MCCAIN TARGETS "FUTURE COMBAT"

For years, Sen. John McCain has been ripping the Pentagon over its sweetheart deals with Boeing. Now, the Senator is going after the biggest deal of all -- the $127 billion Future Combat Systems initiative.

Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is the most complex, most expensive upgrade the American military as ever tried. It calls for the rebooting of almost every component of Army hardware, from armored vehicles to software-based radios to flying drones to the uniforms G.I.s wear. And Boeing -- which got into hot water over its, um, peculiar arrangement with the Air Force for leasing tankers -- is one of two companies overseeing the sprawling effort.

Since FCS began in the late 90's, the project's technologies has been rejiggered, its deadlines have been shifted, and its goals have been reshaped.

Next month, "Mr. McCain, a senior member of the Senate armed services committee, intends to look at the vast FCS program as part of a series of hearings on Pentagon procurement practices," the Financial Times reports. "Mr. McCain was concerned about the structure of the deal, in which the army has essentially outsourced management of the contract to Boeing, in addition to cost overruns... He is also expected to ask the Government Accountability Office [GAO], the oversight arm of Congress, to look into FCS."

The GAO tore into the program and its managers this past April for lunging ahead with FCS, even when they knew its deadlines and technologies weren't at all realistic. What'll happen next, under McCain's direction, is anyone's guess. But I'm betting that there are a whole heap of problems just waiting to be uncovered here.

THERE'S MORE: "I first requested documents regarding the [tanker lease] proposal in June 2003. Regrettably, since then the DoD’s production of documents has been riddled by disruption, obfuscation and delay," McCain wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary on Saturday. "Some documents that were produced were doctored; others that should have been produced, were improperly withheld. To date, after months of assurances, partial production on only about 7 out of 36 request categories have been produced."

AND MORE: FCS is "a huge program, and obviously we need to have a hearing on it. I have no preconceived notions about it," McCain told Inside the Army today after a Senate policy luncheon. "I'm not against it. I'm not for it. I'm not trying to do anything other than exercise our legitimate oversight of the program."

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) told Inside the Army he supported the idea of a hearing on FCS -- if only to help senators help the Army balance its budget, a task complicated by mounting bills from the war in Iraq and other operations. Hearings could help lawmakers evaluate whether certain technologies could be accelerated even more to help soldiers fight the war in Iraq, Sessions said.

“The new FCS right now, we need more [unmanned aerial vehicles] which are part of the Future Combat System, but we need them now in Iraq. So you might take some of the money from some of the things that are not critical to today and say we're going to accelerate this part of the Future Combat System, which might sort of be contradictory to the plan we had prior to 9-11 FCS development,” Sessions said. But, he added, “some of the other things may slip on the timetable.”

SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL

As most regular readers know, I've been extremely skeptical about American involvement in Iraq. The White House's justification for going to war always seemed shaky to me; its execution, nearly as wobbly.

But the sight of so many Iraqis risking their lives to vote yesterday, that was beyond inspirational. And I have to give the President and his team credit here. They had the collective stones to stick with these elections -- even when seizures of violence made the plan look like fantasy. And they had foresight to predict the electrifying power of the ballot in Iraq -- no matter how confused, how rushed, or how scary the election may have been.

In Iraqis, the White House saw a group who couldn't wait to grab control of their lives, after so many years without leverage at all. The President's people were right. And, as a result, something beautiful happened on Sunday.

Here's how one friend, who's been helping the Iraqis set up these elections, described yesterday's events:

Today was a day for voters and electoral workers, and both groups exceeded expectations. Throughout the day, we worked the phones to get updates from friends and associates across Iraq. The phrasing of one seemed to have been echoed by many: “we heard explosions and gunfire, but we were together and were not afraid.” A quintessential example of what happened here today is relayed in an anecdote from Quadisiyah, a district of Baghdad at the end of the peninsula. Voters lined up outside a polling station and then scattered when an insurgent appeared down the street with an RPG and fired. The grenade missed its target, and an hour later the voters regrouped, in greater numbers, to finish the job.

Nearly forty died across Iraq today in the violence that had been promised. Nine suicide bombers also visited polling stations. Insurgents chased down voters exiting polling stations and hit them with grenades. And there were mortars. They waited an hour or so until after the polling stations opened here before hitting in force. And then there was silence, and in that silence, a people beset by hardship went about the business of self-expression. The honor of the fallen was upheld by the undeterred.

A couple weeks ago, a bright young friend of mine asked me “who is this Ben Franklin guy?” I asked what made him wonder and he said, still staring at his internet screen, “because he said that people who think there is a choice between security and liberty deserve neither—I think that’s pretty cool, would there be any problem with my printing this out and hanging it on the wall?” No problem at all, Mohammed, print away.

NUKE LAB FEE SLASHED

We've known for a while now that the "two computer disks that supposedly disappeared last summer, prompting a virtual shutdown of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in fact never existed." But what's interesting in this AP rpeort is that the Department of Energy has gone ahead and decided to slash the lab's management anyway.

In a harshly worded review that described severe security weaknesses at the nuclear lab, the U.S. Energy Department concluded that bar codes were recorded for the disks but the disks themselves were never created. A separate FBI investigation supported that finding, according to the report.

"The weaknesses revealed by this incident are severe and must be corrected," according to the report.

As punishment for the problems, the Energy Department slashed by two-thirds the management fee it paid to the University of California for running the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Out of a possible $8.7 million, UC will get only $2.9 million; it is the largest fee reduction ever imposed on a national laboratory.

"Although multiple investigations have confirmed that the `missing' disks never existed, the major weakness in controlling classified material revealed by this incident are absolutely unacceptable and the University of California must be held accountable for them," National Nuclear Security Agency Administrator Linton Brooks said in a statement.

This is a real change of business for an Energy Department that usually looks the other way when one of its nuclear centers screw up. The lab watchdogs at Project on Government Oversight may feel that any fee is too much for the University. But this seems to me to be a proper step.

