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"A Mushroom Cloud over Las Vegas..."
...Is what will almost, but apparently not quite, be seen on June 2. According to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency , the dust cloud from Divine Strake, a massive conventional explosion scheduled to take place at the Nevada Test Site this summer, "may reach an altitude of 10,000 feet (3,048 meters) [but] is not expected to be visible off the Nevada Test Site."
 The open-air test will ignite 700 tons of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil, good for 593 tons of high-explosives equivalent, according to the Washington Post . The Associated Press describes the test as the largest-ever open-air chemical explosion at the Nevada site – by a factor of forty. Due to the size of the blast – and its sensitive location at the home of the United States' erstwhile nuclear test program – DTRA has taken the trouble to warn the Russians ahead of time of the upcoming test.
The test’s purpose, according to Defense News, is "to examine ground shock effects on deeply buried tunnel structures." The WaPo describes the test as "a conventional alternative" to the politically ornery Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, or "nuclear bunker-buster."
Here’s my $64,000 question, though: is this (700-ton!) explosive really a conventional "alternative," or is it a stand-in being used to simulate a low-yield nuke?
By the way – a "strake” is "a straightedge used for leveling a bed of sand ."
-- Center for Defense Information science fellow Haninah Levine has been passing tips and comments to Defense Tech for months. This is his first post for the site.
(Big ups: Xeni, DS)
UPDATE 11:08 AM: "Ain't nothing you can do when it's Strakes on a motherfucking plain."
UPDATE 04/03/06 12:15 PM: John Fleck, from the Albuquerque Journal, has the answer to whether Divine Strake is nuke-related. "A Pentagon budget request is explicit about its
purpose: to "improve the warfighter's confidence in selecting the smallest nuclear yield necessary to destroy underground facilities while minimizing collateral damage."
Meanwhile, Globalsecurity.org decodes the media gobbledygook surrounding the Divine Strake test.
UPDATE 04/03/06 5:15 PM:"In response to an email earlier today, a DTRA spokesperson confirmed that Divine Strake is the same event that is described in DTRA budget documents as being a low-yield nuclear weapons shock simulation," the FAS Strategic Security Blog notes.
It also turns out that Divine Strake is "an integral part" of STRATCOM's new Global Strike mission, which is normally reported to develop mainly non-nuclear capabilities against time-urgent targets. Global Strike is one of the plillars of the Bush administration’s so-called New Triad which is said to be reducing the role of nuclear weapons.
Army's About Face on Soldier-Bought Armor
 AP: "Just six months after the Pentagon agreed to reimburse soldiers who bought their own protective gear, the Army has banned the use of any body armor that is not issued by the military."
In a new directive, effective immediately, the Army said it cannot guarantee the quality of commercially bought armor, and any soldier wearing it will have to turn it in and have it replaced with authorized gear.
Army officials told The Associated Press on Thursday the order was prompted by concerns that soldiers or their families were buying inadequate or untested commercial armor from private companies - including the popular Dragon Skin gear made by California-based Pinnacle Armor.
The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which is usually mega-critical of the Pentagon's higher-ups, agrees with the Army this time. "The Army has to ensure some level of quality... They don't want soldiers relying on equipment that is weak or substandard," executive director Paul Rieckhoff tells the AP.
But Soldiers for the Truth contends that, "Despite all the evidence to the contrary, including [Army Program Executive Office] Soldier's own ballistic tests conducted at two Army research laboratories that irrefutably proved Dragon Skin was a superior product, the officers charged with providing America's warriors with the best protection possible continue to maintain that the Army's home-grown Interceptor OTV body armor is superior." The site also has the internal Army e-mail telling commanders to diss the Dragon Skin.
A. There may be Soldiers deployed in OIF/OEF who are wearing a commercial body armor called "Dragon Skin," made by Pinnacle Armor, in lieu of their issued Interceptor Body Armor (IBA). Media releases and related advertising imply that Dragon Skin is superior in performance to IBA. The Army has been unable to determine the veracity of these claims.
B. The Army has been involved in the development of Dragon Skin and the different technology it employs. In its current state of development, Dragon Skin's capabilities do not meet Army requirements. In fact, Dragon Skin has not been certified by the Army for protection against several small arms threats being encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
The Naked Cartridge
Ladies and gentlemen: Jimmy Wu. He's a 1st Lieutenant in the Alabama National Guard, an MIT grad in mechanical engineering, and a missile defense systems engineer at Boeing. (Nice resume, hunh?) Jimmy also, in his words, "loves to shoot." So ammo is the subject in the first of what I hope will be a long line of posts for Defense Tech.
Soldiers hate lugging gear around, especially in a hot and sweaty place like Iraq. But going without ammo -- they hate that even more. So they load up on bullets, when they go on patrol.
 A different kind of ammunition, being tested out by the Army, could help. Caseless ammunition give us a lighter round, allowing the soldier to carry more of 'em. A regular cartridge has the bullet, the casing, and the propellant powder inside the casing. In most rifle ammunition, the casing is bigger than the bullet. Caseless ammunition discards the brass and instead molds the propellant around the bullet, giving a lighter and more compact round. For example, a soldier carrying the HK G-11 rifle can carry up to 10 times more ammunition, for the equal weight, than a soldier with an M-16.
Caseless ammunition is not a new idea. The concept has been with us as long as the auto-loading rifle, but it took awhile for the technology to mature. Back in the 1980s, the US Army tried out caseless ammunition under the Advanced Combat Rifle program, but it didn't go anywhere following the end of the Cold War. Germany did the same to their HK G-11.
