"JITTERS," BROKEN DOWN

The Army's massive modernization project, Future Combat Systems, isn't just one program. It's hundreds of interlocking, interwoven efforts to update armor, uniforms, logistics, medical care, and much, much more. A few key threads hold the whole tapestry together. And one of them is rapidly coming undone.

Without communications -- specifically, without the Joint Tactical Radio System, or "Jitters" -- many of FCS' most innovative efforts just won't work. FCS is an attempt to turn the Army into a force that takes out opponents with ultra-precise attacks and almost Godlike knowledge of the battlefield instead of with overwhelming firepower. To make this nimbly lethal dream come true, the Army needs almost-instant information-sharing, both between soldiers and with FCS' new fleet of robots. It needs Jitters.

Right now, the Army isn't getting what it needs. Jitters is flailing, badly. As we noted the other day, the Army has put one of the program's main contractors, Boeing, on notice that it could cancel one component, or "cluster," of Jitters in a month.

Winds of Change offers today some stellar background on the program -- what Jitters does, the problems it faces, and what might happen next. And it the site's comments section, a Jitters engineer weighs in on how the program got so tangled up. Good stuff.

THERE'S MORE: Meanwhile, Inside Defense reports, the Army is starting to look around for alternatives to Jitters.

The Army's next-gen set of rockets is called the Non-Line of Sight Launch System (NLOS-LS). It's supposed to rely on Jitters' "Cluster Five" to direct its assaults. But, like Boeing's component of the radio system, Cluster Five "has hit its own program snags," says Inside Defense. As a result, the Army is considering the possible use of surrogate systems.

NLOS-LS is made up of three key components: the Precision Attack Munition, a direct-attack missile that can autonomously acquire a target; the Loitering Attack Munition, which is being designed to fly to a target up to 70 km away and loiter above it for up to 30 minutes before striking; and the Container Launch Unit, the box that stores, commands and fires the missiles.

The CLU, which officials call “the heart and soul of the program” because it contains the… information that… will tell the PAM where to go, depends on [Jitters].

“The number one risk to the NLOS-LS program currently is the network,” said Ric Magness, president of NetFires LLC, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Raytheon established to build NLOS-LS.

NLOS-LS is supposed to rely on a future software programmable radio called the Joint Tactical Radio System’s Cluster Five, but that program has hit its own program snags. As a result, the Army is considering the possible use of a surrogate for the PAM and the CLU.

According to a Government Accountability Office report, JTRS -- designed to transmit voice, video and data -- was put on a system development and demonstration path with immature technologies and few well-defined requirements. The program faces technical challenges because of its size, weight, power and data processing requirements. Its early development was delayed because of a contracting dispute.

“Consequently, the report said, "the Cluster 5 radios are not likely to be available" for the initial roll-out of FCS." And that includes the new rocket system.

AND MORE: Winds' sister site, Defense Industry Daily, is tracking the criminal investigation into the disfunctional search and rescue radios L-3 Communications has built for the Army.

MASLOW, COVEY VS. TERROR

How do you stop the spread of terror? Blowing stuff up in Fallujah won't help much, says one Defense Department intelligence analyst, over at Kris Alexander's blog. Instead, you've got to focus on Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- especially the parts about "belonginess" and "self-actualization." And adopt Steven Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The craziest part about the plan? It isn't as as crazy -- or as touchy-feely -- as it sounds at first. Give it a read.

THERE'S MORE: Defense Tech Dad Tom Shachtman says Maslow doesn't really apply to would-be Muslim terrorists.

Maslow's frame of reference is western, Judaeo-Christian tradition, and his hierarchy of needs, wonderful and applicable to us though I think it is, falls apart when used as a criterion for judging the motivations of people who are not in those traditions. Highly religious, highly-traditional cultures, and non-Western cultures, place greater emphasis on the third level of needs than on anything having to do with individual aspirations. So holding out the carrot to a Muslim mother that her son will become a well-trained professional in a non-lethal field does not have the same appeal as it does to a Cincinnati soccer mom.

RUMMY + SPIDEY

You'd figure that soldiers might be a little confused about whether Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was really on their side, after he started holding their paychecks hostage. But Rummy knows just how to block out those nasty thoughts: by trotting out Spiderman and his costumed pals.

"Join Secretary Rumsfeld in welcoming Marvel Comics and special guests Spiderman and Captain America as they distribute the new Special Limited Edition of Marvel's Salute to Our Troops Comic Book," reads the announcement over at AmericaSupportsYou.mil. "Thursday 1:00 - 2:30 pm. Pentagon Main Concourse."

Blast! Just missed it! Well, I'm sure there will be other chances, now that Marvel has "recently joined the Department of Defense's 'America Supports You' team," and put all those concerns to rest, once and for all.

(snapshot via Wonkette)

GOOGLESAT MANIA CONTINUES

It's been a week since Defense Tech reader DS dug through Google's archives of satellite pictures, and found a lonely airstrip out by Nevada's legendary Area 51. Apparently, you guys can't get enough of the pics. The tide of, um, interesting Googlesat images keeps pouring into Defense Tech HQ.

In honor of Passover, perhaps, reader DC uncovers this Hebraically-themed shape, carved out of the desert near Groom Lake. "It's a bombing target, set up to simulate a SAM [surface-to-air missile] or antiaircraft berm," says DS, examing U.S. Geological Survey diagrams. Strangely, the targets are often labelled with people's names. This one's called "David."

JC sends in this link, from near Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Zoom on the top right of the image, northwest of the base, and you'll find the "Test Track where they launch 'things' at Mach 10," JC claims. A little further over, he notices this cryptic black bar.

Taking a second look at one of the images from the last Googlesat onslaught, DS notices that the picture looks a whole lot like this overhead view of Nellis Air Force Base -- the headuqarters for the Predator robotic squadrons. DS even finds a close-up, showing planes on the runway.

"Are we ready for a Googlesat contest?" pants JA. "How about a search for an aircraft in flight?"

THERE'S MORE: Game over! Reader NW reminds us that Slashdotters found some mid-air plane pictures a couple of weeks back, including this one, where you can pan left, and watch the plane gain altitude.

AND MORE: This Googlesat picture of a plane in flight "is over my previous residence in Richardson, Texas," says McZ.

ARMY PAYROLL = POLITICAL FOOTBALL

If we're going to send hundreds of thousands of young men and women into harm's way, the least we could do is not screw with their paychecks.

Common sense – maybe. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld presumably disagrees. Back in December, regular Defense Tech readers will recall, Rummy's braintrust decided to dip into the Army's payroll into order to fund truck armor and other wartime expenses. Congress would make up the difference later on, they figured, with a second, emergency "supplemental" funding bill. The fact that the payroll accounts would dry up in May didn't seem to factor into the Pentagon calculus -- except maybe as a lever to force Congress into action.

But as senators loaded the $80 billion supplemental with pet projects -- $23 million for a baseball stadium in DC, $32 million for forest roads in Cali -- and the Pentagon added billions in long-term programs to the supposedly last-minute funding measure, its progress slowed.

So now, Rummy is getting all weepy, complaining to Congress that they're keeping soldiers from getting paid.

"Our folks out there need these funds," he moped in handwritten notes to Capitol Hill chieftains, obtained by CNN.

The Army has slowed its spending, so it can continue operations in Afghanistan and Iraq through early May when the funds are due to run out, Rumsfeld said...

Without [the supplemental's] passage, Rumsfeld warned he would have to move funds which would "seriously disrupt other activities," and he might have to invoke the "Feed and Forage Act" to keep the deployed troops operating.

The Feed and Forage Act allows the military departments to incur obligations in excess of available appropriations for clothing, subsistence, fuel, quarters, transportation and medical supplies, according to Pentagon officials.

I suppose it's nice that Rumsfeld cares enough about our soldiers to invoke emergency measures in order to clothe and feed 'em. But wouldn't it have been better not to sneak off with their paychecks in the first place?

THERE'S MORE: "Who in their right mind would vote to stop the production of armored Humvees?" asks Minstrel Boy. "The odds are 39% that it was your senator. That's right. "A simple measure [an ammendment to the supplemental] to keep the production of armored humvees at two shift capacity for a couple of extra months this summer passed by only a 22 vote margin; 61 to 39 in the Senate [last] week."

EUROPE'S KILLER DRONES

I'm expecting fashionably-sleek little wings and long, tapered missiles. The Italians are about to start testing a prototype killer drone of their own.

Rome-based Alenia Aeronautica is aiming "to fly its new Sky-X unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) technology demonstrator by the end of May," according to C4ISR Journal. "The 7-meter-long demonstrator — which has a wingspan of 6 meters, takeoff weight of 1,100 kilograms and maximum speed of 800 kilometers per hour — will undergo flight trials at Sweden’s Vidsel military test range."

The $43 million + drone is a technology demonstrator, mostly -- a test-bed to see how many decisions the plane can make on its own in midair.

Presumably, Sky-X's new-found smarts will be used to educate the larger, $360 million, pan-European UCAV that's in the works. France's Dassault Aviation is teaming up with Alenia, Saab, and a whole mess of other Continental defense contractors to build the Neuron killer drone.

In early sketches, the Neuron looks a whole lot like the X-47 UCAV that Northrop is developing for the U.S. Navy. But the Neuron might wind up being way meaner than its American counterpart. According this website -- and take this unconfirmed report with a giant rucksack full of salt -- "the aircraft may have... the eventual ability to launch nuclear warheads."

Robots with nukes? Tres mal, if you ask me. A prototype Neuron is supposed to take off from European runways starting in 2009.

COSTS M.I.A. FOR RADIO EFFORT

It's been nearly three years since Boeing won an Army contract to develop the next generation of military radios. But neither the company nor its government partners have any idea how many billions it's going to cost, in the end, to build the Joint Tactical Radio System -- "Jitters" for short. (I've seen estimates as low as $5 billion, and as high as $15 billion. That's a major spread.)

On Monday, the Army told Boeing in a letter than the mega-corporation had 30 days to give a good reason do to some 'splaining about why they let Jitters get so screwed up. The note also gave outsiders a peek into just how wrong Jitters has gone.

"It is impossible to predict with any confidence what the overall program will cost or the associated schedule," Defense Daily quotes the letter as saying. "Further, the government has not seen sufficient evidence of the contractor teams’ understanding of the scale of integration required for [Jitters' first phase] to ultimately achieve the program requirements. Nor has the industry team displayed sufficient ability to estimate a cost and schedule baseline and rigorously manage to that baseline."

As noted earlier, Jitters is not some minor experiment. It's a cornerstone to the Army's modernization plans. Without it, soldiers are stuck using a jury-rigged collection of radios to talk. Figuring out how much the damn things are going to cost seems like a most basic of first steps. Three years into the program, it shouldn't be that hard to take.

