IRAQI SCIENTISTS DENY ARMS EFFORTS

"Despite vigorous efforts, the U.S. government has been unsuccessful so far in finding key senior Iraqi scientists to support its prewar claims that former president Saddam Hussein was pursuing an aggressive program to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons," according to the Washington Post.

Sources said four senior scientists and more than a dozen at lower levels who worked for the Iraqi government have been interviewed by U.S. officials under the direction of the CIA. Some scientists have been arrested and held for months, others have made deals in return for information and at least one has agreed to be interviewed outside Iraq.

No matter the circumstances, all of the scientists interviewed have denied that Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program or developed and hidden chemical or biological weapons since United Nations inspectors left in 1998. Several key Iraqi officials questioned the significance of evidence cited by the Bush administration to suggest that Hussein was stepping up efforts to develop new weapons of mass destruction programs.

ALTERNATIVE TO URANIUM ROUNDS IN THE WORKS

Depleted uranium (DU) has been used for decades in anti-tank shells because its ultra-dense. But DU has been a controversial, possibly toxic, method for piercing armor -- blamed by some for so-called "Gulf War Syndrome," by others for birth defects.

A new alloy is emerging that could be a suitable substitute for DU, New Scientist reports.

The U.S. Army is expected to award a contract "for a test batch of 30-millimetre ammunition of the type used by American A-10 'tank buster' aircraft, which fired some 75 tonnes of DU during the recent Iraq conflict," according to New Scientist.

For years, it's been thought that tungsten could replace DU, since it's about as dense, but --hopefully -- not as toxic.

The problem has been that "tungsten shells flatten on impact, forming a mushroom shape. But DU rounds self-sharpen as they deform" -- making the ammunition much more effective.

"Now Liquidmetal Technologies, an R&D company based in Tampa, Florida, says it can get comparable performance from penetrators made of an exotic alloy of tungsten," says New Scientist, which claims the rounds could be ready in as soon as two years.

SHOOTERS KILL TROOPS' OFF-HOURS

Just out of high school, thousands of miles from friends and parents, and isolated by language and culture from the people around them, young airmen stationed on a U.S. Air Force base in Europe can find life pretty lonely.

But now the military's fresh faces can get a bit of the comforts of home -- by wasting their pals in an online shoot-'em-up game.

U.S. Air Forces in Europe, or USAFE, is investing about $200,000 into networked gaming centers at 14 bases scattered across the continent. All told, more than 100 Microsoft Xbox game consoles will be purchased, giving thousands of airmen a familiar new option for their downtime.

"Everything is so different here. So it's nice to have a taste of what (airmen) are used to -- a taste of America," said David Quinn, who heads the USAFE's Community Activities branch. "This is a way to get them out of the dorms, to keep them from sitting and staring at four walls."

Stars & Stripes had an article about this a little while back. My Wired News piece picks up where it left off.

A CASE FOR TERROR FUTURES?

Did the Penatgon make a mistake in canceling its Policy Analysis Market -- the instantly-notorious terrorism trading floor?

"The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) fumed, as he brought the project to the general public's attention.

But supporters of the program point out that gathering intelligence is often a messy business, with payoffs to unsavory characters and the elimination of potential adversaries. The futures market, ugly as it may sound, doesn't involve any of those moral compromises, said Robin Hanson, one of the earlier promoters of the concept of trading floors for ideas and a PAM project contributor. It's just a way of capturing people's collective wisdom.

"Among the many things we do for intelligence, this is one of the least reprehensible," Hanson said. "Paying people to tell us about bad things. That's intrinsic to the intelligence process."

And a trading floor could be more effective than paying off a snitch.

Projects similar to PAM, like the Iowa Electronic Markets, which speculate on election results, have been surprisingly reliable indicators of what's going to happen next.

My Wired News story has Hanson's -- and others' -- case for terrorism futures.

THERE'S MORE: Althought the market has been billed an aggregator of information, "oddly, the hope of the PAM might have been the ignorance of investors, rather than their intelligence," Slate notes.

