NY National Guard Suddenly Decides Hurricane Relief Trumps Mock Disaster Drill

Updated 8:42 a.m. Hours after being contacted by Danger Room, the New York Army National Guard on Tuesday night abruptly reversed a decision to send hundreds of soldiers out-of-state in the midst of the Hurricane Sandy relief effort.

The troops were previously declared unavailable to help New York recover from the state's biggest hurricane in centuries. Instead, they were assigned to fight a fake disaster.

But hours before they were set to deploy, the troops' participation in a week-long exercise in Missouri known as 'Vigilant Guard' was cancelled. The exercise is designed to test the response to a mock earthquake in the Midwest. Until Tuesday, that previously scheduled drill took precedence over the real-world catastrophe that struck the East Coast. It was declared a bureaucratic near-impossibility to redeploy hundreds of guardsmen at a moment's notice, even at a moment when so many are in need.

Troops from the New York Army National Guard's 104th Military Police Battalion, the 1156th Engineer Company ' 450 soldiers in all ' were poised to head to the middle of the country. Dozens more from the 42nd Combat Aviation Brigade were supposed to train in Pennsylvania this weekend. 'At this point in time, we're still sending our soldiers to Vigilant Guard,' Eric Durr, a spokesman for the New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs, told Danger Room late Tuesday afternoon.

Hours later, that changed. 'Last night the decision was made to cancel New York National Guard participation in Vigilant Guard,' Durr emailed on Wednesday morning. 'The adjutant general [the Guard's commanding officer] decided to keep troops in state in case they are needed.'

The New York Army National Guard has about 10,600 troops in total. Of those, about 2,100 are either in, or are waiting for, basic training. Another 400 to 500 are medically unavailable. And an additional 3,500 troops from the 27th Brigade Combat Team are either just back from Afghanistan or still there. Which means that New York's Army National Guard had, at most, 4,500 troops at its disposal ' before the assignments to Vigilant Guard began. About 2,300 Army and Air National Guardsmen are currently deployed to the hurricane relief effort.

Hurricane Sandy has the most vicious storm system to hit the New York City area in nearly two centuries ' a once-in-several-generations event that's left millions without power and tens of thousands of people homeless. The exercise in Missouri, however, is the second such drill in a year and a half.

Pages: 1 2 3 View All

China's Newest Stealth Fighter Takes Flight

China's newest stealth fighter prototype reportedly took  off on its first test flight over the Shenyang Aircraft Company airfield in northeastern China on Wednesday morning. The 10-minute aerial debut of the twin-engine Falcon Eagle represents a huge leap forward for China's ambitious stealth warplane program.

But more than a month after the Falcon Eagle first appeared in blurry photos apparently shot and posted online by Beijing's army of sympathetic bloggers, there are still more questions than answers about China's second stealth fighter model.

Is the Falcon Eagle, apparently designated J-31 and not J-21 as we originally reported,  a competitor to the larger J-20 stealth prototype that first flew in January 2011? Or is the newer plane meant to complement the J-20, the third copy of which recently appeared outside the Chengdu Aircraft Industry Corporation factory in southwest China?

Is the J-31 destined to operate off of China's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, which has been undergoing testing near the port of Dalian since July 2011 but has yet to launch or land a fixed-wing plane? Or is the new fighter strictly land-based?

We don't know. Nor do we know the state of the Falcon Eagle's engine, avionics and weapons development. The origins of the fighter are equally murky, although superficial similarities to the U.S. F-22 and F-35 have fueled speculation in the West that Beijing based the J-31's design on blueprints reportedly stolen from the servers of at least six American aerospace subcontractors in 2009.

In any event, China is now testing two separate stealth warplane designs, placing the rising Asian power just behind the U.S., which has three F-35 stealth models in development, and ahead of Russia with its three-year-old T-50 and Japan with the ATD-X stealth demonstrator still being assembled.

Fortunately for Washington, the acceleration of Beijing's stealth program comes just as the U.S. Air Force is restoring its beleaguered F-22s to full service amid problems with its oxygen systems ' and as the delayed, over-budget and technically troubled F-35 is finally showing some testing progress. In recent weeks the F-35 has refueled mid-air, released a missile and flown at night with its finicky helmet sight.

If the J-20 and China's other new warplanes are any indication, the J-31's flight testing will ramp up slowly over a period of years. In time, additional copies of the new plane will join the test program. When the J-31 might enter frontline service is anyone's guess.

Of course, the same can be said of the U.S. F-35 and every other stealth fighter in development.

NASA Preps Drone Hurricane Hunters, But Misses Sandy

Hurricane Sandy has slammed onto the eastern seaboard. There's been widespread damage and flooding across more than six states. There's been loss of life. But at NASA, researchers are developing a pair of experimental unmanned drones to track future storms in the hope of being better prepared for when they strike.

That would be the high-flying Global Hawk, used by the Air Force to spy on insurgents in Afghanistan. But it's also able to double for hurricane-hunting missions. They can stay in the air for longer than manned flights ' up to 30 hours ' giving the drones a much larger 'window of opportunity' to fly into a hurricane, and can travel much farther and at higher altitudes than manned planes. When NASA flew one of its Global Hawks toward Hurricane Nadine in September, it sent the drone all the way into the eastern Atlantic, much farther out than the NOAA's WP-3D Orion planes can reach.

In September, NASA began the first test flights of a pair of Global Hawks in a five-year-mission to track hurricanes and tropical storms, called Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel. The Air Force uses the Global Hawk, but it's the first time aerial storm-tracking has been carried out by the drone, which NASA hopes will one day augment manned flights and allow researchers to measure changes in hurricane intensity for much longer periods.

But the drones just missed Sandy.

'Despite the fact that it was an incredibly busy hurricane season, we happened to hit the lull of season,' says Scott Braun, a research meteorologist and mission director.

The missed chance was partly bad luck, and partly because of technical problems. One of the drones encountered faults with its avionics and wiring, and never flew. Later, having seemingly missed their window for Atlantic hurricanes but having fixed the drone's issues, NASA moved the pair this month to the Dryden Flight Research Center in California for test flights in high-wind conditions off the Alaskan coast. While it's possible to fly the drones back to the Atlantic, the hurricane will be long gone by then.

The two drones are equipped with different sensors. The first packs sensors for sampling environmental conditions around hurricanes. The second is designed to fly up above storms with a variety of instruments to measure the storms themselves; including a Doppler radar, a microwave sounder for measuring temperature and humidity, and a microwave radiometer for measuring surface wind speeds and rainfall. In combination, flying one after the other, the pair of robot storm-sniffers can measure more accurately how hurricanes get stronger.

But the drones also have their limitations. Manned planes are quicker and easier to get back into the air afterward than the Global Hawk, partly due to manned flights having larger ground crews. This gives NOAA's current fleet the ability to do 'frequent but short hooks' toward the storms, Braun says. Sufficiently cloudy or foggy weather can also ground the Global Hawk, as a manned observer plane is required to be nearby any drone launches due to FAA regulations. If the spotter plane can't track the drone, then it can't take off.

More likely, Braun says, is flying a combination of manned and unmanned flights, with each swapping out depending on the environment and distance. It won't make the storms any less devastating, but it could give a bit more warning.

Most U.S. Drones Openly Broadcast Secret Video Feeds

Four years after discovering that militants were tapping into drone video feeds, the U.S. military still hasn't secured the transmissions of more than half of its fleet of Predator and Reaper drones, Danger Room has learned. The majority of the aircraft still broadcast their classified video streams 'in the clear' ' without encryption. With a minimal amount of equipment and know-how, militants can see what America's drones see.

Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, have become the single most important weapon in America's far-flung pursuit of violent extremists. Hundreds of American Predators and Reapers fly above Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan ' watching suspected enemies, and striking them when necessary. Nearly 3,000 people have been killed in the decade-long drone campaign.

'If somebody could obtain reliable access to real-time Predator or Reaper video ' without attribution or alerting U.S. military ' that would  a tremendous intel coup,' says Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. 'There is an insatiable demand from Predator and Reaper imagery in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Any reluctance to use those for spying or missile strikes places operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia at some risk.'

Military officials have known about ' and mostly shrugged off ' the vulnerability since the development of the Predator in the 1990s. But the problem drew increased attention in 2008, when drone video footage was found on the laptops of Shi'ite militants in Iraq, who were able to intercept the feed using a piece of $26 software. The Pentagon and the defense industry assured the public that they'd close the hole by retrofitting the robotic aircraft with new communications protocols and encrypted transceivers that would keep the video from being intercepted again.

Four years into the effort, however, only '30 to 50 percent' of America's Predators and Reapers are using fully encrypted transmissions, a source familiar with the retrofitting effort tells Danger Room. The total fleet won't see its communications secured until 2014. This source and others who work closely with drone operations say that drones flying overseas are among the first to get the newly secured equipment. They also noted that they are unaware of any incidents of militants using America's unmanned eyes in the sky to their advantage. 'But I'm surprised I haven't,' the source adds. 'And that doesn't mean it's not happening.'

This isn't the only vulnerability in the drone fleet. In March of 2011, an unknown software glitch caused a Predator stationed at a U.S. base in Africa to start its engine without human direction. Last October, as Danger Room first reported, Air Force technicians discovered a virus infecting the drones' remote cockpits in Las Vegas. It took weeks of sustained effort to clean up the machines. The aircraft, which rely on GPS to guide them through the air, can run into problems if GPS signals are jammed in a particular area ' something that can be done with cheap, commercially available hardware. Iranian officials claimed they hacked the GPS control signal of an advanced drone, though it's impossible to verify that lofty claim.

No one who works with UAVs is questioning the fundamental integrity of the drone fleet at the moment; it would take an incredibly sophisticated hacker to commandeer a Predator, for example. Nor is anyone pretending that this premiere tool of the U.S.global  counterterror campaign is flawless.

Predators and the larger, better-armed Reapers transmit video and accept instructions in one of two ways. The first is via satellite, to remote pilots and sensor operators who are often on the other side of the planet; these satellite communications are encrypted, and are generally considered secure.

