Bigamy, Forgery, Lies: Accused Colonel’s Epic Flameout

Army Col. James Johnson, now facing a court-martial for charges including fraud and bigamy, passes out gifts at a ceremony in Afghanistan, October 2010. Photo: DVIDS

Once, Col. James H. Johnson was an honor graduate of West Point, on his way to a storied career capped by his command of the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team. While leading the brigade, he had an affair with an Iraqi Kurdish woman that cost him his command, his career, and his honor.

Next week, Johnson will face a court-martial in Germany. He pleads not guilty to a host of charges ranging from bigamy to making false statements to financial misconduct. He is one of the most senior officers to be charged with misconduct during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

It all started in 2005, when Johnson, a married man, met a woman in northern Iraq — also married — while in battalion command. Allegedly, to win her over he used thousands of dollars in government money over the years to pay for a variety of favors for her family, and falsified receipts to cover his tracks, as Nancy Montgomery recounts in Stars and Stripes.

After the 173rd deployed to Afghanistan in late 2009, Johnson assured the public that he was spending his brigade’s wartime reconstruction cash in a more transparent way than ever before. But according to Johnson’s charge sheet, he was diverting some of it to his paramour’s family. He filed an invoice for nearly $60,000 to pay her father for services ostensibly rendered on Forward Operating Base Shenk. According to the charge sheet, “the deliverables were not produced nor received as required by the contract, and was then known by the said Colonel James H. Johnson to be false and fraudulent.”

Continue Reading “Bigamy, Forgery, Lies: Accused Colonel’s Epic Flameout” »

Tags: , ,
Back to top

Clothes Will Sew Themselves in Darpa’s Sweat-Free Sweatshops

Soldiers, like this fellow repairing another grunt's threads, might one day live in a world where sewing machines work without an ounce of human effort. Photo: U.S. Army

The Pentagon’s made plenty of progress towards slicker, more specialized uniforms for soldiers. Better camouflage patterns? Check. Sweat-wicking t-shirts? Oh, heck yes. Threads that can take a pulse and monitor pee for signs of a chemical attack? Getting there. Then there’s the Kevlar underwear.

But there’s still one big problem with soldier attire, at least as far as the military’s mad-science agency is concerned: Someone’s gotta stitch the clothes together.

Enter the sartorial specialists at Darpa. Usually the Pentagon’s far-out researchers are more concerned with four-legged robots and preventing pandemics than with the contents of a soldier’s closet. But they’ve doled out $1.25 million to fully automate the sewing process. The agency aspires to “complete production facilities that produce garments with zero direct labor.” And those are a lot of garments: One 2010 estimate put the military’s annual clothing budget at $4 billion dollars.

Continue Reading “Clothes Will Sew Themselves in Darpa’s Sweat-Free Sweatshops” »

Tags: , , ,
Back to top

Air Force Wants Hypersonic Missiles for Stealth Jets

An X-51 Waverider hypersonic missile attached to the wing of a B-52 bomber. The Air Force seeks to build a smaller variant for its stealth fighters. Photo: Boeing

For decades, the military has tried — with little success — to build missiles capable of traveling at breakneck, hypersonic speeds. Missile tests, however, have been uneven, with repeated failures punctuated by the occasional stunning success. Now the Air Force is taking a bigger role by seeking to build another hypersonic missile, this time for its stealth fighter jets.

The Air Force’s desired “High Speed Strike Weapon” would travel at five times the speed of sound or faster, theoretically launching from a stealthy F-22 Raptor jet or a future F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and traveling so fast and at such long distances as to render an enemy’s anti-aircraft systems defunct. The Air Force’s Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate is gathering possible design partners later this month at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida before any solicitation. According to an Air Force notice, whatever prototype gets built will ultimately need to strike “time-critical” targets — on the move, possibly — from “tactically relevant standoff distances.”

If it can be done, the weapon will “be representative of an air-breathing hypersonic missile system” that can tough it out in “the most stringent environments presented to us in the next decade,” said Steven Walker, the Air Force’s deputy assistant secretary for science, technology and engineering, in written testimony to the House Armed Services Committee in February.

