INFLATABLE, UNMANNED HUNTER

In the not-too-distant future, the U.S. Navy could be hunting subs and protecting ships using robotic, inflatable boats. That's the plan, at least, from a team of American and Israeli defense contractors.

The Navy and Coast Guard already use a bunch of rigid-hull inflatable boats to zip across choppy waters and brings SEALs to shore. The services have "high hopes" that unmanned inflatables could handle even more jobs, C4ISR Journal says. Like spotting mines and subs, for example.

The advantage of using an unmanned surface vehicle in these roles, Rear Adm. William Landay III noted, is that it will be able to operate autonomously for an extended period of time – perhaps 24 hours – and at night, when the Navy normally doesn’t do towing [sonar arrays] with helicopters. “We may not even find an enemy submarine [but] it may keep him out of where you want, and in the littorals [coastal waters] that in many cases is just as good as finding him.

United Defense Industries and Haifa-based Rafael Armament Development Authority are trying to convince the Navy that their Protector unmanned surface vehicle is the right robo-boat for the job. The 30 to 35 foot-long Protector can skip across the seas at speeds of up to 40 knots. Day and night cameras, a laser range finder, and a 12.7 mm machine gun all come standard. "A light projector, public address system and a microphone," are optional, according to Defense Daily. The Israeli Navy is already trying one out, a Rafael spokesperson tells DD.

KYRGYZSTAN'S KUNG-FU REVOLUTION

"Many say people power brought down the regime in Kyrgyzstan last week. But Bayaman Erkinbayev, a lawmaker, martial arts champ and one of the Central Asian nation's richest men, says it was his small army of Kung Fu-style fighters," according to AFP.

"When our old men were beaten and thrown out of the regional administration building, my fighters were on the front line. And during the siege in Bishkek, my fighters went in first," Erkinbayev says...

Pupils from Erkinbayev's Alysh martial arts school in Osh were sent to protect demonstrators protesting the contested ballot in the Kara Suu bazaar.

Afterwards demonstrations with the participation of Erkinbayev's trainees spread to the southern cities of Jalal-Abad, Osh, and Batken. They captured government sites, burnt down police stations and blocked key highways in the lead-up to the chaos that deposed Akayev in Bishkek. (via Fortean Times)

GRENADE BOT BLASTS AWAY

Those of you who found the idea of gun-toting robots a little creepy should probably click away right now. Because the Army has just finished testing out a unmanned ground vehicle, or UGV, that obliterates its foes with electrically-fired grenades.

The robot is the same modified Talon UGV that's now on its way to Iraq, to watch the back of Stryker armored vehicles on patrol. But instead of carrying a M249 machine gun, like the Iraq-bound robo-grunt, this Talon has been armed by Metal Storm Limited -- the Australian firm famous for its million-round-a-minute gun.

The robot, which recently wrapped up trials at the Army's Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, only had 16 shots. But they were big ones: 40 mm grenades. And the rounds were loaded four to a barrel, giving the UGV 10 more shots than traditional systems supply. It was enough to waste a variety of mock opponents, "including simulated personnel, an infantry carrier and a bunker," according to Metal Storm. (You can watch video of the bot in action here.) Eventually, the firm thinks it can load the UGV up with as many as 48 grenades at a time.

While Metal Storm seemed pretty psyched about how the Picatinny tests went, there was a bit of bad news for the company. The demonstrations "did not include firings from the Dragonfly DP4X unmanned aerial vehicle as previously planned because of operational restrictions on the range which prevented in-flight live fire trials being possible," Metal Storm sobbed. "Arrangements are currently being made for in-flight test-firings and demonstrations to be held in the next few months."

I'm nervous already.

D.I.Y. DEATH RAY

New, from the maker of the internationally-renowned "Girlfriend Quest" PC game, comes a six-foot tall set of mirrors, designed to reflect the sun's light -- and roast whatever comes in its way.

The Solar Death Ray captures sunlight in 112 mirrors, each 3.5 inches square, and then spits it back onto a single spot five feet, six inches away.

"I estimate that the Solar Death Ray can heat things up to between 500-600 degrees Celsius (930-1100 degrees Fahrenheit) under good conditions," its maker says.

Mr. SDR swears he won't turn his homemade weapon on living things. "I’m not going to burn puppies or goldfish or anything like that." But chocolate bunnies, Hootie and the Blowfish tapes, and "my pants" -- all of them have already been reduced to protoplasmic goo with by the Death Ray's awesome might.

DARPA: TRANSLATE THIS

It's not Kirk and Spock's universal translator. Not quite. But the Pentagon is looking to for researchers to build a software set "with the goal of eliminating the need for linguists and analysts and automatically providing relevant, distilled, actionable information."

Global Autonomous Language Exploitation, or GALE, is a project of -- who else? -- Defense Department mad science division Darpa. And the idea, according to Darpa's call for proposals, is to "develop and apply computer software technologies to absorb, analyze and interpret huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages."

The result won't necessarily be a "natural language" dialogue between man and interpreting machine. But, if GALE works as planned, it will deliver "consolidated information in easy-to-understand forms to military personnel and monolingual English-speaking analysts in response to direct or implicit requests."

The American military is still struggling to fill its ranks with Arabic speakers, three-and-a-half years after 9/11. Language training for enlisted men and junior officers is minimal. And the technological solutions to the problem -- like the hand-held Phraselator and Interact systems -- really only work for the most monosyllabic of conversations.

What Darpa wants instead are a trio of software tools for soldiers and spooks:

• A transcription engine that produces English transcripts [from foreign speech] with 95% accuracy

• A translation engine producing English text [from foreign prose] with 95% accuracy

• A distillation engine able to fill knowledge bases with key facts and to deliver useful information as proficiently as humans can.

And Darpa's not talking about just translating a couple of newspapers in Baghdad. GALE researchers have to be ready to have their algorithms interpret "all the following types:"

• Broadcast news (radio, television)
• Talk shows (studio, call-in)
• Newswire
• Newsgroups
• Weblogs
• Telephone conversations

The source languages will be English, Chinese and Arabic plus surprise languages to be announced later.

MISGUIDED "MINUTEMEN"

I was in Arizona last week, right on the Mexican border. And let me tell you, a whole bunch of folks are about to make asses of themselves there on Friday.

2,200 federal agents are assigned to keep watch over the 260-mile stretch of border known as the "Tucson Sector," which covers pretty much the entire state, except for Yuma. And those agents do a pretty bang-up job, nabbing about a half-million aliens every year. (Compare that to a big city cop, many of whom only make an arrest every few weeks.)

But there's only so much those 2,200 can do. Hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- of people illegally enter the country through the Tucson Sector every year.

So a team of geniuses calling themselves the Minuteman Project have decided that they are going to start policing the border on their own. Starting on April Fool's Day, the Project will disperse an estimated 1,000 volunteers to a slice of the border near Tombstone.

Now, the Minutemen says they'll only be "observing" and "reporting" the movements of illegals. This is "not a call to arms," the group swears. But if you think, in that part of the world, that any organization calling itself a "grassroots effort to bring Americans to the defense of their homeland" is going to be gunless, you need to get off of the peyote. Of course the Minutemen are going to be packing heat.

And so will the smugglers. Since October, 180 Border Patrol agents have been assaulted by the "coyotes" who haul people north. That includes 14 shootings and 20 attempts to run agents over.

Remember, those are attempts on federal agents' lives. Do you think the coyotes will have even the slightest of doubts about pulling the trigger on some self-proclaimed defender of liberty? We all know the answer: hell, no.

But the Minutemen are going to be doing more than just endangering themselves. They're going to be reducing the effectiveness of the Tucson Sector agents, too. Those agents are trained to stop any unknown vehicles sitting on the border line -- which, for the month of April, is going to include a whole bunch of Minutemen. So that will mean less time actually going after illegals. The agents are also trackers, used to picking up fresh tire treads and footprints -- and follow them to coyote-led groups. That's going to be a whole lot harder, with so many Minutemen messing up the trails.

Clearly, these agents, they need help. They're absolutely overwhelmed by the tide of immigrants pouring into this country. Maybe this little bit of political theater will shame DC into hiring a whole lot more agents, and significantly upping the amount spent on border security. If that's the case, then the Minutemen have done something right. But in the meantime, a whole of people are going to get hurt in the process.

THERE'S MORE: "The Homeland Security Department will assign more than 500 additional patrol agents to the porous Arizona border," the AP is reporting. "About 155 agents will be immediately sent to Arizona... More than 370 additional agents -- all new trainees -- will be permanently assigned to the Arizona border throughout the year." Good stuff.

ROBODOC GETS PENTAGON CASH

For decades, telemedicine guru and former MASH surgeon Dr. Richard Satava has been pushing the Defense Department to fund systems for remote and robotically-controlled operating rooms. He's not mentioned in the AP article below. But you can see his fingerprints all over this $12 million Darpa grant to "develop an unmanned 'trauma pod' designed to use robots to perform full scalpel-and-stitch surgeries on wounded soldiers in battlefield conditions."