GITMO GOES GREEN

Happy belated Earth Day, enemy combatants! You may be staying here at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely. And lawyers might be a bit tricky to come by. But at least we won't be burning up a whole lot of oil to keep the lights on when we force you to stay awake! Nope, now we've got four brand-spanking-new, 275-foot tall wind turbines supplying the power around here, Defense Industry Daily says.

Together, the four turbines will generate 3,800 kw [kilowatts], and in years of typical weather the wind turbines will produce almost 8 million kilowatt-hours of electricity. They will reduce the consumption of 650,000 gallons of diesel fuel, reduce air pollution by 26 tons of sulfur dioxide and 15 tons of nitrous oxide, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 13 million pounds each year.

The new wind turbines will provide as much as 25% of the base's power generation during the high-wind months of late summer, and are expected to save taxpayers $1.2 million in annual energy costs.

Sweet!

ARMY READY TO UNPLUG RADIO PROJECT

Boeing has a whole lot more to worry about today than its weak earnings this quarter. Another giant Boeing defense contract is in deep, deep trouble.

First, the company came under fire for its shady, $23.5 billion deal to lease tankers to the Air Force -- and fleece $5.6 billion from taxpayers. Then, projected costs for the its hulking Army modernization effort, Future Combat Systems, grew from $92 billion to a possible $450 billion (all while operating under some quirky purchasing rules that kept government auditors from getting too nosy).

Now, Inside Defense reports, "the Army has put Boeing on notice that within 30 days, the government could terminate" the company's $15 billion contract to replace 750,000 old-school radios with software-based models.

The Army stopped work on the Joint Tactical Radio System ("Jitters") back in January -- partly because of technical screw-ups, partly because of trouble getting the National Security Agency to sign off on the encryption algorithms.

"The government is also concerned that the contractor won't be able to produce a radio that meets the Army's requirements for processing, heat dispersion, size, weight and power. In addition, the software remains immature, and the contractor lacks proper controls," Inside Defense says.

For all these reasons, Boeing now has 30 days to come up with a reason why the Army should not pull the plug on the Jitters contract.

If that happens, it won't just be a couple of Boeing execs who suffer the consequences. Soldiers today need a backpack full of radios to talk to their commanders and comrades. Jitters was supposed to be the way to reduce that load, and get a single communication system for G.I.s, marines, sailors, and airmen. But thanks to another blown defense contract, it looks like they're still going to be forced to carry that burden.

THERE'S MORE: The Washington Post's take is here.

TROUBLE FOR JOINT FIGHTER

Bad news for an already battered Joint Strike Fighter program: the New York Times is starting to throw punches, too.

The Joint Strike Fighter is [supposed] to be a jet fighter for all people and all places. For the Air Force, it will land on runways. A version for the Navy will be able to land on aircraft carriers. And the one for the Marines will land vertically to drop into global hot spots... Eight nations [are] joining with the United States to build it.

But now soaring ambitions are confronting hard realities. What was started five years ago as a streamlined way to do business appears to be going the way of most other Pentagon weapon programs: over budget, behind schedule and with big cuts in the number to be produced...In 2002, the Pentagon estimated the entire program would cost $192.5 billion. In the most recent Selected Acquisition Report, an internal semiannual report by the Pentagon on the costs of major weapon systems, that number had risen to $256.6 billion...

On paper, all the money is being poured into building a craft that would be the Chevrolet of the skies - affordable, dependable and ready to be sold in vast numbers. It is to replace the workhorse F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet, perhaps the most successful in aviation history...

[But] Tough design issues relating to the [replacement's] excessive weight have caused the program to fall two years behind schedule. Some of the international partners are becoming restless and have hinted they may not ultimately buy the plane. And a report last month, from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that the program was so complicated as to be "unexecutable."

BUSINESS = WAR, BUT NOT "WWIV"

We don't do much military strategy around here at Defense Tech. I don't think I'm smart enough for it, frankly.

But guys like John Robb and Thomas P.M. Barnett, they're different. Both of them have brains bigger than watermelons in July. And they both have had fascinating posts in the last week on the changing nature of war.

"Is business war?" Robb asks, over on his Global Guerillas blog. "It is in the world of post-industrial, post-state conflict."

Case in point: Equipment Express CEO Jeffrey Ake, who was taken hostage in Iraq earlier this month.

CEO kidnapping isn't new. It is common practice in Brazil, Mexico, etc. The difference in Iraq is the motive. In Iraq, it isn't purely financial gain. It is being used as a way to unravel the fledgling Iraqi government.

Here's why. America's second largest ally in Iraq isn't the UK. Not even close. Corporations like Halliburton provide almost as many trigger pullers and engineers as the US Army. They are the battalions of foot soldiers in Thomas Barnett's sys-admin force -- connecting Iraq to the US and the world.

This role converts CEOs into generals/colonels in the US globalization machine... They are now legitimate and highly prized targets.

That's because the CEO is so central -- too central, in fact -- to his company's success. It makes him "a single point of failure for the entire corporate organism," Robb says. With comapnies so important these days to the American war effort, this centrality makes CEOs "better targets than government or military officials."

Barnett, on the other hand, is focusing on what people are calling this struggle with Islamic extremism. Since 9/11, some administration officials – and their tag-along reporters – have are gotten used to calling this fight "World War IV" (the Cold War was III). Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map, says that's dead wrong. Click here to find out why.

The WWIV crowd wants to use this notion to rally the nation, to make it the defining cause of the next "greatest generation." In reality, the struggle has little to do with America, which may have started the current iteration of globalization… This struggle is currently about how Islam adapts itself to globalization. America is a distant "devil" in this fundamentally intra-civilizational process, a convenient scapegoat for past failures and current deficiencies, but nothing more. Trying to make this all about us is the height of historical arrogance, and a fundamental misreading of history. Globalization comes with rules, not a ruler. America plays globalization's bodyguard, but hardly its sole defender. Yes, 9/11 was the prompt for us to step up and assume our rightful strategic role, but let's argue this role rationally, without invoking any war clause that the unscrupulous will inevitably use to shout down opponents and their criticisms of current policy. There is no with-us-or-against-us dynamic at work here, but rather a with globalization-or-against-it choice that America makes for no nation, no culture, no individual.

Worse still, Barnett says, is that WWIV "is a self-serving concept that encourages us to rationalize failure."

All's fair in love and war, or so we are told. But nothing could be further from the truth, especially in this struggle, which will involve elements of warfare but hardly be dominated by them. Since warfare will be but a means and never the sole determinant of our achievement of ends, how we wage war will be incredibly important. It has to be contextualized within the larger framework of rule-set extension, meaning we fight and kill and die not just by example but for example. Demonstration of values means everything in this conflict, and so the rationale that some failure can be excused simply because "we're at war—damnit!" is wrong—very wrong.

We don't wage warfare simply to deny our enemies their desired future (although that is an outcome we seek), but rather to invite [other] societies to join our inevitable, shared future. Globalization will win out in the end, because connectivity trumps disconnectedness, and if we have confidence in that outcome, then we must temper our desire for short-term successes with a sense of playing out history's clock and understanding that if we cannot look our opponents in the eye upon any conflict's resolution, our victories will seem hollow indeed. There will be no globalization at the barrel of a gun, but rather at the acceptance of legitimate rule sets to which we likewise must submit in both wartime and peace. Abu Ghraib was wrong, as is Guantanamo, as is rendering terrorist suspects to Gap states which use torture. "WWIV" is easily distorted to excuse all these failures of judgment and action, and for that reason alone it does us far more harm than good.

RFID PASSPORT PLAN FIZZLING?

The State Department may be backing off a bit from its dumb-ass plan to embed radio frequency ID chips in passports, according to Wired News sleuth Kim Zetter.

Instead of freely broadcasting to the world the passport-holder's personal information, the State Department is mulling the idea of requiring the "RFID reader to provide a key or password before it could read data embedded on a... passport's chip. It would also encrypt data as it's transmitted from the chip to a reader so that no one could read the data if they intercepted it in transit."

Pretty Good Privacy creator Phil Zimmerman thinks the plan can "end the threat of skimming and eavesdropping" on the passports by potential evil-doers and identity thieves.

But anti-RFID jihadist Bill Scannell notes that the chips would still contain a code that says the passport belongs to an American. "And for a lot of bad guys," he adds, "that would be enough."

THERE'S MORE: Ryan Singel has the scoop on international reactions to the E-passports -- and what the government may be hiding about its RFID tests.

AND MORE: Awww, yeah. "Responding to fears raised by privacy advocates that new electronic passports might be vulnerable to high-tech snooping, the State Department intends to modify the design so that an embedded radio chip holding a digitized photograph and biographical information is more secure," the Times reports.

MORE GOOGLESAT FUN

Defense Tech reader DS got himself a shout-out in Slate last week, after finding an airstrip out by Nevada's infamous Area 51 in Google's database of satellite pictures. So reader McZ decided to raise the stakes, and sent in to Defense Tech HQ a whole heap of "airfields and strange structures" he discovered in the Googlesat archives.

"All these locations are generally in the same reservation as Groom Lake/Area 51," says JA, who, along with DS, was nice enough to take a gander at the pics for me. "Given that this was the location for a lot of the testing for the F117s and various other black craft, it makes sense to have local targets -- keeps you from having to fly over unsecure ground. But the lack of an identifiable golf course is highly suspicious for a supposed USAF facility."

Anyway, here are a half-dozen of the locations, and what DS and JA had to say about 'em:

latitude 37.363237, longitude -116.827273
DS: Appears to be the same as my airstrip...a target for aerial bombing.
JA: Yep, an airstrip in the middle of nowhere, a target or training site of some other sort.

37.705925, -116.659646
JA: It has the feel of a target about it. But there's a lack of infrastructure around. It just occurred to me to wonder whether any of this apparent plethora of target runways might be set up to resemble certain 'airfields of interest' in other parts of the world. As landmarks they're pretty hard to hide.
DS: Probably not a place you'd want to visit any time soon, since the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] sketch says in big letters "RADIOACTIVE AREA."

37.586145, -116.915330
JA: Definitely the recipient of numerous bombings.
DS: I think we're seeing here why our Air Force is so good at bombing the crap out of the enemy.

37.421686, -116.822768
DS: I'd have to say that this is definitely a bombing target. You can see the blast marks all around the strip.
JA: Target, decoy, or simulation. Large circle appears to have been done over top of earlier scrapings, possibly done for different purpose.

37.485010, -116.228459
DS: It's a strange circular structure -- a possible target range?
JA: It's a location directly north of the strip that got all this started would indicate a target or some other form of training site. There appear to be a couple of towers pointing NNW from the center of the thing. There's a couple of reasons to create a large bull's-eye. A seismographic test facility, perhaps?

37.628036, -116.848060 (pictured above)
DS: Five circles inside of a triangle. It looks fake. But it shows up on other images and has road to it. It has to be an ultra secret homing symbol to assist E.T. with landing...Ok, just kidding...it's a bombing target.
JA: Sand, Cat D9, Bored Airman, Time, some assembly required. It could possibly be another navigational target, but just how many of those do you need in a 10 square mile area? Yanking the former Soviet Union's intel guys' chains? Yanking the Roswell bunch's chain?

