Are Afghans Too Depressed to Beat the Taliban?

Afghan forces guard a polling place in Garmsir district, 2009. Photo: Noah Shachtman

Maybe the reason that the Afghan counterinsurgency has been such a flop is that the people there are too traumatized and depressed to make nation-building work.

That's the controversial conclusion of an Air Force colonel who recently spent a year in Afghanistan as the head of a reconstruction team. In an unpublished paper, Col. Erik Goepner, currently serving as a military fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues that the Afghan counterinsurgency was all-but-doomed before U.S. troops ever landed there. The reason, he writes, is 'the high rate of mental disorders' in Afghanistan and other fragile states. Pervasive depression and post-traumatic stress disorder leads to a sense of 'learned helplessness' among the people. And that makes it next-to-impossible to build up the country's economy and government.

Goepner's argument has a gut-level appeal, observers of Afghanistan like Joshua Foust of the American Security Project say. But Goepner relies almost exclusively for his psychological data on a 2009 study-of-studies (.pdf) in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Foust complains. That's not a strong enough foundation to make such broad conclusions about Afghanistan and every other insurgent battlefield.

'It's an interesting but unsupported argument that needs a lot more support and data to be credible,' Foust says.

That JAMA paper finds that conflict-torn countries have average PTSD rates of 30% or higher ' compared to just 5% in the rest of the world. That's a six-fold difference between populations who are under the stress of war and those that are not. The results for depression were largely the same.

'If an American unit had PTSD and depression rates of 30% or higher, it would likely be declared combat ineffective,' Goepner writes. 'When we conduct COIN (counterinsurgency) in weak and failed states, we are supporting a government and security force that is likewise combat, or perhaps more appropriately, mission ineffective. Mentoring and training them to a sufficient level of legitimacy and effectiveness is incredibly difficult, particularly so in the timeframes likely required by domestic political considerations at home.'

The question is how reliable those statistics about trauma and depression really are. The 181 surveys summed up in the JAMA paper largely rely on surveys of the population. That's a legendarily imprecise way of gauging mental health. Moreover, those surveys stretch all the way back to 1980 ' a time when the understanding of PTSD was quite a bit different than it is today. And there's nothing in the paper that explicitly links all this trauma to whether governments under attack fail or succeed.

Afghan officials, however, say the figures match what they see. 'Two out of four Afghans suffer from trauma, depression and anxiety ' they make up some 50 percent of the population,' the director of the health ministry's mental health department told Agence France-Presse in January. 'They are in trauma mainly because of three decades of war, poverty, family disputes and migration issues.'

Goepner first introduced his argument in March at a Brookings Institution panel (full disclosure: I was the moderator). And it was meant not as a broadside against the Afghan mission ' but against all counterinsurgencies, which he believes are 'almost impossible' to successfully wage.

Not only are counterinsurgents faced with the Sisyphean task of motivating a population that's inclined to feel that their contributions will never amount to anything. 'For the insurgents,' Goepner writes, 'the high rates of PTSD and depression provide a benefit ' making the population more susceptible to intimidation and the belief that they themselves are incapable of changing things for the better. While this does not endear the insurgents to the population, it does keep the environment unstable and insecure over time, which is often an insurgent goal.'

What that means for the American military is pretty basic, Goepner argues. Avoid counterinsurgencies unless its an absolute do-or-die situation. And if you launch that kind of war, plan to stay a long, long time. Fragile psyches make for fragile institutions; it takes years, maybe decades, to shore them up.

Only seize and hold terrain where you plan to provide security around-the-clock. 'Touch-and-go U.S. or host nation presence sets the population up for increased insurgent intimidation,' Goepner writes.  'No security or government presence is preferable from the population's perspective to only having some security and presence.'

Finally, make sure you bring a whole gang of psychiatrists to the battlefield. With populations so traumatized by war, you're going to need them.

Missiles Mounted on East London Apartments for Olympic Defense Drill

Former British Minister for Defense and Support, Quentin Davies inspects the Starstreak High Velocity Missile system. Photo: AP/Peter Morrison

An old match factory in East London ' which now houses more than 700 apartments ' could be used as the launch site for anti-aircraft high velocity missiles during the Olympic Games.

Some (not all) of the residents living in the Bow Quarter have received a leaflet from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) stating that the Lexington Building water tower within the development 'proved to be the only suitable site in this area for the high velocity missile system.' The leaflet adds: 'The location has been chosen as it is situated close to the Olympic Park and offers an excellent view of the surrounding area and the entire sky above the Olympic Park. The top of the tower also offers a flat, uncluttered and safe area from which to operate.'

In a bid to allay the fears of residents, the leaflet adds: 'The air defence system will be manned by fully trained, professional soldiers. It will be securely protected and it does not pose any hazard to residents. The system will be used to monitor the airspace and will only be authorised for active use following specific orders from the highest levels of government in response to a confirmed and extreme security threat.'

This week, the MoD is to carry out a national Olympic security exercise, adds the Guardian, and the missile units at the former Bryant & May match factory will be installed and armed with dummy rockets. The newspaper states: 'The Star Streak missiles that are likely to be installed on top of a water tower inside the Bow Quarter complex travel at more than three times the speed of sound, have a range of 5km and use a system of three dart-like projectiles to allow multiple hits on a target. Ten soldiers will be on duty at all times to guard and operate the missiles if needed to bring down a fast-moving jet or helicopter attack.'

However, a spokesman for the MoD added that it is not yet been decided as to whether the missile system is actually going to be deployed. 'No final decision on whether or not to deploy ground-based air defence systems for the Games has been taken', he told the Guardian. They are simply one option in a 'multilayered air security plan for the Olympics', which includes Typhoon fast jets and helicopters. These capabilities will also be tested during this week's exercise. (Here's a complete list of the missile staging sites.)

Writing for the Telegraph, journalist and Bow Quarter resident Neil Midgley was told by Army military liaison officer Lieutenant-Colonel Fahy that even if the military does opt to put the system in place, the decision to fire any missiles would rest with no less than David Cameron. He said: 'The decision on any firing of those missiles sits with the Prime Minister, and a couple of senior ministers. Nobody in the Army has the power to do that.'

Future Army Truck Inspired by the iPhone

The Army's next truck should be smart, flexible, user-friendly, partially autonomous and affordable. In other words, the automotive equivalent of a gadget from Apple. At a trade conference in Virginia on Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Stephen Farmen, the chief of U.S. Army transportation, held up an iPhone. 'How do we put the kind of power and technology like this into a wheeled vehicle and hit the right price point?' Farmen asked, according to a report by National Defense.

The 'i-Tactical Wheeled Vehicle,' as Farmen called it, is still still years away. The Army just finished buying tens of thousands of medium transport trucks and mine-resistant battlefield transports. The branch's new Joint Tactical Light Vehicle, a Humvee replacement, is in the final stages of design. A truck with iPhone-like capabilities designed from the wheels up might have to wait for the next round of truck replacements in 15 years or so. It's possible by then that the Army won't want or need a truck with smartphone-like qualities. After all, the military does tend to get caught up in the tech trend of the moment. Virtual-reality helmets, anyone?

Still, the basic technology development for a smart truck is well under way. Sensors, robotic controls and smartphone interfaces are all being tested out separately. The big challenge will be integrating all these different techs.

The resulting iTruck, as National Defense dubs it, should be optionally manned. In other words, it should be able to go on missions with an Army sergeant behind the wheel, all on its own, or in convoys mixing drivers and robots. The technology for that capability has been in development since at least 2007. That's when a small company called Perceptek fitted several Marine-issue medium trucks with laser sensors, computer algorithms and a big red button, together called Convoy Active Safety Technology. With a press of the button, the truck's computer brain took over from its human driver. Similarly equipped trucks lined up behind the lead truck, droning along behind it like baby ducks following their mama.

Acquired by Lockheed Martin, the CAST trucks have steadily tackled harder and harder road conditions, culminating in the desert test last year. The Army has talked about deploying the robo-trucks to Afghanistan for further testing, but that country's relative lack of roads could squash the plan.

Human operators should be able to command their iTruck convoys using a smartphone, Farmen added. The Army has begun buying Android phones for the infantry. Meanwhile, the Navy (on behalf of the Marines) is developing Android-compatible controls for a robot cargo helicopter in development to replace the current K-MAX robo-copter.

Finally, the smart trucks should be able to beam video, mission data and even their own maintenance problems to other vehicles and to mechanics back in the motor pool. UPS proved that capability as far back as 1990, when it introduced the very first Delivery Information Acquisition Device, or DIAD ' the brown tablet computer that every delivery person carries. The current DIAD V not only records signatures, it plugs into the delivery truck where it gathers, and transmits, data about the truck and its surroundings.

At the very least, the Army's future truck should be as smart as today's highly computerized civilian cars, Farmen said. 'An Audi A8 can drive down the road and make 3,000 decisions in a mile of travel. How many decisions are the next generation of wheeled vehicles going to be able to make?' With the techs listed above, a lot. Assuming the Army can get them all to work together.

U.S. Amasses Stealth-Jet Armada Near Iran

The U.S. Air Force is quietly assembling the world's most powerful air-to-air fighting team at bases near Iran. Stealthy F-22 Raptors on their first front-line deployment have joined a potent mix of active-duty and Air National Guard F-15 Eagles, including some fitted with the latest advanced radars. The Raptor-Eagle team has been honing special tactics for clearing the air of Iranian fighters in the event of war.

The fighters join a growing naval armada that includes Navy carriers, submarines, cruisers and destroyers plus patrol boats and minesweepers enhanced with the latest close-in weaponry.