"The main challenge is how can we get high-quality medical care onto the battlefield as close to the action and as close to the soldiers as possible," said John Bashkin, head of business development at SRI International, a nonprofit laboratory that often handles Defense Department research. "Right now, the resources are pretty limited to what a medic can carry with him."

SRI researchers caution that the project remains at least a decade away from appearing on any battlefields. Surgeons will need to manipulate the robot in real time, using technology that prevents any delays between their commands and the robot's actions. The "trauma pod" has to keep connected wirelessly without giving away its position to the enemy, and it has to be nimble and hardy enough to perform under fire.

Still, some of the initial technology is already being put to use in hospitals, and the goal of the initial $12 million project is relatively modest — researchers hope to show that a surgeon, operating the robot remotely, can stitch together two blood vessels of a pig...

SRI spearheaded the Pentagon's first such endeavor to develop a "telesurgery" system in the 1980s. The resulting robot, dubbed the da Vinci Surgical System, proved to be too bulky and too dependent on too many humans to be used in battle.

But the Food and Drug Administration approved the da Vinci in 2000 for civilian medical use and surgeons now use the $1.3 million machines in about 300 hospitals worldwide to remove cancerous prostates, repair faulty heart valves and other procedures.

Of course, this isn't the only Darpa telesurgery program. Not by a long shot. A bunch of others are covered here.

A few months back, I wrote about an unmanned ambulance experiment that's being funded by the Army. And here is an article I wrote back in '03 about Dr. Satava's efforts to digitally recreate every element of a soldier's body, and embed it all on a chip in the soldier's dog tags.

NAVY'S NEW TARGET: SWEDISH SUB

"The Navy has formally agreed to lease a Swedish submarine and its crew for a year so U.S. nuclear-powered subs... can practice hunting it," the Virginian-Pilot reports.

The Swedish navy will send a Gotland-class sub to San Diego, where it will help [U.S. Fleet Forces Command] train to combat the potential threat of diesel-powered submarines in the hands of rogue nations.

The 200-foot submarine, which displaces 1,490 tons and carries a crew of about 30, will become frequent prey of American sub hunters nearly twice its size. Los Angeles-class fast attack submarines, for example, are 360-feet long, carry a crew of 140 and displace 7,147 tons when submerged.

The U.S. is interested in studying the quietness of the diesel-powered boats, since it no longer has any of its own, Jim Brantley, a spokesman for the Fleet Forces Command, said Wednesday. (thanks to reader JH for the tip)

THE TIMES TAKES ON "FUTURE COMBAT"

Ever since it was just a wee little $92 billion program, Defense Tech has been ranting about the spiraling costs and doe-eyed expectations behind Future Combat Systems, the Army's gargantuan modernization plan. Now that the project -- meant to almost reinvent just about every aspect of warfighting, almost simultaneously -- is moving north of $145 billion, the New York Times is finally starting to take notice.

The Army's plan to transform itself into a futuristic high-technology force has become so expensive that some of the military's strongest supporters in Congress are questioning the program's costs and complexity.

Army officials said Saturday that the first phase of the program, called Future Combat Systems, could run to $145 billion [click here for details]. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said the "technological bridge to the future" would equip 15 brigades of roughly 3,000 soldiers, or about one-third of the force the Army plans to field...

That price tag, larger than past estimates publicly disclosed by the Army, does not include a projected $25 billion for the communications network needed to connect the future forces. Nor does it fully account for Army plans to provide Future Combat weapons and technologies to forces beyond those first 15 brigades.

Now some of the military's advocates in Congress are asking how to pay the bill.

"We're dealing today with a train wreck," Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania and vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at a March 16 Congressional hearing on the cost and complexity of Future Combat Systems.

"We're left with impossible decisions," said Mr. Weldon, a strong supporter of Pentagon spending. One of those choices, he warned, might cut back Future Combat.

Good idea, Curt. What took you so long?

THERE'S MORE: "But there's another, more serious issue, which the Times' otherwise excellent story doesn't explore," says Slate's Fred Kaplan. "Even if all the technical problems could be solved and the costs brought under control, the Army may be tumbling down the wrong road; Future Combat Systems may not address the true nature and needs of future combat."

AND MORE: Project on Government Oversight piles on, too.

WWII PLAGUE SUB FOUND

St. Patrick's Day was just supposed to be another day of routine training for undersea researchers at the University of Hawaii. But then, they found something extraordinary 870 meters down, off of Barbers Point, Oahu: a mammoth, World War II-era Japanese sub, meant for biological combat.

The submarine is from the I-400 Sensuikan Toku class of subs, the largest built before the nuclear-ballistic-missile submarines of the 1960s. They were 400 feet long and nearly 40 feet high and could carry a crew of 144. The submarines were designed to carry three "fold-up" bombers that could quickly be assembled...

An I-400 and I-401 were captured at sea a week after the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Their mission, which was never completed, reportedly was to use the aircraft to drop rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other diseases on U.S. cities.

When the bacteriological bombs could not be prepared in time, the mission reportedly was changed to bomb the Panama Canal. Both submarines were ordered to sail to Pearl Harbor and were deliberately sunk later, partly because Russian scientists were demanding access to them.

"It is not the first World War II-era 'monster' that the HURL [Hawaii Undersea Research Lab] scientists have found," notes the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. "Last year, off Pearl Harbor, they located the wreck of the gigantic seaplane Marshall Mars, one of the largest aircraft built and used as a transport plane by the U.S. Navy. Two years earlier in the same area, the HURL crew also found the wreckage of a Japanese midget sub that was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941." (via Boing Boing)

BACK FROM TOMBSTONE

Laziness wasn't the reason -- or, at least, wasn't the only reason -- for the paltry posting this week. I was also staying in charming Tombstone, Arizona, on assignment for Wired.

Starting today, blogging should resume its normal pace. If I can get my ass in gear, that is.

COOL GEAR; NOW WHAT?

Getting the gear may have been the easy part. The Army has quickly pushed more than 220 new technologies into the hands of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq -- stuff like bomb-detection bots and handheld translators.

"But much work remains to be done in the equally important second phase — offering spare parts, manuals and other important follow-on services, according to senior officials," National Defense magazine says.

The Army was able to purchase and deploy these items in relatively short time by skirting the traditional procurement bureaucracy and, instead, relying on so-called “rapid fielding” organizations.

Many of these new technologies, however, were sent to war in such a hurry that the Army was unable to arrange the support services usually associated with military systems, such as technical manuals and instructions on how to obtain spare parts...

“Products get fielded by the REF [Rapid Equipping Force],” Brig. Gen. Roger A. Nadeau, commander of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, said. “After a while, soldiers start asking ‘where are the parts?’ Where is the log [logistics] plan? … Collectively, we don’t have a good answer.”

DARPA'S DRONE-KILLER

We're not the only ones with drones. China, Russia, Iran, France -- all sorts of enemies of freedom have unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. All in all, "some 32 nations are developing or manufacturing more than 250
models" of drones, according to the Defense Department's UAV Roadmap. So it's only naturally that someone in the Pentagon would be trying to figure out a way to knock those UAVs out of the sky.

Darpa, the Defense Department's way-out researchers, are looking to spend about $11 million over three years for their drone-killer, dubbed the Peregrine. From Darpa's proposed budget for 2006:

The Peregrine UAV Killer program will develop a small, low-cost, high-endurance UAV, with a high dash speed, capable of destroying most enemy UAVs. Small UAVs with GPS guidance systems have reached such a low cost level that expendable UAV programs are now emerging and GPS capable avionics are available for the hobby market. Current options to counter such a threat, especially at high altitude, involve expensive ground launched anti-air systems or the exposure of manned interceptor aircraft. The Peregrine program will develop and demonstrate a UAV interceptor aircraft that will utilize a dual propulsive power system to provide very high endurance for the loiter and surveillance period, and a very high dash speed for intercept and kill...

Program Plans:
- Define system requirements.
- Develop concept design.
- Demonstrate aircraft performance and kill capability.

MILBLOGGER TRIO

It ain't easy, blogging from the front lines. Keeping a website up isn't exactly the top priority under fire. And what's written often leans towards boosterism -- especially when the brass tends to clamp down on the more unvarnished depictions of military life.

But I've stumbled across a trio of U.S. Army bloggers in Iraq that I think are worth a read. With moving, you-are-there descriptions of military life, pictures from the battlezone, and ruminations on the big questions that war raises, Major K, Thunder6, and Lieutenant C are extremely clickable. And, since all three are from the same batallion, readers get the benefit of three sets of eyes on the same questions and situations. Good stuff.

BIG BOOST FOR PREDATOR FLEET

The U.S. Air Force is looking to expand its fleet of flying drones, big time. Right now, the service has three active squadrons of Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. But that could expand to 15 squadrons of the robotic planes under a $5.7 billion plan just introduced by the Air Force.

In recent years, the Air Force and CIA have used the bulbous-nosed, propeller-driven Predator UAVs to blast insurgents in Iraq, take out Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen, and spy on Iran's nuclear facilities. The 144-drone buy would be the Air Force's "largest acquisition of robotic aircraft to date and represents a significant milestone in the evolution of unmanned aerial vehicles," according to the Los Angeles Times.

