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Tanker Manufacturers to Air Force: Later, Haters

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European defense and aerospace consortium EADS and its U.S. partner, Northrop Grumman, have handed an apparent $35 billion dollar gift to rival Boeing — by packing up and going home.

In late February, the Air Force launched a contest to replace its fleet of Eisenhower-era KC-135 aerial refueling tankers. The Air Force envisioned spending $11.7 billion on the new planes over the next five years; over the life of the program, the service plans to buy a total of 179 aircraft, orders worth a potential $35 billion.

But Northrop and EADS complained that the guidelines weighed the contest in Boeing’s favor, and threatened to pull out of the contest unless the service revised the request for bids. And that’s exactly what happened today. EADS North America released the following statement from Ralph Crosby, Chairman of the Board:

Five years ago EADS partnered with Northrop Grumman, as prime, to pursue the U.S. Air Force KC-135 modernization program. Two years ago our team was selected and awarded the contract. Today Northrop Grumman has decided not to submit a bid to the Department of Defense for the KC-X program.

As a team, our serious concerns were expressed to the Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force that the acquisition methodology outlined in the request for proposal (RFP) would heavily weigh the competition in favor of the smaller, less capable Boeing tanker. Northrop Grumman’s analysis of the RFP reaffirmed those concerns and prompted the decision not to bid.

The source selection methodology clearly signals a preference for a smaller aircraft.

The Air Force has been trying to buy a new tanker for around nine years. And now it looks like it may go to Boeing. And here’s the irony: Back in 2004, Republican Senator John McCain successfully helped block a tanker lease arrangement that he saw as a sweetheart deal for Boeing. (Of course, I was secretly convinced that the nearly decade-long Air Force tanker saga was really a scheme to keep people in the defense trade press gainfully employed.)

Politico’s Jen DiMascio has an awesome quote from Rep. Jo Bonner, the Republican who represents the Alabama political district where the Northrop/EADS team would have built the tankers if it had won.

“I wrote President [Barack] Obama last month and warned him the Pentagon was headed down a path that would kill the chance of competition in the tanker program,” Bonner said. “Apparently the Pentagon didn’t get the word and has handed the president a $35 billion sole-source hot-potato, under circumstances that are highly suspect.”

[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]

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Pentagon-Backed Venture Aims for ‘Google Underground’

The Department of Defense already has omnipresent eyes in the sky, underwater and, of course, on the ground. It’s only when you start going underground that the surveillance powers of the Pentagon begin to wane — at least until now.

Just last month, the Pentagon’s risk-taking research arm, DARPA, announced plans for a program called ‘Transparent Earth’. They’re spending $4 million this year on preliminary plans for a digital, 3D map that would display “the physical, chemical and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 kilometer depth.”

But Geospatial Corporation is already doing it. The company, started in 2005 by longtime water-pipeline manufacturer Mark Smith, uses a proprietary gadget called  ‘Smart Probe’ to map deep earth via underground pipes. The company’s probe can be inserted into pipes as small as 1 1/2 inches, and then travel their length while taking super-speedy coordinates — 800 per second — and saving them onto a USB key. The probe is removed, the data extracted, and a 3D map of the underground region is created. The probe can travel through pipes that are empty, or contain fluid or gas.

Geospatial got started by mapping telecommunication lines for cable companies, and has since moved on to mapping oil and gas lines, waterways and sewage tunnels. They’re also planning to map entire municipalities, to enable cheaper, faster fixes of infrastructure problems. Smith tells Danger Room that the company is creating a “mega-map” geographic information system (GIS) platform, called GeoUnderground. “Underground,” he says. “Is truly the final frontier.”

And the company’s growing a library of data has caught the military’s eye. The Pentagon has already contracted Geospatial to create 3D maps of the deep earth beneath their “critical facilities.” The data would be useful in case of terrorist attack, natural disaster, or, of course, a power outage or sewage leak.

