Rapid Fire 02/28/06

* WH situation room's extreme makeover

* Army helos still undefended

* Pentagon bookkeeping FUBAR

* LAPD's stolen-car spotter

* Britain's "voluntary" DNA sweep

* Osprey goes to war?

* 10,000 combat hours for ScanEagle UAV

* STRATCOM consolidates

* Teeny-tiny planes take off

(Big ups: JR)

Laser Planes' Pains

Jane's has a good overview of the ray gun world's state of play. The bits about the problems facing the beam-firing 747, the Airborne Laser, and the blaster-equipped cargo plane, the Advanced Tactical Laser, are particularly juicy.

Full-on flight tests of the Airborne Laser, or ABL, have been pushed back to 2008. But "some aspects of the system cannot be demonstrated on the ground," Jane's notes. "Laser performance in real high-altitude conditions and the performance of the entire system at high altitudes. As in a rocket, the chemical systems in the COIL [chemical oxygen iodine laser, the ABL's weapon] are affected by atmospheric pressure at the exhaust outlet, which creates back pressure in the flow path."

Another issue is logistics: hydrogen peroxide is corrosive and a powerful solvent of organic materials (including people) and potassium hydroxide is a toxic material used as a drain cleaner and (by Norwegians) to preserve codfish. Neither is used by any other military system, so the chemicals require new storage and transport facilities and special training and handling procedures...

The USAF's other airborne COIL project is the ATL [Advanced Tactical Laser], which has a budget of $200 million [and] is due for high-power flight tests in mid-2007, aboard an C-130H platform.

ATL has a much lower power goal than the ABL - in the tens of kilowatts rather than megawatts - and is intended to disable rather than kill its targets, demonstrating the ability of lasers to achieve specific, ultra-precise effects. The design reference missions for ATL are to stop a moving vehicle and disable a communications node from 10,000 ft.

Stopping a vehicle does not necessarily mean destroying it or killing its occupants. If the laser can penetrate the engine cover, for example, the temperature within the engine compartment is likely to get higher than is mechanically optimal. The laser could penetrate the fuel tank and start a fire. In the case of a communications target, cables and antennas could be the weak spots.

Delivery of hardware for the ATL... started during 2005 and the C-130 platform was delivered to Boeing in January this year... Unlike the ABL, the ATL does not vent harmful gases into the atmosphere: the exhaust is ducted into a container of activated carbon, which absorbs and neutralises it.

While ATL presents less risk than ABL, it is more likely to be overtaken by other developments: primarily, the development of more powerful solid-state lasers. The attractions of a solid-state laser - which uses a solid transmissive material as the lasing medium - are clear, notes AFRL's Hamil: the 'magazine' can be as deep as the aircraft's fuel tanks (which can be replenished in flight) and there are no exotic fuels to handle and no chemical exhaust. The disadvantage is that solid-state lasers today do not have the power to do anything other than illuminate. At high powers, 'thermal lensing' - the change in optical qualities with heat - becomes what Hamil calls "horrific", making it difficult to produce a high-quality beam.

(Big ups: Eric)

Stop Training Iraqi Troops?

What if we’re fighting the wrong kind of war? Some of America’s better military minds have been making a transition in Iraq, from waging traditional battles to clamping down on insurgents. A major part of this shift: training Iraq forces to take over from American troops. Stephen Biddle, with the Council on Foreign Relations, says they’re making a huge mistake.

The problem is that “Iraqization” is a Vietnam-era solution. And “the current struggle is not a Maoist 'people's war' of national liberation [like Vietnam]; it is a communal civil war with very different dynamics,” Biddle writes in an amazingly timely article for the new issue of Foreign Affairs. "Turning over the responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces, in particular, is likely to make matters worse."

Such a policy might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it. Washington must stop shifting the responsibility for the country's security to others and instead threaten to manipulate the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds in order to force them to come to a durable compromise. Only once an agreement is reached should Washington consider devolving significant military power and authority to local forces…

In a people's war, handing the fighting off to local forces makes sense because it undermines the nationalist component of insurgent resistance, improves the quality of local intelligence, and boosts troop strength. But in a communal civil war, it throws gasoline on the fire. Iraq's Sunnis perceive the "national" army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids… to them, the defense forces look like agents of a hostile occupation. And the more threatened the Sunnis feel, the more likely they are to fight back even harder. The bigger, stronger, better trained, and better equipped the Iraqi forces become, the worse the communal tensions that underlie the whole conflict will get.

The creation of powerful Shiite-Kurdish security forces will also reduce the chances of reaching the only serious long-term solution to the country's communal conflict: a compromise based on a constitutional deal with ironclad power-sharing arrangements protecting all parties. A national army that effectively excluded Sunnis would make any such constitutional deal irrelevant, because the Shiite-Kurdish alliance would hold the real power regardless of what the constitution said. Increasing evidence that Iraq's military and police have already committed atrocities against Sunnis only confirms the dangers of transferring responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces before an acceptable ethnic compromise has been brokered.

On the other hand, the harder the United States works to integrate Sunnis into the security forces, the less effective those forces are likely to become. The inclusion of Sunnis will inevitably entail penetration by insurgents, and it will be difficult to establish trust between members of mixed units whose respective ethnic groups are at one another's throats. Segregating Sunnis in their own battalions is no solution either. Doing so would merely strengthen all sides simultaneously by providing each with direct U.S. assistance and could trigger an unstable, unofficial partition of the country into separate Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish enclaves, each defended by its own military force…

What, then, is to be done?... First, Washington must slow down the expansion of the Iraqi national military and police. Iraq will eventually need capable indigenous security forces, but their buildup must follow a broad communal compromise, not the other way around…

Second, the United States must bring more pressure to bear on the parties in the constitutional negotiations. And the strongest pressure available is military: the United States must threaten to manipulate the military balance of power among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds to coerce them to negotiate. Washington should use the prospect of a U.S.-trained and U.S.-supported Shiite-Kurdish force to compel the Sunnis to come to the negotiating table. At the same time, in order to get the Shiites and the Kurds to negotiate too, it should threaten either to withdraw prematurely, a move that would throw the country into disarray, or to back the Sunnis…

The only way to break the logjam is to change the parties' relative comfort with the status quo by drastically raising the costs of their failure to negotiate. The U.S. presence now caps the war's intensity, and U.S. aid could give any side an enormous military advantage. Thus Washington should threaten to use its influence to alter the balance of power depending on the parties' behavior. By doing so, it could make stubbornness look worse than cooperation and compel all sides to compromise.

Rapid Fire 02/27/06

* Coasties spooked by port deal

* New crooks: keyloggers

* SETI@home meets Nazi code-breakers

* "Q branch" IPO tanks (background here)

* Quantum crypto grows up

* Harvard nabs the Wonk

* Signs of hope in Iraq: "Current U.S. military commanders say they have come to understand that they are fighting within a political context, which means the results must first be judged politically. The pace and shape of the war also have changed, with U.S. forces trying to exercise tactical patience and shift responsibilities to Iraqi forces, even as they worry that the American public's patience may be dwindling."

Be Mickey Mouse's Spy

Some of you may have felt a little underqualified to become a manhunter for Special Operations Command. Never fear. An anonymous pal has found a job almost as good: "Intelligence Analyst" for the Walt Disney Company. Yeah, you read that right: a spook for the Mouse... "highly developed Internet skills" and "US Government security clearance (at least Secret-level) desirable."

Employer: The Walt Disney Company
Sector: Public
Type: Job
Status: Full-time
Location: Burbank, CA
Title: Intelligence Analyst

THE SITUATION: Basic Purpose and Objective of the Position: The Intelligence Analyst anticipates and assesses threats that could harm, or make vulnerable, The Walt Disney Company (TWDC), its employees, guests, or assets.

THE POSITION: The analyst thoroughly reviews information from open/public sources, official sources, and professional contacts, and conducts regular assessments of world events, regional/national security climates, and suspect individuals and groups. The analyst produces a range of written and verbal analyses for employees and management of the Company and provides tactical intelligence support to the Company's security and crisis management operators...

% of Total Duties and Responsibilities
45 [%] Monitors open source media, homeland security and law enforcement bulletins, and information from professional contacts, for international, national, and local news and intelligence that may affect the security and safety of TWDC. Maintains comprehensive files of intelligence on key issues and parts of the world; maintains record of threats received, assessments, and their disposition. Plays key information processing role in the Corporate-level Emergency Operations Center, when activated.

35 [%] Anticipates scenarios, analyzes information, and produces written or verbal assessments and warning forecasts for Global Security management and other appropriate TWDC consumers. Assessments will be assigned or self-initiated. Recommends strategies to mitigate security risks as appropriate or required.

10 [%] Develops and maintains regular liaison with local, national, and international law enforcement and intelligence community partners. Maintains and broadens professional skills and contacts through external training and attendance at conferences.

5 [%] Becomes subject matter expert on issues such as counterterrorism, travel security, and international affairs.

5 [%] Finds and coordinates training opportunities and intelligence production of analytic cadre throughout TWDC...

Education Level: BA/BS Required AND 4-6 Years of Experience

Field of Study/Area of Experience: Political science, international relations, national security studies, or related field preferred Other

Training/Technical Skills/Knowledge:

* Highly developed Internet skills and knowledge of Microsoft Office-based applications, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access

* Foreign area knowledge and understanding of contemporary affairs gained through study, travel, or work abroad " Knowledge and understanding of analysis on security issues, especially though not exclusively related to terrorism

* Familiarity with information resources and data-mining techniques " Analytic experience and formal training with an intelligence agency, law enforcement organization, the military, or the private sector required

* US Government security clearance (at least Secret-level) desirable.

Abilities & Behaviors

* Strong research and critical thinking skills to identify, collect, and evaluate data; to absorb and synthesize large amounts of information; and to draw logical, interpretable, and potentially actionable conclusions.

* Strong written and verbal English presentation skills.

* Solid interpersonal, teambuilding, and networking skills

* Ability to work under pressure of tight deadlines and high, exacting standards

* High motivation, desire for professional growth and continuous improvement, and a sincere willingness to learn

* Ability to interface with and represent Disney Global Security to all levels of management, executives, and external partners

* Ability to organize, balance, and prioritize multiple projects

* Exhibits creativity and innovativeness " Willingness and ability to train others " Strong professional ethics and ability to maintain absolute discretion, confidentiality, and trust.

Boing Boing vs. U.A.E.

Superblog Boing Boing is being "blocked by entire countries including the United Arab Emirates, and by many library systems, schools, US government and military sites, and corporations," Xeni says. The reason: a silly little program called Smart Filter, which classified 25,000 BB posts as "nudity."

The problem is, most of these posts don't have any boobies at all. "They're stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn't wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions..."

[Smart Filter maker] Secure Computing offered us a devil's bargain: if we'd change the URLs of images with "nudity" (which, they assured us, included photos of Michaelangelo's David) to something they could detect and block, they'd let the rest of the world see us again. That guy in the UAE who was worried he'd be imprisoned for trying to read BoingBoing would be OK again.

[I]nstead we've decided to help put Secure Computing out of business... We're publishing a guide to evading the SmartFilter censorware. There are hundreds of ways to defeat these censorware apps, and we're going to catalog as many of them as possible. (We'll publish this tutorial shortly, and update the post you're reading with a link to the permanent page).

I.E.D. Answer: New Roads?

I've spoken to a couple of company commanders in Iraq who say they don't have much of a problem with roadside bombs. The big reason why: they avoid the main streets in their neighborhoods, travelling where their enemies aren't.

Now, the Pentagon is looking to use that technique all over Iraq, according to Inside Defense. "Rather than trying to defeat improvised explosive devices (IEDs) head-on with new technologies and tactics, the Defense Department is looking to... construct new roads for supply convoys that simply bypass densely populated, high-threat areas."

The Army is seeking $167 million in military construction funds as part of the Pentagon's soon-to-be detailed $65.3 billion supplemental spending request for fiscal year 2006 to pave roads capable of supporting two-way traffic, complete with shoulders, drainage structures and interchanges to connect with existing supply routes, according to a draft version of the request.

“Failure to provide these routes will result in continued exposure of U.S. and coalition forces as well as Iraqi non-combatants to unacceptable insurgent threats to include IED and vehicle borne IED and direct fire exposure,” states the draft budget document obtained by InsideDefense.com and set to be delivered to Congress soon....

There have been approximately 28,000 IED incidents in Iraq between April 2003 and November 2005, according to Jan. 24 briefing slides prepared by Multi-National Force-Iraq.

Iraq Rebuild More Cash than Marshall Plan?

Adam Rogers is right: "IEEE Spectrum this month has an awesome, awesome article on why we can’t get the electricity on in Iraq."

He pulls out some of the story's juicier tidibits. Stuff like:

* Shortage of power nationwide: 4000 megawatts.

* Amount of power you could generate from the natural gas that gets “flamed off” -- vented and burned — from working oil wells instead of captured: 4000 megawatts.

* Kind of fuel the Iraqis have easy access to: crude oil.

* Kind of fuel the persnickety GE dual-fuel combustion turbines we bought use: diesel or natural gas.

* Cost of bringing high quality diesel, by truck, from the nearest source (Turkey): $85 a barrel.

* Amount of diesel all the fancy new combustion turbines in the country would use if they were up and running, which they aren’t: one tanker-truckful every 45 minutes.

But to me, that most amazing statistic in this numbers-rich article is that "the final [reconstruction] tally might be as high as $100 billion."

