Chuck Hagel Says He's Just Like Obama's Previous Pentagon Chiefs

Two years ago, Leon Panetta figured the surest way to get confirmed by the Senate as defense secretary was to sound a lot like his predecessor, Robert Gates, who was widely respected for overseeing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars while getting rid of questionable defense programs. Panetta won a full 100 Senate votes. Chuck Hagel, the man President Obama nominated to succeed Panetta, won't ' he's already a political punching bag. But Hagel painted himself in the mold of Gates and Panetta during his opportunity before the Senate to punch back.

If Hagel sounded a major theme during his Thursday confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, it's total continuity with the Obama administration's defense policies, as he pledged himself 'committed to [Obama's] positions on all issues of national security.' But since some of those efforts are ambiguous, Hagel's description of them carries meaning. On Afghanistan, Hagel sees no contradiction between 'end[ing] the war there' in 2014 and continuing to authorize the U.S. troops that constitute an envision residual force to engage in 'counterterrorism, particularly to target al Qaeda and its affiliates.'

And while Hagel is wary of new troop commitments on the periphery of U.S. national security, he declared himself on board for shadow wars against al-Qaida spinoffs. Hagel vowed to 'keep up the pressure on terrorist organizations as they try to expand their affiliates around the world, in places like Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa,' throwing money and support behind 'special operations forces and new intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technologies.' If that sounds familiar, it's because you heard the same pledge, almost word for word, two years ago at Leon Panetta's confirmation hearing to the same job.

Iran? 'Prevention, not containment' of a nuclear breakout, for which 'all options must be on the table.' Israel? 'Our friend and ally' will continue to receive U.S. military aid to 'maintain its Qualitative Military Edge,' and particularly for the Iron Dome rocket-defense system and its successors. Nukes? Like Obama, Hagel wants sizable cuts to the nuclear stockpile, and, like Obama, he committed to 'maintaining a modern, strong, safe, ready, and effective nuclear arsenal.'

While in the past Hagel has talked about putting the Pentagon on a budgetary diet, he said the automatic budget cuts called sequestration Congress has slated for March 1 are a 'complete disaster.' And you'll never guess how he phrased that opposition: 'I have made it clear I share Leon Panetta's and our service chiefs' serious concerns about the impact sequestration would have on our armed forces.'

If all of this sounds like a lesson in political reassurance, it should. For weeks, right-wing groups have been slamming Hagel, an old adversary since he broke Republican ranks on the Iraq war (after voting for it), as too far left of the Washington foreign-policy consensus on all these issues. That line of attack got an endorsement from the mouthpiece of that consensus, the Washington Post editorial page, which fretted in December that Hagel was 'well to the left of those pursued by Mr. Obama during his first term' and 'near the fringe of the Senate.' The ranking Republican on the panel, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who opposes Hagel's nomination, said, 'Too often it seems, he subscribes to a worldview that emphasizes appeasing our adversaries while shunning our friends.'

Hagel's none-too-subtle response at the hearing was to tell senators, 'Like each of you, I have a record' [and] no one individual vote, quote, or statement defines me, my beliefs, or my record.' And someone who really does believe in the virtue of scaling back American military overreach, Chris Preble of the Cato Institute, blogged on Thursday, 'the odds are long against Chuck Hagel being a truly transformative SecDef.'

Air Force Wants You to Design Its Next-Gen Sensors (For Cheap)

You may have noticed that the Pentagon is crying poverty. So when the Air Force dreams up its next decade's worth of imagery and sensor technology, it wants it all for cheap.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Air Force's imaging and targeting support directorate let it be known it's looking for the next generation of tools for geospatial (GEOINT) imagery. Everything's on the table, hardware and software, and so the Air Force is dreaming big. According to a request for information about what's technologically feasible, aimed at the defense industry and academics, it wants tools for 'GEOINT in anti-access, denied areas'; for tracking and characterizing data taken from 'underground facilities'; for identifying concealed and camouflaged targets; and it wants them to 'significantly exceed current bandwidth and onboard data storage requirements.'

It's an ambitious step forward, even considering the advanced sensors and cameras that the Air Force is already developing. The 'GEOINT sensors, associated on-board data algorithms and components supporting a functional end-to-end GEOINT architecture' are supposed to maintain the Air Force's edge through 2024. Just one thing: The Air Force isn't going to pay you much for it.

Funding over the next two years is 'uncertain,' given the budget woes of the current Congressional dysfunction about automatic spending cuts and the inability for the past year to even pass the defense budget President Obama submitted in February. So the Air Force's imagery and targeting managers are 'seeking 1-3 year projects that require funding of less than $1.5 million per year.'

To give a sense of scale here, check out the Pentagon's contracts announcements from, say, Tuesday. In one day, the Air Force gave defense giant Lockheed Martin $58 million for the Space Based Infrared Systems Follow-on Production Program; and another $49.6 million to Lockheed for a global-strike software suite. Sure, that's not exactly an apples-to-apples measure, but it does show how much cash the Air Force still has to dole out.

Yet the Air Force's pleading for cheap advanced research reflects the sheer terror that Pentagon budget officials feel. In his advance testimony to the Senate, defense secretary-nominee Chuck Hagel lamented a potential loss of '$40 billion from our budget in a little over half a year' ' the last defense bill Congress passed was $530.6 billion, excluding war spending ' and '20 percent cuts in the Department's operating budgets.' Earlier this month, the services started preemptively cutting their own budgets to prepare for the shock of automatic cuts scheduled for March 1.

It so happens that's the same day the Air Force wants white papers from researchers about all the new geo-spatial gear they'd like to design. Research was probably always going to get the short end of the budgetary stick, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta let it be known earlier this month that he'd prioritize cash for the Afghanistan war. But if the researchers show that they can pull off the specs for the next generation of Air Force imagers on a relative pittance, the Air Force might have to start explaining why it's paid so much for some of its other sensing tools.

7 Big Defense Companies With Big Transparency Problems

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The combination of tons of cash from advanced military projects and excessive secrecy is a dangerous one ' it fuels corruption and graft in defense industries around the world. This week, Transparency International released its summary of corruption in the defense world, and broke down which countries scored an "F" on the watchdog's rankings for openness. The group has also been going after specific vendors of death and destruction that haven't been upfront about measures to stop corruption.

To come to its conclusions, the watchdog group surveyed companies using several criteria: whether the companies have anti-corruption programs in place, whether the companies require ethics training for employees, whether firms keep an eye on graft by their suppliers and contractors, and whether the firms prohibit -- or at least regulate -- political contributions and influence-buying from employees, among many other questions.

Here are seven of the worst offenders.

Above:

General Atomics

General Atomics got its start, per its name, in the nuclear industry. But the company's MQ-1 Predator drone has vaulted it to the forefront of defense firms involved in fighting the war on terror. It's also the most prominent American company to score at the bottom of Transparency International's rankings, as General Atomics did not provide information on its anti-corruption polices to the watchdog. General Atomics has also been adept at greasing its political wheels, having contributed more than $600,000 on trips for key congressional legislators during the Predator's nascent years.

For the watchdog's analysis of the U.S. defense industry as a whole, it comes off looking okay, but not great. (The U.S. gets a "B.") "The [U.S.] has extensive legislation in place to regulate defence procurement," the watchdog notes. Now wait for it: "evidence suggests that defence acquisition decisions are often political in nature." Big surprise.

Photo: Air Force

Next Up for SEALs: Upgraded Batman-Style Grappling Hook Gun

Even Navy SEALs need to feel like Batman sometimes. Especially when they're trying to scale walls or board ships.

Enter Jim LaBine of the defense company Battelle. For years, Battelle has manufactured a tool for SEALs that the Dark Knight might haul from the Batcave: a pneumatically fired grappling hook, launched from an intimidating black cannon about the size of your arm. It's called the Tactical Air Initiated Launch, or TAIL, and LaBine designed it. It's even been featured on MythBusters. Six months ago, LaBine opted to upgrade it.

SEALs wanted something 'that could clear a two-story building,' LaBine explains during a Washington, D.C. special-operations conference. So he designed something that's meant for scaling a much, much taller building instead. Pictured above, the RAIL, or Rescue Air Initiated Launch, is a collapsible metal grappling hook. It's given a lot of extra lift to the gun's ability to get a SEAL over an obstacle.

The grapple on the TAIL is an unyielding metal claw. It's good for getting its hook into a surface 100 feet high and towing a sturdy, nylon-jacketed line or ladder for someone to ascend. But the claw is inflexible, and that poses problems for its use. 'I'm limited by it,' LaBine says, 'but it's got elements that want to let me go further and higher.'

The RAIL operates more like Batman's actual climbing tools (with the caveat being that neither Batman nor his gadgets are real). It folds like an umbrella into the TAIL's barrel, and only flexes after firing, opening into a claw shape at the end of the drag. According to LaBine, it more than doubled the TAIL's upward maximum range, to 250 feet. Search-and-rescue teams might want to use it as well as the military, he thinks.

One problem: according to a video LaBine showed me, the RAIL makes a loud, whistling sound as it sails through the air, so it's not good for a stealth raid like on the bin Laden compound. (There's 'some loud noise,' LaBine concedes.) It's not yet for sale, according to Battelle, so it may have some tweaks on the way before SEALs get to use it for, say, getting aboard a hostile ship. Or even swooping across Gotham's rooftops.

