As I'm sure you all know by now, Saddam Hussein has been hanged to death -- executed for his role in the slaughter of 148 in the Shi'ite town of Dujail.
Iraqis, according to the Times, "spent much of the day crowding around television sets to watch mesmerizing replays of a videotape that showed the 69-year-old Mr. Hussein being led to the gallows at dawn by five masked executioners, and having a noose fashioned from a thick rope of yellow hemp lowered around his neck."
But, as Xeni notes in an excellent round-up of the execution coverage, "explicit images of Hussein's corpse and 'unedited' cellphone video of the hanging (which includes the moment of death) have already shown up online," on Google Video.
The video is grotesque. But "I think there's a public interest in making this available for adults who choose to see it, non-passively," Xeni tells Defense Tech. I agree.
UPDATE 9:26 PM: Defense Tech pal Michael Hastings has himself a scoop, interviewing Ali Al Massedy, who "was 3 feet away from Saddam Hussein when he died. The 38 year old, normally Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's official videographer, was the man responsible for filming the late dictator's execution at dawn on Saturday."
UPDATE 12/31/06 11:49 AM: "We are seeing 21st century psychological operations," says TPM Cafe. "It can be concluded there were elements within America's government and/or military, working in concert with Iraq's current scarecrow power-holders, who wanted as many people as possible in the world to see Saddam hang." I'm not sure I buy this. And I can't get with screeching tone. But it's an interesting notion, nonetheless.
The tribunal also had a unique sense of timing when choosing the day for Saddam's hanging. It was a slap in the face to Sunni Arabs. This weekend marks Eid al-Adha, the Holy Day of Sacrifice, on which Muslims commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son for God. Shiites celebrate it Sunday. Sunnis celebrate it Saturday –- and Iraqi law forbids executing the condemned on a major holiday. Hanging Saddam on Saturday was perceived by Sunni Arabs as the act of a Shiite government that had accepted the Shiite ritual calendar.
The timing also allowed Saddam, in his farewell address to Iraq, to pose as a “sacrifice” for his nation, an explicit reference to Eid al-Adha. The tribunal had given the old secular nationalist the chance to use religious language to play on the sympathies of the whole Iraqi public.
The political ineptitude of the tribunal, from start to finish, was astonishing. The United States and its Iraqi allies basically gave Saddam a platform on which to make himself a martyr to Iraqi unity and independence -- even if by unity and independence Saddam was really appealing to Sunnis' nostalgia for their days of hegemony.
My recent pieces on the Active Denial System (ADS) or ‘pain beam’ sparks discussions here and elsewhere on the web. One of the most common challenges to the device is that the beam of short-wavelength microwaves could easily be blocked with tinfoil.
It’s not that easy.
Captain Jay Delarosa, spokesman for the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate told me:
"We have conducted extensive testing and have determined that most readily available materials are not effective as countermeasures against the ADS.“
Few people appreciate the reasons behind this, and even John Pike’s otherwise excellent GlobalSecurity site claims:
“Countermeasures against the weapon could be quite straightforward — for example covering up the body with thick clothes or carrying a metallic sheet — or even a trash can lid — as a shield or reflector.”
As described previously, the beam is at least two meters in diameter, and the smallest skin exposure is enough to cause intolerable pain. A red hot poker does not need to be in touch with much skin to make you pull away, and the ADS causes as much pain on your nerve endings. A shield will not work unless it covers your whole body and them some, because the ADS beam diffracts. According to an article in Aviation Week & Space Technology last July -
…actual tests show that the beams penetrate even minute openings or cracks, for example, and sometimes appear almost to wrap around corners to affect fingers and feet of those trying to hide behind or hold up protective devices.
"The radio frequency is hard to block," Booen says. "Some of the people tested against tried to hide by laying down behind some concrete traffic barriers and the beam went underneath [where there was uneven contact with the ground]."
What about that tinfoil? It will have to cover every square inch and any rips or tears will make it useless. Joints may be tricky; if you flex foil too many times holes start appearing. For vision you will need a metal mesh visor, like the kind they use on microwave oven doors. The problem is, the size of the mesh depends on the wavelength of the radiation - so short-wavelength ADS beam requires something much finer than normal microwave mesh. You also need to think about the effect on your breathing, body temperature and communication.
While it is theoretically possible to put together an anti-ADS armor suit, this is less of a spur-of-the-moment improvised undertaking and more of an elaborate workshop project taking some time and effort. (And by the same token, you could make yourself bullet-proof if you used quarter-inch steel plate instead of foil.)
Get your suit working and your problems are just beginning, as it will quickly identify you as a troublemaker rather than an innocent bystander. Separating ‘tourists from terrorists’ is one of the ADS’s main goals, and as Capt Delarosa says:
“If an individual makes extensive efforts to counter the effect of a non-lethal system, then they are likely showing hostile intent and an escalation of force may be warranted based on existing rules of engagement.”
The Marines will always ensure that non-lethals have lethal backup. Marine Corps Colonel Wade Hall is blunt about the use of ADS in a convoy protection scenario:
"If they try and deflect beams then we will kill them because we know what their intentions are"
There is another alternative. The Pulsed Energy Projectile (PEP), which I described in New Scientist (subscribers only) is a non-lethal weapon which fires an extremely short laser pulse, producing a plasma flash-bang at the target. This could be deployed on the same platform as the ADS, using the same power source. “Many of the countermeasures that can be envisioned against the ADS” could be nullified by the PEP by “ablation of the defence” according to a Navy study on the effects of plasmas. Such a laser could chew through a layer of foil with a few pulses.
A PEP might also negate foil without having to blast it away. Ultra-short pulses have recently been demonstrated that can turn metals pitch black , so that the surface absorbs incoming radiation and reflective foil is made useless. This technology was developed at Rochester's High Intensity Femtosecond Laser Laboratory ; they are funded by (among others) DARPA and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. We’ll be looking more at short pulse lasers in 2007.
There are many questions still remaining around the Active Denial System and its effects. But we may safely assume that in the many years of its development the Air Force has taken possible countermeasures into account.
UPDATE 5TH JAN Some interesting responses in the Comments section.
Leather is no protection; wet leather, like any other wet material, will absorb the beam and heat up. This may sound like a good idea, until you look at the numbers and realise that it only gives you a few seconds extra, then you have extremely hot water/steam in contact with your skin...foil is a better idea. The issues around damp/wet cloth, sweat etc were investigated a few years back in FWR-2002-0016-H Effects of skin and environmental conditions on sensations evoked by MMW covered this). There was some concern about one subject wearing a sweater developing nettle rash (urticaria) which is mentioned in F-BR-2006-0018-H Effects of exposure to 400-W 95-GHz Millimetre Wave Energy on Non-stationary Humans , but this did not happen again.
To clarify one concern, as I understand it running away would not make you a target for escalated force (like getting shot at); turning up in a tinfoil bodysuit might do.
And as for Nicholas Weaver's request "Could you get zapped by it and tell us first hand?" - er, no thanks. It sounds painful. There's a good firsthand account by Eric Adams in Popular Science here:
"About a half-second after 'One,' I felt a warm spot on my back. A millisecond later the heat intensified dramatically, as though someone were pressing an electric burner hard on my back. I expected to hear sizzling, to smell burning flesh. The pain exploded to the point where I was no longer actually thinking, and certainly wasn't in any sort of control of my reactions. With a shout of "Yeow!" I involuntarily sprang out of the way."
Enough with the popularity contest. Here are my picks -- in more-or-less chronological order -- for the 50 best Defense Tech posts of 2006.
"Q Branch's" Stock Market Shenanigans Killer robots, cheeky Brits, cute marine mammals, shady government officials, insider trading -- plus, a gratuitous reference to James Bond -- all in one post.
Laser Weapons "Almost Ready?" Not! If you’re into military technology at all, somewhere in the back of your mind, you want laser guns to happen. That doesn't mean they will.
Kneel Before the Centaur Like a lot of us, former Navy electrician Dennis Buller is worried about our troops over in Iraq. But he's actually built a machine to do something about it.
The Best Weapon David Axe attends a tanker's memorial service in Iraq.
Real-Life Ray Gun: Say When? I was skeptical, when I first heard about the idea of using lasers and man-made lightning to detonate explosives at a distance. Now, a little less so.
Be Mickey Mouse's Spy Here's your big chance, junior spooks: the Walt Disney Company needs an ""Intelligence Analyst."
The Enemy is Me Last summer, a U.S. Colonel in Baghdad told me that I was America's enemy, or very close to it.
Mini-Sensors for "Military Omniscience" The Pentagon's new way to spot insurgents: a set of palm-sized, networked sensors that can be scattered around a war zone. It’s part of a larger Defense Department effort to establish “military omniscience” and “ubiquitous monitoring.”
Stealth's Radioactive Secret There’s a simple technology that could transform civil aviation -- slashing fuel consumption, reducing greenhouse emissions and cutting noise. The problem, David Hambling explains, is it's a military secret.
New Detectors Sniff Terrorists' Scents
The Pentagon's fringe science arm wants to keep track of potential enemies-of-the-state in every way imaginable: not just by sight, or by sound, or by their e-mail; but by their smell, as well.
Laser Labs Go Back to the Future George Neil and Bob Yamamoto don't remember exactly where they were when they found out that the Pentagon was canceling their laser cannon project. But they remember how they felt.
Air Force One Scare; Real Security Sacrificed The headline sure seemed scary: "Web site exposes Air Force One defenses," Steven Schwartz notes. Too bad the article didn't mention that the site is a firefighter safety manual, to help rescue passengers.
Iran's Kooky, Incendiary Arsenal Super-fast underwater missiles ain't the half of it. Iran's armed forces are rolling out a slew of new military hardware.
China's R&D: Don't Freak China is about to pass the U.S. in the development of defense and commercial technology, Matthew Tompkins warns. And they're gonna take our lunch money, too.
Giant Slingshot: New Way to Space? All space projects get into orbit pretty much the same way – by burning lots of rocket fuel. But what if, David Hambling asks, we could throw something so hard, it would wind up in space?
NSA Sweep "Waste of Time," Analyst Says It'd be one thing if the NSA's massive sweep of our phone records was actually helping catch terrorists. But a leading data analyst says that "it's a waste of time... let[ting] the real terrorists run free."
The Tech That Took Out Zarqawi Ten years ago, taking out Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi with F-16s would have been an impossible task. Not any more, David Axe reports.
Enter the BomBot One of the nice things about being editor of Defense Tech is that people occasionally show up at your apartment with military robots.
Superbomb - or Crapshoot? A panel convenes, to assess the not-quite-dead controversy over a phantom superbomb. Sharon Weinberger wonders why she wasn't invited.
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.
Semper Fi Sauvignon From the halls of Montezuma to Fallujah, the United States Marine Corps have proved themselves to be the most resourceful warriors on the planet. Now, a single test remains: Make a rich, smooth red wine.
CIA's Wacky, Online 'Personality Quiz' These are tough times for the CIA. But can things have grown so dire at Langley that the it has to resort to gimmicks like a wink-wink-trying-to-be-ironic-and-cool- but-instead-looking-even-more-dorky recruiting website?
Area 51: Hype vs. Reality A veteran aviation journo writes about secret airplanes he believes might be under development at Area 51. David Axe wonders how much proof he has.
Robotic Frisbees of Death The Air Force thinks it has an answer to the most vexing problem in counter-insurgency: frisbees. Not just any frisbees, mind you. Robotic frisbees. Heavily armed robotic frisbees.
High-Tech Uniforms Finally Heading to War A collection of high-tech soldier gear, 15 years and half a billion dollars in the making, will finally make it into battle.
Spyboys Go Web 2.0 How the military keeps tabs on overseas TV channels, 24/7 -- and what it means for the future of intelligence.
Cash-Poor Army Pays Big to Pimp Pricey 'Future' The Army is quickly going broke, its leaders insist. But there's one Army account that the generals are still managing to keep packed to the brim: marketing.
Bush: Space is for Soldiers Theresa Hitchens explores the President's new space plan -- and finds a martial bent.
NORK Nuclear Test: It's A Dud Jeffrey Lewis is the first to figure out that Kim Il Jung's nuclear test isn't all it was cracked up to be.
BattleHog Drone's Story Stinks David Hambling asks: Could a home security consultant operating out of a Manhattan apartment have built the latest and greatest killer drone?
"The Deadlies" Defense Tech's search for the most insanely hazardous gear, ever.
Mechanical Mole Men, Attack! Throughout the ages, bad guys have loved bunkers. Which is why the Air Force wants teams of tunneling, foot-long "subterranean vehicles."
Pentagon Plan: Hit Anywhere on Earth, in an Hour The secret connection between Nordstrom's toddlers department and the Pentagon push to "strike virtually anywhere on the face of the Earth within 60 minutes."
So Where Are All The Dirty Bombs?
I've never been one to fully understand the great fear that many state and federal emergency response managers seem to have over dirty bombs, given the many training exercises that seem to include the threat as the main hazard. This USA Today article talks about the issue of loose and stolen radioactive material.
Annual incidents of trafficking and mishandling of nuclear and other radioactive material reported to U.S. intelligence officials have more than doubled since the early 1990s, says the director of domestic nuclear detection at the Department of Homeland Security.
Also up: scams in which fake or non-existent nuclear or radioactive material is offered for sale, often online, says Vayl Oxford, nuclear detection director at the department.
"We sense that people have recognized the value of nuclear material as a useful way of making money," Oxford said. "Nuclear material is becoming a marketable commodity."
