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Predator's Maverick Maker
The Pentagon has been toying around with limited-run, prototype drones for decades. So how did the U.S. military suddenly have a small fleet of Predator robotic planes at the ready after 9/11? Aviation Week says the answer lies with Tom Cassidy, the maverick chief of Predator-maker General Atomics.
"We're going to tell General Atomics to build every Predator they can possibly build," replied [Air Force chief of staff] Gen. John P. Jumper, referring to the small San Diego company that developed the aircraft.
Tom Cassidy isn't waiting for the paperwork to go through. Cassidy, the president and CEO of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, is expanding the Predator production line, even building eight additional Predator Bs -- a more capable version of the aircraft -- without orders. "They'll procrastinate for three years," he says of his military customers. "Then when they want to buy, they think it's like going down to the Ford dealership and picking one off the lot."
Such blunt talk has won him his share of critics, but the 72-year-old retired rear admiral and veteran fighter pilot from The Bronx doesn't seem to care. The Predator, initially shunned by the military services, has won wide acclaim as a simple, adaptable aircraft that can provide crucial reconnaissance and strike capability for the bargain price of less than $5 million a copy, sensors included.
The remotely piloted aircraft, which carries two Hellfire missiles and can stay aloft for more than a day at a time, stunned the world with its ability to hunt down and kill Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives in Afghanistan and the Middle East...
It was Cassidy's risky "build it and they will come" strategy -- developing and building aircraft ahead of orders -- that proved decisive following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. When U.S. forces were unexpectedly and very suddenly ordered to rout guerilla-like forces from mountainous Afghanistan, Hellfire-equipped Predators weren't just a concept on the drawing board. They were in production.
Support Rising for Near-Space Blimps
Good news, blimp boys: the Air Force is slowly starting to line up behind a plan to put airships on the edge of the atmosphere.
 According to Inside Defense, a 90-day Air Force study has concluded that there would be "military utility" in putting blimps, balloons, and drones in near space -- between 65,000 and 350,000 above sea level. Up there, they could serve as cheap substitutes for satellites, relaying communications and snooping on foes. They might be able to carry equipment, effectively becoming giant U-Hauls in the sky. And this could be done, at least in the balloons' case, without "significantly strain[ing] existing infrastructure or requir[ing] large amounts of equipment or personnel to operate the balloons," Inside Defense says.
The Air Force has conducted a number of near space demonstrations in recent months. Three tests, carried out last November, December and January, placed tactical radios on balloons, which then operated between 65,000 and 80,000 feet above sea level...
In March, the Air Force Space Battlelab conducted a proof of concept demonstration for a radio relay system with Combat SkySat I in Arizona. That [system] can now be used in theater operations [places like Iraq, in otherwords].
SkySat II, which the service hopes to test in FY-06 [fiscal year 2006], will demonstrate a payload return system. Such a system would permit heavier, more expensive and more sensitive payloads than were placed on the SkySat I, which utilized payloads that were destroyed after leaving the coverage area.
These Sensors Rock!
 Sooooo sneaky. The Pentagon is working with North Dakota researchers to turn man-made stones into hidden sensors, Technology Trends notes.
RFID sensors... will be installed in fake little rocks. These 'rocks,' which will be the size of golf balls, will be sent from an aircraft and will detect enemies by 'listening' to them from 20 to 30 meters. These sensors should be operational within 18 months and they should be cheap enough to leave them on the battlefield after they completed their tasks.
Memorial Day
On this Memorial Day, the Military.com family is encouraging everyone to click on over to Packages from Home.
As many of you know, American troops in the field often have to dig into their own pockets to buy the most basic supplies -- stuff like sun screen and Gatorade mix and good t-shirts. Packages from Home puts together boxes of these items, as well as snacks and books and phone cards; anything, really, to make soldiers' time overseas go a little bit easier.
It only takes a minute or two to donate a couple of bucks to the group. Or, if you live in Arizona, you can drop off your goods at one of the locations listed here.
THERE'S MORE: Winds of Change has put together an exhuastive list of aid organizations.
Jet Defense Lifts Off
Finally...
In an airplane hangar north of Fort Worth, technicians are preparing to mount a fire-hydrant-shaped device onto the belly of an American Airlines Boeing 767. It is an effort that could soon turn into a more than $10 billion project to install a high-tech missile defense system on the nation's commercial planes.
 The Boeing 767 - the same type of plane that terrorists flew into the World Trade Center - is one of three planes that, by the end of this year, will be used to test the infrared laser-based systems designed to find and disable shoulder-fired missiles. The missiles have long been popular among terrorists and rebel groups in war zones around the world; the concern now is that they could become a domestic threat.
The tests are being financed by the Department of Homeland Security, which has been directed by Congress to move rapidly to take technology designed for military aircraft and adapt it so it can protect the nation's 6,800 commercial jets. It has so far invested $120 million in the testing effort, which is expected to last through next year.
Unmanned Culture Clash
In March, Wired magazine sent me to a remote desert outpost in Arizona, where the Army is training newly-minted GIs to fly the robotic planes which have become so critical to the battle for Iraq. The place is central flashpoint in a military culture clash between teenaged videogamers and veteran fighter jocks for control of the drones. Here's a snippet of what I found:
 Private Joel Clark doesn't have any macho dogfight stories. He doesn't have a cool call sign or the swagger of a guy who has pulled 9 gs. In fact, Clark has never held a throttle. He did, however, flunk high school English. And that's how the milky-pale 19-year-old became one of America's newest pilots.
Clark had planned to join the Army as a Blackhawk helicopter mechanic. But that F kept him from graduating on time, forcing him to reapply. The second time around, his recruiter suggested he try instead to be a "96 Uniform" - Army-speak for a unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, operator. Clark had never considered becoming a pilot. But the idea of running a robot spy plane sounded pretty rad. Now he's one of 225 soldiers, reservists, and National Guardsmen training on a lonely airstrip at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, a 125-year-old outpost 10 miles from the Mexican border.
In a sense, Clark has been prepping for the job since he was a kid: He plays videogames. A lot of videogames. Back in the barracks he spends downtime with an Xbox and a PlayStation. When he first slid behind the controls of a Shadow UAV, the point and click operation turned out to work much the same way. "You watch the screen. You tell it to roll left, it rolls left. It's pretty simple," Clark says. But this is real life. "So you have to take it more seriously. If you crash one of these, you have to bleed and piss" - in other words, take a drug test.
