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Wanted: AUSA
Anyone going to next week's Association of the U.S. Army convention in DC? I can't make it. But I'd be psyched to have a set of eyes check out the event on Defense Tech's behalf. E-mail me at defense-AT-defensetech-DOT-org if you're interested.
Prosthetic Prof Climbs New Heights
I went to Popular Mechanics' Breakthrough Awards last night with pretty low motives: a chance to schmooze with some of the editors who pay my rent. Maybe I'd grab a beer or four in the process. Instead, I walked out uplifted by one of the most inspiringly cool stories I had heard in months. It came from the night's final honoree, MIT media lab professor Hugh Herr.
 As a kid, Herr was a lousy student and good rock climber -- a very good rock climber. Then, in 1982, he "became stranded on Mount Washington, New Hampshire for nearly four days in -20 °F temperatures and blizzard conditions," one biography notes. "Severe frostbite damage took its toll on his lower legs, and both of his feet had to be amputated six inches below the knee."
Improbably, Herr swore he'd climb again. So he became a bookworm, eventually winding up in field of prosthetics. He developed a knee that "adapts to the user’s walking style, adjusting resistance to allow for a secure, agile gait," Pop Mech observes. "Next, he plans to distribute sensors beyond the knee to allow the device to move in response to subtle electrical changes in muscles nearby."
Herr is already helping out soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq. And he is making good on his promise, to get back to climbing. In fact, he says, his new artificial legs are better than his old biological ones. Special wedge-like "feet" allow Herr to slide into cracks in the rock face that he could never use before. For ice climbing, Herr can slip attach spiky crampons to the end of his prosthetics. Or he can use Inspector Gadget-esque extending legs for extra reach.
In school, Herr told the crowd of a hundred or so at the American Museum of Natural History, he kept raising his height an inch a day, to see how long it would take for people to notice. "It took until I was about eight feet tall," he laughed.
Standing on that stage, hopping around on his man-made legs, eight feet seemed like an understatement to me.
Pentagon Weasels on Armor Payback
Everyone in uniform knows that life ain't fair -- that, sooner or later, the government they're trying to defend is going to mess with them, somehow. Set up roadblocks. Make their mission harder. Treat them less than fairly. It'd be crazy to expect anything less from a bureaucracy as giant and disjointed as the Defense Department. So putting up with B.S. just another part of handling the job.
 But this -- this is too much:
Soldiers and their parents are still spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for armor they say the military won’t provide. One U.S. senator said Wednesday he will try again to force the Pentagon to obey the reimbursement law it opposed from the outset and has so far not implemented...
“Your expectation is that when you are sent to war, that our government does everything they can do to protect the lives of our people, and anything less than that is not good enough,” said a former Marine who spent nearly $1,000 two weeks ago to buy lower-body armor for his son, a Marine serving in Fallujah.
The father asked that he be identified only by his first name — Gordon — because he is afraid of retribution against his son.
“I wouldn’t have cared if it cost us $10,000 to protect our son, I would do it,” said Gordon. “But I think the U.S. has an obligation to make sure they have this equipment and to reimburse for it. I just don’t support Donald Rumsfeld’s idea of going to war with what you have, not what you want. You go to war prepared, and you don’t go to war until you are prepared.”
Under the law passed by Congress last October, the Defense Department had until Feb. 25 to develop regulations for the reimbursement, which is limited to $1,100 per item. Pentagon officials opposed the reimbursement idea, calling it “an unmanageable precedent that will saddle the DOD with an open-ended financial burden.”
So wait, let me get this straight: reimbursing 11 Bravos for their body armor is somehow "unmanageable." But sinking hundreds of billions into a flailing, bloated modernization project that changes requirements and deadlines every couple of months, that's perfectly OK? No, wrong. Helping soldiers and marines fight today's war isn't a "burden." It should be a priority. The priority.
(Photo: Johan Spanner)
Rapid Fire 9/29/05
* Court: release Abu Ghraib pics
* D.I.Y. air force
* Robot's "treasure island" loot
* Nuke lab's hiring freeze
* Iraqi insurgency: how big?
* Galloway, beyond pissed
* MVP, so slick
(Big ups: Intel Dump)
Sat-Guided Cannon Ready to Blast
Artillery hasn't been all that helpful in the Iraq counterinsurgency. Even in trained hands, heavy, indirect fire is pretty indiscriminate. Bystanders often get killed, while intended targets slip away.
 Which is why the Army has been bankrolling "Excalibur," a Raytheon effort to build a 155mm artillery shell that's guided by GPS. Think of it as the howitzer's answer to smart bombs.
Each Excalibur round comes with a multi-function fuze with three settings -- height of burst (HOB), point detonating (PD) and delay, Raytheon notes. "An HOB setting will enable soldiers and marines in contact to engage enemy forces on rooftops and in windows while the delay setting will be ideal for penetrating structures and other enemy strongpoints. The PD fuze will be effective against enemy troops, light armor and trucks."
The company just finished a set of Excalibur tests out at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. The plans are for the munition to be fielded in the next six months.