Today, following experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US Army is paying attention again to soldier load. The Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center has been working on a technology demonstration program, with a light machinegun prototype to be built FY06. Perhaps this time around, caseless ammunition will finally take hold in the United States.
-- Jimmy Wu
iRobots Sell, But Who's Buying?
 Someone must be using them, I guess. Otherwise, why would Naval Sea Systems Command buy another $26 million worth of iRobot's explosive-disposal machines? But I've never met a bomb squad technician who actually bothered with one of the things. Too flimsy, they all say. Too hard to operate.
The Baghdad Bomb Squad used their iRobots to decorate their shop. Not far away, at the U.S. military's central robot depot for Iraq, the iRobots sat on shelves, serenely gathering dust, while Foster-Miller's Talon robots would come back, scarred and in pieces, after being chewed up by a bomb.
Foster-Miller, though, doesn't have the PR megaphone that iRobot does. It doesn't have a cute, little household machine to go along with its battlefield models. And when you go to military trade shows, you only see Foster-Miller sporadically. iRobot always seems to have a booth. Maybe there's a connection, somewhere in there, to that big sale?
(Big ups: JQP)
UPDATE 1:50 PM: Of course. I shoulda figured. "Sen. John Kerry Visits iRobot to Congratulate Company on $26 Million U.S. Navy Contract."
Stealth's Radioactive Secret
This is the first in two-part series from exotic weapons guru David Hambling.
There’s a simple technology that could transform civil aviation, slashing fuel consumption, reducing greenhouse emissions and cutting noise. The problem is, nobody knows about it – yet. It's a military secret.
 The way technology migrates from classified weapons programs to everyday life is the theme of my book, Weapons Grade. (Did I mention it was out in paperback this week?) We wouldn’t have jet aircraft, computers or satellite communications without such programs. But when they stay secret, the public benefit is lost. What would have happened to the electronics industry if the transistor had not been declassified in 1949?
Plasma aerodynamics offers tantalizing promises of improving aircraft performance. By producing a thin layer of charged particles around an aircraft you can change the behavior of the boundary layer, significantly reducing friction. The charged layer also absorbs radar, improving stealth.
When my colleague Justin Mullins wrote about the subject for New Scientist magazine back in 2000, it seemed to be an obscure Russian technology dating from the late 70’s which the US was just beginning to examine. But it offered real benefits, with a potential drag reduction of up to 30%.
“A cut in drag of 1 per cent means you can increase an airliner's payload by about 10 per cent, or it could simply fly farther or faster,” Mullins pointed out, “Just imagine the effect this could have on cash-strapped airlines.”
The Russians seemed to be years ahead, even marketing a plasma stealth add-on device said to reduce radar returns by a factor of a hundred.
He concludes by wondering if the technology can actually work in practice.
“Either the new labs are a huge waste of time and money, or the American military knows something we don't.“
As it turns out, they certainly do.
A lot of information on stealth disappeared from the public domain decades ago when the whole subject turned black. Which was why I was surprised to find the original patent for plasma stealth still intact.
Patent 3,127,608 is called "Object Camouflage Method And Apparatus," and "relates to a method of making aircraft or other objects invisible to radar." The inventor, one Arnold L. Eldredge, describes the theoretical basis of plasma stealth accurately.
The most surprising thing is the date. The patent was filed on August 6th, 1956. The technology has been around for fifty years.
But the big problem is with his apparatus – Eldredge uses an electron gun, which would be way too big to carry on an aircraft. In fact, that’s a problem with this whole plasma idea. Apparatus to generate the millions of volts needed is big, bulky and impractical; even these days the Russians are talking 100 Kg and tens of kilowatts.
But there is a way - check out Patent 4,030,098 (1962) “Method and means for reducing reflections of electromagnetic waves “ – assigned to the Secretary of the Army and the rather similar Patent 3,713,157 (1964) belonging to North American Aviation, later absorbed by Boeing – “Energy Absorption by a Radioisotope Produced Plasma”
Both of these use the same basic concept: a coating of radioactive material producing a flux of either Alpha of Beta particles ionize the air, producing the desired layer of plasma. It’s a clever solution. Radioactive paint weighs virtually nothing, does not require any power input and can be dirt cheap. One of the suggested emitters is Strontium-90, which is produced in abundance as a waste product by nuclear reactors.
It’s also quite safe. With a thin protective coating to prevent it from flaking off, the soft radiation (unlike dangerous Gamma radiation) is not a hazard to pilot or maintenance personnel. This type of material is only dangerous if inhaled or ingested.
I checked out the idea with some people who know about these things - Martin Streetly, Editor of Jane's Radar & Electronic Warfare Systems and Professor Igor Alexeff, former President of the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society and an authority on plasma technology.
Both confirmed that the idea, though exotic, was sound enough in theory. Interestingly, neither had come across the idea before. And both observed one obvious disadvantage from the point of view of stealth. The radiation levels involved – 10 Curies per square centimeter – would give the plane a visible glow at night, making it a beacon to enemy air defenses.
Did this problem mean that the whole idea was shelved - or were radioactive stealth coatings taken further?
We’ll be looking at some surprising answers in part two...
-- David Hambling
Highway Watch Revisited
As I mentioned the other day, over the next couple of weeks, a bunch of new voices are going to join the chorus here at Defense Tech. The first to take a solo is IBM homeland security analyst Christian Beckner, who runs my favorite domestic defense blog, Homeland Security Watch.