It's been years since the Air Force has maintained a significant dogfighting presence in the Middle East. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq Boeing-made F-15Cs flew air patrols from Saudi Arabia, but the Iraqi air force put up no resistance and the Eagle squadrons soon departed. For the next nine years Air Force deployments to the Middle East were handled by ground-attack planes such as A-10s, F-16s and twin-seat F-15E Strike Eagles.

The 1980s-vintage F-15Cs, plagued by structural problems, stayed home in the U.S. and Japan. The brand-new F-22s, built by Lockheed Martin, suffered their own mechanical and safety problems. When they ventured from their home bases in Virginia, Alaska and New Mexico, it was only for short training exercises over the Pacific. The F-15Cs and F-22s sat out last year's Libya war.

The Air Force fixed the F-15s and partially patched up the F-22s just in time for the escalating stand-off over Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program. In March the Air Force deployed the Massachusetts Air National Guard's 104th Fighter Wing, flying 20 standard F-15Cs, to an 'undisclosed' air base in Southwest Asia ' probably either Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates or Al Udeid in Qatar. The highly-experienced Massachusetts Guardsmen, who typically have several years more experience than their active-duty counterparts, would be ready 'should Iran test the 104th,' said wing commander Col. Robert Brooks.

Upgraded F-15Cs from the 18th Wing in Japan joined the Guard Eagles. The Japan-based fighters have the latest APG-63(V)2 and (V)3 radars, manufactured by Raytheon. They're electronically-scanned radars that radiate many individual beams from fixed antenna clusters and track more targets, faster, than old-model mechanical radars that must physically swivel back and forth. The 18th Wing is working up a fleet of 54 updated Eagles spread across two squadrons. The video above, shot by an F-15 pilot, depicts some of the wing's training.

F-22s followed this month. 'Multiple' Raptors deployed to Al Dhafra, according to Amy Butler at Aviation Week. Air Force spokesman Capt. Phil Ventura confirmed the deployment. It's not clear where the Raptors came from. If they're from the Alaska-based 3rd Wing, they're the latest Increment 3.1 model with boosted bombing capabilities in addition to the standard air-to-air weaponry. In any event, the Middle East mission represents the first time F-22s are anywhere near a possible combat zone.

The mix of old and upgraded F-15s and ultra-modern F-22s is no accident. When the Pentagon stopped producing the nearly $400-million-a-copy Raptor after 187 units ' half as many as the Air Force said it needed ' the flying branch committed to keeping 250 F-15Cs in service until 2025 at the earliest. Pilots began developing team tactics for the two fighter types.

'We have a woefully tiny F-22 fleet,' said Gen. Mike Hostage, the Air Force's main fighter commander. So the flying branch worked out a system whereby large numbers of F-15s cover for small numbers of Raptors that sneak in around an enemy's flank in full stealth mode. 'Our objective is to fly in front with the F-22s, and have the persistence to stay there while the [F-22s] are conducting their [low-observable] attack,' Maj. Todd Giggy, an Eagle pilot, told Aviation Week.

One thing to look for is the presence in the Middle East of one of the Air Force's handful of bizjets and Global Hawk drones fitted with the Northrop Grumman Battlefield Airborne Communications Node, or Bacon. The F-22, once envisioned as a solitary hunter, was designed without the radio data-links that are standard on F-15s and many other jets. Instead, the Raptor has its own unique link that is incompatible with the Eagle. Bacon helps translate the radio signals so the two jet types can swap information. With a Bacon plane nearby, F-22s and F-15s can silently exchange data ' for example, stealthy Raptors spotting targets for the Eagles.

It's the methods above that the U.S. dogfighting armada would likely use to wipe out the antiquated but determined Iranian air force if the unthinkable occurred and fighting broke out. The warplanes are in place. The pilots are ready. Hopefully they won't be needed.

Former Navy SEAL Powers the Battlefield With Hybrid Generators

Doug Moorehead in the lab.
Photo: Brian Ulrich

Take one Navy SEAL; add an MIT materials- science degree and a Harvard MBA. Result: one ass-kicking entrepreneur. Meet Doug Moorehead, a sharp, athletic guy from Cambridge, Ohio, whose military service took him to Iraq, South America, the Persian Gulf, and the South China Sea. Today, at 37 and retired from the special forces, he's the president of clean-tech startup Earl Energy, where he's using his unique skill set to develop a cheap solar-diesel generator that slashes fuel requirements on the battlefield.

Moorehead got interested in energy efficiency in Iraq. 'I'd see huge generators running all the time yet powering very little,' he says. He also spent countless hours guarding fuel convoys. Carting diesel to remote bases in Iraq and Afghanistan can cost $35 a gallon or more, and one US soldier is killed or injured for every 24 fuel convoys.

To reduce fuel requirements, Moorehead's new generator uses solar panels, but the really big savings come from a battery module. Instead of going constantly, the diesel engine only has to run for short bursts at maximum efficiency to recharge the batteries. 'We take it from running 24 hours down to four or five hours a day,' says Moorehead, who worked for lithium-ion-battery giant A123 Systems before launching Earl Energy.

When the US Marine Corps tested his 18-kilowatt hybrid generator in the Mojave Desert, it cut fuel use by 93 percent. The Corps is now using a pair to power two frontline command centers in Afghanistan. The SEALs recently ordered several units. Fuel savings should pay for the devices in about five months. If trials go well, the US military could soon be using thousands of the generators. Moorehead is also developing a megawatt-scale system for the commercial shipping industry. For companies hesitant to try his tech, the special-ops vet says he has ways of making them reconsider.

 

China, Russia Team Up at Sea

Russian and Chinese flags near Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, China, in 2005. Photo: Flickr/Camphor

Don't freak out. But the Russian and Chinese militaries just joined forces ' at least for a week, for a major exercise at sea. At least two dozen warships from both nations spent the last week conducting anti-piracy and 'joint escort' operations, search and rescue and 'firing hundreds of shells at surface, underwater and air targets,' according to local press reports.

The cooperation between Russia and China's sailors could be a foreboding sign for the U.S. Navy, which is turning its sights to the Pacific. Or it could be a relatively isolated event ' a very temporary alliance between two second-tier powers that still have all sorts of reasons to mistrust one another. And that's if the ships are even capable of holding up over the stress of prolonged exposure at sea.

The exercise, variously named Naval Interaction or Maritime Cooperation 2012, took place in the Yellow Sea near the eastern Chinese coastal city of Qindao. On the Chinese side: two submarines and 16 surface warships, among them destroyers like the DDG-112 Harbin and five frigates like the Chzhoushan and Suyzhow, among auxiliary and support vessels. On the Russian side: the Pacific Fleet flagship cruiser Varyag (not to be confused with a defenseless ex-Russian aircraft carrier that was sold to China and renamed the Shi Lang) along with destroyers Admiral Vinogradov, Marshal Shaposhnikov and the Admiral Tributs.

That's a considerable amount of firepower. But it's peanuts compared to the 2005 'Peace Mission' exercise ' the first time Russia and China ever held a joint military exercise at sea. That one included five times as many ships, plus scary force-projecting amphibious assault operations. This exercise involves more anti-submarine operations, which are notable on their own, particularly for the U.S. Navy. But it's difficult to compare the two.

'To date China has not used its navy the way we think of it,' Jim Holmes, an associate professor of strategy at the Navy War College, tells Danger Room. 'In a sense the U.S. Navy is at sea, and at war, all the time. The only real difference between wartime and peacetime conditions is whether live or exercise rounds come out of the barrel when we fire our weapons during exercises.'

China is different. Sure, they've built a whole slew of new 'ship-killer' missile boats and diesel-powered submarines.  But there's a big difference between building a Navy ' and using it. 'If China wants to be a serious naval power,' Holmes adds, 'it has to take ships to sea, both to test out its shiny new hardware and to let PLA Navy mariners hone their skills and build up some esprit de corps.'

What's undeniable are the short-term and provocative political implications. The exercises also take place with heightened anxiety over a North Korea rocket test ' which dunked into the Yellow Sea earlier this month ' and a possible impending nuclear test. Joint U.S. and South Korean exercises, and the U.S. sending the George Washington into that same Yellow Sea, raised hackles in Beijing. Now these joint operations might be tit-for-tat.

'This exercise is a political message,' e-mails Abe Denmark, with the National Bureau of Asian Research. 'China in recent years has expressed disapproval of [U.S.-South Korean] joint exercises in the Yellow Sea, especially those that involve an aircraft carrier. Chinese officials object to the proximity of American air and naval power to their economic and political centers, and want to make the case (especially to Seoul) that these exercises are uncomfortable when they're just off your shores.'

Of course, these are shores that the U.S. Navy wants to spend more time around. The President and the Pentagon have declared that American forces are pivoting to the Pacific, in part to counter a rising China. That job could get a lot tougher, if Beijing and Moscow start to collaborate more often.

For the moment, though, that doesn't seem to be happening. 'In political terms, I don't see this exercise as a harbinger of things to come in the Western Pacific,' says Holmes. 'It's a lot easier to list things keeping Beijing and Moscow apart than it is to list things tending to unite them in some sort of seagoing entente or alliance.'

' with Robert Beckhusen

New Navy Uniform Could Monitor Sailors' Pee for Signs of Nuclear Attack

One of the U.S. military's many attempts to design a uniform of the future. Photo: RDECOM

The military's uniforms will probably never be runway ready. But in the future, a soldier's threads might very well be quite a bit sharper.

As in, more intelligent. At least if the Office of Naval Research gets its way. On ONR's latest call for research proposals, the organization is asking for uniforms to be capable of measuring soldiers' vital signs, detecting the location and severity of their bullet wounds and even transmitting their location to medical personnel via GPS sensors implanted into clothing fabric.

