War Taxonomies
An encyclopaedia of conditions of lethal force
This is an edited version of a talk given at the Glass Room, London, 3 Nov. 2017.
Part 1
I'm going to talk about the relationship between data and knowledge.
The example through which I'm going to do this is the public data released by the US Defense Department detailing its procurements - its purchases of goods and services from the private sector. This data is housed in an online repository called the Federal Procurement Data System.
At present the repository records an event every 16 seconds. From the start of 2009 to the end of 2016 that amounts to 14.9 million events. Each event is an action pertaining to a financial instrument: funding actions, transfer actions, exercises of options, changes of order, terminations for cause or convenience, close-outs. It is with these financial instruments that the military - that is to say, the government's monopoly on force which quintessentially defines a state - communicates with its service providers - the corporations, at home and abroad, which enable it.
Over the period, the monetary figures recorded total $3,308,927,688,833.05 of costs and $713,730,123,396.27 of spending deducted, that is to say, a total of $2,595,197,565,436.78.
At an annual average of $324.4bn, this is approximately equal to the combined gross domestic product of the 74 smallest-producing countries, according to the World Bank. It is slightly greater than the annual GDP of South Africa (population 55 million), and slightly smaller than that of Egypt (population 92 million).
Since 2009 the annual defence budget of the USA has varied between a low of $610bn and a high of $717bn. On average, the transactions recorded amount to almost half of this.
These numbers, and other numbers like them, are in some sense too big to understand. And the data which they are drawn from are themselves too big to be visible.
Every encyclopaedic project represents an attempt to deal with the problem of what, these days, we might call big data. It's a problem that is more central to us as humans than you might at first imagine. We are data-processing entities, and our foundational myths are data-processing myths.
The Genesis narrative is one such. At the start of the narrative, the "beginning", everything is confusion: tohu-va-bohu, translated as formless void in the King James Bible ("the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep") but commonly glossed by kabbalist interpreters as including the inherent potential for form, the acknowledgement that some inchoate form existed within it.
The process of creation is a process of drawing out this form through distinction, division, demarcation, the creation of categories and nomenclature: light is divided from darkness, one is called day and the other night; the waters are divided by the firmament, and one division of these is then subdivided into land and sea, the land itself divided into herbs and fruits, and so on.
The process of creation, then, is a narrative of a process of knowledge: an account of the human mind getting to grips with the mass of data that surrounds it.
Attempts to represent knowledge regularly come up against the problem of scale. It is a problem that Borges memorably portrayed in his Library of Babel [slide]: the vertiginous library contains everything and its opposite, everything that has been, will be or could be and paradoxically everything that is not (which therefore is). "It contains all knowledge but it cannot be accessed".
Historians sometimes portray the transition to modernity in terms of the transition away from mimetic encyclopaedic forms. Or to put it another way: the transition from complex structures, supposed to represent something imitatively, to lists, which have no imitative or signifying function.
In the Middle Ages, it was typical for works which attempted to contain the world's knowledge to do so by a mirroring or mimetic structure: works were frequently divided thematically, into the seven liberal arts or themes based on this (the Margarita philosophica); into logical attributes (Ramon Llull’s Ars magna) or into the cosmic hierarchy of being (Giovanni Pico’s Heptaplus). The sixteenth-century esotericist Francesco Zorzi, who is an extreme example of this tendency, structured his very large multi-volume "harmonia mundi" - the harmony of the world - after a complex system of “canticles, tones and modulations".
With the arrival of the "Enlightenment" - commonly associated with the breakdown of the ancient structural systems which had conditioned the shape of knowledge since Aristotle - arrived the vogue for alphabetical rather than thematic, cosmic or structural organisation.
The alphabetical system of the 18th century is represented in exemplary form by Chambers' "Cyclopaedia or an Universal Dictionary" (1728) and Diderot-D'Alembert's "Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers" (1751-72).
Thematic structure makes explicit what it regards to be canonical - what's in, what's out. And hierarchical thematic systems - like the cosmic chain of being, or the liberal arts - included a governance of "decorum", as it was often called in literary studies. Things are in their proper place, not promiscuously intermingled. The notable and the banal do not occupy the same or adjoining places. The order of the work should be significant, not arbitrary.
