So here's the scoop: I've started a new blog for Wired. It's called DANGER ROOM. And it'll cover "what's next in national security," from new gear to new strategies. All the familiar faces from Defense Tech will be contributing: David Axe, Sharon Weinberger, David Hambling, you name 'em.
The site doesn't officially launch until Wednesday morning. But since you've managed to make your way over here, I'll slip you a sneak peak.
If you're an RSS type, you can get the new feed here. And you can stay on top of what's going down in the DANGER ROOM by signing up for my e-mail list here.
Navy Grows Land Forces
With the Army and Marine Corps stretched to breaking in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Navy is scrambling for ways to contribute more to inland fights. One result is a new river boat squadron, second of its type, stood up two weeks ago. Riverine Squadron Two and its sister, Ron One, are part of Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, which gathers all the Navy's coastal and land forces under one banner and adds brand new capabilities.
NECC -- based alongside patrol boats (pics!) and amphibious ships at Little Creek, Virginia -- includes construction battalions, logistics troops, harbor patrol units, ordnance disposal teams and the new riverine squadrons, and is the subject of a story in the current issue of Defense Technology International.
"It was definitely the ongoing war that created the idea," says Captain Robert McKenna, NECC's 44-year-old training officer. "We realized that the Army and Marine Corps were nearing capacity and that there was more to be done. We were looking for ways for the Navy to contribute more. Then we started looking out and said, the Navy really is contributing. And the sailors contributing the most in theater are the ones wearing this uniform."
He gestures to his green and brown fatigues, the same ones worn by the Navy's 16,000 Seabees, 3,000 port cargo handlers and hundreds of Explosive Ordnance Disposal experts -- all of whom have been busy abroad in recent years. "They had no type command that took care of their Title X functions: training, equipping, manning."
"We saw a need to put them into a coherent structure and better equip them," adds NECC commander Rear Admiral Donald Bullard, 55. "And then, all of the sudden, we began to look at other capabilities" including Navy civil affairs and riverine.
Riverine forces in nimble, heavily-armed boats played a huge role in the Vietnam War, but were run down after the evacuation of that country as the Navy shifted focus on deterring the Soviet Navy. In Iraq, a country crisscrossed by large rivers, canals and marshes, the U.S. and British militaries (pictured) found themselves chasing down waterborne smugglers and insurgents in jerry-rigged engineer boats until specialized forces could be reconstituted.
The U.S. Marines sent its new boats to patrol Haditha Dam, a major power-generating station in western Iraq, but wasn't happy diverting money and resources to a mission that once belonged to the Navy. By 2005, the Corps was ready to divest itself of the riverine mission. Then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark sensed this.
"Admiral Clark asked, Marines how can I help?" explains Lieutenant Commander Mike Egan, 44-year-old commander of Riverine Squadron One. "One of the ways was, hey, this riverine mission thing. That was the impetus that got the whole riverine thing rolling.â€
NECC will have three squadrons, each with 224 sailors and, eventually, a combination of 39-foot Small Unit Riverine Craft, built by Raytheon, and smaller Special Operations Craft-Riverine, built by United States Marine. “The goal is to get 16 boats per squadron," says Ron One's Lieutenant Chris Cowart, 40. The total includes eight SURCs and at least four SOC-Rs. "The balance could be either."
Until enough boats are manufactured, the Navy is borrowing SURCs from the Marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for training and plans to fall in on the Corps' boats at Haditha Dam when it first deploys a squadron to Iraq in 2007. Their mission in Iraq will be much like the Marines', patrolling waterways, landing Marines and Masters at Arms for raids or riverbank security, searching small boats to interdict insurgents and illegal weapons.
While the missions and platforms are the same, the Navy is adding high-tech capabilities to its riverine squadrons that the Marines have lacked. In addition to the usual bank of radios, Navy SURCs will feature digital network terminals in order to plug into the Army's command and control architecture. And, according to Lieutenant Christopher Farricker from Riverine Group One, the Navy is shopping for a small UAV that can boost a four-boat patrol's situational awareness. The idea, he says, is to get that "bird's eye view and give it back to the boat operator." The service hasn't down-selected types yet.
The conventional Trident may be dead, but nuclear Tridents have sparked a heated debate over the future of the UK's nuclear weapons.
Submarine-launched Trident missiles have been Britain's only nuclear option for almost a decade – the UK never had independent ground-launch capabilities, and all the British air-delivered nuclear weapons were dismantled by 1998. The missiles are built, maintained, and serviced in the U.S., but Britain insists that it maintains operational independence.
Today, the British Tridents are based on four Vanguard-class submarines, which are aging and due to be decommissioned in the 2020s. Since the government believes that new subs will take 17 years to design and build, a decision needs to be made. If Britain does not build new subs, it will lose its independent nuclear deterrent force.
Prime Minister Tony Blair's government could have made the decision on its own, but opted instead to open the issue for debate and let Parliament decide – a vote is scheduled for March 2007.
Supporters of renewing the Trident say that 1) no other nuclear states are considering eliminating their arsenals, 2) the number of nuclear states is increasing, 3) the world is a risky place, 4) it is impossible to predict whether the Tridents will be needed, so it is better to retain them. These arguments together seem to say, essentially, that in an uncertain, dangerous world, it is better to have nukes than not (shhh – don't tell Iran!).
Opponents argue that the weapons are 1) unnecessary (Britain's role in the world no longer requires nukes), 2) ineffective (deterrence is an "unproven theory" that is "essentially flawed," especially when it comes to terror), 3) expensive (roughly £20 billion that could be better spent elsewhere), 4) illegal (in violation of Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty, which obligates each signatory to work towards nuclear disarmament), and 5) immoral.
The Scots have been particularly virulent in their criticisms – this is partially tied up in British regional politics but also stems from the fact that the Trident submarines' only base is located in Scotland. Scottish officials have drafted two provocative but doomed-to-fail bills: one would criminalize "supporting the threat of the UK’s nuclear deterrent;" the other would charge the British government £1 billion (almost $2 billion) for each nuclear warhead transported through Scottish territory.
Churches and NGOs across the country have voiced their opposition, as well, and polls consistently show a majority of the British public opposed to Trident renewal. Blair has only offered minor concessions – he "wants to" reduce the number of subs and warheads slightly but says the issue needs more study.
If the Trident debate remains binary – renewal vs. no renewal – Blair has more than enough votes to push his proposal through Parliament. There may be a third option, though: delay the decision. U.S. nuclear experts Dick Garwin, Philip E. Coyle (disclosure: my boss), Theodore A. Postol, and Frank von Hippel recently argued that the Vanguard subs can last up to 15 years longer than the government said, with refurbishments and light use. They argue that putting the decision off would be the best way to maintain "a variety of options." It is unclear whether the government is interested in this option, but over 100 MPs (out of 646) have called for the decision to be delayed.
This will be a debate to watch – if the disarmament advocates succeed, Britain may become the first of the big five nuclear powers to give up its weapons. It looks unlikely in the near future, though.
This is part three of my investigation of the DOD Chemical Biological Defense Program (CBDP) budget for FY2008. Today, we invade the lair of the research and development community. Sixty-one percent of the R&D budget for next year ($610 million) is in budget activities 6.1 through 6.3, what is called science and technology or the tech base. Not much happens in here other than applied research into potential technologies that might develop into a practical application - someday. And that pays for a lot of scientists' salaries. The other 39 percent is advanced development (about $380 million), budget activities 6.4 and 6.5. These funds are used to prove that prototypes work and that a given project is ready for manufacture and fielding.
I'm going to talk about the advanced development funds first, because it's easier to explain. The medics will develop biological vaccines to counter plague and botulinum toxin ($40 million and $19 million respectively). We might see a fielded plague vaccine in 2010 - maybe. Don't count on a bot tox vaccine prior to 2015. Nearly $70 million is going to the Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative (TMTI). Although the project is supposed to be focused on far future "silver bullets" for BW threats, for some reason, DOD will start spending advanced development funds next year. On what, I have no idea, since the investigational part has barely started in the tech base. I'm not sure DOD knows what they'll be doing either - it's been more of a "here, take this $2 billion and put it to work with industry" kind of affair. Ready, fire, aim.
Medical chemical research funding is about one fourth of that of med bio research funding. The $36 million is being split nearly equally on an advanced anticonvulsant system, a nerve agent bioscavenger, and an improved nerve agent treatment system. There's about $7 million being spent at AFRRI for medical radiological countermeasures. This is a new area - previous to 2007, the CBDP really didn't want to do med rad countermeasures. Then Dale Klein (from DOE) decided that the CBDP might want to think about being a CBRN Defense Program. Hasn't completely happened yet, in part because the Air Force and Navy really don't want to do joint radiological programs, and there is so much medical radiological research already going on outside of the program.
The tech base for medical accounts for 42 percent of the R&D budget. There's nearly $250 million being spent in the TMTI program, $85.7 million spent on biological defense research, and $62 million being spent on chemical defense research. Don't ask me what they spend it on. Lots of drug discovery efforts, studies on how things work in the body, potential pre- and post-treatment therapies. I'm not a medical guy, and tech base is frankly a lot of small, high risk projects, many of which aren't successful. It's not DARPA-like, but it's not uncommon to see a project go for 3-4 years before being terminated if it isn't leading anywhere.
On the non-medical side, about 13 percent of the R&D funds goes to advanced development projects. Detection projects make up 4.5 percent ($45 million) of the R&D funds. In biodetection, most funds are going to the development of critical reagents for biological detection ($10 million) and development of a tactical (man-portable) biological agent detector ($3 million). I'm not enamored of a Joint Biological Tactical Detector System (JBTDS). The warfighters want a bio equivalent to the automatic chemical detectors, refusing to listen to the analysts quietly pointing out that chemical hazards are somewhat different acting than biological hazards. The requirements guys have ignored the challenge of managing the analysis of thousands of liquid samples every week if this system were to be fielded.
On the chemical detection side, DOD is spending $12 million on continued R&D for the Joint Chemical Agent Detector (yes, even as it is being fielded, there's still significant R&D tweaking going on). About the same is being spent on the joint reconnaissance systems, probably tests and evaluations. A few million being spent on the agent water monitor system. There's really not a lot of new R&D being spent in CB detection, largely in part that we've got good systems out there, and there are few potential future technologies to reach out toward.
Individual protection R&D, funded at $12.5 million, is addressing the Joint Service Aircrew Mask, probably for final testing and approval prior to production. No R&D going to new suits or masks for the first time in a while, and is not expected for several years more (other than in the tech base). In part this is because (again) we have pretty good suits and masks, and there are no great leaps forward in this area. Also, the CBDP is being lazy and not really searching for what ought to be the next big idea in individual protection. We're stuck with hot suits and rubber masks. If something comes up, they'll move the money.
Collective protection has just one R&D project, the Joint Expeditionary Collective Protection project. This effort will field mobile field shelters and expedient shelters replacing... well, there is nothing out there right now for troops other than medics. There's $14 million going to that project, which is really a realigned effort from a former CP shelter project that crashed and burned when the users wouldn't back off their unrealistic demands on technology and engineering (we want it much smaller, with air conditioning, easy to transport... whine, whine). So we're trying again, and maybe we'll see some shelters in 3-4 years.
