Insider Attacks Now Biggest Killer of NATO Troops

Rogue Afghan soldiers and police turning their weapons on their allies are now the leading cause of death for NATO troops. On Aug. 28 a man wearing an Afghan army uniform opened fire on Australian soldiers in the southern province of Uruzgan, killing three and wounding two.

That attack brought to 15 the total number of NATO personnel killed in so-called 'green-on-blue' assaults in August ' and raises serious doubts about the alliance's war strategy, which calls for close cooperation between foreign and Afghan troops as the Afghans gradually assume responsibility for their own security.

Of the other 35 international troops who died in Afghanistan this month, 12 were killed by Improvised Explosive Devices and nine died in helicopter crashes. Insurgent gunfire and a suicide bomber accounted for the remaining fatalities.

Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force, told Danger Room he didn't know why the Afghan troops turned their weapons on their foreign allies. He implied the 'sacrifices associated with fasting' during the the Muslim holy month of Ramadan might have played a role ' then quickly qualified the remark, saying Ramadan wasn't exclusively the problem. In any event, 'there is an erosion of trust that has emerged from this,' Allen said in a separate interview.

For its part, the Afghan government blames 'infiltration by foreign spy agencies.' Allen said he looked forward to seeing proof of this assertion. Along with the green-on-blue attacks, there has also been a spike in Afghan troops killing other Afghan troops. 'They're suffering casualties from the same trend that we're suffering' from, said Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

'Were the attacks the result of some kind of Taliban infiltration, the problem would thus be one of counter-intelligence,' explained Andrew Exum, an expert on low-intensity warfare. 'The alternative ' that relations between Afghan forces and their Western partners have structurally deteriorated in fundamental ways ' is a far tougher problem to address.'

During Danger Room's January visit to remote Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan, the rising tension between U.S. and Afghan forces was evident. When an Afghan police recruit began behaving erratically and overstepping his authority, his American trainers took no chances. They fired him ' but only after carefully disarming him.

The reasons for the insider attacks are unclear. But the trend of more and more such assaults is inarguable. Before August, green-on-blue attacks accounted for just 12 percent of NATO troops killed. In 2011 they amounted to just six percent ' up from three percent in 2010. Foreign soldiers wounded in green-on-blue incidents have also increased steadily in the past three years.

August's insider killings occurred in 18 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces but are concentrated in the southern and eastern battlegrounds, according to an analysis by Long War Journal. The three southern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar and Uruzgan account for the majority of green-on-blue attacks.

In the face of the rapidly-escalating insider threat, Allen, who is due to be replaced soon as ISAF's top general, has not signaled any change in NATO's strategy. Foreign troops will continue working closely with the Afghan soldiers who now represent statistically the biggest danger to their lives.

In fact, NATO troops should work more closely with Afghan, Exum advised. 'I urge U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan to remember that the only people who can truly protect them from green-on-blue violence are the Afghans themselves.'

The international alliance is scrambling to mitigate the threat. It's now policy for at least one NATO soldier ' a 'guardian angel' ' to watch over any gathering of Afghan and alliance troops, weapon loaded, 'and hopefully identify people that would be involved in those attacks,' Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said.

But Panetta himself said spotting attackers before they pull the trigger could prove difficult. 'It's clear that there's no one source that is producing these attacks.'

SEALs' Cover Story if Bin Laden Raid Went Bad: Downed Drone

Before SEAL Team 6 was sent into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden, the troops were given a cover story, in case the mission went south. They were supposed to say that they were deep in Pakistani territory, hunting for a lost drone.

It's one of many fascinating details in No Easy Day, Navy SEAL Matt Bissonette's firsthand account of the bin Laden raid.

'We all laughed,' Bissonette writes about the explanation. 'The story was preposterous. We were allies with Pakistan on paper, so if we did lose a drone, the State Department would negotiate directly with the Pakistani government to get it back. The story didn't wash and would be very difficult to stick to during hours of questioning'. The truth is, if we got to that point, no story we could come up with was going to cover up twenty-two SEALs packing sixty pounds of hi-tech gear on their backs.'

The night before the raid, some of the SEALs took Ambien, because they couldn't sleep. They batted away CIA suggestions to take an extra sixty-pound box of cellphone-jamming equipment. Bissonette took along $200 in cash, 'if I needed to buy a ride or bribe someone,' and a digital camera, which he later used to shoot photographs of bin Laden's dead body and bloody face.

On the mission, Bissonette wore $65,000 four-tube night-vision goggles like these, to help him see more clearly and more widely in the night. He dozed on the ride to Abbottabad, then dangled his legs outside the stealth helicopter. When that chopper crashed, his fellow SEAL yanked in Bissonette just before the impact nearly crippled him. It all happened so quickly, neither the SEALs in the accompanying copter nor the administration officials watching the scene from the White House situation room realized the landing was anything but routine.

To confirm that the tall man on the third floor of the Abbottabad compound was really bin Laden, the SEALs took samples of bin Laden's blood, saliva and bone marrow. Then they dragged the body onto a CH-47 Chinook helicopter. The aircraft had loitered above the compound for so long while the SEALs were gathering up bin Laden's hard drives, it almost ran out of gas.

Despite the miscues, the raid was a success, of course. In part, that's because it was so well rehearsed. Some of the most interesting moments of No Easy Day, written by Bissonette under a pseudonym and co-authored by the journalist Kevin Maurer, show just how well the American intelligence community had bin Laden's compound under watch.  CIA analysts watched months of drone video of the man they believed to be bin Laden. They even briefed the SEALs on what kind of digital voice recorder bin Laden liked to use.

In the full-scale model of the compound in the North Carolina woods, 'construction crews put in mounded dirt to simulate the potato fields that surrounded the compound.' An analyst from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency knew every detail of bin Laden's hideout.

'Hey, are these doors on C1 inward or outward opening,' Bissonette asked her.

'Double metal doors,' she answered. 'Opens outward.'

Before they left for Pakistan, the SEALs performed a mock raid on the compound, with the top brass of the special operations and intelligence communities watching through night vision goggles. After that, the SEALs' mission was greenlit.

'Try not to shoot the motherfucker in the face,' one SEAL said, referring to bin Laden. 'Everybody is going to want to see this picture.'

Ultimately, the White House decided not to disclose those photographs taken by Bissonette. They got his story of the raid instead.

 

How the U.S. Fights the Zeta Cartel, From Spies to Sanctions

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The violence in the Mexican border state of Nuevo Leon began Tuesday morning and continued into Wednesday. By the end, 30 bodies had turned up around the state with bullet wounds or had been dismembered. The cause was attributed to a seemingly never-ending war between the Zeta drug cartel and their rivals. And that may only be a prelude. Miguel Angel Treviño, or "Z-40," has seized the leadership of the cartel from longtime chief Heriberto Lazcano, according to the Associated Press, which describes the new boss as a "brutal assassin" who favors cooking his enemies inside burning oil drums.

For those unnerving reasons, the Zetas have come to define the violence of the drug war, and have lead the U.S. and Mexican governments scrambling to fight them. Arguably Mexico's most powerful drug cartel, the Zetas are now estimated to operate in half of the country, if not more, and have expanded into Guatemala. Aside from unleashing violence, extortion and kidnapping across much of their territory, the Zetas are responsible for the February 2011 death of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon deployed 200 Marines to Guatemala in a sign the U.S. is getting more direct in going after the Zetas. The Pentagon stresses that the Marines will play a secondary role to the Guatemalans and are limited to merely tracking drug traffickers. But still, that's a lot of Marines now operating in territory shared by the cartel. The U.S. also considers the operation to be only one part of a much larger strategy. Here are five aspects of that war.

Photo: Army

Body Scans Junked? DHS, Darpa Look for New Airport Sensors

Two years ago, the Department of Homeland Security stepped up its campaign to install controversial body scanners at airports nationwide. At the time, the agency claimed the machines could spot all sorts of hidden weapons and contraband. Today, more than 700 of the imagers are in place at 180 airports. But the so-called 'naked' scanners may not be quite as all-seeing as they were originally billed to be. Quietly, DHS has called in the Pentagon's premier research agency to help develop a new generation of imagers that are faster, smaller, more precise, and less prone to hacking.

It's a bit of a shift for Darpa, which is usually asked to tackle the military's toughest research problems: machines that can think, satellites that can assemble themselves in space, networks that can't be pwned. And it underlies just how difficult it can be to quickly screen millions and millions of people for a few concealed threats.

In an announcement published Monday, the DHS and Darpa indicated that the research for improved body scanners will focus on two main features. The first is defined as 'real-time utilization of compressive measurement techniques.' Its benefits will be faster acquisition of images with fewer samples, scanners equipped with less hardware and, most importantly, more precise and reliable detection with 'reduced probability of false alarm.'

'The research seeks to identify novel signatures distinct from those typically employed in conventional X-ray tomography systems and multi-view dual energy projection scans,' the agencies explain.

The second focus will be on secure memory chips. These will have to be 'hack-proof' chips with 'high-levels of functionality ' for low-cost, reduced power consumption and increased reliability.' The DSH and Darpa want high-speed chips, with random access times 'on the order of 10 ns [nanoseconds].' They should also have 'extremely high-endurance,' which would allow for 'near unlimited wear for write, read, and erase cycles.' To be really un-hackable, they should be resistant to off-line security attacks as well. Stored data shouldn't be readable with powerful devices like electron or atomic force microscopes.