As of fall 2005, the United States had spent or committed more than US $20 billion to the effort, other countries had pledged $13.6 billion, and Iraq itself had contributed about $24 billion, including seized assets of Saddam Hussein.... For comparison, in the first two years of their reconstruction after being devastated in wars, Germany, Japan, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan together received a total of $25.6 billion, in 2003 dollars, according to the United States Institute of Peace, a congressionally created organization devoted to conflict resolution. The first European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt much of Western Europe after World War II, spent the equivalent of about $90 billion in today's dollars between 1948 and 1951.

Rapid Fire 02/26/06

*Catch o' the day: nuclear sub

* Israel's big-ass drone

* Navy's swimming spy plane (background here)

* "TIA lives on"

* Data mining everywhere

* Gunny B got blown up... and lived to tell about it

* Now that is a lot of bombs

(Big ups: RC, JQP, RN, HLS Watch)

Happy Birthday to Me

I called my Mom one day when I was twenty-two, to complain about how totally sucky my life was. I don't remember exactly what was so awful -- I think maybe I was frustrated with a new boss or something. Whatever. I had just graduated college, spent a year on the Clinton campaign, and was sharing a 2,000 square foot apartment/recording studio in Georgetown. My job was fun, my circle of frineds was huge, my bank account wasn't over-drawn, and I had recently spent a half-hour, solo, with Nelson Mandela. In short, I had absolutely zero to whine about.

In her polite, rosy way, Mom told me told shut the fuck up, and enjoy what I had. Great moments don't last forever, she said, and you better enjoy them while they're going on.

I still struggle to remember that simplest of lessons. But birthdays have a way of forcing you to stop and take an inventory of your life -- especially milestone birthdays, like number 35.

So with Mom's advice in mind, here's a list of some of the things I've done since I turned 34.

- Hung backstage with Snoop
- Shot guns with Xeni
- Got shot at by Iraqis
- Climbed Chichen Itza
- Caught the dunk by Iguodala (and Knicks/Sixers with Uncle Steve)
- Rode the rapids upstate
- Got choked in Krav Maga
- Tested a killer robot
- Blew up an IED
- Threw parties
- Threw up at parties
- Rode a Black Hawk and a C-130
- Flew a Joint Strike Fighter sim
- Fasted
- Gorged
- Snowshoed
- Snorkled
- Hiked
- Spellunked
- Sinned
- Atoned
- Prayed
- Cursed
- Cried
- Comforted
- Visited:

* Brooklyn
* San Fran
* L.A.
* London
* Leeds
* Chi-town
* H-town
* Tulum
* Cozumel
* Philly
* Baghdad
* Kuwait City
* Deadwood
* DC
* Sedona
* Manchester, VT
* Norfolk
* The 'burgh
* Ft. Irwin, CA
* Ft. Monmouth, NJ
* Ft. Huachuca, AZ
* Picatinny Arsenal, NJ
* Eglin AFB, FL
* Pentagon, VA
* And THREE laser weapon labs

- Chased crooks (A few weeks before the 34th, technically. Still counts.)
- Filed about 750 blog posts
- Wrote for Wired, Newsweek, the Times, the Forward, Pop Sci, Pop Mech, Wired News, the Times mag, the National Post, and Fast Company.
- Blabbed on CNN, NPR, and the BBC
- Had four albums come out with my name on 'em
- Learned a nice chunk of Hebrew
- Reconnected with my brother
- Raised some Katrina cash
- And, of course, got engaged

You know what? That seems like a pretty good year to me. Thanks, Mom. You were right.

Axe, Out of Iraq, Explains

As many of you know, David Axe spent the last few months reporting regularly from Iraq for Defense Tech and other publications. Then, two weeks ago, those reports abruptly stopped.

In the online edition of Editor & Publisher, David explains why:

In early February, I was embedded at a remote Iraqi Army training base, and interviewing a U.S. officer about the development of Iraqi security forces when a sour-faced U.S. Army sergeant pulled up in a Humvee. He ordered me to put away my cameras and get in.

"You're in violation of regulations," he said. I thought it was a joke. So did the officer. But the sergeant persisted. So I apologized to my interviewee, stowed my gear and climbed into the Humvee.

Over the next 36 hours, I was shuttled from base to base and finally to Kuwait -- under armed guard for all but the final leg. I never got an official explanation for what was happening. From my guards and others, I gleaned that I had published supposedly sensitive information on my blog at www.defensetech.org, thus allegedly endangering U.S. forces and disqualifying me for a military embed.

PTSD Sensors for Returning Troops

The Pentagon wants to know how its soldiers are handling the transition from wartime to regular life. But getting them to see a counselor isn't easy, even in the age of Oprah. So the Defense Department's fringe science division is funding development of wireless sensors (scroll down) to tell whether a veteran is stressed or hitting the bottle too hard after coming home from deployment.

AFrame Digital and Barron Associates, both based in Virginia, are focusing on veterans recovering from battlefield injuries. They both are investigating a "low-cost, noninvasive 'trip-wire' system [that] required that functions as a safety net, detecting when assistance or intervention is needed and issuing advisories to health care providers concerning significant changes in important medical indicators." These monitors will "collect and analyze real time data of vital signs, patient activity, fall acceleration and location parameters to detect deviations." AFrame already makes a version for seniors, that picks up "pulse, temperature, and mobility" and comes with a "panic button and fall detection."

Massachusetts' Erallo Technologies is focusing on whether a vet falls down from drink or stress, instead. According to the Associated Press, one in eight returning troops has PTSD symptoms. CNN puts it at one in five. Its "Intelligent, Wireless, Agent-based Health Monitoring Network for PTSD and Alcohol" will include "a wireless transdermal alcohol sensor, heart rate monitor and accelerometer."

Presumably, like AFrame, Erallo is expecting its system will incorporate "socially acceptable form factors, secure wireless networks, intelligent analysis software, displays for medical personnel, and interfaces to medical record systems."

But those form factors better be pretty dammn small. Because if a soldier feels shy about paying a private visit to a therapist, how eager is he going to be to walk around with some clunky armband?

Grandad's Jet-Pack

I think its in the bylaws of Popular Science, somewhere, that the magazine has to feature a flying car or a jet-pack every couple of issues. This time, however, PopSci has a particularly fun take on an old stand-by -- one I wish I had thought to write, frankly. Check of this lovingly silly portrait of one of the guys who actually flies a jet-pack in his back yard.

Despite the great optimism of the early ’60s, in the rocket belt’s brief history, only 12 souls have flown one. More people have walked on the moon. But Juan Manuel Lozano didn’t want to go to the moon...

Lozano is not a rocket scientist. He is not a stuntman. He is an animated, often goofy granddad who is afraid of the sight of blood. When he’s all dressed up in his rocket suit, Lozano looks more like Andy Kaufman pulling one of his famous stunts than he does James Bond. His highest diploma is a high school degree, although he did attend pilot school in Mexico City and took courses at an aerobatic-flight shop in Houston so he could fly the plane he was designing at the time.

For the past 40 years, Lozano has been a constant tinkerer and rocket hobbyist, and evidence of his obsession is all around his home. He shows me an in-progress rocket-propelled motorcycle that he predicts will go from 0 to 250 in five seconds. Around the back of the house is a rocket engine for a car that Lozano says will have 22,000 horse-power and a shot at breaking the land speed record. His daughter recounts stories of the go-karts dad made for her and her sister. And the high school science fairs? Guess whose kids always won.

(Big ups: Aliray)

Laser Mirrors May Get Testy

Laser weapons have a serious shortcoming, in the minds of some Pentagon thinkers. No, it's not the fact that it takes giant vats of chemicals or a gazillion watts of power to get the beam machines to work. Or that a fair-sized rainstorm pretty much renders them useless. It's that lasers can only zap as far as the eye can see. The beams don't curve, so ray guns can't reach over the horizon.

The Defense Department's Office of Force Transformation wants to change that, however, with a world-wide ring of giant mirrors, that would bounce laser light to wherever the Pentagon saw fit.

The transformation shop has been talking about this Tactical Relay Mirror System, or TRMS, for several years. Now, they may be ready to start some early-stage testing, Inside Defense reports.

“Some of the work that we’re doing on this is very advanced, and [has] come along very well,” Col. Craig Hughes said. “And certainly the test of the laboratory-sized aerospace relay mirror come this spring will be a significant development for us.”

Maybe the mirrors would be connected to a set of giant blimps, some have suggested. Maybe they'd be strapped onto robotic planes. But, strangely, Inside Defense notes, Hughes and his fellow mirror men seem to be tying their program to the star-crossed Airborne Laser, or ABL. That's the 747, modified for ray gunning, that's been sinking rather rapidly in the military's estimation. Flight tests for the thing are now six years behind schedule, and the project was recently demoted down to a technology demonstrator,

“If you put [a mirror] on an airship right above ABL, you instantly double the range of ABL and eventually maybe these things can go into space.”

Considering that the ABL is the only part of this little scenario that's anything more than a PowerPoint slide, however, I guess Hughes and Co. don't really have a choice. Keep on blasting, boys.

Fake Soldier Saves Real Cash

Meet Santos. He's a simulated soldier, being developed at the University of Iowa. And he's so true-to-life, Wired News reports, that engineers are using him to test out equipment before it ever leaves the desktop.

Santos is programmed with extensive modeling data, the result of research on the human body. As he moves in response to commands, he sends back information on his comfort level and joint angles. And, if Santos has difficulty completing a task, project engineers will have the correct information to make modifications before the first stage of production begins.

When the U.S. Army needs new designs of combat-ready body armor and other protective gear, it, too, turns to digital human technology. Santos can model the new duds and advise if they are too restrictive, or if the material doesn't have enough give to be useful in the field.

In a demonstration, Santos appeared on a monitor, dressed in desert camouflage. Darkness enveloped an overturned Humvee, and Santos struggled to escape through a narrow hatch opening. After removing his vest and holster, he easily slid through to safety.

Rapid Fire 02/22/06

* "If this doesn’t spark a much-feared civil war, we’ll be lucky."

* School bus drivers vs. Al Qaeda

* Explosive-eating fungus

* Russian propaganda, US battleship

* Welcome home, Global Hawk

* UK's Afghan base

* Israel's traffic-watching UAVs

* Inside Counter-insurgency U.

* Robo-Stryker in convoy tests

(Big ups: JQP, PA)

US vs. Protoss

I've been into video games since the Atari 2600. And I've played all kinds -- shooters, sports, role-players, what have you. But, for the last decade or so, my real weakness has been real-time strategy (RTS) games. Back in '98, my bandmates and I were so addicted to Starcraft, we put a Zerg hydralisk on one of our posters. Even today, my fiancee, much to her annoyance, has the catchphrases from Age of Empires III memorized, she's heard 'em so many times coming from my laptop.

But, as awesome and as challenging as these war simulations can be, they're not particularly realistic. David Wong wants to change all that. So he's developed his 20-point checklist for the "ultimate" RTS... one that'll give experienced players "Thousand-Yard Stares."

3. Every War Sim has a "Fog of War" that obscures the map in darkness until units scout the landscape. Well, I want a hazy, brown "Fog of Bullshit" layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it to show me a massive enemy fortress where there is actually an Aspirin factory. I want to never know for sure which it was, even after the game is over...

5. I want that "Public Support" meter to rise and fall according to Troops Lost, Length of Conflict, Innocents Killed and Whether or Not There is Anything Else On TV That Week. I want to lose 200 Public Support points because, in a war where 8,000 units have been lost, one of my Mutalisks happened to be caught on video accidentally eating one clergyman. Then, later, my destruction of an entire enemy city goes unnoticed because the Nude Zero-Gravity Futureball championship went into overtime....

7. I want my Mission Objectives to change every 30 seconds, without anyone letting me know. I want little talking heads to pop up on my screen - commanders, politicians, allies, military intelligence - each giving me different sets of victory parameters, all of them conflicting and many of them written in bullshit ass-covering doublespeak.

(Big ups: Kris)

Net is Military's "Weakest Link"

I've always been pretty skeptical about so-called "cyber-terrorism" -- the idea that an Al-Qaeda type is going to logic bomb a server, rather send a truck bomb into a building; for a group trying to sew fear, that electronic attack just doesn't seem visceral enough. Cyber-warfare, on the other hand, sounds plenty likely. Every day, American armed forces grow increasingly reliant on their communications networks -- to relay orders, transmit reconnaissance footage, and plan attacks. Which means those networks become juicier targets, all the time. Unfortunately, they're also the U.S. military's "weakest link," according to National Defense magazine.

The U.S. military is comfortable facing enemies on traditional battlefields, but facing them in the virtual world is a new challenge, said Army Brig. Gen. Susan Lawrence, Joint Staff chief information officer and director of command, control, communications and computers. Until the military figures out how to defeat its adversaries in this battle space, “we’re not going to win the global war on terrorism,” she said at a military communications conference.

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Robert Shea, director of command, control, communications and computer systems on the Joint Staff, said at the conference that “the network is our center of gravity, and our ability to defend it is our Achilles’ heel.”

Army Col. Carl Hunt, director of technology for the joint task force for global network operations, said those who attack the Pentagon’s network are often “a half step ahead of us.”

“We’ve gone to great lengths to build complementary capabilities in the kinetic battlefield,” but not in the virtual battlefield, he told military writers at a briefing. “We have a very thin, fragile communications capability basically in the global information grid and the Internet.”

Rapid Fire 02/21/06

* Bushies pummeled on port deal

* Google cooperating with DHS?