Even After Lackland Scandal, Military Still Isn't Fixing Its Sexual Abuse Epidemic

The Pentagon has talked a lot about putting a stop to sexual abuse and harassment in the military, including abuse carried out by general officers. Yet a new report from the investigative arm of Congress finds it's mostly that ' talk. It catalogs how the military still hasn't fixed a host of systemic obstacles that contribute to sexual assault and make it less likely for survivors to get help.

According to a report released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), while the Pentagon has made some progress in recent years at trying to stop sexual abuse, treatment isn't always available. Medical first-responders are undertrained and not always aware of services available for survivors. Perhaps worse, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs ' which oversees the military's health resources ' hasn't 'established guidance,' required by the Pentagon, 'for the treatment of injuries stemming from sexual assault.'

Among those guidelines: standardizing procedures for collecting evidence; providing specialized medical care; and, perhaps most alarming, keeping the identities of survivors private. Instead, sexual assault survivors within the military have to navigate a hodge-podge of different standards between branches ' even at individual bases. 'These inconsistencies,' the report states, can 'erode servicemembers' confidence. As a consequence, sexual assault victims who want to keep their case confidential may be reluctant to seek medical care.'

All these systemic obstacles to ending sexual abuse persist despite endless pledges from Pentagon officials to finally do away with one of the military's most glaring sources of injustice. 'If we don't take steps to deal with it ' if we don't exercise better leadership to confront it ' it'll get worse,' Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told NBC News in September. 'In a May 2012 letter to military commanders signed by Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chiefs stated: 'As military professionals we must fully understand the destructive nature of these acts, lead our focused efforts to prevent them, and promote positive command climates and environments that reinforce mutual respect, trust and confidence.'

The Pentagon has had an overarching sexual-abuse policy since 2005 which 'calls for sexual assault prevention ' to be gender-responsive, culturally competent, and recovery-oriented; and for an immediate, trained sexual assault response capability to be available in deployed locations,' according to the report. But the Pentagon has fallen short of establishing and enforcing policies that are more specific, and trained first-responders may not always be available or trained properly to respond.

A huge problem is confidentiality ' a reoccurring issue in sexual assault cases where victims may fear retaliation for reporting the crimes. First, sexual assault cases can be reported in the military using two ways: unrestricted reports and restricted reports. For an unrestricted report, a survivor reports an assault to superiors and military law enforcement, who ' in theory ' begin an investigation, and provide medical care and counseling. A restricted report, on the other hand, allows a survivor to confidentially inform superiors about the assault without sparking a criminal investigation. The survivor, according to military policy, should still receive medical care, but personally identifying information will be kept anonymous.

But that's not always the case. At one unidentified military installation, the installation's medical policies 'did not ' offer health care providers alternative procedures for documenting and reporting medical issues associated with restricted reports of sexual assault,' the GAO finds. And across different bases, medical personnel were being given conflicting instructions about how to report the assaults from different levels of command. These contradictory policies 'created confusion for health care providers regarding the extent of their responsibility to maintain the confidentiality of victims who choose to make a restricted report of sexual assault.'

And there's no single method for victims to access medical and mental health care across the military branches, according to the GAO. The Army requires each brigade 'to deploy with a health care provider who is trained to conduct a forensic examination, whereas the Air Force deploys trained health care providers based on the medical needs at specific locations.' The Navy doesn't require ships to have a sailor aboard who is trained to conduct forensic examinations, instead preferring a policy of transferring victims to ships that do ' or onto shore. If a trained examiner is out of reach, the policy is for medical providers to 'do their best ' using the instructions provided with examination kits.'

Meanwhile, the military's medical first responders are 'still unsure of the health care services available to sexual assault victims at their respective locations.' According to the report, there's no consistent instructions on where sexual assault survivors should go for examination, even though evidence in such cases is perishable. 'Refresher training' for sexual assault cases, which the Pentagon requires military first responders to undergo every year, is also below standards, with thousands of personnel missing annual courses.

The report comes a week after the House Armed Services Committee brought in Gen. Mark Welsh III, the Air Force's top general, for a grilling about the Lackland Air Force Base sexual abuse scandal. The sprawling base in San Antonio, Texas, where the Air Force sends all its recruits for basic training, has been the focus of an investigation into sexual abuse of at least 59 recruits and airmen by their instructors. Thirty-two instructors have been disciplined ' including prison terms ' for charges ranging from aggravated sexual assault to rape. There's also the case of Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, accused of 'forcibly sodomizing' a woman Army captain and threatening her military career 'if she ended their sexual relationship,' as stated by military documents acquired by Danger Room in December. On Jan. 22, Sinclair deferred entering a plea at his court-martial.

There's hope things could be different. On Thursday, Dempsey argued to reporters that sexual abuse in the military is partly owed to how the military treats women: as less than equal. 'When you have one part of the population that's designated as warriors, and another part of the population that's designated as something else, I think that disparity begins to establish a psychology that, in some cases, led to that environment,' Dempsey said while announcing plans to integrate women in combat roles and units.

Dempsey never said that equality by itself would be a solution, for the simple reason that it's true. For a start, it means recognizing that talk is talk. It's quite another thing to step up and do something about it.

Here Are The Patterns The Feds Found for U.S. Mass Killings

This is what a mass killer looks like, according to a Department of Homeland Security analysis. He works alone. He uses a semi-automatic handgun. He's a he. And he probably didn't serve in the U.S. military.

That's the conclusion of a November 28 analysis by the New Jersey branch of the Department of Homeland Security's partnership with state and local law enforcement. The so-called intelligence 'Fusion Center' sifted through data on 29 major mass killings in the U.S. since 1999, starting with the Littleton, Colorado school shooting. Its practical advice is to be more concerned by your co-worker with the bad hygiene who mutters about putting his 'things in order' than by the war veteran in the next cubicle.

The basic pattern found by the New Jersey DHS fusion center, and obtained by Public Intelligence (.PDF), is one of a killer who lashes out at his co-workers. Thirteen out of the 29 observed cases 'occurred at the workplace and were conducted by either a former employee or relative of an employee,' the November report finds. His 'weapon of choice' is a semiautomatic handgun, rather than the rifles that garnered so much attention after Newtown. The infamous Columbine school slaying of 1999 is the only case in which killers worked in teams: they're almost always solo acts ' and one-off affairs. In every single one of them, the killer was male, between the age of 17 and 49.

They also don't have military training. Veterans are justifiably angered by the Hollywood-driven meme of the unhinged vet who takes out his battlefield stress on his fellow Americans. (Thanks, Rambo.) In only four of the 29 cases did the shooter have any affiliation with the U.S. military, either active or prior at the time of the slaying, and the fusion center doesn't mention any wartime experience of the killers. Yet the Army still feels the need to email reporters after each shooting to explain that the killer never served.

It's harder to construct patterns around shooter motives, the report notes, since in most cases the killer takes his own life or gets killed by law enforcement before publicizing his reasons for violence. But DHS warns that 'indicators of potential violence' include a worker's abrupt and persistent absenteeism; 'escalation of domestic problems into the workplace; talk of severe financial problems'; a notable decline in 'attention to appearance and hygiene'; unsolicited empathy with the perpetrators of mass violence; and vocalized musings about suicide. The fusion center doesn't offer more granular data.

The data comes as the country begins a renewed, heated debate about the relationship between mass-casualty events and easy access to guns. The Senate Judiciary Committee will explore the question in a Wednesday morning hearing that follows on a series of gun-control proposals pushed by President Obama in the wake of last month's Newtown, Connecticut elementary school massacre. It's worth noting that the fusion center study doesn't mention the circumstances under which the shooter obtained his guns.

One of the most striking patterns about U.S. mass killings is visible only through its absence. Terrorists aren't committing these crimes. Ordinary, unhinged American men are. That's despite an inability for federal law enforcement to track stockpiled firearms and literally years of al-Qaida sympathizers and propagandists urging disaffected U.S. Muslims to rise up against their neighbors.

U.N. Drone Investigator Might Be a Deadly Robot's Worst Nightmare

Ben Emmerson wants to be clear: He's not out to ban flying killer robots used by the CIA or the U.S. military. But the 49-year-old British lawyer is about to become the bane of the drones' existence, thanks to the United Nations inquiry he launched last week into their deadly operations.

Emmerson, the United Nations' special rapporteur for human rights and counterterrorism, will spend the next five months doing something the Obama administration has thoroughly resisted: unearthing the dirty secrets of a global counterterrorism campaign that largely relies on rapidly proliferating drone technology. Announced on Thursday in London, it's the first international inquiry into the drone program, and one that carries the imprimatur of the world body. By the next session of the United Nations in the fall, Emmerson hopes to provide the General Assembly with an report on 25 drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Palestine where civilian deaths are credibly alleged.

That carries the possibility of a reckoning with the human damage left by drones, the first such witnessing by the international community. Accountability, Emmerson tells Danger Room in a Monday phone interview, 'is the central purpose of the report.' He's not shying away from the possibility of digging up evidence of 'war crimes,' should the facts point in that direction. But despite the Obama administration's secrecy about the drone strikes to date, he's optimistic that the world's foremost users of lethal drone tech will cooperate with him.

In conversation, Emmerson, who's served as special rapporteur since 2011, doesn't sound like a drone opponent or a drone skeptic. He sounds more like a drone realist. 'Let's face it, they're here to stay,' he says, shortly after pausing to charge his cellphone during a trip to New York to prep for his inquiry. 'This technology, as I say, is a reality. It is cheap, both in economic terms and in the risk to the lives of the service personnel who are from the sending state.