DRONES, LASERS = I.E.D. SPOTTERS

There were a couple of anti-IED technologies I didn't get to mention in my recent Wired News piece. One of 'em comes from Navy-funded engineers at Advanced Ceramics Research in Tuscon, Arizona. They're outfitting their Silver Fox unmanned plane with a radio frequency emitter. The signal returns when the wave encounters a detonation wire. And that tips troops off to the fact that an handmade bomb might be nearby.

Dayton, Ohio's Spectra Research is also getting some Navy money to spot the jury-rigged weapons. But the company has a whole different approach to doing it. By using a series of laser flashes over a wide array of the infrared, thermal, and visual wavelengths, the company's technology can -- hopefully -- spot suspicious shapes as they appear on the road.

Similar sensors are often fooled by weather or light conditions. Spectra's is different, promises company president Gordon Little. But by using so many different bands of light, Little thinks his project could lead to "greatly reduced false alarms."

But there's a big shortcoming in the technology, Little admits. If an IED is buried in the ground -- and they often are -- Spectra's sensor would be pretty much useless. "Buried objects would not beparticularly accessible to us," he sighs.

CIMOLI'S COPTER DIARIES

Chief Warrant Officer Gordon Cimoli served 10 months in Iraq flying a Black Hawk helicopter. And, as you can imagine, he has stack of stories that illustrate the incredible strain that these pilots undergo. Here are a couple of excerpts from his diaries...

We were descended for landing and we found that we couldn't see anything at all. We could not see where the ground ended and the sky began. Fred slowed down and started a descent but we found that we were not really descending as we intended to. Instead we lingered at 100 to 120 feet at almost zero forward airspeed. We finally made our descent to the ground and at about 25 feet we had a dust cloud surrounding the aircraft. Remember, this is all under NVG's [night vision goggles] with zero illumination from the moon. We basically landed with no visual reference to the ground below us. It was certainly scary but what we have come to expect…

This type of flying goes against all we were taught throughout our flying career-when you can't see the ground and/or the horizon, you are flying under IMC (instrument meteorological conditions), but instead, we fly just as we are VMC (visual meteorological conditions) even though we cannot see the ground or anything in front of us. It is definitely challenging and at the end of every flight, Fred and I look at each other and ask, why are we doing this?

***

Shawn came in to the tent at 12:30am and told me about a Chinook crew that just went inadvertent IMC (flew into the clouds on accident). They recovered here to Udairi with no problem. As it turned out, 2 more aircraft when into the clouds also. These were Alpha company birds. One aircraft came back and the other aircraft did not. No one has had radio contact with this aircraft since they entered the clouds. Hope they come back.

I was talking to Fred about it and it would be very easy to fly right into a cloud without realizing it at night. When we fly NVG flights, it is nearly impossible to see the ground and even more difficult to see what is coming up in front of you. I can foresee this happening to more crews if the weather were worse. The only thing we have going for us is that the weather is typically not cloudy like it is in Germany. However, today, we had so much rain that it is now evaporating and forming low clouds.

While I was writing a letter to Stef, the commander walked into the tent to wake up the 1SG… Not a good sign… Sam just came in and stood next to me. He did not look good. I could tell that the worst had happened and asked him, "Are they not coming back?" He said no. They found the aircraft not far from here. Sam walked back out with the Commander and the 1SG. More information to follow. About an hour later, [the Commander] officially told us the facts as they knew them at the time: 2 CH-47's went IIMC, they recovered. 2 UH-60's went IIMC and only one recovered. CPT Gibbons and 1SG Webb left in a Humvee and came upon the burning wreckage. There were no survivors.

IRAQ COPTERS ON DANGER'S EDGE

It's not clear, yet, why the Marines' CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter crashed near the border of Jordan and Iraq (although weather is a prime suspect). But this New York Times article describes just how dangerous flying one of the copters over Iraq can be.

[After three U.S. helicopter were shot down by insurgents in November, 2003], American commanders ordered pilots to fly evasively at all times. American helicopters routinely fly at tree-top level, bobbing and weaving on their way to their destination. Like the Super Stallion that went down Wednesday, Army and Marine helicopters often fly at night, when the threat of attack is diminished. Helicopter pilots say that they are still routinely shot at from the ground but that the tactics have largely prevented the insurgents from hitting them.

Because the helicopters fly so low, one of the principal dangers is electrical and telephone wires, which the choppers often leap over in flight.

The CH-53E Super Stallion involved in the crash is the largest and heaviest helicopter used by the American military.

"Look at its sheer size - it's huge," said Richard Aboulafia, a military industry analyst at the Teal Group, a northern Virginia aerospace and consulting firm. "It's a monster, and with size comes the fact that it is not very maneuverable."

Weather, too, presents special problems.

"Helicopters are fairly fragile pieces of equipment," said Ivan Oelrich, director of the Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington nonprofit group. "It's rough for them to operate in a dusty, desert environment where the dust can get into the machinery. And they are vulnerable to ground fire because they fly at slow speeds, close to the ground..."

Before Wednesday's crash, the CH-53E Super Stallion had a strong safety record, something analysts said was due to the maturity of its design and the reliability of its equipment.

The helicopter first came into service in 1981, although it is based on a design that dates to the Vietnam War. Produced by the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, the helicopter was bought almost exclusively by the Marine Corps. Production ended about five years ago.

A three-engine craft, the helicopter is designed to operate in bad weather, day and night. It can lift more, carry it farther and fly faster than other helicopters in the Pentagon's fleet. Equipped with night vision ability, it is designed to operate in harsh terrain.

"This is a craft that can operate day or night, in all types of weather," said John Milliman, a spokesman for the Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, Md. "It is a very big, very rugged helicopter than can carry a very heavy load."

Still, for all its bulk, the craft remains vulnerable. If forced to fly evasively in bad weather, a pilot could become disoriented.

Some American officials have expressed worry that the harsh conditions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the frequency with which the helicopters are deployed, could have rendered them vulnerable.