Despite controversies around their intrusiveness, current naked body scanners were widely adopted in 2010 after a terrorist failed to detonate his 'underwear bomb' on a plane headed to Detroit. Since then, claims about the scanners' capabilities have, at times, been overblown by privacy activists and by the media. The ACLU stated at the time that scanners produce 'strikingly graphic images of passengers' bodies, essentially taking a naked picture.' DHS and the Transportation Security Agency has let the talk go on, conscious that scary capabilities ' however untrue ' work as a good deterrent.

When they were rolled out, full body scanners have been criticized for violating traveler's privacy. Backscatter X-ray scanners, one of the two types used by the TSA, basically allowed officers to see under somebody's clothes. For privacy advocates like the ACLU, that was just like a 'virtual strip search,' which would be prohibited when there's no probable cause. Some of these concerns have been alleviated with the adoption of new software that displays passengers as generic stick figures.

There have been health concerns, as well. For some, the use of X-rays could have dangerous consequences. Radiation safety authorities, however, have stated that there's no evidence that supports the notion that full X-ray body scanners could have health risks. Not only that, according to the American College of Radiology, 'an airline passenger flying cross-country is exposed to more radiation from the flight than from screening by one of these devices.'

On Sept. 18, DHS and Darpa will hold at meeting with researchers in Arlington, Virginia, about a next generation of scanners. A strategy to enhance the detection of explosives in both checked baggage and checkpoint screening will be presented, as will Darpa's Knowledge Enhanced Compressive Measurement program, whose goal is to develop systems that gather high-quality information without high-quality instruments. Darpa thinks it could revolutionize traditional sensor systems.

Of course, it's way too early to tell whether another generation of airport scanners will really make flying any safer. But it's worth noting that the TSA is trying to inch away from mass-screening, and toward an approach that concentrates only on the most likely terror suspects. So far, these results have been mixed, at best; a pilot project at Logan Airport resulted in TSA employees harassing black and Latino travelers. Perhaps by the time these new scanners come online, the TSA's so-called 'intelligence-driven' approach will be a little smarter.

Apple Rejects App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes

It seemed like a simple enough idea for an iPhone app: Send users a pop-up notice whenever a flying robots kills someone in one of America's many undeclared wars. But Apple keeps blocking the Drones+ program from its App Store ' and therefore, from iPhones everywhere. The Cupertino company says the content is 'objectionable and crude,' according to Apple's latest rejection letter.

It's the third time in a month that Apple has turned Drones+ away, says Josh Begley, the program's New York-based developer. The company's reasons for keeping the program out of the App Store keep shifting. First, Apple called the bare-bones application that aggregates news of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia 'not useful.' Then there was an issue with hiding a corporate logo. And now, there's this crude content problem.

Begley is confused. Drones+ doesn't present grisly images of corpses left in the aftermath of the strikes. It just tells users when a strike has occurred, going off a publicly available database of strikes compiled by the U.K.'s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which compiles media accounts of the strikes.

iOS developers have a strict set of guidelines that must be adhered to in order to gain acceptance into the App Store. Apps are judged on technical, content and design criteria. As Apple does not comment on the app reviews process, it can be difficult to ascertain exactly why an app got rejected. But Apple's team of reviewers is small, sifts through up to 10,000 apps a week, and necessarily errs on the side of caution when it comes to potentially questionable apps.

Apple's original objections to Drones+ regarded the functionality Begley's app, not its content. Now he's wondering if it's worth redesigning and submitting it a fourth time.

'If the content is found to be objectionable, and it's literally just an aggregation of news, I don't know how to change that,' Begley says.

Begley's app is unlikely to be the next Angry Birds or Draw Something. It's deliberately threadbare. When a drone strike occurs, Drones+ catalogs it, and presents a map of the area where the strike took place, marked by a pushpin. You can click through to media reports of a given strike that the Bureau of Investigative Reporting compiles, as well as some basic facts about whom the media thinks the strike targeted. As the demo video above shows, that's about it.

It works best, Begley thinks, when users enable push notifications for Drones+. 'I wanted to play with this idea of push notifications and push button technology ' essentially asking a question about what we choose to get notified about in real time,' he says. 'I thought reaching into the pockets of U.S. smartphone users and annoying them into drone-consciousness could be an interesting way to surface the conversation a bit more.'

But that conversation may not end up occurring. Begley, a student at Clay Shirky's lab at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, submitted a threadbare version of Drones+ to Apple in July. About two weeks later, on July 23, Apple told him was just too blah. 'The features and/or content of your app were not useful or entertaining enough,' read an e-mail from Apple Begley shared with Wired, 'or your app did not appeal to a broad enough audience.'

Finally, on Aug. 27, Apple gave him yet another thumbs down. But this time the company's reasons were different from the fairly clear-cut functionality concerns it previously cited. 'We found that your app contains content that many audiences would find objectionable, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines,' the company e-mailed him.

It was the first time the App Store told him that his content was the real problem, even though the content hadn't changed much from Begley's initial July submission. It's a curious choice: The App Store carries remote-control apps for a drone quadricopter, although not one actually being used in a war zone. And of course, the App Store houses innumerable applications for news publications and aggregators that deliver much of the same content provided by Begley's app.

Wired reached out to Apple on the perplexing rejection of the app, but Apple was unable to comment.

Begley is about at his wits end over the iOS version of Drones+. 'I'm kind of back at the drawing board about what exactly I'm supposed to do,' Begley said. The basic idea was to see if he could get App Store denizens a bit more interested in the U.S.' secretive, robotic wars, with information on those wars popping up on their phones the same way an Instagram comment or retweet might. Instead, Begley's thinking about whether he'd have a better shot making the same point in the Android Market.

Army Doubles Down on 'Garbled, Ineffective' Next-Gen Radios

In key moments during the U.S. Army's latest war game for advanced communications gear, the troops' high-tech new radios failed them.

The setting was the semi-annual Network Integration Exercise in New Mexico in May and June. The radio in question: the General Dynamics Manpack, a backpack-portable version of the Pentagon's ambitious Joint Tactical Radio System. Voice traffic from the Manpacks was 'garbled' and 'unintelligible,' according to Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester. In a memo dated July 20, Gilmore declared the Manpack 'not operationally effective.' In other words, it didn't work in mock combat ' and it probably won't work in real combat, either.

But the scathing review hasn't stopped the Army from doubling down on the meager remnants of the once-mighty JTRS initiative, which aimed to equip the entire U.S. military with hundreds of thousands of cheap, high-tech radios whose smart processors would switch waveforms in an instant, making them the radio equivalent of Star Trek's universal translator. Just over a week ago the Army dropped $54 million on 13,000 copies of General Dynamics' similar Rifleman radio, banking on engineers to work out any bugs like those identified in the Manpack in New Mexico.

Congressional appropriators, however, are skeptical ' and it's their objections that could lead to the Manpack's demise. That would be only the latest blow to the $17 billion JTRS program, which has seen its various components steadily stripped away over the past several years owing to technical flaws, shrinking it from a Pentagon-wide communications makeover to a modest effort confined mostly to the Army.

The Manpack's glitch occurred at the worst possible moment for the 1st Armored Division soldiers assigned to use the new radio in simulated battle during the May-June Network Integration Exercise at Ft. Bliss and the adjacent White Sands Missile Range near El Paso. 'The company commander was not able to communicate with supporting assets such as fire support and Apache helicopters,' Gilmore wrote.

In addition to voices sounding unintelligible, the Manpack radios at the exercise worked out to a range  of only 7 kilometers, roughly a third as far as old-fashioned radios. The Manpacks were also heavier than advertised: 19 pounds instead of 15.

To be fair, the Manpacks malfunctioned only when running the SINCGARS waveform, designed for transmitting voice and data between scattered combat units. When using the Soldier Radio Waveform, meant for connecting individual troops within a unit, the Manpack radios' performance 'was good,' Gilmore conceded.

Moreover, General Dynamics was able to fix 'some' of the Manpacks' flaws at the network exercise and the rest afterward, according to Defense News' Paul McLeary. But that didn't stop Senate appropriators this month from cutting $190 million from the Army's $290 million request for Manpacks in 2013. The Army was hoping to buy 4,500 of the radios.

The Senate urged the Army to 'leverage commercially available technology' to fill in for the cut Manpacks, something the ground combat branch has done repeatedly over the 15 years of JTRS development. Two brigades slated to go to Afghanistan this fall were supposed to take Manpacks, but program delays that occurred before the Ft. Bliss exercise forced the Army to instead equip the brigades with upgraded, JTRS-compatible PRC-117G radios made by Harris Corporation.

And that's how JTRS has been slowly rendered irrelevant. Every time there's been a delay or technical glitch with the next-gen radios, the Army has bought upgraded versions of existing radios: more than 300,000 in all. For its part, Harris has managed to add many of JTRS' features to the PRC-117G. 'We continue to invest in its capabilities, to include porting of other JTRS waveforms,' Dennis Moran, a Harris vice president, tells Danger Room.

The Manpack's gradual death-by-irrelevance leaves the Rifleman radio, plus niche air-, sea- and space-based radios, as the aspects of JTRS with the best chances of long-term survival. But even if these radios belatedly make it to the front lines, they will represent a profound failure of the Pentagon's original vision of a universal radio.

Marines vs. Zetas: U.S. Hunts Drug Cartels in Guatemala

The war on drugs just got a whole lot more warlike. Two hundred U.S. Marines have entered Guatemala, on a mission to chase local operatives of the murderous Zeta drug cartel.

The Marines are now encamped after having deployed to Guatemala earlier this month, and have just 'kicked off' their share of Operation Martillo, or Hammer. That operation began earlier in January, and is much larger than just the Marine contingent and involves the Navy, Coast Guard, and federal agents working with the Guatemalans to block drug shipment routes.

