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LOS ALAMOS CAVEMAN CAUGHT
 From the truly weird files...
Authorities have evicted a man from a cave on Los Alamos National Laboratory land where they say he apparently lived for years with the comforts of home — a wood-burning stove, solar panels connected to car batteries for electricity and a satellite radio.
Los Alamos Deputy Fire Chief Doug Tucker said Roy Michael Moore's hideaway, which also was equipped with a bed and a glass front door, was discovered earlier Oct. 13 after a Department of Energy employee working at the Los Alamos site office noticed smoke wafting from the cave in a heavily wooded, steep canyon.
The employee reported the smoke to the fire department. Tucker said the smoke came from Moore's wood-burning stove.
Ten marijuana plants were found outside the cave. Moore, 56, has been charged with possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia, according to court documents. He pleaded not guilty and was released on bond.
Wired News notes that "a Lab spokesman, who said the camp was about 50 yards from his office door, insisted Moore was not a 'security threat.'"
MILITARY PRINT-CHECKS DUSTED
"Problems in searching fingerprint databases have left the American military unable to check fully the identities of thousands of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, raising concerns that they might be releasing suspects prematurely, according to Pentagon officials and documents," the Times reports.
The Defense Department, in the field, has used a mobile system that records fingerprints of suspects, but it cannot always search for a match in other government databases.
In a memorandum last February, the Pentagon said the fingerprinting "problem must be rectified as soon as possible" to fight terrorism more effectively. It required that all new electronic fingerprinting systems comply with accepted standards.
The situation has improved since then, said John D. Woodward Jr., the director of the Defense Department's Biometrics Management Office. But he added, "We still need to improve..."
Mr. Woodward, citing "national security concerns," declined to say how many prints had gone unprocessed as a result. Another official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the information, said it exceeded 16,000 at the time of the memorandum.
BROADWAY'S SECRET TRAIN
 There are a zillion reasons why New York is the City with a big "C," and everyone else lives in the land of the lowercase. But right up there at the top of the list is our sprawling subway, the central nervous system of this town. And it turns 100 today.
Like every grand project, there are lots of stories behind its building. But my favorite has to be the one about the secret train which ran under Broadway.
Back in the 1860's, New York had become beyond overcrowded, quadrupling its population in just 40 years. Something had to be done to ease the city's traffic woes. But Boss Tweed, the City's unchallenged ruler at the time, had his hand in the trolley business, and wouldn't let alternatives flower.
So Alfred Beach – the editor and co-owner of Scientific American – decided to build a subway in secret. He had a license to build a mail delivery system under Broadway using pneumatics, or compressed-air. But Beach expanded those tubes many times over, so they could carry people in air-powered trains.
The idea was to make an underground railway so grand, that even Tweed could not resist the public pressure for it. And the scheme almost worked. Unveiled in 1870, Beach's subway was, by all accounts, a smooth, quiet ride. And it was ornate – chandeliers adorned the ceiling of the demonstration terminal. In the middle sat a grand piano.
The press went ga-ga over Beach's railway. 400,000 people paid a quarter to make the one-block trip in the first year the train was open. New York's Senate and Assembly passed bills authorizing Beach to build a Manhattan-long pneumatic subway.
But Tweed, as usual, had the last laugh. Governor John Hoffman, his puppet, vetoed the subway bill. Beach's dream died that day in Albany. It'd take another thirty years before New York would start digging.
NUKE LIBRARY YANKED
CNN is reporting that "the Nuclear Regulatory Commission removed its massive public reading room from the Internet Monday after nuclear safety activists and media organizations found several documents on it containing sensitive information they said could help terrorists."
The information included floor plans for nuclear laboratories at several universities, specifying the types and locations of nuclear materials they use.
The NRC said the removal of the online document library is temporary and that documents will be posted again after they are scrubbed of sensitive information.
Critics said the action was too late -- coming three weeks after the problem was first publicized -- and too drastic, involving the removal of thousands of non-sensitive documents.
RUMMY'S SLICK SUPPLEMENTAL MOVE
 You'd think it'd be a top priority for the Army, outfitting troops with new body armor, helmets, and communications gear. But the Pentagon can't seem to find the cash in its $420 billion budget to pay for the equipment.
Instead, the Army is relying on a supplemental spending bill -- one that's meant to fund the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq -- to cover the costs.
"I always tell people, thank God for the supplemental. We would not be able to do anything … without them," Defense News quotes Lt. Gen. Joseph Yakovac, the Army’s top uniformed acquisition official, as telling an Association of the United States Army conference. "If those don’t happen, we’re in a world of hurt."
Now, last year, the Pentagon used an $87 billion emergency spending measure to buy body armor, among other things. At the time, that made some sense – the war had dragged on longer, and was of a different type, than Rumsfeld & Co. had predicted.
But this year is something different. When the Pentagon was drafting its latest budget, it knew damn well there was going to be a need to get body armor into the field. So what's going on here?
This is another case of Rumsfeld refusing to make a choice between the military's current needs and its future, of trying to have it both ways. He needs to get gear to the troops in Iraq. But he doesn't want to sacrifice any of the military's big ticket items in order to do it. So he pulls a little trick on Congress. First, Rumsfeld sends lawmakers his main Pentagon budget, which has lots of line items for projects like the hulking, $117 billion Future Combat Systems. And then, crying poverty, Rumsfeld asks for body armor money – which there's no chance in hell that Congress will deny.
It's a very, very slick Washington maneuver – one you'd be tempted to call a form of blackmail. Because G.I.s is the field are now counting on that supplemental to keep them safe, Defense News says.
The supplemental will fund much of the work being done by the Army’s two-year-old Rapid Fielding Initiative (RFI), whose goal is to equip all deploying units — and, by 2007, all active and reserve units — with 76 items, including the Advanced Combat Helmet, body armor, desert boots and moisture-wicking T-shirts. Yakovac said the program could cost $5 billion.
“We’re hoping on supplementals to do that,” he added.
Roughly 150,000 soldiers will receive the RFI kits by the end of this year, with another 250,000 troops equipped in 2005, said Brig. Gen. James Moran, the Army’s soldier program executive officer.
