THE BLACK WORLD

Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer finishing his Ph.D. in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, is fascinated by the 'black' world of secret US military programmes in all its aspects and has recently published a book containing 75 patches, the kind worn on military uniforms. The book is called “I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me." Mr. Paglen says the title comes from a patch designed for the Navy Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 4, at Point Mugu, Calif. Its mission, he says, is to test strike aircraft, conventional weapons and electronic warfare equipment and to develop tactics to use the high-tech armaments in war. “The military has patches for almost everything it does,” Mr. Paglen writes in the introduction. “Including, curiously, for programs, units and activities that are officially secret.”

Accorduing to William J. Broad, writing in the New York Times: 'The classified budget of the Defense Department, concealed from the public in all but outline, has nearly doubled in the Bush years, to $32 billion. That is more than the combined budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Those billions have expanded a secret world of advanced science and technology in which military units and federal contractors push back the frontiers of warfare. In the past, such handiwork has produced some of the most advanced jets, weapons and spy satellites, as well as notorious boondoggles.'

'This stuff is a huge industry, I mean a huge industry," says Paglen. "And it's remarkable that you can develop these projects on an industrial scale, and we don't know what they are. It's an astounding feat of social engineering."

See complete article here: Inside the Black Budget