The Senate Armed Services committee hearing on the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Afterthoughts
I have been listening to the Senate Armed Services committee hearing on the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. There are, effectively, 4 people in this meeting. Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick (Chief of the AARO), Senator Kirsten Gillbrand (NY), Senator Joni Ernst (IA) and Senator Jacky Rosen (NV). There are various ways to interpret this, however, it appears quite obviously, that a: no one is interested and b: this is a trivial side-issue.
They do mention, however, an earlier, closed session. This session is merely for the sake of the public and the ability of the Senators involved to get on the record with their concerns. Some of the discussion is quite interesting, particularly when Dr. Kirkpatrick describes the organization’s structures and something of their protocols. He uses the concept of ‘peer review’ frequently, which, while crucial in science, eliminates most of the data. It’s not really complex enough for peer review.
Who would publish papers on these phenomena? Effectively, what he’s doing is limiting the field of inquiry to the absolute degree it can be limited … which is de rigor for science in general. But we don’t peer review intelligence data. The IC doesn’t have to haggle about its perspectives, opinions, data and analysis or recommendations. If this is an intelligence issue, ‘peer review’ is a process that is so incredibly slow that, it puts us way behind the data, and whatever science is involved. Notice also that the phrase ‘all domain’ occurs in the office title. This implies that the mandate might extend to information warfare topics, aquatic phenomena, the entire range of possible anomalism. Yet the hearing focuses primarily on aerial anomalies.
It’s also clear that the AARO isn’t getting funded in the following statement cribbed from the introduction.
The Senator from New York: “in late 2017 media reports surfaced about activity set in motion by the late long-serving Majority Leader Senator Harry Reid, more than a decade ago — we learned that there was strong evidence (of) advanced technology reflected in the features and performance characteristics of many objects observed by our highly trained service members operating top of the line military equipment. We learned that for the at least the past eight years military Pilots frequently encountered unknown objects in controlled airspace off both the east and west coast across the continental United States in test and training areas and ranges.
We don’t know where they are they come from who made them or how they operate, (but,) as former deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist observed: ‘had any of these objects had the label made in China there would be an uproar in the government and media there would be no stone unturned and no efforts spared to find out what we were dealing with.’
We can look at the recent incursion of the unidentified PRC high altitude balloon for… as an example …but because of the UFO stigma the response has been irresponsibly anemic and slow. Congress established AARO we made it clear that we expect vigorous action.
We added very substantial initial funding for the office but despite our best efforts the President’s budget for fiscal 23 and 24 requested only enough funding to defray the operating expenses of AARO. It included almost no funds to sustain the critical research and development necessary to support a serious investigation.
It took a letter to secretary Austin from Senator Rubio (from) me and 14 other Senators to get the office temporary relief for the current fiscal year. In this hearing I tend to probe a series of specific issues in the recent incidents where multiple objects were shot down over North America. It seemed that Pentagon leadership did not turn to AARO office to play a leading role in advising the combatant commander…”
She’s saying: a: ‘The Presidential Budget’ is failing to properly fund the AARO. b: The Pentagon is not actually including them in operational intelligence related to real-time situations, and is, at least as it relates to real-time situations, ignoring the AARO.
Dr. K. also discusses another feature of the situation which is attention to the physical characteristics of sensors of all kinds. It becomes clear that, in general, the military, at least according to Dr. Kirkpatrick, runs an ordinarily pretty narrow ‘filter’, meaning their sensors are generally only tuned to detect aircraft and perhaps missiles. The Senator from NY asks if the need to resolve these phenomena will lead D.K. to advise the armed forces to expand their sensor apertures so that we can get better data. D.K. dodges this question with a distracting explanation of the functions of his office that amounts to ‘No, we won’t.’
I find the discussion of the ‘aperture’ of sensors and what they are tuning out quite interesting because it clearly represents an opportunity to learn more about what is in our skies, in general. Effectively he is suggesting that the forms and adjustments of sensor-tech are skipping most of the available information to focus on known aircraft types. Reasonable. But it also leaves a huge array of data… uncollected and, perhaps… denied.
Dr. K is, perhaps reasonably, avoidant of any admission that anything unusual is actually going on, and is at pains to emphasize the proportion of reports that resolve as non-anomalous. He makes no mention whatsoever of anything surprising, and goes on to say that the cases which do not resolve this way are, he feels, simply the result of insufficient data to settle the case and write it off.
This office is 9 months old, having purportedly inherited its mandate from the The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF 2017–2020), a branch of the Office of Naval Intelligence.
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