Since 9/11, there's been a ton of attention paid to airport security. The job of locking down ports and rail yards has drawn attention, too. But what about trucks? After all, truck and car bombs have long been terrorist favorites. That's the topic Christian takes on in his first post.
 Fleet Owner magazine has an article today that interviews the departing director of the American Trucking Association's Highway Watch program, cites the program's accomplishments, and highlights some of the challenges that it faces:
To date, Highway Watch has trained nearly 250,000 transportation professionals to identify and report emergencies and suspicious activities. [Don] Rondeau noted that although many large carriers have been trained and developed security protocols, he believes vulnerabilities remain in many medium and small trucking companies.
"I think that it will be difficult but we must do it," Rondeau said. “We have to recognize that the owner-operator and the mid-sized trucking companies make up the bulk of the industry. They make up a significant portion of the risk associated with any potential event. If you’re a bad guy would you take advantage of a large corporation, or a guy that’s driving in his office? At the end of the day…we’d be remiss if we didn’t make sure that all members that are elements of the transportation sector could harden their security."
I agree that these are real risks. The security of an open system like trucking is in a sense only as good as its weakest link. That's why I worry that we haven't done enough to secure the trucking sector, especially hazmat trucks, and the 770,000 shipments of hazardous materials that are moved on trucks each day. As I noted in a post in December 2005, the only two significant things that DHS has really done on trucking security are fund Highway Watch and conduct background checks on hazmat drivers. And while useful, that is not enough.
Does the trucking sector need the same degree of security as the aviation system? Absolutely not, since the threats and consequences are different, and the system is inherently difficult to protect. But we know that terrorists have used trucks dozens of times to carry out attacks. MIPT's terrorism database includes 432 incident documents that include the word "truck." And we know that there are scenarios where a truck can be used to cause substantial damage, both from painful experience and from hypothetical scenarios such as an intentional BLEVE. (See this video of an accidental LPG tanker truck BLEVE).
The threats and needs for trucking security are without a doubt greater than the level of funding that DHS has provided to address them. Instead, the DHS FY 2007 budget request shows little interest in trucking security; funding for Highway Watch (via the trucking industry security grant program) is nowhere to be found, and the TSA wants to eliminate funding for a hazardous materials truck tracking pilot project which is funded at $4 million this year. And there are no new initiatives to supercede these programs, as far as I can tell.
More thought needs to be given to a strategic, layered approach to trucking security - one that has a role for Highway Watch, but doesn't end there, and includes activities such as better training and enhanced information-sharing for state Highway Patrols, incentives for the voluntary inclusion of security tools in truck telematic systems, a more direct role for security investment in the Intelligent Transportation Systems funding stream, and integration with air and maritime security activities.
-- Christian Beckner, cross-posted from Homeland Security Watch.
Best. Bomber. Ever.
This may just be my favorite Aviation Week article of all time. It explores, in depth, just how influential the B-2 bomber has been; a quarter-century later, plane-makers are still leveraging lessons they learned from building the thing.
Best of all -- and most unusually, for AvWeek -- the article is actually written (for the most part) in English, not in Pentagonese or aeronautical engineer patois. So we can all appreciate how freakin' cool the B-2 really is.
 By almost any measure, the bomber's development was one of the largest, most technically complex, expensive and demanding programs in aerospace history. But the final product dramatically changed air combat forever. The B-2's "stealth" or low observability (LO) enables unprecedented penetration of enemy territory, essentially neutralizing very costly air defense systems. Precision weapon delivery in all weather conditions, day or night, changed an air warfare tenet from "sorties per target" to "numbers of targets per sortie." In the B-2's case, a single bomber carrying 16 conventional weapons can destroy 16 targets. The same mission once would have required dozens of aircraft dropping hundreds of bombs...
[The B-2 relied on] all-composite skins and structures--the first aircraft to use composites so extensively. This challenge was considered so risky that, for a while, a second team was set up to design an aluminum wing in parallel. A metal structure would have been much heavier, greatly reducing the B-2's range-payload capability. Thus, a considerable effort was devoted to developing a composite version, and it paid off; the aluminum-wing option was dropped before the first Preliminary Design Review took place. "Today, [developing a composite wing] seems straightforward, because the world's used to composite vehicles. But it was a big deal then," Myers notes.
The bomber would have to be designed as an integral system, then manufactured to extremely tight tolerances, to meet LO requirements. Consequently, the B-2 became the first aircraft designed completely via computers, ensuring design and fabrication phases were tightly coordinated, Myers says. However, the analytical models and computer-aided-design/manufacturing (CAD/CAM) tools to accomplish this weren't available in the early 1980s.
In particular, the active flight control system dictated that the entire aircraft be modeled precisely. "I could easily count on one hand the number of people in the [U.S.] who had tried to go through the analytical process for an [active] flight control system," says Myers, who headed that critical risk-closure area at the time...
During the Cold War, weapon system performance was given top priority, trumping cost considerations. Whatever resources were deemed necessary to meet national security goals, they were made available, despite the cost.
"We kept a top-10 list of [B-2 concerns] on the briefing-room wall," Myers recalls. "We were seven years into the program before 'cost' made that list." But those days are gone. "I'm not sure we'll ever see another program like that again," he adds.
Mini-Sensors for "Military Omniscience"
 Spotting insurgents, sorting out friend from foe – it's beyond tough in today’s guerilla war zones. So tough, that no single monitor can be counted on to handle the job. The Pentagon's answer: build a set of palm-sized, networked sensors that can be scattered around, and work together to “detect, classify, localize, and track dismounted combatants under foliage and in urban environments.” It’s part of a larger Defense Department effort to establish “military omniscience” and “ubiquitous monitoring.”
