Putin Preps Russian Navy for Biggest Exercise Since the Soviet Union

The Russian navy is about to stage its largest war exercise in a long time ' possibly the largest since before the breakup of the Soviet Union. It's a chance for President Vladimir Putin to show off his military might, of course. But the exercise may also be a subtle warning to the United States: Stay clear of waters that traditionally lie in Russia's sphere of influence.

The Russian defense ministry says its the 'first time in decades' it's launched naval exercises on this scale. The drills involve warships from all of Russia's fleets: 'the Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific,' noted a statement from the ministry. The exercise will be reportedly held in late January, and involve amphibious landings in the Caucasus and naval exercises in the Mediterranean.

Putin has undertaken a major $659 billion arms buildup through 2020. On Thursday, the Defense Ministry in Moscow also announced the scale of its ongoing naval increase. By 2016, a statement noted, Russia will have 18 new warships, 'and also 30 special-purpose and counter-subversion vessels,' along with six new submarines. One of these vessels, the Borei class ballistic missile sub Yuri Dolgoruky, joined the fleet this week.

What's odd is the timing, and location. The choice of the Black Sea and Mediterranean has led to some speculation that the exercises are cover for an evacuation of Russian citizens from Syria, with estimates ranging from 9,000 to 30,000 people. Could be. Syria's civil war has been drastically getting worse. But Russia also has more practical reasons for putting on a show of force in area. As far as some in Moscow see it, the Black Sea is under threat.

In November, Anna Glazova, a military analyst at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote in the Russian defense magazine National Defence that the U.S. is seeking to 'take military control of the Black Sea region.' The evidence: Washington has moved to install missile defense interceptors in Turkey and Romania ' ostensibly to shoot down Iranian missiles ' but with the Russians seeing it as aimed at them. Romania and Bulgaria joined NATO in 2004, which in Moscow's eyes, meant 'the Americans actually took control of the western Black Sea coast,' wrote Glazova.

That's a bit strong. The U.S. has been restricted by treaty since 1936 in the number of warships it can sail through the Turkish-controlled Bosporus Straits, and how long Washington can keep them in the Black Sea. On the other hand, over the past two years, U.S. cruisers have visited ports in Ukraine and Georgia. Among them included the cruisers Vella Gulf, Philippine Sea and Monterrey, each equipped with Aegis ballistic-missile defense systems.

But the Black Sea is a great setting for this drama to play out. Historically, it's in Russia's backyard, so to speak. But the U.S. isn't about to send an aircraft carrier into the sea to help out Georgia in the event of another war. During the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia, the Pentagon planned to send two hospital ships into the sea, but were blocked by Turkey. (Istanbul doesn't allow more than 45,000 tons of warships into the Black Sea for countries not bordering it.) But a relative decline in Russia's influence is enough to put on a big show.

'That leaves honor ' or, more accurately, national redemption ' as the main propellant for endeavors like this exercise. It's all about demonstrating that Russia remains a sea power to be reckoned with,' says Jim Holmes, an associate professor of strategy at the Naval War College.

Later this month, we'll have to chance to see to what extent. It'll also be interesting to see if Putin has any surprises in store.

Iran Unveils Copycat Arsenal

Iran's newest gunship helicopter, unveiled Wednesday, might look awfully familiar to aviation historians. And it's not unique in that regard. Almost all of Iran's 'new' weaponry ' including jet fighters, 'copters, warships, tanks, missiles and other equipment ' is a copy of a much older American, British, Russian, Chinese or North Korean design.

But that doesn't mean all of Tehran's weapons suck. Far from it. While some of the sillier Iranian gear is obviously meant mostly for fleeting propaganda purposes, the main hardware is grounded in experience and hardship. Driven by desperation and shaped by the isolation that comes with widening external sanctions, Tehran's copycat arsenal could contain a few nasty surprises for the U.S. and its allies in the unlikely event that tensions over Iran's nuclear program come to blows.