* First F-35 leaves factory

* Body language trainer

* "Biowar for Dummies"

* Llama commandos

* Reward for recovered UAV

* X-ray vision, for real

* "Blimp City"

* Rummy "thinks like a futurist and acts like a Neanderthal"

* "God is my intel"

(Big ups: Bryan, Haninah, RC, JQP, Xeni, Wonk)

Decades-Old Docs Reclassified

Phew. I was worried there, for a second, that some evil-doer might learn our country's most sensitive secrets. Like the CIA's 1948 plan to drop leaflets behind the Iron Curtain. Or an English translation of a newspaper article on China's nukes -- from Belgrade, 1962.

Luckily, we won't have to worry about those breaches in security any more. Thanks to some intrepid intelligence agency bureaucrats, the New York Times reports, 55,000 "historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians... have been remov[ed] from public access."

The [program] began in 1999... But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid [who has put his version of the whole affair online, and posted some of the reclassified papers] was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."

"It is important to understand that there is no rigorous, consensual definition of what constitutes classified information," Steven Aftergood notes in today's Secrecy News. "Instead, in a practical sense, classified information is whatever the executive branch says it is."

In 1997, the Central Intelligence Agency declassified the total intelligence budget for that year ($26.6 billion). But intelligence budget figures from three, four and five decades earlier remain classified. Why? Because the CIA says so!

One might argue that it should be the other way around -- budget figures from the remote past should be declassified while more recent figures should perhaps be classified. But such logic is foreign to CIA classification policy, and to the classification system as a whole.

"90 percent" of what's currently classified is being wrongly kept from the public, Rep. Chris Shays, chairman the national security panel of the House Committee on Government Reform, once told me. "I've read supposedly classified documents where page after page after page didn't tell me anything I didn't already know."

Now, some might argue that it's still better to err on the side of keeping things clandestine -- that the risk of releasing one important secret is so great, it outweighs any potential benefit of making the information free.

Those people would not include some of the country's top current and former spies, however. They argue that, by keeping a gazillion documents under wraps, spooks and cops and soldiers are prevented from sharing information. And that's not a good thing, when you're trying to track down terrorists.

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

UPDATE 4:08 PM: Shays is going to hold a hearing on this next month. "Secrets are kept to protect the national security," he said in news release, "not to prevent embarrassment or protect Cold War bureaucrats from history's judgment. When many knowledgeable voices, including the 9/11 Commission, have called for greater openness and information sharing, our policies on creation and handling of sensitive information are moving in exactly the opposite direction. That threatens national security."

UPDATE 4:15 PM: 1442 days ago, when the bioweapons-watchers Sunshine Project filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the National Academies of Science about some supposedly "non-lethal" weapons research, the group figured it would get a speedy response. After all, there's a law that "when NAS does a study for the government, documents that are deposited in the Public Access Records File are public." The Sunshine Project is still waiting. It's one of the group's "Top 10 Freedom of Information Failures," published today.

(Big Ups: Nick)

Breaking Rocks - Lots of Rocks

This is the second in a two part series by Weapons Grade author David Hambling on weapons that drill and scrape their way through targets. Check out part one here.

The Pentagon is developing a bunker buster that can burrow into the ground and break up rock far more efficiently than existing rounds. But hitting underground lairs isn't the only thing the technology can do.

David Burns, program manager of this "Deep Digger" bunker buster, mentioned that a breaching device based on his weapon was already being investigated. Like the Deep Digger, this will fire a volley of projectiles, creating a man-sized hole in walls. Today, you need hand-emplaced explosives or heavy weapons to get the job done. The Deep Digger-ish breaching device would have more fine control -- cutting progressively through the several feet of concrete, or breaking through a single layer of brick without demolishing the building.

Another option would be to combine the special projectile with a million-round-a-minute MetalStorm launcher for a lightweight, rapid-fire mobile system. Burns believes that this could be a distinct possibility if MetalStorm can handle the rounds. Such a weapon would be able to reduce pillboxes and strongpoints into gravel almost instantly.

The special projectiles would also be useful for the traditional combat engineering tasks of demolition and creating field fortifications. And they could have humanitarian uses, too – Burns suggested that a mobile Deep Digger would provide the fastest way of getting to rescuing victims buried under rubble or in mine collapses.

Larger projectiles already exist. BAE Systems Advanced Technologies, Inc. (ATI), who were involved in creating Deep Digger have looked at a larger-caliber cheap version of the round for quarrying and similar uses. They have already tested a 60mm round which can pulverise 0.4 cubic metres of rock with one shot - see the picture above - and they believe that a cubic meter per shot is possible. This represents an awesomely fast and efficient means of mining and tunnelling.

To bring the cost-per-shot down from dollars to pennies, ATI are talking about firing concrete projectiles from an electrothermal launch system. What this really means is a steam gun - a sort of retro-future technology not seen for a while. This seemed to be the future back in 1824 when Mr Perkins’ steam gun was firing 900 rounds a minute; a bit later on the Confederacy had one in the Civil War which was supposed to fire twenty-four pound projectiles and scythe down opposing ranks, but was captured without a fight. The ATI proposal should be more practical. Given an unlimited supply of cheap projectiles and the possibilities multiply for both military and civilian applications. If you want to build a new metro much faster than standard tunnel boring machines, or dig an underground bunker complex in a hurry, this could be for you.

Of course, if such digging device proliferate, they could end up in the wrong hands. I'm thinking of Clint Eastwood in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, where he plays a robber whose signature is using a 20mm Oerlikon cannon to break into bank vaults. With projectile-based excavation, Thunderbolt could try his luck with Fort Knox.

More seriously, this technology means that reinforced concrete cannot necessarily be relied on to protect strategic assets in the long term. Conventional weapons will be able to even threaten facilities that were built to withstand nuclear attack.

-- David Hambling

New Bomb Drills for Bunkers

Weapons Grade author David Hambling has another fascinating two-part series for Defense Tech, on weapons that drill and scrape their way through targets.

Meet Deep Digger, first of a revolutionary new generation of bunker-busting weapons, described in this week’s New Scientist. This is literally ground-breaking new technology which uses cannon to tunnel through solid rock, drilling a channel for the bomb.

Existing weapons for attacking hard targets are kinetic, relying on sheer momentum to break through rock and concrete. To get much improvement you have to make them much bigger - like the outsize 30,000 lb Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or much faster - like the proposed conventional version of the D5 Trident ballistic missile, or denser - like the heavy BLU-109 with its ballast of dense metal. But you can’t get around the laws of physics. As Princeton's Robert Nelson points out in a very thorough analysis, even if the penetrator is a hypersonic projectile made of solid depleted uranium:

“…no Earth Penetrating Weapon can penetrate reinforced concrete deeper than four times the length of the missile.”

So this approach really isn’t going to get you more than a hundred feet through rock at best, and the practical limit is much less.

The supercavitating bunker-buster I revealed last year looks neat, but the jury is still out on whether it works. A lot of people in the industry simply don’t believe that it can. The Broach is an interesting idea but limited to a few metres.

Deep Digger is different. It does not depend on the kinetic energy of the warhead at all – in fact, it parachutes down. Then it stars drilling. The weapon is limited only by how deep the drilling process can go, which is a matter of how deep it can ‘muck’ (clear debris from the shaft). And although the details are classified, that is much, much deeper than any kinetic weapon will ever go. In the tests last year, it demonstrated a tunneled down ten meters -- about 50% more than the BLU-113, which is the current record holder.

It has numerous other advantages. One is a thinner casing which means more payload. Another is that it does not undergo a shattering 10,000g impact. Other penetrating bombs need special insensitive explosives; Deep Digger can carry a range of warheads, as well as sensors and communications. It can stay in touch with the launch aircraft and report its progress; multiple Deep Diggers could be co-ordinated to detonate simultaneously producing a combined shockwave.

Part of the secret is the rock-breaking projectile, developed like the cannon at ARDEC, the US Army’s Armament Research Development and Engineering Center at Picatinny. David Burns, the Program Manager, describes it as being a special .75 calibre round, a monolithic design which is more robust and performs better than earlier projectiles. In place of the blasting gel used earlier it now employs a solid high explosive called PAX-11, one of Picatinny’s own special recipes.

Deep Digger has already moved on from the version described in this presentation. Burns is confident that it’s proven ability to drill consistently through rock will make Deep Digger the leader in its field.

It doesn’t stop with bombs either. There are some other interesting applications for Deep Digger technology too, which we’ll be looking at in part two of this little series, starting with a breaching cannon that cuts through brick walls like a chainsaw through plywood.

-- David Hambling

Rapid Fire 02/16/05

* Predicting the next attack

* 3rd Cav, counterinsurgency specialists

* Navy $7B short, already

* ISR evolves

* UAE runs NYC's port - WTF?

* Darpa wants super-translation machines

(Big ups: KR, CA)

Manhunters: Apply Here

Wanna track the world's most dangerous game? Ready to move to Tampa? Then defense contractor SAIC has a job for you.

Special Operations Manhunting Program Analyst

Job Description:
Performs as the USSOCOM lead for the development and implementation of CT [counter-terror] manhunting operations in support of DOD GWOT [Department of Defense global war on terror] efforts. Individual will research and incorporate current manhunting experiences and procedures in order to provide an educational forum for manhunting issues. Supports development of innovative curriculum targeted at manhunting education throughout DOD and the interagency environment, especially for those who enable and support manhunting. Will coordinate staff actions in support of manhunting issues within the JSOU, USSOCOM, DOD and other agencies.

Upon completion of concept and doctrine development, the chosen candidate may assist with the development of CONOPS [concept of operations] and JTTP’s [joint tactics, techniques, and procedures] for manhunting operations. , Position is located at USSOCOM [U.S. Special Forces Command], on MacDill AFB, in Tampa, FL. The successful candidates will represent Joint Special Operations University and educational issues associated with manhunting to USSOCOM.

Education:
Bachelors Degree in related field of study.

Required Skills:
Must possess a SECRET level clearance and be able to obtain a TOP SECRET/SCI security clearance. Must have articulate speaking, writing, and organizational skills. Demonstrated ability to develop and advance innovative concepts with limited oversight. Knowledge of how SOF and interagency cooperation in the GWOT environment. Attended Intermediate Service School and Joint PME II.

Desired Skills:
Comprehensive understanding of DOD and IA GWOT and CT operations. Attended Senior Service School. Related duties in a joint, interagency, or special mission unit assignment.

(Big ups: A)

Laser Jet Demoted

Some readers got all bent out of shape last month, when I dared to suggest that laser weapons -- especially the modified 747 Airborne Laser -- weren't ready to move beyond science fiction. (They didn't like how I used the words "whiz-bang" and "shit," either.)

Those people are going to be double-mad now, I suppose. Because "the multibillion-dollar Airborne Laser (ABL) program, considered the Pentagon's best chance to develop a weapon to defeat ballistic missiles in their early, boost phase of flight, is being relegated to a technology demonstration status while a planned five-aircraft purchase by the Air Force is put on hold."

The ABL was supposed to start zapping missiles in 2002. Then it was pushed back to 2005. Now, the test is scheduled for 2008. Maybe. Until then, Pentagon's approach to the program is wait and see. Only after that will it be "serious time," a senior Defense Department official says. Originally slated to cost a billion dollars, the ABL has grown into a $7.3 billion behemoth.

Despite all this, the ABL remains the Pentagon's "primary" efort to wack ballistic missiles in their early, "boost" phase. The other big project in the area, the Kinetic Energy Interceptor (a projectile which slams into the missile, basically), had its budget cut by $5 billion over 5 years.

The DOD official said last week the agency is “not committing the funding to complete the program” until KEI successfully demonstrates [its] propulsion system in 2008. “So in 2008 there are two knowledge points,” he said. “For ABL it is the shoot-down. For KEI it is a test of the propulsion stack. We will not flesh out the funding until then.”

Rapid Fire 02/15/06

* Skiers get body armor

* Killer drone, tres chic

* 325,000 watch list names

* Whistleblower: NSA scandal only the start

* Awful new Abu Ghraib pics emerge

* Next "grand challenge": California traffic

* Dems spooked by wiretaps

* Iraq bases here to stay

* We're all spies

* Airstrikes on Baghdad

(Big ups: RN, JQP, Sploid, Giz, Umansky)

Shocking Shotgun: Stuns Quail, Too?

Don't tell Dick Cheney; it'll only make him angrier. But Taser International has just wrapped up tests on a less-lethal shotgun. Even if you nail someone in the face with this thing, the chances of putting him or her is the ICU are pretty low.

Today's standard-issue stun guns work fairly well. But because the Taser uses a pair of tethered darts to deliver its electric shock, range is limited to 7 meters or less. Only one person can be targeted at a time.

This new "Extended Range Electro-Muscular Projectile" works out to 30 meters, according to News.com. And unlike Cheney's birdshot, this ammo fits into a diesel 12-gauge, not a wimpy 28. But testers said it could be "powerful enough for crowd control."

It's one of a bunch of long-range stun guns that that researchers in America and in Europe are investigating, Defense Update observes.

A different concept is the Sticky Shocker, developed by Titan, with DARPA's support... Sticky Shocker clings to a human target inflicting an electrical stun. Effective at up to 10 meters, the projectile contains a battery which excites several short high voltage pulses (50KV) per second... Different method of wireless stun weapon application is "laser induced plasma" weapon [kinda like this one], which uses artificial lightning effects to stun and incapacitate a target. Initial applications of such technology include the StunStrike, which [is] currently maturing into [an] operational system.