The initiative, called 'Intelligent Clothing for Rapid Response to Aid Wounded Soldiers,' isn't the first time the military has tried to 'futurize' its uniforms. In 2004, a major Army effort to entirely reboot soldiers' fatigues ' called Future Force Warrior ' tried to revamp uniforms using lightweight body armor, 'e-textiles' (durable cloth interwoven with wires) and gel sensors meant to transmit a soldier's vital signs back to base. That initiative was later scrapped, but the military's dreams of smarter suit-ups continued: The Army, for one, even 'maintained contact with Hollywood and the videogame industry in order to exchange ideas' about cutting-edge uniforms designs. And now, this.

ONR's ideal uniforms would use a bevy of 'integrated sensors built into fabric' to monitor every aspect of a soldier's wellbeing, and then transmit that information to medical personnel. In addition to vital signs and bullet wounds, the fabric sensors should be able to 'detect exposure to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive agents' by tapping into biomarkers found in soldiers' blood, saliva, sweat or urine. And where bullet wounds are concerned, the threads would do much more than merely detect their location. They'd also 'estimate the depth of penetration and the affected surrounding organs.'

Of course, the idea here isn't to replace medical care with material. It's to give medics and surgeons a major head start, by offering initial diagnostics that'll speed up the process. No doubt, that'd be an invaluable aid where soldier survival is concerned: Odds of a military patient living through an injury plummet once a so-called 'golden hour' has elapsed. So the quicker treatment can start, the better the likely outcome.

Developing smarter fabrics isn't an incredibly tall order. In the last five years, commercial ventures have made impressive progress toward lightweight 'functional clothing' that can detect everything from an athlete's vital signs to a diabetic's blood-sugar level. One group out of Europe even created a fabric that can monitor muscle overload to prevent injury.

But creating sensors as sophisticated as what ONR wants is a tougher challenge. And combining so many sensors into a single uniform ' vital signs, bullet detection, GPS ' is another complicating factor. Not to mention integrating these systems into a fabric that can accomodate body armor and be weighted down with tons of gear. And one that's durable enough to withstand the rigors of combat and a variety of weather conditions.

Somebody should probably tell the military's chief clothing designers, over at Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, about all those requirements. Because as recently as this past January, those guys were convinced that the future of fatigues rested in 'developing, testing and evaluating ' wool fabrics.' Sounds ' itchy. And not particularly futuristic.

U.S. Amasses Stealth Jet Armada Near Iran

The U.S. Air Force is quietly assembling the world's most powerful air-to-air fighting team at bases near Iran. Stealthy F-22 Raptors on their first front-line deployment have joined a potent mix of active-duty and Air National Guard F-15 Eagles, including some fitted with the latest advanced radars. The Raptor-Eagle team has been honing special tactics for clearing the air of Iranian fighters in the event of war.

It's been years since the Air Force has maintained a significant dogfighting presence in the Middle East. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq Boeing-made F-15Cs flew air patrols from Saudi Arabia, but the Iraqi air force put up no resistance and the Eagle squadrons soon departed. For the next nine years Air Force deployments to the Middle East were handled by ground-attack planes such as A-10s, F-16s and twin-seat F-15E Strike Eagles.

The 1980s-vintage F-15Cs, plagues by structural problems, stayed home in the U.S. and Japan. The brand-new F-22s, built by Lockheed Martin, suffered their own mechanical and safety problems. When they ventured from their home bases in Virginia, Alaska and New Mexico, it was only for short training exercises over the Pacific. The F-15Cs and F-22s sat out last year's Libya war.

The Air Force fixed the F-15s and partially patched up the F-22s just in time for the escalating stand-off over Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program. In March the Air Force deployed the Massachusetts Air National Guard's 104th Fighter Wing, flying 20 standard F-15Cs, to an 'undisclosed' air base in Southwest Asia ' probably either Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates or Al Udeid in Qatar. The highly-experienced Massachusetts Guardsmen, who typically have several years more experience than their active-duty counterparts, would be ready 'should Iran test the 104th,' said wing commander Col. Robert Brooks.

Upgraded F-15Cs from the 18th Wing in Japan joined the Guard Eagles. The Japan-based fighters have the latest APG-63(V)2 and (V)3 radars, manufactured by Raytheon. They're electronically-scanned radars that radiate many individual beams from fixed antenna clusters and track more targets, faster, than old-model mechanical radars that must physically swivel back and forth. The 18th Wing is working up a fleet of 54 updated Eagles spread across two squadrons. The video above, shot by an F-15 pilot, depicts some of the wing's training.

F-22s followed this month. 'Multiple' Raptors deployed to Al Dhafra, according to Amy Butler at Aviation Week. Air Force spokesman Capt. Phil Ventura confirmed the deployment. It's not clear where the Raptors came from. If they're from the Alaska-based 3rd Wing, they're the latest Increment 3.1 model with boosted bombing capabilities in addition to the standard air-to-air weaponry. In any event, the Middle East mission represents the first time F-22s are anywhere near a possible combat zone.

The mix of old and upgraded F-15s and ultra-modern F-22s is no accident. When the Pentagon stopped producing the nearly $400-million-a-copy Raptor after 187 units ' half as many as the Air Force said it needed ' the flying branch committed to keeping 250 F-15Cs in service until 2025 at the earliest. Pilots began developing team tactics for the two fighter types.

'We have a woefully tiny F-22 fleet,' said Gen. Mike Hostage, the Air Force's main fighter commander. So the flying branch worked out a system whereby large numbers of F-15s cover for small numbers of Raptors that sneak in around an enemy's flank in full stealth mode. 'Our objective is to fly in front with the F-22s, and have the persistence to stay there while the [F-22s] are conducting their [low-observable] attack,' Maj. Todd Giggy, an Eagle pilot, told Aviation Week.

One thing to look for is the presence in the Middle East of one of the Air Force's handful of bizjets and Global Hawk drones fitted with the Northrop Grumman Battlefield Airborne Communications Node, or Bacon. The F-22, once envisioned as a solitary hunter, was designed without the radio data-links that are standard on F-15s and many other jets. Instead, the Raptor has its own unique link that is incompatible with the Eagle. Bacon helps translate the radio signals so the two jet types can swap information. With a Bacon plane nearby, F-22s and F-15s can silently exchange data ' for example, stealthy Raptors spotting targets for the Eagles.

It's the methods above that the U.S. dogfighting armada would likely use to wipe out the antiquated but determined Iranian air force if the unthinkable occurred and fighting broke out. The warplanes are in place. The pilots are ready. Hopefully they won't be needed.

Army's 'Magic Bullet' Will Hang Out in Midair, But Won't Kill You

U.S. and Thai soldiers test out non-lethal cannons at Fort Surasse, Thailand, Feb. 2010. Photo: U.S. Army

This is the recipe for peak absurdity in weapons design. One part bazooka round; one part suicidal drone; one part stun round. What the U.S. Army hopes will emerge from that mix is a warhead that can loiter in midair while it hunts a human target ' but won't kill him when it finds him.

That 'Nonlethal Warhead for Miniature Organic Precision Munitions' is on the Army's wish list for small business. And for good measure, its outline for the weapon relies on a different system, one that's just barely getting off the ground. 'This effort will require innovative research and advancements in non-lethal technologies which can be packaged within a very small volume and weight,' the Army concedes.

This latest nonlethal weapon is a modification of something called the Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System (LMAMS), something the Army explicitly compares to a 'magic bullet.' That warhead 'should be capable to acquire a man-size target at the system's combat range, in less than 20 seconds, flying at an altitude of 100 meter[s] above ground,' according to the Army's new solicitations for small business. 'If conditions for attack are not met, LMAMS will be able to loiter over the target for up to 30 minutes.'

Under this modification, the L in LMAMS would be replaced by something very un-L. 'The user has expressed a strong need for a non-lethal alternative warhead for these munitions,' the Army explains. What it doesn't explain is exactly what kind of non-lethal weapon this should be. (Chances are it won't be a heat ray, since the power generation necessary for one is probably beyond the scope of any warhead.) The Army encourages small businesses to think about 'mechanical, such as rubber balls; acoustic; chemical; electrical; or dazzle.' (Um, chemical weapons?)

One problem: the LMAMS program is in its infancy. The highest-profile example example of one of its weapons is the Switchblade drone by AeroVironment ' a teeny, tiny guided missile soldiers can direct on a laptop toward a target. Elite troops in Afghanistan are expected to get the first Switchblades ' the first weapon of its kind ' sometime later this year.

Give the Army this: the Switchblade does demonstrate that the technology necessary for creating loitering kamikaze weapons is more than theoretical ' as, on a larger scale, does the new-model Tomahawk missile, which can change direction in midair. But non-lethal weapons tend to have more flash than bang. The Air Force gave up on plans for a dazzler gun in 2008, citing practicality concerns, and the design flaws in the millimeter-wave Active Denial System, a.k.a. the 'Pain Ray,' have kept it stuck in development for 15 years.

To help incentivize small businesses to outperform those recent disappointments, the Army lists some of the 'potential commercial applications' for the non-lethal, loitering bazooka round. And they're in your backyard: 'crowd control for local law enforcement; border protection for Homeland Security; or temporary incapacitation of non violent criminals for local SWAT teams and/or law enforcement.' So if this weapon turns out to be too absurd for the military, there's always the local police station.

Congress Wants to Protect East Coast From Missiles Iran Doesn't Have

A 2004 missile defense test. Photo: USAF

House Republicans have come up with a new method of getting revenge on East Coast elites: putting missile interceptors outside their loft apartments.

A key congressional panel is demanding that the Pentagon start work on a missile defense battery on America's East Coast, all to make sure an Iranian missile doesn't wipe out New York, Philly or D.C. in the next three years. But Tehran's longest-range missile can't come anywhere near American shores. And the Defense Department already has a plan in motion to launch missile interceptors from Europe, just in case Iran somehow makes a giant technological leap in the near future.

