Our boy Bob Cox at the Ft. Worth Star Telegram sent me a hilarious blurb he wrote for his paper on an embarrassing admission by one of Bell's top officials recently.
Bob spotted an interesting little vehicle prototype a few years ago at the international air show in Farnborough and wrote about the thing, which looks a bit like Luke Skywalker's land speeder from Star Wars IV, and it sort of ended there...
Tuesday,July 18, 2006
Edition: Tarrant, Section: Business, Page C1 FARNBOROUGH, England — George Jetson would have loved this one. If only he’d been a space cop, not a sprocket-company employee.
On Monday at the Farnborough International Airshow, Bell Helicopter announced that it will team with an Israeli company to develop a futuristic aircraft that would allow soldiers and police far greater mobility in cities.
The X-Hawk, as envisioned by Bell, could hold a pilot and up to 11 troops. It could navigate congested urban areas by flying above narrow streets and between closely spaced buildings.
Propelled by two jet turbine engines that would drive pusher propellers and downward-thrust lift fans, similar to those on the short-takeoff-vertical-landing version of the F-35 Lightning II, the X-Hawk could operate in spaces far more confined than a helicopter can.
Mark Gibson, Bell’s vice president of advanced concept development, said the X-Hawk is not something out of a science fiction film.
"People look at this and say Star Wars, but they’ve been building these since the 1950s," Gibson said.
That is until a little luncheon last week with the Fort Worth chamber of commerce where a curious attendee asked Bell CEO Richard Millman what that weird thing in the corner of the hanger was...
The prototype, a sort of airborne hovercraft, is still sitting in a hangar at Bell’s Alliance Airport facility. And CEO Richard Millman apparently has no intention of pursuing the project.
At a Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce luncheon hosted by Bell at the Alliance hangar Thursday, Millman was asked what the odd-looking object in the corner was.
"How embarrassing," Millman said sheepishly, as if asked about a daffy relative wandering loose.
"That was a mistake. Built before I got here. I wish we’d never done it."
And Millman is right. Too vulnerable, too slow, too rickety. But kind of a cool idea. I've got to admit, I wouldn't mind giving one a test drive over the crowded commuter routes of the DC area. And hey, the Jetsons know it's inevitable, right?
(Kudos to Bob Cox)
-- Christian
Introducing: The LAW-ski
EDITOR'S NOTE:Greetings folks...I've been in touch with David Crane from Defense Review who was interested in a little content swap between our two organizations and I thought I'd give it a whirl. This is his first entry in the experiment and I'm hoping we can get a little feedback from you folks on some of his more provocative content.
My good friend and professional contact, prolific infantry small arms/machine gun designer Jim Sullivan (a.k.a. L James Sullivan), has complained to me quite a bit about U.S. military infantry warfighters not having an American version of the Russian RPG-7 / RPG-7V shoulder-launched, anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade weapon system (recoilless rifle) at their disposal to match our current and potential future enemies’ RPG-7s / RPG-7Vs. The advantages of the RPG-7 anti-tank weapon system are several.
First, the size of the RPG-7’s warhead/projectile is not limited to the size of the launcher tube, so you can use variable-size warheads that carry more payload and greater penetrative capability than an M72 LAW (Light Anti-Tank Weapon a.k.a. Light Anti-Armor Weapon) 66mm HEAT warhead. Second, the RPG-7’s reloadable/reusable aspect allows the user to carry a quiver of different types of RPG rounds (i.e. standard HEAT warhead, dual-HEAT warhead, and thermobaric rocket-propelled grenades) on his back and quickly choose the best one for the job, load it, fire it at the target, and then reach back and grab the next one in the quiver (or have his buddy grab it for him), load it, and fire it again, which may offer some tactical advantages over carrying multiple disposable rocket launchers on his back. And third, both the the RPG-7 and enhanced-armor-penetration-capable RPG-29 Vampir (Vampire) recoilless rifles‘ respective launcher tubes, ammunition (grenade rounds), and training requirements are significantly less expensive than the U.S. military’s closest equivalents, the M3 Carl-Gustaf 84mm Recoilless Rifle / Multi-Role Man-Portable Anti-Tank Weapon a.k.a. M3 Carl-Gustav Recoilless Anti-Tank Rifle made by Saab AB a.k.a. Saab Bofors Dynamics and the Shoulder-launched Multipurpose Assault Weapon (SMAW) MK153 Mod 0, which is an 83mm multi-purpose recoilless rifle.
The M3 Carl-Gustaf is, no doubt, an excellent weapon system, but it is cost-prohibitive (i.e. too expensive) for many armies to procure it in large numbers. The M3 Carl-Gustaf’s relatively high cost (launcher, ammo, and training) has even contributed to its relatively limited numbers in the U.S. military inventory. The U.S. version is designated as the M3 MAAWS (Multi-role Anti-Armor Anti-personnel Weapon System), and is primarily in use with U.S. military Special Operations Forces (SOF) under USSOCOM a.k.a. SOCOM.
Enter the good folks at Airtronic USA, Inc. who have recently developed an American-version a.k.a. Amerikansky RPG-7 / RPG-7V with a couple of M4/M4A1-Carbine-type features that U.S. military infantry warfighters should enjoy (see features below), and it’s about time somebody did. Quite frankly, an American-made RPG-7 / RPG-7V system is long, long overdue.
Airtronic USA RPG-7 Features:
- Mil-Std-1913 Quad Rail System for mounting combat opics (optical sights), flip-up BUIS (Back Up Iron Sights), aiming lasers/illuminators, tactical white lights, and vertical foregips
- Flip-Up BUIS
- AR-15 Carbine-type Vertical Foregrip
- AR-15/M16 Pistol Grip
- M4/M4A1 Carbine Collapsible/Telescoping Buttstock. Read more at DefenseReview.com...
-- Christian
Air Force Congratulates Self for WMD Intel Failure
O.K. folks, let's pick some scabs here...
It may be chalked up by historians as the most catastrophic intelligence failure of all time, but for the Air Force, it seems to be an opportunity to dance in the end zone.
One of the main justifications for the invasion of Iraq -- what many critics say offered the Bush administration a bumper sticker sales pitch for overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003 -- was the contention that Baghdad had stockpiles of WMD that was too great a risk to allow to potentially slip into terrorist hands.
Now, I beg you dear reader not to rehash this argument...that's not the point of the post. But while nearly everyone in the U.S. (and foreign) security establishment deserves at least some penalty for getting it wrong, the Air Force deserves laurels for making that crashing intel screw up possible.
Listening to Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, the Air Force's top Global Strike commander and 8th Air Force chief, at a breakfast meeting today with reporters in Washington I was struck by the contention that it was indeed the Air Force's success that led to the Bush administration (and nearly the entire intel community) failure on WMD in Iraq.
Listen to this:
"We're real excited about the success of Northern Watch and Southern Watch which was there to enforce the U.N. Security Council resolutions -- two of them, one for the north, of course, was to protect the Kurds, in the south, the Shiia, but the third one had to do with preventing Saddam Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction which was a pretty successful operation."
Of course, the logic follows that Elder has a point here. But I guess it took the passing of the previous administration for a top Air Force general to get the gumption to actually celebrate the service's contribution to an intelligence failure that led to an invasion of Iraq and its bloody aftermath.
All I can say is "Air Power!"
-- Christian
HULC-ing Out in Afghanistan
In case you didn't see this elsewhere, Lockheed Martin recently unveiled a down-scale competitor to the exoskeleton wars. At the February Association of the US Army symposium, LockMart introduced its Human Universal Load Carrier system.
According to LockMart, the HULC can help a Soldier carry up to 200 pounds "with minimal effort."
HULC transfers the weight from heavy loads to the ground through the battery-powered, titanium legs of the lower-body exoskeleton. An advanced onboard micro-computer ensures the exoskeleton moves in concert with the individual. HULC’s completely un-tethered, hydraulic-powered anthropomorphic exoskeleton design allows for deep squats, crawls and upper-body lifting with minor exertion.
Look, you know I'm partial to Troy Hurtubise's Trojan II, but I've got to hand it to LockMart -- the HULC seems to take the middle ground between being a full-on exoskeleton and a passive assistance device to help carry heavy loads. I can see 240 gunners and mortarmen eating this thing up, trudging through the Afghan hills a lot more easily than before. Maybe the HULC could give planners more options by making organic indirect fire support a viable alternative for platoons in the bush.
Obviously it looks a bit ungainly in the video, but in the end, if it does what the video shows and with a few ergonomic tweaks, we'll see a workable option in the field soon. With all the news about load stress on Soldiers' bodies these days, why not use technology to ease the burden?
-- Christian
When You Just Gotta Go
Those of us who’ve laid there for hours on end, watching a suspected insurgent ORP, or gathering intel on that homicide suspect before the knuckle-draggers go serve the warrant, understand that adult diapers aren’t the best answer to the body’s biological imperatives (particularly with regards to matters scatological). The same thing is true (and possibly even more serious, just ask them) for those poor bastards trying to make it through a heroic run of Utgard Keep in one night, or attempting to finish Dire Maul while suffering gastrointestinal distress.
Well, the Japanese have created something that will not only eliminate those troubles, it’ll let you leave the atmosphere without crapping yourself. This space diaper is designed to use powerful suction to gather up all the nastiness created when nature calls. Sensors strategically placed around your ass and crotch let the diaper know when to activate, and it will even dry and clean up its wearer after the fact. JAXA, Japan’s equivalent to our NASA, wants to have the space diaper finished and ready for deployment within the next five years. That’s conceivably in time for the guys slated for deployment in OEF XXIV or so...
CAPE CANAVERAL - NASA is telling museums across the country that have expressed interest in obtaining a genuine space shuttle that it's really going to cost them.
How much? A mere $42 million -- including $6 million for shipping and handling.
That's NASA's price tag for cleaning up each of the three remaining shuttles -- now scheduled to be retired in 2010 -- and delivering one to an airport near the museum.
NASA has never charged institutions such as the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum -- which wants at least one of the orbiters -- for rockets, capsules and other artifacts.
But Wednesday, the agency issued a "Request for Information" to gauge museums' interest in obtaining a shuttle -- and the depth of their pockets. At least five locations across the country -- including Kennedy Space Center -- have expressed interest in displaying an orbiter.
The RFI serves "to notify potential recipients of NASA's intent to require potential recipients to assume all costs associated with transfer of these assets," it states.
Another purpose is "identifying whether potential recipient organizations are capable of bearing the full cost of Space Shuttle Orbiter safing and final display preparation . . ."
"Safing" means decontamination of the ship's fuel systems -- including toxic hydrazine -- and removal of other safety and environmental hazards.
NASA spokesman Mike Curie said that, although NASA generally has not charged museums for relics, the agency recognizes that there is now a market for space artifacts. What's more, he said, some museums allowed Apollo-era relics to deteriorate because they got them for free.
-- Christian
Who's Going to Get Voted Off This Island
Well, we told you this was going to happen, but the Army just announced that it was setting up a presence in the Second Life virtual world.
The U.S. Army will open up two islands in Second Life in the next 30-45 days aimed at recruiting new soldiers. The plans were announced at the Army Science Conference this week, which has a heavy focus on immersive technologies. The project sounds similar to the current implementation of the Air Force’s MyBase, which opened in Second Life yesterday. Users will find a welcome center with information and links to contact a recruiter on one island and military-themed activities like rappelling, shooting, and parachuting on the other. Completing the activities will earn users points toward free Army-branded virtual goods.
You'll remember that we reported in a preview of the Army Science Conference that the service was planning to enter massively multiplayer online games with virtual humans to try and trick real ones into believing the digital Soldiers were made of more than 1s and 0s. Well, don't look now, but that digital dude in the cammo pants and jaunty beret could be giving you a virtual pitch to be an Army of One.
-- Christian
Mind Control -- For Real
Dr. Parmentola mentioned this video a colleague of his sent to him the other day, so I tracked it down and embeded it here for DT readers.
I just got finished reading an excellent SciFi book titled "Old Man's War" (I had already read the "Ghost Brigades") and it talks about a brain-embedded computer called a "brain pal." Well, it looks like we're closer to that than many had once thought.
-- Christian
Army Working on Science's Outer Limits
It's like something out of "The Terminator." Self-aware virtual humans, regenerating body parts on "nano-scaffolding," mind controlled weapons - all the stuff of movie robots, comic heroes and otherworldly tomes.
But for some, this kind of higher-than-high tech is as real as life and death.
Dr. John Parmentola, Director of Research and Laboratory Management with the Army's science and technology office, told military bloggers Nov. 3 that the Army is "making science fiction into reality" by creating realistic holographic images, generating virtual humans and diving into quantum computing.
It may sound like a trailer for the next "Star Trek" installment, but Parmentola is deadly serious.
For the last several years, the Army has kept a close eye on research into areas of science that might have once been called "paranormal;" its practitioners drummed out of the academy as kooks and nut-jobs. But now the idea of implanting specific memories or erasing damaging ones, for example, isn't mere fantasy.
Dr. Joe Tsien, a neurobiologist at the Medical College of Georgia and co-director of the Brain Discovery Institute, has been able to erase certain memories from mice subjected to traumatic experiences in a laboratory environment, Parmentola said. From a practical standpoint, the Army could use this kind of technology to help Soldiers who've been psychologically scarred by staring death straight in the eye.
"You can imagine people who have horrifying memories, it would be great if we could eliminate them so this way they're not plagued by these memories uncontrollably," Parmentola said. "We have Soldiers that have this problem, like PTSD and traumatic brain injury, but there are many other examples that occur in the civilian world."
The Army plans to highlight Tsien's and other research into the ragged edges of science fiction at the 26th Army Science Conference in Orlando next month, where experts in neurorobotics, high-tech computer displays and quantum physics will explain how Soldiers could benefit from the types of radical science most have only seen on episodes of the "X-Files."
Take mind communication, for example. Experiments have shown that certain thoughts generate electrical impulses on the surface of the scalp, Parmentola said. Think commandos who can stealthily communicate without using their voice or Soldiers who control weapons with their thoughts from a distance over a wireless connection.
"You could wear a cap that is sensitive to these electrical impulses, pick up the pattern and amplify those small signals send it over a wire [or wirelessly] connect it to a device," Parmentola said. "So if you think of a thought 'turn on,' it will automatically turn on a computer or that device."
Or how about regenerative medicine? Parmentola said researchers aren't far away from being able to grow back body parts - both internal organs and limbs - that have been lost in combat or other accidents. The technique focuses on the use if molecular-sized particles that act as a kind of scaffolding to support the growth of body tissue - say, a finger - and dissolves as the biological material solidifies.
It's not that unlike what a salamander can do when it loses a limb.
"We're beginning to understand how this occurs and if we can, it holds the hope of, being able to regrow limbs on people," Parmentola said.
Then some of this space-aged research takes a turn into the Einsteinian world of quantum mechanics and particle physics - places most mere mortals who simply hump hills with ammo-laden rucks fear to tread.
"Quantum ghost imaging," for example, is as complicated as it sounds. Basically it's a phenomenon of physics that allows images to be rendered through the pairing of photons that do not reflect or bounce off an object, but off of other photons that did, thereby creating a sort of "ghost" image of it. This technology would enable the Army to generate images of personnel and equipment through clouds and smoke.
"It's like having a tracing tool … that goes over the image and that's connected to another one on a piece of paper that exactly imitates what it is that you are tracing with the other pen," Parmentola said. "It takes advantage of a remarkable property of quantum mechanics to try and do this."
And if you do end up at the Army Science Conference next month, don't be startled by the three-dimensional holographic image of a soldier talking to you (not that the regenerated arm, mind-controlled computer or implanted memories won't freak you out enough) as you walk down the hall. It might just be the virtual human Army researchers are creating to make simulators and war games more realistic for training, Parmentola said.
They're working on creating "photorealistic looking and acting human beings" that can think on their own, have emotions and talk in local slang.
"I actually interact with virtual humans in terms of asking them questions and they're responding," Parmentola said.
To test out the computer generated humans' "humanity," Parmentola and his researchers want to unleash some of their cyber Soldiers into so-called "massively multi-player online games" such as "World of Warcraft" or "Eve Online" - games frequented by thousands of super-competitive human players in teams of virtual characters fighting battles that can last for days.
"We want to use the massively multi-player online game as an experimental laboratory to see if they're good enough to convince humans that they're actually human," he said.
-- Christian
Invisibility and the 'Super Lens'
Last week we had the laser gunship, this week it's the invisibility cloak.
Sounds a lot like science fiction but you'd be surprised how close Army researchers are to actually attaining the Holy Grail of invisibility.
According to Dr. Richard Hammond, a theoretical physicist with the Optical Physics and Imaging Science department of the Army Research Office, engineers are closer than they've ever been to developing a material that can bend light around an object rendering it invisible to certain wavelengths -- light being one of them.
So far scientists have successfully tested so-called "meta-materials" -- ones that are man made and built at the molecular level -- that can render an object invisible to microwaves, which has a larger wavelength than light, Hammond said.
"This is a new paradigm for the science of light," he said during a DoD bloggers' roundtable today. "It can be bent [using these materials] in an almost arbitrary way."
There are some significant obstacles to making a usable "invisibility cloak," however. The main one is the material itself. Since it has to be build at the molecular level, making enough material to cover, say, a truck is still out of reach, Hammond said. Also, so far the science is there to block one kind of wavelength, but not another. So you could render an object invisible on the UV spectrum but not the visible light one at the same time. And if you made something invisible to the human eye, it would be impossible without some kind of other sensor for whoever's behind the object to see anything since you're robbing him of light.
"But in early applications we could shield an object from radar," Hammond added.
Closer to fielding is a similar technology using meta-materials that can enhance optics to see things at the cellular or even molecular level -- "smaller than the wavelength of light," Hammond said, or less than .5 microns.
These "Super Lenses" could be used to detect chemical or biological agents, focus visible light to a single point to "uncloak" cloaked objects or help recharge solar-celled batteries, and could be applied to microscope lenses to increase magnification ten times, Hammond said.
Hammond has been working with UC Berkley, University of Colorado at Boulder, Perdue and Princeton on these efforts under a three-year, $1 million grant.
-- Christian
I Just Can't Take it Anymore!
Those air conditioned trailers, the long nights of work in a comfortable chair, sleeping in my own bed after duty, being so close to Las Vegas!...Whatever...
Just when you thought it couldn't get any more pathetic, something like this pops up:
Predator Pilots Suffering War Stress
MARCH AIR RESERVE BASE, Calif. - The Air National Guardsmen who operate Predator drones over Iraq via remote control, launching deadly missile attacks from the safety of Southern California 7,000 miles away, are suffering some of the same psychological stresses as their comrades on the battlefield.
Working in air-conditioned trailers, Predator pilots observe the field of battle through a bank of video screens and kill enemy fighters with a few computer keystrokes. Then, after their shifts are over, they get to drive home and sleep in their own beds.
But that whiplash transition is taking a toll on some of them mentally, and so is the way the unmanned aircraft's cameras enable them to see people getting killed in high-resolution detail, some officers say.
In a fighter jet, "when you come in at 500-600 mph, drop a 500-pound bomb and then fly away, you don't see what happens," said Col. Albert K. Aimar, who is commander of the 163rd Reconnaissance Wing here and has a bachelor's degree in psychology. But when a Predator fires a missile, "you watch it all the way to impact, and I mean it's very vivid, it's right there and personal. So it does stay in people's minds for a long time."
Now, far be it for me to pass judgement on some of these pilots who feel the stresses of their unique job, but let's hope this isn't just another shot at "relevance" by an Air Force that feels sidelined by two major ground wars in the Middle East.
In interviews with five of the dozens of pilots and sensor operators at the various bases, none said they had been particularly troubled by their mission, but they acknowledged it comes with unique challenges, and sometimes makes for a strange existence.
"It's bizarre, I guess," said Lt. Col. Michael Lenahan, a Predator pilot and operations director for the 196th Reconnaissance Squadron here. "It is quite different, going from potentially shooting a missile, then going to your kid's soccer game."
Among the stresses cited by the operators and their commanders: the exhaustion that comes with the shift work of this 24-7 assignment; the classified nature of the job that demands silence at the breakfast table; and the images transmitted via video.
A Predator's cameras are powerful enough to allow an operator to distinguish between a man and a woman, and between different weapons on the ground. While the resolution is generally not high enough to make out faces, it is sharp, commanders say.
Often, the military also directs Predators to linger over a target after an attack so that the damage can be assessed.
"You do stick around and see the aftermath of what you did, and that does personalize the fight," said Col. Chris Chambliss, commander of the active-duty 432nd Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nev. "You have a pretty good optical picture of the individuals on the ground. The images can be pretty graphic, pretty vivid, and those are the things we try to offset. We know that some folks have, in some cases, problems."
I wonder how embarrassed these pilots are gonna be when they see their quotes used for this kind of story because I guarantee the reporter didn't have this lede in mind when he went into it.
And here's what those "stressed out" Reaper pilots see:
Sorry, but that doesn't stress me out that much...
FORMER NASA astronaut and moonwalker Dr Edgar Mitchell - a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission - has stunningly claimed aliens do exist.
And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions - but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.
Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as 'little people who look strange to us.'
He said supposedly real-life ET's were similar to the traditional image of a small frame, large eyes and head.
Chillingly, he claimed our technology is "not nearly as sophisticated" as theirs and "had they been hostile", he warned "we would be been gone by now".
Dr Mitchell, along with with Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard, holds the record for the longest ever moon walk, at nine hours and 17 minutes following their 1971 mission.
Was Mitchell a technical advisor to the new X-Files movie? Heck of a promo...
"I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real," Dr Mitchell said.
"It's been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.
"I've been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it's been happening quite a bit."
So, I guess we are not alone.
Officials from NASA, however, were quick to play the comments down.
In a statement, a spokesman said: "NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe.
Of course the event got everybody up in a lather about Iran's capability and came darn close to a signing ceremony with SecState Rice and the Czech foreign minister on missile defense cooperation. But to me they sort of looked like '50s-era model rockets. Whoooo...scaaaaary....
[Photo from New York Times online.]
Anyway, sharp-eyed photogs have noticed that the smoke billowing from the launch can be attributed to three rockets, not four. And a photo later distributed by the AP shows three rockets with a fourth launcher that looks like it might have been a dud (or another Photoshopped image).
As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo appeared on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.
Agence France-Presse said that it obtained the image from the Web site of Sepah News, the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, on Wednesday. But there was no sign of it there later in the day. Today, The Associated Press distributed what appeared to be a nearly identical photo from the same source, but without the fourth missile...
For its part, Agence France-Presse retracted its four-missile version this morning, saying that the image was “apparently digitally altered” by Iranian state media. The fourth missile “has apparently been added in digital retouch to cover a grounded missile that may have failed during the test,” the agency said.
So, looks as if the Iranians are trying to get a rise out of America and the Europeans with a little artistic license, I guess. And one has to wonder whether that country's threats are really credible.
When the words foreign object debris (FOD) come to mind the last thing someone thinks about is an owl. On the morning of March 17 on board USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75), an owl is exactly what was found. What might have been a mishap, ended on a happier note thanks to a few Sailors' attention to detail.
"I was the safety behind the 300 jet. That's why I probably ended up there first," said Aviation Structural Mechanic (Equipment) 3rd class Jeremy Smith, a Sailor attached to the "Ragin' Bulls" of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 37.
He was called over by Aviation Electronics Technician Airman Apprentice Tony McJohnston, also part of VFA 37. What they found was a screech owl.
Aviation Structural Mechanic 2nd class Zachary Gorman who is attached to Helicopter Antisubmarine Squadron (HS) 7, the "Dusty Dogs," is a licensed falconer in the U.S. He was called to the scene to check the status of the bird.
"When I got there, I checked him over to make sure he didn't have any broken wings and if he was dehydrated or malnourished," said Gorman.
Gorman and the flight deck medical team nursed the owl, or "Fod" as Flight Deck Control liked to call him, back to health by giving him a shot of sugar water to help rehydrate him.
Gorman said after treating the bird they found no life-threatening problems.
"For the most part the bird was healthy, just a little tired," said Gorman. He also made sure "Fod" was okay in a box the crew dubbed his makeshift "stateroom." Gorman has been working with birds of prey since the age of 12 and said he was more than happy to help the animal.
"I've worked with a lot of owls throughout the years, but I never thought I'd have to deal with one on a carrier in the middle of the Gulf" said Gorman.
The owl could not reside on board indefinitely so they came up with another plan.
(Gouge NC and Aero-News)
-- Christian
You're a LIAR!
Just when you thought things couldn't get any weirder, here's something I ran across today that adds to the mountain of gadgets and gizmos intended to smoke out insurgents hiding in plain sight.
FORT JACKSON, S.C. - The Pentagon will issue hand-held lie detectors this month to U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan, pushing to the battlefront a century-old debate over the accuracy of the polygraph.
The Defense Department says the portable device isn't perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing. The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well. “We're not promising perfection — we've been very careful in that,” said Donald Krapohl, special assistant to the director at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, the midwife for the new device. “What we are promising is that, if it's properly used, it will improve over what they are currently doing.”
The new device, known by the acronym PCASS, for Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, uses a commercial TDS Ranger hand-held personal digital assistant with three wires connected to sensors attached to the hand. An interpreter will ask a series of 20 or so questions in Persian, Arabic or Pashto: "Do you intend to answer my questions truthfully?" "Are the lights on in this room" "Are you a member of the Taliban?" The operator will punch in each answer and, after a delay of a minute or so for processing, the screen will display the results: "Green," if it thinks the person has told the truth, "Red" for deception, and "Yellow" if it can't decide.
