How Victoria's Secret Saved the National Guard During Hurricane Sandy

On Monday night, Hurricane Sandy hit the armory of the New York Army National Guard's 69th Infantry Regiment, leaving the soldiers without power, hot water, or anything but the most rudimentary means of communicating with the outside world. So the next morning, the Regiment's officers made an emergency plea ' to the producers of the Victoria's Secret fashion show.

As they had done for the last three years running, the lingerie company was holding its annual television event at the Regiment's historic armory, located at 25th street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. For the show, the producers had hauled in eight massive 500 kilowatt generators. Of course, the producers said, we'd be happy to help. Hours later, the lights flashed back on.

'We were dead in the water until Victoria's Secret showed up,' says Capt. Brendan Gendron, the Regiment's operations officer.

It's one of many unexpected turns the New York Army National Guard has been forced to take as it copes with the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. On Tuesday afternoon, the Guard was about to ship 450 soldiers to Missouri for a mock disaster drill. Now, not only are those troops staying in-state, but the New York Guard is getting ready to accept nearly 1,000 additional soldiers from the Ohio, Massachusetts, and other states.

And there's a new worry looming. About 350 soldiers from all around New York State have joined the 69th, and are currently sleeping in the Lexington Avenue armory. But by early next week, a good chunk of those troops have to find a new place to rest. (Depending on who you talk to, that may or may not have something to do with the impending show Victoria's Secret is about to put on.) In either case, the officers haven't yet found a decent replacement.

The initial call to the Victoria's Secret crew came at about 7:20 on Tuesday morning. Consulting producer Dave Shapiro and his co-workers were staying a block away at the Hotel Giraffe. They came over, and ran some feeder lines from the Aggreko generators through a transformer and into the building. Some basic lights in the hallways and the basement's hot water heater were back up and running. It was enough to get started.

Then one of the associate producers suggested they might be able to power the whole armory up. They went into the basement and found the main switch connecting the century-old landmark to the lines of Con Edison, the local utility. The idea was to shut down the connection between Con Ed, then attach the Victoria Secret lines during to the armory's busbar ' the long metal strips that conduct electricity to a switchboard. It was a kludge, and it had to be done right: the producers didn't want to fry the building when the local Con Ed substation finally started generating electricity again. 'I have to admit, I was very skeptical,' Shapiro says.

But it worked. By 7 p.m on Tuesday night, the armory was fully powered; even the elevators worked.

The soldiers were still having communications problems, though. Many of the local cell towers were down, and so was the armory's internet's connection. Luckily, Shapiro had answer for that, too. For the show, he had leased a T1 line connected to a microwave dish on the roof. 'We plopped two routers in their command center,' he says, 'and now they're sitting on our internet backbone.'

The troops also needed help distributing food. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had begun bringing tractor-trailers' worth of emergency provisions to the armory. It was up to the troops to break up the pallets, load them in military trucks, and bring them to the seven distribution centers in Manhattan where the Salvation Army would hand out meals to Hurricane victims. One problem: the 69th didn't have a fork lift. So again, they turned to the Victoria's Secret crew.

Meanwhile, the New York Army National Guardsmen have been plenty busy helping others. They assisted in the evacuation of Bellevue Hospital, bringing patients during 13 flights of stairs in the dark. Now, only a single patient remains ' someone who required heart surgery, and was too frail to be moved. So two shifts of 30 troops are hauling diesel fuel up to the 13th floor, where the hospital's generator is located, in order to keep the power running while this one patient recovers from the surgery.

Across Manhattan, soldiers are lugging 120-pound packs of batteries up to rooftops so that cell towers can be temporarily switched on. At Floyd Bennett Field, there's an even bigger food distribution hub. On Thursday night, Marines from the Brooklyn-based 6th Communications Battalion saved 14 people when a transformer blew in Rockaway Beach. The Army Corps of Engineers is busy draining the water from New York's tunnels. In Brighton Beach, troops evacuated a 350-person nursing home. Nearly 350 soldiers riding 150 armored Humvees are keeping order in Staten Island.

It's a big enough effort that nearly 1,000 troops from other states' National Guards ' two military police companies, two medium truck companies and a forward support company ' are rushing in to assist. 300 more Marines and sailors aboard three large-deck amphibious assault ships are now in the waters off of New York and New Jersey. Hopefully, they'll be able to pick up where the lingerie company left off.

