Of course, hearings on this subject are going to continue for several weeks.

Senator LEVIN. I meant in terms of these two witnesses.

Senator WARNER. Yes, that record is open for questions.

Senator LEVIN. Will there be additional questioning today of them?

Senator WARNER. Yes, after the vote.

So we will adjourn for about 15 minutes. [A brief recess was taken.]

Senator WARNER. We will resume the hearing now.

Dr. Ikle, I want to be respectful of your time constraints. If you can bear with us for just a minute until Mr. Levin returns, we will ask General Abrahamson to interrupt his presentation briefly so that we can provide him with a brief question opportunity, and then try and accommodate both of you.

[Pause.]

Senator WARNER. Senator Levin, Dr. Ikle has remained at our joint request.

Mr. Levin, we are hopeful you can make this fairly brief.
Senator LEVIN. Thank you.

I wonder if we can get an estimate from Dr. Ikle as to where we are vis-a-vis the Soviet Union in the SDI area. Are they ahead of us in that narrow area of ballistic missile defense? Are we ahead of them? Are we about even? Where are we?

Dr. IKLE. They are ahead in, of course, the deployment of traditional types of ballistic missile defense. They have a system around Moscow and we do not. They have developed an infrastructure with their radars, including one in violation of the ABM Treaty. They have conducted research on the technologies that are a part of General Abrahamson's program far longer than we have. Maybe General Abrahamson wants to gauge further what the differences are, and I think you have scheduled in this series, as the chairman mentioned, a review of the Soviet ballistic missile effort.

But it is clear that they have been working on it vigorously in the last 10 years while we have scaled down our efforts.

Senator LEVIN. I am just talking about the area

Dr. IKLE. This is the area of advanced technology.

Senator LEVIN. Are you saying the Soviets are ahead of us?

Dr. IKLE. They have been working on it vigorously.

Senator LEVIN. Let me repeat my question.

Are you saying the Soviets are ahead of us in the area covered

by the SDI Program?

Dr. IKLE. In some parts.

Senator LEVIN. Overall, in the area covered by the SDI Program, are the Soviets ahead of us?

Dr. IKLE. It is not possible to make an overall balanced judgment, particularly not in an open session, but we will have further testimony for you on the Soviet program.

Senator LEVIN. Are you saying that it is not possible to make an overall assessment on who is ahead in the SDI area, or that you cannot do it in open session?

Dr. IKLE. The latter primarily.

Senator LEVIN. So that when the President said that they are 10 years ahead of us, he was not referring to the SDI area?

Dr. IKLE. He was referring to the effort they made. They started 10 years earlier, in essence.

Senator LEVIN. They are not 10 years ahead of us. They started 10 years before us.

Dr. IKLE. He was also including-I would have to look at the exact quote-the more traditional ABM systems and the infrastructures that I referred to, the radars and other things that they have been preparing.

Senator LEVIN. You are saying that the impression left by the quote-and I will try to get it

Dr. IKLE. It would be helpful if you had it for us.

Senator LEVIN. The Soviet Union is about 10 years ahead of us in developing a defensive system. That is the exact quote that I have. Dr. ÎKLE. The operative word there is "developing." They started, as I said, 10 years ahead of us.

Senator LEVIN. So you are saying they are not 10 years ahead of us now but that they started 10 years ahead of us.

Is that what you are saying?

Dr. IKLE. What is the meaning they are not 10 years ahead of us now?

Senator LEVIN. This says the Soviet Union is about 10 years ahead of us in developing defensive systems.

Dr. IKLE. They started 10 years earlier and presumably accomplished a great deal in this area. Whether in every part of technology they are more capable now or not would require more detailed evaluation, and that is not what the President was referring to.

Senator LEVIN. So the President is not intending to imply there that in the SDI area, that they are now 10 years ahead of us? General ABRAHAMSON. Let me just

Senator LEVIN. I want to get Dr. Ikle.