Clark has no intention of nose-diving, however. He's gamed away the past 11 months in Arizona, and today, finally, is his last "check ride." After this takeoff, he'll be certified to fly the Shadow 200. He'll spend a few months at Fort Hood, Texas, training with the 4th Infantry Division. Then he'll ship off to what his sergeant calls the Big Sandbox: Iraq.
I've also written an online "reporter's notebook" to accompany the Wired magazine piece. Model airplane champs, robotic border guards, and Saddam's children all figure in. Give 'em both a look.
Bomb-Spotting Laser Tested
 Back in December, there was a bit of a ray gun party at Yuma Proving Grounds, apparently. While the Air Force put its new Scorpion bomb-zapping microwave blaster through its paces, the Army Research Lab successfully tried out a prototype bomb-spotter that relies on lasers to spot explosives, according to Inside Defense.
[The Lab is] calling the system "Standoff LIBS," using the acronym for laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy...
LIBS is a means of detecting traces of explosives on surfaces as far away as 30 meters, employing technology found in mining operations to determine the grade of ore.
As envisioned, here is how the military system could work: A laser is directed at a vehicle or other item that could have a bomb attached. Due to the heat created by the laser, the surface material then vaporizes. In the process, the material's molecules break down into their atoms, which "get excited in the high-temperature environment and light up as sharp lights in the spectrometer" -- the device used to read and analyze the reaction, ARL research physicist Andrzej Miziolek explained.
The wave length of the lights are then analyzed by a computer which matches the information against a library of known signatures...
For instance, a laser pointed at the door handle of a car could let the system detect if someone who has touched explosives has subsequently touched that door...
A typical application for the technology could be at a road checkpoint, where troops would be able to check cars for traces of explosives without the drivers' knowledge, a [military] official said.
"You don't want the adversary to know that you are checking him," the source said. "If you find explosives, you can go ahead and secure the situation."
Torture, Broken Down
So much of what passes for online journalism -- this site included -- is really just old-fashioned newspaper or magazine reporting, ported from the page to the screen. And the few lame attempts by the mainstream press to break out of those formats usually leave readers panting for the old stand-bys.
 Slate's "interactive primer on American interrogation," however, is different. By breaking a large, messy, complex issue into digestible online bites, Phil Carter and friends succeed in educating readers on the torture debate better than any TV show or magazine article or blog post I've seen so far.
Every major player in the American interrogation scandals is profiled. All the legal justifications for torture are called out. Each of the big techniques for getting a suspect to talk is outlined. But despite the motherlode of information, Slate's feature isn't in the slightest bit overwhelming.
If you've largely tuned out the torture issue since those awful Abu Ghraib pictures surfaced last year, it's time to click here.
Congress Slashes Pentagon Space Projects
It's kind of hilarious, when you think about it. At the same time the New York Times is chasing its tail about weapons in orbit, Congress is slashing the Pentagon's eternally-mismanaged space programs.
 "Brushing aside the recent claim by a senior U.S. Air Force officer that all is well with the military space acquisition system, a congressional defense oversight committee made good on threats to rein in the service's top two satellite development programs," reports C4ISR Journal's Jeremy Singer.
In marking up their version of the 2006 Defense Authorization Act, members of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee sent a strong message that they beg to beg to differ with the April 5 assertion by Gen. Lance Lord, commander of Air Force Space Command, that the space acquisition system is not broken and that those who think otherwise should "get over it."
The panel slashed the Air Force's funding request for the Space Radar surveillance satellites and the Transformational Satellite Communications System (T-Sat), directing the service to restructure both efforts. The panel recommended providing $436 million of the $836 million request for T-Sat and $100 million of the $226 million request for the Space Radar.
Hi-Tech Cop Moves Up
I'm not expecting a box of candy or anything. Or even a thank you note. It's just coincidence, of course, that a month after I profiled Ron Huberman – the ex-cop behind many of Chicago's high-tech crime fighting efforts – he gets appointed as Mayor Richard Daley's new chief of staff.
 Huberman was brought in last Wednesday, "the same day that a central figure in a City Hall contracting scam was sentenced in federal court," the Chicago Tribune reports. "Huberman said that 'first and foremost' among Daley's marching orders is to 'help restore taxpayers' confidence in the integrity of city government.'"
Later Wednesday, Daley introduced Huberman to more than three dozen city department heads at a meeting where, to "stunned silence," the mayor "read them the riot act," according to a city official who was present.
Daley told them that Huberman "is going to look at your department and your performance; if you have a problem with that, you are out,'" the official recounted.
In his previous jobs in the police and emergency management departments, Huberman also looked for ways to shove the least productive through the door. CLEAR, Chicago's massive police database project, started out as a tool for fighting crime. Huberman wanted to turn it into pink-slip machine, according to Northwestern University professor Susan Hartnett, a longtime CPD watcher. By tracking cops' arrests and their hours, Huberman hoped to "get rid" of the Chicago police's "bottom third" -- the officers for whom "there's nothing you can do," she observes.
Huberman put it to me more judiciously, saying, "We want to save officers -- ID them when they're falling off the right course early in their career."
CLEAR's personnel suite won't be done for months, maybe years. The system may not even get built at all, without Huberman actively promoting it.
If there's a knock on Huberman, it's that when he's pushing his projects, he gets too caught up in the hype. "He sometimes sort of believes the future is the present," one colleague says.
Anyway, here's a bit more about Huberman -- parts of last month's Wired story that didn't make it into the final draft:
Huberman doesn't want to be here, peering in on perps from 15,000 feet away, staring at the shimmering video wall and the PC monitor banks. "Too clinical," Huberman says. He'd rather be out in the streets, where he spent four years as a beat cop and a gang specialist in Rogers Park. Huberman fell in love with police work, "the pleasure of locking up the bad guy – the justice of it all," from "day one" at the academy. (The fact that his Israeli-immigrant parents were mugged when he was six years old wasn't that much of an inspiration, he insists.)
