FBI USED ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE TO SNOOP

"An appeals court this week put the brakes on an FBI surveillance technique that turns an automobile driver's on-board vehicle navigation system into a covert eavesdropping device," according to SecurityFocus.

"The case arose from a 2001 FBI surveillance operation in Las Vegas, in which agents obtained a court order compelling a telematics company to secretly activate the stolen vehicle recovery feature in a customer's car. The feature, designed to listen-in on car thieves as they cruise around in a stolen auto, turns on a dashboard microphone and pipes conversations out over a cellphone connection -- normally to the company's response center, but in this case to an FBI listening post. "

THERE'S MORE: Congress yesterday gave the FBI "greater authority to demand records from businesses in terrorism cases without the approval of a judge or a grand jury," the Times reports. "While banks, credit unions and other financial institutions are currently subject to such demands, the measure expands the list to include car dealers, pawnbrokers, travel agents, casinos and other businesses."

AND MORE: The New York Police Department yesterday became the first group of local cops to have access to Interpol's 80-country criminal database.

SPEED KILLS, MILITARY WANTS MORE

550 miles per hour is too slow. And a 1,500-mile range just isn't big enough.

The Tomahawk cruise missile may seem fast and far-reaching. But Pentagon planners want more. Late last week, they handed out contracts to 10 firms to start designing a hypersonic missile that can outrun the now-retired Concorde, and can hit a terrorist nest in Europe from the East Coast.

The Falcon, or Force Application and Launch from the Continental United States, project aims to fire a bunker-busting bomb into near-space, and then send it crashing into a target more than 3,000 miles away, at four times the speed of sound.

Speed is becoming an increasingly crucial component of how American forces fight. In the Gulf War, it took days for the U.S. military to identify a target and put a bomb on it. In recent engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, that process was cut to as little as 20 minutes, in some cases.

But this quick response only happens when there are bombers and cruise missiles in the immediate neighborhood. If U.S. forces receive a tip that terrorists are in a part of the world where they don't have American planes in the sky, it can take hours, or days, to act on that information.

With its proposed speed and range, the Falcon project -- co-sponsored by the Air Force and Darpa, the Pentagon's research arm -- aims to make just about the whole world a dangerous place to be a bad guy.

"When Osama's bad brother Larry shows up suddenly in Niger, this is something we can target him with immediately," said Daniel Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Virginia.

My Wired News article has details on the Falcon effort.

THERE'S MORE: A German missile systems company, Lenkflugkörpersysteme, "has for the first time conducted a test firing of a hypersonic missile surpassing Mach 7," says Jane's International Defence Review. "But the firing, on 23 October at Germany's Meppen proving range, may be the last in LFK's hypersonic missile development program now that the German defense ministry has withdrawn all funding as of January 2004, the company's new technologies and studies chief engineer Peter Gleich has told IDR." An LFK press release about the event is here.

AND MORE: In the 60's, Defense Tech pal Jim Lewis notes, the U.S. built a drone that could go Mach 3 -- and even flew it over China a few times.

AND MORE: Air Force forecasters predict that by 2015, America's foes will be able to keep most U.S. planes 250-300 nautical miles away. That's one of the reasons that Air Force is so keen on Falcon, according to a recent Inside the Air Force report.

WILL AGGRO TACTICS IN IRAQ WORK?

The American counter-insurgency in Iraq is reaching new heights, the New York Times reports.

In Saddam's hometown, Tikrit, "commanders called in AC-130 gunships, A-10 attack planes and Apache helicopter gunships, as well as Air Force F-16 and F-15E fighter-bombers with 500-pound bombs, the military said, in the largest bombardment in the area since President Bush declared the end of major combat on May 1."

Meanwhile, U.S. forces called in air strikes "against targets in central Baghdad for the first time since the Spring," Channel News Asia notes.

Major General Charles Swannack, who leads the 82nd Airborne, says the stepped-up offensive "demonstrates our resolve, and we are not going to fight this one with one hand tied behind our backs."