A German arms-maker is working on a "plasma taser" that squirts out an aerosol spray at the target, creating a conductive channel for a shock current, David Hambling noted in New Scientist. Meanwhile, Texas-based Lynntech, Inc. is using a grant from HSARPA (DARPA's homeland security clone) to build a shock grenade. (Here's Hambling's take.) And Taser International is toying around with a less-lethal landmine, based on its original stun gun.

There's no word, yet, on what the weapon does to quail.

(Big ups: RC)

UPDATE 2:04 PM: "Eagle Eye Body Armor sent us a release today noting that "Hunting accidents can be prevented carrying special hunting body armor,'" Defense Industry Daily noes. "'The Eagle Eye hunter's jacket that allows free movement with light weight is specially designed for the protection of individuals during the hunt.'"

Rapid Fire 02/14/06

* Moon plans move ahead

* Giant blimps go luxury

* China web censor hearts Bushies

* Training goal: "clone" great officers

* DOD budget: "new high for defense spending... new lows in the quantity of Army divisions, Navy combat ships, and Air Force wings."

(Big ups: JF, Victor, Haninah)

Moscow's Remote-Controlled Heart Attacks

This is the second of David Hambling's two-part series on plasma and electromagnetic weapons. Check out part one here.

The American military may want to attack the nervous system, with pain rays and laser plasma pulses. But they're not the only ones. The Russians have long studied such systems, too -- including one weapon that could, in theory, remotely trigger heart attacks.

In 2003, at the 2nd European Symposium on Non-Lethal Weapons, Anatoly Korolev and his colleagues from Moscow State University presented a paper with the snappy title "Bioelectrodynamic Criterion of the NLW Effectiveness Estimation and the Interaction mechanisms of the multilayer Skin Tissues with electromagnetic Radiation." This is a study of how radio-frequency weapons -- like the American Active Denial System -- affect the skin. After wading through a mass of technical data showing how complex the interactions are we reach the punch line:

The sensations modality (pricking, touch, pressure, gooseflesh, touch, burning pain etc) depends on the field parameters and individual concrete human being factors. As a matter of fact, we can really choose the non-lethal bioeffect.

The effects include sensations similar to those discussed previously, and more besides. The paper discusses effects on cell membranes and affecting the body’s normal function, including "information transfer to the organs of control."

At the same conference, V Makukhin of the Trymas Engineering Center in Moscow described "Electronic equipment for complex influence on biological objects." And when he says "biological objects," he means you and me.

His laboratory apparatus uses a modulated beam of radio waves to produce what he terms "disorder of autonomic nervous system," put forward as a possible non-lethal weapon. Makhunin notes that there is no general agreement on how EM waves disrupt nerves - he mentions ion channels similar to those in the plasma paper - but he certainly seems to be seeing the same effects as American researchers.

But it need not be a non-lethal weapon. Makhunin also mentions the effects of "change of electrocardiogram" and what he calls "function break of heart muscle."

The vulnerability of the heart to electrical stimulation (including that produced by EM waves) is well documented. A lethal device would interfere with the electrical potentials that keep the chambers of the heart synchronized, producing fibrillation and rapid death. A death ray doesn’t need to be a truck-sized laser that reduces the target to smoking heap; a small device that stops the heart will do the job.

Little has been openly published in this area in the public domain, but this may be the tip of the iceberg. We are likely to be hearing more in future - especially if the Russians manage to find funding.

I don’t think we need tinfoil hats just yet. But a layer of conducting mesh built into body armor might save a lot of heartache in years to come.

(If you want more, there’s a whole chapter on different non-lethal directed energy weapons and where the technology might lead in my book Weapons Grade. )

-- David Hambling

Iraq, Behind the Bombs

We read all the time about the American military effort to stop handmade bombs in Iraq. But we don't know much about the insurgents who build and plant them. Greg Grant, who just got back from Iraq, has one of the most detailed looks yet into the IED supply chain. Here's a snippet. But be sure to read the whole story, in this month's Defense Technology International.

According to U.S. military intelligence, more than 100 cells operate in Iraq. Most limit attacks to roadways and neighborhoods near where the cell members live. Cells advertise their technical skills on the Internet, posting streaming video of IED attacks to jihadist web sites. The most highly skilled IED cells operate as a package and hire themselves out to the larger insurgent networks on a contract basis, changing affiliations for more money.

While ideology motivates many guerrilla fighters in Iraq, some officers believe the financial motivation behind insurgent attacks has been underestimated. “You get a disaffected guy who is making $100 a month and you tell him go place this IED and I’ll give you $300, and if you blow something up we’ll give you a $700 bonus, and that’s a pretty dramatic reward,” says Army Lt. Col. Shawn Weed, a military intelligence officer in Baghdad…

“Payday is the beginning of the month,” says Army Lt. Col. Ross Brown, who commands a cavalry squadron in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (3ACR) operating south of Baghdad. “We can track it on a calendar; he’s buying IEDs on this date, then he’s building them, now he’s putting them out on the roads, then they’re blowing up and then he’s out of money and munitions and he starts over...”

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was saturated with weapons plants and munitions depots. U.S. intelligence indicates that after the regime fell, former officials moved large quantities of munitions into pre-selected caches, many south of Baghdad, from which insurgents draw explosives for IEDs. Army Capt. Ben Crombe, an intelligence officer in 3ACR, says there is a single supplier for many of these cells.

The suppliers provide explosive material to locations across the capital. Components are assembled at well-concealed bomb factories and moved from areas likely to be searched by American patrols to holding areas until the device is emplaced. Because of the frequency of U.S. raids on suspected insurgent hideouts, IEDs are kept in what the military calls “rolling weapons caches”— cars with false bottoms or trunks loaded with explosives that blend in with the thousands of vehicles on Iraq’s crowded city streets.

Individual cells have a specific signature and follow a pattern, Funk says, such as the time of day they carry out IED attacks and where they place bombs, while different cells have access to different types and sizes of munitions. Most of the bombs are unique in construction because the bomb maker is forced to use materials at hand.

Rapid Fire 02/13/06

* "Secure Flight" suspended

* Insurgent intel, explained

* Nanotech sniffs IEDs

* Qinetiq goes public; Carlyle cashes in (background here)

* Everybody hates the QDR

* 100 new, long-range bombers (background here)

* Sweet cammo!

Air Force Plan: Hack Your Nervous System

This is the first of a two-part series on plasma and electromagnetic weapons by David Hambling, author of Weapons Grade: How Modern Warfare Gave Birth to Our High-Tech World.

The brain has always been a battlefield. New weapons might be able to hack directly into your nervous system.

"Controlled Effects" (see image, right) is one of the Air Force’s ambitious long-term challenges. It starts with better and more accurate bombs, but moves on to discuss devices that "make selected adversaries think or act according to our needs... By studying and modeling the human brain and nervous system, the ability to mentally influence or confuse personnel is also possible."

The first stage is technology to “remotely create physical sensations.” They give the example of the Active Denial System "people zapper" which uses a high-frequency radiation similar to microwaves as a non-lethal means of crowd control.

Other weapons can affect the nervous system directly. The Pulsed Energy Projectile fires a short intense pulse of laser energy. This vaporizes the outer layer of the target, creating a rapidly-expanding expanding ball of plasma. At different power levels, those expanding plasmas could deliver a harmless warning, stun the target, or disable them - all with pinpoint laser precision from a mile away.

Early reports on the effects of PEPs mentioned temporary paralysis, then thought to be related to ultrasonic shockwaves. It later became apparent that the electromagnetic pulse caused by the expanding plasma was triggering nerve cells.

Details of this emerged in a heavily-censored document released to Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Project under the Freedom if Information Act. Called “Sensory consequence of electromagnetic pulsed emitted by laser induced plasmas,” it described research on activating the nerve cells responsible for sensing unpleasant stimuli: heat, damage, pressure, cold. By selectively stimulating a particular nociceptor, a finely tuned PEP might sensations of say, being burned, frozen or dipped in acid -- all without doing the slightest actual harm.

The skin is the easiest target for such stimulation. But, in principle, any sensory nerves could be triggered. The Controlled Effects document suggests “it may be possible to create synthetic images…to confuse an individual' s visual sense or, in a similar manner, confuse his senses of sound, taste, touch, or smell.”

In other words, it may be possible to use electromagnetic means to create overwhelming 'sound' or 'light', or indeed 'intolerable smell' which would exist only in the brain of the person perceiving them.

There is another side as well. The “sensory consequences” document also notes that the nervous system which controls muscles could be influenced to cause what they call “Taser-like motor effects.” The stun gun’s ability to shock the muscles into malfunction is relatively crude; we might now be looking at are much more targeted effects.

Tomorrow: Moscow moves in. Remote-controlled heart attacks, anyone?

-- David Hambling

Real-Life Ray Gun: Say When?

I was skeptical, when I first heard about the idea of using lasers and man-made lightning to detonate explosives at a distance. Not only did the technology sound fantastic. But the company pushing the real-life ray gun, Tucscon's Ionatron Inc., seemed so damn squirrely -- long on press releases and shady political connections, short on specifics about how their technology really worked. And that's before you start digging into the questionable stock deals and patent violations. So I wrote Ionatron off for while, despite more and more headlines about the firm and its "Joint IED Neutralizer" -- JIN, for short.

Then, over the summer, I got a call from an Army general who had seen the thing in action. By using femtosecond lasers – light pulses that last less than a ten-trillionth of a second – JIN could carve conductive channels of ionized oxygen in the air. Through these XXXX-foot channels, Ionatron's blaster sent man-made lighting bolts. And they actually seem to work at neutralizing bombs. "We understand the physics of what we're trying to do. Now we're just working on the engineering," the general told me. "I think we're going to solve that problem -- and this is just a guess -- in 12 months, maybe 18."

It turns out the general wasn't the only one who was impressed. Last year, "then-deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz recommended investing $30 million in research and sending prototypes to Iraq for testing," the L.A. Times reports. Ionatron CEO Tom Dearmin told eDefense that the first of 12 units would be in Iraq by the end of July.

"But 10 months later — and after a prototype destroyed about 90% of the IEDs laid in its path during a battery of tests — not a single JIN has been shipped to Iraq," the Times notes. "To many in the military, the delay in deploying the vehicles, which resemble souped-up, armor-plated golf carts, is a case study in the Pentagon's inability to bypass cumbersome peacetime procedures to meet the urgent demands of troops in the field."

"The decision has been made that it's not yet mature enough," said Army Brig. Gen. Dan Allyn, deputy director of... the Joint IED Defeat Organization. Iraq is "not the place to be testing unproven technology."

But the Marine Corps believes otherwise and recently decided to circumvent the testing schedule and send JIN units to Al Anbar province in western Iraq... Based on their performance, Marine commanders said, they hope the device can eventually be used throughout Iraq.

Just about every arm of the Defense Department that deals with R&D has been struggling to figure out when to send new technologies to the field. Wait too long, and you're robbing troops of a valuable tool. Field a gadget too quickly, the un-worked-out kinks can ruin its reputation in the military for a while. Troops can even get hurt, relying on an unstable machine.

Usually, the Pentagon errs on the side of caution. Some of the most valuable tools in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the Predator drone, the Stryker armored vehicle -- were deemed not ready for prime time by Defense Department testers.

But despite "thousands of little items found wrong with the Stryker," it was fielded anyway, Army Test and Evaluation Command chief Major General James Myles told me recently. The problems were small and fixable enough that the Stryker was sent out "four or five years" earlier than what the old regulations would've required. So what if the brakes don't work in the extreme cold? "We can't wait for a perfect solution to get a weapon to the field."

The Times pairs the JIN hold-up with the "military's failure to provide sufficient body armor and adequate armor for transport vehicles." But that's not quite right. There's a big difference between getting proven life-savers to a combat zone, and figuring out when something brand new is good enough to be deployed. That goes double for ray guns.

UPDATE 03/21/06 9:38 AM: This post, and some of the comments to it, have been modified in the interest of operational security.

Rapid Fire 02/10/06

* DHS science and technology chief quits

* Land of the Fobbits

* "Global strike" takes shape

* France boosts nukes

* Whistleblowers strike back

* Brownie, Bushie pointing fingers

* "Free Robot Sex"

* Galloway raps with the Overlords

* More Galloway: "No one has been more contemptuous of Cold War thinking and planning in our military than Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his band of transformers and reformers, and yet when it came time to fish or cut bait this week they just sat in the boat doing nothing."

(Big ups: NS, RC, JQP)

The Best Weapon

On Feb. 2, M-1 driver Cpl. Walter Howard, 35, was maneuvering his tank against insurgents near the town of Balad when an IED exploded, killing him instantly. At his memorial service today, officers and soldiers wept and held each other. A general, colonels and sergeants major clapped shoulders and doled out hugs. An entire battalion and their brigade leadership poured out their hearts. It was hard to watch.

Howard, a former Seabee with a wife and a daughter, is the first fatality suffered by Alpha Company, 1-8 Infantry, which since December has occupied a crappy little FOB called McKenzie, where MREs pass for food, the mud is ankle-deep and the mood is plain glum. Theirs is the bad side of Balad; almost every day they take fire from disaffected Sunnis in the city's suburbs. IEDs are a constant threat. And while everyone hopes that Howard will be the only KIA here, most know better.

Still, every day Alpha Company rides out in their Humvees, M-2 Bradleys and tanks. Every day they walk the area's filthy streets, knocking on doors or kicking them down, following leads, rounding up bad guys and doing what they can to win the hearts of these poor, untrusting people. Every day they face death side by side, motivated in part by patriotism, duty, pay, their desire to help Iraqis or a lack of anything better to do, but mostly by their love for each other and their refusal to let each other down.