U.S. Commandos Were Too Late to Stop Libya Attack (But Might Avenge It)

A day after the CIA released a new timeline of its reaction to the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the Pentagon added some detail to its recap of events as well, confirming that it had two elite military units that mobilized just slightly too late to help repel last month's attack. But those units also had the capability to deal with the aftermath of the attack ' and the Pentagon isn't saying what happened to them once they arrived at a Sicilian airbase a few hundred miles from Libya, leaving the possibility they might play a role in hunting the perpetrators of the attack.

Much remains unclear about the Libya assault. But now different parts of the bureaucracy have taken to explaining they were thisclose to helping stop it. State Department officials last month testified to monitoring it almost in real time, but U.S. officials have said State's hired guard force lacked the capacity to repel the attack. (They may have a point.) The CIA portrayed itself as responding to the attack from multiple fronts as it was happening, successfully extracting U.S. personnel from the site ' except for the four Americans who died. (Additionally, top intelligence officials have blamed themselves for the White House's initial, incorrect explanation that the attack emerged from a protest over an anti-Islamic video.) On Friday, Pentagon spokesman George Little weighed in, explaining a little more than previously about how the Pentagon rushed special operations units into position near Libya, except that the assault subsided before they could reach the country.

Within 'hours' of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta learning of the attack, he ordered two distinct military units to Sigonella, an airbase on the Italian island of Sicily, a few hundred miles from Benghazi. One was a 'Special Operations unit in central Europe,' Little said on Friday; the other, 'another contingent of U.S. troops' stationed in the United States. Both units are distinct from the Marine Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Team (FAST) ultimately sent to Tripoli the following day to secure the embassy there in the wake of the attack.

The units 'were not in place until after the attacks were over,' Little said. But the Pentagon didn't know how long the emergency would last, and the units it ordered to Sigonella could prepare for 'a range of contingencies' in the aftermath of the assault.

'We were ready for the need to augment security measures at our facilities in Libya, if called upon. We were prepared for the possibility, for instance, of a hostage situation as well,' Little said. 'These were all the things we were looking at in the midst of an event that we did not know was going to happen in Benghazi that night.' That decisiveness is different, at least in tone, from Panetta's remarks at a press conference last week that he lacked 'some real-time information about what's taking place' that inhibited commanders from ordering troops into Benghazi.

Little wouldn't describe the two units with any specificity. It's already been reported that one special operations unit was at Sigonella. The second unit is less familiar, but Little appeared to confirm an element of a Fox News report last week that mentioned a second elite special-operations unit was at the airbase, including Delta Force personnel ' which would make sense, given the potential for a hostage-rescue mission, a Delta specialty.

It's less clear what actually happened to those units after they reached Sigonella and the attack of the consulate had ended. In the days after the attack, U.S. officials spoke openly about hunting the attackers, a line reiterated by President Obama in a debate with challenger Mitt Romney. But the Pentagon has spoken less about that hunt as time has passed, and the official line has centered more on Libyan government forces leading the search for those responsible for Benghazi.

Anonymous administration officials have begun casting blame for the disaster. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly accepted responsibility last month for the lack of security at the consulate. Behind the scenes to the press, anonymous officials, seemingly sympathetic to the State Department, portrayed CIA Director David Petraeus as an impediment to securing a consulate that was apparently little more than a diplomatic fig leaf covering a CIA operation. Panetta has not faced the same level of criticism, but now that the knives are out for Petraeus, it's an open question who will play the scapegoat next.

The Pentagon is not saying what happened to the military units it sent to Sigonella, despite repeated inquiries by Danger Room on Friday. It's unclear, for instance, if those units ever deployed to Libya at a later date. Nor has the Pentagon's provided a timeline of its decisionmaking on Benghazi that possesses the specificity of the one provided by the CIA on Thursday.

'They were at Sigonella many, many hours after the attacks had ended,' is all Little said. 'Orders were issued within a few hours of us learned about the events in Benghazi that evening. We did not know when the attacks would end.'

Should the attackers resurface, however, it's possible that we may hear more about the units that made it to Sigonella. At least one of them has openly mocked the U.S. hunt for the assailants while meeting with a New York Times reporter. Another suspect in the assault, Ali Ani al-Harzi, is in Tunisian custody, and two U.S. senators, Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia) announced on Friday that the Tunisians will make al-Harzi available to the FBI. Maybe those elite units sent to Sigonella will make an appearance in Libya, if they didn't actually make it to Benghazi in September.

Here's How Army Engineers Are 'Unwatering' NYC's Tunnels

The scale is staggering: Superstorm Sandy flooded New York City's network of underground and vehicular tunnels with up to 400 million gallons of water. On Thursday, the U.S. military began to bring some of its heavy equipment into place ' from generators to powerful water pumps to trucks flown from across the country. But, as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers emphasized to Danger Room, they're just getting started with the cleanup.