In its markup of next year's Pentagon budget, the House Armed Services Committee's Strategic Forces panel inserted a provision that 'require[s] the Director, Missile Defense Agency to develop a plan for the deployment of an East Coast site to be operational not later than the end of 2015.' And to encourage the Missile Defense Agency to get started, the subcommittee authorized an extra $100 million ' provided the MDA actually comes up with an East Coast plan.

House Republican aides say the extra interceptors are a must because Iran may be armed with an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, in just three short years. 'By the administration's own estimate, Iran could have an ICBM by 2015. And if they get it by 2015, we've got a defense ready to go,' one aide tells Danger Room.

But predicting Tehran's future weapons development is a notoriously imprecise art. Back in 1998, for example, a panel chaired by Donald Rumsfeld swore that an Iranian ICBM could be ready to fly by 2003. That doomsday forecast didn't pan out, fortunately. Neither did an early-'90s intelligence estimate that the weapon would be online by 2010.

Perhaps that's one of the reasons why the Obama administration ' despite the House aide's words ' has actually been rather hesitant to say exactly when Tehran will pose an intercontinental threat. The last two directors of national intelligence declined to make predictions (.pdf) during congressional testimony about when the Iranian ICBM would materialize. A 2010 report on Iran's military power (.pdf) did say that 'with sufficient foreign assistance Iran could probably develop and test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the United States by 2015.' But there was no such timeline in the Defense Department's Ballistic Missile Review, released the same year.

'Regional actors such as North Korea and Iran continue to develop long-range missiles that will be threatening to the United States,' the review stated. 'There is some uncertainty about when and how this type of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) threat to the U.S. homeland will mature.'

Iran has launched satellites into space on rockets' backs ' and those same kinds of rockets could be used to send warheads hurtling thousands of miles away, with the right modifications. So the potential for a serious threat is most certainly there. At the moment, however, Iran's longest-range missile only flies about 800 miles. 'The bottom line,' veteran CIA Mideast analyst Paul Pillar told Danger Room in February, 'is that the intelligence community does not believe [the Iranians] are anywhere close to having an ICBM.'

What's more, the Pentagon says they've already got the East Coast covered, thanks to the anti-missiles already stationed out west and up north. 'The ground-based interceptors fielded in Alaska and California will provide protection from any future Iranian ICBM capability,' the 2010 Ballistic Missile Review says. A communications terminal, planned for Ft. Drum, New York, will only increase the interceptors' accuracy, Missile Defense Agency chief Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly told Congress last week (.pdf).

And if those anti-missiles aren't enough, there's a third array slowly being phased in across eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. The interceptors ' a combination of sea- and land-based defenders ' are primarily meant to counter Iran's medium-range missiles, since those are the weapons most likely to be in Tehran's arsenal. But in its final stage, slated for 2020 or so, the anti-missile battery is designed to stop ICBMs, too.

Of course, the Pentagon has a habit of over-estimating its missile defense prowess. Despite more than a hundred and fifty billion dollars spent, the reliability of anti-ICBM technology is still very much an open question. The administration years ago promised a 'hedging' strategy that would leave America covered if the new anti-missiles fizzled, or if the Iranians suddenly acquired an ICBM. House Republicans say that plan never appeared. 'We got tired of waiting,' a GOP aide says, 'so we made our own.'

When it comes to missile defense, the two political parties has been on opposing tracks for decades. The subject long ago became a matter of political theology in Washington, with Republicans accusing Democrats of inviting Armageddon and Democrats accusing Republicans of blind faith in Star Wars. Usually, that argument has played itself out in the Alaskan tundra or in the Pacific Ocean. Now the Jersey Shore might have another hair-pulling catfight its hands.

U.S. Drones Can Now Kill Joe Schmoe Militants in Yemen

A Reaper drone returns from a mission in Afghanistan. Photo: USAF

In September, American-born militant Anwar al-Awlaki and his son were killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen. In the seven months since, the al-Qaida affiliate there has only grown in power, influence, and lethality. The American solution? Authorize more drone attacks ' and not just against well-known extremists like Awlaki, but against faceless, nameless low-level terrorists, as well.

A relentless campaign of unmanned airstrikes has significantly weakened al-Qaida's central leadership in Pakistan, American policymakers say. There, militants were chosen for robotic elimination based solely on their intelligence 'signatures' ' their behavior, as captured by wiretaps, overhead surveillance, and local informants. A similar approach might not work in this case, however. 'Every Yemeni is armed,' one unnamed U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal. 'So how can they differentiate between suspected militants and armed Yemenis?'

What's more, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula ' the Yemeni affiliate of the terror collective ' 'is joined at the hip' with an insurgency largely focused on toppling the local government, another official told the Washington Post last week. So there's a very real risk of America being 'perceived as taking sides in a civil war.'

The Yemeni drone campaign ' actually, two separate efforts run by the CIA and the military's Joint Special Operations Command ' will still be more tightly restricted than the Pakistan drone war at its peak. Potential targets need to be seen or heard doing something that indicates that they are plotting against the West, or are high up in the militant hierarchy.

'You don't necessarily need to know the guy's name. You don't have to have a 10-sheet dossier on him. But you have to know the activities this person has been engaged in,' a U.S. official tells the Journal.

Gregory Johnson, a Yemen specialist at Princeton University, believes these 'signature' strikes ' 'or something an awful lot like them' ' have actually been going on for a quite a while in Yemen. There have been 13 attacks in Yemen in 2012, according the Long War Journal. Many of them have hit lower-level militants, not top terror names. This authorization only makes targeting killings legally and bureaucratically kosher.

But the despite the increased pace of strikes ' those 13 attacks are more than there were in all of 2011 ' al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula isn't exactly begging for mercy. In fact, White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan last week called it the terror group's 'most active operational franchise.'

All of which leads Micah Zenko at the Council of Foreign Relations to wonder where this drone campaign is going. 'By any common-sense definition, these vast targeted killings should be characterized as America's Third War since 9/11,' he writes. 'Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan ' where government agencies acted according to articulated strategies, congressional hearings and press conferences provided some oversight, and timelines explicitly stated when the U.S. combat role would end'the Third War is Orwellian in its lack of cogent strategy, transparency, and end date.'

'Since these attacks are covert, the administration will offer no public defense,' he adds. But 'it begs [CIA director David] Petraeus' haunting question at the onset of the Iraq war in 2003: 'Tell me how this ends?'

Nah, Iran Probably Didn't Hack CIA's Stealth Drone

Four months after capturing a crashed U.S. stealth drone near the Iran-Afghanistan border, Tehran claims it has hacked into the 'bot's classified mission-control system. If true, it could mean Iran is making good on its vow to reverse-engineer the stealthy, Lockheed Martin-built RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone and produce homemade copies.

But that's not likely. 'Based on my experience,' Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a former CIA director, told reporters, 'I would seriously question their ability to do what they say they've done.' A Pentagon drone program manager was far more blunt. Speaking to Danger Room on condition of anonymity, the program manager said Iran's claim 'sounds like complete bullshit.'

No one wants to talk on the record about the super-secret Sentinel. The Air Force declined Danger Room's requests for comment. So did Lockheed Martin. But they may not need to say anything. Iran's public comments about the RQ-170 do a pretty good job of debunking themselves.

Iran has a long history of faking major weapons developments. That said, many observers ' myself included ' at first believed Iran was lying about capturing the Sentinel. That, at least, turned out to be true.

Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, aerospace division chief for Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, told an Iranian news agency that his engineers gained access to the Sentinel's encrypted hard drive, according to a weekend report by the Associated Press. 'We recovered part of the data that had been erased,' Hajizadeh said. 'There were many codes and characters. But we deciphered them by the grace of God.'

As proof, Hajizadeh cited what he claimed were records of the time the RQ-170 spent in maintenance in California. He said the Sentinel was in the Golden State on Oct. 16, 2010, for 'technical work' before deploying to Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Nov. 18. There, the drone flew operational missions but ran into problems with its sensors, Hajizadeh said. So the U.S. sent the RQ-170 to Los Angeles in December 2010 for another tune-up.

'If we had not achieved access to software and hardware of this aircraft, we would be unable to get these details,' Hajizadeh said. 'Our experts are fully dominant over sections and programs of this plane.'

Sorry, no. Details of the uber-stealthy RQ-170, which played a supporting role in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, are hard to come by. But the Iranians would have us believe the drone stores its missions like tweets, ready for someone to scroll through. Most autonomous warplanes load their missions during pre-flight preparation, and don't store their records in an onboard hard drive.

'Also,' wonders the Pentagon program manager, 'exactly how would the aircraft 'know' it was 'sent' to California? It can't fly from Afghanistan to Lockheed Martin's Palmdale plant without stopping for gas a few dozen times. If it did go to home in 2010, it was probably in a C-17. My hunch is that the Iranians gathered some information using other sources and claimed it was obtained by hacking the 170's systems.'

On the other hand, if Hajizadeh is correct, and the RQ-170 really does keep all its mission data onboard, then that's a stunning, amateurish security vulnerability. Drones malfunction. Drones crash. If a secret drone that flies over hostile territory actually contains a treasure trove of data for an adversary to recover, that might turn an embarrassment for the U.S. into a scandal.

Are Chinese Bloggers America's Accidental Spies?

On Dec. 22, 2010, someone apparently pointed a cellphone out of the window of a car driving along a public road outside the perimeter of a military airfield in Chengdu, an industrial city in central China. The person holding the phone, whose name has never been revealed, snapped a photo of a black-painted jet fighter taxiing through fog blanketing the airfield.