RUSSIA'S ROCKET DRONE

One of the nastier weapons in the Russian arsenal is getting an unmanned spotter. According to C4ISR Journal, the Smerch multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) can now be stuffed with a drone that spots a target 90 kilometers away in just four minutes.

The 92-pound unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, is fired in one of the Smerch's 300 mm rockets. Once it gets to its target, it can loiter for about a half-hour at an altitude of 600 to 1800 feet.

The UAV carries a TV camera and sensors that transmit imagery and coordinates with the MLRS, which in turn identifies a more precise target location.

Trials of the UAV have shown that it reduces by 25 percent the number of times rockets need to be fired to hit a target. “It is a precedent,” said Sergei Malevsky, with Smerch-maker Splav State Research and Production Association. “You can also have three in one: reconnaissance, strike and control...”

Malevsky lamented that due to financial constraints, it will be hard to market the product to the Russian armed forces.

“The most likely clients would be the countries that already operate Smerch,” said Marat Kenzhetayev, an expert with the Center for Arms Control here.

In service since 1987, Smerch was delivered to Algeria in 1999 and Kuwait in the mid-1990s.

NORTHROP WANTS LOS ALAMOS CASH

A second giant defense contractor is getting into the race to run the world's leading nuclear lab.

In a press release that just landed in my in-box, Northrop Grumman has announced that it will "leverage its expertise in advanced technology and large-scale program management to bid on the contract to manage Los Alamos National Laboratory."

Two weeks ago, Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor, made a similar announcement. But there are key differences between the two firms. Lockheed already has a bunch of experience running this kind of research center. The company has been operating Sandia National Laboratories for years -- and plucked Sandia chief Paul Robinson to head up its Los Alamos bid. Northrop says it is "assembling a world-class team of partners from the academic and business communities who offer particular expertise in areas such as scientific research." But it doesn't have the same track record as Lockheed.

Still, a bid from another defense industry heavyweight can't be good news for the University of California (UC), which has run Los Alamos for the Energy Department since the Oppenheimer era. Not long ago, it looked like UC would be the only bidder on the $2.2 billion per year contract -- despite a decade-long series of scandals at the lab. But the Energy Department upped the Los Alamos management fee by 500 percent. Companies can now turn a nice $73 million profit from running the lab. And after 60 years of having the waters to themselves, UC suddenly finds itself surrounded by sharks.

SNOOP PROGRAM RETURNS

Everyone at Defense Tech HQ did a little hat dance after we heard about the demise of MATRIX, the far-flung, state-run, terrorist-profiling database. But it looks like we danced too soon.

Officials in Florida -- who helped run the original data-mining effort -- have put out a call for information for MATRIX II, Defense Tech pal Ryan Singel reports in today's Wired News. And the sequel looks even more invasive than the original Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange.

That system "allowed law enforcement to search a centralized database populated with records collected by states -- including criminal history, driver's license photos, property deeds and fishing licenses -- and billions of commercial data records," Ryan writes. To that, MATRIX II's architects would like to see insurance and financial information added.

That's a giant red flag, Ryan notes.

Though scores of companies sell data-mining and searching technology, only ChoicePoint, currently under media and government scrutiny for allowing identity thieves to harvest hundreds of thousands of records on Americans, has search technology and centralized insurance claim information.

Supposedly, Florida officials need all this information to fight terror. But of the 1,866,202 original MATRIX searches between July 2003 and April 2005, "less than 3 percent were related to terrorism investigations," Ryan says.

Kinda makes you wonder what they'll do if MATRIX II ever gets off the ground.

GPS JUMPERS

He spent way, waytoo much time watching an awful, sports-themed porno called Blowin' the Whistle. But my college housemate Chris will be forever rad in my book. Because he would jump out of planes at 35,000 feet or higher -- braving sub-zero temperatures, sucking on oxygen tanks, free falling for minutes at a time. And then, when he'd finally splash down, he'd go rescue sailors and astronauts lost at sea.

All that was brutal, of course. But there was an equally large danger looming – that he'd miss his target entirely. You see, guys like Chris, doing HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) and HAHO (High Altitude High Opening) jumps, have to leap out of their planes during fog and rain and woolly-thick cloud cover. All of which makes it awfully tough to stick a target.

A new set of gadgets being developed at the Army's Natick Soldier Systems Center should help the Chrises of the world. The Military Free Fall Navigation System connects GPS guidance controls to a helmet heads-up display – "a tiny TV-like display mounted to one side of [a] goggle," Natick says. All of that is then plugged in to a PDA-based mission planner, which can recalculate drop zones and redirect parachutes in the sky, based on wind speed and direction. Natick hopes to field a prototype by 2006.

THERE'S MORE: The navigation system for jumpers runs off of many of the same technologies being used to make precision cargo airdrops. Defense Tech previewed that system – called, no joke, the "Sherpa" – here.

MISSILE MEN NEED WORK

What's with General Lance Lord looking for "alternative uses" for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles? Has "the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War have actually increased the importance of our Minuteman III ICBM," as he says? Or is the general just looking for something to keep his 9,000 misileers busy? The answer from Slate's Fred Kaplan: # 2.

THERE'S MORE: While Gen. Lord tries to keep his current crop of missile men engaged, the Pentagon is developing a next generation of hypersonic, intercontinental missiles. Here's what I wrote about project Falcon ("Force Application and Launch from the CONtinental United States") back in '03.

AREA 51'S HIDDEN AIRSTRIP?

By now, most of you have probably heard the news that Google has added satellite pictures to their maps. And that those eyes in the sky have taken some pretty amazing pictures -- an erupting volcano, a Baghdad firefight, a Russian sub trapped in ice.

Defense Tech reader DS was rifling through Google's satellite database the other day, and found what he says is "an unknown facility" near the infamous Groom Lake military complex -- the place called "Area 51" by tin-foil hatters worldwide.

DS' discovery, at latitude 37.399263 and longitude -116.223850…

is an isolated airstrip with a road connecting it to what appears to be an underground facility of some sort. I pulled up the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] sketches on the area, and it shows no identifying information, however it does reveal what appears to be a tunnel system connecting the various buildings in the underground complex... If you or someone in your circle can shed some light on what this is, it would be interesting I'm sure.

THERE'S MORE: Here's a guy who claims to have Googled his way into pictures of Area 51 itself (via Blogs of War).

SEARCHMILITARY.COM

The overlords at Military.com has come up with another cool app -- a Google-powered search that lets you "find everything military." That means hunting for guys in your old unit, combing through .mil websites, and digging for post-service jobs just got a whole bunch easier. End of plug.

REMOTE CONTROL WACK-A-MOLE

I've been meaning to write for weeks about the Army's new, remotely-operated mine system. Defense Tech pal (and Project on Government Oversight investigator) Nick Schwellenbach finally decided to save me the trouble. Here's his rundown...

Using laptops, US soldiers will soon be able to remotely whack enemies approaching their bases with radio-controlled mines, according to the AP on Monday [via Schneier on Security].

Sound familiar? It should. Iraqi insurgents have been using a similar tactic with improvised explosive devices that are activated with garage dooropeners.

Human Rights Watch has pooh-poohed the system, called 'Matrix' (not to be confused with the movie or the multi-state data-mining exchange), an off-shoot of the 'Spider' smart mine program. "[W]e're putting a 19-year-old soldier in the position of pushing a button when a blip shows up on a computer screen,'" said HRW's senior researcher Mark Hiznay. [Doesn't the Army have 19 year-olds pulling triggers all the time? – ed.]

Bruce Schneier doesn't think this is a bad thing, "With conventional landmines, the man is out of the loop as soon as he lays the mine. Even a 19-year-old seeing a blip on a computer screen is better than a completely automatic system."

Yet, two problems stick out. Could accidental radio interference or clever insurgents trigger the mines? And it might be a bit of a "brain teaser" figuring out which mine to trigger if, say, "you've got 500 of these mines out there [and] the clock's ticking," according to John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org.

-- Nick Schwellenbach

THERE'S MORE: "Can't get enough of mines?" Nick asks. "Check out Defense Tech's coverage of mines that move and communicate with each other to inflict 'maximum harm' and on temporary mines that stop working within 'hours or days' to reduce their long-term danger.

FAB FIVE

For some reason -- probably just plain sloth -- I never seem to get around to linking to these top-notch blogs. That'll change, starting now. Say hello to Airborne Combat Engineer, Murdoc Online, Armchair Generalist, Winds of Change, and the wickedly-funny Ace of Spades. Interesting reads, all. I don't agree with everything these folks say. But I sure do like how they say it.

STOP! OR MY MONKEY WILL SHOOT!

"Can you imagine having your house searched and the cop who walks in with the Kevlar vest using the two-way radio is a monkey?" asks TalkLeft.

Officer Sean Truelove is spearheading the [Mesa Police] department's request to purchase and train a capuchin monkey, considered the second smartest primate to the chimpanzee. The department is seeking about $100,000 in federal grant money to put the idea to use in Mesa SWAT operations...

Weighing only 3 to 8 pounds with tiny humanlike hands and puzzle-solving skills, Truelove said it could unlock doors, search buildings and find suicide victims on command. Dressed in a Kevlar vest, video camera and two-way radio, the small monkey would be able to get into places no officer or robot could go.

It has been a little over a year since Truelove filed a grant proposal with the U.S. Department of Defense under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and he is still waiting for word.

BLOG BEG: STRYKERS

The fine folks at the Project on Government Oversight want to hear from soldiers who've served in the controversial Stryker armored vehicle. Give 'em a shout at defense@pogo.org.

COMMANDO-HIDING CREAM

"The growing use of inexpensive, and commercially available, thermal cameras (that can see at night by detecting body or engine heat), has created more risk for commandos… who typically operate at night, and use stealth," says StrategyPage.

A Greek company, Intermat, has jumped in with clothing, and even a face cream, that makes thermal cameras much less effective. In fact, anyone wearing clothing made from the Intermat material, and wearing the anti-thermal cream, is barely visible to a thermal camera, and would probably be missed by guards glancing at a bunch of monitors showing what thermal cameras outside are scanning. This can work both ways, giving terrorists an edge, but Intermat is a military supplier, and sells only to legitimate military customers. So, for the moment, the troops retain the edge.

RAPTOR READY FOR WAR -- MAYBE

The controversial F/A-22 "Raptor" stealth fighter "is months away from being declared war-ready, but the Pentagon is still trying to decide where it fits in its vision of future warfare," observes the Washington Post. (In a related video, a Raptor squadron commander says his group will be ready to fight in December of '05.)

The Bush administration has proposed cutting $10 billion from the program over the next five years, leaving enough to buy fewer than half the 381 planes the Air Force says it needs. And the plane will have to compete, in an age of budget deficits, with plans to refurbish the Army and fund an even more expensive fighter program, the Joint Strike Fighter, which is still years from delivery.