Alphabetical systems are different from this. By subduing everything to the essentially arbitrary rule of the sequence of the alphabet, they dissolve the bonds between important and unimportant, necessary and unnecessary, relevant and irrelevant that characterised the repositories of knowledge previously.
An example from the opening pages of the Encyclopédie:
Ab - father
Aba - town in Greece
Abaca - type of hemp, not well known what it is
Abach - small town in Germany
Abaco - a word for arithmetic used by some ancient authors
Abacoa - American isle
Abacot - English kings' ancient headgear
Abada - an animal in Bengal, one horn on the forehead and one on the nape of the neck, the size of a small horse, with a tail like a bull but shorter
Diderot and D'Alembert did conceive of knowledge as following a certain structure. And they placed this structure at the start of their book on a large fold-out page. But this structure was not to be the controlling arrangement of their book. D'Alembert spoke at length about the structure in his introductory remarks; he also spoke about its limitations.
"Object of the encyclopaedic order: to gather [material] in the smallest possible space, and place the philosopher above the vast labyrinth from where he can look down on the principal arts and sciences at the same time; to see with a glance the objects of his speculations and the operations he can carry out on these objects; distinguish the general branches of the human knowledges, the points which separate or unite them, and even the secret paths which join them."
He makes a specifically geographical analogy:
"It is a type of world map, which must show the principal countries, their position and mutual dependence, the straight path from one to another; a path often cut by a thousand obstacles which are unknown except to inhabitants or travellers in each country, and which can only be shown on more detailed charts. These more detailed charts are the different articles in the encyclopaedia [i.e. the bits in alphabetical order] and the tree or figured system will be the world map."
And he notes the role of the observer's perspective:
"[But because the world map depends on the perspective from which it is drawn ...] we can imagine different world maps, different projections and almost all knowledgeable men place the knowledge that is their speciality at the centre of all the sciences.
"There is of necessity something arbitrary in the organisation. The most natural arrangement would be that objects follow one another through insensible nuances which serve to unite and divide them. But the small number of entities known to us does not allow us to mark these nuances. The universe is nothing but a vast ocean, on the surface of which we perceive certain bigger or smaller islands, of which the link to the continent is hidden."
Scholars and readers of the Encyclopédie are always delighted to examine its entry for itself - "Encyclopédie" which falls between “ENCROUÉ (adj. (Jurispr.) terme d'eaux & forêts, qui se dit d'un arbre lequel en tombant s'embarrasse dans les branches d'un autre arbre qui est sur pié)” and “ENDECAGONE (Voyez Hendecagone)”.
Diderot, in this entry, described his brainchild as "simultaneously overstuffed and starved":
"Here we are swollen and exorbitant, there meagre, small, paltry, dry and emaciated. In one place we resemble skeletons ... we are alternately dwarfs and giants, colossi and pygmies..."
The audience of an encyclopaedic project is often the learned, or just the average, people of the day. But sometimes it is explicitly something else: the people of the future, or the people of another planet.
Diderot envisaged one use of his encyclopaedia as being a tool for recovery from a disaster to come: "some catastrophe so great as to suspend the progress of science and interrupt the labours of craftsmen and plunge a portion of our hemisphere into darkness once again". (How to ensure that the Encyclopaedia itself survived the catastrophe is something he did not make clear.) In this case, the creation narrative would turn backwards: things would lose their categories and distinctions and would revert to chaos, tohu-va-bohu.
A twentieth-century encyclopaedic project was the burying, in 1965, of Westinghouse Electric Company's "Time Capsule II" in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York, a record of twentieth-century civilisation comprising 17 cans of microfilm: "encyclopaedias, magazines, newspapers, technical papers, pamphlets, catalogs, transcripts, and 29 texts written especially for the capsule by international experts". It also included "Articles of common use": "a kind of cold war consumer survival kit including filtered cigarettes, tranquilizers, contact lenses, plastic wrap, freeze-dried food, detergent, credit cards, a bikini, and a Beatles record, all encased in a leak-proof, argon filled envelope". The capsule weighed 211 kilos and looked like a missile.
