DARPA'S U-HAUL IN THE SKY

Relying on deep-water ports and billion-dollar airports to move its men and machines keeps the Army stuck in molasses mode. It can take weeks -- even months -- to get a division ready to fight. Take the 4th Infantry Division, for example; it missed out on the first months of the Iraq war, waiting for its gear to take the slow boat in from Turkey.

Darpa, the Pentagon's mad science division, has a typically far-out solution: a gi-normous airship that can take an 1,800-person "unit of action" anywhere in the world, without infrastructure, in four days.

The scheme, code-named Walrus, is just, er, getting off the ground. But the agency is clear about what it wants: a prototype "tri-phibian" (air, land, sea) zeppelin with a range of 6,000 nautical miles, ready to go aloft by 2008.

My Wired magazine article has a few details. The Darpa website used to have even more -- but the agency yanked most of its Walrus material. Luckily, I downloaded it first. So you can read about the blimp project here.

THERE'S MORE: The Office of the Secretary of Defense is pushing a heavy-lift blimp plan of its own. But Rummy's lighter-than-air crew doesn't think the Pentagon can -- or should -- do zeppelin-development on its own. Instead, they're trying to encourage a whole industry to come together to build these airborne behemoths, so both soldiers and civilians can benefit.