ROBO-RACE FOOTAGE ONLINE

"It’s not exactly NASCAR," says Engadget's Peter Rojas, "but we did get a kick out of watching robot after robot starting up and then moments later either crashing into a wall, stalling, or catching on fire."

Check out footage from Darpa's ill-fated Grand Challenge robot race here.

U.S. TROOPS USING ISRAELI GEAR

America is only in the first year of the kind of fight Israel has been waging for decades. So it's only natural that the Pentagon is starting to get some of its combat technology from Tel Aviv.

"From tennis ball-sized sensors that can be thrown or shot from sniper’s rifles into terrorist lairs to wall-breaching devices for urban combat, gear invented for Israel’s anti-terror wars in Gaza and the West Bank are increasingly being put in the hands of U.S. warfighters," Defense News reports.

One system proposed for the U.S. Marines is a remote-controlled weapon station for crew protection and target engagement. Combined with an... acoustic sensor detection and direction-finding device, it essentially becomes a robotic anti-sniper weapon for wheeled or tracked vehicles...

[An Israeli] firm sold 100 maritime versions of the remote-controlled systems to the U.S. Special Operations Command in late 2003...

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s Combating Terrorism Technology Support Office has ordered multiple prototypes of a new, 360-degree surveillance sensor from a small Tel Aviv-based firm called ODF Optronics Ltd. Called the Eyeball, the tennis ball-sized reconnaissance system contains motion-detectors, a voice-activated recorder, speakers, microphones and transmitters to see, hear and communicate with enemy insurgents within a 25 meter radius...

And, the U.S. Army has ordered an additional 14 Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd.-developed Hunter unmanned aerial vehicles to support ongoing operations in Iraq.

The Hunter contract, estimated at $33 million, is a follow-on to the Army’s existing fleet of systems, which collectively flew more than 3,000 hours over the Iraqi theater, U.S. and Israeli sources said.

SCIENCE MAGS = MILITARY PORN?

"Popular science magazines used to be aimed at the geeky wannabe inventor," Salon says. "Today, it's all about the glamour of war."

TERRORISTS DON'T NEED STATES

Fareed Zakaria has a must-read Newsweek column on "the rise of a new phenomenon in global politics: terrorism that is not state-sponsored but society-sponsored."

Al Qaeda has lost its base in Afghanistan, two thirds of its leaders have been captured or killed, its funds are being frozen. And yet terror attacks mount from Indonesia to Casablanca to Spain. "These attacks are not being directed by Al Qaeda. They are being inspired by it," the official told me. "I'm not even sure it makes sense to speak of Al Qaeda because it conveys the image of a single, if decentralized, group. In fact, these are all different, local groups that have in common only ideology and enemies."

This is the new face of terror: dozens of local groups across the world connected by a global ideology.

MID EAST HELLFIRE

"Whatever you may think of the Israeli decision to eliminate Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, it is vaguely creepy that the killing of specific individuals can now be done from the air," writes Gregg Easterbrook. "And it's about to get creepier, because this task may soon be taken over by remote-controlled drones."

THERE'S MORE: Israel Aircraft Industries unveiled a pair of itty bitty spy drones weighing just 250 grams.

NASA JET HITS MACH 7

"NASA has made aeronautics history by launching an experimental jet that reached a record velocity of just over seven times the speed of sound," CNN reports.

"Fifty-seven years after test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, NASA on Saturday launched the unpiloted [X-43A] research jet. It is the first time a supersonic-combustion ramjet, or scramjet, which uses air for fuel, had traveled so fast."

Slashdot has more here. And here's an article of mine from November on the Pentagon's supersonic efforts.

DEUTSCHLAND DEPARTURE?

If a new Pentagon proposal gets through Congress intact, half of the G.I.s in Germany may being saying auf wiedersehen to Deutschland. Phil Carter explains the move.

OPEN GOVERNMENT GROUPS UNITE

The Bush administration is increasingly doing the public's work in private, rendering reams of official documents off-limits to average folks. A new coalition of citizens' groups, OpenTheGovernment.org, is getting together to try to buck the trend. Check 'em out here.