The military has been working on gadgets for a while, now, that can be left behind in a bad neighborhood or a jihadist training site, and monitor the situation. These Camouflaged Long Endurance Nano-Sensors (CLENS) would be an order of magnitude smaller than previous surveillance gear of its type -- just 60 milimeters long, and 150 grams.
Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, also wants the monitors to take up a 10,000th of the power of previous sensors. That would give the CLENS enough juice to keep watch over an area for up to 180 days.
 The way they'd keep watch would be different, too. Not as a individual sensors, but as a network of monitors, communicating with ultra wideband radios. The same frequencies could be used as a kind of radar, to track objects and people within the sensor net.
"The best way to learn about an adversary – what he’s done, what he’s doing, and what he’s likely to do - is through continual observation using as many observation mechanisms as possible. We call this persistent surveillance," Dr. Ted Bially, head of Darpa's Information Exploitation Office, told a conference last year. "We’ve learned that occasional or periodic snapshots don’t tell us enough of what we need to know. In order to really understand what’s going on we have to observe our adversaries and their environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week, week-in and week-out."
According to its recently-released budget, Darpa hopes to hand over its new, minature, persistent sensors to Special Operations Command by the end of fiscal year 2007.
UPDATE 8:50 AM: Speaking of military omniscience, Darpa's "Combat Zones That See" effort, meant to network together an entire city's worth of surveillance cameras, gets $5 million in next year's budget.
Hybrid Truck's Katrina Duty
Diesel-electric hybrids vehicles are all the rage at the U.S. Army's Tank-automotive and Armaments Command in Warren, Michigan. Rising fuel prices and attacks on fuel convoys in Iraq have inspired a number of programs to develop more fuel-efficient trucks. The idea, according to industry, is to cut the Army truck fleet's fuel consumption by 20 percent by 2010.
 But there are other advantages to hybrids, according to Gary Schmiedel at Oshkosh in Wisconsin, which builds the Army's Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck. HEMTTs are tough mothers. During the January elections in Iraq, I talked to HEMTT crews who barreled through AK fire to pick up ballots (see photo for the result). Schmiedel says a new breed of HEMTT, the A3 model, will retain all the ruggedness and combat utility of its predecessor, but with the added capability to export up to 100kW of 3-phase AC power, thanks to its new capacitor-based hybrid engine.
To test the A3, and as a public service, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Oshkosh sent a prototype to New Orleans to serve as a mobile generator. Since it uses the same standard of electricity as our public grid, exporting power is as simple as firing up the HEMTT and plugging in your appliance. The New Orleans-deployed A3 enabled workers to pump out the flooded basement of a hospital.
Hybrids are more expensive than their conventional counterparts. But they promise overall savings over their lifetimes thanks to reduced fuel consumption. And they offer many benefits besides, including those demonstrated by Oshkosh's HEMTT A3 after Katrina. These days I'm on the hybrid beat for National Defense, so expect more on the subject in coming weeks.
-- David Axe
No I.D.? No Sweat!
You know all those people at the airport who tell you that you've got to have ID to get on a flight? They're wrong. "You don't need identification to travel on an airplane," Defense Tech pal Ryan Singel discovers.
 "Who says? The TSA [Transportation Security Administration]. 'Passengers are allowed to enter screening area without identification,' TSA spokeswoman Amy Kudwa told this humble reporter today."
The TSA has told the [U.S.] Ninth Circuit [Court of Appeals] in two separate cases (John Gilmore & Daniel Kuualoha Aukai) that airport policy was to let people enter security areas without identification.
Gilmore's Identity Project has been asking for volunteers to see if that was true... [if people really could get through airport security without ID.]
Results, currently mixed. Dog-ate-my homework excuse with contrition gets you less hassle than a flat-out refusal seems to be the pattern, according to folks at the I.D. Project.
So, if you want to fly without identification without telling any white lies, I recommend taking a hearty amount of fortitude and a copy of at least one of the rulings from the Ninth Circuit.
(Big ups: Bill)
Giant Blimp, Deflated
No! Nooooo! Say it ain't so, Darpa! The Walrus program -- the fringe-science agency's awesomely, almost insanely, ambitious plan to build an aircraft carrier-sized blimp -- is over, Defense Technology International discovers.
 Congress had always been skeptical about the idea of an airship that could schlep 500-1000 tons halfway around the world. (After all, the Pentagon's current go-to airborne hauler, the C-130 Hercules cargo plane, holds about 22 tons.) But blimp-lovers had pushed the "tri-phibian" (air, land, sea) Walrus as a way to make American forces less reliant on deep-water ports, foreign bases, and billion-dollar airports to wage war.
But it wasn't meant to be. Darpa took away the fiscal year 2006 funding for the Walrus. And the agency's 2007 budget request calls for "termination of the Walrus effort."
Now, the Army's Surface Deployment and Distribution Command had its own plans for a heavy-hauling airship, too. I'm checking to see if they're still interested. Keep your fingers crossed.
UPDATE 9:46 AM: Don't get too bummed, blimp fans. Darpa's plan for an all-seeing airship that tracks an entire battlefield at once is still intact.
Arquilla: Big War Toys Make Us Weak
Like a lot of other sage observers, Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla isn't nuts about the idea of spending a ton on Cold War-style weapons systems when we're supposed to be fighting terrorists and insurgents. But Arquilla is one of the first military analysts I've heard say that "the Pentagon's big platforms [aren't] merely the wrong weapon systems to fight present and future wars, but [are] actually likely to bring defeat."