Decontamination projects have a big $9 million going to three sensitive decontamination projects: the sensitive equipment decon system, a platform interior decon system, and a human remains decon system. As I mentioned yesterday, the sensitive equipment decon project may be ready in 2010, and the interior decon (for inside vehicles) won't be ready prior to 2012. Right now, the only option to handle contaminated electronic equipment is to junk it. The last project, human remains decon, is a "special demand" by the medics and quartermasters. OSD wants to have the capability to decon contaminated corpses in such a manner that the bodies can 1) come home to Mom and Dad, and 2) be viewed in an open casket funeral. Really unreasonable demands, considering the bodies were formerly contaminated with CB warfare agents, but who ever said OSD leadership was reasonable? So the CBDP will buy some commercial technology and test it, field it in an effort to shut them up.
Information systems are actually getting the most R&D funds (after medical) at $48 million (nearly 5% of the R&D budget), going to the three projects mentioned yesterday - JEM, JOEF, and JWARN. The great thing about software projects is that they can always spend R&D funds to tweak their products, even after they've been fielded (as Microsoft can tell us). Nothing really sexy - it's the usual stuff. Improve the accuracy of how models demonstrate how CB hazards act in the real world, display the information on military communication systems, and include more medical and environmental data in the models. The tough part is, as ever, integrating CB hazard data into battlefield data without stalling communications.
Tech base for the nonmedical efforts are funded at $186 million - about half that of medical tech base (thanks to TMTI). I don't get much details from the tech base - again, it pays for 3-4 year long science projects that investigate various ways to improve the above capabilities. Standoff and point detection science gets the most (more than $40 million in 2008), with information systems getting $30 million and protection (individual and collective) getting $25 million. Decon sciences get less than $10 million, because there aren't a lot of new technologies there. Maybe $30 million for various science research projects aimed at finding out more about threat agents and other innovative research efforts.
The test and evaluation money ($67 million, a bit under 7 percent of the advanced R&D) is just going to building capabilities (buying equipment, outfitting buildings) to modernize the DOD's ability to... test and evaluate CB defense equipment (duh). Lots of money for Dugway, Edgewood, and a few other small T&E sites - special equipment, development of test methods, etc etc. Yawn. Has to be done, I guess, to ensure the equipment works as advertised.
That's about it. Not really sexy like the Missile Defense Agency. But then again, they have a few billion - several billion actually - more than the CBDP does. Again, more information on these R&D projects can be found in the OSD annual report to Congress on CB defense.
Coast Guard commandant Admiral Thad Allen has all but surrendered to critics who’ve been saying that the service’s sprawling $24-billion Deepwater modernization program is fatally flawed and rife with corruption, according to The New York Times:
“We have been running some parts of the Coast Guard like a small business when we are a Fortune 500 company,†Admiral Allen said in a speech on Tuesday to several hundred Coast Guard officials. “We need to evolve with changing times.†A new deputy commandant for mission support will oversee the design, acquisition and construction of new ships and aircraft and the maintenance of the fleet once they are built, functions that are now managed separately.
That will allow the Coast Guard to avoid giving so much authority for design and construction choices to contractors, like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which renovated the first eight trouble-plagued ships in the Deepwater program.
The boats in question are the 123-foot Island-class patrol boats first fielded more than 15 years ago. Last year, former Lockheed Martin engineer Mike DeKort called out the firm for allegedly botching improvements to the boats’ communications. A report from the Coast Guard Inspector General this week confirms some of the flaws, including bad wiring and leaky system security.
The eight boats were withdrawn from service a couple months ago, causing a minor panic in a service that was already short of patrol boats as it awaits the introduction of two classes of brand-new boats over the next decade.
In an email on Tuesday, DeKort declared victory:
The ICGS [partnership between Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman] parties involved have demonstrated themselves to be incompetent and ethically, technically and professionally bankrupt. Also – the IG told me very clearly that the CG and LM were not cooperating with their investigation. They could not get data they asked for or run re-tests they asked for.
But read the IG report carefully:
Aspects of the C4ISR equipment installed aboard the 123′ cutters do not meet the design standards set forth in the Deepwater contract. Specifically, two of the four areas of concern identified by the complainant were substantiated and are the result of the contractor not complying with the design standards identified in the Deepwater contract. For example, the contractor did not install low smoke cabling aboard the 123' cutter, despite a Deepwater contract requirement that stated, “all shipboard cable added as a result of the modification to the vessel shall be low smoke.†The intent of this requirement was to eliminate the polyvinyl chloride jacket encasing the cables, which for years produced toxic fumes and dense smoke during shipboard fire. Additionally, the contractor installed C4ISR topside equipment aboard both the 123' cutters and prosecutors, which either did not comply or was not tested to ensure compliance with specific environmental performance requirements outlined in the Deepwater contract.
Honestly, these are relatively minor complaints. And bear in mind that the boats were withdrawn from service due to hull buckling, not due to the problems DeKort pointed out. Before the buckling became apparent, the first couple modernized boats actually performed quite well, according to one former crewman, Master Chief Eric Gallett. He dismissed DeKort’s allegations as missing the point. The boats’ major strengths were their networked computers.
As for the hull buckling … these boats were designed to last 15 years. And they did. The Coast Guard ran into problems when it tried to keep the boats past their intended service life. Keeping an aged fleet afloat while awaiting new ships is one of the service’s major challenges, as I describe in the current issue of Defense Technology International:
At the Coast Guard Yard in southern Maryland, the [Deepwater] revolution seems a long way off, and the rust is right in your face. At this 108-year-old facility, the Coast Guard’s only government-owned shipyard, 400 workers commanded by Captain Steve Duca gut, repair then piece back together the service’s aging medium cutters and patrol boats, keeping them afloat and livable until they can be replaced with ships like Bertholf. Duca’s is delicate work – “like surgery,†he says. And it’s increasingly urgent. With more than 80 cutters larger than 100 feet, the Coast Guard has the world’s 12th-largest navy. But its fleet is, on average, around a quarter-century old, making it the 38th oldest of the world’s 40 largest navies. Deepwater has suffered delays. The last new ships and aircraft won’t join the force for another two decades, several years later than originally planned. So an old fleet is just getting older.
I’m not one to stand by defense contractors just for the Hell of it. When they’re wrong, they’re wrong. But in this case, Lockheed Martin is guilty only of minor crimes. But these crimes have been blown out of proportion by critics. The 123s worked just fine before their ancient hulls gave out. But when these hulls did give out, folks like DeKort saw an opportunity to attack the contractors. And that’s just not fair.
The pictures released last week of Iraqi high-tech explosives surprised me. These special 'superbombs' that have caused so many US casualties -- they look like they had been assembled in someone's garage.
These bombs belong to a class known as EFP --'Explosively Formed Projectile' or 'Explosively Formed Penetrator,' depending on who you're talking to. They compress a metal liner into a slug and fire it at the target some distance away.
The picture shows what a real EFP munition looks like. This is M2 Selectable Lightweight Attack Munition (SLAM). It's small enough to put in your pocket and weighs a couple of pounds.
This version has been used by US Special Forces for the last 15 years or so. As GlobalSecurity.org describes it, SLAM is versatile, too:
It will be used to support hit-and-run, ambush, and harassing, and urban warface missions. SLAM will also be employed by Light Combat Engineers and Rangers where missions warrant the use of such a device....SLAM is lightweight, lethal, easily emplaced, and can be carried in the quantity necessary to neutralize a broad range of targets.
Different modes allow SLAM to be triggered by the heat or magnetic signature of a passing vehicle or by a timer -- or it can be set off by a human operator. It can be emplaced in seconds and spits out a lethal slug which can punch through 40mm of steel armor at a range of 25 feet. You can leave it on the ground covered in dirt to attack a vehicle's belly, or conceal it beside a road for side attack.
No doubt the Russians and Chinese have their own versions of SLAM, and these have probably been copied too. So you might expect a rougher, cheaper copy to appear in Iraq if it was supplied from the outside.
But as has been observed here, anyone can make crude and simple EFP munitions in a basic workshop. All you need is a lump of plastic explosive and a piece of copper. Shape the copper into a saucer, put the explosive under it, and you're there. Obviously this will be a lot less efficient, accurate and reliable than something like SLAM (optimal design of the the metal 'lens' is an art requiring a lot of computer power), but you can compensate by making it ten times bigger if you need to.
Maybe the insurgents should be given some credit for being able to build their own gear, or maybe there's more intelligence we don't know. But if EFP mines were being supplied by an outside source, you might expect to see somethng a lot slicker.
UPDATE 11:37: Speaking of surprises, Centcom commander Adm. Fox Fallon doesn't agree that the Iranian government has been supplying Iraq's EFPs. He's notalone. Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Peter Pace, on the other hand, seemed to back away from his previous, doubting statements -- at least a little. More here.
UPDATE 01:20: The bombs aren't the only issue, of course. According to the Telegraph, Iranian-supplied sniper rifles are also making their way into Iraq.
UPDATE 15/02/07: Steyr, the Austrian makers of those .50 cal sniper rifles say there's no proof they came from Iran - and that they might not even be Steyr-made rifles at all.
Following up yesterday's post on the new budget, let's see what chem-bio defense equipment the Defense Department is planning to buy. The top line items include (unsurprisingly) CB detection gear, individual protection equipment, and vaccines. About 36 percent of procurement dollars are going to buy specialized CB defense vehicles for the Army and CB detectors for the services. Nearly 24 percent is going to individual protective equipment - mostly masks and suits. The rest is seven percent for collective protection systems, five percent for decon systems, less than three percent for information systems, and nine percent for biological vaccines. Last, 16 percent for installation protection equipment, largely paying for hazmat gear and exercises.
The CB Defense Program (CBDP) is buying 28 M31E2 Biological Integrated Detection System (BIDS) for the Army next year, each costing about $3.4 million. These feature the Joint Biological Point Detection System (JBPDS) as the heart of the system. Most of these BIDS platoons were justified as homeland security capabilities, and we're going to be buying them for several more years. The Navy's getting eleven JBPDS for their ships, for about $330,000 each. DOD will be buying 25,000 biological assay tickets at $50 a pop as the first phase of its Joint CBR Agent Water Monitor. All the rest of biodetection funds is in R&D (tomorrow).
On the chemical side, the Army will get 13 Strykers modified with point and standoff chemical detectors (the Joint Service Lightweight Standoff Chemical Agent Detector) and other equipment (the vehicle designated as the NBC Recon Vehicle). Each one cost $7-8 million each, over twice what the older M93A1 NBCRS "Fox" cost (which it is replacing). We're buying nearly 7000 Joint Chemical Agent Detectors, and more each year through the POM at about $4000 each. The CBDP spent years and more than $100 million developing BAE's ChemSentry to be the JCAD before they gave up and went to Smith Detection's Lightweight Chemical Detector as the candidate. Finally, the Joint "Light" NBC Recon System (it's actually very heavy) is finally rolling out after a four-year delay. Seven Heavy HMMWVs and six LAVs will have the new equipment. Yes, it's duplicative of the Stryker NBCRV but the Strykers can get built faster.
In individual protective equipment, lots of masks - 7122 Joint Service Aircrew Masks (JSAM) costing about $3000 each, and 18,248 disposable Joint Service Chemical Environment Survivability Mask (JSCESM)costing $130 each. The JSAM are for all fixed wing pilots, while the Air Force decided that the program needed to buy them a second mask (instead of using O&M funds as it should). The main program buy is 176,007 Joint Service General Purpose Masks (JSGPM), which will replace both the M40 and the older MCU2/P masks at a cost of $170 each. Overall, there isn't a large improvement in capability, but it is slightly better than the two predecessor masks and it will offer one standard mask for all ground combatants.