The PCASS cannot be used on U.S. personnel, according to a memo authorizing its use, signed in October by the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.
Now, I've been polygraphed before and I gotta tell you, it sucks. I don't like the whole idea of this hand-held lie detector, but I guess I'll hold off final judgment until I see how it works. The Army's bought 94 of the systems and intends to deploy them to Iraq and Afghanistan.
My problem is the device seems to use the same rationale for detecting deception as the full-sized box -- sensing stress reactions in the hands, etc. But if you're an Afghan villager being questioned by American soldiers wearing body armor and carrying rifles -- and oh by the way, speaking to you in a language you don't comprehend -- how are you NOT going to sweat?
It seems like one of those good ideas on paper, but it uses flawed logic to get to the answer.
But still, it's an interesting report...
-- Christian
Dragon Skin Theft...Or Not...?
Here's an item that's actually a pretty interestinjg mystery. I was tipped off by Pinnacle Armor president Murray Neal, who sent me a link to the Soldiers for the Truth site (a huge backer of Neal's Dragon Skin armor) where they're looking into a hullabaloo that's erupted over some wayward DS vests.
It seems that a couple of the 30 Level IV Dragon Skin vests Neal sent to PEO Soldier back in 2006 for that series of first article tests the Army claimed (and we agreed) failed miserably have wound up on eBay. Soldiers for the Truth reports the vests showed up in February with a list price of $3,500.
The plot thickens with a local TV station in Fresno, Calif., taking Neal's bait and doing an in-depth report on the mysterious armor sale. They contacted none other than the Army's "Mr. Body Armor," Karl Masters, who says his office is being investigated over the eBay armor.
I contacted sources in PEO Soldier who clammed up, saying: "The Army, in cooperation with law enforcement agencies, is currently investigating the alleged theft of U.S. Government property and it would be inappropriate to comment on the progress of the investigation at this time."
That's a convenient way of saying "no comment" but I can understand, with their backs against the wall, why the Army would take a pass on throwing fuel on the fire.
I have no idea how this would have happened, but it sure is weird. The government is obligated to hold onto those items forever -- and certainly it is unethical, and maybe illegal, to sell them over an online auction site. The idea that Karl Masters, who I know pretty well from years of covering this, would sell these items on eBay is pretty far fetched in my mind. I know he is the root of all evil to DS backers, but in my experience, he's an intellect to be reckoned with, but no crook.
Could someone down the line in the Army testing chain have done something stupid like this? Surely.
I'd welcome any inside scoop our readers have on this. I'll keep kicking over some rocks to see if I can drum up more.
My understanding is that early attempts at this "light bending" technique required bulky power sources and crazy optics. But from this Washington Post piece, it looks as if materials science is beginning to catch up.
Seems to me at least in the early stages, vehicles and aircraft could use the technology since they can carry more weight and generate a lot of power.
And heck, I could sure use some of this stuff on my hunting forays...those damned deer keep spotting me...
From the Post...
Their Deepest Darkest Discovery
Black is getting blacker.
Researchers in New York reported this month that they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made -- about 30 times as dark as the government's current standard for blackest black.
The material, made of hollow fibers, is a Roach Motel for photons -- light checks in, but it never checks out. By voraciously sucking up all surrounding illumination, it can give those who gaze on it a dizzying sensation of nothingness.
"It's very deep, like in a forest on the darkest night," said Shawn-Yu Lin, a scientist who helped create the material at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. "Nothing comes back to you. It's very, very, very dark."
But scientists are not satisfied. Using other new materials, some are trying to manufacture rudimentary Harry Potter-like cloaks that make objects inside of them literally invisible under the right conditions -- the pinnacle of stealthy technology.
Both advances reflect researchers' growing ability to manipulate light, the fleetest and most evanescent of nature's offerings. The nascent invisibility cloak now being tested, for example, is made of a material that bends light rays "backward," a weird phenomenon thought to be impossible just a few years ago.
Known as transformation optics, the phenomenon compels some wavelengths of light to flow around an object like water around a stone. As a result, things behind the object become visible while the object itself disappears from view.
"Cloaking is just the tip of the iceberg," said Vladimir Shalaev, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University and an expert in the fledgling field. "With transformation optics you can do many other tricks," perhaps including making things appear to be located where they are not and focusing massive amounts of energy on microscopic spots.
U.S. military and intelligence agencies have funded the cloaking research "for obvious reasons," said David Schurig, a physicist and electrical engineer at North Carolina State University who recently designed and helped test a cloaking device. In that experiment, a shielded object a little smaller than a hockey puck was made invisible to a detector that uses microwaves to "see."
The first working cloaks will be limited that way, he said -- able to steer just a limited part of the light spectrum around objects -- and it could be years before scientists make cloaks that work for all wavelengths, including the visible spectrum used by the human eye.
But even cloaks that work on just a few key wavelengths could offer huge benefits, making objects invisible to laser beams used for weapons targeting, for example, or rendering an enemy's night goggles useless because objects would be invisible to the infrared rays those devices use.
The Defense Department did not fund development of the new blacker-than-black material, created by Lin and his colleagues. But military officials were among the first to call after a description of the work appeared in this month's issue of the journal Nano Letters, Lin said in an interview.
Substances that absorb every smidgeon of incoming visible light could complement existing stealth coatings that absorb radar waves, Lin said. He and others emphasized, however, that there are also peaceful and more immediate applications for the blackest stuff on Earth.
Solar panels coated with it would be much more efficient than those coated with conventional black paint, which reflects 5 percent or more of incoming light. Telescopes lined with it would sop up random flecks of incidental light, providing a blacker background to detect faint stars.
And a wide array of heat detectors and energy-measuring devices, including climate-tracking equipment on satellites, would become far more accurate than they are today if they were coated with energy-grabbing superblack.
That helps explain why Lin has been fielding queries from solar-energy companies such as SolFocus of Mountain View, Calif., and the European Space Agency.
"The more black the material the better," said Gerald Fraser, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that specializes in fine measurements and industrial standards.
That agency offers scientists a chemical mix it calls "standard black," which for years has been the defining measure of blackness. Photographers and printers use it to calibrate their gray scales. Industrial radiologists use it to calibrate X-ray imaging systems that detect radiation or hidden defects in building materials.
That black reflects about 1.4 percent of incoming visible light, and in recent years it has become somewhat outmoded. In 2003, scientists developed a substance made of nickel and phosphorus that reflected just 0.17 percent of visible light, winning it a Guinness World Records listing and kudos in Time magazine as one of that year's 300 "coolest inventions."
The newest black -- which when held next to something conventionally black, such as a tuxedo jacket, is noticeably blacker -- reflects just 0.045 percent of visible light.
It is made of carbon nanotubes: microscopic, hollow fibers whose walls are just one atom thick. Importantly, the fibers are widely spaced, providing plenty of space to allow light in and almost no surfaces to bounce it back out.
"There are a lot of materials that are very absorbing of light so that once the light gets in, very little is reflected. That is not the big issue," said John Pendry, a physics professor at Imperial College London. "The big issue is persuading the light to go in there in the first place" -- something the New York team accomplished by spacing the nanotubes so widely...
While Lin and his colleagues, including Pulickel Ajayan, now at Rice University, pursue applications for their superblack, Pendry and others are hoping to go further by perfecting complete invisibility. The big difference is that a superblack object, even if invisible to the eye, still casts a shadow behind it, while an object shielded by an invisibility cloak does not.
Pendry pioneered much of modern thinking about how to attain full invisibility using "metamaterials" -- substances engineered to manhandle light. Ordinary matter, such as glass or water, slows and bends light as it passes through. Metamaterials contain bits of metal or other substances embedded in precise patterns to make the light bend in an opposite direction from normal paths.
"In a sense you have some negative space," Pendry said. "The light appears to go backward in space."
The first generation, metamaterial "cloaks" are not thin and flexible like Harry Potter's imagined version but are inches thick and solid, resembling canisters, making them able to hide a stationary object but not a moving person. But the science is progressing quickly, physicist Schurig said.
To make a thin, flexible metamaterial cloak, Schurig said, "is technically challenging but not fundamentally impossible." And although no cloak can yet make objects fully invisible to the human eye, he added, it may not be long before scientists can bend the visible spectrum enough to make an object hard to see...
As if titanium tubing and exotic-alloy farings weren't enough, now the Air Force is getting all Gucci on us and fashioning airplane parts out of jewelry...sort of.
From Aviation Week:
Researchers at the University of Dayton in Ohio are preparing an Air Force report showing the corrosion-protection potential that results from prodding oysters to produce pearl-like coatings on metals. Senior research scientist Doug Hansen says his team has manipulated oyster blood cells, prompting them to deposit nacre, a natural calcium carbonate ceramic, onto aluminum, titanium and stainless-steel alloys. The deposits are “fracture resistant” and, as coatings, “they can last a lifetime,” he says. The work is funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
I guess if this happens, Air Force maintenance managers are going to have to regularly case the local pawn shops for the flashy pearl-coated parts.
(Gouge: NC)
-- Christian
Air Force Ignores UFO Threat
And they laughed at Dennis Kucinich, didn't they?
This hot off the AP presses:
Several dozen people — including a pilot, county constable and business owners — insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.
"People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it's the end of times," said Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot who said the object he saw last week was a mile long and half a mile wide. "It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts."
While federal officials insist there's a logical explanation, locals swear that it was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the ground than an airplane. They also said the object's lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane. People in several towns who reported seeing it over several weeks have offered similar descriptions of the object.
Machinist Ricky Sorrells said friends made fun of him when he told them he saw a flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet over a pasture behind his Dublin home. But he decided to come forward after reading similar accounts in the Stephenville Empire-Tribune.
"You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal," Sorrells said. "It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I'm not crazy."
Sorrells said he has seen the object several times. He said he watched it through his rifle's telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts or bolts.
Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, said no F-16s or other aircraft from his base were in the area the night of Jan. 8, when most people reported the sighting.
Lewis said the object may have been an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes. Lights from the aircraft would seem unusually bright and may appear orange from the setting sun.
"I'm 90 percent sure this was an airliner," Lewis said. "With the sun's angle, it can play tricks on you."
Officials at the region's two Air Force bases — Dyess in Abilene and Sheppard in Wichita Falls — also said none of their aircraft were in the area last week. The Air Force no longer investigates UFOs.
The Air Force no longer investigates UFOs? Then what the heck do we need the F-22 for?
-- Ward
The Freaky F-35 Lid
I mean, is this the craziest helmet ever? It looks like bogies could die of fright before being shot down.
Gazette and Herald (Wiltshire, UK)
Fighter pilots get a clear vision
By Gazette Reporter
Futuristic new helmets will enable fighter jet pilots to see through their own aircraft, the Ministry of Defence said today.
The head gear being developed for the hi-tech F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is being tested by MoD scientists at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire.
An MoD spokesman said: "Unlike other jet aircraft the JSF, which is planned to replace the Harrier, does not have a traditional head-up display
Instead the computerised symbology will be displayed directly on to the pilot's visors, providing the pilot with cues for flying, navigating and fighting the aircraft.
"It even will superimpose infra-red imagery on to the visor to allow the pilot to look through the cockpit floor at night and see the world below - like something out of Terminator.
"This is absolutely the cutting edge of technology. No other helmet will be able to do this."
The head gear, currently at prototype stage, is being developed by Vision Systems International and Helmet Integrated Systems Limited.
(Gouge: NC)
-- Christian
San Fran Again
First USS Iowa. Then high school ROTC. Then the Blue Angels. Now the US Marine Corp. How much more dis'in can the US Military take from the city and 'burbs by the bay?
A new advertising campaign by the Marine Corp has a their Silent Drill Team (an absolutely amazing display of precision and discipline) being filmed at various places around the US. You can see the products here.
When they wanted to film, on September 11 no less, on California Street in downtown San Francisco, the group was denied a permit to film. While initial inquiries by the press to Stefanie Coyote, the executive director of the San Francisco Film Commission, received the "unavailable to comment" response, Coyote later said to KGO-TV that "traffic control was the issue."
"Traffic control".
So what did the Marines do? They went to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area for the final segment of its "America's Marines" TV commercial then proceeded to New York City and filmed at Times Square where, apparently, traffic is less of an issue that in San Fran.
Yet another slap in the face of the US Military by a shrill anti-military area or a prudent exercising of civil traffic control by sage city elders?
When you absolutely, positively must crash that party you weren’t invited to, here’s your ride.
It’s sophisticated, yet rugged.
The white color scheme and United Nations logo stenciled on the side says “I’m willing to be reasonable about this. Someone must have forgotten to put me on the guest list.” But the smooth-bore 120 jutting from the turret says: “Though, if you’re not going to let me in, we’re gonna have a problem.”
Comfortable Corinthian leather bench seats that can accommodate all your scantily-clad groupies - and thick glass portals to keep the paparazzi at bay.
Oh, and did we forget the beverage cooler and milspec champagne bottle rack?
So when the pansies in Hollywood try to block your entrance to their post-production party in the Hills with their girlie-man Prius hybrids, just put this chick magnet in gear and drive right the hell over them.
A perfect distraction from a Friday that just keeps dragging on.
Best line: "We're not doing that anymore..."
Gay Bomb Recycled
The internet's been abuzz in the last few days with news about how the Pentagon's been working on a "gay bomb." We at DT can only say, "Tell us something we didn't know two-and-a-half years ago."
Here's what then-editor Noah Shachtman reported on January 6, 2005:
Instead of using guns and bombs, let's attack the enemies of freedom with bugs, rats, and horny gay men.
That seems to be the sentiment behind a 1994 Air Force proposal, unearthed by bioweapons-watchers at the Sunshine Project.
The document -- entitled "Harrassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals" -- strings together a couple of ideas for non-lethal agents that could mark an opponent, temporarily change his behavior, or "attract annoying creatures to an enemy position."
Were any of these proposals ever approved? I doubt it. But, boy, do I love the idea of Pentagon program managers dreaming up ways to use "sex attractant chemicals for bugs" as weapons. Or employing a "'sting/attack me' chemical that causes bees to attack." Such an agent "would especially effective for infiltration routes," the paper observes.
"Rodents and larger animals would [also] be candidates to be drawn to enemy positions," according to the proposal. So would other "stinging and biting bugs."
But as irritating as a swarm of bees or rats might be, it's nothing compared to the distraction generated by a man in heat. No wonder, then, that the Air Force document calls for "chemicals that affect human behavior so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely effected. One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."
If, for some reason, military scientists couldn't come up with an effective, sprayable Spanish Fly, well, there are still other possibilities to be explored. For instance: "a low toxicity compound" that creates "severe and lasting halitosis."
Bad breath, in other words.
THERE'S MORE: As if sprays to induce homosexual dalliances and rat attacks weren't problematic enough. In 1997, the Army let loose a proposal, calling for the "preparation of an 'odor index' to match known disagreeable odors to a specific culture, political/religious group or geographical region."
The work looks loving back on a 1944 project, "Who Me," that gave French resistance fighters lead foil tubes, packed with chemicals that produced a "fecal odor." But the plan backfired, this document notes, "when it was found that people in many areas of the world do not find 'fecal odor' to be offensive."
It's one of a number of Pentagon brainstorms, to try to target certain ethnic or geographic groups with non-lethal chemical weapons.
Against my better judgment, I want to add some legs to the story we posted today on the imminent release of Jack (Keith) Idema - the notorious mercenary/self-proclaimed “Super-Patriot” – from an Afghan prison where he was held on criminal charges for running his own little interrogation center/torture chamber.
I have been following this story for several years now, ever since Idema popped up early on in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as both a “humanitarian worker” who helped save National Geographic reporter Gary Scurka’s life and a covert special operative for the CIA (or some other super-secret, unknown, three-letter ‘OGA’) that helped single-handedly secure victory over the Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists for U.S. and Northern Alliance forces.
The embarrassing book “written” by Robin Moore in 2003 titled “The Hunt for bin Laden: Task Force Dagger” unmasked Idema as the primary source for the pitiful account and sent the blogosphere swirling. (That’s Idema on the cover)
By the way, Moore is famous for his first-person account of Army SF indoc - the only journalist ever to undergo the famous "Q" course - in the book titled "The Green Berets."
One of the most brilliant investigations of Idema’s various cons can be found at the Flogging the Simian blog. For years, the blog has tracked Idema’s self-promotion and questionable connections. Is he a former Army Special Forces operator? Was he hired by the CIA/State/US government to help insert spec ops personnel into Afghanistan, track bin Laden with his own mercenary group of has-beens and wannabes, deliver humanitarian aid to war refugees in northern Afghanistan, etc?
You be the judge. But I’ll tell you, this is one of the most entertaining and intriguing stories popping up during a long war that has since had very few of them. And with Idema’s release, we’re sure to hear much, much more about the U.S. government’s secret deals with said Super-Patriot to find the world’s most wanted men and single-handedly save America from the evil doers…
-- Christian
iPod Armor Update
DT just received an update on the iPod armor story. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the post, but thought I'd pass it along anyway since many of you have asked about Apple's follow-up, etc.
The iPod was how Kevin Garrad found out he was shot. This is the real story.
Kevin said he got into the fight with the insurgent and afterwards he did not know he was even shot. He said he returned to his bunk after the patrol, put on his earbuds and began to clean his weapon.
He said: “you get into a ritual out there.”
No music came on. He dug around in the pockets where he kept the iPod and pulled out the twisted hunk of metal that is in the pictures. He said that was how he found out that he had been shot during the fight. He was happy that his armor worked.
He said the upgraded armor he was wearing could stop the AK-47 round. It was not the newest armor that is in Iraq now, but it was an upgrade. This was his second iPod that he had brought to Iraq. The first had been damaged earlier and the store would not replace it, even with the additional warranty he purchased.
The pictures are what happens when an AK-47 bullet hits an iPod.
(Gouge:CM)
-- Christian
iPod Armor
Alright, how many gigs does it take to stop a 7.62 round?
I’m not sure, but if you look at this photo, it takes at least 20G to slow one down.
The pic may have already made the rounds on the net, but it’s worth a second look.
How about a little Good Friday contest?
Question: How many more tactical uses are out there for the ever-popular iPod?
(I’ll post the winning comments as they come in)
DT reader "mrnitropb" writes:
Use the chrome side as a tac mirror for looking around corners.
Use it to listen to Arabic/Farsi language tapes. English track listings for Arabic phrases, choose an aproppriate phrase and share the earbud with person.
Hook up a speaker for that "Ride of the Valkrie" effect before hitting a zone.
I have heard of use #3, though the tune was far more head-banging than Wagner...
...and "RJB1012" passes along his (tongue-in-cheek?) ideas:
turn it on and use it as a tactical light when entering a room
turning the ipod on and off so the light can be used for signalling
something to keep the POWs entertained....
take the old ipods, as an all out last resort, and just throw it at 'em
You gotta love this one. While coalition forces in Afghanistan gear up for a major assault against Taliban insurgents and al Qaeda holdouts, there was one small victory that took the edge off the seriousness of the impending Operation Achilles (which, by the way, is a much better name for such an operation, don’t you think? A lot better than “Together Forward” or something foofy like that).
NATO reports that key Taliban commander and suicide bomb-maker Mullah Mahmood was captured in southeast Kandahar province by vigilant Afghan National Army troops. But here’s the best part. Mahmood was dressed in drag.
NATO reports that the insurgent leader was trying to slip through a checkpoint wearing a burka when ANA soldiers noticed something wasn’t quite right about the ruse.
Maybe that traditional Muslim dress reveals a lot more than one might think?
-- Christian
Chewbacca Arrested in Hollywood!
Los Angeles Police arrested a man dressed as Chewbacca on Thursday. His crime: Head-butting a tour guide on the Hollywood Walk of Fame "who told the character he shouldn't be asking a tourist for money," reports KABC-TV.
A collection of oddball types roam the Walk of Fame, dressed like Tinseltown characters. They pose for pictures with out-of-towners -- usually, in exchange for a few coins. On Thursday, "Chewbacca was putting his arm around a tourist, and the tourist didn't want him there," explained a gaunt, dye-jobbed "Superman" to the Jimmy Kimmel Show. A Starline Tour employee told Chewie to back off. And as everyone knows, it's not wise to upset a wookie. "He head-butted him," Supes added. "The cops were called, and they came down, basically to arrest Chewbacca."
"I'd see him get upset at people, like for not tipping. Like they'd walk off. And he'd get really pissed. Right there and then, take the mask off and start chewing them out, cussing," said a nasal-voiced man wearing a Scream mask. "Even in front of kids."
"Now we want to make clear that this is not the actor who played Chewbacca in the movie, this is just the guy who plays him on the Hollywood Boulevard," a hapless KABC correspondent duly noted.
"I'm sure Han will come and shoot him out of jail and rescue him," Kimmel quipped.
200 Years of "Mind Control"
My Popular Mechanics piece on ‘bioelectromagnetic’ weapon reseach is now online, and as Sharon Weinberger’s intriguing Washington Post article last week made clear, there has been a great deal of military research into the area of "mind control" (though they would prefer to use the term "behavior modification.")
Many people believe they are being targeted by such weapons. Certainly it's a growing phenomenon in the U.S.:
''In the United States, you don't see nearly as many mentally ill people anymore who have delusions and hallucinations with regard to God and the saints as you did 20 or 30 years ago, when I first doing this work. In our secular society, it's more a matter of, well, the President or the C.I.A. is affecting my behavior by radio waves or microwave receivers in my teeth.''
But the problem goes way back. One case from London was James Matthews, who said he was being influenced by an implant in his head by a gang using a weird electromagnetic device. This group, one of many, he called the Air Loom Gang, and among the tortures they inlicted on him were implanting thoughts ('kiteing'), stopping him from speaking ('fluid locking’), cutting his circulation ('sudden death squeezing’) and ‘brain lengthening’ which would 'cause good sense to appear as insanity, and convert truth to libel'.
So far so typical, except that the case was described in 1810 by John Haslam, the apothecary at the notorious ‘Bedlam’ – correctly the Bethlehem Hospital , the original lunatic asylum. This was the first ever full length clinical description of a single patient, one apparently suffering from delusions of control.
So was Matthews simply a lunatic? Bedlam staff said so, but two doctors declared him completely sane. It seems that Matthews was not incarcerated on medical grounds but on the orders of Lord Liverpool, the Home Office minister, who Matthews had accused of being part of a nefarious plot.
Matthews claimed he had been negotiating a peace settlement with France and had been betrayed. Oddly enough, some of Matthews’s story appears to be true; when his mission to Paris failed the French threw him into prison. He behaved quite sanely; in Bedlam Matthews learned architectural drawing, and drew up plans a new hospital building. The Governors gave him £30 for his work and some of the features of his design were incorporated into the new Bedlam. His family maintained he was eccentric but sane.
Haslam’s account of Matthews – “Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity…” was intended to prove that Matthews really was mad. But Matthews kept his own notes on his treatment, notes which found their way to a committee investigating Bedlam some time after his death. These undoubtedly influenced the committee's decision to dismiss Haslam and order that patients should be treated more humanely in future.
If Matthews was the victim of a plot, what about the infernal engine which afflicted him, the mind-control machine he called the Air Loom? According to Matthews, it sent out ‘invisible magnetic rays’ which influenced a magnet implanted in his head and produced many diagrams of it . We may fairly assume that this was a reflection of the fashionable interest in mesmerism and ‘animal magnetism’ of this period. The alternative is that he was trying to describe advanced technology in an age before the discovery electromagnetic radiation or the electrical nature of the nervous system - and that way surely lies madness.
The case has many parallels with the modern descriptions of 'gang stalking' recounted in Sharon's article and suggests that the situation is a complex one. And if bioelectromagnetic weapons ever actually reach the stage of being fielded, then simply labeling people who claim they are being targeted as 'crazy' will no longer be an option.
UPDATE 3:20 PM: These days lots of people are also worried about the effects of electromagnetic smog. Until scientists like the bioelectromagnetics researchers get to grips with this it will reamin with the fringe, like the makers of this anti-EM spray.
And for an musical last word, it's hard to beat this.
Just to update you all: last Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine published a cover story I’d been working on for the past number of months about an extremely large group of people who believe the government is targeting them as part of a "mind control" campaign.
I wrote a brief item here last weekend, and Noah suggested that I check back in a few days and post an update with the response to the article. Well, let’s just say life is an adventure, and the article has elicited strong reactions.
What response? Well, first there are the 75 or so blog entries related to the story, the online discussion and the nine full pages of comments appended to the Washington Post Magazine article, most from people who say they are victims of mind control. There are also some notable reactions here at Defense Tech; and my e-mail inbox (by the way folks, Gmail was wrong about "never deleting another e-mail" -- my account has hit its limit).
Reactions came at two extremes: There were a number of "TIs" (short for Targeted Individuals) who graciously thanked me for writing their story, and then there were skeptics who attacked the article for not concluding the TIs are all schizophrenics in need of medical help. My favorite comment from the Post's site was simply: “Good grief, Sharon, what have you done?!”
I’ve often asked myself that same question.
There were a few people, however, who seemed to agree that whether the TIs' claims are true or false, there's something to be said about trying to understand why so many people believe the things they believe.