 In an interview with Technology Review, the author of Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy explains:
[O]ur military today oversees spending of about a billion and a quarter dollars every day. Most of that is misspent... The principal argument for that is: "We have to keep the big, old-style military because we might fight a big, old-style war one day." But in the future the bigger you are, the harder you're going to fall to ever-more accurate weapons. Creating a mass army to deal with an old-style mass army is simply to put hundreds of thousands of our troops in harm's way needlessly.
TR: In short, smart, precision-targeted weapons like cruise missiles are going to become increasingly cheap and available to any government or group that can afford them. The Falklands War between Britain and Argentina gave early indications of the vulnerability of big platforms, didn't it?
JA I think so. The lessons there include: how many British submarines did it take to pen up the entire Argentine navy? Two. Simultaneously, the Exocet missile proved the slow-moving capital ship's vulnerability. Today, the Chinese aren't developing aircraft carrier battle groups, but brilliant sea-going mines that know how to maneuver, supersonic anti-ship missiles -- which means the Falklands War on steroids -- and super-cavitation torpedoes, which create a bubble of air in front of the torpedo, letting them move at hundreds of knots per hour. The Chinese have an explicit "swarming" doctrine that can best be characterized as sea power without a navy. In this new naval antagonism that's emerging, our potential enemies are not trying to emulate what we're doing. Instead, they're innovating in very thoughtful, effective ways…
Since we're spending so much on military affairs, maybe some of that should be directed towards technologies that will break our opponents' communications. In World War II, there was an investment in creating the first high-performance computers, for that very purpose. Today, it may be an investment in creating the most effective quantum computing or figuring out how to structure the vast ocean of data that masks the movements of al-Qaeda on the Net and the Web. We need a new Bletchley Park [the country house where the German WWII codes were broken], if we're going to win this war.
TR: Aren't our enemies in Iraq an entirely human network? It's not clear that breaking into their Internet communications...
JA: Oh, but they don't exist without the Web and the Net. You don't move around that country easily and even the old-school Baathist insurgent elements rely on the Web. A networked insurgency doesn't have anything like a traditional leadership. Most of the leadership they get is by going on websites, where they share information very quickly.
TR: Could we take down the Net in Iraq and would it have the effect of downing the insurgency to a significant degree?
JA: You could end all Internet access in Iraq and it would in many ways cripple the insurgents, in terms of slowing them down tremendously. But you'd also cripple reconstruction.
TR: So, in other words, we should data-mine Net exchanges within Iraq?
JA: There you go.
Rapid Fire 03/27/06
* Iraq: death squad fears coming true
* Laser jet looking up?
* Marines shelve extra armor (background here)
* Army's UAV field manual
* Iraq's mystery vehicle
* UK's automated aircraft carrier
* Sikorsky's reverse FOIA
* Al-Qaeda hacker caught
* Rail security: asleep at the switch
* Gavins in Iraq
* Doubts on Russia spy story
* Get your secret doors!
(Big ups: Secrecy News, Schneier, CA, JQP)
I'm a Coward
Sherry Ricchiardi from American Journalism Review interviewed me for a story on the dangers facing reporters in Iraq. Kudos to Sherry: the story's great and features one of my personal heroes, John Burns from The New York Times, and friends of mine such as Monte Morin from Stars & Stripes. But I came off sounding like a real coward:
For freelance journalists operating in Iraq, the stakes are even higher. Most enter the country with little logistical support, such  as a safe ride along the dangerous road from the Baghdad airport or lodging in a hotel with proper security. They bear their own expenses for an interpreter, car and driver. The high cost and serious risks cause some, like David Axe, to opt out.
Back home in Columbia, South Carolina, Axe says he has no plans to return. "To be honest, trying to get there just isn't worth it anymore. Except for a handful of major media, journalists are getting out," says Axe, whose stories have been published by the Washington Times, the Village Voice and Salon.
The final blow came when Axe had a run-in with the military over information he filed on a blog, www.defensetech.org, that deals with technology. The report had to do with a radio jammer called Warlock, used to thwart remotely detonated IEDs, one of the chief killers of U.S. soldiers. That got him evicted from his embed and caused him to rethink staying without security. In Iraq, "angry looks and whispered words can be a prelude to death," Axe wrote in a January 20 piece for Salon. He went to cover the war, he said, because "it is the biggest story in the world ... but I also don't want to die."
Read the whole story here.
-- David "Scared to Die" Axe
Defense Tech Wants You...
 ...to join its blogger army. The site needs new writers, fresh voices. So if you like what you read here, and you know a thing or two about military gear, drop me a line.
The pay is, uh... well, let's just say it isn't substantial. But the exposure can be. And I promise: you'll have fun.
Chameleon Weapons Defy Detection
Since 9/11, all kinds of new technologies and new techniques have popped up for detecting concealed weapons.
But they won’t catch everything; far from it. Last week I talked to Anthony Taylor, managing partner of an outfit which makes weapons which can be hidden in plain sight. You can be looking right at one without realizing what it is.
 One type is the exact size and shape of a credit card, except that two of the edges are lethally sharp. It's made of G10 laminate, an ultra-hard material normally employed for circuit boards. You need a diamond file to get an edge on it.
Taylor suggests that the card could easily be camouflaged as an ID card or one of the many other bits of plastic that clutter up the average wallet. Each weapon is individually handmade so they can be tailored to the user’s requirements.
