Military Must Prep Now for 'Mutant' Future, Researchers Warn

The U.S. military is already using, or fast developing, a wide range of technologies meant to give troops what California Polytechnic State University researcher Patrick Lin calls 'mutant powers.' Greater strength and endurance. Superior cognition. Better teamwork. Fearlessness.

But the risk, ethics and policy issues arising out of these so-called 'military human enhancements' ' including drugs, special nutrition, electroshock, gene therapy and robotic implants and prostheses ' are poorly understood, Lin and his colleagues Maxwell Mehlman and Keith Abney posit in a new report for The Greenwall Foundation (.pdf), scheduled for wide release tomorrow. In other words, we better think long and hard before we unleash our army of super soldiers.

If we don't, we could find ourselves in big trouble down the road. Among the nightmare scenarios: Botched enhancements could harm the very soldiers they're meant to help and spawn pricey lawsuits. Tweaked troopers could run afoul of international law, potentially sparking a diplomatic crisis every time the U.S. deploys troops overseas. And poorly planned enhancements could provoke disproportionate responses by America's enemies, resulting in a potentially devastating arms race.

'With military enhancements and other technologies, the genie's already out of the bottle: the benefits are too irresistible, and the military-industrial complex still has too much momentum,' Lin says in an e-mail. 'The best we can do now is to help develop policies in advance to prepare for these new technologies, not post hoc or after the fact (as we're seeing with drones and cyberweapons).'

Case in point: On April 18, 2002, a pair of Air Force F-16 fighter pilots returning from a 10-hour mission over Afghanistan saw flashes on the ground 18,000 below them. Thinking he and his wingman were under fire by insurgents, Maj. Harry Schmidt dropped a 500-pound laser-guided bomb.

There were no insurgents ' just Canadian troops on a live-fire exercise, four of whom were killed in the blast. The Air Force ultimately dropped criminal charges against Schmidt and wingman Maj. William Umbach but did strip them of their wings. In a letter of reprimand, Air Force Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson accused Schmidt of 'willful misconduct' and 'gross poor judgment.'

Schmidt countered, saying he was jittery from taking the stimulant Dexedrine, an amphetamine that the Air Force routinely prescribes for pilots flying long missions. 'I don't know what the effect was supposed to be,' Schmidt told Chicago magazine. 'All I know is something [was] happening to my body and brain.'

The Food and Drug Administration warns that Dexedrine can cause 'new or worse aggressive behavior or hostility.' (.pdf) But the Air Force still blamed the pilots.

The Canadian 'friendly fire' tragedy underscores the gap between the technology and policy of military human enhancement. Authorities in the bombing case could have benefited from clearer guidelines for determining whether the drugs, rather than the pilots, were to blame for the accidental deaths. 'Are there ethical, legal, psycho-social or operational limits on the extent to which a warfighter may be enhanced?' Lin, Mehlman and Abney ask in their report.

Now imagine a future battlefield teeming with amphetamine-fueled pilots, a cyborg infantry and commanders whose brains have been shocked into achieving otherwise impossible levels of tactical cunning.

These enhancements and others have tremendous combat potential, the researchers state. 'Somewhere in between robotics and biomedical research, we might arrive at the perfect future warfighter: one that is part machine and part human, striking a formidable balance between technology and our frailties.'

In this possible mutant future, what enhancements should be regulated by international law, or banned outright? If an implant malfunctions or a drug causes unexpected side effects, who's responsible? And if one side deploys a terrifying cyborg army, could that spark a devastating arms race as nations scramble to out-enhance each other? 'Does the possibility that military enhancements will simply lead to a continuing arms race mean that it is unethical to even begin to research or employ them?' Lin, Mehlman and Abney wonder.

The report authors also question whether the military shouldn't get give potential enhancement subjects the right to opt out, even though the subjects are otherwise subject to military training, rules and discipline. 'Should warfighters be required to give their informed consent to being enhanced, and if so, what should that process be?' the researchers ask.

The ethical concerns certainly have precedent. In a series of experiments in the 1970s aimed at developing hallucinogenic weapons, the Pentagon gave soldiers LSD ' apparently without the subjects fully understanding the consequences of using the drug. During the Cold War U.S. troops were also exposed to nerve gas, psychochemicals and other toxic substances on an experimental basis and without their consent.

Moreover, it's theoretically possible that future biological enhancements could be subject to existing international laws and treaties, potentially limiting the enhancements ' or prohibiting them outright. But the application of existing laws and treaties is unclear, at best. 'Could enhanced warfighters be considered to be 'weapons' in themselves and therefore subject to regulation under the Laws of Armed Conflict?' the researchers write. 'Or could an enhanced warfighter count as a 'biological agent' under the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention?'

Lin, Mehlman and Abney aren't sure. To be safe, they propose the military consider several rules when planning an enhancement. Is there a legitimate military purpose? Is it necessary? Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Can subjects' dignity be maintained and the cost to them minimized? Is there full, informed consent, transparency and are the costs of the enhancement fairly distributed? Finally, are systems in place to hold accountable those overseeing the enhancement?

Whether following these guidelines or others, the Pentagon should start figuring out a framework for military human enhancement now, Lin and his colleagues advise. 'In comic books and science fiction, we can suspend disbelief about the details associated with fantastical technologies and abilities, as represented by human enhancements,' they warn. 'But in the real world ' as life imitates art, and 'mutant powers' really are changing the world ' the details matter and will require real investigations.'

Pentagon Looks to Fix 'Pervasive Vulnerability' in Drones

Drones may be at the center of the U.S. campaign to take out extremists around the globe. But there's a 'pervasive vulnerability' in the robotic aircraft, according to the Pentagon's premier science and technology division ' a weakness the drones share with just about every car, medical device and power plant on the planet.

The control algorithms for these crucial machines are written in a fundamentally insecure manner, says Dr. Kathleen Fisher, a Tufts University computer scientist and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. There's simply no systematic way for programmers to check for vulnerabilities as they put together the software that runs our drones, our trucks or our pacemakers.

In our homes and our offices, this weakness is only a medium-sized deal: developers can release a patched version of Safari or Microsoft Word whenever they find a hole; anti-virus and intrusion-detection systems can handle many other threats. But updating the control software on a drone means practically re-certifying the entire aircraft. And those security programs often introduce all sorts of new vulnerabilities. 'The traditional approaches to security won't work,' Fisher tells Danger Room.

Fisher is spearheading a far-flung, $60 million, four-year effort to try to develop a new, secure way of coding ' and then run that software on a series of drones and ground robots. It's called High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS.

Drones and other important systems were once considered relatively safe from hack attacks. (They weren't directly connected to the internet, after all.) But that was before viruses started infecting drone cockpits; before the robotic planes began leaking their classified video streams; before malware ordered nuclear centrifuges to self-destruct; before hackers figured out how to remotely access pacemakers and insulin pumps; and before academics figured out how to hijack a car without ever touching the vehicle.

'Many of these systems share a common structure: They have an insecure cyber perimeter, constructed from standard software components, surrounding control systems designed for safety but not for security,' Fisher told a group of researchers earlier this year.

It'd be great if someone could simply write some sort of universal software checker that sniffs out any program's potential flaws. One small problem: Such a checker can't exist. As the computer science pioneer Alan Turing showed in 1936, it's impossible to write a program that can tell if another will run forever, given a particular input. That's asking the checker to make a logical contradiction: Stop if you're supposed to run for eternity.

Fisher became fascinated by this so-called 'Halting Problem' as soon as she heard about it, in an introduction to programming class at Stanford. 'The fact that you can prove something is impossible is such an amazing thing that I wanted to learn more about that domain. That's actually why I became a computer scientist,' she says. The instructor for the class was a guy named Steve Fisher. She was interested enough in him that she wound up marrying him after school, and taking his last name.

But while a universal checker is impossible, verifying that a particular program will always work as promised is merely an exceedingly-freakin'-difficult task. One group of researchers in Australia, for example, checked the core of their 'microkernel' ' the heart of an operating system. It took about 11 person-years to verify the 8,000 lines of code. Fisher is funding researchers at MIT and Yale who hope to speed that process up, as part of one of HACMS' five research pushes.

Once the software is proven to work as advertised, it'll be loaded onto a number of vehicles: Rockwell Collins will supply the drones ' namely, small, robotic Arducopters; Boeing will provide a helicopter; Black-I-Robotics will supply a robotic ground vehicle; another firm will provide an SUV.

In another phase of the program, Fisher is bankrolling research into software that can write near-flawless code on its own. The idea is to give the software synthesizer a set of instructions about what a particular program is supposed to do, and then let it come up with the best code for that purpose. Software that writes more software may sound crazy, Fisher says. But Darpa actually has some history of doing it.

'There was a project led here at Darpa a few years ago [to write software for] synthetic aperture radar. They had a non-expert specify [what should go into a synthetic aperture] radar program,' Fisher adds. 'It took the system about 24 hours to produce an implementation'instead of three months [for the traditional version] and it ran twice as fast. So ' better, faster and a lower level of expertise. We hope to see things like that.'

You couldn't ask a program to write the equivalent of PowerPoint ' it does too many different things. 'By the time you've finished the specifications, you might as well have written the implementation,' Fisher says. But the software that controls drones and the like? Ironically, that's way more straight-forward. 'The control theory about how you do things with brakes and steering wheels, how you take sensor input and convert it to actions is described by very concise laws of mathematics.' So synthesized (and secure) software should be possible to produce.

The goal at the end of HACMS is to have the robotic Arducopter running only fully verified or synthesized software. (The other vehicles will have some, but not all, of their 'security-critical code' produced this way, Fisher promises.)  And if the project works out as Fisher hopes, it could not only help secure today's largely remote-controlled drones. It could make tomorrow's drones fly on their own ' without being hacked.