Little surprise, then, that homeland security firms are also interested. Geospatial announced a partnership today with Ridge Global, a firm founded by former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, which “provides strategic and operational services that advance the security and economic interests of businesses and governments worldwide.”

[Photo: Geospatial Corporation]

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The Real-Life Baghdad Bomb Squad, Revisited

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“The Hurt Locker” may have swept the Oscars, but it drew plenty of fire from veterans for its inaccuracies. (And personally, I liked “Point Break” a hell of a lot better.)

Criticisms aside, the movie did put the spotlight on the extraordinary work done in Iraq and Afghanistan by explosive ordnance disposal teams — and the terrible lethality and sophistication of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. It would be hard to overstate how quickly the threat evolved: Back in 2005, Maj. Bruce Paterson, director of the IED working group at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, reminded people working on technological solutions that there was no quick fix, no silver bullet, when it came to detecting and countering these deadly devices.

“I get a whole lot of folks who tell me … oh, we’ve got the answer, we can pick up that 155-mm shell under the ground,” he said. “Great. Can you tell me what 6 155-mm shells, one 500-pound bomb, a tire filled with explosives and two propane tanks all piled together under the road looks like? And is your system smart enough to figure that out? I highly doubt that. No IED is the same. Everyone is different: use your imagination. The enemy does.”

Of course, getting “left of boom” by tracking bomb-building networks was one of the main advances in the counter-IED fight. For an account of that, it’s worth going back and re-reading Rick Atkinson’s indispensable series on the Joint IED Defeat Organization in the Washington Post. And for a more intimate look at the work of a bomb-fighting team, I’d also recommend Noah’s 2005 story on Team Mayhem and the soldiers of the Army’s 717th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company. It’s another must-read.

Also online, Foreign Policy has a decent photo essay on the real-life “Hurt Locker.” And for good measure, read Buda’s Wagon, Mike Davis’ history of the car bomb. It’s not focused on the current wars, per se, but it’s a timely account of one of the more spectacular weapons in the terrorist’s arsenal.

[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]

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Army ‘Mad Scientists’ Study Swarming Mines, Facebook Attacks

Forget the Oscars, the event I want an invitation to is the Army’s annual mad scientists’ ball. That’s right, the Army actually holds an an annual conference — formally titled the  “Mad Scientist Future Technology Seminar” — that brings together scientists, science fiction writers, futurists, academics and members of the government and the private sector to discuss the military implications of emerging science and technology.

Sounds fun. I mean, where else can you get together to talk about electromagnetic pulse guns, cyborgs and swarming mini-bombs?

According to an unclassified summary obtained by Danger Room, the theme of this year’s Mad Scientist confab, held January 20-23, was the “blending” of science and technology in ways that might threaten the United States.

“While there is room for debate about which technologies can and will be blended, what is certain is that the nature of warfare is changing; shifting increasingly from large scale, kinetic soldier-on-soldier operations to decentralized non-kinetic operations reliant upon cyber networks, robotics, and/or electronic media to achieve their desired effects,” the summary states. “… While conventional warfare is by no means obsolete, 21st century warfare will be defined by the adversary’s ability to blend existing and nascent technologies as a means to resist or disrupt a numerically or technologically superior force.”

As the summary notes, advances in robotics will continue, incorporating new improvements in nanotechnology, networking and artificial intelligence. And that could yield deadly new weapons: Participants discussed the possibility of “flooding” future battlefields with swarms of smart, networked explosives that would “have the capability to disrupt tempo and cause severe casualties — a more lethal descendant of today’s IED,” or improvised explosive device.

And future enemies may do more than try to hack your networks. They might try to target the people on your friend list. “Social networking could make the family and friends of soldiers real targets, subsequently requiring increased protection,” the summary states.

Of course, participants couldn’t resist looking at another doomsday scenario: electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons, a.k.a. the “e-bomb.” As Danger Room readers know, EMP is a burst of electromagnetic radiation that can wipe out unprotected electronics. The effect was observed after high-altitude thermonuclear weapons tests during the Cold War, but the Mad Scientists worry that “advances in miniaturization could produce a hand held EMP gun before 2020.”