General ABRAHAMSON. Sir, their defensive technologies-there are many, many defensive technologies. We are not only pursuing advanced lasers and some of these concepts, we are also pursuing some more conventional concepts. The Soviets are taking some different directions, as they always do. They have built on-

Senator LEVIN. General, I understand all of that. They are moving in different directions. I am only talking about in the SDI area. I want to know whether or not they are now 10 years ahead of us in that area, and you are saying no, they started 10 years ahead of us, and that is a very different impression than the President conveyed.

Dr. IKLE. Well, you have to give some meaning to the phrase "they are now 10 years ahead". Do you mean by that, Senator, that if they broke out of the treaty, they could get some important defensive capabilities 10 years before us?

Senator LEVIN. I think the meaning is clear. You quibble on words. The meaning is, it would take 10 years for us to get to where they are now in SDI.

Would it take us 10 years to get to where they are now in the SDI area?

General ABRAHAMSON. Building on the kind of technology that they have today—and by the way, intelligence people would be the ones that could, I think, put this in better perspective, but my understanding of what they are saying-

Senator LEVIN. Who is they?

General ABRAHAMSON. Our intelligence people, that they could have a fairly substantial defense against ballistic missiles. It would be a different character than what we are talking about right now, but a fairly substantial defense in the late 1980's if they chose to. The fact that they started early and now have built a full command and control capability that is nearly ready to go ahead now, that is part of a defensive system.

Senator LEVIN. But now, let's get to my question because we are going toward SDI as the defensive system, and my question is, are they 10 years ahead of us in developing an SDI type defense system?

General ABRAHAMSON. They are, in certain areas.

Senator LEVIN. And in other areas, they are not?

General ABRAHAMSON. In some areas, we have a fundamental technical advantage, but we have not moved to apply those technical advantages to the final solution.

Senator LEVIN. General, would you say overall that they are 10 years ahead of us in developing an SDI type defense?

Dr. IKLE. I think the answer to the question, as I understand it, the way you mean it now, is yes.

Senator LEVIN. General?

General ABRAHAMSON. Sir, I think you are trying to get too simple an answer. I think it is fundamentally more complicated than what you have asked, Senator, and that by trying to make it a simple black and white, yes or no answer, you are trying to elicit the wrong answer.

Senator LEVIN. I am trying to find out what the President means. He is trying to elicit a certain response. He tells the world the Soviet Union is about 10 years ahead of us in developing a defensive system. He is trying to create an impression, and I would say that your answer to my question is that my question is too simple. I would say that that statement is too simple.

General ABRAHAMSON. I think that it is an accurate statement in the sense that the Soviets could have a defensive system built on their earlier start much sooner than we could. In fact, they could have that in the late 1980's. It would be built first of all on traditional technologies, but in addition to that, they have very substantial advances in some of the advanced systems.

Senator LEVIN. But do we have advances in some of the advanced systems?

General ABRAHAMSON. We have fundamental technical advantages.

Senator LEVIN. Why do we not ever emphasize that?

General ABRAHAMSON. I have, sir.

Senator LEVIN. Well, that sure does not come through in this statement.

Dr. IKLE. The President has also emphasized that very much, very much, at the beginning, when he made his first statement about the initiative.

Senator LEVIN. I have a few additional questions of General Abrahamson, and I will insert questions for the record for Dr. Ikle. Senator WARNER. Dr. Ikle, we thank you very much. Senator LEVIN. I thank Dr. Ikle for staying, too.

Shall I just ask a few additional questions?

Senator WARNER. Well, I really feel that we have got this second panel tied up, and they are about to come forward here.

Senator LEVIN. I would like to ask those for the record as well. General Abrahamson and I, we communicate through the record frequently.

General ABRAHAMSON. One of these areas of fundamental technical advantage is, by the way, the one we are saying that we cannot do, and that is this group, and therefore, I think that is important to understand.

Senator WARNER. That is well spoken, General.

Now, General Abrahamson, I know that you have been anxious since early this morning to try and have the opportunity to publicly state your views on the issues of the computers.

You take such time as you need now.