In the remaining component of HACMS, researchers from Galois, Inc. will work on a fully-verified, hack-proof software monitor that can watch a drone's autonomous systems. If those systems operate the robotic aircraft in a normal fashion, the monitor will sit back and do nothing. But if the drone suddenly starts flying itself in some weird way, the monitor will take over, perhaps passing control back to a flesh-and-blood operator.

In other words, a drone won't just be protected from an outside attacker. It'll be protected from itself.

China's Giant New Warplane Will Look Awfully Familiar to the U.S. Air Force

In what has become an almost annual Christmas tradition, the Chinese military has released the first blurry photos of a brand-new warplane prototype ' in this case, Beijing's first home-built heavy transport. It closely resembles other aircraft in its class including, most notably, the U.S. Air Force's workhorse C-17.

In theory, the new plane could give China the same global military reach the U.S. enjoys thanks it its own huge transport force. But as usual with new Chinese planes, at this early stage there are more questions than answers. Especially since prototypes can appear impressive without being actually useful.

The jet-powered, four-engine cargo plane, reportedly designated Y-20, can be seen on the ground in a series of photos apparently snapped at long range at the Xian Aircraft Corporation's Yanliang airfield in east-central China and posted to popular Internet forums. Although portrayed as the work of enthusiasts, postings on these forums are often scripted by the Chinese government as a way of building excitement about new weapons developments. And sure enough, the Chinese Defense Ministry confirmed that it was developing the plane on Thursday: 'To meet the needs of the national economy and social development, and in the service of military modernization, betterdisaster relief, humanitarian relief and other emergency tasks, our country is developing a large transport aircraft.'

Chinese and U.S. sources have estimated the Y-20's weight at around 200 tons, making it slightly smaller than the Boeing-made C-17 and somewhat larger than the European A400M. It appears to be powered by Russian D-30 engines, which not coincidentally also propel China's small fleet of Russian-built Il-76 aerial freighters. It also appears to have a nose similar to the one on the Russian Antonov An-70. China habitually fits older Russian engines to its new prototype aircraft until it can make new, purpose-built motors.

For years, analysts and trade journalists have been alluding to a new Chinese transport plane. The aircraft apparently began development around 2005. Just three years later a massive earthquake devastated Sichuan province, killing tens of thousands ' and possibly accelerating the Y-20's design and construction.

In the quake's aftermath the People's Liberation Army Air Force was unable to deploy more than a handful of transport planes to haul relief supplies. 'Poor air relief efforts have exposed a significant crack in the PLAAF ability to respond to major challenges,' Nirav Patel wrote in Joint Forces Quarterly.

The Americans, however, managed to send a couple C-17s full of supplies ' an obvious embarrassment for the Chinese. 'The Chinese respond to embarrassments in very focused ways,' Navy undersecretary Robert Work, then a Washington, D.C. defense analyst, told Danger Room at the time.

In the years following the earthquake, Beijing made disaster relief capabilities 'a new priority' (.pdf) for the PLA, RAND analyst Roger Cliff told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. As the Y-20's development made progress, in 2009 a model of the new plane appeared at a Chinese trade show. Around the same time, China also began pouring billions of dollars into developing a homemade turbofan engine specifically for large transports.

Just two years later the first Y-20 prototype was ready for its first photo shoot, although it's not clear when the giant plane might fly for the first time.

Nor is it clear to what extent Beijing based the new aircraft on stolen American blueprints. Whenever a new Chinese warplane appears, foreign observers claim it's a ripoff of a U.S., Russian, European or Israeli design. They're not always wrong. The PLA possesses unlicensed copies of Russia's Su-27 and Su-30 fighters.

In 2010 a U.S. district judge sentenced Chinese-born Dongfan Chung, a Boeing engineer, to 15 years for giving Beijing classified data on U.S. rocket technology. Chung was also accused of passing along information on the C-17, although the feds ultimately dropped that charge.

The Y-20 does bear a strong resemblance to the C-17, although to be fair many transports are outwardly similar.

In any case, the mere appearance of prototype plane says little about its actual military potential ' especially where cargo aircraft are concerned. Unlike, say, stealth fighters, transports are meant to fly frequent, lengthy, unglamorous missions where efficiency is more important than raw kinetic performance.

To a great extent, an airplane's efficiency is a function of its engines. That makes transport-optimized turbofans 'arguably more technologically challenging overall' compared to fighter engines, according to analysts Gabe Collins and Andrew Erickson. And yet China has struggled for years to produce even the latter. It could be years before the Y-20 has its own custom motors and, as a consequence, is able to perform at its best.

The Pentagon, on the other hand, already has decades of experience developing and flying many thousands of large cargo planes, steadily building a huge body of knowledge. This year, for example, the Air Force devised a new flying formation for C-17s modeled on the behavior of birds, resulting in a 10 percent fuel savings.

China possesses little equivalent knowledge. And that's likely to show when the new Y-20 eventually takes flight.

The 8 Craziest Job Openings in the Military-Industrial Complex

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Top-secret janitor. Pollster to the spies. Classified comic book artist. Any organization sufficiently large is bound to have the odd job opening within it. But few organizations are as freakin' colossal as the U.S. military intelligence industrial complex, with an estimated 4.9 million Americans holding security clearances today. Which means there are thousands of unconventional positions to fill at any given moment.

Here are some of the wilder military and intelligence "help wanted" ads we found online. Some classifieds are for truly wacky jobs. Others are for slightly more standard positions -- but presented in an odd way. If you find more, let us know in the comments, on Twitter or on Facebook. We'll post some of the best suggestions.

Above:

Military-Industrial Artist

Let's face it, your artistic talent is going to waste working for minimum wage at that coffee bar. And you're not exactly using your top-secret security clearance either, brewing up mochaccinos. Luckily, there's a job that combines your comic book skills with your remarkable ability to make it through art school while only barely hitting the bong. Virginia-based Pentagon contractor TASC is looking for a graphic artist to join their "Global Systems Business Unit." There you'll design "creative artwork" that can "communicate mood, emphasis, insight, viewpoint, and similar visual impressions" through brochures, emblems, and posters. That's like band and gig posters, right? Sure, if you think of "gig" in terms of engineering support for the Pentagon's fleet of spy satellites. (You'll also have to clear a polygraph test.) And not to worry. While the corporate culture of the military-defense industry can be a little square, TASC wants to use satellite data to "move from reporting historical location information to predicting events," company vice president Robert Horback told Geospatial Intelligence Forum. Hipster credibility is based on knowing what's cool in advance of everyone else, so it's a perfect job, really.

Photo: Newton Free Library/Flickr

Pentagon Preps Stealth Strike Force to Counter China

The U.S. military has begun a staged, five-year process that will see each of its three main stealth warplane types deployed to bases near China. When the deployments are complete in 2017, Air Force F-22s and B-2s and Marine Corps F-35s could all be within striking range of America's biggest economic rival at the same time. With Beijing now testing its own radar-evading jet fighters ' two different models, to be exact ' the clock is counting down to a stealth warplane showdown over the Western Pacific.

The gradual creation of the U.S. stealth strike force is an extension of the Pentagon's much-touted 'strategic pivot' to the Pacific region, and echoes the much faster formation, earlier this year, of a similar (but only partially stealthy) aerial armada in the Persian Gulf. That team of F-22s, non-stealthy F-15s and specialized 'Bacon' radio-translator planes was clearly meant to deter a belligerent Iran, although the Pentagon denied it.

The announcements of new Pacific deployments of F-22s, F-35s and B-2s have come like a drumbeat in recent weeks. Early last month, 8th Air Force commander Maj. Gen. Stephen Wilson, who controls the Air Force's 20-strong B-2 fleet normally based in Missouri, said 'small numbers' of his multi-billion-dollar batwing bombers would begin rotating into the Pacific and other regions starting next year. The rotations would last 'for a few weeks, a couple of times a year,' Wilson told Air Force magazine.

For the B-2s, which are being heavily upgraded with new radars and communications, the planned deployments represent a return to form. Beginning in the early 2000s, B-2s frequently deployed to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, occasionally accompanied by stealthy F-22s. But the Pacific rotations were tough on the tiny B-2 force. In 2008 one of the bombers crashed and burned at Andersen; two years later another B-2 suffered a serious engine fire at the remote island base that nearly destroyed the plane.

The Air Force suppressed news of the second incident and quietly pulled the B-2s from the Pacific front line, replacing them with older B-52s. After a period of rest, the stealth bomber fleet is now ready to get back into the habit of operating overseas. 'We're going to put them into the 'new normal,'' Wilson said.

F-22s, normally based in Florida, Virginia, Alaska and Hawaii, are already regular visitors to Andersen and, more frequently, the Pentagon's Kadena mega-base in Japan's Okinawa prefecture. But problems with the pricey, high-flying jet's oxygen systems resulted in crippling flight restrictions for much of this year. The Air Force believes it has finally figured out how to minimize the choking risk to its (occasionally mutinous) stealth pilots. And in a speech at the National Press Club last week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said there would be 'new deployments of F-22s ' to Japan.'

In the same speech, Panetta announced the first planned overseas basing of the still-in-development F-35. The Defense Department is 'laying the groundwork' for F-35s to deploy to Iwakuni, Japan, in 2017, Panetta said. Though he did not specify, it's likely Panetta was referring to the Marines' vertical-landing F-35B version of the troubled, delayed stealth attack jet, as the B version will be the first of three F-35 models to be cleared for combat ' and since Iwakuni traditionally hosts Marine fighters.