The second is through a radio frequency signal called the Common Data Link, which is used to share the drone's video feed with troops on the ground. The CDL's carrier signal ' its specific pattern of frequencies, in a given order and for a given length of time ' tells both transmitter and receiver on how to function. The problem is that the Predators' version of the CDL carrier signal (also known as a 'waveform') didn't include an order to encrypt the signal. So neither the transmitter on the drone nor the receivers that troops used on the ground employed encryption, either.

There were reasons for this. The original Predator, just 27 feet long, was little more than a scaled-up model plane with an 85-horsepower engine. It had a payload of just half a ton for all its fuel, cameras and radios. And encryption systems can be heavy. (Big crypto boxes are a major reason the Army's futuristic universal radio ended up being too bulky for combat, for example.) With the early Predator models, the Air Force made the conscious decision to leave off the crypto.

The flying branch was well aware of the risk. 'Depending on the theater of operation and hostile electronic combat systems present, the threat to the UAVs could range from negligible with only a potential of signal intercept for detection purpose, to an active jamming effort made against an operating, unencrypted UAV,' the Air Force reported in 1996. 'The link characteristics of the baseline Predator system could be vulnerable to corruption of down links data or hostile data insertions.'

The Predator models steadily grew in power and payload, and took a big leap in dimensions and capability with the 36-foot-long Reaper version introduced in 2007. The Reaper has a 950-horsepower engine and a nearly 4,000-pound payload ' more than enough capacity for crypto-enabled systems which, like all electronics, had shrunk in size and weight.

The problem was that, by then, the military had rushed to the battlefield hundreds of Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receivers, or Rovers ' rugged, laptop-sized receivers with screens for watching drone footage. And those early version of the Rovers were developed and distributed so fast, the military once again left the crypto off. 'It could be both intercepted (e.g., hacked into) and jammed,' e-mails an Air Force officer with knowledge of the program.

Which mean the Pentagon was stuck, for a time. The military couldn't replace the old CDL waveform with something encryptable until the Rovers ' and the radio transmitters aboard the Predators ' could handle such a signal.

Eventually, the Rovers began to be swapped out for newer models. The latest version, the 'Tactical Rover,' (.pdf) is about the size of an old-school mobile phone. It can use both the Advanced Encryption Standard an the triple-Data Encryption Standard to secure video feeds. There are now about a thousand of the units in the military's hands.

And now, the Predators and Reapers are starting to get enhanced radios, too. 'The fleet-wide upgrade begins later this year and carries on for several years,' says Maj. Mary Danner-Jones, an Air Force spokesperson. The service is spending $12 million on crypto-enabled Vortex transceivers (.pdf).

That's allowing a new, hardened waveform to be introduced throughout the Predator and Reaper fleet. The Air Force recently gave Predator-maker General Atomics Aeronautical Systems a $26 million contract to retrofit its drone cockpits to accept the carrier signal, among other enhancements.

The question is why hasn't this happened sooner. After all, the Navy installed multiple layers of encryption in their 'bots some time ago. Navy spokesman Jamie Cosgrove tells Danger Room that 'the vast majority' of naval drones are encrypted '  'and have been since development.'

One source who works on developing Navy UAVs, but is not authorized the speak on the record, explains why: 'Standard unencrypted video is basically a broadcast to whoever can figure out the right carrier frequency, so essentially, we are simulcasting to battlefield commanders and the opposing force. If that opposing force knows we can see them and from where, they can take better evasive maneuvers.'

It's possible that none of the militants America is trying today are as sophisticated as the ones who intercepted that drone video in 2008. It's possible that the value of such footage-from-above is so fleeting that extremists have never again bothered to grab it. But it's worth noting that Predator and Reaper video is considered by the U.S. military to be classified information. And when U.S. commanders on the ground get into a firefight, the first call they usually make is for a drone, so they can take a look at the battlefield through the eyes of a drone.

U.S. Expands Secretive Drone Base for African Shadow War

The Pentagon's secretive drone and commando base in the Horn of Africa is getting a lot bigger and a lot busier as the U.S. doubles down on its shadowy campaign of air strikes, robot surveillance and Special Operation Forces raids in the terror havens of Yemen and Somalia.

Camp Lemonnier, originally a French colonial outpost in Djibouti, a tiny, impoverished nation just north of Somalia, has been the epicenter of America's Indian Ocean shadow war since just after 9/11. What was once little more than a run-down compound adjacent to Djibouti city's single-runway international airport is now a sprawling complex of hangars and air-conditioned buildings housing eight Predator drones and eight F-15E fighter-bombers plus other warplanes, as well as around 300 Special Operations Forces and more than 2,000 other U.S. troops and civilians.

According to an investigation by The Washington Post, the Pentagon is spending $1.4 billion to expand the base's airplane parking and living facilities. The extra housing could accommodate another 800 commandos, the Post reports. The military is also adding new lighting to a emergency landing strip a few miles from Camp Lemonnier ' an urgent precaution as more and more planes and drones pack onto the main base's sole runway.

The Djibouti base is just one of a constellation of hush-hush U.S. drone, commando or intelligence facilities in East Africa. Others are located in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and the island nation of the Seychelles. But 'those operations pale in comparison to what is unfolding in Djibouti,' the Post's Craig Whitlock notes.

As previously reported by Danger Room, the scale and intensity of covert U.S. operations in Djibouti has increased steadily since 2001. Navy SEALs, Army Delta Force commandos and other Special Operations Forces stage from Djibouti on surveillance infiltrations, counter-terrorism raids, hostage rescues and pirate take-downs. And those are just the operations we know about.

The CIA's armed Predator drones operated from Camp Lemonnier as early as 2002. In November of that year, an Agency Predator crew, following tips from the NSA, tracked al-Qaida operative Qaed Salim Sinan Al Harethi, one of the men who had organized the October 2000 attack on the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole, to a car in Yemen. The drone launched a single Hellfire missile, killing Al Harethi and several other men.

Drones came and went at Camp Lemonnier on a temporary basis between 2002 and 2010, joining a little-mentioned force of F-15 fighter-bombers deployed to the desert base for high-speed bombing runs over Yemen. In 2007 a Predator apparently flying from Djibouti struck a convoy near the southern Somali town of Ras Kamboni, killing Aden Hashi Farah, one of Somalia's top al-Qaida operatives.

In 2010, the Pentagon made the drone presence at Lemonnier full-time, with eight Predators permanently assigned. In September last year, a Djibouti-based Predator took out Anwar Al Awlaki, an American-born cleric and top al-Qaida member.

As the pace of drone and other warplane flights increased, so too did the number of flying accidents. A Special Operations Command U-28 spy plane crashed in February, killing four airmen. The Post details five Predator crashes at or near Lemonnier since January 2011. Besides providing evidence of a ramp-up in the U.S. shadow war, the crashes represent a window into the little-discussed methods of America's commando forces. One Air Force drone accident report from last year mentions a commando officer, identified only as 'Frog,' whose job it was to alert the Air Force crews to launch their drones on covert missions.

'Who is Frog?' one investigator asked, according to a transcript obtained by the Post. 'He's a Pred guy,' an airman responded. 'I actually don't know his last name.'

That level of secrecy is typical of Pentagon activities in Djibouti. Thanks to the Post's excellent reporting, we now know just a tiny bit more about America's expanding shadow war in East Africa.

Watch a Robotic Navy Boat Shoot Missiles for the First Time Ever

runMobileCompatibilityScript('myExperience1926880504001', 'anId');

brightcove.createExperiences();

Killer robots have officially gone out to sea. For the first time, the Navy has fired missiles from a remote-controlled boat, as shown in the video above.

The firing came as part of a test off the Maryland coast on Wednesday. Six of Rafael's anti-armor Spike missiles got fired off a moving inflatable hulled watercraft, aiming for a floating target about two miles away. The missile firings and the boat's controls were all handled remotely by Navy personnel on shore at the Navy's Patuxent River base.

It's the 'first significant step forward in weaponizing surface unmanned combat capability,' Mark Moses, the Navy's program manager for the armed drone boat project, tells Danger Room. Sure, the U.S. military has no shortage of armed robotic planes and ' soon ' helicopters. But it doesn't have weaponized drones that patrol the seas, either above it or below it. The Navy's early experiments with robotic submarines are for spying and mine clearance, not for attack. Until this week's tests at Pax River, the Navy didn't have a robotic surface vessel capable of firing a weapon ' the fulfillment of a goal the Navy set for itself in 2007.

The Navy's been tricking out this 11-meter inflatable boat for the past several years at its base in Newport, Rhode Island, to do just that. Mounted on the boat is a dual-pod missile launcher and an Mk-49 mounting system, all made by Rafael and fully automated, which the Navy's calling a 'Precision Engagement Module.' The Navy seems the module as the sort of thing that could protect U.S. coastline without danger to sailors or coastguardsmen, or prevent pirates or Iranian sailors from maneuvering their small, fast boats between targets that Navy Destroyers can't risk hitting.

The Precision Engagement Module 'could be used in a number of applications including harbor security, defensive operations against fast attach craft and swam scenarios, which is of primary concern for the Navy,' says Moses. 'However, it is probably most effective when targets try and hide among commercial vessels 'for example, congested waterways.'

In three days' worth of tests at Pax River this week, the Navy shot off the long-range version variant of the Spike, a 30-pound missile with an effective range of about 2 and a half miles. The video above shows six of the remote firings ' and while they looked to our untrained eyes like near misses, the Navy says that's a trick of the camera angle, and they actually hit their targets.

All this is just a demonstration; it'll be years and many more tests before the Navy decides if it wants to purchase a fleet of remote-controlled, missile-packing boats. But 'the increase in attention and effort for water borne technological advancements coincides with the drawing down of U.S. military resources in the land locked campaign in Afghanistan,' Mark notes, 'and a strategic refocusing to problem regions where unconventional maritime threats must be accounted for.' In other words: put the robo-boat off Iranian or Somali waters, and let sailors at a safe distance aim and fire its missiles, much like the Air Forces drone pilots do.