On the beat, he was known as an eager over-achiever. When he discovered a double homicide, he did more than the frontline cop's duty to fill out the initial paperwork, and make the customary rounds; Huberman found the lead suspect's mom, and persuaded her to convince her son to turn himself in.
Even now, working seven-day weeks as the head of the city's Office of Emergency Management, Huberman still likes to go out on patrol, just for fun, once a month, with his old partner, Sgt. Greg Hoffman – an 11-year veteran who keeps a revolver on his hip and a can of chili in his desk drawer...
Ron Huberman has long been a believer in the transformative power of security, in "using the police department not just for law enforcement, but to promote social change," as University of Chicago professor Pastora Cafferty puts it. Back when he was a beat cop, Huberman studied under her, getting dual masters degrees in social work and management, while riding a squad car at night.
During a stint with a Washington law enforcement think tank in the late 90's, Huberman went home to his native Israel, and helped train West Bank cops. "For there to be peace, Palestinians had to learn to police themselves," he says.
For peace to break out on Chicago's streets, law-abiding citizens had to be given a sense that the cops had their backs – even when there wasn't a Crown Vic on the corner. That meant developing a system, like CLEAR, that could help the police figure out who the real crooks were. That meant putting silent, bulletproof sentries with flashing cobalt lights up on telephone poles, to let the bad guys know they weren't welcome any more. "This is about restoring a sense of order, about taking streets from the gangbangers," Huberman says.
WTC Lesson: Don't Obey
"For more than four years... civil engineers have been studying the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, sifting the tragedy for its lessons. And it turns out that one of the lessons is: Disobey authority. In a connected world, ordinary people often have access to better information than officials do," Gary Wolf writes in a provocative little Wired magazine essay. Go read it.
Buying Regs Gumming Up IED Fight
Until American military chiefs start thinking and maneuvering faster than the guerillas they are fighting, this insurgency is never going to put fully under control. Pentagon-funded researchers are building new technologies to help the fight in Iraq. But the Defense Department is buying the goods with a "slow-moving 20th-century procurement system built for a different kind of enemy," the Wall Street Journal notes.
Consider the case of the "jammer," a device about the size of a breadbox that blocks radio waves emitted from remote-control devices that rebels use to detonate roadside bombs.
Last summer TMC Design Inc. signed a contract with the Army to deliver 845 "Warlock-S" jammers, built to interfere with certain explosion-triggering signals. [These appear to be different from the Warlock Red and Green jammers we've mentioned before -- ed.] ...
When insurgents found a way around TMC's jammer, TMC approached the Army in March with a plan to upgrade the product so that it could block some of those "hard to kill" radio signals...
The Army expressed interest, but it took two months to invite TMC to its lab to prove the upgrade worked against some of the signals -- a crucial step to making the change.
One reason for the delay is that the Army was in the middle of preparing to award a new contract for the next generation of jamming devices. The contract could be valued at several hundred million dollars... [And] Army officials worried that TMC might have gained an unfair advantage over rivals competing for the larger contract, since it would have had advance access to the test chambers.
This month, TMC was eliminated from the competition for that larger contract. It also was finally allowed to test the modified, or Warlock-S 1.5, jammer. The upgraded device performed well against several "hard to kill" radio frequencies the Army had identified in February when it first informed TMC that it needed a better device, the company said.
But the TMC jammer couldn't block new frequencies that had appeared since the company was first told by the Army of the problem. "We took care of what we knew about. But there was some stuff we didn't know about that we couldn't handle," said TMC's Mr. Scoughton. (Thanks Eric for the tip)
No More U.S. Battleships?
 "For the first time since the 1890s, the U.S. Navy soon could be without a battleship," Defense News says.
The Senate, in its version of the fiscal 2006 defense authorization bill, authorizes the Navy to dispose of the battleship Wisconsin and transfer it to the state of Virginia.
And a provision in the House version of the defense bill would transfer the battleship Iowa to the Port of Stockton, Calif.
Only two battleships remain in Navy custody: the Wisconsin, berthed at Nauticus maritime center in downtown Norfolk, Va., and the Iowa, moored in a mothball fleet at Suisun Bay, Calif. Per an agreement dating from the 1990s between the Navy and the Senate, the ships have been kept because their 16-inch guns can provide fire support for Marines on shore. The agreement mandates the Navy to keep the ships until an equal or greater fire support capability is operational.
But the Extended-Range Guided Munition (ERGM) intended to provide that new capability remains mired in developmental problems, and it’s not clear when — or even if — that weapon ever will be fielded.
Two other ships in the four-ship Iowa class, the Missouri and New Jersey are now museum ships in Hawaii and New Jersey, respectively.
Real-World Space War
With all the heavy breathing and sky-is-falling chatter about weapons in orbit lately – nice lead editorial, New York Times! -- it's refreshing to see a sober, realistic view of what "space war" would really look like. Most of the action, it turns out, takes place on the ground.
 "Ground-based RF [radio frequency] jammers and laser "dazzlers" might pose a more immediate threat to satellites than deployments of systems formally defined as space weapons," says EE Times.
"Dazzling" is defined as temporary interference with a satellite's optical sensors, as opposed to permanent damage of a satellite's components. At a conference here last week on space military policy, David Wright and Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) said that existing U.S. ground lasers — such as the Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser at White Sands, N.M., and the Starfire Optical Range, near Albuquerque — already could accomplish some dazzling, if not damaging, missions. Wright and Grego co-authored [An American Academy of Arts and Sciences] study, "The Physics of Space Security," with UCS colleague Lisbeth Gronlund.
The problem with laser dazzling and blinding, Grego said, is that they are not necessarily temporary. Given the distance from ground to orbit, by the time the power output is high enough to overwhelm a large section of optical sensors, the central peak of the laser power would be sufficient to damage portions of the sensor permanently, making the assault more likely to be considered an act of aggression…
Peter Hays, a former National Defense University teacher and author of "United States Military Space: Into the Twenty-First Century," said that the military would always prefer jamming, spoofing (scrambling positioning code) or otherwise electronically disabling satellites to destroying them, since the resultant debris fields would pose a threat to all orbiting satellites, not just targeted ones. "There is a preference in the military to rely on reversible effects first," he said…
In their study, Wright, Grego and Gronlund acknowledge the push to use space for both anti-satellite and anti-missile missions. But Wright said at the conference that space makes a poor staging environment for deploying weapons to attack ground, sea or air targets. It is also less than optimal, he said, as a staging environment for anti-ballistic-missile platforms and weapons platforms that would deny the use of space to others.