Policy market day-traders who don't speak Arabic or have access to classified information wouldn't necessarily make worse bets than the professionals who spend their days sifting through Al Hayat and humintel reports. This is a seeming paradox called the "dumb agent" theory—one of my esteemed predecessors in this box explicated it a few years ago. Walk up to a traveler waiting in an airport, ask how many minutes late the plane will take off, and you're likely to get a wrong, uninformed answer. Ask 75 more of your fellow passengers the same question, and you'll get 75 more similarly wrong, uninformed answers. But throw them all together and take the mean, and you're likely to get something pretty close to the right answer.

Priorities & Frivolities digs up a Harvard/Stanford study of Tradesports.com, which has been offering "Saddam Securities."

"The price of the Saddam Security is a reasonable assessment of the likelihood of war. The time series movement in the series seems sensible as measured against both expert opinion and a narrative approach. The market is deep enough that it should have value as a forecasting tool, and market data meets simple tests of efficiency."

Salon's Scott Rosenberg makes a persuasive case against the trading floor:

Markets depend on good information. The DARPA plan is based on the theory that an open market will draw out the best information from multiple sources. That's fine if, in fact, the incentive of making money in the market is strong enough to overcome other motivations of participants. If you were a terrorist planning an attack, would you try to make a little money on the side by using your insider knowledge to place a winning bet? Or would you allocate a little extra money in your operating budget to placing decoy bets to delude those who you knew were turning to the U.S. military-funded terror market for intelligence? Or would you simply stay away, distrusting the market's anonymity mechanism on the assumption that its American designers will have built in some sort of back door? It's nearly impossible to imagine any set of circumstances in which this market would provide untainted information.

Finally, Andy Borowitz puts his signature Spinal Tap-esque spin on a New York Times editorial calling for John Poindexter to step down.

He writes, "The Pentagon has named Retired Admiral John Poindexter, the man responsible for the recently abandoned idea of a 'terrorism futures market,' to head the newly created Department of Bad Ideas."

AND MORE: New Yorker financial columnist James Surowiecki has a defense of the PAM plan in Slate that's just about identical, point-for-point, as my Wired News piece.

DARPA: LIFE CATALOG ONLY THE BEGINNING

To Pentagon researchers, capturing and categorizing every aspect of a person's life is only the beginning.

LifeLog -- the controversial Defense Department initiative to track everything about an individual -- is just one step in a larger effort, according to a top Pentagon research director. Personalized digital assistants that can guess our desires should come first. And then, just maybe, we'll see computers that can think for themselves.

Computer scientists have dreamed for decades of building machines with minds of their own. But these hopes have been overwhelmed again and again by the messy, dizzying complexities of the real world.

In recent months, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a series of seemingly disparate programs -- all designed, the agency says, to help computers deal with the complexities of life, so they finally can begin to think.

My Wired News article has more -- including an exclusive interview with Ron Brachman, who heads the DARPA office overseeing projects like LifeLog. There's a separate story on Brachman's latest project, "Real-World Reasoning," designed to get computers to start looking at problems from different angles -- a key artificial intelligence challenge.

DARPA DESIGNING TERROR MARKET

John Poindexter, the Pentagon division chief behind the notorious Total Information Awareness mega-database, is at it again. Now, he's heading up an effort to build a kind of stock market for terrorist strikes.

The New York Times reports, "traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on a new Internet site" established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Information Awareness Office.

According to the Associated Press, the Pentagon has requested $3 million for the Policy Analysis Market for next year and $5 million for the year after.

THERE'S MORE: "It sounds jaw-droppingly callous, not to mention absurd," notes the San Francisco Chronicle. "But experts say the DARPA-backed Policy Analysis Market is based on a legitimate theory, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, that has a proven track record in predicting outcomes."

Basically, the idea is that the collective consciousness is smarter than any single person. By forcing people to put their money where their mouth is, the wagers help weed out know-nothings and give more weight to the opinions of those in the know.

"Markets are a great way of aggregating information that a lot of different people have," said Eric Zitzewitz, an assistant professor of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "One of the big issues with intelligence that was gathered before 9/11 was that information wasn't aggregated within the intelligence community. This is directly aimed at addressing that."

Instapundit has more on this.

AND MORE: The Associated Press now says that the Pentagon will "abandon" the Policy Analysis Market (PAM). Sen. John Warner, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, spoke with the program's director, "and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped," the AP reports.