EXPLOSIVE PROBLEMS
NBC now says that the 380 tons of missing Iraqi explosives might have vanished before the U.S. invasion. If true, it's a small comfort -- the bottom line is, the insurgents there now have the stuff, to go along with their giant bankroll, swelling manpower, and seemingly-impermeable command structure.
Besides, the NBC story -- now being pushed by conservative commentators -- doesn't quite hold together, Josh Marshall believes.
On Monday, the Pentagon gave mixed signals about what the first troops on the scene found. Or rather, an official whom the AP describes as closely involved in the Iraq survey work says the explosives were there, while Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita says they weren't.
Di Rita's claim that the explosives were already gone was picked up this evening by NBC news which reported that one of its news crews embedded with the 101st Airborne visited the facility on April 10th and found no weapons...
[But] military and non-proliferation analysts say that a detachment of soldiers not specifically trained in weapons inspections work and certainly an NBC news crew simply wouldn't be in a position to make such a determination. We're not talking about a storage unit with a few boxes in it, but a massive weapons complex made up of almost a hundred buildings and bunkers.
Former weapons inspector David Albright was asked about this on CNN Monday evening and he said, "I would want to check it out. I mean it's a big site. These bunkers are big and it could get lost in that complex and it may be that they just didn't go to the right places and didn't see it."
THERE'S MORE: "There wasn't a search," says the NBC news producer with the 101st when it stopped at the weapons dump. "The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was – at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there."
COFFEE-CAN NETWORK GETS READY TO JAM
 "One of the biggest threats in Iraq is [a commercial walkie-talkie] radio," a defense contractor tells Aviation Week. "It's a tiny thing that costs about $100. They've got a 10-mi. range and operate between 40-50 MHz. That's what the terrorists are using. It's hard to monitor. They give a guy a radio, put him on top of a hill, and [he and a string of others] will relay communications for hundreds of miles."
So how does the Pentagon plan on fighting this $100 threat? With a set of cheap, coffee-can-sized transmitters of its own. Except, in this case, cheap means $10,000 a pop. And the little buggers "can listen to enemy radars and communications, analyze an opponent's network and movement of systems and jam emitters or infiltrate enemy computers with packages of algorithms," according to the magazine. An early-phase test of the system, known as "Wolfpack," is scheduled for next week.
No one "Wolf" is particularly powerful. But, collectively, they can be used to triangulate enemy signals -- like those walkie-talkie conversations -- and monitor hostile networks. The idea is to "litter the battlefield with these small objects," Preston Marshall, WolfPack's program manager at Darpa, explained last year.
He'd like to see the Wolves tough enough to be chucked out of helicopters, dropped by drones, or places on rooftops by soldiers. "Once a cylinder hits the ground, it checks itself out. If everything is working properly, the fins will erect and make the device stand up, Marshall said. "An inflatable antenna goes up and it generates a radio signal. They form a network. Wolf networks find other wolf networks and eventually find a path back to the command center."
 "A WolfPack typically would have at least five wolves," Aviation Week adds. "They are designed to be identical, so each of them can take another's role, including subpack leader, to gather information, and pack leader to send it into the larger battlefield network."
The system would come with its own mission planning tool to optimize where wolves are placed. And, as long as a wolf can communicate with any other wolf, it has access to the whole network.
The WolfPack network is set up to be dynamic and autonomous. The pack will reassign responsibilities as needed, and the network may by itself establish sub-nets if those would be useful in attacking a target. Moreover, WolfPack is designed to be smart enough to detect patterns in how an adversary employs his electronic systems so the key nodes can be jammed, listened to or invaded. The system is designed to locate emitters with enough accuracy that they can be attacked with a mortar or bomb.
THERE'S MORE: "To put it bluntly, the 'defense contractor' [quoted at the beginning of the post] is full of crap," says Defense Tech reader WT.
Every SINCGARS (Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System) radio carried in the field is capable of intercepting those transmissions, and there are intelligence assets that are specifically designed to intercept and jam those transmissions. In fact, due to the low power of those radios (typically 2.5 to 7 watts output), they are very susceptible to jamming. The positioning of these radios (on top of hills or tall buildings) makes them more susceptible to direction finding and interception. They are most definitely *NOT* hard to monitor. They are in fact little different from the Soviet era VHF radios. The only difference is in size and weight, the difference between a backpack radio and a handheld. The output wattage and frequencies are the same, as is the modulation.
I suspect that this is a case of justifying something that might be needed in the future (note the reference to ‘infiltrat(ing) enemy computers’) by tying it to the current conflict. A neat toy that could be very useful, but not something that is needed in Iraq now, or in the near future. I’m not saying that this isn’t something that should be pursued, just that the guy doesn’t know what he is talking about.
EURO BANKS HELD OFF U.S. INFO BOMBS
Why didn't the U.S. go after Iraqi computer networks as hard as they could have during the Iraq invasion? To keep French ATMs safe, an Aviation Week article hints.
Basic services such as automatic banking machines could [have been] affected. Parts of the European banking system, for example, were a concern to U.S. officials planning electronic attacks on Iraq. Much of that country's electronic infrastructure was built by French firms.
Nevertheless, the magazine says, the Pentagon is working to develop "computer network attack devices [that] can hijack enemy transmissions, insert specially designed algorithms and then send the altered data stream back into the foe's network."
IRAQ EXPLOSIVES CACHE LOOTED
The New York Times is reporting that " nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations."
The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year...
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.
Josh Marshall has more, including this heartwarming tidbit:
The Defense Department has been trying to keep this secret for some time. The DOD even went so far as to order the Iraqis not to inform the IAEA that the materials had gone missing. Informing the IAEA, of course, would lead to it becoming public knowledge in the United States.
The Times notes that "the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa." Now, the insurgents have something like 700,000 times that amount at their disposal, to go along with their ocean of cash, and increasingly sophisticated tactics like these. Bad. Very, very bad. Andrew Sullivan hits in on the head:
In terrorist-ridden Iraq, the possibility of serious weaponry falling into the hands of the enemy and being deployed against American troops and conceivably American citizens is unforgivable. The whole point of the invasion was to prevent this kind of transfer from taking place. Yet, thanks to this administration, it may have precipitated it.