But for anyone who thinks that all TIs are mentally ill people in need of forced medication, I suggest you check out some of the extremely sane tactics they employ. For example, their organized response to the article would make some political campaigns jealous. As one mind control blog advises:
We must write the Washington Post in high numbers to show that this story merits a follow up. We must get our side of the story out, before the perps start inundating them with letters that we are crazy. Please take part in this to give the accurate side of what is really happening and remember to forward any supporting evidence.
There's also a few researchers raising a fascinating question in the medical literature:
One of the defining features of a delusion is that it should not be a belief "ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture". Nevertheless, some researchers have noted that there is no clear measure of what is 'ordinarily accepted'.
It is also possible that cultures or subcultures could be based around beliefs that would otherwise be diagnosed as delusional. Until now, however, there have been no obvious examples of such subcultures identified.
In the Psychopathology paper, ten websites reporting psychosis-like 'mind control' experiences were identified. The reports were anonymised and independently blind-rated by three psychiatrists who confirmed that they reflect experiences stemming from psychosis.
One final thought: Some of the documents I dug up through a Freedom of Information Act request indeed confirmed that the Air Force Research Laboratory patented a device to send sounds and voices into someone's head as a "psychological warfare tool."
So, I guess that begs the obvious question: even if you dismiss everyone who claims they are a victim of mind-invading technology, what do you think Pentagon plans to do with such a device?
For many years, national security experts, prominent scientists, and probably Dennis Kucinich, have received hundreds of e-mails that begin something like this: “I am surveilled, harassed and gangstalked everywhere I go 24/7/365.”
I’ve certainly received them, and Defense Tech has gotten its fair share, too.
The letters typically state that the person is a victim of an organized mind control plot that involves weapons that beam voices into their head; shoot powerful pain rays at them; and often includes around-the-clock harassment and monitoring. One of the common claims is that the people are targeted by microwave weapons.
What do most people do with these letters? Defense writer William Arkinsays he hits the “delete” button when he gets those e-mails. Jon Ronson, author of the wonderfully wacky Men Who Stare at Goats has stated that mind control is an area that he doesn’t “want to get into.” (This from a gifted writer who interviewed a man who believes the world’s leaders are extraterrestrial lizards in disguise.)
What do I do with these letters? I read them, and this Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine has a cover story based on my nearly year-long investigation into their claims.
I try to raise what I think are some fascinating questions about the Pentagon’s involvement in microwave weapons and the auditory effect (which could be used to send sounds or voices into people’s heads).
As for whether there's any evidence that hundreds, if not thousands of people, are being targeted by microwave weapons, well, read for yourself.
America, it turns out, is suffering from a science and engineering shortage. Students are bypassing the sciences for sexier and more lucrative jobs...
This creates something of a national security problem... According to Dr. Barker, who works in the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, those who manage the national labs and others who conduct sensitive research have been saying for years "how hard it is to find qualified graduate students who are US citizens..."
Barker notes that 50 percent of America's scientific-and-engineering workforce will be eligible to retire in the next five years. Who's going to replace them?...
Hollywood... [may] be part of the solution. By writing and producing movies that have more scientific themes - and more authentic and appealing science protagonists - boosters think the US could encourage more young people to pursue careers in plasma physics, molecular biology, and other fields...
So what they've done for the past three years is convene a three-to-five-day screenwriting class at the venerated American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Called the Catalyst Workshop, it's a lot like other screenwriting classes that have become a cottage industry across the nation. But here's the twist - all participants in this one are actually scientists. Hardcore, PhD-laden, lab-certified scientists.
The military is paying closer attention to business... because the world of geopolitics has discovered itself to be on the same road that business has been on for some time. That road is flatter, more networked and more decentralized than ever.
Large companies are groping for strategies to fend off disruptive competitors, including YouTube, Kazaa, Skype and Wikipedia, companies that are giving away video, music, long-distance and information while eroding the revenue stream of companies that charge for it. YouTube is a website where users swap millions of free videos. With fewer than 100 employees, it has created anxiety throughout the giant industries of film and TV...
How large, traditional companies fare in this fight may prove invaluable in developing a strategy against al-Qaeda. That's why the military is going to school. A book making the rounds at the Pentagon is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. It was written for a business audience, but military strategists are saying, "This is the best thing I've read that applies to counterterrorism," says Lt. Col. Rudolph Atallah, a Defense Department director in international affairs.
The premise of The Starfish and the Spider is that centralized organizations are like spiders and can be destroyed with an attack to the head. Decentralized organizations transfer decision-making to leaders in the field. They are like starfish. No single blow will kill them, and parts that are destroyed will grow back.
When Starfish co-author Rod Beckstrom arrived at USA TODAY's suburban Washington, D.C., headquarters for an interview in November, he said he had just come from meetings with representatives at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the "intelligence community." He said he was contacted "out of the blue" in September by one of the highest-ranking officers in special operations, and more recently by a high-ranking special operations officer at Fort Bragg, N.C.
We Get Letters: French Sub-Makers, UFO-Spotters
While we silly Americans were busy clinging to our neo-pagan rituals -- decorated trees! oil lamps! dropping balls! bowl games! -- the intrepid scientific truth-tellers of France were hard at work, spreading the word about their world-shaking discoveries. Two of these researchers graced me with their communiques in recent days. And I now share these remarkable messages with you:
=====================
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
=====================
Contact: XXXXXXXXX
UFOs Explained at Last
Anti-gravitation, propulsion of UFOs, crop circles, abductions have scientific proof
Since October 2003, over 6400 sightings of unidentified flying objects throughout the world have been reported, and, according to multiple surveys over the last several decades and from different countries, 5-7% of people report having seen a UFO - equivalent to 15-20 million Americans. But is there proof of such a thing? And what about other paranormal occurrences like crop circles, poltergeists, and even time travel? Author Eric Julien says there is science behind the paranormal and presents it in his breakthrough work, _The Science of Extraterrestrials: UFOs Explained at Last._ After more than 50 years of investigation, Julien posits that the fractal nature of time and its three dimensions led to the emergence of a revolutionary global theory: Absolute Relativity. Written for the layman but presented in a solidly scientific way,
_The Science of Extraterrestrials_ highlights the mistakes of science and will furthermore offer insight into extraterrestrial technology. In his book, Julien methodically covers the following:
Anti-gravitation
Propulsion of UFOs
Alien abductions
Formation of crop circles
Strange luminous phenomena
Poltergeists
Ghosts
Post mortem survival
Time travel
Praised by the international scientific community, _The Science of Extraterrestrials_ is "probably one of the best books of ufology from a scientific point of view," said Pascal di Scala, a French professor of mathematics.
About the Author: Eric Julien is a former fighter pilot trainee, a military air traffic controller, twin jet pilot in commercial aviation, station manager for an international airline company and airport manager in the great Parisian airports... He has had contact with extraterrestrials and shares in this body of work his understanding of the universe.
FWIW, I see that the French space agency will be "publish[ing] its archive of UFO sightings and other phenomena online." Maybe this monsieur's close encounters will be included.
---
from: XXXXXXXX
to: defense@defensetech.org
date: Jan 2, 2007 7:50 AM
subject: Sub sea innovative project for civil and Defense strategies.
We do register, as new start up French company, three patents for a very new system of absolute autonomous submarine drone, but more than that, an unlimited sized autonomous submarine *structure* available for all kinds of sea tasks, itself available as completed machine with embedded equipments for many different tasks.
French Marine Headquarter is seriously interested in, but financial conditions are not allowed to start this project. We would like to be known in many countries and by many possible partners in the world.
Meaddle East interlocutors are seriously interested by one version for drinkable water detection and captation for unlimited quantities, without pumping nor pipes at any depth (our technology), but we need strong partners to start and build a proptotype (around two millions Euros). Many options are already designed for Defense original solutions, as submarine rescue, heavy recovery, carrier ships protection, mine hunter or sleeping fire bases as coast undetectable patrolling units.
Would you tell us if you can help us to find contacts for business ?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fighting Shadows: Military Holograms
In science fiction, holograms are realistic, moving three-dimensional images. (Remember Arnie being spooked by his mirror self in Total Recall, and the priceless line “Watch out, he’s got a hologram!”). In the movies, if they flicker a bit ("Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi..."), it’s just so the audience realises it’s a hologram and doesn’t get confused. Real life holograms are a lot more limited, so I was interested to see this study carried by Dr David Watt on Holograms As Nonlethal Weapons for NTIC, the Nonlethal Technology Innovations Center in New Hampshire.
This is a serious look at the technical possibilities for holograms. It’s a far cry from blue sky fantasies like the Air Force 2025 Airborne Holographic Projector which ”displays a three-dimensional visual image in a desired location, removed from the display generator” or the even more wildly optimistic “Hologram, Death: Hologram used to scare a target individual to death.”
Real holograms will not fool people at short range and they do not move, nor can they be ‘projected’ into a remote location. But they might still have their uses.
One of Watt's suggested applications is 'deception in an urban environment'. Take a shop window and replace it with a hologram of a window display, and you have an apparently innocuous space where troops can be stationed without any hint of their presence. A vehicle (a car or bus) could use similar trompe l’oeil effect.
There is the possibility of using holograms to create ‘virtual forces’ or ‘virtual obstacles’, but the problems are all too apparent. The situation is much better indoors where the optical environment can be controlled. Dr Watt suggests installations could have virtual doors, walls and windows as ways of confusing or misleading intruders.
A more unusual approach is using a speckle hologram as ‘virtual smoke’. This type of hologram produces an image that appears to be in front of its real surface, and this could ‘project’ a confusing image of three-dimensional spots before their eyes, making it impossible for viewers to judge what is in front of them and how far away it is.
The human eye is difficult to fool, notes Dr Watt, but infra-red sensors are much less sophisticated – there is no need for the same level of colour fidelity. An infra-red hologram of a vehicle could make a very convincing decoy. Automated systems (such as missile guidance) with no humans to spot the flaws should be particularly easy to fool. However, as Watt points out the technology does not yet exist to create infra-red holograms.
It is the third dimension that makes holograms uniquely different to other means of camouflage and potentially valuable. During WWII, circles of black cloth were used to give the impression of bomb craters on runways after air raids, but these would not stand up to close inspection. Holograms would allow you to put realistic-looking ‘holes’ or craters on any surface and confuse any possible damage assessment.
Watt’s conclusion is “Fascinating, but…” –- there are just too many limitations at present. Size limits and material restrictions are a real problem, and
“Most NLT [non lethal technology] applications rely on psychological predisposition of belligerents.”
In other words it will take a certain amount showmanship to set the illusion up in the first place; this may be feasible in Las Vegas, but not on the battlefield.
But perhaps the biggest stumbling block at present is the cost of holograms large enough for practical applications. Watt quotes $10,000 for a one metre by two hologram, or a hefty $200k for one metre by six metres, which is a lot of money – especially if the bad guys decide to test whether one is real by putting a bullet through it.
"The Deadlies," our contest to find the most insanely-dangerous gear of all time, is well under way. A bunch of folks have already posted their nominees. They're all brilliant. Take MOOSE ("Man Out of Space Easiest"), General Electric's one-man, orbital escape pod from the 1960's.
To use it, an astronaut first would don a spacesuit and remove the 200-pound packaged escape system from a large suitcase-sized container aboard the spacecraft.
Then the person would unfold a 6-foot-long bag made of clear Mylar plastic and step into one end of it.
Attached and bonded to the rear of the bag was an ablative heat shield about one-quarter inch (6.3 millimeters) thick. Inside the bag were two canisters of white polyurethane foam, a portable rocket motor with twin exhaust nozzles that protruded through the Mylar cover, a parachute, radio equipment and a survival kit.
Once inside the bag, the astronaut would don a harness, zip the bag closed and float out the hatch of the spacecraft.
Out in space the astronaut would activate the foam canisters, which would inflate the bag into the shape of a blunt cone within a few minutes.
Then the astronaut would orient the bag with the rocket motor so that the blunt end faced towards Earth. That way, atmospheric heat upon reentry would char only the heat shield.
Perhaps the engineers gained confidence from U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger who made a couple of towering leaps from open-balloon gondolas during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In one high-altitude test in August 1960, Kittinger jumped from a height of nearly 103,000 feet (31,395 meters) and free fell for more than four and a half minutes before his parachute opened. Kittinger even surpassed the speed of sound – the only human to do so without using an aircraft or space vehicle -- yet survived his 20-mile (32-kilometer) fall in remarkably good shape.
The reasoning followed that if one man survived such a drop, then others could as well from even higher altitudes.
Reader Steve Weintz starts us off with a fine, fine suggestion: the steampunk jetpack.
Resembling a cast-iron uterus with whirring, razor-sharp dentata more than a jetpack proper, Andreas Petzoldt has spent the last decade perfecting every rocket lad's dream on his own dime...
It hasn't been tested yet, but... it's hard not to imagine the test flight. With great ebullience, Andreas soars into the heavens. He sneers at gravity with contempt, a spurned mistress, a whore who embraces all but him. But suddenly he hears a horrifying choke and shudder and a sickening vertigo creeping up from his genitalia and into his bowels as he plummets back down to the ground, strapped to over 200 pounds of highly-explosive rocket fuel and whirring metal blades.
Throughout the ages, bad guys have loved bunkers, whether they're in Nazi Germany or Jihadist Iran. With good reason: the suckers are hard to find, and even tougher to blow up. Even the most bleeding-edge, experimental bunker-busters can penetrate, at most, 10 meters down.
Which is why the Air Force is considering a new approach: teams of foot-long "subterranean vehicles" with new-fangled ways to dig.
A subterranean vehicle could engage these types of targets in an effective manner, avoiding both collateral damage and unnecessary risks to our troops. It could be deployed a safe distance from the target and autonomously navigate itself to the target while detecting, identifying, and then avoiding buried obstacles such as pipes, wires, boulders and even other buildings. This vehicle would be able to penetrate the surface either through deployable techniques or on its own.
But "conventional digging techniques" will not get the job done, the Air Force warms. "It’s more likely that a revolutionary approach to digging, involving biologically inspired and/or unconventional physical and chemical approaches, would provide better results."
General Dynamics, for one, already has a digger, derived from nature: the Worm, a 30-inch long, two-and-a-half-inch-wide "combination of hydraulic packers and cylinders" designed to inch its way through soil. It's made to wiggle through 500 feet on earth in about 20 hours.
The Air Force thinks "a system of vehicles" could prove to be a better solution, however, with "each [machine] performing a different task."
Phase I of the "Subterranean Warfare" effort "should establish the ability to penetrate the surface and continue to navigate at least one meter below the surface." After that, it's time to "develop, test and demonstrate an operable prototype."
UPDATE 10:38 AM: Now, of course, conspiracy theorists and comic book fans will tell you that such diggers are almost laughably redundant. To fight underground, all you have to do is find one of the secretpassageways to the Hollow Earth, they'll say. And bring enough troops to deal with the Mole Men, naturally.
UPDATE 2:54 PM: Some of those kooky types might believe in Hollow Earth theories, David Hambling sniffs. But as any real, serious Mulder-in- training will tell you, the Air Force "already operates its own fleet of underground tunnelling machines, digging out all those secret bases to store all the UFOs and stuff." Why, just look at the evidence, to the left. I mean, there's no chance it could have anything to do with item #4 on this list.
Feds Flail Flying Saucer Friend
Yesterday's raids on the homes of Rep. Curt Weldon's daughter and pals is bad news for the Republican party, of course. But it's really, really bad news for the Russian flying saucer community, Wonkette reminds us -- pointing to one of my own dang articles.
Long before he started pushing kooky theories about Saddam's WMD and military data mining, Weldon -- a fluent Russian speaker -- was one a one-man quest to find jobs for former Soviet scientists and engineers. "It keeps them from otherwise working with the bad guys around the world," he told me, for a 2003 Wired News story.
The employment process seemed to begin by getting these Russian firms, like the Saratov aviation company, to hireWeldon's daughter as a lobbyist. Meanwhile, the Congressman would convince arms of the U.S. military to take on projects by the ex-Sovs.
In Saratov's case, Weldon was particularly impressed with "Ekip" -- a flying saucer, relying on vacuum shell for its lift.
"The fact that they had put together a full-scale prototype -- with very limited resources, because of the cutbacks in the military-industrial base -- that was remarkable to me," Weldon said.
So Weldon asked some folks at the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, to take on the saucer project. The initial prototype was supposed to be 500 pounds -- just a speck compared with the 12-ton craft that Saratov claims to have successfully test flown in the early 1990s.
If memory serves, NAVAIR wound up abandoning the project after a while. And if Admiral Joe Sestak winds up beating Weldon in next month's election, it may be a very, very long time before the saucer takes flight.
"The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It's very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices. ... And as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," General Rick Hillier said in a speech in Ottawa, Canada.
"We tried burning them with white phosphorous -- it didn't work. We tried burning them with diesel -- it didn't work. The plants are so full of water right now ... that we simply couldn't burn them," he said.
Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.
"A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those [forests] did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action," Hiller said dryly.
One soldier told him later: "Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I'd say 'That damn marijuana'."
CIA's Wacky, Online 'Personality Quiz'
These are tough times for the Central Intelligence Agency. It's not just the blown calls on Iraq. Or the bruising turf battles with the White House. There's the series of internal purges. And, of course, the constant threat of another terrorist attack. No wonder the Agency is having trouble hiring good people.
But still, 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
The "CIA personality quiz" is supposed to show how the Agency needs all types to function. So the exam offers up a series of questions, about your favorite leisure activities, the "kind of transportation you prefer," and what super power you'd like to have. And then the site tells you what kind of valuable asset to the CIA you'd be.
If the super power you want is flight, for example, and your dream is to climb Mt. Everest, according to the Agency, you're a "Daring Thrill Seeker." If you prefer shopping on Rodeo Drive and sunbathing on a yacht, that means you're a "Innovative Pioneer." If you'd like to have ESP and a designer wardrobe, that qualifies you as an "Impressive Mastermind." Naturally.
Somehow, this is all meant to dispel myths about what it's like to work for the Agency. Take Myth #1, for instance: "You’ll Never See Your Family and Friends Again." Au contraire, the site says. "The work we do may be secret, but that doesn’t mean your life will be. Because the variety of CIA careers is similar to that of any major corporation. So… your friends and family will still be part of your life."
Nor will your work be all that dangerous. "Car chases through the alleyways of a foreign city are common on TV, but they’re not what a CIA career is about. And, they don’t compare with the reality of being part of worldwide intelligence operations supporting a global mission."
And that grueling background check? Don't sweat it. "Because of our national security role, CIA applicants must meet specific qualifications — but, don’t worry. Getting caught smoking in high school isn’t enough to disqualify you. Your intellect, skills, experience and desire to serve the nation are most important to us."
Unless you're setting up Agency websites, I guess.
Saddam's Supergun
Saddam loved his defense technology -- the wackier, the better. Take "Baby Babylon," for instance: "an artillery piece so powerful that it could not only shell his enemies in Tel Aviv and Tehran but also fire a projectile into orbit," the Times reports.
“I would say that Saddam’s regime was not a model of rationality,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-based organization that has studied Mr. Hussein’s weaponry. “He did in some respects share Hitler’s fascination with wonder weapons...”
Mr. Hussein’s scientists could not satisfy his craving for wonder weaponry, although they tried often enough.
There was a reported program to create a “rail gun,” in which electromagnetic pulses would accelerate a projectile to high speeds, research on elaborate multistage rockets and re-entry vehicles, and, before 1991, endless tinkering with weird biological agents. None of it produced anything particularly useful...
Perhaps strangest of all were little Russian armored reconnaissance ground vehicles, somehow evoking Jetsons-style spaceships, made for just one occupant.
It sounds like something out of a comic book, or Lord of the Rings, I know. But there's a chance that invisibility – real-life, honest-to-God invisibility – may actually be possible, some day.
The technology doesn’t come from some dubious unknown inventor, but from Professor Sir John Pendry, the legendary theoretical physicist, I write in this month’s BBC Focus magazine – “the world's best science and technology monthly.” Pendry has developed the concept of metamaterials, which have properties determined by their structure rather than their composition. This can give them 'impossible' properties, such as a negative refractive index. Initially, there was some debate about whether this could ever be achieved. But the proof came last year with the demonstration of a superlens capable of beating any lens made of normal material.
By utilizing metamaterials, it should be possible, in theory, to create what Pendry calls an invisibility cloak -- although invisibility shell might be more accurate as it will need to be rigid. Such a cloak would divert any incident light around its surface and release it on the same path on the other side: to any observer the wearer is invisible.
Interestingly, Pendry’s work on metamaterials started when he was working for Marconi. He was looking at the application of carbon fiber for a stealth coating when he realized that its interaction with radar was determined by the length of the fibers – it was effectively acting as an array of tiny aerials – and that the same effect could have many other applications.
Invisibility in the optical spectrum will be challenging because metamaterials will need to be constructed on a scale corresponding to the wavelengths of visible light, which is just a few hundred nanometres. That technology will not be around for at least five years.
But radar invisibility is much easier because radar wavelengths are in the centimeter range. Pendry’s colleague, Dr. David R. Smith at Duke University, is already working on a microwave metamaterial. Results are expected within eighteen months.
Unlike existing stealth techniques, a metamaterial should in principle be able to make an aircraft (or missile) literally invisible to any radar from any aspect.
There are likely to be other metamaterials along later. As Pendry explained, they can have all sorts of mechanical or acoustic properties as well as affecting light or other radiation. But for the mean time, we are likely to have out hands full just thinking of applications for invisibility.
The biggest question is likely to be the width of spectrum that any given material can handle. According to Pendry, a sufficiently deep metamaterial should be able to cope with a very wide spectrum. This might include all visible wavelengths plus a chunk of infra-red and UV. However, it’s clear that even very limited invisibility could be a major military asset.
Question: Can you go to jail for a plot involving imaginary weapons?
Answer: Yes, but it's not clear if the charges will stick.
In 2005, Ronald Grecula, a would-be inventor, hatched a harebrained plan to build a fusion bomb that violated the laws of physics. He was arrested in Texas after he pitched the idea to undercover FBI agents. The bomb, Grecula said, used light to activate a hydrogen-chlorine solution, which somehow produced fusion. Hmmm.
Dutiful journalists ran the idea by scientists, who were dubious that the scheme could destroy city blocks, as Grecula claimed. (The fact that Grecula was nutty doesn't mean he was original, by the way. The idea of a light-activated hydrogen-chlorine engine appears to be first imagined by Robert Scragg of West Virginia.)
Result: Grecula, who pleaded innocent, has been in jail since May of 2005. New charges have recently been added to his indictment.
Now, over in the United Kingdom, three suspects were recently let go after a British court rejected claims that they broke the law when they allegedly attempted to buy something called red mercury, a nasty substance rumored to be, among other things, fuel for a dirty bomb. The best thing about red mercury, however, is it doesn't exist. And the whole plot was set up by a tabloid hoping to score an expose of terrorism.
Result: The trio was set free.
More recently, you have the bumbling boobs in Miami who dreamed about blowing up the Sears Tower. They never even quite got around to the imaginary weapons part, according to the Washington Post.
Result: Indicted.
Now, it's easy say that even if these were fools, they were dangerous fools. But in all these cases, it wasn't even that the ideas were half-baked, but that the law enforcement efforts required to even make their plots look credible were amusing.
For Grecula, the FBI flew him down to Texas to hear him babble about needing to buy fusion bomb materials from the local hardware store. The FBI kicked in money for office space for the Miami gang. As for the red mercury guys, it's not even clear the would-be purchasers even thought they were buying something that was dangerous.
I suppose what's troubling in these cases is the concern that law enforcement agencies can't or won't differentiate between real weapons that can be relatively simple, but lethal (box-cutters, bombs using fertilizer) and attention-grabbing imaginary weapons that pose little threat to anyone.
P.S. While Wikipedia has its problems, I have to say, if you want any evidence of how hysterically bad About.com is, check out their explanation by the "expert" on red mercury.
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.
"The 3-D maneuverability of the Frisbee-UAV [unammned aerial vehicle] will provide revolutionary tactical access and lethality against hostiles hiding in upper story locations and/or defiladed behind obstacles," the company promises.
The circular drones will be lanuched "from munitions dispensers or by means of a simple mechanism similar to a shotgun target (skeet) launcher," Triton adds. Once in the air, they'll be tele-operated by soldiers on the ground. Or, if needed, the fightin' frisbees will pilot themselves as they hunt for guerrillas.
Once they catch up to the baddies, the drones will use a series of armor-piercing explosives, shooting jets of molten metal, to eliminate their targets. And these MEFP [Multiple Explosively Formed Penetrator] "warheads will be controllable so as to provide a single large fragment (bunker-buster) or tailorable pattern of smaller fragments (unprotected infantry or light utility vehicles)." The decision of whether to go bunker-buster or infantry-annihilator mode can either be determined by the drones' human operators, "or autonomous target classification routine built into the UAV."
"The Frisbee disc has proven its potential on the sports field as a platform for short free-flights," Potts wrote back in an '01 paper. Without "predefined flight orientation," a Frisbee drone "offers novel flight characteristics and manoeuvrability. It is potentially suitable for a variety of mission objectives fulfilling surveillance, communications, munitions and/or airborne radar warning systems."
These days, Potts is focusing less on Frisbee-shaped robots -- and more on Frisbee competitors. "In recent years Jonny has applied his scientific knowledge to develop a range of sports discs with improved aerodynamic performance," says the website of his new company, which makes a line of "super-durable" spinners for $16 apiece. Explosives and robotic controls are not included.