For one, low-tech weapons force the users to fight creatively. 'There's a chance they'll catch us by surprise,' Air Force Lt. Col. Dan Ward, an engineer and acquisitions expert and prolific writer (.pdf), tells Danger Room in an e-mail.

Equally importantly, Iran's tendency to produce slightly evolved versions of classic weapons means it doesn't spend billions of dollars developing, say, a brand-new warplane and all its associated technologies from scratch. 'One of the benefits of this 'frugal innovation' approach is that it allows a greater quantity of aircraft to be purchased (as opposed to the infamously small fleet of F-22s, for example),' Ward explains.

The Iranian air force maintains around 500 manned warplanes, making it one of the biggest in the region. But it's not just planes benefiting from Tehran's secondhand weapons-development strategy. The Toufan 2 attack helicopter, which first appeared in public during a military exercise this week, is an upgraded version of the American AH-1, a Vietnam War-era copter that Iran originally purchased from U.S. manufacturer Bell back in the 1970s, before the Islamic Revolution transformed Tehran from America's close ally to one of its most bitter enemies.

Aviation blogger David Cenciotti notes what appear to be the Toufan 2's improvements over the original American-made 'copter. 'The main difference from the version already in service is the electro-optical surveillance and tracking system that is believed to use FLIR (Forward-Looking Infrared) technology, visible electro-optical imagery, as well as laser designation and illumination to provide target identification, ranging and tracking capability.'

That approach ' adding new electronics to an old, sometimes copied, vehicle ' is characteristic of Iran's arms industry. Among other hardware, Iranian technicians have also reverse-engineered and enhanced: the American F-5 jet fighter; American, British and Russian tanks; British patrol vessels; and Chinese and North Korean ballistic missiles.

The Iranian version of the F-5, known locally as the Saeqeh, made the news a few years ago when state media claimed the obviously non-stealthy jet could evade enemy radar. The government-controlled press has made equally risible boasts regarding the Iranian navy's new Jamaran 'destroyer,' which is in fact a copy of a copy of a decades-old British light frigate, albeit with relatively modern weapons based on U.S. designs. Tehran's Zulfiqar tanks and Dehlaviyeh missiles are likewise knock-offs.

Iran also copies American Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ' or so Tehran claims. Iran's homemade drones (there are lots of them) could combine broad design elements taken from U.S. UAVs that have crashed, with surprising frequency, in or near Iranian territory in recent years. Fitted with electronics built at home or sourced from Iran's few remaining allies, new hybrid drones might look like knock-offs but boast unique abilities. Unexpected sensor combinations, for instance.

Iranian lawmaker Avaz Heidarpour said last month that his country had figured out how to build its own versions of a U.S. stealth spy drone that crashed on the Iran-Afghanistan border in December 2011. There are good reasons to doubt that, even with the RQ-170 Sentinel's wreckage to study, Tehran's engineers possess the technical know-how to perfectly duplicate the radar-absorbing materials that are one key to American stealth warplanes.

But considering Iran's decades of experience tearing down, copying, manufacturing and upgrading old designs of foreign origin, it's not inconceivable that a rough approximation of the Sentinel ' emphasis on 'rough' ' could soon appear in the skies over Iran and its neighbors. If history is any guide, the Iranian done-clone could add customized systems to an airframe modeled on the lines of the crashed RQ-170.

Meanwhile, Iran is also enhancing old U.S.-built F-4D Phantom fighters. Originally acquired from the American plane-maker McDonnell Douglas in the early 1970s, the twin-engine jets quickly fell behind the latest F-15s, F-16s and other U.S. warplanes that entered service in subsequent decades. Blocked from buying new jets, Iran has begun upgrading around 10 of its remaining F-4Ds plus dozens of newer F-4Es with new radars, radios, cockpit displays and missiles sourced from China.

The F-4s aren't terribly maneuverable and they're anything but stealthy, but with new sensors and weapons they could still put up a fight. Germany, Turkey and Japan certainly think so: they, too, still use F-4s fitted with new gear. And Iran's lack of cutting-edge equipment means its pilots must adapt, improvise and emphasize skill and tactics over technology.