'And for that reason there are real concerns that because it is so cheap, it can be used with a degree of frequency that other, more risk-based forms of engagement like fixed-wing manned aircraft or helicopters are not,' Emmerson says. 'And the result is there's a perception of the frequency and intensity with which this technology is used is exponentially different, and as a result, there is necessarily a correspondingly greater risk of civilian casualties.'

Emmerson has zeroed in on the most heated debate about the drones, a subject around which there is little consensus and fewer facts, thanks to government secrecy. Do the drones kill fewer people than other methods of warfare? Or does their seeming ease of use make warfare easier to proliferate, and therefore kill more people ' terrorist and innocent ' than they otherwise would? There are several independent studies, mostly relying on uncertain local media reports from the dangerous places the drones overfly, and no agreement.

'When I think about the covert drones program, we're focused on the civilian impact,' says Sarah Holewinski of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, which has studied the program. 'But nobody really knows! The president doesn't know, I don't know, human rights groups don't know. They're taking place in remote areas. I'm looking forward to knowing from this inquiry what actually happens when a drone strike occurs.'

Enter Emmerson. From now until May, his team will explore 25 drone strikes in the Mideast and South Asia and examine the 'safeguards' that the three countries known to have used the lethal technology ' the U.S., U.K., and Israel ' place around the strikes. It won't settle the debate. But it will provide a deeper pool of data with which to inform it.

'The territories in which these technologies have been used thus far have typically been areas where there's a densely populated civilian community living in poorly constructed buildings that collapse very easily, often like a pack of cards or dominoes,' Emmerson says. 'And [they] cause damage beyond that, which would be the intended consequence or the anticipated consequence. Are those incidents resulting in [internal] investigation? Has any individual or any entity been held accountable? Have lessons been learned? Do these problems continue? Do they [subside], do they carry on or increase? These are the sorts of questions that we'll be trying to look at as best we can.'

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Suicidal Sensors: Darpa Wants Next-Gen Spy Hardware to Literally Dissolve

Forget about a kill switch. Planned obsolescence? Already obsolete. The Pentagon's blue-sky researchers want tomorrow's military hardware to literally cease to exist at a predetermined point. Welcome to the age of suicidal sensors.

Darpa isn't imagining planes or ships that melt into a metallic puddle when their replacements come off the production line. The research agency is thinking, in one sense, smaller: sensors and other 'sophisticated electronic microsystems' that litter a warzone ' and create enticing opportunities for adversaries to collect, study and reverse-engineer. Since it's not practical to pick them all up when U.S. forces withdraw, Darpa wants to usher in the age of 'transient electronics.'

If you've ever lost your phone and worried about random strangers sifting through your data, you have a sense of why the idea appeals to Darpa. But you probably never imagined Apple creating a piece of hardware 'capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner.' That's where Darpa comes in. Next month, it's going to invite interested scientists and manufacturers to a Virginia conference to kick around ideas for creating what it calls 'triggered degradation.' Oh, and some of that degradation will occur inside a soldier's body.

The program to create transient electronics is called VAPR, for Vanishing Programmable Resources. Darpa's going to say more about it in the coming weeks. But thus far, the idea is to make small hardware that performs just like current sensors, only fabricated from materials that can rapidly disintegrate on command.

'VAPR will focus on developing and establishing a basic set of materials, components, integration, and manufacturing capabilities to undergird this new class of electronics defined by their performance and transience,' its program manager, Dr. Alicia Jackson, tells Danger Room.

Sometimes the hardware will be pre-programmed to self-destruct. Other times a human should be able to step in and signal to the device that the cold grasp of oblivion beckons. All of this is supposed to go much, much farther than a circuit board rigged to explode if it falls into enemy hands. And it's not totally mad science. Last year, Darpa researchers successfully demonstrated that super-thin electronics made out of silicon and magnesium could be fabricated to dissolve in liquid. 'This program follows on that study and seeks to develop the technology through the demonstration of a basic circuit,' Jackson says.

'The efficacy of the technological capability developed through VAPR will be demonstrated by building transient sensors with RF links,' explains a Darpa announcement about the February VAPR confab, 'representative of what might be used to sense environmental or biomedical conditions and communicate with a remote user.' Imagine throwing a bunch of sensors around a given swath of forest, ravine or desert that could impart 'critical data for a specified duration, but no longer' ' after which they 'decompose in the natural environment.'

That natural environment might include you. Devices that 'resorb into the body' might prove to be 'promising transient electronic implants to aid in continuous health monitoring in the field.' That is, if Darpa can figure out a safe, 'bioresorbable' material that can safely implant an electronic device, complete with transmitter, inside the most sensitive parts of your body. 'One example of a possible biocompatible application for transient devices is a non-antibiotic bactericide for sterilization at surgery site,' Jackson says.

VAPR's approach views the persistence of battlefield sensors as a problem to be solved. It's worth noting that some defense companies view it as an opportunity to be exploited. Lockheed Martin is working on something called an Unattended Ground Sensor, a monitoring device designed to look like a rock and recharge with a solar battery, to collect and transmit data on a warzone for decades after most U.S. troops there have packed up and gone home. While there's no reason those Unattended Ground Sensors couldn't someday be built out of whatever 'transient' materials VAPR ultimately favors, those sensors represent a different attitude toward the virtues of long-term monitoring.

Of course, all this is academic if Darpa can't figure out what materials can actually make up its transient electronics. And there it concedes that 'key technological breakthroughs are required across the entire electronics production process, from starting materials to components to finished products.' (That might be a concession that it's old BioDesign project, which involved creating a 'synthetic organism 'self-destruct' option' for artificial lifeforms, didn't bear fruit.)

Transience can't mean poor performance while the device still exists. Nor can it mean destruction before a human programmer extracts all the necessary data from the device. Makers can talk this all through at the Darpa 'Proposer's Day,' on Valentine's Day at the Capitol Conference Center in Arlington, Virginia. A more elaborate description of the VAPR program is supposed to follow.

If it works, transient electronics could provide 'fundamental and practical insight into the development of transient electronics of arbitrary complexity' ' such as, perhaps, the self-destructing plane or ship of the far, far future. (That might have come in handy in 2011, when the U.S. lost an advanced stealth drone over Iran.) For now, Darpa will have enough of a challenge building a sensor that accepts its days on this Earth are tragically numbered.

Navy Wants Odor-Sniffing Robot Swarms to Haul Bombs on Ships

Aircraft carrier crews are likely to get rather pungent as they perform the hard tasks of assembling, loading and hauling the massive weaponry that gives the U.S. Navy its edge. To make their lives easier, the Navy's exploring the idea of developing a 'robotic semiautonomous swarm on a ship' that can actually smell its way to weapons prep, thanks to an artificial pheromone.

Conceptually, the project is somewhat similar to existing warehouse robots, which use optical navigation systems that recognize markings on floors and walls. Except this research concept is a bit smellier. The Navy wants its defense-industry partners to 'identify [a] chemical capable of meeting environmental and health requirements' which can act as a pheromone. Next, the Navy needs a system that can encode the chemical with data, and a system for decoding it. Eventually, the plan is to 'fully develop and test modules, for a leader and follower robots, capable of operating for duration of one complete week.'

The description of 'leader' and 'follower' robots comes down to the Navy's requirement that the machines are at least semiautonomous, with a human controller in charge. These robots will be tasked with carrying 1,000-pound bombs inside tight spaces, after all. Per the Navy solicitation, the leader robot will be controlled by a human who guides it along and dispenses the chemical pheromone, with follower robots picking it up, analyzing it and following along like army ants. That should help take some of the load off the aviation ordnance crews known as Red Shirts.

It's unclear how the chemical pheromone will work beyond that. But a rough analogue came from a group of Swiss researchers who tested aerial drones with 'virtual' pheromones in 2010. For the Navy, the fully-autonomous follower robots will have to detect the chemical, use data encoded within it to identify the human-controlled robot as the leader, while detecting messages along at least three 'channels': including swarm formation; speed; and direction.

It's not going to be that simple, though. If the project works, the sniffer-robots will begin deep below the carrier's water-line, hauling bombs from nine levels underneath the flight deck into a series of elevators, before ending up at an assembly point on the deck called the 'bomb farm.' Once there, the chemicals will have to withstand winds whipping over the deck, and 'must be stable enough during direct contact with petroleum products,' withstand temperatures above 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and fade after a mere 20 minutes ' thereby preventing other robot swarms with different instructions from getting confused when moving down the same hallway.

But the idea of partially automating more and more of what a carrier does isn't unique to moving bombs. By the end of the decade, perhaps, robots will be hauling bombs aboard the Ford class of supercarriers, the successor to the Nimitz class supercarriers which dominated the world's oceans during the Cold War ' and still do. The first ship of the new class, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, is expected to set sail in 2015 and is being built with many of her systems automated ' in comparison to the old Nimitz carriers. That's reportedly going to reduce the crew by more than 1,200 sailors. Currently, about 70-80 members of a carrier crew are Red Shirts, of which three to six are needed to move a single bomb pallet.

But the Navy also promises the Ford class will reduce carrier costs, though the new class is a billion dollars over budget. And the Navy is using the same logic for robot swarms, claiming they will be an 'elegant alternative to more costly sensors and obstacle avoidance algorithms.' That smells pretty sweet.