How to Rate a (Possibly) Stupid Weapon Idea
If you follow the fascinating history of Metal Storm, the Australian company that built a weapon that can shoot a “million rounds a minute,” you might want to check out this story in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald on their latest trials and tribulations. (If you’re not familiar with their history, you can check out my very long article with sidebars in the September/October 2005 issue of Defense Technology International.)
I’m going to write a longer post on the company next week, but this news got me thinking on whether there’s a way to predict bad and/or stupid weapons. Now, I’m not saying Metal Storm is a bad or stupid weapon, I’m just saying that it would be great if there were some way to guess ahead of time which ideas are really bad, and which are just a little silly.
In giving some thought to this issue, I’ve created the rating system below — this is still a work in progress (and some credit clearly goes to the crackpot index) — but I think it’s a good starting point.
For suggestions or additions, please leave comments below (or if you prefer, e-mail me at sharonweinberger[at]gmail.com). I’m going to need to run a few possibly stupid weapons through this rating system to get an idea of how the scoring works.
And before anyone gets up in arms (yes, a bad cliche), PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A SLIDING SCALE. For example, Metal Storm has indeed built working prototypes, and I’ve met some really bright military engineers who love to make references to Star Trek. Just look at this system as a reality check.
Enjoy!
How to rate a possibly stupid weapons idea:
1) Promises a “revolution in warfare.”
Add 50 points. Add 25 points for claims of a “new arms race.” Add 5 points for each time any derivative of the word “transformation” is used in promotional materials describing the weapon.
2) Is supposedly based on a “new” innovation, yet on closer examination, there are myriad examples of attempts using similar ideas in the past.
Add 10 points for each case of a similar idea in the past. Add another 15 points, for each case inventor/company was unaware of this earlier attempt, and thus failed to learn from past mistakes.
3) Lacks a realistic operational scenario of where or how such a weapon could be used.
Add 25 points. Add 15 points if inventor/company describes an operational scenario, but it has no relation to current warfare (i.e. aircraft equipped with laser beams shooting at each other).
4) The usability of the weapon assumes as yet unproven leaps in technology to reduce size, power generation or other critical elements.
Add 15 points for each needed technological advance.
5) The idea comes from someone who is unfamiliar with how the military fights and how weapons are used.
Add 15 points (this is slightly subjective, so add only five points if served in military, but never involved in any military operations). Add 20 points if military experience is derived from watching war movies or the evening news.
6) The company/inventor relies on obtaining funding (private or public) from people who themselves have no idea how the military uses weapons (i.e. private investors, congressional earmarks).
Add 20 points if developmental funding relies on congressional earmarks (as opposed to funds requested in the Pentagon’s budget). Add 25 points if developmental funding relies on publicly traded stock. Add 30 points for developmental funding from intelligence agencies.
7) Incorporates references to and/or inspiration from Star Trek, Star Wars, Buck Rogers, or video games.
Add 10 points for Star Trek, 5 points for Star Wars, 3 points for Buck Rogers, and 2 points for video games (regardless whether XBox or Playstation II).
8) Inventor/company argues that people also once doubted the feasibility of a nuclear weapon, as if that automatically means that this weapon will work and/or is deserving of nearly unlimited funding.
Add 25 points. Also add 20 points if similar references are made to the Wright Brothers and airplanes.
9) Claims foreign countries are working hard on this technology, and could overtake the United States if we don’t invest in it (without proof of such work).
Add 10 points for claiming Russia is working on the same type of weapons, 20 points for China, 30 points for North Korea, and 5 points for the French. Score extra 100 points if claim is that extraterrestrial life forms are working on it (in fact, stop now if that’s the case – trust me, that’s a stupid weapon).
10) Claims foreign governments have contacted inventor/company about buying the weapon and/or idea (but with no actual sales).
Add 10 points.
11) Relies on PowerPoint in lieu of engineering details to demonstrate workability.
Add 5 points for each cartoon depiction of technology not yet in existence.
12) References to previous military funding as proof the idea is valid, because we all know the military only funds things that work.
Add 5 points.
13) When presented with possible scientific laws that the weapon – as proposed – might violate, inventor/company simply insists the weapon works, and it’s up to the scientists to explain how.
Add 35 points.
14) Cost of the weapon (please include nonrecurring costs if the weapon doesn’t yet exist), exceeds that of similar one currently in inventory by a factor of 10.
Add 20 points for each factor of 10. Add another 5 points if you assert that costs will come down with mass production without being able to cite evidence for demand and/or how much those costs would be reduced.
15) Any proof the weapon works is openly paraded to the media, but questions about problems with the weapon are rebuffed by claims that the information is “classified” or “proprietary.”
As yet another Phil K Dick book gets the Hollywood treatment – A Scanner Darkly is out now , joining Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall and the rest, I have a piece in online magazine Nth Position looking at the great man’s capability as a predictor of future military technology.
The article pits his book The Zap Gun - set in the futuristic world of 2004 - against Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Heinlein was a Navy man and aeronautical engineer; Dick was a self-confessed “flipped-out freak" with a long history of drug abuse and little knowledge of technical matters.
The result might come as a surprise: the number of hits that PKD scores is impressive, even with ideas that much have seemed deliberately absurd at the time, while Heinlein’s serious projections from then-current technology fail spectacularly. You might not want to take it all too seriously, but there's some food for thought.
Especially when The Zap Gun features an electronic publication called Wep Week, devoted to pictures and specs of new weapon systems and with its own devoted -- if occasionally obsessive -- readership.
Did Dick really gets his information from a pink laser beam projected into his brain by an alien intelligence, as he apparently believed? Or is it just that having a seriously far-out imagination is a major asset? You don’t have to be crazy to anticipate military technology, but it certainly seems to help.
So, last month, I was doing what it seems like I do for about 80 percent of my working life--standing in an ice-cold exhibit hall at a defense conference, chatting with another defense reporter. We were in Washington, D.C. at the Office of Naval Research’s annual science and technology conference, which featured an entire day devoted to alternative energy.
“The cold fusion booth,” I replied. “There are naval folks here presenting cold fusion.”
“No, no, that’s not possible. This is a reputable conference,” scoffed the other reporter.
I pointed to the booth and told him to go over and check it out for himself. He came back toting some books and shaking his head in amazement. Personally, I kept my distance, as I’ve had my fill these past few months with the far reaches of science [For the record, I admire the Office of Naval Research’s open-minded approach to cold fusion scientists--and I remain sympathetic to researchers in the field, but it’d be nice to see something other than promises and old reports.]
What was amazing for me, however, was not that there was a cold fusion booth at the naval conference, but that the cold fusion booth was about the only one there dedicated to energy issues. For all the talk of its commitment to alternative energy, the Pentagon doesn’t appear to be taking steps to support spending on basic science and technology that could lead to breakthroughs. Forget basic science, even more advanced technology efforts, like hybrid vehicles, appear stalled, this month's National Defense magazine reports.
There’s some work around the edges---fuel cells and solar energy, as a recent issue of Defense Technology International noted. But there's no concerted effort. One could argue that the Defense Department isn’t really the place to do energy research, but the Pentagon has deeper pockets than the National Science Foundation and better luck with innovation and high-risk endeavors than the stodgy Department of Energy. The Pentagon also has innate self interest, as the country’s single largest consumer of fuel. A well-funded, scientifically sound approach to energy research could have big payoffs for the military.
Or it would at least offer something better than a lonely couple booths at a trade show.
From the halls of Montezuma to Inchon to Fallujah, the United States Marine Corps have proved themselves to be the meanest, toughest, most resourceful warriors on the planet.
Now, a single test remains for this hallowed assemblage of fighters:
Make a rich, smooth Cabernet Sauvignon.
Fortunately, the former Marines at Firestone Vineyards are meeting the challenge, by producing "Jarhead Red."
The wine is "a robust, full-bodied Cabernet Sauvignon. It was aged in French oak barrels for eight months. It offers flavors of plum, cassis and black currant with fine tannins on the finish," according to Firestone's website. "Jarhead Red is available in 750ml (the Rifleman) and 1.5L (the Sergeant). Occassional availability on larger formats including 3.0L (the Sergeant Major) and 5.0L (the Commandant)."
Third-generation wine grower Adam Firestone (CAPT 1984-91) and vineyard foreman Ruben Dominguez (SGT USMC 1979-84) came up with the Cabernet in "in 1999 as a celebratory bottling for the annual Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation Birthday Ball in Los Angeles," Firestone explains. "Over the years, the wine gained a following by word of mouth and was enjoyed at Birthday Balls around the country. To meet this growing demand, the wine was released for distribution, with net proceeds benefiting the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation."
And, before you ask, Adam Firestone wants to be clear: "There is no affiliation between the wine and the movie 'Jarhead.'" Instead, according to a press release, He created Jarhead Red [to] fortify his loyalty to the Marine Corps and [to] extend it to his skill in winemaking."
Sharon Weinberger is, to put it mildly, skeptical. Her book, Imaginary Weapons[being discussed tonight in New York -ed.], tells the tangled story of the struggle between the "isomer believers" who think a Hafnium bomb it can be made to work, and the doubters who think is based on impossible science.
I'm not so sure. "Fringe science" is a label that history applies after the event to failures; successes are immediately transferred to the mainstream. What looks like ridiculous like fringe tinkering at the time may later be seen as pioneering genius.
It struck me while writing my book, Weapons Grade, that revolutionary advances tend to come from outside the mainstream. This is pretty much true by definition: if a concept is already in the mainstream then it will not be revolutionary. Let's look at three cases of kooks who came good after years in the wilderness: the Spaceman, the Flyboy, and Mr. Death Ray.
Case one is the Spaceman, who spent his career dreaming of travel to other planets. He was suspicious other others and tended to work on his own, refusing to publish many of the details of his work. His report on how he spent a $5,000 grant from the Smithsonian was roundly mocked in the press -- especially the New York Times, which said he should go back and learn some high school physics. His biggest success was to send a craft a distance of 184 feet into a cabbage patch.
The Spaceman took his plans for giant weapons based on his space drive to the military, but nobody was convinced they were feasible. Twenty years earlier his idea for an infantry weapon - using a music stand - had also been shelved.
The Spaceman was in fact Robert Goddard, pioneer of the liquid-fuelled rocket. NASA's Goddard Space Center is named in his honor. Three years after the military turned him down, German V-2 rockets started raining down on London. The V-2 directly drew on Goddard's work from the 1920's; the Nazis had rounded up amateur rocket enthusiasts, who called themselves 'Societies For Space Travel' and set them to building a weapon based on his liquid-fuelled design. Goddard's portable rocket was also resurrected - the shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, or Bazooka, became an important infantry weapon.
On July 17th 1969, the day after Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the moon, the New York Times published a correction to its 1920 story, accepting that Goddard was right: "it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error."
Case two is the Flyboy, a 22-year-old airman who was convinced he could build better aircraft engines than anything that existed at the time. When he took his designs to his superiors, he was told they were nothing new, and that better men with more experience had failed to get similar plans to work. The working temperatures were too high for any known material, the efficiencies required were too great, and the fuel consumption would be far too high.
"Very interesting my boy," one distinguished aeronautics professor remarked, "but it will never work."
The official rejection was scarcely less patronizing: "It must be remembered that a tremendous amount of work is being done, and you may rest assured the criticisms made of your scheme were made with the full knowledge of the results achieved by actual experiment."
The design was going nowhere. Five years later the patent lapsed; the military did not think it was worth renewing, and Flyboy could not afford the fee. He kept working at it though, building prototypes in a tiny workshop on a shoestring budget scraped together from family and friends.
The Flyboy was Frank Whittle, the jet engine pioneer, whose designs form the basis for almost all modern jet engines. He only started to get taken seriously when it became clear in 1939 that the Germans had flown a jet aircraft and were storming ahead in development. The RAF had thrown away a lead of several years: if Whittle had been taken seriously in 1929, the Battle of Britain might have been fought with jet aircraft instead of Spitfires.
Hans Von Ohain, who developed jets in Germany, even suggested that WWII might not have happened if Britain possessed jets, as "Hitler would have doubted the Luftwaffe's ability to win."
Case 3 is the radio Death Ray. Rockets and jet engines may have attracted some ridicule, but death rays were even more absurd. When Marconi developed a directional radio transmitter in 1924, it seemed every crackpot in the word was building one.
One of the most notable self-publicists was Harry Matthews - known to the media as "Death Ray" Matthews - who claimed his apparatus could kill mice and shrivel plants at a distance, and that a weapon based on it would have a range of up to eight miles.
Although radio waves could do serious damage at close range, anything beyond a few feet was less plausible. In the US, the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground offered a standing reward to anyone who could produce a death ray capable of killing a tethered goat. Britain's Air Ministry put up a similar prize to the inventor whose ray could kill a sheep at a range of a hundred yards.
Neither animal was ever seriously endangered.
So great was the public clamor for death rays in Britain that the Air Ministry appointed a committee to look into them. After considerable research, Dr. Robert Watson-Watt reported on February 4th, 1935 that although in theory it was possible to bring down an aircraft with a radio beam, the power required was far in excess of what was possible in practice.
Having done the work, the Ministry then asked Watson-Watt whether, in the absence of death rays, anything useful could be done with these radio beams. Watson-Watt had found that aircraft reflected radio waves, and he drew up a paper entitled "The Detection and Location of Aircraft by Radio Means."
Three weeks after the Death Ray paper, the first test was carried out, showing conclusively that an aircraft could be located from the radio waves it reflected. Radio direction finding, later known as Radar, became one of the RAF's most important tools and was kept strictly secret.
In each of these cases the breakthrough has come from outside the mainstream, and each of them has had a lasting impact. Goddard's rockets paved the way for satellite technology, global communications, GPS, and space imaging (can you imagine weather forecasts without satellite maps?). Whittle's jet engine revolutionized air travel, and we now take for granted out ability to fly the world quickly and cheaply. An although the death-ray enthusiasts were on the wrong track entirely, they were responsible for radar and the related rise in radio-frequency technology, including everything from microwave ovens to lasers.
Revolutionary progress is always going to involve going beyond the mainstream, because if something is in the mainstream already it is part of the slow process of incremental change. It is only the outsiders – often working alone and without sufficient funding - who can bring in those radical innovations.
It's easy to laugh at new ideas, whether they are space rockets, giant electronic brains - or manned flight. Supposed experts in the relevant field often reject such ideas out of hand, not bothering to look closely at the data, and dismiss them as impossible.
But it's surprising how quickly these impossible things become commonplace. We live in an age where robotic terminators taking out terrorists by remote control from thousands of miles away with laser-guided weapons are a routine news story.
Small incremental improvements based on existing ideas are never going to produce the weapons which give decisive advantages like ballistic missiles, jet engines and radar. To paraphrase the great physicist Niels Bohr: "We all know the Pentagon has some crazy ideas. The question is, are they crazy enough?"
On Tuesday morning, a retired Catholic priest and two veterans put on clown suits, busted into a nuclear missile launch facility, and began beating the silo cover with hammers, in an attempt to take the Minuteman III missile off-line. Seriously.
The trio -- members of the Luck, Wisconsin group Nukewatch -- said the break-in was part of "a call for national repentance" for the Hiroshima and Nagaski A-bombings in 1945.
The activists used bolt-cutters to get into the E-9 Minuteman III facility, located just northwest of the White Shield, North Dakota. "Using a sledgehammer and household hammers, they disabled the lock on the personnel entry hatch that provides access to the warhead and they hammered on the silo lid that covers the 300 kiloton nuclear warhead," the group said in a statement. "The activists painted 'It's a sin to build a nuclear weapon' on the face of the 110-ton hardened silo cover and the peace activists poured their blood on the missile lid."
This was all done while wearing face paint, dunce caps, misfitting overalls, and bright yellow wigs.
We dress as clowns to show that humor and laughter are key elements in the struggle to transform the structures of destruction and death. Saint Paul said that we are “fools for God's sake,” and we say that we are “fools for God and humanity.” Clowns as court jesters were sometimes the only ones able to survive after speaking truth to authorities in power.
Guards responded within minutes. And when they arrived, the protesters "ate a lot of gravel," I'm told.
"The individuals were taken from the area and brought to the McLean County Jail," the AP notes. "The three are being charged with criminal trespass and criminal mischief, both Class A misdemeanors, and bond was set at $500 each.... The FBI is involved in the case and federal charges are pending."
Fringe Science? I'll Take Vegas!
Last year, I got a strange call. That’s not surprising, because I get lots of strange calls. But this one was strange because the person on the other end of the phone was asking me for investment advice, and since I can’t quite balance my checkbook, I’m a strange person to be offering financial tips to anyone.
“Whaddya think of this firm Ionatron?” the man asked, introducing himself as vice president of a boutique investment firm in California. He didn’t know much about defense or the Pentagon, but he was really interested in investing in this weapons firm, which he thought had big potential.
For those who don’t know about Tucson-based Ionatron, I first advise reading up on Tesla coils. Once you understand what a Tesla coil is, you’ll be about halfway toward understanding Iontraon, a company that claims to have pioneered a weapon that will shoot lightning bolts (Noah has written some excellent posts on Ionatron here and, most recently, here). When newspapers talk about Ionatron, they usually start by talking about Buck Rogers guns or Star Trek phasers. I prefer to begin by talking about Tesla coils, which shoot sparks a few feet. Legions of would-be inventors, up to an including those in Ionatron, have dreamt of extending those sparks out to tens of meters, or even miles.
I took an hour out of my day to explain to this guy all the reasons why Ionatron, even if its technology pans out, was not likely to be equipping the Army with handheld lightning guns anytime soon. There were some basic practicalities. For example, ionizing the air to make the lightning bolt go at any great distance is really hard. The power sources needed to break down the air and shoot the lightning are pretty bulky. And finally, electricity, as we all learn in grade school, likes to travel in the most efficient manner possible. That means if lightning were ever shot out of a handheld device, you’d need a way to ensure it doesn’t hit the guy holding it, or the unlucky buddy next to him. Good luck.
Okay, those are the scientific barriers, but then there are the bureaucratic considerations. The Pentagon doesn’t one day throw down all its tried and true guns in favor of some fancy static electricity. There’s an entire acquisition process that takes years, and sometimes decades, to field a weapon. So, even if you’ve really perfected the lightning gun, it’ll be quite some time before the first soldier ever lays his hands on it. Finally, you have to ask, are lightning bolts really any better than good old-fashioned bullets? Not always, is likely the answer.
I said all this, but I could tell the guy wasn’t listening, because I wasn’t telling him what he wanted to hear. “Well,” he finally said, “if there’s even one in a hundred shot that Ionatron is really on to something, then it’s worth my relatively small investment.”
Then I realized the problem: I was on the phone with a true believer. There was nothing I could say that this guy would listen to—his logic was that of the hardened gambler. It’s also the same argument that explains the nearly obsessive support among some in the Pentagon for the hafnium bomb, a notional weapon based on an experiment that violated the laws of physics. As I write in my new book, Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld, the true believers grasp on to the most perverse logic: Any chance that a weapon might work warrants investment if the payoff is high enough. In the case of the hafnium bomb, the Pentagon figured that tens of millions of dollars was worth the investment if the result was a weapon that could revolutionize warfare.
But the problem in this argument, like with most fringe science, is that if you follow it to its logical conclusion, you’ll only invest in failures. It’s like arguing that rather than putting money in your 401K, you should invest in slot machines, because the investment is low and the payoff is high. Almost all fringe science is high-risk, high payoff, so by the logic of the true believers, you should invest in all fringe science.
People often ask me: what’s your favorite example of fringe science? I usually tell them, “It’s the Tesla lightning gun.” Not because it’s fringe per se (Tesla coils exist and work), but because every few years, someone modifies a Tesla coil, declares it the next great weapon, and boom, the Pentagon gives them some money. So, will Ionatron buck the trend (or Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems) and invent a really cool weapon? Heck if I know, but the chance that the Pentagon will anytime this decade buy a lightning weapon in mass quantities is so remote as to be almost nil. So, why not just go to Vegas, put your money in the slots, and have some fun.
And, heck, at least in Vegas, the drinks are free.
Oh, this is classic. By now, you're all familiar with Carl Collins, the fringe physicist whose superbomb research Sharon Weinberger dismembers in her new book, Imaginary Weapons. Collins (right) is, understandably, a bit pissed off at Weinberger. He has lost most of his government funding, in part because of her exposés, which showed that no credible scientist could replicate Collins' experiments. So he's launched a multi-pronged online campaign against her -- including a spoof Imaginary Weaponswebsite.
Step one in Collins' push-back effort was to unfavorably compare sales of her book -- "a 'dirty' book, demeaning to diversity, internationalization, and educators and scientists in countries with emerging economies," he writes -- to those of Kitten's First Full Moon. (Why exactly he chose this "sometimes slapstick struggle of Kitten, who sees her first full moon and thinks it's a bowl of milk in the sky," as his comparison point remains a mystery.) In any event, Weinberger's recent sales numbers, putting her book in the top few hundred at Amazon, have not been included.
Second, Collins responded to Weinberger on this site, urging readers to "lighten up a bit." He adds, "I think that the root of my problem has been that for 42 years of academic life I have absolutely refused to accept a 'Security Clearance' – from anybody." That's turned the Pentagon and Energy Department's "Best and Brightest" against him, Collins writes.
Last -- an in no way, least -- Collins has set up ImaginaryWeapons.net, a site that looks almost identical to Weinberger's ImaginaryWeapons.com. Well, except for the plea to "savor Sharon Weinberger's unashamed bitter and 'mean-spirited' exposé of the Bush administration's arrogant refusal to accept the censorship of scientific discovery by the 'Best and the Brightest' of her friends."
In her book Imaginary Weapons, Sharon Weinberger reminds us that vast amounts of the taxpayers money (about $50,000 per second) are spent on the technology of war. Improving of the technology requires understanding of the underlying science, a complex and challenging task. In order to "simplify" decisions that direct (or redirect) billions of dollars of contracts there have emerged cadres of "Experts" whose massive certainties about what can (and more often, what cannot) be done become the dominant factors in decisions about "who gets the money." Membership in these elite cadres having been known as "the JASONS," or "the Best and the Brightest," is usually secret, self-perpetuating, and void of diversity. In Imaginary Weapons, Sharon Weinberger attempts to make an "in-depth" examination of the inherent conflict between the need for scientific advice that is "good for the taxpayer" and that which is "good for the preferred contractors." However, in Imaginary Weapons, what she achieves is a portrayal of 2-dimensional actors in a grotesque morality play that is written without concern for the number of casualties that will result from her labeling of real people as being either Good or Evil according to her shallow level of understanding of the issues.
I guess she struck a nerve, hunh?
UPDATE 4:14 PM: It gets better. Collins' wife, Doina, now has a blog up, dedicated to Sharon-bashing. Here's a snip from the first entry:
[T]he boys and girls from the fly-over country that Sharon despises in such heavy-footed paragraphs don't only do great physics, they also write, perish the thought, great books. Like the physicists, they sometimes have trouble getting their work accepted and appreciated. With deep reverence and humble apology to John Kennedy Toole I have to state that to the musings, criticism and such that will follow, no title, dedication, or quotation is more appropriate than his finding in the writings of Jonathan Swift: "WHEN A TRUE GENIUS APPEARS IN THE WORLD, YOU MAY KNOW HIM BY THIS SIGN, THAT THE DUNCES ARE ALL IN CONFEDERACY AGAINST HIM".
Among the Fringe
“I want to believe” flashed across the screen of the darkened conference hall, the audience broke out in applause, and I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Actually I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, attending the “F section” of the 2006 Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF). Tucked away in the basement of the hotel’s conference facilities, the F section is dedicated to “frontier” concepts, though the more cynically inclined might say “fringe.”
The leader of the group goes by the cyberspace nom de guerre UFOGuy11, and for the uninitiated in the world of fringe science he is, in fact, Paul Murad. No, Murad does not invent antigravity devices in his garage in Roswell, New Mexico, but rather, he works as a scientist for the Defense Intelligence Agency. In an interview with American Antigravity (Okay, need I even explain what this organization is?), he explained why he started the F section: to end discrimination against UFO believers.
"In the early nineties, I submitted papers on topics that focused around UFOs but I never mentioned the subject in the abstract," Murad said in the interview. "The reviewers accepted the papers on the basis of the abstracts."
But eventually, conference organizers caught on to Murad’s little charade and his papers were scanned for hidden UFO references, and then summarily rejected. The F section of STAIF was thus designed to make the world safe for UFO believers, or at least to teach them how to write abstracts that wouldn’t get them tagged as lunatics. On a more serious note, it appears that Murad tries to get scientists on the frontiers of science (or fringe, if you will) to behave in a scientific manner by presenting and defending their theories and experiments. And so in the F section, no idea is rejected outright as fringe, rather, it is examined and debated. It’s a not bad idea, in theory.
The F section, when I attended this February, was currently in its third year. I listened as UFOGuy11 ran through the agenda, featuring presentations like Eric Davis’s “Experimental Concepts for Generating Negative Energy in the Laboratory” (those not familiar with Davis might check out his other work, on teleportation). There was also the usual assortment of papers involving gravity waves, antigravity, and of course zero-point energy (what fringe conference would be complete without zero point?).
Now, before all the free energy enthusiasts, antigravity supporters, and UFO buffs attack me as yet another naysayer, let me say something: I really enjoy reading UFOGuy11’s online dialogues with the likes of Jack Sarfatti, inventor of the God phone. I am intrigued by Sarfatti’s and Murad’s debates over wormholes and warp drive, although I occasionally find their e-mail conversations, interspersed by equations, a little tedious. I want to understand what drives these people and why they believe strange things. I truly believe the F section is a good thing, sort of.