Predator squadrons are slated to be activated in Texas and Arizona in 2006 and 2007, then New York in 2009, said Capt. Shelley Lai, an Air Force spokeswoman. The bases for additional squadrons will be decided upon later this year, she added.

The new squadrons could support operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other overseas hotspots or be deployed domestically for homeland security missions, Lai said.

Last month, the Air Force scooped $160 million out of its maintenance budget to buy 15 new Predators -- and a load of missiles, to arm the drones already in service.

MORE LOS ALAMOS SHENANIGANS

There's only one reporter in the national mainstream press who's had the attention span to stay focused on the ongoing scandals at Los Alamos National Lab. On Friday, CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson had another remarkable story about the almost laughably corrupt business practices at the world's most important nuclear center.

The story centers around Chuck Montano, one of a group of Los Alamos auditors who were supposed to look over the lab's accounts with outside vendors. What he found: "Vendors could charge whatever they wanted." 10,000 purchases out of 56,000 shouldn't have been allowed. Another 38,000 were questionable. "Vendors routinely overbilled and double-billed -- and yet were paid, no questions asked," Attkisson notes. (And you wonder why lab employee tried to buy camping gear and a Mustang with government credit cards.)

But when Montano and his fellow auditors wrote up an account of the fishy deals, the report was buried. Montano was kept idle without work for nine months, he claims.

Obviously, this burying of whistleblowers has become a habit over at Los Alamos. And Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, seems to be getting pretty tired of it. Attkisson asked Barton how could Los Alamos finally be cleaned up. And Barton answered, "One thing we could do is just shut the entire complex down."

ARMY SNAPS UP JAMMERS

For at least six months, military types have been talking up how great Warlock radio frequency jammers have been at stopping roadside bombs in Iraq -- and how few U.S. troops actually had the gagdets.

But the Army is getting wise. Back in December, they beefed up the $4.7 million Warlock budget by $42 million. Yesterday, Army vice chief of staff Gen. Richard Cody announced that the Army is "buying over 8,000 electronic jammers," according to the AFP.

The jammers are "no silver bullet" against the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, Cody warned. But still, it's a good move; they've helped contribute to a 40 percent drop in IED casualties, the General said. Let's just hope the purchase doesn't have anything to do with the fact that the New York Times highlighted the Warlock shortage on page A1 a few weeks back.

CITY-SNOOP PROGRAM RETURNS?

Back in the summer of 2003, I wrote a little story for the Village Voice on the Pentagon's plan to track everything that moves in a city. Since then, there hasn't been much word from the Defense Department about "Combat Zones that See," or CTS. A planned demonstration at Ft. Belvoir never came about – or was kept very quiet. Last year, Congress moved to yank funds from the program's budget.

But now, CTS may be on the way back, if Tony Tether -- the head of Defense Department far-out research arm Darpa -- has his way. The agency's proposed 2006 budget calls for $20 million over three years for CTS. It's part of an expanded, $340 million push by Darpa to develop technologies for urban battles (see Falluja, Najaf, etc.)

Here's what Tether told the Senate Armed Services committee last week about CTS:

We need a network, or web, of sensors to better map a city and the activities in it, including inside buildings, to sort adversaries and their equipment from civilians and their equipment, including in crowds, and to spot snipers, suicide bombers, or IEDs (improvised explosive devices). We need to watch a great variety of things, activities, and people over a wide area and have great resolution available when we need it. And this is not just a matter of more and better sensors, but just as important, the systems needed to make actionable intelligence out of all the data. Closely related to this are tagging, tracking, and locating (TT&L) systems that help us watch and track a particular person or object of interest. These systems will also help us detect the clandestine production or possession of weapon of mass destruction in overseas urban areas. There was a recent incident in Iraq where one of our UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] spotted some insurgents firing a mortar. Then the insurgents climbed back into their car and drove away. The good news was that the UAV was able to track the car so U.S. helicopters could go after it and destroy it. The bad news was that, at one point, some of the passengers got out. Then we had to decide whether to follow those individuals or the car because we simply did not have enough coverage available. If we’d had other sensors available, we would have had a better chance of getting all of those insurgents.

If we could quickly track-back where a vehicle came from, it would greatly help us deal with suicide car bombers. It is difficult, if not impossible, to deter the bombers themselves, just as you cannot deter a missile that has already been launched. But, one key to deterrence that has been missing is reliable attribution, or a “return address.” If we knew where the car came from, using, for example, RSTA [reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition] systems that allowed us to quickly trace the car carrying the explosives back to the house or shop it came from, we could then attack that place and those people.

CTS is one of a bunch of Darpa urban ops programs that skates the fine line between creepy and cool. The agency would also like $10 million to build robotic, flying spies that weight less than 10 grams and are just two inches across. The "Home Field" program would "develop networked video and LADAR [laser radar] processing technology that rapidly and reliably updates a 3D model of an urban area. [Such an] urbanscape will provide 3D situational awareness with sufficient detail and accuracy to remove the 'home field advantage' enjoyed by opponents." Meanwhile, the "Pre-Conflict Anticipation and Shaping" (PCAS) could help American counterinsurgents predict where conflicts might boil up next.

The project will combine computational social science modeling and simulation, scenario generation, evolutionary programming, planning, and multiplayer gaming. When integrated, these technologies allow combatant commanders and senior decision makers to understand and anticipate the societal/regional indicators that precipitate instability and conflict within an area of responsibility, then mitigate the impact of that instability... The goal of PCAS' more powerful societal/regional models is an integrated perspective encompassing, in a consistent way, all the dimensions of social change.

$127 BILLION DOWN PAYMENT

$127 billion? That's just an ante. A down payment in the biggest, most expensive modernization program in the Army's history: Future Combat Systems, or FCS.

FCS -- the Army's plan to completely overhaul its forces, turning troops into a robot-reliant, network-heavy bunch -- has been slated to cost anywhere from $90 to $127 billion, according to the military.

But on Wednesday, Government Accountability Office eyeshade Paul Francis told the Senate Armed Services Committee said those cost estimates were misleading, at best. The first part of FCS, Francis noted, the one that weighs in at $108 billion, would only cover a third of the Army's troops. How much would it cost to upgrade the rest? Well, given the project's history of delays, switchbacks, poor management, and limp government oversight -- that's anyone's guess, Francis said in his prepared testimony.

Nearly 2 years after program launch and about $4.6 billion invested to date, requirements are not firm and only 1 of over 50 technologies are mature — activities that should have been done before the start of system development and demonstration. If everything goes as planned, the program will attain the level of knowledge in 2008 that it should have had before it started in 2003. But things are not going as planned. Progress in critical areas, such as the network, software, and requirements has been slower than planned. Proceeding with such low levels of knowledge makes it likely that FCS will encounter problems late in development, when they are costly to correct. The relatively immature state of program knowledge at this point provides an insufficient basis for making a good cost estimate.

HITLER'S BOMB: B.S.?

"German historian Rainer Karlsch says in a new book, Hitler’s Bomb, that the Nazis successfully tested tactical nukes. While I haven’t seen his book and I don’t speak German, I’m frankly very skeptical," says Military.com analyst Joe Buff.

Not only does Dr. Karlsch publicly admit that he lacks definitive proof. But long-known facts, and his newly-revealed facts, in my mind just don’t add up to anything like a working nuclear weapon.

One supposed eye witness to the test describes “two huge explosions” on one night in March, 1945. Others describe the same event in terms of just one “long, slim pillar of light.” This pillar swelled at the top so that it gained the appearance of a crown of branches and leaves atop a tree trunk. To me, in modern terms, this does sound like a mushroom cloud. People living nearby said that afterward they experienced nose-bleeds, nausea, fatigue, and headache symptoms. One man who was involved said that authorities asked his building company to cremate hundreds of corpses that were burned and dismembered, and then afterward destroy their own clothes -- he said the bodies were obviously those of concentration camp or forced-labor inmates.

To me this reads a lot more like a disaster at a factory handling toxic chemicals, which might or might not have been intended for use as chemical weapons. Here are nine reasons why:

1. Any large explosion creates a mushroom cloud.

2. Any above-ground nuclear detonation, even a small tactical-yield one, begins with a blinding flash across the entire sky. Vision is especially impaired at night, when most peoples’ pupils are dilated due to the dark. The atomic mushroom cloud only results a few seconds after this initial flash. And in war-time 1945, in the remote area where these tests supposedly took place, between blackouts and chronic power shortages and such, at night it would have been really, really dark. One “eye witness” says they were looking out a window and then saw the mushroom cloud. OK, but it weren’t no nuke.

3. Acute radiation sickness severe enough to cause widespread nose-bleeds would cause other subcutaneous hemorrhaging too -- like bruises all over the body -- and both vomit and diarrhea would be bloody as well. Yet these symptoms are not mentioned, and they would’ve seriously stuck in peoples’ memories if they’d occurred, I think.