While he conceded that some in the military believe the United States should deploy space-based weapons as soon as possible to avoid a "space Pearl Harbor," Wright argued that no lasting military advantage would be gained by being first to weaponize space.
THERE'S MORE: "A small segment of the Air Force space leadership has always been in favor of unrealistic space weaponry, but is rarely able to convince anybody at higher levels that it is necessary," notes Dwayne Day in a strong Space Review essay.
General Tommy Power wrote that in 1962 in a secret telex explaining why the Air Force needed a manned spacecraft propelled into orbit by nuclear bombs exploded underneath it—fighting its way into space the whole time. Power was in charge of Strategic Air Command, and the Orion space battleship was obviously not approved, either by his bosses on the Air Staff or the Secretary of Defense. However, that kind of overheated warrior rhetoric has always existed in the US Air Force when it comes to space programs…
Unfortunately, a lot of people outside of this community fall for the rhetoric with regularity. The press reports these speeches and the occasional wild study as if they represent real Pentagon plans. Conservatives believe that if an Air Force general states the need for an anti-satellite weapon or an expensive piece of hardware it must be vital. Moreover, so-called “peace and justice” groups claim that the sky is falling and that we are about to enter the era of space militarization. The gulf between rhetoric and reality is filled with a lot of clueless people.
AND MORE: The biggest danger to American satellites might come from junk -- 100,000 - 200,000 "small, untracked pieces of man-made debris" in orbit today. (Thanks RC for the tip.)
Microwave Ray Gun Zaps Bombs
To the American military's growing menagerie of high-tech, bomb-battling oddities, add this little creature: a microwave ray gun, designed to wipe out Iraqi insurgents' explosives.
 Last fall, engineers from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Alliant Techsystems put together the "Scorpion," a prototype microwave generator, for an exercise at the Yuma Proving Grounds. It was the "first-ever high-power microwave system that was built tough enough for transport," according to Defense Daily. And during that Yuma test -- meant to simulate conditions in Iraq -- the Scorpion "blew up... more than 75% of the improvised explosive devices it encountered in operationally realistic scenarios," AFRL spokesman Rich Garcia writes.
The Scorpion's development "was done under a cooperative research and development agreement that began mid-last year... and slated to run until June 1, 2006," he adds. "No money was involved in the CRADA. Rather, we shared expertise, information and facilities."
What's the next step for ray gun? There's no word, yet. But if the system continues to work the way it did at Yuma, there are a whole lot of soldiers right now that could use a Scorpion in Iraq.
Border Tech Full of Holes
The idea was bold, when it was proposed back in 2003: a "futuristic surveillance and intelligence network" to regulate immigration, "rely[ing] on databases, digital cameras, face- and voice-recognition systems and electronic-fingerprint readers, all linked by computer."
 But nearly two years later, the next-gen promises of the US-VISIT "virtual border" project have been left by the wayside, the Washington Post reports. What's left is decidely less impressive -- creaky and old-school.
For now, US-VISIT is relying on several aging and ineffective computer systems that were designed in the 1990s by contractors for the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was merged in 2003 into the new Homeland Security Department...
One of the programs [is] a computer network known as IDENT, which requires travelers to submit prints of both index fingers at U.S. consulates and embassies overseas. IDENT then collects two index fingerprints from those visitors at the U.S. border and matches them against a database to determine whether they are allowed into the country...
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, under congressional mandate to develop biometric standards for screening foreign visitors, recommended the government use 10 fingerprints. Using all 10 prints provides better matching capabilities and interoperability with other databases, the scientists said in their 2003 report.
US-VISIT officials did not heed the scientists' advice...They promised to upgrade the two-fingerprint IDENT system.
Last fall, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner said authorities had made improvements to the IDENT system so it could communicate more effectively with the FBI's database...
But the government's own studies show IDENT is not fully integrated with the FBI system. One study by the Justice Department's inspector general's office, released three months after Bonner's remarks, concluded that progress toward making IDENT fully interoperable with other systems, including the FBI's, has "stalled."
The technology's limits and the government's desire to avoid long delays curbs the number of people who can be thoroughly screened. This year, homeland security officials expect to check about 800 people out of the roughly 118,000 visitors a day who should be screened against the FBI database, the Justice Department's inspector general said.
"The lack of immediate access to the FBI's full criminal master file creates a risk that a terrorist could enter the country undetected," the inspector general found.
Last fall, Stanford University researcher Lawrence M. Wein testified before Congress that US-VISIT, using IDENT, had no more than a 53 percent chance of catching a terrorist who had altered his or her fingerprints, even if that person was on a terrorist watch list. Wein said authorities should not assume the current two-fingerprint system is sufficient to stop terrorists. "It would be naive to think that these people are not trying to defeat the system," he said.
Laser Weapon Firm Targeted
It ain't easy pinning down Ionatron Inc., the Tucson, Arizona laser weapon firm.
 Company execs say they're working on a real-life ray gun which uses femtosecond lasers – light pulses that last less than a ten-trillionth of a second – to carve conductive channels of ionized oxygen in the air. Through these channels, Ionatron's blaster supposedly sends man-made lighting bolts, frying anyone unfortunate enough to step into their path, up to 800 meters away.
The feds have given the company $12 million to chase these ray gun dreams. But good luck finding anyone in the Defense or Energy departments who will publicly endorse Ionatron's ray gun work. Or even say they're passingly familiar with it.
A couple of months ago, Ionatron gave me a couple of contacts in officialdom -- guys who are supposedly teaming up with the Tucson firm on laser projects. When I tracked these folks down, they said they really didn't know much about Ionatron at all.
Maybe Ionatron's research is so super-secret that nobody in government will acknowledge its existence. But if the work is so secret, why does Ionatron keep bragging about it to the media?
The company's latest press release shouts that Ionatron just been featured on the NBC Nightly News. In the statement, the company quotes Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Task Force as telling NBC, "The Ionatron system was just the type of out of the box, new technology solution we're looking for, quite honestly."