THERE'S MORE: Juan Cole points out that this is one of several "missing deadly weapons" scandals to break in Iraq. In the middle of the month, we heard about the nuclear equipment buildings that simply disappeared from the world's satellite screens. And in the summer of 2003, we learned that radioactive materials -- good for a dirty bomb -- had vanished from Iraq's al-Tuwaitha facility.
INSURGENTS = ENTREPRENEURS?
John Robb has a must-read post today about the "guerilla entrepreneurs" now operating in Iraq. If you want to know why this insurgency in Iraq is going to be so tough to stop, start clicking.
Arab warfare, until late in this century, was driven entirely by entrepreneurship. For example: Lawrence of Arabia, the father of modern guerrilla warfare, used combinations of direct payments and the promise of loot to build his forces. Faith played a major part, but it was almost always secondary.
Recent reports confirm from the US military analysts confirm the financial nature of the open source bazaar in Iraq:
* "Unlimited amounts" of violence capital for guerrilla entrepreneurs is flowing into Iraq from ex-Baathists, relatives of Saddam Hussein, Saudi sources, and bin Laden. Given global guerrilla ROIs (returns on investment) of up to 100,000 x, this should be cause for alarm.
* Loot from convoy hijackings, theft of oil through bunkering, and ransoms play a major part of the motivation for attacks. Fully 80% of the attacks fall into this category.
* A granular competitive market. There are over 50 guerrilla groups active in Iraq. The sheer diversity of the effort indicates a process that is very similar to historical patterns of Arab warfare.
THERE'S MORE: "About $500 million in unaccounted funds from Saddam Hussein's former regime is being used to finance a growing insurgency in Iraq," according to CNN.
WHITE HOUSE: AL QAEDA = MAFIA
If you're still thinking about voting for George Bush on November 2, you owe it to yourself to read this article from today's Washington Post, in its entirety. Bottom line: the Bush administration thinks fighting terrorism is like taking on the Mob; all you have to do is lock up the top bosses, and the gang will fall apart.
What a pleasant little world we'd live in, if that were true. It ain't. Because Al Qaeda isn't a mafia, with a small band of non-replaceable criminal chiefs. It's a cancer. And, by misdiagnosing the problem, the White House is helping it spread.
Bush conducts the war on terrorism above all as a global hunt for a cast of evil men he knows by name and photograph. He tracks progress in daily half-hour meetings that Richard A. Falkenrath, who sometimes attended them before departing recently as deputy homeland security adviser, described as "extremely granular, about individual guys." Frances Fragos Townsend, who took the post of White House counterterrorism and homeland security adviser in May, said in an interview that Bush's strategy -- now, as in the war's first days -- is to "decapitate the beast..."
Townsend, the White House terrorism and homeland security adviser, gives two framed courtroom sketches from a former life a place of honor on her West Wing wall. The color portraits, from 1990, depict her as lead prosecutor in a case against New York's Gambino crime family. When she took her White House job in May, she told the Associated Press that the transition from organized crime to terrorism "actually turns out not to be that big a leap." She added, "Really in many ways you're talking about a group with a command-and-control structure..."
Students of al Qaeda used to speak of it as a network with "key nodes" that could be attacked. More recently they have described the growth of "franchises." Gordon and Falkenrath pioneered an analogy, before leaving government, with an even less encouraging prognosis.
Jihadists "metastasized into a lot of little cancers in a lot of different countries," Gordon said recently. They formed "groups, operating under the terms of a movement, who don't have to rely on al Qaeda itself for funding, for training or for authority. [They operate] at a level that doesn't require as many people, doesn't require them to be as well-trained, and it's going to be damned hard to get in front of that..."
Marc Sageman, a psychologist and former CIA case officer who studies the formation of jihadist cells, said the inspirational power of the Sept. 11 attacks -- and rage in the Islamic world against U.S. steps taken since -- has created a new phenomenon. Groups of young men gather in common outrage, he said, and a violent plan takes form without the need for an outside leader to identify, persuade or train those who carry it out.
The brutal challenge for U.S. intelligence, Sageman said, is that "you don't know who's going to be a terrorist" anymore. Citing the 15 men who killed 190 passengers on March 11 in synchronized bombings of the Spanish rail system, he said "if you had gone to those guys in Madrid six months prior, they'd say 'We're not terrorists,' and they weren't. Madrid took like five weeks from inception."
Much the same pattern, officials said, preceded deadly attacks in Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya, Morocco and elsewhere. There is no reason to believe, they said, that the phenomenon will remain overseas.
Such attacks do not rely on leaders as the Bush administration strategy has conceived them. New jihadists can acquire much of the know-how they need, Sageman and his counterparts still in government said, in al Qaeda's Saudi-published magazines, Al Baatar and the Voice of Jihad, available online...
Downing, Bush's first counterterrorism adviser after Sept. 11, said in a 2002 interview that hunting down al Qaeda leaders could do no more than "buy time" for longer-term efforts to stem the jihadist tide. This month he said, "Time is not on our side."
"This is not a war," he said. "What we're faced with is an Islamic insurgency that is spreading throughout the world, not just the Islamic world." Because it is "a political struggle," he said, "the military is not the key factor. The military has to be coordinated with the other elements of national power."
Many of Downing's peers -- and strong majorities of several dozen officers and officials who were interviewed -- agree. They cite a long list of proposals to address terrorism at its roots that have not been carried out. Among them was a plan by Wendy Chamberlin, then ambassador to Pakistan, to offer President Pervez Musharraf a substitute for Saudi funding of a radical network of Islamist schools known as madrasas. Downing backed Chamberlin in the interagency debate, describing education as "the root of many of the recruits for the Islamist movement." Bush promised such support to Musharraf in a meeting soon after Sept. 11, said an official who accompanied him, but the $300 million plan did not survive the White House budget request.
THERE'S MORE: Hoo boy, is TM Lutas annoyed by this post.