Another configuration is a stabbing weapon which is indistinguishable from a pen. This one is made from melamine fiber, and can sit snugly inside a Bic casing. You would only find out it was not the real thing if you tried to write with it. It's sharpened with a blade edge at the tip which Defense Review describes as “scary sharp.”
I asked about more elaborate weapons. If modern synthetic materials are strong and hard enough to make a knife out of, how about a gun, like the non-metallic gun assembled by John Malkovich’s assassin character in In the Line Of Fire? According to one gun magazine, the CIA has had a ceramic handgun firing caseless non-metallic ammo for years.
Taylor certainly doesn’t rule out such a weapon, but points out the obvious flaw: how do you disguise it? Even a ceramic gun still looks like a gun, and anyone patting you down will find it. (James Bond fans might remember the golden gun used by Scaramanga which broke down into a fountain pen, cigarette case and lighter, but this is pure Hollywood fantasy)
 In the real world, Taylor is more interested in supplying something that undercover narcotics agents can carry as a last-ditch weapon. In that sort of situation it can make the difference between life and death. And if you’re thinking of buying one, you should know that he only sells to law-enforcement and government agencies. This policy has him cost a lot of business, but being from a law-enforcement background himself, Taylor is not about to help the other side.
Of course there could be someone out there manufacturing chameleon weapons for the bad guys. That’s why some of Taylor’s business is with the various government agencies both in the US and in other countries whose job it is to detect such things, and who want to see the state of the art.
So how do you prevent someone from taking this sort of weapon through security checks? “Take everything off them and examine every item individually,” advises Taylor. “That’s the only reliable way.”
-- David Hambling
PS My book Weapons Grade is coming out in paperback next week! More later.
UPDATE 12:28 AM: The FBI's extensive Guide to Concealable Weapons has 89 pages of weapons intended to get through security. These are generally variations of a knifeblade concealed in a pen, comb or a cross - and most of them are pretty obvious on X-ray.
"Great Robot Race": Geeky Fun
If you're enough of a dork to be reading this site, you're enough of a dork to enjoy PBS' "The Great Robot Race," airing next Tuesday night.
 The show does a nice job setting up the main rivalry of last fall's Darpa Grand Challenge, the $2 million unmanned raly across the Mojave Desert. Domineering, jerky genius Red Whittaker and his hyper-funded Carnegie Mellon team comes charging out of one corner. Likeably bland Sebastian Thrun and his nerdy Stanford crew ambles out of the other.
And there's more than a difference in personalities. Whittaker builds his bots, more or less from the ground up. Thrun gets his pretty much of-the-shelf from Volkswagen, so he can concentrate on software instead. Carnegie Mellon uses a laser mounted to a gimbal to help its robots see; it works like a human head, constantly on watch. Stanford opts to keep its lasers static; but combines them with video data, to put together a more complex picutre of what's in front of the driverless car.
By now, it's no secret which team came out ahead. But still, there's a geeky thrill watching the race's pivotal moment through the eyes of Stanley, the Stanford machine. That alone is worth checking out the hour-long documentary.
Like most shows of its kind, "The Great Robot Race" could've done better at balancing out its animated schematics and techie explanations with real human drama. And there was plenty to be had during the Grand Challenge; Thrun and Whittaker were colleagues until just a few months before the race. But the show ends on a gee-whiz-science-is-awesome, let's-all-hug moment, instead of with the obvious friction between the Carnegie and Stanford camps. Why set up a rivalry with no tension? Worse, "The Great Robot Race" leaves out perhaps the most fascinating story of the whole event: the Gray Team from New Orleans, a group of insurance company amateurs who nearly beat Stanford and Carnegie both, despite having its shop wrecked by Katrina.
Girls Hate Defense Tech
So the results from last week's demographic survey are in. Thanks to all you guys -- 1,351, in a little more than 24 hours -- who filled it out.
 And I don't mean "guys," figuratively. A full 97.8% of Defense Tech readers are male, it turns out. Rich males: half had family incomes over $75,000 a year. A little more than 40% were part of the larger "military community," split fairly evenly between active duty troops, veterans, and defense contractors.
Hopefully, this will give the ad sales team enough to work with. What this all says to me: More pin-ups. And more dick jokes.
Everybody is E.O.D.
A shortage of Explosive Ordnance Disposal experts in Iraq means that engineers and infantry often end up tackling Improvised Explosive Devices themselves.
 New equipment including tougher vehicles and simple ground robots make this possible, as I explain in an article in the April National Defense Magazine:
Armored vehicles originally designed to clear mines are used to sweep roads of bombs. Patrols travel inside the protective bubbles of sophisticated radio jammers that intercept the signals that detonate explosives. And engineers are refining the use of small ground robots to identify and destroy IEDs.
Read the entire article here.
-- David Axe
UPDATE 9:49 AM: Noah here. As you can imagine, the guys who spend a year training to become bomb squad technicians aren't exactly thrilled by the newbies who think they handle their jobs, just because of a few new toys. This isn't just a matter of guarding turf (although there is some of that, for sure). There's a pretty major safety issue involved here, too.
Quick example: a group of combat engineers near Baghdad were all fired up about their new, bomb-grabbing Buffalo armored vehicle, which they used to sift through roadside junk piles for IEDs. These guys would dig up an explosive with the Buffalo's spindly claw. And then, they'd be so proud of what they found, they'd want to snap a quick picture of their prize. So they'd use the claw to bring the bomb right up to the Buffalo's cab. And then, the IED would go off. A bad thing, of course. And the kind of thing that happens when folks aren't properly trained in bomb-handling.