But the Salt Lake City Tribune notes that "a top-secret CIA assessment from Iraq, widely reported last week, has warned that such aggressive counterinsurgency tactics by the army could incite more Iraqis to fight the Americans."

With their gruesome acts, terrorist-type insurgent groups (think Hamas, or Peru's Sendero Luminoso) traditionally try to provoke the government into ever-more repressive responses. The more heavy-handed the government is, the theory goes, the more the populace is radicalized, and the more ripe for revolution the area becomes.

Does that mean, then, the the U.S. offensive is playing into the bad guys' hands? Do American military commanders have any other choice?

THERE'S MORE: On the other end of the tactical spectrum, "the decision to pull the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division out of the 'Sunni Triangle' city of Ramadi — and to turn local security over to Iraqi officers — might be the most significant step since the U.S.-led occupation began six and a half months ago," Slate's Fred Kaplan says. "If the Ramadi experiment succeeds, it could serve as the road map to a responsible exit strategy. If it fails, it will dramatize the depths of our predicament, the utter lack of good options, the tenacity of the — dare we say it? — quagmire that bogs us down."

AND MORE: "The U.S. Air Force used some of the largest weapons in its inventory to attack targets in central Iraq," according to the Associated Press.

"A pair of 2,000-pound satellite-guided bombs were dropped late Tuesday near Baqouba, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, on 'camps suspected to have been used for bomb-making,' said Maj. Gordon Tate, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division."

POLICY MARKET REDUX?

The infamous "terror futures market" may be on its way back.

Starting in March, 2004, Net Exchange -- the private firm that was one of the contractors on the initial Darpa project -- will begin taking "investments" on world events. This time, however, no government money will be involved. And "violent acts" will be taboo, too.

(via Cursor)

DARPA: HELP US FIND BOMBS, JAM CELLS

"If you've got a good idea" for how to take on terrorists, Darpa and the influential Defense Science Board write in e-mailed pleas, "turn it in as soon as possible because we've got the money" for new anti-evil doer technology.

Two areas are of particular interest, Aviation Week notes: detecting the improvised explosive devices being used to pick off U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and jamming the cell phones relied on to pass orders and trigger those explosives.

"The first few ground vehicle-mounted detection and jamming devices from Darpa have just been deployed in Iraq," the magazine says. But the range of these is pretty limited.

"This is kind of sad," a Navy official tells Aviation Week. "It can be perceived as a mark of desperation, and [with more timely investments] we shouldn't have been put in that position."

"Project Eyes," mandated by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper, is examining existing technologies to see if they can be applied quickly to the problem...

However, when asked if the Air Force in particular was organizationally prepared to shift its long-endurance intelligence-gathering resources to focus on the spreading terrorist threat in Iraq, a senior service official's reply was pungent: "Hell, no. Out of all the Air Force task forces, not one is focused on counter-terrorism."

VIRUS BUILT FROM SCRATCH

Scientists, lead by the genome sequencing pioneer Craig Venter, "have built a virus from scratch in only two weeks," Nature reports. "It is the second virus to be synthesized from commercially available ingredients. The first - a poliovirus completed by Eckard Wimmer and his colleagues in 2002 - took three years to make."

Defense Tech reader JB says Venter's breakthrough shows that, not too long from now, "it will be a trivial exercise for a rogue government or other moderately scientifically sophisticated group to create modified organisms for use as terror weapons. The genomes of various pathogens are already known, and modification for increased virulence or communicability, or even vaccine/drug resistance, would… be easily achievable with some targeted experimentation."

The CIA, apparently, shared JB's gloomy views.

"Growing understanding of the complex biochemical pathways that underlie life processes has the potential to enable a class of new, more virulent biological agents engineered to attack distinct biochemical pathways and elicit specific effects," reads a CIA report, "The Darker Bioweapons Future."