JAILHOUSE TECH

Back in the day, putting down a jailhouse riot meant using a couple of billy clubs and a whole lot of malice. But now, there's a wider array of tools, from cameras that see through walls to robots that spew fog. Wired magazine looks at the technology of prison guards.

MINE DETECTION ALL SHOOK UP

Clearing the world's nearly 60 million unexploded land mines is tedious, torturous work, with conventional detectors often unable to tell the difference between a mine and a Coke can.

"But a new technology that shakes the surface of suspected mine fields with gentle seismic waves may one day detect many plastic or metal mines while ignoring metal debris," the New York Times reports. "That is because these mines vibrate differently from the soil or debris around them. Radar or laser-based scans can detect this difference and, with the right signal processing, show the location of mines in computer displays."

HOMELAND SECURITY CASH = RURAL PORK

Since 9/11, the federal government has given the states $13.1 billion for homeland security -- a 990% increase over preceding three years.

"But the vast majority of the $13.1 billion was distributed with no regard for the threats, vulnerabilities and potential consequences faced by each region," Time reports.

Of the top 10 states and districts receiving the most money per capita last year, only the District of Columbia also appeared on a list of the top 10 most at-risk places... In fact, funding appears to be almost inversely proportional to risk. If all the federal homeland-security grants from last year are added together, Wyoming received $61 a person while California got just $14... Alaska received an impressive $58 a resident, while New York got less than $25. On and on goes the upside-down math of the new homeland-security funding.

THE RED ARMY'S IPO

During the Cold War, the Irkutsk Aviation Plant cranked around supersonic fighter jets for the Soviets. Now, the plant (under the name Irkut Corp.) is going public -- the first Russian defense firm to have an IPO. Slate has the details.

STEALTH FIGHTER TESTS OK'D

After weeks of indecision, the Pentagon has decided to go forward with a key round of tests on the troubled F/A-22 stealth fighter, Reuters reports.

"The testing begins a month later than recently planned (in April), but the stealthy, next-generation fighter program -- currently valued at more the $70 billion -- could still be on track for a December review on whether to proceed to full production levels," the wire service says.

Critics in Congress and without have blasted the jet for big cost overruns, and for a deisgn better suited to the Cold War than to the fight against terror.

IMPROVED MISSILES IN IRAQI HANDS?

"The Pentagon is investigating whether new, more deadly versions of Russian missiles may be in the hands of Iraqi insurgents, possibly enabling them to shoot down U.S. Army helicopters and threaten other aircraft," the Boston Globe reports.

U.S. military officials thought they were well prepared for the variety of shoulder-fired missiles utilized by Saddam Hussein's forces, mainly missiles manufactured in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. For years American intelligence officials gathered technical information on a variety of portable Russian missiles - including the SA-7, SA-14, SA-16, and SA-18 - in order to develop countermeasures, such as electronic jamming equipment and decoy flares.

But missile components and other weapon systems uncovered by US forces in Iraq have fueled suspicions that insurgents may have obtained more advanced weapons, not previously known to US intelligence, that can confuse helicopters' electronic defenses or overcome attempts to send them off course, the officials said.

Nine helicopters have been lost to enemy missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, and small arms fire - costing the lives of 32 soldiers - since the US-led invasion last March. Several airplanes flying into Baghdad International Airport have also been hit by missiles, but managed to land safely.

PENTAGON MASTER STRATEGY REVEALED

For years, the American military said it had to ready to fight two major wars at the same time. William Arkin, in the L.A. Times, reveals the Pentagon's new grand plan:

The Rumsfeld plan envisions what it labels a "1-4-2-1 defense strategy," in which war planners prepare to fully defend one country (the United States), maintain forces capable of "deterring aggression and coercion" in four "critical regions" (Europe, Northeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East and Southwest Asia), maintain the ability to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously, and be able to "win decisively" — up to and including forcing regime change and occupying a country — in one of those conflicts "at a time and place of our choosing."

The new strategy embraces the administration's philosophy of preemptive strikes as well as the Rumsfeld vision of integrating special and covert operations and nuclear weapons into future conventional military planning. At a time when American military forces are already stretched to the limit, the new strategy goes far beyond preparing for reactive contingencies and reads more like a plan for picking fights in new parts of the world.