 UPDATE 10:07 AM: Of course, being an EOD pro doesn't make you bomb-proof. In an incident I barely missed, UK Captain Peter Norton lost a leg and part of an arm to an IED. Yesterday, he was awarded one of the British military's highest honors, the George Cross. Only 21 others have received it since 1945. His citation reads, in part:
"Captain Norton was the second-in-command of the US Combined Explosives Exploitation Cell (CEXC) based in the outskirts of Baghdad. The unit has been in the forefront of counter Improvised Explosive Device (IED) operations and is plays a vital role in the collection and analysis of weapons intelligence.
At 1917 hours on 24 July 2005, a three vehicle patrol from B Company, 2nd Battalion, 121st Regiment of the Georgia National Guard was attacked by a massive command initiated IED in the Al Bayaa district near Baghdad. The ensuing explosion resulted in the complete destruction of a 'Humvee' patrol vehicle and the deaths of four US personnel. Due to the significance of the attack, a team from CEXC, commanded by Captain Norton, was tasked immediately to the scene. On arrival, Captain Norton was faced with a scene of carnage and the inevitable confusion which is present in the aftermath of such an incident. He quickly took charge and ensured the safety of all the coalition forces present. A short while later he was briefed that a possible command wire had been spotted in the vicinity of the explosion site. With a complete understanding of the potential hazard to himself and knowing that the insurgents had used secondary devices before in the particularly dangerous part of Iraq, Captain Norton instructed his team and the US forces present in the area to remain with their vehicle while he alone went forward to confirm whether a command wire IED was present.
A short while later, an explosion occurred and Captain Norton sustained a traumatic amputation of his left leg and suffered serious blast and fragmentation injuries to his right leg, arms and lower abdomen. When his team came forward to render first aid, he was conscious, lucid and most concerned regarding their safety. He had correctly deduced that he had stepped on a victim operated IED and there was a high probability that further devices were present. Before allowing them to render first aid, he instructed his team on which areas were safe and where they could move. Despite having sustained grievous injuries he remained in command and coolly directed the follow-up actions. It is typical of the man that he ignored his injuries and regarded the safety of his men a paramount as they administered life saving first aid to him. It is of note that a further device was found less than ten metres away and rendered safe the following day. Captain Norton's prescience and clear orders in the most difficult circumstances undoubtedly prevented further serious injury or loss of life.
(Big ups: JQP, LB)
Pentagon's Animal Kingdom
When ABC News really, really wants to know about robolobsters, mind-controlled sharks, mechanical pack mules, and terror-fighting dolphins, they know just who to call...
 "Animals have been part of military operations since there have been military operations," said Noah Shachtman of DefenseTech.org. "They have been the fighting man's best friend for generations and in modern-day warfare that's still the case."
While there are no sharks yet in uniform and cyborg insects are still in development, Shachtman finds some encouragement in the military's more unusual programs.
"The Defense Department is what, $600 billion a year?" he asked. "That leaves a lot of room for all kinds of kooky projects. I wouldn't say there's an order from Donald Rumsfeld to build mechanical bees or something like that, but especially in DARPA, there's a desire to explore and freedom to look into things that may or may not work out militarily."
He believes that, although many of DARPA's programs are scrapped before they're seen through, it's one of the few places in government research where dreaming is considered an asset.
"I wouldn't interpret that to mean we're going to have an army of dolphins and robotic bears attacking the enemy anytime soon," Shachtman joked.
Read thing whole thing here.
Morphing Planes Moving Towards Reality
The idea has been around for ages -- since before the Wright Brothers. But, lately, the military has gotten serious about trying to build airplanes that change shape in flight. The reason? To get "aircraft that loiter for a long time and that also fly very fast," a Darpa program manager told New Scientist in '03. "The type of wings that you design for each of those things are different... loitering wings are generally high span and a large surface area, whereas fast wings have a low wing span and a low area. We want to generate wings that drastically change their surface area and shape, meaning more than 150 per cent change in surface area."
 Sounds cool. But pulling it off has been really tough. Some Pentagon-funded engineers are trying to design wing superstructures that slide or fold. Another group, also with Defense Department backing is aiming for an even further-out solution: materials that actually bend and twist into new shapes.
Nature has already figured out how to do this, Darpa program managers noted, with plants. A plant bends toward the light, quickly furls its leaves when touched, or pushes a concrete sidewalk aloft with its roots is essentially moving fluids between cells.
MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang "realized that the solid compounds used to store electrical energy in lithium rechargeable batteries could be made to work in a similar way. The movement of ions to and from these materials during charging and recharging, he thought, was analogous to the moving fluids in plants," an MIT press release notes. "Could this be a synthetic counterpart to nature's solution?"
To find out, Chiang and Hall began testing commercially available rechargeable batteries of a prismatic form, then designed their own devices composed of graphite posts surrounded by a lithium source. The results were promising.
Among other things, they found that the batteries continued to expand and contract under tremendous stresses, a must for devices that will be changing the shape of, say, a stiff helicopter rotor that's also exposed to aerodynamic forces...
The researchers have already demonstrated basic battery-based actuators that can pull and push with large force. Later this year, they hope to demonstrate the shape-morphing of a helicopter rotor blade. The morphing capability should allow for a more efficient design, ultimately making it possible for a vehicle to carry heavier loads.