Osprey OK'd
It took twenty years and $19 billion. But at 4pm today, I'm told, the Pentagon's Defense Acquisition Board will announce its recommendation to go ahead with "full rate production" of the once star-crossed, accident-prone Osprey V-22 tiltrotor craft.
 The fate of the hybrid aircraft has been very much in question, ever since a pair of Ospreys crashed in 2000, killing 23. This decision "gets the program off probation. It can't be summarily cancelled now," a source close to the program says.
It's not exactly clear how many of the hybrid aircraft will eventually be manufactured. The President proposed budget calls for 458 Ospreys to be built into the next decade, starting with 13 next fiscal year. The Marines are ultimately scheduled to get 360 aircraft, Special Operations Command are supposed to have 50, and the Navy is slated to have 48. "Pentagon budget documents show the cost of V-22s at about $100 million each," the Star-Telegram notes. Osprey makers Bell Helicopter say the figure is more like "$72 million and headed down."
Those prices and those plans could change in the years to come, of course. But this much is set: A squadron of pilots starts training on the V-22 next week. And an operational squadron of nine Ospreys will be ready to fly out of North Carolina's Marine Corps Air Station New River by 2007.
THERE'S MORE: Inside Defense has the report from the Pentagon's testing office, which gave the thumbs-up to the V-22.
AND MORE: The watchdogs at the Project on Government Oversight still aren't convinced. "It can’t autorotate to a safe landing, has no defensive gun, lacks the ability to perform quick evasive combat maneuvers under fire, and can’t descend too quickly or it will go into a dangerous roll," they say.
AND MORE: The Osprey's final two crashes were due to a mysterious aeronautical phenomenon known as "vortex ring state." after re-reading Wired's Osprey story, I can't say I feel too good about how that's been dealt with.
Lead test pilot Tom MacDonald of Boeing was assigned the VRS problem. "It was this mystery area," he says. "So little research had been done on it. People wondered: Would it swallow planes alive?"
MacDonald and the engineers worked out a system. He'd take the plane to 10,000 feet, putting enough air between him and the ground so he'd be able to recover if he got into trouble. Then he'd pull the nacelles back until they were almost vertical, in helicopter conformation, slow his forward airspeed, and try to induce VRS.
"We'd fly all day long," says Gross, copilot on a few of the test runs. "We'd fall 2,000 or 3,000 feet and recover. We'd fly back up to 10,000 feet, repeat the exercise at 1,000 feet per minute, then 1,500, then 2,000, all the way up to 5,000 feet per minute. Then we'd do it again, this time changing our airspeed." (A typical rate of descent for a 747 passenger jet on runway approach is 700 to 800 feet per minute.) In the process MacDonald, a former Marine pilot, quadrupled the published knowledge base on VRS.
What he found was that vortex ring state is surprisingly hard to induce. He had to fly slower than 40 knots while keeping the plane in a steady position for at least five seconds, and then descend at a hot 2,200 feet per minute. He also found that in an Osprey, he could recover from the condition relatively easily, provided he had 2,000 feet of altitude to play with. In the end, the team didn't alter the aircraft. Solution: Install a simple warning system. When a pilot pushes an Osprey toward VRS, a light flashes in the cockpit and a voice cautions, "Sink rate." And Osprey pilots now know to pay attention to those warnings.
Rapid Fire 9/28/05
* Rocket-powered blimp drawn up
* LAW reinstated
* G-Men, Chinese tag team
* U.S. to Israel: No copters for you
* Marines' green fuel
* GPS fat cat finder
* Maxwell Smart, Semper Fi
* Number two? Not!
* Back to even
(Big ups: Xeni, RC)
"Cheap, Ugly" = Good
The Army's Future Combat Systems overhaul is FUBAR, we all know. But it's just the latest in a long line of big-ticket Pentagon programs to burn cash and squander expectations.
 So it there any way for the Defense Department to buy next-gen gear without picking taxpayers' pockets and leaving soldiers ass-out? Pentagon insider Dave has a few new rules on his blog, Garfield Ridge.
-- It has to be cheap...
-- Only one, maybe two, leap-ahead technologies allowed per program. The rest of the program has to rely on stuff we've already done before...
-- Congress must not care about it. If it hates it, it will cut it and ruin program stability, particularly in the early years where it's needed most. If it loves it, it'll add unneeded money and unrealistic demands on the program. The best programs are always the ones that Congress keeps their noses out of.
-- The program must be small enough to fail.
That last one is probably the most important one of all.
Most of the Pentagon's acquisition trouble in recent years has occurred on programs that are quite simply too big to fail. Either the requirement is one that can't be ignored, thus forcing the development program into a fixed schedule -- never a good idea to do this stuff on a deadline -- or the program reaches a point where so much money has been spent on it that in the event of failure no one wants to cut their losses and try something new. The moment the contractor smells fear on the part of the Pentagon, once it knows no one in the Building has the guts to cancel the program as it goes south, that's when the Pentagon takes it in the wazoo from industry, often willingly.