4. It’s extremely unlikely, especially the way Nazi weapon scientists worked in general, for them to have conducted two nuclear tests at the same place in one night, as one witness claims. A test early in any country’s nuclear weapons program is an incredibly important event. Huge amounts of data are collected and need to be analyzed before it makes any sense to expend additional fissile metal on another test.

5. The Nazis did use slave labor in many of their industrial and weapons plants. Any victim killed in a series of explosions at a chemical factory would likely have been burned and dismembered -- you don’t need a tactical nuke for that. And recovery-worker clothing would indeed get contaminated by whatever chemicals caused the original disaster, so you’d certainly want to dispose of them once you disposed of the corpses.

6. References in some of the media coverage to a Nazi “dirty bomb” seems muddled up with an actual fission device. Hitler is stated to have been relying on these dirty bombs to repulse the Soviet Army’s advance on the Eastern Front. But it’s well known now, and it would have been understood by German physicists in 1945, that dirty bombs are largely psychological weapons -- and they wouldn’t have dented the psyche of Stalin’s revved-up minions marching on Berlin. The toxic effects of true dirty bombs are much more likely to be cancers years down the road, not immediate and total incapacitation and/or death such as occurred to victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To halt a few million Russkie foot-soldiers on a front across hundreds and hundreds of miles, the idea of using radiological bombs is just delusional -- but then, I admit, toward the end Hitler was completely delusional.

7. The actual supposed A-bomb test is described as having a yield much lower than that of the bombs the U.S. used on Japan. The German test, it’s said, was maybe about a kiloton. But in reality it’s actually a much more difficult engineering problem to cause an atomic blast of “just” one KT instead of 20 KTs. Sure, in theory the smaller yield can be obtained with less fissile fuel, which would seem to make it an easier and quicker thing to do, but again there’s a very big “but.” Achieving super-criticality at all with the amount of uranium or plutonium needed to produce a yield of exactly 1 KT is very, very hard, especially with W.W.II-era technology from any nation. Unless, that is, you willing design the weapon to use 20 KT’s worth of bomb fuel and waste it in an intentionally inefficient blast -- which would make no sense at all, even to a crazy Nazi.

8. Ah, you say, but maybe Hitler was going for 20KT and a bad design made the weapon fizzle, so it only yielded 1 KT. Sorry, that still doesn’t answer the other objections above.

9. Dr. Karlsch relies on analysis of modern soil samples to say that the Germans operated a nuclear reactor near Berlin for “perhaps some days or weeks.” It’s been well known since 1945 that the Nazis were working on what was quaintly called in those days an “atomic pile.” The design was dreadfully flawed and its uranium was nowhere near purified enough even to mere reactor grade -- the pile would never have achieved a sustained critical chain reaction. The flawed design, running at its best sub-critical activity level, would indeed leave behind traces to show up in soil samples and get people excited sixty years later, if they enjoy getting excited by this sort of thing.

The book says that the nukes were never used against the Allies because the Nazis didn’t have enough of them. With this part I agree: not enough, as in having exactly zero.

DARPA'S SUMO IN SPACE

It seemed like kind of joke last October, when the Pentagon wished out loud for a spaceship that would grab enemy satellites, and throw them around -- maybe even out of orbit. But the Defense Department is dead serious, the Arms Control Wonk tells us. $35 million serious.

In its proposed budget for 2006, Pentagon way-out research arm Darpa is asking for 35 large over the next two years for its Spacecraft for the Unmanned Modification of Orbits (SUMO) program.

"SUMO combines detailed stereo photogrammetric imaging with robotic... manipulators to autonomously grapple space objects," the agency says. "SUMO offers the potential for spacecraft salvage, repair, rescue, reposition, and debris removal to extend service life or provide a safe and calculated de-orbit."

Sounds friendly enough -- like a tugboat in space, maybe. Until you stop to think that the SUMO could also grab satellites that don't want to be repositioned or de-orbited. Suddenly, that tugboat starts looking an awful lot like a wrestler's arm, about to toss an opponent out of the ring.

THERE'S MORE: Of course, since this is Darpa we're talking about here, there are a whole smorgasbord of wild-sounding space projects waiting to be funded. Using "x-ray celestial sources to determine the three dimensional position... of orbiting spacecraft," anyone? Or how about space tethers, to "rapidly remediate high energy radiation particles produced by a High Altitude Nuclear Detonation?" A bunch of others are here.

DHS SETTING TERROR THREAT PRIORITIES

In the months after 9/11, the government seemed scared shitless of just about everything. Chemical, biological, dirty-bomb attack – it didn't seem to matter what type of scare was involved. For every threat, the fear dial was cranked up to 11. Even cattle poisoning and hacker break-ins were suddenly treated like potential cataclysms.

Thankfully, that's a trend which seems to be petering out. The Department of Homeland Security is in the process of sketching out plausible attack scenarios, and rating them in terms of seriousness, the New York Times reports. And judging from the preliminary results, DHS seems set on separating out the truly scary (and truly likely) strikes from the Hollywood or tin-hat variety.

The chart which accompanies the Times story is particularly useful in this sorting process. An attack on a chlorine chemical plant could leave 17,500 dead and 100,000 hospitalized. Cyberstrikes on "several parts of the nation's financial infrastructure," on the other hand, would have a total casualty count of zero. A deliberate spread of foot-and-mouth disease to American livestock would have similar results – at least among the human population. If you were Michael Chertoff, the new homeland security chief, where would you spend your resources?

Hopefully, this kind of cost-benefit analysis will also lead to a second look at how we're spending bio-defense dollars. The result of a coordinated, five-city aerosolized anthrax attack – which would take a minor miracle of planning and science for a terrorist group to pull off – could leave 13,000 dead and cause billions of dollars in damages, DHS believes. But a new flu pandemic, emerging from China – a not altogether unlikely possibility – could kill five times that number, put 300,000 is the hospital, and cost up to $160 billion to contain. So preventing naturally-occurring diseases, you'd figure, would take precedence over these deliberately-spread agents, right?

Well, maybe in the future. But for now, as the Times recently noted:

...grants for research on the bacteria that cause anthrax and five other diseases that are rare or nonexistent in the United States have increased fifteenfold since 2001. Over the same period, grants to study [viruses and] bacteria not associated with bioterrorism [think flu –ed. ]… have decreased 27 percent

LASER HUMMER IN IRAQ

The Army’s first and only battlefield laser system is back.

In 2003, the Army sent ZEUS, a Humvee armed with a 10kw solid-state laser, to Afghanistan, to blast mines and other explosives left over from years of war. In the six months ZEUS spent there, the laser-hummer zapped over 200 pieces of unexploded ordnance, according to the Army, "at one point setting a record for ordnance disposal by negating 51 pieces in less than 100 minutes."

Now, ZEUS "is being forward deployed" again, Army Space and Missile Defense Command Lt. Gen. Larry Dodgen tells Defense Daily.

"According to spokesman at Headquarters, Department of the Army, ZEUS is in Iraq as part of a three-vehicle convoy protection concept being evaluated now," DD adds.

ZEUS uses a pair of lasers to sizzle its targets, according to Sparta, Inc., the vehicle's maker. A joystick-controlled green Nd:YAG laser is used to designate the target. One it's locked, an invisible high-power Nd:YAG laser swerves around, to heat the sucker up.

The system uses diesel fuel to create the laser beam, which focuses energy on the outer casing of the target, which heats up until it detonates, [triggering] a less violent explosion than if the explosive was activated, causing less damage to the surrounding area...

“Its power level and utility is new and is not for aerial targets, it’s for unexploded ordnance,” Dodgen said. “It is a system that works, and we certainly would like to use it whenever possible.”

GIANT SPIDERBOT STEPS OUT

No one at the Pentagon has plans to stick G.I.s in giant, six-legged, super-strong robots. Yet. But you've got to figure it's only a matter of time, now that a Finnish subsidiary of John Deere is building the machines for new-jack lumberjacks.

In the works for a decade and a half, the Plustech Oy Walking Machine is supposed to be an eco-friendly, log-hauling monstrosity; its six massive legs spreads the weight of the machine evenly, the company claims, to minimize any impact on the forest soil.

"Depending on the terrain, the ground pressure can be adjusted by changing the machine’s six 'shoes,'" according to Plustech Oy. "When the machine confronts obstacles, it simply steps over them... avoid[ing] significant ground disturbance and minimiz[ing] damage to tree roots.

The company's website doesn't have much detail on the machine. But, in pictures and videos, the spider-like Walker seems to be able to toss around logs and step through the forest with ease. And for a Defense Department keyed up to build walking robots, that would seem like a mighty tempting target.

SPACE SWATTER KEEPS HITTING

For some reason, there have been questions in Defense Department circles about whether or not it's a good idea to fund a "giant, kevlar fly swatter that is supposed to whack satellites out of the orbit."

Luckily, the Arms Control Wonk tells us, the pro-swatter crowd seems to have gained the upper hand. The Kinetic Energy Anti-Satellite (KE-ASAT) program is still getting Pentagon cash.