My problem with the F group, however, is the very problem pointed out by Murad himself. Some of the experiments supposedly supporting the outer reaches of science, like antigravity, have problems when other researchers try to replicate the results. “Some of these experiments are so difficult, you can’t replicate them,” Murad said.
Say what? Did he say you can’t replicate them? Isn’t that the gold standard of most science, just like they taught us in grade school? There were other problems; sometimes it was difficult to get the scientists on the frontiers to attend even friendly sessions like the F section. Some frontier scientists, it turns out, don’t like having their papers critiqued. Wow, scientists not wanting to attend scientific conferences and having their ideas debated? That sounds problematic, too.
These are similar to the problems that plagued the idea of the hafnium bomb, the notional weapon based on an experiment that violated the laws of physics. The experiment allegedly supporting the hafnium bomb had problems being replicated by independent researchers. And when a panel of experts, called the JASONS, tried to question the lead experimenter about his work, he was nowhere to be found. None of that prevented the Pentagon from funding the hafnium bomb, however.
So, let’s momentarily put aside the question of whether or not we want the Pentagon to fund “frontier” science (which I discussed yesterday). Let’s ask a simpler question: Why do they believe? That’s another question I ask in my book released this week, Imaginary
Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld, which chronicles the life and near death of the hafnium bomb. I contend the very statement “I want to believe” is exactly where the problem lies. Most scientists don’t believe or disbelieve—they just look at the data, relying on the tried and true (albeit imperfect) criteria of reproducibility and peer review.
Why does Murad believe? He says it himself—like Agent Mulder from the X-Files, he believes because he wants to believe. Antigravity, faster-than-light travel, and teleportation would all be great if they were real. Upstairs in the main section of the STAIF conference, scientists and engineers discussed such mundane things as, “How the heck are we going to fulfill the inane drive to Mars with current technology?” For many in the F section, that’s just way too down-to-earth.
There’s no evidence that Murad, despite his Pentagon position, has funded any of these wild ideas, so I find the F group an interesting challenge to mainstream science, and not a threat to national security, like the hafnium bomb. Maybe some day, the scientists of the F section will even replicate a few experiments, come out of the basement, and join the rest of the conference. I wish them luck.
I recently got a call from a source with big news: Something called a “hafnium review panel” had convened in last month to assess the not-quite-dead controversy over whether a radioactive material called hafnium could be made into the next superbomb.
Why wasn’t I invited, I wondered?
For two years, I followed the hafnium bomb, the concept of building a nuclear-type weapon based on charged-up nuclei called nuclear isomers. Through the story of the hafnium bomb, I was trying to understand how the Pentagon gets involved in harebrained projects. The end result is my new book, Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld, which chronicles the rise of fringe science in the Pentagon. (The book is officially released this week; and the Monday edition of NPR’s Fresh Air features an interview with me on some of topics covered in the book.)
The tale of the hafnium bomb, as I like to describe it, is a tragicomedy about how a fast-talking scientist from Texas convinced the Pentagon to sink millions of dollars in pursuit of the next superbomb. The whole scheme hinged on an experiment involving a used dental X-ray machine, a music amplifier, and a few specks of highly radioactive dust.
At the height of the controversy, the State Department was demanding briefings, and everyone from the DIA to the CIA was looking into hafnium. The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) also hopped on board, with plans to spend tens of millions of dollars. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, always an optimist, was said to want a hafnium bomb in 18 months. It was, simply put, a bit ludicrous.
Why does it matter? It matters because the world is filled with strange ideas that could be important for national security, if they were real. Red mercury, antimatter bombs, and military psychics are all candidates. Then there are the mysteries of ball lightning and cold fusion, both of which have also attracted interest from military circles.
There’s nothing wrong with government officials considering wild ideas. Science is about curiosity and being open-minded and no idea should be summarily dismissed. (I even admit a soft spot in my ice-cold skeptic’s heart for some of the more serious cold fusion researchers, who are trying very, very hard to solve the energy crisis — but a bit better reproducibility, and maybe a good theory would be helpful.)
But should the Pentagon fund them? And how does the Pentagon know which far-out ideas to fund? Is it okay to fund a teleportation study, which the Air Force did a couple years ago, but not to fund cold fusion? Many of these ideas have been around for quite some time. As one former Pentagon official put it to me: There is a big difference between high risk, high payoff, and foolish risk, no payoff.
And this is why the Pentagon needs peer review—in other words, review of scientific concepts by independent scientists. They may not always be right, but it sure beats a crapshoot approach to funding anything and everything.
Hafnium, at this point, has been reviewed by just about every peer out there. The JASONS, the secretive group of elite scientists, reviewed it in 1999. So did the Institute for Defense Analyses, a highly regarded federally funded think tank. So did a host of other researchers — some even hired by DARPA. They all concluded the experiments done by the Texas group were flawed.
Why does it matter? It matters because funding for science and technology is in decline, and a $1 spent on a bad project is a $1 not spent on a good one. Imagine if the military has passed over physicist Charles Townes and his work that led to the laser, because they decided instead to fund someone like Josef Papp, who claimed to have built a nuclear submarine in his garage (apparently defense company TRW came to Papp’s 1968 public demo with check in hand).
Luckily, Congress stepped in two years ago to cancel DARPA’s isomer bomb, although rumor has it that a small amount of money through the Department of Energy keeps these periodic hafnium reviews alive. The Air Force and Army also fund some isomer research, though nothing related to a bomb and they appear to be staying away from hafnium.
Will isomers someday yield a breakthrough that could make investment in research worthwhile? Possibly. Scientists have imagined everything from a nuclear battery to a new way to power rockets into outer space. But a nuke the size of a hand grenade? Ain’t gonna happen, at least according to the experts. And if you don’t want to listen to the experts, then there are some fantastic perpetual motion machines out there you can buy.
So what happened at last month’s hafnium meeting? Hard to say, but the hafnium believers haven’t given up. The Texas scientist who invented the imaginary hafnium bomb recently posted a new update to his website claiming even greater confidence in isomer triggering. He’s also not very fond of my book.
But last I heard, DARPA’s director told the hafnium believers that if they want more money out of the agency, they should publish their results in a peer-reviewed journal. What a great idea!
UPDATE 06/14/06 12:06 PM: Carl Collins drops by to respond, here.
"Imaginary Weapons," Whole Lotta Fun
In the fall of 2003, defense industry reporter Sharon Weinberger was sitting through yet another Capitol Hill briefing on Pentagon weaponry, when a fellow in the back of the room mentioned something called a "hafnium bomb." Weinberger had never heard of it. So she turned around and asked the guy what the hell a hafnium bomb was.
The question started Weinberger on a two-year "journey through the Pentagon's scientific underground." By the time she was done, Weinberger had run into eavesdropping kittens, wormhole builders, antimatter rocketeers, psychic CIA agents, intelligent designists, and cold fusion true believers. But most importantly, she became deeply intertwined with a far-flung coalition of Defense Department-backed scientists who believed that they could construct nuclear hand grenades out of bits of the radioactive isotope hafnium-178 -- despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. It's all chronicled in Weinberger's fascinating, disturbing, wickedly funny new book, Imaginary Weapons.
Weinberger's story centers around Carl Collins, a Texas scientist turned nuclear Don Quixote, who convinces Pentagon and Energy Department officials to spend millions on his jousts with the laws of physics. The fact his windmill-tilting relies on a second-hand X-ray machine, taken from a dentist's office, doesn't seem to matter. Or that his Romanian wife has a sketchy choke-hold over the hafnium supply. Or that every scientific panel the Pentagon assembles calls Collins' work bunk. Or that no reputable physicist can replicate his hafnium experiments.
Luckily for Collins, "no one remembers the failure," Weinberger quotes Darpa chief Tony Tether as saying. "That allows us to try again and again… Darpa is Groundhog Day. We do things over and over again." For years, it seems, Tether and others in Defense Department woke up every morning convinced that the Russians were about to have a hafnium bomb. It took a near-Herculean effort to finally persuade them that it might not be true.
In the book – and over the next few days, in a series of exclusive posts for Defense Tech – Weinberger shows how dangerous the amnesiac attitude is for the nation's security. But God, is it good for readers. Weinberger is a master observer, capturing the sights and sounds surrounding the inanity and near-insanity of military fringe science, from the puffed-up research claims to the hushed denials, based on questionable secrecy. Scientists wax poetic about the beauty of mushroom clouds. Google searches for hafnium turn up an Alabama physicist, who sees the isomer's intricacy as a sign of intelligent design. Supposedly landmark experiments are commemorated by stryfoam cups marked "Dr. C's memorial target holder." Imaginary Weapons can lay the physics on a little thick for the lay reader, at times. But mostly, accompanying Weinberger on her trip through the Pentagon's pseudo-science netherworld is madcap, farcical fun. Here's an excerpt:
Hafnium went to the Pentagon by way of New Mexico, helped along by a cadre of believers in the Air Force. One of those, of course, was Forrest "Jack" Agee, the Air Force scientist in charge of funding basic physics. He was the man who, in 1999, started funding Collins, while also publishing with him.
In early 2004, I went to visit Agee at his office in Arlington, Virginia.
Standing in front of the nondescript building that housed the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, I stopped for a moment to take in the gray façade that showed little sign of military occupancy. Office workers shuttled in and out of the multistory building, and it wasn't until I arrived at the Air Force's floor that a halfhearted attempt at military security was on display. A sullen woman reading a copy of People shoved a red badge at me, barely glancing at my press credentials.
Agee, once described to me as the eminence grise behind isomers, smiled as I entered his office and extended his hand like a caretaker greeting a mourning relative on their way to buy a casket. It was the last time he smiled. With dark-tinted glasses and a dour demeanor, Agee did not seem like the type of military official to give interviews, and I was surprised, in fact, that he had agreed to speak to me at all. Maybe he was surprised, too, because as soon as we sat down at the small oval table in his office, he immediately looked uncomfortable. Seated at the table, I noticed that Agee had a corner office, but with the windows blocked at every angle by adjacent buildings, casting the room in a permanent gloomy haze.
To Agee's right sat a public affairs official, and to his left, a security officer, who as Agee explained, was there to make sure he didn't say anything classified.
What secrets could accidentally slip out, I wondered?...
When I asked him about the controversial nature of the [hafnium] work, particularly the scientific debate around Collins's hafnium triggering experiment, Agee frowned deeply. "I know that work is going on around the world in this area," he said. "We are familiar with a number of countries that are pursuing this."
Agee paused for a moment to clear his throat and glanced out the window with its plaintive view of the next building—perhaps thinking about the legions of foreign countries that could be eavesdropping on our conversation about dreaded isomer weapons.
He cleared his throat again, and then continued: "It was a surprise that Japanese torpedoes worked in a shallow harbor in 1941. We were technologically surprised by that and with awesome impact. So, the fact that there are countries other than ours that are working on this, well, we better be able to know what this is about whether we ever find an application for it or not, in case others find that." …
I was struck that just about every government scientist I'd met had described their job as preventing "technological surprise," but something like the isomer weapon was only a threat if it worked, or had a reasonable chance of working, I pointed out… An expert panel of scientists had essentially said the hafnium bomb couldn't work, or at least had about as much a chance of being a bomb as a jelly donut. Was there really any legitimate fear of isomer bombs raining down on the United States anytime in the near-to-distant future?
Agee scoffed.
"We rely on more than just a few days' review by some panel—albeit populated by smart people," he said.
UPDATE 06/14/06 12:06 PM: Carl Collins drops by to respond, here.
Army's Psychic Animal Pals
In 1953 the U.S. Army commissioned a report by Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine to ascertain "whether dogs could, as claimed, locate buried landmines under conditions that gave no normal sensory cues." The conclusions of this report were considered so dangerous embarrassing they remained classified until today.
The Memory Hole has been hard at work obtaining a copy of Rhine's "Final Report for Contract DA-44-009-ENG-1039" -- codename "Animal E.S.P."
According to Dr Rhine, "an investigation of the available reports, and visits to England to learn what the British Army had found, led to a serious question as to whether the claim was well founded". Dr Rhine's experiments focused on German Schu mines buried in a few inches of moist sand. A tough nut to crack, you'll agree. Only 2 years and 15 grueling typed pages later, Dr Rhine concluded "dogs can be trained to locate mines...and there can be no doubt but that, for the most part, this is a sensory function, olefactory in type". Stop the presses.
That didn't end the Pentagon's fascination with E.S.P., author Jon Ronson notes in his book The Men who Stare At Goats. He explains, "In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them." However, it's not entirely clear from Mr. Ronson's work whether the classic 'crook' or more painful 'stink eye'was used.
Unfortunately the affects of Dr Rhine's work penetrated deep within the Army psyche altering the course of 'black' operations for years to come. Disasters associated with programmes such as pSychic Warfighter Insertion/Nautical Extraction, or the "Bay of Pigs" as it was known, forced many subjects underground and left the rest of us with memories of psychic animals we'd rather forget.
-- Steven Snell
Holy Controlled Roof Ascent!
The geniuses at Darpa have had another brainstorm: a high-powered ejector seat designed to forcibly shoot an unfortunate soul onto a roof, instantly. It should wow onlooking crowds at house fires and hostage situations alike.
An inclined (ha) member of the military or emergency services simply seats themselves -- and in around two seconds experiences what can only be described as being 'sneezed' to a height of five stories.
Existing circus cannons fall outside the FCS framework, so once again the Pentagon has turned to Darpa to pick up the slack. Of course, Darpa were happy to provide their inspiration in the patent:
"Circuses have amused crowds by shooting performers out of cannons. For recreational enjoyment, certain traditional devices for launching subjects catapult subjects to experience a free-fall sensation similar to the sensation of bungee jumping or skydiving. Aircraft ejection seat technology and aircraft carrier launching systems, such as catapults, are also capable of launching payloads, however, most of these designs have unpredictable and uncontrollable trajectories and/or cannot be immediately reset and reused."
I'm glad to see they did their research; it's been a tough year since 'Captain Crazy Clowns Emergency Roof Cannons' filed for bankruptcy - all those burnt cats...
"What is therefore needed is a launcher that is controllable, and able to launch payloads through a repeatable and predictable trajectory. Furthermore, the launcher should have a substantially short recycle time thus a user can launch another payload in a relatively short time after the previous launch."
And consider his life insurance plans, while he's at it.
Unfortunately this "man-cannon" is a rather bulky device requiring multiple hands get around and construct. Plus, I think it looks like a contraption from Hustler, patiently waiting for a C-list celebrity to straddle it on the The Howard Stern Show.
For regular folk (and members of Voltron Force), there is an alternative on the market: the 'Rescue Rocket' line, comprised of compressed-air launched grappling hooks, should handle the needs of most Batmen. The new-fangled devices known as 'ladders' should take care of the rest.
-- Steven Snell
Tongue = Battlefield Probe?
Ok, ok. I know the topic is a couple of days old. And I know it was mentioned in yesterday's Rapid Fire. When when Jimmy Wu sent in a short post about using tongues to make better sense of the battlefield, well, I couldn't resist.
In Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein envisioned troopers using their heads and tongues to turn on/off the infrared snoopers, plasma and bomb aiming reticles, moving map overlays, jump jets, etc, of their powered armor suits
Researchers at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition developed a "Brain Port" that puts 144 electrods on the tongue. The pattern of electrode firing convey information such as sonar returns and compass headings. Michael Zinszer, a diver, described it as "Pop Rocks candies". The research team has built the system for sonar and compasses, and plans to integrate infrared sensors.
This is a logical next step, as the tongue has more nerve endings per inch than most other parts of the skin.
Modern human-machine interfaces are approaching the threshold of information overload. For example, fighter cockpits used to be full of analog gauges and TV screens. It takes a long time for pilots to learn which gauges were important when. Even with the advent of multi-function displays, pilots still struggle with information management. Infantrymen, and maybe a few German infantrywomen, will soon face the same problem. For example, the Land Warrior soldier ensemble gives soldiers outputs from GPS, text and voice comm links, LLTV and IR cameras, and moving map displays. And soldiers still have to contend with the regular inputs from their Mk I, Mod 0 eyeballs and ears.
It will be interesting to see whether the "Brain Port" will allow soldiers to process more information than before. If it will, the brain port will herald a revolution in human information processing. For example, in stock trading, the analysts can "look" at more data and make better decisions. And our soldiers will "see" better than our enemies.
-- Jimmy Wu
E-mail Overreaction Bubbles Over
In recent days, an e-mail and a set of cool-but-silly pictures has been making the rounds, showing an airplane hangar overflowing with foam. Now, the public affairs officers at Ellsworth Air Base -- who have some time on their hands, obviously -- have gone to the trouble of writing up a "news" article to dis that e-mail, complaining that it "has caused considerable work in correcting wrong information."
One Air Force insider's reaction to the overreaction: "It was a dang foam test. What does it matter if people think it went a little overboard?" This is "the first time I have seen a news release to disprove an email," he adds. "Especially one that is relatively innocuous."
The misrepresentation of this test has raised the level of awareness about the far-reaching effects of e-mail and technology.
Master Sgt. Dana Rogers, 28th Communications Squadron superintendent of network security, said e-mails such as the one depicting the foam test “misrepresent our capabilities” and can even cause damage to computer networks.
“You think it’s so funny, so you send it to 10 people. Then, they send it to 10 more. This takes up an extremely large amount of e-mail space and can lead to the loss of resources,” he said.
Another aspect of e-mails that miscommunicate facts is the amount of time someone may have to take in order to set the record straight. An e-mail that took two seconds to send caused a large number of man-hours to set straight.
"This is supposed to be a lesson about misuse of government resources," the insider replies. "But in an age where I can buy a terabyte of storage for a relatively small amount of money, who really cares about 'email space'? Besides, they put a hard cap on my storage space at work, so I am forced to delete things (and email) before I can log off if I go above it.
"It seems to me that some PA type at Ellsworth is a bit anal that the story got outside of their control, and they felt they had to spend 'a large number of man-hours to set straight.'"
Happened across this pic while browsing. I can't direct link to the captioned version, but here's the super-sized version at the Defense Visual Information Center. Here's the caption:
LCPL Chad Codwell, from Baltimore, Maryland, with Charlie Company 1st Battalion 5th Marines, carries an experimental urban combat skateboard which is being used for maneuvering inside buildings in order to detect tripwires and sniper fire. This mission is in direct support of Urban Warrior '99.
An. Urban. Combat. Skateboard.
Laugh, if you want, but it's the only vehicle from Future Combat Systems to be fielded so far.
I also see it was "experimental". This must have been in Darpa's lean years. Was this was before the military starting buying commercial parts? Back when the Pentagon shopped at rummage sales?
And I'm fuzzy on this whole "detecting trip wires and snipers" tactic, here. I mean, you'd detect them, all right. I'm no military strategist, but you don't need a skateboard to set off booby-traps and get shot at.
I can see it now: "Lance Corporal, go see if that hallway is rigged to blow. Yeah. Just roll down it. Fast. Ever see 'Behind Enemy Lines'? Outrun the explosions like Owen Wilson did in the movie. And draw any sniper fire, while you're at it..."
The skateboard doesn't appear to be armored, though, and I can already hear Rummy going on about how you go to war with the skateboard you have, not the skateboard you want. Which is too bad, because there are some real bitchin' decks out there this year. (The board this Marine has is not one of them.)
Ahem. Seriously now. To be honest, if that photo and caption hadn't come from the DoD I'd think it was a joke. I almost should go check Snopes on this one. Does anyone have any info on the urban combat skateboard? I looked around a bit but got bupkes.
This is the second in a two-part series on radioactive stealth from exotic weapons guru David Hambling. Check out part one here.
Back in the 60's, there was considerable work done on developing radioactive coatings which would have the double benefit of absorbing radar and reducing drag. We know that from the patents we looked at in part one. What aircraft would have had such coatings?
In the late 1950’s there had been several attempts to reduce the radar cross-section of the U2 spy plane under the name Project Rainbow, detailed here. These included the ‘trapeze’, an arrangement of poles and wires, and ‘wallpaper,’ material printed with with radar-aborbent circuitry. The results were not satisfactory – Kelly Johnson called the modified U2s ‘dirty birds’ because of the effect on their aerodynamics which lost them several thousand feet. Even worse, the ‘wallpaper’ caused overheating with the loss of one aircraft and the death of test pilot Robert Sieker.
A coating that reduced radar returns and improved aerodynamics would have been the answer – but at the price of a visible glow at night. So, were there any sightings of mysterious glowing U2s? A CIA report on the CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90 states:
According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States. (45) This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.
Why would anyone report a U2 as a UFO?
The early U-2s were silver (they were later painted black) and reflected the rays from the sun, especially at sunrise and sunset. They often appeared as fiery objects to observers below.
I leave it to those who compile statistics on flying saucers to say how many glowing UFOs were sighted under these conditions and how many appeared to be luminous on their own account. Note also the wording in Patent 3,713,157 which says that the plasma cloud produces a combination of ‘absorbtion, reflection, refraction and diffraction’ across frequencies including visible spectrum, which would certainly alter the appearance of an aircraft, perhaps to the point of making it an unrecognisable blob.
A radioactive coating would be unlikely to be applied to the entire aircraft – as Martin Streetly of Jane’s pointed out to me, this would immediately block the aircraft's own radar, communications and navigation aids. However, a coating on the locations contributing most to radar returns – inlets and wing-body junction – would have a significant effect, and a coating along the leading edge would give the desired reduction in drag. It might even be possible to have coated surfaces which could be covered or uncovered as needed.
Given that the radioactive plasma coating was known to improve aerodynamics and stealthiness in the 1960’s, we would expect the next step to be a way of achieving the same benefits without radioactivity.
This brings us to the B-2, an aircraft with has long been the subject of speculation. Even respected aviation writer Bill Gunston has commented on suggestions that the B-2 employs a system which charges the leading wing edge to ‘millions of volts’. (Interestingly, most such speculation is tied up with ideas of ‘electrogravitics’, anti-gravity and alien technology, which belong firmly in the disinformation category).
This would chime with a comment in Ben Rich’s book about the Skunk Works . He could not believe that Northrop’s stealth bomber design was 10% more aerodynamically efficient than Lockheed’s competing design, which was externally similar (page 338 in the Warner edition). Perhaps Northrop were exagerating, as Rich suggests; but perhaps their plane had a secret advantage.
Many have commented on a photograph of a B-2 from Edwards AFB (published in Air Forces Monthly in October 2000) in which the wing seems to be enveloped in a faint glowing cloud. This was explained by the Air Force as water vapor, but some commentators have argued that such a cloud would not form simultaneously above and below the wing.
See also the discussion and perhaps anomalous picture here.
The USAF appears to have been using plasma aerodynamics for decades. The Russians certainly know all about it , as does anyone who has bought the technology off them. According to the patents it has additional benefits too – it can muffle the noise produced by engines as well as preventing contrails from forming.
The only people not enjoying its benefits are the civilian taxpayers who funded it in the first place.
(If you’re interested in more, there’s a chapter on secret aircraft and UFOs in my book Weapons Grade, out this week in paperback, and chapters on new military developments in other fields from nanotechnology to artificial intelligence).
This is the first in two-part series from exotic weapons guru David Hambling.
There’s a simple technology that could transform civil aviation, slashing fuel consumption, reducing greenhouse emissions and cutting noise. The problem is, nobody knows about it – yet. It's a military secret.
The way technology migrates from classified weapons programs to everyday life is the theme of my book, Weapons Grade. (Did I mention it was out in paperback this week?) We wouldn’t have jet aircraft, computers or satellite communications without such programs. But when they stay secret, the public benefit is lost. What would have happened to the electronics industry if the transistor had not been declassified in 1949?
Plasma aerodynamics offers tantalizing promises of improving aircraft performance. By producing a thin layer of charged particles around an aircraft you can change the behavior of the boundary layer, significantly reducing friction. The charged layer also absorbs radar, improving stealth.
When my colleague Justin Mullins wrote about the subject for New Scientist magazine back in 2000, it seemed to be an obscure Russian technology dating from the late 70’s which the US was just beginning to examine. But it offered real benefits, with a potential drag reduction of up to 30%.
“A cut in drag of 1 per cent means you can increase an airliner's payload by about 10 per cent, or it could simply fly farther or faster,” Mullins pointed out, “Just imagine the effect this could have on cash-strapped airlines.”
The Russians seemed to be years ahead, even marketing a plasma stealth add-on device said to reduce radar returns by a factor of a hundred.
He concludes by wondering if the technology can actually work in practice.
“Either the new labs are a huge waste of time and money, or the American military knows something we don't.“
As it turns out, they certainly do.
A lot of information on stealth disappeared from the public domain decades ago when the whole subject turned black. Which was why I was surprised to find the original patent for plasma stealth still intact.
Patent 3,127,608 is called "Object Camouflage Method And Apparatus," and "relates to a method of making aircraft or other objects invisible to radar." The inventor, one Arnold L. Eldredge, describes the theoretical basis of plasma stealth accurately.
The most surprising thing is the date. The patent was filed on August 6th, 1956. The technology has been around for fifty years.
But the big problem is with his apparatus – Eldredge uses an electron gun, which would be way too big to carry on an aircraft. In fact, that’s a problem with this whole plasma idea. Apparatus to generate the millions of volts needed is big, bulky and impractical; even these days the Russians are talking 100 Kg and tens of kilowatts.