With that simple act, the photographer appeared to outperform the $80-billion-a-year U.S. spy community, which has the advantage of a plethora of drones, satellites, hackers and old-fashioned human spies. The snapshot was the first hard evidence  of China's very first 'fifth-generation' stealth fighter, the J-20 ' and it seemed to come as a surprise to some Pentagon analysts. 'We have been pretty consistent in underestimating the delivery and initial operational capability of Chinese technology weapons systems,' Vice Adm. David Dorsett said.

In 2009, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had predicted that China would 'have no fifth-generation aircraft by 2020.' Granted, Gates might have meant operational fifth-generation aircraft. All the same, the J-20's appearance years ahead of schedule was a dramatic demonstration of China's rapidly expanding aerospace prowess. And discovering it was also a signature achievement by a relatively unknown group of Chinese internet users whose military-technology fandom is having a profound effect on the most important strategic rivalry of the early 21st century.

The Chinese fanboys, who post rumors, photos and snippets of technical data to a wide range of blogs and forums, are America's de-facto spies in China, hoovering up information on Beijing's latest planes, ships, missiles and ground vehicles and making it widely available to U.S. analysts, journalists, military planners and policymakers. These 'accidental spies' are also the subject of my feature in the new Pacific Standard magazine. (Danger Room's own Spencer Ackerman is also a contributor.)

The Chengdu snapshot's roundabout journey from the photographer's cellphone to computer screens in the United States is typical of the postings from these Chinese forum members. The photog uploaded the J-20 shot to an obscure military forum apparently hosted inside the firewalled Chinese internet. That's where one prominent, U.S.-based Chinese forum member found the photo. This person, whose name I agreed not to mention, uploaded it to Top81, a popular forum that includes an English-language extension that is easily accessible by foreigners.

On Christmas Day 2010, Bill Sweetman, one of the world's leading aviation journalists, noticed the photo at Top81 and, appreciating its significance, linked to it at Ares, the website of Defense Technology International magazine. Sweetman's link spawned countless other links. There were skeptics, at first. But within a few days the J-20 was featured in newspaper headlines all over the Western world. Shortly thereafter Dorsett admitted the Pentagon was behind the curve.

It's not actually certain that the fanboys are better spies than the Pentagon's, CIA's and NSA's professional spooks. It's possible that the Chinese People's Liberation Army controls the trickle of information to the forums, and by extension to Western audiences ' making the fanboys more propagandists than spooks.

Indeed, some forum members admit to belonging to the '50-cent club,' named after the bounty the PLA pays for each reposting of information the military quietly disseminates. Other forum-goers are given access to military facilities or alerted to forthcoming weapons tests at sites that are calculated to be just barely visible to the curious public.

As I explain in Pacific Standard, some forum members are apparently straight-up government mouthpieces or counter-intelligence operatives, willingly repeating government talking points in pursuit of some sinister agenda. Tellingly, the J-20 first flew on Jan. 11 (depicted in the video), during an official visit to China by Gates and other top Pentagon officials. It's likely the J-20's debut was timed to embarrass the American defense secretary.

Equally, the PLA could be using the forums to compensate for its own poorly developed public-affairs apparatus. There's an expectation of official secrecy in China that can be counterproductive to Beijing's own goals. Inasmuch as the PLA has an interest in being respected for its military capabilities, it could rely on the forum members to paint a believable portrait of those capabilities.

In that way, China's accidental spies might also be its accidental diplomats.

Exclusive: Senior U.S. General Orders Top-to-Bottom Review of Military's Islam Training

U.S. soldiers in Iraq attend a technical class, 2009. The U.S. military is now launching a wide-ranging review of its professional instruction to remove anti-Islam material. Photo: DVIDSHUB

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Tuesday ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to ensure it doesn't contain anti-Islamic content, Danger Room has learned. The order came after the Pentagon suspended a course for senior officers that was found to contain derogatory material about Islam.

The extraordinary order by General Martin Dempsey, the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S. armed forces, was prompted by content in a course titled 'Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism' that was presented as an elective at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. The course instructed captains, commanders, lieutenant colonels and colonels from across all four armed services that 'Islam had already declared war on the West,' said Lt. Gen. George Flynn, Dempsey's deputy for training and education.

'It was inflammatory,' Flynn told Danger Room on Tuesday. 'We said, 'Wait a second, that's really not what we're talking about.' That is not how we view this problem or the challenges we have in the world today.'

The strong response by the Pentagon brass illustrates growing sensitivity around the issue since Danger Room's investigation of anti-Islam material in the FBI's counterterrorism training last September. That story sparked strong condemnation of the training material from the U.S. Attorney General on down, and prompted the White House to order a review of U.S. counterterrorism training last October.

Despite that White House order, the 'Perspectives' course, taught since 2004, not only evaded review, but had defenders in the Joint Forces Staff College that taught it.

Danger Room first learned about the course last month, and determined that one of its guest lecturers was Stephen Coughlin, who has taught FBI and U.S. Army audiences that Islamic law is a danger to U.S. national security. We sought comment from a representative for the Joint Forces Staff College, who defended the propriety of the course.

Feedback from students has been 'mostly positive, usually around the 90% range,' Steven Williams, a spokesman for the college, e-mailed Danger Room on Mar. 14. 'Students generally appreciate thought-provoking discussion and the freedom to consider critical perspectives.'

The Pentagon, though, told a very different story Tuesday. Flynn disclosed that since an unspecified 'revision' of the course in the summer of 2011, multiple officers who attended the course had raised internal objections about its presentation of Islam and Muslims. He estimated that about 20 officers attend each eight-week elective course, which is offered four times a year.

Flynn said he heard about the objectionable material on Friday after a colonel enrolled in the course complained about the anti-Islam lessons. 'We looked at it and we found the material to be objectionable and we started digging into it to see, how did the course get this way?' Flynn said.

The course was scheduled to hold its second weekly meeting of the semester on Wednesday. But class will not be in session. Flynn has appointed a two-star general to spend the next 30 days investigating how the course came to include anti-Islam material in apparent contravention of the White House directive.

Accordingly, Dempsey has issued a letter to the chiefs of all four military services and the leaders of the military's regional commands to make extra-sure that their own educational and training materials 'are consistent with our values,' said Brig. Gen. Richard Gross, Dempsey's senior legal adviser.

'Possibly, we did not follow the procedures we should have followed in academically approving the course, but that'll be formally determined when we complete the inquiry into this,' Flynn said.

Last month, Williams, at the Joint Forces Staff College, assured Danger Room that the course followed the White House-approved guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security (.pdf) to prevent anti-Islam material from being taught by the U.S. government. He described the class as including 'the basic tenets of Islam; the context in which it was founded; the life of the Prophet Mohammed; Islam's early development; the practice of Islam in various countries; the foundations and principles of terrorism; the roots of Islamic militancy, and a broad overview of various Islamic radical groups and their philosophies.'

But although the course material is unclassified, Williams would not disclose it to Danger Room. Flynn spoke more candidly about the material on Tuesday.

'We have an elective that did not meet the educational standards or the values of our JPME enterprise, so we're going to suspend the course,' Flynn said Tuesday, using the acronym for joint professional military education. He added that his inquiry will determine whether 'academically, did it go through the academic review process to make this truly an accredited course we should be teaching.'

Flynn's inquiry will examine the chain of command to determine how the inappropriate material got into a course taught to senior military leaders. Flynn said there was as yet no indication that the anti-Islam instructions had disseminated beyond the Joint Forces Staff College, but the various inquiries will have to determine that.

'We'll take whatever action is warranted,' Flynn said.

Army Wants PTSD Clinicians to Stop Screening for Fakers

After a spate of controversies over inaccurate PTSD diagnosis techniques, the Army has released new guidelines meant to prevent doctors from screening for "malingerers," who are faking their symptoms. Photo: U.S. Air Force

In a big reversal, the Army has issued a stern new set of guidelines to doctors tasked with diagnosing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among returning soldiers. Stop spending so much time trying to spot patients who are faking symptoms, the new guidelines instruct. Chances are, they're actually ailing.

The 17-page document has yet to be made public but was described in some detail by the Seattle Times. In it, the Army Surgeon General's Office specifically points out ' and discredits ' a handful of screening tests for PTSD that are widely used by military clinicians to diagnose a condition estimated to afflict at least 200,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

The Army Surgeon General finds great fault with a dense personality test popular with clinicians that ostensibly weeds out 'malingerers,' as PTSD fakers are known.

But the results of what's known as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test are flawed, according to the report. PTSD sufferers often exhibit anxiety, insomnia, flashbacks and depression ' all of which, some doctors believe, can be discounted under the test. The test devotes a large swath of questions to catching apparent exaggerations of symptom severity, seemingly inconsistent answers, or reported symptoms that don't mesh with the typical signs associated with an illness.

'The report rejects the view that a patient's response to hundreds of written test questions can determine if a soldier is faking symptoms,' the Seattle Times summarized. Where PTSD is concerned, that's especially true. The condition is accompanied by symptoms that can differ markedly between patients: Some are hyperactive, others are lethargic; some exhibit frenetic rage while others are simply sullen and depressed.

'And,' the Times continued, '[the report] declares that poor test results 'does not equate to malingering.''

Those tests were the standard of care at Madigan Army Medical Center ' which is a big deal. Located in Tacoma, Washington, Madigan isn't just one of the military's largest medical installations. It's home to a forensic psychiatry team tasked with deciding whether soldiers diagnosed with PTSD were sick enough to qualify for medical retirement. In March, the Army launched an investigation of the Madigan team after Madigan's screening procedures allegedly reversed 300 of the PTSD diagnoses among soldiers being evaluated.