"Kerry has literally, and publicly, likened the fight against terrorism to prosecutorial efforts against gambling and prostitution. That's what the whole thing about "terrorism as nuisance" was about. President Bush has personally and publicly derided this idea. The idea that it is Bush that is the terrorists = mafia candidate is so far out there that my only question is, aren't you embarrassed? When you discount Bush's own words and go with a Washington Post article as being more authoritative, you really do need to justify such an odd decision with some sort of evidence. And given Kerry's public statement saying he would fight terrorism as he fought gambling and prostitution when he was a DA, not even mentioning Kerry's stand just shows how much you're in the tank for Kerry, no matter what. If you'd have said go third party or stay home, I'd respect that. As is, I'll just read your actual defense technology posts where you do a decent job.
But I'm not "embarrassed," and here's why: Yes, Bush says he's treating the fight against Islamic extremism like an all-out, throw-everything-you-got-at-em war. But many of his actions -- including tapping a former Mob prosecutor for anti-terror duties, undervaluing American financial and media "soft power," and focusing on high-level individuals -- undercut those assertions.
Now , Lutas is right; Kerry is a former prosecutor. But ironically, he seems less enamored of the Mafia model than Bush. And let's look at that "nuisance" comment again. It seems to me that it's not a model for fighting Islamic extremism. It's a description of what our world would feel like, once that struggle has been won.
''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' Kerry said. ''As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''
This analogy struck me as remarkable, if only because it seemed to throw down a big orange marker between Kerry's philosophy and the president's. Kerry, a former prosecutor, was suggesting that the war, if one could call it that, was, if not winnable, then at least controllable. If mobsters could be chased into the back rooms of seedy clubs, then so, too, could terrorists be sent scurrying for their lives into remote caves where they wouldn't harm us. Bush had continually cast himself as the optimist in the race, asserting that he alone saw the liberating potential of American might, and yet his dark vision of unending war suddenly seemed far less hopeful than Kerry's notion that all of this horror -- planes flying into buildings, anxiety about suicide bombers and chemicals in the subway -- could somehow be made to recede until it was barely in our thoughts.
AIR FORCE: SATELLITE JAMMER READY
The U.S. Air Force is ready to start jamming enemy satellites. So says ISR Journal, which reports that the Counter Communications System (CounterCom), a radio frequency-based system to disrupt communications satellites, has been declared operational by the American military.
CounterCom is classified, so there's not a whole lot of details floating around about the program. But ISR Journal does say that the $75 million "system is similar to other ground based electronic warfare gear and is based largely on commercially available components, according to [Air Force] Space Command officials."
As regular Defense Tech readers know, the Air Force has been getting increasingly interested in how to take out orbiters. Not just ones from enemy countries. But satellites from neutrals, and private companies, too.
NASA'S SCI-FI GROUP MEETS
Alan Boyle, that lucky bastard. MSNBC's crack space columnist got to be a fly on the wall at the annual meeting of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts -- the space agency's sci-fi arm. They're the guys who fund way-out studies into things like magnetic plasma beam propulsion, weather control, and robot swarms to defend the Earth. Think of it as an itty-bitty version of Darpa, but for space. With way more lasers.
One of the ideas reviewed at this week's confab: a spray-on spacesuit for a trip to Mars. MIT engineering professor Dava Newman "has been looking at the possibility of spraying a layer of polymer fabric over an astronaut, in a booth much like those used for getting a spray-on suntan," Alan explains. "The 'second-skin' suit could be augmented by temperature-control underwear, flexible joint attachments and perhaps even an exoskeleton."
Grrrrr.
PENTAGON HEARTS NASCAR
 U.S. military chiefs want their crews to get quicker and better at maintaining weapons systems. So they're turning to NASCAR for ideas, National Defense magazine says.
Not only are NASCAR technologies making their way into military vehicles, but the pit stop is becoming a model for how to service equipment more efficiently.
A case in point is a novel windshield coating — used on NASCAR race cars — that is now being applied to military helicopters.
The Army has adopted pit-stop maintenance for a missile-defense launcher that is now in development. [They're doing the same thing with tanks, too.] The Navy, for its part, is designing the flight deck of its next-generation aircraft carrier, the CVN 21, so that aircraft can be refueled and loaded with bombs in pit stop areas, as opposed to having to move the aircraft around the deck.
IS RUMMY'S "TRANSFORMATION" REAL?
 When Don Rumsfeld first became Defense Secretary, he pledged to push military "transformation" -- turning heavy-footed American forces into lighter, quicker, smarter squads. During the debates, President Bush mentioned "transformation" as the reason the U.S. would be able to bring troops home from Europe and Korea -- and stave off a draft, as well.
But have Bush and Rummy done much to "transform" the military? Not really, says Slate's Fred Kaplan.
The military establishment has become more expensive to maintain — its budget has risen from $362 billion to $420 billion (not including the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) — but the extra money has purchased little in the way of "transformational" combat power.
Rumsfeld has changed a few things. He canceled the Army's Comanche helicopter. With the enthusiastic backing of President Bush, he's added billions of dollars to missile defense. And he has purchased a lot of drones and smart bombs. Beyond that, in the words of a report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments — a Washington think tank directed by Andrew Krepinevich, a former Pentagon official who invented the phrase "military transformation"—Rumsfeld's programs "fairly closely resemble those of previous years and the plan … inherited from the Clinton administration."
Nearly all the big-ticket items in the fiscal year 2005 military budget — which a House-Senate conference committee approved this month — have nothing to do with transformation, nothing to do with any threat on the horizon. Look at them:
* $4.1 billion for 24 F-22 stealth fighter planes — at a time when our prospective enemies can barely fly fighter planes, much less shoot down our non-stealth aircraft;
* $4.3 billion for continued development of the F-35 Joint Strategic Fighter, a smaller version of the F-22;
* $2 billion for a new "Super Hornet" version of the F/A-18 fighter plane;
* $2.3 billion for a new Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine, at a time when our Navy faces virtually no threat and possesses more subs than it knows what to do with.
All true. But I don't think Kaplan has it quite right. It's not that Rumsfeld has chosen old-school military gear over transformation. It's that he hasn't chosen at all. Old and new school projects -- like the Army's ginormous transformation effort, Future Combat Systems -- are being funded to the hilt, all while burning bales of cash in the Middle East. That can't continue. As Kaplan notes:
Rumsfeld or whoever replaces him needs to think about a different sort of transformation, one that emphasizes better planning, training, mobilizing, and equipping for the kinds of wars we're really fighting now.