The work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Manhattan starts at the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the major underwater thoroughfare for cars passing between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Corps crews assembled at South Ferry, near the Manhattan entrance to the tunnel, have begun receiving power generators and other preliminary equipment by barge from the Navy, ahead of the high-head submersible pumps or centrifugal pumps necessary to start drainage. Task number one is to clear out the underpass to the tunnel, a task that the Corps' Jim Pogue estimates will take about 24 hours, coming from two different sites. The expected extraction: 10 million gallons.

The crews have limited access to the submerged tunnels: There's 'only one way in and one way out,' Pogue tells Danger Room. Worse, it's a moving target. As the water recedes, 'you're chasing it down the tunnel so the pumps have to be continuously repositioned.'

Not that the pumps are fully in position yet. The Corps is 'looking at bringing in' two types of pumps, a 'high-head submersible' and a centrifugal one, Pogue says. The high-head pump goes below the surface, extracting water down from the top, while the pump itself may be submerged as far down as 100 feet. The centrifugal pump is more familiar, using a hose 'similar to a straw,' as Pogue put it, to suck the water out. The plan is to pump the water back out to sea.

But it's not clear when the pumps will arrive, or how long it'll take the corps to clear out the entire tunnel before moving onto New York's other vehicular tunnels, like the Holland and Lincoln that connect Manhattan to New Jersey. The Corps has already shipped 12 eight-inch pumps and 13 six-inch pumps out to the city ' from, of all places, New Orleans. And a Corps team is working with the Navy to get the pumps in place; a Navy spokesman, Lt. Matt Allen, referred comment to the Corps. Pogue added that the Coast Guard is sending 16 pumps to the Tunnel site, from New Jersey, Alabama and California. The Pentagon said late Thursday that it's in the process of moving 120 'high-flow water pumps' to New York and New Jersey.

And not only will the pumps have to be repositioned as the water in the tunnels recede, the Corps crews will have to go slowly as they pump the water out. 'These large tunnels take large capacities of water,' says Curry Graham, a Corps official in Washington D.C. 'We can't de-water quickly because that could cause damage to the structure.' (Graham says the Corps hasn't received a request from either the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the City of New York to help bail out the city's warren of subway tunnels.)

It's an 'un-watering' process the Corps has had to work on three times since Hurricane Katrina, to the point where the Corps personnel at work on the tunnel underpass come from a special Task Force Unwatering the Corps has based in Illinois. However, the Corps notes, the Task Force 'does not have large pumping or construction equipment or operating
manpower on staff or on contract standby; all such assets must be procured under emergency contracting provisions and personnel deployments.'

Thousands of Army and Air National Guard troops are already involved in the relief effort, commanded by the governors of their respective states. But the U.S. military is bringing help as well. On Thursday afternoon, five C-5 and 12 C-17 cargo planes are expected to arrive at Stewart Air National Guard base in Newburg, New York, the result of a request from FEMA for military airlift. (See video, above.)

The planes will carry unusual passengers: not military personnel, but a crew of about 12 people and 69 trucks ' flatbed diggers, cherry-pickers, mobile command centers and more ' from the Southern California Edison electric utility. The utility will assist in a 'power restoration mission,' said George Little, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, who did not specify where the mission will focus.

Additionally, the Navy is moving three ships to the mid-Atlantic: the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp, the amphibious transport dock San Antonio and the dock landing ship Carter Hall. None of the ships has a designated mission as yet, and Little called their deployment 'a precautionary measure.' The Wasp is scheduled to reach New York on Thursday, with the other two ships arriving Friday; a Pentagon spokesman, Air Force Lt. Col. Tom Crosson, says they'll float in the waters off New York until the Navy tells them to return to their Norfolk, Va. home port.

The military is only one aspect of the Sandy relief effort. On a Thursday conference call with reporters, the administrator of FEMA, Craig Fugate, said that his agency was shifting away from search and rescue missions and toward power restoration and water clearance missions. Fugate said he did not anticipate using trailers for interim housing assistance, as was the case with Hurricane Katrina. A Red Cross senior vice president on the call, Charley Shimanski, said that his top priority was providing food and shelter over the next two days.

It is unclear what military aid is en route to storm-ravaged New Jersey. The Pentagon said that 2000 New Jersey National Guardsmen were available for Gov. Chris Christie's efforts. Efforts to learn about airlift, cargo or additional help from the state's sprawling Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst were unsuccessful on Thursday.