A few weeks ago, JB and Barbara Hatch Rosenberg form the Federation of American Scientists engaged in a semi-civil throwdown here at Defense Tech over the bioterror threat.

DARPA ROBO-RACE FINALISTS ANNOUNCED

The teams for Darpa's "Grand Challenge" -- the $1 million all-drone road race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas -- are set, says UV Online. And despite fears that only university-backed megacrews would qualify for the mid-March ride, several of the little guys have made the final cut.

A team from Palos Verdes High School in California will be running. And so will Team LoGhIQ, the straight-out-of-college boys, profiled in this Wired News article of mine, who maxed out their credit cards to build their 'bot.

Unfortunately, the way Darpa came to its decision is a little shady. First, the Challenge was open to all teams. Then, agency officials decided that only twenty teams could compete -- and that they'd visit every drone-making site to decide which ones could run. Finally, they decided to pick 19 of the 20 teams, and only allow site visits to determine who got the final slot, and the five alternate positions.

Some teams, shut out of the process, say they're going to start their own, "Civilian Grand Challenge," to run side-by-side with Darpa's race. But organizing the event with so little time is going to be pretty-damn-near impossible.

THERE'S MORE: The reason the Grand Challenge is such a big deal is that the drones won't be able to talk to their human masters at all during the race.

Most of what are today called "autonomous" aerial or ground vehicles are, in fact, operated from a human being in another location -- souped-up radio-controlled toys, in other words. Each Global Hawk UAV, for example, has two or three flesh-and-blood operators on the ground, plus a dozen people devoted to its maintennance, StrategyPage observes.

That's why predictions of all-robot armies any time soon are so silly. And that's why the Grand Challenge is such a big step.

ISRAELI DRONE COPTER STOLEN

The money and the software, they didn't touch. But thieves made off with an Israeli robotic helicopter prototype over the weekend, Globes reports.

The copter, made by the Israeli firm Steadicopter, was stolen a few days after its final tests flights, a company spokesman claims.

(via /.)

CIA: "GROWING CONCERN" ABOUT SYRIA NUKES

"In a marked shift from previous assessments, the CIA said in a report released today that it is monitoring Syrian nuclear intentions with 'growing concern,'" Global Security Newswire says.

The unclassified semiannual report, covering a period from Jan. 1 to June 30 of this year... (noted) continued Syrian-Russian agreements on nuclear cooperation and Damascus’s expanded access to foreign nuclear-related expertise. Previous agency assessments of Syrian nuclear weapons efforts, however, do not describe U.S. interest in Syrian nuclear activities in such ominous language...

The CIA says that Syria continued during the first half of this year to seek foreign assistance to develop a solid-propellant rocket motor development and production capability. Syria has also relied on other nations, primarily North Korea, for assistance with its liquid-propelled missile program, the report says.

Concerning biological and chemical weapons, the report says that it is “highly probable” that Syria has continued to work to develop an offensive biological weapons capability and that Syria continues to seek foreign assistance and equipment for its chemical weapons program.

In equally grim news, today's Newswire also reports that the "Iran has systematically concealed wide-ranging nuclear activities including the production of small amounts of plutonium and low-enriched uranium," according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. However, "it is not clear whether the country has tried to develop a nuclear weapon."

GOVERNMENT LAB KEYS LOST -- AGAIN

"A U.S. nuclear weapons laboratory must replace up to 100,000 locks at a cost of more than $1.6 million, after staff lost several sets of master keys to the complex, then failed to notify superiors," the Associated Press reports.

The extraordinary series of security blunders at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is outlined in a scathing report by the U.S. Energy Department's inspector general.

According to the report, officials at the laboratory have lost nine master keys and three magnetic key cards to the top-secret research facility. In some cases, officials still do not know when or how the keys went missing.

In at least one instance, a loss only came to light after a locksmith blew the whistle on security officers who tried to have duplicate master keys made to replace a set they had lost. Such master keys are only entrusted to a handful of staff.