It's a big shift for U.S. forces in the region. For years, the Pentagon has sent troops to Guatemala, but these missions have been pretty limited to exercising 'soft power' ' training local soldiers, building roads and schools. Operation Martillo is something quite different.

The news comes as two U.S. agents wounded in an attack in Mexico last week were discovered to be likely working for the CIA. The attack appears to be a case of mistaken identity after the agents fled from a Federal Police checkpoint, thinking the plain-clothed Mexican cops were cartel members. Police, seeing the agents' bulletproof SUV flee their checkpoint, presumably thought the same thing, followed them and shot up their car. The agents have now been discovered as likely working for the CIA, as one of the wounded agents' false identity was linked to a post office box in Virginia previously tied to CIA rendition flights.

The Marines' share of the operation involves chasing drug traffickers with UH-1N Huey helicopters. The Marine contingent has four of the choppers, and the Marines are carrying weapons. 'It's not every day that you have 200-some Marines going to a country in Central and South America aside from conducting training exercises,' Staff Sgt. Earnest Barnes, the public affairs chief for Marine Corps Forces South, tells Danger Room. Prior to the Marines' deployment, there were only a 'handful' of Marines in the country, Barnes says.

However, the Marines can't technically use their guns except in self-defense, and Barnes wouldn't say whether they're authorized to pursue drug traffickers on the ground. The description of what they're doing, however, suggests that they probably can't. Instead, they'll be looking out for suspicious boats ' including crude narco-submarines ' and then radio the Guatemalans, who do the work seizing their drugs and arresting cartel members. That could be on rivers, or along Guatemala's two coastlines, reports the Marine Corps Times.

'Overall the Marines are there to provide aerial detection and monitoring, and aerial surveillance, and so the appropriate authorities can do their job, whether it being Guatemalan military or some other form of law enforcement agency or authority to perform their duties,' Barnes says. Among the force are pilots and communication teams, as well as combat engineers to build landing sites.

On the other hand, just because the Marines may not be officially authorized to stop drug traffickers ' instead only spot them ' doesn't mean they won't be drawn into a conflict. The drug war is messy and involves going after criminal groups that don't for the most part wear uniforms or identify themselves as cartel members. Nor is it true to say the U.S. isn't already involved in a shooting war in Guatemala, with potentially ill consequences.

On the night of May 11, Honduran troops along with Drug Enforcement Administration agents allegedly killed two civilians ' possibly four according to local accounts ' including a pregnant woman. According to a report released this month by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, Guatemalan troops and U.S. agents seized a boat on a river containing cocaine near the town of Ahuas, when another boat ' containing civilians ' rammed into the first boat in the darkness. DEA agents and Guatemalan troops circling in a helicopter then fired on the second boat (.pdf). The U.S. has denied that any of its agents took part.

The DEA isn't a military organization, but what the Ahuas shootings represented was a military approach to the drug war gone bad. A case of mistaken identity, sure, as the mayor of Ahuas said following the shootings. But it also reflects a danger of stopping drugs at the point of a gun.

The Ahuas shooting 'demonstrates the risks of flooding foreign countries with armed representatives of the U.S. government, to fight an enemy that is largely indistinguishable from the civilian population on unknown terrain,' wrote Patrick Corcoran of InSight, a Latin America crime monitor. 'The Ahuas shooting may not have been inevitable, but as Americans take a more hands-on role, such scandals are likely to be repeated,' he wrote.

On the other hand, as Mexico's drug violence worsened, cartels like the Zetas began spilling over Mexico's southern border. Guatemala is now a base for the Zetas, who use the country's remote northern region shipment route for narcotics and weapons. In February, Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina said his country is 'not doing what the United States says, we are doing what we have to do' ' in other words, decriminalize drugs. But Molina has also emphasized cracking down on the cartels in a mano drua, or 'iron fist,' approach to crime.

Now, on the contrary, the U.S. hasn't gone anywhere close to suggesting drugs be decriminalized. Gen. Douglas Fraser, the head of U.S. forces in South and Central America, said last year to the House Armed Sevices Committee that 'the violence continues to increase in Central America, and that's where and why we are focusing there.'

That's where the Marines come in. And as far as the Zetas go, the U.S. hasn't directly confronted them with troops. Mexico City will absolutely not allow it. Guatemala is different, which means the distance between the gun barrels of a militarized cartel, and that of the U.S. military, could start to get much shorter.

Syrian Rebels Hit Back At Regime Warplanes

Syrian president Bashar Al Assad's jet fighters and helicopters continue to pound Free Syrian Army rebels in Damascus, Aleppo and other battleground cities, contributing to a death toll reportedly as high as 320 in one town in a single week. Attacks by jet fighters on rebels in Damascus yesterday reportedly killed 60 people.

But the rebels are fighting back, aiming heavy machine guns ' and, if one report is to be believed, U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles ' at Al Assad's aircraft. Yesterday rebels apparently downed a Russian-made helicopter over Damascus, as seen in the video above. If confirmed, the smashed copter could boost the rebels' tally of destroyed aircraft to at least six, including an L-39 jet forced to crash, a MiG-23 fighter-bomber apparently brought down over eastern Syria and another MiG blown up on the ground.

Heavy machine guns appear to be the rebels' best defense against Al Assad's aircraft, even when they miss. 'We're using these anti-aircraft guns to force their planes to fly higher so they can't hit their targets so accurately,' Malik Al Kurdi, deputy commander of the Free Syrian Army, told Al Jazeera on Aug. 17.

At the time Al Kurdi denied the rebels had received heat-seeking Stinger missiles from the U.S. ' though he wished they had. 'If we had those missiles, we'd use them straight away,' Al Kurdi said.

But the same day, an unnamed 'a source in the Syrian opposition' told Al Arabiya the Free Syrian Army had taken delivery of 14 Stingers. In the 1980s, the CIA famously passed Stingers to mujahedeen fighters battling the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. There the shoulder-fired missiles took a heavy toll on Soviet warplanes, hastening the Soviets' retreat. In Iraq and Libya and America's own Afghanistan war, the fear of Stinger-style missiles kept U.S. air planners awake at night.

In parallel with beefing up their air defenses, the Syrian rebels have been lobbying the U.N. and sympathetic governments to install a no-fly zone enforced by jet fighters, similar to that imposed over Libya early last year. Two weeks ago U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed a no-fly zone was on the table. But resistance from Al Assad-backer Russia ' not to mention logistical and basing concerns ' could make the protective zone unfeasible.

In any event, the Syrian regime is losing more and more aircraft as the fighting nears its 18th bloody month. The destruction of six or more of Al Assad's planes and copters might not mean the end of the airborne onslaught ' Damascus does, after all, possess hundreds of aircraft. But the erosion of the government's aerial advantage could help sustain the insurgency after repeated setbacks in bitter urban ground fighting.

With both sides deploying heavier weaponry, and using it to greater effect, the Syrian civil war shows every sign of escalating ' and no sign of a rapid resolution.

Bin Laden Raid Became Reelection Mission, SEAL Book Says

The mission was twofold: First and foremost, kill Osama bin Laden. Then, once the deed was done and the troops were back safe, help reelect the President of the United States by promoting the death of the world's most wanted terrorist.

That's the accusation in 'No Easy Day,' the firsthand account of the bin Laden raid from Matt Bissonette, a former member of SEAL Team 6. Copies of the book, due out next week, were obtained by the Huffington Post and by the Associated Press' Kim Dozier.

In the excerpts they present, Bissonette praises President Obama for giving the green light to attack bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad. But even before the mission began, Bissonette and his fellow SEALs knew that the raid would be played up by the White House for political purposes.

'We'll get Obama reelected for sure. I can see him now, talking about how he killed bin Laden,' one SEAL said, according to Bissonette.

Bissonette adds: 'We all knew the deal. We were tools in the toolbox, and when things go well they promote it. They inflate their roles. But we should have done it. It was the right call to make. Regardless of the politics that would come along with it, the end result was what we all wanted.'

The degree to which the White House took credit for ' and leaked information about ' the bin Laden raid has already become a contentious campaign issue. 'No Easy Day,' written by Bissonette under a pseudonym and co-authored by the journalist Kevin Maurer, won't exactly relieve that strain. A political action committee backed by right-wing activists and claiming to represent former special operations forces has gone after the 'countless leaks, interviews and decisions by the Obama administration' that have 'put future missions and personnel at risk.' Republicans have teased Obama for playing up his role in the mission. 'He pats himself on the back every night for continuing the aggressive search for bin Laden started by George Bush,' said one surrogate for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.

Obama administration internal messages, released yesterday by Judicial Watch, provide fresh details about the promotional push that followed the bin Laden raid. The CIA, for example, helped a pair of White House-friendly filmmakers, Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow, arrange interviews with two of the men who accompanied Bissonette on the mission to Abbottabad. 'I know we don't pick favorites but it makes sense to get behind a winning horse,' agency spokesperson Marie Harf wrote. 'Mark and Kathryn's movie is going to be the first and the biggest. It's got the most money behind it, and two Oscar winners on board.'

Bissonette writes that the initial accounts of the raid, leaked by administration officials, were bordering on Tinseltown, as well. A claimed 40-minute gunfight between the SEALs and al-Qaeda operatives never happened. Nor was bin Laden shot while reaching for a gun, as officials originally claimed. In fact, the terrorist was unarmed and didn't even bother to defend himself. 'The raid was being reported like a bad action movie,' Bissonette says. 'At first, it was funny because it was so wrong.'