At an October 2003 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Joel R. Hefley, Republican of Colorado, the chairman, said the typical Super Stallion returning from service in Afghanistan and Iraq was found to have 150 pounds of sand spread throughout its interior.

Sand is thought to be one of the worst enemies of the helicopter in Iraq, wearing down rotors and seeping into engines and electronics. It can blind pilots, especially on landing, when the helicopters kick up huge clouds of dust. It mixes with lubricants and turns them into sticky masses of gum.

"The conditions were harsh," Mr. Hefley said. "The heat, the sand, the operational tempo together resulted in our troops taking a beating."

THERE'S MORE: A Kiowa scout copter has just crashed in Baghdad, the AP is reporting.

DEFENSE TECH GABS

I'll be on the public radio show Future Tense today, talking about the Pentagon's high tech ways to stop jury-rigged bombs. (Here's a link that'll take you straight to the interview.)

THERE'S MORE: I've also got a short article in today's Times, about a new generation of music mixing software, for mobile phones.

MARINE HELO DOWN; 31 DEAD

This is awful, just awful. Let's hope these numbers are off.

A U.S. Marine helicopter transporting troops crashed Wednesday in the desert of western Iraq, killing 31 people, American military officials said. It was the deadliest crash of a U.S. military helicopter in Iraq.

A Pentagon source said the helicopter was a CH-53 Sea Stallion, which is normally configured to carry 37 passengers, but can take up to 55. There was no immediate word on how many people were on board or what caused the crash.

The military officials did not specify the nationalities of those on board or say how many were soldiers.

It was the biggest loss of life in a helicopter crash in Iraq -- and could be the deadliest single incident for American forces since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

THERE'S MORE: Back in August, a Sea Stallion crashed in Okinawa; thankfully, no one was killed. But that same month, two Marines died when their CH-53 copter went down over Iraq's Al-Anbar province. In 2002, two more lost their lives when the newer, Super Stallion version of the aircraft broke down in Afghanistan.

JAMMERS, MICROWAVE BLASTS TARGET I.E.D.S

When U.S. Army Capt. Christopher Sullivan was killed last week by a handmade bomb, it was a tragedy for his family -- and a tragically ordinary event for the American military. Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, have been responsible for hundreds of American casualties in Iraq. And so far, there doesn't appear to be any reliable way of stopping them.

The Pentagon, scrambling for answers, is in the middle of a frantic search for high-tech methods to find and neutralize the jury-rigged weapons.

Microwave blasts, radio-frequency jammers and chemical sensors are among the methods being explored and deployed in this largely secret effort.

But, because IEDs are cobbled together from "whatever the people that plant them can find," warned Cliff Anderson, a program manager at the Office of Naval Research, "there is no magic bullet" that will suddenly end the IED threat...

Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area think tank, believes, the most effective IED countermeasure might be a pulse of electromagnetic energy that can "fry the circuits of these bombs."

Researchers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Dahlgren Laboratory in Virginia are working on such a solution, called NIRF, short for Neutralizing Improvised Explosive Devices with RF. The device, according to a source familiar with the project, "produces a very high-frequency field, in the microwave range, at very short range" to take out an IED's electronics. The Pentagon hopes to deploy NIRF in Iraq later this year.

My article in today's Wired News has details.

THERE'S MORE: The L.A. Times has a dynamite story today from Al-Ramadi, Iraq, on the dangers facing American convoys there.

As he always does before traveling the roadways of Iraq, Marine Staff Sgt. Johnathan Radel on Tuesday said a short prayer.

"Lord, please keep us safe today from IEDs and VBIEDS," he said as he sat in his Humvee, using the initials for improvised explosive devices and vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices.

Less than five minutes later, as the eight-vehicle convoy rolled through the streets of Ramadi in the predawn darkness, an IED exploded beneath one of the Humvees, sending an orange fireball into the sky and shredding the vehicle's back tires.

AND MORE: How does the Army's 3rd Corps Support Command say you should handle IEDs? Read this briefing to find out.

HAIRDRESSER HAS TOP NUKE LAB CLEARANCE

There's nothing wrong, of course, with a hairdresser having top-secret clearance at the world's most important nuclear weapons center. But it is kinda funny. From the Los Alamos Monitor:

Anthony Moya is a Q-cleared [top security rated] computer technician at Los Alamos National Laboratory by day and a highly skilled razor-blade-sculpting hairstylist at his own salon by night...

He remembers first discovering his interest and talent for hairstyling in the fifth or sixth grade... Moya's parents went out dancing on Saturday nights and Moya would look over his mother's coiffure and snip away any unruly hairs.

"Finally, my mother let me style her hair," Moya said. "I also trimmed my father's mustache and got them both ready to go out..."

Moya said while he continued to cut and style his family's hair throughout the years, the timing was never right to enter styling school to earn his formal styling license.

Over two years and 1,000 hours later, Moya received his certificate in barbering, passed the state board examination, and interned at an Espanola salon.

"The only difference between a barber and a cosmetologist is barbers shave and cosmetologists do nails," Moya said.

"Barbers have to learn to apply permanents, color, and blow dry hair, and use a curling iron. They also learn to perform facials. I am now certified in both barbering and cosmetology...

In 1979, Moya went to work at the [oft-troubled] plutonium facility at TA-55 as a materials technician and in shipping and handling... Moya now performs computer technician work at NMT-3 [the Nuclear Materials Technology division]...

"I'm just thoroughly enjoying life working at the lab and styling hair at the salon."

ARMY PICKING UP TAB FOR G.I. GEAR

"To keep troops from spending what the Army found was an average of $300 per year on [their own] equipment, the service is now issuing troops everything from improved helmets to seasonal boots," Stars & Stripes reports.

The service plans to issue the gear to every soldier headed to Afghanistan, and to as many troops as possible serving in Iraq...

All troops would get better helmets and boots. Troops with brigade combat teams would get [an] extra kit, such as grappling hooks, door rams, battle axes and fiber-optic viewers.

