Army's Demonic Numbers for Budget Cuts: 6, 6, and 6

The entire U.S. military is terrified of the impending budget cuts scheduled to hit Friday. But the Army thinks the cuts are demonic.

'The fiscal crisis that we face today can be summed up by three numbers: six, six and six,' Maj. Gen. Karen E. Dyson, the director of the Army's budget office, told reporters on Wednesday. Seriously.

Dyson's talking about three different figures that hit this year ' not all of which actually add up to six, but whatever. First is a $6 billion shortfall to the Army's operations and maintenance account, the pot of money that funds the stuff the Army currently does, resulting from Congress' failure to pass a defense budget for 2013. Then comes another anticipated shortfall, between $5 and $7 billion, that the Army faces in Afghanistan this year.

The final 6 is actually 12 ' the $12 billion that the Army will lose if automatic, across-the-board budget cuts take effect as scheduled on Friday. Half of that is for the Army's operations and maintenance funds. Strictly speaking, that's four sixes, not three, but the Army clearly wants the Number of the Beast to ring in people's heads when they think about the impact of budget cuts.

But as much as the brass might want to associate the budget cuts with the devil, the Army's specific, planned cuts do not sound like they'll consign soldiers to eternal damnation. It's talking about soldiers taking trash to the landfill or being unable to renovate their kitchens.

Maj. Gen. Robert Dyess, the Army's director of force development, anticipates that the longer so-called 'sequestration' cuts persist, the more difficulty he'll have purchasing next-gen hardware that's currently in research and development. Only Dyess wouldn't say which R&D projects are likely to remain in the lab: He said he probably wouldn't be able to say until June. But Dyess said to expect delays in the hardware the Army's purchasing, generically ' though he punted on saying any major systems will actually be canceled.

Training is likely to get sacrificed. Dyson said the Army will prioritize giving full training to units heading to Afghanistan, Korea or any other global hotspot. Other units, some 78 percent of the Army, are simply going to train less, reducing their readiness to deploy in a crisis.

Life at the Army's 75 installations worldwide is set to get a lot more annoying. The Army's resource management director, Brig. Gen. Curt Rauhut, expects to cancel upgrades to buildings and facilities, and stop hiring contractors to make repairs. So if a water main bursts, a roof leaks or a window breaks, soldiers will have to shower elsewhere and get some tarp or plywood to fix the hole. Youth sports for the children of soldiers are probably going to be canceled. And with base workers and contractors cut, the Army might have to do more of its own dirty work.

'Do we want our soldiers to do refuge removal, trying to find a tactical vehicle to pull a Dempsey Dumpster off-post and take it to a landfill? Do we want them riding around on lawnmowers cutting grass? Do we want them to do custodial services?' Rauhut said. 'I would tell you that our force today, I think we'd rather have them flying helicopters, doing live-fire exercises out on the ranges.'

This is what sequestration has become: diabolical descriptions of soldiers mowing lawns. Dyson told a story about a military family she knows making a decision not to renovate their kitchen due to the sequester. It's rather far from former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's dire 2011 warning of eliminating all nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Something that really would be diabolical: if training and readiness decline significantly, the Army might have to extend the deployments of units in Afghanistan, to avoid sending unready units to replace them. That would happen at precisely the time that the military is drawing down from the war, a painful irony. 'That won't be done lightly, I can tell you that,' Dyess said. But the Army is currently seeing the devil in a lot of budgetary details.

In North Korea, Dennis Rodman Finds New Ways to Embarrass Himself

North Korea's reward for its recent nuclear test is a visit from the Worm.

All-time NBA great Dennis Rodman has arrived in Pyongyang for a publicity stunt and a bit of basketball diplomacy. Invited a month ago by a North Korean basketball association ' which is apparently a thing ' the fierce rebounder told reporters at the airport that he's just trying to put on a good show for the kids. 'Hopefully, it'll be some fun,' Rodman said.

'Fun' is in short supply in the world's last remaining Stalinist dictatorship. Here's what isn't, according to Amnesty International's 2012 overview of North Korea: 'Credible reports estimated that up to 200,000 prisoners were held in horrific conditions in six sprawling political prison camps, including the notorious Yodok facility.' Such conditions included 'hazardous forced labour, inadequate food, beatings, totally inadequate medical care and unhygienic living conditions.'

Earlier this month, North Korea conducted its third test of a nuclear weapon. This bomb was evidently larger than its predecessors; like the others, however, it resulted in condemnation from the international community. 'Just being me,' Rodman tweeted.

And how. Rodman is a magnet for attention and controversy. ('Don't pretend you're more seriously hurt than you are,' he once remarked after kicking a cameraman in the groin during a game.) And he's evidently determined to live up to his reputation on his current trip. 'I'm not a politician. Kim Jung Un & North Korean people are basketball fans. I love everyone. Period. End of story,' he continued to tweet, using the hashtag #WORMinNorthKorea.

Rodman quickly made a diplomatic faux pas. 'Maybe I'll run into the Gangnam Style dude while I'm here @psy_oppa,' he enthused ' prompting Psy, the South Korean viral pop sensation to gently reply, 'I'm from #SOUTH man!!! kk.' Eric Schmidt's recent trip to North Korea, this is not.

Budget Cuts Will Mean Delays for Burials at Arlington Cemetery

The cuts to the military budget scheduled to take effect for Friday can seem abstract ' or even, sometimes, breathless. But one impact will be a somber one: The cuts will mean delays for veteran funerals at Arlington National Cemetery.

There's currently an average of 31 funerals a day at Arlington, the nation's most prestigious resting place for war veterans. But the Army expects that under the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration, that average will drop to 24. As first tweeted by CNN's Barbara Starr, that works out to 160 fewer funerals every month.

The Army says Arlington's top priority is to bury troops killed in action in Afghanistan. That is not going to change under sequestration. Arlington representatives say that such burials typically take place within two weeks of receipt of the bodies of the fallen.

'We are working to reduce what we can without impacting funerals, and will, no matter what, bury those killed in action in accordance with current policy,' Army spokesman George Wright tells Danger Room. 'However, there is no question cemetery operations ' as well as our ability to accommodate visitors ' will be seriously impacted.'

Veterans of older conflicts are likely to experience longer wait times. Those currently range from 30 days for burials without honors, to three months for full honors. After burying those killed in action, others scheduled to be interred will do so on a first-come-first-served basis.

Unless Congress and President Obama can agree to a package of tax increases and spending cuts before Friday, the Pentagon expects to lose as much as $46 billion from its current budget through the rest of the year. The sequestration cuts will take approximately $600 billion from the military budget over the next decade, applied by about 9.4 percent to nearly every military program except for troop pay.

The longer sequestration continues, the greater the likelihood that the Defense Department's civilian workforce will have to be furloughed, losing a day each workweek. Arlington will be no exception. The reduction in civilian staff at the cemetery is one of the drivers of the estimation of fewer burials and longer wait times, as fewer staff will be available to arrange burials, chapel time, military bands, caissons and some of the other ceremonies that often accompany such burials. Those who opt for simpler funerals are likely to be buried quicker.

Chuck Hagel Becomes Defense Secretary In Time for Military Budget Chaos

Isn't Chuck Hagel the luckiest man in Washington? Now that he's finished running a bruising gauntlet through the Senate, during which his former GOP Senate colleagues implied he was an Israel-hater and a weakling, he'll run a Pentagon that's freaking out about a massive budget cut scheduled for Friday.

Seventy-one senators voted Tuesday to break a short-lived Republican tactic to stall a vote to confirm Hagel, assuring he'd become the next secretary of defense. Hours later, as expected, Hagel got a 58-41 majority of Senate votes to make it to the Pentagon's top job.

In his January Senate hearing, Hagel did a notably bad job of defending his past positions on cutting the nuclear arsenal and opposing unilateral economic sanctions on Iran. The charges against Hagel went further: a story by Breitbart.com claimed, citing unnamed Senate sources, that Hagel received funding from a group called 'Friends of Hamas,' which Danger Room pal Dave Weigel of Slate determined does not exist. A New York Daily News reporter later wrote that he made an 'obvious joke' about Hagel and the nonexistent organization to a Senate staffer, who in turn kickstarted a damaging rumor.

All that is done with. Hagel's first task at the Pentagon is to figure out how to mitigate the Defense Department's impending, abrupt loss of $46 billion during the remainder of the fiscal year, overwhelmingly from its operations and maintenance accounts. The cuts, a combination of automatic spending reductions scheduled for Friday and diminished funds resulting from Congress' failure to pass a defense bill, will create, at some point, an 'intolerable risk' for U.S. national security, according to Pentagon chief spokesman George Little.

The armed services are already talking about cutting operations in 2013 to preserve their ability to respond to unforeseen challenges. The Navy is cutting aircraft carrier deployments and talking about ending operations in South America. The Air Force is grounding planes and the Army is cutting training for units back from Afghanistan. Little told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday that the military isn't 'crying wolf' on the impact of the cuts, even though the overall level of military funding under sequestration will be roughly at 2007 levels.

If there's an irony here, it's that the senators most fervently opposed to Hagel generally oppose the Pentagon cuts ' although the Republican legislative bloc has split over the question of opposing the sequester. They'll look to Hagel to advocate for greater Pentagon funding, including a repeal of the sequester, as Hagel predecessor Leon Panetta did. Hagel said in his confirmation hearing that he also opposed the sequester, calling it a dumb way to curb what he earlier described as Pentagon bloat.

The next several weeks should determine how magnanimous Hagel wants to be in victory. Hagel might decide that he's already got congressional budget hawks on his side, since there isn't another defense secretary they can appeal to. And Hagel's allies are encouraging him to seek revenge by canceling military projects in the districts of his accusers. At the Pentagon, Little said Hagel plans to be a 'team player' with Congress.