Never mind radio jammers, armored vehicles and drones. Never mind multi-billion-dollar programs like FBCB2 and Blue Force Tracker. The real secret weapon of this nasty little war is the young grunt on the ground, the guy who faces Iraq's million little problems with a million little solutions of his own, every day for a year at a time, and who -- while folks back home decry the monetary cost of this war -- bears the true cost, in his blood.

God bless the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.

-- David Axe

Rapid Fire 02/09/06

* Two words: explosive ink

* Space travel really screws you up

* "New H-Bombs!!! Woo-Hoo!!!"

* Drones for cops

* Laser pointers to Iraq

* Terror info-sharing: still sucktastic

* Shoe bomb plot: for real?

"TIA" Reboots

We all knew that Total Information Awareness and its uber-database progeny weren't going away. It was just a question of what names TIA's bastard children were now using, and what government agencies had decided to give 'em a home.

Today, we find out about two of the not-so-little stinkers. Newsweek, in a brutal assessment of the NSA and other intelligence agencies ("Wanted: Competent Big Brothers"), tucks in this nugget:

Today, very quietly, the core of TIA survives with a new codename of Topsail... two officials privy to the intelligence tell NEWSWEEK. It is in programs like these that real data mining is going on and—considering the furor over TIA—with fewer intrusions on civil liberties than occur under the NSA surveillance program. "It’s the best thing to come out of American intelligence in decades," says John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "It is truly Poindexter’s brainchild. Of all the people in the intelligence business, he has the keenest appreciation of using advanced information technology for intelligence gathering." Poindexter, who lives just outside Washington in Rockville, Md., could not be reached for comment on whether he is still involved with Topsail.

Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor has discovered a new data-mining program over at the Homeland Security Department. It's called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement -- "ADVISE," for short.

What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.

But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA [Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment] portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.

For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.

Another component of ADVISE that the Monitor doesn't pick up on: The project seems closely tied towards WMD defense. It'll "incorporate a comprehensive encyclopedia of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive threat and effects data," DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology Charles McQueary told the House Committee on Science last year. This report sketches out one way ADVISE might use that information:

A radiation detector at a Canadian border crossing may pick up an anomalous reading that might be too ambiguous to trigger an alarm, but the incorporation of additional data (e.g., the driver is associated with a group known to be collecting nuclear materials or the same anomalous reading appears every week from the
same driver and truck) would greatly improve the threat detection ability of these systems.

(Big ups: Eric, Laura)

UPDATE 9:42 AM: "After seven weeks of refusing to provide Congress with details of its secret domestic spying program," the L.A. Times reports, "the White House changed course Wednesday and began to describe the operations of the controversial surveillance to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees." And the WaPo notes that "twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court."

UPDATE 2:04 PM: "I wonder if this is not yet another example of our country’s over-reliance on technology to try to solve its intelligence problems," says Kris, who knows a thing or two about intel.

[Osama] probably isn’t clicking around on Amazon. The bad guys are smart enough to adapt to the environment in which they live. They know when our satellites are passing over. They know that we monitor their communications and work to counter that. They’ll counter this too. I’m not saying that something like this won’t produce useful intelligence. I’m sure it will, but we’ll still be left with gaps.

The Amazing, All-Purpose, Styrofoam Drone

"I get paid by the Army to fly remote-controlled planes," says Sgt. Nathan Wyatt from 3-29 Field Artillery. From his post at LSA Anaconda, he operates the three foot-long Raven unmanned aerial vehicle. Almost every day, he hand-launches one of his three Kevlar and Styrofoam birds into the skies over north-central Iraq. Wyatt controls the Raven with a handheld console while, ideally, an assistant monitors flight parameters on a separate console. Each operator has a screen showing what the Raven sees. With a range of up to 15 miles and both day and night sensors, that amounts to quite a lot. The imagery is beamed straight to a display in the tactical operations center.

At nearby Camp Paliwoda, 1st Lt. Peter Postma from 1-8 Infantry describes how his battalion decided to give a three-bird Raven set to each of its companies as well as to its scout section. That way company commanders can send Ravens to support individual patrols instead of having to ask battalion. "It's working well for us," Postma says.

"It's all GPS-driven," Wyatt says, singing the Raven's praises. All he has to do is punch coordinates into his console and the Raven goes there.

But the Raven hates bad weather. A few days ago, one of the year's worst winter storms downed power lines and left Anaconda and Paliwod ankle-deep in mud. As the storm was brewing, one of Wyatt's Ravens crashed onto the roof of an Iraqi house. A patrol promptly retrieved it, and Wyatt come into the S-1 shop cradling his busted-up bird in his arms. The Raven is designed to pop apart on impact, making repairs pretty straightforward. And lucky for Wyatt, Anaconda hosts the only Raven repair shop in all of Iraq. You just trade in your broken bird and sign out a new one.

Raven also hates Warlock, the radio jammer used to thwart remotely-detonated IEDs. If a Raven flies over a patrol with a Warlock, it might get jammed. If that happens, the Raven tries to fly home, but computers being computers, sometimes it just crashes instead.

-- David Axe

Air Force Aims for Weather Control

Someday the U.S. military could drive a trailer to a spot just beyond insurgent fighting and, within minutes, reconfigure part of the atmosphere, blocking an enemy's ability to receive satellite signals, even as U.S. troops are able to see into the area with radar.

"This scenario may not be far away," says Defense Tech pal Sharon Weinberger in this month's edition of the always-excellent Defense Technology International.

An engineer with Research Support Instruments in Princeton, N.J. recently completed the first phase of work for a U.S. Air Force sponsored project called Microwave Ionosphere Reconfiguration Ground based Emitter, or Mirage. (scroll down)

The work involves using plasma — an ionized gas — to reconfigure the ionosphere. Mirage would employ a microwave transmitter on the ground and a small rocket that shoots chaff into the air to produce about a liter of plasma at 60-100 km. (36- 60 mi.) in altitude, changing the number of electrons in a select area of the ionosphere to create a virtual barrier. Ionosphere reconfiguration offers two major applications of interest to the military: bouncing radars off the ionosphere, also known as over-the-horizon radar, and the ability to jam signals from the Global Positioning Satellite system, according to John Kline, the lead investigator for Mirage.

This work is only the latest effort in Kline's more extensive investigations of atmospheric plasmas… Before Mirage, Kline had another contract for a project called Plasma Point Defense, which explored the possibility of using a plasma weapon on board a U.S. Navy surface vessel to protect against threats ranging from surface-to-surface missiles to mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

In the past, NASA's fringe science arm has looked into tweaking Mother Nature, to throw hurricanes off their course. But those were just computer simulations. No one actually tried to go out a build some weather control machine.

NSA: How They Spy

Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache have put together a fascinating pair of stories for News.com that outline what the NSA's domestic spying program might look like. Part one surveyed telecom companies, to find out which ones cooperated with the spooks. Part two sketches out how the NSA might be able to listen in. A few excerpts are below. But do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

99 percent of the world's long-distance communications travel through [undersea] fiber links... It's easiest to tap those underwater cables when they make landfall instead of trying to do it underwater, analysts say.

"The easiest thing to do would be to somehow get an agreement with a provider and just simply co-exist in a building, one of the main fiber stations, (peering) points or whatever. In other words, work out something with either a long-haul provider or with an employee." ...

Phill Shade, a network engineer for WildPackets who is the company's director of international support services, says such interception would be easy, at least for the NSA. WildPackets sells network analysis software.

An eavesdropper could just "take something off the shelf and use it to make copies of traffic and just save the copies," Shade said. "Our software captures packets; the data recorder stores terabytes of information. We use it for forensic analysis and troubleshooting networks. When you call back and say, 'I was hacked Tuesday night at 11:30,' we look back and see what was going on Tuesday night."

Making sense of that massive volume of data is not exactly trivial. While it may be easy to perform keyword searches and identify flagged names and phone numbers, detailed analysis typically takes human intervention. "For the near future, at least, our ability to gather info through various surreptitious and open means is going to be a lot better than our ability to analyze it," said Richard Hunter, vice president of executive programs at Gartner Group...

Because of the way that the Internet backbone and the telecommunication network are structured, NSA operatives likely would not have to leave the country to install taps. The vast majority of Internet traffic is routed through switches on American soil, which can be directly monitored with (or without) the cooperation of backbone providers...

In 2005, an estimated 94 percent of that "inter-regional" traffic passed through U.S. switches, Mauldin said. Many other communications links run around in the U.K., a country that has a history of sharing communications intelligence with U.S. spy agencies.

That's a boon to the NSA, which reportedly carries out its surveillance activities in a "wholesale" way. That means it potentially scoops up millions of phone calls and e-mail messages and feeds the data to its supercomputers--considered some of the most powerful and plentiful in the world--to comb for red flags and people on a so-called watch list.

Defense Budget Duck and Weave

Rumsfeld came out and said it: He's not sacrificing any of his modernization plans just because there's a war going on.

"We, simply, as an institution, have to not stop doing what we were doing and start doing something new," he told reporters yesterday, introducing the Defense Department's budget for fiscal year 2007.

But some analysts aren't so sure that Rummy is being straight up about how he pays for his new gear. Steven Kosiak, with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, thinks there's a "significant mismatch" between the Pentagon's "modernization plans and [its] projected funding levels. The new budget "would do little to improve the affordability."

Moreover, some of the proposed shifts in priorities — such as the accelerated fielding of a new long-range strike aircraft (in 2018 rather than 2037) — are likely to be dependent, for their implementation, on the willingness and ability of a future administration to make offsetting cuts in other DoD priorities. The QDR and FY 2007 budget request have, for the most part, deferred these difficult choices.

But that's not all. In addition to the gazillion dollar excuse me, $439.3 billion main Defense budget, there's also an extra $120 bill that's supposed to go to supporting the fights over in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kosiak is pretty sure a big chunk of that cash is going somewhere else. Some of it is going to fund an Army reorganization into smaller, more deployable units. Then there's this:

In early 2005, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that sustaining US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan at essentially today’s level would require about $85 billion in FY 2006. This suggests that the administration’s proposed $120 billion in emergency funding for military operations in FY 2006 may be too high by as $35 billion.

Rummy has pulled this kind of stunt before -- dipping into the Army's payroll, and then forcing Congress to make up the difference in a war-funding bill. But I was half-hoping that this time around, he'd act like a man, and really say how much he was spending on his transformation projects. Oh, well.

UPDATE 02/08/06 11:56 AM: "Many of the spending priorities in President Bush's proposed $439.3 billion defense budget conflict with the military requirements outlined in a new long-range plan drawn up by Pentagon officials," Knight-Ridder's Bob Cox reports.

Once again, experts say, the budget drawn up by the Pentagon's top civilian and military leader's calls for massive spending on new high-tech fighter jets, warships and missile defense systems at the expense of bolstering American soldiers' capability to prevail in the low-tech conflicts they're now engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, released Friday, identifies a wide range of problems the military must be prepared to deal with. It calls for enhancing the ability of U.S. forces to conduct a low intensity, "long war" against terrorists in far flung locations, improve the military's homeland security capabilities, and prepare for a possible all-out with an emerging power like China.

It's the latter scenario, which the military foresees fighting with F-22 fighter jets and new high-tech warships built by Lockheed Martin, that gets the biggest investment in the 2007 budget Bush submitted to Congress on Monday...

"The words in the QDR don't seem to bear much resemblance to the numbers in the `07 spending request," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute defense think tank.

UPDATE 1:16 PM: The new budget kicks the Defense Department's new laser-based communications satellites to the curb, Reuters notes. The Armchair Generalist looks at the counter-WMD programs. (Here's some background.) Defense Industry Daily has a massive round-up of budget-related links.

UPDATE 1:28 PM: Despite Sen. Robert Byrd's observation that the Pentagon's budget amounts to "$439 for every minute since Jesus Christ was born," many Senators are worried that Rummy & Co. aren't spending enough, Defense News reports. Shockingly, that's particularly true of guys like Joe Lieberman, who have big weapon-building facilities in their states.

DHS Budget, Broken Down

Homeland security analyst Christian Beckner obviously didn't sleep too much last night. Or he played hooky from his day job. Or both. Those are the only explanations I can come up with for the exhaustive, five part analysis he put together of the DHS budget, just 18 hours after the thing was released.

Border security was the biggest "winner," Christian tells us. Domestic nuclear detection gets a bunch more cash, too. Click through the links to see how DHS local grant programs, infrastructure protection, and analysis and operations did, too.

UPDATE 02/08/06 11:11 AM: Now he's got breakdowns of the aviation and maritime security budgets, too.

Rapid Fire 02/07/06

* Gonzalez spins spying

* Laser jammers step up

* Yawn... yet another flying saucer UAV

* NSA's not-so-secret prop

* Skunk Works opens up

* Laser dazzlers = checkpoint defenders?

* CIA's "remote medical diagnosis"

* Shuttle sucks space science bucks

(Big ups: RC, JQP)

To Armor or Not to Armor? That is the Question

The Army's pie-in-the-sky Future Combat Systems will make brigades more easily deployable by replacing vehicles like 70-ton M-1 Abrams tanks with much lighter alternatives. To match the survivability of the older systems, FCS will rely on superior communications, new surveillance equipment and forthcoming electromagnetic shields.