The incidents tracked by the department, based on its reporting and information from foreign diplomatic and intelligence sources, average about twice the number made public each year by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Oxford said reports of nuclear and radioactive materials trafficking have ranged from 200 to 250 a year since 2000, up from about 100 a year in the 1990s.
But here's the thing ,Vayl. When you look at the amount of materials stolen or lost (some data are shown in the article's sidebar), we're talking about ounces and a few pounds at best of gamma emitters. No one's tracking the alpha/beta radioactive material out there (polonium anyone?). Still, not exactly enough for an improvised nuclear weapon, maybe enough to scare unknowledgable people.
You might have seen the last season's "Sleeper Cell" that only reinforced some of these fears. I enjoyed watching the terrorist cell use americium 241 to "test" their lead-lined cooler container for radiation leaks (except that americium isn't a strong gamma emitter), talk about how exploding an aircraft holding one nuclear fuel rod over Los Angeles would "cover the city in nuclear fallout" (ah, not really), and how the authorities "got a hit from the radioactive sniffers" on the lead-lined cooler on its way to the last target. Yeah, it's only a drama, but I'll bet people believe this stuff. Maybe it was just disinformation for the real terrorists... yeah, that's the ticket.
UPDATE 12/29/06 11:36 AM: David Hambling writes in to say: "Also, the UK police are ordering some 12,000 CBR [chemical-biological-radiological] suits -- looks like they're expecting those famous/mythical dirty bombs too."
UPDATE 12/29/06 12:05 PM: J here. Great conversation in the comments, especially the cool-headed plugger noting that "dirty bombs" are hazards, not life-threatening events. Many of the comments seem to go to the question of "what's your point?" Without getting too academic (hey, I'm not the ArmsControlWonk, after all), my point is simply this. While there's lots of radioactive hazards out there, the really bad ones aren't being moved in great quantities to cause a mass casualty incident. Given that "dirty bombs" of whatever flavor - alpha, beta, gamma - are largely more of a clean-up job, and while costly to clean up, government goes on. The anthrax letters didn't shut down the USPS, but it did slow things down on the east coast. The polonium poisoning didn't shut down Heathrow Airport for a minute.
They're hazards, they are low-probability events, they're not mass casualty events. Given that basis, what's the appropriate federal response? I suggest that it is not to put rad detectors in every port and every border crossing into the United States and within every major metropolitan area, as DHS's DNDO has suggested (which would cost billions of dollars to implement plus annual sustainment and training costs). The appropriate response is to lock down the bad rads (cesium, uranium, and plutonium), get the terrorists before they attack, and be prepared (like our UK brethern) to clean it up if it happens. Simple. Smart. Efficient. But not the course of action being implemented by the government.
Out of the hundreds and hundreds of technologies, tactics, and political maneuvers Defense Tech highlighted, here are the twenty you guys clicked on the most in 2006. Thanks for another great year, everyone.
1) 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.
2) Look Out, Pyongyang? Rail Gun in the Works One of the big selling points of the Navy's new destroyer is that it can rain a whole lot of hell -- 20 rocket-propelled artillery shells, in less than a minute -- on targets up to 63 nautical miles away... But really, that's the start. The ship's real power will come when it moves away from chemical powders to shoot its projectiles -- and starts relying on electromagnetic fields to shoot projectiles almost six kilometers/second, instead.
3) SEAL Ship: Silent But Deadly Every shipbuilder in the Navy these days talks about how his hulking destroyer or Cold War sub is now going to sneak SEALs onto shore... Military.com overlord Chris Michel was down in San Diego, and saw a pretty cool new prototype ship that's been designed from scratch to handle the mission.
4) Air Force Plan: Hack Your Nervous System The brain has always been a battlefield. New weapons might be able to hack directly into your nerve cells and neural pathways.
5) Marines Quiet About Brutal New Weapon
War is hell. But it’s worse when the Marines bring out their new urban combat weapon, the SMAW-NE. Which may be why they’re not talking about it, much.
8) Robotic Frisbees of Death It ain't easy, picking out evil-doers in the urban canyons of the Middle East; there are so many places to hide. Taking 'em out can be even harder, what with all those noncombatants hanging nearby. But the Air Force thinks it might have an answer to this most vexing problem in counter-insurgency: frisbees. Not just any frisbees, mind you. Robotic frisbees. Heavily armed robotic frisbees.
9) David and the Inflatable Goliath Inside the Darpa project to build a humongous blimp that can haul 500-1000 tons' worth of soldiers and gear halfway across the world in less than a week.
10) Falcon Fills Blackbird's Shoes A decade after the final retirement of Lockheed Martin's Mach-3 SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, the Air Force is preparing to test a plane that flies more than three times as fast. Two Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicles, built by Lockheed Martin with input from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), will take to the air in 2008. The $100-million program aims to field a Mach-10 unmanned aircraft that can spy on foreign powers, drop bombs or even lob satellites into orbit.
11) Giant Slingshot: New Way to Space? All space projects get into orbit pretty much the same way – by burning lots of rocket fuel, a spaceship powers itself past the sky. But what if there was a different approach? What if we could throw something so hard, it would wind up in space?
12) Facial Armor Rears Its Ugly Head No matter how many times soldiers and marines say they're not interested, there's always someone trying to wrap them up in heavier, hotter, more uncomfortable armor. The latest culprit: MTek Weapon Systems, which is pushing Stormtrooper-esque "facial armor" for our troops.
13) Air Force's Secret Drone Program Revealed A new, $1.7 billion, "Penetrating High Altitude Endurance" drone is thought to be able to cruise at 70,000-80,000 ft,soaring high above defended territory.
14) CIA's Wacky, Online 'Personality Quiz' These are tough times for the Central Intelligence Agency. But can things have grown so dire at Langley that the CIA has to resort to gimmicks like this wink-wink-trying-to-be-ironic-and-cool-but-instead-looking-even-more-dorky recruiting website?
15) Pain Ray, Sonic Blaster, Laser Dazzler - All in One For a while, now, I've been hearing about the Defense Department's plans to outfit a fighting vehicle with a pain ray, a sonic blaster, and a laser dazzler, too. I never figured they'd actually send the thing to Iraq, though. Project Sheriff, I assumed, would just be the military equivalent of a concept car -- a chance to see if some whiz-bang gear really worked together. But the Pentagon may wind up deploying this straight-outta-sci-fi jalopy, after all.
16) Battle Ball for Sailor Training Check out the Navy's nine-foot plastic ball. It sits on wheels, enabling unlimited rotation in any direction -- making virtual reality feel a whole lot more real.
17) Chinese Laser vs. U.S. Sats? Was it just China Hawks' hype? Or did Beijing really blind U.S. satellites by firing high-powered lasers at 'em? And what does that mean for the future of America's eyes and ears in the sky?
18) The Tech That Took Out Zarqawi Ten years ago, taking out Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi with F-16s would have been an impossible task. Not any more.
19) 'Invisible' Boomerang 'Bot It's nice to have a set of robotic eyes in the sky. But surveillance drones tend to be loud, and rather obvious, as they keep watch above a Middle Eastern city. That's why a small company out of Minneapolis, VeraTech Areo, has built a hand-held spy drone that it says is practically invisible.
20) Area 51: Hype vs. Reality A veteran aviation journo writes about secret airplanes he believes might be under development at the Air Force's remote Groom Lake test facility in Nevada, a.k.a. Area 51. How much proof does he have?
CBS News took a peek last night at our favorite giant golf ball, er, missile defense radar.
With documents obtained by the Project on Government Oversight the CBS News Investigative Unit found a host of issues with the Sea-Based X-Band Radar — SBX for short — that still remain unresolved, just ahead of its activation in the waters off Adak Island, Alaska.
- Beyond questions raised in our CBS Evening News story about plans to stick it in some of the most unforgiving weather in the world, if the SBX has a single point of failure, according to sources within Missile Defense, it is The Dove. The Dove is the large support vessel, 279 feet long, which travels with the SBX, delivers personnel, supplies and fuel to the radar platform. Though the SBX has a helicopter platform, military and Coast Guard helicopters won’t land there. So the SBX uses a single crane to lift people and material off the Dove. According to the Coast Guard letter obtained by CBS News, there are regularly waves as high as 30 feet many days out of the year. There are concerns that the Dove will not be able to maneuver close enough to the SBX to re-supply without colliding or injuring crew men in those conditions.
Other potential problems include:
-Fuel spills: the Dove carries 600,000 gallons of diesel fuel and the SBX carries 1.2 million gallons. If both vessels spilled their fuel in the pristine waters off Adak Island, it would be the second largest fuel spill in Alaskan history. Second only to the Exxon Valdez. How likely is a fuel spill? According to incident reports obtained by the Investigative Unit, the Dove spilled 3-5 gallons of diesel during fueling operations on December 9th. It happened near Hawaii and the system was shut down when crewmembers saw a growing oil slick. That’s not a lot of fuel by Exxon Valdez standards but the spill occurred in ocean conditions with 12-foot swells, relatively calm compared to conditions in the Bering Sea.
-Security: As a source within the Missile Defense Agency said, “Trying to defend a billion dollar asset with rifles, shotguns and 50 cals is ridiculous.” The SBX will be protected around the clock by about a dozen lightly armed security contractors. Can the SBX defend itself from a direct attack by a bomb-laden boat?
Pentagon Plan: Hit Anywhere on Earth, in an Hour
I've had sources ask to meet me in some pretty odd places. But there was one meeting last year that had to be just about the strangest request yet. It wasn't just that this very-recently retired Defense Department strategist wanted to meet at the Pentagon City Mall -- that's a pretty common place to grab an off-the-record cup o' joe. It was where in the mall he had in mind: at the Nordstrom's coffee shop, tucked all the way in the far reaches of the store, just past the little kid's clothes section.
So I walk past the rows of toddlers' jumpers, past the blue-haired ladies ordering around their grandkids. I sit down with my source. And he begins to tell me about a Pentagon plan that's even odder that the place where we're meeting.
Sounds... ummm, ambitious, right? So how do you pull off that kind of mission, now known as "Prompt Global Strike?" Well, that's the subject of my cover story in this month's Popular Mechanics.
Now, of course, the American military has weapons that can destroy just about anything on the planet in a matter of minutes: nuclear missiles. Which might have been the right answer for containing our Soviet adversaries. But as the Cold War receded into memory, U.S. strategists began to worry that our nuclear threat was no longer credible. That we were too muscle-bound for our own good. Were we really prepared to wipe out Tehran in retribution for a single terrorist attack? Kill millions of Chinese for invading Taiwan? Of course not. The weaker our enemies grew, the less ominous our arsenal became. Military theorists called it "self-deterrence." "In today's environment, we've got zeros and ones. You can decide to engage with nuclear weapons, or not," Navy Capt. Terry Benedict told me. "The nation's leadership needs an intermediate step – to take the action required, without crossing to the one."
Benedict's option -- one of two I explore in the article -- is Trident ballistic missiles, armed with conventional warheads instead of nukes. For lots of good reasons (like the better-than-average chance the missiles could start World War III) Congress has negged the idea. But, in the military establishment, there's still a great deal of interest in using ballistic missiles for the hour-or-less mission. How exactly the nuclear holocaust issue is supposed to be resolved is, at this point, unclear.
Which brings us to option #2. It's a long-term play. And a long-shot, too. The military's research divisions are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into exotic, high-speed weapons like the X-51 hypersonic cruise missile, illustrated on the cover. If it works out as planned, the X-51 will go Mach 5 (roughly 3600 mph) -- much, much faster than any equivalent in the U.S. arsenal. Some Pentagon planners see the X-51 as part of a suite of futuristic weapons that can almost-instantly threaten American adversaries everywhere, without threatening the entire planet in the process. But it's way off in the distance; the X-51's first test flight isn't until 2008. I'm expecting several more trips to Nordstrom's Cafe before then.
UPDATE 11:40 AM: If you want to learn how the Prompt Global Strike concept got started -- and how it's being put into early development, today -- I strongly recommend this chronology, from the Federation of American Scientists' Hans Kristensen.
Flood of Secret Docs Coming
Score one for the good guys. In a shockingly sane move, the Bush Administration -- widely considered to be the mostsecretiveinrecenthistory -- is going to let hundreds of millions of once-classified documents enter into the public sphere.
Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought exemptions on the ground that the material remains secret...
And every year from now on, millions of additional documents will be automatically declassified as they reach the 25-year limit, reversing the traditional practice of releasing just what scholars request...
Gearing up to review aging records to meet the deadline, agencies have declassified more than one billion pages, shedding light on the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War and the network of Soviet agents in the American government.
Earlier this year, the Administration was scrambling to make secret again already declassified papers, like the CIA's 1948 plan to drop leaflets behind the Iron Curtain. Good for them for having the sense to switch course.
Behind the Green Zone Jail Break
In a war filled with too-strange-for-fiction stories, this may be the strangest yet. Was Iraq's former electricity minister, jailed on corruption charges, really "sprung from a Green Zone prison this weekend by U.S. security contractors?" If so, how did they pull it off? And what does it say about the rapidly-expanding, ridiculously-lucrative, morally-ambiguous field of private militaries?
Robert Young Pelton, author of the recently-published Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror, tells Defense Tech that his "guess (if the story is true) is that they simply presented their DoD and other credentials and said [the contractors] were there to accompany him to some mythical destination. Once out of prison it is very easy to leave the Green Zone and then take a taxi to Jordan, Syria, Kuwait or Kurdistan."
