Rapid Fire - Weekend Edition

* Ford: Hybrids? Never mind...

* Electrolux death ray

* Nuke clowns: Keep chasing, ABC

* Raptor export ban over?

* More heavy-breathing over Nork missile

* Pentagon wind farm fight heats up

* Gurkhas in Afghanistan

* AT&T main source for NSA database?

* Bank-tapping: "A Secret the Terrorists Already Knew"

* Gitmo ruling big blow to Bush

* Brazil's buffalo cops

* Milspace about to be axed?

(Big ups: MG, RC, FT)

Ja! German Bot Spies By Satellite

Check it out, frauleins: The German Federal Armed Forces are experimenting with a prototype, satellite-controlled robot that can go on recon missions, while its human operator hangs out in Berlin.

The satellite link, which can transmit video at 2 Mbps and receive control channel data up to 128 Kbps, makes the RoboScout something of an oddball in the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) world. As Peter J. Brown notes in the latest issue of Via Satellite magazine, satellite signals are easy to lose in the urban canyons and forested areas where UGVs are likely to operate. Plus, the uneven ground can cause the 'bots to tilt by 20 or 30 degrees in one direction or another -- which means locking onto a satellite gets even trickier. Most robot-makers go for radio-control, instead.

RoboScout was one of more than 20 UGVs shown off during May's European Land-Robot Trial -- sort of a Continental answer to Darpa's Grand Challenge, but without the "'winners' and 'losers,'" the organizers note. The machines were put through a series of obstacles during their time under the Bundeswehr's care in Hammelburg -- "stairs, narrow passes, and collapsed ceilings... as well as ditches, fences and fire." And from the looks of the couple-thousand pictures taken at the event, RoboScout (and many of the other UGVs) handled themselves rather well. Achtung!

New Twist in Dragon Armor Tale

After a few soldiers started wearing Dragon Skin body armor, the much-hyped alternative to the standard Interceptor defenses, the Army banned the flexible armor -- and allegedly threatened to cut off the life insurance policies of anyone wearing it. Then, the Army took a different tack, saying it would start testing the Skin, to see if it was up to snuff.

Now, one of the officers in charge of those tests is publicly dissing the Dragon armor, Jane's Nathan Hodge reports.

In comments posted on an online discussion forum, Karl Masters, director of engineering for Program Manager - Soldier Equipment, said he recently supervised tests of Dragon Skin, a vest made by California-based Pinnacle Armor.

"I was recently tasked by the army to conduct the test of the 30 Dragon Skin SOV 3000 level IV body armor purchased for T&E [tests and evaluation]," Masters wrote in a 6 June posting. "My day job is acting product manager for Interceptor Body Armor. I'm under a gag order until the test results make it up the chain.

"I will, however, offer an enlightened and informed recommendation to anyone considering purchasing an SOV 3000 Dragon Skin - don't."

Masters added that he would not recommend the vest, particularly given the threat from 7.62 x 54R armor-piercing rounds.

"I do, however, highly recommend this system for use by insurgents," he added...

Pinnacle officials have consistently maintained Dragon Skin passed the tests that were conducted in May, and said army officials agreed to continue tests at a later date. They say they are awaiting word from the army on the resumption of testing...

After repeated inquiries, an army public affairs official referred Jane's to Pinnacle for more information on the results of testing. Lieutenant Colonel William Wiggins, an army spokesman, said the safety of use memorandum regarding Dragon Skin is still in force.

"As our research community comes up with new products, we'll field them," Col Wiggins said. "You can be assured that we field the best body armour in the world."

Rapid Fire 06/29/06

* Buffalos, Cougars take Manhattan

* Supremes: Gitmo trials no-go

* Russia and China get littoral warships, too

* Ultrasound to treat war wounds (background here)

* Raptor goes 108 and 0

* Stealth radar can't be spotted

* Heart-rending goodbye in Ramadi

* Mmmmmm... astroturf!

* VA employee had take-home OK

* Homeland net: lights on, no one home

* Soldiers' families get threats

* Cybersecurity czar: crooked?

(Big ups: BB, RM, EH, DID, CP)

Miniature Bomb, Heavyweight Punch

You hear a lot of big claims in this industry. So when I read about a 31-inch, 64-pound weapon that's supposed to have more killing power than a 1,000-pound cluster bomb, I was more than a little skeptical.

After all, a typical cluster bomb distributes over two hundred BLU-97 bomblets over a wide area. Together they produce thirty times as many shrapnel fragments as the 64-pound mini-munition, Textron Systems' Clean Lightweight Area Weapon. It was hard to see how CLAW could compete.

But it turns out that CLAW can be awfully deadly, in its own right. After ejection, CLAW descends by parachute, and a proximity sensor detonates it sixteen feet above the ground. That means its fragments get dispersed far and wide. In contrast, the BLU-97 only goes off on contact with the ground, which sends a lot of fragments into the dirt – instead of into targets. (Check out this video to see what CLAW does to a 16 by 12 foot target.)

The design of the warhead casing helps, too. It's a steel cylinder scored on the inside, so that it forms diamond or arrowhead shaped fragments, over two thousand of them. A special proprietary technique is used to cut the pattern on the warhead casing, creating fragments which are bullet-sized (about 7 grams/114 grains) and effective over a very wide radius. BLU-97 fragments are much smaller (about 30 grains) and less effective.

The explosive filling of CLAW is PAX-21, which is both more powerful and more stable than previous explosives. The combination of explosion and fragments produces thorough coverage of a circular area over 140 yards across, effective against targets including personnel, soft vehicles, parked aircraft and anti-aircraft sites. Textron Systems have precisely quantified this performance with ground tests, and their claim about its effectiveness looks like a strong one.