The reversals resulted in some soldiers being diagnosed with 'personality disorders' and others left with no diagnosis at all. Madigan allegedly used the tests to save money by limiting the number of patients who'd qualify for retirement. 'We have to ensure we are not just 'rubber stamping' a soldier with the diagnosis of PTSD,' reads a memo from an unnamed Madigan psychiatrist that leaked last month. 'We have to be good stewards of the tax-payer dollars.'

The Surgeon General's attempts at strengthening its PTSD diagnostic tactics might come as a relief to veterans. But they might also be more than a little too late. Shortly after the scandal at Madigan emerged, subsequent reports of similar shoddy diagnostics at Walter Reed, Fort Carson and Fort Bragg trickled out as well, including more allegations of soldiers being pinned as malingerers by military docs.

'Leading off, trying to say it's isolated, doesn't really pass the common-sense test,' Patrick Bellon, executive director of Veteran's for Common Sense, told Stars and Stripes earlier this month. 'Clearly, something is not right.'

One U.S-Afghan Security Pact, Two Very Different Missions

Mechanics from the 1st Stryker Brigade combat team train to recover vehicles from the Kandahar mud. Photo: DVIDSHUB

The U.S. has finally completed an agreement pledging to protect Afghanistan for another decade, even after the vast majority of troops withdraw. (We hate to say we told you so.) But don't misunderstand. This deal isn't really about Afghanistan at all.

Or, to be more precise, it's about way more than Afghanistan. It's primarily about Pakistan ' and the shadow war that the U.S.-Afghan accord will allow Washington to continue waging there.

Details of the pact have yet to be released. But over the past year, top generals and Pentagon officials have sketched ' in congressional testimony, interviews and forum discussions ' an outline of how the U.S. will operate after the accord takes effect, following the departure of most U.S. troops in 2014. U.S. and Afghan troops will live together on joint bases formally operated by the Afghans. The U.S. mission for training Afghan soldiers and police will continue until 2017 or so, although for financial reasons, the size of those Afghan troops under U.S. mentorship will shrink after 2014. Starting immediately, Afghans will have significant if incomplete influence over U.S. commando raids.

But these mentorship missions will not be the most important ones the U.S. executes in Afghanistan after 2014. They're merely the visible ones. And they're the cost of getting to the missions the U.S. considers most important.

To be blunt: Afghanistan is valuable to the United States because it's the most logical place from which to conduct a war in Pakistan that's primarily fought by armed drones and occasionally special operations forces. It's not really valuable in and of itself. The U.S. interests in Afghanistan, as defined by the Obama administration, are to keep Afghanistan from internal collapse so al-Qaida doesn't return. President Hamid Karzai's government is corrupt? Yawn. Dealing with that is an expensive diversion from the core issue.

The core issue, as the Obama team sees it, is that there's a residual al-Qaida presence next door, in the Pakistani tribal areas. Because Pakistan won't let U.S. troops overtly operate on its territory, the U.S. basically needs to rent some nearby property. Afghanistan doesn't have much to offer the rest of the world ' minerals, maybe? ' but it has a lot of land abutting Pakistan.

Rumors have circulated for months in defense circles that the U.S. wants to retain a few bases that can serve as a staging ground for drone warfare and overhead surveillance of suspected terrorist activity in those Pakistani tribal areas. They include Bagram airfield, a huge aerial hub near Kabul; the airfields at Kandahar in the south and Jalalabad in the east, places where armed drones heading for Pakistan already take off; and perhaps a brigade-sized base called Salerno in Khost Province, just barely west of the Pakistan border and Mazar-e-Sharif, a transit and resupply hub in the north.

To be clear, the U.S. military has not formally confirmed the desire to retain access to any of those bases. That'll be the subject of follow-on negotiations with the Afghans, which will flesh out the accord reached on Sunday. 'We simply aren't there yet in terms of our thinking,' Navy Capt. John Kirby, a top Pentagon spokesman, recently told Danger Room.

None of this is to suggest the residual U.S. troop presence will simply munch down KBR-provided meals and pump iron at the on-base gyms if it looks like Afghanistan implodes after 2014. Its mentorship of Afghan troops, and continued presence, will allow Washington an emergency option should security descend into pure chaos. Additionally, special operations raids to hunt key Taliban and Haqqani Network insurgents or disrupt any al-Qaida supply chains are sure to remain on the U.S. agenda. But Washington wants to use those options as little as possible as it winds down the war and looks toward Asia and the Pacific as the centerpiece of U.S. security.

Notice, however, that all this gives Karzai a lot of leverage. He'll be, in essence, a landlord for the U.S. military. And as long as the U.S. wants to wage its shadow war in Pakistan ' a war it does not seem interested in ending ' he can set his rent as high as he likes. According to the New York Times, he's thinking about an annual rate of $2.7 billion to bankroll the Afghan security forces alone.

If all of this seems convoluted, it's the result of a basic cloudiness that has hovered over the war for its entire 10-year existence. In Afghanistan, the U.S. does not fight the enemy, al-Qaida, that prompted the war in the first place. It concerns itself with the byproducts of that war: al-Qaida's erstwhile Taliban allies; a network of other local insurgent groups; corruption; the cultivation of Afghan security forces; and so on. The 2014 drawdown plan and this new U.S.-Afghan accord that follows it won't resolve this strategic murkiness. Washington merely hopes to recalibrate it, so that its troops focus more on Pakistan than Afghanistan.

But the U.S. has failed to emphasize the shadow war in Pakistan for the entirety of the Afghanistan War. And the longer it stays in Afghanistan, the deeper it gets sucked into addressing Afghanistan's own concerns, which do not necessarily have much to do with U.S. security interests. The U.S. hopes to buck that trend, but there's little evidence to date that it can. And if all this seems like a lingering morass rather than a clean break with a decade of conflict, that's how the U.S. 'ends' its wars in the 21st century.

Leathernext: Marines Want Better Networks, Sensors ' And Terminator Vision

Marines might soon see the world the way the Terminator does. Screencap: Atari via IGN

The Marines of the future are all about communication.

The Leathernecks want data networks that can keep them connected all the way from the decks of their ships to the beaches they storm. They want online search tools that rely on natural language instead of keywords (like the rest of us). And they want software that can sift through the oceans of data their wartime sensors and cameras collect ' including tools that can scan through faces in a crowd, like the Terminator, and alert Marines to danger.

That's according to the Corps' blueprint for its science and technology needs over the next 20 years. Communications are a big, gaping hole for the Marines of the present, and the Marines want to hand their successors more seamless, networked ways of talking. That's on top of other wish-list material, like advanced sensors that can sniff drugs and homemade bombs ' oh, and laser-stopping goggles.

The blueprint (.pdf), first published by Inside Defense, doesn't come out and criticize the Corps' current suite of communications tools and sensors. But there's a yawning technological chasm in-between the present-day Marines and where the Leathernecks want to be in 2025.

From 'flagpole to fighting hole,' the blueprint writes, Marines need to be in constant communication: 'The objective is to provide a holistic, end-to-end, turnkey [command-and-control] capability to execute commander's intent, facilitate implicit communications, visualize battlespace reality, promote initiative, enable centralized command and decentralized control, and ultimately accomplish the mission.'

There's a tyranny of distance here. It's easier for Marines to stay in radio contact while on patrol in Helmand or Anbar province than it is for them to talk to a mothership hundreds of nautical miles away. That's why the Corps is already testing out experimental long-range networks to share text, voice, data and imagery from way, way offshore. That prototyped network, the Distributed Tactical Communications System (DTCS), saw its first major test in February during a huge wargame.

A visualization from the Marines' future-tech blueprint of how its next-gen communications tools should work.

The blueprint doesn't necessarily endorse DTCS ' which works via satellite communications ' just the concept of long-range communications. The Corps must 'develop technologies that allow bandwidth limited sensors to exchange data and information with bandwidth restricted tactical users,' it reads, as well as to 'develop technologies to enable small unit leaders to set their own intelligence requirements (IRs) and receive intelligence feeds.'

In other words: the more networked a Marine unit is, the more autonomous it can be. Especially if it has tools to sift through all the intelligence data it needs to operate.

Drinking from the fire hose of data risks 'overwhelming' Marines who need to rapidly make sense of full-motion video and sensor data. 'The ability to intelligently and precisely filter and
automate processing of much of this data is critical to our capacity to ingest it into our decision-making cycle,' the blueprint reads. Alas, it doesn't come up with any suggestions for how to solve the problem ' by contrast, the far-out Pentagon researchers at Darpa are working on a camera suite that uses an algorithm to determine what's important and what's not ' but the Corps has very specific ideas for what it wants its next-generation sensors to collect.

New 'aerial and terrestrial sensors' should distinguish 'armed and unarmed personnel' ' modified metal detectors, perhaps? ' as well as spot 'Homemade Explosives (HME) and narcotics precursors.' It should crunch data into sizes small enough to port over networks in low-bandwidth environments like chaotic warzones. And the databases that store all this intel should 'provide question answering and semantic search capabilities to warfighters and intelligence analysts.' Siri, does that guy have an AK-47?

But perhaps the most ambitious sensing requirement contained in the blueprint would have the Marines 'seeing' the world much as the Terminator does.

New sensors should identify 'individuals of interest that could pose threats.' Not so far out there, theoretically speaking: The U.S. military takes a trove of biometric data from people in warzones that it uses to classify friend and foe; similar facial-recognition tech has already piqued Facebook's interest.

This is way next-step, though. The system would sit on a Marine's helmet 'and then transmit the data to where it can be assessed in near real time.' It would then use a 'feedback mechanism' to alert Marines to an identified threat. 'The system is needed specifically to identify any person-of-interest within a crowd, approaching a checkpoint, etc. that requires closer inspection but ideally would be sufficiently portable to be used by patrolling dismounted Marines. Threat detection beyond 30 meters is desirable.' Just add an eyepiece ' hey, Darpa's working on one ' and suddenly Marines see things like Arnold.