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DARPA Pushes for Fail-Proof Prosthetics

450x21Better prosthetic devices have been a major Pentagon priority for years. Now, they want to make the devices longer-lasting, more reliable and better able to integrate directly with the human brain.

DARPA, the military’s risk-taking research agency, is launching the next phase of its Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, which was started in 2000 with the goal of creating a fully-functioning, neurally-controlled human limb within five years.

Since then, the agency has made plenty of progress. They’re currently doing human trials of the DEKA Arm, a prosthetic that allows users to complete day-to-day tasks with unprecedented ease. That arm uses a joystick-style interface, with a user tapping commands with their toes to trigger movements with the arm. At Johns Hopkins, DARPA-funded researchers are still working on an arm that uses a 100-sensor neural interface to create a brain-body meld much like what’s inherent in natural limbs.

But although DARPA had hoped to have a fully-functional, neuro-prosthetic model ready by 2010, the agency’s researchers have yet to master the integration of human neural pathways with artificial platforms. For one, neural-recording interfaces are notoriously short-lived, with a life-span of around two years, and they don’t extract adequate information to yield seamless movement from brain to neurons to limbs. A seemingly simple motion, like using an arm to eat, is actually a series of thousands of movements, sensations, cues and brain-neuron communications. Right now, DARPA’s prototypes can transmit 500 events per second. According to the agency, that’s not nearly enough.

So DARPA’s launching a new program, Histology for Interface Stability Over Time, in hopes of creating not only a neurally-controlled limb, but one that has a 70-year lifespan and flawless integration with the human body.

It’s a three-year, three-phase initiative that’s first and foremost about failure. DARPA wants to know why neural-recording interfaces are apt to break down or suffer lagging performance, and how researchers can predict that failure sooner — before an amputee is stuck with an arm or leg that’s simply stopped working. They’re asking researchers to batter and overload the neural platforms, to figure out where vulnerabilities can be detected.

DARPA also wants researchers to determine which neural models are the most effective, though they already anticipates that successful prototypes will use “implanted cortical microelectrodes,” to yield the best results. In other words, brain implants that directly communicate with the nervous system. That entails another hurdle: a non-invasive method of monitoring and repairing the devices.

Revolutionizing the state of prosthetic models hasn’t been easy, and DARPA notes that “significant risk may hinder the achievement of all programmatic milestones.” Not that DARPA’s ever been scared off by risk — they’re just expecting a long, difficult effort to overcome it.

[Photo: U.S. Army]

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Despite New Policy, Pentagon Still Wary of the ‘Tubes

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The Pentagon last week issued a new “open door” policy on social media last week. So how did an Air Force network administrator find out about the change? Not through their chain of command, but by reading about it on Danger Room.

“I found out how the policy changed through Danger Room, not through a DoD website,” the source said. “When I inquired through our chain of command, they hadn’t heard anything about  it.”

What’s more, the source added, access to many web tools had become more, not less, restricted since the policy was put in place. “Any other browser other than Internet Explorer has been blocked over past 96 hours,” the source said. “The only Google tools we can access now are Google Reader and Google Voice.”

Part of it may be a top-down management style that creates information bottlenecks. The source said they found out about Pentagon’s recently lifted ban on USB drives through Danger Room, not through official channels: “This is very peculiar, given the position I have and the level of connectivity I have, that this is how I find out it’s official policy.”

Others have written in to complain that they are still being blocked from accessing social media like Facebook and Twitter. “No SNS (Social Networking Services) here yet,” wrote an NCO stationed in Europe. “In fact, USAREUR [U.S. Army Europe] just published a huge list of requirements for subordinate units to satisfy before even considering the request to open the pipes.”

It’s getting to the point, multiple sources tell Danger Room, where unofficial sites — which don’t necessarily reflect official policy — have become a faster way to get information about what’s going on in military communities.