Later, Bissonette and his fellow SEALs met the president. At the end of the meeting, Obama invited the troops to the White House for a beer at a later date. A few weeks later, Bissonette asked a teammate is he heard anything about the beer. The reply, according to the author: 'You believed that shit. I bet you voted for change too, sucker.'

Russian Troops Welcomed Into NORAD, America's Cold War HQ

NORAD deputy commander and Canadian Forces Col. Todd Balfe, right, on board a Fencing 1220 aircraft with Russian Air Force Col. Alexander Vasilyev during Vigilant Eagle 2011. This year's exercises brings officers like Vasilyev out of the skies and into NORAD's headquarters. Photo: U.S. Northern Command

During the Cold War, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, watched out for a potential nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. But times have changed. Now NORAD is inviting members of the Russian military in.

This week, a group of Russian officers will train alongside their U.S. and Canadian counterparts to respond to a simulated terrorist hijacking above the Arctic Circle. One group, led by Maj. Gen. Sergei Dronov, is operating out of Norad's HQ at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. A second will work out of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska. Still more Russian troops will operate in Russia's far east.

'What makes this year interesting is that the Russian personnel from the Russian Federation air force are actually here at NORAD headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs,' Royal Canadian Navy Lt. Al Blondin, a NORAD spokesman, tells Danger Room.

For all the fears of a new Cold War between the U.S. and Russia, it's worth noting that Ivan is now training within the heart of America's defense network. The partnership underscores how the already poor chances of an armed conflict erupting between Russia and the West is becoming even more remote.

Nor is this kind of exercise entirely new. NORAD and Russia have been carrying out the exercise ' called Vigilant Eagle ' for several years, but those exercises involved real-life pilots from Russia and the U.S. scrambling to intercept a 'hijacked' airliner as it transited the air-space border over the Arctic. This one's computer-simulated, and emphasizes more face-to-face time between Russian officers and their counterparts inside America's aerial defense headquarters.

'It's basically an ability to better network with our Russian counterparts,' Blondin says. 'So if there's a situation where an aircraft of interest is intercepted over one airspace and then has to carry on into the next airspace, well, how do we handle the logistics and the protocol from one nation to another?'

This year's exercise ' which starts today and runs through Wednesday ' scaled back on the hardware, and is entirely performed on computers with no actual aircraft. One reason, Blondin says, is due to the fact that it's cheaper to simulate the hijacking with computers than it is to fly real planes. It's budget crunch-time, after all. Last year's exercise, for instance, including the most expensive fighter jet in history, the F-22 Raptor.

NORAD is testing two scenarios. In one, a commercial airliner traveling to Russia from Alaska is hijacked. In the other, an airliner from Russia is captured while heading into U.S. airspace. Communications with the plane ceases. Fighter aircraft from both countries are then scrambled to intercept and have to work out how to transfer authority once the hijacked plane crosses international boundaries.

The main challenge, Blondin says, is communication. This has been a recurring problem. Following a live exercise in 2010, Canadian Air Force Col. Todd Balfe wrote in the The Canadian Air Force Journal (.pdf) that 'communication between former Cold War adversaries was an immense obstacle.' NORAD wouldn't comment to Danger Room whether these challenges have been overcome, but Balfe noted problems were resolved with translators and communicating over Skype ' not the most secure, but it worked. Balfe also noted difficulties working with 'highly process-driven and top-down Russian decision making.'

This year's exercise, though, takes place during a period of seeming anxiety between the U.S. and Russia. Moscow has taken flak for the jailing of punk rockers Pussy Riot. There's the mutual finger-pointing between the two countries' diplomats over who is arming whom in Syria. When Congress returns in September, it may approve the Magnitsky Act, which would ban human rights offenders in Russia from entering the United States. Vladimir Putin is not happy about that ' but then again, neither is Barack Obama.

This month, Russia finally joined the World Trade Organization after 18 years of trying. The U.S. has been supportive, but Congress hasn't yet followed up and granted Russia permanent normal trade relations status. And, of course, there's the acrimony over the U.S.'s plans to install a missile defense shield in Europe and Russia's displeasure with new sanctions against Iran.

On the other hand, that's only one side of the story, and doesn't mean relations have degraded to a level that's simply unworkable. 'I don't think that we have entered any 'new' period, that Russia has taken a harsher stance toward the United States (as the media sometimes put it), that our priorities have changed and that the 'reset' has winded down without any results. This is absolutely wrong,' Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told the Times of London last month.

And for those worried about a coming naval Arctic war, the U.S., Russia and Norway met up in August to train together and 'perform firing exercises at an above-surface target,' Russian navy spokesman Vadim Serga told RIA Novosti. The exercise ended over the weekend, and also included training to counter piracy and terrorism.

Still, training at sea ' and in the air ' is one thing. Training with Russian officers inside NORAD's headquarters, given its history as the watchdog for a dreaded catastrophic war with a rival superpower, is a sign that we probably don't need to worry that much about going to war with the Ivans.

U.S. Spies Summon Star Wars for 3-D Hologram Displays

It's one of the most memorable scenes in science fiction: a 3-D, holographic Princess Leia, begging for Obi-Wan's help. America's spy services have just plunked down $58 million to make it real. And if you think the gadget-makers behind this 'Synthetic Holographic Observation' effort weren't inspired by Star Wars, well, take a look at this presentation (.pdf) from one of the companies that bid for the 3-D holographic displays. On page four, there's Leia, telling Kenobi that he's her only hope.

The military and intelligence communities have been working with holographic and 3-D displays for years. Air Force analysts, for instance, use stereoscopic glasses to pick out which targets to bomb. But the tools have been of limited utility. Some required specialty eyewear; others only displayed a few colors, or could only been seen from a few angles.

That's not good enough, says the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity ' the spy services' equivalent of Darpa. All sorts of data now naturally comes in three dimensions, like the information generated by lidar, the laser equivalent of radar. Groups of analysts need to be able to see and interact with that information, all at once and without some clunky headgear. 'These requirements and practical operational environment constraints beg for new display technology transcending all current commercial offerings and their future projected capabilities,' Iarpa notes.

The Synthetic Holographic Observation (SHO) effort is supposed to produce these full-color '3D workstation display-systems that are simultaneously viewable by multiple people with the unaided eye,' the agency adds in its description of the program.

Iarpa first introduced the program in July of last year. Last week, the agency handed out a $58 million contract to build the prototype SHO system to Ostendo Technologies of Carlsbad, California. (Alas, they weren't the guys who used Leia in their presentation.)

Ostendo will have to work for its millions. Not only do the displays have to show off standard overhead imagery and lidar data in 3D. The devices should let intel analysts work together to comb through the scenery ' something that can't be done with old-school maps, no matter how mention dimensions they come in. As Iarpa puts it, the SHO system has to allow for 'sustained and interactive exploration of massive and dynamic, fused 3D data.' The prototype should be able to render 'several terabytes' of information, the agency adds. Eventually, that data could include synthetic aperture radar and hyper-spectral imagery, too.

Within the first 18 months of the program, Ostendo will have to show off a display with a width of at least 16 'hogels' ' geekspeak for a hologram's smallest elements; basically, the 3D equivalent of pixels. By month 45 of the project, that display must have 1024 hogels, each able to be viewed clearly from more than 65,000 different angles. That's almost as many ways as Leia's famous holographic plea for assistance has been seen.

'Degrade, Disrupt, Deceive': U.S. Talks Openly About Hacking Foes

Troops update security software at Barksdale Air Force Base. Photo: USAF

There was a time, not all that long ago, when the U.S. military wouldn't even whisper about its plans to hack into opponents' networks. Now America's armed forces can't stop talking about it.

The latest example comes from the U.S. Air Force, which last week announced its interest in methods 'to destroy, deny, degrade, disrupt, deceive, corrupt, or usurp the adversaries [sic] ability to use the cyberspace domain for his advantage.' But that's only one item in a long list of 'Cyberspace Warfare Operations Capabilities' that the Air Force would like to possess. The service, in its request for proposals, also asked for the 'ability to control cyberspace effects at specified times and places,' as well as the 'denial of service on cyberspace resources, current/future operating systems, and network devices.'

The Air Force says it will spend $10 million on the effort, mostly for short programs of three to 12 months; the service wants its Trojans and worms available, ASAP. And they should be available to both the top brass and to the 'operational commander,' too. In other words, cyber strikes shouldn't just be the prerogative of the president, to be launched at only the most strategically important moments. Malware should be a standard component of a local general's toolkit.

These digital weapons could even be deployed before a battle begins. The Air Force notes that it would like to deploy 'technologies/capabilities' that leave 'the adversary entering conflicts in a degraded state.'

Such an open discussion ' even one so vague ' might seem like a bit of a surprise, considering the Obama administration is actively investigating leaks to the press about America's online espionage campaign against Iran. The Senate Intelligence Committee considered the disclosure so dangerous, it passed a controversial bill last month that creates new punishments for leakers of classified information.

But this isn't 2007, when the Pentagon was still insisting that it had a 'defensive mindset' in cyberspace. New pieces of military-grade malware ' apparently linked to the broader U.S. cyberspying push ' are being discovered constantly on Middle Eastern networks. Besides, the Air Force is hardly alone in talking about its desire for ' and use of ' network attacks. They are becoming a regular part of the military conversation ' so normal, in fact, that generals are even beginning to talk about their troops' wartime hacking.