CLAW’s small size means that strike aircraft could carry it in large numbers, but at present it’s being marketed as the ideal weapon for killer drones. Even something as large as a Predator drone can only carry two Hellfire missiles. For the same weight you could carry several CLAWs, but it also means that even smaller UAVs could be armed for the first time. The development of this type of miniature munition – and even smaller weapons are in the pipeline – brings the possibility of large numbers of armed UAVs on the battlefield for the first time.

(CLAW is not effective against heavy armor, but the same GPS-guided Universal Aerial Delivery Dispenser which delivers it can also be loaded with a BLU-108 anti-tank weapon with four target-seeking warheads.)

But perhaps the most impressive thing about CLAW is how much work has gone into making sure it only explodes when it’s meant to. There is a triple-redundant fuzing system – the proximity fuze, a ground contact fuze, and a time delay. If all of these fail, then the battery dissipates within seconds and the munition is inert. It’s not just unexploded, but unexplodable.

You could hit the CLAW with a hammer, run over it with a tractor or put it in a fire, and it will not detonate. You could take it apart without any personal risk. The insensitive explosive really is insensitive.

“The only way you could make it explode would be to take it to a laboratory,” says Richard D. Sterchele, Textron’s Business Development Manager for Smart Weapons.

This means that unexploded CLAWs cannot be turned into IEDs. Iraq is awash with weaponry, but in other conflicts like Vietnam guerrillas have used unexploded bombs as a major source of explosives.

More importantly, it does not leave hazardous unexploded bomblets scattered around. The failure rate of BLU-97 is widely quoted at around 6%, so each CBU-103 leaves about a dozen potentially lethal bomblets to be cleared up. It is hard to over-emphasize just how dangerous these are; according to the USMC’s Multi-Service Procedures for Operations in UXO Environment:

“Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity Studies show 40 percent of the duds on the ground are hazardous and for each encounter with an unexploded submunition there is a 13 percent probability of detonation…Thus, even though an unexploded submunition is run over, kicked, stepped on, or otherwise disturbed, and did not detonate, it is not safe. Handling the unexploded submunition may eventually result in arming and subsequent detonation.”

In one incident in 1991, seven members of the 27th Engineer Battalion were killed during operations to clear a runway at As Salam when a pile of ‘dud’ BLU-97’s exploded.

In the Cold War scenario, where the enemy was an invading Soviet horde, unexploded bomblets may not have been seen as a problem. But in scenarios like Iraq and Afghanistan where US engineers are likely to have to deal with them, the argument for a ‘clean’ weapon like CLAW is a compelling one.

It remains to be seen whether the Pentagon will take up CLAW, which is a private company initiative. Live CLAW munition tests from operational UAVs are being conducted by the U.S. Air Force and Army over the summer 2006. It’s a fraction of the cost of a cluster bombs, but the saving in lives could be much more important. But in the world of defense procurement, unfortunately it’s not always that simple.

-- David Hambling

White House NYT Bashers: Hypocrites

Since 9/11, nobody -- and I mean nobody -- has done more reporting on the government's attempts to track terrorists through their data trails than the National Journal's Shane Harris. (The guy ate Spam and knocked back Tequizas with John Poindexter, for chrissake!) So I couldn't be more psyched to welcome Shane to the Defense Tech family. This is the first of what I hope will be a long string of posts for the site.

Bush administration officials have been lining up to condemn The New York Times for revealing a program to track financial transactions as part of the war on terrorism. But if the Times’ revelation about a program to monitor international exchanges is so damaging, why has the administration been chattering about efforts to monitor domestic transactions for nearly five years?

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, many journalists — including this one — were briefed by U.S. Customs officials on Operation Green Quest, an effort to roll up terrorist financiers by monitoring, among other things, "suspicious" bank transfers and ancient money lending programs favored by people of Middle Eastern descent.

I interviewed Marcy Forman, director of Green Quest, at her Washington offices in December 2001, when I was a writer for Government Executive magazine. Our meeting was sanctioned by Customs' public affairs office, and came at a time when the White House was eager to talk about all the work federal agencies were doing to hunt down terrorists. Forman told me the kinds of people, transactions, even locations that the government was targeting. (These are details, it should be noted, that the recent Times piece did not reveal.) Among the potentially sensitive items Forman told me, which were published:

“Operation Green Quest is focusing on the informal, largely paperless form of money exchange known as hawala, which is Arabic for ‘to change.’”

“Few undercover agents can penetrate Middle Eastern communities and money laundering rings because they look like outsiders and don't speak the language…. As a result, Green Quest has to be more clever, by setting traps on the Internet and working to flush currency traffickers out of their hiding places.”

“Treasury and FBI investigators have identified hawala as a means by which the alleged Sept. 11 terrorists may have received money from overseas.”

“Green Quest investigators, who've spent their careers dismantling money laundering rackets, were blindsided by the existence of the system. ‘Most of us couldn't spell hawala’ before Sept. 11,’ Forman said.”

“The agencies' [involved in Green Quest] cooperative efforts have recently culminated in raids of alleged money laundering operations that aid suspected terrorist networks.”

“Green Quest also wants to lower the threshold at which bank deposits and electronic funds transfers must be documented. Dropping the ceiling from $10,000 to $750, Forman said, may force money traffickers to try to get their cash out of the country by hand. They would then be subject to capture by a beefed-up cadre of Customs Service officers at border crossings, airports and seaports.”