“None of this is rocket science, but I’ve had soldiers say to me, ‘If my feet are cold, I’m not combat effective,’” said Chuck Fick, spokesman for the Army Materiel Command Field Support Brigade-Europe.

Another Kaiserslautern soldier, Spc. Gabriel George, had already purchased a fleece jacket and gloves similar to those he picked up Monday. He was nonetheless relieved the Army decided to hand it out, too.

“It’s better to have too much than not enough,” George said. “There’s always some sucker that didn’t bring his. I’m glad about it. It’s good stuff.”

SICK TEST: SNIFF A SOLDIER'S BREATH

Commanders want to know when their soldiers are sick or tired. But, so far, there's no good, quick, objective test to figure out how they're doing.

Pentagon-funded researchers think they may have found the answer, by chemically "sniffing" a soldier's breath.

"Human breath contains a treasure-trove of metabolic data, which has the potential to provide real time information representing an individual's baseline health status," notes a recent Defense Department Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) award, given out to the University of Tennessee.

Lung health, ulcers, exposure to allergens or chemical toxins -- even stress can be picked up by sorting through the molecules we exhale, studies indicate.

Johns Hopkins scientists are looking to build sensors that can instantly detect these warning signs, by combining "tunable, mid-wave IR [infrared] semiconductor laser technology and cavity-enhanced spectroscopy."

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, on the other hand, think they can do the same job with a portable version of their "Electronic Nose Microsensor," which looks for the electrical signature of certain molecules in a gas. Altogether, five contracts were handed out recently by the Pentagon for the breath-o-meters.

Not to be outdone, University of Pennsylvania scientists want to build for the Pentagon a machine that can automatically spot when a soldier gets sleepy, "captur[ing] the early signs of fatigue such as lack of concentration, yawning, changes in voice characteristics, etc." The idea is to use smart cameras and eye-safe laser scanners that can tell when a G.I. yawns or blinks. It's an approach, based on a model which has "proven to be extremely powerful in characterizing human speaker and bird voice characteristics," the Pentagon STTR award says.

TINY METALS, BIG EXPLOSIONS

"Nanotechnology is grabbing headlines for its potential in advancing the life sciences and computing research," Defense Tech pal John Gartner notes in Technology Review. "But the Department of Defense has found another use: a new class of weaponry that uses energy-packed nanometals to create powerful, compact bombs."

Sandia National Laboratories, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are researching how to manipulate the flow of energy within and between molecules, a field known as nanoenergentics, which enables building more lethal weapons such as "cave-buster bombs" that have several times the detonation force of conventional bombs such as the "daisy cutter" or MOAB (mother of all bombs).

Researchers can greatly increase the power of weapons by adding materials known as superthermites that combine nanometals such as nanoaluminum with metal oxides such as iron oxide, according to Steven Son, a project leader in the Explosives Science and Technology group at Los Alamos.

"The advantage (of using nanometals) is in how fast you can get their energy out," Son says.

Son says that the chemical reactions of superthermites are faster and therefore release greater amounts of energy more rapidly.

"Superthermites can increase the (chemical) reaction time by a thousand times," Son says, resulting in a very rapid reactive wave. (Thanks to RC for the tip.)

THERE'S MORE: Howard Lovy has the goods on "death by nano."

CARGO PLANE FLUNKS EXAM

One of the most controversial proposed cuts to the Pentagon budget is the slashing of funds for the C-130J cargo plane. Earlier this month, two dozen Senators called on Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to keep the carrier's cash intact. And Air Force officials have suddenly started gushing about their "outstanding tactical airlifter."

But Tom Christie, who heads the Pentagon's testing and evaluation office, isn't impressed.

In a new report, he calls the C-130J "neither operationally effective nor operationally suitable." The plane's "capabilities are limited."

Christie's evaluation found "hardware, software, and technical order deficiencies," in the aircraft, as well as "manufacturing quality" and "sub-sytem reliability."

"The aircraft’s defensive systems have yet to demonstrate that they will work properly and the aircraft’s airdrop mission has yet to be evaluated by Christie’s office," the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) notes. And the weather reconnaissance version of the plane is still having issues with "radar performance in hurricane reconnaissance missions, propeller anti-ice protective cover peeling, and excessive vibration."

POGO says it'll have the C-130J evaluation online later today. Or, for $25, you can download Christie's complete report, which looks at just about every major Pentagon project there is, from Inside Defense right now.

BOSTON BIO-BOTCH: GET READY FOR MORE

Boston was only the beginning. With so many biodefense labs being built across the country, you can expect to see more news like the weekend's revelation that three Boston University lab workers were infected with tularemia, or rabbit fever.

Since the 2001 anthrax attacks, the federal government has been pouring money into labs that research the deadliest of bioagents. "Currently there are four [maximum security] Biosafety Level 4 laboratories nationwide, with six more planned," the New York Times notes. "50 laboratories operate at Biosafety Level 3, sufficient to work with anthrax, and 19 more are planned at universities and government institutions, according to the Sunshine Project, a Texas group that is tracking the growth."

With these labs flowering so quickly, "hundreds of inexperienced researchers [are being drawn] into work with hazardous organisms," the Times adds. Security is being compromised, as a result.

In 2002, the discovery of lethal anthrax outside a high-security laboratory at the military's premier biodefense laboratory, the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland, led to sampling throughout the institute. Investigators found three different strains of anthrax bacteria outside the sealed-off laboratories, indicating at least that many leaks, according to an Army report.

Then, last spring, Southern Research Institute, a contractor in Frederick, Md., shipped anthrax bacteria to an Oakland, Calif., hospital after immersing it in hot water to kill the germs. When mice injected with the supposedly harmless bacteria for a vaccine experiment quickly died, researchers realized the bacteria were still lethal.

The list goes on. "A US Army-funded biosafety level three lab in Tennessee that holds biological weapons agents... hasn't had an Army biosafety inspection in three years," the Sunshine Project notes. Tulane University, which runs a similar center, hasn't convened its biosafety committee in years. Since 1998, the safety group at Rockefeller University in New York City "has met exactly twice," according to the Project.