Exclusive: U.S. Rushes to Stop Syria from Expanding Chemical Weapon Stockpile

The regime of embattled Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is actively working to enlarge its arsenal of chemical weapons, U.S. officials tell Danger Room. Assad's operatives have tried repeatedly in recent months to buy up the precursor chemicals for deadly nerve agents like sarin, even as his country plunges further and further into a civil war. The U.S. and its allies have been able to block many of these sales. But that still leaves Assad's scientists with hundreds of metric tons of dangerous chemicals that could be turned into some of the world's most gruesome weapons.

'Assad is weathering everything the rebels throw at him. Business is continuing as usual,' one U.S. official privy to intelligence on Syria says. 'They've been busy little bees.'

Back in July, the Assad regime publicly warned that it might just use chemical weapons to stop 'external' forces from interfering in its bloody civil war. American policy-makers became deeply concerned that Damascus just might follow through on the threats. Since the July announcement, however, the world community ' including Assad's allies ' have made it clear to Damascus that unleashing weapons of mass destruction was unacceptable. The message appears to have gotten through to Assad's cadre, at least for now. Talk of direct U.S. intervention in Syria has largely subsided.

'There was a moment we thought they were going to use it ' especially back in July,' says the U.S. official, referring to Syria's chemical arsenal. 'But we took a second look at the intelligence, and it was less urgent than we thought.'

That hardly means the danger surrounding Syria's chemical weapons program has passed. More than 500 metric tons of nerve agent precursors, stored in binary form, are kept at upward of 25 locations scattered around the country. If any one of those sites falls into the wrong hands, it could become a massively lethal event. And in the meantime, Assad is looking to add to his already substantial stockpile.

'Damascus has continued its pursuit of chemical weapons despite the damage to its international reputation and the rising costs of evading international export control on chemical weapons materials,' the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a leading think tank on weapons of mass destruction issues, noted in an August profile of Syria's illicit arms activities.

Exactly why is unclear; Assad is perfectly capable of mass slaughter with more conventional means, like tanks and cluster bombs. Perhaps his chemical precursors are relatively unstable, and he needs fresh supplies; perhaps this is a late shopping spree before the international noose tightens completely; perhaps he wants to send a warning to potential adversaries in Jerusalem and Washington.

Whatever the rationale, Assad is continuing his attempts to buy the building blocks of nerve agents like sarin. The CIA and the U.S. State Department, working with allies in the region, have recently prevented sales to Syria of industrial quantities of isopronol. Popularly known as rubbing alcohol, it's also one of the two main chemical precursors to sarin gas, one of the deadliest nerve agents in existence. The other precursor is methylphosphonyl difluoride, or DF. The Syrians were also recently blocked from acquiring the phosphorous compounds known as halides, some of which can be used to help make DF.

At a recent meeting of the Australia Group, an informal collection of international government officials dedicated the stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction, participants 'discussed the extensive tactics ' including the use of front companies in third countries ' [that] the Syrian government uses to obscure its efforts to obtain [regulated equipment], as well as other dual-use items, for proliferation purposes.' Bottom line: 'Syria continues to be a country of proliferation concern, with active biological and chemical weapons programs.'

In June, Jane's Defence Weekly reported that North Korean engineers were spotted in Syria working on Scud-D short-range ballistic missiles, which can carry chemical warheads. Two months later, witnesses tell the German magazine Der Spiegel, Syria test-fired several of its chemical-capable missiles at the al-Safirah research center east of Aleppo.

To Leonard Spector, deputy director of the James Martin Center, these reports are signs that 'Syria has not stopped the weapons of mass destruction program.'

Among American policy-makers, there's a growing sense (perhaps a bit wishful) that Damascus will eventually fall to the rebels ' despite Assad's brutal crackdown on the uprising, and despite an often-haphazard international campaign to help the rebellion. On Thursday, rebel group announced that they had seized two more districts in the city of Aleppo. U.S. intelligence agencies are believed to be helping with the training of opposition groups, while the Pentagon denies shipping arms to the rebels. In public, American aid has largely been limited to organizational advice (Washington is trying to set up a council of opposition leaders in Doha in the next few weeks, for instance) and technical assistance. Several hundred Syrian activists have traveled to Istanbul for training in secure communications, funded by the U.S. State Department. The rebel leaders received tips on how to leapfrog firewalls, encrypt their data, and use cellphones without getting caught, as Time magazine recently reported. Then they returned to Syria, many of them with new phones and satellite modems in hand.

In the background, the U.S. is also starting to strategize for how it should operate in a post-Assad Syria. And that includes scoping out plans for disposing of Assad's stockpiles of nerve and mustard agents. It won't be easy: Iraq's former chemical bunkers are still toxic, a decade after Saddam's overthrow. The U.S. recently said it won't be done disposing of its Cold War chemical weapon arsenal until 2023.

Disposing of chemical weapons might not be as touchy a political issue in Syria as it is in America. But Assad's nerve agents will still be tricky to render (relatively) safe ' or 'demilitarize,' in weapons jargon. DF, for example, can be turned into a somewhat non-toxic slurry, if combined properly with lye and water. The problem is that when DF reacts with water, it generates heat. And since DF has an extremely low boiling point ' just 55.4 degrees Celsius ' it means that the chances of accidentally releasing toxic gases are really high. 'You could easily kill yourself during the demil,' one observer tells Danger Room.

Naturally, this process could only begin once the DF and the rubbing alcohol was gathered up from Assad's couple dozen storage locations. Then, they'd have to be carted far, far out into the desert ' to make sure no bystanders could be hurt ' along with the enormous stirred-tank reactors needed to conduct the dangerous chemistry experiments. And when it was all done, there would the result would be a whole lot of hydrofluoric acid, which is itself a poison. In other words, even if the U.S. stops every one of Assad's chemical weapon shipments from here on out, the legacy of his illicit weapons program will linger on for decades.

Drug Cartel Kingpin's Death May Make the Zetas Even Deadlier

When Mexican marines killed the leader of the Zetas earlier this month, they killed the only person capable of holding Mexico's most dangerous cartel together. But instead of collapsing, the cartel could become even more dangerous. That's the conclusion reached in an upcoming report from West Point.

'I think it will be harder to detect and determine who the heads are of these smaller groups, and by that defeat them,' Samuel Logan, the director of intelligence firm Southern Pulse and the report's author, tells Danger Room. The reason why involves the complex and shifting allegiances and economics of Mexico's drug trade, and the risks in killing or capturing drug lords. Like insurgent warlords, killing one can provoke more bloodshed as rivals scramble to fill the vacuum.

The report appears in the forthcoming issue of CTC Sentinel, a monthly security newsletter from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, one of the military's premiere think tanks on terrorism. Now, as the Afghan war winds down, it's turning its eyes to Mexico ' and specifically, to the Zeta Cartel.

Nor did the Zetas start out as drug dealers at all, but as former Mexican army commandos who turned into enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, now the Zetas' enemies. After a split with the Gulf Cartel in 2010, the Zetas applied their military training and loose structure to create an entire nationwide criminal enterprise. The formula worked regardless of the fact that few Zetas today have any military training, but because of who held the whole structure together: drug boss Heriberto 'Z-3' Lazcano. Individual Zeta cells would pay a cota, or tax, to Lazacno and his second-in-command Jose 'Z-40' Trevino. In return the cells would be allowed to operate relatively freely.

Other than the tax, all the ex-military boss asked of his franchises was their loyalty. Logan notes the Zetas would distinguish themselves not only by their brutality and precision, but through 'a level of espirit de corps more recognizable in a military unit than a criminal organization' seen in organized prison breaks, refusing to leave their dead Zetas behind, and 'the dogged pursuit of arrested plaza bosses by their rank-and-file.'

After Lazcano was killed in a military operation earlier this month, the Mexican government handed his body over to a funeral home. What did the Zetas do? They showed up with guns and seized the remains. But with Lazcano gone, the loose franchise structure he built could be in trouble. Trevino was never a member of the Zetas' old-school founding military cadre. 'Trevino is prone to confrontation and violence,' Logan writes. But Trevino also 'likely does not receive the same level of respect Lazcano enjoyed among the rank and file.' The break-up could also spark violence that's 'spectacular at localized levels in cities and states where the organization once controlled its own rank-and-file.'

There are some signs this is happening. Following Lazcano's death, narco-banners appeared in the border city of Nuevo Laredo announcing a declaration of war against the Zetas. The group, calling itself the Legionaries, described themselves on the banners as 'renegade Zetas who were betrayed by 'Z-40'' and promised 'an eye for an eye' killings of 'people from the Zetas and their families.'

They're not the first. Prior to Lazcano's death, Trevino was already muscling his way to replace the now-ex-kingpin. Another Zeta franchise boss named Ivan Velazquez Caballero ' known by the alarming name 'El Taliban' ' waged a brief war on Trevino until he was captured by the Mexican military. He likely won't be the last.

Watch Darpa's Rescue Robot Jump, Climb and Dodge Obstacles

Robots aren't often athletic. But in this new video, a prototype version of a robot sponsored by the Pentagon's blue-sky researchers climbs over wooden blocks, jumps while maintaining its balance, and climbs up stairs ' the kinds of athletic tasks that Darpa wants robots to perform in order to aid with disaster relief.

This is the Pet-Proto, a cousin of the PETMAN humanoid robot manufactured by Boston Dynamics, makers of the headless BigDog robo-mule. Darpa released video of its athletic prowess on Wednesday as part of the next phase of its latest grand challenge, an effort to vastly expand the capabilities of robots so they can help repair meltdowns at nuclear plants, rescue people trapped in collapsed buildings, and assist with other disaster-mitigation efforts.

The skills that the Pet-Proto performs in the video are somewhat indicative of what Darpa wants out of its Robotics Challenge, announced in the spring. Contestants will have to go beyond the state of the art: Darpa will make the competing robot designs drive cars; walk over an uneven, debris-strewn surface; climb shaky industrial ladders and catwalks; use power tools to break through a concrete panel; find and close a valve near a leaky pipe; and replace a piece of industrial machinery like a cooling pump. There's a reason Darpa calls these things challenges. At the end of a 27-month gauntlet of tests, the winning team will get a $2 million prize.