He also figures that "there was no gunplay or violence involved... [A]nother likely scenario would be to simply bribe the jailer (by paying a family member) and then the jailer making up some cock and bull story."
Brookings Institution Senior Fellow P.W. Singer -- who wrote Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, which has become the ur-text on this new wave of mercenaries -- is less interested in the particulars of the break-out. It's the long-term trend that bothers him: guns-for-hire running around war zones, with almost zero accountability, undermining the U.S. war effort again and again. He tells Defense Tech:
So the Great Private Military Escape joins the lengthy list vying to be made into a bad Hollywood movie (sorry, Blood Diamonds). My other favorites include the Triple Canopy lawsuit which alleges that a company supervisor told his employees that he had "never shot anyone with my handgun before" and then fired his handgun through the windshield of a parked taxi, killing the driver; the Aegis "trophy video," in which employees posted footage on the web of shooting at Iraqi cars on the web, set to Elvis music; the Donald Vance case, in which a US contractor was held 97 days without charges in a US military prison; the various Blackwater episodes, ranging from the 4 guys sent to Fallujah without maps, intell, or proper equipment, to the plane crash in Afghanistan, in which the plane lacked basic safety equipment and didn’t even follow basic flight safety procedures, flying by guesswork into a box canyon, killing 3 civilians and 3 US Army; and of course don’t forget the wonderfully named Custer Battles charging for all sorts of fraud at Baghdad airport, such as a bomb-sniffing dog that in the words of a US Army colonel turned out to be "a guy with his pet."
At what point do we accept that this whole situation has gone well beyond the original idea of privatization and start to rein it in? Then again, the Army Under Secretary testified to Congress 2 months back that the Army had never authorized Halliburton or its subcontractors to carry weapons or guard convoys, denying we even had firms handling these jobs. So, I guess its like the end of Dallas, where the whole private military industry in Iraq (estimated by Centcom to be 100,000) was "just a dream."
Phil Carter, just back from a year-long Army deployment in Iraq, notes that the 100,000 contractors (mostly logistics guys, not trigger-pullers) "very nearly doubles the size of the U.S. force in country. However, there has never been an open, public, meaningful debate over the wisdom of using so many contractors in so many battlefield roles. Instead, it has happened over time as the slow result of small policy decisions made by myriad actors. I think this will be one of the major policy questions which emerges from the Iraq war once it is over."
Axe Meets the Space Marines
Axe is in Lebanon. So he's not around to give his Pop Sci cover story, "Semper Fly," a proper shout-out. Allow me.
The Marines have typically been the American military's emergency fighter, its "911 force," the guys you want to get to a trouble zone, ASAP. But these days, getting overflight rights and managing logistics right can slow things to a crawl. So a bunch of waaaay out-of-the-box-thinkin' Marines have come up with an almost insanely ambitious new plan: send squads through space, instead. The concept is called "Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion," or SUSTAIN.
Each Sustain lander is intended to hold a squad of 13 Marines. Mounted on wedge-shaped carrier aircraft, the lander would detach, climb, and accelerate with scramjet engines to 100,000 feet and then fire rocket engines to get above 50 miles, following an arc over hostile countries. Composite shields would absorb or deflect the searing heat of reentry as the vehicles angle for the landing zone.
Lafontant arrived at this Space Marines vision after years of analyzing military space needs. A 44-year-old Queens, New York, native who joined the Corps in 1984 as an infantry officer and progressed through Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where he studied space systems operations and joined the small fraternity of Marine Space Operations Officers. In 2001 he took a job in the Pentagon working for the National Reconnaissance Office. He was serving as liaison to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in November 2001 when the Marine Corps launched its deepest air assault ever.
Five hundred Marines from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit prepared to fly 441 miles through the mountains of northern Pakistan in CH-53E Sea Stallion helicopters to capture an airstrip near Kandahar, Afghanistan. It was to be the beginning of the first large offensive against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. If all went well, the Marines expected to walk away with Osama bin Laden.
But political considerations sabotaged the mission. For weeks, the Marines had bobbed on the Indian Ocean aboard two assault ships while State Department officials negotiated with Pakistan for the right to fly through the country’s airspace. Pakistan granted access only after winning economic and military concessions that, some say, have reinforced a repressive regime. When U.S. troops finally touched down on November 25, bin Laden’s trail was cold. “We ended up selling our soul to the devil to get through,” Lafontant says. He grew determined to find a way around that sort of diplomatic entanglement. “What if we don’t have to have anybody’s permission?” he asked himself. “What if we just go above and drop in?”
Now, David just loves this idea. But he knows it's pretty damn far-fetched. He does a good job at laying out the obstacles to making SUSTAIN happen. Not just the extremely high technical hurdles; the Marines' total and utter lack of funds for the project, too. He warps up his story on a balanced note:
Whether or not Sustain ever makes it past the concept stage, it’s clear that military planners are looking to increase the mobility of American forces. A Marine space transport — one that would reduce politically charged bureaucratic delays and the potential for mission snafus — might sound impossible, but to Lafontant and others entrusted with imagining the future of war, it is simply the next logical step.
The wings on the Air Force's latest experimental "X" plane can't stay on straight. And that's a good thing.
The X-53 -- formerly known as the "Active Aeroelastic Wing research vehicle," or AAW -- is pretty much your standard /A-18 fighter jet. Except its wings are flexible, twisting as the plane races through the air at transonic speeds -- and giving the plane better maneuverability, in the process.
Every plane's wings bend a little, when air pressure hits 'em. But that "aeroelastic effect" is usually a bad thing for the aircraft, dragging it down. So, "traditionally, air vehicles have been designed with stiff geometry in order to minimize aeroelastic instabilities," the Air Force notes.
The X-53, on the other hand, is built from the start to bend with the wind. Its flaps, ailerons, and actuators are repositioned, so that the air pressure bends the wing in a way that provides lift, instead of drag. A thinner skin allows the outer wing panels to twist up to 5 degrees.
When Orville Wright first took to the air on Dec. 17, 1903, he didn't have ailerons or flaps to control his airplane. Instead, the Wright brothers had chosen to twist or "warp" the wingtips of their craft in order to control its rolling or banking motion. Rather than using one of the craft's two control sticks to make the wingtips twist, they had devised a "saddle" in which the pilot lay. Cables connected the saddle to the tips of both wings. By moving his hips from side-to-side, the pilot warped the wingtips either up or down, providing the necessary control for the Wright Flyer to make turns.
The X-53 -- a cooperative effort between the Air Force Research Lab, NASA, and Boeing's Phantom Works, in the works since the beginning of the decade -- should give engineers "more freedom in designing more efficient, thinner, higher aspect-ratio wings for future high-performance aircraft while reducing the structural weight of the wings by 10 to 20 per cent," NASA says. "This will allow increased fuel efficiency or payload capability, along with potentially reduced radar signature. The technology also has application to a variety of other future aircraft, such as high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aircraft, transports, and airliners."
I knew it was going to be a bad day in Beirut when I got booted out of the breakfast buffet at the downtown Radisson.
I had been enjoying my hummus, green olives and nan with a pot of strong coffee when I made the mistake of putting down my fork so I could turn the page in the Patrick O'Brian novel I was reading. The waiter grabbed my plate without asking if I was done, and scurried off. I figured, hey, no problem, I can always get another plate. And besides, I still got my coffee. But then the waiter came back and took those too.
Now, I could've raised a fuss, but I was too tired to remember how to say, "stop," in Arabic. (I remember now: "kiff.") you see, I'm still on D.C. time so I couldn't sleep the night before. I was nearly delirious. And, on the radio, they were playing a Christmas rendition of the Macarena. (don't ask.)
Anyways, I had interviews -- I'm on assignment here for Defense Technology International. So a couple hours later I hailed a cab and headed out. By 4 o'clock, I was done with my interviews, even more exhausted and, what's more, starving. I needed some kebab bad. I tried to hail a cab but they were all full. I walked down a street, hailing cabs all the while, until I came to an army checkpoint. A soldier asked me, in Arabic, where I was going. I replied in french and we had a rather muddled conversation that resulted in him pointing back the way I had come and gesturing with his rifle. So I turned around ... And got turned around. I couldn't remember which way was home.
I finally got a cab. The driver spoke some french. He didn't know where the Radisson was, so it was up to me. I had no idea so I picked a direction and hoped I might eventually recognize something. But half an hour later, I decided we were going in the wrong direction. I admit, I blamed my cabbie. Beirut is his town; he should know where the Radisson is. So I told him to stop "over there" and I hopped out with a mind to walk a couple blocks then hail another cab with, hopefully, a smarter cabbie.
By now I could've killed and eaten a small Lebanese person. Perhaps a baby Druze.
I walked down a sketchy alleyway full of broken-down cars and greasy, dark-eyed mechanics who stared at me as I passed. I was feeling very American in a very bad way, so I waved down the first cab I saw and hopped in without looking at the driver. Then a voice said, in French, "number two?"
It was the same cabbie as before. And it was too late to refuse his service. He was already speeding down the road, assuring me that he had just remembered where the Radisson was.
(Lest you fail to appreciate the sheer enormity of this coincidence, let me stress: Beirut is crawling with tens of thousands of cabs, and in 10 minutes I had walked several blocks in a random direction from where I got dropped off. Hundreds of cars passed within sight, including scores of cabs. The odds of hailing the same cabbie a second time in that environment are astronomical.)
Hey, Macarena!
Half an hour later, I was at the Radisson and my cabbie was 20,000 livres richer. That's no fewer than eight kebab-equivalents. Speaking of which, I found the nearest kebab stand, politely refused some skewered lamb brains bobbing in olive oil and ordered two kebabs.
They were the most delicious kebabs I've ever had. And they haven't even made me sick (yet).
p.s.: the Lebanese army has stationed an M-113 armored personnel carrier with a .50-caliber machine gun at the McDonald's down the street, perhaps to guard the "McArab" chicken shawarma they serve there.
Military deaths from roadside bombs have hit an all-time high in recent months: In October, 53 US troops died from improvised explosive devices, while in November, 49 troop deaths were blamed on so-called IEDs -- the second and third highest monthly tolls of the war, official statistics and casualty reports show...
The Joint IED Defeat Organization, which had been hailed as the "Manhattan Project" of the roadside bomb problem, "has been a disaster," said Ed O'Connell, a counter-insurgency specialist at the government-funded Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., who has advised US commanders in Iraq.
For its part, the organization claims some progress. They say that the percentage of bombs that are disarmed or detonated before they can kill or maim has remained "stable and consistent" over the past 18 months, and they say there are now fewer casualties per IED attack...
But officials acknowledged that the number of roadside bombings has "risen dramatically over the last two years," though they would not provide statistics.
That increase has confounded the military and raised questions about whether gathering intelligence on the bombers should be the office's top priority... [T]he IED office told the Globe that it spends 63 percent of its budget on ways to "defeat the device," while only 30 percent goes to attacking "the network" that creates and plants the bombs. The rest of its budget is spent on new training methods for US troops operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But military specialists say that the Pentagon needs to pay more attention to dissecting the "kill chain" -- the source of the bomb components, who made the bomb, and who planted it.
"We can't even detect their explosives," said Loren Thompson , a military specialist at the Lexington Institution, an Arlington, Va., think tank that supports strong military preparedness. "We don't have the resources to police or survey every road. The IED problem is a case study of how military transformation has failed.
"It sounds like a threat where good intelligence and good surveillance would make a big difference," [h]e said. "But we don't seem to be able to develop those things."
UPDATE 4:40 PM: This seems like a smart, and long-overdue, move.
Iraq War Ain't by the Book
There was a disconnect, when the Army first released its interim manual for fighting insurgencies, two years ago. The book said to stay off of big bases, and to emphasize "secrecy and surprise." American operations often went in the completely opposite direction.
The U.S. military's new counterinsurgency doctrine takes issue with some key strategies that American commanders in Iraq continue to use, most notably the practice of concentrating combat forces in massive bases rather than dispersing them among the population...
The authors of the manual say the new doctrine is not meant as a critique of the Iraq strategy... [They] rather were saying they simply did not want people to hole up and become "fobbits."
"You put a protect force in that lives in the neighborhood. They stay 24/7 to protect the people," Keane said at a briefing this week. "That piece is what we have never been able to execute in Baghdad..."
The new doctrine, which was begun in January and released in draft form in June, cautions that campaigns against insurgents are "often long and difficult" and that progress is hard to measure. Conventional militaries often stumble in the beginning of an insurgency but can succeed if they learn, adapt and push ahead against it, according to the manual.
"The military forces that successfully defeat insurgencies are usually those able to overcome their institutional inclination to wage conventional war against insurgents," the doctrine says...
Overall, the doctrine says, a counterinsurgency operation is "a struggle for the population's support." To win that confidence, militaries must learn about the culture and people they are trying to protect as well as fight the insurgents who are attempting to destabilize the country, it says...
"I do not know how they will translate this to the field," [one author] said. "But I do think this will be No. 1 on the reading list."
By the way, I'm in the middle of going through the new field manual. It's fascinating -- and an easy read, not at all jargon-filled. I'd encourage everyone to check it out for themselves.
UPDATE 7:20 PM: Eason Jordan's new IraqSlogger site is trying to launch with a little controversy, by questioning why this new manual was posted on public sites -- and highlighting online Jihadists' reactions. "How would a U.S. soldier... feel knowing the hot-off-the-presses counterinsurgency manual is available to the 'bad guys' at the same time it is available to the 'good guys?'" the site asks.