AND MORE: The cancelled terror market project wasn't the Pentagon's only experiment in trading floors that gauge the likelihood of world events. Two small firms -- Market Technologies Systems (the professors behind the famed Iowa Electronic Markets election exchange) and Neoteric Technologies -- received grants from DARPA to build such operations. Two of their trading floors are up on the web, currently: One market speculates in homeland security threat levels; the other in the spread of SARS.

U.S. ORDERS BAGHDAD MOBILES OFF

Last week, mobile phones mysteriously began working in Baghdad, giving the war-ravaged city a needed boost to its shattered communications infrastructure. Now, the BBC reports, U.S. authorities in Iraq have ordered the Bahraini firm Batelco to stop running the service.

"The authorities were concerned that a renegade service provider could upset its own plans to put Iraqi mobile licences up for tender next week," according to the Beeb.

"Since Batelco had not applied for a licence of its own, the Coalition Provisional Authority has asked the firm to shut down its roaming facility. The firm said it had already spent $5m (£3.1m) on infrastructure in Baghdad."

(via Techdirt)

REPORT: BLAME CREAKY INFO TECH FOR 9/11 INTEL GAPS

By now, we've all heard that turf battles in the intelligence community were partially responsible for the 9/11 plot being missed. But, according to Computerorld, a recent Congressional report also notes that creaky, outdated information technology played a big role, too.

That lack of IT capability was a major problem for the FBI's pre-Sept. 11 investigation into potential al-Qaeda plans, according to the report. In fact, when a Phoenix FBI field office agent drafted an e-mail in July 2001—known now as the infamous "Phoenix Memo"—he had no reliable way of querying a central FBI system to determine whether there were other reports on radical fundamentalists taking flight training in the U.S.—or whether other FBI field offices were investigating similar cases. Another agent had expressed similar concerns.

In addition, congressional investigators found that because of the limitations of the FBI's Automated Case File (ACS) system, a number of addressees on the Phoenix communication, including the chief of the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit, weren't aware of the communication before the attacks occurred.

The FBI deployed the ACS in 1995 to replace a system of written reports and indexes. However, FBI agents told congressional investigators that the system was limited in its search capacity, difficult to use and unreliable. The system was so difficult to use, in fact, that FBI officials informed Congress that as of Sept. 26, 2002, 68,000 counterterrorism leads dating to 1995 remained outstanding and unassigned. (emphasis mine)

NO PERISCOPE ON NEW U.S. SUBS

StrategyPage:

For nearly a century, submarine design has dictated that the control room be right below where the periscope is. That's because the periscope was an optical device, where the user in the sub was looking at what a system of mirrors in the periscope tube showed was outside."

That changes with the new Virginia class U.S. Navy boats, which will be the first subs built without an optical periscope. Instead, the periscope mast contains video, still and infrared cameras that provide digital images in color, and black and white.

Since the images are digital, the periscope mast does not have to pierce the hull (cutting construction costs a wee bit) and the control room can be anywhere in the sub.

NAVY SEC'Y COMMITTED SUICIDE

The Associated Press reports:

The death of Colin McMillan, an oilman awaiting Senate confirmation as Navy secretary, was ruled a suicide by gunshot Friday.

McMillan, 67, was found dead Thursday at his 55,000-acre ranch in southern New Mexico, near the White Sands Missile Range.

"The cause is a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The manner is suicide," said Tim Stepetic, spokesman for the state medical investigator.

In Alamogordo, District Attorney Scot Key would not say whether McMillan left a suicide note. Key said a handgun was found with the body.

$1B IN BOEING CONTRACTS YANKED FOR THEFT

"The Air Force on Thursday banned Boeing Co. from future satellite-launching contracts to punish the company for stealing sensitive information from a competitor," according to the Associated Press

"The Air Force also took away seven military satellite launches from Boeing and gave them to competitor Lockheed Martin Corp. -- a shift which represented about $1 billion worth of business, said Air Force undersecretary Peter Teets."

Boeing employees are accused of pilfering about 25,000 pages of sensitive Lockheed documents during the 1998 bidding process for the 1998 Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle contract.

"The Department of Defense did not take the more aggressive step of banning it from government contracts in other areas," The Financial Times notes. "Such a move would have been devastating for Boeing, which now derives more than half its revenues from defence activities."