How many Raptors the Pentagon buys -- no one expects the program to be killed -- is part of a debate over what kind of wars the nation's leaders should fear most: a large-scale battle with another industrial power, where the Raptor could dominate, or skirmishes in rogue states such as Iran or Syria, where ground forces would lead. (via Sploid)

FUTURE NAVY SINKING?

"The Navy's new destroyer, the DD(X), is becoming so expensive that it may end up destroying itself," the Times' defense tech reporter, Tim Weiner, writes today. "The Navy once wanted 24 of them. Now it thinks it can afford 5 - if that."

The price of the Navy's new ships, driven upward by old-school politics and the rusty machinery of American shipbuilding, may scuttle the Pentagon's plans for a 21st-century armada of high-technology aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines.

Shipbuilding costs "have spiraled out of control," the Navy's top admiral, Vern Clark, told Congress last week, rising so high that "we can't build the Navy that we believe that we need in the 21st century."

The first two DD(X)'s are now supposed to total $6.3 billion, according to confidential budget documents, up $1.5 billion. A new aircraft carrier, the CVN-21, is estimated at $13.7 billion, up $2 billion. The new Virginia-class submarine now costs $2.5 billion each, up $400 million. All these increases have materialized in the last six months.

The Navy says it can make do with fewer big ships patrolling the oceans. It wants more fast boats and aircraft to fight offshore and upriver, a speedier force to counter terror. But Congress, seeking to sustain America's shipyards, wants as many big ships as possible.

Admiral Clark, who plans to retire later this year, says both strategies could be sunk by soaring costs.

"MATRIX" UNLOADED

Score one for the good guys. A project to find enemies of the state in the credit card records, marriage licenses, and vehicle registration data of avergage citizens appears to be over.

At one time, at least a dozen states had jacked into the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or MATRIX. Dozens more were considering participation in the four billion-record database. But then came the howls from privacy advocates. And the revelations that MATRIX's founder had been linked to Bahamian drug smugglers in the '80s.

In the end, only Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and Connecticut were left. And now that $12 million in federal grant money has run out, it seems unlikely that these states will continue with the project.

“This may be the biggest victory for privacy since we and our allies from across the political spectrum shut down Total Information Awareness,” the ACLU's Barry Steinhardt said in a statement, referring to a similarly Owrellian Pentagon program shuttered by Congress in 2003.

TOUGHEST DRONE, DEFENDED

Navy roboticist H.R. "Bart" Everett is not happy with me, or with a post I wrote back in March on his creation, the ROBART III.

"Maybe there's been a less intimidating guard drone developed by the U.S. military. But I haven't seen it," I said then of the 2XL-looking robot prototype, designed to detect intruders, and pop 'em with a simulated dart gun.

Here's what Everett had to say this morning about Toughest. Drone. Ever, my "put-down article on ROBART III:"

1. This platform is a research prototype only.

2. It was never intended to leave the laboratory environment.

3. It serves as a tech-base development tool for hardened production systems which are designed for the real world.

4. The production version of ROBART is called the Mobile Detection Assessment Response System (MDARS).

5. There is an indoor version and an outdoor version, which you can see at www.spawar.navy.mil/robots/.

6. As a research platform, ROBART III is one of the most sophisticated mobile robots in the world.

7. It has been featured numerous times on the History and Discovery Channels.

8. The basic thrust of the research is an ability to enter and map a completely unknown environment, without getting lost.

9. The secondary thrust is to develop a vision-controlled weapons system that is self targeting [sic].

10. The pneumatically-powered non-lethal weapon is for demonstration purposes only.

11. It supports the vision-based weapon control research without undue risk to personnel.

12. The third research thrust is to develop a natural language interface that eliminates the need for a robotic controller.

13. You can read about the technical details at http://www.spawar.navy.mil/robots/pubs/spie5609-33.pdf.

14. In trying to be cute, you have seriously misled your readers, and lost your technical credibility.

THERE'S MORE: Ah, what are friends for? Over in the Defense Tech forum, the Arms Control Wonk gets my back. And gets nasty.

PENTAGON'S HACKERS

"The world's most formidable hacker posse."

That's how Wired News describes the Pentagon's Joint Functional Component Command for Network Warfare. The highly classified U.S. Strategic Command unit is "charged with defending all Department of Defense networks" -- and with attacking other countries' computers, too.

BLOG BEG: E.O.D.

I'm slowly starting to put together a story on explosive ordnance disposal, or E.O.D. If you or any of your buddies have ever been in the bomb-defusing business, give me a holler: defense@defensetech.org. It'll all be kept off-the-record, unless you tell me otherwise.

DRAGON LADY'S "MASSACRE"

"Just when you thought you’d heard the end of the illegal escapades of former Boeing exec Darleen Druyun, along comes another chapter that includes allegations of a 'clean up' and deletion' of documents," the Project on Government Oversight notes. "Government auditors are calling this one the '15 September Massacre.'"

Earlier this year, Druyun began serving a six-month sentence at Club Fed for felony conspiracy in relation to her illegally taking a job with Boeing Company while overseeing a fat Air Force tanker lease contract... Since the tanker scandal Druyun also has been suspected of steering other weapons contracts to Boeing and other defense contractors – more than you can count on your two hands. Druyun’s name surfaced again during testimony Thursday afternoon before the Senate Armed Services’ Airland Subcommittee...

The man pointing the finger at Druyun this time was Daniel I. Gordon, [with] the [Congressional investigators at the] Government Accountability Office. Gordon led an investigation... into the awarding of contracts that the former No. 2 Air Force acquisition official supervised – one a small diameter bomb contract and the other a C-130 avionics modernization contract. Gordon’s investigation concluded that the two contracts were improperly awarded.

During the C-130 Avionics contract, Gordon said, [Druyun] requested that contract evaluators first come to Washington D.C. on September 15, 2000 to discuss the “status” of their evaluations of who should get the contract. During that meeting and four subsequent meetings, Druyun “expressly or implicitly directed multiple changes to the evaluators’ ratings, many of which favored Boeing,” Gordon said. Then following the request for final proposal revisions, the contracting officer (not named in the testimony) sent an email to a recipient list that included “virtually everyone” involved in the source selection process, directing them to “clean up” and “delete” various portions of the evaluation record.

With so many big Defense Department projects going so wrong, it's no wonder McCain is now calling a "broad review" of the Pentagon's system for buying things.

The sleazy Druyun affair is just one "glaring example of a management and oversight failure in our acquisition process," McCain said at an Armed Services subcommittee hearing yesterday. "Clearly, we need to examine the whole procurement process as it works today in the Department of Defense."

"MINORITY REPORT," FOR REAL

Sometimes, military researchers like to pretend that they aren't grabbing ideas from science fiction. Then there are times like these:

A computer interface inspired by the futuristic system portrayed in the movie Minority Report... could soon help real military personnel deal with information overload.

The film sees characters call up and manipulate video footage and other data in mid-air after donning a special pair of gloves. Now defence company Raytheon, based in Massachusetts, is working on a real version and has even employed John Underkoffler, the researcher who proposed the interface to the makers of the film.

"Pamela Barry, then a Raytheon Co. engineer, had a eureka moment while watching the... sci-fi flick," the Wall Street Journal reports. "Ms. Barry believed such a system could be a boon to the military as it tries to parse reams of information in the heat of a battle."

Commanders are increasingly unable to process the massive flow of intelligence from satellites, sensors and soldiers. To tackle that challenge, Mr. Underkoffler and Raytheon are devising ways to visually display and manage the data in a user-friendly way to quicken combat responses...

"Keystrokes and mouse clicks limit your degree of freedom," says Mr. Underkoffler , who earned his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By communicating with a computer through gestures, hands can do as much as five or six mice, he adds. "Your hand becomes a Swiss Army knife," he says.

Raytheon, which has licensed Mr. Underkoffler's technology and unveiled it to Air Force and intelligence officials last week, aims to adapt it for use in future command centers. The idea is to streamline the disjointed and limited functions currently performed by scores of soldiers manning banks of individual PCs. In Raytheon's vision, real-time video and maps will be fused with database information on large interactive screens to assess battle situations.

Raytheon has no plans to use psychically-sensitive crack babies to parse the information. Or, at least, not yet.

UK'S CHICKEN-POWERED NUKE

Like me, you've probably stayed awake countless nights wondering, "Did the Brits ever make plans for a nuclear landmine, powered by chickens?"

Well, dear reader, I'm here to tell you that the answer is yes. At least, according to the UK's National Archives.

Conceived during the Cold War, the seven tonne device was the size of small truck and was designed to be buried or submerged by a British Army retreating from Soviet forces. The landmine had a plutonium core surrounded by high explosive and would have been detonated by remote control or timer, causing mass destruction and contamination over a wide area to prevent subsequent enemy occupation.

Scientists working on the project realised that the bomb could fail in winter if vital components become too cold, so they explored ways of keeping the inner workings warm. One proposal put forward consisted of filling the casing of the nuke with live chickens, who would give off sufficient heat, prior to suffocating or starving to death, to keep the delicate explosive mechanism from freezing. Despite the potential importance of chickens to the project, the mine was codenamed 'Blue Peacock'.

"The mines were to be left buried or submerged by the British Army of the Rhine. They would then have been detonated by wire from up to five kilometres away or by an eight-day clockwork timer. If disturbed or damaged, they were primed to explode within 10 seconds," New Scientist explains.

Each mine was expected to produce an explosive yield of 10 kilotons, about half that of the atom bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945...

Blue Peacock was to consist of a plutonium core surrounded by a sphere of high explosives, all encased in steel. The design was based on Blue Danube, a free-fall nuclear bomb weighing several tonnes that was already in service with the Royal Air Force. But Blue Peacock, weighing over seven tonnes, would have been much more cumbersome.

The steel casing was so large that it had to be tested outdoors in a flooded gravel pit near Sevenoaks in Kent. If questions were asked, Nuclear historian David Hawkings says the army's cover story was that it was a container for "an atomic power unit for troops in the field". In July 1957, army leaders decided to order 10 Blue Peacock mines and to station them in Germany.

Hawkings describes their plans for deploying the weapons in the event of an imminent Soviet invasion as "somewhat theatrical". One problem was that the mines might not work in winter if they became too cold, so the army proposed wrapping them in fibreglass pillows.

In the end, the risk from radioactive fallout would have been "unacceptable", says Hawkings, and hiding nuclear weapons in an allied country was deemed "politically flawed". As a result, the Ministry of Defence cancelled Blue Peacock in February 1958. (via Linkfilter and Improbable Research)

BLIMPS FOR MARINES IN IRAQ

We're all huge -- huge! -- fans of blimps here at Defense Tech HQ. So when the word came down from Defense Daily that the Marines are starting to use aerostats as communications relays in Iraq, it brought a chorus of huzzahs in the newsroom.