'It's been said the greatest swordsman in the world has nothing to fear from the second greatest swordsman,' Ward notes. 'He should be worried about some idiot who's never picked up a sword before and acts in a completely unpredictable manner. Iranians flying refurbished and upgraded F-4s will, out of necessity, fly them differently than a pilot in a more advanced fighter.'

'We'll learn and adapt, of course,' Ward adds, 'but that first hit could hurt more than we think.'

CIA Official Who Destroyed Torture Tapes Squirms at Zero Dark Thirty Abuse

Jose Rodriguez thinks the new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden is 'well worth seeing.' But the retired CIA veteran has reservations about its gut-churning portrayal of the CIA's treatment of detainees. Which is rich, coming from the man who destroyed the video footage documenting many of those brutal agency interrogations.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post on Friday, the former chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and its clandestine service takes issue with Zero Dark Thirty's torture scenes. Those scenes are admittedly hard to watch. They show terrified, disoriented and bloodied detainees kept awake for days on end by having their arms painfully suspended from the ceilings of secret jails; stuffed into tiny wooden boxes when they don't cooperate with their inquisitors; and waterboarded on soiled mattresses while interrogators bark questions. They also largely match up with the minimal public disclosure of how the post-9/11 program actually operated.

But they offend Rodriguez, who describes himself as 'intimately involved in setting up and administering' a program he has steadfastly denied amounted to torture. Most CIA detainees weren't subject to what he euphemistically calls 'enhanced interrogation.' Those who were experienced 'harsh measures for only a few days or weeks at the start of their detention.' And director Kathryn Bigelow left out all the bureaucratic red tape CIA interrogators encountered: 'To give a detainee a single open-fingered slap across the face, CIA officers had to receive written authorization from Washington.'

Except there's a problem with Rodriguez's account that he sidesteps in calling the film inaccurate. While at the CIA, Rodriguez himself destroyed nearly 100 video recordings of brutal interrogations, including those of two al-Qaida figures who most definitely were subjected to 'harsh measures,' Abu Zubaydah and 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. If Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal are in the dark about torture ' like the rest of the country ' Rodriguez is a big part of the reason why.

It took a Justice Department inquiry to reveal even the outlines of the destruction of the torture tapes. In 2009, the government disclosed that Rodriguez in 2005 ordered the destruction of 92 videotapes of interrogation footage totaling hundreds of hours' worth of footage. As the New York Times noted, Rodriguez's order came at a time when 'Congress and the courts were intensifying their scrutiny of the agency's detention and interrogation program.' The destruction was a deliberative process: Rodriguez wrote in his memoir last year that he used a shredded packing 'five spinning and two stationary blades' capable of chewing through 'hundreds of pounds of material in a single hour.'

Rodriguez claims he ordered the destruction on his own after his bosses vacillated on whether the tapes ought to be destroyed. His stated rationale for liquidating evidence that was relevant to a potential criminal investigation was to protect his interrogators. It had the effect of destroying a major aspect of the historical record. When Rodriguez swears in his op-ed that the torture program worked as he says it did, he left observers with few independent ways to check his claims.

Ultimately, a Justice Department special prosecutor opted to abandon criminal cases against CIA interrogators who had received authorization from senior government officials for the interrogation program. Rodriguez himself never faced criminal charges for the destruction of the tapes.

Despite the destruction, Rodriguez's insider account isn't the only one that has survived. Phil Zelikow, a former aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, told Danger Room last year that the CIA's brutal interrogations amounted to 'war crimes,' an assessment he conveyed during an internal 2006 debate about the CIA program. One of the CIA interrogators involved in the program's early days has lamented that he 'destroyed a man's life' through the abusive techniques.

There are other reasons to doubt aspects of Rodriguez's accounts. He writes that 'When the detainee became compliant, the techniques stopped ' forever.' But three powerful senators who helped helm a four-year classified study of the CIA program, Dianne Feinstein, John McCain and Carl Levin, wrote to the CIA on December 19 that 'The CIA detainee who provided the most accurate information about the courier [to Osama bin Laden] provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques.'