To be fair, the B-2s, F-22s and F-35s aren't expected to fight alone. Besides the existing Pacific force structure of F-15s, F-16s, A-10s and other warplanes, drones and support aircraft, the Pentagon is planning on sending in the Navy's new P-8 patrol plane and, eventually, the Air Force's still-unbuilt KC-46 tanker.

Still, it's possible that all three radar-evading planes could be flying together over the blue waters of the Pacific as early as five years from now. By that time China might have built and deployed combat-ready versions of its own J-20 and J-31 stealth fighters. That doesn't mean the two aerial armadas will be fighting each other, of course. Conventional war with China is, and will likely remain, unnecessary and unlikely.

For both sides the planned stealth strike forces are all about showing off, and impressing your rival so much that actually fighting him seems unthinkable. And that's a good thing.

Here's How Darpa's Robot Ship Will Hunt Silent Subs

Submariners like to say there are two kinds of ships: subs and targets. The Pentagon's futurists want to turn that aphorism on its head, and develop a new kind of surface ship that can turn a sub into a target. Naturally, the sub-hunter won't have a human on board. Here's how it's going to work.

The video above is a new promotional piece of machinima (do people still say that?) released by the defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation, which has a $58 million contract with Darpa to build its unmanned sub-hunter of the future. That maritime robot, called the Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vehicle, or ACTUV, doesn't exist yet and won't for years. But here SAIC at least sketches out how the long, thin and 'radically different' ACTUV can keep surface ships from becoming targets.

The really interesting thing here is how different the surface-gliding ACTUV is from the now-familiar drones that litter the skies. Even the longest-flying drones can only stay in the air for 30 hours or so. SAIC intends for this thing to stay on a hunt for 60 to 90 days.

What's more, SAIC is designing the ACTUV to be way more autonomous than contemporary drone aircraft: After a sailor powers it up and helps guide it out of port, she can go on a long vacation while the ACTUV speeds out to the open water to use its long-range acquisition sonar and other advanced sensors to scan for submarines, while automatically steering clear of any nearby surface ships.

Assuming SAIC isn't over-promising (much), the sonar pods underneath the belly of the ACTUV create an acoustic image of a submarine and pursue it at high speed ' although that's something that can only happen when the ACTUV gets fairly close to its quarry. (More on that in a second.) Once the ACTUV thinks it's got something, it pings nearby Navy ships through a satellite link. If a sailor thinks the ACTUV has made a mistake, he can convey that back to the unmanned ship and it'll move on.

If not, the ACTUV operates alongside the fleet, with coordination not often seen with aerial drone tactics. SAIC apparently wants the ACTUV in constant communication with a mothership and Naval aircraft that would fly overhead and drop sonar charges to hunt the mystery sub, with the ACTUV speeding along to keep pace with the swift submarine. SAIC seems to intend for the ACTUV to follow the sub back to its home port (!) if necessary, or until a human in the fleet commands it to break contact. The ACTUV, in case you were wondering, isn't armed.

How all this will happen isn't yet clear. The subs that really give the U.S. Navy pause are cheap diesel-electric models, which are technologically puny compared to the Navy's nuclear-powered subs but can be much quieter and harder to track. Russia sells them; Iran claims to have them. SAIC's video suggests that the ACTUV can't actually find the diesel-electric sub on its own: The scenario here depends on a Navy commander suspecting there's an enemy sub in the area and deploying a P8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft (successor to the P-3C Orion) to drop sonar buoys to find it. The ACTUV sprints out in a certain pattern while 'predict[ing] that long-range sensors will be able to completely envelop' the area where the sub might be 'and prevent successful evasion.' So not an exact science, but its sonars are said to get more precise the closer the ACTUV gets to the suspected sub target.

The on-board hardware described generically in the video relies on 'collected data and sophisticated logics' to 'infer the intent' of watercraft. So that should at least make the ACTUV cognizant of any sizable metal thing that seems to be tracking a Navy ship. And if SAIC is right that the ACTUV can really hear the diesel-electric subs, then that enemy sub really may become the ocean's newest target.

This Scientist Wants Tomorrow's Troops to Be Mutant-Powered

Greater strength and endurance. Enhanced thinking. Better teamwork. New classes of genetic weaponry, able to subvert DNA. Not long from now, the technology could exist to routinely enhance ' and undermine ' people's minds and bodies using a wide range of chemical, neurological, genetic and behavioral techniques.

It's warfare waged at the evolutionary level. And it's coming sooner than many people think. According to the futurists at the U.S. National Intelligence Council, by 2030, 'neuro-enhancements could provide superior memory recall or speed of thought. Brain-machine interfaces could provide 'superhuman' abilities, enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.'

Qualities that today must be honed by years of training and education could be installed in a relative instant by, say, an injection or a targeted burst of electricity to the brain. Rapid advancements in neurology, pharmacology and genetics could soon make such installations fairly easy.

These modifications could give rise to new breeds of biologically enhanced troops possessing what one expert in the field calls 'mutant powers.' But those troops may not American. So far, the U.S. military has been extremely reluctant to embrace human biological modification, or 'biomods.' And that could result in a veritable mutant gap. In this new form of biological warfare, the U.S. could find itself outgunned.

But not if Andrew Herr can help it.

A 29-year-old Georgetown-trained researcher with degrees in microbiology, health physics and national security, Herr is one a handful of specialists in the defense community preaching greater U.S. investment in biomods. First as a consultant with the Scitor Corporation, a Virginia-based firm whose clients include top military and intelligence agencies, and later as the head of his own research organization, Herr's job has been to think about biological modifications whose effects he says are 'more than evolutionary.'

Another word for that: revolutionary.

Whether positive or negative, the impact of routine biomods could be huge. 'The best-case scenario is extraordinary increases in quality of life in the First World and beyond,' Herr says. The worst-case scenario, he adds, is people being biologically modified 'without them knowing it.' That is, an evolutionary sneak attack.

But it's not clear how closely the government is listening.

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Meet the Grabby, Sugar-Fueled Robots the Navy Wants to Put in Space

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Maybe you need to unfold a stuck solar panel in the vacuum of space. Or maybe you need an autonomous probe to make sure the systems on a satellite are functioning properly in geosynchronous orbit. Or maybe, just maybe, you'd like to turn the gunk at the bottom of a nearby riverbed into fuel for exploring the far end of the solar system. If so, stop by the outskirts of Washington, D.C., because that's where the Navy does its work in space robotics.

Sure, the Navy usually works to keep the world's waterways open for business. But for decades, the Spacecraft Engineering Department at the Naval Research Laboratory has been the outlet for its more celestial ambitions. The 1958 Vanguard satellite -- the second object mankind launched into space -- was one of theirs.

These days, the Spacecraft Engineering Department works closely with NASA and the Pentagon futurists at Darpa on the grabbier end of outer-space science projects. As in literally grabby: "Ninety-nine percent of our focus is robotic arms," says space roboticist Greg Scott.

Those mechanized arms are designed to perform maintenance tasks on space hardware, and even help the Navy down here on earth. But some of Scott's other space projects involve "some pretty ridiculous science," Scott tells Danger Room -- like these robotic astronauts.

BICEP

The BICEP started life in 2009 as a Mitsubishi robotic arm, bought off the shelf. When the Naval Research Laboratory was through with it last year, it had become a tool with seven points of robotic articulation to unravel a solar panel that got stuck in a satellite. When rockets launch satellites into space, their solar panels are folded up for proper aerodynamic launch, and sometimes they don't unfold on their own.

The "end effectors" -- basically the "hands" on the BICEP's two white arms -- are shaped so the device can "push into a spacecraft body, and then the [solar] panel pops out," Scott explains, either autonomously or under an astronaut's controls. (That thin black-metal plate on the right of the picture is subbing for the solar panel.) Then you're ready to catch some rays.

Photo: Naval Research Laboratories

U.S. Officials Doubt Syrian Rebels' Chemical Attack Claim

Updated 2:56 p.m.

Opposition activists in Syria are claiming that the embattled regime of Bashar Assad gassed rebel forces in the battleground city of Homs on Sunday. U.S. officials tell Danger Room that they are skeptical about the rebels' chemical weapon claims, however.

Al Jazeera reported that seven people died after inhaling a gas sprayed by government forces in a part of Homs held by the rebel Free Syrian Army. 'We don't know what this gas is but medics are saying it's something similar to sarin,' rebel Raji Rahmet Rabbou told the Qatar-based news organization.

The 'poisonous material' was deployed by government warplanes, Haaretz reported, citing a rebel statement. The Assad regime, meanwhile, is blaming the rebels for the attack.

Al Jazeera posted two videos it said were obtained from 'a field clinic in the city.' The graphic videos appear to depict gasping victims of what could be construed as a nerve agent attack.  However, the origins and contents of these videos have yet to be verified by other sources.

U.S. officials note that several things about the video are inconsistent with a sarin strike. There are complaints of strong smells; sarin is odorless. There are reports that the victims inhaled large amounts of the chemical; a minuscule of amount of inhaled sarin can be fatal.

'It just doesn't jibe with chemical weapons,' one U.S. official tells Danger Room.

In fact, the symptoms shown in these videos might have been caused by other chemicals ' possibly chlorine, phosgene, or cyanogen chloride, according to one independent review of the clips (.pdf). Or we might simply be seeing a severe asthma attack.

The specter of chemical warfare has long loomed over the brutal Syrian conflict, which rebels claimed has killed no fewer than 37,000 people. As early as this summer Assad's regime warned it might deploy its 500-ton chemical stockpile. 'There was a moment we thought they were going to use it ' especially back in July,' a U.S. official told Danger Room. 'But we took a second look at the intelligence, and it was less urgent than we thought.'