IRAQ PREDICTIONS REVISTED

"A year ago tonight, President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond," the Washington Post notes. "The invasion and occupation of Iraq, [the Bush] administration predicted, would come at little financial cost and would materially improve the lives of Iraqis. Americans would be greeted as liberators, Bush officials predicted, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein would spread peace and democracy throughout the Middle East.

"Things have not worked out that way, for the most part."

There is evidence that the economic lives of Iraqis are improving, thanks to an infusion of U.S. and foreign capital. But the administration badly underestimated the financial cost of the occupation and seriously overstated the ease of pacifying Iraq and the warmth of the reception Iraqis would give the U.S. invaders. And while peace and democracy may yet spread through the region, some early signs are that the U.S. action has had the opposite effect...

On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq. "The American part of this will be $1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further-on funding for this..."

...The administration has already sought more than $150 billion for the Iraq effort.

In its predictions a year ago, the Bush administration similarly underestimated the resistance the United States would face in Iraq. "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Cheney said in a March 16 interview.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz derided a general's claim that pacifying Iraq would take several hundred thousand U.S. troops. And Rumsfeld, in February 2003, predicted that the war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months..."

Considerable economic activity has resumed in Baghdad and other major cities, while living standards are better than at any time since the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the country's oil revenue is gradually climbing. "What's impressive -- and maybe more credit goes to Iraqis than to us -- is that economic activity has picked up. Clearly, there's money out there. People are going to jobs and working," said Henri Barkey, former State Department expert on Iraq and now chairman of Lehigh University's International Relations Department.

[An] ABC News poll confirms this. Fifty-six percent of Iraqis said things are better than before the war, and 71 percent expect that their lives will be even better next year.

THERE'S MORE: Are Iraqis better off now than they were a year ago? The Christian Science Monitor offers a detailed scorecard.

TSA TO AIRLINES: PAPERS, PLEASE

The Transportation Security Administration has decreed that it will soon order airlines to turn over passengers' personal records for the hotly-contested CAPPS II traveller screening program.

GUNS-FOR-HIRE TO GUARD AMERICAN HQ IN IRAQ

The Washington Post is reporting that "the U.S.-led authority in Iraq plans to spend as much as $100 million over 14 months to hire private security forces to protect the Green Zone, the four-square-mile area in Baghdad that houses most U.S. government employees and some of the private contractors working there."

The Green Zone is now guarded primarily by U.S. military forces, but the Coalition Provisional Authority wants to turn much of that work over to contractors to free more U.S. forces to confront a violent insurgency. The companies would employ former military personnel and be responsible for safeguarding the area for the first year after political authority is transferred to an interim Iraqi government on June 30.

STEALTH FIGHTER TEST FLIGHTS "IFFY"

The troubled F/A-22 stealth fighter has been in the works since 1986. But the jet may not be ready to start a key set of tests just two weeks away.

"I think it's iffy," Air Force Secretary James Roche tells Aerospace Daily.

Roche said the F/A-22 has overcome many of the problems that have plagued parts of the aircraft, including the canopy and vertical fin. But he said test flight rates continue to be lower than desired. The General Accounting Office said in a recent report that test pilots could fly only about 53 percent of their planned flights from October 2003 to January 2004, with maintenance problems being a major culprit.

The upcoming tests are supposed to be used to determine whether or not the stealth fighter -- criticized as a Cold War jet unsuited for the anti-terror conflict -- will go into full production this December.

PENTAGON CHEATS ANTI-MISSILE WARGAME

"Should I save Boise or Anchorage? We may not have enough interceptors for both."

That's the conundrum James Glanz, from the New York Times, finds himself in today. The Defense Department is eager to show off its new anti-missile training program. And so the Pentagon invited seven reporters, including Glanz and the Washington Post's Bradley Graham, to take its "Missile Defense Wargame and Analysis Resource" for a spin.

In the end, both Anchorage and Boise are saved. But only by cheating at the game.

Last summer, collection of top physicists concluded that it was essentially impossible to knock down a missile in its "boost phase," right after it launches. Using lasers do to the job was particularly unlikely, since the Pentagon's Airborne Laser -- an effort to put ray guns on a modified 747 -- is way, way over-budget and behind schedule.