Feinstein, McCain and Levin have now turned their focus to the CIA's cooperation with a movie that they believe conveys the mistaken impression that torture led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Rodriguez makes no secret of what he thinks about Congress prying into the CIA's dark corners. He singles out a scene in Zero Dark Thirty when an agency employee threatens to alert a congressional committee about her boss's seeming failures. 'Now that,' Rodriguez writes, 'would be torture.'

Navy Preps to Build a Robot Ship That Blows Up Mines

The Navy's next wave of robots will take on one of the most dangerous missions on the open water: destroying mines.

Anti-mine warfare is a critical mission for the Navy, as nations like Iran can mess with the global economy just by threatening to plant mines in crucial commercial waterways. But the tools that the Navy has to disable mines have a crucial weakness: they depend on humans getting too close to them for comfort. When it comes to blowing up, or 'sweeping' mines, explains Navy Capt. Duane Ashton, 'There's a saying: 'Hunt if you can, sweep if you must.''

Ashton, the Navy's program manager for its seafaring robots, has a different idea: Let the robots do the dirty work. By April, he tells Danger Room, he hopes to solicit defense contractors to build something called the Unmanned Influence Sweep System, or UISS, a robotic ship charged with speeding out into suspected minefields and essentially fooling them into detonating them before they come in contact with a ship full of sailors. If the UISS works as intended, it'll be part of a fleet of near-future Navy robot ships and subs designed to neutralize some of the most immediate threats on the high seas.

The idea is to launch the UISS from a Littoral Combat Ship, the new close-to-shore fighter that the Navy wants to be the mine-stopper of the future, among its other missions. Currently, minesweeping is a task for manned ships and helicopters like the Avenger-class mine countermeasures ship and the MH-53 helo. 'This would be the first unmanned sweep system [for a] surface capability,' Ashton says, something 'a lot of countries are looking at' but none have yet succeeded in developing. It works by playing a kind of practical joke on a minefield.

Underwater mines don't necessarily need to detonate on contact with a ship. Many explode when they sense the acoustic sounds that ships give off when passing through a waterway, or by detecting the magnetic signatures of the metals used to construct ships. So the UISS spoofs those acoustic and magnetic signals, getting the mines to 'wake up,' in Ashton's phrase ' that is, detonate ' well out of range of a Littoral Combat Ship or other Navy ship charged with keeping waterways mine-free. In 2011, testing in the Florida waters with a 40-foot, remote-controlled UISS prototype proved that the robot's joke could get the mines to explode far from any sailor. Last week, in a much-anticipated step ahead of the UISS solicitation, the Navy asked defense companies for their feedback on constructing the robot minesweeper.

There's long been concern about the ability of the new Littoral Combat Ship, whose missions include stopping mines, to accurately spot mines. Last year, the Pentagon's top weapons tester judged that the sensor and laser systems designed for the Littoral Combat Ship were 'deficient' for their major mine-spotting task. And there's little margin for error: Mines are likely to blow the Littoral Combat Ship to bits if the UISS can't stop them.

But since the Littoral Combat Ship is designed to be modular ' that is, to swap out its sensor packages when better ones come on-line ' the Navy's response is to let the robots take care of hunting and sweeping mines. In April, it unveiled the Knifefish, an experimental, oblong underwater robot launched from a Littoral Combat Ship designed to hunt mines.

But the Knifefish can only find the mines. It can't destroy them. That's where the Navy wants the UISS to come in. In principle, a controller aboard a Littoral Combat Ship will program the UISS out to steam out to a set of coordinates, possibly provided by the Knifefish, and from there it'll emit its spoof signals prompting the mines to detonate, and then swim back on its own to its mothership, which can rest easier knowing it won't be steaming into a minefield. Ultimately, the Navy wants 52 of the robots, including training modules, so that every Littoral Combat Ship tasked with stopping mines carries a UISS.