FCS, for all its necessary wisdom -- after all, it makes no sense to modernize the Army one little piece at a time -- FCS is precisely one of the complex systems that the Pentagon can't seem to run right anymore, if it ever could.
Welcome to the ugly.
And read the whole thing.
Defense Tech vs. "The World"
You can hear me stammering through another interview on BBC/Public Radio International's "The World" this afternoon. I'll be talking about my favorite $450 billion science project.
THERE'S MORE: It's online now, here.
Slow, Fat "Future" for Army
It's official: After $450 billion, the Army's quick-moving force of the future will be just about as slow as the one that's around right now.
As I noted in June, one of the big ideas behind the Army's massive modernization effort, Future Combat Systems, was to make American troops more mobile – able to get around the world in a matter of days or weeks, instead of the months that are needed now.
 The first step: slim down the service's cannon and armored vehicles. Today, it takes a gargantuan C-17 or C-5 transport plane to lug a single, 32-ton Paladin 155 mm howitzer. Army planners wanted the Paladin's next-gen replacement to weigh in at 19 tons or less – so one could fit inside a much smaller C-130 transport plane, instead.
After dancing around the issue for a couple of months, the Army has now delcared that neither the Paladin replacement nor any other FCS vehicle is going to fit into a C-130, according to Defense News' Greg Grant. And that "appears to abandon the fundamental rationale for FCS, which was intended to speed Army brigades to combat zones around the world within 96 hours."
The Army created the FCS concept about five years ago, after long delays in deploying a small air-ground task force to the Balkans raised questions about the service’s strategic relevance. Under Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army’s former chief of staff, the service scrambled for lighter armored vehicles to replace heavy Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles...
[Army Secretary Francis] Harvey’s announcement appears to confirm that the Army does not have the technology to allow lighter vehicles to survive future anti-armor threats. This is in part a realization born of tough losses in Iraq, where 70-ton Abrams and Bradleys have been lost to roadside explosives and rocket-propelled grenades.
But more than FCS' weight requirement has changed. As recently as last year, the program was slated to cost $92 billion. Then, suddenly, that estimate ballooned -- first to $127 billion, and next to $145 billion. Finally, we were told that this gargantuan sum would only pay for transforming a third or less of the Army.
And what would be so different, after all that cash was spent? When the program first got started, the armored vehicles were not only going to be light -- they were going to be electric-powered. And they were going to fire laser weapons. Now, all of that has been dropped, understandably.
But even the more basic changes have seemed near-impossible to pull off. The effort to get all soldiers on a common radio, for example, is facing massive restructuring, after the project's main contractor, Boeing, seems to have flushed $5 billion and three years worth of work down the toilet.
"The government has not seen sufficient evidence of the contractor teams’ understanding of the scale of integration required… to ultimately achieve the program requirements," the Army told Boeing in an April letter. "Nor has the industry team displayed sufficient ability to estimate a cost and schedule baseline and rigorously manage to that baseline."
In other words, the radio project has become slow and bloated. Just like the rest of FCS.
Rapid Fire 9/27/05
* SEC zaps Taser
* Planet defenders pick asteroids
* Anti-missile agency skips tests
* Bing back in Fallujah
* Fingerprint lock FUBAR
* 70's spysat flick revealed
* 5-0, 1.64
(Big ups: /., Schneier)
Generals' Crystal Ball?
What if there was a piece of software that could predict -- really, accurately predict -- how a war was going to go?
The Economist reports on a "collaboration between computer programmers, mathematicians, weapons experts, military historians, retired generals and combat veterans" that's been surprisingly prescient about conflicts' length and casualty counts. The catch: it doesn't work on counterinsurgencies and guerilla wars, like the one we now have in Iraq.
The Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model's predictive power is due in large part to the mountain of data on which it draws, thought to be the largest historical combat database in the world. The Dupuy Institute's researchers comb military archives worldwide, painstakingly assembling statistics which reveal cause-and-effect relationships, such as the influence of rainfall on the rate of rifle breakdowns during the Battle of the Ardennes, or the percentage of Iraqi soldiers killed in a unit before the survivors in that unit surrendered during the Gulf war.
Analysts then take a real battle or campaign and write equations linking causes (say, appropriateness of uniform camouflage) to effects (sniper kill ratios). These equations are then tested against the historical figures in the database, making it possible to identify relationships between the circumstances of an engagement and its outcome, says Chris Lawrence, the Dupuy Institute's director since its founder's death in 1995.
The TNDM's reliance on real combat data, rather than results from war games or exercises, also gives it an edge. Another forecasting system, TACWAR, was used by America's Joint Chiefs of Staff to plan the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Like many models, it was largely developed with data from war games. As a result, says Richard Anderson, a tank specialist at the Dupuy Institute, TACWAR and other programs based on “laser tag” exercises tend to “run hot”, or overestimate casualties. Real-bullet data is more reliable, because fear of death makes soldiers more conservative in actual combat than they are in exercises, resulting in fewer losses. The discipline is only just beginning to recognise the “tremendous value of real-world verification”, says Andreas Tolk, an eminent modelling scientist at Virginia's Old Dominion University.