Not Even the Pentagon Bomb Squad Knows How Fast Insurgent IEDs Degrade

Like all wars, the war in Afghanistan must someday end. But the end of its signature weapon may not arrive on the same schedule.

Insurgents' homemade bombs, known as improvised explosive devices, look increasingly like a lasting fixture on the early-21st century battlefield. The Pentagon's bomb squad warns that the cheap, easily fabricated family of explosives are spreading all around the world. But it doesn't know how long the devices themselves last.

The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, JIEDDO, collects sheafs of data about the bombs. It knows what sorts of materials go into the bombs, where the materials come from, what countermeasures succeed at stopping the blasts (and which ones fail), and how many of them turn out to be duds. But to date, it hasn't acquired any data about the lifespan of an improvised explosive device. 'There are no historical records or analysis documenting how effective emplaced and undetonated IEDs may become over time,' David Small, JIEDDO's spokesman, tells Danger Room.

That means the U.S. is largely blind to how long an explosive device nestled in an Afghan culvert will remain a threat to civilians even after the hypothetical day when insurgents close their bomb factories. (After all, those factories don't stamp a date of manufacture on their deadly weapons.) The fact is IEDs are constructed to kill people with minimal technological sophistication. They're not constructed to be durable. But the science associated with the materials used in the bombs indicates that they're likely to remain lethal for a year or more after they're assembled.

Start with the kind of bang used in the bomb. In Iraq, the devices were often artillery shells or other military-grade hardware daisy-chained together, resulting in a patient, long-lasting bomb. Same for those that used plastic explosives, explains Augustus Way Fountain III, the Army's senior research scientist for chemistry. 'As long as they're encased and don't have access to extreme heat,' Fountain says, the bombs are 'very, very stable, [lasting] years.'

But those types of devices aren't often seen in Afghanistan. There, the vast majority of bombs JIEDDO has discovered ' some 97 percent ' rely on homemade explosives for their explosive force. Sixty percent of that homemade explosive comes from ammonium nitrate derived from Pakistani fertilizer; much of the rest uses potassium chlorate. Ammonium nitrate will degrade based on environmental factors ' most importantly, water in the air.

When humidity reaches 55 percent, ammonium nitrate will start absorbing moisture, starting a chemical degradation process. At 15 percent saturation, JIEDDO estimates, the ammonium nitrate probably won't detonate; at 20 percent, it definitely won't. 'It just gets mushy, harder to work with,' says Jimmie Oxley, a professor of chemistry who focuses on explosives at the University of Rhode Island. (Potassium chlorate, not so much.)

Insurgents, however, have ways of mitigating that. Often the ammonium nitrate or potassium chlorate will be stored in plastic palm-oil jugs, which keeps the moisture out. In the jugs, 'they're pretty much impervious' to the elements, Fountain says. Even without them, the climate in which they're produced tends not to break down the dangerous compounds. 'In the dry, arid environment they're manufactured in,' he continues, 'they can last for a long time.'

Oxley notes that in lab conditions, ammonium nitrate is good for something like a decade. In the real world, 'when you look at what [information] the suppliers of ammonium nitrate provide, they usually put a two-year shelf life on their products,' she says. Putting the explosive in plastic jugs, burying it in dry soil ' all of that acts as a preservation agent for the bombs. 'It's safe to say they can last a year or two,' Oxley judges, and potassium chlorate-based bombs, which lack the same sensitivity to moisture, are probably good for longer.

At the same time, just because a bomb is capable of detonating doesn't mean it will. And lots of things impact whether a bomb detonates (and degrades) besides the explosive used: its construction, its wiring, its detonation mechanisms. As befitting a bomb that costs, on average, $265 to construct, most improvised explosive devices fail. Between April 2011 and April 2012, they saw a 25 percent drop in effectiveness. And they get spotted: according to JIEDDO's most recent data, U.S. troops encountered over 3,000 IEDs during the final three months of 2012, and safely cleared 69 percent of those they encountered in vehicles and 86 percent of those they encountered on foot.

At least some that failure rate can be attributed to the U.S.' array of sensors and intelligence methods. But that's about to drop off, as U.S. troops come home. Lt. Gen. James L. Terry, the day-to-day commander of the war, told Pentagon reporters on Wednesday he was concerned about Afghan troops' relatively immature counter-IED technology.

But even if insurgent bombs grow more sophisticated, numerous and effective, they're nothing like the danger from landmines. For one thing, the point of tiny military-grade landmines is to litter a swath of territory to deny it to an adversary. IEDs are usually placed along a road that an adversary travels, and not in great concentrations. For another, the casing and detonation devices of the mines are usually more reliable ' and built to resist degradation. In 2011, according to the most recent report from the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the mines killed or wounded 4,286 people in six countries in 2011.

'I've disassembled mines in the Falklands islands, a very harsh climate,' says Colin King, a former British Army bomb-disposal officer, 'and the last ones I did were more than 30 years [older] than the event, and some of those were in perfect condition 30 years on. I've seen some in Cambodia and in Jordan, particularly in Cambodia where you've got a wet climate and poor quality mines, which were nonfunctional very, very quickly. But there are very few IEDs that are going to last for years.'

Science and experience indicates as much. But the data, alas, is lacking. 'There are anecdotal reports of IEDs being emplaced underneath roads, paved over and then detonated a long time after, but this is neither reported frequently nor trending to warrant consistent tracking,' JIEDDO's Small says. 'The bottom line: There is no exact answer to degradation.'

Mali Militants Shift Up Tactics As France's War Coalition Grows

Updated, 7:10 p.m.

Mali's rebels are adapting to attacks from above as the 15-day-old air war over West Africa gets a lot more intense. After Paris' air force last week blasted the militants' exposed vehicles and headquarters buildings (depicted in the targeting system video above), the survivors of the initial bombing runs learned to camouflage themselves.

'The rebels will quickly adapt their tactics to better conceal themselves and thus complicate targeting from the air,' Christopher Chivvis, an analyst with the California-based think thank RAND, said on Thursday.

More complicated targeting is forcing the French-led coalition to add spy planes to its order of battle. 'There's still more need for [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] platforms,' David Cenciotti, a highly-regarded aviation journalist, tells Danger Room. 'You must detect and follow rebels as they move, then you can order, coordinate and manage air strikes.'

'It's tough to get access for platforms that can collect,' warned Army Gen. Carter Ham, in charge of U.S. Africa Command. But that doesn't mean the French and others won't try.

The aerial escalation has driven the expansion of the French-led coalition from just a handful of countries to more than a dozen. Nigerian and British combat planes and airlifters from several European and Middle Eastern states have joined the French aerial armada hunting militants in northern Mali. There have also been unconfirmed rumors of greater American involvement in the airborne onslaught.

In the first phase of the air war starting Jan. 11, French Gazelle and Tiger helicopters and Mirage 2000 and Rafale fighter-bombers based in Mali, Chad and France pounded rebel ground forces, supply lines and command infrastructure, while two French Harfang drones spotted targets. French KC-135 tankers refueled the fighters as French, British, Canadian, Belgian and Danish and chartered Ukrainian cargo planes hauled reinforcements, armored vehicles and supplies into Bamako, Mali's capital.

The more intensive second phase of the aerial campaign around a week later saw the U.S. offer up C-17 transports. The Nigerians added transports, Hind helicopter gunships and a pair of Alpha Jet light bombers. Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands and the UAE joined the airlift effort and Italy sent a KC-767 tanker to boost the French KC-135s.

But the most striking additions were the spy planes, demand for which is apparently increasing fast. The French deployed to Senegal five Atlantique II naval patrol planes, which are optimized for hunting ships and subs but can also use their video cameras to spot land targets. And the British Royal Air Force has committed one of its five Sentinels, business jets fitted with powerful underslung radars for simultaneously tracking scores of ground targets. 'It could provide French forces with data relating to the rebels' movements,' Cenciotti explains.

The Sentinel could be just the beginning for the RAF in Mali. U.K. Defense Secretary Phillip Hammond said London 'would be looking at further French requests for additional logistical and surveillance support.'

The details of America's participation in the Mali air war are less clear, although Washington has expressed its determination to help in some capacity. 'We are in for a struggle, but it is a necessary struggle,' Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday. 'We cannot permit northern Mali to become a safe haven.'

But the Pentagon has copped only to sending five C-17s. But there have been rumors of U.S. drones and other surveillance and strike aircraft in the region. 'MQ-1 [Predator] and RQ-4 [Global Hawk drones] can be heard two or three days a weak crossing the Maltese airspace towards North Africa using LiveATC.net,' a Website that picks up air traffic control radio broadcasts, says Cenciotti. The robots could be Mali-bound.

Moreover, an air strike in northern Mali in June might have been a Predator's handiwork. And according to The Washington Post, U.S. Special Operations Command has based PC-12 manned spy planes (also known as U-28s) in Burkina Faso for patrols over West Africa, possibly including Mali.

Late Saturday, the Pentagon told reporters that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta committed to conducting midair refueling missions for French jets, something the French have sought from the U.S. since their war began. The U.S. will also transport African troops, particularly those from Togo and Chad, to the battle. It's another gradual escalation of the U.S. contribution to its ally's 'aggressive operations against terrorist networks in Mali,' as Panetta's spokesman, George Little, put it.

