
Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer finishing his doctorate in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, has managed to document some of this hidden world. Private analysts say it apparently is meant for developing space weapons. This year, for instance, the Pentagon says Program Element 0603891c is receiving $196 million but will disclose nothing about what the project does. In the past, such handiwork has produced some of the most advanced jets, weapons and spy satellites, as well as some notorious boondoggles.īudget documents tell little.

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. That is more than the combined budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and NASA.

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. Military officials and experts said that the patches were real, if often unofficial, efforts at building team spirit. "Gustatus Similis Pullus," reads the caption below, dog Latin for "Tastes Like Chicken."
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"To Serve Man" reads the text above, a reference to a classic episode of the "Twilight Zone" TV show in which man is the main course, not the customer.
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One patch shows a space alien with huge eyes holding a stealth bomber near its mouth. "It shows that these secret programs have their own culture, vocabulary and even sense of humor." "It's a fresh approach to secret government," Steven Aftergood, a security expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, said in an interview. The book offers a glimpse of this dark world through a revealing lens: patches, the kind worn on military uniforms. It is, according to a new book, part of the hidden reality behind the Pentagon's classified, or "black," budget that delivers billions of dollars to stealthy armies of high-tech warriors. No, this is not the fantasy world of a 12-year-old boy. A wizard with a staff that shoots lightning bolts.