The relief was short-lived. Assad began trying to expand his arsenal with fresh sarin precursor materials ' specifically, isopropanol and methylphosphonyl difluoride. U.S. and allied agents blocked at least some of the new acquisitions, but there was little they could do about the existing stockpile.

Three weeks ago U.S. surveillance spotted special Syrian military units mixing the precursors and prepping sarin warheads for possible use. 'Physically, they've gotten to the point where the can load it up on a plane and drop it,' an official told Danger Room at the time.

Washington and its allies have repeatedly said they would not tolerate a chemical attack. 'This would cross a red line and those responsible would be held to account,' Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned previously.

Even Sergei Lavrov ' foreign minister of Assad's ally, Russia ' called the use of chemical weapons 'political suicide.'

Now the question is: Has the regime actually taken that step? Are the rebels confused? Or is this an opposition effort to further discredit the regime?

Army Goes Goth With 'Super-Black' Materials

Get ready to break out the eyeliner and the candelabras, because the Army is going goth.

In its latest round of solicitations for small businesses, the Army is asking for proposals for super-black material. That is, material so black that it absorbs 99 percent of all light. But it isn't really black paint, exactly. The plan is to use either an 'antireflective coating or surface treatment process for metals' to absorb stray light 'in the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared regions.' This, the Army hopes, will boost the quality of high-resolution cameras, while also cooling down sensitive electronics. Or to put it another way: The Army needs the color black to reflect its icy-cold heart.

Another curious thing is that the program is being run out of the Army's Program Executive Office Ammunition at the Picatinny Arsenal, a main center for the Pentagon's experiments in all sorts of weapons: from rifles and tank cannons to directed-energy weapons. But the purpose of the solicitation isn't much more specific than described. 'Simply put, it's too early yet to speculate on where the technology(s) will go,' Frank Misurelli, an Army spokesman at Picatinny said in a statement provided to Danger Room. 'Possibly in a few months, after an contract has been awarded, more information may become available.'

But for whatever the Army wants to fade to black, it seems that regular black isn't good enough. This is because most black paint will absorb only around 90-95 percent of light, with the other 5-10 percent reflected back outwards. For a high-resolution camera, that stray light can bounce back into the lens and interfere with the quality of an image. It's even a problem for NASA's ultra-deep-space sensors. In the extreme coldness of space, black paint turns a silver-y color, which increases heat and can interfere with infrared-detecting instruments.

But wait, doesn't black get really hot when hit with light, like wearing black clothes during the summer? The answer is: sorta. Black is really good at absorbing heat, but is also really good at radiating heat away. This is why cooling fins, radiators and engines for cars and trucks are often painted black. In 2011, NASA developed a carbon-nanotube coating that absorbed between 98-99.5 percent of light, depending on the wavelength. Nor do the coating's thin layers of nanotubes change color in extreme cold. They absorb more light, and help radiate heat away from instruments, keeping them cold.

The Army could go another route. A second option uncovered by Britain's National Physical Laboratory involves immersing an object in a solution of nickel and sodium for several hours, which blackens the color, and then taking it out and dunking it in nitric acid for a few seconds. According to New Scientist, this creates an alloy pock-marked with tiny microscopic craters that prevent light from bouncing away.

Finally, the Army also hopes to expand the materials to 'optical glass surfaces' ' camera lenses, in other words ' while testing to see whether 'it will be able to survive in a military environment.' The material should also come in 'multiple surface colors' and be able to 'selectively exhibit earth color instead of broadband absorption.' And another hope is to use the materials to absorb water to cool down equipment. See, it's tough out there being goth, but it doesn't mean you can't do it in comfort.

Assad Just Hit Us With Poison Gas, Syrian Rebels Claim

The regime of embattled Syrian president Bashar Assad gassed rebel forces in the battleground city of Homs, anti-government activists told Al Jazeera on Sunday. If the unconfirmed report is true ' and that's a huge if ' the chemical attack could signal the biggest escalation yet of 20-month-old Syrian civil war, with serious implications for the rest of the world.

Danger Room first reported in early December that the Assad regime was preparing some of its nerve weapons for possible use against rebel forces. Washington and its allies have repeatedly said they would not tolerate such an attack. 'This would cross a red line and those responsible would be held to account,' Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned previously.

Even Sergei Lavrov ' foreign minister of Assad's ally, Russia ' called the use of chemical weapons 'political suicide.'

Al Jazeera reported that seven people died after inhaling a gas sprayed by government forces in a part of Homs held by the rebel Free Syrian Army. 'We don't know what this gas is but medics are saying it's something similar to sarin,' rebel Raji Rahmet Rabbou told the Qatar-based news organization.

The 'poisonous material' was deployed by government warplanes, Haaretz reported, citing a rebel statement. The Assad regime, meanwhile, is blaming the rebels for the attack.

Al Jazeera posted two videos it said were obtained from 'a field clinic in the city.' The graphic videos indeed appear to depict gasping victims of what could be a nerve agent attack.  Again, however, the origins and contents of these videos have yet to be verified by other sources.

Sarin can cause paralysis, choking and even death. But the symptoms shown in these videos might have been caused by other chemicals ' possibly chlorine, phosgene, cyanogen chloride, according to one independent review of the clips (.pdf). Or we might simply be seeing a severe asthma attack.

The specter of chemical warfare has long loomed over the brutal Syrian conflict, which rebels claimed has killed no fewer than 37,000 people. As early as this summer Assad's regime warned it might deploy its 500-ton chemical stockpile. 'There was a moment we thought they were going to use it ' especially back in July,' a U.S. official told Danger Room. 'But we took a second look at the intelligence, and it was less urgent than we thought.'

The relief was short-lived. Assad began trying to expand his arsenal with fresh sarin precursor materials ' specifically, isopropanol and methylphosphonyl difluoride. U.S. and allied agents blocked at least some of the new acquisitions, but there was little they could do about the existing stockpile.

Nor could the international community easily prevent Syria from adding to its stocks of sarin delivery systems. Damascus already possessed chemical-capable gravity bombs and short-range rockets. This year the regime also rebuilt its reserves of Scud ballistic missiles, which can carry sarin warheads. Government troops fired explosive-tipped Scuds in combat this month.

With the escalation of the gas threat, Western governments began training some Syrian rebels in methods of securing chemical weapons. In addition, 'U.S. contractors have also been on the ground in Syria to monitor the status of regime stockpiles,' according to the Syria Deeply site.

Though Turkey and some of its NATO allies have deployed troops to the border with Syria, American officials have consistently questioned the feasibility of a Libya-style intervention in the Syrian conflict. But this reluctance includes a chemical-warfare caveat. 'The United States is not going to be able to sit it out if Syria starts using chemical weapons on its people,' an official told The New York Times.

Three weeks ago U.S. surveillance spotted special Syrian military units prepping sarin warheads for possible use. 'Physically, they've gotten to the point where the can load it up on a plane and drop it,' an official told Danger Room at the time. And now it's possible they've done so, with grisly results.

Earlier this month Clinton promised a U.S. response to any use of chemical weapons by Syria. 'We are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur,' she said, without specifying what form that response might take.

Now we could be about to find out.

15 More of the World's Most Dangerous People, Selected by You

We've published our list of the 15 people most responsible for turning this world haywire. But 15 dangerous folks weren't nearly enough, you told us in your comments, your tweets and your Facebook mentions. So here's a second helping of dangerousness, all thanks to you.

No, your mother-in-law doesn't get on the list. Nor does Chuck Norris or the Sith. (We're trying to keep it relevant to 2012.) But we've picked out 15 of the best suggestions, with links to your comments and tweets.

• Kim Jong-un. The 29-year-old dictator managed to launch North Korea's first satellite into space. Plus, he's got those nukes, and a dastardly plan to invade America. On the list you go, and at the top.
• Ashfaq Kayani. Pakistan's army chief of staff and former director of its spy service isn't just one of that unstable country's most important leaders; he's emerged as one of the main go-to people in Pakistan as the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan. Let's hope he doesn't make it too hard on us as we leave.
• Vladimir Putin. Since Russia's potentate returned to the presidency this year, he's brought with him ambitious plans to rebuild Moscow's military, launched a massive internet surveillance project, and arrested dissidents who aren't too excited about this never-ending presidency stuff.
• David Petraeus. He goes on the list, and we're talking about the whole man. While Paula Broadwell sent the e-hate that got ultimately led the FBI to their affair, the general made the choice to start screwing around. In other words, he's responsible for his own demise.
• Satoshi Nakamoto. The pseudonymous creator of the Bitcoin digital cryptocurrency has seemingly disappeared into the shadows, but his invention lives on with potential to disrupt the powers-that-be. What happens when crooks can move money effortlessly online, without ever being traced? We might soon find out.
• Ken Shamrock: 'Wait a minute. Why is Ken Shamrock not on the top of this list??' asked one of our commenters. If he wants to call himself the world's most dangerous man, that's cool. You won't see me arguing with him about it.
• Cosmo the God. The 15-year-old hacker isn't legally allowed to use the internet without supervision, since he was caught breaking into Amazon.com and taking down the websites for the CIA and NASDAQ, but it might not also stop him from hijacking your Twitter. In another sense, Cosmo has been revealed as the ultimate example of how online security ' for even the America's spy agency ' can still be brought down by a teenager.
• Ayman al-Zawahiri. The al-Qaeda chief has been dangerous for a long time, but hasn't been particularly dangerous in 2012. But it probably wouldn't hurt to keep an eye out for him. And with al-Qaeda moving into Libya and Syria, it's a wonder what Zawahiri has been doing behind the scenes.
• Zaheer ul-Islam. Pakistan's current spy chief since March 2012 is not only in charge of subterfuge in one of the most volatile regions of the world, but is in a position to determine what happens next to Afghanistan as U.S. troops withdraw.
• Ke$ha: Joshua Foust of the American Security Project was skeptical we didn't include the autotuned pop singer. Alright then, if you insist.
• Fethullah Gulen. Is this influential Turkish scholar a liberal reformer or an Islamic extremist? The answer is more complicated than that, but with his millions of followers and a network of more than 1,000 schools around the world, he's shown to be a force against the powers of Istanbul's military.
• James Carter IV. Had the grandson of former U.S. President Carter not discovered an obscure clip of Mitt Romney on YouTube, and hadn't tracked down the guy who filmed the complete video, Romney's '47 percent' comment may have never been heard. Call it dangerous if you want, but it sure is disruptive.
• Anonymous. While the hacker group flipped over the collective table in 2011, they've still remained a dangerous force, and even joined in during the Israel's strikes on Gaza.
• Unknown. One commenter made the observation that the most dangerous people in the world are 'not currently on anyone's radar. This is what makes them so dangerous.' Worth considering, no?
• Michael Bay. Because seriously.