Those are just a few examples of the yawning gap between theory and practice when it comes to the military’s use of Web 2.0. Earlier this week, Janson Communications, a public relations firm that works for government and defense industry clients, released an interesting survey of the military’s use of Facebook pages. (.pdf) Among the study’s findings:

* Most of the military pages — a full 84 percent — had no interaction with their fans at all during the study period.
* Some of the pages studied had no content, or hadn’t been updated for several months (what the study cleverly describes as “zombie” pages).
* Many military Facebook pages were not clearly marked as “official,” meaning they could be easily confused with “clone” pages made to look like official, government-sponsored pages that may have inaccurate information.

Why is that important? It’s not just about morale, or creating a web-savvy image: When something happens like yesterday’s shooting at the Pentagon metro entrance, people need to find out as quickly as possible. They shouldn’t have to wait several hours for a commanding officer to give a briefing, as happened at Fort Hood. Web 2.0 isn’t a cure-all, but if used effectively and correctly, it can solve communications problems and eliminate information bottlenecks.

Photo: U.S. Department of Defense

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Hurry Up and Wait for the Gajillion-Dollar Stealth Plane

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The news isn’t getting any better for the Pentagon’s star-crossed effort to design and procure an all-purpose stealth jet. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to be a sort of Swiss army knife of the skies: It will replace everything from the tank-busting A-10 to the carrier-launched F/A-18.

Andrea Shalal-Esa of Reuters reports that the Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman is now planning to hold hearings on the troubled acquisition program. Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the committee, said: “There’s a lot of questions that need to be answered.”

For starters: How long, exactly, will it take to deliver the planes? In a hearing this week on the Air Force budget, Secretary of the Air Force Michael Donley told reporters “we are going to have a slip” in the program. According to the Associated Press, the new planes probably won’t be ready for the Air Force until 2015, two years after they were supposed to become available.

Last month, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates sacked the Marine general who headed the military’s gajillion-dollar program. “When things go wrong, people will be held accountable,” Gates said. Dan Crowley, the Lockheed Martin executive running the program on the industry side, got off a bit lighter. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports Lockheed Chief Executive Robert Stevens said he had “no intention” of firing Crowley.

Stevens’ remarks came in a conference call with Ashton Carter, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer. MarketWatch notes that the conference call in part was meant to reassure international buyers, who have also committed billions to the program.

But Danger Room pal Bill Sweetman cut through the obfuscation. “For every month’s litany of problems in the program, you’ll find a Lockheed Martin or government program boss assuring the customers, Congress and the taxpayers that everything is going fine,” he wrote. “‘On track,’ as they like to put it.

“Remember this distinction:  The Donner Party was on track. They were not on schedule.”

[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]

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Mullen: Give ‘Soft Power’ a Chance

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In Afghanistan, the top U.S. general has placed heavy restrictions on the use of force, limiting air strikes and artillery support. In a major speech last night, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen had a message: This is the new American way of war, so get used to it.

“Force should, to the maximum extent possible, be applied in a precise and principled way,” Mullen said.

That approach, Mullen said, is why the bar has been set so high for calling for indirect fire in Operation Moshtarak, the current offensive in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. And that is why Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the head of the U.S.-NATO International Security Assistance Force, has issued rules restricting night raids.

But Mullen was also making a larger argument about the outsize role of the U.S. military in foreign policy. It requires a bit of parsing, but Mullen seemed to suggest that powerful heads of U.S. geographic commands had become, well, a bit too powerful.

“U.S. foreign policy is still too dominated by the military, too dependent upon the generals and admirals who lead our major overseas commands,” he said. “It’s one thing to be able and willing to serve as emergency responders; quite another to always have to be the fire chief.”

This isn’t a new argument: A few years back, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest wrote an excellent book, The Mission, that explains how combatant commanders (referred to as “CinCs” before former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld changed the lingo) had emerged as powerful regional proconsuls, outstripping ambassadors in terms of their prestige, resources and access.