General ABRAHAMSON. Thank you, sir. I appreciate very much the opportunity to allow some additional experts to be heard. It is my hope, of course, that the press and others will see that there is a very substantial body of opinion that is very well founded on just how difficult and how best to proceed in the difficult area of computers. So I would like to introduce three people who have had access to our program and who I think will provide some very credible counters to what I consider to be a very pessimistic view of what our technology can do at this point.

The first one I would like to introduce is Dr. Dick Lau, a Ph.D. from Yale who has served on the Cal Tech faculty and is now at the Office of Naval Research. Now, the one important activity that Dr. Lau has been very active in for us is bringing together some of these experts from outside to give us advice on the systems, and in fact, he chaired the effort that Dr. Parnas attended and then left. So I would like him to offer some of his own opinion based upon some of the information presented to each of them, but also his own opinion on the program.

And I would also then like to introduce Frederick Philip Brooks, who is a professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has an industrial background as well as an academic background. In fact, he was the manager in charge of developing the IBM system, the 360 system, which is a whole compatible family of computers. An important relevant statistic is that while people have said that developing a 10-million line-of-code system may well be impossible, the 360 system operates essentially on 10 million bytes of software, and its operating system to make that work.

And finally, Dr. Lipton from Princeton is a professor of computer science. He is an expert in architecture for computers, and particularly the application of some of these architectures to large-scale integrated circuits, what we call VLSI, and he has the added distinction of having once been a student of Dr. Parnas.

So I would like to invite you all to come up, and I will just move out of the way.

Senator WARNER. Why do we not just receive your brief testimony which can be expanded for the record, in order of your introductions.

STATEMENT OF RICHARD LAU, OFFICE OF NAVAL RESEARCH Mr. LAU. My name is Richard Lau, from the Office of Naval Research, and I would like to say something simple but I hope compelling.

I perhaps should start with an analogy and ask you to suppose you are a combat general faced with the prospect of attacking or not attacking, if you so decide, a difficult objective. What do you do? Well, you might pull your copy of Clausewitz out of your pocket and consult that, and that might be useful. You might communicate back to the staff college and ask the theorists-the warfare theorists-what their opinion of your situation is and how you might proceed. But I think what you would in fact do is consult your best combat officers, those both above and below you with real experience in taking real objectives.

A case can be made, to shift gears now, from combat to software, that there are four great software gurus in this world, the people who founded the subject and who have probably collectively made the greatest contribution to the subject. One of them is sitting next to me, and I apologize for calling you a guru. That is Fred Brooks. The others are Harlan Mills of IBM, Vic Vyssotsky of Bell Labs, and David Parnas, to give him his due, of the University of Victoria.

[Additional information follows:]

On the matter of SDI software, I do not know Mills' views. Of the remaining three, Parnas is the "staff college theoretician" and Brooks and Vyssotsky the "combat officers" with great experience in the construction of large, real-time software systems. Parnas advances what are essentially theoretical arguments that dependable SDI battle management software cannot be constructed. Vyssotsky, who has very extensive experience in large telephone system software and who successfully developed the Safeguard software, has told me that he sees no reason why SDI software cannot successfully be developed. Further, after hearing the results of our summer Eastport Group Study, in which both Professor Lipton and I participated, Vyssotsky observed that we had made surprising progress and that his optimism was reinforced. I believe that Professor Brooks will follow me with testimony substantially endorsing Vyssotsky's views.

Senator WARNER. The fundamental issue before us is the program, SDI. An integral part of it is the computer software system. What is your judgment with respect to the U.S. technology achieving the goals that are now being laid down by General Abrahamson?

Mr. LAU. My judgment is that there is no reason why we should not be able to build the computer hardware and software system to support SDI battle management, and I was going to cite the names of the four people whose opinions count more than mine.

Senator WARNER. That judgment is predicated on what experience that qualifies you as an expert?

Mr. LAU. Fifteen years of computing experience, mostly in the management of basic research in computer science.

Senator WARNER. Thank you very much. You are qualified as an expert witness.

Now we will take the next gentleman.