Now, I haven't seen the tape of the segment. But in the transcript, neither Gen. Votel nor the NBC reporter mentions Ionatron by name. Odd.
But there's one media outlet where Ionatron's name has been mentioned a whole lot, lately. That would be the New York Post, where business columnist Christopher Byron has been on a one-man jihad against the ray gun company. His most recent strike came last week, as he accused Senate Appropriations Committee chief Thad Cochran of steering millions in congressional discretionary funds Ionatron's way – in return for $9,000 in campaign contributions, and a promise to relocate to Cochran's home state of Mississippi.
"Inside the Beltway, it's business as usual," Byron says of the alleged tit-for-tat (the story is buried in the Post's pay-for-play archives). His other allegations go beyond the garden variety, however. Click here to read 'em.
On May 9, he claimed that "accumulating evidence now suggests that at least some of the technology that Ionatron claims to possess may actually belong either to Waltham, Mass.-based Raytheon Co., which has been conducting its own government-funded 'directed energy' weapons research for years, or to a small California tech company rival called HSV Technologies, Inc., or perhaps to both."
A review of e-mails, nondisclosure agreements, board memos, letters and other similar documents, all supplied by officials at HSV Technologies, appear to support the assertion of HSV's president, Peter Schlesinger, that he and his board were hoodwinked by a Raytheon official named Joseph Hayden.
Specifically, Schlesinger claims that in early 2002 he was approached by Hayden with what purported to be an officially authorized partnership and licensing offer from Raytheon Co. - contingent, of course, on Raytheon first being permitted to review HSV's own directed energy research efforts.
Three separate meetings followed… at these meetings, Schlesinger says he and his colleagues provided the Raytheon people with an array of patented, confidential information regarding HSV's own directed energy development work.
Unfortunately, says Schlesinger, at the third and final meeting of the two groups, which took place on May 31, 2002, at a Raytheon missile defense facility in San Diego, Calif., the HSV officials discovered that Hayden had apparently been secretly passing their information along to an outsider… [Ionatron founder Robert] Howard.
Hayden, by the way, is now one of Howard's employees at Ionatron.
But a sneaky approach to intellectual property isn't Byron's only beef with Howard. The Post columnist calls the Iontration founder "a twice-fined Wall Street stock promoter… who agreed to pay $2.9 million in penalties in 1997 in settlement of a Securities and Exchange Commission suit charging him with making false and misleading statements about another company he founded and controlled, called Presstek, Inc."
That's one of the reasons, no doubt, that Byron has been so suspicious of Ionatron's rises and dips on the penny stock market. As he noted on April 25:
Shares in a high-flying penny stock called Ionatron Inc. had been climbing for months… [when] suddenly, on March 18, with Ionatron's shares having climbed to a high of $10.41, the company's stock was hit with an avalanche of insider selling, as more than 50 Wall Streeters privy to Ionatron's innermost secrets bailed out of nearly every share of stock they held, knocking more than 30 percent off the price in the days that followed.
Another cautionary tale from the pump-and-dump annals of the penny stock market? In fact, it's a lot more than that, for… nearly every one of the more than four dozen insiders who dumped their Ionatron shares on March 18 have now been identified by The Post as employees of a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group that is owned, operated and financed out of the black box budget of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Byron's talking about In-Q-Tel, the non-profit investment arm of the CIA that put money into Ionatron when the company was young. In-Q-Tel officials heatedly denied that the firm was involved in any "pump-and-dump" schemes. And I'm inclined to agree. In-Q-Tel isn't like other venture capital firms. It's more like an incubator for spook-friendly technologies. Getting a big financial return on investment doesn't seem to be a big motivation. And if making money isn't that important, why bother with insider trading?
What seems more plausible is that In-Q-Tel's employees, officially separated from their employer, may have been less scrupulous -- in Byron's words, "stag[ing] an end-run around In-Q-Tel's not-for-profit legal status [to] benefit personally from the fund's investments."
They accomplished this by buying shares for themselves in a separate and parallel "for profit" entity called the "In-Q-Tel Employees Fund LLC."
Using the cash contributions from the employees, the LLC thereupon took equity stakes on their behalf simultaneously in each of the three companies in which the not-for-profit fund was itself buying shares - an arrangement almost identical to the so-called "Raptor" partnerships through which top officials at Enron Corp were able to cash in personally on investment activities of the very company that employed them.
Byron only offers circumstantial evidence to support his claim; there's no Enron-esque trail of damaging e-mails that he's uncovered. Nevertheless, Ionatron officials wouldn't comment on this – or any of the allegations that Byron has leveled.
THERE'S MORE: In-Q-Tel spokesperson Gayle von Eckartsberg says Byron’s allegations about the 85-person employee (and ex-employee) investment fund "are also false."
Employees have no control over the selection of the investments, nor over the timing of the distribution of the equity or proceeds from the Fund... Participation by all employees is mandatory... Employees do not control how much equity is purchased, or when, nor can they opt out of participation in the Fund or in any of its investments. In other words, employees cannot “cherry pick.”
Besides, the few-million dollar kitty isn't making anybody rich, von Eckartsberg notes. The largest share, about six percent, goes to In-Q-Tel CEO Gilman Louie. And he donates it all to charity.
But the cash is needed, she says, to "attract the talent we need to do our job." Getting venture capitalists to do non-profit work isn't easy. They need some incentive that there will be some kind of payoff down the road. But so far, that hadn't happened, von Eckartsberg observes. "To date, employees have put in more than they have received from the Fund."
Defense Tech + CNNi
CNN International has made the mistake of booking me a guest tonight, at 7:45pm EDT. I'll be talking about my story in next month's Wired, on the U.S. military's new wave of drone pilots.
D.I.Y. Detective
One of the cooler things about the Chicago police's big anti-crime database is that any beat cop can use it to track criminal patterns in his or her neighborhood -- something that only detectives could do a few years back. Now, with Google Maps and a slick little website called ChicagoCrime.org, citizens can get in on the act, too.
The site lets you search and map every crime in the Windy City, by beat, by date, by felony, or by site -- from alleyways to ATMs to abandoned buildings. The searches take a few seconds. And they come with a handy map of the infractions, so you know where to watch your neck.