THERE'S MORE: "As reliance on foreign bases is reduced, the carrier battle group becomes more important to the projection of our power. The increasing purchasing of Diesel subs by potential enemies promises that the ASW [anti-submarine warfare] function of our Navy is alive and growing," says Defense Tech reader WW. "As a grandfather and granduncle of troopers currently in Iraq I do not begrudge any reduction in cannon fodder in exchange for mechanical force projection and protection."
AND MORE: Reader RT also wants us to remeber that --
1. Some of these systems have been pushed by Congress, not the Pentagon.
2. Some have been kept active in order to keep the at infrastructure at some
amount of viability (Atomic/Diesel Submarines, ect.)
3. The aircraft presently in use are in most cases over 25 years old
(minimum) and pushing 50 years in the case of the B-52. Retrofits will only
go so far. Talk to the maintainers, it will give you some perspective on
reality.
4. A balanced force should not focus only on an "Iraq" scenario. The
reluctance to address what is not popular (that we may someday have to face
an enemy with advanced weapons systems and forces) is wishful thinking that
will leave our forces in dire straits when the "fit hits the shan".
CAPPS' EVIL STEPBROTHER
The eerily invasive passenger-screening program CAPPS II may be dead, "but its evil stepbrother, 'Secure Flight,' will live if we don't complain loudly enough," says Defense Tech pal Bill Scannell. "If something isn't done soon, the passenger records of over 54 million Americans will be handed-over to the [Homeland Security Department] by the airlines. The time to file your comments is now. We've built an interface that links directly into the 'Secure Flight' comments database. The Bill of Rights you save may be your own.
NUKE LAB FRAUDSTERS COP A PLEA
The men who helped start the current wave of scandals at Los Alamos pled guilty yesterday to charges of conspiracy and mail fraud, the AP reports.
Peter Bussolini, 66, and Scott Alexander, 42, are both facing 12 to 18 months in jail for making fishy purchases with taxpayer money. I mean, really fishy -- gas grills, CB radios, picnic tables, all for a "government emergency command center," supposedly.
Ex-police chiefs Glenn Walp and Steve Doran were brought in to investigate Bussolini, Alexander, and other slippery lab characters. But Walp and Doran were fired, once they started uncovering widespread fraud.
That got the attention of Congress, and the press. Hearings were held of Capitol Hill. And, eventually, all of the lab's top managers were forced out.
But the renewed scrutiny didn't end there. Security lapses and safety breaches kept coming to light – over and over again. Eventually, the lab had to be largely shut down – a reboot, of sorts, to get employees to start taking regulations seriously. That restart, begun in July, still isn't completely done.
Anyway, here's a partial list of some of the things Bussolini and Alexander bought on your dime:
5 Genesis Gold barbeque gas grills
1 19" Panasonic television/VCR combination set
4 Cobra 75 WV CB radios
3 30 Watt solar panels
3 automatic double gate openers w/ remotes
2 Wyoming saws
8 picnic tables
4 sage-colored Cabela Deluxe Arm Chair
38 chamois shirts
15 pairs of thinsulate gloves
152 assorted knives, including 8 "SOG M37 Seal Pup Knives"
13 motorcycle helmets
12 headlamps
5 ULT Command Center monitors
24 camping lanterns
4 olive drab ATV covers
1 Carhart XXXL coat
3 pair New Balance hiking boots
15 sleeping bags
4 sleeping pads
4 reclining loungers
4 "Portable Buddy Heaters"
6 parkas
5 "Portable Catalytic Heaters"
4 "Pocket Chain Saws"
4 "Deluxe Ratchet Pruners"
6 knife-sharpeners
6 Magellan Map 330M GPS units
8 pocket & micro torches
3 goretex jackets
4 stand-up heaters
3 pairs of "Polarized Lenses"
4 Rangesafe Ear Muffs
4 "Ultimate 10 Hearing Protectors"
NAVY GETS NEW DUDS
 After months after the Army rolled out its summer line of fatigues, the Navy is showing off new-fangeled uniforms of its own.
The key word here is "uniform." Sailors have long had a variety of working outfits. The Navy Working Uniform is an attempt to put everyone in the same clothes, the Navy News Service says.
The Navy Working Uniform is being designed to take the place of utilities, wash khaki, coveralls, woodland green, aviation green, winter working blue and tropical working uniforms. The normal wear life is designed to last up to 18 months, compared to the current wear life of six months for the working uniform.
The working uniform design is not intended to camouflage Sailors against the background of a ship. Instead, the multiple colors on the uniform - navy blue, deck gray, haze gray and black - are common in the maritime working environment, making them a more practical choice.
“What we have heard from Sailors aboard ship is if they get a small spot of paint or grease on a pair of solid-color utilities or coveralls, it’s easily visible and detracts from the uniform’s appearance,” Scott said. “With the Navy Working Uniform’s multicolor pattern, a small spot or stain may be almost entirely unnoticeable.”
Another positive aspect of a multicolor pattern is that wrinkles caused by daily wear would be less visible, and the new uniforms will be wash and wear with no ironing required.
There's good news for the Navy's gadget freaks, too. Sailors in working uniforms will will now be able to wear cell phones and PDAs, Gizmodo notes. Lady gadget freaks are especially psyched. Skirts are now optional "for the first time since women officially entered the service in 1908," the AP reports.
SOUPED-UP ARMORED CARS PREPPED FOR IRAQ
 Soldiers in Iraq might soon get armored vehicles equipped with pain rays, sonic weapons, or guns that automically return fire – if a Pentagon project works out as planned.
As we've said before here, when U.S. troops are forced with an angry mob, they only have two options at their disposal, currently: the bullhorn or the M16. Last month, a U.S. helicopter fired into a group of Iraqi crowd, killing more than a dozen.
The idea behind "Project Sheriff," according to Stars and Stripes, is to give "troops working in urban terrain more options, especially when deciding how to deal with potential noncombatants or civilians being used as shields."