(In the 1990s and 2000s Westinghouse Electric Corporation was in the throes of a long restructuring process. Parts of it became CBS and were then bought by Viacom. Parts were sold to Siemens. Parts were sold to British Nuclear Fuels which in turn was sold to Toshiba. Parts of it went to Northrop Grumman, the defence contractor, now one of the most frequently cited and highest earning corporations in the defense data repository: a company which in 2016 made 10,535 transactions with the government - 28 a day - for a total of 10,575,996,507.36.)
More recently, the artist Trevor Paglen has developed his own version of this future-anxiety-encyclopaedia, entitled The Last Pictures: "a micro-etched disc with one hundred photographs, encased in a gold-plated shell, designed withstand the rigors of space and to last for billions of years" and launched from Kazakhstan into geostationary orbit on communications satellite EchoStar XVI in November 2012. "The satellite will spend fifteen years broadcasting television and high-bandwidth internet signals before maneuvering into a 'graveyard' orbit where it will become a ghost-ship, carrying The Last Pictures towards the depths of time.”
Part 2
The video shows part of a stream of transaction data for procurements by the Defense Department made on this day a year ago: 3 Nov. 2016.
Each transaction, as represented here, has 55 elements. I have selected these 55 from a larger totality of elements available in the overall data set. The day, which was a Thursday, saw 14,222 transactions. This means that the total procession of data would amount to 782,210 elements, which at a rate of one element a second would take just over 217 hours to display.
I've called this discussion "War Taxonomies: An Encyclopaedia of Conditions for Lethal Force". What the data represent are money offered by the government (i.e. the taxpayer, or bond-purchaser) to corporations to carry out certain tasks, which are inevitably tasks extending into the future. Each line of the data includes four dates: DateSigned, EffectiveDate, CompletionDate, EstUltimateCompletionDate. The traces that the data offer are thus, on first appearance, traces of the future - indications of events that should happen, at least are contractually obliged to happen, but are nonetheless dependent on contingency and the conditional as to whether and how they do happen.
As time goes by they recede into traces of a possible past: but what actually happened, on the ground, may or may not be clear from them.
The data are also conditional in that they do not encompass the most essential activities of war-making, the application of force itself: the shooting or dropping of projectiles or explosives.
These actual events, the events of lethal force which the military tends to refer to by the euphemism "kinetic", are beyond the data's vanishing point. But the conditions which precede these events and make them possible are manifold and these traces do exist: provision of fuel, construction of runways, purchasing of projectiles, training of pilots and so on.
Each of these actions - one every 16 seconds - is "described" in terms which can range from very short - sometimes one character only - to quite long.
Among the briefest of descriptions:
Among the longest:
If we scan down the list of descriptions for this day - a day like any other day - we come across purchases relating to:
the thermal imaging technology experiment, aviation turbine fuel, refrigeration system, guidance system for Minuteman III, Talos technical support, Big Safari, Sniper Advanced Targeting Pods, Sonar Dome, counterintelligence support, solid waste management, snow and ice removal, war gaming support services, intelligence, target system analysis, FLIR camera, labor, pest control, ball bearings, gasket, switch, relay, antenna, valves, adverts on buses, apples, pork spareribs, salad mix, strawberries, raw salmon portions, IGF, "EMMA&HELGA (HARDKILL)".
These are items that I have chosen more or less at random.
Describing the events of 3 Nov. 2016 in these terms, in any order or none, may not be very enlightening. So in addition and in the alternative we can look at the map, to borrow D'Alembert's term, that is, the taxonomy or breakdown of categories which the items fall into.
Most of the 55 elements of each transaction can be considered taxonomical, although not all. The Description is not particularly helpful as a taxonomy because it tends to be unique or nearly unique. The sum of money spent would be a possible taxonomy in some cases: it can be useful to look at the most expensive things, perhaps, or the least expensive, but not particularly useful to look at as a category "things which cost $12.20" (incidentally, the most frequent sum spent after zero). But most of the other elements have some taxonomical advantage: which agency paid for the work, which company received money for it, where that company is based, what type of work is performed - according to two differing standard category sets - and what contract number the work is performed under: all of these are plausibly helpful ways of beginning to parse and distinguish the flow of data and separate it into something that might be interpretable.