Lt. Gen. Richard Mills, who led coalition forces in southwestern Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, bragged at a technology conference last week that his troops had broken into militants' communications. 'I can tell you that as a commander in Afghanistan in the year 2010, I was able to use my cyber operations against my adversary with great impact,' Mills said. 'I was able to get inside his nets, infect his command-and-control, and in fact defend myself against his almost constant incursions to get inside my wire, to affect my operations.'

Mills added that the Marines had recently put together a company of Marines, stationed at the headquarters of the National Security Agency, to give the Corps 'an offensive capability.' A second company 'will be designed to increase the availability of intelligence analysts, intelligence collectors and offensive cyber operations and place them in the appropriate unit, at the appropriate time, at the appropriate place, so that forward deployed commander in the heat of combat has full access to the cyber domain.'

The day before Mills' talk, the Pentagon's leading research division announced a new, $110 million program to help warplanners assemble and launch online strikes in a hurry and make cyber attacks a more routine part of U.S. military operations. The effort, dubbed 'Plan X' by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, isn't supposed to formally get underway until Sept. 20. But Darpa has already awarded a no-bid, $600,000 contract to the Washington-area cybersecurity firm Invincea to start work on 'Plan X.'

Invincea wasn't immediately able to comment on the 'Digital Battlefield Understanding Study and proof-of-concept demonstration' that it intends to produce for Darpa. But a military document justifying Invincea's sole-source contract notes that the company submitted an 'unsolicited proposal' for the project on June 26. Less than a month later, it was approved. 'Invincea is the only source who possesses the particular commercial software and knowledge necessary to rapidly address technical insights in modeling a cyber battlespace and optimizing digital battle plans,' the document notes.

Invincea isn't the only military contractor working on the tools of cyber war, however. These days, the build-up of America's online arsenal has become the subject of all sorts of open talk and deal-making.

How Pacific Island Missile Tests Helped Launch the Internet

ARPA's Charles Herzfeld (center, in white shirt) and other military researchers visit the Kwajalein Atoll for missile defense tests. The problem of processing the trials' data would help lead to the creation of the Arpanet. Photo courtesy of Charles Herzfeld

There are a thousand stories about the origin of the internet, each with their own starting point and their own heroes. Charles Herzfeld's tale began in 1961 on a series of tiny islands in the South Pacific. The U.S. military was test-firing a series of ballistic missiles at the island chain, known as the Kwajalein Atoll, with an array of radars and optical infrared sensors recording every re-entry. Herzfeld, the Vienna-born physicist and newly installed chief of the Advanced Research Projects Agency's missile defense program, was trying to figure out how to make sense of the vast amount of data generated by all of those incoming missiles. The computers he had at the time weren't up to the task.

Herzfeld, in search of solutions, asked his colleague J.C.R. Licklider out to lunch. They met at the Secretary of Defense's Mess in the Pentagon's E Ring, and over a series of meals talked through ideas that would transform computing forever.

Licklider, the head of of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office, was already one of computer science's leading thinkers. ('Licklider was our prophet. I signed onto his vision from the beginning,' Herzfeld says.) Not only did Licklider predict that one day 'human brains and computing machines will be coupled' into a partnership that would surpass either component's ability to process information. Licklider theorized that people could one day interact with all sorts of computers at once ' even though each machine had its own programming language and its own control scheme. They would all be part of a single network.

'Most people don't understand the experience of doing something absolutely new,' Herzfeld says, more than 50 years after the fact. 'This was a new idea, and very radical.'

Over their E Ring lunches, Herzfeld told Licklider about the mass of data he was generating at the Kwajalein Atoll as his machines tried to discriminate between chaff and missile, between countermeasure and target. Herzfeld funded the development of broadband receivers, electronics that could accept data at an unheard-of rate: 150 megabits per second. He backed new storage media, including a magnetic tape that would one day lead to video cassettes. It wasn't enough.

'Look, Lick,' Herzfeld said, 'If your [network] idea could be done, it would make all of this much easier.' Researchers could rely on a whole network of machines, not just a single one.

'You're right,' Licklider answered. 'But it's too soon.'

Six years later, the time was right. Herzfeld had ascended to the top position at ARPA. He hired Bob Taylor, a specialist in human-computer interaction, and together they began talking about steps to make Licklider's vision concrete. That led to a million-dollar grant to begin work on the Arpanet, the internet's direct predecessor. For funding that all-important work, Herzfeld was inducted earlier this year into the Internet Society's Internet Hall of Fame, alongside such pioneers as Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

In some ways, the internet was as much a product of an institution as of a group of people. ARPA ' later renamed DARPA ' plucked visionaries like Licklider and Taylor from industry and academia, sucked up their best ideas, and then returned them to their home institutions a few years later. ARPA directors like Herzfeld had a tremendous amount of leeway to set priorities and to spend money as they saw fit; few others in the military research community enjoyed that kind of flexibility. (To this day, that freedom to kill an artificial intelligence project one minute and launch a new soldier enhancement program the next continues to periodically enrage Congress and the Pentagon brass.) Herzfeld believes it's one of the reasons why his agency ' and not some other government group ' gave rise to the internet.

Still, every new project needed to be justified to his Pentagon bosses. ('We needed a story and it had to be plausible,' Herzfeld remembers.) The story also had to be big. ARPA, in Herzfeld's opinion, wasn't designed to take on minor matters. It was supposed to study strategic, Presidential-level issues ' at the time, missile defense, nuclear test verification, and mastery of counterinsurgency were the big ones. Then, ARPA was meant to find solutions to those most important and most vexing of problems. Even in an age of ambitious government projects (think Apollo 11), it made ARPA unique.

The key to unlocking these big ambitions, according to Herzfeld, was to put together a family of research projects that could address a major topic all at once. 'Large programs do better when they have a theme. Most times, there's a bowl full of beautiful jewels, but there's no necklace,' Herzfeld says.

Project AGILE studied every aspect of counterinsurgency ' from social dynamics in potential hotbeds like Thailand to new tools of infantry warfare like jet packs. The nuclear inspection programs, VELA and LASA, built satellites to monitor above-ground atomic blasts and revolutionized geophysics by training a series of first-of-its-kind phased array radars to look for hints of tests beneath the Earth's surface.

Licklider's idea ' of a computer network as easy to operate as the telephone ' was a necklace all by itself.

'There were about 100 mainframe computers in the whole country, and about 1,000 to 10,000 people to use them. When it came time to explain why we wanted to do the Arpanet, I told [the Pentagon brass]: I want every investigator to have a console at their desk, where they can find all the tools, all the programs, and all the data to do their work.'

In a small space next to Taylor's Pentagon office, there was a kind of advertisement for why such a project was needed. Taylor had three computer terminals, each connected to a separate mainframe. One could communicate with MIT, another with a University of California, Berkeley machine, and a third with an Air Force-built mainframe in Santa Monica, California. Taylor could only interact with one remote site at a time. None of those other researchers could easily pass information to one another. And even if there were such a connection, one machine couldn't comprehend what the other was saying; each computer was programmed with its own boutique language. The result: wasted time and duplicative research. What they needed was a network, instead.

The Pentagon bosses approved the $1 million. And Taylor got to work writing a request for proposals for what would become the Arpanet.

Over the years, the project accumulated all kinds of origin myths. In one version, the Arpanet was supposedly developed as a tool for communicating after a nuclear holocaust. (Not true, but one of the men who came up with the idea of packet-switching, which became the internet's method for passing along data, was so motivated.) In another version, recounted in the fabulous history Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Herzfeld approved the Arpanet million after a single, 20-minute pitch from Taylor. 'That makes me sound like an easy spender, which I was not,' says Herzfeld.

But maybe all the stories make sense. They are, after all, about a global network-of-networks ' a way to connect machines (and people) with different languages, different functions, different points of view. So maybe the tale can begin at all sorts of nodes. Even one as distant as the Kwajalein Atoll.

U.S. Spies Summon Star Wars for 3D Hologram Displays

It's one of the most memorable scenes in science fiction: a 3D, holographic Princess Leia, begging for Obi-Wan's help. America's spy services have just plunked down $58 million to make it real. And if you think the gadget-makers behind this 'Synthetic Holographic Observation' effort weren't inspired by Star Wars, well, take a look at this presentation (.pdf) from one of the companies that bid for the 3-D holographic displays. On page four, there's Leia, telling Kenobi that he's her only hope.

The military and intelligence communities have been working with holographic and 3D displays for years. Air Force analysts, for instance, use stereoscopic glasses to pick out which targets to bomb. But the tools have been of limited utility. Some required specialty eyewear; others only displayed a few colors, or could only been seen from a few angles.

That's not good enough, says the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity ' the spy services' equivalent of Darpa. All sorts of data now naturally comes in three dimensions, like the information generated by lidar, the laser equivalent of radar. Groups of analysts to need to be able to see and interact with that information, all at once and without some clunky headgear. 'These requirements and practical operational environment constraints beg for new display technology transcending all current commercial offerings and their future projected capabilities,' Iarpa notes.

The Synthetic Holographic Observation (SHO) effort is supposed to produce these full-color '3D workstation display-systems that are simultaneously viewable by multiple people with the unaided eye,' the agency adds in its description of the program.

Iarpa first introduced the program in July of last year. Last week, the agency handed out a $58 million contract to build the prototype SHO system to Ostendo Technologies of Carlsbad, California. (Alas, they weren't the guys who used Leia in their presentation.)