Only Pet-Proto won't be competing. Boston Dynamics is working on a yet-unfinished descendent of Pet-Proto, called Atlas, that teams will use as a testbed to design the advanced software for a disaster relief 'bot. (Darpa released this video to show what tasks it expects Atlas to perform ' and, perhaps, surpass.) Those teams, unveiled Wednesday, hail from RE2, the University of Kansas, Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, TRAC Labs, the University of Washington, the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Ben-Gurion University, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and TORC Robotics.

They're not the only teams competing in the challenge. A different group of teams won't use Pet-Proto or Atlas at all: They'll create their own robots and the software for them. Some are new designs modeled off existing work, like the Guardian robot that Raytheon adapted from its exoskeleton projects. Others are modifications of existing designs, like the 'dextrous humanoid' Robonaut that NASA's Johnson Space Center entered ' a version of which is at work on the International Space Station.

Getting a robot to climb across an industrial catwalk and operate power tools is a massively complex endeavor for robotic mobility and autonomy. Dennis Hong, the Virginia Tech engineer who entered the challenge with a modification of his titanium-springed Autonomous Shipboard Humanoid, sums it up like this: Some engineering problems are hard, and others are 'Darpa-hard,' meaning they're theoretically resolvable but practically maddening. 'We consider this beyond Darpa-hard,' Hong says. His robot better be one serious athlete if he wants to win.

With 'Safe Haven,' Desktop Weaponeers Resume Work on 3D-Printed Guns

Three weeks after a group of desktop gunsmiths had its leaded 3D printer seized by the digital manufacturing firm that owned it, the weaponeers have quietly restarted plans to build a gun entirely of printed parts. The group has also begun expanding their operation with outside help, including space for ballistics testing provided by a mysterious firm involved in the defense industry.

Cody Wilson, founder of the Wiki Weapon project, tells Danger Room that the unnamed company's owner 'wanted to offer me a safe haven, basically.' Wilson describes the company as a 'private defense firm' in San Antonio, Texas, but the company's owner is wary of negative publicity and Wilson doesn't want to reveal the firm's name without consent.

'We've got basically a space where we can do experiments. Ballistics, basically. So it's not quite a range ' we've got a range ' but we've got floor space where we can literally test the guns and set up instrumentation,' Wilson says.

A second unnamed company has also stepped in to volunteer manufacturing space. That company works with 3D printers and is based in a light industrial district in nearby Austin, where Wilson lives.

But the new assistance wouldn't have happened had Wiki Weapon not first run into trouble acquiring a 3D desktop printer ' which use layers of heated materials to create everyday objects. At the low-end, they can be used to print everything from silverware and jewelry to Warhammer miniatures. At the high-end, the printers are used in industries ranging from dentistry to aerospace. But Wiki Weapon intended to go much further by producing a working pistol.

The group was stymied in late September after a printer leased from desktop manufacturer Stratasys was seized by the company over fears the group was preparing an illegal and unlicensed gun undetectable by airport security scanners. The federal law Stratasys alleged Wilson intended to break ' the Undetectable Firearms Act ' provides an exemption for plastic gun prototypes made by licensed manufacturers. Within days after his printer was taken away, Wilson was also questioned after visiting a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms office in Austin. The group is now seeking a license from the agency.

Later, Wilson was approached by a licensed gun manufacturer who was apparently willing to let the group use his personal 3D printer. 'But he got cold feet, so we walked away from it,' Wilson says.

The desktop gunsmiths are also forming a slew of corporations to protect Wiki Weapon against potential lawsuits. The online collective overseeing the project, called Defense Distributed, is being turned into a nonprofit 501(c)(3) engaged in 'charitable pubic interest publishing,' Wilson says, which will distribute weapons blueprints online for free. A new research and development company created by the group called Liberty Laboratories is being incorporated in Texas and will be responsible for printing, testing and firing the guns. The group plans to start a third company for raising and protecting its private assets.

It's not hard to see why. An early attempt at fundraising over Indiegogo was blocked until the group raised $20,000 over the online currency network Bitcoin. But the amount raised so far is fairly limited, and Wilson says the move is necessary to raise private capital.

Adding a sense of legitimacy to the project may also be a way to shield the group from some criticism. Ever since the group had its first printer taken, a raging debate has been carried out online over questions of gun control and the potential dangers regarding a future where anyone could potentially download a gun off the internet.

Gun control advocates slammed Wilson. Josh Horwitz, the executive director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, called Wilson an 'extremist' involved in a 'blatant, undisguised attempt to radically alter our system of government.' Backing up Wilson and Wiki Weapon were a loose coalition of gun enthusiasts, techies, libertarians and Reddit geeks.

At the same time, however, hobbyists have continued to experiment with printed gun parts. Earlier this month, one at-home manufacturer produced a working fire control group ' the component which handles a gun's trigger motion ' for an AK-47 rifle. The debate will likely resume if or when Wiki Weapon produces a fully printed gun. 'We have a printer on standby right now,' Wilson says. But he added that the group is looking at another five to six weeks at minimum before they're ready, and that's a big maybe. When (or if) the group receives a firearms license is still indeterminate.

'We want to prototype a few things first,' he says. 'I think there's no rush for me to go ahead and get into renting an Objet printer or something more high-end until one of these first few prototypes shows it has a promise.'

The good news for the group is that they've found companies willing to associate with DIY gun makers. It hasn't been easy, so far. But don't say isn't easy isn't impossible either.

Pentagon's Newest 'Humanoid' Walks as Awkwardly as You Do

It's not going to dance Gangnam Style any time soon. But in order to help sailors extinguish shipboard fires, the Navy's newest robot has to learn how to move as awkwardly as real people do.

This is the Autonomous Shipboard Humanoid, or ASH, the latest robotic creation from Dennis Hong's team at Virginia Tech. ASH is based on Hong's award-winning (and Gangnam-dancing) CHARLI-2, a highly mobile, 4-foot-tall 'bot. Only ASH is going to have a major upgrade from CHARLI-2: titanium springs in his legs and butt that act like human muscles. No more will robots amble stiffly like, er, robots.

The reason they do is that they're designed that way. Humanoids typically have rigid limbs, an approximation of the bones of their human creators. That's good for robotic durability, but it has limitations for mobility. Approximating the tendons and musculature of homo sapiens 'has been a no-no for some time' among robot engineers, says Hong, who displayed ASH ' well, his lower half at least; that's all Hong's built so far ' for the first time at the Office of Naval Research's biennial science and technology expo. 'He's a significant departure from the traditional humanoid robot.'

There hasn't really been a reason for humanoid robot design to approximate the more complex ambulatory systems of a human's lower body. Most robots only have to walk across the flat surfaces of laboratories, stages and convention floors, Hong explains. But ASH is part of a program, funded by the Office of Naval Research, called SAFFiR, an effort to create an autonomous robot that can help human sailors deal with shipboard disasters like firefighters. And a regular humanoid robot wouldn't be able to maintain its balance aboard a rolling deck, climb through 'knee-knocker' passageways or ascend the ladders and stairs that define shipboard life. To do that, Hong had to design ASH according to 'biological principles.'

That means ringing its legs and hindquarters with 'compliant linear actuators,' Hong says ' i.e., titanium springs. 'You don't walk like a robot,' Hong explains, somewhat generously, as he exaggerated his own gait as if he were walking on the moon. 'You store potential energy, and then you reset [your leg], like a spring' It helps you keep your balance after you're knocked off it. It's more energy-efficient.'

It's somewhat similar to Boston Dynamics' PETMAN, a headless robot that walks more naturally than most humanoid machines. And it's a bit counterintuitive: By making ASH's legs springy, and seemingly more wobbly than the average robot, Hong is betting he can better stabilize ASH's mobility, plus allow him to climb ' a traditional robotic difficulty.

ASH got his share of gawkers as Hong and other Virginia Tech engineers suspended him near the exhibition floor ' understandably, since the robot doesn't have a body from the waist up. Hong programmed the robotic leg set to move about, demonstrating its hydraulics and titanium springs. It was the first time Virginia Tech brought ASH out to meet his public. But since the robot is unfinished, it can't yet march, let alone climb, and his tethered ambling was a bit awkward.

The Navy will start testing him aboard a ship next year, Hong says. But there's no word yet on when ASH will hit the dance floor.

Romney's Big Navy Guru Made Millions From Building Ships

Edited 4:55 p.m.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has vowed to boost the size of the Navy by roughly 15 percent as part of a broader defense buildup. 'Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917,' he complained in Monday night's debate. 'That's unacceptable to me.'

But for one of Romney's most important advisers on Navy issues, a man who oversaw a massive naval expansion for Pres. Ronald Reagan, there's more at stake than U.S. national security. John Lehman, an investment banker and former secretary of the Navy, has strong and complex personal financial ties to the naval shipbuilding industry. He has profited hugely from the Navy's slow growth in recent years ' raising the prospect that he could make even more if Romney takes his advice on expanding the fleet.

That doesn't mean that a bigger or better Navy is necessarily a bad idea. But it does complicate Romney's claim that a larger Navy would merely be 'matched to the interests we need to protect.' A bigger maritime force has the possibility of personally enriching one of the candidate's top advisers. In fact, it already has.

Lehman is the founder and chairman of J.F. Lehman & Company, a private equity firm. He also sits on several corporate boards.

Lehman invested in a government-backed 'Superferry' in Hawaii ' a business that ultimately failed, but not before boosting the standing of Austal USA, an Alabama shipbuilder that constructed the ferry service's ships. Austal USA's rising fortunes in turn benefited international defense giant BAE Systems, which then bought up shipyards owned by Lehman in order to work more closely with Austal USA.

When all was said and done, the roundtrip deal helped net Lehman's firm a reported $180 million. And besides that, Lehman continues to own shipyards that do lucrative maintenance work for the Navy. Even leaving aside the intricate ferry-and-shipyard series of deals, Lehman still stands a decent chance of profiting from the naval buildup he is helping to plan.

Lehman, through a Romney campaign aide, calls any suggestions that he benefited from shipbuilding operations 'kind of amusing.' Lehman says he lost enormous sums of money on the Superferry deal, rather than earning it.