But Mullen took things a bit further, suggesting that the military shouldn’t continue to do the heavy lifting around the globe unless the diplomats and the development experts are willing to step up to the tasks of nation-building and stability ops.

“Secretaries Clinton and Gates [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates] have called for more funding and more emphasis on our soft power, and I could not agree with them more,” he said. “Should we choose to exert American influence solely through our troops, we should expect to see that influence diminish in time. In fact, I would argue that in the future struggles of the asymmetric counterinsurgent variety, we ought to make it a precondition of committing our troops, that we will do so only if and when the other instruments of national power are ready to engage as well.”

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Israelis Nix Op After Facebook Fiasco (Updated)

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In Israel, the military had to call off an entire operation after a trooper posted the time and place of an upcoming raid in the West Bank on his Facebook page. D’oh! According to Associated Press, the soldier boasted that his unit was planning on “cleaning up” the village.

It’s the kind of scenario that keeps military planners up at night: A meticulously planned operation goes dangerously awry because some dolt couldn’t resist telling every one of their Facebook friends or Twitter peeps about it. In this case, the Israelis moved swiftly to respond.

“Fellow soldiers reported the leak to military authorities, who called off the raid fearing that the information may have reached hostile groups,” the AP noted. “The soldier was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 days in prison.”

Instantaneous electronic communication can be a dangerous thing, and the U.S. military is also wrestling with new rules to allow troops more access to social networking sites. As this incident shows, balancing the openness of Web 2.0 with the need for operational security is not a problem exclusive to the U.S. armed forces.

It’s doubly interesting to read about this case, because the Israeli military has worked very hard to use social networking as an information warfare tool. During Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009, the the Israeli military started its own YouTube channel to distribute footage of precision airstrikes; Israeli diplomats even hosted a press conference on Twitter.

Update: The BBC notes that the Israeli military had launched a full-scale campaign warning against Facebook leaks before the operation. According to the report, posters show a mock Facebook request with images of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, captioned, “You think that everyone is your friend?”

[PHOTO: IDF]

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Russia’s Terror-Fighting Trains Back on the Rails

chechnya-trainThe armored train was an important weapon in the Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war. Now, it looks as if the Russian government may bring a few out of retirement to fight insurgents in the restless north Caucasus.

While the war in Chechnya may be officially over, attacks on the railway system in neighboring Dagestan have become a major problem. Andrew McGregor of Eurasia Daily Monitor documents over half a dozen recent attacks by militants, who have targeted railways and other key infrastructure. And last year, terrorists struck the Nevsky Express, a luxury train on the Moscow-St. Petersburg line.

A recent article in Russia’s Nezavisimoye voennoye obozrenie (Russian only, sorry) quotes Lt. Gen. Sergei Klimets, commander of Russia’s railway forces, as saying that the special trains were on standby in Russia’s Stavropol region, should they be needed. “The situation is very tense and requires additional measures to ensure the safety of steel highways of the north Caucasus,” the general reportedly said. “So if we get orders to move out, they will be implemented in full.”

It’s an interesting development, with some pretty rich history behind it. The website of Russia’s ministry of defense has a good photo gallery of railway troops in action in Chechnya (1995-1996) and in Abkhazia (in 2008). And if you’ve never seen the cheesy epic Reds, spare yourself three hours and watch the best nine minutes on YouTube: The climactic action scene in which the armored train carrying Warren Beatty gets ambushed by the Whites.

The history of the armored train isn’t limited to Russia. Here’s the link to a November 1899 article from the New York Times archive detailing an attack by Boer guerrillas on a British armored train during the Boer War. The train, the report states “was derailed yesterday by a force of the enemy who were in ambush, and it is estimated the British loss was 100 to 150 in killed, wounded, and missing. Among the latter are Capt. Haldane and Lieut. Winston Churchill, son of Lady Randolph Churchill. Both, it is believed, are prisoners.”

[PHOTO: Russian Ministry of Defense]

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