Awful stuff. But what's truly creepy is that, in March, an almost identical incident went down at the government's Sandia weapons lab.

HACKERS' RIGHTS SLIP AWAY

Hackers have long been treated like terrorists by the Justice Department. But now, things have just gotten a whole lot worse for people who make a habit of snooping around computer networks, thanks to Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Ashcroft recently released a new version of the "Guidelines for FBI National Security Investigations and Foreign Intelligence Collection." And they are not exactly hacker-friendly, SecurityFocus' Kevin Poulsen observes.

The new guidelines, billed as a response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, permit the Bureau to engage in the "proactive collection of information on threats to the national security," displacing an older policy that obliged the FBI to have a specific investigative purpose before collecting information on individuals or groups.

Like the older rules, the new guidelines allow the Attorney General to specify anything as threat to national security at any time. But a few threats are specifically hardcoded into the new rules: terrorism, espionage, sabotage, political assassination, and "foreign computer intrusion."

The latter is defined as "the use or attempted use of any cyber-activity or other means by, for, or on behalf of a foreign power to scan, probe, or gain unauthorized access into one or more U.S.-based computers."

To date, there has not been a single case of state-sponsored "cyber-terrorism" -- ever. Nor are such attacks very likely, as Jim Lewis, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted in an article of mine from last year.

GORE VS. BIG BROTHER

I'm no fan of Al Gore. But, like him or lump him, he was one of the first Democratic politicians to put together a cogent critique of George W. Bush's Iraq policy.

In a speech yesterday, Gore offered (what seems to me to be) the first big-picture assault by a political heavyweight on the Bush administration's Big Brother-attitude towards civil liberties.

Here's an excerpt. But read the whole thing.

Now, if it wants to, the federal government has the right to monitor every website you go to on the internet, keep a list of everyone you send email to or receive email from and everyone who you call on the telephone or who calls you – and they don’t even have to show probable cause that you've done anything wrong. Nor do they ever have to report to any court on what they’re doing with the information. Moreover, there are precious few safeguards to keep them from reading the content of all your email.

Everybody fine with that?...

For America’s first 212 years, it used to be that if the police wanted to search your house, they had to be able to convince an independent judge to give them a search warrant and then (with rare exceptions) they had to go bang on your door and yell, “Open up!” Then, if you didn’t quickly open up, they could knock the door down. Also, if they seized anything, they had to leave a list explaining what they had taken. That way, if it was all a terrible mistake (as it sometimes is) you could go and get your stuff back.

But that’s all changed now. Starting two years ago, federal agents were given broad new statutory authority by the Patriot Act to “sneak and peak” in non-terrorism cases. They can secretly enter your home with no warning – whether you are there or not – and they can wait for months before telling you they were there. And it doesn’t have to have any relationship to terrorism whatsoever. It applies to any garden-variety crime. And the new law makes it very easy to get around the need for a traditional warrant -- simply by saying that searching your house might have some connection (even a remote one) to the investigation of some agent of a foreign power. Then they can go to another court, a secret court, that more or less has to give them a warrant whenever they ask.

EUROFIGHTER OUT -- DRONES IN?

The British military has decided to cut its fleet of Eurofighter jets by a third -- and replace them, perhaps, with drones.

A decade late and tens of billions of dollars over budget, the Eurofighter would essentially be "outdated by the time it enters military service in 2006," the Telegraph reports. Designed to counter a Soviet threat, the initial batch of jets couldn't even attack the ground -- a key role for fighters in the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts.

Small wonder, then, that the Royal Air Force will slash its Eurofighter order to 143 planes, from 232. What is surprising, however, is the Telegraph's assertion that "as well as easing the financial pressure on the Ministry of Defence's annual £31 billion budget, the cuts have also been prompted by the emergence of new, unmanned aircraft, which are seen as the future of aerial warfare."