But there is a way - check out Patent 4,030,098 (1962) “Method and means for reducing reflections of electromagnetic waves “ – assigned to the Secretary of the Army and the rather similar Patent 3,713,157 (1964) belonging to North American Aviation, later absorbed by Boeing – “Energy Absorption by a Radioisotope Produced Plasma”
Both of these use the same basic concept: a coating of radioactive material producing a flux of either Alpha of Beta particles ionize the air, producing the desired layer of plasma. It’s a clever solution. Radioactive paint weighs virtually nothing, does not require any power input and can be dirt cheap. One of the suggested emitters is Strontium-90, which is produced in abundance as a waste product by nuclear reactors.
It’s also quite safe. With a thin protective coating to prevent it from flaking off, the soft radiation (unlike dangerous Gamma radiation) is not a hazard to pilot or maintenance personnel. This type of material is only dangerous if inhaled or ingested.
Both confirmed that the idea, though exotic, was sound enough in theory. Interestingly, neither had come across the idea before. And both observed one obvious disadvantage from the point of view of stealth. The radiation levels involved – 10 Curies per square centimeter – would give the plane a visible glow at night, making it a beacon to enemy air defenses.
Did this problem mean that the whole idea was shelved - or were radioactive stealth coatings taken further?
We’ll be looking at some surprising answers in part two...
"Animals have been part of military operations since there have been military operations," said Noah Shachtman of DefenseTech.org. "They have been the fighting man's best friend for generations and in modern-day warfare that's still the case."
While there are no sharks yet in uniform and cyborg insects are still in development, Shachtman finds some encouragement in the military's more unusual programs.
"The Defense Department is what, $600 billion a year?" he asked. "That leaves a lot of room for all kinds of kooky projects. I wouldn't say there's an order from Donald Rumsfeld to build mechanical bees or something like that, but especially in DARPA, there's a desire to explore and freedom to look into things that may or may not work out militarily."
He believes that, although many of DARPA's programs are scrapped before they're seen through, it's one of the few places in government research where dreaming is considered an asset.
"I wouldn't interpret that to mean we're going to have an army of dolphins and robotic bears attacking the enemy anytime soon," Shachtman joked.
So the Memory Hole has posted a list of movies made or used by the CIA. Some have titles you'd expect: "Ear Wiretapping -- Bugging Devices," "Investigation of US Bacteriological Warfare." Others seem out of place, like "Animal Farm," the animated version of the Orwell classic.
But, as Nick reminded me the other day, no one should be surprised to find "Animal Farm" on the list. After all, the Agency bought the movie rights to the book, a long time back. Nick dug up a Times article for 2000, which explains:
Many people remember reading George Orwell's "Animal Farm" in high school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it "impossible to say which was which."
That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film's secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.
The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell's pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to "Animal Farm" from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.
Rewriting the end of "Animal Farm" is just one example of the often absurd lengths to which the C.I.A. went, as recounted in a new book, "The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters" (The New Press) by Frances Stonor Saunders, a British journalist.
Sticky Foam Gets Serious
Sticky foam is the custard pie of the nonlethals world, often seen more as a practical joke than a weapon. In fact, it worked well enough at stopping people, but suffers from some critical disadvantages, as Noah pointed out a while back.
One of the big problems is that having slimed a rioter, you can’t arrest them or take them away. And if the sticky foam covers their mouth and nose, it can be anything but non-lethal.
After some initial enthusiasm for the idea during the Marine deployment to Somalia in 1995, the idea faded and has been in limbo ever since. Now sticky foam is back, defending nuclear weapon stockpiles, according to this report from Government Security.
The report explains that some facilities storing uranium and plutonium now boast steel doors with containers of hydrocarbon solution built into them. Breach the door, and the liquid comes foaming out under high pressure, expanding in bulk by a factor of forty and sealing the breach with an impassable obstacle.
The idea is that sticky foam will delay any attackers for long enough for the defenders to call in reinforcements. Experiments with explosives found it was impossible to break through the doors without the foam barrier deploying. Another test showed how a defender could release the foam by shooting it with an M-16. According to Ronald Timm, president of RETA Security:
“If you're on the high security side of a door and attackers are attempting to break through, you can use your weapon to shoot the door…The sticky foam will deploy, delay the attackers, and give you time to call for help.”
The doors are already installed at undisclosed sites. In the new role, the foam's drawbacks become advantages. Keeping attackers stuck in place for as long as possible is helpful…and there are unlikely to be protests if any of them tries to force a way through and comes to a sticky end.
The U.S. military already trains dolphins to hunt for mines. But why draft Flipper, when you can get Jaws, instead?
That's the thinking, I guess, behind the Pentagon's decision to fund research into brain implants that could one day lead to sharks becoming "'stealth spies,' capable of gliding undetected through the ocean."
At first, the implants are being used to "steer" spiny dogfish, New Scientist notes.
As the dogfish swims about, the researchers beam a radio signal from a laptop to an antenna attached to the fish... Electrodes [inside the fish's head] then stimulate either the right or left of the olfactory centre, the area of the brain dedicated to smell. The fish flicks round to the corresponding side in response to the signal, as if it has caught a whiff of an interesting smell: the stronger the signal, the more sharply it turns.
Boston University biologist Jelle Atema plans to use the implants to study how sharks track chemical trails. We know that sharks have an extremely acute sense of smell, but exactly how the animals deploy that sense in the wild has so far been a matter of conjecture. Neural implants could change all that.
(Big ups: Clark, who says, "Obviously they never saw that cinematic classic, Deep Blue Sea.")
Be Mickey Mouse's Spy
Some of you may have felt a little underqualified to become a manhunter for Special Operations Command. Never fear. An anonymous pal has found a job almost as good: "Intelligence Analyst" for the Walt Disney Company. Yeah, you read that right: a spook for the Mouse... "highly developed Internet skills" and "US Government security clearance (at least Secret-level) desirable."
Employer: The Walt Disney Company Sector: Public Type: Job Status: Full-time Location: Burbank, CA Title: Intelligence Analyst
THE SITUATION: Basic Purpose and Objective of the Position: The Intelligence Analyst anticipates and assesses threats that could harm, or make vulnerable, The Walt Disney Company (TWDC), its employees, guests, or assets.
THE POSITION: The analyst thoroughly reviews information from open/public sources, official sources, and professional contacts, and conducts regular assessments of world events, regional/national security climates, and suspect individuals and groups. The analyst produces a range of written and verbal analyses for employees and management of the Company and provides tactical intelligence support to the Company's security and crisis management operators...
% of Total Duties and Responsibilities
45 [%] Monitors open source media, homeland security and law enforcement bulletins, and information from professional contacts, for international, national, and local news and intelligence that may affect the security and safety of TWDC. Maintains comprehensive files of intelligence on key issues and parts of the world; maintains record of threats received, assessments, and their disposition. Plays key information processing role in the Corporate-level Emergency Operations Center, when activated.
35 [%] Anticipates scenarios, analyzes information, and produces written or verbal assessments and warning forecasts for Global Security management and other appropriate TWDC consumers. Assessments will be assigned or self-initiated. Recommends strategies to mitigate security risks as appropriate or required.
10 [%] Develops and maintains regular liaison with local, national, and international law enforcement and intelligence community partners. Maintains and broadens professional skills and contacts through external training and attendance at conferences.
5 [%] Becomes subject matter expert on issues such as counterterrorism, travel security, and international affairs.
5 [%] Finds and coordinates training opportunities and intelligence production of analytic cadre throughout TWDC...
Education Level: BA/BS Required AND 4-6 Years of Experience
Field of Study/Area of Experience: Political science, international relations, national security studies, or related field preferred Other
Training/Technical Skills/Knowledge:
* Highly developed Internet skills and knowledge of Microsoft Office-based applications, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access
* Foreign area knowledge and understanding of contemporary affairs gained through study, travel, or work abroad " Knowledge and understanding of analysis on security issues, especially though not exclusively related to terrorism
* Familiarity with information resources and data-mining techniques " Analytic experience and formal training with an intelligence agency, law enforcement organization, the military, or the private sector required
* US Government security clearance (at least Secret-level) desirable.
Abilities & Behaviors
* Strong research and critical thinking skills to identify, collect, and evaluate data; to absorb and synthesize large amounts of information; and to draw logical, interpretable, and potentially actionable conclusions.
* Strong written and verbal English presentation skills.
* Solid interpersonal, teambuilding, and networking skills
* Ability to work under pressure of tight deadlines and high, exacting standards
* High motivation, desire for professional growth and continuous improvement, and a sincere willingness to learn
* Ability to interface with and represent Disney Global Security to all levels of management, executives, and external partners
* Ability to organize, balance, and prioritize multiple projects
* Exhibits creativity and innovativeness " Willingness and ability to train others " Strong professional ethics and ability to maintain absolute discretion, confidentiality, and trust.
Grandad's Jet-Pack
I think its in the bylaws of Popular Science, somewhere, that the magazine has to feature a flying car or a jet-pack every couple of issues. This time, however, PopSci has a particularly fun take on an old stand-by -- one I wish I had thought to write, frankly. Check of this lovingly silly portrait of one of the guys who actually flies a jet-pack in his back yard.
Despite the great optimism of the early ’60s, in the rocket belt’s brief history, only 12 souls have flown one. More people have walked on the moon. But Juan Manuel Lozano didn’t want to go to the moon...
Lozano is not a rocket scientist. He is not a stuntman. He is an animated, often goofy granddad who is afraid of the sight of blood. When he’s all dressed up in his rocket suit, Lozano looks more like Andy Kaufman pulling one of his famous stunts than he does James Bond. His highest diploma is a high school degree, although he did attend pilot school in Mexico City and took courses at an aerobatic-flight shop in Houston so he could fly the plane he was designing at the time.
For the past 40 years, Lozano has been a constant tinkerer and rocket hobbyist, and evidence of his obsession is all around his home. He shows me an in-progress rocket-propelled motorcycle that he predicts will go from 0 to 250 in five seconds. Around the back of the house is a rocket engine for a car that Lozano says will have 22,000 horse-power and a shot at breaking the land speed record. His daughter recounts stories of the go-karts dad made for her and her sister. And the high school science fairs? Guess whose kids always won.
Wanna track the world's most dangerous game? Ready to move to Tampa? Then defense contractor SAIC has a job for you.
Special Operations Manhunting Program Analyst
Job Description:
Performs as the USSOCOM lead for the development and implementation of CT [counter-terror] manhunting operations in support of DOD GWOT [Department of Defense global war on terror] efforts. Individual will research and incorporate current manhunting experiences and procedures in order to provide an educational forum for manhunting issues. Supports development of innovative curriculum targeted at manhunting education throughout DOD and the interagency environment, especially for those who enable and support manhunting. Will coordinate staff actions in support of manhunting issues within the JSOU, USSOCOM, DOD and other agencies.
Upon completion of concept and doctrine development, the chosen candidate may assist with the development of CONOPS [concept of operations] and JTTP’s [joint tactics, techniques, and procedures] for manhunting operations. , Position is located at USSOCOM [U.S. Special Forces Command], on MacDill AFB, in Tampa, FL. The successful candidates will represent Joint Special Operations University and educational issues associated with manhunting to USSOCOM.
Education:
Bachelors Degree in related field of study.
Required Skills:
Must possess a SECRET level clearance and be able to obtain a TOP SECRET/SCI security clearance. Must have articulate speaking, writing, and organizational skills. Demonstrated ability to develop and advance innovative concepts with limited oversight. Knowledge of how SOF and interagency cooperation in the GWOT environment. Attended Intermediate Service School and Joint PME II.
Desired Skills:
Comprehensive understanding of DOD and IA GWOT and CT operations. Attended Senior Service School. Related duties in a joint, interagency, or special mission unit assignment.
(Big ups: A)
Moscow's Remote-Controlled Heart Attacks
This is the second of David Hambling's two-part series on plasma and electromagnetic weapons. Check out part one here.
The American military may want to attack the nervous system, with pain rays and laser plasma pulses. But they're not the only ones. The Russians have long studied such systems, too -- including one weapon that could, in theory, remotely trigger heart attacks.
In 2003, at the 2nd European Symposium on Non-Lethal Weapons, Anatoly Korolev and his colleagues from Moscow State University presented a paper with the snappy title "Bioelectrodynamic Criterion of the NLW Effectiveness Estimation and the Interaction mechanisms of the multilayer Skin Tissues with electromagnetic Radiation." This is a study of how radio-frequency weapons -- like the American Active Denial System -- affect the skin. After wading through a mass of technical data showing how complex the interactions are we reach the punch line:
The sensations modality (pricking, touch, pressure, gooseflesh, touch, burning pain etc) depends on the field parameters and individual concrete human being factors. As a matter of fact, we can really choose the non-lethal bioeffect.
The effects include sensations similar to those discussed previously, and more besides. The paper discusses effects on cell membranes and affecting the body’s normal function, including "information transfer to the organs of control."
At the same conference, V Makukhin of the Trymas Engineering Center in Moscow described "Electronic equipment for complex influence on biological objects." And when he says "biological objects," he means you and me.
His laboratory apparatus uses a modulated beam of radio waves to produce what he terms "disorder of autonomic nervous system," put forward as a possible non-lethal weapon. Makhunin notes that there is no general agreement on how EM waves disrupt nerves - he mentions ion channels similar to those in the plasma paper - but he certainly seems to be seeing the same effects as American researchers.
But it need not be a non-lethal weapon. Makhunin also mentions the effects of "change of electrocardiogram" and what he calls "function break of heart muscle."
The vulnerability of the heart to electrical stimulation (including that produced by EM waves) is well documented. A lethal device would interfere with the electrical potentials that keep the chambers of the heart synchronized, producing fibrillation and rapid death. A death ray doesn’t need to be a truck-sized laser that reduces the target to smoking heap; a small device that stops the heart will do the job.
Little has been openly published in this area in the public domain, but this may be the tip of the iceberg. We are likely to be hearing more in future - especially if the Russians manage to find funding.
I don’t think we need tinfoil hats just yet. But a layer of conducting mesh built into body armor might save a lot of heartache in years to come.
(If you want more, there’s a whole chapter on different non-lethal directed energy weapons and where the technology might lead in my book Weapons Grade. )
The brain has always been a battlefield. New weapons might be able to hack directly into your nervous system.
"Controlled Effects" (see image, right) is one of the Air Force’s ambitious long-term challenges. It starts with better and more accurate bombs, but moves on to discuss devices that "make selected adversaries think or act according to our needs... By studying and modeling the human brain and nervous system, the ability to mentally influence or confuse personnel is also possible."
The first stage is technology to “remotely create physical sensations.” They give the example of the Active Denial System "people zapper" which uses a high-frequency radiation similar to microwaves as a non-lethal means of crowd control.
Other weapons can affect the nervous system directly. The Pulsed Energy Projectile fires a short intense pulse of laser energy. This vaporizes the outer layer of the target, creating a rapidly-expanding expanding ball of plasma. At different power levels, those expanding plasmas could deliver a harmless warning, stun the target, or disable them - all with pinpoint laser precision from a mile away.
Early reports on the effects of PEPs mentioned temporary paralysis, then thought to be related to ultrasonic shockwaves. It later became apparent that the electromagnetic pulse caused by the expanding plasma was triggering nerve cells.
Details of this emerged in a heavily-censored document released to Ed Hammond of the Sunshine Project under the Freedom if Information Act. Called “Sensory consequence of electromagnetic pulsed emitted by laser induced plasmas,” it described research on activating the nerve cells responsible for sensing unpleasant stimuli: heat, damage, pressure, cold. By selectively stimulating a particular nociceptor, a finely tuned PEP might sensations of say, being burned, frozen or dipped in acid -- all without doing the slightest actual harm.
The skin is the easiest target for such stimulation. But, in principle, any sensory nerves could be triggered. The Controlled Effects document suggests “it may be possible to create synthetic images…to confuse an individual' s visual sense or, in a similar manner, confuse his senses of sound, taste, touch, or smell.”
In other words, it may be possible to use electromagnetic means to create overwhelming 'sound' or 'light', or indeed 'intolerable smell' which would exist only in the brain of the person perceiving them.
There is another side as well. The “sensory consequences” document also notes that the nervous system which controls muscles could be influenced to cause what they call “Taser-like motor effects.” The stun gun’s ability to shock the muscles into malfunction is relatively crude; we might now be looking at are much more targeted effects.
Tomorrow: Moscow moves in. Remote-controlled heart attacks, anyone?
Someday the U.S. military could drive a trailer to a spot just beyond insurgent fighting and, within minutes, reconfigure part of the atmosphere, blocking an enemy's ability to receive satellite signals, even as U.S. troops are able to see into the area with radar.
An engineer with Research Support Instruments in Princeton, N.J. recently completed the first phase of work for a U.S. Air Force sponsored project called Microwave Ionosphere Reconfiguration Ground based Emitter, or Mirage. (scroll down)
The work involves using plasma — an ionized gas — to reconfigure the ionosphere. Mirage would employ a microwave transmitter on the ground and a small rocket that shoots chaff into the air to produce about a liter of plasma at 60-100 km. (36- 60 mi.) in altitude, changing the number of electrons in a select area of the ionosphere to create a virtual barrier. Ionosphere reconfiguration offers two major applications of interest to the military: bouncing radars off the ionosphere, also known as over-the-horizon radar, and the ability to jam signals from the Global Positioning Satellite system, according to John Kline, the lead investigator for Mirage.
This work is only the latest effort in Kline's more extensive investigations of atmospheric plasmas… Before Mirage, Kline had another contract for a project called Plasma Point Defense, which explored the possibility of using a plasma weapon on board a U.S. Navy surface vessel to protect against threats ranging from surface-to-surface missiles to mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.
In the past, NASA's fringe science arm has looked into tweaking Mother Nature, to throw hurricanes off their course. But those were just computer simulations. No one actually tried to go out a build some weather control machine.
Insurgents Using Chem Weapons - On Themselves?
This has to be the most bizarre twist in the WMD saga yet. Insurgents in Iraq could very well have chemical weapons. And they may be using them - on themselves.
The story starts over a year ago with a Marine blogger in Iraq. On June 2nd 2004 "The Green Side" - we’ll get back to the signficance of this source later - describes suicidal attacks by insurgents in Fallujah: “We could not understand why they kept coming but they did.” The reason, it turned out, was drugs: “…these ‘holy warriors’ are taking drugs to get high before attacks. It true, as we pushed into the town in April many Marines came across drug paraphernalia (mostly heroin). Recently, we have gotten evidence of them using another drug BZ that makes them high and very aggressive.”
BZ is not your typical substance of abuse. It’s a hallucinogenic chemical weapon. This weird concept originated in the 1950’s when “better living through chemistry” was a slogan to live by and warfare without blood was the goal. As the Washington Star noted in 1965:
New chemical weapons that win by creating confusion rather than death and destruction have proved so successful that they have been quietly added to the Army's arsenal. The latest and best, a gas called BZ by the Army, put a number of soldier guinea pigs out of action during field tests at a Utah Army base last November, and did it without harming a man.”
BZ or "Agent Buzz" is the military name for 3-quinuclidinyl benzillate, an extremely powerful hallucinogen. After experimenting with a whole stash of mind-altering substances including cocaine, heroin and LSD, the Pentagon selected BZ for weaponizing. Its major advantages are that it can easily delivered in an aerosol cloud, and it is very safe. With many substances, the effective dose can be dangerously close to the amount needed to kill - ask any anesthetist. With BZ, the tiny effective dose (maybe two milligrams) is around one-thousandth the lethal dose. It is also odorless and invisible, and there is currently no means of detecting it.
Agent Buzz was tested between 1959 to 1975 on some twenty-eight hundred US soldiers at several locations. It proved extremely effective as an incapacitant. The physical effects are increased heart rates, pupil dilation, blurred vision, dry skin and mouth, increased temperature, and flushing of skin – as a med school mnemonic has it “blind as a bat, dry as a bone, hot as Hades, red as a beet.”
But the psychological effects are more important than the physical ones, as the subject is also rendered “mad as a hatter.”
It also produces uncontrollable aggression, Wouter Basson, the man behind South Africa’s chemical and biological warfare program, notes. His version of BZ, in fact, was modified with CB (Carboxy-Methoxy-Benzoxytropane) specifically to reduce this effect.
The Serb army manual on their BZ munitions implies a violent reaction: “it can be expected that such individuals or groups will subsequently, under the effects of [this chemical agent], inflict great damage and losses on their own forces.”
Over a hundred thousand pounds of BZ were produced by the US. However, it fell out of favor because its effects were considered to be too unpredictable. Destruction of the BZ stockpile commenced in 1988 and was reportedly completed in Pine Bluff in 1990.
Could any be in Iraq? In 1995, the British reported that Iraq had produced Agent 15, similar or identical to BZ, and possessed ‘large stocks’ of it. A later CIA report discounts this and concludes that "Iraq never went beyond research with Agent 15—a hallucinogenic chemical similar to BZ—or any other psychochemical.” The British do not agree and as of the last updated in 2004, the MoD maintains its claim. This would appear to be the most likely source of any insurgent supplies.
I did not initially take the report from The Green Side too seriously. Posted in the form of letters home from a Marine to his Dad, it looked like just keeping in touch with the folks at home and recording a piece of personal history, not an intel report. But the blog turns out to be the work of Lt Col Dave Bellon (right), not just another Marine but intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team. The blog can no longer be easily accessed as it has now disappeared behind a USMC security screen.
Given Lt Col Bellon’s access to inside information, his rather specific claim about BZ becomes more serious. Other US sources do not mention BZ by name but do describe drug use by insurgents.
The account of the November 2004's "Fall of Fallujah" by Bing West in the Marine Corps Gazette mentions “crazies” rushing out in suicidal attacks as well as others “sustained by drugs.”
Elsewhere, Dan Senor, a Senior Advisor from the CPA stated: “Our delegation has been told by Fallujan leaders that many of the individuals involved with the violence are on some - are on various drugs. It is part of what they're using to keep them up to engage in this violence at all hours
Other drugs were clearly involved as well, and Lt Col Bellon’s information about BZ may simply be wrong. But it’s quite possible than coalition troops are facing a number of aggressive, paranoid insurgents, unable to tell friend from foe and unable to realize that there was anything wrong with them, beyond control and hallucinating their worst fears.
Could the guerillas be taking BZ -- sometimes called “the ultimate bad trip” – willingly? This seems unlikely: blurred vision, paranoia and hallucinations are not assets in a firefight. But the British Navy traditionally issued a half-pint ration of rum before action and there were always plenty of takers. In Iraq, cynical leaders might dole out BZ to unwitting cannon-fodder. A homicidally aggressive fighter, even an impaired one, is more useful than one who won’t fight against insane odds. This may remind some people of the fabled assassin cult, but don’t believe everything you read in Dan Brown.
Back during the first Gulf War, some in the tinfoil-hat crowd tried to argue that the US used BZ on Iraqis. Wouter Basson even claims to have found traces of BZ in the urine of supposed victims. As with the other alleged BZ attacks mentioned above there is no independent confirmation of this. And reading the incredible story of Basson’s involvement in the whole area of chemical and biological weapons – mind-boggling only begins to describe it – you can assess his credibility yourself. Anyone making such claims will need solid evidence.
But just in case: if anyone offers you any performance-enhancing substances with the words “Dude, this is weapons grade…” – just say no.
(Speaking of Weapons Grade, my publishers would like me to mention my book of the same title which provides an insight into military high-tech from directed-energy weapons to nanotechnology and how it will change both warfare and civilian life.)
I was worried there for a minute. Sure, the U.S. military was figuring out ways to give its troops sharks’ electric sensors. But would they remember to outfit the fighters with artificial gills?
I should have a little more faith. Of course they would. The Army recently handed Case Western Reserve University and Waltham, MA’s Infoscitex Corp. a joint contract to start investigating a “Microfabricated Biomimetic Artificial Gill System… based on the subdividing regions of clef, filament, and lamellae found in natural fish gills.” In the first phase of the program, “gas exchange units will be designed and demonstrated for rapid, efficient extract of oxygen from surrounding water.”
“An advanced breathing apparatus that mimics the efficiency, simplicity, and durability of the gill-swim bladder found in fish could greatly improve human maneuverability and sustainability in both aquatic and high altitude settings,” the contract announcement reminds us. Sure could.
But the synthetic gills aren’t the only useful item the military is funding in this years’ crop of Small Business Technology Transfer awards. Others include spray-on thermal coatings for "hypersonic projectiles," "hybrid propulsion system for undersea weapons," and, naturally, "Electromagnetic and Laser Launch Systems for Affordable, Rapid Access to Space." (Here's a bit of background.)
THERE'S MORE: Over in the comments, Willy Volk tells us that an Israeli inventor "has already developed a new 'tankless' scuba system" that's been patented in Europe and in the U.S. IsraCast has an interview with the fellow.
Sign Language
Back in college I had a Soviet studies professor whose office was decorated with lurid, humorless security posters from the U.S.S.R. I thought they were artifacts peculiar to repressive, secrecy-obsessed regimes -- until I started covering the Pentagon.
On bulletin boards, doors and office walls throughout the building, my colleagues and I would find dozens of security posters and signs of varying quality and message – some of them just as spooky as those Soviet posters in my professor’s office (and some still focused on the Soviets, for that matter). My favorite, which one of my co-workers was kind enough to swipe for me, was a warning to government officials about to travel abroad. “Get your travel threat briefing before departing,” it screamed, the words surrounded by hideous, bloody drawings of what might happen to if you weren't careful – hostage situations, attacks in café’s, etc.
