Rallying 'Round the Flag

Multimax Inc., Largo, Md., won two five-year contracts worth a total of $75.7 million from the Air Force for communications support, testing and IT security services to Air Force organizations at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan for $32.8 million; and Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., for $42.9 million . . . .

Science Applications International Corp. . . . won two contracts worth a total of $68.4 million over three years from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help implement and support the agency's BioSense national syndromic surveillance program. . .

Or you can tour the bollards and cranes.

But it's all amorphous, compared with the sheds full of government workers thrown up on the Mall in the 1940s.

Hoping for a peek at the new wartime economy, I visited last year's Government Security Expo & Conference, or GOVSEC, at the Washington Convention Center. Launched in 2002, GOVSEC is an annual event "for those responsible for protecting government's physical, information and cyber security at the federal, state and local levels." The 2005 conference attracted 6,000 people, many of whom obviously had influence over government spending, because more than 500 companies -- from small inventors to charter members of the military-industrial complex -- waited eagerly to meet them in the exhibition hall.

Booths covering acres of floor space displayed products ranging from flashlights to speedboats. Some of the merchandise was brutally prosaic: jacks for lifting rubble, protective suits for cleaning up toxic debris, civil defense sirens, gas masks, stretchers, shatter-resistant windows. Some of the gear was old technology repackaged for new sales: traffic cones as evacuation markers; police vans souped up into mobile crisis command centers.

Other offerings were snazzy and high-tech; for example, a computer software package called VIS2TA. It was sold by Northrop Grumman, a Los Angeles company that happens to have four offices in Northern Virginia and yet another in Maryland. During World War II, the companies that now make up Northrop Grumman built airplanes and ships. Now they're raking in money writing software. VIS2TA was designed to reduce reams of emergency information into a single database. Suppose a bomb exploded in a VIS2TA town. The computer would quickly produce a city map showing every building in the vicinity of the blast. Click on a building, and up would pop a detailed floor plan and evacuation route. Every hospital, firehouse and police station would feed information into the map, updated as the crisis unfolded. Another layer of data would reveal the weather conditions and project the fallout based on prevailing winds.

But no one would buy just the software package. The same officials who would want VIS2TA would want a powerful new computer network to run it. They would want to house the network in a custom-built command center, like the one Gainer showed me last year inside Capitol Police headquarters. There, inside a secure room, I counted at least 10 big flat-panel displays and dozens of smaller screens showing views from surveillance cameras planted throughout Capitol Hill. There were also scores of phones and computer consoles. One display tracked the direction of the wind, and another reported the locations of key members of Congress. Yet another displayed the paths of nearby aircraft.

What chief would not like to have a space-age setup like this, whether or not he has Gainer's obvious reasons for needing it? And, of course, the command post must be connected to a mobile headquarters, which must be linked to rescue unit crews wearing new hazmat suits and carrying pricey hand-held radios. Multiply all those chiefs times all that gear, connect them through lobbyists and members of Congress to the pipeline of federal money, and you can begin to picture one tributary of the great Doom Boom. One of many.

Strolling up one aisle of GOVSEC and down the next, I was chilled at first by the horrible assumptions underpinning the bazaar. Portable anthrax tests. Bomb-defusing tents. Personal climate systems, for hunting terrorists in extreme heat or cold. Holographic weapons sights. Everything trailed a stink of death and dismemberment. But soon enough an almost giddy feeling of gee whiz replaced the horror: Wow, can they really do that? Have they actually perfected a voice-analyzing "truth verification system"? Is it true that sensors can identify people based on their unique pattern of blood vessels beneath the skin? Can a lightweight barrier really be strong enough to stop a speeding truck? And look at all this James Bond stuff: a cellphone that performs video surveillance; another cellphone that eavesdrops on the conversations of callers nearby.

Not every company hawking a product was based locally, of course. One of the most intriguing devices on display was produced by American Science and Engineering (AS&E), of Billerica, Mass. The company's ZBVs -- "Z Backscatter Vans" -- appeared to be ordinary white delivery trucks, but inside they were packed with supersensitive scanning machines. According to the company sales pitch, one driver in a ZBV can thoroughly search more than 100 cars, trucks, shipping containers, Dumpsters, boxcars -- you name it -- every hour, just by driving slowly past. From the sidewalk, it looks like Mr. Repairman needs a parking space, but, in fact, the van is emitting "backscatter X-rays," whatever those are, in a search for bombs, hidden passengers, illegal drug stashes and so on. Another machine, at the same time, is probing the air for radioactive telltales of nukes and dirty bombs. A ZBV can look through the walls of some buildings and the clothes of passersby. It can park at the curb and scan traffic, or it can race along at highway speeds, scanning the cars alongside. And if you paint FTD on the side, everyone will think it's roses.

AS&E makes these vans in Billerica, but Washington is the place to turn sneaky vans into profits. This is where America keeps its checkbook. This is where the grants are bestowed for purchasing bomb-finders and nuke-sniffers. This is where the money comes from for research and development on the next generation of scanning technologies. This is where a company's executives can have lunch with their lobbyists, should they wish to seek counsel on the best way to dip their corporate pail into the government's cataract of cash.