Now the CBDP isn't supposed to buy consumable items, but the services bullied OSD into ignoring the public law and buying them lots of JSLIST protective suits, boots and gloves ($39 million worth) and Joint Protective Aircrew Ensembles (JPACE). The ground suits cost about $250 a pop, while the aviator version cost twice that. That's because aviators have to look good in protective suits, and they need pockets for their pens and sunglasses. In the vaccine area, the CBDP is procuring 1.43 million anthrax vaccine doses at about $26 each and 1.25 million smallpox vaccine doses at about $4 each. In a few years, DoD will be buying plague vaccine as well. It's starting to get really expensive to buy these doses for the total force every year, and some are suggesting DOD procure vaccine doses for military dependents as well.
In the information systems, there are three products - Joint Effects Model (hazard prediction), Joint Warning and Reporting Network (the communication backbone), and Joint Operational Effects Federation (for data management). Most of the procurement funds are going to make CDs to send the first products out to the field. It's amazingly small amounts of money ($14 million across all three products) for a "network-centric" military. Bottom line, the old-time CBDP people still focus on detectors and protective suits as the favored children over hazard prediction models.
The CBDP is continuing to buy Karcher decon systems as its Joint Service Transportable Decon System (Small Scale) - 338 systems at $24,ooo each, plus DF200 decontaminants. After the Army's government-produced system M21/M22 Modular Decon System wasn't accepted (and not deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom), it turned to industry for the solution. Again. In 2009, we might see the first buys of the Joint Service Sensitive Equipment Decon System - 52 systems at $80,000 a pop. These systems are way, way overdue, but critical if we're ever to clean up after a CB warfare event.
The medics wanted collective protection for their field hospitals and forward aid stations, so they're getting the Chemical Protective Deployable Medical System (CP DEPMEDS) for about $1.5 million each. The CB Protective System (CBPS), which is installed in medical HMMWVs, costs about $1.2 million each - we're getting 21 systems in 2008. The Navy convinced OSD to give it money back in the late 1990s to install collective protection systems in its amphibious ships and hospital ships. Next year, the USS Makin Island will get its collective protection for only $10.5 million. The Navy keeps getting money for this purpose (for which it ought to be paying for itself) through FY 2009. No one else seems to value collective protection for fixed and semi-permenant sites, strangely enough.
I'm going on too long, but let me just note the PM Guardian's fine efforts for installation protection. For the past year (and this year going through next year), the program's been buying gear for the installation response teams. Each base gets eight DFU-200 air samplers, two chemical point detectors, three chemical agent monitors, six radiation detectors, and assorted other gear. In 2006, 50 bases received this gear. In 2007 they plan to drop this at 17 sites, and in 2008, at 15 sites more. So in 2008, we're going to see 15 sites get a limited amount of CB defense gear, some comm connectivity, and exercises for $86.4 million. Read the description in the P-forms, and you'd never know what an insufficient capability is actually being provided. This isn't a protection effort, it's augmenting the response capability.
Hell of a program. But no one said that passive defense was at the top of any priority lists. "Combating WMD" means air and missile defense, special operations, and interdiction missions. My personal observation - field grade officers are making poor procurement decisions to which the general/flag officers pay little attention, because it benefits their respective services to do so (and I include the Army in this). They're not going to change until there's an actual attack and people die from CB weapons, and that's the real shame of it all.
And you thought your phone bill was high. The Navy is paying about $4 billion a year for calls, according to Defense News. And not surprisingly, there is a whole lot of padding in that tab.
A check of telephone bills in the Jacksonville, Fla., area “found that when we have a digital receipt for a phone bill in the area…we are being overcharged 30 percent,†deputy chief of naval operations Vice Adm. Mark Edwards told a group of military-industrial insiders at a recent conference.
Telephone service with no digital receipt showed overcharges of 18 percent, he added.
The Navy’s top IT official said he wasn’t accusing telephone companies, but he just might not let it slide. “What I’m saying is: It’s my money and I want it back. And we’re going to get it back,†he said, to some chuckles.
By recouping 30 percent of the $4 billion tab over the five-year defense plan, “we could build another carrier, just on the phone bill,†noted Edwards, a former ship and carrier battle group commander. “It won’t be quite that easy, but we’re working it.â€
And it might not end there. Edwards wants the Navy to change course by replacing traditional landlines for VOIP, or “voice over IP,†communications, he said. “It would save us over 24 percent the first year†and 24 percent the second year, he estimated.
Nazi Roots for Iraq Super-Bombs
The debate these days is all about whether or not Tehran is supplying Iraq's armor-piercing bombs. But the roots of these explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs, goes all the way back to Hitler-era Germany, the Yorkshire Ranter notes. Military historian Larry Grupp explains.
Dr. Hubert Schardin was definitely not a Nazi. Nevertheless, he stood stiffly at attention in full Luftwaffe dress uniform at Gestapo headquarters in Budapest, Hungary. It was the spring of 1944 and Schardin, a brilliant German explosives physicist, needed assistance. Under direct orders from Adolf Hitler to develop new superweapons, he needed the Gestapo's help to locate a famous but reclusive Hungarian colonel named Misznay who could provide detailed information regarding the complex physics involved in shaped charge explosives.
Colonel Misznay was, by all historical indicators, so elusive that today we are even uncertain what his real first name was. In all probability, Misznay was either a double or perhaps even a triple agent. After World War II, he dropped out of sight in the Eastern Bloc. Yet his last name lives on as a result of a special explosive phenomenon he identified, called the Misznay-Schardin effect -- a phenomenon that recognizes that fragments can be thrown from the face of an explosive charge in a predictable pattern, much like a projectile from a rifle barrel.
It's that effect which forms the heart of the EFP's deadly power. ThesePentagondocuments. , obtained by ABC News, give the best public run-down I've seen so far on how lethal these bombs have been.
(Big ups: AT)
Nork Nuke Deal: Back to the Future?
Great news. According to the Times, "The United States and four other nations reached a tentative agreement to provide North Korea with roughly $400 million in fuel oil and aid, in return for the North’s starting to disable its nuclear facilities and allowing nuclear inspectors back into the country."
But here's the weird thing. "We almost certainly could have gotten this deal before the North Koreans tested a missile and a nuke," the Arms Control Association's Paul Kerr notes. In a way, I agree with this statement from John Bolton:"
This is the same thing that the State Department was prepared to do six years ago. If we going to cut this deal now, it’s amazing we didn’t cut it back then.
Not that the deal is entirely set. As Slate observes, "any agreement with North Korea should be met with some skepticism because the country has changed its mind in the past, and leader Kim Jong-il still has to give his blessing."
Inside the Pentagon's Chem-Bio Budget
The Defense Department's chem-bio defense budget (CBDP) only accounts for less than one percent of what the U.S. military spends. But there's still a lot to pore over. I thought that I would give an overview today, talk about procurement tomorrow, and talk about RDT&E on Thursday. (Go to the Defense Department Comptroller's web site for fiscal year 2008 and access the procurement and RDT&E programs, to find the appropriate documents.)
Overall, the DoD CBDP will obligate $1.63 billion dollars in FY 2008 against 40-odd acquisition projects and other efforts. That's a bit less than one percent of the DoD modernization budget for that year. Breaking it down, the CBDP will spend:
$609.6 million for science and technology (37.4 percent)
$381.9 million for advanced research and development (23.5 percent)
$543.8 million for procurement (33.4 percent)
$93.6 million for management functions (5.7 percent)
The services were a bit snippy about this budget because of the spending pattern - R&D spending is twice that of procurement, which means they don't get as many toys. It's a trend that continues through the 2008-2013 Program Objective Memorandum (POM), which is the Pentagon's five year spending plan. Part of this is because of Rumsfeld's direction to "assume risk in the short term" in order to invest more in out-year future tech. The other part is because most, if not all, of the CB defense projects (detection in particular) have slipped their fielding dates by several years (for several reasons, most involving poor management), forcing a move of funds into R&D (lest they be taken away).
Medical biological countermeasures is the obvious favorite in the program this year (see breakout of funds by area here). You can thank the DOD vaccine program (anthrax and smallpox vaccine buys) and the Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative (TMTI) for that. The vaccine program is spending about $48 million in 2008, while TMTI is spending $248 million in tech base and $69 million in advanced R&D. Both programs' costs will continue to climb through 2013. The TMTI is the latest "good idea" from OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense], where DoD is basically sending a hell of a lot of money to industry to find "silver bullets" - a therapeutic that will address a broad range of BW threats, instead of a "single vaccine-single disease" approach.
This ambitious project is the latest Holy Grail for CBDP. In the late 1990s, the program promised free protective suits and vaccines for everyone. Then it was stand-off biological detection in 2000-2001. In 2002, OSD decided that every military base should have CB defense gear for antiterrorism, and threw a billion dollars at that problem. Now it's the terrorist BW threat, combined with the worry of "genetically engineered" BW agents, that drives OSD's "good idea" effort. Funny as in tragic. The installation protection effort started in 2004 (PM Guardian) got half its funds taken to kick-start TMTI, had to be reorganized, and is trying to get back on track. More on PM Guardian's failures later.
We're not going to see anything from TMTI for several years though. First, as a warning shot, Congress took $90 million of TMTI money from the DOD CBDP FY07 budget because there was no business plan other than "throw money at industry." Now a plan has been put together, and they're hiring lots of managers. But as with all medical research projects, and this one in particular, there's not going to be a final product ready for FDA approval for six to ten years, if we're lucky. But it's really, really important! To OSD leadership, not the warfighter, mind you.
In general, the DOD CBDP priorities run like this - chem-bio detection, protective suits and masks, and medical biological countermeasures. The funds left over go to CB defense information systems, medical chemical countermeasures, collective protection systems and decontamination systems. This has been pretty much the same profile for both R&D and procurement since 1995, which is funny since both Gulf Wars (1991 and 2003) showed that our forces really have no effective CB defense information systems, collective protection, or decon capability for most of our operational units or fixed sites.
Test and evaluation efforts have recently been called out in a separate budget line. Nearly $67 million is going to projects to modernize test and evaluation capabilities at Dugway Proving Ground, Edgewood, Dahlgren, and other test sites. The aging test infrastructure was one reason why new CB defense equipment has been delayed. Hard to tell when - or if - this funding is going to get the projects back on schedule. Another $54 million in management funds goes to Dugway every year to pay for salaries and other T&E needs. Past CBDP management funds were kept down to 4 to 4.5 percent of the total program costs, but that's bounced up to 5.8 percent (and rising) due to OSD deciding it's going to spend more on studies and upgrading service laboratories. This management slice also doesn't reflect the R&D funds spent at DTRA CB and the Joint Program Executive Office on managing projects directly.
If you're an "Old Crow" -- or a friend of one -- drop me a line. I'm trying to learn more about the fine, fine work y'all are doing. All conversations will be off-the-record, naturally.
Deadly Bombs' Long, Winding Trail
The U.S. government's claim yesterday, that the Iranians are supplying weapons to Iraqi militants, was met with a huge amount of skepticism -- and with good reason, given the Administration's lousy intel-interpreting track record, and the strange conditions of Sunday's presentation. (More on that, in a second.) But, for what it's worth, Defense Tech has been hearing about these weapons -- especially the "explosively-formed projectiles," or EFPs -- for the last eighteen months. Many of the government's assertions track, at least loosely, to what we've heard.
Soldiers in Iraq were already encountering EFPs -- and the closely-related "shaped-charges" -- back in the summer of '05, when I visited the country.
In the garden, there's a seemingly innocuous copper cylinder, concave on one end, about the size of a gallon of paint. It's called an explosively formed projectile, or EFP, and when it detonates, the concave end blows outward and melts into a bullet-shaped fragment that slices through armor and flesh. "Ten days ago, one of these sons-of-bitches took out an arm of a Humvee driver and both his legs," says Captain Greg Hirschey, the 717th's commander. "I get shivers up my spine every time I see one."