These kinds of signs have been around a long time, of course. Here’s one of the all-time classics. (Some, though, were pretty horrible.)
Now, they’re official policy – according to military regulations, such security warnings have to be displayed in certain areas.
But do they work? Consider this: According to an Army security manual, “after a while, a security poster, no matter how well designed, will be ignored; it will, in effect, simply blend into the environment. For this reason, awareness techniques should be creative and frequently changed.”
There are quite a few signs and posters online. Some are, in fact, creative. Some are attempts at humor. Most fail. And some are just plain weird. (Really weird. And what's up with all the kids?)
Here's a sampling of some of the best -- and worst.
"There's a new battle plan for bringing the battleship Iowa to San Francisco," the Chronicle reports.
The battleship's supporters now hope to gain the support of city leaders by turning part of the vessel into a museum about the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and the contributions of gays, lesbians, ethnic minorities and women to the military.
The Board of Supervisors rejected the ship in July, and two supervisors explained their "no" votes by saying they objected to the military's policies toward gays and lesbians, while others opposed the war in Iraq.
Hurricane, Halt!
Note to self: Next time a super-storm wipes out a major American city, do not wait two weeks to mention Ross Hoffman's research into controlling hurricanes.
In May '04, I wrote a bit about Hoffman and his work for Wired News:
For 25 years, Ross Hoffman has had a vision: to use tiny changes in the environment to alter the paths of hurricanes, slow down snow storms and turn dark days bright.
For most of those years, Hoffman kept his ideas largely to himself. His adviser at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told him weather control was too outlandish for his Ph.D. thesis. The chances of a buttoned-down foundation or government agency funding such research were so slim, Hoffman didn't even bother to ask.
But, in 2001, all that changed. Hoffman stumbled upon a tiny, obscure cranny of the American space program -- the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, or NIAC. In this $4 million-a-year agency, Hoffman found a place where the wildest of ideas were not only tolerated, they were welcome...
With his [NIAC research grant], Hoffman tweaked a weather-prediction program to show that moving a hurricane was possible -- at least in theory. Here's how: You need a ring of satellites in orbit, channeling the sun's energy, stretching around the Earth. The machines would beam power to the planet, using microwaves. But, tuned to 183 GHz, they could also heat up small regions of the atmosphere by a degree or two. Those small changes could have enormous impact, Hoffman's simulation showed. A deadly hurricane, headed for the Hawaiian island of Kauai, drifted off into the Pacific, harmlessly.
"One of the great things about NIAC is that they never say, 'That's crazy, you can never build a fleet of solar-powered space stations,'" Hoffman said.
In this Scientific American article from last October, Hoffman fleshes out his storm-curbing idea. If microwave-blasting satellites aren't available, he suggests, maybe we could coat "the ocean surface with a thin film of a biodegradable oil that slows evaporation."
While the New York Times and others are contemplating the beginning of the end of oil, the Pentagon's way-out research arm is trying to figure out what it would take to make the U.S. military "petroleum free," according to Inside Defense.
Naturally, the mad scientists picked robots and wireless battlefield networks as two of their top energy savers.
“This universal connectivity will allow commanders to track individual soldiers and robots as well as logistics system status and readiness,” the summary [of a February Darpa energy workshop] states. These capabilities, coupled with advanced modeling and simulation tools, will allow commanders to rapidly explore and exploit warfighting options, which in the end translates into shorter execution time lines and reduced energy requirements.
Darpa-ites also saw drones as a potential boost to oil alternatives.
Using more unmanned systems will save energy because they will be smaller and lighter than manned systems that require armor, the summary states. Plus, robots and other unmanned systems “will allow reduction of the number of combat soldiers needed to accomplish the mission, further contributing to reduced energy requirements.”
Electricity will one day be the big replacement for oil, the Darpa conferees believe. And "since electricity can be generated from a variety of sources, it may be possible in 30 years to avoid having to rely on energy and fuel imported into a battlespace," Inside Defense notes.
The military would also need portable generators and "'ultra-high-capacity' electric storage devices to support directed-energy weapons and other 'futuristic gun systems' that require massive amounts of energy in short bursts."
But those ray guns shouldn't be wired up to the generators. The energy should be beamed through the air, instead. "This technology will be valuable because power lines are highly vulnerable to sabotage," the Darpa summary observes. Of course they are.
Flocking Drones, Stress-Free Soldiers
Inside Defense's John Liang also spent last week snooping around DarpaTech 2005, the sorta-annual get-together of the Pentagon's mad science division. Here's a bit of what he found. You can check out the rest by giving this link a click.
* Birds of a feather. Getting unmanned aircraft to fly in formation is a challenge that still escapes DARPA scientists, according to Tactical Technology Office program manager Tom Beutner. "Formation flight is an idea we know should work," he says. "We see it even in nature, yet while we routinely use formation flight for tactical advantage, it has never been utilized for the full aerodynamic benefit it offers." Flying in formation allows the aircraft behind the leader to conserve fuel by flying in its slipstream, just like geese do when they fly south for the winter. "Only birds now do this routinely, and they can't explain it to us," he said.
* Stressed out. DARPA's Defense Sciences Office has been trying for years, now, to figure out how GIs can fight on little or no sleep. Now, DSO officials are looking for ideas on how soldiers can wage war, just about stress-free. The scientists are seeking ways to completely eliminate post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as techniques to map and identify the neural transmitters that cause the brain to feel stress.
* Let is snow, let it snow, let it snow (or sleet, or blow sand). DSO officials also want to enhance the human body's ability to adapt to extreme environments. Normally it takes a human several weeks to get used to a new environment; DARPA seeks technologies to speed that process up, as well as to identify the essential building blocks of how such adaptations happen.
* Itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka dot . . . contact lens? DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office is looking for ideas that would allow a nano-chip to be placed on a contact lens, according to MTO's Dennis Palla. The technology also would allow soldiers to receive and read data from various sources, as well as act as a miniature camera that could transmit what he or she sees back to either the headquarters unit or to other soldiers in the field via a network, Palla says.
-- John Liang
Phone Book: G.I.'s Best Friend?
Darpa program manager Michael Pagels says he could easily drown a soldier... in data, with more than 400 terabytes each day. A terabyte, from the Greek word for monster, is a thousand billion bytes or a thousand gigabytes. And 400 terabytes is the equivalent of every person in the urban Los Angeles area taking a digital photo every second for a year, noted Pagels, a program manager with the far-side agency's Information Exploitation Office.
Pagels wants a new kind of map to avoid this this "death by data." One that does what our brains do automatically: create models of the world that are constantly updating to reflect our experiences.
We maintain a 4D model of the world in our heads and during every waking moment we update it with information from our senses, identifying objects, and reasoning about the relationships among those objects. It works so well in our brains, but how do we make it work in our exploitation systems?
IXO colleague Robert Tenney argued that the key to this new map might be found in the phone book. By applying longitude and latitude to the telephone numbers in a given operational area, Tenney said the military can create models that indicate whether there's a market on the street around the corner or a warehouse. Useful info for a soldier on the move, assuming they have Yellow Book in Tikrit. The models would merge data from imagery and conventional maps as well.
Our Soldier in Baghdad knows where she is; GPS solves that problem, at least in terms of lat/long. Maps, perhaps updated with images, give her an address and that of the street around the corner. The telephone book tells her what's on that street around the corner: a gas station, a mosque, a firehouse, a factory, whatever.
Ideally, Tenney said, all of that information would be matched up, somehow, with the knowledge of a neighborhood's recent past.
Did the beatup car come from a residence or a chop shop? Did a pedestrian come from a home or from a car that sped away? Did the fire engine come from a firehouse or a warehouse?
Let's call these things "track history." In the urban world, it's good to know where a truck came from. It's good to know with whom it interacted along the way. Because this historical information can help distinguish the guy who's just picking up the trash, from the guy who's about to die—along with you, and many others...
More people will be in the market during morning and afternoon on weekdays, than at night, at noontime, or on holy days. They may be expressed as travel patterns: garbage trucks have more-or-less normal routes. They may be expressed as social or business activities: neighborhood soccer games happen in the evening. All these normal behaviors, when filtered out, leave indications of abnormal behavior.
Okay… sounds good. But remind me again: Who puts out the Yellow Pages for Baghdad?
THERE'S MORE: Richard Parent nicely illustrates the potential for these Darpa proposals. Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase is involved.
Brain Caps and Pentagon Pandas
I wasn't able to make it out to DarpaTech 2005, last week's get-together of the Pentagon's way-out researachers. Luckily, Defense Tech spy Catherine Macrae Hockmuth snuck in for all of us. She a veteran defense industry reporter who's returning to the field after a little hiatus. Here's what she found...
It’s amazing how much defense conferences are like episodes of Law & Order. Even when you stop watching for a time it’s easy to jump back in because the issues never change. Law & Order is forever about perverts on the loose, people who kill family for insurance, and weird, doped-up rich kids who kill for fun. Speeches at defense conferences are always about shortening DOD’s odious procurement cycle, managing hordes of data, lifting the fog of war, and managing hordes of data.
DarpaTech, a technology conference held every 18 months in Anaheim by the Defense Department’s mad scientists is no exception. Fortunately, Darpa program managers have always had a certain I-have-no-idea-if-this-will-work,-but charm, and that allows for some wild animation and ideas. And, oh yes, pleas to the defense industrial complex for help, which is the basic function of DarpaTech. Some 2,500 attendees listened attentively this week as PMs laid out their big ideas, closing with some variation on “if you can help make this happen come see me.”
At that, a few ideas:
Brain Caps. Navy Cmdr. Dylan Schmorrow wants to put “brain caps” on soldiers to improve their ability to take in new information under stress. Schmorrow, a Darpa program manager in the Information Processing Technology Office, is a naval aerospace experimental psychologist. The concept is based on the fact that humans can only handle so much information at any given time. As a result, “complex human-machine interactive environments” common in the military often fail under stress, according to a description of the program, Improving Warfighter Information Intake[formerly known as "Augmented Cognition" --ed.], on IPTO’s Web site.
Schmorrow said if you were to ask a person whether he wanted lunch while he was giving a presentation and simultaneously answering questions from a crowd of people, you wouldn’t get much of an answer. That’s because his brain’s verbal center is overloaded. But if you gestured to him by simulating eating a sandwich, he could probably nod or motion yes or no.
Schmorrow said brain caps would not read minds; they would just measure types of activity much the way mood rings report when someone is stressed out. More broadly, as displayed in IPTO’s giant brain exhibit, artificial intelligence researchers are trying to teach computers how to learn and reason like us. It’s the difference between programming a robot to play soccer, and enabling a robot to learn the game.
PANDA. Darpa’s IXO office wants software that can analyze strange maritime behavior, alerting the Navy when something’s not right such as a shipful of terrorists transporting WMDs. Apparently, pirates are something of a menace on the high seas, hijacking commercial vessels, stealing and selling illicit materials and wreaking havoc on the shipping industry. PANDA, or predictive analysis for naval deployment activities, would track local and global patterns of behavior by commercial vessels including their shipping routes and routine detours for fuel or paperwork. That way when a ship that always travels between Malaysia and Japan winds up in the Indian Ocean we know something is up.
Information Explotation Office (IXO) Program Manager Kendra Moore said currently this sort of tracking is done manually based on a list of about 100 vessels that are known to be troublemakers. She plans to issue a broad area announcement on the program in the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile, the Sixth Fleet will soon be the first to deploy new software that will automate the tracking process until PANDA comes along. Moore said the automation software, Fast-C2AP, would make tracking down certain ships more like looking for a stock price online.
Multi-Modal Missiles. The military has missiles that can shoot down planes, and destroy tanks and bunkers, what it doesn’t have is a single missile that can do all of those things. Oh, and, Tactical Technology Office Director Art Morrish asks, can it be handheld? Morrish asked attendees to play other “thought games,” such as:
What if we didn’t have to trade efficiency for speed? What if we could make aircraft that could fly in and out of an area at Mach 1.5 or better and still have tens of hours to days of loiter time?
Space Dust. Gary Graham, from the Virtual Space Office, continued the game with a call for WMD-hunting space dust and other novelties.
The time is ripe for revolution. What if we could launch many small microsatellites and network them with WiFi, the way we link laptops to the web at Starbucks? What if we could develop a launch vehicle so light and reusable that we could move from limited launches to space sorties? What if we could develop antennas that are small on launch, enormous on orbit? Or apertures that build themselves in space? What if we could exploit near space to take advantage of the closer distances and eliminate orbital launch requirements altogether? What if, in the quest to monitor weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), we could sprinkle large geographic areas with dust that changes in the presence of WMD agents and monitor all this from space?
Sounds swell, Gary. As long as I'm not allergic. For more on Catherine's take on DarpaTech, click on back tomorrow...
Punk at the Pentagon
Punk rock -- and Pentagon program managers?
Stick with us here.
Two Air Force majors with way too much time on their hands have tackled that very topic in the latest issue of a Pentagon magazine called Defense AT&L (that's "acquisition, technology and logistics" -- don't go looking for it on newsstands).
The duo has the temerity to suggest that the Ramones, the Clash and others like them "would have totally rocked as program managers."
Punk is primarily a do-it-yourself genre, and even those who make it big usually manage to retain a sense of DIY amateurism in their art. Unfortunately, in many professional circles, the term “amateur” is synonymous with “sloppy,” and indeed, many amateur-driven projects fall short of the quality level inherent in more professional enterprises. Many, but not all.
Some amateurs actually produce better-quality stuff than the pros. Linux is one example, and the pioneers of punk are another. Skunkworks’ early stuff (the U-2, SR-71, etc.) certainly fits the bill, though like most garage bands, they lost some of their edge when they made it big.
Punk rock, the authors conclude, "is loud and in-your-face, unapologetic and fearless. We need more of that attitude around here."
Michael Wynne, the former Pentagon acquisition chief, has been pressed back into service for the summer to oversee the Defense Department's base realignment and closure efforts, according to Pentagon sources.
At the behest of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Wynne scuttled plans to leave the Pentagon in late June, returning to a post he previously held -- principal deputy under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, according to Pentagon officials.
By keeping Wynne in the Pentagon, Rumsfeld may have his eye on more than just a BRAC point man, sources say: Wynne's name is being floated for the vacant position of Air Force secretary.
Wynne was among four top Pentagon officials named by the Defense Department inspector general as major players in pushing the Air Force tanker lease deal that was at the heart of the Druyun scandal. Should be an interesting confirmation hearing if the Bush administration actually picks him to pilot the Air Force.
The idea is to catch subs and mines, not kids swimming off of the Florida coast. But the methods could wind up being largely the same. The Navy has tapped three firms to build prototype gadgets that duplicate what sharks do naturally: find prey from the electric fields they emit.
A shark doesn't use its eyes to find its next meal. It relies on jelly-filled canals inside its head to pick up on the tiny electrical charges that potential morsel makes when it flexes its muscles, or swims counter to the earth's magnetic fields.
It's a real-live sixth sense. And it's something the Navy would like to exploit as its sailors look for subs and mines in the crowded coastal waters.
San Diego's RD Instruments is one of three companies that have received Navy small business grants to try and pull off the trick.
The sharks themselves will be our initial guides into what is possible. We will quantify the shark's ability to detect nonelectrogenic objects in an applied electric field, and determine the extent to which we can emulate it with custom-built electrodes. Once feasibility is determined, we will propose a prototype sensor capable of deployment on a variety of COTS [commercial, off-the-shelf] platforms.
THERE'S MORE: Meanwhile, three other small businesses have won Air Force contracts to make laser-proof contact lenses for pilots. Laser targeting and defense systems are growing more common in the skies above a battlefield. And that means more chances for flyboys to get zapped in the eye.
Houston's Nanospectra Biosciences thinks it can provide protection by embedding in contacts "a new class of optically tunable nanoparticles [that can] extinguish target wavelengths of light."
Reveo Inc., on the other hand, is banking on "a thin, flexible, polymeric reflecting film on or within the lens... The film is engineered to reflect completely incident light in the far red and near infrared (670 nm - 1,200 nm) regions, while remaining highly transparent (> 90%) elsewhere in the visible range."
(photo credit: Callaghan Fritz-Cope/Pelagic Shark Research Foundation)
Wonder Weapons, $20 a Pop
I've been a fool.
Obedient sheep that I am, I believed all those government and scientific reports that laser rifles and hand-held force fields were decades away from reality -- if they were possible at all. Cloaked in the dull skepticism of a flat-earther, I naively thought that advances like "Electro-Hypnotizers" and "Ion Ray Guns" were the stuff of science fiction, or merely hoaxes.
Now, friends, my eyes are open wide. The truth has been revealed. Not only are these items for real, but a helpful Internet retailer -- "Information Unlimited," out of Amherst, New Hampshire -- has been thoughtful enough to sell them all under one electronic roof. Huzzah!
My only question is what to buy first. Should it be the "Telekinetic Enhancer"? The "Sonic Nausea Device" Or maybe I should go with the "Magnetic Cannon." Luckily, the plans for most of these projects are only $20. So I can afford to make some mistakes.
Israel is building an underwater barrier extending out to sea from its border with Gaza to deter Palestinian infiltrators as part of a planned withdrawal from the coastal strip, a newspaper said on June 17.
The Jerusalem Post reported in detail, but without citing any sources, that the barrier, part concrete and part floating fence, would stretch 950 meters (1039 yards) into the Mediterranean from Israel’s boundary with the northern Gaza Strip.
The aim of the structure would be to stop Gaza-based militants from launching attacks into Israel by sea after the Israeli government implements a plan to remove all 21 Jewish settlements from the occupied territory starting in mid-August.
The Israeli military declined comment on the report, which said construction had begun.
The report said the first 150 meters (164 yards) would consist of concrete pilings burrowed into the seabed while the remaining 800 meters (875 yards) is planned to be a submerged 1.8 meter (six-foot) deep “floating fence.” No further details were given.
While no static defense will hold against an equipped and determined attacker, simple barriers can do much to keep just anyone from crossing over, and they allow more valuable resources and personnel to be used where the need is greater.
The idea behind World War II's Project X-Ray "was that a bomb-like canister filled with bats would be dropped from high altitude over the target area," says Murdoc Online. "The bats would be in a sort of hibernation, but as the bomb fell (slowed by a parachute) they would warm up and awaken."
At the appropriate altitude, the bomb would open and over one thousand bats, each carrying a tiny time-delay napalm incendiary device, would flutter away and roost in various nooks and crannies, many of them in extremely flammable wooden Japanese buildings.
The napalm devices would go off more or less simultaneously, and thousands of little fires would start at the same time. Many of them would grow into large fires, and the ability of the Japanese firefighters to contain them would quickly be overwhelmed...
Seems to me, as outrageous as it sounds, that it could have worked... In fact, one afternoon while demonstrating the napalm devices, several bats woke too early in the lab, flew off, and ended up burning down the brand-new but uninhabited Carlsbad Auxiliary Army Air Base in New Mexico. Really.
The Israeli Army "has started using bottled chemical substances resembling the stench of dead bodies in simulated training exercises," Ynetnews says.
During an exercise two weeks ago, marking the end of a specialized workshop for non-commissioned rescue officers, bottles containing the "smell of dead bodies" were scattered around the simulated "disaster site" to provide a feeling of real-life disaster...
The search for a scent resembling the dead was not an easy task. Rescue and medical professionals, who are familiar with the stench from personal experience, tested several chemical and organic substances before finding the exact "smell of death..."
"The strong smell is a significant part of every rescue incident," [Army commander Yisrael] Rozin Rozin said. "It's important that our soldiers, who will have to handle situations like this in the future, adapt to a situation as close to reality as possible, to prevent shock during the moment of truth." (thanks to Sam for the tip)
WE GET LETTERS
One of the unique pleasures of running a military technology blog are the plans for world-conquering weapons that folks expect you to pass on the Pentagon. I get about one every other week, all promising that the American military will kick a whole lot more tail if they're adopted. But none of these schemers has promised that U.S. forces would become downright unbeatable. Well, until now.
I am writing to propose that our military could use Invincible Defense Technology to stabilize Iraq. Invincible Defense Technology is a hot topic in defense - read on!
Invincible Defense Technology is a scientifically validated means of preventing terrorism, reducing violence, and ending conflict. A peer-reviewed study published in the "Journal of Offender Rehabilitation" showed a 72% reduction in deaths due to international terrorism (p<
RUMMY + SPIDEY
You'd figure that soldiers might be a little confused about whether Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was really on their side, after he started holding their paychecks hostage. But Rummy knows just how to block out those nasty thoughts: by trotting out Spiderman and his costumed pals.
"Join Secretary Rumsfeld in welcoming Marvel Comics and special guests Spiderman and Captain America as they distribute the new Special Limited Edition of Marvel's Salute to Our Troops Comic Book," reads the announcement over at AmericaSupportsYou.mil. "Thursday 1:00 - 2:30 pm. Pentagon Main Concourse."
It's been a week since Defense Tech reader DS dug through Google's archives of satellite pictures, and found a lonely airstrip out by Nevada's legendary Area 51. Apparently, you guys can't get enough of the pics. The tide of, um, interesting Googlesat images keeps pouring into Defense Tech HQ.
In honor of Passover, perhaps, reader DC uncovers this Hebraically-themed shape, carved out of the desert near Groom Lake. "It's a bombing target, set up to simulate a SAM [surface-to-air missile] or antiaircraft berm," says DS, examing U.S. Geological Survey diagrams. Strangely, the targets are often labelled with people's names. This one's called "David."
Taking a second look at one of the images from the last Googlesat onslaught, DS notices that the picture looks a whole lot like this overhead view of Nellis Air Force Base -- the headuqarters for the Predator robotic squadrons. DS even finds a close-up, showing planes on the runway.
"Are we ready for a Googlesat contest?" pants JA. "How about a search for an aircraft in flight?"
THERE'S MORE: Game over! Reader NW reminds us that Slashdotters found some mid-air plane pictures a couple of weeks back, including this one, where you can pan left, and watch the plane gain altitude.
AND MORE: This Googlesat picture of a plane in flight "is over my previous residence in Richardson, Texas," says McZ.
GITMO GOES GREEN
Happy belated Earth Day, enemy combatants! You may be staying here at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely. And lawyers might be a bit tricky to come by. But at least we won't be burning up a whole lot of oil to keep the lights on when we force you to stay awake! Nope, now we've got four brand-spanking-new, 275-foot tall wind turbines supplying the power around here, Defense Industry Daily says.
Together, the four turbines will generate 3,800 kw [kilowatts], and in years of typical weather the wind turbines will produce almost 8 million kilowatt-hours of electricity. They will reduce the consumption of 650,000 gallons of diesel fuel, reduce air pollution by 26 tons of sulfur dioxide and 15 tons of nitrous oxide, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 13 million pounds each year.
The new wind turbines will provide as much as 25% of the base's power generation during the high-wind months of late summer, and are expected to save taxpayers $1.2 million in annual energy costs.
Sweet!
MORE GOOGLESAT FUN
Defense Tech reader DS got himself a shout-out in Slate last week, after finding an airstrip out by Nevada's infamous Area 51 in Google's database of satellite pictures. So reader McZ decided to raise the stakes, and sent in to Defense Tech HQ a whole heap of "airfields and strange structures" he discovered in the Googlesat archives.
"All these locations are generally in the same reservation as Groom Lake/Area 51," says JA, who, along with DS, was nice enough to take a gander at the pics for me. "Given that this was the location for a lot of the testing for the F117s and various other black craft, it makes sense to have local targets -- keeps you from having to fly over unsecure ground. But the lack of an identifiable golf course is highly suspicious for a supposed USAF facility."
Anyway, here are a half-dozen of the locations, and what DS and JA had to say about 'em:
latitude 37.363237, longitude -116.827273 DS: Appears to be the same as my airstrip...a target for aerial bombing. JA: Yep, an airstrip in the middle of nowhere, a target or training site of some other sort.
37.705925, -116.659646 JA: It has the feel of a target about it. But there's a lack of infrastructure around. It just occurred to me to wonder whether any of this apparent plethora of target runways might be set up to resemble certain 'airfields of interest' in other parts of the world. As landmarks they're pretty hard to hide. DS: Probably not a place you'd want to visit any time soon, since the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] sketch says in big letters "RADIOACTIVE AREA."
37.586145, -116.915330 JA: Definitely the recipient of numerous bombings. DS: I think we're seeing here why our Air Force is so good at bombing the crap out of the enemy.
37.421686, -116.822768 DS: I'd have to say that this is definitely a bombing target. You can see the blast marks all around the strip. JA: Target, decoy, or simulation. Large circle appears to have been done over top of earlier scrapings, possibly done for different purpose.
37.485010, -116.228459 DS: It's a strange circular structure -- a possible target range? JA: It's a location directly north of the strip that got all this started would indicate a target or some other form of training site. There appear to be a couple of towers pointing NNW from the center of the thing. There's a couple of reasons to create a large bull's-eye. A seismographic test facility, perhaps?
37.628036, -116.848060 (pictured above) DS: Five circles inside of a triangle. It looks fake. But it shows up on other images and has road to it. It has to be an ultra secret homing symbol to assist E.T. with landing...Ok, just kidding...it's a bombing target. JA: Sand, Cat D9, Bored Airman, Time, some assembly required. It could possibly be another navigational target, but just how many of those do you need in a 10 square mile area? Yanking the former Soviet Union's intel guys' chains? Yanking the Roswell bunch's chain?