Ostendo will have to work for its millions. Not only do the displays have to show off standard overhead imagery and lidar data in 3D. The devices should let intel analysts work together to comb through the scenery ' something that can't be done with old-school maps, no matter how mention dimensions they come in. As Iarpa puts it, the SHO system has to allow for 'sustained and interactive exploration of massive and dynamic, fused 3D data.' The prototype should be able to render 'several terabytes' of information, the agency adds. Eventually, that data could include synthetic aperture radar and hyper-spectral imagery, too.

Within the first 18 months of the program, Ostendo will have to show off a display with a width of at least 16 'hogels' ' geekspeak for a hologram's smallest elements; basically, the 3D equivalent of pixels. By month 45 of the project, that display must have 1024 hogels, each able to be viewed clearly from more than 65,000 different angles. That's almost as many ways as Leia's famous holographic plea for assistance has been seen.

Fight or Flight: Darpa Explores the Neuroscience of Threat Response

An Iraqi army soldier runs during an ambush exercise taught by U.S. troops. Now, Darpa wants to use neuroscience to improve the mental and physical reactions of soldiers under threat. Photo: Department of Defense

Everyone knows there are some instinctual reactions to threats. It could be anxiety from standing too close to the edge of a cliff, or a flinch from a punch. But the exact neuroscience behind those reactions are still something of a mystery.

Darpa, the Pentagon's advanced research division, now wants to find out. The agency has awarded a $300,000 grant over two years to a researcher from the University of Colorado at Boulder, to use neuroeconomic models to study how the way we move changes when faced with threats. Dr. Alaa Ahmed, a professor of integrative physiology, hopes to eventually change ' and improve ' those reactions. There's even a chance that this could inform the development of new weapons.

'Traditionally, in movement control, it's always been assumed that we're rational decision makers, that we have a good estimate of the movement uncertainty ' like how accurate I am ' and that we have a good estimate of the reward structure in the task, whether it's explicit or implicit,' Ahmed tells Danger Room.

Of course, people are not that rational. Instead, Ahmed says, 'people seem to be irrational in their movement decision, which suggests that risk is influencing the decision.' There's no confirmed link between the threat and movement, but one way to find out is to study the different ways the risk-seekers and risk-averse among us physically react when faced with a threatening situation.

For soldiers, it could mean overreacting ' or underreacting ' when making decisions during combat, which could have potentially lethal repercussions such as pulling a trigger. 'In an environment of COIN [counterinsurgency] or stability operations, a split-second decision by a corporal under stress can have significant and profound consequences on the whole of U.S. interests in a given theater,' (.pdf) wrote Col. Kevin Felix in a 2011 paper arguing for increased military research on decision science.

Ahmed plans to test the theory ' the link between threat and movement is still largely unexplored ' in a laboratory equipped with movement games designed to test motor and non-motor skills. In one test, participants stand on a platform and control a cursor on a screen. The participants control the cursor by leaning forward, and have to reach a target. Ahmed wouldn't say what the target is, exactly, but she gave an example of a cliff. The closer you move the cursor to the edge of the cliff, the more points you get. But if you get too close and fall off the cliff, you lose. Another game operates along a similar design, but uses a joystick to control a robotic arm.

The tests use fairly simple economic models. When we're faced with a task that has a high degree of uncertainty, and given the choice between a high-risk reward and a sure bet, risk-seekers could be more likely to go for broke. For the risk-averse, or those with a tendency to avoid risky situations, it could mean being needlessly cautious.

If a link between those models and how we move is found, then one outcome might be updated military training programs. It's not specifically included in the grant, but one possibility is creating physical simulations to provoke moderate stress in soldiers, then placing the soldiers into a high-stress environment, studying the results, and then training troops' minds to reach the best outcome.

But it may have more uses beyond improving troops' mental and physical performance. It could also be used against an enemy. 'This proposal is about decision making, we want to understand the decision making process,' Ahmed says. 'So it stands to reason that if you can understand it, then you can manipulate it, whatever, whoever it is can be manipulated. So it's not just about our troops, and our side. But it also means you can expand that to the other side as well,' she says.

Ahmed cautions that using neuroscience against an enemy is speculative, and that the link between threat and movement has yet to be deduced. Still, it's not the first time the military has taken an interest in using neuroscience to read minds ' and perhaps one day weaponize fear. In 2010, the Pentagon outlined plans for embedded body sensors to determine mental alertness. Darpa has also fielded ideas for interest in a system to boost memory recall.

During the 2000s, Darpa spent tens of millions of dollars researching brain activity in pilots. Called Augmented Cognition, the idea has run its course but attempted to build computers that can interact with human brains. The computer interfaces, Darpa hoped, would read a pilot's brain and then use the data to determine which information to display.  In 2009, the Air Force unveiled an effort to research bio-science to improve cognition and 'degrade enemy performance' by manipulating the brain's chemical pathways to 'overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities.'

Darpa's look into how we respond to threats might not be as far-flung, although the research is still in the very early stages. Whether ' and how ' the research could be used as a weapon is hypothetical. But the military might not need to go as far as that, if there are troops handling threats better than their foes.

From Bug Drones to Disease Assassins, Super Weapons Rule U.S. War Game

Sailors train for chemical and biological warfare. Photo: U.S. Navy

CARLISLE, Pennsylvania ' A rogue state is on the verge of developing a deadly biological weapon against which the rest of the world has no defense. Through its connections to extremist groups and smugglers, the regime could be planning to launch bio attacks on U.S. allies and interests.

With tensions mounting, a cabal of American military officers, intelligence agents, scientists, industry officials and theoreticians gather at a secure facility within the Defense Department's oldest base. Their mission: to plot America's response to the bio-weapon threat. The ideas ' some good, some bad, a few downright horrifying ' flow freely.

A quiet man wearing a dark suit stands and the room grows silent. In clinical terms he describes a new technology, previously unknown to most of the cabal, that could disrupt the rogue state's bio-terror scheme ' but at a cost. If the Pentagon unleashes this weapon now, it will forever alter the strategic landscape, with unpredictable results. The new system, the man says, is a 'game changer.' Like the atom bomb.

The scenario ' the rogue state with its bio-weapon ' is fictional. But the meeting, which took place at the Army's historic Carlisle Barracks in southern Pennsylvania in mid-August, is real. The two-day war game, orchestrated by Australian consulting firm Noetic and hosted by the Army War College, posited a range of military threats in 2025 and the future technologies, in their infancy today, that the Pentagon could potentially use to counter those threats.

The NextTech Workshop, as the war game was branded, was actually the second in a four-part series of intellectual exercises meant to explore how 'future advancements in different technology focal areas may be used in given scenarios,' according to a Noetic handout. The first war game session, held in Washington, D.C. in June, focused on the science behind five new technologies: drones, software, directed energy, biological enhancement and 3-D printing. The Carlisle event approached the techs from a U.S. military standpoint. Future workshops will consider the enemy's use of the same technologies ' and also the legal and ethical implications.

In attendance: scores of mid-level civilian government officials, influential researchers, scientists and engineers plus mostly mid-career officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and the Australian military, among other armed forces. Danger Room attended alongside reporters from at least two other media outlets. The event was under Chatham House rules ' meaning the identity of the participants could not be revealed, except with their permission. However, a few key participants agreed to go on the record; others would only be identified anonymously. The views expressed are the speaker's alone, and do not reflect U.S. government policy.

The rules of the game were simple: a Noetic representative introduced the basic concept before giving the floor to experts in each of the technology fields. The experts outlined the state of the art in their respective disciplines ' in essence, telling the war-gamers what new weapons they would possess in four simulated battles.

Besides the bio-terror scenario, the workshop also gamed out: a ground battle in a city fortified by enemy tanks; a naval blockade pitting American aircraft carriers against an enemy's own flattop, World War II-style; and a disaster-relief situation similar to that in Haiti two years ago. The players tried to imagine how drones, cutting-edge software, bio-mods, energy weapons and 3-D printing could help U.S. forces win the battles faster, more quietly, more decisively and with less bloodshed.

Though not without risk. The experts and event organizers constantly reminded the gamers to consider 'second- and third-order effects' ' that is, the unforeseen and sometimes terrible consequences of unleashing a new technology on human societies unprepared to handle them. 'The human mind thinks in linear terms, but most technological change happens exponentially,' one official warned.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 View All

Spec Op Chief Says Blabbermouths Face 'Criminal Prosecution'

The leader of the U.S. Special Operations Command and architect of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden is seriously unhappy about a forthcoming book by a member of the SEAL raiding team. And he wants other elite U.S. commandos to know they could be in for a world of legal trouble if they write their own tell-alls.

No Easy Day is the first first-person description of the Osama bin Laden raid, penned by a former SEAL Team Six member named Matt Bissonnette. It's set for publication, naturally, on Sept. 11. And it took the Pentagon and the White House by surprise. Admiral William McRaven, the leader of the U.S. Special Operations Command, wants to make sure it doesn't lead to a pattern of similar memoirs.

McRaven, the former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, reminded fellow members of the special-operations community reminding them that they signed binding documents designed to keep them from discussing their highly secretive work.

'Every member of the special-operations community with a security clearance signed a non-disclosure agreement that was binding during and after service in the military,' McRaven wrote in an open letter to current and former special-operations troops, as reported by the Associated Press and the Daily Beast. 'If the U.S. Special Operations Command finds that an active-duty, retired or former service member violated that agreement and that exposure of information was detrimental to the safety of U.S. forces, then we will pursue every option available to hold members accountable, including criminal prosecution where appropriate.'

Legal experts say McRaven is correct. 'If they release classified information, yes,' they can be prosecuted, says Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer who frequently represents CIA and military clients in disputes with the government. 'In fact, if they're still on active duty, there are other charges that can likely be brought associated with violating a secrecy [or] non-disclosure agreement. Civil remedies also.'