So how did the two cities survive?

According to Glanz, "by a 'boost phase' interceptor — a laser that does not actually exist yet but that in the simulation is flying on an airplane."

BUSH STOPPED PRE-9/11 PREDATOR FLIGHTS

"Though Predator drones spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times in late 2000, the [Bush] administration did not fly the unmanned planes over Afghanistan during its first eight months," the Associated Press reports.

The military successfully tested an armed Predator throughout the first half of 2001, and top administration officials discussed such a mission at a White House meeting just one week before the [9/11] attacks. But they failed to resolve a debate over whether the CIA or Pentagon should operate the armed Predators and whether the missiles would be sufficiently lethal, officials told The Associated Press.

The months-long disappearance in 2001 of U.S. Predators from the skies over Afghanistan is discussed in classified sections of Congress' report into pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures and is expected to be examined by an independent commission appointed by the president and Congress, officials said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA put the armed drones into the sky within days, and they soon played an important role in one of the early successes of the war on terror.

(via Atrios)

STEALTH FIGHTER IN CONGRESS' SIGHTS

Good government groups and military analysts have been taking aim at the F/A-22 stealth fighter plane program for years. The jets cost too much, they say. Designed for Cold War, air-to-air combat, the planes aren't needed in the anti-terror fight. Osama doesn't have an air force, after all.

The critics got a big pile of new ammunition yesterday, in the form of a new report from the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The Air Force still hasn't said "why this aircraft is needed given current and projected threats," according to the GAO. And the F/A-22 program is way, way over-budget: once scheduled to buy 277 of the planes, the Pentagon can now only purchase 218, due to inflated costs.

"What's more, the Air Force plans to add extra air-to-ground missions to a plane designed for air-to-air combat, which could push costs up another $8 billion or more," according to the Washington Post.

The Air Force originally wanted to see the plane's sophisticated avionics, or electronics gear, achieve 20 hours of uninterrupted flying time without a software failure. When the plane couldn't achieve that, the Air Force changed its goal to flying five hours without a software failure. As of January, the plane could average no better than 2.7 hours.

In addition, the plane's microprocessor is an obsolete model no longer manufactured. The Air Force plans to switch to a newer type, including one created for the upgraded F-16 fighter jet, a type of plane far older than the F-22.

It's no surprise, then, that watchdog groups like the Project on Government Oversight are asking the Pentagon to put this sick puppy of a program to sleep.

"There's no place for weapons without a mission like the F/A-22 given the current budget squeeze," POGO's Eric Miller said in a statement.

ROBOT DREAM, ROBOT REALITY

One of the big ironies of the DarpaTech conference is the disconnect between the program managers' lofty visions for the future and the often mundane experiments they show off. Robotics is probably the most striking example.

In the cavernous conference hall at the Marriott Anaheim, Darpa's Ted Bially sketched out a vision of tomorrow's fighting force. Fleets of drones do most of the fighting, he said, and a couple of humans would be left to make a few big-picture decisions. Across the corridor, at the agency's Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems' display, was a prediction by Sen. John Warner (R-Virginia) in big, bright letters. By 2010, he foretold, one-third of America's deep-strike aircraft would fly without a pilot. (By 2015, a third of the ground vehicles are supposed to be unmanned, too.)

Inside the booth, as if to confirm the senator's statements, a trio of flat-panel screens showed snazzy animations of U.S. drones blowing up Scud missile launchers to a techno soundtrack.

But a few feet away, the reality was a whole lot more humdrum -- and a whole lot cuter.

Kids from Carnegie Mellon University sat on the floor, redirecting their soccer-playing, robotic dogs. Drones still have a tough time seeing the world around them, and a game of soccer helps researchers figure out new ways to see the ball.

Employees from iRobot -- the company that makes the drone vacuum cleaner -- were right next to the students. They were directing a gaggle of toaster-sized bots through a makeshift maze. Mechanical creatures aren't particularly good at cooperating with one another yet. This "Swarm" project is the beginning of an attempt to get the robots to work together.