With or without the Americans, the growing number of warplanes supporting the French-led ground war points to a more intensive, potentially bloodier intervention. If America's own wars across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia are any indication, it's a lot easier to increase a military commitment than to decrease one. That could point to a drawn-out campaign for France and its allies.

British and French Commandos Take Charge of Mali War

Jet fighters, armored vehicles and high-tech helicopters may have hogged the media spotlight, but in the 2-week-old international campaign to recapture northern Mali from Islamic militants, secretive special operations forces are doing much of the heavy lifting.

French and British commandos are reportedly on the ground in Mali, leading Malian troops and calling in air strikes by French Mirage and Rafale fighters. Meanwhile Algerian special troops, on standby to rescue hostages in neighboring Mali, also pulled off the ballsy, and bloody, liberation of an Algerian oil facility seized by militants allegedly in retaliation for the intervention in Mali.

It's less clear what, if any, role U.S. special operations forces are playing. Prior to last year's political upheaval in southern Mali, which presaged the Islamists' capture of the north, American commandos worked closely with the Malian military. Officially, the U.S. troops evacuated after a military coup in March, but a fatal accident occurred shortly after the official departure ' raising questions about whether the U.S. Special Operations Command is really done with Mali.

French special operations forces arrived in Mali soon after the Jan. 11 opening battle in the town of Konna, in which Mirage planes and Gazelle helicopters based in nearby Chad and Burkina Faso blunted an advance by hundreds of militants traveling in as many as 200 vehicles.

Paris' commandos came with Patsas light armored vehicles and Caracal and Gazelle copters of their own, according to Joseph Henrotin, a French analyst and military academy instructor. 'They are engaged in recon and combat operations,' Henrotin tells Danger Room. French army operations in Mali are depicted in the official video release above.

But the French special troops are not fighting door to door, Henrotin says. Instead the commandos are advising, commanding and supporting Malian soldiers as they handle most of the direct combat. In that way the commandos are essentially the glue holding together the poorly-trained, under-equipped Malian army.

In the first confrontations with the Islamists, many Malian troops deserted. 'When the first French troops arrived, everything changed,' Malian Capt. Cheichne Konate told Agence-France Presse. 'They helped us to reconstitute the defense formations. The men who had left returned. Without them it would be over for us.'

French air controllers, which in the U.S. are considered special operations forces, have also coordinated the aerial bombardment, helping fighter pilots spot targets on the ground.

These 'Tactical Air Control Parties,' as they're known, are a relatively new specialty for the French. 'Since 2001, a lot of progress has been made in terms of TACP development, training and equipment,' Henrotin says. Four years ago, Paris acquired its first handheld Remote Video Terminals that allow ground troops to exchange video directly with drones and pilots in the air.

The U.K., too, has deployed a small number of special operations forces to Mali, The Guardian reported. The British commandos are part of a team of military and intelligence personnel working alongside French commanders and are not doing any actual fighting, The Guardian claimed.

Likewise, Algeria's commandos are engaged only on the periphery of the French intervention. After militants kidnapped seven of Algiers' diplomats in the northern Malian city of Gao last April, Algerian special troops went on a 'war footing' on their side of the border, ready to launch a rescue, according to French analyst Eric Denécé.

But the Mali rescue never happened, and when Algerian special operations forces swung into action, it was on home soil. Last week, militants based in Mali seized a natural gas facility in remote eastern Algeria, taking hostage hundreds of Algerian and foreign workers, including Americans.

Commandos led a rescue effort on Saturday. When the smoke had cleared, 29 militants and 37 hostages lay dead, the latter either executed by the terrorists or killed in the crossfire. Governments protested the hostages' deaths, but Denécé said it was wrong to blame the commandos, who have been battling militants on their own doorsteps for 20 years and take for granted a high death toll. 'This is a different psychology, that of a country that has experienced two decades of bombings and terrorist massacres.'

If the U.S. has its own special operations forces in Mali, it's not saying. In years past, U.S. Special Operations Command frequently sent commandos to the West African country in order to train Malian troops. But the U.S. government announced that relationship ended in March of last year, after the very Malian army officers the U.S. trained toppled the democratically elected government, which began a chain of woes that led to the Islamists' capture of the north.

'The Department of Defense's Defense Security Cooperation Agency received a memorandum from the State Department dated 19 April notifying the DoD of the coup designation and the termination of all military assistance programs,' Col. Tom Davis, spokesman for U.S. Africa Command, said in a statement. 'Upon receiving this notification from State Department [sic], we began arranging the departure of personnel and equipment from Mali.'

According to The Washington Post, the U.S. had already ended all training and civil-affairs efforts in Mali by the end of March, before the State Department notification. But some special troops were still in the capital of Bamako on April 20, the day after the order to depart. That night, three American commandos ' two civil affairs soldiers and an intelligence specialist ' accidentally drove their Toyota Land Cruiser off a bridge and into the Niger River. All three died along with three Moroccan prostitutes also in the vehicle.

That a few commandos were still on the ground in Mali a day after being told to leave is not itself all that strange. What's notable is the government's explanation for their continued presence. In the aftermath of the accident Africa Command told The Washington Post that 'a small number of personnel' had remained in Mali to 'provide assistance to the U.S. embassy' and 'maintain situational awareness on the unfolding events.'

Asked if any Special Operations Command troops were still working for the embassy in Mali, a command spokesman referred us to Africa Command. Africom, based in Germany, did not respond to a message sent early Friday.

If any commandos remain at the U.S. embassy, they're in good company, in a war waged largely by special operations forces from allied nations. And if not, however much the Pentagon might want to limit the U.S. contribution to the Mali war, the pressures of a sustained fight against the Islamists might create pressure for Washington to send them there.

Darpa's Plan to Recruit Military Dogs: Scan Their Brains

Dogs do it all for the military: sniff for bombs, detect narcotics and rescue hapless humans. But to recruit the best canine squadmates, the Pentagon's blue-sky researchers are working on a plan to scan their brains ' and figure out how dogs think. Belly rubs won't cut it anymore.

According to a new research solicitation from Darpa, the project ' adorably called FIDOS, for 'Functional Imaging to Develop Outstanding Service-Dogs' ' touts the idea of using magnetic image resonators (or MRIs) to 'optimize the selection of ideal service dogs' by scanning their brains to find the smartest candidates. 'Real-time neural feedback' will optimize canine training. That adds up to military pooches trained better, faster and ' in theory ' at a lower cost than current training methods of $20,000, using the old-fashioned methods of discipline-and-reward.

Though it's still very much in the research stage, the plan owes many of its underpinnings to several recent discoveries about the brains of our canine friends.

Last year, Emory University neuroscientist Greg Berns and his colleagues trained dogs to sit unrestrained inside an MRI machine, shown hand signals associated with a food reward, and then scanned. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers noticed increased brain activity in the dogs' ventral caudate, a region of the brain associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine.

In their study, published last April in Public Library of Science One, Berns and his colleagues concluded that the activity was due to a 'trained association to a food reward; however, it is also possible that some component of social reward contributes to the response.' Anyone who's ever held out a piece of chicken to a well-behaved pup already knows that dogs like getting fed when they're good. And dogs are highly social animals, closely adapted to human behavior given a shared evolutionary history. But the Emory University team was the first to observe this specific brain activity using MRIs.

That seems to have perked Darpa's interest. (The researchers have even kicked around the idea of using machines to automate puppy training.) The agency believes it may be possible to screen 'high-value service dogs ' based on their neutral activation to specific handler training cues,' Darpa notes in the solicitation. The idea is that dogs who show greater brain activity when given such cues will be 'faster and easier to train' than dogs that show less activity. And instead of merely using approximations of something the dog wants, to make the dog do something else, handlers could fine-tune their techniques to more closely match the chemical responses happening inside the dog's head.

Neuroimaging may also help spot 'brain hyper-social dogs.' These very social dogs, once scanned and located, could be selected for use in rehabilitative therapy for soldiers exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries.

One way to locate those pups, the solicitation suggests, is to scan dogs that show 'neurophysiological markers of handler stress and anxiety.' That hypothesis is roughly based on research showing that dogs can follow along to the human gaze and finger-pointing, and how dogs catch yawns from their owners at a greater rate than strangers ' a possible hint of a canine theory of mind, or the ability to understand and interpret human intentions.

Thus, when a handler is showing symptoms of trauma in the form of stress, the dogs that sense it best could make for ideal therapy partners. And in all areas of military pooch-work, the particular breeds sought by the military ' like the Belgian Malinois ' are highly selective: a 'scarce canine resource' that needs to be managed carefully.

Fortunately, getting dogs inside an MRI chamber shouldn't be too much of a problem, as pups can be trained in a few months to obediently rest inside, all cute and snugly-like.

Here's How the Military Will Finally Accept (Most) Women in Combat

Congratulations, women in the military! You're about to get more opportunities to fight in the wars of the future. Someday. After a long, long process of review.

As of Thursday afternoon, by act of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the 1994 Direct Combat Exclusion Rule for women is no more. But it won't be gone gone until 2016. Between now and then, the services will present plans for gender integration, due May 15, and then gradually integrate women into combat occupations ' as well as assess which tasks they're going to keep all-male.