The blimps, called the Marine Airborne Re-Transmission Systems (MARTS), will receive signals through a fiber-optic tether. Then, the airships will transmit messages up to 100 miles away, via UHF and VHF frequencies. Troops on the ground, as well as pilots in the air, will be able to communicate through the blimps.

One airship, first tested in February, is being deployed to Iraq right now (exactly where, the Corps won't say). A second is being readied. The Marines are scrounging up $14 million to buy four more. It may sound like a lot, but it's cheaper than building radio towers -- and having Marines protect those towers.

A MARTS blimp "can run for two weeks before it would need refueling, and can remain afloat in winds up to 50 mph," according to DD. With a combination kevlar/mylar skin, the aerostat can even "handle small arms fire... function[ing] with a 4-inch diameter hole."

MARTS was made by Columbia, Maryland's TCOM LP, which built some of the border patrol blimps that are now watching over southern Arizona and the Gulf of Mexico. And the Army already has a pair of aerostats in Iraq, looking out for insurgents. So it's only natural that "the Marine Corps is looking at putting surveillance equipment on future generations of the blimp," says DD. "It would be just a matter of adding another box to include infrared radar."

PENTAGON BUDGET GOES BLACK

It's like the Cold War all over again. The Defense Department is now spending more of its money on "black," or classified, programs than at any time since 1988.

19 percent of the Pentagon's acquistion budget -- the money to research and buy things -- is being devoted to super-secret items, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. That comes out to about 28 billion dollars, almost double what was spent in 1995.

"The record for classified acquisition programs has been mixed," CSBA's Steven Kosiak argues.

Some successful and effective weapon systems were developed and even produced as black programs. These include the F-117 stealth fighter and the B-2 stealth bomber. On the other hand, some classified programs have had troubled histories. Restrictions placed on access to classified funding have meant that DoD and Congress typically exercise less oversight over classified programs than unclassified ones. This lower level of scrutiny, coupled with the compartmentalization of information generally associated with classified efforts has contributed to performance problems and cost growth in a number of programs, such as the Navy’s ill-fated A-12 attack aircraft program. (via Secrecy News)

THERE'S MORE: "The Defense Department is unable to track how it spent tens of millions of dollars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the U.S. war on terrorism, Congress's top investigator said on Wednesday." (Thanks to RC for the tip.)

DEADLY FLU SHIPS; BIOSAFETY M.I.A.

This is a nightmare. But it's not a surprise.

A dangerous strain of the flu virus that caused a worldwide pandemic in 1957 was sent to thousands of laboratories in the United States and around the world, triggering a frantic effort to destroy the samples to prevent an outbreak, health officials revealed yesterday.

With the government tossing out biodefense research grants like Louisville Sluggers on Bat Day, universities and private companies by the dozen have been building labs to handle the nastiest bacteria and viruses around. As a result, "hundreds of inexperienced researchers [are being drawn] into work with hazardous organisms," the Times observed a few months back.

But the federal government is largely leaving oversight of these labs up to the colleges and companies themselves, the bio-watchers at the Sunshine Project note. Each institution is supposed to be policed by a home-grown "biosafety committee." But, as of last summer, at least, "some three dozen laboratories" receiving federal biodefense dollars hadn't even set their committees up.

When these committees are active, they often work in secret. So no one from the outside the lab has a good idea what's going on inside. There's little, if any, independent safety advice. And that makes it easier for potentially-deadly mistakes -- like distributing an ultra-dangerous flu strain to thousands of sites scattered around the globe.

"As if recent tularemia incidents, SARS escapes, and the myriad of other accidents in recent years were not enough," writes the Sunshine Project's Edward Hammond. "When will researchers and regulators come to grips with the inevitability of human error and equipment failures and restrict research and require transparency (as a restraining measure) - by law - as is so obviously required?"

THERE'S MORE: POGO has put together a creepy timeline of biosafety mishaps over the last three years.

CHINA THREAT, ROUND THREE

Does China's People's Liberation Army have the teeth to chomp down on Taiwan? Responding to a twitchy New York Times story from last week, China-watcher Jeffrey Lewis said no. But Jane's Defence Weekly thinks the answer may soon be yes.

An emerging consensus among long-time PLA observers, including within the US intelligence community, is that the Chinese military has successfully achieved a far-reaching qualitative advancement in its war-fighting capabilities since the beginning of this decade. The PLA is quickly becoming an increasingly credible threat against Taiwan and could even begin to pose a challenge to US military preponderance in East Asia in the next decade if the momentum is sustained.

The country's leadership has given strong backing to the PLA's transformation and force-regeneration efforts, which has translated into a hefty and sustained increase in military spending over the past few years. The officially published defence budget has risen on average by 15 per cent over the past five years from ¥121 billion ($15 billion) in 2001 to ¥220 billion last year...

The Pentagon and US intelligence community estimates that these published figures represent between one-third and one half of actual Chinese military expenditures.

Click here to keep reading Jane's analysis of the Chinese military -- its leaner, better-trained ground forces, its growing missile array, and its next-gen ships and subs.

The PLA is engaged in a rapid build up of necessary assets that includes amassing a sizeable short- and medium-range ballistic missile force, cruise missiles and special operations units and strengthening its strategic surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting capabilities. The Taiwanese Defence Ministry in March 2005 reported that the PLA had deployed around 700 ballistic missiles in the vicinity of the Taiwan Strait and was also quickly building an arsenal of at least 200 Hong-Niao cruise missiles within the next year…

To be able to fight high-tech wars, the PLA is shifting its recruitment system from a reliance on poorly educated conscripts, who now serve only two years, to emphasise the development of a professional long-serving cadre of troops…. The PLA will reduce its manpower from 2.5 million to 2.3 million soldiers by the end of this year. This comes on top of a reduction of 500,000 troops in the late 1990s….

[With the troops that are left] "the PLA has shifted focus towards amphibious operations for a significant part of the ground forces", Dennis Blasko, a former US Army attaché in China, points out. This has included the reorganisation of two motorised infantry divisions in the Nanjing and Guangzhou Military Regions into amphibious infantry divisions and the transfer of another infantry division to the navy to form a second marine brigade in the late 1990s.

Blasko estimates that around a quarter of all PLA manoeuvre units, which number around 20 divisions or brigades, plus supporting artillery and air-defence units, have participated in training exercises for amphibious operations…

[Meanwhile] The PLA Navy (PLAN) is rapidly transforming itself from a coastal force into a bluewater naval power with a force modernisation drive that is unprecedented in the post-Cold War era. "The range and number of warships the Chinese navy is acquiring can be compared to the Soviet Union's race to become an ocean-going navy to rival the US in the 1970s," said a China-based foreign naval attaché.

The US intelligence community has reported that since 2001, the Chinese shipbuilding industry has produced 23 new amphibious assault ships and 13 conventional attack submarines.

The current top priority for the PLAN is the replacement of its fleet of outdated Soviet-era conventional and nuclear submarines with five new advanced models of domestically developed and imported Russian vessels…

The long-awaited Type 093 nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) is also close to entering into service, with the lead vessel already undergoing sea trials and expected to be accepted by the navy this year. There are reports that three hulls of this new class have already been laid…

The Type 094 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, said to be an elongated version of the Type 093 and equipped with JL-2 sea-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, is reported to have been launched last July and could be operational within the next couple of years. This is well ahead of Pentagon forecasts, which had previously estimated that the Type 094 would not enter service until towards the end of this decade.

(Thanks to reader JF for the tip.)

EX-SECDEF: RESEARCH CUTS HURT SECURITY

It's not just the geeks who are worried. Last week, computer scientists voiced concerns about the Pentagon's retreat from funding blue-sky research. In a Times op-ed today, former Defense Secretary William Perry and CIA chief John Deutch say they're nervous, too. And not just about the Defense Department's shrinking purse for open-ended, basic research. But about the larger step back from the future that the Pentagon seems to be taking.

Of the Pentagon's $419.3 billion budget request for next year, only about $10.5 billion - 2 percent - will go toward basic research, applied research and advanced technology development. This represents a 20 percent reduction from last year, a drastic cutback that threatens the long-term security of the nation. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should reconsider this request, and if he does not, Congress should restore the cut...

Of course, the administration and Congress need to make tough budget choices. But to shift money away from the technology base to pay for Iraq, other current military operations or research on large, expensive initiatives, is to give priority to the near term at the expense of the future. This is doubtful judgment, especially at a time when the nature of the threat confronting America is changing. New threats, like catastrophic terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, urgently call for new technology.

SAMSPADE.COM

Would you be jealous if your spouse started smooching other people -- in an computer game?

"For some players of Second Life, a massive multi-player online role-playing game, such virtual infidelity is a step too far," the BBC says. "So to keep an eye on their loved ones, some spouses are paying real money to in-game detectives, to snoop on the character... used by their real world partner." (via Geek Press)

THERE'S MORE: Wagner James Au's original story, which inspired the BBC piece, is here. Clive has some thoughts on cybercheating, too.

AND MORE: The Washington Post has a long feature today on the Army's new breed of interactive training. "This is a sim of judgment calls. There is no right or wrong answer."

SENATORS LARD UP WAR BILL

It's bad enough that the Pentagon has crammed an $80 billion bill, supposedly meant to cover last-minute contigencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, with all kinds of military pork.

Now, "senators [have] seized a chance to pack pet projects into an unstoppable bill, adding provisions dealing with oil drilling, forest services, a new baseball stadium for Washington and economic assistance to Palestinians," the Times reports.

Senator Thad Cochran, the Mississippi Republican who is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the draft "a straightforward bill" that "meets the needs of our fighting forces overseas" and "addresses emergency requirements here at home."

His own addition to the spending bill was a measure giving Mississippi control of the mineral rights and the ability to permit certain drilling below the Gulf Islands National Seashore in the Gulf of Mexico. Some environmental groups have opposed the measure.

In a statement, Mr. Cochran said that the provision "removes the cloud of confusion over who owns the mineral rights to the Mississippi barrier islands" while "allowing the National Park Service to continue its good work in preserving the natural and historic features of the Gulf Island National Seashore."

Democrats charged Republicans with using emergency supplemental bills to circumvent the budget debate. "The White House has turned on its head the definition of an emergency supplemental appropriation," Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, said. "This is not truth in budgeting. Tactics like this hide the real costs of the war."

SANDIA CHIEF LEADING LOS ALAMOS BID

For a while, it looked like no one would challenge the University of California for control of Los Alamos, the world's leading nuclear lab. Not any more.

Lockheed Martin, the country's biggest defense contractor, is prepping for a monster bid for Los Alamos. And the company has tapped the longtime chief of Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos' more buttoned-down sister to the south, to head the effort.

Lockheed already runs Sandia for the Energy Department. And for nearly ten years, the former Los Alamos physicist C. Paul Robinson, has been the company's point man there. It's been a relatively calm period for the Sandia, with only a faint whiff of the corruption and shaky security that has stunk up Los Alamos over the last decade.