Now, all of this might be perfectly acceptable, if these labs were really helping to save lives. But that's a questionable proposition, at best. Because many of the agents being investigated at these labs are only marginal threats to public health.

These bioagents are notoriously difficult to turn into weapons. And, with a deliberate spread, they aren't hurting that many people. There are only 130 cases per year of tularemia. Smallpox isn't infecting anyone these days. And the anthrax that killed five people in 2001 -- that probably came from one of these biodefense centers.

"Compare that to a real biological killer, like tuberculosis," I suggested in a 2003 Tech Central Station article.

It ends the life of more than 2 million people every year. But the federal government is "luring researchers away" from scientific research into TB and other infections of mass destruction, notes Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, with the Federation of American Scientists.

UCLA's Dr. Marcus Howritz was "on the cusp of real progress" in developing a better TB vaccine, Merrill Goozner reports in this month's American Prospect. Now he's been diverted into working on a barely-lethal biological agent.

Nancy Connell, who heads a Pentagon-funded bio-defense lab in Newark, NJ, doesn't think a biological strike is all that likely. But she takes grants to study smallpox and anthrax, because she can use the same research funds to work on flu and TB, which "actuall do kill people," she notes.

JAMES FALLOWS AND THE JEWEL THIEF

In Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief, diamond-nabber Bill Mason notes notes a strange security trend: people will spend big bucks to have a whole host ultra-sophisticated locks on their front doors -- but they'll put something flimsy on the back door, or leave the windows unlocked altogether.

That's what came to mind as I read James Fallows' homeland defense story in the current Atlantic Monthly. The Transportation Security Administration is spending $4 billion -- 80 percent of its budget -- on airport screening. Making sure grandma takes off her Mary Janes before she gets on the plane. That leaves, Fallows notes, "well under $1 billion for everything except airlines: roads, bridges, subways, tunnels, railroads, ports, and other facilities through which most of the nation's people and commerce move."

Kinda reminds you of Mason's back door, hunh? Except the analogy doesn't quite hold together. It'd probably be more accurate to say that, while the Bush administration is making sure America's front door is tripled-locked, it has left the jewel box out on the front lawn.

From President Bush to Senator Kerry to just about every homeland security guru in between, all these guys agree that "loose nukes" -- the 30,000 atomic warheads from the former Soviet arsenal -- are the worst threat to our nation imaginable. But, as Fallows notes, the U.S. seems to be "in no apparent hurry" to make sure these weapons are "safely locked away."

Yes, it's true that the U.S. has helped secure in recent years about a hundred kilograms of Russian bomb-grade uranium. But that's out of 460 metric tons of Russian weapons-usable material. The Defense Department will spend about a billion -- a twentieth of a percent -- of its annual budget next year on "all forms of nuclear material control," Fallows observes. The Energy Department will add some additional dollars. But still, we're talking relative peanuts thrown at what everyone agrees is the biggest threat to our country.

For the cost of a handful of Raptor stealth fighters, we could double our efforts to gather together these loose nukes. For what it takes to pay a couple of dudes at the airport inspecting grandma's shoes, we could hire a Russian nuclear scientist -- and make sure he doesn't start working for the other team.

GENERAL'S UP-ARMOR PLEA IGNORED

For more than a year, Maj. Gen. William Webster, the head of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, had been asking his bosses for the money to toughen up his armored personnel carriers. And for more than a year, his requests went nowhere.

Then, in December, Tennessee National Guard Spc. Thomas Wilson scorched Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for not armoring up American vehicles. Within days, Inside the Pentagon notes, Gen. Webster's long-ignored plea was finally answered.

Webster’s request for additional armor for his M113 [personnel carriers] had languished at Army headquarters since October 2003, a month after he took command of the “3rd ID,” as it is called... The requirement for up-armored M113s was just one of more than 50 “operational needs statements” Webster submitted at the time...

Initially, the 3rd ID flagged other requirements as more critical than the M113 up-armor effort, sources said. The division was requesting hundreds more radios, machine guns and trucks with the first priority being “to shoot, move and communicate” when they returned to Iraq, said one Army insider.

But field commanders became increasingly uneasy last summer as casualties mounted in Iraq from ever more sophisticated insurgent tactics. M113s in Iraq were becoming vulnerable to roadside bombs and mines, Army officials say. Its light armor can stop pistol and rifle fire and shrapnel, “but that’s it,” said one.

The 3rd ID commander began pushing in earnest last August to up-armor his personnel carriers, according to sources and documents. His quest met considerable opposition at Army headquarters and at the service’s Forces Command, where senior deputies argued the M113’s existing light armor allowed it agility in urban terrain, and said it should be sufficient against an insurgency that lacks traditional armor of its own, sources said.

The three-quarter-ton armor that gets plated onto the humvees, for example, limits its carrying ability and puts additional strain on the transmission, according to service officials...

In mid-October, Webster officially requested that Army headquarters in Washington approve a $20 million armor upgrade for about 450 M113 troop carriers... In view of the estimated $1 billion being spent for Iraq operations each month, proponents of the up-armoring view it as a relative bargain. The M113 -- essentially a box on top of its tracked chassis -- is easier to armor-plate than the humvee and can be done at one-fifth the cost...

“At this time, the division does not have a viable mix of active and passive add-on armor systems for its combat and combat support vehicles that will help prevent casualties and losses,” [Webster] wrote, citing “an increasing sniper, roadside bomb, improvised explosive device, mortar, rocket propelled grenade, anti-tank missile, machine gun and small arms threat in theater...”

Webster sought “delivery of all add-on armor systems [no later than] 15 January 2005,” [a] letter states, [when the 3rd ID would be returning to Iraq]...

It was not until a late-December meeting at the Pentagon that the 3rd ID was assured Army support for getting up-armored M113s, sources said. The “can do” attitude of a new head of force development at the Army’s “G-8” programs office, Maj. Gen. Stephen Speakes, may have played a role in the shift, according to some officials.