Green Quest was only one of the administration’s efforts to combat terrorist financing which officials discussed publicly. More than two years after 9/11, federal officials testified before a congressional field hearing in Miami and "detailed efforts to stop the illegal financing of terrorist networks." A senior adviser for the Treasury Department "named several initiatives, such as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which is developing technology to let financial institutions report suspicious transactions more easily and quickly." The adviser also named the system FinCEN was developing to manage a database built to search financial transactions. And he said the department was working directly with financial institutions to help them "develop software to better identify potential terrorist-financing activities."

These details, provided by Customs and Treasury officials, undoubtedly gave terrorists some insight into how the U.S. government was tracking them, and what investigators knew about terrorism financing. These officials weren’t whistleblowers—they were sanctioned by the administration to dispense this information.

In the wake of the latest Times revelation, Rep. Peter King of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, wants the attorney general to investigate and prosecute reporters and editors of the Times for “aiding the cause of our enemies.” What King and others critics haven’t addressed is how the publication of specific details, over the past half decade, about the techniques the government employees to track terrorists’ money doesn’t also aid their cause.

-- Shane Harris

UPDATE 06/29/9:34 AM: Intel Dump takes a very different point of view. Meanwhile, Bob Kerrey -- and even, to some extent, Peter King -- wonder the Times' disclosure actually helps counterterror efforts.

Bob Kerrey, a member of the 9/11 commission, [said] that if the news reports drive terrorists out of the banking system, that could actually help the counterterrorism cause.

"If we tell people who are potential criminals that we have a lot of police on the beat, that's a substantial deterrent," said Mr. Kerrey, now president of New School University. If terrorists decide it is too risky to move money through official channels, "that's very good, because it's much, much harder to move money in other ways," Mr. Kerrey said.

A State Department official, Anthony Wayne, made a parallel point in 2004 before Congress. "As we've made it more difficult for them to use the banking system," Mr. Wayne said, "they've been shifting to other less reliable and more cumbersome methods, such as cash couriers..."

Since [9/11], the Treasury Department has produced dozens of news releases and public reports detailing its efforts. Though officials appear never to have mentioned the Swift program, they have repeatedly described their cooperation with financial networks to identify accounts held by people and organizations linked to terrorism...

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, convened a hearing in 2004 where Treasury officials described at length their efforts, assisted by financial institutions, to trace terrorists' money. But he has been among the most vehement critics of the disclosures about the Swift program, saying editors and reporters of The New York Times should be imprisoned for publishing government secrets.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. King said he saw no contradiction. "Obviously we wanted the terrorists to know we were trying to track them," Mr. King said. "But we didn't want them to know the details."

Rapid Fire 06/28/06 (Updated)

* ACLU: stop brain scanning terrorists

* How to tell if the NSA snoops on you

* Bullets, password-protected

* ONR's million-dollar contest

* Israel's Gaza strike - and what lead up to it

* Inside China's space command center

* Super Hornets' sweet new radar

* Freezing Falcons

* America's own cyanide IED

* NYT's finance scoop: old news, no biggie

* Beating China's great firewall

* eBay = homeland security answer?

* U.S. chips compromised?

* Renewable energy: crowds?

* Starfire redux (background here)

* Switchblade redux (background here)

(Big ups: EH, Schneier)

Robo-Doggie's New Pal

Defense Tech loves robots, of course. But our favorite of 'bot of all is the four-legged mechanical pack mules known as the BigDog. We've been barking about the robo-fido, ever since it was a sketch on a drawing pad.

So imagine the joy at Defense Tech HQ when we learned that there was a new puppy in the mechanical litter -- a second BigDog. The two bots were running around Marine Corps Air Station New River recently -- along with an exoskeleton-clad marine and a new trauma pod.

The roboteers at Boston Dynamics have been training the 165-pound, two-and-a-half foot-tall BigDogs to carry gear for soldiers and marines over uneven terrain. So far, they've gotten the pooches to "run at a rate of 3.3 mph, climb a 35 degree slope and carry a 120 pound load," according to Marine Corps News. The bots have proved sturdy enough to take a big kick, and keep on walkin'.

Maybe it's this sturdiness that's inspiring some to think about the BigDogs are most than just mechanical beasts of burden. This article -- and take this a can of salty Alpo -- says Darpa "is considering plans such as weaponizing the BigDog robots."

Down, boy. Down.

(Big ups: BB)

Hoax Watch, Day 10: No Nork Launch, After All

Ten days ago, the New York Times and its sister paper, the International Herald Tribune, ran a pair of breathless stories, warning us that North Korea's long-range Taepodong-2 missile was being fueled for "take off." Worse, the weapon could have the ability to "deliver chemical, biological or perhaps nuclear warheads to targets as far away as the continental United States."

Worldwide hysteria followed. Condi Rice called it a "provocative act." The Japanese prime minister said they would "respond harshly" to a launch. The Pentagon shouted that its missile defense system was ready to go. A former SecDef and a former VP called for preemptive strikes on North Korea.

But cracks in the story appeared almost immediately. No one could really say what this Taepodong-2 really looked like, or what it could do. Responsible reporters recalled North Korea's history of saber-rattling stunts -- and its anemic track record for testing missiles.

And then there was the fuel and oxidizer supposedly being loaded into the missile. Corrosive stuff, it could eat through a missile's metal casing in two or three days. Which meant that the Norks had to launch quickly, or not at all. With every day this missile "crisis" dragged on, the less likely it became.

By the beginning of this week, it became clear that a world-class hoax had gone down. Either Pyongyang had hoodwinked the globe into thinking it was about to launch -- or the Times was once again hyping up a national security threat.

Today, finally, the Times admitted the obvious. Well, kinda sorta. And on page A9 -- not the font page, where the Taepodong "scoop" had been originally published.