The UISS and the Knifefish are part of a relatively new trend in naval robotics: unmanned ships and subs that can perform some of the Navy's most pressing and most dangerous missions. There's also the ACTUV, a project from the Pentagon futurists at Darpa, in which a semi-autonomous ship detects and hunts enemy submarines ' another high-stakes mission that counters one of the Navy's most immediate threats. Previous Navy robotics projects have either taken to the skies, like with carrier-based drones or cargo helicopters, or focused on more peripheral jobs like putting out shipboard fires or even exploring space. There have been some sound technological reasons for this, like the tough propulsion and fueling challenges implicit in long-range robotic travel. But these newer programs point to increased Navy trust in robots to meet some of its most central maritime challenges.

The specifics of the UISS are still undecided. That'll be a job for Ashton and the Navy to work out with an industry excited for the robo-sweeper contract. (The AAI Corporation, for instance, hopes its Common Unmanned Surface Vessel will become the basis for the UISS.) The current plan is to get the UISS out into the fleet by 2017. If Ashton can pull that off, adversaries might have cause to flip the Navy's adage: Mine if you must.

Obama's New Year's Resolution: More Drone Strikes

It's barely three days into 2013, and the Obama administration's lethal campaign of drone strikes has resumed in earnest. Missiles fired by remotely piloted planes struck targets in Pakistan and Yemen three times in the past several hours, killing several people, including two prominent militant commanders.

In Pakistan's South Waziristan province, at least 4 MQ-1 Predators or MQ-9 Reapers operated by the CIA killed a Pakistani Taliban commander, Maulvi Nazir, according to media reports that cite unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials. Nazir had struck a detente with the Pakistani government but, according to drone watcher Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal, maintained ties to al-Qaida and attacked U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The drones fired on Nazir's vehicle, killing him and at least five others.

A separate drone strike on a different vehicle in North Waziristan shortly thereafter brought the death toll to 15, CNN reports. The New York Times reports that the identities of those killed in the second attack 'were not immediately known.' Thousands of miles away and several hours later, a drone strike in Yemen killed Moqbel Ebad Al Zawbah, a 'leading al-Qaida figure,' and two of his allies, al-Jazeera English tweeted.

Welcome to 2013, yet another year of the drone. Senior Obama officials recently signposted the indefinite character of the drone campaign: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta heralded further strikes 'in areas beyond the reach of effective security and governance,' as he put it in a November speech, even beyond Pakistan and Yemen, probably into destabilized African countries. Those strikes kill an untold number of civilians.

And just as the U.S. drone campaign persists, so does the veil of secrecy surrounding it. As my colleague David Kravets reports, a federal judge has denied an effort by the New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union to disclose the secret memoranda that the administration uses as the legal rationale for the drone strikes. Although Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. Southern District Court of New York declared that the government possessed wide legal latitude to keep the memos secret, her Wednesday ruling also expressed discomfort with the legality of some of the strikes, especially the September 2011 Yemen attack that killed al-Qaida propagandist and U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki.

McMahon considered Awlaki's affiliation with al-Qaida to be treasonous on its face. Nevertheless, she wrote, 'the Founders contemplated that traitors would be dealt with by the courts of law, not by unilateral action of the Executive.'

A bipartisan majority in Congress has shown little desire to exercise public oversight of the drone campaign, much less rein it in. Secrecy-watcher Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists notes that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, one of two congressional panels that oversees the CIA, held only one unclassified hearing in 2012. In response, Danger Room pal Marcy Wheeler argues that a helpful start to 2013 would involve holding a hearing on the civilian toll inflicted by the drone program ' a topic of much speculation, debate and controversy but also practically no official disclosure or reckoning.

'[C]ontinuing to rest the drone program's legitimacy on repeated public calls to 'trust me' actually undermines its legitimacy,' Wheeler writes. It remains to be seen if that or other aspects of the global, lethal drone effort will concern the Obama administration, Congress or the courts in 2013.

