---
title: "KONA BLUE was a proposed DHS successor to AAWSAP/AATIP after its 2012 termination, described by AARO as a 'Prospective Special Access Program' that was never approved"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/AARO_Historical_Record_Report_Volume_1_2024.pdf"
source_author: "All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), U.S. Department of Defense"
source_date: "2024-02-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "This proposal gained some initial traction at DHS to the point where a Prospective Special Access Program (PSAP) was officially requested to stand up this program, but it was eventually rejected by DHS leadership for lacking merit."
source_tier: 1
audit_status: "2026-07-28 cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5; writer claude-sonnet-5): re-fetched the AARO report via extract_pdf (tls verified) and verified the claim against pp. 22–23 and 34–35. Two corrections, applied in place: (1) the original source_quote — 'Prospective Special Access Program ... never approved by DHS' — was a stitched composite; the phrase 'never approved by DHS' is not verbatim (the report says 'The SAP was never approved or stood up, and no data or material was transferred to DHS'); replaced with the report's own sentence. (2) The body's closing 'no formally-proposed institutional successor' inverted the record — KONA BLUE was formally proposed (a PSAP was officially requested); reworded to 'no approved successor.' Claim substance confirmed."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-26-is-the-dias-advanced-aerospace-weapon-system-applications.md, 2026-07-27"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-07-26-is-the-dias-advanced-aerospace-weapon-system-applications.md"]
date_created: "2026-07-27T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["defense-funding","aatip","aawsap","dia","aaro","kona-blue"]
---


Per AARO's 2024 historical-record report, after the [[entity-aawsa-program|AAWSAP]] contract's 2012 termination, its supporters "unsuccessfully attempted to convince DHS to support a new version of this effort dubbed KONA BLUE." AARO records that the proposal "gained some initial traction at DHS to the point where a Prospective Special Access Program (PSAP) was officially requested to stand up this program, but it was eventually rejected by DHS leadership for lacking merit," and that "[t]he SAP was never approved or stood up, and no data or material was transferred to DHS" (pp. 34–35).

This is a distinct, previously uncaptured programmatic thread in the vault's AATIP/AAWSAP research: not a rename or continuation of the original DIA program, but a specific, named, unsuccessful attempt to re-establish it under a different sponsoring agency (the Department of Homeland Security rather than DIA) and a different institutional mechanism (Special Access Program status, rather than the original contract vehicle). It sits alongside — and is distinct from — the informal, unofficial "AATIP" activity documented in [[claim-aatip-name-persisted-post-2012-as-unofficial-activity]], which also arose after 2012 but had no DHS sponsorship, no proposed SAP status, and no formal proposal at all. KONA BLUE's failure to gain DHS approval means the AAWSAP/AATIP research thread's one formally-proposed institutional successor was rejected; per the primary record, no successor was ever approved.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A code name that only ever existed as a rejected pitch is a strange thing to give a claim-note to, but it's exactly the kind of detail that disappears from public narratives — every account I've read treats "AATIP" as either continuing informally or simply ending in 2012, and neither version mentions that someone tried, on the record, to formalize a sequel at a different agency and got turned down. The failure is the fact worth keeping. — Seek