"All three (UK armed) service chiefs are said to have agreed to the cuts in the Eurofighter... after being assured that the savings will be used to develop future weapon systems," the paper notes. "These include unmanned aircraft and 'smart missiles,' which can be directed by computer on to targets hundreds of miles away with pinpoint accuracy."

SUN TZU: IRAQI INSURGENT?

Iraqi guerillas are taking page out of Sun Tzu's 2,500 year-old playbook, says a 30-year CIA veteran in today's New York Times.

BUNKER-BUSTER NUKE FUNDS CUT

Congress has cut in half the Bush administration's budget for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator -- a nuclear bomb designed to wipe out underground bunkers.

Now, $7.5 million will go to the project next year, instead of the $15 million requested, Global Security Newswire notes. Congress also trimmed $4 million off of a $6 million request for low-yield nuclear weapons research, and cut $12 million from a $23-million request for building a new nuclear warhead pit production facility.

CLARK: GOP ABOUT "WEAPONS," DEMS ABOUT "PEOPLE"

General Wesley Clark has given a number of explanations for his turn towards the Democratic party. But this has to be one of his strangest rationalizations yet.

In an interview yesterday on New Hampshire Public Radio's "The Exchange," Clark spoke about how guys in uniform try to stay apolitical. Then he dropped this rhetorical bomb:

What I learned in the armed forces is this: To be, to be really cold about it, the Republicans are mostly interested in weapons systems. The Democrats are interested in people. And the more senior I became in the armed forces, the more clear it became to me that it's the people that matter the most, not the weapons systems.

And that's what made you start leaning in the Democratic direction?

Absolutely.

This declaration begs a question or two, of course. For example, does Wes Clark mean that the importance of individual soldiers wasn't clear to him when he was a Purple Heart-winning officer in Vietnam? And, if he was already leaning Democratic when he reached the military's upper echelons in the early 90's, why did he then say such sweet things about George W. Bush, Condi Rice, and company in 2001?

(Thanks to Defense Tech pal Brian McWilliams for the catch)

LIE DETECTORS STILL FIBBING

Everyone knows that the polygraph is far from an air-tight way to catch a liar. But despite this, the Defense Department's Polygraph Institute conducted 11,566 of the tainted tests in fiscal 2002, according to USA Today.

A broad array of efforts are underway to replace the polygraph. But, the McPaper notes, "all the projects are in their early stages, and they are shadowed by a glaring fact: Scientists still haven't proven that there is a scientific way to catch a liar."

ISRAELI MISSILE LAUNCH ON TAPE

A technician for Israel's Channel 10 has caught a secret Israeli missile launch on tape, Ha'Aretz is reporting.

LASERS POWER PLANES, DRONES

Somewhere, Nikola Tesla is smiling.

More than a century ago, Tesla - as famous for his discovery of alternating current as for his claim of inventing a giant death ray - dazzled onlookers by sending bolts of electricity crackling 30 feet through the air. To him this was proof that one day information and electricity would be sent across the skies instead of through copper cable.

Since then, Tesla's intellectual descendents have fantasized about, and dabbled in, the possibility of reliably transmitting power without wires. After decades of on-again, off-again experimentation, this Tesla-inspired dream is now showing signs of becoming real, at least in a modest way.

In September, in a hangar in Huntsville, Ala., NASA engineers flew a small propeller-driven model plane powered from the ground by a beam of laser light. The Army, meanwhile, is looking to finance research into laser-charged drone aircraft. And Boeing engineers have already built a tiny lunar rover that runs on laser-transmitted energy.

My New York Times story has the details.

THERE'S MORE: The "power-beaming" crowd has always been a group of, shall we say, ambitious thinkers. Case in point: The Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency proposed a network of 1,870 microwave power-beaming satellites, each 15 kilometers long – 136 times the size of the completed International Space Station. This constellation would send energy to 103 receiving bases scattered across the globe, each 27 by 30 kilometers big.