That's the fantasy. The reality might turn out quite differently. For while many of the communications and surveillance tools of the future force are already finding their way into service in Iraq, the Army isn't getting any lighter. In fact, it's only getting heavier.

The North Dakota National Guard's 164th Engineer Regiment has got to be one of the best-equipped Guard units in Iraq right now. They ride in factory-fresh M-1114 up-armored Humvees and a whole circus of new vehicles originally designed to clear mines: the Buffalo, the Meerkat, the Husky and the RG-31. Every day, they roll out to sweep Improvised Explosive Devices from the highways around Logistics Support Area Anaconda.

The Buffaloes are heavily-armored six-wheeled Mack trucks with an articulated arm used to pick up and shake suspicious objects. The Meerkat and its larger cousin the Husky are spindly four-wheelers with X-rays for spotting metal bombs. The RG-31 is a tall mine-proof vehicle that more or less duplicates the Humvee's gun-truck role and carries the 164th's Warlock IED jammers. All the vehicles are equipped with the Forward Battle Command Brigade and Below (FBCB2) battlefield internet, one of the lynchpin systems of the lighter future force.

But does the FBCB2 make the 164th any more survivable on Iraq's IED-infested roads? If the answer is yes, why all the expensive new armored trucks? The 164th is heavier than ever, and has all this armor to thank for its safety. They've been blown up many times; one Buffalo is scorched from nose to waist from a massive IED blast. But no one has died.

"Our vehicles take good care of us," says 164th Staff Sgt. Colin Thompson in his North Dakota accent. Note that he doesn't single out the FBCB2 for doing the same. For while information is a great enabler, it won't magically root out every homemade IED tucked inside the carcass of a cow -- and it won't save your sorry ass when that IED blows up under your vehicle.

--David Axe

Army's Blogger PR Push: Lame

So the Army has finally sent its "exclusive editorial content" to bloggers like me. And, wouldn't you know it, that content is almost comically lame.

Earlier this month, Charlie Kondek, an account exec at the Michigan public relations firm Hass MS&L, e-mailed a "handful of bloggers" with promises of goodies just for us. I wasn't expecting much. After all, the Defense Department has been cracking down on blogs, lately. One Pentagon spokeswoman, after laying out her strategy for keeping the mainstream media in check, admitted that she and her colleagues "still don’t know how to handle the bloggers."

But still. I figured what we'd get in our in-boxes wouldn't be this bad: two Wonder bread-bland profiles of Army reservists.

As a member of the Army, [Staff Sgt. Jose] Salazar has been able to wear the uniform across numerous continents and time zones--including a recent deployment in Iraq—something a 17-yr old kid from San Francisco never would have even dreamed of.

“It’s interesting when I look back at my childhood and see how much I’ve changed over the years,” says Salazar. “The Army really provided me with the tools and background I needed to get on track. Now, as part of the Army Reserve, I’ve taken that next step in the process, combining my training with my civilian career to help serve my country in Iraq during a pretty historic period.

Staff Sergeant Salazar also cites travel and the opportunity to experience different cultures as another benefit of service.

“Throughout my time in uniform, I’ve been able to travel all over the world and have been able to experience different cultures and people and realized that, even though we may have different beliefs and ways about ourselves, we are all really the same. My time in Iraq really provided me an amazing perspective on the world.”

Hard-hitting, hunh? Well, that's Woodward-and-Bernstein compared to this profile of JAG officer Captain Patrick Johnson (that's him in the pic).

In addition to the mutually beneficial relationship between the skills he receives during his Army training and those used in his civilian career, Captain Johnson has also benefited from the emphasis on character that the Army instilled in him during basic training—an important characteristic that has remained a constant thread as he continues to seek challenges and opportunities to be part of something larger than himself, both in his role as an Army Reserve officer and as a prosecutor for Spokane County.

“The Army really provided me with so many fundamental skills, from discipline and honor to the ability to make a difference in the world—skills that continue to play an important role in everything that I do in life. I know that, whatever the challenge or obstacle, I can find a way to overcome it—the Army taught me that...”

“I've never lost sight of the fact that I'm lucky to be in a country where I can advance myself as far as my ability and drive will take me. Serving in the Army Reserve makes me realize that I am ensuring that these opportunities continue for my children and my children’s children. It’s a pretty amazing when you think that generations down the line will experience the effects of what I’m participating in right now.”

And to think, that was an exclusive... just for me.

Facial Armor Rears Its Ugly Head

No matter how many times soldiers and marines say they're not interested, there's always someone trying to wrap them up in heavier, hotter, more uncomfortable armor.

Reader AS points to the latest culprit: MTek Weapon Systems, which is pushing Stormtrooper-esque "facial armor" for our troops.

The mask weighs 1.3 pounds, is compatible with ballistic eyewear, and will stop a bullet from a .44 magnum. So far, there seems to be one marine corporal using the thing in Iraq. We'll see if more emerge.

Rapid Fire 02/06/06

* Cell tracking gets creepier

* LAPD's "smart darts" find cars

* Holograms vs. hooligans

* Domestic spying story heats up...

- Telcoms fess up!
- Intel officers: it's lame!
- Data-miners: really lame!
- Specter: illegal, too!
- (But Arlen's still a patsy)

* Chuck the go pills, chew caffiene gum

* Livermore's 50 round-per-second gun

* Robo-Osprey takes off

* How 'bout that flea flicker?

* More cash for IED task force (background here)

(Big ups: Ben, TBV, RC, /.)

Eyes on Balad

Logistics Support Area Anaconda, 50 miles north of Baghdad, is the major supply hub for all military operations in Iraq. All day every day, Army CH-47 Chinooks and Air Force C-17 Globemasters crisscross the sky. Every night, Army transportation companies sortie mile-long convoys to every corner of the country. The passenger terminal is the second busiest in the entire U.S. military. The bottom line: Anaconda is really, really busy and really, really important -- and just a few well-placed mortar rounds could put a lot of kinks in a lot of plans here.

The tedious, dangerous job of policing the surrounding countryside and the nearby Shiite town of Balad has fallen to the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, now on its second rotation in Iraq. A task force built around 3rd Battalion of the brigade's 29th Field Artillery Regiment is responsible for the countryside while the 1st of the 8th Infantry's task force keeps an eye on Balad proper. That's a combined 1,500 soldiers overseeing an entire city and hundreds of square miles. "Spread thin" is an understatement.

But these are a new breed of task forces. Between deployments, the 4th ID reorganized from three to four brigades, or so-called "Units of Action", adding dedicated reconnaissance battalions and picking up a lot of neat new toys, including Raven aerial drones, the Forward Battle Command Brigade and Below (FBCB2) battlefield internet, a bunch of new armored vehicles and new sensors. Plus, both task forces here benefit from the Air Force, Army and even Marine Corps surveillance assets -- RC-12s, F-16s, F/A-18s, Predator drones, etc. -- based at Anaconda and other nearby airbases.

On a patrol with 3-29 on Feb. 2, Staff Sgt. John Lohnes navigated using the FBCB2's touch-screen digital map while AH-64 Apaches and OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters swooped overhead and Ravens droned invisibly in the distance. "It basically makes it easier to track my own position," Lohnes says of FBCB2. But it does so much more. Every FBCB2-equipped patrol is visible as an icon on the map. Simply by touching the screen, Lohnes can pull up imagery of particular points of interest. And he can send and receive secure Instant Messages from the task force command center, where a bunch of officers sit in front of plasma screens displaying imagery from Predators and tower-mounted sensors called "J-Lenses".

The Army of the future is on display here in muddy north-central Iraq. I'm embedded with 3-29 and 1-8 for the next couple of weeks. Stand by ...

-- David Axe

QDR: Reviews Pour In

Reviews of the Penagon's Quadrennial Defense Review are pouring in. Here's a sample...

Slate: "The document envisions a world where the U.S. military's main missions are homeland defense, the war on terrorism, and 'irregular' or 'asymmetric' warfare... Much ink is spilled in discussing these new kinds of wars and the new kinds of soldier and command structures that they require. But look at what the Pentagon is really doing, how it's spending its vast sums of money (close to $500 billion next year, not including the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). With a few notable exceptions (most of them inexpensive), you'd think that we were still fighting the Soviet Union and that the Cold War were still raging on."

LAT: "The review does not endorse a large increase in U.S. ground forces. But after three years of a war that has been longer and more lethal than most in the Pentagon had envisioned, the document places a new importance on getting help from other nations to fight wars and keep peace."

WaPo: "The review's key assumptions betray what Pentagon leaders acknowledge is a certain humility regarding the Defense Department's uncertainty about what the world will look like over the next five, 10 or 20 years, as well as its realization that the U.S. military cannot attain victory alone."

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Watch looks at the section of the QDR's promises of "defending the homeland in depth." And here's the extended version of the interview I did last week with The World on the Defense Department's new master plan.

Ralph Peters: "If you found your hilltop house on fire, would you (A) put out the flames, or (B) buy flood insurance? If your answer is 'B,' you're suited for a job in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). At a time when our Army and Marines bear by far the heaviest load of our nation's security burdens, OSD proposes reducing the number of soldiers to free up funds for wasteful Cold-War-era weapons systems."

UPDATE 1:36 PM: I haven't made it all the way through, yet. But this "alternative QDR" has some good stuff in it.

The Department of Defense must direct its resources to areas likely to reap the largest security gains. The administration’s current so-called “capabilities approach,” which “focuses more on how an adversary might fight than who the adversary might be and where a war might occur,” fails to assign levels of risk and importance to the various threats this nation faces. The Pentagon must reintroduce elements of a “threat-based” model that guided its thinking in the immediate post-Cold War period. Weapons procurement policies must also change dramatically, so that they are attuned to actual needs rather than political interests. The administration and Congress should eliminate outdated weapons, cut losses on systems that do not work but are kept alive because of political interests, and increase funding for systems that reflect changing threats to U.S. national security. Only through the assignment of risks and priorities can the Pentagon produce programs and budgets that are affordable and cost effective.

It also calls for boosting the Army by 86,000 troops, and for dropping the Raptor, DD(X), Osprey, and Virginia-class sub.

UPDATE 02/06/06 8:16 AM: Joe Katzman "looked for articles that were positive as well as critical" of the QDR. "Unfortunately, that proved something of a Diogenesian search - the 2006 QDR's early 'buzz meter' is distinctly unfavourable, even among entities usually supportive of the military."

For example, here's Tom Barnett, who's generally a pretty big fan of Rumsfeld et. al.:

Bush sets the right course. He just does it a way that’s completely unsustainable, and to me, in the end, that’s bad grand strategy. Bush begins the Long War but he and his crew need to exit stage right before we can get seriously prepared to win it.

The Army is serious about moving in this direction, as is Special Operations Command and the Marines. For now, because the White House indulges them, neither the Air Force or the Navy has gotten with the program. When the Navy brags how its huge destroyers are justified because they can also insert SEALs, you know strategic logic has left the building.

QDR: Kerry's Pentagon

Who put John Kerry in charge of the Defense Department? Back in the ’04 campaign, the insufferable Massachusetts senator got hammered by Republicans for his calls for more international coalitions, for his observation that there were non-military ways to win the war on terror, and for his view that there might not be a formal end to the anti-terror fight. But take a look at what the Pentagon’s every-four-years master plan, the Quadrennial Defense Review, has to say about fighting Islamic extremists. You get a decidedly Kerryesque view:

The long war against terrorist networks extends far beyond the borders of Iraq and Afghanistan and includes many operations characterized by irregular warfare – operations in which the enemy is not a regular military force of a nation-state. In recent years, U.S. forces have been engaged in many countries, fighting terrorists and helping partners to police and govern their nations. To succeed in such operations, the United States must often take an indirect approach, building up and working with others. This indirect approach seeks to unbalance adversaries physically and psychologically, rather than attacking them where they are strongest or in the manner they expect to be attacked. Taking the “line of least resistance” unbalances the enemy physically, exploiting subtle vulnerabilities and perceived weaknesses. Exploiting the “line of least expectation” unbalances the enemy psychologically, setting the conditions for the enemy’s subsequent defeat….

Victory will come when the enemy’s extremist ideologies are discredited in the eyes of their host populations and tacit supporters, becoming unfashionable, and following other discredited creeds, such as Communism and Nazism, into oblivion. This requires the creation of a global environment inhospitable to terrorism. It requires legitimate governments with the capacity to police themselves and to deny terrorists the sanctuary and the resources they need to survive. It also will require support for the establishment of effective representative civil societies around the world, since the appeal of freedom is the best long-term counter to the ideology of the extremists. The ultimate aim is that terrorist networks will no longer have the ability or support to strike globally and catastrophically, and their ability to strike regionally will be outweighed by the capacity and resolve of local governments to defeat them.

Just as these enemies cannot defeat the United States militarily, they cannot be defeated solely through military force. The United States, its allies and partners, will not win this long war in a great battle of annihilation. Victory can only be achieved through the patient accumulation of quiet successes and the orchestration of all elements of national and international power. (emphasis mine)

Don't get me wrong; I like what I'm reading here. In fact, I thought the ideas sounded pretty good in 2004, too.

UPDATE 3:45 PM: So the Pentagon is saying that beating Islamic extremism "requires the creation of a global environment inhospitable to terrorism." How're we doing on that front? Judging by the jihadists' strong showings at the polls in the West Bank and in Egypt, I'd say that part of the Long War isn't exactly going swimmingly.

Rummy Shuffles on Domestic Spying

Rummy went to the National Press Club yesterday, and answered some questions. Am I the only one that found his responses kind of lame?