Looking over at the audiovisual extravaganza going on in the Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems booth, an iRobot employee subtly shook his head. The people mesmerized by the slick presentation don't understand how hard it is for robots to do the most basic of things, he explained.

He murmured, "It's so far off."

GRAND CHALLENGE BREAKS DOWN

It now looks like all of the robot racers in Darpa's Grand Challenge have broken down in the Mojave Desert.

The "variety of problems included stuck brakes, broken axles, rollovers and malfunctioning satellite navigation equipment," reports the Elko Daily Press. "One six-wheeled robot built by a Louisiana team was disqualified after it became entangled in barbed wire."

All this was to be expected. Half of the bots couldn't make it through the mile-or-so obstacle course, meant to separate out the sturdy drones from the weak. And the rest could only creep through the qualifying heat.

THERE'S MORE: The New York Times, Washington Post, and S.F. Chronicle all chime in on the robots' defeat.

DARPA GETS SPACEY

Robots building communications arrays hundreds of miles above the Earth. Electromagnetic pulses cleansing space of nuclear explosions' lethal effects. Raw materials turning themselves into orbiting sensors.

That's just a small sample of what Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, has in store for space.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a well-deserved reputation for tackling the quasi-fictional. But at the agency's three-day confab in Anaheim -- where proposals for thinking computers, wall-crawling soldiers and unmanned armies are just about ho-hum -- the ideas for space may be the wildest of all.

The United States' military leans more and more on satellites to guide its bombs, spy on its foes and route its top-secret messages. But, for the first time in decades, America doesn't have space to itself. And that has the Pentagon spooked.

"The world scene is changing. We have to quickly shift gears in space," Darpa official Gary Graham told an invited audience of 2,200 at the DarpaTech conference. "Many nations have growing capabilities in imaging and communications and navigation. The Chinese have a manned space program."

The way to counter this perceived threat, according to the research agency, is to make building and launching American satellites much, much cheaper and easier. Right now, the United States sends only a few dozen satellites into orbit each year. Darpa program manager Tim Grayson wants "operating in the spaceways (to) become as routine as traveling the airways."

My Wired News article has details.

MATRIX SHRINKS -- MAYBE

New York and Wisconsin are the latest states to pull out of the notorious MATRIX data mining effort. That means only five states are officially left in the program, according to Wired News.

But "whether they know it or not, at least 33 states have released government and commercial records on residents to MATRIX," the Salt Lake Tribune reports.

THERE'S MORE: The New York Times looks at MATRIX's rapid decline in Monday's edition.

ANTI-MISSILE SYSTEM BOMBED

Senators and independent experts piled on the President's missile defense program yesterday, calling the system unproven, politically driven, and over-the-top expensive. The New York Times has details.

THERE'S MORE: The Airborne Laser -- the Pentagon's star-crossed effort to but an anti-missile ray gun on board a 747 -- is in trouble, again. According to Aerospace Daily, Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI), with the Armed Services Committee, says the beam-firing jet is heading for a $2 billion cost over-run.

AND MORE: Slate's Fred Kaplan launches an anti-anti-missile sortie here.

HALLIBURTON'S NOT ALONE

Halliburton's Iraq contract shenanigans aren't unusual, according to a watchdog group. They're practically built into the way the government and big companies make deals.

"What most people do not realize is that those contracts are not anomalies – in fact, they simply reflect the flawed federal contracting system that exists today," the Project on Government Oversight says in a new report, Federal Contracting and Iraq Reconstruction. "Favoritism, waste, abuse, and even fraud are far more likely today because of the systemic reduction of oversight and transparency in government contracting over the past decade."

THERE'S MORE: "Amid allegations of overbilling by top Iraqi contractor Halliburton and kickbacks to its employees," the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, "senior Defense Department officials vowed yesterday to get tough with the politically connected conglomerate."

DARPA WANTS ALL-SEEING BLIMP

Conspiracy freaks, hold on to your tin hats. Darpa may have publicly abandoned its creepiest programs, like Total Information Awareness. But the agency, holding its every-18-months conference this week in Anaheim, still has a project to make you run full speed into your bunker.

Darpa is starting the planning for a blimp, three times the size of Goodyear's, that would keep watch over an entire city.