AND MORE: As if on cue, Dr. David Criswell -- the director of the Institute for Space Systems Operations at the University of Houston -- talked up power-beaming to Congress on Thursday.

"Solar power bases will be built on the Moon that collect a small fraction of the Moon's dependable solar power and convert it into power beams that will dependably deliver lunar solar power to receivers on Earth," he said.

ESQUIRE LOOOOVES DARPA

So explain this one: You're Tom Junod, one of the top writers for Esquire, one of the finest-written magazines on Earth. You're assigned a fat feature on Darpa, the Pentagon's research arm, for the mag's "Best and Brightest Issue." And in your story, you devote one sentence – one! – to Total Information Awareness, Darpa's infamous uber-database project.

Now, instead of focusing on TIA -- a program that's been the subject on front pages and Congressional inquiries – you choose to wax rhapsodic for paragraphs without end about Darpa's unparalleled genius. Aside from a few throw-away lines about the terror futures market, you make no mention of the agency's creepier programs – the ones to keep an entire city under watch, for example.

Here's a sample of the wet-kiss approach: "If there's anything you learn from visiting DARPA, it's this: An alien race is exactly what we are. Americans. Humans. There's nothing we won't think of, nothing we won't do. There are no limits. Nothing is impossible."

Oy vey. I guess at this point I'm supposed to cue the rousing theme music.

It's true, of course, that Darpa – and the scientists they fund – do a tremendous amount of work that is really, really cool. And it's led to a lot of not-unimpressive achievements, like this whole Internet thing.

It's also true that these "Best and Brightest" magazine issues are boosterish, by their very nature.

But one sentence? Come on.

THERE'S MORE: Esquire atones for its sin of Darpa sycophancy by sucking up to Secrecy News chief – and Defense Tech pal -- Steven Aftergood.

This guy deserves more attention for his many efforts. It's nice to see him get it.

FBI VISITS CRYPTOME

Cyrptome, the invaluable website specializing in raw documents from the underbelly of the intelligence and defense communities, had its offices (or, more likely, its webmaster's living room) visited by the FBI today.

(Special Agent Todd) Renner said that a person had reported Cryptome as a source of information that could be used to harm the United States. He said Cryptome website had been examined and nothing on the site was illegal but information there might be used for harmful purposes. He noted that information in the Cryptome CDs might wind up in the wrong hands.

SA Renner said there is no investigation of Cryptome, that the purpose of the visit was to ask Cryptome to report to the FBI any information which Cryptome "had a gut feeling" could be a threat to the nation.

There was a discussion of the purpose of Cryptome, freedom of information, the need for more public information on threats to the nation and what citizens can do to protect themselves, the need for more public information about how the FBI functions in the field and the intention of visits like the one today.

(Special Agent Christopher) Kelly said such visits are increasingly common as the FBI works to improve the reporting of information about threats to the US.

JAMMING PLANES GROUNDED

The U.S. Navy has grounded nearly 40 percent of its Prowler electronic attack jets because of wear on the wings' center sections, KOMO-TV in Seattle reports.

The Navy's announcement Friday that it was pulling 24 more of the EA-6B jets from service follows a September announcement pulling 19 jets for the same reason.

The aging jets, primarily based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Oak Harbor, are used to jam radar and communications. The Prowler played an important role in the past two wars, helping protect U.S. and coalition planes from surface-to-air missiles.

(via Periscope)

DEPRESSING SCORECARD FOR IRAQ

The always-intriguing Defense and the National Interest website has a downright-depressing scorecard on how the U.S. military is doing in Iraq. Let's hope this is off-base (though I'm worried it's not):

Have the Iraq "insurgents" gained, for now at least, a superior position?

- Based on public sources, apparently the Coalition still does not know the nature of the opposition: leaders, goals, ideology, numbers, etc.

- Insurgent attacks demonstrate the operational resources to strike at will in central Iraq, and on occasion anywhere in Iraq.