Check out the Defense Secretary on the Pentagon's efforts to keep tabs on home-grown peace groups, for example. First, he says he didn't know anything about it. Then he says it was "perfectly understandable." Then he invokes 9/11, and the prevetion of sabotage. Finally, he concludes, the whole thing is "no big deal."

SALANT: This questioner writes about a recent report about the Defense Department monitoring antiwar protesters and wants to know why the Defense Department is doing that.

RUMSFELD: Well, I wasn't aware of it at all, but it turns out that -- this is no surprise to anyone here -- the Department of Defense has the responsibility in the United States for force protection. We don't have the responsibility for homeland security. That's with the Department of Homeland Security.

We do have the responsibility, however, to protect our own forces. And apparently, what took place was a perfectly understandable thing.

They decided that the way -- given the assignment to do that -- they decided to establish a program whereby they would be able to observe and do the kind of countersurveillance to see who was taking pictures of military installations or sensitive activities, and who was observing them, and gather information of that type, so that we would not be accused of failing to protect our forces and their families and the military installations in the country. And so, they began this process.

According to the people who briefed me on it, to do that, you obviously end up scooping up information, whether it's names or films, or whatever, to protect your base. And that information then comes into a data bank.

And, you know, think of 9/11. Everyone accused the government of not connecting the dots. You didn't connect the dots before the fact, and you weren't able to stop it.

So, here they are trying to connect the dots, and someone looks at it and says, oh, my goodness gracious! Isn't that terrible! You're collecting information on people in the United States.

And, of course, if you look at it, that's what it is. It's information about people who are physically in the United States, who were observing a base in some way. And so, they put in some new rules whereby the people doing this have to purge the system periodically, so we don't end up with massive data that we don't need and don't want and didn't intend to keep in the first place.

And they then review what there is and see, is there a threat to that base of some kind? Is there something that should be turned over to the FBI?

And it's no different, in a sense, than a private business that has a building or a factory or facility, and has a security force, and they have surveillance of it to see who's looking at it and what's being done.

But because of the sensitivity of it, obviously, it became a big cause celebre, and I think -- at least I'm told -- that they now think they've put in place the kinds of procedures, so that the information that's gathered will not become a permanent record, and will be purged appropriately. And to the extent they connect any dots, they obviously turn them over to the FBI, or whoever local law enforcement, if they're concerned about some security.

In short, it's no big deal...

But, as bad as he fumbled this question, I found this answer to even worse:

QUESTION: A lot of questions about Iraq. First one from this questioner.

What do you say to a young G.I. on his or her third tour of duty in Iraq?

RUMSFELD: Well, first of all, G.I., if you mean by that a soldier, Army, there are to my knowledge no Army people who are back for their third one-year tour that weren't volunteers.

First of all, everybody in the military today is a volunteer.

So, the first thing I would say, though, to them is, thank you for volunteering. Thank you for deciding you wanted to serve the country. Thank you for putting up your hand and say, send me.

The tour lengths are quite different. The Army has a year -- up to a year -- in Iraq. The Marine Corps has seven months, up to seven months. The Navy deployments tend to be six months in and 12 months back.

The Air Force differs widely. Some are a year. Some are three months rotation where they go back in frequently.

But anyone who's there on a third tour for a year, you can be absolutely certain volunteered. And I say, thank you for volunteering.

Bump: China Tops Iraq, Osama in QDR

I'm bumping this post from ten days ago back to the top, because of the impending QDR roll-out [UPDATE 12:33 PM: It's online now]. According to today's Washington Post:

The United States is engaged in what could be a generational conflict akin to the Cold War, the kind of struggle that might last decades as allies work to root out terrorists across the globe and battle extremists who want to rule the world, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday.

The strategic vision outlined in the QDR has won high marks from defense analysts for diagnosing the problems the U.S. military will likely face. However, it is less successful in translating those concepts into concrete military capabilities, the analysts say...

The strategy does call for devoting resources to accelerate a long-range strike capability directed at hostile nations, and for new investments aimed at countering biological and nuclear weapons -- such as teams able to defuse a nuclear bomb. But it makes relatively minor adjustments in key weapons systems, with the biggest programs such as the Joint Strike Fighter and the Army's Future Combat Systems escaping virtually unscathed. This leaves less room for investments in innovative programs and forces to address the types of problems that the QDR identifies, analysts say.

For months, now, word has been leaking out about the Pentagon's every-four-years master plan, the Quadrennial Defense Review.

Finally, we’re starting to see some excerpts from the big document itself, thanks to Inside Defense. My quick, subject-to-instant-revision first impression: Rumsfeld & Co. are focusing more on China than they are on Osama.

Very roughly speaking, there are two factions jockeying for control in the Pentagon. One thinks that the U.S. military is going to spend a big chunk of the next twenty years hunting down terrorists and stabilizing screwed-up states. The other believes that China has to be smacked down, before it bulks up to superpower status.

The first group gets the rhetoric. “[P]repar[ing] for wider asymmetric challenges” is one of the “fundamental imperatives for the Department of Defense.” We’re in the middle of a “Long War,” according to the QDR. Iraq and Afghanistan are just part of it.

There’s organizational and personnel help, to go along with the lofty words. The Combatant Commanders – the guys in charge today of the boots on the ground – will get more of a say in how future weapons are bought. The QDR boosts Special Operations Forces by 15% and “increase[s] the number of Special Forces Battalions by one-third.

U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) will establish the Marine Corps Special Operations Command. The Air Force will establish stand up an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Squadron under USSOCOM. The Navy will support a USSOCOM increase in SEAL Team manning and will develop a riverine warfare capability. The Department will also expand Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs units by 3,700 personnel, a 33% increase. Multipurpose Army and Marine Corps ground forces will increase their capabilities and capacity to conduct irregular warfare missions.

These changes are not insignificant. They’ll require billions to back them up. But the China-watchers, on the other hand, get the kind of gold-plated new hardware that costs tens, even hundreds, of billions to make. As Inside Defense notes, the QDR “leaves intact all of the military services’ most prized weapon system programs. In fact, some programs will see significant increases.

Many involved in the review believed at the outset that the QDR might call for a resource shift between the departments -- specifically from the Air Force and Navy to the Army -- that did not materialize.

The Air Force, which set as its highest goal for the QDR the protection of the F-22A fighter, managed to extend production two years beyond 2008, which means it can work [on] going beyond the planned 183-aircraft buy.

Similarly, the Navy in late November was granted permission to move ahead with its next-generation DD(X) destroyer program, which will consume a big chunk of the service’s shipbuilding account as the QDR-directed enhanced submarine procurement is set to kick in.

…As for the Army, the QDR confirms the service has protected its top priority, the Future Combat Systems program…

…The QDR also leaves intact the Marine Corps’ top priorities, including the V-22 Osprey and its Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle…

“What they’ve done, in effect, is say, ‘Yeah, Rummy, we’ll make all these promises. Of course, you’re not going to be around to hold us to them. In the meantime, we will sustain our programs and build program momentum with Congress and industry,’” said a source familiar with the QDR findings.

The China crowd also gets what looks to be some big-time new, as of yet undefined, weapons programs. That includes a new, long bomber of hypersonic drone that can conduct “global strike” missions against unruly states.

“The United States' experience in the Cold War still profoundly influences the way that the Department of Defense is organized and executes its mission,” the QDR notes. “But, the Cold War was a struggle between nation-states, requiring state-based responses to most political problems and kinetic responses to most military problems. The Department was optimized for conventional, large-scale warfighting against the regular, uniformed armed forces of hostile states… [Today] many of the United Slates' principal adversaries are informal networks that are less vulnerable to Cold War-Style approaches... Defeating unconventional enemies requires unconventional approaches.”

But it does not require, apparently, a wholesale change of direction. Terrorist-type threats will get some new attention. But the Defense Department isn’t about to optimize for that threat, the way it did for the Soviet Union. Big money will continue to be spent on fighter jets designed to duel with the Soviets and destroyers designed for large-scale ground assaults. Grunts on the ground won’t get much more than they do now. The war on terror may be “long.” But, apparently, it’s not important enough to make really big shifts.

UPDATE 3:56 PM: The QDR was "toned down by a year of deliberation and not a single signature weapon system has been terminated," ubiquituous military analyst Loren Thompson tells Defense News. “That tells you that Rumsfeld’s team is not so clear about what to do about this new environment."

UPDATE 01/24/06 10:36 AM: The WaPo puts the QDR on page one, and emphasizes the growing numbers of Special Forces. Meanwhile, the LA Times (via Laura) says the QDR's direction means that Iraq was a "one-off."

The U.S. military has long been accused of always planning to fight its last war. But as the Pentagon assesses threats to national security over the next four years, a major blueprint being completed in the shadow of the Iraq war will do largely the opposite...

For more than two years, Army officials have been fending off questions about whether they have enough troops to complete their mission in Iraq and racing to get armor plates bolted onto Humvees and supply trucks to defend against homemade bombs.

But in the Pentagon blueprint, officials are once again talking about a futuristic force of robots, networked computers and drone aircraft. And they are planning no significant shift in resources to bulk up ground forces strained by the lengthy occupation of Iraq...

Yet some experts say that failure to draw broader lessons from Iraq is dangerous, especially if the U.S. military suddenly faces a new war in a hot spot such as North Korea or Iran that it has no choice but to fight.

"There is a logical disconnect between the lessons learned from Iraq and the conclusions that we can live with a smaller ground force," said Michele Flournoy, a defense policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former top Pentagon official.

UPDATE 11:59 AM: On his website, Thompson adds:

There are several decisions coming out of the QDR that are hard to square with what the Pentagon says about future challenges. For example, if the global war on terror really is a "long war" as the QDR report contends, why is the administration eliminating brigades from an overextended Army? And if mobility is so critical to military success, why is it proposing to shut down both the C-130J and C-17 lines -- the only airlifters in production?

Maybe it doesn't matter -- Rumsfeld will be gone soon, and Capitol Hill has ceased caring what he wants anyway. Congress will probably add money for the lost brigades and airlifters, just as it will reject other bad proposals like the idea of creating a monopoly for fighter engines. But with the clock ticking down on Donald Rumsfeld's tenure, it's a little hard to say what he has achieved in the way of a lasting, positive legacy.

UPDATE 3:24 PM: There's a nice little debate going on about this over at Kevin Drum's place.

Truck Makers Eye Next-Gen Humvees

There are no definite plans, yet. But the Army and the Marines are slowly getting ready to replace the Humvee. National Defense magazine profiles the "truck manufacturers large and small, foreign and domestic, [which] are gearing up to take on the only maker of the 20-year-old vehicle, AM General."

Archie Massicotte, president of military and government business at International Truck and Engine said, “the Humvee has served a great life for the military for 20 some years. I think what they’re finding is that we’re fighting battles now in Iraq, and they’re using it as a tactical wheeled vehicle. And it was never intended to be a tactical wheeled vehicle,” he said...

The question of armor—how much is needed, when to use it and the trade-offs in engine power, weight and carrying capacity it entails—will be a technological challenge for any proposed follow-on vehicle, experts said...

[Jim] Mills, who worked on the Humvee program while in the Army... said there will also be a need for windshields that can better accommodate night-vision technology. Lead content in the glass can reduce its effectiveness. Soldiers want to be able to drive at night with headlights turned off. And in special operations when stealth is necessary, it’s mandatory to go in with night-vision technology. Longer-range infrared headlights, which would allow drivers to go 45 to 60 miles per hour, will be needed for any follow-on vehicle used in such operations, he said.

Other improvements Mills recommended include a spare tire, air conditioning and electronic stability control. The latter is necessary to prevent rollovers, another leading cause of death and injury in Iraq. Soldiers want to push the Humvee faster to avoid insurgent attacks. Such a system could prevent drivers from having accidents, Mills said, noting that the driver is often the youngest and most inexperienced of the three-soldier crews...

A spare tire, sturdier armor and the perpetual demand for increased cargo space all lead to one thing: a larger, heavier vehicle, Mills said. The term “light tactical vehicle” is becoming a misnomer, he added.

“A soldier in the military will always find more things to carry inside a vehicle,” Mills said. “The next question is how much bigger will the new truck be?”

One vehicle not mentioned explicitly in the story -- but getting a ton of props from marines in the field -- is this Cougar mine-protected vehicle. This Georgia Tech prototype is turning heads, too.

Next week, the National Automotive Test Center will hold its annual "rodeo" for tactical vehicles. It follows a big conference on the subject, featuring the major players from the Army and Marines. I assume those two potential Humvee replacements will be there, ready to ride.

UPDATE 10:10 AM: As Inside Defense notes, the Army and Marines are going to start pursuing next-gen light tactical vehicles together, after years of separate research.

Drone Seahorse Gets Wet

The Navy is testing out its latest "untethered, unmanned, underwater robotic vehicle, capable of pre-programmed independent operations": the 28 1/2 foot, 10,800 pound Seahorse.

The drone (more pictures here) was originally developed for the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) by the Penn State University Applied Research Laboratory as an economical, long-endurance, unmanned underwater vehicle for oceanographic surveying and bottom mapping. The Navy, as is often the case, has a few ideas of its own for the vehicle.

SEAHORSE construction is modular to facilitate field maintenance, rapid mission turnaround, and payload flexibility. With an integrated afterbody for propulsion and hydrodynamic control, plus variable ballast systems fore and aft, the UUV can execute a variety of high-level commands, such as maintaining a constant depth, course, and speed; navigating between waypoints; and conducting search and survey patterns. Typical mission operating depths range from 15 to 1,000 feet, with endurance up to 72 hours. SEAHORSE vehicles are 28 feet long, slightly more than three feet in diameter, and weigh 10,500 pounds. Standard alkaline batteries (D-cells) power the vehicle, allowing a 300-mile range. NAVOCEANO plans to transition to rechargeable lithium-ion battery technology in the near future.