On Monday and Tuesday, two officials said the intelligence could, at best, be interpreted as offering only a prudent assumption that the missile was fueled, and that intelligence analysts had described an already fueled missile as a worst-case scenario.

"It is impossible to know for certain whether or how much fuel is moving between a closed container through a closed line to another closed container," one official said.

Citing intelligence gathered by "overhead systems" photographing the missile, Senator Warner said, "We are not certain if it's fueled."

(Big ups: TP)

UPDATE 07/06/06 12:11 PM: Well, so much for hoaxes! See here for coverage of the Nork's actual launch.

JSF Delays Vex Marines

The Marines put all their tacair eggs in one basket when they decided, in the early 1990s, to pass up the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and wait for a vertical take-off plane instead. That plane turned out to be the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter, and the Marines have committed to buying as many as 500 to replace around the same number of single- and two-seat F/A-18 legacy Hornets, AV-8B Harriers and EA-6B Prowlers -- necking down to one tactical airframe and saving loads of cash in the process.

Sounds great, right?

The problem is that the F-35 initial operational capability keeps sliding right thanks to weight, software and engine problems. It's unlikely the Marines will be able to field a squadron before 2012, several years later than originally planned. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the Marines are flying the life out of all their airplanes, putting as many hours on a deployed jet in just seven months as they would in two years back in the States.

By the time the JSF enters Marine Corps service in large numbers, the service's jets will be around 25 years old on average. That's old for a naval jet. But when you talk about aircraft age, there's calendar age and then there's fatigue age. What with all the hard use in hot, sandy Iraq and on the Navy's carriers (to alleviate Navy force cuts, the Marines contribute several Hornet squadrons to carrier air wings), the Marines jets "feel" a lot older than they actually are.

The result is premature retirement for dozens of tired jets, mostly Hornets. As the fleet shrinks without a hot production line to replace losses, the only way the Marines can keep its squadrons fully equipped is to decommission a few squadrons and redistribute their jets. Which is exactly what will happen in March 2007, when the Corps shutters VMFA(AW)-332 and VMFA-134 flying the F/A-18D and F/A-18A+, respectively.

I embedded with 332 in Iraq this year, reporting on the great work they were doing supporting the ground troops in restive Al Anbar province. 332 is a fine unit with one of the best safety records in the entire Marine Corps, having last crashed a jet around 30 years ago. It'll be a shame to see them go.

On the other hand, these force structure cuts themselves don't actually reduce the number of jets in Corps service. They just consolidate the existing jets into fewer, larger units that can fly and maintain the planes more efficiently. This is making lemonade out of lemons from trees planted a decade ago when the Corps pinned all its tacair hopes on a paper airplane that is only now taking shape, years late.

Here's to hoping the F-35 pans out. If it doesn't, the Air Force can buy new F-16s and F-15s from production lines sustained by foreign sales and the Navy can boost its Super Hornet order (as has already been rumored), but the Marines are screwed. As long as nobody at HQMC is interested in the Super Hornet, there's no contingency plan.

Pay 332 a tribute by checking out some of their Iraq snapshots at Flickr.

--David Axe

All-Seeing Blimp on the Rise

The problem with the American military today is that it doesn't have a giant, robotic airship, two-and-a-half times the size of the Goodyear blimp, that can watch over an entire city at once. Thankfully, the Pentagon's way-out research arm, Darpa, is trying to fix that.

The program is called ISIS, short for "Integrated Sensor Is Structure." And the idea is to park an unmanned airship over a hot zone for a year, at nearly 65,000 feet in the sky. Up there, ISIS can spot enemy soldiers up to 180 miles away, target tanks and trucks, and watch out for incoming cruise missiles 350 miles in the distance -- a "detailed, real-time picture of all movement on or above the battlefield," one Darpa program manager says. During down times, ISIS might even serve as a cell tower in the sky, relaying communications to U.S. troops.

But to pull it all off, almost the entire hull of the ISIS ship would have to be turned into a phased-array radar antenna. And that is no mean task.

To get the airship to fly, the antenna would have to weigh about 2 kilograms/meter -- as opposed to 20 kg/m today. And new tricks in power storage will be needed, too -- batteries that can store a kilowatt-hour's worth of juice in half a kilogram, instead of the 2 kg currently required.

Darpa, along with the Air Force Research Lab, just handed Lockheed Martin the latest in a $42.5 million series of contracts to develop components the uber-blimp. If all goes well -- and that's a big, fat if -- the ISIS could fly by 2011.

Rapid Fire 06/27/06

* Israel's big JSF order

* Launch pad's tribal curse

* Hoax watch, day 9: Nork missile MIA

* Los Alamos: quadruple nuke triggers

* Shaped charges, profiled

* Vets' private hunting ground?

* Rummy's China hack

* Overhaul for emergency alerts

* Troops rig up DIY "hajjinets"

* Laser jet passes test

* UK commandos' cover: US uniforms

* Steambots!

* "Greatest toy sensation": gas masks

* NYC's hybrid cabs

* Roaches' robotic siren

(Big ups: BB, SJ, GW, Wonkette)

Older is Better

U.S. Army aviators in Iraq and Afghanistan have begun removing the Longbow radars from their AH-64D Apache helicopters. Which is funny, since the radar is pretty much the point of the $10-billion Longbow upgrade.

The radar weighs 1,500 pounds and makes the Apache sluggish in hot and high-altitude environments -- really the only places the Army fights anymore. Aviators are cool with flying without their radars since the things were designed for taking out Soviet tanks. "It was designed for a different fight than we're finding ourselves in now," Lt. Col. Mark Patterson told Defense News. He added that the A-model Apache (dating from 1983) is better suited to today's fights.