- The increasing frequency of attacks against Coalition forces and its "collaborators" indicates growing resources for the insurgents, with attack rates of 25 - 30 per day.

- The increased sophistication of attacks demonstrates the insurgents growing experience and the Darwinian nature of guerilla warfare, culling the slow learners from insurgent forces. Note the improvised and camouflaged missile launcher which attacked the Rashid Hotel, one of the best guarded sites in Iraq. Built by the insurgents, it fired two different types of missiles — one designed for use by helicopters. Probably the next attack will be designed better and executed more successfully.

We can only guess, probably poorly, at the insurgents' ultimate goals. Still, they have accomplished important objectives.

- Stripping the Coalition's support by UN and non-governmental organizations, such as the Red Cross.

- Limiting the Coalition's ability to recruit other nations, such as Turkey and India, who could provide diplomatic support and military forces.

Perhaps most important, they have gained the initiative. Coalition operations appear almost totally reactive.

The result:

Coalition forces appear to have lost the vital connection between strategy and tactics. Clear and feasible goals drive strategy, which drives tactics. Also, Coalition leaders much have clear and popular goals to maintain domestic support for the War. Feasible strategy and tactics maintain domestic confidence in Coalition leadership. With popular support success in long and painful conflicts becomes possible.

What are the Coalition's goals and strategy? If these are in fact uncertain, as they were in the Viet Nam war, development of successful tactics becomes difficult. Maintaining domestic support and confidence becomes problematic.

Fortunately, the public in Coalition nations does not seem to know the odds against us. In modern times, insurgents' successes far outnumber the few successes of western nations. Also, the western wins come at a large cost in resources and lives — guerillas, defenders, and civilians. Note the US experience in the Philippines (1899 - 1902, with "pacification" continuing until 1932) and the British in Malaya (1948 - 1961).

E-BOMB EXPLAINED

In the months leading up to Gulf War II, the Pentagon started dropping hints that it might drop the "E-Bomb" -- a munition using high-powered microwaves to fry circuits and computers.

Time and other big media outlets dutifully prostrated themselves before this new "wonder weapon." And some observers wondered whether the "E-Bomb" might actually be more of a threat to the U.S. than to the Saddam-ites.

Now, IEEE Spectrum has come out with the definitive story, to date, on the history and the inner workings of this and other so-called "pulsed power" arms. Don't worry, it's in plain English. Check it out.

MORE ON DARPA'S ROBO-RACE

I did some additional digging into Darpa's robotic rally, scheduled for March. Wired News is running the story today:

Seth Chabe's bank accounts are empty. And he's exhausted from endless work.

Since April, Chabe has been scrambling to build from scratch a robotic jeep, of sorts, to run in a million-dollar, all-drone road race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas next March, sponsored by the Pentagon.

But now, Chabe may not get the chance. After inviting every robot maker with a dream to take part in the Grand Challenge, Darpa, the Defense Department's research arm, has suddenly declared that only 20 drone roadsters will be allowed to enter. This may not mean much to the conglomerate-sponsored, university-backed outfits in the race. But bootstrapping crews like Chabe's six-man Team LoGhIQ now may not make the cut.

"I basically feel jerked around," said Chabe, a 24-year-old engineer from Glen Cove, New York. "I've put so much time into this."

Grand Challenge spokesman Don Shipley says Darpa was caught off-guard by the enormous response to the race.

"All along, we told state and local officials that there'd be no more than 20 vehicles," Shipley said. Changing those commitments to the authorities at this late date just wouldn't be feasible, he said.

So, instead, Darpa's changed the rules on the racers a bit.

Now, in addition to approving a written proposal -- and conducting a series of inspections in the week before the race -- Darpa representatives will be performing "site visits" to qualifying teams in December.

The smaller teams are not happy about having to jump through this extra hoop.