Four to six vehicles -- the Army’s new Stryker armored personnel carrier, for example, or the Marine Corps’ Light Armored Vehicle -- would be retrofitted with non-lethal weapons and new defense systems. They plans have been finalized, yet. But options include the Active Denial System – a microwave-like pain ray – and the earsplitting Long Range Acoustic Device, a sort of bullhorn on steroids.
But Project Sheriff will also have a new, deadly set of capabilities, as well. Under consideration in the Gunslinger weapons system, which "uses acoustic and infrared sensors to identify a sniper," according to Inside the Army. Then, a pack of machine guns can automatically return that sniper fire. The Pentagon wants to have the system in G.I.s' hands by June or July.
THERE'S MORE: Reader RM wants to know, "Why can't they just use tear gas? Why all the money on fancy high-tech?" Here's your answer, RM, from Sid Heal, a long-time veteran of the Marine Corps and L.A. Sheriff's department. He's one of the leading non-lethal weapons experts around.
Because they [Active Denial Systems] don't change the environment and there is no personal decontamination required. For example, tactical commanders are EXTREMELY reluctant to use any chemical agent around intersections, roads, schools, hospitals, etc. AND it's effectiveness is largely weather dependent. A stiff breeze blowing in your face is NOT the time to deploy tear gas because it leaves the mob unaffected while putting all your people in masks.
DARPA: PLANES = PLANTS?
 The Pentagon wants planes to start acting more like plants. That's the ultimate goal of a research project, funded by Darpa, the Defense Department's mad science division.
We all know plants change their shape. Some bend to catch the sun's rays; some snap to catch a meaty treat; some stiffen when they're watered. Darpa would like to have tough, man-made materials that can pull off some of the same tricks. Maybe, one day, it can lead to a jet that can pull back its wings when it's ready to attack, or extend 'em to glide.
Researchers at Virginia Tech have won from Darpa a $2.1 million, year-and-half grant to start to figure out ways to do this. "The plan calls for the investigation of the protein structures of plants for the purpose of understanding their role in generating shape changes in natural materials," says a Virginia Tech press release. "The protein structures under analysis would then be used to develop a synthetic material that incorporates properties that produce controllable shapes."
The project – Nastic Materials -- is part of a whole range of efforts by Darpa to make materials that act a little like living things. As John Main, the program's manager, said at a DarpaTech conference earlier this year:
The intersection of materials science and nature appears to show great promise for delivering materials with unobtainable properties.
Natural materials are truly magnificent: Living bones grow, repair damage, remodel to distribute stress, and produce blood. Muscle turns lipids into work to help us regulate body temperature, maintain balance, and walk. Plant tissues grow, distribute nutrients, isolate injury, self-clean, support leaves, and sometimes even move with surprising force, such as tree roots upending concrete sidewalks.
All of these characteristics are unobtainable [in man-made things] if you limit yourself to the world of conventional materials. Yet they are all clearly possible, because nature has supplied us with examples to study and potential paths to follow to create similar capabilities.
GEAR LACK ALMOST STOPPED IRAQ OPS
"The top U.S. commander in Iraq complained to the Pentagon last winter that his supply situation was so poor that it threatened Army troops' ability to fight," the Washington Post's Tom Ricks reports.
The lack of key spare parts for gear vital to combat operations, such as tanks and helicopters, was causing problems so severe, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez wrote in a letter to top Army officials, that "I cannot continue to support sustained combat operations with rates this low."
Senior Army officials said that most of Sanchez's concerns have been addressed in recent months but that they continue to keep a close eye on the problems he identified. The situation is "substantially better" now, said Gary Motsek, deputy director of operations for the Army Materiel Command.
Sanchez, who was the senior commander on the ground in Iraq from the summer of 2003 until the summer of 2004, said in his letter that Army units in Iraq were "struggling just to maintain... relatively low readiness rates" on key combat systems, such as M-1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, anti-mortar radars and Black Hawk helicopters.
He also said units were waiting an average of 40 days for critical spare parts, which he noted was almost three times the Army's average. In some Army supply depots in Iraq, 40 percent of critical parts were at "zero balance," meaning they were absent from depot shelves.
THERE'S MORE: As we all know by now, the U.S. miliary is running short on personnel for Iraq, too -- so short, they've decided to deploy their "OPFOR," or opposing force, used to test other units' mettle. That's the equivalent of "eating your seed corn," Phil Carter says.
This unit is responsible for training other units and raising their level of expertise and combat readiness. The 11th ACR is being replaced by a National Guard unit. That's like replacing the Dodgers with a high school baseball team. Sure, they can both play baseball and wear the uniform — but one is a whole lot more proficient and experienced at its job. The OPFOR has a reputation as a tough enemy, and that's a good thing because it forces units training at the NTC [Army National Training Center] to become better themselves. By replacing this unit with National Guard troops, the Army has hurt its ability to produce good units for Iraq in the future. Suffice to say, National Guard and active units that go through Fort Irwin aren't going to get the same tough experience they would have with the [11th ACR] as OPFOR — and that means they'll be less ready for combat when they get to Iraq. This is a desperation measure, and I think the Army will come to regret it.
REPORT: TOXINS BEHIND GULF WAR SICKNESS
"A federal panel of medical experts studying illnesses among veterans of the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf has broken with several earlier studies and concluded that many suffer from neurological damage caused by exposure to toxic chemicals," the New York Times says.
Citing new scientific research on the effects of exposure to low levels of neurotoxins, the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses concludes in its draft report that "a substantial proportion of Gulf War veterans are ill with multisymptom conditions not explained by wartime stress or psychiatric illness."
It says a growing body of research suggests that many veterans' symptoms have a neurological cause and that there is a "probable link" to exposure to neurotoxins.
The report says possible sources include sarin, a nerve gas, from an Iraqi weapons depot blown up by American forces in 1991; a drug, pyridostigmine bromide, given to troops to protect against nerve gas; and pesticides used to protect soldiers in the region.
MORTAR-FINDER BACKFIRES
 An Army radar designed to spot enemy mortar attacks isn't working as advertised in Iraq.
"For members of the 1st Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, the 20-year-old AN/TPQ-37 Firefinder Weapon Locating System was more of a problem than an asset, Defense News reports. "The unit came under mortar fire 40 times in Iraq, but the system only detected rounds three times. The squadron suffered between 10 and 15 injuries from mortars."