In addition, former Boeing executives Kenneth Branch and William Erskine have been charged with conspiracy, theft of trade secrets and violating federal procurement laws in federal court in Los Angeles, the Associated Press says.

AFP reports that the pair are each facing up to 10 years in prison, and a fine of a quarter-million dollars.

BUNKER BUSTERS MAY SAY WHAT THEY'VE SMASHED

At first glance, it would seem so simple: figure out whether or not a bomb has really damaged a target or not. But in real life, such assessments can be extremely tough.

That's why, Jane's Defence Weekly reports, the U.S. Air Force "wants to equip its 'bunker buster' munitions with the capability to transmit immediate feedback on their performance during a strike to operational commanders."

Defeating a hardened and deeply buried facility remains one of the most challenging tasks for the service. Real-time data from the bombs as they penetrate soil and the reinforced concrete of an underground structure en route to detonation would contribute to the overall assessment of the strike's effectiveness and help determine if a subsequent attack is necessary, the USAF says.

Toward that end, the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) intends to launch a Fuze Integrated Battle Damage Information Demonstration (FIBDID) programe later this year to fit existing penetrator munitions with wireless radio-frequency transmitters that pass data to battlefield sensors, according to service documents and officials.

The AFRL expects to test a modified 'bunker buster' bomb against a replica underground target in late 2007.

9/11 REPORT: NO IRAQ-OSAMA LINK

"The report of the joint congressional inquiry into the suicide hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001, to be published Thursday, reveals U.S. intelligence had no evidence that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, or that it had supported al-Qaida," according to UPI.

"'The report shows there is no link between Iraq and al-Qaida,' said a government official who has seen the report."

The New York Times notes that the report blames poor communications between the FBI and CIA for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

The paper says, "for nearly two years before the attacks, the Central Intelligence Agency knew about the terror connections between the two men, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who in 2000 moved to San Diego, frequenting Muslim circles that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had infiltrated... [I]f the F.B.I. had used its informants more aggressively, the presence of Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi in San Diego offered 'the best chance to unravel the Sept. 11 plot.'"

(UPI story via Josh Marshall. A copy of the report is available here)

THERE'S MORE: UPI now says it "cannot further stand by this story as originally filed and will have a corrected version soon."

U.S. PASSPORTS WILL GO BIOMETRIC IN 2004

In a little more than a year, the U.S. government will start including biometric data in new passports, the Register reports.

The U.S. issues about 7 million passports per year. And starting in October 2004, the new passports wil contain a chip, with at least 32K of memory. On the chip will be a digital image of the holder's face.

"European biometric passports, by contrast, are planned to feature both retinal and fingerprint recognition biometrics on their smart cards," the Register says.

BusinessWeek notes that biometrics are rapidly being adopted by the both the public and private sectors. In Afghanistan, for example, the U.N. uses an iris-scanning system to identify refugees returning from Pakistan.

But Biometrics are no "magic bullet" for security, according to the magazine. The technology "works best in controlled situations -- which are hardly the norm in the real world."

DARPA'S DIGITAL FLUNKIES

The Pentagon is doling out $29 million to develop software-based secretaries that understand their bosses' habits and can carry out their wishes automatically.

Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science will get $7 million to build a Perceptive Assistant that Learns, or PAL, a kind of digital flunky that can schedule meetings, maintain websites and reply to routine e-mail on its own. A total of $22 million is going to SRI International, Dejima and a coalition of other researchers for the construction of a wartime PAL.

The efforts could make leaders in the boardroom and on the battlefield more efficient, says the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. But some defense analysts are finding it hard to see the military value in such a system.

Digital assistants have been a DARPA focus of late. The controversial, all-encompassing LifeLog project is also supposed to lead to the construction of a computerized helper. LifeLog's goal is to digitally capture and categorize every aspect of people's lives, from the TV shows they watch to the places they visit. The more information the assistant has about its boss, the argument goes, the more useful it can be.

"The idea is to develop a system that will adapt to the user, instead of the other way around," said Antoine Blondeau, president of Dejima, a software development firm in San Jose, California, that is working on the PAL effort.

Check out my Wired News story for more on DARPA's new electronic helpers.