But Ryan Sibley ' an editor at the Washington, D.C.-based watchdog Sunlight Foundation who has closely tracked the former Navy Secretary's investments ' says that 'Lehman's involvement with the Superferry shows that he is no stranger to using personal connections to influence costly decisions.'

Pages: 1 2 3 View All

President Romney Can Thank Obama for His Permanent Robotic Death List

It's a good thing that Mitt Romney endorsed President Obama's counterterrorism agenda. Should he win the election in two weeks, Romney will inherit an institutionalized, bureaucratic machine for using lethal robots to target and kill suspected terrorists and their allies. Killing Osama bin Laden was a one-time event; this 'Disposition Matrix' is Barack Obama's real national-security legacy.

The Matrix, as detailed in a blockbuster Washington Post expose, is a master list maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center of suspected terrorists around the world, matched with methods for dealing with them. Most often, that means killing them; and most often, that means using an expanding fleet of armed drones to do so, taking off from hubs in the Arabian Peninsula, eastern Afghanistan and Djibouti's Camp Lemonnier. Despite bin Laden's death and the supposed disruption of al-Qaida's old leadership, the Matrix keeps adding names, as fast or faster than the drones drop bodies.

Maybe the White House still believes, as Obama aide Ben Rhodes recently contended, that the Arab Spring will 'undercut the al-Qaida narrative.' But the constellation of U.S. counterterrorism agencies is settling in for the long haul: a war that expands worldwide and shows no sign of ending. 'We're not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, 'We love America,'' one tells the Post's Greg Miller.

There's a rhetorical consensus in Washington that, as Romney said at Monday's debate, the U.S. 'can't kill our way out of this mess.' It's spoken so often it's a cliche. But in practice, killing appears to be the mainstay of U.S. efforts: nearly 3,000 people have been slain by drone strikes, according to a Post online database, including an undisclosed number of civilians. And the security agencies are preparing for even more.

As the Post's Greg Miller recounts, the security bureaucracy has dug in. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the elite military organization that killed bin Laden, now runs a targeting center outside Washington. The CIA, Miller writes, seeks to expand its drone fleet and remain 'a paramilitary force,' rather than 'return to its pre-Sept. 11 focus on gathering intelligence.' The U.S. military might be drawing down from Afghanistan, but JSOC and the CIA are what backstop that retrenchment.

At the nearby National Counterterrorism Center, teams of analysts and officials compile the targeting lists compiled by JSOC and the CIA, and match them to unspecified standards for dealing with terror suspects. They review the Disposition Matrix every three months before passing it along to the White House for approval of specific actions outside the well-entrenched Pakistan drone campaign. There, John Brennan, Obama's trusted chief counterterrorism deputy, runs an interagency meeting that passes selected targets for killing to Obama for approval.

The Matrix is a 'work in progress,' officials told Miller, and goes beyond drone strikes to include 'sealed indictments and clandestine operations.' (It's not clear what grand juries are issuing such indictments.) But if the Matrix actually contains names of terror suspects, then it may not be exhaustive of U.S. counterterrorism efforts: the CIA also conducts so-called 'signature strikes' against unknown persons who merely match a demographic profile for terrorism.

What's more, there are constraints on the U.S.' ability to take non-lethal action against terrorists, some of them self-imposed. Protracted disagreements between the White House and Congress over terrorism detentions, for instance, have led to few terrorism suspects being captured outside Afghanistan. Those who have, like the Somali suspect Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, have been placed in ad hoc prisons like the brig of the USS Boxer. There are some signs Congress might revisit the detentions question, but until some resolution exists, lethal strikes will remain the option of choice.

And there's little evidence of a strategy, like the one Romney called for on Monday, in which the lethal operations fit. After ten years and two presidencies, the U.S. still lacks a mature strategy for stemming the demand for al-Qaida globally. What it's got instead is 'Countering Violent Extremism,' a jumble of efforts, many outside government, that either borrow the tactics of anti-gang task forces or send Muslim rappers on pro-U.S. goodwill tours.

Obama did not run for president to preside over the codification of a global war fought in secret. But that's his legacy. Administration officials embraced drone strikes because they viewed them as an acceptable alternative to conventional ground warfare, which it considered too costly and too public, but the tactic has now become practically the entire strategy. Micah Zenko at the Council on Foreign Relations writes that Obama's predecessors in the Bush administration 'were actually much more conscious and thoughtful about the long-term implications of targeted killings,' because they feared the political consequences that might come when the U.S. embraces something at least superficially similar to assassination. Whomever follows Obama in the Oval Office can thank him for proving those consequences don't meaningfully exist ' as he or she reviews the backlog of names on the Disposition Matrix.

Army's Giant Spy Blimp Plan for Afghanistan Set Adrift

The military's distant dream of a floating eye in the sky may have become even more distant. Just over two months after the inaugural test flight of the Army's giant robotic spy blimp ' and before a planned mission over Afghanistan ' the Army is saying it's not so sure about sending the airship abroad after all. Which sort of defeats the point of having the blimp in the first place.

'Whether it's going to Afghanistan or not, I am not sure, because all of that is based on safety, getting it over there and what the time line is,' force development director Brig. Gen. Robert 'Bo' Dyess tells Inside Defense (woefully behind a paywall). Dyess added that the Army is focusing instead on a slimmed-down version of its aerial surveillance network MARSS and the Army's 'Grey Eagle' variant of the Predator drone. Meanwhile, the LEMV will retain 'some investment' and be kept among a number of the Army's 'future capabilities.' The Army and Northrop-Grumman ' the airship's developer ' have not responded to Danger Room when asked for comment.

It's an odd reversal from the optimism surrounding the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV). Measuring out to around the length of a football field, the LEMV is designed to float thousands of feet above a warzone while scanning everything in sight. It also takes off like a conventional plane before switching to helium and floating, which in theory allows it to stay aloft for weeks. In August, the LEMV took to the skies for the first time, a success for the Army's best hope for a working spy blimp.

But Northrop was also betting on an Afghanistan deployment planned for 2013 to show off the blimp and wow the Army into buying more of them. After a withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2014, however, there may not be the will or interest among commanders for an airship that spies on insurgents the U.S. is no longer fighting. The military was also swamped with another massive spy blimp that's since been disassembled. Now neither may actually go to war.

The Army had a competitor in the Air Force's even larger Blue Devil 2 airship ' a favorite of Senate defense moneymen Daniel Inouye and Thad Cochran. The Air Force spent two years and $211 million to build the blimp, only to unceremoniously deflate it this summer before it was ever deployed to combat and after numerous delays. At the same time, the Air Force was reluctant from the beginning about the Blue Devil. The airship's developer, Mav6, also didn't have the heft of a major defense contractor like Northrop.

When the LEMV was first delayed, the Army backed it up. Northrop boasted of the LEMV's first successful flight control test in August, and pitched the airship as a hybrid spy and cargo craft. Since the LEMV is big enough to lug seven tons of cargo at once, the blimp could be a way to help lift weapons and equipment out of Afghanistan as troops withdraw. It was a good-looking piece of machinery, at least on paper. It burned a 10th of the fuel of a conventional plane tasked with the same mission, and could be flown manned or unmanned.

But the LEMV's expectations may have been set too high in a field crowded with competing blimps and surveillance planes, and not only the Blue Devil. There was also the ISIS and Pelican dirigibles floated by the Pentagon's far-out researchers at Darpa. According to Lt. Gen. Mary Legere, the Army's deputy intelligence chief, the LEMV ran into snags because of it being a 'one-of-a-kind prototype,' she told Inside Defense. Left unsaid is why there was a proliferation of unique ' and expensive ' blimps when only one was needed to do the job. The Senate Armed Services Committee wondered the same thing.

It's also worth considering what the LEMV will be doing after 2014. If it doesn't make it to Afghanistan by the time U.S. troops withdraw, the blimp ' or rather blimps ' may end up floating aimlessly after being designed for a war they never fought.

Navy's Top Geek Says Laser Arsenal Is Just Two Years Away

Never mind looming defense cuts or residual technical challenges. The Navy's chief futurist is pushing up the anticipated date for when sailors can expect to use laser weapons on the decks of their ships, and raising expectations for robotic submarines.

'On directed energy' ' the term for the Navy's laser cannons, 'I'd say two years,' Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, the chief of the Office of Naval Research, told Danger Room in a Monday interview. The previous estimate, which came from Klunder's laser technicians earlier this year, was that it will take four years at the earliest for a laser gun to come aboard.

'We're well past physics,' Klunder said, echoing a mantra for the Office of Naval Research's laser specialists. Now, the questions surrounding a weapon once thought to be purely science fiction sound almost pedestrian. 'We're just going through the integration efforts,' Klunder continued. 'Hopefully, that tells you we're well mature, and we're ready to put these on naval ships.'

Klunder isn't worried about the ships generating sufficient energy to fill the laser gun's magazine, which has been an engineering concern of the Navy's for years. 'I've got the power,' said Klunder, who spoke during the Office of Naval Research's biennial science and technology conference. 'I just need to know on this ship, this particular naval vessel, what are the power requirements, and how do I integrate that directed energy system or railgun system.'

That's a relief for the Navy. It means that the Navy's future ships probably won't have to make captains choose between maneuvering their ships and firing their laser weapons out of fear they'd overload their power supplies.

But shipboard testing is underway. Klunder wouldn't elaborate, but he said that there have been 'very successful' tests placing laser weapons on board a ship. That's not to say the first order of business for naval laser weaponry will be all that taxing: In their early stages, Pentagon officials talk about using lasers to shoot down drones or enable better sensing. Klunder alluded to recent tests in which the Navy's lasers brought drones down, although he declined to elaborate.

Then come the unmanned submarines. Current, commercially available drone subs typically swim for several days at a time, according to Frank Herr, an Office of Naval Research department head who works on so-called unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs. That's way behind the capabilities that successive Navy leaders want: crossing entire oceans without needing to refuel. So Klunder wants to raise the bar.