Then there's another challenge, one that will go a long way to determining the stamp Hagel intends to leave on the Pentagon. Military officials have said the budget cuts call into question their ability to carry out the defense strategy the Obama administration unveiled last year, heavy on drones, special operations forces and emphasizing Asia. Little said the Pentagon was unprepared to revise that strategy, calling it 'right.' But unless the cuts are repealed, Hagel might need to recast that ostensibly fundamental document. That should end all debate about just how dovish the new defense secretary actually is.

'Data-Entry Error' Led Military to Falsely Claim Taliban Attacks Are Down

The U.S. military proudly touted a 7 percent drop in Taliban violence in 2012 as a measure of progress in America's longest war. Only one problem: The drop never happened.

Its explanation: a data-entry error.

The Associated Press' Robert Burns discovered the mistake, which undercut a January claim by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO military command in Afghanistan. In reality, Burns reports, there was no substantive change in the level of 'enemy-initiated attacks' in Afghanistan during 2012.

'During a quality control check, ISAF recently became aware that some data was incorrectly entered into the database that is used for tracking security-related incidents across Afghanistan,' ISAF spokesman Jamie Graybeal told Burns.

Only the Pentagon is denying that the statistical flatlining in enemy violence has any impact on its claims of progress in the war.

'In spite of the stated adjustment, our assessment of the fundamentals of progress in Afghanistan remains positive,' chief Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters on Tuesday. 'The fact that 80 percent of the violence has been taking place in areas where less than 20 percent of the population lives remains unchanged.'

That might be the best that can be said for the U.S. military's 2010-2012 troop surge in Afghanistan: it changed the contested geography of the country. In 2012, for the first time in five years, Afghan civilian deaths and injuries declined. But the surge did not reduce violence, according to military statistics issued before the clerical error: enemy-initiated attacks have plateaued at a higher level than before the surge began. In 2012, over 2,700 Afghan civilians died and another 4,800 were wounded in war-related violence.

The primary U.S. goal in the war is to transfer control of it to its proteges in the Afghan police and army, and it remains to be seen if the Afghan security forces can keep that territory out of the hands of the resilient Taliban. On Sunday, the Afghan government ordered U.S. special operations forces out of the violent eastern province of Wardak after allegations of their complicity in kidnappings and killings of civilians, a charge that the U.S. is denying. A joint ISAF-Afghan inquiry has been set up to investigate the charges.

'In recent months, a thorough review has confirmed that no Coalition forces have been involved in the alleged misconduct in Wardak province,' ISAF spokesman Lt. Col. Les Carroll e-mailed Danger Room Tuesday. 'But we take all allegations of misconduct seriously and will work with our Afghan partners to fully investigate.'

'There's a tendency sometimes to fixate on only one metric, whether it's this particular database number, or insider attacks, or casualties,' Little said at the Pentagon. 'The complete picture of progress in Afghanistan is much more nuanced.'

Out: Latin American Drug Cartels. In: African Drug Cartels

For years, West African cocaine traffickers have worked as mules for Latin American drug cartels seeking to smuggle their powder to Europe. But now the mules are going independent ' and muscling their former bosses out of some of the world's most in-demand drug turf.

According to a report released this week by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, West African drug smugglers are playing a more direct role in trafficking the $1.25 billion worth of cocaine moving through the region every year. Most of the region's cocaine still originates with Latin American cartels like the FARC, but these cartels' direct involvement in trafficking drugs through Africa to Europe has declined. In their place, West African trafficking groups are building their own narcotics transport and distribution systems, pushing out the Latin Americans, and are now producing their own methamphetamine on a large scale.

This means the West African traffickers have grown up, in a way, instead of working as couriers underneath the Latin American cartels. The West African cartels are now shipping cocaine by sea, a safer alternative for traffickers than high-risk smuggling on commercial planes, which can more easily be interdicted by police. Nigerian criminal groups have also moved to take control of cocaine exports in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, where most of the Africa-bound coke leaves the continent. Latin American gangs are left to sell coke to the locals.

'In the end, the gross volume of drugs transiting the region is less relevant than the way West Africa interacts with it,' according to the report. 'It appears a growing share is not merely the property of Latin Americans making use of West African logistic services, but that West Africans are playing an increasingly independent role in bringing the drugs into their region.' The report also notes: 'Over time, Latin American involvement in the region appears to have declined, and so has the average seizure size.'

But it's not exactly good news, whether or not it reduces profits earned by Latin American cartels. It means West African cartels are likely to grow and become wealthier than ever before. 'Unless the flows of contraband are addressed, instability and lawlessness will persist, and it will remain difficult to build state capacity and the rule of law in the region,' the report notes.

The U.N. reached its conclusion using several metrics. Brazilian officials reported increasing control of that country's cocaine exports by Nigerian gangs. The number of cocaine shipments captured in West Africa is also dropping, but importantly, that doesn't mean cocaine trafficking is actually going down. The report explains how African drug cartels hustle cocaine in smaller amounts of 175 kilos or so, instead of big shipments of multiple tons, which are more characteristic of the Latin American cartels. If the African cartels are taking a bigger role in cocaine, that means there are fewer truly big shipments for European police to intercept, and more little shipments, creating the illusion of trafficking in decline.

The U.N. thinks that might be the case, especially since demand for cocaine in Europe has doubled in the past decade. As demand increased, Latin American drug cartels moved into Africa to use as a staging ground. 'For the Latin American traffickers, one of the virtues of using the West African route was its novelty ' law enforcement authorities were not expecting cocaine to come from this region,' the report notes. 'By 2008, due to the international attention the flow received, much of this novelty had been lost.'

Beyond the cartels' turf getting stale, the U.N. proposes several other theories. Political and economic crises ' including rebellions, wars and coups in 2008 and 2009 ' 'may have disrupted the channels of corruption that facilitated trafficking through the region.' Before 2009, most of the cocaine being seized in the region was being moved by West African traffickers, but owned by Latin American cartels and abetted by corrupt officials. After large-scale drug busts, and then having cocaine vanish from police custody (and presumably into the hands of West African traffickers), the Latin American cartels 'may have concluded that they had been betrayed by the corrupt officials they were sponsoring, and severed relations.'

The African cartels are also cooking meth. According to the report, there's now evidence of large-scale methamphetamine production in Nigeria, along with trafficking in the region growing rapidly since 2009. Ephedrine, an organic compound used in decongestants and a commonly-used precursor for meth, is loosely regulated in West Africa and hard to track.

Drug traffickers may have also adopted the drug after gaining experience smuggling cocaine for the Latin American cartels in the 2000s ' basically, learning the ropes from the pros before going solo. As Walter White from Breaking Bad could tell you, meth has low entry costs compared to cocaine (for one, you don't have to grow it), and is a good choice for the newly independent drug trafficker. It also helps to be sitting on an in-demand piece of real estate. Mexico's cartels are similar, with growing meth production and sitting between their supply of yayo in South America ' and their demand ' in the United States. West Africa's gangsters are simply doing it for Europe.

Online Jihadi Forums Fear a U.S.-Israel-Iran Alliance Will Take Over Syria

There is a conspiracy to destroy Syria, fear the jihadis and jihadi-wannabes on one of the internet's most prominent extremist forums. Pose as they might as enemies, the U.S. will team up with Iran to take advantage of the Syrian civil war.

'With time, everyone will be exhausted, all weapons in Syria will be destroyed, and all signs of civilization will be obliterated and cast back to what existed before the Stone Age,' predicts a thread on the password-protected Shumukh forum, one of the major jihadist warrens of the internet. 'Thus will the path be paved for direct and indirect military intervention in Syria, and for redrawing the map in accordance with the wishes of the Zionist-Crusader-Zoroastrian alliance.'

In case you're not familiar with the language of Sunni jihadi conspiracy theorists, 'Zionist-Crusader-Zoroastrian alliance' refers to the U.S., Israel and Iran, which to all outward appearances are foes, not least of which because Iran identifies Israel and the United States as its main foes. Oh, and the key media organ of this unlikely entente is the 'lying channel' al-Jazeera, which is waging 'a concerted media war against the brothers in Syria.' No need to troll this thread.

For all the discussion in the American press about how the al-Qaida-aligned Nusra front is the strongest Syrian revolutionary faction, the Shumukh forum isn't optimistic that Nusra is going to be victorious. The 'revolutionary and the mujahideen are currently being besieged in an effort to prevent their acquiring arms,' laments a lengthy forum thread dedicated to strategizing a path to success. Their enemies in the aforementioned Zionist-Crusader-Zoroastrian alliance are likely to 'wrest control of or destroy the chemical weapons facilities within Syria.' (Apparently Shumukh participants don't put much stock in the fears of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who says he probably won't have enough advance intelligence to avert a Syrian chemical attack.)

The thread, compiled and translated by the invaluable Jihadica website, doesn't offer much in the way of a strategy to save the Nusra Front's fortunes. It proposes 'collecting the greatest possible amount of heavy and unconventional weapons' (presumably including chemical arms); 'patience, and trust in God alone in all things'; and 'preaching, consciousness raising, and communications' on behalf of the Syrian jihadis. Significantly, Shumukh is stopping short of calling for the mobilization of jihadist sympathizers to the conflict.

'What this means is that there first be peaceful activities, as we have indicated [in point seven],' the forum says, 'but that they be accompanied by the threat of plunging the entire region into a vast war if our brothers in Syria are besieged or conspired against whether [by elements] from beyond Syria or by the brothers of the revolution itself.' The 'brothers from the Islamic State of Iraq' ' that is to say, al-Qaida in Iraq ' are supposed to be the 'strategic depth' of the Nusra Front and allied groups. Shumukh apparently sees the Syrian conflict as not a high enough priority to fight for.