The whole thing kinda reminds me of what CPD Commander Jim Keating told me a few months back about his database:
"Before, it would take six to eight months to develop a set of contacts in your district. And we had to rely on the detectives to put together the patterns," Keating says. "Now, it's click, click, click, and we have it all citywide... It slaps me in the face, how much information we have." (via Boing Boing)
Death by Powerpoint
Guerilla snipers in Iraq are now polishing their craft online, with a web-based training manual.
"If you had only one shot, who should you kill?" the primer asks, leading its students through a series of grisly scenarios.
If you see a line of Soldiers, kill the one who you think is the officer. Then, shoot the communications officer, then the MG [machine–gunner] – then the doctor – if he’s there, you’ll know by the red cross on his arm – (you don’t need to respect the Geneva Treaty as long as the enemy does not respect it) and shoot at the Soldiers.
The manual was recently translated, turned in to a PowerPoint presentation, and given to Defense and the National Interest by an American government worker in Iraq.
"We posted it primarily to make it widely available to U.S. troops, including those in the U.S," the site's editor, Chet Richards says.
In that spirit, Military.com has uploaded an HTML version so folks without PowerPoint can take a look. ABC News has more.
Buried Camera for Hidden Foes
Okay. Let's say you want to keep watch over a terrorist hide-out -- a close watch. You can't just hook a surveillance camera to the side of the building, or the belly of the cave. You've got to hide it somewhere. A new Israeli invention might be able to help.
 The Mini Unattended Ground Imager (MUGI) is a 9-pound, jug-sized "multispectral, medium-range surveillance system designed to detect, identify and optionally target individuals on the move," according to Defense News. But the best part is that the device can be "buried underground, with only its periscope viewfinder protruding some four inches above ground. The finger-sized protrusion is then easily concealed by any number of camouflaged items or environmental debris and remains in place from 10 days to three months, depending on the operational life of the lithium batteries and external power packs.
Designed in response to Israeli military requirements and endorsed by... Israel’s Ministry of Defense, MUGI features a daytime color camera and nighttime infrared sensor for round-the-clock recognition of suspected terrorists or intruders.
During the day, MUGI has a range of some 3,000 meters, but at night is limited to about 1,000 meters. A mechanical device holding both cameras within the MUGI’s carbon fiber canister enables rotation and tilting, for horizontal and vertical scanning as well as zooming.
[In addition to being buried,] the MUGI also can be prepackaged in Hollywood-style props that don’t have to be buried, but are strategically positioned along streets, valleys or terraces in high-threat areas. Whether partially buried or disguised by props, the only element that must remain unobstructed is a small 1.2 inch-by-3.2 inch surveillance slit.
Times' Shaky Spacewar Story
For most of the planet, it will seem like a shocker. But, really, the fact that the Air Force is looking for President Bush's approval to put weapons in space is no revelation. The service has been shouting for orbiting arms for years.
 The New York Times is reporting today that the Air Force wants a new national-security directive to "replace a 1996 Clinton administration policy that emphasized a more pacific use of space, including spy satellites' support for military operations, arms control and nonproliferation pacts."
Well, of course that's what the Air Force wants. Last year, an Air Force paper on "Counterspace Operations," signed by chief of staff Gen. John Jumper, declared that the "freedom to attack… denying space capability to the adversary" has become a "crucial first step in any military operation." In 2003, the service released a "Transformation Flight Plan," complete with a space weapons wish list -- from anti-satellite lasers to arms that could "strike ground targets anywhere in the world from space."
It's from this collection that the Times' Tim Weiner draws at least some of its examples of weapons in orbit. And I'm afraid Weiner may have confused the Air Force's equivalent of day dreams with full-blown, big-money Pentagon development efforts.
[An] Air Force space program, nicknamed Rods From God, aims to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon.
Yes, "Rods from God" is mentioned in the 2003 "Flight Plan." But the idea was debunked so long ago that's it's hard to believe the service is actually pursuing the Rods in any serious way. As Columbia University physics professor Richard Garwin noted, the Rods could only work if they orbited at low altitudes. And that means they "could only deliver one-ninth the destructive energy per gram as a conventional bomb."
[Another] program would bounce laser beams off mirrors hung from space satellites or huge high-altitude blimps, redirecting the lethal rays down to targets around the world.
This is a project Defense Tech has reported on several times, most recently in early May. It's not as outlandish as "Rods from God." But the laser-mirror effort is still in its infancy, with the most basic of experiments now getting started. This is a long way from a weapon, folks.
A [third] seeks to turn radio waves into weapons whose powers could range "from tap on the shoulder to toast."
Obviously, the military is very interested in high-powered microwaves -- the Active Denial crowd control system is the best example. But microwave weapons, based in space? That's just wishful thinking.
The Air Force already has a potential weapon in space. In April, the Air Force launched the XSS-11, an experimental microsatellite with the technical ability to disrupt other nations' military reconnaissance and communications satellites.
This isn't quite right, either. The 305-pound, nine foot-long XSS-11 is a demonstrator to show how maneuverable and autonomous future mini-satellites might be. Down the road, those capabilities would be great to have on an anti-satellite device, sure. But it's a mistake, I think, to call the XSS-11 itself a "weapon." I'll have more to say about the XSS-11 in next month's Popular Mechanics.
A new Air Force strategy, Global Strike, calls for a military space plane carrying precision-guided weapons armed with a half-ton of munitions. General Lord told Congress last month that Global Strike would be "an incredible capability" to destroy command centers or missile bases "anywhere in the world."
Pentagon documents say the weapon, called the common aero vehicle, could strike from halfway around the world in 45 minutes. "This is the type of prompt Global Strike I have identified as a top priority for our space and missile force," General Lord said.
Now this project -- which we first looked at back in November 2003 -- is legit, with a hefty $91 million invested into it over the last two years. But, by making so little distinction between this effort and more pie-in-the-sky plans, the Times does its readers a bit of a disservice.
What's more, the paper of record actually ignores some of the Air Force's actual, working space weapons while spilling ink over the service's least-likely schemes. In October, the Air Force deployed a radio-frequency jammer, meant to disrupt opponents' satellite communications. And, according to Air Force documents, commercial spacecraft, neutral countries' launching pads – even weather satellites – are all on the potential target list. To me, that's truly shocking.