Thanks again, everyone. Tune in next year for more danger.

7 Codes You'll Never Ever Break

The history of encryption is a tale of broken secrets. But some mysteries remain unraveled. Among the thousands of broken codes and ciphers solved by cryptologists from the NSA and the KGB to amateurs at home, there are the few elusive codes that no one has ever managed to crack.

What makes these ciphers even more intriguing are the people who supposedly wrote them: an estranged lover; a serial killer who sent encrypted letters in a kind of twisted mind game; an esoteric 15th century alchemist for reasons still unknown today. Some of the codes turned up in the pockets of dead men: some unidentified to this day, others who were murdered by strangers for no discernible reason why.

Some may even be hoaxes. But even figuring out which ciphers are real and which are not can be nearly insurmountable. And even if we can spot the authentic codes amidst the hoaxes, some of these rare and challenging codes may still be impossible to solve, in our lifetimes at least. We've asked Kevin Knight ' the University of Southern California computer scientist who recently helped crack the 250-year-old Copiale cipher ' to walk us through seven of the most confounding codes and give us an idea of what makes these things so tough to break.

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The Voynich Manuscript (1400-1500s)

Few encrypted texts are as mysterious ' or as tantalizing ' as the Voynich manuscript, a book dating to either 15th- or 16th-century Italy and written in a language no one understands, about a subject that no one can figure out, and involving illustrations of plants that don't exist. Plus it's got Zodiac symbols, astrological charts, illustrations of medicinal herbs, and drawings of naked women bathing while hooked up to tubes. The manuscript's 246 calfskin pages were perhaps meant for alchemy or medieval medicine, but no one knows for sure.

What we do know is that it's written in a language distinct from any European language, and follows a pattern unique to its own. The alphabet ranges from 19 to 28 letters, with an average word length consistent with Greek- or Latin-derived languages, but is missing two-letter words while repeating words at a much higher rate than other European languages. All told, the book has 170,000 characters in it, written from left to right, and there are no punctuation marks.

William Friedman, one of the 20th century's greatest cryptographers, couldn't figure it out and suspected Voynich was a constructed, artificial language. (With no Rosetta Stone to help translate.) German computer scientist Klaus Schmeh suspected a hoax, and also suggested the manuscript's original language could have been encoded in a much larger set of "meaningless filler text." But there's no system for separating out the real text from the junk. Linguist and computer scientist Gordon Rugg also concluded the manuscript was a hoax.

Knight has been wrestling with Voynich for the better part of a decade, on and off. Recently, he and University of Chicago computer scientist Sravana Reddy discovered that the word length and frequency (.pdf) and the seeming presence of morphology ' or the structure of word forms ' "and most notably, the presence of page-level topics conform to natural language-like text." The problem is that no one seems to know where to go next.

Photo: D.C.Atty/Flickr

In Ex-Soviet States, Russian Spy Tech Still Watches You

On November 12, the Russian Supreme Court okayed the wiretapping of an opposition activist. The Court ruled that spying on Maxim Petlin, a regional opposition leader in Yekaterinburg, was lawful, since he had taken part in rallies where calls against extending the powers of Russia's security services were heard. The court decided that these were demands for 'extremist actions' and approved surveillance carried out by the national interception system, known as SORM.

Manned by the country's main security service, the FSB, this 'System of Operative Search Measures' has been in use for more than two decades. But recently, SORM has been upgraded. It is ingesting new types of data. It is being used as Moscow's main tool for spying on the country's political protesters. And it has become extremely useful in the quest to make sure that the Kremlin's influence in the former Soviet Union continues long into the second regime of Vladimir Putin.

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Watch Darpa's Headless Robotic Mule Respond to Voice Commands

If robots are ever really going to carry the bags of U.S. soldiers and Marines, the Pentagon's futurists think, they're going to have to act more like pack animals. That means responding to voice commands, figuring out when it makes sense to follow a human being and when it doesn't, and getting around uneven terrain and other obstacles. Darpa thinks it's off to a good start.

Over the past two weeks, the Pentagon's blue-sky researchers took an upgraded LS3 robot ' a cousin of the headless BigDog and PETMAN made by Boston Dynamics ' on a walk through the woods and hills of Fort Pickett, Virginia. (LS3 = 'Legged Squad Support System,' get it?) It was the first test conducted on the LS3 after bolstering the autonomy functions for the $54 million project, now in its fifth year. As the video above shows, when a human instructor calls out 'engine on' and 'follow tight,' the robot's engine activates, and it follows its master on exactly the path the human takes. When the human calls out 'follow corridor,' the robot will 'generate the path that's most efficient for itself,' explains Army Lt. Col. Joseph Hitt, Darpa's LS3 program manager.

Darpa figures that it's illogical to make a soldier hand over her rucksack to a robotic beast of burden if she's then got to be preoccupied with 'joysticks and computer screens' to guide it forward. 'That adds to the cognitive burden of the soldier,' Hitt explains. 'We need to make sure that the robot also is smart, like a trained animal.' So the LS3 uses a laser range-finder, specialized cameras and stereo vision to keep track of its human master.

Darpa is really literal when it means that the LS3 has to operate like a mule. It needs to haul up to 400 pounds, walk 20 miles and operate for 24 hours without human intervention. The program's been undergoing tests for years, and Darpa and Boston Dynamics have put out numerous videos showing the gangly metal beast climbing woodlands, recovering from being kicked over, and running on treadmills. The Fort Pickett tests show much of the same. Only this time, the robot is way quieter ' emitting 'less noise than any combustion-engine system out there that's tactically relevant,' Hill says ' and its rounded back and spindly legs allow it to climb out of the uneven terrain that troops in, say, Afghanistan encounter. The LS3 can now also put its feet on uneven surfaces like logs, whereas before it labored to avoid them.

All this is the result of major advances to the LS3's software, particularly as it integrates with the system's sensors. At Fort Pickett, it walked through an obstacle course of shipping containers that subbed for the narrow alleyways of urban conditions. That showed the LS3 computing a course on its own: 'The robot has to decide, 'Can I fit here 20, 30 meters from now, or do I have to turn around?'' Hitt says. (Skip to 1:40 on the video to see what the robot sees.)

So far, the system responds to 10 basic voice commands ' again, like a trained animal ' like 'stop,' 'follow tight,' or 'engine off.' But 'perception and platform robustness' remain challenges, Hitt concedes, like ensuring the robot can react to changes in light or weather. It can't, for instance, look at a snow-covered hill and figure out if the snow is too deep to traverse. Nor can it avoid battlefield dangers like gunfire or bombs. 'We'll have to always continue to add additional logic,' Hitt says.

That's what's going to happen over the next two years. Every three months, Darpa will take the LS3 to a different set of climate conditions that U.S. troops have to encounter; first up is the arid, desert environment of the Marines' Twentynine Palms base in California's Mojave Desert. That's an indicator of Darpa's desire to hand over its first robot to a Marine company in 2014. The LS3 may not have a head, but Darpa expects it to be at least as smart as a real-life mule.

Benghazi Commission Practically Demands Pain Rays at Embassies

Want to stop the next riot at a U.S. embassy? The commission into the September assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi has an unexpected suggestion: load them up with exotic, supposedly non-lethal weaponry. Not that the commission has much confidence in the security personnel who'd operate the controversial gear.

In its newly released report into the Benghazi disaster, an independent commission assembled by the State Department found that, among other security failures, 'the lack of non-lethal crowd control options' at the consulate 'precluded a more vigorous defense.' (.pdf) The September attack, in which Libyans assaulted the sparsely defended consulate with rockets, mortars, machine-gun fire and more, killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The commission doesn't explicitly endorse any particular form of non-lethal defense of diplomatic installations. But the obvious options would be a laser flash that 'dazzles' oncoming attackers, an ear-splitting sonic blaster ' and a microwave-like pain ray that make targets feel like they're being hit with the exhaust of a giant oven. The first two weapons have been used by U.S. military forces overseas in recent years. The third one was pulled from Afghanistan because it was considered too controversial.

The commission does not consider such weaponry a panacea. It does find that the State Department is behind the curve on exploring how those technologies, however. 'There have been technological advancements in non-lethal deterrents,' it writes, 'and the State Department should ensure it rapidly and routinely identifies and procures additional options for non-lethal deterrents in high risk, high threat posts and trains personnel on their use.'

The U.S. military has been experimenting with non-lethal crowd control systems for years. One of the marquee projects of its Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate is a millimeter-wave gun called the Active Denial System. Intended for the perimeter defense of a base, the truck-mounted weapon blasts angry mobs with 12 joules of focused energy per square centimeter. The blast doesn't penetrate the skin, but ' as I learned first-hand in March ' it very rapidly creates an unbearable burning sensation, prompting anyone in its path to involuntarily move out of the way.