UDAY AND QUSAY DEAD

Saddam Hussein's sadistic, demonic spawn, Uday and Qusay, have been killed in Mosul. According to CNN, U.S. Special Operations team Task Force 20 -- backed-up by 200 members of the 101st Airborne's 2nd Brigade, armor, and air power -- killed the pair and two others after a six-hour firefight. A walk-in tipster betrayed the pair's location.

The two were widely considered the most brutal in a brutal Baathist regime. Qusay was in charge of Iraq's intelligence services. Uday organized the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam, "headed the country's Olympic Committee and was reported to have tortured athletes who did not compete as well as he hoped," the Washington Post notes.

THERE'S MORE: "Humvee-mounted TOW missiles likely struck the fatal blows that killed Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay," according to CNN.

LOS ALAMOS WORKERS CONTAMINATED; REGULATORS YAWN

Workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have been contaminated with radioactive material at least twenty-one times in recent months, Energy Daily reports. But Department of Energy (DOE) officials won't be investigating the incidents, like they would ordinarily.

To DOE enforcement bigwig Stephen Sohinki, the "personal commitment" of Lab director Pete Nanos "to the implementation of comprehensive corrective actions" makes the repeated contaminations excusable.

In May, workers were hit with radioactive tritium while removing copper piping in Los Alamos' Ion Beam facility. Fifteen similar incidents have been reported.

At one unidentified section of the Lab "elevated airborne radioactivity levels” were found six times in the first half of the year, all of which resulted in personnel and room contamination.

Click here for more Defense Tech coverage of the troubled nuclear lab.

(via Global Security Newswire)

TROUBLED EUROFIGHTER LIMPS TO SHOWROOM

After 30 years -- and £50 billion -- the Eurofighter airplane is finally ready for action. But, the Guardian reports, the Soviet threat the Eurofighter was made for has evaporated. And the plane's performance is leaving many underwhelmed.

NAVY'S SHORELINE FIGHTER MOVES FORWARD

These days, the U.S. Navy isn't worried about being attacked by big battleships, firing their giant guns from miles away. It's the little, sneaky ships operating close to shore -- the diesel subs, the explosive-laden powerboats -- that are the real danger.

So the Navy has been pushing for a fast, new ship that can navigate these coastal waters, and can plug into the military's concept of a fully-networked fighting force.

The initial, $10 million contract for this Littoral Combat Ship was handed out recently. Check out the design here.

THERE'S MORE: Raytheon and General Dynamics were also given similar-sized contracts to work on their versions of the shoreline ship. (Raytheon has a pretty fancy promotional video here.)

SPECIAL FORCES ENLIST UAV FOR AIRLIFTS

Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, have been used to snoop on Baathist bigwigs and to take out Al Qaeda operatives. Now, U.S. Special Operations Command is starting to use flying drones to transport ammunition, medicine, and soldiers' gear.

The SnowGoose UAV doesn't look like much -- a round-nosed trunk with a single propeller and a parachute. And it doesn't move very fast -- the SnowGoose has a maximum speed of just 35 knots.

But the drone, launched from the back of a Humvee or another plane, can get up to 18,000 feet in the air, and is virtually undetectable about 2,000 feet, its makers say.

There are situations where the SnowGoose could be most helpful to Special Forces, a Defense Department UAV specialist noted. Take the nightmarish "Black Hawk Down" scenario. The Rangers didn't bring their night-vision gear when they went on their fateful mission in Mogadishu. The drone could have dropped see-in-the-dark goggles to them, delivered plasma, and dropped much-needed ammunition.

COLD WAR BRITS PLANNED NUKE LANDMINES

New Scientist reports:

To counter the threat of Soviet invasion, the UK planned to bury 10 huge nuclear landmines in Germany, declassified army documents from the 1950s reveal.

The extraordinary weapon was designed to cause mass destruction and radioactive contamination over a wide area to prevent an occupation by Soviet forces. Each mine was expected to produce an explosive yield of 10 kilotons, about half that of the atom bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945.

The mines were to be left buried or submerged by the British Army of the Rhine. They would then have been detonated by wire from up to five kilometres away or by an eight-day clockwork timer. If disturbed or damaged, they were primed to explode within 10 seconds...

In the end, the risk from radioactive fallout would have been unacceptable...and hiding nuclear weapons in an allied country was deemed "politically flawed." As a result, the Ministry of Defence cancelled (the nuclear landmine project) in February 1958.