This is truly the mother of all scoops. After months of clandestine meetings, Freedom of Information Act requests, and classified military computer hacks, Murdoc has finally discovered the wonder weapon that is guaranteed to turn the tide in Iraq. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the Urban Combat Patrol Tricycle!
Army About to "Break," Says Chief
For most of the year, Army officials have been complaining that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are chewing up their money, their gear, and their troops. Now, Army chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker has made the loudest, most public plea yet.
As it currently stands, the Army is incapable of generating and sustaining the required forces to wage the Global War on Terror and fulfill all other operational requirements without its components - active, Guard, and Reserve - surging together...
At this pace, without recurrent access to the reserve components, through remobilization, we will break the active component.
As the Washington Post notes, he's calling for "expanding the [active duty] force by 7,000 or more soldiers a year [to a total of 512,000] and lifting Pentagon restrictions on involuntary call-ups of Army National Guard and Army Reserve troops."
Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, issued his most dire assessment yet of the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the nation's main ground force. At one point, he banged his hand on a House committee-room table, saying the continuation of today's Pentagon policies is "not right."
In particularly blunt testimony, Schoomaker said the Army began the Iraq war "flat-footed" with a $56 billion equipment shortage and 500,000 fewer soldiers than during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Echoing the warnings from the post-Vietnam War era, when Gen. Edward C. Meyer, then the Army chief of staff, decried the "hollow Army," Schoomaker said it is critical to make changes now to shore up the force for what he called a long and dangerous war.
Most observers say Schoomaker's dire forecasts are on the money, and a long time coming. But Spencer Ackerman, for one, says the chief of staff "deserves no praise for the warning he issued yesterday."
In February, when Rumsfeld had to go to the Hill to refute charges of breaking the Army, he brought Schoomaker along for insulation:
General Schoomaker points out that he remembers what a "broken" Army looks like when he was a young officer... The difference between that Army and the professional and motivated force we have today could not be more dramatic.
...is Noah Shachtman doing? Find out in the March issue of Wired magazine.
Army "Future": Fewer Drones
The other day, Inside Defense broke the news that the Army was shaving billions off of its massive modernization program, Future Combat Systems. Now, we're starting to get some details. Turns out the drones are the ones getting the axe.
FCS originally envisioned four types and sizes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, buzzing over soldiers' heads. The littlest ones would join platoons. Slightly bigger drones would be assigned to companies. Batallion commanders would supervise an even larger UAV. And the biggest of 'em all -- an armed, robotic helicopter -- would work for the brigade.
Those four classes of UAVs are now being trimmed down to two; just the tiniest and the most gargantuan drones will remain. There will still be other robotic planes in the Army's arsenal -- the hand-held Ravens, the Shadows, and the big, high-flying, bad-ass Warriors.
But the move is the latest in a series of efforts to scale down the once-grandiose FCS vision. First to go were the all-electric, laser-firing, next-gen fighting vehicles. Then, the requirement that those vehicles fit into a C-130 transport plane. And after that, the high-tech uniforms that were supposed to electronically tie the grunts to the larger Army. With the vehicles' designs still very much in flux -- and with the network connecting all of those drones and vehicles together still facing majorroadblocks -- who knows what will be left, when FCS finally deploys?
UPDATE 3:55 AM: Speaking of those little Raven drones, it looks like the Marines will start using 'em, too. Inside Defense says that the Corps has given up on its own mini-UAV, the Dragon Eye. During the Iraq invasion, Marines found the drone "too flimsy," and didn't stay in the air nearly long enough. Some fixes were made. But the things still had a nasty habit of "break[ing] apart upon repeated landings." So it's out with the Dragon Eyes. In with the sturdier Ravens.
We Get Letters: 'Sats Attacking My Brain'
It's actually been a while since I've been sent an e-mail this nutty. Can the Air Force's satellite hackers help out here?
Dear Sir,
Satellite Technology could be used on terrorist. If a terrorist is caught the "lasered" with Satellite technology then let go. That individual can be monitored 24/7/365 with out ever knowing that it is being done to him. Follow the rat back to the nest. If the "laser" that can shock the nervous system is also applied then that individual can be controlled to a certain extent. Sleep deprivation can be used and the shocking of the nervous system takes allot out of the individual. I know it is being used on me.
I am sending you this because I do not know who else to turn to. Satellite technology is being used on me. The only proof I have is other people hearing these people. My dentist, people at a coffee shop, barber, suppermarket, everywhere I go ect... I hoped that I was just mentally ill but when other people can hear them then it's not me. Me I am having sleep deprivation, shocking to my nervous system and other disruptive things being done to me utilizing this technology.
"Give Back to Those Who Give It All"
Good stuff. The Overlords and the Military Channel are teaming up to raise money for charities that support servicemembers and their families.
Beginning this holiday season and continuing throughout 2007, the Military Channel and Military.com will spotlight a different military-focused charity through monthly on-air and online promotions. United under one banner, www.ReconnectAmerica.com will serve as a portal to all charities in the program, and provide the tools people need to make a difference in the military community. Visitors to the site can make online donations, send e-cards to servicemembers, post their thoughts on message boards, watch video postings from the frontline and access a "military-buddy" locator database.
Operation Gratitude is the first of 12 national charities that will be highlighted as part of Reconnect America. Founded after 9/11 as a means to lift troops' morale, Operation Gratitude brings a smile to servicemembers' faces by sending care packages overseas.
Following Operation Gratitude, the following charities are scheduled to be spotlighted on ReconnectAmerica.com in early 2007:
* Armed Services YMCA: The Armed Services YMCA has provided services to the military community for over 140 years, offering essential programs such as childcare, hospital assistance, spousal support, health & wellness services, holiday meals and many others.
* Fisher House Foundation: Since its inception in 1990, the Fisher House Foundation has provided over 2 million days of lodging to military families in need, offering a "home away from home" that enables family members to be close to a loved one at the most stressful time---during hospitalization for an illness, disease or injury.
* The National Military Family Association (NMFA): NMFA is dedicated to providing information to and representing the interests of family members of the uniformed services. NMFA sponsors a military spouse scholarship program, the NMFA Very Important Patriot Award, and the NMFA Family Award.
* The Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, Inc. (TAPS): TAPS is a one of a kind non-profit Veteran Service Organization offering hope, healing, comfort and care to thousands of American armed forces families facing the death of a loved one each year.
In addition to the support received from visitors to ReconnectAmerica.com, the Military Channel and Military.com will make monetary and other in-kind donations to each organization throughout the year. Furthering exposure and penetration for the Reconnect America program, the Military Channel will also work with its distribution partners in communities nationwide to build customized local citizen involvement in this charitable effort.
"A number of countries are exploring and acquiring capabilities to counter, attack, and defeat U.S. space systems," Undersecretary of State Robert G. Joseph... the senior arms control official at the State Department... said.
...He said terrorists and enemy states might view the U.S. space program as "a highly lucrative target," while sophisticated technologies could improve their ability to interfere with U.S. space systems and services.
Joseph did not identify terror groups or nations that might have such motives.
Nor, apparently, did Joseph mention that the Air Force already has a team of satellite-attackers in place, who's job is to replicate terror strikes -- using nothing but gadgets they can pick up at Radio Shack. My Popular Mechanics article explains:
Three or four times a year, small groups of junior officers gather at an Air Force Research Laboratory facility in New Mexico and try to figure out how to take down an American satellite using nothing more than sweet talk and off-the-shelf gear.
The U.S. military relies on satellites to relay orders, guide precision bombs and direct flying drones. But those multibillion-dollar systems can be surprisingly vulnerable to the simplest of attacks. So, it’s up to the members of the Space Countermeasures Hands On Program — Space CHOP, for short — to find those weaknesses before enemies have a chance to crack them.
Space CHOP was formed in 1999, and one of its earliest experiments used a UHF generator and a small amplifier purchased from an electronics store. The team pieced together an antenna out of copper wire, PVC piping and other easily obtained materials. (The Air Force won’t elaborate on Space CHOP hardware or targets.) By aiming the antenna at the sky and turning on just a few milliwatts of power, the team showed it could block signals from a military communications satellite.
“We demonstrated that a few unsophisticated guys with a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment could interfere with a seriously sophisticated satellite system,” says John Holbrook, Space CHOP’s program manager. “If we had turned on full power, we would’ve knocked [the system] out.”
More often than not, the Space CHOP team doesn’t need any equipment to uncover a vulnerability. They scour the Internet for potentially damaging information. They case out Air Force bases. Or, posing as graduate students, they pump defense contractors and military officers for information until they’ve figured out a way to take down a satellite or its link on the ground.
The military also has personnel known as “red teams” — full-time mock adversaries who specialize in cyberattacks — Holbrook notes. But his team of outsiders often finds vulnerabilities that the red teams miss. “We’re experts in not being experts,” Holbrook says with a laugh.
Double Down? Or Move to the 'Burbs?
One of these things is not like the other...
NYT: "Iraq has presented the United States with a plan that calls for Iraqi troops to assume primary responsibility for security in Baghdad early next year. American troops would be shifted to the periphery of the capital."
"I think it is extremely important they reduce their visibility and they reduce their presence," Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser, said of the American troops in Baghdad. "They should be in the suburbs within greater Baghdad."
LAT: "Strong support has coalesced in the Pentagon behind a military plan to 'double down' in the country with a substantial buildup in American troops, an increase in industrial aid and a major combat offensive against Muqtada Sadr, the radical Shiite leader impeding development of the Iraqi government.
The problem with any sort of surge is that it would require an eventual drop-off in 2008, unless the president was willing to take the politically unpopular move of remobilizing the National Guard and sending reserve combat units back to Iraq.
But military officials are taking a close look at a proposal advanced by Frederick W. Kagan, a former West Point Military Academy historian, to combine a surge with a quick buildup of the Marines and the Army. That could allow new units to take the place of the brigades sent to Iraq to augment the current force.
"It is essential for the president to couple any recommendation of a significant surge in Iraq with the announcement that he will increase permanently the size of the Army and the Marines," Kagan said.
Kagan, who plans to release a preliminary report on his proposal Thursday, said he had discussed his ideas with people in the government. Although the military has had trouble meeting recruiting goals, Kagan said Army officials believed they could recruit at least an extra 20,000 soldiers a year. The Army missed its recruiting targets in 2005 but met this year's goal.
Video: Shark Spies Steered by "Squid Juice"
I'm sure you'll all remember that happy day last March, when word broke that a Darpa-funded scientist was looking for ways to turn sharks into "stealth spies." Now, thanks to the sharp-eyed SC, we can all check out a video of the shark training in action.
Back in the spring, I figured this research was in its earliest, most basic stages -- getting a sense of what makes a shark tick. Not so. Boston University professor Jelle Atema can actually "steer a shark" -- either through "electrical stimulation of the brain" or by delivering "little odor pulses" of "squid juice" to the predator's nose.
Atema's Darpa funding is done. So Atema is looking for more cash to better train his sharky posse. Maybe to "track ocean temperature changes," or the "spread of pollution," he says.
Meanwhile, "the military has... made the research classified, and it is now run out of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center," says a Boston University alumni newsletter. No word, yet, on whether the little buggers have frickin' lasers attached to their heads. But, surely, it can't be that far off.
So Long, Key West
The Secretary of Defense, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, dropped in at our FOB in Iraq on Saturday, and I got to ask him some questions. On the subject of the Key West Agreement -- the one that splits the skies between the Army, Air Force, and Navy -- Mr. Rumsfeld said that people in the Pentagon do not operate under "antiquated agreements." So I guess that means the Key West Agreement is no longer in force. It's open season for Army Aviation!
One glaring gap in Army aviation is in the light attack role, currently filled by the AH-64 Apache, designed in 1972. As aviation programs now take decades to develop, we need to start looking at the follow-on Apache replacement.
Apache ably fulfills its primary role, which is conducting anti-tank ambushes in the deep battle against enemy armor formations in approach march. However, it is doubtful if we will ever see a hostile enemy armor formations in an approach march situation in this century. The Army's needs will be close air support, armed reconnaissance, and helicopter escort, which Apache does right now. However a fixed wing platform like the old OV-10 will be more efficient at these missions most of the time. In general, helicopters require more maintenance per flying hour than fixed wing aircrafts. On an engine thrust basis and fuel consumption basis, prop-driven fixed wing aircrafts are more efficient than helicopters in delivering payloads. For a given payload, a fixed wing aircraft is cheaper than a helicopter. With a stall speed of 55 mph, the OV-10 can take on the slower spectrum of helicopter missions. What helicopters give you is the ability to VTOL, which is not a requirement in the light attack mission set. In fact, the only reason the Army went into the attack helicopter game in the first place was because of the Key West Agreement.
An attack helicopter can operate from a very small forward arming and refueling point to increase sortie rate, but the Army does not use small FARPs very often. In a fast-maturing theater like Iraq, the FARPs rapidly evolve into full-on Army Airfields, rivaling the size of Third World air force bases. On the Army airfields, there is plenty of space for the 400-meter runway a light attack plane like OV-10 might need.
[Edited to add: My bad, FARPs don't evolve into army airfields. The aviation brigade assembly areas become army airfields. However, the OV-10 can make the round trip to the airfield before an AH-64 comes back on station from a FARP.]
Army aviation's experience in Iraq provides evidence supporting a prop-driven fixed wing platform. Apache crews trained to fire their weapons from a hovering position, reflecting the anti-tank ambush scenario. However, in the 360 degree security environment in Iraq, a hovering helicopter will quickly draw fire from hidden insurgents. Apache crews now use a shallow dive when they deliver their munitions to minimize exposure to ground fire. Since we're not hovering to fire anymore, an OV-10 would do much better for our missions here.