Lots of the military's most wired jobs are already open to women. Women in the Air Force can be drone pilots, for instance, as only elite special-operations jobs in the flying service are male-only. (The Air Force is already 99 percent gender integrated.) Crucial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance positions are performed by women every day. So are cybersecurity tasks. Women serve on massive ballistic-missile submarines. And the wars of the past 11 years have proven that even officially non-combat roles like truck driving become combat roles the instant an insurgent decides to attack.

'Female servicemembers have faced the reality of combat,' Panetta recognized in a Thursday press conference at the Pentagon.

Across the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force, there are about 237,000 positions excluded to women in the combat professions. They break down in two ways. First are the 184,000 positions excluded by specialty: infantry, artillery, serving on small fast-attack submarines, things like that. Then there are 53,000 positions inside combat units that exclude women ' even though the jobs themselves, like medics or headquarters staffs, are open to women in other units.

The whole purpose of lifting the ban is to open those jobs up ' or to figure out which ones the services really, really believe they can't.

That is: the presumption inside the services will officially be that all combat roles ought to be open for women. Any service that wants to keep a combat role all-male will have to satisfy the Secretary of Defense that it's got a good reason. 'The burden used to be that we would say, 'Why should a woman serve in a particular specialty?',' Dempsey said. 'Now it's 'Why shouldn't a woman serve in a particular specialty?''

And before combat units get fully integrated, Dempsey and Panetta indicated they expect women to fill leadership slots, both officers and enlisted, so women can see they have a career path upward and can 'compete for command' with men.

For the next several months, and particularly over the summer, the services will reevaluate the standards they have in place for these combat positions, particularly the physical-fitness standards. A host of Defense Department officials swore to reporters on Thursday morning at the Pentagon that they'll neither lower physical-fitness standards nor establish different standards by gender, something they say would violate federal law, anyway.

So the likely outcome of those tests is to find which jobs will remain excluded to women. An example a senior Marine official cited involved a loader on a tank crew. Loading a tank round requires a certain degree of upper body strength. You need to hoist a 50-odd pound, 120-mm round, removing it from its rack and loading it into the breach ' here's a video demonstration ' all in a space that doesn't really allow a lot of lower body strength to supplement. When the Army and Marine Corps explore job openings for women, that's what they'll test ' whether a soldier or marine can do that, repeatedly, in relevant and realistic conditions, regardless of gender. (Although Dempsey mentioned one of the turret gunners in a Humvee he rode in as a division commander in Iraq was named Amanda.)

'For us it comes down to, it's the physical standard and can they do it,' the Marine official said. 'Those that can will have a greater opportunity and we'll have a bigger pool to draw from. Those that can't, no harm, no foul.' Or, as Panetta put it: 'There are no guarantees of success. Not everyone is going to be able to be a combat soldier. But everyone is entitled to a chance.'

There's also a reality the military will need to face: this is a cultural change, much like allowing open gay and lesbian service was. And while Dempsey and Panetta talk about moving 'expeditiously' to integrate the combat professions, the services will likely want to move more deliberately. Gen. Robert W. Cone, who runs the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, advocates integrating field artillery positions first ' suggesting that allowing women into infantry positions will happen closer to 2016 than 2013.

Dempsey made a subtle argument that touched one of the most explosive issues the military faces: a spate of sexual harassment and sexual abuse cases, some of which have involved general officers. While Dempsey didn't present gender integration as a panacea, he expected it to have an ameliorative effect on one of the military's persistent sources of dishonor.

'When you have one part of the population that's designated as warriors, and another part of the population that's designated as something else, I think that disparity begins to establish a psychology that, in some cases, led to that environment,' he said. 'The more we can treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each other equally.'

That won't satisfy people who argue that treating people equally is not the military's central function; winning wars is. Panetta has a response to that: 'I fundamentally believe our military is more effective when success is not based solely on ability, on qualifications and on performance.' And it might take years to fully put that proposition to the test, but Panetta has in a big way staked his legacy at the Pentagon upon it.

Pentagon Watchdog Clears Darpa in Ethics Probe

The Pentagon's far-out research agency is something of a revolving door. Program managers enter; defense consultants and academics leave; and then they come back a few years later. The Pentagon's watchdog has concluded that's completely above board.

Darpa's ethics training 'appropriately mitigated the potential for conflicts-of-interest,' concludes Jacqueline L. Wicecarver, the Pentagon's assistant inspector general, in a report released on Thursday. Its ethics policies are consistent with federal standards, and its employees tend to follow them. In the major test case for conflicts of interest that the inspector general studied, Darpa came out with a clean bill of good-government health.

The case began with a request from a different watchdog, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). As Danger Room first reported in August 2011, the group prevailed on the Pentagon inspector to take a broad, wide-ranging look at Darpa's contracting process. The initial reason: the discovery that then-Director Regina Dugan owed her family firm, a Darpa contractor, tens of thousands of dollars. (Dugan's spokesman said she recused herself from any dealing with the firm, RedXDefense. Dugan left Darpa last year to take a job with Google.)

But the inspector general didn't look at Dugan's business arrangements in this review. That'll await a separate inquiry. For now, Darpa's process for dealing with conflicts of interest passes official muster.

The report, however, shows the depth of conflicts among Darpa employees. The 40 employees the inspector general selected for ethics review ' the agency employees around 200 people ' filed 53 reports notifying the government of some sort of conflict of interest with supervising agency contractors or grantees. And that was just in a two-year period.

To some degree, it's a function of the limited time researchers work for the agency. 'Darpa recruits and hires individuals to fill specific innovative research needs for limited time periods (generally 3 to 6 years), then the employee returns to private industry,' the inspector general notes. Darpa's Information Innovation Office, for instance, hired a conspicuous number of veterans of defense giant BAE and a subsidiary called AlphaTech, which reaped contracts from the agency. But 'we found no indication of bias in contract award,' Wicecarver wrote.

The report doesn't mollify the good-government group. 'POGO is disappointed with the report's findings because nearly all agencies have ethics training and standards that meet or exceed the standards set out in federal laws and regulations,' says general counsel Scott Amey. 'Many agencies err on the side of caution and prevent senior officials from having financial ties to contractors. Darpa relies mostly on recusals, which doesn't go far enough. This review was long overdue, as is an investigation into former Director Dugan and her relationship with a Darpa contractor.'

Darpa spokesman Eric Mazzacone declined to comment, emailing that the report speaks for itself. At least until the Pentagon's review of Dugan is complete, the agency can return to day-to-day activities like folding proteins and releasing open-source software so you can build your own tank that swims.

11 Body Parts Defense Researchers Will Use to Track You

Cell phones that can identify you by how you walk. Fingerprint scanners that work from 25 feet away. Radars that pick up your heartbeat from behind concrete walls. Algorithms that can tell identical twins apart. Eyebrows and earlobes that give you away. A new generation of technologies is emerging that can identify you by your physiology. And unlike the old crop of biometric systems, you don't need to be right up close to the scanner in order to be identified. If they work as advertised, they may be able to identify you without you ever knowing you've been spotted.

Biometrics had a boom after 9/11. Gobs of government money poured into face and iris recognition systems; the Pentagon alone spent nearly $3 billion in five years, and the Defense Department was only one of many federal agencies funneling cash in the technologies. Civil libertarians feared the worst as face-spotters were turned on crowds of citizens in the hopes of  catching a single crook.

But while the technologies proved helpful in verifying identities at entry points from Iraq to international airports, the hype -- or panic -- surrounding biometrics never quite panned out. Even after all that investment, scanners still aren't particularly good at finding a particular face in the crowd, for example; variable lighting conditions and angles (not to mention hats) continue to confound the systems.

Eventually, the biometrics market -- and the government enthusiasm for it -- cooled off. The technological development has not. Corporate and academic labs are continuing to find new ways to ID people with more accuracy, and from further away. Here are 11 projects.

Above:

The Ear

My, what noticeable ears you have. So noticeable in fact that researchers are exploring ways to detect the ears' features like they were fingerprints. In 2010, a group of British researchers used a process called "image ray transform" to shoot light rays at human ears, and then repeat an algorithm to draw an image of the tubular-shaped parts of the organ. The curved edges around the rim of the ear is a characteristic -- and most obvious -- example. Then, the researchers converted the images into a series of numbers marking the image as your own. Finally, it's just a matter of a machine scanning your ears again, and matching it up to what's already stored in the system, which the researchers were able to do accurately 99.6 percent of the time. In March of 2012, a pair of New Delhi scientists also tried scanning ears using Gabor filters -- a kind of digital image processor similar to human vision -- but were accurate to a mere 92 to 96.9 percent, according to a recent survey (pdf) of ear biometric research.

It may even be possible to develop ear-scanning in a way that makes it more reliable than fingerprints. The reason is because your fingerprints can callous over when doing a lot of hard work. But ears, by and large, don't change much over the course of a lifespan. There's a debate around this, however, and fingerprinting has a much longer and established history behind it. A big question is whether ear-scanning will work given different amounts of light, or when covered (even partially) by hair or jewelry. But if ear-scanners get to the point of being practical, then they could possibly work alongside fingerprinting instead of replacing them. Maybe in the future we'll see more extreme ear modification come along as a counter-measure.

Photo: Menage a Moi/Flickr

Pentagon Starts to Acknowledge Women Already Serve in Combat

The Pentagon took a major step on Wednesday to recognizing that women already fight in combat. Now comes all the hard work of opening infantry positions and other dangerous military roles to women, a task that is likely to take years.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are finalizing the end of the longstanding prohibition on women in direct combat, as first reported by the Associated Press. A senior Defense official, who would not speak for the record in advance of an official release, said the 'policy change will initiate a process whereby the services will develop plans to implement this decision.'