THERE'S MORE: Winds of Change has an interesting post up about the media-military divide. And Winds sister site Defense Industry Daily points out a new $19.5 contract for Boeing to start working on "large structure deployment and control from space." Be sure to check out Armchair Generalist's take on the Times story, too.
RC TOYS VS. IEDs
How do you handle a roadside bomb, when there's no robot nearby? Simple: you use one of those remote-controlled cars that kids have been playing with for decades.
 "Yesterday, I was 'outside the wire,' patrolling with the 2nd Platoon. We came upon a possible IED [improvised explosive device] in the middle of the road, and stopped all traffic to check it out," writes Sgt. Greg Papadatos, of the 69th Infantry Regiment, in a Military.com diary.
A young private [named "E.S."] in that platoon has one of those radio-controlled toy cars. When they find unidentifiable debris in the road, E.S. sends out his little RC car and rams it. If it's light enough to be moved or knocked over, it's too light to be a bomb, so we can approach it and get rid of it. If it's heavy, we call EOD [explosive ordnance disposal -- the military's bomb squad]. At night, they duct tape a flashlight to the car.
The military actually has robots that it uses for such things, but they are larger, slower, higher-tech, and frightfully expensive. Only EOD units have them, and you could wait for hours and hours before they show up with their robot. If 200 units read about this idea, and 50 units actually buy a toy RC car, and it saves just one single life, it would all be worth it.
I've suggested to E.S. that he put some fancy paint and a couple of LED lights on his toy car, demonstrate it to some Army brass at the Pentagon, and sell it to them for $80,000. He won't actually try that, but it's fun to imagine. In the meantime, I've also suggested to some of his chain of command that they put him in for a commendation or a medal for his ingenuity. If he ever finds a real bomb with that toy car, they probably will. (via the Huffington Post)
SUB BASE DEFENDERS POUR IN
It's not just the locals who are gnashing their teeth about the Pentagon's proposed shut down of the giant sub base in New London, Connecticut. Key members of Congress and undersea warfare experts are mad, too.
 “I support keeping the base open,” House Armed Service Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-CA) told Defense News. “In discussing base closures with Secretary Rumsfeld, the only facility I talked to him about other than Southern California installations is the Submarine Base New London.
So far, objections to the Pentagon's base closure plan have come in two flavors, mostly. Either folks don't want their neighborhood installation closed. Or they think that the Defense Department's larger consolidation strategy is flawed. Base Realignment and Closure commissioners, for example, are taking a page from Phil Carter's notebook, and voicing concerns that fewer national guard depots "would make it even harder… to retain their forces if members have to travel more than 50 miles to report to their bases," according to The Hill.
But the Naval Submarine Base New London – home to 18 submarines and 33,000 sailors, civilians and family members -- seems to be an exception to the rule, generating far wider support than other installations.
"The Navy's [need for] advanced training is so great that it is hard for me to believe that there would be a significant saving in shutting down Sub Base New London," Rear Admiral Hank McKinney, the former commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's submarine force, tells Defense Tech. "If the issue is to relocate [the] submarines to Norfolk [Virginia] and Kings Bay [Georgia, the other two sub installations on the East Coast], where there are better maintenance facilities… then there probably is an argument for shutting down the submarine support side of the base. But I am not convinced that it makes sense to shut down and relocate the training establishment. The Navy kept [the] Great Lakes Naval Training Center [near Chicago] open to support training and I believe we should do the same in New London."
Undersea authority Joe Buff is a whole lot less gentle, calling the rationale for closing the base "deeply and dangerously flawed." Click here to read what he has to say.
The report's main justification for closing the New London base is that existing naval berthing space (piers and docks) on the East Coast is in excess of required capacity. The report also states that the reduction from 3 to 2 bases supporting U.S. Navy submarines on the Atlantic seaboard will maintain adequate fleet dispersal without affecting operational capability. Let me pick this "logic" to pieces.
Firstly, America's submarine fleet is barely half the size it was at the end of the Cold War, and is rather badly overstretched due to too many worldwide mission commitments. Slow, meager future submarine acquisition plans only promise to make the problem more severe. Our Silent Service fast-attacks may dwindle to 28 boats by 2029, only half of what we have today -- and what we have today is barely enough.
The Navy itself has stated that in essence every submarine must act as a two-ocean warship, transiting between the Atlantic and Pacific very rapidly in any crisis situation. The most covert route is also the shortest -- through the Arctic, north of Canada. Were New London not available, a round trip from Atlantic to Pacific would be 1,000 miles longer from Norfolk, Virginia, and 2,000 miles longer from Kings Bay, Georgia. The added travel time and wear and tear, over a protracted period of high-tempo ops, become serious crew retention, safety, and cost concerns.
Worse, with weapons of mass destruction in play and continuing to proliferate, the idea of concentrating indispensible skills and installations in very few places defies military common sense. Suppose a terrorist or rogue does succeed in nuking Norfolk or Kings Bay, with New London closed. If one Atlantic Coast base were destroyed, only one would be left, and badly overtaxed. How will new submarine crews be trained? How will vital research be performed? Where will subs that survive the attack, or were at sea during the attack, go as an interim home port that has the unique resources required to adequately support them? Imagine how vulnerable they'd be if they only had one possible refuge, rather than a choice between two. When viewed in this context, the BRAC Report's supposed "excess berthing capacity" suddenly doesn't appear so expendable, does it? To me, it's quite the opposite: New London becomes more vital than ever, not simply as a fully active facility in its own right, but also as a reserve against a future threat of unknown source and nature, whose effects in a single surprise attack could devastate a whole base.
Couldn't this same argument be applied to every military installation? Not really. Submarine bases must be on a coast, and aside from the three existing ones on the Atlantic, all the other ones are on the West Coast or in Hawaii or Guam -- much too far away to provide adequate redundancy.
Planes can use a civilian airport, and troops can live in tents. Nuclear submarines are temperamental, needful beasts that just don't have these sorts of options and protections.
LIQUID LASERS HEATING UP
It's not easy building a laser weapon. And the hardest part might be keeping the ray gun cool.