This is old news. In Balad, Iraq, in February, Sgt. Erik Morrow told me that the M-1A1 Abrams tank was better for Iraq than the newer M-1A2 since the A1 tank is more reliable and starts up quicker. Earlier, the Marine Corps aviators of All-Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332, deployed to Al Asad in western Iraq, had told me their old $40-million F/A-18D Hornets equipped with sensor pods are better-suited to counter-insurgency combat than $130-million F-22A Raptors, which don't even have hardpoints for pods. See my Flickr for pics.

The major impetus for the constant development of new and more high-tech weapons was the arms race with the Soviet Union and the need to counter massed tank armies with much smaller forces. Those things no longer apply, and now critics across the services are calling for a different way of doing things -- namely, sticking with weapons that work, even if they're old. In some cases, the Defense Department has listened, which is why we're seeing M-14 rifles and Light Antitank Weapons pulled out of storage for troops in Iraq.

But old stuff doesn't keep the defense industry flush with cash. And Pierre Sprey, one of the designers of the F-16 Fighting Falcon and an F-22 critic, told me that's the point of most new weapons. More on that later.

--David Axe

P.S. -- The excellent Daniel Robert Epstein interviewed me for Suicidegirls.com. Check it out.

UPDATE 06/27/06 8:44 AM: Eric Umansky looked at the Apache's woes all the way back in '99.

Pentagon's "Best Source of Intel": TV

"Though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly bashed the media’s continuous coverage of insurgent bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan," Inside Defense notes, "it turns out the Pentagon’s command center relies very heavily on such press reports to gather real-time intelligence."

The National Military Command Center, a windowless underground facility located beneath the Pentagon, must constantly provide information about current events to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the defense secretary and ultimately the president.

The center has many military means of gathering intelligence, including classified computer networks and space-based systems, but standard television news reports are often the best way to stay abreast of events in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Rear Adm. Ronald Henderson, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff.

“Perhaps our best source of information is the television,” Henderson said June 19 during a panel discussion in Washington sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

“And in fact, if you were to come into the command center, you would see six big, giant TV screens,” he said. “Now I spend a lot of time watching TV because -- if you think about it -- it’s the best intelligence network in the world.”

It's become almost a cliche that 80 percent or more of intelligence work comes from "open source" materials, like press reports. So it's always been kind of a mystery to me why the administration and Pentagon chiefs constantly go after the media, when reporters are actually helping these guys do their jobs. It's like beating up on Raytheon for making missiles, or Motorola for building radios.

Does a free press mean that embarrassing, even dangerous, details about American operations will occasionally get disclosed? Yup. Does it mean that media reports will sometimes be more negative and sensational than the military would like? Of course. But if what you get in return is the "best intelligence network in the world," isn't that a price worth paying?

UPDATE 10:37 AM: One Pentagon agency that's been particularly aggro in its dealing with the press has been the Joint IED Defeat Organization. The groups, which started in 2003 as a "12-person office to develop quick strategies for combating homemade bombs in Iraq -- has quietly expanded into a $3 billion-per-year arm of the Pentagon, with more than 300 employees and thousands of contract workers," the Boston Globe notes. And like most fast-growing start-ups, the JIEDDO is having trouble figuring out what its focus should be.

General John Abizaid , the head of US military forces in the Middle East, recently complained to members of the IED group that its emphasis on multimillion-dollar contracts to develop high-tech sensing equipment has been ineffective at curbing attacks by homemade bombs, according to a person who was present.

Abizaid said the office... should focus more on nontechnical solutions, such as figuring out where the explosives are coming from and who is planting them, the official said.

A recent report commissioned by the Pentagon, written by a team of counter-insurgency specialists and provided to Abizaid, was blunt: "The response to the IED has been primarily to increase force protection by emphasizing technical solutions which have proven insufficient," said the internal report, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe...

Interviews with current and former members of the task force -- all of whom requested anonymity because they are not authorized by the Pentagon to speak to the media -- revealed widespread frustration that money and other resources were going into long-term deals with major defense contractors.

"This is a perfect example of a Cold War mind-set," said one former official who held a senior post in the office and has since left government...

Some members of the House and Senate share the concern that by focusing on longer-term projects, the task force is squandering its mission to provide quick, on-the-ground solutions to homemade bombs, whether through technology or intelligence.

(Big ups: RC)

Rapid Fire 06/26/06

* Hummers headed home from Iraq

* Army's top 10 inventions of '05

* Hoax watch, day 8: No Nork missile (background here)

* Mystery plane spooks Brits

* Secret space ship revealed

* Torpedo gets wings

* Sea lions, dolphins in war games

* Iraq = Vietnam in reverse?

* General: help make robots safe

(Big ups: Gyre, NW, RC, W&P)

Postal Service's Nuke Deal Off

Triumphs of common sense can be few and far-between, when you're dealing with the management of Los Alamos National Lab. So let's all get out of chairs and do a little victory jig: The U.S. Postal Service has backed out of a plan to help the nuclear weapons mecca fund a 400,000 square-foot "Science Center," off the books.

The Fort Polk Road Show

Realistic training for Iraq-bound units is in high demand these days. And despite the proliferation of high-fidelity simulations -- at Fort Polk's Army Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Irwin's Army National Training Center and the Marine Corps' Mojave Viper at Twentynine Palms -- there still isn't enough capacity to train up all of the approximately 20 combat brigades at a time that deploy to Iraq.