AREA 51'S HIDDEN AIRSTRIP?
By now, most of you have probably heard the news that Google has added satellite pictures to their maps. And that those eyes in the sky have taken some pretty amazing pictures -- an erupting volcano, a Baghdad firefight, a Russian sub trapped in ice.
Defense Tech reader DS was rifling through Google's satellite database the other day, and found what he says is "an unknown facility" near the infamous Groom Lake military complex -- the place called "Area 51" by tin-foil hatters worldwide.
DS' discovery, at latitude 37.399263 and longitude -116.223850…
is an isolated airstrip with a road connecting it to what appears to be an underground facility of some sort. I pulled up the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] sketches on the area, and it shows no identifying information, however it does reveal what appears to be a tunnel system connecting the various buildings in the underground complex... If you or someone in your circle can shed some light on what this is, it would be interesting I'm sure.
THERE'S MORE: Here's a guy who claims to have Googled his way into pictures of Area 51 itself (via Blogs of War).
"MINORITY REPORT," FOR REAL
Sometimes, military researchers like to pretend that they aren't grabbing ideas from science fiction. Then there are times like these:
A computer interface inspired by the futuristic system portrayed in the movie Minority Report... could soon help real military personnel deal with information overload.
The film sees characters call up and manipulate video footage and other data in mid-air after donning a special pair of gloves. Now defence company Raytheon, based in Massachusetts, is working on a real version and has even employed John Underkoffler, the researcher who proposed the interface to the makers of the film.
"Pamela Barry, then a Raytheon Co. engineer, had a eureka moment while watching the... sci-fi flick," the Wall Street Journal reports. "Ms. Barry believed such a system could be a boon to the military as it tries to parse reams of information in the heat of a battle."
Commanders are increasingly unable to process the massive flow of intelligence from satellites, sensors and soldiers. To tackle that challenge, Mr. Underkoffler and Raytheon are devising ways to visually display and manage the data in a user-friendly way to quicken combat responses...
"Keystrokes and mouse clicks limit your degree of freedom," says Mr. Underkoffler , who earned his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By communicating with a computer through gestures, hands can do as much as five or six mice, he adds. "Your hand becomes a Swiss Army knife," he says.
Raytheon, which has licensed Mr. Underkoffler's technology and unveiled it to Air Force and intelligence officials last week, aims to adapt it for use in future command centers. The idea is to streamline the disjointed and limited functions currently performed by scores of soldiers manning banks of individual PCs. In Raytheon's vision, real-time video and maps will be fused with database information on large interactive screens to assess battle situations.
Raytheon has no plans to use psychically-sensitive crack babies to parse the information. Or, at least, not yet.
UK'S CHICKEN-POWERED NUKE
Like me, you've probably stayed awake countless nights wondering, "Did the Brits ever make plans for a nuclear landmine, powered by chickens?"
Well, dear reader, I'm here to tell you that the answer is yes. At least, according to the UK's National Archives.
Conceived during the Cold War, the seven tonne device was the size of small truck and was designed to be buried or submerged by a British Army retreating from Soviet forces. The landmine had a plutonium core surrounded by high explosive and would have been detonated by remote control or timer, causing mass destruction and contamination over a wide area to prevent subsequent enemy occupation.
Scientists working on the project realised that the bomb could fail in winter if vital components become too cold, so they explored ways of keeping the inner workings warm. One proposal put forward consisted of filling the casing of the nuke with live chickens, who would give off sufficient heat, prior to suffocating or starving to death, to keep the delicate explosive mechanism from freezing. Despite the potential importance of chickens to the project, the mine was codenamed 'Blue Peacock'.
"The mines were to be left buried or submerged by the British Army of the Rhine. They would then have been detonated by wire from up to five kilometres away or by an eight-day clockwork timer. If disturbed or damaged, they were primed to explode within 10 seconds," New Scientist explains.
Each mine was expected to produce an explosive yield of 10 kilotons, about half that of the atom bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945...
Blue Peacock was to consist of a plutonium core surrounded by a sphere of high explosives, all encased in steel. The design was based on Blue Danube, a free-fall nuclear bomb weighing several tonnes that was already in service with the Royal Air Force. But Blue Peacock, weighing over seven tonnes, would have been much more cumbersome.
The steel casing was so large that it had to be tested outdoors in a flooded gravel pit near Sevenoaks in Kent. If questions were asked, Nuclear historian David Hawkings says the army's cover story was that it was a container for "an atomic power unit for troops in the field". In July 1957, army leaders decided to order 10 Blue Peacock mines and to station them in Germany.
Hawkings describes their plans for deploying the weapons in the event of an imminent Soviet invasion as "somewhat theatrical". One problem was that the mines might not work in winter if they became too cold, so the army proposed wrapping them in fibreglass pillows.
In the end, the risk from radioactive fallout would have been "unacceptable", says Hawkings, and hiding nuclear weapons in an allied country was deemed "politically flawed". As a result, the Ministry of Defence cancelled Blue Peacock in February 1958. (via Linkfilter and Improbable Research)
KYRGYZSTAN'S KUNG-FU REVOLUTION
"Many say people power brought down the regime in Kyrgyzstan last week. But Bayaman Erkinbayev, a lawmaker, martial arts champ and one of the Central Asian nation's richest men, says it was his small army of Kung Fu-style fighters," according to AFP.
"When our old men were beaten and thrown out of the regional administration building, my fighters were on the front line. And during the siege in Bishkek, my fighters went in first," Erkinbayev says...
Pupils from Erkinbayev's Alysh martial arts school in Osh were sent to protect demonstrators protesting the contested ballot in the Kara Suu bazaar.
Afterwards demonstrations with the participation of Erkinbayev's trainees spread to the southern cities of Jalal-Abad, Osh, and Batken. They captured government sites, burnt down police stations and blocked key highways in the lead-up to the chaos that deposed Akayev in Bishkek. (via Fortean Times)
ASSAULT RIFLE SPRAYS TUNES
Thank God Congress got rid of that annoying assault weapons ban. Otherwise, how could we enjoy the new MP3 player that fits into the magazine of an AK-47?
The 20 GB, USB-compatable player "can be used on its own or it could be attached to the Kalashnikov machine gun instead of the ordinary magazine," promises the gnomes at AudioBooksForFree.Com. The device's "stainless steel body makes this new player uniquely suitable for outdoors."
Speaking of steel bodies, the gagdet's website is worth a click, if only for the "Triple Kalashnikov Girls," barely dressed "in what we can only imagine is standard Russian military attire," Gimzodo snickers. A mere $600 will get you a copy of the Girls' favorite toy, with 450 audio books preloaded.
ISRAELI ARMY DISSES D&D
When I was 19, and Saddam was lobbing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv, I had a brief urge to join the Israeli army. Good thing I didn't. Because the generals there wouldn't have been too happy with my dormroom Dungeons & Dragons habit. Ynetnews explains:
"They're detached from reality and suscepitble to influence," the army says.
Fans of the popular role-playing game had spoken of rumors of this strange policy by the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces], but now the army has confirmed that it has a negative image of teens who play the game and labels them as problematic in regard to their draft status.
So if you like fantasy games, go see the military psychologist...
"These people have a tendency to be influenced by external factors which could cloud their judgment," a military official says. "They may be detached from reality or have a weak personality -- elements which lower a person's security clearance, allowing them to serve in the army, but not in sensitive positions." (via Fortean Times)
POLICE DOGS GET K-9 CAMS
There's been a new edition to Defense Tech's headquarters staff -- Pablo, a cute-as-hell retriever-lab blend on loan from the girlfriend's sister. Pablo has been helpful about getting the folks here out of the house (for once). But he hasn't been enlisted for surveillance duty. Yet.
That may change, as Defense Tech considers following the lead of the Northumbria Police Department, and outfitting Pablo with a mini camera and wireless transmitter that sits on the top of the pooch's head. (via Gizmodo)
THERE'S MORE: Hopefully, these spy-doggies will get a nice set of K-9 armor when they're out on patrol.
"EX" STRESS RELIEF FOR G.I.S
First we found out that the Army was planning to ply G.I.s with the raver favorite Ketamine, or "Special K," as a morphine substitute. Now comes word that "American soldiers traumatized by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be offered the drug ecstasy to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares," the Guardian reports.
The US food and drug administration has given the go-ahead for the soldiers to be included in an experiment to see if MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, can treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
Scientists behind the trial in South Carolina think the feelings of emotional closeness reported by those taking the drug could help the soldiers talk about their experiences to therapists. Several victims of rape and sexual abuse with post-traumatic stress disorder, for whom existing treatments are ineffective, have been given MDMA since the research began last year...
The South Carolina study marks a resurgence of interest in the use of controlled psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs. Several studies in the US are planned or are under way to investigate whether MDMA, LSD and psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, can treat conditions ranging from obsessive compulsive disorder to anxiety in terminal cancer patients. (via Boing Boing)
"RATS, BUGS, BOYS" REDUX
It's been nearly two weeks since Defense Tech highlighted a series of rather silly Pentagon schemes to fluster enemy soldiers by harassing them with rats, stinging bees, and men in heat. And, since then, the international press has been having a big ol' belly laugh with the so-called "gay sex bomb."
One man isn't smiling, however. That would be Edward Hammond, the bioweapons researcher at the Sunshine Project who, uh, turned me on to the proposed "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals." He says that Pentagon spokesmen fibbed when they claimed that the ideas in the document were "rejected out of hand."
* In 2000, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) prepared a promotional CD-ROM on its work. This CD-ROM, which was distributed to other US military and government agencies in an effort to spur further development of "non-lethal" weapons, contained the "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals" document. If the proposal had been rejected out of hand and not taken seriously, it would not have been placed in JNLWD's publication.
* Similarly, in 2001, JNLWD commissioned a study of "non-lethal" weapons by the National Academies of Science (NAS). JNLWD provided information on proposed weapons systems for assessment by an NAS scientific panel. Among the proposals that JNLWD submitted to the NAS for consideration by the nation's pre-eminent scientific advisory organization was "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals".
Thus, the Pentagon's statements (as quoted in news reports) are inaccurate and should be corrected.
"RATS, BUGS, BOYS: ATTACK!"
Instead of using guns and bombs, let's attack the enemies of freedom with bugs, rats, and horny gay men.
That seems to be the sentiment behind a 1994 Air Force proposal, unearthed by bioweapons-watchers at the Sunshine Project.
The document -- entitled "Harrassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals" -- strings together a couple of ideas for non-lethal agents that could mark an opponent, temporarily change his behavior, or "attract annoying creatures to an enemy position."
Were any of these proposals ever approved? I doubt it. But, boy, do I love the idea of Pentagon program managers dreaming up ways to use "sex attractant chemicals for bugs" as weapons. Or employing a "'sting/attack me' chemical that causes bees to attack." Such an agent "would especially effective for infiltration routes," the paper observes.
"Rodents and larger animals would [also] be candidates to be drawn to enemy positions," according to the proposal. So would other "stinging and biting bugs."
But as irritating as a swarm of bees or rats might be, it's nothing compared to the distraction generated by a man in heat. No wonder, then, that the Air Force document calls for "chemicals that affect human behavior so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely effected. One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."
If, for some reason, military scientists couldn't come up with an effective, sprayable Spanish Fly, well, there are still other possibilities to be explored. For instance: "a low toxicity compound" that creates "severe and lasting halitosis."
Bad breath, in other words.
THERE'S MORE: As if sprays to induce homosexual dalliances and rat attacks weren't problematic enough. In 1997, the Army let loose a proposal, calling for the "preparation of an 'odor index' to match known disagreeable odors to a specific culture, political/religious group or geographical region."
The work looks loving back on a 1944 project, "Who Me," that gave French resistance fighters lead foil tubes, packed with chemicals that produced a "fecal odor." But the plan backfired, this document notes, "when it was found that people in many areas of the world do not find 'fecal odor' to be offensive."
It's one of a number of Pentagon brainstorms, to try to target certain ethnic or geographic groups with non-lethal chemical weapons. The Sunshine Project details more here.
AND MORE: On the Defense Tech forum, reader DB drops some science on the poop-smell project.
AND MORE: These ideas "might not be so far away from reality as [they] might initially seem," the Sunshine Project's Edward Hammond says in the forum.
A WHOLE NEW KIND OF "K" RATION
If it's good enough for ravers, it's good enough for G.I.s. That's the thinking, apparently, behind the Army's decision to test the animal tranquilizer Ketamine as away to soothe injured soldiers.
The drug – known in the clubs has "Special K" – has been reducing party-goers to gurgling blobs for more than a decade. This year, the Army has been running final, phase III Food and Drug Administration trials on a quarter-dose nasal inhaler of "K," to see if it can substitute for morphine.
"With morphine, the soldier's just gorfed, he can't do anything," Col. Bob Vandre, of the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command, told me as I stopped by his booth -- a mock MASH tent -- at the Army Science Conference. "With this, he can drive his truck, or shoot his gun."
Col. Vandre said he knew full well that Ketamine "had been snorted by people at rave parties" and that "it makes you kind of weird, sort of like acid."
However, he promised, the military's dose of "K" would not have the same effects.
"It doesn't make you weird," Col. Vandre said. "But it does reduce pain."
The Ketamine snort is one of a number of novel treatments Col. Vandre was showing to conference-goers. Further up the pipeline was a tiny bottle filled even smaller bubbles, just two microns across. The bubbles in this dodecafluoropentane emulsion swelled to double-size when they were in the lungs. And once they started flowing to the rest of the body, the bubbles distributed oxygen more efficiently than normal red blood cells, Col. Vandre claimed. 40 cubic centimeters – just eight teaspoons – was as good at delivering oxygen as all of the blood flowing inside a person.
"We've taken mice, drained out all of their blood, and replaced it with a saline solution and this," Col. Vandre said. "They walk around like nothing's happened."
At least for a half-hour or so. That's when the bubbles begin to lose their fizz, and the mouse needs its blood back, if it's going to live.
THERE'S MORE, DUDE: Back in '64, the Army decided it'd be a good idea to give 60 of its soldiers inhalable LSD. Here is what they found.
AND MORE: "Ketamine is already FDA approved in humans as an anesthetic drug and has been for years," reader 5911674 notes over on the Defense Tech forum. That's right: in kids, "K" has been okayed for, among other things, "induction of general anesthesia" and "sedation in the intensive care unit." 5911674 is also right that I should've mentioned this before. Good catch.
"WHEN I GROW UP, I WANNA SPY ON THE NEIGHBORS!"
Imagine a world where Teletubbies pack heat and Spongebob goes undercover. That's apparently what US government web designers had in mind when they followed President Clinton's 1997 order to add child-oriented Web pages to government sites. Today, the results are bizarre - cryptographic coloring books, drug-sniffing dog cartoons, and spy-satellite sing-alongs. Are they giant inside jokes? Coded messages? The remnants of LSD experiments gone awry? Only Dick Cheney may know for sure.
Here are two examples. Click on over to my story in this month's Wired magazine for the rest:
NRO Jr.
The National Reconnaissance Office used to be so hush-hush that officials wouldn't admit it existed. Now the spy-satellite agency has gone cute. The site has songs ("Whoosh Goes Satellite," to the tune of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat"), stories of cats in space, and "simple-to-make, paper-plate satellite puppets."
CIA's Homepage for Kids
Youngsters can thank CIA "Ace Photo Pigeon" Harry Recon for the exciting overhead views of the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters (presumably with some details redacted). Meanwhile, Ginger, a mischievous blue teddy bear, takes a tour of spook HQ - without a security badge. "Lucky the guard knows me!"
USAF WANTS ANTIMATTER WEAPONS
No way. "The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source -- antimatter, the eerie 'mirror' of ordinary matter -- in future weapons," the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Beyond the pointed-ear cool factor, antimatter would make a powerful weapon -- at least in theory. "If electrons or protons collide with their antimatter counterparts, they annihilate each other. In so doing, they unleash more energy than any other known energy source, even thermonuclear bombs," the Chron explains.
The energy from colliding positrons and antielectrons "is 10 billion times ... that of high explosive," Kenneth Edwards, director of the "revolutionary munitions" team at the Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base, noted in an address to the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). Moreover, 1 gram of antimatter, about 1/25th of an ounce, would equal "23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy." Thus "positron energy conversion," as he called it, would be a "revolutionary energy source" of interest to those who wage war.
It almost defies belief, the amount of explosive force available in a speck of antimatter -- even a speck that is too small to see. For example: One millionth of a gram of positrons contain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT, according to Edwards' March speech. A simple calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to the explosion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Unlike regular nuclear bombs, positron bombs wouldn't eject plumes of radioactive debris. When large numbers of positrons and antielectrons collide, the primary product is an invisible but extremely dangerous burst of gamma radiation. Thus, in principle, a positron bomb could be a step toward one of the military's dreams from the early Cold War: a so-called "clean" superbomb that could kill large numbers of soldiers without ejecting radioactive contaminants over the countryside.
A copy of Edwards' speech on NIAC's Web site emphasizes this advantage of positron weapons in bright red letters: "No Nuclear Residue."
It's wet-the-bed scary, sure. But don't get out the rubber sheets, yet. Right now, only about 84 billionths of a gram of antiprotons are made worldwide, according to Los Alamos physicist Steve Howe, who is studying antimatter-driven trips to Alpha Centauri for NIAC.
"With present techniques, the price tag for 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter would be $6 billion," according to the Chron.
FBI ON UFOS
Wanna see the FBI's records on UFOs, cattle mutilation, and other "unusual phenomena?" Defense Tech pal PA points us to this handy Bureau website.
First USS Iowa. Then high school ROTC. Then the Blue Angels. Now the US Marine Corp. How much more dis'in can the US Military take from the city and 'burbs by the bay?
Los Angeles Police 
So far so typical, except that the case was described in 1810 by John Haslam, the apothecary at the notorious ‘Bedlam’ – correctly the 
I wrote a 
I’ve certainly received them, and Defense Tech has gotten its 
The Air Force is 
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 "
We've all 
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.
Reader Steve Weintz starts us off with a fine, fine suggestion: the 
Which is why the Air Force is considering a new approach: teams of foot-long "
UPDATE 10:38 AM: Now, of course, conspiracy theorists and comic book fans will tell you that such diggers are almost laughably redundant. To fight underground, all you have to do is find one of the 
Long before he started pushing kooky theories about 
"The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It's very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices. ... And as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," General Rick Hillier said in a speech in Ottawa, Canada.
Not just any frisbees, mind you. Robotic frisbees. Heavily armed robotic frisbees.
I’m going to write a longer post on the company next week, but this news got me thinking on whether there’s a way to predict bad and/or stupid weapons. Now, I’m not saying Metal Storm is a bad or stupid weapon, I’m just saying that it would be great if there were some way to guess ahead of time which ideas are really bad, and which are just a little silly.
Now, a single test remains for this hallowed assemblage of fighters:
I'm not so sure. "Fringe science" is a label that history applies after the event to failures; successes are immediately transferred to the mainstream. What looks like ridiculous like fringe tinkering at the time may later be seen as pioneering genius.
"Very interesting my boy," one distinguished aeronautics professor remarked, "but it will never work."
Having done the work, the Ministry then asked Watson-Watt whether, in the absence of death rays, anything useful could be done with these radio beams. Watson-Watt had found that aircraft reflected radio waves, and he drew up a paper entitled "The Detection and Location of Aircraft by Radio Means."
The trio -- members of the Luck, Wisconsin group 
“Whaddya think of this firm Ionatron?” the man asked, introducing himself as vice president of a boutique investment firm in California. He didn’t know much about defense or the Pentagon, but he was really interested in investing in this weapons firm, which he thought had big potential.
Step one in Collins' push-back effort was to unfavorably 
The leader of the group goes by the cyberspace nom de guerre UFOGuy11, and for the uninitiated in the world of fringe science he is, in fact, 
The tale of the hafnium bomb, as I like to describe it, is a tragicomedy about how a fast-talking scientist from Texas convinced the Pentagon to sink millions of dollars in pursuit of the next superbomb. The whole scheme hinged on an experiment involving a used dental X-ray machine, a music amplifier, and a few specks of highly radioactive dust.
The question started Weinberger on a two-year "
In 1953 the U.S. Army commissioned a report by 
An inclined (ha) member of the military or emergency services simply seats themselves -- and in around two seconds experiences what can only be described as being '
In 
One Air Force insider's reaction to the overreaction: "It was a dang foam test. What does it matter if people think it went a little overboard?" This is "the first time I have seen a news release to disprove an email," he adds. "Especially one that is relatively innocuous."
Here's the caption: 
The way technology migrates from classified weapons programs to everyday life is the theme of my book, 
"Animals have been part of military operations since there have been military operations," said Noah Shachtman of DefenseTech.org. "They have been the fighting man's best friend for generations and in modern-day warfare that's still the case."
But, as 
One of the big problems is that having slimed a rioter, you can’t arrest them or take them away. And if the sticky foam covers their mouth and nose, it can be anything but non-lethal.
That's the thinking, I guess, behind the Pentagon's decision to fund research into brain implants that could one day lead to sharks becoming "'
Employer: The Walt Disney Company
Wanna track the world's most dangerous game? Ready to move to Tampa? Then defense contractor SAIC has a 
The American military may want to 
The first stage is technology to “remotely create physical sensations.” They give the example of the 
"This scenario may not be far away," says Defense Tech pal 
The story starts over a year ago with a Marine blogger in Iraq. On June 2nd 2004 "
Agent Buzz was tested between 1959 to 1975 on some twenty-eight hundred US soldiers at several locations. It proved extremely effective as an incapacitant. The physical effects are increased heart rates, pupil dilation, blurred vision, dry skin and mouth, increased temperature, and flushing of skin – as a med school mnemonic has it “blind as a bat, dry as a bone, hot as Hades, red as a beet.”
I did not initially take the report from 
I should have a little more faith. Of course they would. The Army recently handed Case Western Reserve University and Waltham, MA’s 
Back in college I had a Soviet studies professor whose office was decorated with lurid, humorless 
Now, they’re official policy – according to military regulations, such security warnings have to be displayed in certain areas.
The battleship's supporters now hope to gain the support of city leaders by turning part of the vessel into a museum about the military's "
In May '04, I wrote a bit about Hoffman and his 
Naturally, the mad scientists picked robots and wireless battlefield networks as two of their top energy savers.
* Birds of a feather. Getting unmanned aircraft to fly in formation is a challenge that still escapes DARPA scientists, according to 
Pagels wants a new kind of map to avoid this this "death by data." One that does what our brains do automatically: create models of the world that are constantly updating to reflect our experiences.
It’s amazing how much defense conferences are like episodes of Law & Order. Even when you stop watching for a time it’s easy to jump back in because the issues never change. Law & Order is forever about perverts on the loose, people who kill family for insurance, and weird, doped-up rich kids who kill for fun. Speeches at defense conferences are always about shortening DOD’s odious procurement cycle, managing hordes of data, lifting the fog of war, and managing hordes of data.
The idea is to catch subs and mines, not kids swimming off of the Florida coast. But the methods could wind up being largely the same. The Navy has 
I've been a fool.
The idea behind World War II's Project X-Ray "was that a bomb-like canister filled with bats would be dropped from high altitude over the target area," says 
The Israeli Army "has started using bottled chemical substances resembling the 
I am writing to propose that our military could use Invincible Defense Technology to stabilize Iraq. Invincible Defense Technology is a hot topic in defense - read on!
You'd figure that soldiers might be a little confused about whether Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was really on their side, after he started 
In honor of Passover, perhaps, 
Happy belated Earth Day, enemy combatants! You may be staying here at 
"All these locations are generally in the same reservation as Groom Lake/Area 51," says JA, who, along with DS, was nice enough to take a gander at the pics for me. "Given that this was the location for a lot of the testing for the F117s and various other black craft, it makes sense to have local targets -- keeps you from having to fly over unsecure ground. But the lack of an identifiable golf course is highly suspicious for a supposed USAF facility."
Defense Tech reader DS was rifling through Google's satellite database the other day, and found what he says is "
A computer interface 
Conceived during the Cold War, the seven tonne device was the size of small truck and was designed to be buried or submerged by a British Army retreating from Soviet forces. The landmine had a plutonium core surrounded by high explosive and would have been detonated by remote control or timer, causing mass destruction and contamination over a wide area to prevent subsequent enemy occupation.
Thank God Congress got rid of that annoying assault weapons ban. Otherwise, how could we enjoy the new 
18-year-olds who tell recruiters they play the popular fantasy game are 
There's been a new edition to Defense Tech's headquarters staff -- Pablo, a cute-as-hell retriever-lab blend on loan from the girlfriend's sister. Pablo has been helpful about getting the folks here out of the house (for once). But he hasn't been enlisted for surveillance duty. Yet.
Instead of using guns and bombs, let's attack the enemies of freedom with bugs, rats, and horny gay men.
If it's good enough for ravers, it's good enough for G.I.s. That's the thinking, apparently, behind the Army's decision to test the animal tranquilizer Ketamine as away to soothe injured soldiers.
Imagine a world where Teletubbies pack heat and Spongebob goes undercover. That's apparently what US government web designers had in mind when they followed President Clinton's 1997 order to add child-oriented Web pages to government sites. Today, the results are bizarre - cryptographic coloring books, drug-sniffing dog cartoons, and spy-satellite sing-alongs. Are they giant inside jokes? Coded messages? The remnants of LSD experiments gone awry? Only Dick Cheney may know for sure.
