing about
intelligence failures before 9-11, but the failure to detect and
prevent terrorism is nothing new. From the Marine barracks bombing
in Beirut to the first World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy
bombings in Africa, and every other attack including and since
Pearl Harbor, our intelligence community has failed to protect us.
Judging by Rainbow Tom Ridge’s color-coded alerts, the information
we seem to be getting lately is no more specific — and no more
accurate — than a weather forecast. So why not apply the
tremendous amount of cranial capacity at DARPA to the issue?
Answer: we damned well ought to.
DARPA has been working at improving the intel game for years.
And one of the places they have been looking is the computer
simulations of markets and other aspects of the real world that
many top colleges such as the University of Chicago develop. So
when the idea of a futures market in terrorism came up, DARPA took
a hard look. What they came up with made some sense. Stock markets
are pretty good prognosticators of political and economic events.
If terrorist acts are anything, they are intended to be harmful
economically and achieve political ends by violence. When DARPA’s
little program was set up, it was intended to capture the wisdom of
the marketplace in helping forecast terrorist events. As DARPA’s
initial announcements put it, the advice of the market is often
better than advice from experts.
Called “FutureMAP,” the DARPA program would have allowed one
thousand people — later up to ten thousand — to buy and sell
“futures” contracts, betting on whether certain events would happen
in the Middle East, or on specific terrorist acts. Because the real
futures markets can be manipulated by real terrorists, FutureMAP
could have helped DARPA learn how that could be done, spot those
manipulations and turn them into two kinds of useful information.
First, the information could have been used directly to help
predict terrorist acts. Second, the DARPA program could have been
the basis for devising new intelligence methods to discover
terrorist plans. Both objectives were worthwhile, and should have
been continued. And then Byron Dorgan and his pals started shouting
that it was “unbelievably stupid.”
Many senators know very well that we can trust DARPA with a
whole stack of things that — handled badly — will result in an
Earth-shattering “KABOOM.” Yet they made the instant judgment for
the television cameras that we couldn’t trust DARPA with FutureMAP.
Maybe they thought it wasn’t expensive enough. At $8 million over
two years, the DARPA program cost less than Congress spills on its
shirt any given day. (And a great deal less than any number of
Federal nuisances. NEA cost us $115 million last year, and the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting stings us for $300 million
every year.)
For now, at least, FutureMAP is an idea as dead as French honor.
It was a decent idea, which could have been tried without a huge
dent in the public coffers. It’s interesting to see how quickly
Congress shot it down, and how slowly it will be to come up with a
better idea to help predict terrorist events. Don’t hold your
breath.