It will come as news to the Crusader-Zionist-Zoroastrian Alliance that they are locked in an alliance. A persistent argument for U.S. intervention in the conflict is to weaken Iranian regional influence by deposing Tehran's proxy, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. Marine Gen. James Mattis, the outgoing commander of all U.S. troops in the Mideast and South Asia, sounded persuaded by that logic. Meanwhile, the Syrian rebel factions that the U.S. does want to help are frustrated by what they see as fainthearted support from Washington.

There's a broader irony staring the Shumukh denizens in their faces. Nominally, they're the ones aligned with the Crusaders and the Zionists, at least in the sense that all three entities want the Assad regime destroyed, while the Zoroastrians are trying to preserve Assad's bloody hold on power. Coming to terms with that stark geopolitical reality would make for a way better thread.

The Navy Is Sick of the One-Person Subs It Uses for Deep-Sea Diving

Moving around underwater in a diving suit is a lot less fun than it sounds. To survive at the deepest depths, divers need enormous, cumbersome, pressure-resistant suits that limit their mobility. But the Navy is sick of trading survivability for flexibility, no matter how far into the briny deep its divers wade.

In the Navy's most recent round of technology solicitations to small businesses, the seafaring service is looking for someone to develop a lightweight atmospheric diving suit that weighs under 400 pounds and can withstand pressure at 1,000 feet below sea level. If the weight requirement still sounds pretty heavy, consider that the current generation of deep-sea suits can weigh thousands of pounds, limiting what divers can do in them.

According to the solicitation, the new diving suit is for 'expeditionary diving and salvage forces' (.pdf) and retrieving 'high value material' in 'austere environments.' Unlike the bulky suits divers currently wear ' really more like one-person submarines ' these might be light enough so divers can propel themselves with their own feet. (Current models use thrusters, not divers' legs.) Still, a wetsuit this ain't: It's still a self-contained pressure suit.

It's also extremely dangerous to dive below a few hundred feet without one of these single-serving subs. Below 500 feet, a neurological disorder called high-pressure nervous syndrome can kick in, which can lead to drowsiness and tremors. Breathing nitrogen and oxygen at depths below 300 feet can also cause blackouts and even death. Saturation diving, which relies on gradually acclimating to underwater pressure over time, isn't perfect either. Surfacing too quickly can result in the bends, a form of decompression sickness caused by nitrogen bubbles expanding and becoming stuck in vital organs.

To prevent death from happening at these extreme depths, bulky atmospheric suits maintain a steady internal pressure of one standard atmosphere, or one atm ' the same as the mean pressure at sea level. That also means deep-sea divers don't have to depressurize when surfacing. But the Navy notes: 'This size and cumbersome configuration severely constrains its use.'

Some experimental suits have some of the functionality the Navy wants. Canadian firm Nuytco Research recently developed an atmospheric diving suit called the Exosuit ADS, which can descend to 1,000 feet ' its crush depth is double that ' and weighs between 500 to 600 pounds, just over the Navy's requirement. Divers can wear flipper boots in addition to the suit's thrusters. And the Nuytco model uses a foam coating of teeny, tiny microbubbles to keep divers' limbs buoyant. The suit also has artificial hands controlled by handles contained inside.

Nor is the Navy is the only part of the military giving divers a boost. The Pentagon's blue-sky research agency Darpa wants to develop a sensor system that can detect signs of decompression sickness in divers, and adjust for it by squirting small amounts of nitric oxide into divers' lungs when there's danger. But those divers won't be operating at extreme depths. For that, you'll still need a clunky suit ' though a lighter one. With flipper boots.

Pentagon Wants A 'Family of Devices' As It Makes Big Move Into Mobile Market

The next big customer for smartphones and tablets? The U.S. military. Finally.

The military has begun talks with device and mobile operating-system manufacturers, as well as the major carriers, to supply troops with secured mobile devices. The idea is for the manufacturers to offer the Pentagon an already-secure device and OS, rather for the military to laboriously build a bespoke mobile suite that inevitably won't keep pace with commercial innovation.

And the military has a significant amount of purchasing power on its side: hundreds of thousands of customers for the winning bid.

The architects of the Pentagon's new Commercial Device Mobile Implementation Plan, unveiled Tuesday, want to be clear they're not talking about soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines all buying, say, an iPhone 5 ' and being stuck with it for years after the companies come out with improved, upgraded mobile products. And they'd prefer to let the troops pick from a selection of secured, approved smartphones and tablets, not issue everyone a mobile device like they issue rifles.

'We're device-agnostic,' Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Wheeler, the Pentagon's deputy chief information officer, told reporters. 'What we're looking for is a family of devices that are available depending on the operator. ' And we're going to continue to update as they update.'

That's going to be a significant change from the top-down way the Pentagon often buys hardware. The Pentagon plan calls for giving security guidelines to the mobile companies, from secure to classified ' data-security standards that have been worked out with the National Security Agency ' and then shopping around for the best family of products that can meet the standard. It's going to publish those security guidelines, for both devices and for the mobile applications they'll run, within 120 days.

'Instead of the government, or defense contractors supporting the government, getting an operating system and then doing all the reviews to lock it down,' said John Hickey, the mobility program manager for the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Pentagon's 'concept now is: here's our security requirements to operate within DOD, you bring us the [Security Technical Implementation Guides] and we review it very quickly.'

The sheer volume of customers that the Pentagon represents is supposed to control costs, the plan's architects figure. Already, 600,000 department employees are using mobile devices, the overwhelming majority of which are RIM's Blackberry. Hickey said a 'mixture' of companies are already interested in getting that big market.

'On the device side, if you're talking about the operating system on the device, it would be the Samsungs, the Apples, et cetera, the ones that are really running the operating systems,' Hickey said, declining to elaborate much. 'And let's not leave RIM out of that picture, with BB10 coming.'

This is something the Army in particular wants badly. It spent over a decade building a data network to push mapping and other information to dismounted soldiers ' a network currently in use, for the first time, in Afghanistan ' and recent rolled out a smart device (it doesn't make calls) called Nett Warrior, running Android, to operate over it. The Army also built an app store, still in beta, so soldiers can access the apps they'll run on the devices. The new Pentagon-wide plan calls for building a military app store by 2014.

And it's not just the Army. The Navy and the Marines are sending their first ship-to-ship wireless network to sea this spring, and purchasing hundreds of phones from the local electronics store to use it. The Air Force's early experiments with smartphones and tablets involves turning heavy, on-paper flight kits into apps.

The plan doesn't call for signing on with one particular carrier: that's impractical, since that the military operates globally. The Pentagon has also yet to decide whether all the approved smartphones and tablets will run the same operating system, although it's worth noting the smartphones and tablets the military has purchased so far have typically been Android devices.

All this represents a potential windfall for mobile companies, even with cuts to the defense budget looming. The military not only wants to automate data and put it in troops' pockets, it wants to keep pace with the gadgets that troops use in their civilian lives ' a big reason why the Pentagon doesn't want to build a bespoke device.

Buying the devices isn't going to be the only challenge. Securing them is going to be another. Hickey acknowledged that the Pentagon's got to make choices about how much sensitive or classified data can live on devices that troops can easily lose and how much needs to live on a secured cloud. Another is just teaching the military the basics about what mobile technology is.

'Everyone thinks of, 'devices,'' Wheeler said. 'For someone whose job it is to work this all the time, as an aviator, I'm thinking 'device.' I'm not thinking the [data-management requirements], I'm not thinking the actual applications, I'm not thinking the OS and I'm not thinking the device. But all of those are part of the security solution. And that was something difficult for some of the leaders to get their hands around.'

The AR-15 Is More Than a Gun. It's a Gadget

I was shaking as I shouldered the rifle and peered through the scope at the small steel target 100 yards downrange. It was officially the coldest day in Las Vegas history, and I was in the middle of the desert, buffeted by wind and surrounded by the professional gun press, about to fire an AR-15 for the first time.

I grew up with guns, and I even own a small .22-caliber target pistol that I take to the range occasionally. But I had fired a rifle maybe twice in the past five years. I was a novice, and I was frozen to the core. I flinched as I pulled the trigger the first time, sending my shot wide of the mark. But the recoil wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared; in fact, the shot was actually pleasant. I fired again with more confidence, and the bullet rang the distant steel plate like a bell; then the next shot hit, and the next.

'You're doing great,' said Justin Harvel, founder of Black Rain Ordnance and maker of the gun I was shooting.

'It's not me,' I replied. 'I've never shot like this in my life. It's gotta be this gun.'

'Yeah, it's definitely not your daddy's hunting rifle, is it?'

In the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the AR-15 has gone from the most popular rifle in America to the most scrutinized and, in some quarters, vilified. Also known by its military designation, the M16, the rifle was racking up record sales in the years before Sandy Hook, but now, in the midst of a renewed effort to ban this weapon and others like it from civilian hands, the AR-15 market has gone nuclear, with some gun outlets rumored to have done three years' worth of sales in the three weeks after Newtown.

Now that the post-Newtown nation has suddenly woken up to the breakout popularity of the AR-15, a host of questions are being asked, especially about who is buying these rifles, and why. Why would normal, law-abiding Americans want to own a deadly weapon that was clearly designed for military use? Why are existing AR-15 owners buying as many of these rifles as they can get their hands on? Are these people Doomsday preppers? Militia types, arming for a second American Civil War? Or are they young military fantasists whose minds have been warped by way too much Call of Duty?

Preppers, militia types, and SEAL Team 6 wannabes are certainly represented in the AR-15's customer base. But fringe groups don't adequately explain the roughly 5 million 'black rifles' (as fans of the gun tend to call it) that are now in the hands of the public. No, the real secret to the AR-15's incredible success is that this rifle is the 'personal computer' of the gun world.