GUNS-FOR-HIRE TO POLICE IRAQ?

The U.S. may turn to a private security force to guard as many as 2,000 key sites in Iraq, the New York Times reports.

The idea, currently being floated "at the highest levels of the Pentagon," is to re-hire former Iraqi soldiers, and to retrain them to guard the National Museum and other locations.

"Our sense is that the military has too much on their plate right now, and that these are issues that need to be addressed, and the way to do that is through the private sector," Anne Tiedemann, an executive at the security firm Kroll Inc., told the Times.

Guns-for-hire are becoming an increasingly attractive option for U.S. policy-makers. They're being used currently to spot drug-growers and rebels in Colombia. And, as discussed a few weeks ago, they're being considered for peace-keeping duties in the Congo.

THERE'S MORE: Peter Singer -- author of the recently-published Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry -- calls the privatized police idea "another checker player's move in a game of chess."

"Now we have a situation where the new Iraqi army, new Iraqi police force and now new Iraqi paramilitary force will all be assembled by the private market," he tells Defense Tech.

That's in addition to all of the other functions contractors are filling in Iraq. By some estimates, the ratio of private employees to U.S. soldiers operating in the Persian Gulf area is one-to-ten.

The lurch towards an outsourced police force, Singer notes, is an indicator of "how little planning the administration gave to the post-conflict stage ('don't know what to do, just give it to someone else to do')."

He adds, "How can you think that creating a new, private, paramilitary force (hired and fired by outsiders) will not cause problems with the other forces and not undermine the authority of the public Iraqi administration we are supposed to be setting up?"

STRYKERS MAY HEAD TO IRAQ

General John Abizaid, the new chief of U.S. Central Command, raised a ruckus yesterday when he acknowledged that American troops were facing a "classical guerrilla-type" war in Iraq.

But lost in the fuss over Abizaid's comments was an interesting bit of news: the Army may soon be sending its controversial, high-tech Stryker light armored vehicle brigade to help combat the Iraqi insurgents.

Light, mobile, and packed with the latest communications gear, the eight wheel drive Strykers would seem to be a perfect fit for the intermittent, free-flowing fighting going on in Iraq.

But the vehicles -- the first new armor to be introduced into the Army since the Abrams tank in the 1980's -- have had a rocky recent past. During the Millennium Challenge 2002 war game, for example, soldiers complained that the Stryker was susceptible to flat tires, couldn't hit targets on the run, and would get unbearably hot inside -- 120 degrees and higher.

And that was during testing in California. Imagine how toasty the Strykers will get in the heat of the Mesopotamian desert.

THERE'S MORE: Two National Guard brigades may also be called up to Iraqi duty. And Phil Carter isn't too happy about it.

America's National Guard has already been stretched thin by consecutive homeland security deployments since Sept. 11, known as Operation Noble Eagle. In the California Army National Guard, nearly every combat arms unit has already deployed once. The units which have deployed have returned in deplorable condition, with most soldiers opting to leave the Guard. There are a number of National Guard units which have been left alone for homeland security, and these are the likely units to deploy to Iraq. However, even that is a finite supply. If America is to stay in Iraq for the long haul, this solution won't work.

NEW GUN FIRES 600,000 ROUNDS PER MINUTE

Plain ol' hand guns, firing one bullet at a time, can be plenty deadly. So imagine how dangerous a new gun capable of firing up to 600,000 rounds per minute could be. The Daily Standard looks at this fearsome new weapon, "Metal Storm."

The gun would be more than just a way to mow down enemy troops, the Standard says. Metal Storm's hail of bullets could one day replace landmines as a defensive measure. Or the gun could be placed on unmanned combat vehicles, for ultra-precise robotic strikes. Yikes.

THERE'S MORE: "Oh, sure, (Metal Storm) is a neato idea. But I'm hard pressed to find a use for the system except as a curiousity," says James Rummel.

"Those pesky Australians have been trying to market their system for some time now," he writes. "The main problem with the system is that it increases the maintenance load, expense and complexity over conventional weapon systems without offering any significant advantage. Sure, they put out a lot of lead in a short period of time, but there's not many jobs that need that kind of blizzard that can't be done with the guns that we already have."