Sitting at 70,000 feet above groud, the ISIS (short for "Integrated Sensor is Structure") airship would use a giant, flexible radar antennae to give, in the words of Darpa program manager Larry Correy, a "dynamic, detailed, real-time picture of all movement on or above the battlefield: friendly, neutral or enemy."

"We will apply this technology to track people emerging from buildings of interest and follow them as they move to new locations," added Darpa's Paul Benda. "Imagine the impact it will have if ISIS tracks the movement of individuals for months. Hidden webs of connections between people and facilities will be revealed."

Such a system is meant to keep tabs on urban battlegrounds abroad, of course. But, like Darpa's "Combat Zones That See" project, there's no reason ISIS couldn't float over New York or Chicago or Kalamazoo.

For now, hold off on buying that one-way trip to a secluded Caribbean island. ISIS is futuristic, even by Darpa standards. At the moment, the agency is only studying the feasibility of the airship. Darpa won't even begin soliciting research proposals until 2005.

A key problem to tackle: how to store energy for the blimp. Correy figures ISIS will need batteries ten times lighter than today's cells to stay aloft. Building the airship's enormous radar antennae – as large as the ship itself – is going to be a huge challenge, as well. The lightest space antennae weight 20 kilograms per square meter. For ISIS to work, that'll have to drop at least seven-fold.

THERE'S MORE: Darpa invented the Internet. And now, the agency wants to reboot it, Government Computer News reports. Darpa is looking for ways to dramatically revamp the Internet Protocol, which forwards information from one computer to another, and assigns us all a place on the uber-network.

"I’m not advocating throwing out the Internet Protocol completely, but we must absolutely have some mechanism for assigning network capabilities to different users and that capability has to scale to large numbers of devices automatically," Darpa's Col. Tom Gibson said. "The commander wants to be able to send a message and have it delivered, completely, accurately and on time."

DARPA TAKES IT TO THE STREETS

Darpa, the Pentagon's way-out research arm, is known for projects that border on science fiction. But Tuesday, at the start of its three-day, 2,200-person conference, agency officials were sounding downright practical. For them, at least.

In addition to their usual pie-in-the-sky fare -- satellites that build themselves, jets that change shape on command -- they introduced a new thrust: helping soldiers in urban combat zones like Tikrit and Baghdad.

My Wired News article has details. And my DarpaTech roommate, Phil Carter, wraps up some of the show's gee-whiz gadgetry for Slate.

ROBOT RACERS CATCH A BREAK

The rules were simple: if drone makers wanted to compete in the Pentagon's million-dollar, robotic, off-road rally, they had to make sure their creations could navigate a mile-long obstacle course first. The test was needed, Defense Department officials repeatedly said, to make sure the bots had at prayer of completing this Saturday's 210 mile journey across the Mojave Desert.

But when the qualifying rounds began Monday for this "Grand Challenge," run by the Pentagon research arm Darpa, it quickly became clear that only a handful of the bots could pass the exam on the opening day. The array of slight ditches and wide passages set up at the California Speedway were just too much for the drones.

So Darpa has re-written the rule book, at least a little. Before, teams had to clear a "required demonstration of intelligent autonomous behavior and safety features around a short demonstration course." Now, it looks like just about any robot car will be on the starting line in the desert town of Barstow, California.

My Wired News story has more.

THERE'S MORE: Seven driverless cars have now made it through the obstacle course, MSNBC's Alan Boyle says. The final Grand Challenge lineup is set to be announced later today.

AND MORE: 15 teams will be at the Grand Challenge starting line in Barstow, California tomorrow. The Palos Verdes High School crew -- which eventually made it about a third of the way through the mile-or-so-long qualifying obstacle course -- will be in 10th position.

Darpa "loosened the rules a bit," said Palos Verdes parent mentor Cecille DeSimone. "Any team that wasn't an obstacle to the others was let in."

AND MORE: Interestingly, Darpa is now calling its Mojave Desert jaunt a "field test" -- as if the agency isn't really expecting anyone to actually pass the challenge this time around.