Back then, it was commonly assumed that the EFP-makers were getting some over-the-border help. After all, Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas have been using the weapons against Israeli tanks for some time.
A few months later, David Axe caught word of a particularly nasty EFP in Anbar province: infrared "tripwire-activated IEDs disguised as rocks and apparently employing shaped-charge warheads." That sounds almost exactly like the "Fully Operational, Camouflaged Passive Infrared EFP" that the government, in its Iran presentation, said was found in the Basra area, last May.
Still, does that mean there's a direct, tight connection between the Iranian government and the Iraqi bombers? Terrorists -- especially terrorist bomb-makers -- share best practices, from Colombia to Spain to Lebanon to Iraq. So it's not surprising to see one group's methods mimicked somewhere else. Take those infrared tripwires: they were first used by the Irish Republican Army. And I don't think we're about to send a carrier group to the Celtic Sea.
What's more, when Iranian EFPs were first spotted in Iraq, the bombs were in the hands of Sunni insurgents. At the time, that "seem[ed] to suggest a new and unusual area of cooperation between Iranian Shiites and Iraqi Sunnis to drive American forces out - a possibility that the commanders said they could make little sense of, given the increasing violence between the sects in Iraq." But now, this looks like terror-makers sharing tricks of the trade, rather some grand, ecumenical alliance.
Or, as Kevin Drum notes, Iran could just be trying to stoke chaos on all sides. "If I were in charge of Iran, it's probably what I'd be doing," he writes. And there's more than just the EFPs to tie Tehran to the conflict in Iraq. Iranian TNT and newly-minted mortars were also trotted out in the American presentation. "The evidence of Iranian meddling in Iraq," McClatchy notes, "is far more compelling than much of the administration's pre-war intelligence about Iraq."
That said, if the case was ironclad, the administration wouldn't be resorting to silly maneuvers like these when it made its case for Iran's involvement:
The officials said they would speak only on the condition of anonymity, so the explosives expert and the analyst, who would normally not speak to the news media, could provide information directly. The analyst's exact title and full name were not revealed to reporters. The officials released a PowerPoint presentation including photographs of the weaponry, but did not allow media representatives to record, photograph or videotape the briefing or the materials on display.
Too much is riding on this evidence for such chicanery. Make the case cleanly, guys. Or don't make it at all.
UPDATE 5:11 PM: As benjoya notes in the comments to a previous post, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace doesn't agree with the administration's assessment.
UPDATE 5:36 PM: Be sure to read Newsweek'scover story, too. But be ready to wince.
Copters' Missile Threat (and How to Stop it)
We do not have any direct evidence that insurgents in Iraq are using advanced surface-to-air missiles (sometimes called MANPADS – from MAN-portable Air Defense System); just best guesses, for now. But with the loss of five (and maybe even six or seven) helicopters in quick succession -- and an insurgent video apparently showing the latest loss to be a missile casualty -- the possibility needs to be considered.
Early MANPADS like the Russian SA-7 are fairly primitive, homing in on exhaust heat. As they steer towards the hottest object in their field of view, they can easily be lured away by decoy flares (or even the sun).
With more advanced missiles, it becomes a game of cat and mouse between the electronics in the missile seeker head and the countermeasures seeking to confuse it. Advanced seekers can not only discriminate flares from engines, but they can be smart enough to home in on the source of the flares. Advanced laser-based countermeasures like CLIRCM do not blind or dazzle seekers as is sometime supposed, but produce a signal which generates false targets and sends the missile off course.
Some missile makers claim that their seekers can beat all known countermeasures; some countermeasures manufacturers claim to be able to defeat all known missiles.
Certainly better missiles need better countermeasures. It's interesting that the proposed defenses for civilian airliners against terrorist MANPADS only goes up to the level of Stinger Basic, a technology now 20 years old.
Earlier missiles were intended to get close enough to have some chance of damaging an aircraft with shrapnel; modern warheads are contact fuzed, indicating that they are expected to actually hit the target. And hit in a specific place: the missile can discriminate between single-engine, multi-engine aircraft and helicopters and select the optimum point of vulnerability. The recent models are designed to send a dense pattern of high-speed fragments through the target for maximum damage, and the explosion may be enhanced by fuzing which detonates any unused fuel. Their destructive power is formidable.
This leads to last-ditch defenses like aim-point biasing, relatively cheap countermeasures (compared to the multi-million dollar laser jammers) to get the warhead to strike the less flight-critical parts of a helicopter and make the difference between a hit that results in a hard landing and one that destroys the helicopter completely.
Another way of dealing with the threat is to gets the MANPADS first. While Rules of Engagement are unlikely to be changed to alow helicopters to open fire at will, the AirCrcaft CounterMeasures (ACCM) laser provides one option. This is a laser dazzler fitted to helicopters to illuminate potential threats on the ground. The laser makes it much harder to target a helicopter, but more significantly the reaction of the person targeted gives a clue as to whether they are an insurgent getting ready to fire or an innocent civilian.
Another new approach, Ares notes, is DARPA's Battlefield Helicopter Emulator, an expendable decoy drone which produces the same noise and heat signature as a real helicopter. It may seem like an expensive option -- but losing helicopters is a far more costly prospect.
Helicopters operate at low speed and low altitude, making them especiallyvulnerable to MANPADS. Heavy armor is not an option except for attack choppers like the AH-64 Apache; transport, utility and scout craft carry much lighter protection. And in Afghanistan, even the Soviets' armored Mil-24 Hind gunships proved vulnerable to Stinger MANPADS.
The situation in Iraq has its parallels with the conflict then. The main importance of new missiles would not be in shooting down helicopters, but on the morale of both sides. The Mujahideen took new heart that the previously invincible ‘Devils Chariot’ could be defeated. Soviet helicopter crews found themselves facing an opponent who could shoot back, and were forced to adopt more evasive tactics which limited their effectiveness.
A similar decrease in effectiveness could happen in Baghdad.
"Based on what we have seen, we're already making adjustments in our tactics and techniques and procedures as to how we employ our helicopters," Maj. Gen. William Caldwell was reported as saying earlier.
Previously, US helicopter cover has prevented insurgents from operating from rooftops. If exposing helicopters becomes too risky, then that cover will be more limited. In this way, just a handful of MANPADS could have a significant impact on the ground battles. Which makes the timing of these latest helicopter losses -- just before the surge of US troops arrives for a make-or-break operation in Baghdad -- highly significant.
(My thanks to Jim O'Halloran, editor of the authoritative Jane’s Land Based Air Defence for providing an insider view on this topic.)
The Pentagon's IT geeks are putting together plans for a new White House "top-secret network and multimedia Crisis Management System (CMS) designed to operate in a wide range of fixed locations, on Air Force One and on a new fleet of presidential helicopters." That's according to the fine folks at FCW.com. The idea is to "provide the president, cabinet secretaries, and designated agency directors and their staffs with a secure, dedicated network capable of handling full motion video, voice graphics and data at 64 fixed and mobile locations."
The new network will also feature a collaborative tool suite similar to Microsoft Share Point. It will allow the top federal leaders to view and work on documents on the network’s video displays. Ten locations will be equipped with the new technology in 2008 at a cost of $12 million, according to the DISA [Defense Information Systems Agency] budget documents.
DISA said it will equip two next-generation Boeing 747s that serve as Air Force One and nine new presidential helicopters with the new network and CMS. They will also be on six 757 and two 737 VIP aircraft used by the vice president and cabinet secretaries. The new network will provide the leaders with “near perfect reliability and communications survivability,†the DISA budget documents state.
But this summer, the Board is being asked to make a very different examination, Inside Defense notes. Instead of drilling down deep, to study a specific problem, Board members are being asked to think expansively -- very, Very expansively -- and look at... well, pretty much every bad-case scenario an American bureaucrat could ever imagine. Asian economic growth, terrorist technological development, epidemics, famine, religious strife, faulty American manufacturing, biological weapons, hurricanes -- you name it, the Pentagon wants the Board to study it. And the members are supposed "identify possible solutions" and come up with “innovative technologies, systems or operational concepts that can be applied... before it becomes a national crisis.â€
Better get going, boys.
In Deep
“May God bless this ship and all who sail in her,†said Meryl Chertoff, wife of Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, as she cracked a bottle of Champagne on the towering bow of U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Bertholf at the Northrop Grumman shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi in November. The newly-christened Bertholf, the first of the so-called National Security Cutters, is the product of two defense giants’ controversial coupling and the biggest piece yet of a sprawling service-wide modernization program. In 2001, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin formed a joint venture, Integrated Coast Guard Systems, to win the then-$11-billion Deepwater contract to replace most of the Coast Guards’ ships, aircraft and command systems. Since then, Deepwater’s cost has ballooned to $24 billion for 90 new ships and 200 aircraft.
Perhaps worst, the program’s much-needed modernized small cutters have proved to be a total wash. Fixating on these leaky, over-budget 123-foot boats, critics in Congress have assailed the joint venture. U.S. Representative Bob Filner (D-Calif) even characterized the firms’ allegedly shoddy work as “criminal if not treasonous.â€
But critics have ignored the successes of other Deepwater designs and perhaps miss the point of the partnership. Integrated Coast Guard Systems is the lead systems integrator on Deepwater, but it farms out work on many of the individual cutter and aircraft designs to other companies. Northrop Grumman is building the big cutters and four Global Hawk drones, but other firms are responsible for scores of smaller cutters, short-range boats and vertical-takeoff drones.
EADS provided kits for helicopter upgrades and has delivered the first of 36 HC-144 patrol planes based on its C-235 transport. Lockheed Martin handles upgrades to the service’s HC-130 Hercules patrol planes as well as much of Deepwater’s electronics, but General Dynamics contributes key parts of the latter. To Integrated Coast Guard Systems, platforms are secondary to integration, to the network that links the platforms together. And that network, more than any new ship or airplane, promises to eventually revolutionize the U.S. Coast Guard, assuming the service’s fleet hasn’t rusted away to nothing in the meantime.
But that's a big if. Read the rest of the story in the latest issue of Defense Technology International. Pics here.
It takes most people more than a year to graduate from the the U.S. military's explosive ordnance disposal school. With good reason: bombs are beyond dangerous, and defusing them is a whole lot more complicated than "pulling the red wire."
Which is why I cringe every time I hear about some newbie trying to play bomb squad hero. This NPR story, of a beyond-incompetent Iraqi EOD team, has to be the most cringe-worthy case I've heard yet. Because the only thing dumber than randomly shooting at a bomb is randomly kicking it and tossing it around.
Someone, stop these fools, before they get themselves killed.
...an Iraqi explosives team are on the case.
The Iraqi police start shooting at the potential bomb, hoping to set it off. But to no avail. The convoy continues to sit and wait. An hour passes. As Sgt. Lord watches, the Iraqi police move closer to the suspected bomb.
In this case, the first IED turns out to be a fake. To the surprise of the American soldiers, this emboldens the Iraqi police who are now focusing on the second suspected bomb.
"Oh, he kicked it," says an American soldier watching.
"The second one must have been safe," Lord says, "because they went over to it, kicked it over, and then threw it across the road. Ay yi yi."
An hour and a half after first stopping, the convoy moves on. (emphasis mine)
Vegas!
Any Defense Tech people in the Vegas area? I'm headed out to Sin City tomorrow for the weekend, to catch a little family entertainment.
If anyone wants to share a beverage, the first round is on me. We'll even pour out a little for Anna Nicole. E-mail me if you're down.
U.N. Bulks Up to Protect Lebanon
Defense Tech's David Axe was in Lebanon in December, reporting on the U.N. force there. His story has been embargoed. Until now ...