The next challenge will be to expand the TNDM's ability to forecast the outcomes of “asymmetric” conflicts, such as the Iraqi insurgency. To this end, the Dupuy Institute is hoping to get its hands on the Vietcong archives, as Vietnam opens up. Insurgencies rarely leave much of a paper trail, but the Vietnamese kept detailed records of their struggle against the French and Americans. The resulting papers provide the world's most extensive documentation of guerrilla fighting.
(Big ups: JVD)
No-Fly List Follies
 It's been a while since we've tuned in to the long-running comedy "Secure Flight." That's the one where the feds try to screen airline passengers based on their data trails -- and wind up breaking the law and falling on their faces in the process. Defense Tech pal Ryan Singel catches us up on all the new plotlines.
First up is the story of Sister Glenn Anne McPhee, the Catholic education chief who was mistaken for an Afghani terrorist -- and put on the Transportation Security Administration's "no-fly" list. A similar screw-up just cost a pilot his job.
"Collecting full names and birth dates will reduce false matches by 60%," a top TSA data-miner says. So will snagging "marriage and birth certificates, credit-card records, court filings, [and] newspaper clippings," supposedly. (Cue laugh track.)
In a rare break with character, the TSA decided in last week there might, in fact, be some "privacy concerns" in harvesting all that commercial data. So the administration will knock it off, for now. Of course, this is after the TSA "secretly tested this procedure" on 100 million passenger records.
The privacy worries are one reason why a Secure Flight advisory panel has recommended that all live testing of the system be stopped. There are one or two other minor concerns, as well. Small stuff, like "What is the goal or goals of Secure Flight?" and "What is the architecture of the Secure Flight system?"
Jeez. Now I remember why I never bother to watch this show. Somebody, hand me the remote.
THERE'S MORE: Last month, BJ notes, the feds supposedly trashed three million of its suspicious passenger records. Bill wonders whether that was housecleaning effort or "destruction of evidence?"
Rapid Fire 9/26/05
* Snitch site rats out informants
* Secret air force shuttles suspects
* GIs swap snuff shots
* GPS 2.0 launched
* Flipper, locked and loaded
* More cash for underwater drones
* "DHS" producer: crook
* Pentagon ex-IG: crook, freak
* Superman takes a bow
(Big ups: RC, JQP and the ten zillion people who e-mailed me about the dolphins)
Ayatollahs in Orbit
Tehran is about to send its first satellite into space, says the Jerusalem-based Isracast.
By the end of September a Russian Cosmos 3 missile will be launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome 800 km north of Moscow, carrying two Iranian satellites into orbit. Although the satellites are claimed to be for meteorological and experimental purposes, experts believe that one of them will possess surveillance capabilities allowing it to observe American and Israeli military facilities throughout the Middle East...
The Iranian Satellite to be launched called the Mesbah, which literally means “lantern,” has been in the works for the last eight years and reached maturity after collaboration between Iranian and Italian engineers. The Italian company Carlo Gavazzi Space (CGS), who assisted in the Iranian space effort to develop the Mesbah also contributed extensive knowledge to its partners and as a result, Iranian officials have been quoted as being optimistic regarding their ability to independently launch more advanced satellites in the next several years.
The 65-75kg Mesbah will, according official Iranian sources, be used as a tool for collecting data on ground and water resources and meteorological conditions, and will also be used to control power supply systems and pipelines. However, various intelligence sources report that the satellite will also have limited surveillance capabilities and will be used by Iran to gather intelligence information on neighboring countries including American bases in Iraq, the Gulf and Israel. The satellite is expected to remain in orbit for three years and some experts say it will be able to continue operations for up to five years. Along side the Mesbah, the Russian Cosmos 3 will reportedly launch a smaller Iranian satellite named Sinah-1. This 20kg domestically made satellite was meant to be launched using Iran's own launcher as a technology demonstrator, but for unknown reasons will eventually be launched using the Russian booster.
Nations around the world have raised concern regarding the ongoing efforts by the Iranian government to acquire advanced military capabilities including independent satellite launching capabilities which are directly linked to the development of its ballistic missile program. Tal Inbar, senior research fellow at the Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies, told IsraCast that the development of the Iranian space program will allow Iran to continue the development of its long-range ballistic missile program surpassing the watchful eye the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), the organization in charged of preventing the proliferation of missile technology. Technologies that accompany the development of satellites such as micro electronics can also be used as a cover for the development of small size nuclear weapons which will fit the advanced version of the Shihab missile, says Inbar...
Rapid Fire 9/23/05
* Darpa's streaky, pretty sat
* Army's weapons handbook
* Pentagon bulk-buys anthrax (the safe kind)
* RFID crackers hotwire cars
* Lame "E-Ring"
* Strong Moose
(Big ups: ACW, DH, Boing Boing, Sploid)
Drones on Hurricane Hunt
One of the promises of unmanned airplanes has been that they would handle jobs that were too dangerous for flesh-and-blood pilots to handle -- not just over a battlefield, but here at home, as well.