CHALLENGE 1, ROBO-RACERS 0

A million dollars waits the winner of the Darpa Grand Challenge, the all-robot, off-road rally across the Mojave Desert, slated for this weekend. But at the rate the race's preparations are going, there may not be a winner at all.

None of the drones that attempted to qualify on Monday made it through a simple obstacle course at the California Speedway, nestled in the San Bernadino Mountains about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. Others aren't expected to traverse more than a few hundred feet of the 210 mile trek, scheduled to begin early Saturday morning.

Even Sandstorm – the Carnegie Mellon University multi-million dollar, pilotless Humvee that's the envy of most of the other teams here – went through a near-death experience just a few days ago, and just about limped to the track.

Sponsored by Darpa, the Pentagon's research arm, the Challenge is a presents competitors with a monumental task: to get a robot to drive itself across the desert, when most of the drones the military uses today have a human piloting them from afar. It's a mission that's so far eluded the Defense Department's brightest minds and its biggest contractors.

What makes completing the Challenge a nearly miraculous feat is that most of the competitors are amateurs: entrepreneurs, college professors, moonlighters and even a team of high-school kids.

"We barely made it here," said C.J. Pedersen, a Los Angeles mechanical design consultant and part-time race-car driver. His handcrafted, wedge-shaped drone, A.I. Motorvator, had its share of false starts.

My Wired News article has details.

THERE'S MORE: Over the New Year's holiday, the proposed routes for the Grand Challenge allegedly leaked online, throwing the drone teams into a tizzy. Some robot builders even argued that the rally was "pointless" after the alleged disclosure.

But Darpa chief Tony Tether denied Monday that the leak ever happened. "We didn't know the route until a week ago," he said. The information shown online only showed "1500 miles" where the rally's route "could be."

TASER'S SUCCESS NO SHOCK TO COPS

The Taser electro-shock gun is changing policing for the better, the New York Times concludes.

In Seattle, for the first time in 15 years, no one was killed by the police in 2003. And "Miami, a city with a long history of police shootings and ensuing civil unrest, had no police shootings last year, fatal or otherwise, for the first time in 14 years."

ANTI-TERROR RESEARCH FUNDS = "PUBLIC TROUGH"

The L.A. Times reviews the billions of dollars in research money being spent this year on homeland defense. The paper's -- and a former defense official's -- conclusion: "What we will have in two or three years is a huge new public trough. The funding going into this is way overblown. When you throw this kind of money around, even well-intentioned people can't control it."

Efforts to build national [biological] networks of sensors "makes Star Wars look easy," the defense official said, referring to the 20-year drive to build a missile defense system. The official agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. As government offices, universities and contractors establish dozens of homeland security research centers, he added, "What you hear is the thundering of the herd rushing to the money."

EXOSKELETON WALKS OUT OF BERKELEY

UC Berkeley robot-makers say they've developed a real-life, powered exoskeleton, to make it easier for soldiers to carry their super-heavy packs. According to Jane's, the artificial legs could let special forces haul more than 200 pounds worth of gear into battle.

Field testing starts next year. But the Pentagon-funded project is going to be shown off at the DarpaTech conference in Anaheim, which begins Tuesday.

I'll be there. So expect reports on this and other projects all next week.

(via Geek Press)

"BLACK BOX" FOR PEOPLE

"An aircraft 'Black Box' accident recorder but miniaturised for the human body."

That's how Microsoft researchers are describing SenseCam, a "badge-sized wearable camera that captures up to 2000 VGA images per day. In addition, sensor data such as movement, light level and temperature is recorded."

This is undoubtedly linked to MyLifeBits, the effort by minicomputer pioneer (turned Microsoft brain) Gordon Parks to create a surrogate, digital memory. And it sounds a whole lot like LifeLog, the Pentagon's now-defunct effort to capture and categorize everything about a person's life.

(via /.)

CALLING FOR CAPTURE

Swiss cell phone SIM cards lead international investigators to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The New York Times has the details.

SONIC WEAPON IN IRAQ

"U.S. soldiers in Iraq have new gear for dispersing hostile crowds and warding off potential enemy combatants," the Associated Press reports. "It blasts earsplitting noise in a directed beam. "

The equipment, called a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, is a so-called "non-lethal weapon" developed after the 2000 attack on the USS Cole off Yemen as a way to keep operators of small boats from approaching U.S. warships.