Reminiscent of the drawn-out effort to remove the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly, the different military services will have a long time to open their most dangerous tasks to women. Initial plans from the services for implementing the repeal are due on May 15. Reportedly, the services have until January 2016 to seek exemptions for positions they believe should remain closed to women. Still, as CNN notes, eliminating 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' might have taken a long time, but when it ultimately ended in mid-2011, it happened all at once,, with all military positions open to out gays and lesbians.

A January 9 memo from Dempsey on the repeal, first reported by Kristina Wong at the Washington Times, comes with caveats. It says the services will 'need time to get it right' and describes a 'full intent to integrate women into occupational fields to the maximum extent possible.'

The U.S. Special Operations Command declined to 'speculate' about the impact the gender integration will or won't have on the military's unconventional forces ahead off an actual announcement of the change. But Col. Tim Nye, a spokesman for the command, said that 'in general terms, the services retain administrative control of special operations personnel and SOCOM generally follows the services' personnel policies.'

Panetta and Dempsey will hold a press conference on Thursday afternoon at the Pentagon, when they're likely to explain in more detail how gender integration for combat specialties will work. But this is a major legacy item for the outgoing secretary of defense. It potentially opens approximately 230,000 jobs to women in the military, and follows on last year's decision to open a limited number of combat positions to them. In October, the Marines opened up their infantry course to women for the first time.

More than 11 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan has eroded the distinction between frontline combat and the relative safety of the rear. Women troops have died and been wounded in combat circumstances, whether through small-arms fire, homemade insurgent bombs or being rocketed on their bases. A woman platoon commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Riannon Blaisdell-Black, told the New York Times in 2011 that the only time gender disparities were an issue 'is when you're out on a three-day patrol, and you need to find a place to pee.'

At least two U.S. congresswomen are Iraq combat veterans. Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) lost both legs when her Black Hawk was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in 2004. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hi), who deployed twice, said in a statement, 'I have had the honor of serving with incredibly talented female soldiers who, if given the opportunity, would serve as great assets in our ground combat units.'

9/11 Defendants Seek to Preserve CIA Sites Where They Were Tortured

The last people you might expect to want to see the CIA's secret torture prisons kept intact are the people who were tortured there. But the defense lawyers for the 9/11 co-conspirators are arguing that the CIA's so-called 'black sites' need to remain open, untouched and exactly as they were when top al-Qaida operatives were abused.

The CIA torture program isn't on trial at Guantanamo Bay. The five accused 9/11 conspirators are, and they face the death penalty. But the legal maneuver brings to light an irony of post-9/11 justice: The military tribunals that remain the bane of civil libertarians might be one of the last venues to investigate torture.

On Monday at Guantanamo, Army Col. James Pohl, the judge in the 9/11 tribunal, will hear a longstanding motion filed by the defense team to 'preserve any existing evidence of any overseas detention facility used to imprison any witness in this case.' The gambit, explains James Connell, a Defense Department civilian who represents defendant Ammar al-Baluchi, seeks to treat the black sites like crime scenes ' something the Justice Department has been reluctant to do.

It's not that the defendants want others taken to the black sites. It's that, as Connell tells Danger Room, 'If a site is still open, it's evidence.'

Some of the treatment experienced at the black sites by the five defendants, which include the confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, include being doused with water for the simulated drowning known as waterboarding; being kept in contorted 'stress positions'; and being deprived of sleep for extended periods, sometimes as a result of the stress positions. But the defense hasn't been able to review any official material about what went on inside the black sites ' something crucial to its legal strategy, since the military commissions are supposed to exclude evidence obtained through 'the use of torture, or by cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.' (.PDF)

Emphasis on supposed to. 'The government has not yet provided any discovery or information about our clients' treatment at the black sites,' Connell says. 'If the trial were tomorrow, I would have no way of introducing it.'

The CIA sent 14 detainees from the black sites to Guantanamo in 2009. President Obama forbade the CIA in 2009 from holding any other detainees. But the CIA didn't build the black sites, it rented them, in places like Romania, Poland and Thailand. And since they've been closed, they're at risk of being destroyed or modified by their host countries in such a way that will prevent anyone outside of the torture program from ever knowing what exactly went on there.

Connell isn't even asking for documentation from inside the black sites. That's likely to come later this year, he says. For now, the defense team is looking to preserve the architecture of the sites, which it contends can reveal information about his clients' treatment. 'If a person is in isolation,' Connell argues, 'how that isolation is enforced is a relevant legal factor as to whether they've been illegally punished, and the building design is relevant to that.'

An earlier version of the military commissions insisted the government not mess with the shuttered black sites. In April 2009, Army Col. Stephen R. Henley, another military judge, ordered the government to 'maintain the status quo' at any facility where the 9/11 defendants were held. (.PDF) But in 2010, the Obama administration voided the military commission for the five accused 9/11 conspirators in a failed bid to try them in civilian courts, only to start over with a different commission ' one that may not be bound by Henley's order. 'Unlike a civilian court, the authority of a military commission ends when it is dissolved,' Connell clarifies.

If it seems strange that the black sites' building design should be a factor for disclosure about the treatment that took place inside them, consider that there's been practically no official disclosure about what did. The Senate intelligence committee recently completed a report into the CIA's 'enhanced interrogation program,' but for the time being, it remains a secret. The Justice Department declined to prosecute CIA officers involved in the torture program. Nearly everything else known about the treatment of detainees kept in black sites has been pieced together from references in declassified legal documents or from journalism.

The secrecy surrounding the commissions prevents Connell from saying if he has specific reason to fear that the black sites are at risk of destruction. ('I can neither confirm nor deny that,' he says.) But it's not a hypothetical fear. The former chief of the CIA Counterterrorism Center destroyed nearly 100 videotapes documenting brutal interrogations.

Observers of the military commissions are reluctant to predict how Pohl will rule on the black-site preservation. But Daphne Eviatar, who monitors the commissions for Human Rights First (disclosure: a former journalistic colleague of mine), isn't optimistic after seeing Pohl kill the audio feed in the courtroom last October when it seemed like one of the lawyers was about to use the word 'torture.'

And even if Pohl orders the government to preserve evidence from the black sites doesn't mean he'll allow that information to be disclosed in open court. A victory for Connell isn't the same as a victory for openness about torture. And if that's the way Pohl rules, it may be a long time before the public has a better chance to learn even a little more about what the CIA torture program entailed.

'War crimes trials are often about a public presentation of what happened at some historical point,' Eviatar says. 'Here, although what happened [before] 9/11 is the primary subject of the trial, how the U.S. responded to 9/11, through these five defendants, is also important, and the trial out to be able to bring out all of that.'

'If the government wants to go forward with a case seeking the death penalty against these men, it has to make the evidence which may still exist available to them,' Connell says. 'If they will not make relevant evidence available, the law suggests the prosecution cannot go forward with the case. ' Unless Pohl decides otherwise.

Drones, Beware: United Nations Investigates Obama's Targeted Killings

After years of warning that President Obama's targeted killing program skirted with lawlessness, the United Nations has announced it's investigating the centerpiece of the U.S.' shadow wars worldwide.

The inquiry will be led by Ben Emmerson, the U.N.'s special rapporteur for human rights and counterterrorism. It'll focus on most of the places that the U.S.' armed drones and elite special-operations forces operate: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; as well as in the Palestinian territories, indicating that Israel's targeted attacks on Hamas will be a subject as well.

Emmerson's focus will be on an 'applicable legal framework' for targeted killing, with a special emphasis on drones ' something that the lethal technology employed by the U.S. has outpaced, to the chagrin of many legal experts. Afghanistan is the only declared and internationally recognized conflict zone in which the United States operates, and while the U.S. maintains its strikes outside Afghanistan are legal, that legal premise rests on a 2001 act of Congress that many other nations don't recognize. U.S. strikes have surged in Pakistan so far this year.

What's more, the U.N. promises 'a critical examination of the factual evidence concerning civilian casualties.' That holds out the chance of creating, for the first time, an internationally established standard for the number of noncombatants who have died in drone strikes and commando raids, the subject of fierce dispute and little official acknowledgement.

Emmerson told a press conference in London that he's going to focus on 25 test cases, seemingly of drone strikes, primarily. (Drone strikes and targeted killings are distinct U.S. efforts ' targeted killing often employs drones, but drone efforts go beyond the lethal strikes ' that often get conflated.) The Guardian previously reported that Emmerson has expressed concern about so-called 'double-tap' strikes, in which U.S. drones attack the debris of earlier strikes when people, including rescue workers, gather to investigate.

Drone critics are cheering the inquiry, which follows years of international-law experts warning the U.S. was dancing on the precipice of lawlessness. 'Virtually no other country agrees with the U.S.'s claimed authority to secretly declare people enemies of the state and kill them and civilian bystanders far from any recognized battlefield,' said Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union. 'To date, there has been an abysmal lack of transparency and no accountability for the U.S. government's ever-expanding targeted killing program.'

There is so far no indication of the level of cooperation Emmerson will seek from the United States, let alone how much the Obama administration will provide. Emmerson's report is due in the fall.