Another non-lethal option: sonic blasters like the Long-Range Acoustic Device or the Inferno, which cause, in the words of Danger Room co-founder Sharon Weinberger, 'the most unbearable, gut-wrenching noise I've ever heard in my life.' The Long-Range Acoustic Device, for instance, fires sound waves at a 300-meter distance, and has been used against pirates; a related Israeli weapon, called the Scream, was put to work in 2009 to literally nauseate protesters.

But the commission's brief plaudit for less-lethal weaponry doesn't consider some of the very real drawbacks of these systems, both technical and, er, diplomatic. The commission notes that the Benghazi attack happened too quickly for the U.S. military to respond to. That would also be too fast for the Active Denial System, which needs a 16-hour boot-up time if the energy-intensive device isn't constantly running. It also doesn't work as well in dusty, rainy, snowy or other poor-weather conditions.

Then there are the diplomatic problems with the weapons. The Active Denial System was recalled from Afghanistan after a brief deployment in 2010 out of fear that the Taliban would effectively portray it as a sterilization device. Mounting one of these on the walls of an embassy would not exactly send the message that the U.S. is eager to work with the locals on matters of mutual interest.

But the Benghazi commission also provides little confidence in the security officers who'd have to operate and oversee the non-lethal weapons. The State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security comes across in the commission's report as barely able to manage the resources that it already has. Not only did the Benghazi consulate depend on a 'poorly skilled' Libyan militia and unarmed guards from the Blue Mountain security firm, the commission found the Diplomatic Security bureau needs to 'upgrade surveillance cameras at high risk, high threat posts for greater resolution, nighttime visibility, and monitoring capability beyond post'; create an 'action plan' about what to do about 'the use of fire as a weapon against diplomatic facilities'; and 'revisit [its] high-threat training with respect to active internal defense and fire survival.'

That makes it sound like the Bureau of Diplomatic Security is under-prepared at the basics of protecting diplomatic outposts. And it's not the first time the directorate has come in for criticism. A 2007 State Department inquiry found that the bureau exercised inadequate oversight of its private security force in Iraq, owing to under-staffing and meager budgets. (That's something Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is asking Congress to correct.) In Afghanistan, Diplomatic Security contracted out for embassy guards that couldn't speak English, despite repeated warnings from embassy personnel that such a move jeopardized an effective response to a crisis.

Veterans of the bureau describe a hidebound bureaucracy insulated from accountability, especially as it had always succeeded at its core job of keeping diplomats alive. Until Benghazi.

'The [Diplomatic Security] Bureau showed a lack of proactive senior leadership with respect to Benghazi,' the commission writes, 'failing to ensure that the priority security needs of a high risk, high threat post were met.' The commission, however, stops short at recommending anyone inside the bureau be fired over Benghazi, punting on that suggestion to 'future' studies. But the report appears to have prompted the resignations of top Diplomatic Security officials, including Amb. Eric Boswell. Not exactly the people you'd want manning your acoustic cannons and heat rays.

While Report on CIA Abuse Stays Secret, Senators Blast Tinseltown Torture

Three senators are furious at how the new movie on the manhunt for Osama bin Laden portrays torture. Unlike other critics of the film, they have the power to actually correct the record, by declassifying a major Senate inquiry into the CIA's torture program. Only they're not doing it.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) want Zero Dark Thirty distributor Sony Pictures to know they think the film buys into the false narrative that torturing detainees helped the U.S. nab Osama bin Laden. McCain, a torture victim himself, says he was 'sickened' by the movie. Feinstein called it 'a combination of fact, fiction and Hollywood in a very dangerous combination,' and all three prepared a letter to Sony registering their objections, as The Hill first reported. 'Grossly inaccurate and misleading' is how the letter, released late Wednesday, describes the movie.

All of which is well and good, even if we don't consider the movie to be pro-torture. The problem is, the senators are complaining about fake torture when they could be showing us the truth about the real stuff . If the problem with Zero Dark Thirty is that it's not an accurate presentation of the utility of torture (and we shudder at the thought that torture ought to be evaluated according to its utility), the senators could make a major push to declassify a massive report put together by Feinstein's committee into what the CIA's torture program did and didn't do.

Last week, Feinstein announced that the Senate intelligence committee she chairs finally approved a 6,000-page study into the CIA's treatment of terrorism detainees in its custody that took almost four years to investigate. By reviewing more than '6 million pages of CIA and other records,' Feinstein said, the report details how the detainees were treated, how they were interrogated, and, crucially, 'the intelligence they actually provided and the accuracy ' or inaccuracy ' of CIA descriptions about the program.' Feinstein promised 'startling details' and 'critical questions' about the program, promising it would 'settle the debate once and for all over whether our nation should ever employ coercive interrogation techniques such as those detailed in this report.' Small problem: the report is secret, so you can't read it.

At least not yet. Feinstein says the report will remain classified until President Obama and 'key executive branch officials' review it. Then her committee will consider declassifying it. So the report that could settle the debate about torture won't settle the debate about torture until the self-interested parties who've stymied accountability for torture decide it's safe to settle the debate about torture.

It's not like Obama has any interest in exposing the torture program. After an early and acrimonious decision to partially declassify key Justice Department memos authorizing the torture ' for which Obama deserves praise ' he's done nothing. A special prosecutor empowered by Attorney General Eric Holder ended up not indicting any CIA official who abused detainees, and didn't even consider investigating the top officials who authorized the torture in the first place. There has been even less official public reckoning with what the torture program entailed, something that would fray Obama's relationship with a CIA that implements his lethal drone program, since a former Bush administration aide described that program as amounting to 'war crimes.' And it's worth noting that under Obama's watch, the U.S. military placed accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning in conditions that were harsher than those for many Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Morris Davis, a retired Air Force colonel, also sees the easy way to get beyond the Zero Dark Thirty debate for some actual accountability. 'As it stands now, the only information guaranteed to reach the public is the false account of torture in a Hollywood movie,' Davis writes in Der Spiegel. 'That makes it vitally important to make the Guantanamo military commissions open and transparent, and to declassify the Senate Intelligence Committee report.'

Zero Dark Thirty also threatens to mess up the career of the Pentagon's intelligence chief. McClatchy reported that Michael Vickers, already lionized in the counterterrorism film Charlie Wilson's War, is under investigation for allegedly leaking information about the SEALs who conducted the raid to filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal. The Pentagon has rallied to Vickers' side, calling McClatchy's reporting 'unwarranted, unfounded, and unfair' even while conceding the department's inspector general is examining Vickers. The Hill's Carlo Munoz reports that the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith (D-Calif.), has thrown his full support behind Vickers, considering him not to have jeopardized national security.

Zero Dark Thirty will inevitably stir heated disagreement. What's important is to disclose and reckon honestly with the very ugly history that it presents, fictionally or otherwise.

Almost Everything You've Heard About the North Korean Space Launch Is Wrong

Last week, North Korea finally managed to put an object into orbit around the Earth after 14 years of trying. The event was greeted with hysterical headlines, about how the whole thing was a likely a missile test and most certainly a failure of Western intelligence. Most of those headlines were dead wrong.

There are many questions yet to be answered about this launch and what it means. Some of them will take weeks or months to determine, others may never be answered satisfactorily. But there's enough information already in the public domain to answer basic questions about the launch. News flash: Most of the initial reports about it were total misfires.

Was This a Ballistic Missile Test or a Satellite Launch?

Some of the same technologies are needed for long-range missiles and for space launches ' most notably rocket motors, high strength-to-weight fuselages, and guidance software. But they're not the same thing. All evidence points to a satellite launch, despite headlines like these.

The goal of a space launch vehicle is to insert payloads into orbit and to do so they must perform two functions. They must first lift a payload to a desired altitude above the Earth and then give that payload enough forward speed to remain in orbit at that altitude. The final speed required for this is determined by the altitude and pull of the Earth's gravity. With enough speed, the payload moves forward equal to the distance it is pulled towards the Earth by gravity. It moves in an ellipse around the Earth, continually falling towards the Earth but missing ('free fall').

Ballistic missiles, on the other hand, have a different goal. Their objective is to deliver a payload to another spot on the Earth. To do so, they need to accelerate the payload to a very high speed, although significantly slower than the space launch vehicle, and after separation from the rocket, the ballistic missile's payload follows an elliptical path through space similar to a satellite. However, the ballistic payload is not in orbit ' part of its elliptical path is inside the Earth's atmosphere. The payload coasts along its elliptical path and instead of 'free-falling' around the planet, it re-enters the atmosphere and impacts a spot on the surface of the Earth.

From a practical perspective, these different goals result in significant differences in the flight profile of a space launch versus a ballistic missile launch. Look at the illustration of the North Korean launch compiled by Dr. David Wright. The green trajectory in this illustration is for a ballistic missile trajectory while the red and yellow trajectory is for a space launch trajectory. The most striking difference is in the altitude ' a long-range ballistic missile actually goes much higher into space than a typical space launch into low-Earth orbit (LEO), sometimes as high as 1,500 kilometers (930 miles).

Within these parameters, the North Korean rocket launch was most certainly a space launch and not a ballistic missile test. This can be verified by multiple sources before, during and after the launch. Prior to the launch, North Korea notified international agencies of the splashdown zones for the first two stages and the payload shroud, as is standard practice. These splashdown zones corresponded to a space launch trajectory, indicating beforehand that the North Koreans planned to try and place a satellite into orbit. During the launch, heat from the rocket was picked up by constellations of U.S. military infrared satellites in orbit. Tracking of the burn phase of the launch by those satellites allows the U.S. to verify that it was on a space launch trajectory. After the launch, remnants of the first stage were recovered in the pre-announced splash zone by the South Korean Navy.