“This crazy nonsense is because there was an unwillingness to admit three things: the Iraqi insurgency is a rebellion against the U.S. military occupation, it was steadily worsening, and U.S. soldiers were at serious risk in wheeled vehicles,” says retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, a former armored cavalry officer who led troops in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

THERE'S MORE: The number of troops on the ground matters more than what kind of vehicle they ride around in, argues this Knight-Ridder story (via Steve Gilliard). Take the Iraqi city of Mosul, for example, where 5,000 Stryker Brigade troops replaced 20,000 from the 101st Airborne.

The men of the 101st moved around Mosul in Humvees but sustained few casualties, even though some of their Humvees lacked armor.

Conditions in Mosul, however, have gotten worse since the [more heavily-armored] Strykers arrived.

Visiting the town of Hammam al Alil, south of the city, Lt. Col. Todd McCaffrey said the area had become a "planning, bedroom community for terrorist cells "that coordinate attacks in Mosul..."

"We spend a lot of time trying to separate the populace from the insurgency," said McCaffrey, who's with a unit of the 25th Infantry Division that deployed to Iraq in late September. "Obviously, when you go from the 20,000 that the 101st had to 5,000, there's a clear change."

A steady stream of Army units has been sent to reinforce the troops in Mosul during the past two months, increasing the American presence to some 12,000 soldiers, according to Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of the Stryker brigade.

"You win this thing with boots on the ground, not by throwing more vehicles at the place," said 1st Lt. Ed Mikkelsen of the Stryker Brigade.

TRANSFORMATION CHIEF RETIRING

Donald Rumsfeld's point man for military modernization is stepping down, Inside Defense reports.

Since 2001, retired Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski has headed the Pentagon's 25-man Office of Force Transformation, which pushed the armed services to become quicker, lighter, and better able to share data.

He's retiring "on doctor's orders," Inside Defense says. Cebrowski has been "fighting pneumonia for months."

Long before he joined the transformation office, Cebrowski, the former head of the Naval War College, was one of the main advocates of "network-centric warfare" -- the idea that every soldier, every drone, and every general should be linked together into a giant Internet for combat. “He was advocating that we need to get off the focus on the big war and the big enemy," Thomas Barnett, a former Office of Force Transformation researcher, told Inside Defense.

The office also championed some of the Pentagon's wilder ideas: Humvees that combined pain rays with regular guns, battleship blimps for hauling military cargo.

"It’s frequently said that you cannot predict the future. But, in fact, we know a great deal about the future," he told an industry forum last fall. There are "perfectly predictable surprises, so also are [there] opportunities for leaders to make change. And the great burden for leaders in this time is to recognize the inevitable and turn it into a virtue."

LASER 747: COOL YOUR JETS

For those of you fired up about the idea of a laser-blasting 747, a word of advice: relax.

Sure, the Airborne Laser, or ABL, managed late last year to achieve "first light" – turn on its ray gun. But it's going to be a long time before that laser is loaded onto the plane, and the thing starts flying.

ABL, long criticized for busting budgets and cracking deadlines, was supposed to start zapping missiles in 2002. Then it was pushed back to 2005.

This week, at a Washington conference on laser weapons, the Missile Defense Agency's Lt. Gus Valez wouldn't even hazard a guess as to when those tests might begin.

In the coming year, Lt. Valez said, the Agency would fly the plane, with its beam control and fire control equipment loaded aboard, but turned off – to see if the stuff could handle the stress. Then would come test flights with the gear switched on. During this time, on the ground, the laser weapon would continue to have the bugs shaken out of it. Only after all these tasks were completed, Lt. Valez noted, would the arduous process of integrating the laser into the 747 begin.

As Lt. Valez spoke, a PowerPoint slide over his right shoulder gave a timeline, with a first ABL in-air blast coming sometime between 2006 and 2009. But when asked to confirm that schedule, he demurred.

"We're not predicting a date right now," Lt. Valez answered.

THE PUNK AND THE GODFATHER

If I sounded a little distracted during my interview on Tuesday's edition of "The World," the BBC/Public Radio International show, there was a reason: shock. Because while I was mumbling about the Pentagon's so-called budget cuts in the BBC's cramped studios on Broadway, a hero of mine was sitting in the next booth over.

He'd seen better days – better decades – clearly. His eyes were puffed and heavy; bags dropped most of the way down his cheeks. His skin was saggy and full of lumps. A couple days' worth of gray gristle didn't make him look any more lively. Still, it took me only about a nanosecond to recognize him: Pete Townsend, guitar and songwriting god of The Who.

Now, when I was about thirteen or so, I didn't just like The Who. I came pretty close to worshipping them. Before my record collection had thirty LPs, Townsend's two records from the mid-80's were piled near Who's Next and Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy. "My Generation" was the first bad-ass song I learned to play on bass. I even went to a Roger Daltrey solo show at Madison Square Garden; Big Country opened the bill.

In the BBC studio, I smiled a teenaged grin as I saw Townsend. And it took just about everything in my power not to go up to the booth's glass and start doing Townsend's signature windmill strum. But I managed to resist. And as I tested my mic levels, the engineer kindly pumped in Townsend's interview into my headphones; he was discussing a pink Stratocaster guitar.

My interview quickly got underway. As I answered a question about the Raptor stealth fighter, Townsend backed away from his microphone, put on his coat, stood up, and walked out the door.

I sang "Behind Blue Eyes" the whole way home.

DRONES STOP FALLLUJAH FRIENDLY FIRE

Usually, a big battle to take a city means a bunch of "friendly fire" casualities. But in November's assault on Fallujah, no U.S. troops were killed by these so-called "blue-on-blue" incidents, the Marines are saying. According to the L.A. Times, flying drones and careful planning were big reasons why.

Col. John Coleman, chief of staff for the Camp Pendleton-based 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said new technology, rushed to Fallouja within days of the battle, allowed air and ground units to know the precise location of U.S. forces in real time. Among the improvements was better intelligence gathering by ScanEagle, the unmanned reconnaissance aircraft that circled Fallouja and continuously beamed back information on U.S. forces and the location and movement of insurgents...