'The propulsion systems that I think you're going to see within a year are going to [give] a UUV with over 30 days of endurance,' Klunder said. By 2016, a prototype drone sub for the office's Long Duration Unmanned Underwater Vehicle program should be able to spend 60 days underwater at a time: 'That's ahead of schedule of what we told the secretary of the Navy a year ago.'

That's a challenge for the subs' propulsion and fuel systems. Typically, Herr explains, the commercially available batteries built into prototype drone subs take up a lot of the ship; but building bigger subs just increases the need for power. The nut that the Office of Naval Research has to crack is using more efficient fuel cells while designing subs that don't need as much energy to run. 'We're thinking about power requirements for these systems as well as the power [sources] available for them,' Herr says.

'The breakthrough,' Klunder explains, 'was really on getting past your more traditional lead-acid battery pieces to more technically robust but also mature lithium ion fuel cell technology and the hybrids of that.'

None of that is to say the lasers will be actually on board by 2014 or the drone subs will disappear beneath the waves for 60 days by 2016. That depends in part on the Navy's ability to afford it ' and at the conference this morning, Adm. Mark Ferguson, the Navy's vice chief, warned that 'research and development is part of that reduction' in defense budgets currently scheduled to take effect in January. But it might not be long before Klunder is finally able to hand over a battle-ready laser cannon to Big Navy.

Make Mitt, Not War: Romney Channels Inner Peacenik in Debate

He doesn't want military intervention in Syria. War with Iran has to be an absolute last resort. The surest way to stability in the Mideast comes through economic development. The Afghans are on track to take over the Afghanistan war in 2014, paving the way for a U.S. troop withdrawal. The U.S. can't 'kill our way out of this mess' in the Middle East. America possesses 'the mantle of leadership for promoting the principles of peace.

No, it wasn't President Obama who said, 'We don't want another Iraq. We don't want another Afghanistan.' Mitt Romney showed up to Monday night's foreign policy debate as a dove.

Before the debate, Danger Room opined that Romney's main task was to draw clear distinctions with Obama while not seeming like he'll start another war. He definitely succeeded on the latter point.

Surprisingly, Romney explicitly stepped away from his bellicose rhetoric on Iran and Syria, two of his main lines of foreign-policy attack against Obama. On Iran, Romney pledged to 'tighten' sanctions on Iran and called military action a 'last resort' to 'only, only consider if all the other avenues were tried to their full extent.' On Syria, Romney reiterated his pledge to arm the rebels ' but not with American weapons, and he ruled out using the U.S. military to topple dictator Bashar Assad. On Afghanistan, Romney didn't even entertain the possibility of leaving troops in the country after 2014. He's not a total dove ' he endorsed the drone strikes against al-Qaida ' but Obama sounded more belligerent in the debate than Romney did.

The cost of all this was to blunt distinctions with Obama. By my count, Romney said he agreed with Obama on five issues: drone strikes; Afghanistan; calling for the ouster of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak; killing Osama bin Laden; and placing economic sanctions on Iran. Romney conspicuously avoided attacking Obama's handling of last month's assault on the U.S. conflict in Benghazi, Libya. In previous speeches, Romney has criticized Obama's foreign policy more than he's actually explained what he'd do differently; on Monday night, voters were treated to the curious sight of Romney explicitly endorsing several aspects of Obama's agenda.

Obama didn't have a good debate. He ducked several questions ' what to do if Afghanistan looks like a shambles in 2014; what to do about the shambles in Syria right now ' and preferred to attack Romney. Sometimes he actually mocked his challenger. When Romney reiterated a talking point that the Navy is smaller now than in 1917 (a spurious comparison that ignores the vastly more capable fleet of 2012) Obama shot back that the military has 'fewer horses and bayonets, too. We also have these things called aircraft carriers; they land planes on them.' Obama sounded disinterested in discussing his agenda ' outside of killing Osama bin Laden, which he reminded everyone about ' and dismissing Romney's.

Romney had some stumbles, such as when he described Syria as Iran's 'path to the sea,' even though Iran has tons of coastline in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. But for all of his lack of distinctions from Obama, he called back to an era of Republican stewardship in foreign policy, from Eisenhower to Nixon to George H.W. Bush, that emphasized sturdy, understated global leadership; a distaste for military adventurism; and, above all, competence. Nowhere was that clearer than when Romney conceded that the U.S. has no choice but to work with its frenemy in Pakistan despite how distasteful it might be, since Pakistan's nuclear arsenal precludes American disengagement.

Many on the left spent the Bush era wondering what happened to that tradition. The Mitt Romney who showed up to the final presidential debate sounded like he'd bring it back.

Why Benghazi Is Even Bigger Than You Think for Obama and Romney

The assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya promises to play a big role in Monday's debate between President Barack Obama and former Governor Mitt Romney. But don't cringe: for all the silly gotcha moments about who cried 'terror' and when, the Benghazi attack provides a chance for both candidates to address major concerns about their approaches to a chaotic world.

The first round of congressional hearings on the Benghazi assault have come and gone. But they didn't focus on the crucial question of the strategic implications of the assault. Does it mean the U.S. needs to involve itself deeper in the Arab Spring; pick favorites within the uprisings; or stand back as the the upheaval proceeds? Both candidates have said a lot about the incident and practically nothing about arguably the most important questions it raised.

Benghazi was a major departure for Obama. Whatever you think of his foreign policy, it's been devoid of single-shot, high-profile disasters. There haven't been hostage crises, Marine barracks or Khobar towers bombings, 9/11s or botched invasions. He's succeeded when his troops have executed missions like killing Osama bin Laden or freeing Americans from pirates; and secrecy conceals potential mistakes rising from his drone war. The result has been a veneer of competence.

But several aspects of his foreign policy have either skirted on the edge of disaster or risk tipping over into them, whether it's the surge and ensuing the drawdown from Afghanistan; or his inconsistent approach to the Arab Spring, where he'll intervene in Libya but not Syria. Indeed, Libya looked like the successful ouster of a dictator with no U.S. casualties, but it turned out the U.S. neglected the warning signs of Islamist resurgence in eastern Libya until it murdered four Americans.

Benghazi resonated because it pierced that veneer of competence. It's reasonable to wonder if there are about to be several Benghazis on Obama's watch, whether in the form of raided Mideast embassies or Taliban advances or an Iranian nuke. Obama's most urgent task in this debate is to explain why there won't be.

Obama began to make that argument last week by reminding voters that he ordered the raid that killed bin Laden: 'We are going to hunt them down, because one of the things that I've said throughout my presidency is when folks mess with Americans, we go after them.' But that's not an answer, unless Obama is prepared to accept avenging disasters, not preventing them. And militants in Benghazi suspected of involvement in the consulate attack are unimpressed by the bin Laden raid. Instead, Obama needs to explain how his approach to the Middle East adjusts to the assault and takes the region actively in a direction amenable to U.S. interests. Treating the attack as 'non-optimal,' as Obama said to Jon Stewart, is a cop-out, one that can reinforce an impression that Obama has been lucky, not wise ' which Romney is sure to cultivate.

Romney arguably has an easier task. Now that he's narrowed the race, he just needs to seem like a credible commander-in-chief. But as Romney has sowed doubt about Obama's record, he's raised several about his own agenda. Thus far, Romney has yet to distinguish his geopolitical plans from Obama without seeming like he's out to start a whole new war.

For example: Romney has portrayed Iran's continued Uranium enrichment as a major Obama failure, and echoed Netanyahu's rhetoric of confrontation. But while Romney's rhetoric on Iran is bellicose ' adviser Dan Senor last week emphasized keeping the 'military option' available ' his stated proposals for confronting Iran center around the economic sanctions that Obama has enacted. And while he criticizes Obama's 'reset' with Russia, Romney doesn't acknowledge that the reset helped halt Russia's aid to Iran, which kept the Tehran regime from getting advanced air defenses and needed injections of cash. If Romney recognizes this tension in his agenda, he has yet to address how to overcome it.

That tension runs through many Romney foreign-policy proposals. He's tried to signal that he'd be tougher than Obama, but also that voters don't have to worry about electing a warmonger. He's often ended up blurring distinctions with Obama. On Afghanistan, for instance, he has endorsed Obama's exact strategy, even while criticizing it for weakness. Same thing with Syria: he's criticized Obama for staying aloof, but has stopped short of the critical step of arming the rebels, out of the same caution over inadvertently arming jihadists that Obama has exhibited. The exceptions have been Romney's calls for increased military spending and expanding the Navy ' but he's provided few details for either.

Benghazi gives Romney a big opportunity to resolve these tensions. He's had two chances to signal how future Benghazis won't happen on his watch: first, a much-criticized attack on Obama within hours of the battle; second, a semantic criticism of Obama's statements on the attack at last week's debate. What Romney has yet to do is explain how his approach to the Arab Spring would move the Mideast in a pro-American direction. Romney has already tightened the race, so now he has to look like a competent commander-in-chief before sealing the deal with voters, and that's where Benghazi is a double-edged sword. If Romney's going to keep hammering Obama on Benghazi, at some point he has to unveil an alternative for avoiding them ' deeper involvement in Arab civil wars? Greater opposition to their Islamic factions? ' or he'll reinforce the impression that he's out of his depth on foreign policy.

Whatever the politics surround it, Benghazi is important. It revealed the U.S. doesn't understand the forces in the Mideast that the Arab Spring has unleashed, and lacks an understandable approach for dealing with them before they jeopardize American lives. Creating one is part of the foreign policy debate the country deserves. Whether Obama and Romney present that debate this evening is a different story.

Narquitectura: Inside the Fortified Palaces of Mexico's Drug Lords

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

A gangster lives a fast, dangerous life ' especially Mexico's brutal narco-chieftains. Just look at their houses. With the prospect of death never far away and plenty of money to burn, it makes sense to spend lavishly on a mansion ' especially a fortified one. The locals have a term for the style: narquitectura.