The weird thing about Beirut is all the bullet holes in buildings, road signs and overpasses. It’s not the bullet-riddled stuff, per se, that’s so strange, but the contrast with all the shiny new stuff. Fifteen years after the end of a decades-long and bloody civil war, Beirut is booming. This despite the interruption of last summer’s war with Israel.
Air raids during that conflict knocked out power, felled bridges, took out the airport for a couple months and blew the top off the lighthouse on the beach near the Jnah neighborhood. Some parts of the Shi’ite southern suburbs took a beating, but Beirut proper escaped mostly unscathed. No, most of the war damage in Beirut is left over from the civil war and testifies to the scale of the destruction in that conflict.
On December 14th near downtown Beirut, I’m in a battered silver BMW with my chummy fixer Hasham, a former police detective who has, in retirement, exploited his connections to become the city’s go-to man for international media. This guy knows everybody. Traffic is heavy this morning – “Everybody going to work,†Hasham says – and in the gridlock he waves to friends in nearby cars and passes notes through his rolled-down window. He greets hotel bellhops, government bureaucrats, passing policemen and street-corner baristas in the uniquely Lebanese mixture of English, French and Arabic.
Hasham says the war with Israel was like cold water on Lebanon’s hot tourism industry. In the year before the war, millions of tourists passed their holidays in Beirut and the picturesque south. Now the stream of tourists is just a trickle, and hotels are so desperate for lodgers that they’re giving away upgrades like candy. Still, this little slump is nothing like the prolonged misery of the old days. Most of the recent war damage has been repaired, international investment is flowing in, people are working and Hasham is quietly optimistic.
Even the mass demonstrations – and occasional rioting — by hundreds of thousands of super-religious Shi’ites and their Christian allies don’t get Hasham, a secular Sunni, too worked up – nor does the prospect of a second round with Israel. The pro-Hez demonstrations peaked in December with nearly a million people in downtown Beirut, all demanding that Iran-backed Hezbollah have more power in government. The crowds are smaller and usually quieter now. Even so, American pundits are calling the protests a harbinger of a violent coup. Hasham just shrugs. “Since 1973 we had shit,†he says. But even at the height of the civil war, he got up every day and went to work with the police’s counter-drug department. He got shot three times but kept on going.
There are a lot people – both Lebanese and foreigners – working on behalf of this storied little country, doing their best to make sure all those scars of war remain just that: fading signs of old wounds. Western and regional investment is pouring in. And 10,000 heavily-armed U.N. peacekeepers in the south swear they’re doing their best to keep the peace. That’s the subject of a news feature in the February issue of DTI:
Since the summer war, UNIFIL has added 8,000 soldiers and sailors to its original contingent of 3,000, and has quietly integrated artillery, heavy tanks, tank destroyers and patrol boats to its main body of light infantry, medics and engineers, while also boosting daily patrols from just a handful to around 200. The result, in the final days of 2006, is a new UNIFIL, one with an apparent growing will to fight–and the means to do so.
Check out my Lebanon pics here. And go on patrol with the UN below:
I'm not one of those bloggers that feels the need to play gotcha every time some big paper gets a story wrong. But yesterday's article on page one (page one!) of the New York Times is lightweight, even for a breezy feature.
It's all about the Army's new-ish combat uniform -- and how soldiers don't like the velcro on the ensemble. Which is kind of interesting, I suppose. But you'd think the fact that the camos don't actually hide soldiers in many environments would get a mention, at least. A lousy sentence. Especially since these Army Combat Uniforms, or ACUs, or supposed to be "universal camouflage." And especially since the Army just decided to sink another $72 million into the new uniforms.
The ACU (as I have seen in both the woods of Georgia and the desert & urban areas of Iraq) is pretty much crap. Yes, I agree it works well if you are lying still in a gravel parking lot or next to a large moss covered live oak. Any other circumstance, though, you are truly "Ghost Recon". I work at the Recon Surveillance Course 4th RTB at Benning, and teach camouflage here. The grey pattern sticks out like a white ghost. At nighttime it gets highly illuminated by the moon and stars. The ACU is pretty much the joke of the Army. Joke's on you. Thank God I am a Marine!
Or check out this PowerPoint presentation, on how the camo pattern for the new uniforms was picked. What eventually became the ACU's pattern (called "urban track") comes in, at best, 3rd place out of 4. Yet just about every soldier is now wearing that also-ran. Trial after trial between competing patterns were held. And then, out of nowhere, the Army picked the pattern for the ACU -- a pattern that hadn't even been in the tests. That's deserves, at minimum, a brief nod from the Times, no?
(Big ups: WT)
Bump: New Weapon Targeting Copters?
I've put this post back up at the top of the site, after today's tragic events in Iraq.
When three American copters crashed over Iraq in about a week, Kiowa Warrior pilot ME chalked it up to dumb luck and thinly-armored aircraft. Now that a fourth and a fifth have been shot down, ME is having second thoughts. It could be that Iraq insurgents have gotten their hands on a new, more deadly strain of surface-to-air-missiles (SAMs), he thinks.
"Sunni militants" have recently boasted that "'God has granted new ways' to threaten U.S. aircraft," the AP says. And that could be a major problem for U.S. commanders, the wire service observes, in another story. American forces "rely heavily on helicopters not only in combat but also to move soldiers and supplies around the country. Helicopters have been used more and more as the war progressed to avoid a bigger threat from roadside bombs."
The latest helicopter casualty, an Apache, "exploded in a ball of fire" on Friday, according to witnesses.
"That's unlikely to happen due to small arms fire," ME says, "and the odds of hitting an Apache heads on with an unguided RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] are pretty slim."
The fuel cells are crashworthy, and unless they are hit by something like an API (armor piercing incendiary - like a .50 cal or higher) shell, I don't think they are going to explode. Hitting munitions onboard isn't likely to make a fireball either. But the explosion of a SAM hitting it might look like a fireball.
If a copter pilot does get attacked by an advanced SAM, he has a couple of ways to defend himself. He can fire off flares to confuse heat-seekers. He can set off radar or infrared jammers. Or he can fly "NOE" ("Nap of the Earth"), very low to the ground, following the contours of the landscape. That "minimize[s] the amount of time to acquire, and shoot a targe -- whether it's an AK[-47 assault rifle], RPG, or SA-7/14/18 [SAM]," according to ME.
But in training for Iraq, ME recalls, "we weren't too worried about SAMs... [W]e didn't think they had very many of them, in operating condition, in the hands of trained users. The more likely threat was massed fire from the vastly more common AK and RPG."
That threat assessment seems to be changing, quickly. "Based on what we have seen, we're already making adjustments in our tactics and techniques and procedures as to how we employ our helicopters," Maj. Gen. William Caldwell told reporters.
But there are only so many changes that can be made. These copters don't have a lot of armor. And not much more can be added, without "trading off fuel, weapons, or some other weight," ME notes. "Helicopters are already at very near their max weight... Improved electronics/avionics would help save a lot of weight, but most pilots would rather have the improved flight performance that reduced weight provides, rather than more armor."
"The real problem," he adds, "is the idea of using an anti-armor bird like the Apache or a scout like the Kiowa to slug it out with insurgents on the ground. Neither were really built for it, and the pilots aren't trained for it (unless its done at the individual unit level). TF160 [160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment] teaches and trains the best air to ground engagement tactics, but the rest of the aviation community doesn't get the ammunition, or range time to really teach it."
OK, sure. But now that we're in this counterinsurgent fight, what choice do those pilots really have?
UPDATE 02/08/07 11:10 AM: "The two military and intelligence sources believe al-Qaeda has organized a grouping of cells [with a mission of] deny[ing] Coalition forces the free use of helicopters to ferry troops, resupply outlying areas, and conduct assault missions," Bill Roggio reports.
Al-Qaeda wants to force Coalition forces to use ground transportation, where it believes heavier casualties can be inflicted on U.S. forces via roadside bombing and mine attacks (IEDs). Helicpoter shoot-downs also "make for compelling television," according to a military source, which "helps project the image of a deadly, unbeatable enemy." Al-Qaeda is believed to have deployed multiple anti-aircraft cells along the known overflight routes in and around Baghdad.
The cells are thought to be armed with Russian made Strela SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles, a first generation shoulder fired anti-aircraft missile which is widely distributed throughout the world. These weapons are not as sophisticated as U.S. made Stingers, which were used with deadly consequences by mujahideen in Afghanistan against Soviet fixed and rotary wing aircraft. U.S. aircraft have systems to deter missile threats (jammers, flairs, chaff) but there are no reports these systems were deployed during any of the engagements.
Amphibious Vehicle Leaks Cash
"After 10 years and $1.7 billion, this is what the Marines Corps got for its investment in a new amphibious vehicle: A craft that breaks down about an average of once every 4 1/2 hours, leaks and sometimes veers off course. And for that, the contractor, General Dynamics of Falls Church, received $80 million in bonuses," the Washington Post's Renae Merle reports in a brutal front page story.
The amphibious vehicle, which can be launched from a ship and then driven on land, is so unreliable that the Pentagon is ditching plans to begin building the first of more than 1,000 and wants to start over with seven new prototypes, which will take nearly two years to deliver, at a cost of $22 million each.
The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle is one of the Pentagon's largest weapons programs and exemplifies the agency's struggle to afford a cadre of new mega-systems that are larger and more complex, but also more trouble, than their predecessors.
Despite reforms meant to rein in costs, it is not unusual for weapons programs to go 20 to 50 percent over budget, the Government Accountability Office recently found. Among the offenders is the Army's sprawling modernization program, which aims to update everything from tanks to drones and is now expected to cost $160 billion [or much more -- ed.], up from $90 billion, and a Lockheed Martin missile-warning satellite program, which is projected to cost more than $10 billion, up from $4 billion...
The overruns are eating away at the Pentagon's buying power but not its appetite. The amount the Pentagon plans to spend on major weapons systems has doubled in the past five years, to $1.4 trillion from $700 billion, according to the GAO...
When it was launched in 1996, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle was promoted as an example of acquisition reform... But the program has struggled with repeated delays, cost increases, budget cuts and dashed expectations, according to military officials and government reports. Problems range from leaks in hydraulics systems to software glitches, according to the reports. Last year, the vehicles completed just two of 14 planned tests.
"They started out really well, and I was really pleased," said Philip Coyle, the Defense Department's former director of operational test and evaluation. "But gradually the complexity of the program has overcome the contractor, so they are years behind schedule."
General Dynamics defends its progress, noting that the vehicle has met many goals, including being able to reach speeds of 30 knots on the water. The vehicle is fast enough to keep up with the Abrams tank on land, it can carry 17 Marines, and its systems can communicate with other ships and tanks, all key performance criteria, the company says...
An independent review released in December by the Navy's acquisition office questioned the company's commitment to solving the development problems that plagued the vehicle. The report said General Dynamics appeared more interested in starting production than trouble-shooting and didn't manage the groups making many of the decisions. The production phase is typically more profitable for a contractor and often marks a point at which a program becomes more difficult to cancel.
General Dynamics "seems to be focused on production rather than on solving significant design and engineering problems," the Navy report said. "This must be changed if the Program is to move ahead successfully."
"News that an Iraqi Army brigade and 2,000 American troops have begun an operation in [Baghdad's] Sunni dominated neighborhood of Azamiyah has kicked off speculation the Baghdad Security Operation is now underway in full force," serial embedder Bill Roggio notes. "But the fact is the operation to stabilize the capital and the surrounding provinces is only in its infancy. Today's positioning of forces Azamiyah is but one more opening move on the chessboard."