The KE-ASAT has spooked some in U.S. Strategic Command, because of the debris it might generate from a mid-orbit smackdown. "As of mid-2001 three prototypes had been built, and all three remained in storage at a Boeing facility in Anaheim, CA," GlobalSecurity.org notes. Defense Department higher-ups haven't funded the program in a few years.

But the Army and the Missile Defense Agency have continued to slip KE-ASAT a few million annually. And now, the Army's Space and Missile Command is thinking about dropping $15 mil to start flight testing parts of the system. If all works according to plan, a swatter prototype could take off some time in 2007.

ASSAULT RIFLE SPRAYS TUNES

Thank God Congress got rid of that annoying assault weapons ban. Otherwise, how could we enjoy the new MP3 player that fits into the magazine of an AK-47?

The 20 GB, USB-compatable player "can be used on its own or it could be attached to the Kalashnikov machine gun instead of the ordinary magazine," promises the gnomes at AudioBooksForFree.Com. The device's "stainless steel body makes this new player uniquely suitable for outdoors."

Speaking of steel bodies, the gagdet's website is worth a click, if only for the "Triple Kalashnikov Girls," barely dressed "in what we can only imagine is standard Russian military attire," Gimzodo snickers. A mere $600 will get you a copy of the Girls' favorite toy, with 450 audio books preloaded.

TOURNIQUETS, AT LAST, FOR G.I.S

"Under pressure from Congress, the Army has decided to quickly dispatch modern tourniquets to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan," the AP reports. "That’s more than two years after military doctors recommended that every soldier carry one."

In an article March 6, The Baltimore Sun described a lack of tourniquets among soldiers in the field and delays in supplying them.

Virginia Stephanakis, a spokeswoman for the Army surgeon general, had no immediate details on the number of tourniquets or a timetable by which they will be sent to U.S. troops...

A committee of military doctors urged in February 2003 that every soldier carry one of the $20 medical devices, a nylon and plastic version of the simple cloth-and-stick device armies have used to stop bleeding for centuries.

But many don’t, and some have bled to death from wounds on which a tourniquet might have been effective, according to more than a dozen military doctors and medical specialists interviewed by The Sun.

The U.S. Central Command, which oversees combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, issued a directive Jan. 6 requiring all soldiers to carry a modern tourniquet.

However, compliance was left up to individual units, and many have not acquired the devices.

Three weeks ago, the Army’s surgeon general, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, approved a new first-aid kit for soldiers that includes a modern tourniquet and other life-saving equipment.

But the training manual was still being written and the kits were expected to be field tested, a process expected to take months.

Now, Stephanakis said that the tourniquets would be sent without waiting for the field testing of the new first-aid kits.

TOUGHEST. DRONE. EVER.

Maybe there's been a less intimidating guard drone developed by the U.S. military. But I haven't seen it, yet.

The ROBART III is the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center's prototype for a mechanical rent-a-cop replacement -- designed to detect intruders, and pop 'em with a "pneumatically powered six-barrel Gatling-style weapon that fires simulated tranquilizer darts or rubber bullets."

In development since 1992, ROBART III uses "head-mounted sensors, includ[ing] two Polaroid sonar transducers, a Banner near-infrared proximity sensor, an AM Sensors microwave motion detector, and a video surveillance camera" to spot infiltrators. But what happens when the bot finds its foes -- well, I'm guessing ROBART's creators haven't thought that far ahead. Faced with a contraption that looks like a cross between Johnny Five, 2XL, and ROM Spaceknight, only the most timid of trespassers would be scared off by the machine, you'd figure.

Maybe that'll change, when ROBART's new helpers come on line. In a new research thrust, drone-builders at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center are looking to put together "a group of slave robots [that] would follow ROBART III into a building and be deployed at strategic locations to serve as communication relays, rearguard lookouts, expendable point men... preventing an intruder from playing 'hide-and-seek' with ROBART III."

I feel safer already.

HAPPY SUNSHINE WEEK!

It's our most basic right, really, to know what the hell the government is doing with our money. But, in recent years, that right has been under attack, with more and more public information being kept away from ordinary folks.

That's why the Associated Press and others have launched Sunshine Week, a seven-day celebration highlighting the dangers of too much government secrecy -- and the steps people can take to get their data back.

People are getting increasingly active, trying to mine the hidden nuggets that lie inside government archives with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, a new AP study shows. But fewer and fewer of those requests are honored by Washington.

"The locations of stores and restaurants that have received recalled meat, the names of detainees held by the U.S. overseas and details about Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 energy policy task force are all among the records that the government isn't sharing with the public...

At the CIA, just 12 percent of the FOIA requests processed were granted in total in 2004, down from 44 percent in 1998. The FBI gave people asking for records everything they asked for just 1 percent of the time in 2004, compared to 5 percent in 1998.

That's not just inconvenient for reporter types. It costs the country a bundle. And it actually harms national security, Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) argues. Battling complex terrorist networks requires more sharing of information, not less; just look at how effective data-hoarding was at stopping the Twin Towers attacks.

"Our secrecy system is all about protecting secrecy officers, and has nothing to do with protecting secrets. It's a self-licking ice-cream cone," Rich Haver, Donald Rumsfeld's former special assistant for intelligence, told Defense Tech in 2003. "We're compartmentalizing the shit out of things. It's causing a total meltdown of our intelligence processes."

In response, a group of bipartisan lawmakers has introduced a set of bills designed to strengthen and speed up the FOIA process. "The last time Congress approved major reforms to FOIA was nearly a decade ago," the website of Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) notes. It's time to change the law again.

THERE'S MORE: Here's a set of links to help you file a FOIA request of your own.

MOONIE TIMES HEARTS MISSILE DEFENSE

Were these guys even on the same call? If you read the Moonie-owned Washington Times yesterday, you would have thought everything was just hunky-dory with the missile defense system -- never mind all those tests in which the interceptors couldn't get off of the ground.

U.S. defenses against enemy missiles are progressing toward full deployment and a new sea-based version hit a simulated Scud missile flight during a test last month, Pentagon officials said yesterday.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, told reporters that the basic system of interceptor missiles, sensors and tracking devices is working and is a critical national security weapon.

"Overall I'm very optimistic," Gen. Obering said during a telephone conference. "This is a critical capability and I think that people will realize over time that we absolutely need this for our security, and I think we'll look back and say thank goodness that we were able to develop this system when we did and get it into the field."

But now, check out what Defense Daily -- the military-industrial trade e-journal, not exactly regarded as a bastion of left-wing thought -- had to say about Obering's chat:

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) director Air Force Lt. Gen. Trey Obering is disappointed with recent flight test problems in the ground- based midcourse defense arena.

"I'm very disappointed in this last test because of the simplicity of the failure," Obering said in a teleconference yesterday.

"The flight test interceptor aborted as designed," Obering said.

"We had a failure of one of the ground support equipment arms to adequately clear out of the way as it should have" within the silo.

Or how about this, from the Washington Post?

The general in charge of the Pentagon's faltering effort to develop a system for defending the United States against ballistic missile attack said yesterday that he has ordered a thorough review of all ground equipment used in testing and appointed a senior Navy officer to oversee future test preparations.

The moves by Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry A. "Trey" Obering III follow failed attempts in December and February to launch interceptor rockets in tests of the fledgling system. Both failures have been blamed on what defense officials say were minor glitches -- a flawed software code in December and a faulty silo retracting arm in February.

In a conference call with reporters, Obering expressed continued confidence in the system. He said that even without the launch of the rockets, the recent tests scored some successes by demonstrating the system's ability to track target missiles and generate intercept instructions. But he acknowledged frustration at the tendency of simple glitches to foil the tests.

"The hard things about missile defense we are accomplishing," Obering said. "The easy things are what we're having trouble with."

So here's my question: Did the Moonie Times' Bill Gertz actually sit down and think, "Hmmm, let me carry the Administration's water today"? Or is blind acceptance so pre-programmed into the paper's DNA that this kind of cheerleading becomes automatic?

(Thanks to Victoria for the catch.)

THERE'S MORE: On second thought, maybe this all has something to do with little piggies. Or with getting high on the job. Sneak a peek at Dr. A.C. Wonk's take on the missile defense hackery.

SHARK SKIN SHIPS?

"A new environmentally friendly coating based on sharks' skin may soon help the U.S. Navy increase ship speeds while saving fuel," Wired News reports.

The coating... will be applied on the hull of ships below the waterline, where all manner of algae, barnacles and other wee beasties attach themselves, slowing ships and reducing their maneuverability...

Of the $550 million to $600 million the Navy spends annually on powering its ships and submarines, at least $50 million stems directly from drag due to marine growth fouling the vessels' hulls, said Stephen McElvany, an environmental quality program officer in the Office of Naval Research's physical science division.

Existing antifouling paints such as tributyltin, or TBT, kill algae and barnacles when they latch on. TBT is being banned worldwide by... the U.N. body responsible for overseeing shipping-related issues...

To find a way to persuade algae to move on rather than killing them, Anthony Brennan, a University of Florida professor of materials science, and his colleagues turned to nature. Sharks don't have algae or barnacle problems despite being underwater all their lives. Shark skin is made up of tiny rectangular scales topped with even smaller spines or bristles. This makes shark skin rough to the touch. This irregular surface makes it difficult for plant spores to get a good grip and grow into algae or other plants.