Some are built like castles, intended to express authority and feature lavish interiors and pens of exotic pets. Others are tucked into tony, upper-income neighborhoods, making their gaudiness less conspicuous. But a gangster's house, no matter where it is, is going to be ostentatious and idiosyncratic. Some house are simply way too big, with furnishings seemingly chosen at random and in an apparent hurry. Damien Cave, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote that the mansions look they were built and decorated "as if on a shopping spree with a deadline imposed by a dangerous profession."

But the defining aspect of narquitectura is paranoia. Walls or gates are a must. Many gangster cribs have few windows and resemble command centers as much as homes, including business-like meeting rooms and advanced security systems. Drug cartels have even carried over some of the tacky luxury into death with elaborate bulletproof tombs. Narquitectura estates often turn out to be lifelong investments ' no matter how short those lives are.

Above:

Arabian Nights

Few drug lords matched the excess of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Arguably the most powerful Mexican drug boss of the 1990s, Carrillo assassinated his way to the top of the Juarez Cartel and was infamous in the U.S. for transporting billions of dollars worth of cocaine on a fleet of private jets.

His vanity was reflected in this oversized mansion, named "The Palace of a Thousand and One Nights" after the Middle Eastern folk tales. Estimated to be worth $5 million, the mansion now sits abandoned and covered in graffiti in the posh Colonia Pitic neighborhood in the northwestern Mexican city of Hermosillo. Authorities have since taken steps to demolish it. Carrillo died in 1997 during a botched plastic surgery operation.

Photo: Artotem/Flickr

Danish Architect Maps Every Plane, Helicopter Shot Down by Syrian Rebels

View Syria: downed aerial vehicles in a larger map

In July, the embattled regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad unleashed its jet fighters against the growing rebel forces of the Free Syrian Army, marking a major escalation of the bloody civil war. The rebels responded. With guns and, allegedly, Stinger shoulder-fired missiles acquired from the CIA, they sent some of Assad's roughly 460 planes and copters tumbling in flames to the ground.

Now a Danish architect and part-time aviation journalist is mapping each claimed shoot-down of Assad's jets and helicopters, resulting in the first running tabulation of the cost ' at least in terms of machinery ' of the escalating Syrian air war. Bjørn Holst Jespersen's map, sponsored by journalist David Cenciotti's blog The Aviationist, marks 19 possible 'kills' by rebel forces, as reported in the press or seen in YouTube videos.

But some of these alleged shoot-downs are listed as being based on 'weak report[s].' 'The information is gathered from unverified sources (for the main part),' Jespersen warns in the map's disclaimer. 'It might be subject to change, and the list does not pretend to be complete.'

By the same token, there have been scattered reports of additional aircraft kills that Jespersen and his contributors have not yet added to the map. 'For sure some helicopter cases are not (yet) on the list,' Jespersen admits.

The uncertainty reflects the difficulty of getting reliable information from the battle zone, plus the prevalence of the Free Syrian Army's propaganda. One video from August purports to depict the destruction of a government L-39 jet, but the plane turned out to be a remote-controlled toy.

In any event, the map can help outsiders visualize the scale and intensity of the fighting in Syria, more than a year after rebels first took up arms.

Video: Navy's Humanoid Robot Dances Gangnam Style

Meet CHARLI-2, Virginia Tech's skinny, five-foot tall humanoid robot. His balance is enviable: Jostle him, and he'll right himself ' which is one of the reasons the Navy is using him for research on its firefighting robot of the future. Oh, and as the video above shows, he also dances Gangnam Style.

On Monday, CHARLI-2 will formally meet his flesh-and-blood shipmates at an expo in Virginia thrown by the futurists at the Office of Naval Research. His creator, engineer Dennis Hong of Virginia Tech's Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory, has a $3.5 million grant from the Navy to help design CHARLI-2's son, the Autonomous Shipboard Humanoid, or ASH. CHARLI-2, the current test platform for ASH, will take the stage at the Office of Naval Research's annual science and technology showcase to demonstrate how robots can interact with humans.

The Navy has been experimenting with a different robot, the similarly lifelike Octavia, on the same program to build a robot that works with human sailors to fight shipboard fires. Octavia, however, has a wheeled chassis. She will never do anything Gangnam Style. And since ships are filled with 'knee-knocker' passageways, ladders and steps, the Navy needs a robot that ' at least theoretically ' can.

'If a robot can do all the tasks that come with fighting a fire, it can do all these other things on ships, like mopping the deck,' Hong tells Danger Room. 'It's like the Swiss Army knife of robotics.' Or at least the PSY.

But the Navy isn't just working with Hong because CHARLI-2 has graceful legs. It's because of the robot's advanced software, particularly its ability to orient itself. 'If you have a bipedal robot with a camera on its head, it's shaking a lot, so how does the robot figure out where it is in the room?' Hong explains. So Hong designed an algorithm for stabilizing CHARLI-2 and getting it to adapt to obstacles like those knee-knockers. (In robotics, the effort is called SLAM, for simultaneous localization and mapping.) CHARLI-2's software will contribute to the ASH project, even as its hydraulics help Navy researchers tackle the physical challenges of designing the 'bot to ascend and descend decks.

Oh, and CHARLI-2's also, uh, famous. He's the repeat champion at the prestigious RoboCup robotics awards two years running in the full-size humanoid category. Time has gushed over him. Luxury brand Louis Vuitton gave CHARLI-2 an eponymous award after beating a Singaporean robot at soccer. Hong got a monogrammed leather LV case.

But CHARLI-2 isn't going to be a prima donna on ship. Starting next year, the Navy will start 'making sure it can walk along [a ship's] aisles, and probably by the end of next year, put it in a smoky environment,' Hong says. And he's got a love interest: Octavia's smooth, creamy skin will combine with some of CHARLI-2's features to yield the ASH robot. Like his father, ASH will have articulable legs that can be placed inside a protective suit, like a human, to withstand temperature extremes.

CHARLI-2's son might one day work alongside human sailors to put out shipboard flames. But it remains to be seen if either robot can outcompete those sailors in a Gangnam dance-off. However, a confident Hong says, 'CHARLI-2 can at least beat Navy sailors in a dance-off doing 'The Robot.''

Darpa Wants to Find Hidden Bombs the Way Doctors Find Breast Cancer

To find hidden bombs, the U.S. military has tried everything from sniffing their chemical scent to shooting lasers into the ground. The Pentagon's blue-sky researchers think they have a better paradigm: search for them the way physicians locate tumors.

Darpa recently launched a program called Methods for Explosive Detection at Standoff, or MEDS. The agency wants companies to 'rapidly develop and demonstrate non-contact methods to detect explosives embedded or packaged in opaque media with high water content (e.g., mud, meat, animal carcasses)' using ultra-wideband microwaves, that 'have shown promise for breast cancer detection,' according to a project solicitation.

In recent years, breast cancer researchers have had success using ultra-wideband, or UWB, to detect malignant tumors in breast cancer patients. It's complicated, but involves zapping tissue at close range with signals from across the radio spectrum, at much wider range than conventional X-rays. To oversimplify it, the UWB waves bounce back and highlight healthy tissue while contrasting it with a darker-colored malignant tissue. If it's possible to detect a tiny tumor with it, then it stands to reason that it may be possible to detect explosives hidden inside some wet mud or even a dead dog. (It happens.)

Improvised bombs remain the primary weapon of insurgent warfare, and they're proliferating beyond the warzones. Meanwhile, the number of IED attacks against U.S. troops has continued to increase, though the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization says that the bombs are now fortunately killing fewer troops. Locating the bombs before they explode is tremendously complex.

The U.S. built expensive bomb jammers for a time ' until insurgents switched to bombs that detonate by wire; and then to bombs that detonate by pressure. Metal detectors used in Afghanistan provoked insurgents to build bombs out of wood and fertilizer. The military has built a plane-mounted radar to track militant bomb teams from above. But a slew of expensive directed-energy weapons have come to little ' including one truly ridiculous lightning gun ' and the military has been so desperate to stop bombs planted in drainage ditches that the Army allowed itself to get ripped off by shoddy Afghan contractors.

And it won't be easy to build ultra-wideband detectors. A recent declassified NATO report (.pdf) on work with UWB bomb detectors was optimistic about method, but clutter like rocks and other debris 'degrade[d] the signal to clutter ratio and reduce[d] the system performance.' Handheld UWB detectors, such as the Army's Minehound scanner, were also limited by a single pair of antennae and ' with few exceptions ' couldn't draw an image of what they saw.

Darpa's MEDS program isn't requiring its detectors to use imaging ' it really wants something that can simply pinpoint a buried bomb ' but considers the option 'desirable, if feasible.' The agency doesn't specify if the devices will be handheld or carried by vehicles or robots. Regardless, the devices will have to get pretty close to the ground for an antenna to pick up a signal, as the NATO report considered the range on potential systems to max out around 20 to 30 centimeters 'in ideal conditions.'

The program also points toward other 'potentially relevant areas' such as non-linear acoustics ' distorted sound waves, basically ' and 'mixed modality mechanisms' like electron-photon beams. What Darpa doesn't want are devices that use X-rays 'with the possible exception of X-ray backscatter,' due to the risk of contamination. One thing about finding tumors: you don't want to poison your patient as you search, as any doctor could tell Darpa.

After Libya, U.S. Seeks to LoJack Its Diplomats

Among the horrors of the September assault on the Benghazi consulate was that security personnel at the diplomatic compound lost track of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens for hours. They next saw him when Libyans returned his corpse. A new program by the State Department's security branch seeks to ensure diplomats in conflict zones can't go missing anymore.

A recent solicitation revealed that State wants to upgrade its security to a Personnel Tracking and Locating system that could allow diplomats to check in with security personnel through their phones or other handheld devices. The 'device agnostic' system would work similarly to the Blue Force Trackers that soldiers use to keep track of one another on the battlefield: a signal emanates from the device over a satellite network and apears as an icon on a digitized map monitored by State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Devices networked together that host the tracking software need to be able to call up a map on a web browser that shows the relative position of each user, layered over a GoogleEarth baseline.

The new system has to 'display live/historical tracks with the following device information for all ingested devices: device ID, alias/call-sign, last reported latitude/longitude, last reported track receive time, and emergency status,' reads the solicitation for the system's software. For additional security, State wants diplomats to be able to create geo-fences using the system, with automatic alerts going out to authorized users once the devices' signal leaves (or, conceivably, enters) a perimeter.