In the past two decades, the AR-15 has evolved into an open, modular gun platform that's infinitely hackable and accessorizable. With only a few simple tools and no gunsmithing expertise, an AR-15 can be heavily modified, or even assembled from scratch, from widely available parts to suit the fancy and fantasy of each individual user. In this respect, the AR-15 is the world's first 'maker' gun, and this is why its appeal extends well beyond the military enthusiasts that many anti-gun types presume make up its core demographic.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 View All

Rapping Terrorist Accused of Not Writing His Own Jihadi Rhymes

It's not enough that the most famous American jihadist in Somalia is a terminally wack rapper. Now Omar Hammami stands accused of not even writing his own lyrics.

And in what may be a face-saving abandonment of the jihadi rap game entirely, a Twitter account close to Hammami ' possibly even operated by Hammami himself ' is pretty much conceding that Hammami used a ghostwriter. #Flexbomb

It's like the terrorist version of P. Diddy's famous 'If I don't write it well, I recite it well' concession. Except Omar Hammami did not even recite it well.

To back up: Omar Hammami, or Abu Mansour al-Amriki, is one of the highest-profile Americans to ever join an al-Qaida affiliate. He quickly established himself as a unique sort of English-language propagandist for Somalia's al-Shabab. 'Land by land / and war by war / only gonna make our black flag soar / drip by drip / shot by shot / only gonna give us the death we sought,' he rapped in 2009. In 2011, the Alabama-bred rapper spat, 'It ain't do or die/ it's do or paradise' on a track called 'Send Me A Cruise' (as in cruise missile). And Hammami had the unmitigated gall to flip Tupac's 'Hail Mary' on 'Make Jihad With Me.' ('Attack America now/ martyrdom or victory/ we takin' Nairobi to Addis [Ababa].') Pretty terrible, but still good enough for WorldStar.

But last year, Hammami had an abrupt falling out with al-Shabab. He recorded a YouTube clip in March warning that his 'life may be in danger' by his former allies. For the better part of a year, it's looked like Hammami's life was touch and go: In January he recorded another video, ominously titled 'Final Appeal.' But while Shabab put Hammami on notice thereafter that he had 15 days to turn himself over to them ' in the words of the Outlawz, the got an APB out on his thug family ' it appears that a Somali tribe is sheltering him.

Now, however, Hammami's old allies aren't just trying to end him. They're trying to end his rap career.

A 17-page PDF circulating online by an apparent former colleague calling himself Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir terms Hammami a fraud in every way. 'A brittle mental construct of his own making' is one of the nicer descriptions.' He's militarily incompetent; he even got his metaphorical chain snatched. (That is, his gun and $200 were allegedly stolen once.) He spends too much time on Twitter. But not only is Hammami a fake thug, he's a fake emcee.

'Worth noting here also is that the Jihadi rap Nasheeds, 'Send Me A Cruise' and 'Make Jihad With Me,' that are often erroneously attributed to Abu Mansur are the work of another Muhajir ' another American Mujahid ' but, of course, Abu Mansur would never say otherwise since the Nasheeds 'perfect' and complement his projected self-image,' Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir wrote.

Even the best rappers sometimes use ghostwriters. But Omar Hammami is no Nas. Except when it came time for his camp to respond, they conceded.

As terrorism expert J.M. Berger noted, a figure that may be Hammami himself. At the very least, a Twitter account called @AbuMAmerican frequently speaks in Hammami's defense. On Thursday, he tweeted: 'Thank God the shabab got those awful raps off my back. They were attributed to amriki without permission.'

That's not exactly a total confirmation of the general ghostwriting allegation ' except in one case, 'Send Me A Cruise,' which @AbuMAmerican says Hammami did not write. In any event, with that, Hammami's friends ' perhaps Hammami himself ' effectively delivered Hammami's resignation from rap.

Berger notes that there may be something deeper going on. Between the accusations of Hammami's ineptitude at jihad and AbuMAmerican/Hammami's repudiation of the jihadist raps, Hammami appears to be rehabbing his image as a bit part in the jihad, although he's not renounced his jihadi beliefs.

'The raps were pretty terrible,' Berger tells Danger Room. 'If he's not responsible for even one, that's a black mark erased from his record.'

Engine Crack Grounds Pentagon's Entire Fleet of F-35 Stealth Fighters

The U.S. military's entire fleet of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters has been grounded, owing to a crack in the engine of one jet. This is at least the fourth full or partial stand-down of the F-35, the Pentagon's main future fighter, in just the last two and a half years.

'On Feb. 19, 2013, a routine engine inspection revealed a crack on a low pressure turbine blade of an F135 engine installed in a ' test aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base, California,' Kyra Hawn, a program spokeswoman, wrote in a statement.

The damaged blade is being shipped to its manufacturer, Connecticut-based Pratt and Whitney, for a 'more thorough evaluation and root cause analysis,' Hawn continued. 'It is too early to know the fleet-wide impact of this finding, however as a precautionary measure, all F-35 flight operations have been suspended until the investigation is complete.'

The F-35 previously had engine-blade problems in 2008.

The grounding affects F-35 testing in Florida, California and New Jersey and initial pilot training in Florida and Arizona. The Pentagon possesses around 100 F-35s of three models: the Air Force's lightweight A-model, the vertical-landing F-35B belonging to the Marine Corps and the Navy's carrier-compatible F-35C. The military plans to buy a total of 2,400 F-35s over the next 30 years at a cost of more than $1 trillion, training and maintenance included.

Unprecedented in scale and ambition, the Lockheed Martin-run F-35 program has been beset by cost overruns, delays and design problems. The Pentagon has steadily downgraded the plane's performance specs. Even so, it struggles to match its required blend of stealth, maneuverability, speed and range.

All F-35s were temporarily grounded in late 2010 and again in 2011 because of a faulty fuel pump. The Marines' F-35Bs briefly stood down last month after an engine malfunctioned ' a failure later tied to a poorly-made fluid line. Every grounding causes testing delays that could bump back the Joint Strike Fighter's frontline debut, currently expected in 2018 or 2019.

The fact that the three Joint Strike Fighter models share a common engine design means a turbine crack in one F-35 could affect all the others.  The Pentagon at one time planned to have two different, but swappable, engines for the F-35 ' one each from Pratt an Whitney and rival General Electric. But after a bitter political fight and with the military's recommendation, Congress terminated the alternate engine two years ago on cost grounds.

If it lasts, the current grounding could very well revive that battle.

DIY Drone-Proofing: Militants Use Carpet, Grass Mats, Mud to Hide From Robots

[WizardRSS: unable to retrieve full-text content]

What's the simplest way to evade a $4.5 million armed, flying robot? Get some grass mats. Or smear your car with mud.

Cash-Strapped Army Still Plans on Helping Pakistan Fight Narcotics

The war on terrorism isn't the only endless war the U.S. is waging. The drug war never went away, it just went overseas ' and the U.S. military is lending new support to an effort to stem narcotics in Pakistan.

A series of new solicitations by the Army Corps of Engineers show that even in these cash-strapped times, the U.S. is willing to build new structures, including in major airports, for its Pakistani frenemies to sniff out drug smugglers.

At the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, the Army expects to build a 7,000-square-foot command center right inside Jinnah International Airport. Complete with a 'cell/interrogation building,' the new center will help provide 'quick-response to constantly evolving narcotics and contraband smuggling tactics.' Among the chief beneficiaries: Pakistan's 'Rummaging and Patrolling Section,' which apparently exists. Cost: up to $2 million.

Then there's another 28,300-square-foot command center the Army wants to construct in Islamabad. This one will be operated by Pakistan's DEA-mentored 'elite, vetted' Anti-Narcotic Force Special Investigative Cell. At the command center, the Cell will 'carry out liaison with international counterparts, compile sensitive drug related intelligence, conduct sophisticated investigations, and plan interdiction operations.' Cost: up to $5 million.

Pakistan is a hub for drug trafficking ' not just the narcotics coming in through the opiate breadbasket next door in Afghanistan, but precursor chemicals like acetic anhydride, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. The U.S. interest in assisting Pakistan hunt narcotics dealers is less clear, particularly as the military lights its hair on fire warning about the disastrous impact of automatic spending cuts looming on March 1. To scare Congress into reversing the cuts, the Army this week released a state-by-state breakdown of what a loss of $18 billion this year from its operations account would look like.

Yet counternarcotics is one of the most lucrative sources of government contracting, and one that ties the war on drugs into the war on terrorism. A Pentagon bureau known as the Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office is staffing up in Kabul to run Afghanistan's drug war. And in 2011, it disbursed a pot of money worth more than $3 billion for security contractors everywhere from Mexico to Azerbaijan, making it one of the most lucrative security-contracting agencies in the entire U.S. government. It'll be a long time before the U.S. military gets out of the south-Asian anti-drug game, whatever the budget situation might be.

7 Obscure, Remote and Super-Geeky Military Bases

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The military doesn't always pick prime real estate for its bases. Often it prefers strange, far-flung and obscure parts of the world ' particularly when it comes to its geekiest endeavors. Some are out-of-the-way test sites for the latest military and space technology. Others are far-flung spots of particular interest to scientists, in areas few could survive unshielded from the elements. Some are obscure because the Pentagon doesn't like to advertise what they do.

Others face a predicament. Some bases built during the Cold War have found their original reason for existing suddenly disappear. But instead of closing them down, the Pentagon has found new reasons to justify their existence. Others now exist only on life support. There are also the bases built as a consequence of Cold War nuclear paranoia, now acting as a shelter for paranoia over terrorism and global pandemics.

Aside from their obscurity, these bases are monuments to the military's faith in technology. Implicit in their location is the idea that no matter how extreme or odd or isolated a location, the military can build a place to track intercontinental ballistic missiles, launch secretive drones, or hook up an array of antennas that can study the ionosphere. From the deserts of Utah to the islands of the Arctic Circle and the Pacific, here are seven such bases.

Above:

Thule Air Base

Along the frigid northwestern coast of Greenland lies one of the U.S. military's most isolated bases, and home to one of the Pentagon's primary tools for keeping an eye out for intercontinental ballistic missile launches: a giant phased array radar. Called the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) at Thule Air Base, the radar works by blasting a constant beam of radio waves off the ionosphere, instantly detecting any object flying over the North Pole once it crosses the horizon.