The devices have been used on some U.S. ships since last summer as part of a suite of protection measures.

Now, the Army and Marines have added this auditory barrage dispenser to their arms ensembles... Some of the Iraq-bound devices will be used by members of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, both recently deployed to the western province of Al Anbar, a largely barren, predominantly Sunni Muslim area.

1 IN 100 SOLDIERS' CITIZENSHIP "UNKNOWN"

"The citizenship of 16,031 members of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines is listed as 'unknown.' That's about one in 100 active-duty military members who might be U.S. citizens, legal immigrants - or just about anybody else."

THE CIA'S PORTFOLIO

Nano-scale manufacturers, image searchers, and software-based translators -- those are just a few of the businesses that the CIA has sunk money into, through its investment arm, In-Q-Tel. USA Today profiles this most unusual venture capital firm.

DEMS: DHS = "TWO TRAILERS IN HURRICANE'S PATH"

As the U.S. Homeland Security Department reached its one-year anniversary today, critics have complained that insufficient funds for the agency have left the nation vulnerable to a variety of threats, Global Security Newswire reports.

Airliners remain vulnerable to easily obtained shoulder-fired missiles, while improper screening of air and sea cargo allows for potential smuggling of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons into the country, critics said. Meanwhile, the department has an understaffed intelligence unit and has no comprehensive strategy to defend the United States against various terrorist scenarios, lawmakers and security analysts said.

There are fewer than 100 U.S. inspectors assigned overseas to inspect millions of cargo containers heading from foreign ports to the United States, according to a 135-page report on the department from Democrats in the House of Representatives.

New York University Professor Paul Light, who studies government bureaucracies, noted organizational weaknesses in the department.

“They’re facing some organizational problems,” he said. “Congress wants to build this department on the cheap; it’s like lashing together two mobile homes and putting them in the path of a hurricane,” he added, referring to the 22 agencies and 180,000 employees that were merged to form the department last year.

U.S.-PAK DEAL: TROOPS IN, NUKE SALES OK

When A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, "confessed" to mounting a rogue operation to sell the world's bad guys nuclear technology, it seemed awfully fishy.

Now, we know what stinks, thanks to the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh. It’s a "quid pro quo": Bush gets to send troops inside Pakistan to finally hunt for Osama bin Laden; Pakistani president Musharraf is let off the hook for helping countries like North Korea go nuclear.

THERE'S MORE: Pakistan's government is denying Hersh's allegations.

MARINES, FROGS IN HAITI

200 Marines and 50 French troops have already landed in Haiti, to restore some speck of order to Port-au-Prince. More American troops are almost certain to follow, now that the U.N. Security Council has approved a multi-national peacekeeping force to be sent there.

Phil Carter and Caribpundit are keeping track of developments.

THERE'S MORE: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld estimated 1,500 to 2,000 U.S. troops would take part in [the Haiti] operation to be commanded for no longer than three months by U.S. officers before being turned over to the United Nations," according to the Washington Post.

QUICK EYE FOR THE MILITARY GUY

Thanks to Predator drones and other spy planes, the military is sending more and more video over fragile, creaky networks, clogging up the systems. But a Glasgow start-up has figured out a way to compress digital video signals a hundred-fold, freeing up bandwidth and allowing near-instant transmission of moving pictures from the battlefield. And that's got the Pentagon extremely interested, the New York Times reports.

NAVY: MORE SHIPS, FEWER SAILORS

The Navy wants more ships. And to pay for them, the service is going to drastically cut the number of sailors working on them.

National Defense magazine says the Navy is looking to beef its fleet up to about 375 ships, from a current 292 -- the fewest number of vessels since before World War I.

The downsizing to fund this expansion "already is underway. For fiscal year 2005, the Navy is budgeting for 7,900 fewer people. A senior Navy official who briefed reporters last month said the cuts would generate savings of $254 million," the magazine notes.

"The Navy believes it can simultaneously deploy more ships and downsize the force, because ships will be more technologically advanced and staffed with smaller crews."