In standard operations, the Seahorse is launched from a T-AGS 60 Pathfinder-class ship. The most recent pictures show test operations on the FSF-1 Sea Fighter X-Craft. Test launches from Trident missile tubes have been performed, as well. The Seahorse's diameter prevents it from being launched from standard torpedo tubes (maximum of 21 inches).

The Seahorse's primary survey mission could be very valuable to the Navy in a supporting role, especially in the littorals, but the modular nature of the vehicle and rapidly-advancing technology could broaden the scope of the Seahorse's mission extensively. At worst, it will serve as an advanced test-bed for the Navy's wide range of unmanned underwater vehicle programs. These include the Long-Term Mine Reconnaissance System (LMRS), a torpedo tube-launched AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) for mine detection and countermeasures, the Mission-Reconfigurable UUV (unmanned underwater vehicle), which would be launched from submarines or surface ships and carry array of sensor payloads for performing a variety of information-gathering missions, the Advanced Development UUV, the large-diameter, Remus (Remote Environmental Measuring Units), BPAUV (Battlespace Preparation Autonomous Underwater Vehicle), and Manta.

For more on this alphabet-soup, see Unmanned Vehicles for U.S. Naval Forces: Background and Issues for Congress (.pdf, particularly pg. 4), RECENT U.S. NAVY UNDERWATER VEHICLE PROJECTS (.pdf), and especially THE LOWER DEPTHS: Navy Plans for Unmanned Undersea Vehicles on Military.com.

More-direct support for military operations, such as real-time intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. resupply of special forces ashore, or even direct attacks against sea or short targets with weapons, are in the cards for these robot subs. The Seahorse will lead the way for follow-on vehicles, and might even get a chance to contribute a bit itself.

--cross-posted by Murdoc

Boeing: We Screwed Up, Give us $500 Mil

"When a child who is on trial for murdering his parents pleads for leniency on grounds that he is an orphan, we call that chutzpah," says Space News' Washington Aerospace Briefing. "When a U.S. defense contractor botches a program demands a huge termination fee when the contract is cancelled, we call that... standard operating procedure."

So no, we weren't completely shocked to hear that Boeing is seeking about $500 million from the National Reconnaissance Office in termination fees associated with the Future Imagery Architecture spy satellite program. The NRO cancelled the optical portion of Boeing's multi-billion dollar FIA contract last year after becoming fed up with the company's technical struggles and that lead to innumerable delays and soaring costs.

FIA was supposed to be “a constellation of satellites that would gather clearer and more-frequent images -- even at night and when there is a cloud cover -- of enemy military activity than current satellites can,” the Los Angeles Times notes. Originally scheduled to launch in 2005, at one point, FIA looked like it might become the “most expensive program in the history of the intelligence community,” according to Globalsecurity.org.

When Boeing won the FIA contract, back in 1999, it was something of a coup. As the Times observes, “Much of Boeing's space expertise was in making rockets to launch satellites and developing commercial telecommunication satellites. It had little experience manufacturing satellites with optical lenses that can take close-up pictures from space of objects on the ground.” That was Lockheed Martin’s area of expertise. “Boeing bid very aggressively even though it didn't understand the technology as well as Lockheed," the ubiquitous Loren Thompson told the LAT.

So it’s no surprise that Boeing started burning through cash and dropping deadlinesa, once FIA got underway. “As early as 2002, the government had to reprogramming of about $625 million [and possibly as much as $900 million] from other intelligence programs… to get the program back on schedule,” Globalsecurity.org says. “By the end of 2004 the House Intelligence Committee remained concerned about the viability and effectiveness of a future overhead architecture, given the apparent lack of a comprehensive architectural plan for the overhead system of systems, specifically in the area of imagery.”

By 2005 – after $10 billion on FIA, including about $4 or $5 billion in cost overruns – the government finally had enough, taking the project away from Boeing, and giving it to Lockheed.

Boeing's request for a half a B to make up for the lost work is big. But it's not totally unprecedented, Washington Aerospace Briefing says. The company is still arguing with the Pentagon over $2.3 billion for the A-12 stealth carrier aircraft program, cancelled in 1991.

(Big ups: AT, JS)

UPDATE 2:28 PM: AT points out that there were some interesting names associated with Boeing's controversial FIA win. In Boeing's '99 press release, we read:

Ed Nowinski, Boeing FIA Program Manager, stated, 'This was a very hard-fought competition and the win is the result of the total commitment of our team.'

Who is Ed Nowinski? Check out this press release, from 1996:

MELBOURNE, Florida, August 5, 1996—Harris Corporation has named Ed Nowinski as vice president of Strategic Planning and Business Development for the company's Electronic Systems Sector.

Mr. Nowinski most recently was the director of imagery intelligence for the U.S. government's National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and director of development and engineering for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Nowinski joined the CIA in 1967 and rose rapidly to positions of increasing responsibility during his career with the CIA and NRO, including director of the Data Communications Group, deputy director of development and engineering, and director of systems engineering. During his government career, he was instrumental in establishing several of the country's premier intelligence collection systems.

Rapid Fire 02/02/06

* Veins = "bar code"

* Amateur spysat hunters

* USAF's folding telescope

* Tests for "Jitters"

* Drone-maker profiled

* IED defeat: "letterheads, not action?"

* Counter-WMD: "passing fad?"

* NYT discovers QDR (background here)

* Shoot those flares!

(Big ups: RS, JQP, RC, SH, Anon)

Kneel Before the Centaur

Like a lot of us, former Navy electrician Dennis Buller is worried about our troops over in Iraq -- specifically, about the amount of gear they have to lug around. But unlike the rest of us, he's built a machine to do something about it.

Think of it as a Segway for grunts. Except you kneel down on it, instead of ride upright. "After seeing the Chronicles of Narnia, I want to call it the Centaur," Buller writes in. (Don't worry, George, he doesn't mean literally breeding animals with humans.) "See the movie and you will know what I mean."

This thing will scurry an infantryman around at twenty miles an hour, enable him to carry enough armor to make small arms obsolete, keep him warm, cool, and allow him to open a door and waste someone with extreme prejudice...

I built this because I know how hard it is for non-Technical [sic] people to understand what is in my head. Plus I cannot draw...

Dennis' prototype is about 3 1/2 feet long, and travels about eight miles an hour (the next one, he promises, will go twice as fast). The Centaur's small size makes it a better option for troops in urban battlefields than a Humvee, which "cannot pear [sic] around a corner, take cover in a house or dodge an RPG round." Dennis wants to pair later versions up with technology from the IBOT electric wheelchair, so the Centaur can climb stairs.

This first model is quite crude. But it works better than the first motorcycle, or the first ATV, or the first snowmobile. Not bad considering I made it in my shed.

Defense Budget Oinks

Everyone knows that there's pork in the defense budget bill -- hell, in every big bill that moves through Congress. But how exactly all those useless pet projects get crammed in there, that's been a mystery, at least to me. Over the last few days, long-time Senate staffer Winslow Wheeler has been pulling back the curtain in this trio of tutorials on military pork.

It turns out that most military pork -- like the $1.6 million for “Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Activities” stuffed into the kitty for soldier pay and benefits -- doesn't actually appear in the main body of the bill at all. Instead, the offensive items are tucked inside the "'Joint Explanatory Statement' (JES) that accompanies the text of the bill as it moves through its final stages of congressional approval. Both the text of the bill in final form and the JES constitute what is called a 'conference report' on Capitol Hill," Wheeler explains.

The JES is especially important. Its ostensible purpose is to provide guidance to the executive branch, and the public, on Congress’ intent and rationale for the various provisions in the legislation. And, indeed, there is often some material that is explanatory. However, most of the document simply lists pork projects...

DOD [Department of Defense] is not permitted discretion in implementing the add-ons. For “congressional interest items,” DOD is specifically instructed that the amounts specified by Congress in the conference report, and its other reports, must be spent unless DOD specifically asks the appropriations committees for permission to change the amount in a “reprogramming” and the permission is granted. Such permission is rarely sought.

According to Wheeler, "there are 2,966 examples [or pork] costing about $11.1 billion" in the JES. Some are baldly offensive, like the $500,000 for the "Westchester County World Trade Center Memorial," or the $850,000 for the "Des Moines Memorial Park and Education Center." But most sound perfectly legitimate -- at least from their titles. Soldiers in the mountains of Afghanistan could very well use $4 million worth of “fleece insulated liners.” The “Walter Reed Amputee Center” might have a need for an extra $5.5 million, sure.

Regardless, Wheeler argues, they're still pork.

The real problem is that nobody knows the real merit of these and other earmarks, even when they have relevant and useful sounding names. For example, could the $5.5 million for the Walter Reed Amputee Center actually be for a new cafeteria there, or is it for proven-quality wounded veterans’ care? You are not likely to find a meaningful answer by reading the “Joint Explanatory Statement” for the 2006 DOD Appropriations Act or, for that matter, any other report from the House or Senate Appropriations Committee.

The real problem with “pork” is that no one knows whether it is good or bad. Virtually none of these congressional add-ons are put through a rigorous, even competent, review process by any objective entity...

In short, pork is not necessarily “bad stuff” crammed into the defense budget by Congress; it is unknown stuff. Its cost and need are only dimly known, if at all, and effectiveness compared to competitors is completely unexplored. The worst part of the pork process is that no one has established whether any specific earmark is junk or very much needed in even larger amounts.

Congressional add-ons are included in the defense budget, not because a case for them has been made, but because someone wants them.

So how does pork get stopped? A couple of speeches on the Senate floor -- even a scandal or two -- isn't going to help much. What's needed is a more fundamental change, Wheeler contends: Congressmen shouldn't be allowed to insert their pet projects into the defense budget any more. Not without "a written statement on the desirability of the earmark from the manager in DOD." And not without some independent financial review from the Congressional Budget Office.

Some, probably many, in Congress will oppose these suggestions; clearly they would subvert the intent of many members to steer government spending toward selected interests for purposes that may or may not advance national security. However, were there to be in Congress, especially the Senate, members who seek genuine reform, there are tools at their disposal to help them impose their will. Senate rules have been specifically designed to assist them in this regard; all that is needed is the will to do so.

It would likely not be a pretty fight, but it would definitely be worth watching. And it would help the country separate the real reformers from the rest.

Hunting IEDs from 10,000 Feet

The F/A-18D Hornet handles a lot of jobs in Iraq, these days – including bomb-hunting. Two two-seater plane looks out for improvised explosive devices with its nose-mounted Advanced Tactical Airborne Reconnaissance System, a bank of downward-looking cameras that replaces the Hornet's standard 20-millimetere cannon.

A ground station at Al Asad air base is equipped with a new workstation that allows analysts such as Sgt. Elizabeth Zakar to lay two day's imagery side by side to isolate the differences. This way they can spot disturbed earth, suspicious objects, piles of debris and other telltale signs that insurgents have planted a roadside bomb.

It's not easy work, but there's a full-time civilian expert named Kevin White on hand to help. White is my roommate here at this sprawling air base. Besides being a great guy, he's a hard worker too -- for a full year he's worked late nights and long morning in the analysts' tiny little trailer on the compound of the Marine Fighter Attack community. The Marines are making an effort to keep one of their six F/A-18D squadrons in Iraq at all times, and the ATARS is a major reason why.

Here at Al Asad, the chowtime talk is all about Ralph Peters, the Army officer-turned-columnist who loves to rail against the Air Force and its budget-hogging ways. A recent Weekly Standard piece by Peters took the Air Force to task for spending billions on a handful of F-22s when less money invested in simpler platforms would, he claims, pay far greater dividends. The fliers of Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332 agree wholeheartedly, pointing to their bargain-bin Hornets and their huge quiver of weapons and sensors.

I'm not quite convinced that the Air Force needs to abandon the cutting-edge of air supremacy. A few Marine aviators here have indirectly sided with the Air Force with tales of getting schooled in air-to-air exercises by aggressive Thai F-16 pilots.

--David Axe

UPDATE 02/02/06 3:02 PM: There have been a heap of interesting comments on this post. One of the best (as usual) comes from Joe Katzman, who asks:

Why are we using Hornets, that cost thousands of dollars per hour to fly, so we can wear down a fleet that would be useful in a more serious war and deplete US forces down the road (fighters have lives measured in hours put on the airframe)?

For the job they're doing, you could use a Cessna. Yeah, the same ones that do traffic reports here at home. Same job, just add cameras and communications. Heck, Cessnas can even be given small gun pods if they feel a need to be able to shoot up a convoy of terrorists in the middle of an IED instalation operation.

How expensive do you think that would be to buy? To fly? How easy to transfer the aircraft to Iraqis without a lot of difficulty?

Heck, we could even buy Schweitzer's dedicated reconaissance aircraft for that job at a couple million per, and get something that not only has a ton more station time, but is SILENT from observation height so people can't hear it coming. Paint it correctly, and it would be hard to see from the ground as well.

Cheap, devastatingly effective, could be bought in numbers and drive the rate of IED attacks (and hence deaths) down.

Perhaps someone out there can kindly explain why $40 million ($55-60 million replacement cost) jet fighters are doing this job instead? That was excusable in 2003 when the operation began. In 2006, it's just waste.