That may not be so far fetched. Other Marine ideas are more questionable. 'Eye protection ' to include optics ' is needed to counter the emerging threat of multi-spectral battlefield lasers,' the blueprint says. Anti-laser goggles would be quite a thing to behold. But if anyone's investing in battlefield lasers, and specifically dazzlers, it's the U.S. military, not its rivals. Unless the Marines are worried about friendly laser fire.

All this is perhaps more of a wish list than a blueprint. It's going to be a long, long time before most of these technologies make it to prototyping, let alone deploying with a Marine air-ground task force. Still, the Marines couldn't express their future communications needs any clearer.

Military Wants an Arctic Knight Rider

The U.S. military must be suffering massive Knight Rider nostalgia. First it signed a deal to develop an autonomous car to speed through minefields and destroy homemade bombs. Now it's interested in another kind of KITT: this one an all-terrain vehicle for the arctic tundra.

That's the basic idea behind a military proposal that's barely off the ground called, adorably, KODIAK. The military wants a rugged vehicle capable of operating in sub-zero conditions. Driver strictly optional.

Northern Command, the young and relatively obscure military command responsible for the North American continent, wants information on 'existing semi-autonomous ground vehicles and/or modification of commercial all terrain vehicles that can operate as manned (two person) or unmanned mode of transportation,' according to a bulletin it quietly released last week. 'The platform must be commercial to facilitate ease of obtaining parts and repair in austere locations supported primarily by local commercial vendors.'

How austere? Places with 'minimal vegetation,' prone to 'deep snow,' and that can dip to '-50 degrees' Fahrenheit but that can hit the 90s in summertime. (So, Canada?)

The semi-autonomous KODIAK might not be a mere vehicle. Northern Command wants it to carry a sensor payload, though it's unclear what kind of surveillance an ATV is really optimized to collect. It's possible that the sensors are just to guide the autonomy. The Northern Command request for information about the feasibility of KODIAK describes 'threat assessment; persistent stare [and] mobile surveillance' as the benefits of military robots. An ATV is far from an obvious choice for any of that.

But then comes the challenge of tricking out the ATV for an unmanned mode. Theoretically, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. The Army has small, tracked vehicles that it controls remotely, as well as a six-wheeled robotic mule.

It's unclear if Northern Command can get its unlikely KITT into production. (If it can, the bullet says the command wants it fielded within two years.) But if it runs into problems with making the thing autonomous, it might consult with David Bruemmer's 5D Robotics in California. Bruemmer's adaptive vehicular-autonomy sensors, known as a 'Behavior Engine,' helped pioneer military Knight Rider cars. It might be a matter of time before KITT goes off-road into the snow.

USA Today: Online Pentagon Payback Campaign Targeted Us

Photo: USAF

The U.S. military's propaganda activities ' known formally and euphemistically as 'information operations' ' has this week faced serious accusations of targeting Americans, a major infraction. According to USA Today, military personnel (or contractors) apparently took to the web to unleash a vitriolic, and embarrassingly transparent, smear campaign against two of the paper's staff members. Why? Because they published a damning investigation of the military's dubious propaganda campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

USA Today reported on Thursday evening that a reporter and an editor, Tom Vanden Brook and Ray Locker, respectively, had been victims of a web campaign intent on damaging their professional reputations. Though the paper couldn't confirm who was behind the attack, they've got their suspicions: It started shortly after the two staffers kicked off an investigation of the Pentagon's own propaganda contractors.

The campaign included phony websites, dubious Wikipedia entries, Twitter accounts and message forum posts. All of which, according to the paper, have now been taken offline.

The paper's investigation of the Pentagon's info ops was scathing. In February, USA Today published a lengthy report ' co-bylined by Vanden Brook and Locker ' critiquing 'poorly tracked marketing and propaganda campaigns,' orchestrated to win over Afghan and Iraqi citizens throughout the wars in both countries.

'[D]ozens of interviews and a series of internal military reports,' Vanden Brook and Locker summarized, prove 'that Pentagon officials have little proof the programs work and they won't make public where the money goes.'

Around the time Vanden Brook started digging into info ops, he alleges, a fake website was registered to his own name. Two weeks after the USA Today story was published, a separate website was registered under the name of Ray Locker. The sites re-posted previously published works of both, with a bevy of replies from 'commenters' bent on insulting the integrity and quality of Vanden Brook and Locker's reporting.

The websites may have been lame, but the wannabe-reputation-ransackers did at least one thing right. Both sites used a proxy service to hide their creator's identity, which according to USA Today costs a mere $50 to do.

In another instance, someone allegedly created a Wikipedia entry that accused Vanden Brook of 'misreporting' facts during the 2006 Sago Mine disaster. A fake Twitter account was also created in Vanden Brook's name, and then bizarrely defended the integrity of Vanden Brook's reporting in response to other fake Twitter accounts. A handful of message forums and blogs were also dotted with posts that accused the USA Today staffers of being 'in bed with the Taliban,' among other remarkably unconvincing insults.

The military has been quick to deny involvement in any smear campaign. 'We're not aware of any participation in such activities, nor would it be acceptable,' Lt. Col. James Gregory, a Pentagon spokesperson, told the paper.

On the off-chance that the smear campaign was the work of some random troll unconnected to the Pentagon, that would be merely a massively toolish thing to do. But if the amateurish initiative really was the work of Pentagon staffers or contractors, it's a flagrant attack on freedom of the press and possibly illegal, since 'information operations' are never supposed to target Americans.

 

Pentagon Wants Spy Troops Posing as Businessmen

They only look like they're sleeping. Under a new Pentagon proposal, troops could pose as businessmen for spy missions. Photo: Flickr/drbeachvacation

If the Pentagon gets its way, the gentleman doodling on his notepad as your next overseas business trip goes on endlessly could be a soldier, sailor, airman or marine in disguise.

This extraordinary redefinition of the U.S. military's authorities for clandestine action overseas is officially part of a Pentagon wish list for revisions to its legal authorities recently sent to Congress.

'The conflict with al Qaida and its affiliates, and other developments, have required the regular conduct of small-scale clandestine military operations to prepare the battlefield for military operations against terrorists and their sponsors,' the Pentagon explains in a document first reported on by Inside Defense. 'Expansion of this authority is necessary to permit DoD to conduct revenue-generating commercial activities to protect such operations and would provide an important safeguard for U.S. military forces conducting hazardous operations abroad.'

There's another change the proposal would make ' one that seems boring and bureaucratic, but explains a great deal. Authority for overseeing the Defense Department's human spying lies with the Defense Intelligence Agency. The proposal would give it instead to the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, the top aide for intel to the secretary of defense. And that undersecretary, Michael Vickers, is one of the Pentagon's leading advocates of the transformation of special operations forces into elite intelligence operatives. Basically, Vickers would take control of a broad expansion in clandestine military activity.

Notice how the proposal says that using the cover of 'commercial activities' would 'provide an important safeguard for U.S. military forces.' Perhaps it would. But it would also place businessmen in danger. Once civilian commercial activities become a front for U.S. military spying, then foreign governments will likely view normal businessmen as targets for their own counterspying, or even detention.

This is why medical aid workers had such a negative reaction to the CIA's use of a Pakistani doctor to collect DNA in the town where Osama bin Laden was hiding under the cover of a vaccination program. If civilian activities become tied up with military activities, then the civilians who perform them will be seen as military targets, even if they have nothing to do with the military themselves.

'Additional classified background information regarding the Department's conduct of its commercial cover program will be made available to the armed services committees,' the Pentagon promises in the proposal. Perhaps the generals will brief congressional staff in business suits.

Oil Dispute May Yield Africa's Newest War

President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan at a summit for The New Partership for Africa's Development in January 2009. Photo: U.S. Navy

Weeks of fighting over a major disputed oil field along an ill-defined border between Sudan and the world's newest nation, the breakaway Republic of South Sudan, has escalated to the brink of war. Welcome to Africa's newest conflict, something the Obama administration worked hard to prevent.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir ' an indicted war criminal dating to his role in the Darfur genocide ' told troops in the border state of South Kordofan on Thursday that they won't stop with just taking back the disputed oil field, but 'in a final lesson of force' his troops 'shall go all the way to Juba,' South Sudan's capital, according to the Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, Sudan's parliament declared that South Sudan's government 'must be fought until it is defeated.'

Suffice to say, the situation is chaotic. Recent weeks saw South Sudanese troops occupy the oil field, called the Heglig, which both sides say is part of their territory (more on this later). Following the occupation, reports began appearing of air and ground attacks continuing into Thursday by Sudan's military against South Sudanese troops entrenched around the oil facilities. According to the latest reports, the South beat back four attacks this week by Sudanese troops along the border. Philip Aguer, military spokesperson for South Sudan, said the army was 'still in its positions.'

It's an open question whether Bashir is serious about taking the war all the way to South Sudan's capital. 'The Republic of South Sudan is not in the state of war, nor is it interested in war with Sudan,' Barnaba Marial Benjamin, South Sudan's Minister of Information, said. That might be a moot point. Benjamin added that Sudan's declaration of his government as an enemy 'amounts to a declaration of war.'

South Sudan officially became independent last July. But fighting in the region goes back decades, with two civil wars and more than two million deaths claimed by the conflict. Since the South's independence, the dispute over oil has come to the forefront.

The two governments have accused each other of supporting rival rebel groups, and have traded economic barbs: South Sudan stopped oil production completely in January, starving Sudan of much needed revenue. (The South uses Sudan's pipelines for export). Sudan has also been accused by the South of seizing oil shipments. And in case anyone is wondering why Sudan wants the disputed Heglig oil field back ' its crude comprised roughly half of Sudan's oil revenue. Altogether, Sudan lost about two-thirds of its oil output with the South's independence.