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The 15 Most Dangerous People in the World

There used to be an established order to the world. A structure to things. You couldn't print a gun like a term paper. It was impossible to wreck a nuclear production plant with a few lines of code. Flying robots didn't descend on you in the dead of night and kill you in your home.

But that order has been upended. Cheap videos in California help spark riots in Cairo. Lynchpins of the Middle East now rant about 'Planet of the Apes' in public, and Iranian generals trash-talk David Petraeus over SMS. The world has gone a little haywire ' sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Here are our choices for the 15 people most responsible for making it that way.

Who did we miss? What did we get wrong? Sound off in the comments, or find us on Twitter or Facebook.

' Noah Shachtman

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15: Paula Broadwell

One day you're pitching a biography of a top general. The next you've brought down a CIA director, stalled the career of another top general and ensnared numerous federal agencies ' and yourself ' in a sprawling investigation-cum-media circus. Paula Broadwell didn't mean to wreck any careers, but she accomplished something that no U.S. adversary could: remove David Petraeus from the U.S. government.

Broadwell, a former Army intelligence officer, developed an unhealthy attraction to Petraeus. What started out as spinning for Petraeus' Afghanistan strategy and a florid book became a full-blown affair once Petraeus became director of the CIA. All that would have stayed between the two lovers ' had Broadwell not used an anonymous e-mail account to berate Jill Kelley, a Tampa socialite whom Broadwell considered unduly flirtatious with the military brass. Kelley turned to an FBI agent she knew, Frederick W. Humphries II, to open a cyber-stalking investigation.

The feds don't usually pursue cyber-stalking cases. And this one ended without any charges filed against Broadwell ' but not before uncovering poor data hygiene from Broadwell's famous paramour. Petraeus and Broadwell shared a password on an e-mail account and would pass messages to each other by saving e-mails as drafts. What's more, Broadwell got into the habit of talking openly about sensitive CIA operations, like its response to the September attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. It's unclear whether there will be any charges filed against either Broadwell or Petraeus over classified material discovered on Broadwell's computer.

Petraeus, the most celebrated general of his generation, resigned in humiliation. The FBI inquiry also turned up what the Pentagon called "flirtatious" e-mails between Gen. John Allen, the outgoing Afghanistan war commander, and Kelley, which has now blocked Allen's promotion to NATO commander. What's more, the coming reshuffle in President Obama's national security team has reopened a debate into whether the CIA should back away from Petraeus' torrid pace of drone strikes. Petraeus, and not Broadwell, is ultimately responsible for his own poor decision-making. But the next time a cabinet official sleeps around, he'd better make sure his mistress keeps the affair offline.

' Spencer Ackerman

Photo: AP/Nell Redmond

Army Says This General Sexually Abused an Officer, Then Threatened Her Career

An Army general isn't just accused of sexually assaulting a female subordinate. According to newly released military documents, the one-star general 'threaten[ed] to use his rank, position, and authority to damage or ruin [the captain's] military career if she ended their sexual relationship.' And he disobeyed a direct order from his superior officer to leave the female officer alone.

Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, the former deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, 'received a lawful command from Major General (O-8) James L. Huggins,' then Sinclair's superior officer, to cease contact with an unnamed female Army captain that Sinclair stands accused of sodomizing 'without [her] consent.' That's according to Sinclair's official charge sheet, which Danger Room has acquired. Sinclair 'attempt[ed] to willfully disobey the same by calling her cell phone' in March 2012. That attempted contact occurred after Sinclair allegedly sexually abused the captain.

It is unclear from the charge sheet if Huggins knew that Sinclair had forced himself on the captain, who apparently maintained a sexual relationship with Sinclair for years. Huggins recently completed a tour as the 82nd's commanding officer and commander of U.S. forces in southern Afghanistan. He is slated for a promotion to lieutenant general.

On Tuesday, officials at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, announced that Sinclair will definitely face a court-martial on charges of forcible sodomy, sexual misconduct, conduct unbecoming an officer, and other charges. Sinclair's arraignment at Fort Bragg is scheduled for Jan. 22.

According to the charge sheet, the married Sinclair displayed 'pornographic and sexually explicit photographs and movies' while serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan; used his government charge card for personal uses; and carried 'inappropriate relationship[s]' with at least two other female officers, one a major and the other a lieutenant. The charge sheet does not accuse Sinclair of abusing those officers.

Sinclair is also charged with covering up his abuse of the female captain. In March of 2012, while he was serving in Kandahar, the charge sheet alleges Sinclair 'wrongfully endeavor[ed]] to impede an investigation in the case of himself, by deleting nude photographs' and the e-mail account that either sent or received them.

As has been previously reported, when criticized for using 'derogatory and demeaning words to refer to female staff officers,' Sinclair allegedly responded, 'I'm a general, I'll say whatever the [redacted] I want,' according to the charge sheet, which calls that 'conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman.' The female captain allegedly abused by Sinclair testified at a pre-trial hearing at Fort Bragg in November.

Secrecy has surrounded the Sinclair case since it became public in September that Sinclair faced potential prosecution. It's unusual for the sheet listing the charges facing an accused servicemember to be delayed for so long. Retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, told Danger Room in November that it smelled of favoritism shown to a general officer that an enlisted soldier wouldn't enjoy. The Army insists that's flat wrong.

'We did not initially release the charge sheets because the Article 32 investigating officer needed to decide if the evidence presented was sufficient to bring forward to the General Court Martial Convening authority for his action,' says Col. Kevin Arata, the spokesman for the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg. 'Now that the GCMCA has made a decision on those charges, and the accused is being arraigned, we know explicitly what charges are being referred against the accused, thus the release of the redacted charge sheets at this time.'

Gary Solis, a military law scholar at Georgetown University, considers that a credible explanation. 'There is much to criticize, when it comes to public access to disciplinary matters denied by the military, but this is not such a case,' Solis tells Danger Room. 'To have publicly announced un-investigated charges in the case of a general officer, even this one, would have been a miscarriage of justice, had any of the charges been demonstrated at the 32 to be groundless.'

Davis, unconvinced, adds: 'I can't recall a case where there was public interest where the charges were withheld from public disclosure until after the Convening Authority decided to refer the case to trial.'

Sinclair is one of a number of prominent generals whose ethical lapses have prompted Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to launch an inquiry into whether the military needs to review its ethics training. (Dempsey's initial findings, delivered last Friday, are that general and flag officers could benefit from ethics refreshers.)

But those other generals either misused small amounts of their official salaries for personal benefit, like Army Gen. William 'Kip' Ward and Navy Adm. James Stavridis, or may have had 'flirtatious' relationships over e-mail, like Marine Gen. John Allen. Sinclair stands accused of sexually assaulting, harassing and humiliating one of the officers under his command. It's hard to imagine that a general officer needs a refresher course to understand how wrong that is.

Islamic Extremists Rescue NBC Reporter Held in Syria

When Americans encounter jihadi groups in warzones, it can often mean captivity or even execution. Except in Syria, where they just rescued NBC News' chief foreign correspondent from a days-long ordeal.

Six days ago, Richard Engel and his production team were captured while traveling in northwest Syria with a rebel group when they were taken captive by forces loyal to dictator Bashar Assad. One of the rebels was killed on sight by the 15 loyalist gunmen, and the American crew was subject to death threats and what Engel described as 'psychological torture.' But the loyalist plan was to orchestrate an exchange of prisoners with the rebels. Until they ran into a leading Syrian jihadist group.

While Engel and his team were blindfolded and shoved into the back of a truck, the loyalists unwittingly stopped at a checkpoint run by Ahrar al-Sham. As Engel recounted on the Today Show Tuesday, fighters for the jihadist group confronted the loyalists and a firefight broke out, killing two of the loyalists. Ahrar al-Sham let Engel and his producers leave Syria unharmed, and posted the above video of the NBC team to its YouTube channel.

The U.S. is supposed to be in an epic global struggle with Islamic extremism. But the Arab revolutions of the past two years have shuffled the deck. Like with Libya in 2011, the U.S.' sometimes-reluctant call for the ouster of regional dictators has put Washington effectively on the same side as some of the jihadist groups it fears will take power. In Syria, the U.S. is especially wary of the jihadi fighters, many of whom are believed to be veterans of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Securing Engel's freedom is a particularly unexpected turn for Ahrar al-Sham, which the Associated Press describes as 'Islamic fundamentalist brigade home to many foreign jihadis.' A recently revamped rebel command structure excluded the group, along with the al-Qaida-aligned Jabhat al-Nusra, seemingly to secure Western backing. Such groups are given to criticizing the U.S. ' not for intervening in Syria, but for not intervening enough in Syria, and being prissy about the company it keeps.

Ahrar al-Sham might give Westerners pause. But Danger Room pal Matt Fanning, a Fort Worth-based IT consultant who closely tracks Syrian rebel groups, says the jihadist organization is one of the most effective and the most media-savvy of the rebel coalition. Their weapons of choice include roadside bombs and car bombs, tactics that 'clearly came from Iraq,' Fanning says.

Ahrar al-Sham is also one of the most prolific Syrian jihadi groups on YouTube. Ahrar al-Sham takes video cameras along on raids ' to capture giant explosions for upload ' and doesn't mind displaying maps of its operations against Assad's forces. 'Sham also releases probably 3-5 videos a day where Nusra is good for about 1-3 a week,' Fanning says.