In Fallouja, the chances for friendly-fire deaths were significant, as more than 10,000 Marines and soldiers and dozens of warplanes were involved in a crowded, fast-moving battle in an area roughly the size of a Southern California suburb.

The U.S. used several unmanned aircraft during the battle. Unheard and largely unseen, they broadcast information to forces on the ground, air units and top brass at a command post.

"It's been a great tool for us," Coleman said during a wide-ranging interview about Fallouja and other aspects of the Marine mission in Iraq.

Brig. Gen. Joe Dunford, assistant commander of the 1st Marine Division, said in a separate interview that, along with technological advances, good "situational awareness" among troops on the ground thanks to advance planning helped avoid friendly-fire casualties.

"Technology is an enabler, but there's no substitute for the engagement of Marines, soldiers, sailors at all levels in good cross-talk," Dunford said.

Last year, I wrote about new-jack ID tags that could be used to prevent friendly fire. That article, for the New York Times, is here.

"RATS, BUGS, BOYS" REDUX

It's been nearly two weeks since Defense Tech highlighted a series of rather silly Pentagon schemes to fluster enemy soldiers by harassing them with rats, stinging bees, and men in heat. And, since then, the international press has been having a big ol' belly laugh with the so-called "gay sex bomb."

One man isn't smiling, however. That would be Edward Hammond, the bioweapons researcher at the Sunshine Project who, uh, turned me on to the proposed "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals." He says that Pentagon spokesmen fibbed when they claimed that the ideas in the document were "rejected out of hand."

* In 2000, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) prepared a promotional CD-ROM on its work. This CD-ROM, which was distributed to other US military and government agencies in an effort to spur further development of "non-lethal" weapons, contained the "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals" document. If the proposal had been rejected out of hand and not taken seriously, it would not have been placed in JNLWD's publication.

* Similarly, in 2001, JNLWD commissioned a study of "non-lethal" weapons by the National Academies of Science (NAS). JNLWD provided information on proposed weapons systems for assessment by an NAS scientific panel. Among the proposals that JNLWD submitted to the NAS for consideration by the nation's pre-eminent scientific advisory organization was "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals".

Thus, the Pentagon's statements (as quoted in news reports) are inaccurate and should be corrected.

ARMY SHIELDING "FUTURE COMBAT"

There's been a lot of noise in recent weeks about the fighter planes and aircraft carriers the Pentagon may or may not be cutting. But lost in the clamour is a simple, and strange, fact: one of the programs considered most likely to be pruned back has somehow avoided the budget axe. And now, Defense News reports, the Army is moving to "build a fence" around its gargantuan, $127 billion modernization program, Future Combat Systems, so it doesn't get cut in the upcoming tussle over Defense Department funding.

Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is a sprawling effort by the Army to turn itself Army into a quicker, better-networked, robot-reliant force. Since it was introduced back in the Clinton years, FCS has been reconfigured more than once, with deadlines pushed back and funding scraped away.

"In December, the Office of the Secretary of Defense recommended cutting $1.5 billion from the FCS program each year from 2006 to 2011," Defense News' Megan Scully notes. But instead of trimming that money, "typically considered the low-hanging fruit in the Pentagon budget," the Army is looking to make up the shortfall "largely by cutting civilian personnel."

"To significantly cut its payroll," the magazine says, "the Army may have little choice but to fill less than half of the slots it creates when it converts military posts to civilian positions, and may only be able to replace half of the civilians who retire."

The Army will also try to save FCS by relying on supplemental funding bills, meant to pay for the war in Iraq. The Army could get more than $66 billion from such a measure when it passes Congress -- which it almost certainly will, since no Senator or Represenative wants to be seen as keeping soldiers in the field from getting the gear they need.

"Some officials and military analysts said they are wary of the supplemental funding bills because they are not guaranteed annually," Defense News observes. "Still, the Army’s future plans hinge on having Congress authorize supplemental money for years to come."

BOMBED IN D.C.

I'm in Washington this week. And to celebrate, me 'n the Arms Control Wonk are going to have some beverages at the venerable Fox & Hounds pub. Come knock back a few with us, if you're interested, next Tuesday, the 18th, starting around 8pm.

NEW PROPAGANDA TECH FOR SPECIAL OPS

You'd think that, in 2005, there'd be a better way to push propaganda. But last year, the U.S. military dropped 9.3 million leaflets into Afghanistan, and another 3.8 million into Iraq, according to Special Operations Technology magazine, trying to convince the locals to play nice with G.I.s.

U.S. Special Operations Command is exploring alternatives to the flyers. In a recent call for research, SOCOM expressed an interest in "air droppable, scatterable electronic media" to spread the good word about American intentions. "Internet-capable devices, entertainment and game devices, greeting cards, and phone and text messaging technologies" are just a few of the suggested options for these so-called "psychological operations," the magazine notes.

Already, the Pentagon has purchased 100,000 solar-powered radios, so folks on the ground can listen in to official American dispatches. (It's a time-tested technique.) To that, SOCOM is considering adding "disposable or temporary cell phone[s]," Special Operations Technology notes.

Another, more cost-effective solution might be to use tried and true technologies and applications but adapt them for military use. Did you ever send or receive a talking greeting card? Hallmark tried, but discontinued such a line. SOTECH talked to one of the company’s chip providers about how that same technology might enhance military leaflet programs. Sure enough, they had first-hand knowledge, but a company executive was unable to provide details.

The company, Americhip, specializes in producing sound inserts—short recorded advertisements—embedded on chips that can be used in any number of printed, package, or trinket applications such as a key chain or other small gadget. These talking cards, packages, toys or other novelties offer a number of communications advantages, including overcoming literacy issues. Plus, there’s the “look what I have” factor that, according to Americhip’s Web site, may help generate more attention and keep the piece in circulation longer than a static piece of paper.