Divers Could Become Real-Life Aquamen if This Pentagon Project Works

Even casual divers know that diving too deep, or surfacing too quickly, can cause a host of complications from sickness to seizures and even sudden death. Now the Pentagon's scientists want to build gear that can turn commandos into Aquaman, allowing them to plunge into the deeps without having to worry as much about getting ill. (Orange and green tights sold separately.)

According to a list of research proposals from the U.S. military's blue-sky researchers at Darpa, the agency is seeking 'integrated microsystems' to detect and control 'warfighter physiology for military diver operations.' Essentially it comes down to hooking divers up to sensors that can read both their bio-physical signs and the presence of gases like nitric oxide, which help prevent decompression sickness, commonly known as 'the bends.' If those levels dip too low, the Darpa devices will send small amounts of the gases into divers' lungs to help keep them swimming.

The agency doesn't specify what exactly the machine will look like, as it's still in the research stage, but the plan is to make it portable enough for a diver to carry, of course. Darpa also wants the gear for bomb-disposal units and 'expanded special operations.'

For an understandable reason. Decompression sickness can be extremely painful, and potentially lethal to divers in both the civilian world and the military. When underwater, a diver breathing compressed air out of a tank normally absorbs the air into fatty body tissues instead of breathing it all out, which is normally safe. But ascending to the surface too fast after a deep dive can cause those gases to form into bubbles inside the body ' imagine yourself as the equivalent of a soda bottle, shaken really fast. That causes the body's nervous system to go haywire and the joints to freeze up as if they were paralyzed. And that's in addition to oxygen toxicity, nitrogen narcosis and a nasty problem called high-pressure nervous syndrome. None of these things are very pleasant, let alone for those who make a career deactivating underwater mines.

To avoid these problems, Navy divers are trained in 'breathing static gas mixtures at prescribed pressures and durations,' according to the Darpa solicitation, as well as training in practical measures to avoid them, like divers would normally do. But to go further, Darpa's plan is to use sensors to read 'pressure-related physiologic conditions' and provide 'constant physiological feedback.'

Then, the system will administer small amounts of nitric oxide into the diver's lungs, which may reduce the bubbles that cause the bends. To clear up any confusion, nitric oxide ' which helps our cells communicate with each other ' is a different chemical than nitrous oxide, which is popularly known as a dental anesthetic. Darpa has also experimented with nitric oxide to see if it can prevent hypoxia in aircraft pilots.

Darpa also wants the gear to include a tiny gas chromatograph, which is used to analyze the gases, and another tool called CMUTs, or 'capacitive micro-machined ultrasonic transducer arrays.' Basically, handheld ultrasound probes used by doctors to monitor body organs. But Darpa hopes the CMUTs can detect when bubbles form inside the body.

Finally, the agency wants the system to be built tough, and protect a diver during an 'extreme combat dive profile.' This means the gear will have to work with a diver while jumping out of an airplane at six miles up, free-falling to the ocean before deploying a parachute, and diving down to 200 feet below the surface. Once the diver is underwater, they'll need to be able to stay down for at least two hours, then surface, and dive again, although at a higher depth and for shorter periods of time. Not only that, but the system will have to protect the diver after he or she is picked up in an 'unpressurized aircraft' like a helicopter. The reason that's important? Taking to the air after diving can lead to decompression sickness even if you were safe coming out of the water, since the diver's body is now reacting to an environment with plunging air pressure.

But there are also some civilian applications, and Darpa wants the gear to work with 'exploration and extraction of undersea oil, gas, and minerals.' So super-powered oil divers searching for resources ' in addition to bomb-disposal experts and special operations troops? Alright then. But it's not certain whether the Aquaman would approve, being an environmentalist and all.

Data Dive Reveals 15,000 New Victims of Syria War

The world already believed Syria's civil war to be monstrous, with nearly 45,000 slain. But when the United Nations plunged into the disparate databases cataloguing the victims, it discovered there had been an awful oversight. The true death toll was more like 60,000 people, the data-mining operation revealed. And even that elevated total is likely to be low.