It will never be known whether a tracker could have saved Stevens' life. But his death provides a grim reminder of what can happen when diplomats disappear.

According to the U.S. government's official timeline of the Benghazi assault, when militants began firing rocket-propelled grenades into the compound, a consular official responsible for security quickly lost track of Stevens in a cloud of thick, dark smoke. He and others inside the main building had to flee to a nearby annex without the ambassador. At some undetermined point, Libyans outside the gates brought Stevens out through the melee and got him to Benghazi's central hospital. It is unknown whether he was alive at the time, or how long it took anyone to find him after the attack began.

The State Department wants some functionality that military systems like Blue Force Tracker or the Army's reconfigured Nett Warrior communications suite don't have. In an 'emergency,' it wants the software to 'to remotely activate the microphone of audio-capable trackers' ' which could allow security officials to gather intelligence on a hypothetical hostage situation.

To be very clear, there's no way that tracking devices like these could have stopped the Libya assault from happening. They don't substitute for understanding the dangers that lurk outside diplomatic gates or having available, competent security personnel prepared to deal with them. But the acrimony over the Benghazi debacle threatens to compel diplomats worldwide into retreating behind hardened embassy walls, rather than accepting the risks of travelling to far-flung areas where diplomacy sometimes needs to be conducted. LoJacking diplomats like they're cars is one small way the department can mitigate those risks while still conducting vital foreign policy.

Frappe-Sipping Libyan Militant Laughs at U.S. Manhunt for Benghazi Killers

No one from the FBI has interviewed him. Libyan security forces haven't brought him in for questioning. But one of the leading suspects behind last month's bloody assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi just gave a boastful interview to the New York Times, all while comfortably sipping a strawberry frappe and trying to convert the reporter to Islam.

Ahmed Abu Khattala is not living the life of a wanted man. Eyewitnesses to the attack interviewed by the Times placed him at the scene, and he's connected to the militant group Ansar al-Shariah that the U.S. believes played at least some role in the assault. There is supposed to be a search for the attackers underway. President Obama has vowed revenge for Benghazi.

Yet Abu Khattala met with the Times' David Kirkpatrick at a 'luxury hotel' in eastern Libyan city for 'two leisurely hours,' and did everything but laugh openly at Obama's pledge. Abu Khattala doesn't plan to go into hiding. The reconstituted Libyan army is a 'national chicken,' he said, and poses no threat to him. And he's not sorry for the assault that killed Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans; indeed, he equivocates on what his precise role in it was. 'No authority has even questioned him about the attack,' he told Kirkpatrick.

Abu Khattala basically trolled the U.S. in the pages of its leading newspaper. 'Why is [the U.S.] always trying to use force to implement its agendas?' queried a man who may have helped a mob kill four Americans. Complicating the current consensus narrative of the Benghazi assault, Abu Khattala says the attack on the consulate had 'had grown out of a peaceful protest against a video' insulting the Prophet Muhammed ' a peaceful protest the State Department now says never took place. Most of all, he gave the interview on an patio of a crowded luxury hotel, drinking a strawberry frappe, musing about the incompatibility of Islam and democracy and inviting Kirkpatrick to convert.

Abu Khattala is obviously not feeling pressure from the manhunt that Obama administration officials have portrayed as under way. There are supposed to be U.S. surveillance drone orbits over Libya, which never stopped after last year's war. Below them is supposed to be an FBI team investigating the attack. (The team was delayed.) And the Washington Post reports that the Libya attack has helped fuel a CIA push to expand its armed drone fleet.

On October 4, Pentagon spokesman George Little portrayed the U.S. was 'aggressively' hunting Stevens' killers. 'We've not been sitting around waiting, you know, for information to come to us,' Little told reporters. 'We've been actively chasing leads in various ways. The intelligence community, the State Department, FBI, the full range of capabilities of this government have been used to try to determine what happened in this tragic incident.'

At the second presidential debate, Obama reiterated a vow to avenge the Benghazi attack, and tied it to the successful manhunt that killed Osama bin Laden. 'We are going to find out who did this and we're going to hunt them down,' Obama said on Tuesday, 'because one of the things that I've said throughout my presidency is when folks mess with Americans, we go after them.'

At least one person wanted in connection with that attack does not believe Obama.

Sim Ship: Royal Navy's Realistic Bridge Trains Officers On Dry Land

Britain's Royal Navy has built one of the world's most advanced ship simulators, designed to prepare trainee naval officers for navigating through tricky waters before they even leave the shore.

The bridge simulator is located at the Brittania Royal Naval College in Dartmouth and has been recently upgraded with photorealistic simulations of harbors such as Portsmouth and Plymouth. Marine IT specialists Transas, who completed the simulator upgrade, spent five days photographing Portsmouth harbor at different times of day.

The result is 630 megabytes of realistic buildings whose signs have readable letters and whose lights reflect off the waters, accurate depictions of different light and weather conditions and, for the trainees, an eerie sense that the simulator isn't on dry land.

'You're absorbed by what is going on,' said Lt. Simon Preece, who works on the navigational staff at the college. 'You forget that you're not in Plymouth or Portsmouth'

The false bridge may not be on a ship, but otherwise it's entirely complete. About the only difference between the simulator and an actual ship is the view: Where an actual warship has windows to the outside world, the simulator features 180 degrees of display screens.

The bridge is so realistic that it can simulate heavy seas and winds over the bow, though it works best at winds below Force 7. 'Some people have even asked if it's on hydraulics,' said Lt. Sam Stephens, head of navigation at Dartmouth. 'It's not. It simply tricks the mind.'

Officers will spend about 30 hours on the simulator during their initial training. In addition, bridge teams throughout the Royal Navy will use the simulator to practice navigating through tricky harbors.

'You can run through any scenario on here that you wouldn't want to try for real,' said Lt. Stephens. 'It's a safe environment ' as well as everyday maneuvers, such as replenishing at sea, navigating in fog or poor weather conditions.'

Photo: Royal Navy

Buffoonish Would-Be Jihadist Sought to Blow Up the New York Fed Today

He tried to detonate the Federal Reserve in lower Manhattan, only his bomb was a dud. He asked a contact over Facebook ' who was a secret FBI informant ' if it was permissible to blow up a country that granted him a student visa. And he cackled in a park about wanting to pull off a terrorist attack so big it would bring Muslims closer to the day they would 'run the world.'

This is the mind-boggling tale of Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, a 21-year old Bangladeshi national arrested in New York on Wednesday on terrorism charges. If even a fraction of what the government alleges against him is true, Nafis is simultaneously a dedicated would-be mass murderer and a complete buffoon who, like many jihadi wannabes, set himself up for failure from the start.

The FBI, NYPD and New York's Joint Terrorism Task Force announced on Wednesday that they had thwarted a plot by Nafis to detonate the New York Federal Reserve Bank in a massive suicide bombing. 'We will not stop until we attain victory or martyrdom,' the feds allegedly have Nafis on video saying. Only the bomb didn't work, because its component parts were provided to Nafis by an undercover FBI agent.

The FBI has a recent history of announcing thwarted terrorist attacks that only came to be because FBI informants or agents convinced the perpetrator to go through with them. If the government complaint against Nafis holds up in court, he was something genuine. The Justice Department alleges that Nafis came to Queens, New York, in January from Bangladesh on a student visa ' and quickly began exploring his options for pulling off a terrorist attack. Only Nafis was so inattentive to keeping his operation a secret that he practically stood on a street corner and waved his arms until the FBI and NYPD took notice.

In July, Nafis crossed the radar of an anonymous FBI informant, according to the criminal complaint against him. When they initially spoke on a phone call, Nafis attempted to cover himself with a crude code: He was a fan of 'O' (Osama bin Laden), a reader of 'I' (Inspire, al-Qaida's English-language webzine for DIY terrorism), and he wanted to pull off 'J' (jihad). But the very next day, Nafis was so trusting that he openly discussed on Facebook 'Islamic legal rulings' on the permissibility of bombing a country that granted him a student visa. Within a week, was ranting in person to the informant about killing 'a high-ranking government official' and boasting of his ties to al-Qaida.

The informant did what informants in these cases do: snitch. He told Nafis that he knew a member of al-Qaida in New York. An excited Nafis attended a meeting with the al-Qaida agent in Central Park on July 24, where he allegedly gushed about wanting to pull off something 'very, very very very big, that will shake the whole country, that will make America not one step ahead, change of policy' [but] that will make us one step closer to run[ning] the whole world.'

Of course, Nafis was speaking with an undercover FBI agent, less than a month after making contact with the snitch. The closest Nafis came to disbelieving the agent came in a question the following month: 'The thing that I want to ask you about is that, the thing that I'm doing, is it under al-Qaeda?' The undercover FBI agent nodded, and that was enough for Nafis, who implored him to tell al-Qaida that he had come up with the plan to bomb the Fed all by himself.

The agent took it from there. He hooked Nafis up with 20 50-pound bags of fake explosives, a van and a storage space for it all; and convinced Nafis not to return to Bangladesh to see his family a final time. Nafis, for his part, gave the agent a thumb drive containing an article he wanted published in Inspire explaining his brilliant plan. Go time was set for Oct. 17, 2012, with the hope of disrupting the presidential election.

On Wednesday morning, the two assembled the bomb, hooked up a cellphone detonator, loaded it into the van, and parked outside the Federal Reserve. They rented a room at a nearby hotel so the agent could film Nafis' video explanation. 'We will not stop until we attain victory or martyrdom,' he allegedly says, before placing several calls to the detonator device ' which was never actually hooked up to a live bomb. The phone, of course, was tapped. Once Nafis called the device, agents had everything they need and arrested him.

It might come out at trial that all or much of this story is untrue. A criminal complaint is not proof. But if the government's portrait of Nafis is even partially accurate, he had more dedication to terrorism than he had brains ' which is something that probably reassures counterterrorism operatives who still don't know how to end al-Qaida once and for all.