But since the end of the Cold War, BMEWS at Thule has seen its mission recede in importance, a kind of post-1980s job security crisis for missile-tracking radars. The dangers of a nuclear missile attack on the United States of the kind the Pentagon feared in the 1970s and 1980s ' and which would necessitate immovable radars in the Arctic ' is now largely unthinkable. The good news is that the radar has found another job monitoring satellites and scanning for space debris.

Though it's a bit tricky keeping everything functioning up in Thule. The temperatures regularly drop to negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, with storms that can lead to frostbite on exposed skin in less than a minute. Four months of every year are without sunlight, and sea access is blocked by ice for nine months. (These extreme conditions hampered clean-up during one of the "worst "Broken Arrow" nuclear accidents in U.S. history.) Oh, and there's unexploded ordinance left over from Cold War missile tests around the site, and arctic "wormholes" (.pdf) of frozen ice that can collapse when you step on them.

Photo: NATO

Navy Tweets How Budget Cuts Will Sink Its Fleet, Ground Its Planes

If automatic Pentagon budget cuts go through as scheduled next week, the Navy is going to grind its major operations practically to a halt. Or at least that's the message it's sending on social media.

The Navy's top public-affairs officer, Rear Adm. John Kirby, tweeted out an updated plan Tuesday for how the Navy absorbs billions of dollars in budget cuts scheduled to take effect on March 1. The deployments of 10 destroyers will be cancelled, including seven tasked with missile defense. Four aircraft-carrier air wings will be 'shut down.' The Navy will 'Reduce Investment in ships, aircraft, weapons, R&D' by $7.75 billion. Should a crisis break out somewhere in the world in 2013, only one aircraft carrier strike group will be available for deployment.

Others in the Navy public-affairs shop took to their own social-media accounts to spread the word. The Navy's official Twitter account retweeted the planning document to its 114,000-plus followers. Consider it a form of public pressure.

Tweeting the expected impact for what's called 'sequestration' inside the Beltway fits a recent Navy pattern. The seafaring service has been vocal in advertising how budget cuts will hobble it. Earlier this month, it publicly cancelled the deployment of the USS Harry Truman to the Middle East, leaving the region with only one U.S. aircraft carrier near Iran for the first time in two years, right before a new round of nuclear negotiations with the Iranians. Days later, it said it would delay the years-long refueling and retrofitting of another aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, which saves money by putting additional strain on the other carriers. (And something also prominently tweeted by the Navy.) Air-show attendees will also have to do without the Blue Angels.

Turns out the aircraft carriers are just the beginning of the Navy's expected woes. There will be 'immediate coverage gaps' in multiple military commands worldwide, according to the Navy plan. No amphibious ready groups will be prepared to go into crisis zones. The Marines' version of the F-35 stealth fighter won't go into flight testing on the USS Wasp. There won't be any Navy operations in South America. And all of this is on top of the Navy's recent announcement that it expects to build fewer surface ships than it had planned for years.

It's debatable how much this Navy planning is intended to pressure Congress and President Obama to work out a deal averting the cuts ahead of the March 1 deadline. At least one commentator thinks the Navy's public cries of impending penury are inappropriate. 'The Navy could have cut back other, less-sensitive deployments or acquisition programs,' Ralph Peters wrote in the New York Post last week. 'But the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chose to embarrass the White House and pressure Congress. He should have been fired.'

As Sam LaGrone of the U.S. Naval Institute wrote for Danger Room last week, the Navy's making a specific gamble with its deployment cuts and their impact on short-term naval readiness. It's sacrificing what it does in the near-term in order to preserve its long-term, high-budget shipbuilding plans, which take years to come to fruition.

But the Navy's social-media plan already is. It took the unusual step of tweeting its budget documents shortly after sending it to Congress. Congress is out of session this week ' indicating that Navy is diving into the blue waters of public opinion to save its money.

Darpa Wants to Help You Survive a Nuclear Disaster

If you're near a nuclear disaster ' either a detonated bomb or a malfunctioning reactor ' you are probably going to die, and die unpleasantly. Unless the Pentagon's mad scientists have anything to say about it.

Darpa doesn't have a program in place for creating, say, a super-therapy or spray-on tan that stops nuclear radiation. But 2011's Fukushima Daiichi reactor catastrophe in Japan got the blue-sky researchers thinking.

'In light of the diverse, persistent, and substantial threat posed by ionizing radiation from nuclear and/or radiological weapons,' the agency wrote in a request for information released Wednesday, 'Darpa is requesting information on novel therapies, methods, devices, protocols, compounds, and/or systems to mitigate the dangers that ionizing radiation poses to human health.' The idea is to help inform 'a potential new program focused on demonstrating novel methods for mitigating the susceptibility of victims exposed to large doses of ionizing radiation over a range of temporal scales.'

Darpa's breaking down its interest in nuclear survival into three main research areas. One is 'prophylactic' and 'post-exposure' treatments that can neutralize ionizing radiation before it starts to cause serious cellular damage. Another looks at how to survive and/or mitigate the long-term effects of radiation exposure, to include cancers ' effectively meaning Darpa wants to push the boundaries of surviving radiation-induced cancer. The third is to better understand and model the effects of radiation on the human body, from a molecular up to a systemic level, with an eye to 'mitigation and repair of genetic and cellular damage.'

A particular area of interest: what nuclear radiation does to the very building blocks of life. 'Emerging models of DNA damage dynamics, DNA damage response, signaling pathways and DNA repair mechanisms,' Darpa's request reads, 'may lead to the development of novel therapies for long-term radiation damage.'

Perhaps none of this research should come as a surprise, as it emerges from the agency that once dreamed of building a nuclear reactor the size of a microchip. And it's ambitious, to say the least. But Darpa will truly be doing something revolutionary if it can figure out how to make the human body resilient against nuclear energy or fallout.

Senator Lists the Death Toll From U.S. Drones at 4,700 People

The government says you can't know how many people U.S. drone strikes have killed, because that's a state secret. But one of the most hawkish members of the U.S. Senate just said the strikes have killed 4,700 people. And his math raises questions.

That's what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) approvingly told an Easley, South Carolina, Rotary Club on Tuesday afternoon. It's the first public death toll provided by a U.S. government official for the signature method of killing in the U.S.' sprawling, global counterterrorism campaign.

'We've killed 4,700,' Graham said, according to an Easley website. 'Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we're at war, and we've taken out some very senior members of al-Qaida.' Graham did not evidently offer an estimate of how many innocent people the drones have killed.

Graham staffers did not return voicemails and e-mails seeking elaboration. (We'll update if they do.) But that's a very high figure ' at least as it pertains to the CIA's drone strikes, outside the declared battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is what the context of Graham's remarks make it seem like he's referring to. As Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations blogs, that's on the highest end of the drone-death estimate compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism from publicly available news reports. Zenko's compilation of the averages of non-governmental organizations' guesstimates for drone casualties is about 1,700 people lower.

The CIA declined to comment about whether Graham revealed classified information. Counting the death toll from drones is a notoriously imprecise, murky business.

Graham's death count would raise questions about the much-vaunted precision of the strikes. Using the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's count, the U.S. has launched between 416 and 439 drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia since the U.S. first successfully weaponized an MQ-1 Predator a decade ago. If Graham's right, each strike would have to kill more than 10 people. It's certainly possible ' the 100-pound Hellfire missile carried by the drones is capable of it ' but U.S. counterterrorism officials typically describe the drones as a tool geared for the targeting of a specific terrorist at a time, with minimal civilian casualties. (That isn't necessarily the case: Sometimes the CIA kills people with drones without knowing who exactly they are.)

Yet Graham's count is simultaneously low. Judging from the context of his remarks, he's evidently not counting the U.S. military's drone strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the real number of deaths from the strikes between the covert CIA drone program and the U.S. military's still rarely acknowledged efforts is likely even higher.

It wouldn't be the first time that a U.S. senator has offhandedly revealed specific and unacknowledged information about the drones. In 2009, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, blabbed that the Pakistani government was hosting CIA drones for strikes on Pakistanis.

But Graham's disclosure underscores the extraordinary secrecy around the centerpiece of U.S. counterterrorism efforts ' a military action in all but name, operated by an agency that need not explain to the public how it carries out the program. Even Feinstein, a big advocate of the CIA and its drones, acknowledged to Danger Room earlier this month that the CIA has a history of being deceitful with Congress about its other highly valued programs. And even after the CIA's likely next director, John Brennan, acknowledged that the CIA performs such lethal strikes, the Justice Department still maintains that even the existence of its drone program is a state secret, so that it need not disclosure information about it in court. Whatever Graham's intentions in stating a death toll ' regardless of its accuracy ' that secrecy is the most prominent, visible fact about the drones.

Beyond Radiation: Pentagon Seeks Better Ways to Detect Nuclear Weapons

Forget about checking for nukes by monitoring radiation fluxes in the atmosphere, and be careful of relying on satellite photography. The next wave of research for detecting nuclear weapons is going to study changes in the ground, develop tricked-out sensors and look at how networks of nuclear proliferators move around the world.

That's the focus of new research soon to be sponsored by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which runs the Pentagon's efforts at locating and controlling material used for the world's deadliest weapons. Beginning later this year, the agency is going to spend between $400,000 and $6 million apiece on research into how to find nuclear weapons through practically every method except old-school atmospheric radiation.