 Here's a mission which fits that perfectly: Last week, an Aerosonde drone took off from southern Florida, rode through Tropical Storm Ophelia, and "provided the first-ever detailed observations" of a killer storm's "near-surface, high wind... environment."
"Today we saw what hopefully will become 'routine' in the very near future," Joe Cione, a researcher at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, said in a statement. "If we want to improve future forecasts of hurricane intensity change we will need to get continuous low-level observations near the air-sea interface on a regular basis, but manned flights near the surface of the ocean are risky. Remote unmanned aircraft such as the Aerosonde are the only way..."
While the successful use of NOAA's WP-3D Orion, its Gulfstream-IV aircraft and the U.S. Air Force Reserve's WC-130H aircraft have been important tools in the arsenal to understand tropical cyclones, detailed observations of the near-surface hurricane environment have been elusive because of the severe safety risks associated with low level manned flight missions. The main objective of the Aerosonde project addresses this significant observational shortcoming by using the unique long endurance and low-flying attributes of the unmanned Aerosonde observing platform, flying at altitudes as low as 500 feet...
The Aerosonde platform that flew into Ophelia was specially outfitted with sophisticated instruments used in traditional hurricane observation, including instruments such as mounted Global Position System (GPS) dropwind sondes and a satellite communications system that relayed information on temperature, pressure, humidity and wind speed every half second in real-time. The Aerosonde also carried a downward positioned infrared sensor that was used to estimate the underlying sea surface temperature. All available data were transmitted in near-real time to the NOAA National Hurricane Center and AOML, where the NOAA Hurricane Research Division is located.
The environment where the atmosphere meets the sea is critically important in hurricanes as it is where the ocean's warm water energy is directly transferred to the atmosphere just above it. The hurricane/ocean interface also is important because it is where the strongest winds in a hurricane are found and is the level at which most citizens live. Observing and ultimately better understanding this region of the storm is crucial to improve forecasts of hurricane intensity and structure.
Back in '02, I wrote a story for the Times on civilian UAVs. The star of the story: an Aerosonde over the Arctic Circle, monitoring the frozen seas and skies.
THERE'S MORE: American spy sats will be watching Rita from above, the AP says. Meanwhile, NASA has transferred control of the International Space Station from Houston to Moscow.
(Big ups: UV Online, Sploid)
Rapid Fire 9/22/05
* Texas biolab ready for Rita
* North Korea's new nuke construction
* Pentagon budget's missing billions
* Disaster planning's five easy steps
* Wireless hijack stoppers
* Student-made microsat
* The "Armani of bulletproof clothing"
* We're baaaaaack!
(Big ups: Nick, /.)
Rita: Watch This Blog
Defense Tech pal Kris Alexander works for Texas' homeland security department. Which makes his blog absolutely essentially reading, now that a category 5 killer hurricane is about to put the whomp on the Lone Stars.
 He runs down the reasons to hope and the potential "friction points" as the state gets ready for a rumble -- from Texas' 375,000 Katrina refugees to the hospitals that have already cleared out. Bottom line:
All of this is happening without one bit of federal resources being committed. FEMA is at the state operations center, but its a state and local show right now. We never planned on FEMA saving our bacon. And no this plan didn't happen overnight. It has taken years of detailed planning to reach this point. Will there be screw-ups? Yes. Will we do better than LA and NOLA? Probably.
This isn't meant as hubris. I feel that too many people, especially in the left side of the blogosphere, have rushed to defend the LA state and local governments. I disagree. I think they screwed up regardless of whether or not FEMA/DHS was slow on the draw. I don't think, knock on wood, that anyone is going to drown and die in a nursing home on the Texas Coast.
THERE'S MORE: Kris reassures us that the big hospital on Galveston Island is being evacuated. But what about the "hot zone" biodefense lab there?
AND MORE: The Journal runs down the gagdets you need to make it through an emergency (too bad they didn't do it before I re-stocked my disaster kit). And Xeni has pics of the sonic blaster we've discussed here before.
AND MORE: "Is it my imagination," asks Kathryn Cramer, "or isn't the use of sonic blasters as weapons to deliberately inflict pain on crowds 'torture' as defined in article 1 of the UN Convention Against Torture?"
AND MORE: John Little, from Blogs of War, works in downtown Houston. "I have a window office on the eight floor of a building in the Texas Medical Center. I have to assume that in a couple of days I'll have a windowless office on the eight floor of a building in the Texas Medical Center." He's got a great list of resources for folks looking to track the storm.
Spec Ops in DC
"Today, somewhere in the DC metropolitan area, the military is conducting a... Top Secret and compartmented [exercise of] the military’s extra-legal [response to] weapons of mass destruction," writes William Arkin, on his extremely awesome new blog, Early Warning. "It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."
A spokesman at the Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region (JFHQ-NCR) confirmed the existence of Granite Shadow to me yesterday, but all he would say is that Granite Shadow is the unclassified name for a classified plan.