"The idea that our participation now depends on how well we can kowtow to some Washington bureaucrat has put us at wits' end. We feel this is a preposterous insult to our all-volunteer effort," Ivar Schoenmeyr, with the CyberRider team, wrote in an e-mail. His group of nine has already spent $20,000 out of their own pockets on the Grand Challenge drone, and has committed another $40,000 to the effort.

CHINA NUKE ARSENAL DETAILED

How many nukes do the Chinese have? It's long been one of the great intelligence puzzles.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists takes a shot at this geopolitical Rubik's Cube this month, detailing the 400 or so warheads in Beijing's arsenal.

The good news: few, if any, of the Chinese Bombs can reach the U.S. The bad news: they're working on it.

TANK DESTRUCTION A "MYSTERY"

The M-1A1 tank was supposed to be just about invincible. But last week, one was damaged by a makeshift bomb. And in late August, a "mystery projectile" burst through the tank's side armor, StrategyPage notes.

"Whatever it was, it just barely missed the tanks gunner (it went through the back of his seat and grazed part of his flak jacket) and put a pencil size hole nearly 50mm deep into the four inch thick armor on the other side of the tank," the website says.

"No known RPG (rocket-propelled grenade, one of the preferred anti-tank weapons) would do that kind of damage."

THERE'S MORE: Army Times has additional details on the M1 puzzle.

Last week's M1 attack "blew the turret completely off," the Times also notes. "Two soldiers were killed when the device — a 155mm round packed with 50 pounds of C4 explosive — detonated near the tank on patrol about 45 miles north of Baghdad."

AND MORE: StrategyPage now says that "the 'Mystery Projectile'... was probably a Russian RPG-7V or similar type."

COPTER DOWN; 16 G.I.'S DEAD

The worst week so far in the Iraq war has gotten much, much worse.

"A U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter packed with soldiers headed for a short-term break was hit with a missile and crashed in a field west of Baghdad on Sunday morning, killing 16 soldiers and wounding 20 others," the Washington Post reports. It's the single deadliest attack of American forces since the start of Gulf War II.

The shoulder-fired missile streaked through a clear blue sky and struck the dual-rotor helicopter in its rear around 9 a.m. as it was ferrying soldiers from bases in western Iraq to Baghdad's international airport...

The force of the impact destroyed the 10-ton Chinook, scattering twisted and charred bits of fuselage over a wide area. Everyone on board was killed or injured, many of them severely, military officials said...

The missile strike provided an example of the increasing sophistication and lethality of attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. Resistance fighters who began their effort to evict American troops by indiscriminately firing guns and rocket-propelled grenades at supply convoys now are targeting well-fortified bases with mortars, firing volleys of rockets inside the seat of the U.S. occupation authority, concealing roadside bombs and launching antiaircraft missiles.

Iraqi "Guerrillas are known to have fired missiles at American planes two or three times a week, and ground fire at helicopters even more often," the Times notes. "Only defensive tactics and devices had enabled aircraft to avoid disaster until Sunday."

Fewer than a third of the 5,000 shoulder-fired missiles in Saddam's stockpile have been accounted for.

These weapons are a constant threat to American helicopters. "But there appears to be no ready means to avoid flying," the Times says.

In a country the size of California, where more than 150,000 American and allied troops are operating, routine daily missions must go on, and every method of moving people and things around Iraq is dangerous.

Armored convoys can carry tons of equipment, supplies and ammunition, but they are under growing attack from homemade roadside bombs. They require escorts and are limited in how quickly they can deliver essential troops and matériel.

So commanders must also rely on scores of Army helicopters, from Black Hawks to the giant, twin-rotor Chinooks, and a fleet of Air Force cargo planes to ferry ammunition, equipment and personnel on hundreds of flights a day across Iraq.

"There's no way to stop using large cargo aircraft," said Walter P. Lang, a former chief Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. "There's just so much stuff."

THERE'S MORE: The New York Times Magazine has the most detailed examination yet of why the Iraq afterwar has gone so wrong. It's a must read.