Keeping as our example the events of that day, these preliminary taxonomies comprise 3,207 Procurement Instrument Identifiers, 2,639 Global Vendors, 2,154 Indefinite Delivery Vehicles, 658 Product/Service Descriptions and 412 NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) Descriptions.
Bertolt Brecht famously remarked that "less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp armament works or the AEG tells us next to nothing about these institutions."
As a commentary to this remark, we may consider these satellite images at 1km elevation of the "addresses" - i.e. company offices - that received the most business from the US Defense Department (in dollars) over the course of 3 Nov. 2016.
Boeing
Harris Corp
Lockheed Martin
MSG
Royal Dutch Shell
General Dynamics
McKesson
Johns Hopkins
Raytheon
Professional Contract Services
Taking as an example Lockheed Martin, we can observe 696 transactions on this one day, arranged under 21 indefinite delivery vehicles and 28 procurement instrument identifiers. The vast majority of the transactions fall under one single delivery number but are for an indiscriminate collection of machine parts: relays, motors, plugs, filters, clamps, flanges, locks, cushions, wedges, solenoids, hoses and so on. What do these parts - costing a total of $97,454.85 but individually costing an average of $156.93 - tell us about, say, the activities of Lockheed's F15 fighter jet?
In real terms it makes little sense to base an analysis of these types of efforts over the transactions of a single day; transactions may form part of a chain of contractual operations over months or years, and any one item in this chain may be obscure without seeing the other items associated with it - this we may compare to D'Alembert's "insensible nuances which serve to unite and divide" one thing with or from another.
Thus the Lockheed contract - categorised by SPE7L116D0003 - includes actions dated from 22 February 2016 continuing almost daily throughout the remainder of the year - almost 300 different days of activity, totalling nearly 90,000 transactions in total.
If we want to understand the activities of 3 Nov. 2016, therefore, we need to zoom out to a longer duration - and here of course we find there is more data to contend with.
On 3 Nov. 2016, as noted previously, there were contractual actions with 2,639 different global vendors. In 2016 as a whole, there were 57,583. Zooming out further, from 2009 to 2016 the repository charts the fluctuating relationships between the state and some 200,000 corporate vendors. It is difficult to know this number precisely, because complex business structures and subdivisions obscure the ultimate destination of the revenue in some cases. How many of these vendors are private, and how many have public share ownership, is also beyond the reach of our knowledge, though not incalculable.
The repository records the lifecycles of around 3.5 million simple contracts - "Procurement Instrument Identifiers" or PIIDs - and some 142,000 more capacious and longer-running Indefinite Delivery Vehicles. Such contracts can span years, receding into the past or the future beyond the glimpse that the current timespan of data gives us.
Taking this 8-year spread - more or less coextensive with the Obama administration - we can determine that the categories of product or service on which the most money was spent were the following:
AIRCRAFT, FIXED WING
SUPPORT- PROFESSIONAL: ENGINEERING/TECHNICAL
MEDICAL- GENERAL HEALTH CARE
COMBAT SHIPS AND LANDING VESSELS
LIQUID PROPELLANTS AND FUELS, PETROLEUM BASE
GUIDED MISSILES
DRUGS AND BIOLOGICALS
IT AND TELECOM- OTHER IT AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS
GAS TURBINES AND JET ENGINES, AIRCRAFT, PRIME MOVING; AND COMPONENTS
NUCLEAR REACTORS
MISCELLANEOUS COMMUNICATION EQUIPMENT
HOUSEKEEPING- FACILITIES OPERATIONS SUPPORT
CONSTRUCTION OF MISCELLANEOUS BUILDINGS
ELECTRONIC COUNTERMEASURES, COUNTERCOUNTERMEASURES AND QUICK REACTION CAPABILITY EQUIPMENT
UNMANNED AIRCRAFT
TRUCKS AND TRUCK TRACTORS, WHEELED
Among the least expensive over the same period of time:
TOBACCO PRODUCTS
DEPTH CHARGES AND COMPONENTS, EXPLOSIVE
SOUPS AND BOUILLONS
LIVE ANIMALS, NOT RAISED FOR FOOD
MEAT PROCESSED FROM CARCASSES
VENDING MACHINE OPERATORS
RICE FARMING
CITRUS (EXCEPT ORANGE) GROVES
OTHER VEGETABLE (EXCEPT POTATO) AND MELON FARMING
NEWS DEALERS AND NEWSSTANDS
FLORICULTURE PRODUCTION
RETAIL BAKERIES
COMMERCIAL LITHOGRAPHIC PRINTING
FATS AND OILS REFINING AND BLENDING
The repository also offers a "place of performance" for events destined to occur outside the United States.