That classified plan, I believe, after extensive research and after making a couple of assumptions, is CONPLAN 0400, formally titled Counter-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. [It's] a long-standing contingency plan of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) that... lays out national policy and priorities for dealing with WMD threats in peacetime and crisis -- from far away offensive strikes and special operations against foreign WMD infrastructure and capabilities, to missile defenses and "consequence management" at home if offensive efforts fail...
U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the military's new homeland security command, is preparing its draft version of CONPLAN 0400 for military operations in the United States, and the resulting Granite Shadow plan... include[s] deployment of "special mission units" (the so-called Delta Force, SEAL teams, Rangers, and other special units of Joint Special Operations Command) in Washington, DC and other domestic hot spots...
Further, Granite Shadow posits domestic military operations, including intelligence collection and surveillance, unique rules of engagement regarding the use of lethal force, the use of experimental non-lethal weapons, and federal and military control of incident locations that are highly controversial and might border on the illegal.
U.S. Lags in Civilian Bots
Are all our robots going to wind up being soldiers?Wired News reports that, "with the exception of military and space applications, the United States is falling behind Europe and Asia in robotics research, according to an international study."
 Unlike many other developed countries, the United States lacks a coordinated strategy to cultivate robotics development... Robotics research funding has been dropping in the United States for at least the last decade, with [the National Science Foundation's] funding now at less than $10 million per year.
In contrast, he said Japan's government will spend nearly $100 million in 2005. And over the next three years, Europe plans to spend nearly $100 million on a new program called Advanced Robotics. South Korea, meanwhile, spends $80 million on robotics research annually.
THERE'S MORE: If you've got a 'bot that can dig up moon dirt, NASA has a quarter-million bucks for you.
Bedlam Follows Basra Intrigue
Of all the insane stories that have come out of the war in Iraq, this might just be the craziest.
 "Two unknown gunmen in full Arabic dress began firing on civilians in central Basra, wounding several, including a traffic police officer," CNN reports. "The two gunmen fled the scene but were captured and taken in for questioning, admitting they were British Marines carrying out a 'special security task.'"
"Iraqi security officials... accused the two Britons they detained of... trying to plant explosives," the Washington Post notes.
Members of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the rebellious Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, then "converged on the police station holding the British men, apparently hoping to seize them in order to free... three colleagues in British custody," the New York Times says. "[They] begun attacking the station with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, and... British troops soon responded to defend it...
"British armored vehicles... fired on the station, headquarters of the major crimes unit in central Basra, and [broke] through its outer wall. Troops then stormed in and freed the two [Marines]."
 The pair were "sprung only hours after British forces had encircled the building but were forced to flee by a violent mob hurling stones and Molotov cocktails," the Times of London reports. "Two Iraqi civilians were reportedly killed in the riots, during which two UK Warrior armoured vehicles were set alight."
According to the AP, "150 Iraqi prisoners [also] fled as British commandos stormed inside and rescued their comrades."
THERE'S MORE: The BBC says the marines were actually being held in a militia safehouse. It's one of a number of discrepancies in the news accounts of this confusing story. There are sure to be more.
Juan Cole has put together a timeline of the events, and a possible explanation.
Propaganda, Inc.
Lying your ass off -- excuse me, strategic communications -- is the oldest government consulting job in the book. Defense Tech pal Sharon Weinberger has found an English firm looking to take the profession to a whole new level, by mass-deluding citizens in times of national crisis.
Rapid Fire 9/19/05
* "How Vile is Katrina's Toxic Goo?"
* Buh-bye, MX missile
* Army's new armored trucks
* 007, minus the gadgets
* MiG on eBay
* WWII battlefields, then and now
(Big ups: JQP, GeekPress)
Marines in Spaaaaaace!
"After three years of being laughed out of meetings, the U.S. Marine Corps' futuristic plans to deploy through space may finally be getting some traction," notes Aviation Week's spunky new spin-off, Defense Technology International.
Although the chuckle factor hasn't altogether disappeared, the Air Force Research Laboratory and Darpa are beginning a study of options for a reusable upper-stage space travel vehicle -- the same kind of technology that the Marines might need for a ride halfway across the globe.
The effort is called "Hot Eagle," and it could be the first step forward in the Marine Corps' hopes for space travel. Within minutes of bursting into the atmosphere beyond the speed of sound -- and dispatching that ominous sonic boom -- a small squad of Marines could be on the ground and ready to take care of business within 2 hours. [One presentation muses that the capsule might later be picked up by a Osprey or by a "balloon cable and C-17" transport plane. Or, the Marines might "hike out," and "leave [the] crew capsule behind." -- ed.]
The Marine Corps calls the concept the Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion Capability (Sustain). This plan, a growing group of Marine supporters say, is the natural evolution of the service's proclivity for expeditionary warfare that began decades ago with amphibious landings...
The concept is to deliver strategic equipment or a small squad of soldiers to any point on the globe -- even the most hard-to-reach location -- within hours of need. Once on the ground, those soldiers can carry out strategically critical missions like reconnaissance or destroying a specific target.
At least, that's their pitch.
THERE'S MORE: Speaking of space, Popular Mechanics is all over NASA's return-to-the-moon announcement.