Rapid Fire 03/22/06
* "Scientist faces arms charges"
* Spec Ops Osprey delivered
* SpaceX set to launch
* Human brain on a chip
* Brooklyn Bridge's Cold War stockpile
* Q-Branch's solar drone
* One plane: no flaps, no pilot
* Portable water purifier wins nanotech prize
(Big ups: CA, RC)
Chem Plant Security Gets Serious
 There are 15,000 chemical plants scattered around the country. A third of them are near major population centers. The estimated casualty counts if any of them were struck are utterly catastrophic. And there's no federal plan -- not even federal guidelines -- to secure these facilities. The chemical industry has been "reluctant to accept... security requirements" from Washington, Global Security Newswire notes. And, for the longest time, Washington didn't want the power to do so. "Unlike EPA, for example, which requires drinking water facilities to improve their security," notes a recent Congressional report, "DHS [Department of Homeland Security] does not have the authority to require chemical facilities to assess their vulnerabilities and implement security measures."
But there's been an "unusual turnabout by the Bush administration," the Times reports. "It is now lobbying for regulations that senior administration officials worked privately to block shortly after the 2001 attacks, saying then that voluntary measures would be sufficient."
In his speech Tuesday, at a forum sponsored by George Washington University and the American Chemistry Council, a trade group, [DHS secretary Michael Chertoff] said the regulations should be most stringent for plants that, because of the amount and danger of their chemical stockpiles or their proximity to urban areas, pose the greatest risks.
But he said the nation should have uniform standards, strongly implying that states should not be allowed to adopt their own rules, as New Jersey did late last year, particularly if those rules were more stringent.
He also said private-sector, "third party" inspectors could check on compliance, similar to the way accountants certify corporate financial compliance for the government.
Chertoff used the speech to endorse a chemical security bill, backed by Senator Susan Collins, that's currently making its way through Congress. According to IBM homeland security analyst Christian Beckner -- who's my go-to guy on these matters -- it's "sensible legislation that requires all parties to make compromises and can deliver the level of security that we need."
That is, if it can get passed. Beckner "walked away from the event feeling less confident about whether the key parties are actually ready to actually make these compromises, or whether they would rather hold out for legislation that meets more or all of their key demands."
Hopefully my gut intuition is wrong here, and we will instead see a sensible compromise in the weeks ahead and a bill signed into law in the next few months. Any failure to move forward on this legislation is unacceptably dangerous for our national security.
UPDATE 10:22 AM: Read the AP's account of Chertoff's talk, and you'll get the feeling that the wire service's reporter was at an entirely different speech.
He said the government would not set minimum standards for chemical companies to follow, allowing the industry to tailor its own "so we can go about the objective of raising our security in a way that doesn't destroy the businesses we're trying to protect."
"There are a lot of ways to skin a cat, and we're going to let chemical operators figure out the right way, as long as the cat gets skinned," Chertoff said...
Critics said the proposal relies too much on the chemical industry to police itself.
"It's a lot like putting a 'Beware of dog' sign out in the yard but not actually buying a guard dog," said Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass. He said federal regulations should spell out minimum protections against different kinds of terror attacks, adding that the use of outside auditors was like "having the private sector grade the industry's homework."
C.N.O., Podcasting
 One thing about the Overlords at Military.com: They've got juice -- especially in the Navy, where editor Ward Carrolll and Overlord-in-Chief Chris Michel both served as fliers. Drop their names, and admirals return e-mails, quick.
So it's no surprise, really, that Ward was able to snag for his podcast this week Admiral Mike Mullen, Chief of Naval Operations. Click here to listen to the CNO talk about his vision for a "thousand-ship Navy," the need to "outpace strategic competitors," and the "shift of our forces to the Pacific." Recent guests have included Joe Galloway, Nate Fick, James Barber, and, uh, me.
Rapid Fire 3/21/06
* Space sensors, terror auto-responder on DoD tech demo list
* E-mail in short supply at FBI
* Land mines' welcome mat
* GAO still hates Future Combat
* SAIC employees get bloggy
* Private companies to service Space Station
* New missions for laser jet?
* Iraq's "Britney Spears Effect"
(Big ups: /., TR, DID)
Iraqi Police = Shi'ite Militia?
Defense Tech pal Chris Allbritton has a brutal story out of Iraq, on the "growing evidence" that "massacres... are being tolerated and even abetted by Iraq's Shi'ite-dominated police forces, overseen by Iraq's Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr." This is exactly the kind of thing Stephen Biddle warned us about.
On his watch, sectarian militias have swelled the ranks of the police units and, Sunnis charge, used their positions to carry out revenge killings against Sunnis. While allowing an Iranian-trained militia to take over the ministry, critics say, Jabr has authorized the targeted assassination of Sunni men and stymied investigations into Interior-run death squads...
So black is the reputation of the National Police, that after the Feb. 22 bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, many Sunnis said the perpetrators were Interior Ministry troops who were looking for a pretext to start a civil war. Their fears were further fueled in the bloody two days after the attack, when Iraq became a sectarian slaughterhouse. Instead of protecting citizens from each other, National Police units stood by as Shi'ite rioters — and rival militiamen from Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army — stormed Sunni mosques and swarmed over Sunni neighborhoods, according to numerous reports, including some confirmed by U.S. Gen. George Casey, commander of American forces in Iraq...
[Former National Security Advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority David] Gompert notes, "I remember saying, 'If there is going to be a civil war, it's going to be fought between Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militias." And as long as Jabr is running the Interior Ministry and its police forces, there is little doubt which of the two in such a conflict will have the law — and American training — on its side.
America's Arsenal Aimed at China
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