"It's like trying to walk across a bed of nails when some nails are longer and unevenly distributed," Brennan said.

Using a combination plastic-and-rubber coating, Brennan replicated a version of shark skin that is made up of billions of tiny raised, diamond-shaped patterns, visible under a microscope. Each "sharklet" diamond measures 15 microns, or 15 thousandths of a millimeter, and contains seven raised ribs that resemble different lengths of raised horizontal bars.

In lab tests, the coating -- provisionally named Gator Sharkote -- reduced by 85 percent the settlement of spores from a very common and detrimental type of algae called Ulva, a green seaweed often seen on the sides of ships.

"The only place the spores land right now is where we have a defect in the pattern," Brennan said.

The Navy has had a wicked case of shark envy, lately. A few months ago, the service started looking into how sailors could use sharks' electric sensors to spot underwater mines.

THERE'S MORE: Over on the Defense Tech forum, there's an impassioned defense of TBT, the old-school ways to clean ships.

(photo credit: Callaghan Fritz-Cope/Pelagic Shark Research Foundation)

LOS ALAMOS: HELP WANTED

It ain't easy, running the world's most important nuclear lab. There are billions of dollars to worry about. Tons of lethally radioactive material. And thousands of scientist employees who think they're smarter than you -- and are probably right. Worst of all, if recent history is any guide, you'll be kicked to the curb before your contract is up, the victim of the latest in a series of seemingly-endless scandals.

So maybe that's why Los Alamos is advertising for top jobs in the Washington Post's classified section. Here's one of the ads, for the Principal Associate Director for Nuclear Weapons Programs.

Responsible for the technical and administrative supervision of approximately 2,500 scientific and administrative personnel, and a budget of about $1 Billion.

Manages the Laboratory nuclear weapons technology program, which includes nuclear weapons design... ensure[s] confidence in the safety, security and reliability of the nations nuclear weapons stockpile.

Serves as the Laboratory focal point for all nuclear weapons activities, including the assessment and certification of the performance of the LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] designed enduring nuclear stockpile. Activities include surveillance, maintenance, and stockpile life extension and limited-scale fabrication of a variety of nuclear and non-nuclear components.

Responsible for the pit manufacturing function, which includes the development and implementation of the capability to fabricate plutonium pits [the hearts of thermonuclear weapons] on all types of pits in the enduring nuclear stockpile...

Must have exceptional management skills on large scale programs approaching a 1Billion/year or more.

Desire a nationally recognized expert in the field of nuclear weapons technology, with a strong background in nuclear physics and nuclear weapons design and evaluation.

If that position doesn't quite match up with your expertise, don't worry. There are others available, including the lab's #2 slot, Deputy Director, and associate directorships for science and technology, international security, and engineering and evaluations.

(via LANL: The Real Story)

NAVY SINKS 'AMERICA'

"No one has been able to land a [big] punch on an American [aircraft] carrier for over half a century," StrategyPage notes. "There is no practical knowledge about exactly how sturdy, or not, these big ships are."

So the Navy is going to sink the USS America, decommissioned since 1996, to find out what happens when the 1060-foot long carrier gets hit, hard.

In $22 million worth of "experiments that will last from four to six weeks," the AP reports, "the Navy will batter the America with explosives, both underwater and above the surface, watching from afar and through monitoring devices placed on the vessel."

These explosions would presumably simulate attacks by torpedoes, cruise missiles and perhaps a small boat suicide attack like the one that damaged the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

At the end, explosive scuttling charges placed to flood the ship will be detonated, and the America will begin its descent to the sea floor, more than 6,000 feet below...

Certain aspects of the tests are classified, and neither America's former crew nor the news media will be allowed to view them in person, Dolan said. The Navy does not want to give away too much information on how a carrier could be sunk, Pat Dolan, a spokeswoman for Naval Sea Systems Command, said.

Why the America? No other retired supercarriers were available on the East Coast when the test was planned, Dolan said. The others - the Forrestal and the Saratoga - were designated as potential museums, she said.

HYDROGEN CAR IN ARMY TEST

If you believe the hype out of Detroit, we'll all be driving ultra-clean cars running on hydrogen fuel cells one day, instead of today's gas-chuggers. The latest comes from General Motors, who "reported Monday it has made a breakthrough that brings hydrogen-powered vehicles a bit closer to reality," according to the Red Herring.

The Army's National Automotive Center is taking a peek into that future now, testing out its first hydrogen-powered car.

The 66-inch wide, 13.5 horsepower Aggressor Alternative Mobility Vehicle goes from 0 to 40 mph in four seconds, and tops out at 80 mph, according to its makers, Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide.

But speed isn't really the selling point of the Aggressor. Stealth is. The vehicle has a "virtually silent operating mode with reduced thermal signature," making it harder for evil-doers to spot the car.

The Quantum Aggressor runs on compressed hydrogen utilizing... carbon fiber storage tanks. A 10 kW fuel cell is coupled with an energy storage module in a parallel hybrid configuration, which provides power on demand to a high-torque electric motor driving the rear-wheels...The Quantum Aggressor can be driven to the intended destination and then be used as a silent power generator to produce high quality electricity for telecommunications, surveillance, targeting, and other battlefield equipment.

But not to worry, greenies. Quantum says that the Aggressor is eco-friendly, too -- no matter what the operating mode, "the vehicle does not produce any emissions."

ISRAELI ARMY DISSES D&D

When I was 19, and Saddam was lobbing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv, I had a brief urge to join the Israeli army. Good thing I didn't. Because the generals there wouldn't have been too happy with my dormroom Dungeons & Dragons habit. Ynetnews explains:

18-year-olds who tell recruiters they play the popular fantasy game are automatically given low security clearance.

"They're detached from reality and suscepitble to influence," the army says.

Fans of the popular role-playing game had spoken of rumors of this strange policy by the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces], but now the army has confirmed that it has a negative image of teens who play the game and labels them as problematic in regard to their draft status.

So if you like fantasy games, go see the military psychologist...

"These people have a tendency to be influenced by external factors which could cloud their judgment," a military official says. "They may be detached from reality or have a weak personality -- elements which lower a person's security clearance, allowing them to serve in the army, but not in sensitive positions." (via Fortean Times)

$127 BILLION -- "OFF-THE-SHELF"

The $127 billion Future Combat Systems is the biggest, most expensive modernization program in the history of the U.S. Army. So why are its components being bought like thousand-dollar PCs?

That's what Sen. John McCain would like to know. As Inside Defense notes, under Defense Department rules -- specifically, Federal Acquisition Regulation 12 -- everyday, "off-the-shelf" items can be bought with a minimum of paperwork and oversight. Filling out endless forms just to buy new copies of Microsoft Word doesn't make much sense, after all.

But neither does applying FAR 12 to Future Combat Systems, or FCS, a program which encompasses everything from fleets of new robotic vehicles to a whole new architecture for battlefield communications to new uniforms for the troops.

"The FCS system is being included in the fiscal '06 budget as a commercial off-the-shelf item. That means that they are relieved of the obligation to [give] cost and purchasing data to military auditors," Sen. McCain told Army Secretary Francis Harvey during a March 3 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. "Tell me, Mr. Secretary, where might I be able to purchase such a vehicle commercially?"

"It's not -- it's certainly not off the shelf," Harvey replied. "Senator, you know that. It's a very heavy technology development program."

"I really think we’re going to have to change this designation," answered McCain, who's already planning on holding hearings on FCS.

Good idea. The FCS program has already been rejiggered, its costs have inflated, its deadlines have pushed back. And, oh yeah, one of the companies in charge of the program, Boeing, is hemorrhaging top executives because of ethical lapses. Maybe it made some kind of sense, at one point, to apply off-the-shelf rules to FCS, in an attempt to get the lumbering program going. But now, this project needs more oversight, not less.

ROBO-PUPPIES GO TO SCHOOL

Darpa, the Pentagon's mad science division, wants to teach little mechanical puppies to think. Hopefully, that'll let the bots run around with soldiers on the battlefield one day.

Getting robots to maneuver around rocks and trees and potholes is tough -- just ask any of the tinkerers whose bots bit the dust during last year's all-drone off-road rally across the Mojave Desert.

One way around the problem, some drone-makers think, is to give their creations legs, so that they can maneuver just like a person or an animal would. But that's easier said than done. Walking, it turns out, requires a zillion tiny calculations to keep balance and avoid obstacles. It's so complex, Darpa notes, that "handcrafting the control laws and parameters" needed for robots to hike "may not even be possible with reasonable effort." So instead, Darpa would like to get the bots to figure out how to walk on their own.

In the Learning Locomotion program, algorithms will be created that learn how to locomote based on the experience of a legged platform confronting extreme terrain. It is expected that the performance of these algorithms will far exceed the performance of handcrafted systems, creating a breakthrough in locomotion over extreme terrain. Further, it is expected that these algorithms will be broadly applicable to the class of “agile” ground vehicles.