Typically, inconvenient United Nations pronunciations are ignored inside the U.S. ' when they're not insulted outright by a U.N.-wary political class. Yet dozens of nations are experimenting with drone technology, including U.S. adversaries like Iran, prompting fears of an unmanned, robotic arms race. That's probably not the biggest U.S. concern, given the overwhelming U.S. robotic advantage, especially in on-deck drone tech like the Navy's forthcoming carrier-based armed drone. But even if the U.S. doesn't like his work, Emmerson might represent the first wave of an international legal framework governing a technology that doesn't right now clearly follow one ' which might also give legitimacy to at least some robotic or targeted killing efforts.

This Tech Entrepreneur Is About to Launch the Blackwater of the High Seas

Beware, pirates of Africa. You may have outlasted years of patrols from the world's navies. You may have driven fear into the hears of shipping magnates and sent insurance rates skyrocketing. But now you'll have to contend with a dapper British investor who is seeking to privatize the fight against seafaring brigands.

Anthony Sharp, a 50-year-old veteran of tech startups, grew up with a love for ships. On February 7, he'll turn that boyhood affection into what might be the first private navy since the 19th century. Sharp's newest company, Typhon, will offer a fleet of armed ex-Royal Marines and sailors to escort commercial ships through pirate-infested waters. In essence, Typhon wants to be the Blackwater of the sea, minus the stuff about accidentally killing civilians.

Sharp thinks the market is ripe for Typhon, a company named for a monster out of Greek myth. Budget cuts are slicing into the wallets of the militaries that provide protection from pirates. The conflicts and weak governments that incubate piracy in places like Somalia persist. 'Maritime crime is growing at the same time that navies are shrinking,' Sharp tells Danger Room by telephone from the U.K. 'The policemen are going off the beat.' Sharp thinks that creates a potent opportunity for the fleet he's buying.

But he might be too late. Without much notice, piracy actually declined in 2012, bringing down the high insurance rates that send shipping companies running for armed protection. Meanwhile, the market for such security is being filled by companies that station armed guards aboard commercial ships to deter or combat pirates. That practice, known as 'embarked security,' follows years of security firms, including Blackwater itself, trying and mostly failing at amassing fleets to escort commercial ships ' Typhon's model.

Sharp says he's heard the objections and is undeterred. 'We've got personnel. We've got clients,' he insists. And when Typhon launches on February 7 and begins operations in April, Sharp won't just take a gamble on a market much different than the ones he made his money in. He'll reintroduce the world to the forgotten concept of a private navy. And the U.S. Navy is watching, with much curiosity.

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France Brings Bigger Gunships, Heavy Artillery to Mali as Militants Dig In

The French-led international assault on Islamist-held northern Mali is about to get a lot more explosive. With a big assist from the U.S., U.K. and other allies, Paris is deploying heavier vehicles, high-tech artillery pieces and its most sophisticated helicopter gunship, the Tiger.

The reinforcements reflect France's surprise at discovering that Mali's rebels possess some dangerous weaponry of their own.

'The defense minister has recognized that the enemy resistance was tougher than initially envisioned,' Joseph Henrotin, a French analyst and military academy instructor, tells Danger Room. When French ground troops counter-attacked towards the battleground town of Konna in central Mali on Jan. 15, they encountered rebels equipped with 'technical' trucks. Photos have depicted militants riding in a wide variety of these improvised, gun-armed pickups, long a mainstay of African warfare.

'Our enemies were well-armed, well-equipped, well-trained and determined,' an unnamed French diplomat told Ireland's RTE News.

French air force Mirage and Rafale fighter-bombers destroyed some, but not all, of the Islamists' vehicles. That left the survivors to face the combined French-Malian ground assault, which has been carefully maneuvering northward from the capital of Bamako since the middle of last week. (One leg of the advance is depicted in Paris' official video release, above.)

Stiff rebel resistance was not entirely unplanned for, according to Gen. Bertrand Clément-Bollée, commander of French land forces. Clément-Bollée told one French defense blog that Paris had designated a series of increasingly heavy army formations for potential intervention in Mali. The first were the lightweight troops of France's small, but permanent, garrisons in Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso and other countries. Under the French army's 'Cheetah' deployment model, paratroopers, helicopters and two mechanized brigades based in France were also in line to deploy to Mali as needed, the general said.

According to Clément-Bollée, the first of the Cheetah forces activated shortly after the Jan. 11 opening salvo. 'We had a very rapid need for a company of the 92nd Infantry,' he revealed. The 92nd is equipped with the wheeled Véhicule Blindé de Combat d'Infanterie, a sort of light tank armed with a 25-millimeter cannon. Twenty or so of the 26-ton VBCIs were airlifted into Mali to join the lighter armored cars and recon vehicles belonging to the garrison units.

The French army's 5th Regiment, which operates the Tiger gunship ' Europe's answer to the U.S. Army's Apache ' began arriving in Mali last week, Clément-Bollée said. Older Gazelle gunships participated in the first wave of French air attacks on rebel troops. One of the Gazelles was hit by gunfire and its pilot died. Compared to the Gazelle, the Tiger boasts heavier armor and weaponry and more sophisticated long-range sensors, allowing it to shoot from greater distance.

The heaviest Cheetah forces for Mali ' available but not necessarily deployed '  include: two more companies of VBCIs plus a number of Leclerc heavy tanks and units equipped with the Caesar, an ultra-modern, truck-mounted 155-millimeter artillery piece.

Henrotin says the first Caesars bound for Mali are 'currently underway.' The French magazine Le Progrés appears to corroborate this claim with a photo depicting artillerymen from the 68th Regiment, which possesses Caesars as well as mortars and other equipment, preparing to go to Mali.

But it's unclear if the soldiers were taking the heavy guns with them or just mortars. Clément-Bollée, for his part, seemed reluctant to list in detail all the Mali reinforcements. 'Our enemies also read,' he said.

In any event, Paris lacks the airlift capacity to haul all the hardware bound for Africa. 'At the strategic airlift level, the capability gap has been since long considered as problematic,' Henrotin says. Early on, Paris appealed for help from allied nations. Canada and the U.K. were the first to offer up C-17 transport planes ' one and two, respectively; the U.S. sent five of its own C-17s over the weekend. The four-engine C-17 is big enough to carry a Caesar and any other French vehicle.

Besides the transport planes, Washington has not yet agreed to contribute any other forces to the fight. 'Our support of French operations in Mali does not involve what is traditionally referred to as boots on the ground,' Pentagon spokesman George Little said. As Paris escalates its involvement in Mali with heavier and more powerful weaponry, it does so without the guarantee that if the battle turns against the French, allied nations will rush to the rescue.

Top Afghanistan General Cleared in Email Ethics Probe

The commander of the Afghanistan war didn't have sex with or engage in any otherwise inappropriate behavior with a Tampa socialite, according to the Pentagon's inspector general. This is how the bizarre downfall of ex-CIA Director David Petraeus winds to a conclusion.

Marine Gen. John Allen's career has been upended for the past two months after the FBI gave the Pentagon a large volume of email between Allen and Tampa socialite Jill Kelley, the initial recipient of harassing, anonymous emails from Petraeus' mistress, Paula Broadwell. Pentagon officials initially characterized those emails as 'flirtatious,' rather than evidence of an affair. Yet the Pentagon inspector general began combing through them to make sure the married general didn't engage in an affair that would have violated military law.

Spoiler: He didn't, as first reported by Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post. 'The Secretary was pleased to learn that allegations of professional misconduct were not substantiated by the investigation,' George Little, top spokesman for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, stated late Tuesday afternoon. 'The Secretary has complete confidence in the continued leadership of General Allen, who is serving with distinction in Afghanistan.'

But Allen might not be out of the woods yet. President Obama nominated Allen to become the next NATO commander in October, and the Pentagon review of his emails prompted Panetta to ask the Senate to put that nomination on hold. Little's statement didn't mention if the NATO job is still in the cards for Allen, and Pentagon officials didn't respond to requests for clarification. The New York Times quoted an anonymous official saying 'The final decision has not yet been made on General Allen's nomination.'

That means the only one still under federal investigation, whether criminal or administrative, in the Petraeus scandal is likely Petraeus himself. The Justice Department isn't going to prosecute Broadwell for cyber-harassing Kelley. As of December, sources close to Broadwell said they had no indication she's a subject or target of any investigation about improper handling of classified information, the suspicion that prompted the FBI to seize her computer in November.

The CIA inspector general opened its own inquiry into Petraeus in November, to see whether Petraeus used any agency resources to conduct his affair. It's unclear what the status of that review is. But it carries no criminal penalty. Should the Justice Department opt not to indict Broadwell or Petraeus for bad classified-information hygiene, then the sex scandal that brought down one of the most respected Army generals of his generation will have fizzled out.

Jill Kelley and her husband Scott also made it clear they want vindication. They published an op-ed in the Washington Post saying that Broadwell's emails contained 'threats of blackmail and extortion,' prompting them to seek help from an FBI agent they knew. That move sparked a sprawling inquiry into several people's private email accounts ' but now the Kelleys want Congress to 'consider what access to and disclosure of private e-mails of law-abiding citizens will be allowed, and what safeguards should be in place' as part of a debate on strengthening the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Allen has yet to issue any statement. He still has one final task in Afghanistan before Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford relieves him: finalizing his recommendations for troop reductions in 2013 and for the size of the U.S.' post-2014 residual presence.