But Sandia has also missed the flashes of scary brilliance that the world has come to expect from Los Alamos. Sandia is known more as an engineering center.

Last August, Lockheed dropped out of the running for Los Alamos. The retainer for running the lab was puny. And early drafts of the request for bids seemed heavily slanted in California's favor.

But "Lockheed Martin jumped back into the fray after the DOE proposed changes to the Los Alamos contract, including increasing the manager's fee from 0.6 percent of the lab's $2 billion annual budget to 3 percent," the Contra Costa Times says.

And now, it looks like a second discouraged Los Alamos bidder, the University of Texas, may be coming back to the table, as well. Lockheed and Texas officials are talking about teaming up to run the lab.

In recent years, many Los Alamos scientists have been vocal in their distaste for both Texas and Lockheed. "We've established a reputation as an idea lab, and I think you'd lose that if the management went to a corporation," Los Alamos nonproliferation scientist Bill Priedhorsky told me back in 2003. "I think you'd see the better people flee."

This morning, someone posted to Los Alamos employee blog LANL: The Real Story a Photoshopped memo from Paul Robinson. He's wearing a Hitler moustache in it.

But attitudes may be softening, a bit. "I'm mid-career, and frankly am ready to work for a manager that's competent, deft, astute, respected, efficient, rational, self-disciplined, and understands what we do and how hard it is to do it," writes one LANL: The Real Story poster. "LockMart & C. Paul Robinson sure look like they got a good opportunity to fulfill that potential."

"What a difference a year makes!" another writes. "Can you imagine anyone at LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] saying a year ago, 'Gee, I wish LockMart would take over from that incompetent bunch at UC...' Now, we hear, 'Paul! Save us! Bring in some sanity from Lockheed Martin! You can even change our name to Sandia National Laboratories at Los Alamos! We don't care! Just SAVE us!'

REPLACEMENT ARM, GOOD AS NEW

Thought-controlled robotic limbs were only the beginning.

Scientists have had a string of remarkable successes lately, taking signals from the brains of monkeys and men, and using them to move mechanical arms.

Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research division, now wants to ratchet that work up about ten notches, by developing a "neurally controlled artificial limb that will restore full motor and sensory capability to upper extremity amputee patients. This revolutionary prosthesis will be controlled, feel, look and perform like the native limb."

So, basically, what Luke Skywalker gets in Empire Strikes Back, after Darth chops off his hand. Except, researchers won't have a long, long time to get this limb ready. Darpa wants the robo-arm stat -- in four years or less.

The limb would have to be wired directly into the peripheral nervous system, instead of the brain-controlled arms being demonstrated today, Darpa tells researchers interested in working on this "Revolutionizing Prosthetics" project. Under agency guidelines, the arm will need enough finesse to pick up a raisin or to write in longhand. It needs to be sensitive enough for the wearer to handle day-to-day tasks in the dark. And the limb will have to be strong enough to lift 60 pounds at a time.

These are beyond ambitious goals, and even the even the big thinkers at Darpa acknowledge it. Breakthrough research in "neural control, sensory input, advanced mechanics and actuators, and prosthesis design and integration" will all be needed, the agency says in a call for proposals. Neuroscientists, roboticists, engineers, occupational therapists, and surgeons in the neural, orthopedic, reconstructive subspecialties will have to chip in.

"Revolutionizing Prosthetics" is so far-out that Darpa is taking the unusual step of hedging its bets, and running a parallel, more down-to-earth program.

The vision of the Prosthesis 2007 program is to leverage recent research advances in neural sensing, control systems, actuation, power storage and distribution, freeform manufacturing, neural control, microfabrication, sensory feedback, flexure and transmission design, signal processing, and information science to dramatically improve the capability of upper extremity prosthetic limbs beyond those that are currently available commercially. This vision will be realized by increasing the range of motion, strength, endurance, and dexterity of upper extremity prosthetic devices. The final product [an above-the-elbow prosthetic arm] must be ready for human clinical trials… [and] sufficiently mature to enter the appropriate approval processes for general medical use by the end of 24 months."

Sounds like a snap.

CHINA THREAT? NOT!

You see that New York Times' story, three posts down, on China's growing threat to Taiwan? Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis, who's spent a whole lot of time studying the Chinese military, isn't buying it.

All the unclassified modeling of a PRC-ROC [China-Taiwan] throwdown suggests the Chinese need a lot more than a few more amphibious ships and submarines to make a run at Taiwan. [The Pentagon's annual assessment] Chinese Military Power in 2003 captured some of the difficulty in mounting an amphibious operation when it noted:

However, the PLA’s [China's People's Liberation Army] ability to project force beyond China’s land borders, while improving, remains limited due to a shortage of amphibious ships, heavy cargo carrying aircraft, long-range transports, and other logistical shortcomings. Even though the PLA has improved its amphibious attack capabilities in recent years, there are few signs that Beijing is serious about increasing the PLA’s heavy lift capacity or conducting sustained ground operations abroad in the near term.

The New York Times' description of the intelligence report isn't very, well, descriptive -- I'd like to know what kind of amphibious assault ships and whether they are augmenting or replacing existing assets. Either way, [what's described in] the report doesn't seem like enough to fundamentally changes the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait.

Chinese Military Power in 2004 did allude to amphibious and submarine construction, but still concludes that "Most of the PLA’s landing craft are small and incapable of operating on the open ocean; its larger landing ships are old and in need of replacement. Since the mid-1990s, a number of newly designed landing ships have been under construction; however, the numbers currently believed to be under construction most likely are insufficient to support a sizable amphibious operation in the next 5 years."

THERE'S MORE: Be sure to see Jeffrey tear AEI "scholar" Dan Blumenthal a new one over Beijing's alleged "marketing to the mullahs." Here's a one-sentence sample: "Blumenthal’s article starts strong — which is to say that it begins with a falsifiable thesis statement." Read the rest.

FORUM = FUN!

Overzealous military marketeers; ships and sailors in matching shark-skin outfits; and what border vigilantes are really all about. That's just a taste of what they're debating on the Defense Tech forum right now. If you haven't checked it out in a while, go click on over. You'll be glad you did.

RFID PASSPORT: "SHOOT ME!"

When privacy provocateur Bill Scannell called me in my Tombstone, Arizona hotel room a few weeks back, ranting about the State Department's decision to imbed radio frequency ID chips into passports, I didn't pay him much mind. New passports are already machine readable, I thought. So what if they can be read from a little further away?

I guess I can be a little thick sometimes. Especially when it's late at night, and I'm on assignment. Because after reading this story in Salon, I get it. The dangers of RFID passports are pretty freakin' obvious.

The reason RFID is more controversial than, say, a bar code is that the data on the chip is read by a remote reader. The State Department asserts that the tags it will use can be read from only 4 inches away. But privacy advocates say there's no way the State Department can guarantee that.

As security expert Bruce Schneier writes on his blog: "Unfortunately, RFID chips can be read by any reader, not just the ones at passport control. The upshot of this is that travelers carrying around RFID passports are broadcasting their identity. Think about what that means for a minute. It means that passport holders are continuously broadcasting their name, nationality, age, address and whatever else is on the RFID chip. It means that anyone with a reader can learn that information, without the passport holder's knowledge or consent. It means that pickpockets, kidnappers and terrorists can easily -- and surreptitiously -- pick Americans or nationals of other participating countries out of a crowd."

There are no plans to encrypt the data on the tags in passports. "This is a dangerous, inappropriate device to be installing in U.S. passports," says Scannell, who imagines terrorists overseas identifying Americans by their passports when picking targets to bomb. "Which cafe do we lob the grenade into? Ping, ping, ping. There are 21 Americans in there." The tags could also be used to identify people who walk into an abortion clinic, a mosque or a political meeting.

CHINA THREAT RISING?

"A decade ago, American military planners dismissed the threat of a Chinese attack against Taiwan as a 100-mile infantry swim," the New York Times says. "The Pentagon now believes that China has purchased or built enough amphibious assault ships, submarines, fighter jets and short-range missiles to pose an immediate threat to Taiwan and to any American force that might come to Taiwan's aid."

In 1996, when China fired warning-shot missiles across the Taiwan Strait before the Taiwanese elections, President Clinton responded by sending a carrier battle group to a position near Taiwan. Then, China could do nothing about it, Now, analysts say, it can.

In fact, American carriers responding to a crisis would now initially have to operate at least 500 miles from Taiwan, which would reduce the number of fighter sorties they could launch. This is because China now has a modern fleet of submarines, including new Russian-made nuclear subs that can fire missiles from a submerged position. America would first need to subdue these submarines.

China launched 13 attack submarines between 2002 and 2004, a period when it also built 23 ships that can ferry tanks, armored vehicles and troops across the 100-mile strait. Tomohide Murai, an expert on the Chinese military at the National Defense Academy in Tokyo, said that China's buildup is intended to focus on an American response, but he is skeptical that China already has the naval and air superiority over Taiwan to dominate the strait.

OSPREY SPRINGS A LEAK

It'd be really cool if the Marines could get a hold of a reliable, tilt-rotor aircraft that combined an airplane's speed with a helicopter's abilities to takeoff without a runway. Too bad the crash-prone V-22 Osprey ain't it. For what seems like the zillionth time, the tilt-rotor craft has broken down, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram is reporting.

Leaking hydraulic fluid triggered a fire in the engine compartment of one of the Marine Corps' newest V-22 Ospreys last week, the latest in a string of technical problems for the Bell Helicopter-built aircraft.

Navy and company spokesmen downplayed the seriousness of the fire, which they said was quickly extinguished and did little damage.

"There was never any danger to personnel or the aircraft," said Ward Carroll, spokesman for the Naval Air Systems V-22 Program Office...

Carroll said engineers were still investigating the cause of the hydraulic leak, which occurred in a low-pressure hydraulic line, not the more critical high-pressure lines.

Two V-22 crashes have been attributed in part to failed or leaking high-pressure hydraulic lines. In 1992, a leak led to an engine compartment fire that destroyed the drivetrain of a V-22 and caused a crash at Quantico, Va., that killed seven people.

A ruptured hydraulic line triggered a chain of events that led to another crash that killed four Marines in December 2000...

Before the Marines could begin the operational evaluation testing, the Navy and Pentagon were required to certify to Congress that a number of major issues had been adequately resolved, including the reliability of the V-22 hydraulic system.

Former Marine colonel and test pilot Bill Lawrence of Aledo, who has been critical of the V-22, said the fire was not a good sign for the safety and reliability of the Osprey.

"There are a ton of airplanes out there flying around with hydraulic fluid leaking and they don't catch on fire," Lawrence said.

SOLDIERS' STORIES, COLLECTED

On a bad-ass scale of one to ten, flying a Black Hawk over Iraq rates about a twelve to me. Which is what Chief Warrant Officer Gordon Cimoli did for ten months back in 2003. So I'm figuring that Iraq: Providing Hope, the new book from Cimoli and 50 other soldiers who've been stationed in Iraq, is packed with good stories. (His online diaries sure are.)