According to an announcement released by the Pentagon agency on Tuesday, the parameters of the research are broad. Work into new technologies that can detect the presence of a nuclear device should focus on 'distributed and disposable sensors, re-purposing of existing sensors, combinations of sensors to produce new signature modalities, on-board sensor processing, and reductions to bandwidth and power requirements.' The agency wants to develop unconventional 'non-radiation indicators of nuclear WMD-related behaviors and activities,' like mapping the commercial patterns of 'networks' that illicitly traffic in nuclear materials. It's OK to study the impact of a nuclear device on the atmosphere, just as long as researchers focus on modalities like 'electrostatic, thermodynamic, mass, acoustic, chemical, or gravitational.'

The turn away from atmospheric radiation detection underscores a shift in how nukes get developed. North Korea exploded all three of its nuclear tests underground, limiting the atmospheric fallout and making the world reliant on seismography for learning about the tests and extrapolating data about the weapons' destructive yield. Iran's nuclear program reportedly involves a warren of underground tunnels.

And the alternative nuclear-detection techniques have application beyond the inspection of rogue nuclear programs. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency came into existence two decades ago in order to verify that the former Soviet Union's nuclear weapons and precursor material was locked down. These days, it monitors Russian compliance with nuclear-reduction treaties like 2010's New START, but that monitoring typically depends on negotiated Russian access to nuclear sites. The research here might have some utility for a standoff detection of nuclear weapons, although the announcement hardly specifies that as a goal.

Few of these techniques are actually novel. The Defense Department dabbled, for instance, in modeling and detecting the gravitational signatures of nuclear bombs for decades. And studying the patterns of nuclear proliferators ' like Pakistan's old A.Q. Khan network ' relies on classic sleuthing techniques, like studying shipping manifests and patterns of commercial activity. But the new research, if it yields anything, shows the Pentagon looking beyond the familiar methods of radiation detection and satellite photography ' as those methods are more to tell you about the past as they are about where the next developing nuclear threat takes place.

Top U.S. Stealth Jet Has to Talk to Allied Planes Over Unsecured Radio

For the first time, America's top-of-the-line F-22 fighters and Britain's own cutting-edge Typhoon jets have come together for intensive, long-term training in high-tech warfare. If only the planes could talk to each other on equal terms.

The F-22 and the twin-engine, delta-wing Typhoon ' Europe's latest warplane ' are stuck with partially incompatible secure communications systems. For all their sophisticated engines, radars and weapons, the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks. That is, unless they want to talk via old-fashioned radio, which can be intercepted and triangulated and could betray the planes' locations. That would undermine the whole purpose of the F-22's radar-evading stealth design, and could pose a major problem if the Raptor and the Typhoon ever have to go to war together.

The F-22-Typhoon training is a big deal for both air forces. Previous encounters between U.S. Raptors and Typhoons from the U.K. and Germany were brief and, some say, rigged to handicap the arguably more capable F-22, widely considered the best aerial fighter ever. Operation Western Zephyr, as the combined American-British aerial training is known, essentially merges separate flying squadrons from both air arms for unprecedented levels of cooperation.

Eight Typhoon FGR.4s and 200 personnel from the RAF's XI Squadron are spending more than a month with the 40 or so F-22s of the U.S. Air Force's 1st Fighter Wing, based in Virginia. The Raptors and Typhoons have flown mock battles against supersonic Air Force T-38s and Navy F/A-18 Hornets. And on Feb. 7, the F-22s and Typhoons flew to North Carolina to join a wide-ranging simulated air war also involving F-15s, F-16s and aerial tankers.

Next, the Raptors and Typhoons will travel together to Nevada to participate in Red Flag, the Air Force's main war game, scheduled for late this month. 'Across the board, the training we're getting here is probably the best I've had on Typhoon,' said Wing Cmdr. Rich Wells, the top officer in XI Squadron.

But the mostly incompatible communications systems complicate closer cooperation. The F-22 was designed during the Cold War to be a solitary hunter, able to silently swap radar-based targeting data only with other F-22s using a special, hard-to-intercept radio datalink. Accordingly, the Raptor does not have the full Link 16 datalink installed on the Typhoons and many other Western fighters, support planes, warships and ground-based air defenses. Link 16 is what allows different air, sea and ground forces from the U.S. and its allies to securely swap information back and forth during wartime.

To be clear, the F-22 can receive Link 16 data ' and has done so with the Typhoons. 'That information in addition to other systems was used for coordinating tactical actions during the training,' Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, an Air Force spokesman, tells Danger Room. But the F-22s did not transmit targeting data back to the Typhoons, Sholtis says. In short, an F-22 pilot can see what a Typhoon pilot sees on his radar, but not vice versa.

For true two-way comms, Raptor and Typhoon pilots have to fire up their old-school voice radios and broadcast an easily-intercepted message, thereby jeopardizing the Raptor's stealth advantage. In other words, routine communication between F-22 and Typhoon pilots hobbles the American jets, downgrading them from fast, high-flying and hard-to-detect to just fast and high-flying. According to some accounts, the communications shortfall kept the F-22 out of the multinational Libya air war two years ago.

Efforts to upgrade Raptors with two-way Link 16 or another, more widely compatible datalink so far have been stymied by technical and budgetary problems. In 2008, the Air Force tested a ground station at Langley that was able to receive data from F-22s then pass it back up to other fighters, but it's not clear whether that technology is still in use.

In another quick fix, the government installed software 'gateways' in a handful of support planes: four modified business jets and three Global Hawk drones belonging to the Air Force plus two of NASA's research planes. This allows them to translate between scores of different radio systems, including the datalinks on F-22s and other fighters. But most of the gateway planes are in Afghanistan. If one of these precious support planes is flying alongside the F-22s and Typhoons on their current training, the Air Force isn't saying.

The flying branch has launched a fresh effort to solve the F-22's communications problem, recently requesting industry to provide a technologically mature system to allow 'fifth-generation' fighters such as the Raptor to 'digitally connect to and exchange data' with non-stealthy 'fourth-generation' fighters like the Typhoon, according to an official document obtained by Flight.

In the meantime there could be limits on how closely the American and British jets can cooperate. The intensive training taking place in Virginia, North Carolina and, soon, Nevada is honing the pilots' skills and tactics, but only within the constraints of the mismatched communications.

The Raptor and Typhoon still make a powerful team: both jets fly high, fly fast, and have excellent sensors. The Typhoon carries more weapons, even as the Raptor is more maneuverable. The two planes' teamwork could prove useful in some future air war, assuming the British jet doesn't need the F-22's targeting data ' or provided the enemy's defenses aren't too tough and the F-22 doesn't require its stealth. Those are pretty big caveats for a stealth warplane that's supposed to be the best in the world.

Senate Minority Leader Fooled by Report in Military Version of The Onion

The best parody contains elements of truth. Which might explain how the military's answer to The Onion suckered the Senate's Republican leader.

Meet The Duffel Blog, if you haven't already. A must-read for national-security nerds ' and anyone who enjoys humor, really ' it provides pitch-perfect military parody online, such as this piece about Syria hosting Iraq War reenactors (bylined by 'G-Had') or this one about a Google Street View Prius getting blown up in Kandahar. The Duffel Blog, as dutiful readers know, is America's oldest online source for fake military news, founded in 1797 in a moment of farsightedness. It often gives more real talk than most legit journalistic institutions, but there is no way you can confuse it with the real news.

Unless you are a senior member of the United States Senate.

On November 14, 2012, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wrote to Elizabeth King, the Pentagon's congressional liaison, with a an unusually credulous query. 'I am writing on behalf of a constituent who has contacted me regarding Guantanamo Bay prisoners receiving Post 9/11 GI Bill benefits,' McConnell wrote in a letter acquired by Danger Room. 'I would appreciate your review and response to my constituent's concerns.'

Um, Guantanamo detainees getting GI Bill benefits? Yes, that's from the Duffel Blog, as McConnell's constituent clearly states, complete with the reference URL. Said constituent even notes that he or she can't find any information about the alleged government payouts to suspected insurgents and terrorists.

The Defense Department does a lot of inexplicable things at Guantanamo Bay ' there's a resume-building workshop for detainees, for real ' but paying detainees GI Bill benefits is not one of them. 'The very idea that the U.S. government would extend GI Bill benefits to enemy detainees is a patent absurdity,' says Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, the Pentagon's spokesman on all matters Guantanamo.

The Duffel Blog piece about the fake GI Bill benefits is not subtle. 'By allowing the detainees to use the Department of Veterans Affairs, we hope to completely crush their souls with bureaucracy,' it quotes a fake Pentagon spokesman saying. There's also a false quote from Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki: 'Because most 'guests' at Guantanamo Bay have been there nearly a decade and there is no end in site for their 'visit,' the Department of Veterans Affairs is ready to have their claims processed in 12-15 years as per standard operating procedure.'

At the risk of explaining the joke, the Duffel Blog's real objective is to send up the inadequate, mollasses-slow benefits the government provides to the nation's veterans. In other news, Garfield ate all the lasagna and now Jon is really mad.

It's admirable that McConnell went out of his way to address a constituent's question. 'The senator's office had a request from a constituent asking us to inquire about an issue,' explains McConnell spokesman Michael Brumas. 'Our office forwarded the constituent's question to the Defense Department.'

But perhaps simply following the link to the uniformed version of The Onion would have sufficed to clear up any confusion.

Afghanistan Gets Safer for Civilians as U.N. Warns Taliban of 'War Crimes'

Civilians are safer from harm in Afghanistan's decade-long conflict than at any time since before the U.S. troop surge, according to new United Nations statistics.

Last year, 2,754 Afghan civilians died and another 4,805 were wounded. That's the first time civilian deaths and injuries dropped since 2007, the United Nations mission to Afghanistan announced in a report released Tuesday, and a 12 percent drop from 2011. Insurgents are responsible for the vast majority of those casualties, 81 percent.

The report is sure to come as a big relief to the United States and its NATO allies. They're not the drivers of dead Afghans, thanks in part to sharp restrictions on air strikes since 2011. Only eight percent of civilian deaths and injuries are attributable to the actions of the U.S. and its allies. (Another 11 percent of casualties don't have a clear cause.) The biggest danger to Afghan civilians comes not from NATO air strikes but from homemade Afghan insurgent bombs. Some 782 bombing incidents in 2012 accounted for 34 percent of all Afghan civilian casualties.