Darpa is planning on handing out a series of $600-800,000 contracts to try to teach drones to walk. And the robots the agency wants researchers to train are 6.6 pound, 10.6 inch-long "Little Dogs."

During the 15-month first phase of the "Learning Locomotion" project, Darpa wants the pooches to be able to travel .6 of an inch per second, and scale obstacles about 2.5 inches tall. For Phase II, those numbers should go up to approximately 3.8 inches and 5.7 inches, respectively.

That may not sound like much. Bu the drones will have to be smart enough that that can "learn 'on-the-fly' how to traverse new obstacle types," Darpa tells researchers. "Government tests will measure the ability of the performer systems to learn from experience."

This isn't the only Darpa program to try to get ground-based bots to think. Nor is this the only Defense Department project which involves dog-like drones. Last year, the Army doled out $2.25 million to two robotics firms to prototype a big, mechanical pooch capable of carrying ammunition, food and supplies into battle.

THERE'S MORE: Oh, this rules.

Flesh and bone triumphed in the first ever man-versus-machine battle of brawn - an arm wrestling contest between robots and humans in California on Monday.

The champion, beating all three robotic arms each in matter of seconds, was a 17-year-old girl called Panna Felsen, a high school student from San Diego, US.

The contest was set up by Yoseph Bar-Cohen at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California, US, in an attempt to encourage the development of polymer-based artificial muscles... The ultimate aim is to have an artificial arm beat the world's strongest person, says Bar-Cohen. But for now he wanted to make the challenge slightly more attainable which is why Panna, a self-confessed wimp, was chosen to represent humanity.

Despite her lack of strength, training and technique, she was able to conquer the first arm... in just 24 seconds. Following this, and a pep talk from an arm wrestling expert, it took her just four seconds to beat the second arm and three seconds for her to win the last match.

ISRAELI "IMPERSONATORS" KEY TO TERROR FIGHT

The Israeli military knows a thing or two about clamping down on terrorists. And it has some advice for the Pentagon: “You can’t fight terror [conclusively] in the midst of a counter-insurgency campaign" like Iraq, Lt. Col. Erez Wiener, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) division operations chief for the West Bank region, tells Defense Daily. "It requires continuous presence in the field and operations amongst the entire population."

"Impersonation units," have been key to the Israeli anti-terror fight Erez says.

Of the 2,200 arrests Israelis made in the West Bank last year, about 1,500 were conducted by special operation forces (SOF), including 366 by a special Arab impersonation unit, he explained. These specially selected and trained personnel have demonstrated the ability to completely blend into the opposing population for intelligence and operational purposes.

The unit would be a component of a much wider military and intelligence campaign designed to create an infrastructure for human intelligence gathering and rapid dissemination, he said. “You must be able to get the kind of timely information, like ‘[a terrorist] is planning on detonating a bomb at that intersection right there the next time one of your vehicles passes.’”

...
The problem, Erez notes, is that it's hard to put these kind of units together if your side doesn't definitively control a big chunk of territory. That's one of the main reasons the Israelis built their controversial fence along the West Bank border -- to isolate potential terrorists, and allow the "impersonators" to move in. But the U.S. isn't about to put a wall up around Baghdad or Mosul. So how do they effectively infiltrate terror groups? Good question, Erez says.

Erez said he believed the United States could develop the capabilities allowing it to operate continuously in any enemy areas so as to create a real terrorist deterrence. “But the big challenge is if they will achieve this before the current war is over.”

DICK TRACY CONTROLS FOR ISRAEL'S DRONES

"Israeli troops are now wearing gear that Dick Tracy would be proud of," the AP reports, "tiny video screens, worn on the wrist, that display video shot by unmanned airplanes."

Similar screens have been in use for close to a year in the Israeli military's attack helicopters, helping pilots identify and strike Palestinian targets within seconds. The technology, also used in tanks and armored vehicles, was a closely guarded secret until the company that developed it offered reporters a rare glimpse at the system this week...

The screen being field-tested by a limited number of foot soldiers is about 3 inches wide, and weighs just a few ounces. Code-named V-Rambo, it's attached to the wrist by a velcro strap. The LCD screens display color video beamed directly from drones in real time at 30 frames per second -- the same rate as broadcast TV.

Attack helicopters have been fitted with 5-inch screens. The Video Receiver systems also include small reception units that are installed on the vehicles and helicopters or carried in soldiers' vests.

The new technology is considered much more than a novelty.

Military drones have been used by Israel since the early 1980s. [The Israelis have also designed many of the drones used by American forces -- ed.] But until recently, the information they gathered was sent to a ground command center that interpreted it and then shared it with forces in the field. The Tadiran systems allow the information to be received instantly by the various forces, company officials said. The drones are still controlled by a ground command center, but the forces have the ability to guide the camera to meet their specific needs.

This real-time information has enabled Israel to perfect its ability to attack from the sky. During more than four years of fighting with the Palestinians, Israeli helicopter air strikes have killed dozens of combatants.

ARMY'S ARMOR SNAFUS

There's an old military saw, that amateurs study tactics, and the pros study logistics. (Where exactly that puts defense technology bloggers, well, I'll leave that up to you.)

Today's remarkable New York Times story on the fumbles and fouled-up decisions the Army made while trying to get armor for its troops and vehicles shows the substance behind the cliché.

At the same time, in shipping plates from other companies, the Army's equipment manager effectively reduced the armor's priority to the status of socks, a confidential report by the Army's inspector general shows. Some 10,000 plates were lost along the way, and the rest arrived late.

In all, with additional paperwork delays, the Defense Department took 167 days just to start getting the bulletproof vests to soldiers in Iraq once General Cody placed the order [for them on May 15, 2003]. But for thousands of soldiers, it took weeks and even months more, records show, at a time when the Iraqi insurgency was intensifying and American casualties were mounting.

By contrast, when the United States' allies in Iraq also realized they needed more bulletproof vests, they bypassed the Pentagon and ordered directly from a manufacturer in Michigan. They began getting armor in just 12 days.

But new armor wasn't the only life-saving item Pentagon bureacrats failed to secure during in the early days of the Iraq war, the Times notes.

Long before the war, the Pentagon was excited about new ways to subvert these [Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs].

A California military contractor developed a countermeasure during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. Known as the Shortstop Electronic Protection System, it evolved into a portable device that was heralded for its ability to jam the radio frequencies used by insurgents to detonate their bombs.

Col. Bruce D. Jette... was heading up a new unit called the Rapid Equipping Force, which was given license to ignore the lumbering ways the Army traditionally fills orders from the field.

Colonel Jette, who has a Ph.D. in electronic materials from M.I.T., dodged the Army's research-and-development agencies and phoned his scientist friends to find a commercial robot that could search for explosives. He embedded his staff in combat units. He took manufacturers to Iraq so they could quickly modify designs for body and vehicle armor...

Some Pentagon officials say they first realized soldiers were being killed by I.E.D.'s as early as June 2003, and late that summer the Army's 101st Airborne Division issued a report that cited "numerous" injuries from I.E.D.'s in its plea for more vehicle armor and training to evade the bombs.

The Defense Department had been producing various I.E.D. countermeasures. But the Pentagon did not start ordering large quantities of one of the most promising ones, known as the Warlock, until December 2003, nine months after the war began...

Colonel Jette was frustrated, and in October he resigned. In interviews, he said as the rush of war wore off, the Army's traditional supply corps began reasserting lengthy contracting and testing regimens, leaving him increasingly discouraged.

"That perfection in testing becomes the enemy of what is operationally good enough," he said. "And the soldiers in the field are looking for good enough."

THERE'S MORE: Back in January, we took a look at the Maj. Gen. William Webster's year-long fight to get his personnel carriers armored up.

ALIENS GET ANKLE MONITORS

There's a new Homeland Security Department push underway, to require immigrants in eight cities to wear Sopranos-style electronic ankle bracelets.

"But the government's pilot project is putting monitors on aliens who have never been accused of a crime," NPR reports.

So far, the Department of Homeland Security has put electronic monitors on more than 1,700 immigrants. Victor Cerda, director of Detention and Removal Operations at Homeland Security, says the anklets will help prevent tens of thousands of immigrants who are ordered to leave the country each year from "absconding" -- going into hiding to avoid deportation.

But critics say Cerda and other Homeland Security officials have exaggerated the extent of the problem. They point to a Justice Department study that put part of the blame on immigration officials, saying they'd failed to keep adequate records to track aliens.

Despite the uncertain rationale, NPR notes, if the program is deemed a success, "Homeland Security might require every non-citizen who's applying to stay here to wear a [ankle] montior, at least for a while -- unless they're waiting in jail."

THERE'S MORE: "It's not just immigrants," the Washington Monthly observes, pointing to an article from a couple of weeks back in the Sacramento Bee:

Educators in a small Sutter County school district gathered electronic tracking devices from hundreds of elementary and junior high school children Wednesday morning, ending the controversial pilot program that raised concerns over Big Brother-type privacy violations.