I am not advocating the elimination of attack helicopters. The ARH will be very useful, and it will fill the missions where the light attack plane is not as optimal. And there are many situations where a Ka-50 may out-perform an OV-10. For the follow-on platform for the Apache, though, we should opt for a prop-driven fixed wing aircraft.
-Jimmy Wu
The Sound of Rummy
We've all suspected for some time that our outgoing Defense Secretary is a very, very odd man. And that Fox News blowhard Cal Thomas is completely freakin' bonkers. There's further proof, after the jump, in this straight-outta-Wonderland exchange between the two. Julie Andrews, beware.
SEC. RUMSFELD: It's good to see you.
MR. THOMAS: When you get things, you know, straightened out, come down and see a movie with us. I promise it won't be a war movie.
SEC. RUMSFELD: What kind of a movie?
MR. THOMAS: We got a movie theater we kind of like in our house.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, do you really?
MR. THOMAS: Yeah, we decided we're not leaving anything to the kids, so we're spending it on ourselves since I earned it.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Yeah, damn right. That's my answer. (Laughter.)
MR. THOMAS: (Laughs.) There you go. And so we have this nice movie theater with surround sound --
SEC. RUMSFELD: I've heard these home theaters -- you have chairs that --
MR. THOMAS: Oh, they're fun. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah do that. You can sleep, you can do anything. It's very cool.
SEC. RUMSFELD: My wife --
MR. THOMAS: Juke box, all kinds of stuff.
SEC. RUMSFELD: My wife loves movies.
MR. THOMAS: Oh, good. Well --
SEC. RUMSFELD: She goes all the time with a group of women, and I have not been in six years to the movies.
MR. THOMAS: It'll be fun. I got one for you that'd you'd really love. You got it this Christmas. Get for her and watch it together. It's called "Akeelah and the Bee." Starbucks is involved in it. It's about a little African-American girl, 11-years-old, growing up in Crenshaw in LA... And they discover that she has this great gift of spelling. Laurence Fishburne is in it, Angela Basset. She goes out and redeems everybody... I'm sitting there I'm balling away. I'm cheering for the kid...
I guarantee you I'll give you your money back if you don't love this movie. You will absolutely love this. It's got everything. There's not a white guy -- the only white guy in it is the principal of the school. Everybody else is minority, everybody else gets along.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Did you like the "Sound of Music?"
MR. THOMAS: Of course I liked the "Sound of Music."
SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, so did I... People laugh at that.
MR. THOMAS: Well, I want to you something. I stalked Julie Andrews for 40 years before I finally got her.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Is that right.
MR. THOMAS: On our shelf, a picture of us having tea together in New York.
SEC. RUMSFELD: How long ago?
MR. THOMAS: Two years. But I --
SEC. RUMSFELD: She's showing her years.
MR. THOMAS: Yeah, well -- no, she looks great.
SEC. RUMSFELD: (Laughs.)
MR. THOMAS: I waited for her outside the Majestic Theater in 1962 in the rain. That's when it started... And that's how I opened the letter to her, you know. So anyway, you got more important things to do.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Good to see you.
MR. THOMAS: Good to you see you, and let's stay in touch.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Terrific.
MR. THOMAS: And come and see a movie. You will love that one, I guarantee it. Merry Christmas.
So you'd think that Jonas would be all into the idea of using these data-mining systems to predict who the next terrorist attacker might be.
Think again. "Though data mining has many valuable uses, it is not well suited to the terrorist discovery problem," he writes in a new study, co-authored with the Cato Institute's Jim Harper. "This use of data mining would waste taxpayer dollars, needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, and misdirect the valuable time and energy of the men and women in the national security community." Are you listening, NSA?
Jonas doesn't have a problem cobbling together information on suspects from various databases. It's using these databases to forecast a terrorist's behavior -- think market research, but for Al-Qaeda -- that Jonas hates. "The possible benefits of predictive data mining for finding planning or preparation for terrorism are minimal. The financial costs, wasted effort, and threats to privacy and civil liberties are potentially vast," he writes.
One of the fundamental underpinnings of predictive data mining in the commercial sector is the use of training patterns. Corporations that study consumer behavior have millions of patterns that they can draw upon to profile their typical or ideal consumer. Even when data mining is used to seek out instances of identity and credit card fraud, this relies on models constructed using many thousands of known examples of fraud per year.
Terrorism has no similar indicia. With a relatively small number of attempts every year and only one or two major terrorist incidents every few years—each one distinct in terms of planning and execution—there are no meaningful patterns that show what behavior indicates planning or preparation for terrorism. Unlike consumers’ shopping habits and financial fraud, terrorism does not occur with enough frequency to enable the creation of valid predictive models. Predictive data mining for the purpose of turning up terrorist planning using all available demographic and transactional data points will produce no better results than the highly sophisticated commercial data mining done today [with results in the low single-digits – ed.]. The one thing predictable about predictive data mining for terrorism is that it would be consistently wrong.
Without patterns to use, one fallback for terrorism data mining is the idea that any anomaly may provide the basis for investigation of terrorism planning. Given a “typical” American pattern of Internet use, phone calling, doctor visits, purchases, travel, reading, and so on, perhaps all outliers merit some level of investigation. This theory is offensive to traditional American freedom, because in the United States everyone can and should be an “outlier” in some sense. More concretely, though, using data mining in this way could be worse than searching at random; terrorists could defeat it by acting as normally as possible.
Treating “anomalous” behavior as suspicious may appear scientific, but, without patterns to look for, the design of a search algorithm based on anomaly is no more likely to turn up terrorists than twisting the end of a kaleidoscope is likely to draw an image of the Mona Lisa.
Civil libertarians and bloggers have talked 'til they're blue in the face about how lame this kind of terror-predicting is. But I don't think I've ever heard a giant of the field, like Jonas, come out against the practice -- at least not on-the-record. Let's hope this is one conversation that the feds are monitoring.
UPDATE 11:49 AM: Shane Harris here. Die-hard proponents of pattern-based 'data mining' to catch terrorists will remain unconvinced by Jonas' and Harper's argument. While it's true that data mining in the commercial sector is based upon "training patterns," backers of systems such as Total Information Awareness will say, yes, and that's why data mining for terrorists has to start with hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of known or potential terrorist patterns to look for. A major part of TIA research was the creation of terrorist attack templates through red teaming exercises, in which experts were paid to come up with devious and clandestine plots that a terrorist might conceivably attempt. Their various machinations would, presumably, leave a set of digital footprints -- airline tickets purchased, money wired, hotels paid for, and so on -- and THAT data would be mined for clues.
What's also interesting about this paper is the combination of the authors. Jim Harper is a well-known and articulate activist, and has long since staked out central territory in the security vs. privacy debate. But Jonas has stayed out of politics. Indeed, those who've met him will know that he sticks out like a sore West coast thumb among Washington gear heads, being unafraid to use the word "dude" in formal conversation and happily acknowledging his ignorance of most Beltway insider baseball. But those who know Jonas and have heard him speak about electronic terrorist hunting know that, like his co-author Harper, he has a strong libertarian streak. Maybe Jonas wouldn't put it quite that way -- dude -- but it's there.
DC Drink Debrief
When Jeffrey Lewis and I suggested the other day that some folks should meet us in a bar in DC, I figured maybe 10 geeks, wonks, and bloggers would show. 15, tops.
So you can imagine how psyched I was, at 8 o'clock or so, when our little nerd soiree have become a full-fledged throwdown. I'd say there were at least 50 people jammed into the Big Hunt's attic. Among the whiskey-inhalers were hitters from DHS, State, the Hill, the Pentagon, and some, uh, "other government agencies." Bloggeratti like Matt Stoller (thanks for the shoes!), Swift Cat, Buckethead, and Spencer Ackerman made their presences felt. And pretty much the entire Defense Tech crew was in effect: Imaginary Sharon, Axe, Spooky Shane, Ryan 27B, AC Wonk, High Tech Haninah, T-Hitch, Pogo Nick... I'm sure I'm missing more than a few.
The last thing I remember was Greg Grant and one of my old college buddies punching me in the chest. Repeatedly. I can't wait to get hit again.
Paging Mr. CVN-21
Speaking of the Big Hunt party, I promised to get a card from a particular nuclear engineer... and then spaced on it. So if you worked on designing the CVN-21, drop me a line.
ABC of Pain
ABC News follows up on Hambling's pain ray report... and quotes both him and me in the process. Which is mighty kind of them.
And while I'm giving my horn a honk, here are two other recent press hits I forgot to mention:
The blogs were destroyed in September, hours after pictures of Australian soldiers playing with guns surfaced on the internet in the days before the inquiry into Private Jake Kovco's death in Baghdad. [He was the first Australian servicemember killed in Iraq -- ed.]
...A 26-year-old Sunshine Coast soldier serving in Iraq was placed under review and his milblog "Iraqi Letters" was deleted during the ADF's move to silence servicemen online.
The soldier's writing was positive of the army [The blog was an excellent advert for the ADF" one commenter said -- ed.] and at times poetic, detailing the taste of cold water on a dust-parched throat and the friendly ribbing soldiers received after the Socceroos lost to Kuwait.
Minutes after "Iraqi Letters" was destroyed, Brisbane IT consultant and blogging expert Mike Fitzsimons salvaged it for safe-keeping. [Alas, it looks like it was subsequently yanked -- ed.]
"I think it is a valuable piece of Australian history," he said. "Look at how today's historians revere letters from Gallipoli."
...Neil James, the executive director of independent lobby group Australia Defence Association, said milblogs should be allowed provided they were risk-assessed and any potential security violations censored.
"(Blogging) is not going to go away and the Defence Force is going to have to face up to this," he said. "It is not something that can be ignored."
Maybe if everything was going jim-dandy in Iraq, and world opinion was solidly behind the operation, then the western militaries could afford to silence the mission's most vociferous supporters. As we all know, it ain't. The entire operation is teetering on one foot. And short-sighted bureaucrats seem to be doing everything they can to shoot that foot off.
Our Army gets $168 billion a year to train and fight. So why do its chiefs keep complaining about a cash crunch? The Wall Street Journal's Greg Jaffe explains, in maybe the best article on the subject to date.
From 1990 to 2005, the military lavished money on billion-dollar destroyers, fighter jets and missile-defense systems. Defenders of such programs say the U.S. faces a broad array of threats and must be prepared for all of them. High-tech weaponry contributed to the swift toppling of the regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but has been of little help in the more difficult task of stabilizing the two countries.
Of the $1.9 trillion the U.S. spent on weaponry in that period, adjusted for inflation, the Air Force received 36% and the Navy got 33%. The Army took in 16%, it says. Despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both dominated by ground forces, the ratio hasn't changed significantly...
It may seem hard to believe that a country which allocated $168 billion to the Army this year -- more than twice the 2000 budget -- can't cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the two pillars of the Army, personnel and equipment -- both built to wage high-tech, firepower-intensive wars -- are under enormous stress:
The cost of basic equipment that soldiers carry into battle -- helmets, rifles, body armor -- has more than tripled to $25,000 from $7,000 in 1999.
The cost of a Humvee, with all the added armor, guns, electronic jammers and satellite-navigational systems, has grown seven-fold to about $225,000 a vehicle from $32,000 in 2001.
The cost of paying and training troops has grown 60% to about $120,000 per soldier, up from $75,000 in 2001. On the reserve side, such costs have doubled since 2001, to about $34,000 per soldier.
At Fort Knox, Ky., the cash crunch got so bad this summer that the Army ran out of money to pay janitors who clean the classrooms where captains are taught to be commanders. So the officers, who will soon be leading 100-soldier units, clean the office toilets themselves.
"The cost of the Army is being driven up by [Iraq and Afghanistan]. That's the fundamental story here," says Brig. Gen. Andrew Twomey, a senior official on the Army staff in the Pentagon. The increased costs are "not from some wild weapons system that is off in the future. These are costs associated with current demands."
Senior Army officials concede they mistakenly assumed prior to the Iraq war that if they built a force capable of winning big conventional battles, everything else -- from counterinsurgency to peacekeeping -- would be relatively easy. "We argued in those days that if we could do the top-end skills, we could do all of the other ones," says Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the deputy commander of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command. Iraq has proven that guerrilla fights demand different equipment and skills. "I have had to eat a little crow," says Gen. Metz...
The Humvee stands as a metaphor for the problems the Army faces. First fielded in the early 1980s, it was designed to ferry soldiers around behind the front lines of a conventional war. In recent years, the vehicle, which troops drive on the streets of Iraq, has been modified countless times. The Army has bolted layers of armor onto it to protect troops from roadside bombs. It has added sophisticated electronic jammers, rotating turrets, bigger machine guns, satellite navigational systems and better radios.
The result is a Humvee that is much better than the version the Army took to Iraq in 2003. But the add-ons have driven up its cost. The modified vehicle is top heavy and tends to tip over at high speeds. Army officials say they can't add more weight without overwhelming the engine or breaking the axle.
"The Army recognizes that the Humvee has reached a limit of our ability to improve it for the current fight," Gen. Speakes says.
What the Army says it really needs is an all-new vehicle, designed to better withstand roadside bombs that have become part of life in Iraq. But such a vehicle likely won't be ready until 2010 or 2012, Army officials say. In the interim, the Army wants to buy something on the commercial market -- South Africa, Turkey and Australia all make alternatives. Yet it's not clear whether the Army, which is struggling to equip the current force, has the money.