“We stopped, we moved the radar around, the technical guys around worked the [software] programming,” said Lt. Col. Gregory Reilly, squadron leader. “We tried everything humanly possible.”
The unit even fired its own mortars at the system in an attempt to work out the bugs. Even under the best circumstances, the radar detected only one out of five rounds.
“I just don’t think there was fidelity in the system,” Reilly said. “I don’t think that it worked.”
Thales Raytheon System’s Q-37 Firefinder radar, which can be transported on a 2.5-ton truck, was first fielded in the 1980s to detect rounds from long-range Soviet artillery up to 50 kilometers away...
Army program officials, who say they track the performance of the upgraded Q-37 daily, rate its effectiveness at roughly 90 percent — when it is used correctly by troops who have been trained extensively.
The radars are “performing exceptionally well for a system originally designed and developed 20 years ago for a different type of warfare,” Lt. Col. Al Visconti, Firefinder product manager, wrote in a response to questions.
PENTAGON BOARD: SPY ON EVERYONE
The only way to win the war on terror is to track everyone, and everything, that moves.
That, according to ISR Journal, is the conclusion of an influential group of Pentagon advisers, the Defense Science Board. "Technologies that can identify people by unique physical characteristics — fingerprint, voice, odor, gait or even pattern of iris — must be merged with new means of 'tagging' so that U.S. forces can find enemies who escape into a crowd or slip into a labyrinthine slum," says a DSB study, completed over the summer.
“The global war on terrorism cannot be won without a ‘Manhattan Project’-like TTL [tagging, tracking, and locating] program,” briefing charts summarizing some of the study’s findings say...
This tagging and tracking could be used for:
• People or groups such as enemy leaders or sympathizers, nuclear weapons or explosives experts, and terrorist paymasters.
• Things such as weapons of mass destruction, materials or components, precision machinery, pharmaceutical plants, specialized instruments, pathogens and seed stocks or vehicles.
• Activities such as recruiting, financial transactions, Internet activity, pathogen genome sequencing or organizational activity or meeting.
How much would it cost to bring these sci-fi technologies to the real world? Doesn't matter, the Board declares. "Cost is not the issue; failure in the global war on terrorism is the real question."
Long-time Defense Tech readers will find this whole thing terribly familiar. Last year, Pentagon mad science arm Darpa introduced a plan to use security cameras to monitor an entire city at once. The program will receive $4 million in the fiscal year '05 budget. And Mayor Daley is trying to do something similar in Chicago.
Like the Darpa effort, the DSB plans to track all these irises, and all this Internet activity, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where insurgents have a nasty habit of melting away into the background. But, of course, if these technologies were ever successfully developed, the temptation to use it to track enemies of the states here at home would be mighty strong, too.
CONCEALED WEAPONS
Camouflage doesn't do you a whole lot of good, if your gun sticks out like a Rabbi at a yacht club. MilitaryPhotos.net has a slew of guns, painted to blend in.
PENTAGON WANTS MINI-KILLERS IN SPACE
 A few weeks back, Defense Tech took a look at the Air Force's emerging plans for fighting in space. Well, "Arms Control Wonk" Jeffrey Lewis has uncovered what looks like a Pentagon wish list for orbital combat. At the top of the list: a slew of itty-bitty satellites. Their mission: "Destruction of Enemy Spacecraft," the Defense Department briefing says.
These killers would be loaded, ten at a time, into a reusable military orbiter. Once a target had been hunted down, these "Microsat Kinetic Kill Payloads" (MKKPs) would intercept an enemy satellite -- the briefing calls it a "hyper-velocity 'tail chase.'" Then they would inspect the damage, after the MKKPs had done their worse.
The MKKP is part of a larger Pentagon project called the Experimental Satellite Series (XSS), Lewis explains.
Launched Jan. 29 [2003], the 28-kilogram XSS-10 successfully demonstrated its ability to move closely around another object to take images. The contract to build its successor, XSS-11, and its more specific sensor payload already has been awarded.
Taking pictures is not much of a threat, but the Air Force sees these satellites as more than just shutterbugs. The "single strongest recommendation" of the Air Force's 1999 Microsatellite Technology and Requirements Study was "the deployment, as rapidly as possible, of XSS-10-based satellites to intercept, image and, if needed, take action against a target satellite," according to an unclassified summary published in 2000.
Other XSS projects, according to the Pentagon briefing, include a "blocker" microsat, which uses a "circular, gimbaled, opaque fan" to stop up enemy communications in space, as well as a satellite "jammer."
But my favorite has to be the "grabber" microsat -- a machine straight out of James Bond, with a mechanical arm, meant for "docking with and reorientation of enemy spacecraft." With this "grapple feature," the mini-ship will "attach itself to [an] enemy satellite, [and] benignly cause disorientation."
THERE'S MORE: Via Geek Press, here's Air Force Space Command's Trek-like new badge.
WE GET LETTERS
One of the joys of being a writer online is the thoughtful, articulate letters you receive. Case in point:
Hell-Low from Heaven-High; I am author/publisher of Manna Biblical Sacrament ... I have been having extreme trouble these last years finding PURE LSD, of course I realize the illegality of my request, but am making this desperate plea to anyone who can help me obtain some. At age 47 this has become harder than I ever expected ... This is NOT entrapment, I am who I say and need a brother to help me out. Emphasis on the word PURE cannot be over-stressed.
COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN IN IRAQ
The Pentagon's master plan for the future relies on networking together every grunt, every general, and every drone -- so information is instantly available to everyone on the battlefield and in headquarters. The Iraq invasion was supposed to the beta test for this military "transformation." And for the top brass, it all worked great. But for many of the front line soldiers in Iraq, this tranformed military looked like a combat force, circa 1944, reports Technology Review.
Take Lt. Col. Ernest “Rock” Marcone, a battalion commander with the 69th Armor of the Third Infantry Division. He was supposed to capture a key bridge on the Euphrates River.