At a special meeting the night before, officials from locally based InCom Corp. announced that they were pulling out of an agreement with the Brittan School District near Yuba City that allowed them to test the devices on the students.

The company markets the badges, which have a radio-frequency antenna that is scanned when students pass through specially outfitted doorways, as a tool for taking attendance and monitoring students' locations.

SHAYS: SECRECY HURTS SECURITY

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT) has been a long-time critic of the Bush administration's urge to declare off-limits to the public all the information it possibly can. Yesterday, Shays, who heads the Goverment Reform Committee's national security panel, gave one of the best speeches yet about the dangers of overclassification, just before lanuching into a hearing on the subject.

"The Cold War cult of secrecy remains largely impervious to the new security imperatives of the post-9/11 world. Overclassification is a direct threat to national security.

"Last year, more federal officials classified more information, and declassified less, than the year before. In our previous hearing on official secrecy policies, the Department of Defense (DOD) witness estimated that fully half of all the data deemed "Confidential," "Secret" or "Top Secret" by the Pentagon was needlessly or improperly withheld from public view. Further resisting the call to move from a "need to know" to a "need to share" standard, some agencies have become proliferators of new categories of shielded data. Legally ambiguous markings like "Sensitive but Unclassified", "Sensitive Homeland Security Information" and "For Official Use Only" create new bureaucratic barriers to information sharing. These pseudo-classifications can have persistent and pernicious practical effects on the flow of threat information.

"The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission) concluded that, "Current security requirements nurture overclassification and excessive compartmentation of information among agencies. Each agency's incentive structure opposes sharing, with risks (criminal, civil and internal administrative sanctions) but few rewards for sharing information. No one has to pay the long-term costs of over-classifying information, though these costs... are substantial."

"Those costs are measured in lives as well as dollars. Somewhere in the vast cache of data that never should have been classified, and may never be declassified, is that tiny nugget of information that, if shared, could be used to detect and prevent the next deadly terrorist attack.

"Recently enacted reforms should help focus and coordinate disparate elements of the so-called "intelligence community" to broaden our view of critical threat information. The previously ignored, and still unfunded, Public Interest Declassification Board has new authority to push for executive branch adherence to disclosure standards, particularly with regard to congressional committee requests.

"But those promising initiatives still confront deeply entrenched habits and cultures of excessive secrecy. The 9/11 Commission successfully worked through security barriers to access and publish the information they needed. But as soon as the Commission's legal mandate expired, heavy-handed classification practices reasserted themselves. As a result, release of the final staff report on threats to civil aviation was delayed. And the version finally made public contains numerous redactions, some of which needlessly seek to shield information already released by other agencies.

"The Cold War was a struggle of the Industrial Age. The global war against terrorism is being waged, and must be won, by the new rules of the Information Age. Data and knowledge are the strategic elements of power. With just a few keystrokes, individuals and groups can now acquire technologies and capabilities once the sole province of nation-states. Modern, adaptable networks asymmetrically attack the rigid, hierarchical structures of the past.

"In this environment, there is security in sharing, not hording, information that many more people need to know. We asked our witnesses this afternoon to help us assess the impact of current access restrictions on efforts to create the trusted networks and new information sharing pathways critical to our national security. We look forward to their testimony."

FORUM BACK IN BUSINESS

Our friendly Military.com overlords have put up a new set of forums so we can chat away. The revamped discussion boards sure look a lot better than the old ones -- and they seem more stable, too. Click on over, and let's gab. Think of it like Coffee Talk, but with guns.

GRAMMAR FOR SPYBOYS

Maybe sixth-grade English was more helpful than we thought. One of the dullest grammar exercises is being used to help find potential terrorists, and save companies a bundle.

Diagramming sentences - picking out subject, verb, object, adjective and other parts of speech - has been a staple of middle and high school grammar lessons for decades. Now, with financing from the Central Intelligence Agency, a California firm is using the technique to comb through e-mail messages and chat room talks, which can be a rich lode of corporate and government information, and a tough one to mine.

Figuring out the connections among people, places and things is something computer algorithms do pretty well, as long as that information is structured, or categorized and put into a database. Looking through a company's customer file for a person named Bonds, for example, is fairly simple. But if the data is unstructured - if the word "bonds" hasn't been classified as the name of a ballplayer or as an investment option - searching becomes much more difficult.

For people in business or in public service, only 20 percent or so of their information is kept in formal databases, noted Nick Patience, an analyst with the 451 Group, a technology research firm. The rest is unstructured, tucked away in e-mail messages, call logs, memos and instant messages.

Attensity, based in Palo Alto, Calif., and financed in part by In-Q-Tel, the C.I.A.'s investment arm, has developed a method to parse electronic documents almost instantly, and diagram all of the sentences inside. ("Moby-Dick," for instance, took all of nine and a half seconds.) By labeling subjects and verbs and other parts of speech, Attensity's software gives the documents a definable structure, a way to fit into a database. And that helps turn day-to-day chatter into information that is relevant and usable.

My article in today's New York Times had details.

SOLDIER "DEATH BENEFITS" M.I.A.

Last month, the Bush administration announced that, in the Pentagon's 2006 budget, there would a big bump in the so-called "death benefit" for military families. If a soldier was killed in war, administration officials promised, his loved ones would get a $100,000 lump sum -- up from just $12,420 -- plus an extra $150,000 in life insurance payouts. It seemed like a great idea. Everybody cheered.

But then, something curious happened. Or rather, didn't happen. The Pentagon never included the money for a bigger death benefit in its budget. So now, the Army has gone to Congress, asking for an extra $348 million to keep the administration's word.

The money is part is a larger, $4.8 billion package of Army "FY06 Shortfalls and Requested Legislative Authorities" -- programs that the service's chiefs felt should have received more money from the Pentagon budgeteers. Every year, the Army, Navy, and Air Force appeal directly to Congress to infuse these programs with more cash. This year's Army list also includes $443 million for more M16s and other small arms and $227 million for night vision equipment, Inside Defense notes.

Now, maybe the death benefit lack this year was just a simple oversight on the Pentagon's part. Maybe the Defense Department's PR machine spun a little faster than its financial wheels could turn. But given the cynical games the Pentagon has been playing with soldiers' paychecks -- holding them hostage, essentially, as a back-door way to inflate military spending -- I'm inclined to believe the worst.

THERE'S MORE: Inside Defense has a full list of all of the services' "unfunded requirements."

SCIENTISTS BLAST BIOTERROR BOONDOGGLE

Researchers have been quietly complaining for years about the gigantic piles of cash being burned on bioterror defense -- while threats like tuberculosis, which kill millions every year, are given short shrift.

Finally, these microbiologists are starting to get organized, and speak out in public. From the Times:

More than 700 scientists sent a petition on Monday to the director of the National Institutes of Health protesting what they said was the shift of tens of millions of dollars in federal research money since 2001 away from pathogens that cause major public health problems to obscure germs the government fears might be used in a bioterrorist attack.

The scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners and a biologist who is to receive the National Medal of Science from President Bush in March, say grants for research on the bacteria that cause anthrax and five other diseases that are rare or nonexistent in the United States have increased fifteenfold since 2001. Over the same period, grants to study bacteria not associated with bioterrorism, including those causing diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis, have decreased 27 percent, the petition said...

signers of the petition insisted that the government was making poor trade-offs. "These projects obviously take money away from basic research in the United States," said Sidney Altman, a molecular biologist at Yale who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989. He said that while a risk of bioterrorist attack existed, he considered it "a very minor factor" among all the threats faced by the nation. "There's no question that microbiology has suffered" by the focus on obscure organisms, Dr. Altman said.

THERE'S MORE: Nick directs our attention to this handy (and depressing) chart, showing just how out-of-whack the biodefense spending numbers are.

AND MORE: "The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has repeatedly claimed that the biodefense boom has not adversely impacted funding for public health research," the Sunshine Project's Edward Hammond notes in a release. "But NIH data does not support [that] position. In fact, analysis of competitive grant data shows double digit declines in funding for high priority public health diseases since the end of 2001."

CIA DRONES FLYING OVER IRAN

Usually, hunting for missiles and reactors from the sky would be a job for the Air Force. But those spy drones that are flying over Iran, looking for nukes -- they belong to the CIA, according to Aviation Week.

"They are using the I-Gnat and Predator [drones that the CIA] used early in the Afghanistan war... They focus on small areas, and that's what they need to find those dispersed [nuclear weapons development] sites," a senior Air Force official says. "The data are sent back to Beale [Air Force Base in California, via satellite]... The information is then separated by its code word [prefix] and sent to the proper agency."

Beale is the major intelligence exploitation center; processed information is then distributed, often by secure landline, to other bases such as Indian Springs auxiliary airfield near Las Vegas, where Predator missions are controlled.

The CIA [was the] first [American agency to use] armed Predators, although flown remotely by [Air Force] pilots, that were launched on combat missions from bases in Uzbekistan. Since both the Army and Air Force now operate similar [drones], the CIA's small fleet could be flown from the same bases in the theater or from small bases in remote areas of Afghanistan or Iraq.