When the State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a clandestine nuclear weapons program, the agency refused, citing a large workload and a desire to protect its sources and tradecraft.
Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer to find the names another way—by using Google. Those with the most hits under search terms such as “Iran and nuclear,” three officials said, became targets for international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United Nations.
[snip]
In the end, the CIA approved a handful of individuals, though none is believed connected to Project 1-11—Iran’s secret military effort to design a weapons system capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The names of Project 1-11 staff members have never been released by any government and doing so may have raised questions that the CIA was not willing or fully able to answer. But the agency had no qualms about approving names already publicly available on the Internet.
This actually makes sense: You have what you think is the real list, but you only nail people for whom you can make a public case. But woe unto the poor schmoe who has to push a bunch of google search terms on skeptical foreign diplomats.
Come to think of it, the Project 111 name comes from the laptop of death (more) —so what’s the big secret?
This raises so many questions: Is unknown electro-folkie Johnny Burroughs, who records under the name Project 111, now on every no-fly list ever?
Update: I asked about the hyphen in Project 111. D-linz e-mailed me to say:
I decided to add it yesterday because that is how U.S. intelligence officials pronounce the project, with the 1 first and then the 11. Like the way you say nine-eleven for Sept. 11, rather than 9-1-1- for emergency help or one hundred and eleven. IC folks say “project one-eleven”
Later Update: Noah points out that I totally avoided the big revelation, that "none of the 12 Iranians that the State Department eventually singled out for potential bans on international travel and business dealings is believed by the CIA to be directly connected to Iran’s most suspicious nuclear activities.”
I guess that would mean the sanctions are kind of pointless, no?
Even later update: Noah here. At Defense Tech HQ, we're all bigfans of open source intelligence -- information that's out there in the public sphere -- to nail potential bad guys. But only if it actually nails legitimately bad dudes, not just the random Joes who are unlucky enough to show up at the top of a Google search.
Last Thursday, the Senate approved legislation within the "Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act" (S. 3678) to create a Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA). This particular legislation has been in the works for about two years as Congress has tried to address industry gripes about Project BioShield, the DHHS effort intended to fastrack industry's development and fielding of medical countermeasures used in the response to a terrorist CBRN incident.
The biggest challenge to the U.S. government has been to encourage industry to make drugs that may never be used, and if given out in large quantities during an emergency, may be misused or abused by the general public and/or panicky emergency responders. Big Pharma took a look at the risks, the liability insurance needed, and the profit margin, and said "no thanks, we'll stick to curing male impotence issues." However, little brother Pharma (the small start-up labs struggling to break out) said "give us an indemnification agreement against future liability suits and make it worth our while and we'll talk." In short, that's what BARDA's role will be.
The legislation is much more pretty-sounding. It says the DHHS Secretary will “coordinate the acceleration of countermeasure and product advanced research and development” by:
- facilitating collaboration between DHHS and other agencies, industry, academia, and other persons, with respect to such advanced research and development;
- promoting countermeasure and product advanced research and development;
- facilitating contacts between interested persons and the offices or employees authorized by the Secretary to advise such persons regarding requirements under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act; and
- promoting innovation to reduce the time and cost of countermeasure and product advanced research and development
The legislation also authorizes BARDA to execute a $1 billion budget, and it limits any disclosure of “specific technical data or scientific information that is created or obtained during the countermeasure and product advanced research and development carried out under subsection (c) that reveals significant and not otherwise publicly known vulnerabilities of existing medical or public health defense against biological, chemical, nuclear, or radiological threats.” That means FOIA or FACA requests would not apply to BARDA working groups or the National Biodefense Science Board.
That part is a little controversial, and was one of the main reasons why it's taken Congress two years to actually try to improve Project BioShield. DHHS has awarded a few procurement contracts for anthrax vaccines, a botulinum toxin antiviral, and potassium iodide, but not much else. This legislation will enable BARDA to "help" industry through the long, expensive process of making other vaccines, ones that probably won't have too much use outside of emergency response to the very low probability of bioterrorism incidents. Needless to say, industry loves this idea and can't wait for the House to agree to the words and print this baby into law.
Passage by the U.S. Senate of this bill, which includes critical BARDA provisions and provisions to reauthorize bioterrorism grants, is an important and necessary step toward improving America's defenses against bioterrorism and pandemic diseases.
This legislation recognizes that the 'Valley of Death' remains a barrier to effective countermeasure product development, and authorizes the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) within the Department of Health and Human Services. Through BARDA, contracts and grants for advanced research and development will be made to companies working on products to protect the American people. The bill also contains important contract reforms that improve upon the advances made under Project BioShield, by allowing, for example, milestone payments and surge capacity provisions to improve the viability and sustainability of biodefense product development and manufacture.
Significantly, the Senate-passed bill contains strong funding levels and important provisions to permit competing companies to cooperatively respond to government-declared emergencies without violating antitrust laws.
The "Valley of Death" refers to the time period between industry's drug development and the FDA's approval of the drug. The current BioShield legislation doesn't award any federal funds until the industry firm is producing the actual approved drug, and the small pharma firms just don't have the investments to make it that long. Thus, like a superhero racing to the rescue, comes Big BARDA!
I'm off to southern Lebanon for a couple weeks in order to check up on the U.N. force (including the bad-ass at left) that's supposedly keeping an eye on Hezbollah and intercepting Syrian infiltrators and Iranian weapons. With pro-Hez demonstrations only growing in Beirut, it seems that the U.N. force is at best ineffective and, at worst, an irritant to local Shi'ites. My job is to check out the U.N. forces' weapons and technology for Defense Technology International, but I'll be keeping my eyes open for other stories too. And I'll blog the trip once my boss at DTI, the fabulous Sharon Weinberger, gives me the all-clear. You can help underwrite my travels by buying my new book, ARMY 101, coming soon from University of South Carolina Press. Okay, enough whoring. Wish me luck!
This teeny-tiny piece had more than its fair share of hilarious research moments. The best of 'em had to be when I stumbled across this zany Japanese promotional video for the wine-ager. Behold, as a cuter-than-cute cartooon grandpa gets his drink on, while a little girl blinks her giant eyes, and gets all golly-gee. Complete with an overdub that would make Godzilla proud.
Like the old man in the video says, "Mmmm. Well, let's start the consumption."
A few other interesting tidbits in the ish. Defense Tech pal Clive Thompson takes a look at the Boomerang 'Bot -- and eats a little DT dust in the process (which is fine, considering I wrote up one of his ideas last year). Jonathan Shainin takes note of the CIA's "Ziggurat of Zealotry," and the infamously-fictional "Rods from God" space weapon concept.
Since the elections in November, there's been plenty of talk about Democratic plans to implement the 9/11 Commission recommendations (or not). Advocates of the idea have touted it as a critical and timely response to issues left unaddressed in the last two years, with incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi making their implementation "one of the centerpieces of her 'first 100 hours' legislative agenda" according to the Washington Post. Skeptics have scoffed at this notion, with the Heritage Foundation's James Carafano telling the AP in late November that "I don't think there's a lot more to do there" and "I think we're done."
Amidst all of this rhetoric, there's an easy way to resolve this dispute: go to the source. That's what I've done over the last two weeks, going one-by-one through the each of the 41 recommendations in the 9/11 Commission Report, looking at what's been done to date, and analyzing what the 110th Congress could potentially do to make progress on each and every one of these recommendations.
You can read the complete analysis in this 25-page paper:
Overall, I think the analysis shows that there is a lot that the incoming Congress can do to respond to the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, not only in terms of authorizing legislation, but also in terms of funding, oversight, investigations, public communications, and personal outreach. These recommendations are neither a panacea nor a finish line (there is no finish line against a constantly evolving threat), but they are still a useful set of recommendations that can improve our counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence capabilities, and they are part of a credible security agenda for the next Congress.
The report of the Iraq Study Group... was doomed to fall short of expectations. But who knew it would amount to such an amorphous, equivocal grab bag.
Its outline of a new "diplomatic offensive" is so disjointed that even a willing president would be left puzzled by what precisely to do, and George W. Bush seems far from willing.
Its scheme for a new military strategy contains so many loopholes that a president could cite its language to justify doing anything (or nothing).
Given the specific lineup of the 10 wise men and women serving on the Iraq Study Group, the most conspicuous absence is that of supermodel Heidi Klum. Sure, she has no relevant experience in foreign policy, nor any real knowledge of Iraq -- but neither do commissioners Sandra Day O'Connor, Vernon Jordan, Alan Simpson, or Edwin Meese. What Klum does have to offer is a lesson completely lost on the commission, one taught each week on her hit reality show Project Runway: you're either in, or you're out. When it comes to Iraq, it's good advice.
OK, no Heidi Klum, I can understand. My question is: Why no veterans? Why no people that have actually fought this war?
In essence, the study group is projecting that a rapid infusion of American military trainers will so improve the Iraqi security forces that virtually all of the American combat brigades may be withdrawn by the early part of 2008...
Jack Keane, the retired Army chief of staff who served on the group’s panel of military advisers, described that goal as entirely impractical. “Based on where we are now we can’t get there,” General Keane said in an interview, adding that the report’s conclusions say more about “the absence of political will in Washington than the harsh realities in Iraq.”
UPDATE 10:02 AM: "Iraqi politicians and analysts said Wednesday [that] the report... neither addresses nor understands the complex forces that fuel Iraq's woes. They described it as a strategy largely to help U.S. troops return home and resurrect America's frayed influence in the Middle East," according to the Washington Post.
UPDATE 12/08/06 9:42 AM: Phil Carter read the list of people consulted by the Iraqi Study Group. He's not happy.
[It's] a long and distinguished list, to be sure. But one group of people seemed to be conspicuously absent from the list.
Grunts. Not just infantrymen, but military enlisted personnel and junior officers generally. I don't see any officers below the military rank of Lieutenant Colonel listed in the ISG's report. And there are zero enlisted personnel listed. What gives? Counterinsurgencies are won or lost at the local level, so it would've made an awful lot of sense to talk with a few troops who've served at that level.
Not that Bush is listening to Baker and company, anyway.
Sometimes they buzz my apartment on the summit of Columbia Heights in northwest Washington, D.C. They're bright red with white stripes and black noses, and they make a noise like giant lawnmowers. They're Eurocopter HH-65C Dolphins belonging to the U.S. Coast Guard, and they've inherited an unusual mission, patrolling the skies over the nation's capital to intercept infiltrating light aircraft like the one that crashed onto White House grounds in 1994.
It used to be this mission belonged to the Customs Service's air branch (PDF!) with its sharp black-and-gold Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawks, aka "Customshawks". Sharpshooters aboard the aircraft could, in a pinch, put a bullet or twelve into the infiltrator's engine to prevent it crashing into anything important such as, oh, my apartment. Or my favorite breakfast spot. Or Congress.
But Customs has been busier now that it has merged with the Border Patrol and finds itself responsible for 2,000 miles of porous southern border. And besides, the Coast Guard has, in recent years, refined the so-called "airborne use of force" mission using a small squadron of MH-68 choppers based in Jacksonville, Florida. These nimble birds are ideal for chasing down drug smugglers' fast boats and positioning snipers to shoot out their engines so Coast Guard cutters can move in for an arrest. It was a small step for the Coast Guard to perform a similar mission using its standard HH-65 rescue choppers, targeting airplanes instead of boats. Details about the D.C. detachment are classified, but the choppers' presence is pretty obvious when they're flying right overhead.
Five years ago, armed Coast Guard helicopters were a rarity. But the service has beefed up since 9/11 to tackle a wider range of increasingly lethal threats, from smugglers to terrorists and even, while deployed alongside the Navy, waterborne insurgents. The future of warfare is looking more and more like policing on steroids. So the nation's coastal cops are becoming more like warriors every day.
I went flying with an HH-65 unit over Atlantic City this week. It was great fun. Check out my Flickr stream for pics.
The Army made a big decision, back in October. After 15 years and a half-billion dollars in development, the service would finally take Land Warrior, its ensemble of high-tech soldier gear, to war for the first time. The collection of radios, GPS-locators, and next-generation rifle scopes wasn't perfect -- far from it. But, for infantrymen who typically don't even have a walkie-talkie, it was an important first step towards plugging the average soldier into battlefield network.
But, just six weeks later, the Army appears to have reversed itself. According to Inside Defense, service financiers have decided to kill off Land Warrior in its 2008 budget. It's one of a number of high-tech programs slated for big cuts by the Army.
The service got $17 billion less than what it wanted for its 2008 budget from the Pentagon and the White House. "Earlier in October... Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker said if the service got less than what it needed in FY-08 it would be forced to slow the modernization of the force," Inside Defense's Dan Dupont notes. "In submitting its budget plan to Pentagon leaders last week, the Army contended that budget constraints have forced the service to take what it believes are imprudent risks in the readiness of today’s forces, as well as in its future plans."
Future Combat Systems -- the Army's plan to connect all its next-generation tanks, robots, and fighting vehicles to that battlefield network -- is also slated to take a good-sized hit.
By delaying key milestones, shifting some pieces of the program out of FCS plans and killing others, the Army believes it can save more than $3.3 billion over the next six budget years (fiscal years 2008 to 2013).
The moves would reduce the cost to field each FCS brigade combat team, but it would also push back procurement plans for BCT equipment, delaying by five years the schedule for fielding the teams, according to sources familiar with the plan.