MISSILE AGENCY WANTS MORE CASH

Remember that big cut to the missile defense budget? It could be coming back, if the anti-missile agency has its way.

"Although it expects to reduce spending in the next fiscal year, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) wants to ramp up its budget over the next four years to more than $10 billion annually by fiscal 2009, according to Defense Department budget documents," David Ruppe at the Global Security Newswire reports. That's about $2 billion a year more than what's currently spent.

With the extra loot, the MDA plans to buy some more radars and sea-launched interceptor missiles. According to the Newswire, the agency also wants to "acquire by the end of 2009 an additional 20 land-based interceptor missiles through the midcourse program to bring the projected total to about 40."

Now, buying more of the sea-going anti-missiles, that makes some sense. Those interceptors have been performing pretty well in recent tests. But the land-based missiles are another story. In trials, they've been flopping over and over again. A February test, in which fizzling ground support equipment kept the anti-missile from launching, was only most recent in a long string of examples. Why spend extra to get more of these clunkers?

The Arms Control Wonk has more on the Missile Defense Agency's budget, including which programs got cut, and which "went black."

THERE'S MORE: Inside Defense knows where the MDA wants to put $672.9 million of that extra luchre -- into space. Specifically, into an orbiting version of the non-explosive projectiles known as Kinetic Energy Interceptors, or KEIs. They're designed to knock down enemy missiles before they too far off of the ground.

Under the MDA's plan, in 2008 the agency will choose several contractors to design a space test bed... The following year, a contractor team or teams will be selected for the space test bed development and test phase, during which they will qualify the kill vehicles for space use, modify the KEI program's command and control system, develop the interceptor's motors and complete several other tasks.

The team will be required to launch five space-based interceptors and perform space-based intercept testing against medium- to long-range ballistic missile targets, according to MDA. “We anticipate the development and test phase to run through FY-15 [fiscal year 2015] in order to enter a production phase for a small space layer in FY-16,” the agency said...

The agency says a limited constellation of space-based interceptors, housed in 50 to 100 satellites, could offer a "thin boost/ascent defense against intercontinental range ballistic missiles..."

Mixing the space-based interceptor with the KEI program “offers the best defensive combination to defeat both rogue and near-peer adversaries,” MDA told Congress.

TIKRIT, CLOSE UP

Assaulting islands on the Tigris River, defusing roadside bombs, collecting guerillas' weapons caches -- it's all in a couple week's work for one Army unit, stationed in Tikrit. Random Probabilities has the first-hand account, plus a slew of pics. (via Winds of Change)

PENTAGON'S FLYING SAUCER

Before the Pentagon decided that it wanted to stock soldiers' backpacks with miniature unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, Defense Department researchers had a slightly different idea: give G.I.s their own flying saucers instead.

The Multipurpose Security and Surveillance Mission Platform (MSSMP), flown from 1992 to 1998, used a ducted fan and a 50 hp engine to "cruise at speeds of up to 80 knots, for up to three hours, with a ceiling of 8,000 feet," according to Helicopters.com. Weighing at 250 pounds with a diameter of six feet, the MSSMP was meant to "provide a rapidly deployable, extended-range surveillance capability for a variety of operations and missions, including: fire control, force protection, tactical security, support to counterdrug and border patrol operations, signal/communications relays, detection and assessment of barriers (i.e., mine fields, tank traps), remote assessment of suspected contaminated areas (i.e., chemical, biological, and nuclear), and even resupply of small quantities of critical items," its makers at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center say. (These are the same wizards of robotics that put together the ultra-intimidating Robart III guard drone.)

In the mid-90's, the MSSMP apparently had a couple of successful demontrations at Army posts. For example, in January 1997, the MSSMP system's flew over Ft. Benning's urban operations training facility, providing "reconnaissance support with the vehicle flying down city streets, looking through upper- and lower-story windows, providing lookout support ahead of advancing troops, and performing observations after landing on the roof of a two story building. The vehicle also dropped a simulated radio relay on the top of a building, a miniature intrusion detector in an open field, and carried a standard Army laser rangefinder/designator as a payload."

The Army has a similiar set of tasks in mind for its family of "Organic Air Vehicles," slated for soldiers hands if and when the Future Combat Systems project ever comes to pass. The "Organics" rely the same, ducted-fan propulsion as the MSSMP.

This isn't the only saucer-esque craft the Pentagon has toyed with. In 2003, the Navy worked briefly with Russian scientists on a vacuum-powered, pita-shaped UAV. And back in the 40's, the Navy developed the Flying Flapjack -- a propeller-powered, Frisbee-looking fighter plane that could take off and land like a helicopter. Despite years of testing, it never got more than a few feet off of the ground.

DEFENSE DEPARTMENT TONGUE-TIED

I'm way too cynical these days. After leafing through the doublespeak and circlicued excuses for inaction that make up the Pentagon's new "Defense Language Transformation Roadmap," I blew it off.

Yes, the Roadmap is a textbook example of bureaucrats forming committees and "assessing needs" rather than going to work. And sure, it's awful that the Pentagon still doesn't have a wide-scale program to teach soldiers Arabic and other foreign tongues -- three and a half years after 9/11. But whadya expect?

Slate's Fred Kaplan has a better attitude. He's outraged. Completely disgusted. And with good reason.

The document — only 19 pages, so take a look — traces, all too clearly, the project's shameful chronology. It got under way in November 2002 — over a year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — when the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness was directed to have the military departments review their requirements for language professionals...

In September 2003 — two years after the 9/11 attacks that made officials realize they didn't know enough about the rest of the world — the deputy undersecretary of defense for plans commissioned a study "assessing language needs..."

From June through August, 2004, the steering committee oversaw the development — and on Aug. 31, approved—the "Roadmap," and submitted it to the undersecretary of defense.

So, by the end of last summer, it had taken 21 months simply to draw up a 19-page plan.

It gets worse.

The plan lays out a series of "required actions" to improve language skills and incorporate expertise in languages and area studies in the military's programs for recruitment, promotion, and training. But look at the plan's dawdling deadlines.

For instance: "Publish a DoD Instruction providing guidance for language program management." The deadline: July 2005. That's 11 months — not to come up with a program, but to issue guidance for managing the program...

"Develop and sustain a personnel information system that maintains accurate data on all DoD personnel skilled in foreign-language and regional expertise. Work closely to ensure stabilized data entry and management procedures." Deadline: September 2008...

In the three and a half years after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States built a massive arsenal, equipped an equally massive fighting force, and declared victory in a worldwide war over imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.

In the three and a half years after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the U.S. government funded dozens — if not hundreds — of Russian-language and Russian-studies departments not just within the military but in high schools and colleges all across America.

Now, three and a half years after Islamic fundamentalists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Department of Defense is three months away from publishing an official "instruction" providing "guidance for language program management."

It's pathetic.

MCCAIN 1, ARMY 0

That didn't take long. Less than a month ago, Sen. John McCain started raising a stink about the Army's see-no-evil oversight of Future Combat Systems, its mammoth, $127 billion plus modernization project. Today, the Senator got what he wanted. Army Secretary Francis Harvey agreed to start treating the biggest technology development program in Army history like a real defense contract -- and less like the purchase of a couple of off-the-shelf PCs.

For reasons that remain unclear (but sure smell fishy) the Army made a deal with FCS' lead contractors, Boeing and SAIC, under Federal Acquisition Regulation 12. That rule lets the government buy everyday items, like commercially-available software, without having to fill out a pile of forms.

But it also means that contractors "are relieved of the obligation to [give] cost and purchasing data to military auditors," McCain told Harvey at a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing last March. In a program as massive as FCS -- and as crucial to the Army's next generation -- that kind of oversight can't be optional, McCain said.

"Now, Harvey and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker will review the program at least three times each year," Inside Defense says. And the FCS contract will be renegotiated under more standard terms, which will include items like "the Truth in Negotiation Act; the Procurement Integrity Act; Cost Accountability Standards; and an organizational conflicts-of-interest clause. These regulations were not part of the current agreement," according to the Seattle Times.

Hopefully, now that Harvey's giving himself the power to supervise FCS like it should, he'll take the opportunity to ask Boeing and SAIC execs a question or two about the program's skyrocketing costs, missed deadlines, and shifting priorities.

"We'll probably, without getting into the details, give the LSI (Boeing) some more incentives to control costs," Harvey tells Reuters.

Since the bill for FCS has grown from $92 billion to a possible $450 billion in less than a year, those incentives should probably a brick. Or a couple of two-by-fours.

HIGH-TECH HOG-TIE

When handcuffs along won't do the trick, there's a new way for cops to restrain their uppity suspects, Slate tells us: "a high-tech hog-tie."

Park City, Utah's Safe Restraints, Inc.... touts its product — called "the Wrap" — as "the ultimate immobilization system." The Wrap consists of a shoulder harness, a binding for the ankles, and a blanket with straps that encircles and restrains the legs. The harness and the ankle strap attach to loops on the blanket with carabiners, which helps to keep captives from moving. The whole device comes in a handy black carrying case.

The manufacturer recommends using the Wrap on prisoners who are already facedown with their hands cuffed behind their back—the handcuffs then hook onto the shoulder harness. A properly wrapped prisoner will be stuck in a seated position, unable to run or kick. Some doctors argue that police use of conventional hog-tying—with the wrists and ankles tied together, and the prisoner lying on his or her stomach—can be dangerous; restraining prisoners in a seated position supposedly reduces the risk of suffocation.

Maybe that's what happened Sunday morning, when a man, supposedly secure in the Wrap, died after a 15 minute struggle with South San Francisco police.

"They're supposed to prevent someone from hurting themselves or one of the officers," San Mateo Police Sgt. Hugh Wilkins, who hasn't heard of anyone dying in one of the wraps. "They're always used to transport someone safely."

CIA BUDGET REVEALED -- 42 YEARS LATE

It's ridiculous that it has come to this, but...

"A federal judge yesterday ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to disclose its 1963 budget, marking the first time that a court has compelled the CIA to surrender intelligence budget information," Defense Tech pal Steven Aftergood writes in today's Secrecy News.

It is "ORDERED that the defendant [CIA] shall disclose the CIA budget figure for 1963 by May 6, 2005," rules Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit filed by Aftergood.

In fact, the 1963 CIA budget figure -- $550 million -- is already known. Although CIA said it could not be disclosed, FAS [the Federation of American Scientists] showed (with the assistance of Prof. David Barrett of Villanova University) that it had been quietly declassified and released years ago. As a result, Judge Urbina determined that it was no longer exempt from disclosure under the FOIA.

Meanwhile, the 1962 CIA budget and the 1964 CIA budget, like most other intelligence budget figures since 1947, continue to be withheld.