North Korea Pledges No Nukes
Great news: "North Korea agreed to end its nuclear weapons program this morning in return for security, economic and energy benefits," the New York Times is reporting.
The United States, North Korea and four other nations participating in nuclear negotiations in Beijing signed a draft accord in which Pyongyang promised to abandon efforts to produce nuclear weapons and re-admit international inspectors to its nuclear facilities. Foreign powers said they would provide aid, diplomatic assurances and security guarantees and consider North Korea's demands for a light-water nuclear reactor...
The new agreement commits North Korea to scrap all of its existing nuclear weapons and nuclear production facilities, to rejoin the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and to re-admit international nuclear inspectors. North Korea withdrew from the treaty and expelled inspectors in 2002.
The United States and North Korea also pledged to respect each other's sovereignty and right to peaceful co-existence and to work toward normalization of relations. The two countries do not have full diplomatic relations and did not sign a peace treaty after the Korean War...
"It is significant that the countries have agreed on a broad set of principles," said Koh Yu Hwan, a North Korea expert at Dong Guk University in Seoul. "But they postponed addressing the hot-potato issues to prevent the talks from collapsing."
Most pointedly, the agreement finesses the North Korean demand that proved the biggest stumbling block in the latest round of talks -- its condition that the outside world provide a light-water nuclear reactor that it says it will use to produce electricity. The issue is left essentially unresolved, potentially leaving both sides to claim that their views prevailed.
The reactor "is not the only sticking point," the L.A. Times notes.
The Bush administration wants a far more extensive nuclear dismantlement than occurred after the 1994 treaty. North Korea is expected not only to dismantle its plutonium-based weapons program at Yongbyon, the country's main nuclear facility 60 miles north of Pyongyang, but also a secretive nuclear program based on highly-enriched uranium. It was news of the existence of this program in late 2002 that caused the earlier treaty to collapse.
North Korea had denied having a highly-enriched uranium program, and some other parties to the talks, notably China and Russia, have expressed doubts about the Bush administration's evidence.
In addition, North Korea will be forced to account for and dismantle its already-completed nuclear bombs, possibly as many as 13, which are believed to be hidden underground throughout the country.
Today's agreement skirted many of these difficult issues, which are likely to raise considerable hurdles in the next round of talks scheduled for November.
THERE'S MORE: Meanwhile, "the Pentagon may be having second thoughts about proposed revisions to its nuclear weapons doctrine that would allow commanders to seek presidential approval for using atomic arms against nations or terrorists who intend to use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons against the United States."
AND MORE: "The agreement punts on most of the contentious questions; buying time is a respectable diplomatic strategy -- but time favors the North Koreans (who keep stockpiling Plutonium)," says Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis, who studies Asian nuclear arsenals for a living.
I love the agreement, because my Republican buddies will have to shut their pie-holes about how the Clinton Administration blew it with North Korea. After five years of Bush, we still don't have a different plan than what the Clinton Administration did. The joint statement doesn't make any progress on the North Korean uranium enrichment program and the Bush Administration expressed it's "respect" for the DPRK's "right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy."
AND MORE: "It's a significant breakthrough. But it could easily have been accomplished two and a half years ago, had President George W. Bush been willing," argues Slate's Fred Kaplan. "It is also nothing like an actual agreement, just a preliminary step before the real negotiations — where, if history holds, North Korea will frustrate us with tricks and backtracking, and we just have to hang on tight."
Rapid Fire 9/16/05
* Pak jihadists get UAVs
* India buys subs
* New fighter = bomb-jammer?
* Counterfitters = terror aides?
* '71 spy sat declassed
* Geek FM on air
(Big ups: Secrecy News)
Plague Mice Escape Newark Lab
Just when we we starting to breathe a sigh of relief, that nothing toxic appears to have escaped New Orleans' anthrax labs. Now comes word, from the Star-Ledger, that three mice "carrying deadly strains of plague" have disappeared from the biodefense lab at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, N.J.
State Health Commissioner Fred Jacobs said mice infected with plague die "very fast," so "the risk to the public ... is probably slim to none. We didn't think -- nor did the CDC think -- there was any public health threat..."
Infectious-disease experts... called the episode ... very troubling -- raising serious issues of security and control...
Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and a critic of the government's rapid expansion of bio-terrorism labs... noted there has been a series of serious incidents across the country involving accidental human infections at several of the labs working with agents like anthrax and plague. At the same time, he said, federal guidelines call for only minimal security -- a lock on the lab door and a lock on the sample container and cage.
"You have more security at a McDonald's than at some of these facilities," he said.
THERE'S MORE: Back in April of '03, I profiled the lab's chief, pacificst-turned-biodefender Nancy Connell, for Wired News.
AND MORE: Want an idea of how little oversight there is of these biodefense labs?
New Jersey... does not know how many labs in the state are actually conducting experiments involving lethal bacteria or viruses.
It was just Wednesday that the Emergency Health Powers Act was signed into law, requiring all people, companies or institutions working with or possessing disease strains that can be used for biological weapons to register with the state Department of Health and Senior Servicers.