AMERICA'S IRAN RAIDS

By now, you've probably heard about Seymour Hersh's latest bombshell: that U.S. forces have been conducting covert raids into Iran since last summer.

Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me...

Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After [the Israel raid on Iraq's nuclear reactor at] Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.)

“They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted,” the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teams—in on-the-ground surveillance—before being targeted.

All of which sounds perfectly reasonable to me. But, this being the Bushies, there has to be at least a touch of wild-eyed messianism thrown into the mix. And indeed, there is, Hersh reports.

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse”—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

“The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, “will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime.”

THERE'S MORE: "Mr. Hersh’s article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed," says Pentagon mouthpiece Larry DiRita. "Mr. Hersh’s source(s) feed him with rumor, innuendo, and assertions about meetings that never happened, programs that do not exist, and statements by officials that were never made."

"CARNIVORE" CHEWED UP

Before Total Information Awareness, before MATRIX, before Secure Flight, and before CAPPS II, the government data-diving project that gave civil libertarians fits was the FBI's Carnivore. Used in tandem with other Bureau tools, Carnivore could monitor a target's Internet traffic, piecing together e-mail messages and web-surfing history.

But Carnivore has been abandoned, according to Security Focus' Kevin Poulsen. And it's not because the Feds have decided that it's no longer cool to peek into a person's inbox. Rather, Carnivore has been outpaced, it appears. The Bureau is now using "commercially-available products to conduct Internet surveillance" instead.

THERE'S MORE: "If you're among the millions of Americans who took airline flights in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the FBI probably knows about it - and possibly where you stayed, whom you traveled with, what credit card you used and even whether you ordered a kosher meal."

CIA BANK'S TIES REVEALED

Back in college, I always found it a little fishy that the deans at Georgetown essentially checkmated students into using Riggs Bank for their financial needs. It was the only bank on campus, besides a flaccid student credit union. And the credit cards they pushed on kids came with interest rates that were downright obscene.

Now, it's become clear that bilking a few freshmen out of their beer money was the least of Riggs' sins. Over the summer, the bank was dinged for $25 million by the Treasury Department for money laundering. It's been accused of hiding cash for the Saudi royal family and for the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. And then there's that mysterious "relationship" with the CIA that the Wall Street Journal reported on a few weeks back.

The Public Accountability Initiative has a new report out on the bank -- and its links to the Bush administration.

LASER WARNINGS FOR PILOTS

"A day after the Department of Transportation urged pilots to report hazardous laser beams aimed at aircraft," the Washington Post reports, "the U.S. military said it is testing a system to beam red and green lasers at aircraft in the Washington area as a warning when they enter restricted airspace."

MISSILE DEFENSE "GLITCH?" YEAH, RIGHT

Everything is working perfectly. There is nothing -- repeat, nothing -- to worry about. The reason the missile defense system flunked it's most recent $100 million test? Just a "very minor" software glitch, insisted Missile Defense Agency chief Lt. Gen. "Trey" Obering. It was inconceivable, Obering told the Washington Post, that such a problem could ever, ever happen again. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense system may have face-planted this time. But against a real missile, he promised, it was absolutely sure to work right.

Providing the first detailed account of what went wrong, Obering told reporters that the countdown was automatically aborted when a routine system check of internal electronic signals detected a potential problem. The check showed that too many electronic messages had been missed in the signal flow between the flight computer and the unit that controls the interceptor's thrusters.

In retrospect, Obering said, designers of the interceptor had imposed too tight a limit on the number of allowable missed messages.

"It turns out we had overly constrained the system," he said.

Obering called the chances of such a glitch occurring "very rare." If it had happened during an actual crisis, with an enemy missile heading toward the United States, the system would have simply bypassed the faulty interceptor and launched another one, Obering said.

Sounds reasonable. But Philip Coyle, the former head of the Pentagon's office of Operational Test and Evaluation, isn't buying it.

First of all, Coyle noted, the tests that the anti-missiles keep flunking are way, way over-simplified. In the December trial, called Integrated Flight Test (IFT)-13C, the target was fixed with a radar beacon and GPS locator, making it pretty damn easy to spot.

More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that there's only one target. If Kim Jong Il is ever steamed enough to lob missiles at us, you can be sure he ain't gonna shoot them off one at a time.

Secondly, that "minor" glitch? It turns out that it's in a very major part of the missile defense system -- one that's had a whole bunch of problems in the past. Click here to continue on, as Coyle looks at just how significant the anti-missile system's problems really are.

For more background than you could possibly want, rumor has it that the failure in IFT-13C was in the CLE. CLE is short for Command Launch Equipment. It's a big computer system and part of the Ground-based Interceptor (GBI) Support System. Lots of software is in the CLE system, and they've had significant problems with that software. Part of the CLE is on the ground and part is in the interceptor.

It's built by Northrop Grumman, and, according to their website, "controls the interceptor through launch, providing near real-time trajectory planning, commanding, and health and status monitoring."

Northrup says, "The CLE software was developed on a highly accelerated schedule and delivered in half the time of the shortest possible schedule predicted by standard software models," which could suggest they had to rush their work.

The CLE is used to perform a wide variety of command and communications functions, everything from:

1. Communication with the BMC3 system,

2. Interceptor launch guidance, control and reporting,

3. Interceptor flyout communications and monitoring,

4. Controlling and monitoring electrical power,

5. Environmental and health and safety monitoring and control.

It's a very important system. For example, among other things, it calculates the engagement geometry and solar angles, retrieves data about the target, generates discrimination data for the interceptor, and tells the GBI where to go and what to look for. The CLE is an important part of the brains of the overall system, and is a "system-of-systems" itself. It also takes the info from the C-band beacon - a targeting aid that no enemy would provide -on the target reentry vehicle to create the first Weapons Task Plan, defining the basket out in space where the interceptor is aimed.

Obering is implying that the failure was on the ground, and so the interceptors are OK and don't need to be pulled out of the ground and fixed. But that remains to be seen since the CLE