From what I understand, Gen. David Petraeus, the new American commander in Iraq, only now just got to Iraq. So it doesn't seem like the moment for the be-all-, end-all push the papers are trumpeting.
New Camera Sees In Bullet Time
Here's your cool gadget of the week: a video camera that can follow speeding bullets midflight. I took a look at the gizmo, built by Nova Sensors Inc for the Air Force Research Laboratory, for Wired News. I've examined Nova's goods before. But this is the first time it's ability to mimic the Matrix's bullet time sequences has been revealed.
The first videos -- which you can see via the Wiredstory -- are crude. But it's an impressive capability. Existing sniper-finding systems rely on radar or acoustic sensors. And they can be heavy, bulky, and are one more piece of kit to carry. Nova Sensors device (known as VAST) can be integrated into a thermal imager, devices which are small enough for personal use.
Effectively, it could turn every round into a tracer bullet. Anyone firing at you would give themselves away immediately, even if the muzzle flash is hidden. From Nova President Mark Massie’s comments on the sensor, it sounds as though different types of rounds may have very different signatures, so enhanced software would not only be able to pinpoint the source of a shot, it could say what type of weapon is being fired. A system that tells you that two AK-47s and one AK-74 are firing from the upper story of Building A? Sounds pretty useful.
Interestingly, right at the moment a new evaluation is being carried out using ShotSpotter acoustic sniper location system in conjunction with Boeing's ScanEagle UAVs. The idea is that the ShotSpotter indicates the location and Scan Eagle goes over to get a better look. A ScanEagle equipped with the VAST camera system would be a logical extension of this idea.
(The bad guys could try to get around it by using bullets cast from ice when they are sniping, an approach only used so far in bad thrillers as far as I know. It's possible; it gives terrible ballistics and very limited lethality, but the bullets could not be tracked by the VAST system. Or at least, not until Massie's team spend five minutes on the software and get it to pick out cold objects against the warm background as well as hot ones.)
If only Zapruder had had one of these, we would be able to see exactly how many bullets were fired at Kennedy and from what direction...
There are likely to be a lot of other applications which are more prosaic than following bullets in flight. But as a first demonstration, it’s pretty impressive.
As expected, the Army has eliminated funding for its high tech soldier ensemble, Land Warrior, in its budget for 2008. The gear -- a collection of radios, electronic maps, and next-gen rifle scopes -- was finally supposed to connect the average infantryman into the growing network for combat. But the Army never could figure out the seemingly-endless weight and usability issues.
DOD planners dream up expensive systems... while ignoring the obvious success of modern digital device formats, such as cellphones, PDAs and even iPods. You may not be able to tap out a text message on a cellphone during a firefight as easily as with the Land Warrior, but what are you doing text messaging anyways? That's what the radio is for!
But Land Warrior isn't quite dead, yet. The 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry will still be taking more than 200 Land Warrior uniforms to Iraq, later on this year. The systems were already bought and paid for, in earlier budgets. And the hope is that Land Warrior performs so well under fire that the Army's chiefs have no choice but to turn the program's cash spigot back on. "It's kind of a Hail Mary pass," one Pentagon insider tells me.
Also, as expected, the Army will trim its mongo modernization project, Future Combat Systems, by cutting "two classes of unmanned aerial systems, one unmanned ground system and remov[ing] the Intelligent Munition System [a sort of smart landmine] from the program," Inside Defense reports. Army budget director Lt. Gen. Dave Melcher says the changes will save $3.3 billion over five years. FCS will still cost taxpayers $10.6 billion in fiscal year 2008 alone, if the Pentagon's budget goes through. Plus, there will be another $222 million for the Warfighter Information Network - Tactical, which is designed to help troops on the battlefield plug into info networks through satellite, airborne and terrestrial links. That's a nearly 100% increase over the previous year.
Defense News lists some of the other items that the Army is buying this year with its $27.8 billion procurement budget:
• $473 million to buy Patriot PAC-3 missiles.
• $596 million to buy 7,000 Humvees.
• $828 million to buy 2,862 trucks in the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles.
• $483 million to buy trucks in the Family of Heavy Tactical Vehicles.
• $172 million to buy mortars rounds.
• $222 million to buy artillery rounds.
• $167 million to buy rockets.
• $132 million to buy combat service support equipment.
• $712 million to modernize AH-64 Apache helicopters.
• $705 million to buy UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.
• $191 million to buy Chinook CH-47 cargo helicopters.
• $468 million to buy Armed Reconnaissance Helicopters to replace OH-58D Kiowa Warriors.
• $230 million to buy Light Utility Helicopters.
• $98 million to buy 5,900 M4 carbines.
“We are trying to procure M4s for all soldiers in theater; the shorter weapon gives a lot more potential,†the service’s budget director, Lt. Gen. Dave Melcher said.
UPDATE 7:44 PM: "The 4th Brigade was also scheduled to test Land Warrior at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., but now that has also been canceled," Federal Computer Week notes. "NTC is a common final stop for realistic training before Iraq deployments."
The unit will be fully supported throughout its Iraq deployment, Atherton said. The Army has funding for unit support and repair parts through 2007 and is confident they will find procurement or operating money to keep the unit alive in 2008.
Meanwhile, the program office for Land Warrior here at home will be shut down. The Army will buy replacement parts and materials to last during the duration of the deployment...
The Army is looking for alternatives to give dismounted soldiers a point of presence on the network, Melcher said. One possibility is something called the Single Infantry Transport System, which has similar capabilities, he said.
The big weapons -- the destroyers, the aircraft carriers, and the stealth jets -- all emerged pretty much unscathed in the Pentagon's latest budget. Some of the more bleeding-edge projects weren't so lucky. Especially at the Missile Defense Agency, which took about a half-billion dollar hit for fiscal year 2008.
Take the High-Altitude Airship, for instance. Just a year ago, the Pentagon handed Lockheed a $150 million contract to build the missile-spotting dirigible. No, it wouldn't be 25 times bigger than the Goodyear Blimp, as originally planned. Nor would it be powered by lasers. But it would still be built to "hover above the jet stream at an altitude of 65,000 feet for months at a time." That is, if major advances in solar panels, fuel cells, aerodynamic controls, and flexible materials could be overcome.
Lockheed won't get the chance any time soon, however. The High Altitude Airship "has been canceled due to funding constraints," according to the Missile Defense Agency. But get too distraught, blimp-lovers; the budget for the Aerostat Joint Program Office just jumped from $243 million to $481 mil.
The Airborne Laser -- the modified 747, meant to zap missiles as they take off -- still gets more than $500 million in the new budget. But its first live-fire test has been delayed, again. Originally scheduled for 2002, the blast has now been rescheduled for 2009, Inside Defense notes. The Laser Jet's alternative -- the "Kinetic Energy Interceptor," a non-explosive interceptor missile -- has been pared back, as well. There's no longer a "kill vehicle," or warhead, part to the program, Defense News observes. Instead, the KEI has been tweaked, to become a "common booster" for all sorts of missile interceptions.
There's much, much, much more in this budget to explore. Expect lots of posts in the week to come.
Pentagon Sued Over Milblog-Monitoring
The digital rights crusaders over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation are suing the Department of Defense, "demanding expedited information on how the Army monitors soldiers' blogs," according to an EFF statement.
EFF filed its suit after the Department of Defense and Army failed to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about the blog monitoring program...
According to news reports[ahem, ahem], an Army unit called the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell (AWRAC) reviews hundreds of thousands of websites every month, notifying webmasters and bloggers when it sees information it finds inappropriate. Some bloggers have told reporters that they have cut back on their posts or shut down their sites altogether because of the activities of the AWRAC.
Well, not exactly. Most of the bloggers I've talked to dialed back their sites because of a more broad suspicion about blogging within the military community -- and unclear regulations about what can and can not be written online.
Still, the EFF's suit should be useful. Because the AWRAC's blog-eying regimen seemed almost laughably loose, when it was announced in October. The Army team "uses several scanning tools to monitor [these] sites for OPSEC [operational security] violations," the Army notes. "The tools search for such key words as 'for official use only' or 'top secret,' and records the number of times they are used on a site. Analysts review the results to determine which, if any, need further investigation."
The most common OPSEC violations found on official sites are For Official Use Only (FOUO) documents and limited distribution documents, as well as home addresses, birthdates and home phone numbers.
Unofficial blogs often show pictures with sensitive information in the background, including classified documents, entrances to camps or weapons. One Soldier showed his ammo belt, on which the tracer pattern was easily identifiable.
The EFF's suit "demands records on how the AWRAC conducts its monitoring, as well as any orders to soldiers about revision or deletion of web posts. It also demands expedited processing, as the information is urgently needed by the public."
"Of course, a military effort requires some level of secrecy. But the public has a right to know if the Army is silencing soldiers' opinions as well. That's why the Department of Defense must release information on how this program works without delay," EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann said.
In its new budget for fiscal year 2008, the Pentagon says it'll parcel out about $142 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Defense Department doesn't really believe in its own figures, apparently. The number was was calculated before the new 35,00-48,000 troop "surge" plan was put in place, Pentagon comptroller Tina Jonas said in a news conference. So $142 billion is just a "best estimate."
"We know it will be wrong," she added. "Conditions will change, and we'll have to adjust at that point."
The number is also $28 billion dollars less than the $170 billion being spent on Iraq and Afghanistan this year. Does that mean there's some sort of secret plan to start bringing troops home? Hell, no. "White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that fact shouldn't be interpreted as an indication of likely reduction in U.S. troops in Iraq," according to the AP.
There was another item of note from the Pentagon news conference introducing the new budget. Vice Admiral Stephen Stanley, Director for Force Structure, Resources, and Assessment for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, listed a number of major "risks" to the health of the American armed forces. One of the biggest was increased wear and tear that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were putting on military gear. Another was the increased "operational tempo" from those wars, which were grinding down our troops. In other words, the wars themselves are a threat to the American military. Interesting to hear that, in a Pentagon briefing.
New Weapons Get Big Cash in Pentagon Request
You might think, with two wars draining hundreds of billions from the country's coffers, that the Pentagon would be inclined to slow down its modernization efforts. Especially ones that have little or nothing to do with fighting terrorists -- or even battling North Korea or Iran. That'd be wrong.
The Pentagon fiscal year 2008 budget adds another $8.8 billion to its modernization accounts, Defense Department comptroller Tina Jonas justed noted in a news conference. That'll include "the first significant funding" -- $3 billion -- in the next generation of aircraft carrier," the CVN-21. The Joint Strike Fighter fleet will grow from two in FY07, to twelve the following year -- including the first short take-off version. It'll take $6 billion in 2008, the Pentagon projects. Despite major cost inflation, the Defense Department budget request "funds three littoral combat ships and will continue funding for two DDG-1000-class destroyers and another amphibious assault ship," according to a American Forces Press Service article. "The Air Force F-22 Raptor fighter is budgeted at $3.8 billion for 20 aircraft."
The F-22, it should be noted, was recently deemed "too sensitive... to be useful" in places like Iraq. Most of these other systems -- big destroyers, new aircraft carriers, and the like -- wouldn't have much to do with an Iraq-style situation. Neither would the $8.8 billion for missile defense (although that is a more than a half-billion less than what the program got last year).
Of the major service's weapons programs, only the Army's massive modernization effort, Future Combat Systems, seems to have been trimmed. The $3.6 billion requested for FCS is just slightly less than what the Pentagon asked for last year.