The FCS cuts also entail the removal of some unmanned aerial vehicles from the program and the deferral of some vehicles, as well as some ammunition. The upshot of the moves would be an FCS program consisting of 14 platforms plus the network, down from the 18 envisioned today, with FCS systems to be fielded at a rate of one brigade combat team per year for fifteen years, beginning in 2015. Prior plans called for those 15 BCTs to be fielded at a rate of 1.5 per year over 10 years.
Now, just because the Army has proposed these cuts doesn't necessarily mean they are going to happen. As you may have heard, there's a new party taking over Congress. And, at least in the run-up to the elections, these guys made a lot of noise about giving the Army a boost. Then there's the new Secretary of Defense. He may be more favorably inclined to funding the Army than his predecessor was. Certainly, he seems to look kindly on the larger goal of retooling the military. Check of this exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Dole:
SEN. DOLE: Dr. Gates, the transformation efforts undertaken by Secretary Rumsfeld are critical to meeting the challenges of the 21st century. While Secretary Rumsfeld made transformation of the military a priority, obviously much remains to be done. In your view, which transformation programs are the most important and effective in fighting this war on terror?...
MR. GATES: Senator Dole, one of the things that has impressed me the most in the briefings -- the very short briefings that I've received preparatory to this hearing, is the extent of the transformation that actually has taken place in recent years, compared to when I was in government.
I can't tell you how many crisis meetings I sat through in the Situation Room over a 20-year period, and we would look at military contingencies, and we would be looking at 60 to 90 days to generate a brigade, to get a military force on the move and in place.
So the expeditionary nature of the Army, the mobility, the change in mind-set -- sometimes perhaps those of you who have been really close to it may not fully appreciate just how dramatically the situation already has changed, compared to when I was in government last.
I think that the transformation needs to continue... The two things that I think make a lot of sense has been this shift of the Army from being basically a static force to a more mobile expeditionary force. I think that's very important.
I think that the -- based on very superficial information at this point, this -- the shift from divisions to the brigade structure does make a lot of sense, and I think it provides a lot more flexibility.
I would say that one of the things that I think is very important in the transformation is continuing to strengthen our capacity to fight irregular wars. I think that's where the action is going -- is most likely to be for the foreseeable future. And so I think it's very important that it go forward.
Bump: Drink Up, DC - Thurs 12/07/06
Thursday, December 7th is "a day that will soon live in infamy for a whole bunch of [new] reasons," says the Arms Control Wonk.
That's the day he and I are hosting the 3rd annual Defense Tech vs. Arms Control Wonk soiree, in DC.
Come debate the finer policy points of military robotics, nuclear proliferation, and Irish whiskey with us, upstairs at the Big Hunt, 1345 Connecticut Ave., NW.
The affair will be strictly off-the-record, of course. It'll kick off around 5, and -- if history is any guide -- go real late. C'mon down.
Topic A at today's Senate confirmation hearings for Defense Secretary Bob Gates was Iraq. Topic B was Afghanistan. Topic C? That was the fate of Texas A&M's football team, naturally. (You know how politicos love their sports-talk.)
Somewhere down around the bottom of the alphabet was China. Which is really too bad. Because one of the biggest choices Gates will have to make in his term at the Pentagon will be how to handle Beijing.
As guys like Tom Barnett have endlessly pointed out, there are, roughly speaking, two competing camps in the Defense Department. One group -- mostly Army guys and Marines -- wants to retool our military, to go after terrorists and tackle insurgents. The other -- largely made up of Air Force and Navy-types -- thinks that Iraq and Al-Qaeda are distractions from the one mortal enemy that can really threaten America long-term: the Chinese.
Donald Rumsfeld's words favored the first camp. "[P]repar[ing] for wider asymmetric challenges" is a "fundamental imperative" for the military, the Pentagon noted in the Quadrennial Defense Review, its every-four-years look at grand strategy. We're in the middle of a "Long War." Iraq and Afghanistan are just the opening battles.
But follow the money, and a very different set of priorities emerges. The Pentagon is spending its $70 billion budget on new weapons like it's the Cold War all over again – with China stepping in for the Soviets. Nearly $10 billion a year goes to ballistic missile interceptors originally designed to stop Russian missiles; $9 billion to new-jack fighter jets meant to take on MiGs; $3.3 billion to next-gen tanks and fighting vehicles; $1 billion for the Trident II nuclear missile upgrade; and $2 billion for a new strategic bomber.
Gates can continue the trend. Or more than five years after 9/11, he can commit to focusing the Defense Department firmly, absolutely on the two-front war which he admits the U.S. is "not winning." That's the fundamental choice to be made. You can change tactics in Iraq –- or not. But as long as China remains front-and-center for so much of the military, it's hard to see how the U.S. winds up winning this "Long War."
UPDATE 6:10 PM: So what will Gates do? Here's the only interchange on China from today's hearings:
SEN. INHOFE: The -- in 2000, we formed the U.S.-China Security Economic Review Commission, and it's usually referred to the U.S.- China Commission. They have had -- come out with five reports. This is the fifth report that just came out. I've been disturbed that no one seems to care about these. They don't seem to read these and understand what's in them. I have a couple of questions about that I want to ask you. But I am concerned about China, and I'd like to hear what your thoughts are.
And just in the last month the Chinese hackers, as you, I'm sure, have read, have shut down the e-mail and official computer work at the Naval War College. The -- this is referred to by this commission as the "tightened rein" "Titan Rain."
In September the Department of Commerce experienced a massive shutdown of its computer system. This goes on and on.
In July the State Department acknowledged that Chinese attacks had broken into systems overseas and in Washington.
Recently China's been -- used lasers to blind our satellites.
On October 26th a Song-class Chinese submarine surfaced near the USS Kitty Hawk. They'd been following them undetected for a long period of time.
I've had occasion to spend quite a bit of time in Africa, and I noticed that China's presence in Africa, particularly in those states around the Sea of Guinea and where they have great oil reserves, is there. And they are way ahead of us. It happens that China and United States are the two countries that depend on foreign sources of oil more than any of the other countries.
The -- as this continues, I'd like to ask you what your feeling is about this as a top priority, about how you view China, about whether or not you have read these reports, and if not, if you would or if you plan to do that, and if you agree with some of that which you have heard coming out in these reports.
MR. GATES: Yes, sir. I have not read the reports.
SEN. INHOFE: And I would also say that we watched this -- as we were drawing down in the 1990s, they increased their military procurement by over 1,000 percent. So this is a great concern.
Go ahead.
MR. GATES: Yes, sir. I have not read the reports. I would be more than willing to do so.
I've been aware, just from reading in the newspapers -- it's been a number of years since I received any classified intelligence on what the Chinese were up to. But it's been my impression that they've had a very aggressive intelligence-gathering effort against the United States. Some of these other things that you've mentioned -- this is the first time I've heard about that. And clearly, if confirmed, this would be something that I would want to get well informed on quickly
UPDATE 7:15 PM: "I've been watching defense secretaries in confirmation hearings for 30 years, off and on, but I don't think I've seen any perform more forthrightly than Gates did this morning," coos Fred Kaplan.
The most eyebrow-raising moment—of many such moments—in Robert Gates' confirmation hearings today came when Sen. Robert Byrd, the stentorian Democrat of West Virginia, asked if he favored attacking Iran.
Most witnesses in Gates' position would duck the question, citing the time-honored practice of avoiding "hypotheticals." No senator would have condemned him for following precedent. But Gates plunged right in and said, basically, no.
"We have seen in Iraq," Gates replied, "that once war is unleashed, it becomes unpredictable." The Iranians couldn't retaliate with a direct attack on the United States, he said, but they could close off the Persian Gulf to oil exports, send much more aid to anti-American insurgents in Iraq, and step up terrorist attacks worldwide...
When Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the panel's senior Democrat, asked if the United States was winning the war in Iraq, he said, "No, sir." Later, when James Inhofe, R-Okla., asked if he agreed that we weren't losing the war either, Gates replied, "Yes," but added, "at this point..."
It is impossible to imagine any of George W. Bush's previous Cabinet appointees, or any of his sitting Cabinet officers, making such stark—and, at least implicitly, critical—statements in an open Senate hearing.
In short, Gates may well be that entity that Washington has not seen for many years: a truly independent secretary of defense.
Broken Gear, Piling Up
The Washington Post has a fascinating report from the Anniston Army Depot, where "sprawling lots of tanks and other armored vehicles are just the start of a huge backlog" of gear broken by Iraq and Afghanistan.
"There's stuff, stuff everywhere," Joan Gustafson, a depot official, said as she wheeled her brown Chevrolet van through a landscape of rolling hills lined with armadas of mobile guns.
"There's another field of M1s," she said, motioning toward a swath of M1A1 Abrams tanks next to the winding road. "We're just waiting for someone to tell us what to do with them..."
Equipment shipped back from Iraq is stacking up at all the Army depots: More than 530 M1 tanks, 220 M88 wreckers and 160 M113 armored personnel carriers are sitting at Anniston. The Red River Army Depot in Texas has 700 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 450 heavy and medium-weight trucks, while more than 1,000 Humvees are awaiting repair at the Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania.
Despite the work piling up, the Army's depots have been operating at about half their capacity because of a lack of funding for repairs. In the spring, a funding gap caused Anniston and other depots to lose about a month's worth of work...
Responding to urgent requests from the Army and Marine Corps, Congress approved an extra $23.8 billion in October to replace worn-out equipment in fiscal 2007. With the money, the Army plans to double the workload at its depots, which will repair and upgrade 130,000 pieces in 2007, up from 63,000 last year. This will include a quadrupling of the number of tanks, Bradleys and other tracked vehicles overhauled, from 1,000 to 4,000.
At Anniston, which will handle 1,800 combat vehicles in fiscal 2007, a cavernous 250,000-square-foot repair shop is humming as damaged tanks are rolled in one by one and disassembled with the help of giant cranes. Removing an M1 tank's turret alone takes a day and a half, and the entire overhaul requires 54 days and costs about $1 million, said Ted A. Law, the depot's vehicle manager.
Earnest Linn, 58, a heavy-mobile-equipment mechanic who as of January will have worked at Anniston for 30 years, said that "it's never been like this" since the end of the Vietnam War.
Live-Blogging Gates
Inside Defense, the invaluable suite of military-related newsletters, is live-blogging the Gates confirmation hearings. And there's already a bunch of great stuff up -- from whether we're winning the Iraq war to whether we can afford Future Combat Systems. Go check it out.
UPDATE 12:04 PM: One thing that jumps out at me is how realistic -- and pessimistic -- Gates is about Iraq. The status quo there is "not acceptable," he says. But, at the same time, there are "no new ideas" on Iraq.
Drunks, Butts Test Pain Ray; Paris Hilton Next?
I have a story in Wired News today about the Air Force’s Active Denial System (or ‘pain beam’) and why it is still not in service -- despite all those years of development, and all those calls for it in Iraq. The big problem is not with the technology, which seems to work fine. The problem is getting people to accept it. Everyone is still worried the millimeter-wave beam is going to give them cancer, melt their eyeballs or make them sterile.
The Air Force has done a lot of safety testing on the Active Denial System. They have done every sort of test you could think of – and many you would never imagine. Thanks to Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Project, I received a hefty stash of all 14 sets of protocols for ADS testing involving humans which he acquired using the FoIA. There are some amazing ones in there.
F-WR-2002-0024-H - Effects of Ethanol on Millimeter-Wave-Induced Pain translates roughly into “let’s see if a guy can stand the pain if we give him enough vodkas.” FWR-2002-0023 Facial sensitivity and eye aversion response says that earlier trials included testing the pain beam on subjects buttocks; and FWR-2004-0029-H: Effects of Active Denial System Exposures on the Performance of Military Working Dog Teams involved putting a trained attack dog and its handler in front of the beam and seeing what happened when the animal was exposed to sudden, intense pain. Down, boy, down...
The beam has been tested thousands of times, and the bottom line is the same – apart from very occasional blisters (seven in ten thousand exposures), all the ADS does is hurt a lot. Earlier concerns about zippers and spectacles seem to have been settled. But the Pentagon are hugely defensive about it. Perhaps it’s coincidence, but since those FoIA documents went out the Joint Non-lethal Weapons Program updated their web site’s section on the ADS. The best bit is the new video here. If you ignore the Pentagon PR blather and move to a point 1 minute 19 seconds in you can see the actual effects of the beam, but only for 8 seconds, and again at 1 min 40 for 6 seconds.
And this is the problem. Tests conducted in secrecy without independent observers are not going to convince people: it amounts to "It’s safe because we say it is. Trust us." The ADS must not simply be safe and effective, it must be seen to be safe and effective, preferably by as many people as possible. And that means television.
Which is where my own modest proposal comes in. It’s inspired by F-BR-2006-0018-H: Effects of Exposure to 400-W, 95-GHz Millimeter Wave Energy on Non-Stationary Humans:
Adult volunteers…will be asked to traverse a course as quickly as possible. At the end of this course they must then unlock a door (a subtask requiring some degree of fine motor skills) in order to exit the course (complete the task). During commission of this task, subjects will be targeted by the small-beam diameter, 400-W, 95-GHz device.
In other words, you try to get through the obstacle course (described as ‘maze-like”) while being zapped one or more pain beams. It’s a valid test of the beam’s ability to prevent people from getting through a perimeter fence or similar, but it's also got a neat competitive element. It's already using cameras, and it has a sort of gameshow format, with post-zapping interviews:
Subject performance during all of the trials will be videotaped. After each trial, subjects will be asked for a self-report of "hits" and the perceived effectiveness of those hits utilizing a pain scale.