In fact, the United Nations special representative warned the Taliban that placing bombs along transit routes used by civilians might be a violation of the laws of war. 'This is a war crime and people will be held responsible in the future for this war crime,' said Ján Kubi', the U.N.'s man in Afghanistan.

The report also has implications for the controversy over U.S. drone strikes. Civilian deaths, particularly caused by the U.S. from the air, are falling. Yet the U.S. military launches far more drone strikes in Afghanistan than it and the CIA launch in the undeclared battlefields of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. According to Air Force statistics released earlier this month, the U.S. fired missiles from its unmanned planes if Afghanistan 44 times in January 2013, more than twice the total drone strikes outside that warzone in the same period. A separate United Nations effort will soon investigate U.S. drone strikes, including those in Afghanistan.

U.N. officials first started to record a drop in civilian deaths in the first half of 2012. The death toll from the war is still somewhat higher in Afghanistan than the 2,118 the U.N. recorded in 2008. But back then, the U.S. was responsible for 39 percent of those deaths, with air strikes accounting for about two-thirds of them. Ever since 2009, when the U.S. military emphasized a counterinsurgency strategy that put a premium on protecting civilians from harm, the proportion of civilian casualties the U.S. has created has declined. Only in 2012, however, did Afghan civilians actually experience the lower levels of harm that the strategy promised.

The drop is perhaps a lagging indicator, arriving after the U.S. military backed away from counterinsurgency and put its back into handing the war over to U.S.-sponsored Afghan security forces. But the U.N. doesn't attribute the drop in civilian casualties just to U.S. actions. (Levels of violence, at least as of mid-2012, outpaced their 2009 levels.) Insurgents have shifted to a strategy involving less direct confrontation with U.S. troops and more toward assassinating key Afghan government and allied figures.

'Targeted killings' of notable Afghans rose 108 percent in 2012, accounting for 698 of the year's civilian death toll. Those killings focused on 'Government officials, religious leaders, tribal elders, off-duty police officers and persons supporting the peace process,' the U.N. found. That's a 700 percent increase over the previous year, which the U.N. report calls 'staggering.'

The Taliban assassination campaign is hardly the whole of its war effort. Only 14 percent of 2012's civilian casualties can be called targeted killings, according to the U.N. stats. But the drop in overall violence highlights the difference between fighting a war while trying to protect civilians and fighting a war by targeting them for death.

3-D Printing Pioneer Wants Government to Restrict Gunpowder, Not Printable Guns

Just as gun control has made a comeback among politicians after a spate of deadly mass shootings, the rapid advances in 3-D printed guns have threatened to undermine those controls before they even get started. According to a leading 3-D printing researcher, the only way to prevent printed guns from shooting a new loophole in the law may be to control the gunpowder you need to fire them.

'Perhaps the only way forward, if we choose to try and control this, is to control the gunpowder ' the explosives ' and not the actual device,' Hod Lipson, a Cornell University professor of engineering and an early pioneer of 3-D printing, tells Danger Room. The reason, Lipson says, is that it would be the remaining 'controlled substance' in a field that's otherwise uncontrollable, regardless of the shape or size of the firearm that you're using ' or printing. It is the 'unifying material everybody would need, and it would be a good target for regulation if people choose to regulate it.'

This is because while gunpowder can be manufactured at home, it is largely unregulated for small arms ammunition. (Although making it in your basement can be difficult and dangerous.) Making usable bullet cartridges is relatively simple with gunpowder, brass and some machine tools. But making a 3-D printed gun is even easier, involving inexpensive printing machines which create everyday objects using layers of heated plastic, and structured according to blueprints that can be freely shared and downloaded.

Lipson doesn't make printed weapons. But for groups like Defense Distributed, a collective of 3-D printing gunsmiths which distributes firearms blueprints through its database Defcad, printable guns have been a means to directly challenge gun control legislation. Partially-printed guns have already been tested and refined by the group. In January, New York lawmakers banned magazines that hold more than seven rounds. In response, the group took to testing a printable 30-round magazine for the AR-15 rifle and named it the 'Cuomo' after the state governor. The printable, plastic magazine survived after cycling through more than 300 rounds. Other hobbyists have since replicated Defense Distributed's design.

Preventing anyone from making a 3-D printed gun or magazine is also tricky, to say the least. A common target for gun control advocates is the 'Gun Show Loophole,' which allows gun sales between unlicensed individual buyers and sellers ' without a background check ' provided the sellers don't make a living off it. But for 3-D printed guns, the question over whether to conduct a background check doesn't even apply. The schematics are literally downloaded off the internet, shared anonymously, and serve as the blueprint for a gun anyone can make using plastic printer bought off a shelf. The guns themselves are not even sold to anyone, so how do you regulate it?

Lipson, who recently co-authored a book about 3-D printing, is cautious about what form gunpowder regulation could take, and didn't explicitly take a side for or against gun control. 'Whether or not there should be gun control as an issue ' I'm trying to avoid the question of whether or not there should be ' if somebody is going to put in gun control, it's all about catching the one case,' he says, referring to individual criminals. The problem, he adds, is that it's 'very easy to make a one-off disposable plastic gun, if you like, that will shoot a few rounds. It's not something that will happen in 20 years. It is possible today to do that, and the technology is only getting better.'

Note, however, these are not the kinds of firearms sold in gun stores, or the kind used by the military. They're relatively crude, require some metal parts to function, and cannot survive during long-term use. A lot can go wrong, namely that the thermoplastic used to print a gun can melt and fail during firing if it's brittle or absorbs too much heat.

Lipson should know: he's a pioneer in the 3-D printing field. As the director of Cornell's Creative Machine Labs, he's led development in the Fab@Home Project, an open-source collective that created one of first 3-D printers that can use multiple materials ' and that has reached the public. Lipson's printers have since been used to print everything from artificial limbs to edible food.

Lipson also doesn't believe criminals or those who would use the guns for sinister reasons would print one instead of simply buying a cheap conventional handgun. But even a working pistol that will fire enough rounds to kill someone could be enough to break gun control at the sale point ' skipping around rigorous background checks and restrictions on high-capacity magazines.

'Criminals have other channels to get guns, but I am really more concerned about hobbyists and enthusiastic kids trying this route at home and actually injuring themselves in the process of doing that,' Lipson says. 'If you make one and got it in the wrong temperature or was shoddy in any way, it's actually dangerous to fire.'

This is a problem for Defense Distributed. The group has been cautious to note that 'melting and failing in your hand will be a concern,' according to the group's website. Hence the need for a lot of testing.

But there's a dilemma inherent to the group's vision of open-source weapons. It's a question whether freely shared blueprints, modified with anonymity ' and with zero oversight and regulation ' can be truly made safe for the user. Sharing faulty blueprints could also make for a dangerous kind of trolling. That's all a moot point if the guns don't have the powder to shoot.

MIT Wants Tomorrow's Soldiers to Talk Through Their Shirts

If a group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have their way, the soldier of the future mumbling into his jacket won't be a crazy person. He'll be using microscopic fibers woven into his uniform to communicate with his battle buddies and clear up some of the fog of war.

Can you spot the gold threads in the Army Combat Uniform shown above? They're not included for style ' but they do provide a kind of demonstration. MIT and the Army wanted to prove that they could fabricate a uniform that included a kind of fiber optic-like thread developed through a joint effort that should allow soldiers' threads to detect light, heat and sound.

Only the fibers don't have any transistors, processors, or circuitry. 'These are new kinds of fibers that are themselves devices,' says John Joannopoulos, the director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, a joint Army-MIT venture for far-out basic research.

The gold fibers in the uniform, the product of years of research, don't actually do that communications work yet. Currently, they're 'too thick for a uniform,' Joannopoulos tells Danger Room: They're about a millimeter in diameter, and Joannopoulos wants to scale down to 100 microns. Joannopoulos' team plans on spending the next 10 years testing and refining the concept and the design further. He and a team at the Army's Soldier Systems Center at Natick, Mass., created the garment using dummy fibers as a proof-of-concept that the fibers could be woven into a jacket without damaging them.

The fibers could make identifying friendly soldiers on a confusing, smoky, dusty, dark battlefield easier. Shine a laser designator on someone you don't recognize. If she's wearing the same uniform as you, the functional microfibers sewn into it would sense the laser and send a data signal back to your shirt. Same with someone's voice. Heat-sensitive fibers show potential for battlefield medicine: the shape and rate of change of a heat pattern pressed up against the shirt indicate where and how severely someone's been wounded.

'Your uniform would transit that information. You wouldn't be talking, it would transmit information: who you are, what time you went down, where the wounds are, what is the estimated severity of the wound, et cetera,' Joannopoulos says. 'The idea with these fibers is that eventually, we'd like to enable full-body sensing for the soldier.'

The breakthrough came a few years ago when the team, led by MIT materials-science professor Yoel Fink, demonstrated that they could fabricate fibers made out of a 'multiplicity of materials,' Fink tells Danger Room, instead of the single-material glass fibers that make up fiberoptic cable. That led the team to think about turning the fibers themselves into functional devices. To build a fiber that could detect heat, for instance, you take some semiconductor material ' whose conductivity changes when heat varies ' spanning wires running down the length of the fiber.

Using a method similar to the manufacture of fiberoptics, the MIT team took all these materials ' 'typically a combination of insulators, semiconductors and conductors,' Fink says ' 'fluidized' it through a process called thermal drawing, and cut it super-thin. The team then thought about what functionality they might want their fibers to possess, and changed the secret sauce accordingly.