One bit of good news is that the Army, after years of requests, is starting to get a bigger slice of the budget. "If the budget is enacted as submitted, the Army will receive $130.1 billion in fiscal 2008, for an increase of more than 20 percent," the American Forces Press Service says. "The Navy will receive $119.3 billion, up 9 percent. The Marine Corps will receive $20.5 billion, up 4.3 percent, and the Air Force will receive $136.6 billion; an increase of 8.2 percent."
Bloomberg's ace Pentagon-watcher, Tony Capaccio, has more.
UPDATE 02/06/07 4:06 PM: "Any fear that war costs would crimp spending on new weapons evaporated Feb. 5 when the Pentagon unveiled its proposed 2008 budget," says Defense News. Check out these stats:
• $14.4 billion for new ships, a 29 percent increase over 2007.
• $6 billion for satellites and related equipment, a 25 percent increase.
• $27.4 billion for warplanes, an 18 percent increase.
• $3.7 billion on the Army’s Future Combat Systems, a 9 percent boost.
Pentagon's Big-Ass Budget
How much cash do we spend on defense, really? Center for Defense Information budget guru Winslow Wheeler provides this handy chart. Check out the $50 billion increase in the "peacetime" Pentagon coffers -- the money that doesn't get spent on Afghanistan and Iraq.
And where does that money go? Healthcare, paychecks, and new weapons, mostly. Check out this Pentagon chart.
It ain’t much to look at. But then, ODIS wasn’t designed to win robot beauty contests. ODIS, which stands for Omni Directional Inspection System, is one of a score of small military ground robots developed by universities in recent years and now seeing its first real-world tests in Iraq and Afghanistan.
ODIS looks like a fat bathroom tile and moves like a hockey puck on tiny invisible wheels. It was designed in the late 1990s by researchers at the University of Utah to assist military and law enforcement personnel in inspecting vehicles for bombs and contraband. The bot’s low profile and small size let it skate easily underneath any vehicle, where it uses a simple digital video camera to peer up at the vehicle’s undercarriage.
The first ODISs were “totally autonomous,†according to Terry Tierney, an engineer at the Army’s robotics labs at the Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center in Warren, Michigan. But users complained that they didn’t trust the bot, so TARDEC took the basic, autonomous ODIS and made it dumber.
Besides assuaging the fears of bot-phobic operators, this had the effect of making ODIS cheaper, meaning TARDEC and its university partner could make more of them for testing. The less-autonomous models were handed over to the Coast Guard and the California Highway Patrol, and later, to U.S. forces deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, where suicide car-bombers (warning: graphic!) are a constant threat.
Getting feedback from the deployed test models is difficult, says TARDEC’s Bill Smuda, since the operators are more focused on using the system than writing up reports about it. So periodically, Smuda goes on the road with his menagerie of small bots – to places like Baghdad – and sees for himself how they perform.
Based on this, TARDEC has made several fixes to ODIS in anticipation of greater military demand for the system. Engineers have added a metal “zipper mast†that unrolls from inside the robot to elevate a camera for peering into truck beds. They’ve also made the wheels detachable. In a 10-minute operation, you can add bigger wheels for off-roading. They’ve designed additional fixtures including cameras and claws to give operators choices. Finally, TARDEC has switched the ODIS control console from a unique proprietary system to one that’s based on the Xbox gaming controller. Why? “Because,†Smuda says, “you can buy them in the PX,†or post-exchange – the military’s department stores. So if your ODIS controller breaks, even in back-woods Afghanistan, a replacement isn’t far off.
ODIS is just one of several types of Unmanned Ground Vehicles that is slowly and subtly transforming the way soldiers fight. The fundamental idea is “standoff.†That is, keeping soldiers at a distance while expendable robots go into harm’s way.
When controversial new military tools are being rolled out, perceptions often matter more than reality. Take the Active Denial System, the millimeter-wave pain ray developed by the Air Force. The weapon's effects are now pretty well understood by military researchers. But for the average person, it's been nearly impossible to sort through the range of claims and counter-claims surrounding the system. And these questions could come back to haunt the American government, if and when they ever deploy the system.
I was powerfully reminded of this by the recent case of Raul Castells.
Raul Castells is a controversial social activist in Argentina. In 2004 he organised a march on McDonalds ; in March 2006 he opened a community kitchen providing free food for poor people in Puerto Madero, a swish redeveloped dock area. Located opposite the Hilton Hotel, it carried the slogan "We are fighting for an Argentina in which the dogs of the rich don't eat better than the children of the poor".
This behavior has angered some of his opponents in Argentina.
“I was victim of a new Police weapon, a type of flame thrower,†said Castells (my translation). In fact, he was not sure if it was a flamethrower,a giant lighter or something else. Others claim that rubber bullets were fired at them after they went to help the burning man.
The police dispute the account given by Castells and his followers, saying that he was hit by a molotov cocktail thrown by one of his own supporters.
“The Buenosairean and Federal Police do not use flame throwers,†said a police spokesman, reasonably enough.
My first guess was that this was an accident, and that Castells had been hit with pepper spray which had been accidentally ignited. Such sprays use a flammable alcohol base; non-flammable alternatives have been rejected on grounds of safety, effectiveness and environmental damage. However, the police deny using pepper spray in the encounter.
This leaves two completely opposed versions of what happened. Who do you believe, the police or the protesters? While the days of the dirty war and critics of the government being 'disappeared' have long gone, the police are not universally trusted and officers have been convicted of extra-judicial executions of protesters as recently as 2002.
I’m not suggesting that the Argentine police are covertly field-testing an Active Denial system (though a portable version for police use was under development, and the Argentine police are quite innovative, being the first to adopt the electric cattle prod in the 1930’s ). But when the ADS is employed, people will turn up on CNN claiming to be victims, and showing off sunburn, leprosy, blisters and every other skin condition ever seen. Who will you believe? More importantly, who will the local population believe?
Dr Juergen Altmann suggests that prolonged exposure would likely produce high temperatures resulting in blistering over the entire exposed surface of the body. Clearly there is a risk, but re-radiation of heat outwards, and conduction of heat inwards will prevent the temperature from rising indefinitely. I have great respect for Dr Altmann’s technical knowledge in matters nonlethal, but the lack of this kind of injury during extensive testing leads me to suspect that the ADS is (relatively) safe.
Consider: if you step into warm sun from an air conditioned room, in a few seconds your skin temperature shoots up several degrees. This does not mean the solar heating will cause you to burst into flames if you remain for a few more minutes.
But who is really right? Until questions like this can be resolved, any deployment of Active Denial technology is going to be a political minefield.
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.
* Flying car just around the corner... for the 384958736479th time
(Big ups: RC, EH)
Iraq Re-arms
Despite flat oil exports and a struggling economy, Iraq has embarked on a comprehensive program to re-arm its embattled security forces. That's focus of my latest feature for World Politics Watch:
The country is buying American patrol planes, Italian naval vessels, Russian helicopters and armored vehicles co-produced by American and British firms. The new equipment is utilitarian stuff -- optimized for patrols in and over Iraq's teeming cities and on its smuggler-infested waters rather than for attacks on external foes -- and reflects the complete inward focus of Iraq's military. But the purchases do little to solve the forces' nearly complete lack of logistics capability.
Iraq has spent around a billion dollars on new weapons in the past year, but all the new planes, vehicles and patrol boats do nothing to address Iraqi forces' fundamental flaws, including their nearly total lack of logistics ability, as I explained in a story for National Defense Magazine a few months back:
After three years of training by coalition advisors, Iraqi forces in southern Iraq are capable of planning and commanding operations. But their logistics systems remain deeply flawed, and the Iraqis rely on British and U.S. forces for supplies and spares support for all but the most basic functions.
Plus, it doesn't matter how well armed Iraqi forces are if they can't deploy within their own country, a problem I addressed last year for The Washington Times:
The 700-strong Kurdish Iraqi army battalion, originally from the northern city of Sulaimaniyah, deployed to Balad recently to bolster a single Shi'ite battalion mustered from local residents. ... The large Sunni minority living around Balad has protested the Kurdish unit's presence, said U.S. Army Lt. Col. David Coffey, a member of an ad hoc military transition team that is helping train the Kurdish battalion. He said the residents have resisted the presence of the Kurdish battalion with such force that commanders are afraid to let the soldiers leave their base, which is adjacent to a U.S. compound outside the city.
But then, Arab militaries have a bad habit of buying impressive-looking weapons that they're incapable of using to advantage. Saudi Arabia's latest spending spree, for example, includes new Apache attack choppers, Typhoon fighters and the latest Abrams tanks. But that country remains incapable of defending itself, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
"Civilian casualties in Iraq's volatile Anbar province would have been greatly reduced over the past 20 months if an inexpensive, hand-held laser system had been sent to the Marines operating there, according to a series of e-mail messages between troops in the field and acquisition officials in suburban Washington" obtained by the Tampa Tribune. "A military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said close to 50 innocent Iraqis were killed and nearly 140 were wounded in Anbar between March and December by Marines who did not have the dazzlers as an alternative to lethal force."
The decision to deny delivery of the Compact High Power Laser Dazzler has touched off an internal debate, the messages reveal, with highly charged phrases such as "unnecessary carnage" being used to describe the situation...
The dazzler is a nonlethal tool for steering unwelcome vehicles and people away from U.S. checkpoints and convoys. Without it, U.S. forces must open fire when Iraqis fail to heed warning signals and get too close...
Made by LE Systems, a small company in Hartford, Conn., the compact laser creates a wall of intense green light that stops or redirects oncoming traffic by temporarily impairing the driver's vision.
In June 2005, Marine Corps leaders in western Iraq filed an "urgent universal need" request for several hundred of LE Systems' dazzlers, which cost about $8,000 each. The request, which was repeated less than a year later, has gone unfulfilled.
The dazzler order appears to have been made by Marine Corps Major General Richard Zilmer, who's heading up the coalition effort in western Iraq. He is emerging as a extremely interesting figure. First, he tells Congress that the Marines "needs [the] capability" to deploy through space. Then, once he gets to Iraq, he sends an "urgent request" to the Pentagon, asking for new gear. At the top of his list: a "priority 1" plea for 183 renewable power stations, equipped with "solar panels and wind turbines." By reducing the need for [petroleum-based fuels] at our outlying bases, we can decrease the frequency of logistics convoys on the road, thereby reducing the danger to our Marines, soldiers, and sailors," the request stated. So far, however, the response to Zilmer's renewable-power request has been limited. A single station is being examined for research and development, sources tell Defense Tech. And the Army's Rapid Equipping Force is putting together four alt-power units: two trailer-sized, and two as big as "connex" cargo containers. It's a start, for sure. But it's a far cry from what Zilmer asked for.
President Bush and his new military chiefs have been saying for nearly a month that they would "surge" an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq, in a last, grand push to quell the violence in Baghdad and in Anbar Province. But a new study by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the real troop increase could be as high as 48,000 -- more than double the number the President initially said.
That's because the combat units that President Bush wants to send into hostile areas need to be backed up by support troops, "including personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police, and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical, and other services," the CBO notes.
Over the past few years , DoD’s practice has been to deploy a total of about 9,500 personnel per combat brigade to the Iraq theater, including about 4,000 combat troops and about 5,500 supporting troops.
DoD has not yet indicated which support units will be deployed along with the added combat forces, or how many additional troops will be involved. Army and DoD officials have indicated that it will be both possible and desirable to deploy fewer additional support units than historical practice would indicate. CBO expects that, even if the additional brigades required fewer support units than historical practice suggests, those units would still represent a significant additional number of military personnel.