So the bigwigs at Fort Polk have come up with a plan to take JRTC on the road. The idea is to package up the basic elements of JRTC's Iraq sim, including pyrotechnics experts, combat-vet observer-controllers, an opposing force trained in insurgent tactics and some of the simulation gear (including the new-generation MILES II laser-tag) and deploy it to brigades' home stations, where the JRTC "road show" will take over some local training ranges and run a compressed, bare-bones pre-deployment exercise.

It won't be cheap, considering that Fort Polk JRTC rotations cost around $10 million apiece and don't include the Road Show's transportation costs. But, as JRTC spokesman Maj. Eric Baus says, "What cost is too much" when it comes to preparing troops for Iraq?

Right now the JRTC Road Show is just an idea. But with the military training community better resourced and more motivated than ever after three years of war, expect it to become a reality very soon.

See my Flickr for JRTC pics. Read more at Military.com and The Washington Times. And check out my graphic novel WAR FIX.

--David Axe

Damn It! '24' Stars Meet Homeland Security Bigs

The Heritage Foundation hosted an event this morning on "'24' and America's Image in Fighting Terrorism" that was probably as close as the homeland security policy community will ever get to the world of the glitterati, bringing together think tankers with the producers and cast members of '24.' The auditorium at the Reagan Building was packed with an overflow crowd (which included Justice Clarence Thomas) for the event. Homeland Security Watch was there.

Sec. Chertoff kicked things off with a few remarks before heading off to the DOJ press conference on the Miami terror plot (and adding a non-subtle jab at NYC and DC leaders that this plot proves that terrorism is a "national problem"). Turning to the show, he noted that it reflected real life in its portrayal of the decisions that leaders must make, constantly forced to choose "a best choice among a series of bad options" in an environment of imperfect information that always seems more orderly in hindsight. But he added that in real life, you can't resolve problems in 24 hours, and that perseverance is the real key to winning the war on terror. And he noted that in reality successed depended not on the extraordinary feats of a Jack Bauer, but on the quiet, resolute work of thousands of "real heroes," doing their jobs behind the scenes each day, at DHS, other agencies, and at the state & local level.

When asked how '24' compared to reality, he noted that "DHS doesn't have an operations center like the CTU," (although later it was pointed out that the set designer for '24' also helped design the operations center at the National Counterterrorism Center) and that unlike in '24', "we don't get information using measures that violate the law." And he wistfully noted that the governments' technologies often paled in comparison to '24', commenting that he had never seen a computer crash on the TV show.

The event then shifted to a panel session moderated by Rush Limbaugh, featuring think tankers Jim Carafano from Heritage and my former boss David Heyman from CSIS (described by Limbaugh as the "token moderate" on the panel), along with producers Howard Gordon, Joel Surnow, and Robert Cochran, and actors Mary Lynn Rajskub (Chloe), Carlos Bernard (Tony), and Gregory Itzin (President Logan). (Click here for a group pic.)

The session was weighed down at times by Limbaugh's tendentious and leading questions; he was constantly striving to get the panelists to confirm his notions that Hollywood, foreigners, and liberals don't like the show and/or aren't hip to the war on terror, rather than acting as a neutral, inquisitive moderator of the discussion. But in spite of that, the panel session was very interesting, and at times quite funny.

A lot of the discussion focused on the relationship between art and reality, looking at the extent to which '24' looks to the real war on terror for ideas and conversely, how government officials might consciously or unconsciously model their own decisions after the show. The producers noted that Seasons 2 and 4 were consciously drawn upon real events in the war on terror. And Limbaugh pointed out that a number of senior government officials - including Cheney and Rumsfeld - are fans of the show.

Is the conduct of the war on terror influenced by the show? The evidence was inconclusive, but Carafano made the point that it would be bad idea to execute the war on terror based on the show, commenting that "this is not how you stop terrorism." Instead, he argued (echoing Chertoff's earlier comments) that fighting terrorism involves a lot of unglamorous, mundane work over months and years, quietly taking place outside of the political and media cycle. He wistfully noted that he wished more people in the general public would spend as much time learning about and researching real homeland security and counterterrorism efforts as they do watching '24' - a sentiment with which I heartily concur.

The producers were asked a few times what sources they used for their plot lines. Their answer, by and large: "we make it up." Carafano noted that he hoped would-be terrorists would use the show for the purposes of developing terrorist tradecraft; if they did, he said, they would likely fail miserably.

The discussion also touched upon the public reaction to the show. Surnow commented that "everybody from Rush to Barbra Streisand likes the show." Heyman suggested a potential reason why the show resonates across the political spectrum: it allows the viewers to have both "justice" (nabbing the bad guys) and "process" (action within a legally-accepted system) - when in the real world it's often difficult to have both. Carafano pointed out that most of the non-Americans with whom he's discussed '24' enjoy the show, because of its quality, adding that people take away things from it based on their preconceived notions.

Some other interesting or humorous tidbits:

-- Surnow noted that when he original came up with the idea for a show that takes places over 24 hours, his first thought was to do a romantic comedy that chronicles a wedding over the course of the day. Needless to say, it was a good move not to go with that.

-- One of the producers joked that next season the bad guys will be "Swedish terrorists." A joke perhaps - but then again, perhaps he hasn't heard of surströmming.

-- When asked how '24' has changed her life, Rajskub wrily commented that "strangers touch me now," and that "people think I'm a better person." Later, apropos of nothing (and perhaps somewhat freaked out to be speaking at the Heritage Foundation with Clarence Thomas and Rush Limbaugh 10 feet away) she pointed out that she wasn't wearing a bra.

Overall, a very interesting and fun event, the likes of which we're unlikely to see again in the homeland security policy world for a long time to come. The full program is archived already on C-Span's website as a video clip, and I imagine it'll be re-airing on their stations over the weekend.