Reality television which involves suffering has been huge recently. We’ve seen a rash of programs like Big Brother (which did more damage to George Galloway's reputationthan the Senate Committee) and Survivor in which contestants endure appalling experiences for big prizes. We used to laugh at the Japanese humiliation-show Endurance, but the UK's biggest hit du jour is I'm A Celebrity Get me Out of Here, in which D-list celebs try to boost their flagging ratings by eating caterpillars and even more disgusting delicacies .
So why not turn the ADS testing into a live show? That way millions of people could see for themselves exactly what the pain beam does. Familiarity would dispel all the myths about it, and thorough medical examinations (and perhaps the odd lawsuit) would settle any questions its safety once and for all. Even better, because it's a matter of the nation's defence, we can rope in anyone we want from the worlds of sport, entertainment and politics to ensure we get the ratings:
Dear Minor But Irritating Celebrity,
You have been selected by national poll to participate in a project vital to National Security. You are therefore required to report at the address attached on the stated date. Filming starts at 20:00 Saturday, and your attendance is mandatory and will be enforced. It'll hurt, but it's in a good cause.
You could vote for people to be included because you want to see how tough they really are, because they absolutely deserve it -- or just because it would be fun to see them get zapped. Unlike other non-lethal weapons like rubber bullets and tear gas, ADS is equally safe on a 250 lb althete or a 110 lb heiress. Pacemakers, piercings, prosthetic joints, pregnancy or silicone implants are no obstacle to competing -- the whole point of the ADS is that everybody is fair game. And it won't leave any bruises, marks or damage a hair.
Whichever celebrity gets furthest in the trial is the winner that week, and gets to go on all the chat shows and talk about their experiences and have their picture in all the magazines. (Heat would be sort of appropriate). Picking the planet's most egotistical and driven individuals should ensure that the beam really does work against highly motivated opponents, which previous tests have not necessarily proven.
As for a title - how about calling it "No Pain No Gain"?
A couple of months ago, I made a snide remark about those who advocate “pulling out of the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits [military] installations on the moon among other things.”
“Not that we have a plan for a [military] moon-base, but we might—you know?”
NASA’s Lunar Architecture Team, chartered in May 2006, concluded that the most advantageous approach is to develop a solar-powered lunar base and to locate it near one of the poles of the moon. With such an outpost, NASA can learn to use the moon’s natural resources to live off the land, make preparations for a journey to Mars, conduct a wide range of scientific investigations and encourage international participation.
“The architecture work has resulted in an understanding of what is required to implement and enable critical exploration objectives,” said Doug Cooke, deputy associate administrator, Exploration Systems Directorate. “This is all important as we continue the process we have begun and better define the architecture and our various exploration roles in what is a very exciting future for the United States and the world.”
As currently envisioned, an incremental buildup would begin with four-person crews making several seven-day visits to the moon until their power supplies, rovers and living quarters are operational. The first mission would begin by 2020. These would be followed by 180-day missions to prepare for journeys to Mars.
The proposed lunar architecture calls for robotic precursor missions designed to support the human mission. These precursors include landing site reconnaissance, natural resource assays and technology risk reduction for the human lander.
Anyway, the announcement contains nothing to suggests that the notional moon-base would be a military installation or in any way incompatible with the Outer Space Treaty.
But it did remind me of Cold War studies for lunar military installations. For a history of crazy military moonbase ideas, Jeff Richelson’s “Shooting for the Moon” in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is a great place to start.
There's a bit of a magic number, when it comes to lasers. A threshold at which beams of coherent light stop being tools for welding or analysis... and start becoming weapons. That level is generally considered to be around 100 kilowatts.
For years, solid state, electric lasers could only operate at a tiny fraction of that 100 kw mark. But the beams are getting stronger. Take Bob Yamamoto's Solid State Heat Capacity Laser, at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. In March, 2005, it hit 45 kw, a new record -- and more than triple what it could do just three years before.
Now, in a new pair of papers provided to Defense Tech, Yamamoto reveals that his laser has hit 67 kw of average power during short bursts -- a 50% jump in a little more than a year. In other words, a battlefield-strength laser is just about in reach. The Livermore crew has even started designing a "gatling-gun"-style prototype, that uses clear, garnet slabs instead of bullets for ammunition.
(There are still a bunch of other hurdles to jump to get to a laser weapon -- like generating enough electricity to make it work, and cooling the thing down. But beam strength is one of the tallest obstacles.)
Yamamoto's team isn't the only one trying to put together a military-ready machine. Textron Systems and Northrop Grumman beat the Livermore crew out for $90 million worth of Defense Department grant money to build a 100 kilowatt laser by 2009. And these systems won't just be stronger than today's lasers. They'll be more compact, too -- maybe even ready for a prototype weapon.
10 Doses of Spy Poison: $225
When it came out the other day that you could buy a speck of the spy-killing poison polonium-210 online, lots of folks said: big whoop. After all, it could take thousands of such samples to build up the amount of radioactivity that offed Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spook.
But it might just be time to start worrying again. As Bill Broad reports in today's New York Times:
An antistatic fan made by NRD, of Grand Island, N.Y., contains 31,500 microcuries of polonium 210 — or, in theory, more than 10 lethal doses. The unit often sells commercially for $225.00. Repeated calls to NRD were not returned, but the company in sales literature describes its products as unusually safe.
The company’s antistatic brushes contain less polonium, typically 500 microcuries of radiation. The three-inch brush often sells on the Web for $33.99. In theory, by spending $203.94, before tax and any handling charges, and then disassembling six brushes, someone with lab experience could accumulate a lethal dose.
In Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory sells dozens of types of rare nuclear materials to American manufacturers. But Bill Cabage, a lab spokesman, said it sold no polonium 210 because Russia was able to do so much more inexpensively.
“That’s typical” of exotic radioisotopes, he said. “We can’t compete with their prices.”
Last week, Russia’s top nuclear official said it exports 8 grams of polonium 210 a month, or 96 grams a year, to the United States. That is 3.4 ounces, which seems like a trifle but in theory is enough for thousands of lethal doses.
Rummy: Iraq War Plans Suck
Two days before he resigned as defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged that the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction...
...the memo calls for examination of ideas that roughly parallel troop withdrawal proposals presented by some of the White House’s sharpest Democratic critics...
The "Above the Line" options -- ones that "could and, in a number of cases, should be done" -- include:
* Conduct an accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases. We have already reduced from 110 to 55 bases. Plan to get down to 10 to 15 bases by April 2007, and to 5 bases by July 2007...
* Withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions — cities, patrolling, etc. — and move U.S. forces to a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be available when Iraqi security forces need assistance.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all U.S. intelligence agencies, has for nearly three months been holding a series of low-profile "privacy workshops" with a range of experts on technology and privacy.
The stated purpose to educate DNI officials, their technologists, and civil liberties watchdogs on what current and emerging technologies could be used to protect privacy rights during the collection and analysis of intelligence. These broad — and largely informal — discussions are being held against the backdrop of increased surveillance and electronic monitoring by the government as it pursues terrorist suspects.
Some of the workshop attendees praised the DNI for seeking checks against potential abuses, particularly as the government’s appetite for data mining and profiling systems increases. But several well-known and highly regarded experts - who include vocal critics of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies - were not invited to attend.
The final workshop will be held next week, outside Washington. Officials aren’t asking attendees to recommend a particular way forward on privacy-protection, but they say they’ll use what they’ve learned to help chart the DNI’s “research agenda.”
Check out the full story in the current National Journal, out now.
-- Shane Harris
Mind Control, Prisoner Experiment Okays
Heads up, Navy scientists! If you want to perform "severe or unusual intrusions, either physical or psychological, on human subjects," you're going to need approval from the Under Secretary of the Navy.
According to a memo unearthed by Secrecy News, that goes for "consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques," as well. Ditto for experiments on "prisoners" -- even though the document says earlier that "research involving any person captured, detained, held, or otherwise under the control of DoD personnel (military and civilian, or contractor employee) is prohibited." The UNDERSECNAV's thumbs-up is also required for human trials involving "potentially or inherently controversial topics (such as those likely to attract significant media coverage or that might invite challenge by interest groups)."
On the other hand, the Director of Defense Research and Engineering makes the call on "all proposed research involving exposure of human subjects to the effects of nuclear, biological or chemical warfare agents or weapons."
So keep that in mind.
Hez Hack Mystery Unfolds
Back in September, Newsday sparked a furious debate when it reported that Hezbollah had hacked into Israel's best-protected radios. At stake was more than that security of Israeli communications; American radios, which rely on similar technologies and designs, would also be at risk if the terror group was now able to listen in.
Hezbollah is incapable of penetrating and exploiting the Israeli army's tactical radio systems as it claimed it did during the recent fighting in Lebanon, say senior U.S. electronics industry officials.
Even so, the militant Islamic organization is parlaying the results of a relatively common signals intelligence capability for analyzing communications traffic and intercepting cell-phone calls into a major psychological warfare victory, say U.S. officials. The success has been so complete that both Israel Defense Force (IDF) and U.S. Army users of advanced encrypted, frequency-hopping radios have raised doubts about the security of their communications.
"What they're really doing is a very good psychological operation," says a senior information operations specialist and industry executive. "One of the things you want to do is instill doubt. Hezbollah makes the pronouncement that they can read encrypted radios. They wanted the IDF troops to believe they weren't as invulnerable as they thought... They scored big time."
"What was more relevant was monitoring cell phones," [a] signals intelligence specialist tells the magazine, echoing what we said here when the Newsday story broke.
"Everybody out there has a cell phone. You see any picture of troops on the street in Baghdad and they've got a Blackberry or a cell phone. That's what is monitored... With something like a police radio scanner, if you're in the right frequency, you can listen to a cell phone."
Except... it's not that simple. The Northeast Intelligence Network got a hold of some IDF pictures, showing a Hezbollah hideout with equipment that's a whole lot more sophisticated than police scanners.
So what really happened? Many Defense Tech readers -- guys who know a thing or two about secure communications -- believe that Hezbollah never actually decrypted Israel's communications, which rely on "spread-spectrum" (bouncing from one frequency to the next) technologies. They didn't have to, as Nicholas Weaver noted:
Just some high speed triangulation of spread-spectrum sources (which actually, the spread-spectrum nature probably helps, just a bunch of antennas looking at ONE frequency with high-precision timing, and take advantage that it "hops on, hops off" cleanly to get start-end time for each signal source) can give you a huge amount of information as to where the communicating enemy is.
Av Week's specialist basically draws the same conclusion.
"It's not the hopping but the encryption that's very difficult, if not impossible, to break," the specialist says. "What they did is use direction finding [DF] to locate frequency hoppers. In fact, they're easier to DF than conventional signals because you have more shots at it. With a commercially available system, you can probably find at least one of the frequencies."
Iraqis, according to the Times, "spent much of the day crowding around television sets to watch mesmerizing replays of a 
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So I walk past the rows of toddlers' jumpers, past the blue-haired ladies ordering around their grandkids. I sit down with my source. And he begins to tell me about a Pentagon plan that's even odder that the place where we're meeting.
The Marines have typically been the American military's emergency fighter, its "
The 
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Uh-oh. America's brand-spankin', new, 
FCS originally envisioned four types and sizes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, buzzing over soldiers' heads. The 
It's actually been a while since I've been sent an e-mail this nutty. Can the Air Force's 
I'm sure you'll all remember that happy day last March, when word broke that a Darpa-funded scientist was looking for ways to turn sharks into "
Apache ably fulfills its primary role, which is conducting anti-tank ambushes in the deep battle against enemy armor formations in approach march. However, it is doubtful if we will ever see a hostile enemy armor formations in an approach march situation in this century. The Army's needs will be close air support, armed reconnaissance, and helicopter escort, which Apache does right now. However 
We've all 
So you'd think that Jonas would be all into the idea of using these data-mining systems to predict who the next terrorist attacker might be.
"The Australian Defence Force has 
Linzer has to be 
Last Thursday, the Senate approved legislation within the 
I'm off to southern Lebanon for a couple weeks in order to check up on the U.N. force (including the bad-ass at left) that's supposedly keeping an eye on Hezbollah and intercepting Syrian infiltrators and Iranian weapons. With pro-Hez demonstrations 
Sometimes they buzz my apartment on the summit of Columbia Heights in northwest Washington, D.C. They're bright red with white stripes and black noses, and they make a noise like giant lawnmowers. They're Eurocopter 
But, just six weeks later, the Army appears to have reversed itself. According to 
Somewhere down around the bottom of the alphabet was China. Which is really too bad. Because one of the biggest choices Gates will have to make in his term at the Pentagon will be how to handle Beijing.
The Air Force has done a lot of safety testing on the Active Denial System. They have done every sort of test you could think of – and many you would never imagine. Thanks to Ed Hammond of the 
“Not that we have a plan for a [military] moon-base, but we might—you know?”
For years, solid state, electric lasers could only operate at a tiny fraction of that 100 kw mark. But the beams are getting stronger. Take Bob Yamamoto's 
But it might just be time to 
The stated purpose to educate DNI officials, their technologists, and civil liberties watchdogs on what current and emerging technologies could be used to protect privacy rights during the collection and analysis of intelligence. These broad — and largely informal — discussions are being held against the backdrop of increased surveillance and electronic monitoring by the government as it pursues terrorist suspects.
Heads up, Navy scientists! If you want to perform "severe or unusual intrusions, either physical or psychological, on human subjects," you're going to need approval from the Under Secretary of the Navy.
Now, Aviation Week is weighing in, to say that 