To reflect some of the uncertainty about the number of support troops, CBO developed its estimates on the basis of two alternative assumptions. In one scenario, CBO assumed that additional support troops would be deployed in the same proportion to combat troops that currently exists in Iraq. That approach would require about 28,000 support troops in addition to the 20,000 combat troops—a total of 48,000. CBO also presents an alternative scenario that would include a smaller number of support personnel—about 3,000 per combat brigade—totaling about 15,000 support personnel and bringing the total additional forces to about 35,000.
According to the study, the costs for the "surge" would also be dramatically different than the President has said. The White House estimated a troop escalation would require about $5.6 billion in additional funding for the rest of fiscal year 2007. Of that, about $3.2 billion was supposed to go to the Army and Marines for their escalated activity.
But that figure appears to have been grossly underestimated. The CBO now believes "that costs would range from $9 billion to $13 billion for a four-month deployment and from $20 billion to $27 billion for a 12-month deployment." There's a more detailed analysis of the numbers on pages 3 and 4 of the study, which was sent to House Budget Chairman John Spratt today.
UPDATE 1:43 PM: Here's Spratt's reaction, in a statement just released:
“An average of 170,000 military personnel has been maintained in the Iraq theater of operations, and this high deployment level has taken a toll. Last year, CBO reported that the Department of Defense had reduced the amount of ‘dwell’ time for many troops from two years to one year in order to sustain troop levels. ‘Dwell’ time is the time troops spend in training at bases in the United States while living with their families. CBO questioned whether such a high pace of operations was sustainable over the long term. The President’s proposal will increase this level to above 200,000 troops, and to reach this level, the Pentagon will probably have to relax ‘dwell’ time standards even more.
“CBO’s report concludes that the cost of the President’s plan to ‘surge’ troops will be higher than previously indicated, both in dollar terms and in the burdens it places on our military.â€
Asked by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., why he had not requested the full five extra brigades that Bush is sending, Casey said, "I did not want to bring one more American soldier into Iraq than was necessary to accomplish the mission."
With many in Congress opposing or skeptical of Bush's troop buildup, Casey did not say he opposed the president's decision. He said the full complement of five brigades would give U.S. commanders in Iraq additional, useful flexibility.
"In my mind, the other three brigades should be called forward after an assessment has been made on the ground" about whether they are needed to ensure success in Baghdad, Casey said. later.
Like a bad stain, it seems the V-22 Osprey can't wash away the stigma that it's crash-prone. The main culprit: so-called vortex ring state, a circulating, donut-shaped air flow that can cut a copter's lift, almost instantly. VRS helped down a pair of Ospreys seven years back, killing 23. And those blood spots should be hard to get out. But how accurate is the recent criticism that the V-22 remains dangerously and uniquely susceptible to VRS and blade stall?
After months of flight testing, the Marine Corps and Osprey's makers, Boeing and Bell Textron, said VRS is no more of an issue than for other rotorcraft: something that pilots need to be aware of, but not something they should freak about. And it's not something that only test pilots are qualified to avoid. Contrast that with Lee Gaillard's critical report which depicts VRS as a monster waiting to devour any distracted pilot who wanders outside of a very narrow arrow of the flight envelope.
What's the objective bystander to think? Gaillard makes much ado about how the Osprey is limited to vertical descents of 800 feet per minute (only 9.1 mph, he emphasizes). He says such a slow descent would make the Osprey a fat target in a hot landing zone. But 800 fpm is a meaningless number when separated from horizontal speed; and the report never mentions that the 800 fpm limitation only applies when forward airspeed is less than 40 knots.
Above 40 knots, the limit on vertical descent grows dramatically until, in full airplane mode, the Osprey can, like any airplane, drop like the proverbial brick. NAVAIR says the 800 fpm-descent limit at less than 40 knots applies to ALL Marine Corps helicopters, and that flight testing showed that the V-22 doesn't get close to VRS until 2000 fpm. Furthermore, the V-22 can swoop in from high altitude at more than 200 knots and not start slowing down until it's a minute and a half from the landing zone, minimizing its exposure, says NAVAIR. And it's 75 percent quieter in aircraft mode than the CH-46 and CH-53 it's supposed to replace.
But what does the Navy know? For comparison, look at the UH-60 Black Hawk. A Black Hawk pilot told me he sometimes sees 2500 fpm descents when coming into an LZ doing 60 or 70 knots. That's a vertical speed of 28 mph (only!), but apparently it's no problem for the ubiquitous, beloved and combat-proven Black Hawk. Why would anyone think a V-22 carrying 60 knots forward airspeed would be any worse?
So while critics are all hung up on 800 fpm, it's really no big deal. The Gaillard brief has lots of information, but, in the end, creates more heat than light. At least on this issue. For his work mapping the V-22's VRS envelope, Boeing test pilot Tom Macdonald was honored by the Society of Experimental Test Pilots in 2003. Macdonald wrote the book on VRS and how fleet pilots can avoid it. I met Macdonald, an ex-Navy helo pilot, at Patuxent River Naval Air Station. He didn't seem like the kind of guy who would hide facts that would endanger other pilots or Marines. Ditto for his testing partner, Marine Col. Kevin Gross, who has written a detailed piece about the V-22 and VRS.
Is the Osprey perfect? No, but what aircraft is and who defines perfection anyway? Is it a widow maker as its critics claim? If yes, than it seems doubtful that VRS will be the culprit. But the jury is out. While it seems Osprey critics may be wrong about VRS, that doesn't mean their other criticisms are off the mark. Make no mistake: the Osprey is a historic achievement. But it is crazy expensive and still has flaws such as its lack of defensive firepower and a pressurized cabin, which will seriously reduce its advertised range and speed while carrying troops. The question is whether those issues can be fixed or whether operators can find practical ways to work around them. We'll wait and see what the guys who fly and fight in it have to say.
Last week, the Defense Department showcased its "Active Denial System" or ADS At Moody Air Force Base, Georgia. Officially this system is still in "extended user evaluation" phase of an ACTD (advanced concept technology demonstration). They aren't being produced in quantities to ship to Iraq, although I'm sure the troops there wouldn't mind having a few in Baghdad. This system uses millimeter wave energy to cause an uncomfortable hot sensation, designed to encourage people to a hasty retreat from the scene.
The ADS has gone thorough treaty and legal reviews to ensure the system is compliant with applicable arms control treaties and agreements, according to the release. It has also undergone three military utility assessments, where it was evaluated in a variety of operational scenarios ranging from checkpoint support to facility, perimeter and harbor security.
Most of DoD’s current non-lethal weapons, such as bean bag rounds, use “kinetic†energy, Hymes said. With these weapons, the size and mass of the target and the distance at which the weapon is used can change the effect of the weapon, perhaps making it more dangerous, he explained.
“The ADS, on the other hand, is a ‘muzzle-safe’ weapon, which means it is safe and effective at 50 feet and 500 meters,†Hymes said. “The range, safety, universal effect, and tremendous repel capability make the ADS a very versatile non-lethal weapon with a great deal of military utility.â€
Other people are more skeptical. German physicist Juergen Altmann points out that non-lethal weapons (or as some prefer, "less-lethal") are not without the capability for lethal results.
"It only stays at 50 degrees Celsius if the beam is switched off at the correct time, let's say after 3.5 seconds," he says. "If you beam on for a further three or five seconds, then you get 60 and 70 and 80 degrees, and you get second- and third-degree burns on the whole part of the body that is exposed, because the beam is at least 3 meters wide, and probably a little wider. You get essentially half of the body exposed that is pointing toward the antenna. And then there is the potential for life-threatening conditions. Medical literature says that if you have somebody who has second- or third-degree burns on more than 20 percent of his body, then he has to be put into intensive care, because it's life-threatening."
Concerns such as these may be why DOD is getting some early press on the system. While the Department says that the system has cleared treaty and legal issues, there will always be the perception that military personnel don't use non-lethal weapons without causing some casualties. DefenseTech has covered the evolution of this system for some time, and captured this Marine officer's comment in response to a question: what if the bad guys try to deflect the beam?
"If they try and deflect beams then we will kill them because we know what their intentions are. "
OKAY! good to know that the non-lethal weapons are of some use, in at least identifying the bad guys to shoot. For the final word, let's go to the Colbert Report. On Tuesday night, Stephen Colbert talked about the ADS (it had been featured on Faux News). He commented, "This is the perfect weapon for the war on terror. What's better than an invisible beam to fight an abstract concept?"
NECC -- based alongside patrol boats (
The conventional Trident may be 
Coast Guard commandant Admiral Thad Allen has all but surrendered to critics who’ve been saying that the service’s sprawling $24-billion 
At the Coast Guard Yard in southern Maryland, the [Deepwater] revolution seems a long way off, and the rust is right in your face. At this 108-year-old facility, the Coast Guard’s only government-owned shipyard, 400 workers commanded by Captain Steve Duca gut, repair then piece back together the service’s aging medium cutters and patrol boats, keeping them afloat and livable until they can be replaced with ships like Bertholf. Duca’s is delicate work – “like surgery,†he says. And it’s increasingly urgent. With more than 80 cutters larger than 100 feet, the Coast Guard has the world’s 12th-largest navy. But its fleet is, on average, around a quarter-century old, making it the 38th oldest of the world’s 40 largest navies. Deepwater has suffered delays. The last new ships and aircraft won’t join the force for another two decades, several years later than originally planned. So an old fleet is just getting older.
The picture shows what a real EFP munition looks like. This is M2 Selectable Lightweight Attack Munition (
The CB Defense Program (CBDP) is buying 28 
A check of telephone bills in the Jacksonville, Fla., area “found that when we have a digital receipt for a phone bill in the area…we are being overcharged 30 percent,†deputy chief of naval operations Vice Adm. Mark Edwards told a group of military-industrial insiders at a 
Soldiers in Iraq were already encountering EFPs -- and the closely-related "shaped-charges" -- back in the 
Early MANPADS like the Russian SA-7 are fairly primitive, homing in on exhaust heat. As they steer towards the hottest object in their field of view, they can easily be lured away by decoy flares (or even the sun).
The Pentagon's IT geeks are putting together plans for a new White House "
The new network will also feature a collaborative tool suite similar to 
Typically, the 
Which is why I cringe every time I hear about some newbie 
Air raids during that conflict knocked out power, felled bridges, took out the airport for a couple months and blew the top off the lighthouse on the beach near the Jnah neighborhood. Some parts of the Shi’ite southern suburbs took a beating, but Beirut proper escaped mostly unscathed. No, most of the war damage in Beirut is left over from the civil war and testifies to the scale of the destruction in that conflict.
It's all about the Army's new-ish combat uniform -- and how soldiers don't like the velcro on the ensemble. Which is kind of interesting, I suppose. But you'd think the fact that 
"Sunni militants" have recently boasted that "'
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The first 
Robot Economist is 
Take the 
The digital rights crusaders over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation are 
In its new 
The Pentagon fiscal year 2008 
It ain’t much to look at. But then, ODIS wasn’t designed to win robot beauty contests. ODIS, which stands for 
I was powerfully reminded of this by the recent case of Raul Castells.
Los Angeles Police 
"Civilian casualties in Iraq's volatile Anbar province would have been 
That's because the combat units that President Bush wants to send into hostile areas need to be backed up by support troops, "including personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police, and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical, and other services," the CBO notes.
After months of flight testing, the Marine Corps and Osprey's makers, Boeing and Bell Textron, said VRS is no more of an issue than for other rotorcraft: something that pilots need to be aware of, but not something they should freak about. And it's not something that only test pilots are qualified to avoid. Contrast that with Lee Gaillard's critical report which depicts VRS as a monster waiting to devour any distracted pilot who wanders outside of a very narrow arrow of the flight envelope.