From 2008 to 2016, some of the most costly projections of power overseas calculated in terms of what the government paid to corporations were
$77.6bn in Afghanistan
$23.1bn in Kuwait
$21.8bn in Iraq
$18.6bn in Germany
$11.8bn in the United Arab Emirates
$11.7bn in Switzerland
$8.7bn in the UK
$5.7bn in Kyrgyzstan
But this is misleading, since the manufacture and purchase of goods for use overseas is often coded as a domestic cost, and activities that take place overseas are often left blank. More than 350,000 places of performance are blank in the repository.
In recent years, the companies recorded as having received the highest overall revenue include Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies, L-3 Communications, BAE Systems, Humana, Bechtel Group, UnitedHealth Group, Health Net, McKesson and Booz Allen Hamilton.
But to dwell on these would be to ignore more than 74,000 other companies which are recorded as contracting with the department over the same period. They are easy to ignore, because their names arouse little recognition, and the sheer number of them makes singling any out for inspection more difficult. How should we choose which to look at?
To return momentarily to Borges's Babel library:
"When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. ... This unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly disproportionate depression. The certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon contained precious books, yet those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable. ... Infidels claim that the rule in the Library is not 'sense' but 'non-sense', and that 'rationality' (even humble, pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak, I know, of 'the feverish library, whose random volumes constantly threaten to transmogrify into others, so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity.'"
There are moments of rationality and sense in the stream of data which can stand out from the chaos - a little like, as D'Alembert said, islands amid a vast ocean.
In August 2013, for example, the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa hired two front end loaders from a local firm for a ninety day period. Their destination was an austere airstrip in Djibouti, a few kilometres outside the capital.
At the start of that year the land to the north of the strip was cleared, and containers deposited in the corner of the clearing.
For the next two years the data records hires of equipment, refuse service, labour and materials on a near monthly basis:
01/06/13 2 FRONT END LOADERS WITH A POP OF 90 DAYS. 1 FRONT END LOADER WITH A POP OF 30 DAYS. IN SUPPORT OF CHABELLEY AIR FIELD BUILD OUT. MISCELLANEOUS FOREIGN CONTRACTORS 40500
22/08/13 CHABELLEY VEHICLE RENTALIGF::OT::IGF MISCELLANEOUS FOREIGN CONTRACTORS 17802
13/09/13 CHABELLEY REFUSE SERVICEIGF::OT::IGF NALCO CONSTRUCTION COMPANY 3500
18/09/13 CHABELLEY PORTABLE TOILETSIGF::OT::IGF ALUMINIUM 2000 FZCO 18000
28/09/13 CHABELLEY AIRFIELD LIGHT SPARESIGF::OT::IGF CARMANAH TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 35674.66
30/09/13 CHABELLEY DUMP TRUCKIGF::OT::IGF MISCELLANEOUS FOREIGN CONTRACTORS 12174.66
07/03/14 IGF::OT::IGF MOD A00009 CHANGE IN CHABELLEY SERVICES. KBR INC. 0