It is CIA's contention that disclosure of such budget figures could lead to the compromise of an intelligence method, namely the method by which Agency funding is hidden in the published budget. The court accepted this argument, based on the sworn declaration of Acting Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin in September 2004.

But as it happens, CIA's argument is false. It is methodologically impossible to deduce or infer the clandestine funding mechanism from the total Agency budget figure, since there are too many variables involved. First of all, the number and identity of budget line items used to channel CIA funds is not constant. But even if those were somehow known, which they generally are not, there is no way to determine how the budget total is allocated among them.

Judge Urbina rejected this critique of ours, concluding that it is a subjective opinion that is not legally compelling. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the disclosure of the CIA 1963 budget figure has not compromised the funding mechanism for that year. (Whether it would matter if it had been compromised is a separate question.)

THERE'S MORE: The government's resident keepers of all things classified, the Information Security Oversight Office, released its annual report yesterday. All told, there were 15,645,237 classification actions last year, up from 14.2 million in 2003.

ITSY-BITSY DRONE

There are now dozens of different types of drones in the Pentagon's arsenal. But you'd be hard-pressed to find one smaller than this Wasp Micro Air Vehicle (MAV), now being tested aboard the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group off Southern California.

"The Wasp has two cameras — one forward and one aft — that collect and feed live video or other information. It’s designed to follow a programmed or relayed route using Global Positioning System waypoints or other navigational systems," C4ISR Journal says.

Last month, researchers on the Nimitz's ships "launched several of the 7-ounce, 13-inch planes." Sailors there will be taking "the Wasp along on its upcoming deployment, used it for several missions, including maritime interdiction and force protection. Micro UAVs might help in situations in which ships do not have helicopters available... 'It has the potential to save lives during boardings,' said Lt. Cmdr. Joseph Roth, the Nimitz group’s communications officer."

Meanwhile, Darpa and Honeywell are teaming up for a second, slightly larger MAV program. Weighing in at about 12 pounds, the gallon-of-apple-juice-sized drone is meant to fit inside a soldier's (already overstuffed) backpack. The idea is that the MAV will give a small infantry unit the ability to see over the next hill, or around the next corner. That's pretty much what the hand-launched Raven and Dragon Eye drones do today. But this MAV uses ducted fan propulsion, giving it a helicopter-like ability to hover over a valley or alleyway -- or even land on a nearby rooftop, and watch a battle unfold.

NEW RUSSIAN MISSILE FIGHTS PATRIOTS

Given the, um, uneven track record of the Patriot missile interceptor, you'd think such a weapon might not be necessary. But Russia has gone ahead and put together "the first ballistic missile ever to include built-in countermeasures against the West's growing range of deployed theatre missile defence systems," according to Jane's Defence Weekly.

The Iskander-E short-range ballistic missile is designed to defeat Western ballistic missile defence systems, particularly the Patriot air-defence system...

It appears to forego conventional chaff, flare and anti-radar signals and instead employs manoeuvring at both launch and attack phases, a low and direct trajectory and a low radar signature produced by what Russian reports called "a special composite"... These details will be [puzzling] to Western missile defence specialists.

The Iskander-E has a maximum range of 280 km and a payload of 480 kg to comply with the limits laid down by the Missile Technology Control Regime... In each case these missiles can be used to carry be nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.

Nations such as Syria (in 2004) and Iran (in 2001) were reported to have shown interest in purchasing this weapon - which is currently available to the market - however this seems an unlikely event and was denied in each case. Russia appears to be courting its market by revealing many of the missile details in a 21 February 2005 broadcast on Moscow's Channel 1 television news programme. "Missileers are usually wary of showing their hands regarding countermeasures," said Uzi Rubin, former director of Israel's Missile Defence Agency. "I can only interpret the Russians' bout of transparency as a marketing effort toward customers who face theatre missile defence systems."

UNMANNED TIMES

If I hadn't just spent the last month working on a magazine feature along very similar lines, I'd say this New York Times story on unmanned aerial vehicles was pretty damn good.

There are nearly a dozen varieties in service now, from the 4.5-pound Ravens that fly just above treetops, to the giant Global Hawks that can soar at 60,000 feet and take on sophisticated reconnaissance missions. And while much of the appeal of the aircraft is that they keep aircrews out of the line of fire, there are now so many of them buzzing around combat areas that, in fact, the airspace can get dangerously crowded.

In November, for example, a tiny Army Raven surveillance aircraft plowed into a Kiowa scout helicopter, causing no injuries or serious damage, but raising safety concerns...

Read the whole thing. Grrrr.

JERSEY ATTACKED; NEW YORKERS CHEER

Like most New Yorkers, I'd be just as happy to see New Jersey wiped off of the map.

But I suppose, on the off chance that bio-agents unleashed by terrorists might somehow be able to make it past the Holland Tunnel, that it's a good idea for the Department of Homeland Security to run a 10,000-person drill for first responders in the Garden State (and in Connecticut, too).

"According to the script" set for TOPOFF 3, DHS' bi-annual exercise for coping with unconventional strikes, "terrorists planning to attack New York and Boston suspect their plans have been compromised and launch a premature attack by dispersing a biological agent from a car in New Jersey," the AP reports. (Because who plans on going to Jersey?)

"As seriously injured people begin to flood local hospitals, the chemical attack that had been planned for Boston also is launched prematurely -- in the town of New London, Connecticut, some 250 kilometers away."

Which sucks, because New London has some really great fish and chips.

Anyway, there have hopefully been a few lessons learned since 2003's TOPOFF 2, which simulated biological and "dirty bomb" strikes in Chicago and Seattle. In the Windy City, local officials lacked an "efficient emergency communications infrastructure" to deal the bio-attack, according to an a summary of the drill afterwards. Seattle had "critical" problems in trying to determine where radiological plumes had spread.

Better luck this time, fellas. I guess.

DARPA COMES DOWN TO EARTH

There's always been a tension at Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, between helping fight today's battles and funding projects that might impact the war twenty years down the line... or go nowhere at all. Generals want the latest toys from the Defense Department's answer to James Bond's "Q." But without Darpa's daydreaming, there'd be no stealth fighter, and no Internet.

Back in 2003, the Senate Armed Services Committee was worried enough about Darpa getting overly-practical that it launched an investigation into whether the agency had "raided" its basic research budget to finance "near-term goals."

Now, the Times reports, Darpa is cutting its funds for "open-ended 'blue sky' research by the nation's best computer scientists... in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff."

This week, in responding to a query from the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darpa officials acknowledged for the first time a shift in focus. They revealed that within a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose slightly from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million last year, the portion going to university researchers has fallen from $214 million to $123 million.

The agency cited a number of reasons for the decline: increased reliance on corporate research; a need for more classified projects since 9/11; Congress's decision to end controversial projects like Total Information Awareness because of privacy fears; and the shift of some basic research to advanced weapons systems development.

In Silicon Valley, executives are also starting to worry about the consequences of Darpa's stinting on basic research in computer science.

"This has been a phenomenal system for harnessing intellectual horsepower for the country," said David L. Tennenhouse, a former Darpa official who is now director of research for Intel. "We should be careful how we tinker with it."

University scientists assert that the changes go even further than what Darpa has disclosed. As financing has dipped, the remaining research grants come with yet more restrictions, they say, often tightly linked to specific "deliverables" that discourage exploration and serendipitous discoveries.

Many grants also limit the use of graduate students to those who hold American citizenship, a rule that hits hard in computer science, where many researchers are foreign...

"Virtually every aspect of information technology upon which we rely today bears the stamp of federally sponsored university research," said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington and co-chairman of the advisory panel. "The federal government is walking away from this role, killing the goose that laid the golden egg."

THERE'S MORE: Darpa may be investing more in super-secret computer science research. But overall, the agency's proposed classified budget has shrunk by over a third, a Congressional source tells Defense Tech.

DEFENSE TECH, MEDIA WHORE

I'll be on Inside Edition tonight, talking about the rash of iPod thefts in New York. Plus: "Hilary Swank Started Something! Women Are Transforming Their Bodies By Boxing."

IRAQ'S NEW WAR PLAN

The situation in Iraq seems to settled considerably in recent months, with the January elections there being credited for the calm. But a new U.S. military battle plan probably had something to do with it, too. Especially since "prior to a February revision... the secret blueprint lacked detailed mileposts for achieving security in the war-torn nation," according to Inside Defense.

The top U.S. officer in Iraq, Army Gen. George Casey, issued his first campaign plan in August 2004, just one month after becoming commander of Multinational Forces Iraq, or “MNF-I,” according to Air Force Col. Robert Potter, the general’s spokesman in Baghdad.

Officials privy to the document say it contained an array of lofty objectives, like bringing stability to the nation and transitioning security responsibilities to newly trained Iraqi forces. But it offered unit commanders virtually no guidance on how to implement the goals and laid out no time lines, officials say.

“You had a classified campaign plan,” said one retired officer who has worked in Iraq. “It was dense. It was strategically broad. It almost didn’t mean a thing...”

Casey’s earlier plan depicted multinational security operations in Iraq along a military concept for “lines of operation,” in which activities are segmented into discrete baskets like civil affairs, counterinsurgency operations, logistics, economic reconstruction and the like, according to defense officials.

“None of these things are connected,” one source recalls an officer at Casey’s headquarters acknowledging. “They didn’t understand the enemy and didn’t frame it the right way” in Casey’s first plan, said this former officer. “It was many things but it was not a counterinsurgency plan.”

The new edition “adds milestones and what we call cradle-to-grave processes,” Janke said. It offers “the big picture view” and tells unit commanders, “Now we’re going to give you direction,” he said...

Many in Casey’s headquarters were resistant to embracing the new tack, defense officials tell ITP... Casey’s deputy chief of staff for strategy, plans and assessment -- was advocating a major change that would make Iraq operations more unified around the counterinsurgency effort. The Army-dominated bureaucracy at Casey’s headquarters was pushing back, this official said.

“It was a big shift for people to say, ‘OK, now we’re in an insurgency,’” said an Army officer interviewed last month.

Heading into the first weeks of February, there still was “not a consensus inside MNF-I headquarters about the idea of what priorities MNF-I should pursue,” a former military officer said...

“It’s dawning on [senior leaders] what they’re dealing with now” is a full-blown counterinsurgency campaign to which all other objectives in Iraq must be linked, the official said.

The military blueprint that Casey’s August plan replaced -- a January 2004 document issued by Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the top general in Iraq -- offered even less insight on how the U.S.-led counterinsurgency effort was to succeed, defense officials say...

By spring of last year, “the Sanchez campaign plan was thrown out” and officers in Iraq were being told “there was none,” recalls one officer who recently returned from the region.

Over the ensuing 12 months, as casualties have mounted, the focus in Iraq has largely shifted from broad security and reconstruction tasks to fighting a war against the insurgency, according to officials in the region. Casey’s challenge now is to apply the resources -- both funds and troops -- in the right places to fulfill U.S. military objectives, defense sources say.

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