-- Christian Beckner (cross-posted from Homeland Security Watch)

Clowns Sabotage Nuke Missile

On Tuesday morning, a retired Catholic priest and two veterans put on clown suits, busted into a nuclear missile launch facility, and began beating the silo cover with hammers, in an attempt to take the Minuteman III missile off-line. Seriously.

The trio -- members of the Luck, Wisconsin group Nukewatch -- said the break-in was part of "a call for national repentance" for the Hiroshima and Nagaski A-bombings in 1945.

The activists used bolt-cutters to get into the E-9 Minuteman III facility, located just northwest of the White Shield, North Dakota. "Using a sledgehammer and household hammers, they disabled the lock on the personnel entry hatch that provides access to the warhead and they hammered on the silo lid that covers the 300 kiloton nuclear warhead," the group said in a statement. "The activists painted 'It's a sin to build a nuclear weapon' on the face of the 110-ton hardened silo cover and the peace activists poured their blood on the missile lid."

This was all done while wearing face paint, dunce caps, misfitting overalls, and bright yellow wigs.

We dress as clowns to show that humor and laughter are key elements in the struggle to transform the structures of destruction and death. Saint Paul said that we are “fools for God's sake,” and we say that we are “fools for God and humanity.” Clowns as court jesters were sometimes the only ones able to survive after speaking truth to authorities in power.

Guards responded within minutes. And when they arrived, the protesters "ate a lot of gravel," I'm told.

"The individuals were taken from the area and brought to the McLean County Jail," the AP notes. "The three are being charged with criminal trespass and criminal mischief, both Class A misdemeanors, and bond was set at $500 each.... The FBI is involved in the case and federal charges are pending."

Rapid Fire 06/23/06

* Aegis missile defense hits again

* Predators learn to "sense-and-avoid"

* Hoax alert! Another day, no Nork launch

* Watchdogs vs. Raptors

* "Thunder Chickens prep for lift-off"

* NATO's big moment

* Pfizer's amnesia weapon

* Chinese death vans

* "WMD explosive containment chamber"

* Reverse peephole viewer

* "The case for invading Somalia"

* Free tix to The War Tapes, courtesy of Military.com

* Don't confuse me with the facts

* Later, Larry

(Big ups: JRP, BB, GP)

Bank Data "Motherlode" in Feds' Hands

At the end of today's Century Foundation round table on government snooping, a questioner asked if there were other government monitoring programs we didn't all know about, yet. The response from us panelists -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- was unanimous: you bet your ass there are.

Usually it takes more than seven hours to get proven right. Not this time.

"Under a secret Bush administration program," the Times' Risen and Lichtblau report, "counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States."

The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift...

"The capability here is awesome or, depending on where you're sitting, troubling," said one former senior counterterrorism official who considers the program valuable. While tight controls are in place, the official added, "The potential for abuse is enormous..."

Swift is a crucial gatekeeper, providing electronic instructions on how to transfer money between 7,800 financial institutions worldwide. The cooperative is owned by more than 2,200 organizations, and virtually every major commercial bank, as well as brokerage houses, fund managers and stock exchanges, uses its services. Swift routes more than 11 million transactions each day, most of them across borders...

The Swift data has provided clues to terror money trails and ties between possible terrorists and organizations financing them, the officials said. In some instances, they said, the program has pointed them to new suspects, while in others it has buttressed cases already under investigation.

Among the successes was the capture of a Qaeda operative, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, believed to be the mastermind of the 2002 bombing of a Bali resort, several officials said. The Swift data identified a previously unknown figure in Southeast Asia who had financial dealings with a person suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda; that link helped locate Hambali in Thailand in 2003, they said...

Quietly, counterterrorism officials sought to expand the information they were getting from financial institutions. Treasury officials, for instance, spoke with credit card companies about devising an alert if someone tried to buy fertilizer and timing devices that could be used for a bomb, but they were told the idea was not logistically possible, a lawyer in the discussions said.

The F.B.I. began acquiring financial records from Western Union and its parent company, First Data Corporation. The programs were alluded to in Congressional testimony by the F.B.I. in 2003 and described in more detail in a book released this week, "The One Percent Doctrine," by Ron Suskind. Using what officials described as individual, narrowly framed subpoenas and warrants, the F.B.I. has obtained records from First Data, which processes credit and debit card transactions, to track financial activity and try to locate suspects.

Similar subpoenas for the Western Union data allowed the F.B.I. to trace wire transfers, mainly outside the United States, and to help Israel trace the financing of about a half-dozen possible terrorist plots there, an official said.

The idea for the Swift program, several officials recalled, grew out of a suggestion by a Wall Street executive, who told a senior Bush administration official about Swift's database. Few government officials knew much about the consortium, which is led by a Brooklyn native, Leonard H. Schrank, but they quickly discovered it offered unparalleled access to international transactions.

Swift, a former government official said, was "the mother lode, the Rosetta stone" for financial data.

UPDATE 10:53 AM: Good commentary from Intel Dump and HLS Watch.

Iraqi Troops, Muderers?

News reports fingering Iraqi soldiers in the 2004 shooting deaths of two California National Guardsmen have again raised the perennial issues: How reliable are Iraqi forces? And when can U.S. and British militaries fully turn over security in Iraq to native troops?

The answers, it seems, are "not very" and "not soon" -- with qualifiers.

"Restoring Iraq to military self-sufficiency will require at least a decade," says John Pike, a military expert at the think tank Globalsecurity.org. "For that reason alone, Iraq will remain an American protectorate well into the next decade ... [and] I would not expect to see a significant drawdown [of U.S. troops] prior to 2007."