LIFELOG GETS A FACELIFT

Monday is the deadline for researchers to submit bids to build the Pentagon's all-encompassing, über-diary project, LifeLog.

But while teams of academics and entrepreneurs are jostling for the 18- to 24-month grants to work on the program, the Defense Department has changed the parameters of the project to respond to a tide of privacy concerns.

My Wired News story has more.

FORCE FIELDS? X-RAY VISION? SOUNDS SUPER!

Will ordinary people ever get super powers? Could we ever regenerate limbs, see through walls, or have super strength?

Wired magazine takes a look -- with some references that'll sound mighty familiar to Defense Tech readers.

U.S. TO SKIP NUKE TREATY CONFERENCE

"Reflecting its unwillingness to permanently renounce nuclear weapons test explosions, the Bush administration has decided not to attend an international conference in September to encourage other countries to adopt the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," Global Security Newswire reports.

"The United States is one of 13 holdout countries whose ratification is required before the treaty can take effect."

THERE'S MORE: Defense Tech pal Wyatt Earp points out that the Senate rejected the test ban treaty in 1999.

GUN FAILURES LEAD TO PRIVATE JESSICA'S CAPTURE

Why were Iraqi fighters able to ambush Private Jessica Lynch and the 507th Maintennance Company? Because the Americans' weapons didn't work, according to a new report.

"The report indicates that soldiers had difficulty firing both their personal weapons (the M16A2 rifle) and their crew-served weapons (the M2 .50 caliber machine gun) at the enemy," Phil Carter notes. "It appears from this report and others that the culprit was poor weapons training and maintenance."

He continues, "Support units work hard in peacetime to keep our equipment running, often to the neglect of their own field training. The result is that they do not meet the standard for basic soldiering and warfighting skills."

"Our Army needs to embrace the warrior ethos in all units -- not just the combat arms -- and it needs to ensure that every unit can fight its way out of an ambush like this one."

Soldiers for the Truth has a Gulf War II after-action report on which small arms worked, and which ones didn't.

CATCHING UP

There's been a slew of fascinating defense technology stories making the rounds in recent days. But I've been too buried in Internet porn to notice!

(See Thursday's Wired News for an explanation.)

Check these out:

- Real world invisibility cloaks and anti-gravity machines (sorta)

- The Marines' four-foot-tall, 1,600-pound crowd control robot

- WMD-hunting ballistic missiles

DARPA'S SIMPLE PLAN TO TRACK YOUR EVERY MOVE

The cameras are already in place. The computer code is being developed at a dozen or more major companies and universities. And the trial runs have already been planned.

Everything is set for a new Pentagon program to become perhaps the federal government's widest reaching, most invasive mechanism yet for keeping us all under watch. Not in the far-off, dystopian future. But here, and soon.

The military is scheduled to issue contracts for Combat Zones That See, or CTS, as early as September. The first demonstration should take place before next summer, according to a spokesperson. Approach a checkpoint at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, during the test and CTS will spot you. Turn the wheel on this sprawling, 8,656-acre army encampment, and CTS will record your action. Your face and license plate will likely be matched to those on terrorist watch lists. Make a move considered suspicious, and CTS will instantly report you to the authorities.

Fort Belvoir is only the beginning for CTS. Its architects at the Pentagon say it will help protect our troops in cities like Baghdad, where for the past few weeks fleeting attackers have been picking off American fighters in ones and twos. But defense experts believe the surveillance effort has a second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities under an omnipresent, unblinking eye.

This isn't some science fiction nightmare. Far from it. CTS depends on parts you could get, in a pinch, at Kmart.

Read more about CTS in my cover story (!!!!) for the Village Voice.

DISSERTATION BECOMES TERRORIST TREASURE MAP

Great story in today's Washington Post:

Sean Gorman's professor called his dissertation "tedious and unimportant." Gorman didn't talk about it when he went on dates because "it was so boring they'd start staring up at the ceiling." But since the Sept. 11th attacks, Gorman's work has become so compelling that companies want to seize it, government officials want to suppress it, and al Qaeda operatives -- if they could get their hands on it -- would find a terrorist treasure map.

Tinkering on a laptop, wearing a rumpled T-shirt and a soul patch goatee, this George Mason University graduate student has mapped every business and industrial sector in the American economy, layering on top the fiber-optic network that connects them...

Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links, trying to answer the question: "If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack?" In the background, he plays the Beastie Boys.

For this, Gorman has become part of an expanding field of researchers whose work is coming under scrutiny for national security reasons...

"Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined I'd be briefing government officials and private-sector CEOs..."

Invariably, he said, they suggest his work be classified. "Classify my dissertation? Crap. Does this mean I have to redo my PhD?" he said. "They're worried about national security. I'm worried about getting my degree..."

"He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade -- and then they both should burn it," said Richard Clarke, who until recently was the White House cyberterrorism chief. "The fiber-optic network is our country's nervous system."

NETWORKED SOLDIER PLAN DELAYED

"The Army’s plan for turning soldiers into digital warriors is once again being rewritten, in the wake of disappointing field trials that showed that technology is improving, but is not yet ready for combat," National Defense magazine reports.

"Land Warrior Initial Capability" (LW-IC) was supposed to be the first step in a long process of networking soldiers together. Each fighter would get equipped with a small, 500 megahertz computer running Windows 2000, a radio, a customized rifle and a helmet-mounted display eyepiece. All of these would be linked together. And all that a soldier sees or says could be sent to each other or to headquarters.

“Every soldier on the battlefront will be seamlessly interconnected with his buddies as well as operation command and control structures," Lt. Col. Dave Gallup, LW program manager, tells the magazine.

LW-IC was supposed to be given to Army Rangers in the upcoming fiscal year. But that's not going to happen, now.

"Although it has been much improved over earlier prototypes, the system was deemed 'unreliable' and unlikely to survive the rigors of combat," National Defense says.

The Army will now be moving directly to a more advanced version of the program, which is supposed to mesh with the Army's newest light armored vehicle, the controversial Stryker.

Why this next generation with be any more reliable than the first is unclear.

WHITE HOUSE ADMITS IRAQ NUKE CLAIM IS BOGUS

Five-and-a-half months after President Bush declared that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium in Africa;

four months after documents supporting the assertion were shown to be fakes;

one day after a former ambassador investigating the African uranium claim said that the Bush administration "twisted" intelligence about Iraq's nuclear ambitions;

and a few hours after White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that there was "zero, nada, nothing new" in the ambassador's revelations,

the Bush administration finally admitted that its allegation of an Iraqi nuclear shooping spree in Africa is bogus.

NAVY PLANS DISPOSABLE RAY GUNS

American warships could be armed with disposable laser weapons within five years, if a plan by U.S. Navy scientists works as promised.

Michael Wardlaw, with the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division, has proposed that the Navy use a battery of solid-state, one-shot-only lasers to zap enemy boats and defend against missile attacks. This Expendable Modular High Energy Laser (EMHEL), Jane's Defence Weekly reports, would use a brick of 120, meter-long laser modules that could fire individually or in one giant pulse.

"Each individual module would contain a single-shot laser capable of firing 10 kilojoules of energy at peak power in a single burst," Jane's notes. "With such a system, Wardlaw said, 'you can drill through 6in [15cm] of steel in under a second.'" (emphasis mine)

Wardlaw noted that, given proper funding, he "could envision having modules available within a year and systems available in probably five" years. The EMHEL could be ready so soon, he explained, because work on the concept has already been conducted and because "it's more a new way of thinking about the problem than it is a technological challenge."

By dropping the requirement for the laser to have to survive for multiple shots and instead being expendable, Wardlaw said, the cost of each can be reduced dramatically. And by having small modules that can be mass-produced, economies of scale can be achieved during production, reducing costs still further.

U.S. OFFICIAL: WHITE HOUSE "TWISTED" IRAQ NUKE INTEL

"Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?" Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador to Gabon, asks in a Sunday New York Times op-ed.

"Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

In 2002, Wilson was asked by the CIA to check out claims that uranium from Niger has somehow ended up in Saddam's hands. Wilson did just that, and found that the assertions were bogus; Niger's uranium industry was just too tightly-controlled, he concluded.

But Wilson was ignored, it seems. The Bush adminsitration highlighted the Niger case as a big-time example of Saddam's push to build nuclear weapons. administration officials even brandished documents that "proved" the Niger uranium transfers. Those papers were later shown to obvious forgeries.