Battleship = Gay Museum?
"There's a new battle plan for bringing the battleship Iowa to San Francisco," the Chronicle reports.
 The battleship's supporters now hope to gain the support of city leaders by turning part of the vessel into a museum about the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and the contributions of gays, lesbians, ethnic minorities and women to the military.
The Board of Supervisors rejected the ship in July, and two supervisors explained their "no" votes by saying they objected to the military's policies toward gays and lesbians, while others opposed the war in Iraq.
Osprey Cleared for Take-Off
I was beyond skeptical when Wired announced that the crash-prone Osprey tilt-rotor craft was being cleared for take-off. After all, twenty years and $19 billion in the V-22's development, the craft was still having trouble handling sharp banks and U-turns last September.
 But things seem to have changed. In July, Navy testers declared the Osprey "operationally suitable." Now, the sticklers at the Pentagon's Operational Test and Evaluation Directorate are getting ready to "endorse the findings of naval testers," according to Inside the Navy, "who found the Osprey to be... effective for military use and recommended introducing the aircraft to the fleet."
Which means the Marines may get their wish for a craft that combines the speed of an airplane with a helicopter's ability to takeoff without a runway.
After two fatal crashes in 2000, Congress decreed Osprey production would stay at a minimum sustaining rate -- which has since turned out to be 11 aircraft annually -- until the defense secretary certifies that successful operational testing proved the program had overcome previously identified problems involving hydraulics, flight control software, reliability and maintainability...
The Pentagon is set to decide whether to buy the aircraft in large quantities at a Defense Acquisition Board meeting Sept. 27.
NoLa Biolabs: Research Wrecked
The AP, following on Nick's research over the last few days, says that Katrina "decades" of biodefense and other research.
Important work on heart disease, cancer, AIDS and a host of other ailments may be lost forever to scientists at Tulane and Louisiana State universities' medical schools in New Orleans.
LSU lost all of its 8,000 lab animals, including mice, rats, dogs and monkeys. Many drowned. Others died without food and water and the rest were euthanized, said Dr. Larry Hollier, dean of the LSU Health Sciences Center School of Medicine.
About 300 federally funded projects at New Orleans colleges and universities worth more than $150 million - including 153 projects at Tulane - were affected in some way.
The article also confirms the "thin silver lining" that Nick had found: "no deadly diseases were released from the area's "hot labs,' where researchers routinely handle and store some of the world's most dangerous germs."
Pentagon's Homeland Priorities
Spencer's article on the military's homeland security mission got me thinking. So I did a little digging, and found this Pentagon "Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support." It reinforces the money quote from Spencer's Katrina response story, that "the system that we have worked as it was designed. It was never designed to get masses of aid into place in 24 hours. And that's the problem."
 Check out the teeny-tiny emphasis that the generals place on responding to a disaster that doesn't have to do with WMD:
Key Objectives of the Strategy
Within the lead, support, and enable frame work for homeland defense and civil support, the Department is focused on the following paramount objectives, listed in order of priority:
• Achieve maximum awareness of
potential threats. Together with the Intelligence Community and civil authorities, DoD works to obtain and promptly exploit all actionable information needed to protect the United States. Timely and actionable intelligence, together with early warning, is the most critical enabler to protecting the United States at a safe distance.
• Deter, intercept and defeat threats at a safe distance. The Department of Defense will actively work to deter adversaries from attacking the US homeland. Through our deterrent posture and capabilities, we will convince adversaries that threats to the US homeland risk unacceptable counteraction by the United States. Should deterrence fail, we will seek to intercept and defeat threats at a safe distance from the United States. When directed by the President or the Secretary of Defense, we will also defeat direct threats within US airspace and on US territory. In all cases, the Department of Defense cooperates closely with its domestic and international partners and acts in accordance with applicable laws.
• Achieve mission assurance. The Department of Defense performs assigned duties even under attack or after disruption. We achieve mission assurance through force protection, ensuring the security of defense critical infrastructure, and executing defense crisis management and continuity of operations (COOP).
• Support civil authorities in minimizing the damage and recovering from domestic chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive (CBRNE) mass casualty attacks. The Department of Defense will be prepared to provide forces and capabilities in support of domestic CBRNE consequence management, with an emphasis on preparing for multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents. DoD’s responses will be planned, practiced, and carefully integrated into the national response. With the exception of a dedicated command and control element (currently the Joint Task Force Civil Support) and the Army National Guard Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Civil Support Teams, DoD will rely on dual capable forces for the domestic consequence management mission. These dual capable forces must be trained, equipped, and ready to provide timely assistance to civil authorities in times of domestic CBRNE catastrophes, programming for this capability when directed.
• Improve national and international capabilities for homeland defense and homeland security. The Department of Defense is learning from the experiences of domestic and international partners and sharing expertise with Federal, state, local, and tribal authorities, the private sector, and US allies and friends abroad. By sharing expertise, we improve the ability of the Department of Defense to carry out an active, layered defense. (emphasis mine)
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