The brutal truth is that no one really knows how many Syrians have died in dictator Bashar Assad's brutal crackdown: warzone death estimates are notoriously imprecise. By its own admission, the death toll compiled by the human rights tech group Benetech, on behalf of the U.N., is inaccurate. But its assessment has the virtue of specificity, a factor that preempts some of the doubts raised about mortality estimates in other warzones. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, called the study 'a work in progress, not a final product.'

Benetech's report (.PDF), released on Wednesday, dives into databases of the dead compiled by six Syrian organizations ' several of them tied to the rebellion, such as the Syrian Revolution General Council ' and one by the Assad government. The firm sifted through over 147,000 records to identify and exclude duplicated mortality accounts. Only the 'unique' accounts of 'identifiable victims' fall into Benetech's count. If the records don't show someone's name, date and location of death, Benetech doesn't count it.

That data sift leads to a more precise picture of the Syrian civil war than the rougher estimates previously on offer. Between March 2011 and November 2012, Benetch tallied 59,648 'unique killings.' Over 76 percent of them are male, 7.5 percent are female, and records 16.4 percent of them 'do not indicate the sex of the victim,' Benetech reports. The highest concentration of the dead are found in Homs, rural Damascus, Idlib, Aleppo and Daraa. Benetech is more cautious about estimating patterns of ages for the dead, a stat that casualty-counters often use to make inferences about combatant casualties (on the presumption that 'military-age males' in their 20s through early 40s are likely to fight), since it finds a 'high proportion of missing age data' across the seven datasets. Other U.N. stats also show the war has produced over 478,000 refugees.

Benetech's study suffers from selection bias, as its researchers concede up front. The patterns it finds cannot account for 'unobserved and unidentifiable' killings. If the seven databases do not document a death, or do not document it with sufficient specificity ' say, a name is only partially recorded, or a location of the death is absent ' then Benetech discounts it from the study. Nor does Benetech have a means of fact-checking what's in each dataset, as brutal wars do not lend themselves to such analytic rigor, so an element of faith is unavoidable here. Duplicated information is useful for establishing patterns in the killings, but shouldn't be confused with a verification mechanism for the dead. Accordingly, 'the statistics presented in this report should be considered minimum bounds,' Benetech specifies.

Still, Benetech's emphasis on precision isn't always on display in warzone death counts. Controversially, the British medical journal Lancet sought to calculate the human cost of the Iraq war using a metric called 'excess mortality,' (.pdf) which sought to count dead people who wouldn't otherwise have died in peacetime, whether from American bullets or more inferential measures like poor wartime sanitation. The accordingly high death estimate ' as high as 200,000 dead by 2004 alone ' became a political lightning rod. It's arguable that analytic fears of wading into the debate about how best to measure the death toll has inhibited knowing precisely how many people the Iraq war killed.

Other warzone death estimates are also highly disputable. The U.S. does not disclose how many people have died in the drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, prompting observers to guesstimate off of media reports. Various death tallies have come in for criticism for over- or under-modeling the human impact of the wars: some stand accused of undercounting civilians, relying on inaccurate early reports, undue credulity about sourcing and so forth.

Benetech provides almost a clinical agnosticism about its death sourcing. It does not shy away from using the accounts of interested parties ' both the Syrian government and its adversaries ' and explicitly says in the case of Assad's count that it has no reason to disbelieve those figures. (Though it specifies,' we see that the government data source shares very few records in common with the other data sources.') It's single-mindedly interested in death claims that have high degrees of specificity attached to them, a metric that perhaps unexpectedly led Benetech and the U.N. to offer an higher estimate of the Syrian bloodshed than the one typically bandied about in the press.

But the tech firm hints that a 'subsequent report' will wade into precisely the controversies that have marked other warzone death estimates. 'Benetech will address the question of undocumented killings directly through statistical modeling,' it pledges. Get ready for a fight over the validity of that grim model.