'Given the brutally indiscriminate ways in which Khartoum has previously chosen to wage war on the people of the South ' as well as of Darfur, Blue Nile, and South Kordofan ' we should expect huge civilian casualties, massive human displacement, and intolerable assaults on civilians in the North who are 'ethnically Southern,'' blogged Eric Reeves, a Sudan analyst at Smith College.

Both sides have been beefing up for a confrontation for years, anticipating the South's independence. Sudan purchased around a dozen MiG-29 fighter aircraft in 2009. South Sudan reportedly received tanks and artillery from Ukraine. In 2008, our own State Department awarded a contract to a U.S. security firm to train and advise the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), the rebel group turned national army of South Sudan ' and now occupying the Heglig. In January, the Obama administration sent five military officers to join the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, or UNMISS, and issued a memorandum 'giving the U.S. the ability to send weapons and defense assistance to South Sudan,' according to the Associated Press.

Indeed, the Obama administration emerged as one of South Sudan's strongest backers. In the administration's 2013 budget, South Sudan emerged as a recipient of $250 million for relieving the country's debt. Millions in potential funds were also to be directed toward boosting agriculture, schools and the country's legislature. The administration also cleared U.S. companies to invest in the country's oil industry.

But as war seemed likely, the administration moved to try and prevent it. According to a White House statement dated April 2, President Obama spoke with South Sudanese President Salva Kiir Mayardit to 'ensure that South Sudan's military exercises maximum restraint,' and to not engage in any fighting along the border. Eight days later, on April 10, South Sudan occupied the Heglig oil field ' prefiguring, it seems, Africa's newest war.

Darpa to Troubled Soldiers: Meet Your New Simulated Therapist

The Pentagon hasn't made much progress in solving the PTSD crisis plaguing this generation of soldiers. Now it's adding new staff members to the therapy teams tasked with spotting the signs of emotional pain and providing therapy to the beleaguered. Only this isn't a typical hiring boost. The new therapists, Danger Room has learned, will be computer-generated 'virtual humans' programmed to appear empathetic.

It's the latest in a long series of efforts to assuage soaring rates of depression, anxiety and PTSD that afflict today's troops. Military brass have become increasingly willing to try just about anything, from yoga and reiki to memory-adjustment pills, that holds an iota of promise. They've even funded computerized therapy before: In 2010, for example, the military launched an effort to create an online health portal that'd include video chats with therapists.

But this project, funded by Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, is way more ambitious. Darpa's research teams are hoping to combine 3-D rendered simulated therapists ' think Sims characters mixed with ELIZA ' with sensitive analysis software that can actually detect psychological symptoms 'by analyzing facial expressions, body gestures and speech,' Dr. Albert Rizzo, who is leading the project alongside Dr. Louis-Philippe Morency, tells Danger Room.

For now, the system, called SIM Sensei, is being designed for use at military medical clinics. A soldier could walk into the clinic, enter a private kiosk, and log on to a computer where his or her personal simulated therapist ' yes, you can pick from an array of different animated docs ' would be waiting. Using Kinect-like hardware for motion sensing, a microphone and a webcam, the computer's software would take note of how a patient moved and how they spoke. The video above offers a demonstration of what a SIM Sensei would look like, and how they'd interact with a patient.

SIM Sensei won't replace human clinicians. Instead, it'll supplement them, and help military clinics prioritize which patients need care most acutely, and which can wait to see a flesh-and-blood doctor. If a soldier talking to the SIM exhibits minor symptoms, the Sensei might help him or her schedule an appointment to see a human therapist in two weeks' time. But if the Sensei detects 'red flags' in an individual's behavior ' vocal patterns that signal depression, for example ' the SIM could schedule that patient to see a doctor immediately.

'Let's say you have a more serious case, where it becomes evident to the Sensei that a patient is exhibiting major depression or might be a suicide risk,' Dr. Rizzo tells Danger Room. 'The computer could immediately call for a human doctor to come take over.'

The initiative is a collaborative effort between the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and Cogito Health, a spin-off company developed by MIT researchers. It's also the next phase of an ongoing Pentagon-funded project, called SIM Coach, that's designed for soldiers to use within the privacy of their own homes but doesn't incorporate any analysis of a soldier's body language or vocal tone.

ICT has deep experience with virtual therapy. Under Rizzo's leadership, the institute was the first to develop immersive programs that allowed patients afflicted with PTSD to revisit combat scenarios. The programs have been widely lauded, and are now used by more than 60 military medical clinics across the country.

Cogito's role, on the other hand, raises something of a red flag. The company was developed out of the lab of MIT scientist Alex Pentland. He's the number-cruncher whose 'reality mining' spurred Darpa to throw millions into a dubious program to mine social data and then yield conclusions about U.S. progress in Afghanistan, known as Nexus 7. The initiative, as Danger Room reported exclusively last year, has been something of a disaster.

Cogito is also grounded in data mining. But the company's aim is to evaluate a single person's well-being, rather than an entire community's. The company will incorporate its bespoke software suite, called 'Honest Signals,' into the new Darpa program. It 'assesses cues in an individual's natural speech and social behavior' to spot potential mental health problems, according to a statement that Cogito e-mailed to Danger Room. The company declined to offer studies on the efficacy of 'Honest Signals,' but did point to a book ' co-written by Pentland ' on that very subject.

Rizzo acknowledges that pulling accurate data out of an individual's face, voice and other such metrics remains a challenge. 'We've got some heavy lifting ahead of us,' he says. But he's also extremely confident that Pentland and Cogito are well equipped with data that can turn SIM Sensei into a success. 'These guys are bright as hell,' he says. 'They're pioneers in the field, and they've got an amazing capacity to detect the smallest problems that pop up in someone's behavior.'

That said, the SIM Sensei idea is also bogged down by another downside. Computer-based therapy, in comparison to face-to-face treatment, is inevitably impersonal.

Studies on the efficacy of telemedicine (therapy via video chat with a human therapist), where PTSD or depression are concerned, have been mixed. But in an interview with PBS published last year, Stars and Stripes reporter Megan McCloskey summed up the shortcomings of such therapy for mental health conditions. 'Many of those who need more intensive counseling ' don't like the impersonal nature of talking to a TV screen,' she says. 'For some, telemedicine doesn't meet their needs and adds to their sense of isolation.'

Cyber therapy would be even more vicarious. Soldiers will talk to a videogame character, rather than a real person, through their computer screen.

But a robust virtual option would give soldiers, many of whom still shy away from face-to-face mental health treatment, the option to seek solace in a more anonymous alternative. Eventually, Rizzo and his colleagues hope to see SIM Sensei available for soldiers within the comforts of their own home, rather than a military clinic.

'A lot of people still don't want to stop by the clinic and meet with a real person,' he says. 'Technology is ripe for us to leverage. I'm extremely confident that we can use it, leverage it, to help people who otherwise wouldn't get better.'

U.S. Troops Take Pics With Afghan Corpses. Again.

An Army aviator flies over Logar Province, Afghanistan, at sunset. Photo: U.S. Army

In yet another unforced error by U.S. troops this year jeopardizing the Afghanistan war, photographs published by the Los Angeles Times show soldiers posing and grinning with the remains of an Afghan insurgent. Yes, again.

A soldier with the 4th Combat Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division provided the paper with grisly photographs of soldiers from his own unit, in what the Times described as an attempt to blow the whistle on a breakdown of command discipline.

The photographs are not new; they're from 2010. Two years after the pictures were taken ' and only because they were published by the L.A. Times ' the Army is only now investigating the incident.

The military was quick to condemn the actions shown in the photos. 'This behavior and these images are entirely inconsistent with the values of ISAF and all service members of the 50 ISAF countries serving in Afghanistan,' said the war's commander, Gen. John Allen, using the acronym for the NATO mission he leads. 'Anyone found responsible for this inhuman conduct will be held accountable in accordance with our military justice system,' added George Little, the chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

There's a reason for their alacrity. Every month this year has seen another unforced error by U.S. troops in Afghanistan that jeopardizes the entire decade-long war. In March, it was the brutal massacre of Afghan civilians, mostly women and children, allegedly by an Army staff sergeant. In February, it was the burning of Korans at a detention center near Kabul, which set off nationwide riots. In January, it was more old imagery taken by U.S. troops as they disrespected Afghan corpses ' this time, Marines urinating on dead Taliban. Peppered throughout have been battlefield setbacks for the U.S., like the executions of U.S. troops inside Afghanistan's ministry of interior and Sunday's multicity, 18-hour Taliban assault.

But the military didn't just criticize the troops who photographed themselves with pieces of a Taliban suicide bomber. 'The secretary is also disappointed that despite our request not to publish these photographs, the Los Angeles Times went ahead,' Little said in a statement. (We're not publishing the photos because we don't own the rights to them.)

Unaddressed in Little's statement is the issue of command climate that the Times said motivated the soldier to provide the photographs in the first place. Around the time those photos were taken, a handful of disturbing incidents surrounded the brigade. A battalion leader and senior enlisted officer were stripped of their commands after creating racist and sexist PowerPoint presentations. And the wife of the brigade commander had to be barred from family morale activities on the brigade's home base of Fort Bragg after an inquiry found she had harassed soldiers' spouses.

The cumulative effect of all of these recent scandals has been to drain U.S. public support for the war, despite military spin that it's going well. A majority of typically hawkish Republican voters now say the war isn't worth fighting. That verdict isn't the result of big Taliban battlefield advances (although its decade-long resilience against a vastly more powerful adversary probably counts as such). It's partially the result of mistakes the U.S. inflicted on itself.