On the other hand, bringing charges against one of the SEALs who helped kill bin Laden is a dicey political proposition, to say the least. As a civilian, Bissonnette would be prosecuted by the Justice Department, which may not relish the optics of pursuing a man whom many would surely consider a national hero. (According to the book's publisher, Bissonnette was 'one of the first men through the door on the third floor of the terrorist leader's hideout and was present at his death.') Yet McRaven's warning isn't just directed at the author of No Easy Day, but at potential spec-ops memoirists, too.

Still, some in the special operations community are shaking their heads at Bissonnette, even before they've read the book. Fox News reports that an unnamed Navy SEAL said, 'How do we tell our guys to stay quiet when this guy won't?' After all, the book comes on the heels of several recent national-security leaks ' as well as a campaign by some former special operations troops to pin the blame for them on President Obama. So far, the group has yet to criticize No Easy Day.

One of These Trucks Will Be the Army's New $14B Ride

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The U.S. Army just took a big step closer to getting a brand-new, high-tech ride. Yesterday the Army announced the three companies that will continue to develop the new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, a sort of blend between today's workhorse Humvee and the bomb-resistant MRAP trucks that have saved so many lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lockheed Martin, AM General and Oshkosh Defense each received around $30 million to refine their JLTV prototypes ahead of a final selection 27 months from now.

At stake in the seven-year-old competition: up to 50,000 trucks for the Army and another 5,000 for the Marines, at a cost of $250,000 apiece. The nearly $14 billion program is one of the few big, near-term prizes in Pentagon budgets squeezed by war costs and the economic downturn.

Some have questioned why the ground combat branches even need a new vehicle. After 11 years of war the Army and Marines are flush with fresh up-armored Humvees and no fewer than 20,000 of the hulking MRAPs, the latter costing $1 million apiece. There are so many surplus MRAPs that the Pentagon gives them away to allies and is planning to park thousands of them in overseas warehouses, where they will await the next major ground war.

But the JLTV is special, the military argues. Thanks to its blast-deflecting shape and classified armor mix, the seven-ton new truck will have the same level of underside blast protection as an MRAP, but at half the weight. Though roughly the same dimensions as the Humvee, the JLTV "has so much more payload and so much more capability," the Marine Corps said. The Pentagon hopes a JLTV-equipped force will be light enough to deploy quickly but tough enough to survive in the era of the improvised bomb.

AM General BRV-O

As the maker of the stalwart Humvee, the Pentagon's standard truck since the mid-'80s, AM General was expected to field a strong JLTV candidate. The company calls its new vehicle the Blast Resistant Vehicle ' Offroad, or BRV-O.

Photo: AM General

What Surge? Afghanistan's Most Violent Places Stay Bad, Despite Extra Troops

U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Paul Grimm, foreground, a rifleman with Police Advisor Team 2, Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 6, patrols in Sangin District, Helmand. Photo: U.S. Marine Corps

When President Obama surged 30,000 additional U.S. troops into Afghanistan in 2010, the new forces were concentrated overwhelmingly on two volatile areas of southern Afghanistan: Helmand and Kandahar Provinces. Now, as the troop surge is practically over, those provinces still rank as the most violent in the entire country.

According to Marine Gen. John Allen, the commander of the war, ten districts around Afghanistan account for fully half of the insurgent violence in the country. (Afghanistan has 405 districts.) According to a breakdown provided to Danger Room by the Pentagon, six of those districts ' Sangin, Now Zad, Nad Ali, Kajaki, Musa Qalah, and Nahr-e Saraj ' are in Helmand Province, where the Marines started fighting a costly and grueling battle with the Taliban in 2009. Three more of them ' Maiwand, Panjwei and Zharay ' are in Kandahar, the Taliban's birthplace and the scene of similarly arduous Army fighting from 2010 to the present. (The final district, Pul-e Alam, is in the eastern Logar Province.)

Spokespeople for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), NATO's military command in Afghanistan, did not immediately respond to inquiries seeking elaboration. But there are around 80,000 U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan, and the remaining 10,000 surge troops are due to leave the country by the end of September. The persistence of the violence in the provinces they bled and died to pacify raises questions about the durability of what the U.S. will leave behind in Afghanistan.

The Marine Corps, for reasons that remain obscure, decided in 2009 to focus its fight on sparsely-populated Helmand Province. They've fought hard and recently in Sangin and Kajaki; and in July 2011, ISAF boasted to Danger Room that violence in Nad Ali was down 70 percent from the previous year. With the surge forces receding, the Marines now find themselves spread thin: Marines have only a single company for each of the districts of Now Zad and Musa Qaleh.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a Washington Post associate editor, focused much of his recent book about the war, Little America, on the Marine fight for Helmand. While he noted that several of the violent districts aren't ones where the Marines donated the majority of their focus in the province ' some are the responsibility of British forces ' the overrepresentation of Helmand in Afghanistan's most violent districts 'raises some fundamental questions about the Marine narrative that they fundamentally transformed Helmand province,' Chandrasekaran said, particularly Now Zad, Musa Qaleh and Sangin, places where the Marines have claimed major progress. 'If six of the ten most violent districts in the country are still in Helmand, it does call into question the sustainability of some of their gains.'

Kandahar, on the other hand, is one of Afghanistan's most populous regions ' not to mention the traditional home of the Taliban. And there ISAF has some good news to report: the United Nations found that civilian casualties declined in 2012, although they remain triple the rate of civilian deaths in 2008. Kandahar City, the site of intense fighting in 2010 and 2011, is no longer one of the hottest of hot spots. Neither is the adjoining Argandab River Valley, where U.S. troops flattened entire villages that the Taliban boobytrapped.

But coalition forces fought hard in Kandahar's Maiwand and Panjwei provinces ' where the fight grew so frustrating and American leadership became so weak that a band of rogue, sadistic soldiers formed a 'Kill Team' to take revenge. One Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who recently ended a year's tour in Kandahar described it as the most arduous thing he has ever done in his life.

Nonetheless, after two years of combat in Kandahar and Helmand, those provinces still account for an outsize proportion of Afghan insurgent violence.

Allen doesn't see it that way. He contended to Pentagon reporters that U.S., Afghan and allied troops pushed the Taliban out of former redoubts and essentially forced them into small clusters. He cited the ten districts accounting for half of the violence in the country as a positive indicator.

It is doubtful that the post-surge U.S. presence in Afghanistan will take those ten violent districts head-on. By the fall, the Marine presence in Helmand will fall by 10,000, leaving 7,000 Marines in the province. After the summer, the likely focus of the Army-led task forces in Kandahar will be on consolidating security gains and mentoring Afghan troops to prepare to secure the future. That future, Allen told reporters, will not be an peaceful one: after NATO ends its combat mission in 2014, Afghan forces must continue to 'deal with violence.'

From Bug Drones to Disease Assassins, Super Weapons Rule US War Game

Sailors train for chemical and biological warfare. Photo: U.S. Navy

CARLISLE, Pennsylvania ' A rogue state is on the verge of developing a deadly biological weapon against which the rest of the world has no defense. Through its connections to extremist groups and smugglers, the regime could be planning to launch bio attacks on U.S. allies and interests.

With tensions mounting, a cabal of American military officers, intelligence agents, scientists, industry officials and theoreticians gather at a secure facility within the Defense Department's oldest base. Their mission: to plot America's response to the bio-weapon threat. The ideas ' some good, some bad, a few downright horrifying ' flow freely.

A quiet man wearing a dark suit stands and the room grows silent. In clinical terms he describes a new technology, previously unknown to most of the cabal, that could disrupt the rogue state's bio-terror scheme ' but at a cost. If the Pentagon unleashes this weapon now, it will forever alter the strategic landscape, with unpredictable results. The new system, the man says, is a 'game changer.' Like the atom bomb.

The scenario ' the rogue state with its bio-weapon ' is fictional. But the meeting, which took place at the Army's historic Carlisle Barracks in southern Pennsylvania in mid-August, is real. The two-day war game, orchestrated by Australian consulting firm Noetic and hosted by the Army War College, posited a range of military threats in 2025 and the future technologies, in their infancy today, that the Pentagon could potentially use to counter those threats.

The NextTech Workshop, as the war game was branded, was actually the second in a four-part series of intellectual exercises meant to explore how 'future advancements in different technology focal areas may be used in given scenarios,' according to a Noetic handout. The first war game session, held in Washington, D.C. in June, focused on the science behind five new technologies: drones, software, directed energy, biological enhancement and 3-D printing. The Carlisle event approached the techs from a U.S. military standpoint. Future workshops will consider the enemy's use of the same technologies ' and also the legal and ethical implications.

In attendance: scores of mid-level civilian government officials, influential researchers, scientists and engineers plus mostly mid-career officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and the Australian military, among other armed forces. Danger Room attended alongside reporters from at least two other media outlets. The event was under Chatham House rules ' meaning the identity of the participants could not be revealed, except with their permission. However, a few key participants agreed to go on the record; others would only be identified anonymously. The views expressed are the speaker's alone, and do not reflect U.S. government policy.

The rules of the game were simple: a Noetic representative introduced the basic concept before giving the floor to experts in each of the technology fields. The experts outlined the state of the art in their respective disciplines ' in essence, telling the war-gamers what new weapons they would possess in four simulated battles.