 Take the Airborne laser, for example. The blaster-carrying, modified 747 – scheduled for test flights later this decade – has a powerful chemical laser cannon that heats up to 540 degrees celsius when fired. Each few-second blast needs to be followed by minutes of cool-down time. 8,000 gallons of hydrogen peroxide and other chemicals has to be flushed out and chilled to prepare for the next blast.
Next-generation, solid state lasers aren't much easier to handle. True, there are no chemical vats. But the gases, liquids, and mists required to keep these ray guns cool are plenty bulky. And they, too, need to be swept out before the laser can fire again. It's one of many reasons why lasers are being planned for big, clunky planes like the 747 – and not for fighter jets.
For years, Darpa, the Pentagon's way-out research arm, has been bankrolling a project to cool a high-energy laser with a liquid that has the same angle of refraction as the mirrors inside the blaster. That way, the ray gun can fire away, even while it's being cooled. The weapon should take up a whole lot less room. And that could pave the way to putting a blaster "on a ground vehicle, a helicopter, a jet," according to Charles Manor, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin, which was recently named the weapon system integrator for this High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) project.
The San Francisco Chronicle notes that General Atomics – maker of the Predator drone – will build HELLADS' laser, "while Lockheed… will develop the system's ability to pinpoint and track a target."
The goal is to have, by 2009, a powerful blaster that's be "an order of magnitude" lighter than comparable lasers – five kilograms for every kilowatt of energy produced.
The HELLADS project is "currently in the third of five phases," General Atomics says.
The current phase consists of developing the technology necessary to demonstrate a subscale [15 kw] prototype laser system in the laboratory. This subscale demonstrator shall be constructed in the same geometry and operate with a fluence comparable to that of the final weapon system.
As currently envisioned, the fourth phase shall consist of a ground-based laser weapon system demonstrator with an approximate average power of 150 kW. The laser weapon system demonstrator constructed in this phase shall employ a design and materials which demonstrate the ability of the final weapon to achieve low specific weight (5 kg/kW) and a compact geometry suitable for deployment on tactical systems [like a Humvee or a fighter plane].
The final phase consists of the engineering, fabrication, integration and demonstration of a complete HELLADS weapon system on a tactical platform.
 That platform might even be robotic, Darpa chief Tony Tether told Congress back in 2003.
With HELLADS, the next-generation Predator B or the heavily-armed Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle "could protect fixed installations or population centers from attack, patrol a border, or patrol a demilitarized zone with the capability to react to hostile actions and engage tactical missiles, rockets, or artillery at the speed of light." Darpa wants to spend $60 million over the next three years on the system.
BEST OF ANTI-MISSILES AXED
 The most successful part of the star-crossed missile defense system has been the one based at sea. So, naturally, the Pentagon has decided to cut the program's budget, Defense Daily reports.
Launched from cruisers off the Hawaiian coast, the Standard Missile-3 interceptors have managed to hit their targets in five out of six recent tests. Land-based anti-missiles, on the other hand, couldn't even make it into the air during two recent exercises over the winter.
But never mind all that. The sea-based interceptors have been slated for a $95 million cut. That could keep a key signal processor from coming on line, which might "set back the whole program at least a year," Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) complained in a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. (Here's the transcript.) "Why are we setting aside such a successful program, where the outcome is almost predictable, and spending it on other, riskier programs?"
See if you can find the thread of logic in this answer from Missile Defense Agency chief Lt. Gen "Trey" Obering. Becasue I sure can't.
Well, let me get to the -- first of all, the program has been very successful in the testing that we have done to date.
Now, one of the things we have not done yet is fly against a separating [warhead – one that detaches from the main body of the missile]. And that is something that we do need to do because that represents the lion's share of the threats that we may be facing around the world.
And the reason that we haven't done that is because, if you recall, the one failure that we did have in the test program had to do with the [malfunction of the] divert attitude control system… that we would need for a separating warhead.
And we have not completely fixed that yet in the program. We're still going through the ground testing for a new design to validate that we do have a fix. We think we have identified the root cause of that and we've taken steps to address that.
But that's why we don't have a more robust profile, either in testing or in our production profile, because we haven't jumped all those technical hurdles yet. But we are in the process of doing that.
"Would it improve the program if you got your signal processor?" Inouye responds.
Obering replies, "Yes, sir, it would."
So Obering is worried his sea-based missiles can't hit separating warheads, therefore he's scaling the project back. But his land-based missiles can't hit anything at all -- so he's going full steam ahead with those. WTF?!?!?
THERE'S MORE: "Obering basically admitted that while the Aegis system may be progressing along its development path, it still cannot defend U.S. interests against the threat for which it was designed," says Center for Defense Information missile guru Victoria Samson.
Minus the SDACS (solid divert and attitude control system), which allows it more maneuverability, the Aegis BMD [sea-based ballistic missile defense] system cannot reliably intercept threat missiles with separating warheads, which, to Obering's own admission, represent "the lion's share of the threats that we may be facing around the world."
Which puts the so-called success of the Aegis BMD system in a different light.
AND MORE: Meanwhile, Defense Daily notes, one of missile defense' main cheerleaders in the Senate is calling for big changes in the interceptor effort. His suggestion: weapons in space that can knock down missiles in their "boost phase" – just as they take off. "We should begin the process of developing a space-based boost phase capability," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said.
There is no money in the current budget, or in next year’s request, for space-based systems, and Kyl bemoaned the fact that MDA is not expected to begin any development work on such programs until FY ’08. “Everyone knows that’s where we have to go,” Kyl said.
“It’s the political arguments that restrain us,” he said, adding that advocates must push the case for a space-based system.
In the 1980s, the Pentagon backed a space-based interceptor program known as “Brilliant Pebbles” that envisioned placing thousands of interceptors in outer space. Opponents ridiculed the concept, which became a lightning rod for criticism.
Obering also brought up space-based interceptors during his Senate testimony.
There are a lot of technical challenges that we need to address. And I think that while it is important to have the debate on the philosophical advantage and strategy of having space-based interceptors, it would be prudent to lay in a technical experimentation program to see if we can even do that.
"To my knowledge, that's the first time that someone from MDA has admitted that they may be breaking new ground with the SBI system and therefore should discuss the ramifications of doing so," Samson says. "Previously, Obering has been very careful to couch his remarks in the technical challenges to SBI, not the philosophical ones."
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