20/06/14 IGF::OT::IGF UNDEFINITIZED CONTRACT ACTION TO NEGOTIATE OPTIONS 1, 2 AND 3 FOR ANNEX 2002010 CHABELLEY AIRFIELD KBR INC. 0
19/08/14 IGF::OT::IGF ADD FUNDING FOR LOCAL NATIONAL LABOR UNDER ANNEX 2002010 CHABELLEY AIRFIELD OPTION PERIOD ONE KBR INC. 502891.85
23/09/14 IGF::OT::IGF TASK ORDER 0027 FOR CHABELLEY AIRFIELD MILL&PAVE - REPAIR CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT - SAES GEOENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES INC 72154
26/09/14 IGF::OT::IGF CHABELLEY INSTALLATION DEVELOPMENT PLAN H.D.R. INC. 422635
16/04/15 IGF::OT::IGF RENTAL OF REACH TRUCK, BOOM LIFT, AND BACKHOE FOR LARGE AREA MAINTENANCE SHELTERS AT CHABELLEY AIRFIELD, DJIBOUTI. SELECT INTERNATIONAL SERVICES FZCO 45,370.00
06/06/15 CHABELLEY AGGREGRATE SELECT INTERNATIONAL SERVICES FZCO 64,742.40
26/08/15 IGF::OT::IGF GRAVEL DELIVERY TO CHABELLEY AIR FIELD GOLDEN RELIEF RESOURCES LTD 46,200.00
30/09/15 IGF::OT::IGF CONCRETE AND GRAVEL FOR CHABELLEY AIR FIELD GOLDEN RELIEF RESOURCES LTD 176,000.00
27/01/16 IGF::OT::IGF, TASK ORDER FOR CHABELLEY AIR FORCE LAMS. JOC NSA CAMP LEMONNIER&CHEBELLEY DJIBO KBR INC. 613,804.59
13/02/16 IGF::OT::IGF GRAVEL FOR CHABELLEY GOLDEN RELIEF RESOURCES LTD 5,416.00
02/03/16 IGF::OT::IGF SPRUNG PARTS FOR CHABELLEY AIR FIELD SPRUNG SALES LTD 59,770.34
By the end of this period, the containers had disappeared and the cleared area been transformed into hangars and satellite installations.
The broad-winged aircraft visible outside the hangars are Predator or Reaper drones.
The data invokes the department's evolving contractual relationships around the development, provision and maintenance of Reapers, which it recognises by their technical designation MQ-9, through payments to the drone's manufacturer, General Atomic Technologies, and other service providers such as Lockheed Martin, Shultz and Associates and Aerotronics.
22/09/16 ACAT 1C, MQ-9, ECP DMS FY14 SERVO REPLACEMENT GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 1,661,464.92
23/09/16 IGF::OT::IGF MQ-1/MQ-9 SUPPORT SERVICES - EAC LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION 27,592.00
23/09/16 IGF::OT::IGF_CONTRACTOR LOGISTICS SERVICES FOR MQ-1 PREDATOR AND MQ-9 REAPER GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 5,456,010.40
23/09/16 MQ-9 RPA CONTROL CONSOLE SIMULATOR AEROTRONICS LLC 36,683.34
26/09/16 ACAT 1, MQ-9, FOT&E SUPPORT - INCREMENTAL FUNDING GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 2,406,000.00
27/09/16 ACAT 1, MQ-9, POP EXTENSION CLINS 0001 AND 0002 GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 0.00
29/09/16 IGF::OT::IGF REPAIR AIRCRAFT PARKING RAMP, MQ-9 SHULTZ & ASSOCIATES LTD 12,512.00
29/09/16 IGF::OT::IGF MQ9 MAINTENANCE SUPPORT AT SCLA LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION 1,202,787.00
30/09/16 IGF::OT::IGF MQ-1/MQ-9 SUPPORT SERVICES - CP4 LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION 2,643,303.00
05/10/16 IGF::OT::IGF BLOCK 30 RETROFITS FOR MQ-9 REAPER GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 0.00
20/10/16 ACAT 1C, MQ-9, UPDATES TO ELIN AND GFP LISTS; POP EXTENSION GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 0.00