Read my full report at Military.com. Check out an Iraqi forces photo gallery at Flickr. And see my graphic novel WAR FIX for real-life scenes from Iraq's dangerous streets.

-- David Axe

Perry: Strike Korea Now, Get Intel Later (Updated)

Clinton defense secretary William Perry is ready to attack North Korea, now.

Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to U.S. soil?... If North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched.

But there's a teeny-tiny fact Perry seems to have overlooked: We have no idea, really, whether North Korea is preparing a missile. Or what that missile is capable of doing.

The hype kicked into high gear when the New York Times claimed that the Norks "completed fueling a long-range ballistic missile" over the weekend. But the report is getting fishier by the second. The Norks generally rely on a highly corrosive gasoline-kerosene mix for their missile fuel, and an oxidizer containing nitric acid. It's nasty, metal-eating stuff. And once fueled up, the missile has to be launched quickly -- two or three days, I've been told -- or else the missile is basically ruined.

It's now been four days. And there's been no launch. Which means it's becoming increasingly unlikely that a missile has been fueled. So much for Perry's demand "to strike the [missile] if North Korea refuses to drain the fuel out."

And, of course, there may not be an ICBM at all. Remember, the North Koreans have launched exactly one intermediate-range ballistic missile, in 1998. The thing -- a combination of smaller, Nodong and Scud missiles -- went about 2,000 km or so. Now, U.S. intelligence assumes the Norks have been working on strapping together more Nodongs and Scuds (or, at least, their engines) for an ICBM -- something that can reach three to five times further, and hit the U.S. But no one has actually seen the weapon. Even how many the stages the mystery missile has in unknown; some folks say two, others say three.

Plus, as the Post mentioned a few days back, Pyongyang has a long history of staging elaborate hoaxes, in order to get the world's attention.

A year ago, the world was on edge after reports that North Korea might test a nuclear weapon -- and one report even suggested the evidence showed that viewing stands had been built. No test took place.

Now, what happens if we strike North Korea -- and there's no missile to hit? What does that do to American standing, then?

UPDATE 11:47 AM: "South Korea's defense minister said Thursday that Seoul believes North Korea's missile launch is not imminent despite concern in the region that the communist nation would test-fire a long-range missile." (AP, via FP Passport)

UPDATE 5:36 PM:Even Dick Cheney -- Dick Cheney, fer chrissakes! -- is pouring cold water on the Nork missile threat. Check out this interview with CNN's John King:

KING: Do we know what's on that missile? Is it a satellite? Is it a warhead? Is it a test?

CHENEY: We don't know. That's one of the concerns, that this is a regime that's not transparent that we believe has developed nuclear weapons and now has put a missile on a launch pad without telling anybody what it's all about -- as to put a satellite in orbit, or a simple test flight. They will, obviously, generate concern on the part of their neighbors and the United States to the extent that they continue to operate this way.

As the president's made clear, this is not the kind of behavior we'd like to see, given the fact the North Koreans do have a nuclear program and have refused to come clean about it.

KING: What do we know about their capabilities? Some have said this new longer range missile could reach Guam, perhaps Alaska. Others say, no, it might be able to reach Los Angeles. And there are some who think maybe even right here, Washington, D.C. What do we know?

CHENEY: We -- this is first test of this particular Taepo Dong II missile -- we believe it does have a third stage added to it now. But again, we don't know what the payload is. I think it's also fair to say that the North Korean missile capabilities are fairly rudimentary. They've been building Scuds and so forth over the years. But their test flights in the past haven't been notably successful. But we are watching it with interest and following it very closely. (emphasis mine)

National Security Adviser Steven Hadley says the same thing, basically: "In terms of North Korean intentions, you know this is a very opaque society, and very hard to read." Then he adds this little gem about our mighty missile defense system:

"We have a missile defense system ... what we call a long-range missile defense system that is basically a research, development, training, test kind of system," Hadley said. "It does ... have some limited operational capability. And the purpose, of course, of a missile defense system is to defend .... the territory of the United States from attack."

(big ups: RC)

Postal Service Funding Nuke Labs

$2.1 billion dollars a year ain't enough for the brains in charge of Los Alamos National Lab, apparently. So the world's most important nuclear research center has turned to the U.S. Postal Service, of all places, to fund its new, 400,000 square foot "Science Complex."

No, it's not like the fathers of the atom bomb are now starting some new-fangled effort to zap your mail. Instead, the lab's managers have been on the hunt for "alternative funding (i.e. third-party methods)" to bankroll its construction projects, documents uncovered by Nuclear Watch of New Mexico reveal.

Funds for the new Science Center weren't anywhere to be found in the Energy Department's publicly-available budgets. Nuke Watch had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out that the Energy Department was digging into the U.S. Postal Service's pockets for two new buildings (one classified, the other not) and a parking lot. "As a justification," Nuke Watch notes, the department "cited a vaguely worded federal law that authorizes the USPS to furnish property and services to executive branch agencies and vice versa."

Nuke Watch director Jay Coghlan calls it an "end run around Congress."

About 10% of Los Alamos' total workforce will eventually have their offices in the Science Center. That includes the everyone in the "Strategic Research" directorate, including the folks in the "Nuclear Technology Office." What will they do there? Well, they probably won't be handling big piles of uranium or plutonium. But they will be tackling "basic and applied scientific research" for "Stockpile Stewardship" -- maintenance of the country's nuclear arsenal.

Now, Los Alamos complains that half of its 8.9 million square feet of facilities are over 30 years old, and half are in "fair, poor, or failing condition." So the need for new buildings is understandable. But why do if off-the-books? And why the shenanigans with the Post Office?

(Big ups: TH)