Besides the bio-terror scenario, the workshop also gamed out: a ground battle in a city fortified by enemy tanks; a naval blockade pitting American aircraft carriers against an enemy's own flattop, World War II-style; and a disaster-relief situation similar to that in Haiti two years ago. The players tried to imagine how drones, cutting-edge software, bio-mods, energy weapons and 3-D printing could help U.S. forces win the battles faster, more quietly, more decisively and with less bloodshed.

Though not without risk. The experts and event organizers constantly reminded the gamers to consider 'second- and third-order effects' ' that is, the unforeseen and sometimes terrible consequences of unleashing a new technology on human societies unprepared to handle them. 'The human mind thinks in linear terms, but most technological change happens exponentially,' one official warned.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 View All

South Korean Weapon Expos Are Fun for the Whole Family

Young girls with fingers on machine-gun triggers, old ladies staring down rifle scopes and crowds enraptured by simulated firefights. These are strange scenes for many Western eyes, but for a country like South Korea that's spent its whole existence in a state of military high alert, they are commonplace.

In his photo series Really Good, Murder, South Korean artist and photographer Suntag Noh, 41, goes inside his country's weapon shows to look critically at their celebration of war and its equipment.

'All different kinds of people go to the shows,' says Noh. 'Weapons dealers, weapons enthusiasts, tourists, parents trying to educate their children, model [toy] weapons manufacturers and youth applying for the special forces.'

Military trade expos such as IDEX in Abu Dhabi are common across all continents ' just this June controversy ensued when calls were made to the organizers of the Paris Arms Show to exclude Rosoboronexport, Russia's state-owned arms company, which was supplying weapons to Syria.

While most international arms expos are public, Noh's work captures a more intimate atmosphere, where South Korean families get up close and personal with lethal hardware, which creates a significant propaganda interface between the citizens and the military.

'Every time a bomb explodes, every time a shouting order is echoed, applause and cheers follow, 'Hurrah, bravo!' ['] What is not allowed for viewers of imaginary bombing attacks is to feel disturbed,' says Noh.

A fragile armistice has existed between South Korea and North Korea since 1953. Every year, the South Korean military holds a massive exercise called Hoguk, or 'Defending the Nation,' in which tens of thousands of troops work on their coordination in the face of a potential attack, with North Korea as the perceived threat. Virtual wars are routinely waged, and drills undertaken with the U.S. that North Korea considers provocative, but live-fire skirmishes have ratcheted up tensions in recent years.

In November 2010, North Korea shelled Yeonpyeong, an inhabited South Korean island just south of the maritime armistice line. South Korean returned fire with K9 Thunder howitzers and put its F-16 fighter jets on alert. Earlier that same year, the Cheonan, a South Korean naval vessel, was torpedoed, resulting in the deaths of 46 South Korean sailors. Initially, the North Koreans tamped down allegations they were the aggressors, but international consensus is against Pyongyang.

Noh does not deny the North Korean threat, but he does ask viewers to think about how they inform themselves on the debate.

'A weapon is praised in the name of 'science' and 'security.' Having some doubts on it is criticized as 'antisocial.' Why so?' asks Noh. 'Do we need a weapon because the Korean peninsula is divided with a threat of war? Isn't it those overproduced weapons that bring about war? A war requires weapons. The Korean peninsula has been under war for over a century. It is natural to ask us what a weapon means to us.'

Suntag Noh's work is celebrated by politically engaged art theorists. In a lengthy and academic catalog essay [pdf.], Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler write, 'Suntag perceives Korea as situated in a general state of precariousness, describing it as experiencing a permanent state of emergency, as an enduring projection of a 'delayed danger.' In this respect, the 'case of Korea' simultaneously mirrors the state of a world that has established itself in the midst of codified polarizations ' north/south, poor/rich, communism/capitalism, peace/war.'

This binary-trap Dressler and Christ describe is a source of chagrin for Noh. He characterizes war as the 'modern engine' behind applied sciences such as precision machinery engineering, optics, and electromagnetics. He hopes that in another history these advances could've been made without the collateral deaths of men, women and children.

'The climax of the spectacle is the fantastic super operation using A'10 Thunderbolt fighter'bombers and the AH'64D Apache Longbow helicopters to rescue our troops who have been taken hostage by the enemy. The firm determination that anyone messing with our side will not be forgiven, and the warm humanism of valorizing each and every soldier on our side down to the last guy form the essence of this operation. Let's not mention the 'gratuitous sacrifices' that the operation may inadvertently entail.'

For Noh, weapons shows are a disconcerting overlap of capitalism and politics; they are designed 'to experience and learn about the legitimacy of a weapon.' Ultimately, Noh's call is for South Koreans to critique their role in the rhetoric of war and to question the desensitized version of conflict they're served at the events.

'The state, corporations, arms dealers, and regional communities hold these extravagant shows hand-in-hand,' writes Noh in his Really Good, Murder working notes. '[The shows exist] for national security, for the reinforced Korean'American alliance, for corporations who have dedicated themselves to the development of state'of'the'art sciences, for strengthening international competitiveness, for fostering regional tourism and for educating children. It's show time.'

All Photos: Suntag Noh

Child Porn, Coke Smuggling: Hundreds of DHS Employees Arrested Last Year

An unidentified Customs and Border Protection officer scans a car dashboard with a density meter in San Luis, Arizona on Feb. 16, 2012. Photo: Customs and Border Protection

Border Patrol agents smuggling weed and coke. Immigration agents forging documents and robbing drug dealers. TSA employees caught with child porn. Those are just a few of the crimes perpetrated by Department of Homeland Security employees in just the past year.

Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security nearly a decade ago, the agency's inspector general has been tasked with uncovering corruption, waste and criminality within its own ranks. The IG has had his hands full.

According to a newly released DHS inspector general's summary of its significant investigations, 318 DHS employees and contractors were arrested in 2011 (.pdf). That's about one arrest per weekday of the men and women who are supposed to be keeping the country safe. The report lets us not only see how corrupt some agents tasked with protecting the homeland can be, it also gives us a scale of the problem. In short: There are a lot of dirty immigration and border officers.

That might send the wrong impression. DHS is a massive agency of more than 225,000 employees. Within DHS, sub-agency Customs and Border Protection has more than doubled in recent years to nearly 59,000 employees. Maybe it's not so surprising an organization of that size has a few bad apples. There's also some good news. The number of arrests is going down: there were 519 arrests in 2010, compared to the 318 last year. Still, within that number includes some serious crimes.

'Border corruption may take the form of cash bribes, sexual favors, and other gratuities in return for allowing contraband or undocumented aliens through primary inspection lanes or even protecting and escorting border crossings; leaking sensitive law enforcement information to persons under investigation and selling law enforcement intelligence to smugglers; and providing needed documents such as immigration papers,' Charles Edwards, the acting inspector general for DHS, told Congress earlier this month (.pdf).

According to the report, a Border Patrol agent from Tucson named Yamilkar Fierros was given 20 months in prison for providing 'sensor location maps, trail maps, and communications technology' to cartel members in exchange for more than $5,000 in bribes. Another incident involved an 8-year veteran CBP agent who conspired with cocaine traffickers to let drugs past his border inspection post. The agent, whose name and former location are undisclosed in the report, was sentenced to 110 months in federal prison.

Other corruption cases read like a list of bad career decisions, some appalling; others involve petty greed. The appalling includes at least two employees ' one from CBP and another from the TSA ' who were caught in possession of child pornography. A Border Patrol agent in Arizona 'punched a fellow agent and threatened him with his service-issued weapon after the fellow agent joked about the excessive amount of tactical gear the [Border Patrol] routinely wore,' according to the report.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent named Valentino Johnson was sentenced to 120 months in prison for working an off-duty job robbing drug dealers, according to the report. Johnson, who was busted after attempting to steal a load of fake cocaine, worked with a stick-up crew who saw him as a means to portray a sense of legitimacy to their robberies.

A Border Patrol agent in Arizona named Michael Atondo was convicted for attempting to distribute marijuana. The agent, according to the report, using his patrol vehicle to bypass checkpoints and smuggle more than 100 kilos of marijuana. Among ICE agents, many cases involve forging fake immigration documents for bribes. A CBP agent posted to Logan International Airport in Boston even reportedly stole astronaut Neil Armstrong's customs declaration form and attempted to sell it on the internet.

The corruption investigations have also netted contractors. At least one contractor with the Federal Emergency Management Agency was convicted of defrauding the agency of more than one million dollars. A company employee for security contractor MVM was discovered to have falsified training documents to the Federal Protective Service, which oversees security at government buildings.

There's also a caveat. While the numbers of arrests have fallen this year, the long-term trend of cases against CBP agents, at least, has been on a rise since 2004, according to the Arizona Daily Star. Between 2004 and 2010, the number of cases doubled. Former Border Patrol agent Lee Morgan told the Daily Star the increase was due to the agency expanding its ranks so quickly. 'This is just such a tarnish on the badge of the U.S. Border Patrol,' he told the paper.

Homeland Security's inspectors are also overloaded, and are now framing out more criminal cases to sub-agencies. The CBP, meanwhile, is boosting its own internal affairs staff, and is implementing lie-detector tests starting in January.

'While the number of corrupt individuals within our ranks who have betrayed the trust of the American public and their peers is a fraction of one percent of our workforce, we continue to focus our efforts on rooting out this unacceptable and deplorable behavior,' CBP acting commissioner David Aguilar told Congress (.pdf).

The director's testimony came at a bad time. On Friday, in one of the most high-profile cases of agency corruption in recent years, two former Border Patrol agents were found guilty of smuggling hundreds of people in their vehicles in exchange for cash. They could face up to 50 years in prison. Perhaps they'll meet up with some old colleagues, if they're put behind bars.