31/10/16 DEVELOP AND DEMONSTRATE THE STEREO TRACKING (ST) ELEMENT OF THE ADVANCED TRACKING AND TARGETING SYSTEM (ATTS). THIS EFFORT SHALL INCLUDE THE DEVELOPMENT OF SYSTEM COMPONENTS, INTEGRATION OF THESE COMPONENTS WITH MQ-9 REAPER, REMOTELY PILOTED AIRCRAFT (RPA) AND DATA PROCESSING AND ANALYSIS SYSTEMS, AND CONDUCT A SERIES OF TEST FLIGHTS TO GATHER EXPERIMENTAL DATA TO DEMONSTRATE SYSTEM PERFORMANCE. TASK ORDER 0003 IS FOCUSED ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF A PRECISION TRACKING SYSTEM ENABLING A LAUNCH ON REMOTE CAPABILITY USING EXISTING AND RAPIDLY DEPLOYABLE ELECTRO OPTIC/INFRARED (EO/IR) SENSORS AND AIRCRAFT. IGF::OT::IGF GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 3,198,732.00
31/10/16 THE CONTRACTOR WILL DESIGN, BUILD, AND TEST IN THE LABORATORY KEY LASER SUBSYSTEMS REQUIRED TO DEMONSTRATE PRECISION TRACKING. THE CONTRACTOR WILL PERFORM SYSTEMS LEVEL ANALYSES AND PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENTS BASED ON DESIGN PREDICTIONS AND LABORATORY MEASUREMENTS. THE CONTRACTOR WILL DEVELOP AND DEMONSTRATE, A MQ-9 FLIGHT REPRESENTATIVE LASER SYSTEM WITH THE BEAM TRAIN OPTICS REQUIRED TO UPGRADE A MULTI-SPECTRAL TARGETING SYSTEM (MTS-C) FOR USE AS AN ACTIVE TRACKING SENSOR. UNDER THIS CONTRACTUAL EFFORT THE CONTRACTOR IS TO DELIVER A LASER SYSTEM SIZED TO MEET MQ-9 INTEGRATION REQUIREMENTS. IGF::OT::IGF GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 3,662,000.00
08/11/16 IGF::CT::IGF:: UK MQ-9 CLS 16-19 GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 1,539,802.00
21/11/16 MQ-9 EXTENDED RANGE ADDITIONAL PROCUREMENT GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 9,960,139.00
21/11/16 MQ-9 EXTENDED RANGE ADDITIONAL PROCUREMENT GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 29,817,284.76
30/11/16 SENSOR TECHNOLOGY THAT SEEKS TO LEVERAGE PERSISTENT SURVEILLANCE PLATFORMS (E.G., MQ-9) AND ADVANCED ELECTRO-OPTIC SENSORS TO EVALUATE THE ABILITY OF SUCH SYSTEMS TO DETECT, IMAGE AND PROVIDE THREE-DIMENSIONAL TRACKING OF TARGETS IN FLIGHT. SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT, EXPERIMENTS AND PROTOTYPE TESTING WILL BE CONDUCTED TO EXAMINE TECHNICAL FEASIBILITY, PERFORMANCE, RELIABILITY, MEASURE ACCURACY AND TIMELINESS, AND EVALUATE THE ABILITY TO FOR RAID-HANDLING CAPACITY. GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 0.00
09/12/16 AFLCMC, ACAT 1C, PREDATOR REAPER, MQ-9 BLOCK 5 EXPORTABILITY GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 16,825,032.00
22/12/16 IGF::OT::IGF MQ-1/MQ-9 SUPPORT SERVICES - AFSOC DP-37 – DEOBLIGATION EAC LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION -609,707.00
22/12/16 IGF::OT::IGF CONTRACTOR LOGISTICS SERVICES FOR MQ-1 PREDATOR AND MQ-9 REAPER GENERAL ATOMIC TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION 104,927,364.00
While fragments - islands - of sense like this can be constructed from the data, it leaves oceans of non-sense, and sometimes nonsense, to be assessed and interrogated. The process of acquiring knowledge from information is dialectical, the expansion of parts and the contraction of wholes, the movement from distance to close-up and back again. The problem of acquiring knowledge is that the parts and the wholes can be too small, or too large, to perceive.