“Next to the fall of Baghdad,” says Marcone, “that bridge was the most important piece of terrain in the theater, and no one can tell me what’s defending it. Not how many troops, what units, what tanks, anything. There is zero information getting to me. Someone may have known above me, but the information didn’t get to me on the ground.”
Marcone’s men were ambushed repeatedly on the approach to the bridge. But the scale of the intelligence deficit was clear after Marcone took the bridge on April 2.
As night fell, the situation grew threatening. Marcone arrayed his battalion in a defensive position on the far side of the bridge and awaited the arrival of bogged-down reinforcements. One communications intercept did reach him: a single Iraqi brigade was moving south from the airport. But Marcone says no sensors, no network, conveyed the far more dangerous reality, which confronted him at 3:00 a.m. April 3. He faced not one brigade but three: between 25 and 30 tanks, plus 70 to 80 armored personnel carriers, artillery, and between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi soldiers coming from three directions. This mass of firepower and soldiers attacked a U.S. force of 1,000 soldiers supported by just 30 tanks and 14 Bradley fighting vehicles. The Iraqi deployment was just the kind of conventional, massed force that’s easiest to detect. Yet “We got nothing until they slammed into us,” Marcone recalls.
Microwave relays, meant to transmit satellite and spy plane images, were not more reliable.
Critically, these relays—sometimes called “Ma Bell for the army”—needed to be stationary to function. Units had to be within a line of sight to pass information to one another. But in practice, the convoys were moving too fast, and too far, for the system to work. Perversely, in three cases, U.S. vehicles were actually attacked while they stopped to receive intelligence data on enemy positions. “A lot of the guys said, ‘Enough of this shit,’ and turned it off,” says Perry, flicking his wrist as if clicking off a radio. “‘We can’t afford to wait for this.’”
One Third Infantry Division brigade intelligence officer reported to Rand that when his unit moved, its communications links would fail, except for the GPS tracking system. The unit would travel for a few hours, stop, hoist up the antenna, log back onto the intelligence network, and attempt to download whatever information it could. But bandwidth and software problems caused its computer system to lock up for ten to 12 hours at a time, rendering it useless.
All of this jives with earlier "after action" reports on the invasion, where communication problems were the norm. Some members of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, for example, had to use a helmet headset, four radios and two laptops at once to communicate with their comrades and commanders.
IRAQ NUKE GEAR VANISHED
What the hell is this?
Equipment and materials that could be used to make nuclear weapons are disappearing from Iraq but neither Baghdad nor Washington appears to have noticed, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency reported on Monday.
Satellite imagery shows that entire buildings in Iraq have been dismantled. They once housed high-precision equipment that could help a government or terror group make nuclear bombs, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report to the U.N. Security Council.
Equipment and materials helpful in making bombs also have been removed from open storage areas in Iraq and disappeared without a trace, according to the satellite pictures, IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said.
THERE'S MORE: This guns-for-money program seems like a most excellent turn of events. But with the prices the U.S. military is paying Al-Sadr's gang -- $250 for a mortar, $170 for a grenade launcher and, for a bullet, 25 cents," according to the New York Times, I can't help but wonder: is this a surrender by the Sadrists, or a fundraiser?
AND MORE: "The cash-for-guns initiative is a good idea," Phil Carter says. "If we can at least get rid of some heavy weapons and explosives, it's always worth it, even if they keep the light stuff."
AND MORE: Blame President Bush for the missing gear, says Matt Yglesias.
Before the war, Iraq's nuclear program was years away from bearing a usable weapon and, thanks to the sanctions regime, getting further away. Then, thanks to diplomacy and threats of force, IAEA inspectors returned to the country. These inspectors informed the U.S. government that its pre-war assessments of Iraq's nuclear program were off-base and that the threat was nowhere near as imminent as the administration had maintained. Nevertheless, the United States invaded, thus precipitating the evacuation of IAEA inspectors who'd been safeguarding the most advanced elements of the Iraqi nuclear program. After the war, the administration failed to provide enough manpower to secure the sites and, displaying its typical disdain for international institutions, wouldn't let the inspectors come back.
As a result, instead of being under lock-and-key, bits and pieces of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program are now off God knows where.
"E-BOMB," FOR REAL?
 On the eve of the Iraq invasion, it was being hailed as America's next "wonder weapon." The "e-bomb" -- a munition using high-powered microwaves to fry circuits and computers -- was about to be dropped on Baghdad, we were told. And the press could hardly keep from quivering at the thought of the big, electromagnetic strike, which would sizzle everything from anti-aircraft radars to Iraqi phone systems. But then... well, what happened next is unclear. Some say a prototype e-bomb was used to knock out Saddam's broadcast facilities. Others aren't so sure.
Now, Aviation Week reports, there are a pair of efforts underway at the Pentagon to use high-powered microwaves -- the core of the e-bomb -- for real.
The German manufacturer Diehl is "supplying U.S. forces in Iraq with 10 'prototype' HPM [high-powered microwave] devices in trials, where they will be used for convoy protection, according to a company source. They will be employed to jam detonation commands for improvised explosive devices."
Meanwhile, the American military is looking at a British program to pack cruise missiles with HPM warheads. American tests of the project -- code-named Virus -- "will likely be carried out at [Naval Air System Command's] China Lake, Calif. range against a target set of foreign systems, including radars and weaponry."
The Pentagon won't immediately make a purchase based on the tests, Aviation Week says. But it could "trigger a process resulting in a purchase." The Defense Department is also looking to load HPMs onto other weapons, including the satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition, used so often in the early days of the Iraq war.
GAMERS GET ARMY'S NEW DUDS
 Soldiers in the field won't see the next generation of combat uniforms until 2007, at the earliest. But videogamers can check out the "Future Force Warrior" gear right now, in the latest Tom Clancy digital adventure. Players can strap on the FFW helmet, with night-vision sights, radio antennae, and bone-conducting microphones built in. They can drink out a new-fangled, "on-the-move" hydration system. And, of course, they can blast away, with the ultra-slick M29 rifle -- the one with the mounted camera, laser target designator, and grenade launcher built in. There's no word, yet, on whether gamers will be able to use FFW's extended, unisex zipper and expanded butt-flap, which allow G.I. Janes to tinkle without "literally being caught with their pants down,"
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