That’s the hope, at least. The U.S. military has a mixed record with hypersonics. Last August, the Pentagon’s pizza-shaped Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 failed for a second (and likely final) time, crashing into the Pacific during a test flight. But the Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon did much better during a test in November. Two years ago, the Air Force successfully flew its X-51 WaveRider scramjet missile at speeds of Mach 5 for 200 seconds after launching it off a B-52 bomber. A later test, though, ended with engine failure.

Continue Reading “Air Force Wants Hypersonic Missiles for Stealth Jets” »

Tags: , , , ,
Back to top

U.S. ‘Extraordinarily Dissatisfied’ with Pakistan on Afghan War

Gen. Martin Dempsey, right, gets briefed by Maj. Gen. Daniel Allyn about the state of eastern Afghanistan, where Pakistan-sponsored insurgents operate. Photo: U.S. Army


In yet another day of public criticism of Pakistan, the top U.S. military officer told reporters he was “extraordinarily dissatisfied” with Pakistan’s continued toleration of Afghan insurgents.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has spent seven years working with the Pakistanis on counterterrorism, wasn’t uniformly negative. He praised Pakistan’s own efforts in its insurgent-laden tribal areas. But he said it was “frustrating” that the Pakistanis remain unconvinced that Afghan insurgents like the Haqqani network represent threats that need confrontation.

“The Haqqani network is as big a threat to Pakistan as it is to Afghanistan and us, but we haven’t been able to find common ground on that point,” Dempsey said on Thursday. “That’s been very frustrating.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Wednesday acknowledged on Wednesday that the U.S. is at war in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal areas. When Danger Room asked, Dempsey declined to second that view, saying instead that the U.S. is at war with al-Qaida wherever it goes.

“Pakistan, with us, is at war in the FATA with other groups,” Dempsey said. “Although we are extraordinarily dissatisfied with the effect the Pakistanis have had on the Haqqanis, we are mindful that they are conducting military operations at great losses.”

Continue Reading “U.S. ‘Extraordinarily Dissatisfied’ with Pakistan on Afghan War” »

Tags: , ,
Back to top

Check Out This Giant Spy Blimp Before the Air Force Kills It

Blue Devil 2 in its North Carolina hangar. <em>Photo: David Axe</em>

Blue Devil 2 in its North Carolina hangar. The orange canisters contain helium. Photo: David Axe

ELIZABETH CITY, North Carolina — Down the road from the Coast Guard air station, past the copse of oak trees, surrounded by fields of leafy collard greens, in a 1,000-foot-long steel hangar built during World War II here in coastal North Carolina, the unlikely dream of an upstart military contractor is about to be literally deflated. In the hangar’s musty gloom, underneath rafters where countless birds perch and spatter the concrete floor 200 feet below with their waste, a 370-foot-long, ultra-high-tech surveillance airship floats just a foot off the ground, tethered to Earth by three metal cables each weighing three tons.

But not for long. The $211 million Blue Devil 2 airship, built for the Air Force by the tiny, Virginia-based company Mav6, is slated for dismantling and storage at the end of this week, bringing to an ignominious end a two-year saga of technological ambition, bureaucratic waffling and vicious politicking. The Air Force no longer wants Blue Devil 2 or anything like it, a reversal from its official position just two years ago on a program that a former Pentagon chief said was “urgently needed.” Now tensions between the Air Force and Mav6 are bad enough that a company employee had to sneak me into the hangar past a pair of Air Force officers just to see the blimp.

There’s a slim chance the story’s not over. The Pentagon — particularly, the Army and Navy — is still keen to build next-gen “hybrid” airships, which combine lighter-than-air buoyancy with thrust from propellers. Mav6 is talking to the Navy about picking up Blue Devil 2 from the Air Force. The company should have the thumbs-up or -down from the sailing branch by Friday, though we’re told it could be weeks before the Navy’s decision is made public. If the Navy passes, an alternative model for overhead military surveillance will deflate without ever taking off.

Continue Reading “Check Out This Giant Spy Blimp Before the Air Force Kills It” »

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Back to top
« OLDER POSTS