But Ahrar al-Sham's ideology is no less extreme. It's issued religious edicts against the ruling Alawite minority and has been criticized for rounding up Shias as hostages. 'I agree with al-Qaida on certain things and disagree on others,' one Ahrar al-Sham fighter, a veteran of al-Qaida in Iraq, told the New York Times in July. His nuanced view of suicide bombing: OK against government troops, not OK against civilians.

As BuzzFeed recounts, NBC worked hard to keep reporters from mentioning Engel's captivity, for fear that publicity might jeopardize his safety. That's no idle concern: the Committee to Protect Journalists says Syria is 'by far the deadliest country' for reporters, with 28 'killed in combat or targeted for murder' in 2012 by the various warring factions. Engel and his team are some of the lucky ones ' and unexpectedly lucky that they ran into one of Syria's leading jihadist organizations.

Why Spree Shooters Commit Suicide

With the Sandy Hook shooter dead, we may never fully understand why he gunned down 26 random strangers at a public school. Even when such killers have survived, their self-explanations have done little to shed new light on acts the rest of us can only grasp as psychotic. Inevitably, we are left with the bare facts of the attacks themselves to frame our understanding.

Such facts may be bare. But they are far from silent.

I recently conducted a study (currently in review) using binary logistic regression statistical tests and data from the 2010 NYPD report of all identity-known active shooter incidents (n=179) in the U.S. between 1966-2010.

Here's what I found: In about half of the 'rampage' incidents (more than two casualties), the shooters killed innocent victims ' and then committed suicide.

Why are some mass shooters more likely to kill themselves? If we go beyond the armchair psychology and diagnostic labels in the coverage of this horrific tragedy, the data from past rampage shootings (see also this paper and this related paper) may partially reveal some motivations.

It's about self-loathing and perceived injustice. And location matters.

Psychologists have long theorized that there's a connection between rage against others and rage against the self.

According to my findings, the shooter's likelihood of committing suicide or suicide by cop appears to be 1.16 times higher (controlling for the attacker's age and sex) for each additional victim that is killed. This suggests that those who have the most rage toward others ' and therefore end up killing the most victims ' would also feel the most guilty and ashamed about their crimes. They are therefore more likely to engage in 'self-punishment' via suicide or suicide by cop. After the initial explosion of rage causes them to open fire, active shooters who see many dead or dying victims around them may feel a correspondingly higher need for self-punishment than shooters with fewer victims.

Besides killing more victims, active shooters who arm themselves with more weapons are possibly fueled by a more powerful sense of 'injustice' and hopelessness than other active shooters. For each additional weapon a rampage shooter brings to the crime scene, his or her likelihood of dying is 1.76 times higher. This would also explain why they're more likely to end up killing themselves.

Criminologist Jack Gibbs's theory of social control suggests that when an individual commits murder, he or she does so because the social system is perceived to have failed in its responsibility to control the behavior of others and thus protect that individual's rights. Unable to rely on broader instruments of social control, the murderer tries to 'correct' past injustices by employing his or her own direct control over others, which manifests itself through violence.

Anecdotal evidence supports the theory's application to many active shooters, who indeed claimed to have attacked in response to past injustices. Perhaps the same offenders who have the least hopeful perception of social control mechanisms ' and thus need to exercise the most direct control themselves ' also feel like they have the least to live for, because society is so terribly unjust. This interpretation would dovetail with previous theories of suicide that suggest that hopelessness is one of the most common reasons why people seek death.

These same concepts help explain why active shooters who attack in open commercial locations are particularly likely to end up dead. Because attack location makes a difference: Shooters who struck at sites such as shopping malls, department stores, and restaurants were 4.19 times more likely to die as a result of their attacks (compared to those in the NYPD's 'other' location category).

The biggest difference between attacking at open commercial sites and attacking at other locations is the nature of one's victims: at open commercial sites, victims tend to be far more random and representative of a cross-section of society.

Gibbs's theory of social control applied here suggests that offenders who attack random victims at open commercial sites are responding to perceived failures of social control at a societal level, and are thus the most universally hopeless about their future. In contrast, offenders who target victims at schools or office buildings would be responding to failures of social control at a much smaller level, and would not be as hopeless about society at large and therefore would have less desire to die.

The guilt, shame, rage, and self-loathing generated by active shooters who kill random victims may be even more overwhelming than the feelings experienced by offenders who kill a subset of victims at a specific location they view as particularly oppressive and corrupt.

Stealth Pilot Training Begins Despite Jet Delays

Yesterday the Air Force officially cleared its pilots to begin formal training on the military's small fleet of early-model F-35A Joint Strike Fighters. The clearance followed a 46-day examination of the new plane's systems at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. 'The team at Eglin went through a rigorous process to lead the way for F-35A training,' said Gen. Edward Rice, the head of Air Education and Training Command.

Prior to Rice's go-ahead, only test pilots had flown the slowly-growing fleet of so-called 'fifth-generation' F-35s stationed at Eglin and at bases in Arizona, California and Maryland. There are three versions of the jet: the Air Force's lightweight F-35A, the Marines' vertical-landing F-35B and the larger, heavier Navy F-35C meant for at-sea carrier ops.

But the green light for training doesn't mean the stealth fighter ' which costs $105 million a copy not counting development ' will be ready for combat anytime soon. Indeed, the Air Force still hasn't officially decided when it will declare its JSFs operable, although 2018 has been mentioned.

The rush to train stealth fighter pilots places the Air Force in the same camp as the Marine Corps, which stood up a combat-designated JSF squadron last month despite the unit possessing a mere three F-35Bs. Of the U.S. military branches slated to get their own versions of the JSF, only the Navy is holding off on forming frontline squadrons or training pilots.

At present the F-35 can't drop bombs or fire missiles. Its custom helmet-mounted sight doesn't work and Lockheed Martin's engineers are still tweaking the jet's design. And as late as this summer the JSF, which has been in development since 2001, still had a 'scrap rate' of 16 percent, meaning roughly one out of every six parts on jets in production had to be removed and reworked or totally thrown out and replaced. That's double the scrap rate for most earlier warplanes at equivalent stages of development, according to the Pentagon.

With ongoing design work and a possible six-year gap between initial training and actual combat readiness, what's the rush?

Officially, the Air Force's plan is to incrementally ramp up its training program, from 36 pilots next year to a peak of hundreds annually. 'We designed the system to start very slowly,' Rice told Aviation Week. The first few dozen fliers trained on the F-35 will become instructors for other instructors and, eventually, for combat pilots, thus carefully laying the foundation for 40 years or more of JSF operations involving a planned fleet of 1,763 Air Force F-35As and potentially tens of thousands of aviators in total.

But Ty Rogoway, an independent aviation analyst and blogger, is skeptical. The F-35 is designed to be easy for beginner pilots, with docile handling and intuitive electronics. Currently, basic training for a new JSF pilot requires a total of 130 hours of instruction spread over six weeks of classroom studies, followed by six weeks of flying.

It shouldn't take six years to build up the JSF training base, and 'training for training's sake is a waste of taxpayer dollars,' Rogoway wrote. (An hour of flying in an F-35 could cost $50,000 or more, according to an estimate by Center for Defense Information analyst and stealth skeptic Winslow Wheeler. Today's F-16s cost less than half that per hour.)

'If the jet's envelope is so restricted and its mission systems are not even operable then we are paying tens of thousands of dollars an hour to have pilots whiz around in these things, for what?' Rogoway asked. 'It seems like a PR stunt to me.'

He may have a point.

The hurry to begin training could reflect worry within the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin over the $396-billion JSF program's worsening reputation and sales prospects. Training flights might look like progress at a time when the F-35, which at a projected $1 trillion over 50 years to buy and operate is history's priciest weapons program, desperately needs good news. Note also Lockheed's recent, dubious claim that the JSF will actually grow more stealthy over time, the opposite of the historical trend for radar-evading jets.

The F-35's development is jointly funded by a consortium of 10 countries, including the U.K., Canada, Italy and Australia. The partners were supposed to buy hundreds of JSFs, helping drive down the per-plane cost. But in recent months several of the developer states have cut back or cancelled their orders for the new jet, citing uncertainties over schedule, price and performance.

Just last week Canada nixed plans to buy 65 F-35s to replace its aged F/A-18s, blaming the cancellation on a threefold cost increase over Lockheed's original estimate. Earlier the U.K. had cut its own F-35 order by two thirds and Italy by a quarter, and Australia had pushed back by several years its planned purchase of at least 70 JSFs. Japan, which selected the F-35 only last year to replace four dozen ancient F-4s, has already threatened to cancel its JSF order if the acquisition bill rises.

So far the wavering foreign support has not affected the Pentagon's F-35 acquisition. This week the Defense Department signed a $3.8-billion contract with Lockheed for the purchase of a fifth batch of new JSFs numbering 32.

But looking ahead, shrinking foreign orders could boost the price of an F-35 and force foreign governments in particular to cut back even more on their purchases of the new jet. That feedback loop of escalating cost and decreasing quantity, called the 'death spiral,' has effectively killed off or severely curtailed many U.S. warplane programs. The death spiral is why the Air Force possesses just 180 or so F-22s instead of hundreds more, and only 20 B-2 bombers rather than six times that number, as originally intended.

'We are moving along; we are hitting all parts of the envelope; we are seeing a high-performing, fifth-generation airplane,' Steve O'Bryan, Lockheed's vice president for F-35 business development, assured reporters this summer.

The facts do not necessarily support such a rosy view. But if the F-35 is going to avoid the death spiral and survive in its current form, O'Bryan's claim needs to at least appear to be true to foreign buyers of the new plane. The Air Force's confident commencement of JSF flight training, six years before any frontline pilots are even needed, could be just the thing to restore confidence in the troubled stealth fighter.

Even if it is technically unnecessary.