'If you're trying to achieve an acoustic fiber, then one of your materials is going to be an acoustic transduction material,' Fink explains. 'If you're trying to create a microfluidic fiber, than one of your materials may be a fluid. Different functions necessitate different materials. But nominally, we incorporate conductors, insulators and then some other functional material.' And they're really, really small.

They're also not without problems. The fibers are line-of-sight devices: when something gets in the way of a straight line between two soldiers wearing the uniform, the data transmission is compromised. Seventy-five meters is the longest distance tested so far. And the MIT crew hasn't figured out how exactly the data transmission will work. No one thinks they're going to replicate the features of a radio or a phone that you wear, but they do think their fibers can supplement those devices. All this is a challenge ' an arduous one ' for years' worth of future tests.

Still, the potential battlefield clarity it might provide gives the MIT team motivation. For Fink, it's also personal: a cousin of his serving in the Israel Defense Forces died in a fratricide incident borne out of battlefield confusion. And as a former sergeant in the IDF himself, Fink has insights borne from experience about the roles for his team's fibers.

'We used to call it bridging the gap between the range of vision and the reach of voice,' he says. 'The reach of voice is very short. But you're able to see from [far] away. And [bridging] that gap is something that's an acute battlefield need. It's not going to come as a surprise that to this day there are plenty of operational ramifications of the fact that gap exists and we don't know how to bridge it effectively.' Commence muttering into your shirt, then.

There Is No Way to Stop Space Rocks From Hurtling to Earth and Killing You

Space is out to kill you. There is no way to stem its aggression. But it's usually an incompetent killer, so don't freak out.

The last thing residents of Chelyabinsk, in central Russia, expected on Friday was to see a flaming fireball from the heavens hurtle towards their industrial city. On-scene accounts make it seem like an angry deity enacted His vengeance for some unknown slight. The meteor was actually unrelated to the 2012 DA14 asteroid near Earth, according to NASA. (Which, by the way, you can watch soar by.) But 1,000 Russians were injured from the concussive blast and flying, shattered glass.

All the advanced air defenses that humanity has invested in? The interceptor missile that are (sometimes) able to stop an adversary missile from impacting? The early-warning monitoring systems that are supposed to give humanity enough time to plan a response? They are useless, useless against a meteorite onslaught. Do not believe the stories about the Russians shooting the cosmic rock down.

'The reason, simply put, is physics,' explains Brian Weeden of the Secure Earth Foundation, a former captain and missile expert in the U.S. Air Force Space Command. Asteroids orbit the sun like Earth does, and occasionally our orbits intersect, causing the rocks to enter the atmosphere as flaming meteors screaming toward impact. They are not flying like airplanes and missiles that air defenses target. Shooting them will not change their speed or trajectory ' at best, a missile impact might change its direction somewhat or shatter it into more pieces.

But let's say that happens. What then? 'Now you've got a shotgun blast instead of a single shot,' Weeden explains, and 'all those pieces are still traveling in the same direction and at the same velocity.' Gulp.

Still, it's vanishingly unlikely that air defense systems would be able to even make the shot. The Chelyabinsk meteor was traveling at something like 32,000 miles per hour. (A 747's typical cruising speed? 567 miles per hour.) By the time you notice it, it's too late to stop it.

Not that you would notice it. Meteors like the one in Chelyabinsk are going to pass through the detection systems that humans have. Telescopes pointed to space are only going to be able to see a ginormous asteroid. Missile warning and air-defense radars run via software that ignores things that aren't planes and missiles. And the eyes of U.S. military satellites are pointed the wrong way ' down toward Earth. The Defense Support Program satellite constellation, for instance, is looking for launches of things like intercontinental ballistic missiles that threaten America, using infrared. But the asteroid is cold until it enters the atmosphere.

And in this case, the asteroid was relatively small, maybe eight to ten tons. The asteroid tracking networks ' run by NASA, the European Space Agency and bands of amateurs ' are looking for massive space rocks, some the size of moons, and calculating their potential intersection with Earth. That process can provide early warning ' years and decades out. Something small enough to slip into the atmosphere like this one is unlikely to be detected. And there's not a weapon forged by man that could do something about it anyway, short of calling Bruce Willis.

But there's good news. Space rocks are lousy shots. The Earth is mostly ocean and uninhabited areas. The frequency of meteorite impacts is correlated with size, Weeden explains, and the smaller the meteorites, the more often they land. 'But the places where people are is actually pretty small,' he says. Even the injuries that occurred at Chelyabinsk were mostly concussions and accidents from shattered glass, not from the meteorite itself. Close but no cigar, space: 'Your odds of dying by a meteor are pretty damn small. You're thousands of times more likely to die by car on way to work.'

Believe it or not, there is actually a United Nations team convening to spare Earth from the ravages of space. Weeden just met with it in Vienna a few days ago, and its meetings are ongoing. And it has a plan.

Within the United Nations Special Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is a subcommittee on science and technology. That subcommittee has an ad hoc advisory team of dozens of space experts from around the world who try to 'figure out how to coordinate detections, warnings and response, and possible deflection' of asteroids that might impact Earth, Weeden says. They're mostly focused on the big asteroids, the ones larger than 100 meters in diameter or bigger. And among their ideas ' the one that 'physics says should work,' in Weeden's phrase ' is something called a Gravity Tractor.

The idea is to launch a spaceship near a nefarious asteroid. The presence of the spaceship's inherent gravitational field should impact the asteroid's, to the point where it might be able to shift the asteroid's trajectory and get it to avoid the path of Earth's celestial journey. It's untested ' and apparently it won't even host astronauts: it's unmanned, so Bruce Willis can take a knee. But Weeden has faith the Gravity Tractor will work. Here's a simulation. (It's worth mentioning that other proposals include Armageddon-style nuclear detonations, laser-beam pushes and even attaching a big-ass cord to pull the thing out of the way.)

Oh, and the name of that United Nations advisory group that came up with the Gravity Tractor? It's called Action Team 14. 'They're not superheroes,' Weeden helpfully clarifies. But right now, superheroes are the only defense Earth has against falling space rock.

Army Kills The Military's Last Remaining Giant Spy Blimp

Updated, 6:38 p.m.

And so ends the U.S. military's dream of mega-blimps strapped with powerful surveillance gear. The Army confirms to Danger Room that it's killed the last of those lighter-than-air ships.

Say goodbye to the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, or LEMV. Built by Northrop Grumman, it's a dimpled blimp as long as a football field; seven stories high; and carries a price tag of over half a billion dollars. The plan was to use the blimp over Afghanistan, where its gondola could haul seven tons of cargo ' including advanced camera gear able to see dozens of square miles of terrain with crystal-clear resolution at a single blink. It would stay 20,000 feet above the warzone for weeks at a time, something beyond the capabilities of any spy plane, manned or piloted. Trials over Afghanistan were slated for early this year.

Not anymore. A report in InsideDefense citing anonymous sources said LEMV quietly met the Army budget axe last week. The Army confirmed it, on the record, to Danger Room late on Thursday.

'Due to technical and performance challenges, and the limitations imposed by constrained resources, the Army has determined to discontinue the LEMV development effort,' Army spokesman Dov Schwartz emails.

That came as news to the branch of the Army actually testing the blimp. 'The Department of the Army has not notified the Army Space and Missile Defense Command of any programmatic changes to the LEMV program,' spokesman John Cummings told Danger Room earlier Thursday. 'LEMV continues to be a technology demonstration at SMDC.' Northrop Grumman was surprised by word of the cancellation; it has yet to comment.

The LEMV has been in trouble for awhile. A technical analysis in 2011 questioned whether the blimp could actually stay aloft for the 21 days Northrop hyped, and figured it was closer to 10. Although the ship was supposed to head to Afghanistan this year, its only flight has been its maiden August test voyage over New Jersey, which was months late. The Army, once a vocal LEMV booster, began backing away from the blimp in October.

And as the LEMV goes, so too went the military's dreams of giant spy blimps for the foreseeable future.

Last year, the Air Force abruptly canceled its contract for the Blue Devil, a blimp seven times larger than the Goodyear Blimp and LEMV's main rival. It was a massive reversal: More than just a lighter-than-air vehicle for spy gear, it was to host 12 different sensors and a supercomputer that made Blue Devil capable of acting as a quarterback coordinating other aerial spy gear. Only the avionics arrived late to the party, and technical challenges mounted.

Not even the backing of the Air Force's former intelligence chief, whose company built the thing, could spare Blue Devil: As my colleague David Axe reported, the Air Force office running the Blue Devil added requirements in a bureaucratic shanking. The Air Force likes planes, not blimps. With Blue Devil dead, all that remains of the mega-blimps is the LEMV.

Here's the justification for the mega-blimps. They give the U.S. military a middleweight spy tool, between the heavyweight spy satellites orbiting Earth and the welterweight spy planes taking pictures thousands of feet over a given swath of territory. Each has their functions: Satellites pick up huge, wide views and spy planes, manned and unmanned, provide hours' worth of imagery. For something in between ' say, weeks' worth of so-called 'pattern of life' data, send in something lighter than air, higher and more persistent than a plane, below a satellite, and carrying a ginormous amount of sensors, cameras and data processors.

Lots of people in Congress never bought it. As the budget for spy blimps ticked upward and the Army and Air Force fought over who controlled the mega-airships, the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2011 questioned why two competing airframes were necessary. By the time the two top Senate appropriators ' the most important legislators in the chamber ' threw their weight behind the Blue Devil, the Air Force had all but decided blimps were a non-starter.

The LEMV cancellation means an entire model of aerial surveillance is stillborn. The future of military blimps will be miniaturized: U.S. bases in Afghanistan often use tethered aerostats strapped with cameras above their fortifications to enhance their ability to spot insurgent threats beyond what the eye can see. But with the U.S. packing up from Afghanistan, the smaller blimps have also lost their rationale. The sound you hear is a lot of military hot air escaping.

Updated 6:38 p.m. with Army confirmation that the LEMV is cancelled.