For the Army Corps of Engineers, its priority along the East Coast is and other major transportation systems cleared to operate. The task is huge: the Corps has some 35 'large scale infrastructure projects' in New York alone, Graham says, atop some 26 official assignments from FEMA more broadly. It's got 200 generators ready to provide emergency power at four locations in New York to take some of the strain off the beleaguered Con Edison utility. And the project to clear out the Battery Tunnel underpass is a 'smaller and simpler project,' Graham says, 'while we do the engineering work on the bigger tunnels.'

'Unsatisfactory' Mega-Contractor Re-Ups on Another Big Military Deal

Just days after an inspector general report revealed that a giant Pentagon contractor performed 'unsatisfactory' work in Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force awarded the firm another multimillion-dollar pot of cash.

Virginia's DynCorp, which performs everything from private security to construction for the U.S. military, has re-upped with Air Force to help pilots learn basic flying skills on the T-6A/B Texan II aircraft, a training plane. The deal is only the latest between DynCorp and the Air Force on the Texan II: In June, the Air Force Materiel Command gave the company a deal worth nearly $55 million for training services. The latest one, announced late Thursday, is worth another $72.8 million, and lasts through October 2013.

But the Air Force's lucrative vote of confidence in DynCorp comes not even a week after the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction blasted the company for performing 'unsatisfactory' construction work at an Afghan Army base in Kunduz. The base was 'at risk of structural failure' when the watchdogs initially inspected, but the Army Corps of Engineers chose to settle DynCorp's contract, a move that awarded the company '$70.8 million on the construction contracts and releas[ed] it from any further liabilities and warranty obligation.' (.pdf)

A DynCorp spokeswoman, Ashley Burke, told Bloomberg News that the company disputed the special inspector general's findings. For its part, the special inspector general took to tweeting photographs of what it called 'DynCorp's failed work at #Afghan #Army Base in #Kunduz.'

But the base-construction contract is far from DynCorp's only deal with the U.S. government that's raised eyebrows. In December 2010, it won a fierce competition with the company formerly known as Blackwater to retain a contract for training the Afghan National Police worth up to $1.04 billion. That award came after years of criticism of the Afghan police's competence and integrity ' and after DynCorp guards assigned to protect President Hamid Karzai were fired for drinking and whoring; and also after late payments from DynCorp landed a 75-year old American subcontractor in an Afghan jail. If that wasn't enough, just this week, the inspector general called the sustainability of the Afghan soldiers and police into question, although it didn't single out DynCorp as a reason.

Nor are DynCorp's contracting woes limited to Afghanistan. The Project on Government Oversight, a private, nonpartisan watchdog, lists the company as number 23 on its Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, for infractions ranging from making false claims on an Iraqi police training contract to involvement in human trafficking in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

DynCorp is hardly the first firm to keep winning large government and military deals despite a spotty performance or integrity record. But it might be the first to re-up mere days after an instance of apparent misconduct comes to light.

Newest Benghazi Scapegoat: CIA's David Petraeus

There's an unexpected casualty of the September assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya: the reputation of David Petraeus, the celebrated Army general turned CIA director. For among the first times in his career, a bureaucratic effort to throw Petraeus under the bus is showing through in the press.

Last week, a Fox News story portrayed the CIA as doing practically nothing while the consulate burned. The CIA pushed back against that on Thursday, telling reporters that two different CIA teams, one on hand at the Benghazi compound and the other rushing in from Tripoli, played an active role in repelling the hours-long assault that ultimately left four Americans dead. But not everyone is happy about the CIA's performance ' including that of its director.

The Wall Street Journal cites several anonymous officials who go after Petraeus hard. The CIA, operating out of an 'annex' near the 13-acre consular compound, dwarfed the regular diplomatic presence in Benghazi, with the mission of hunting down ex-dictator Moammar Gadhafi's unsecured rockets and missiles. That apparently led to an expectation at the State Department that the CIA would secure the compound in the event of a disaster, which never congealed into a formal arrangement. The next month, after a contentious congressional hearing, the Journal reports that officials 'were surprised' Petraeus attended a screening of the film Argo, a celebration of a CIA success.

The complaints compile: unlike predecessor Leon Panetta after the 2009 attack on a secret base in Afghanistan, Petraeus kept the CIA's Benghazi role in the shadows. The Journal's sources portray Petraeus as shielding the agency from embarrassment; keeping the agency's role in Benghazi a secret even from top-level officials; and leaving Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to phone Petraeus directly as the attack proceeded in the hope of getting real-time intelligence.

And while the Journal piece doesn't mention it, there's a possible policy element to the discrepancy between the State Department and CIA. The CIA had 10 people to protect its annex in Benghazi, but the State Department relied on a previously obscure British firm, Blue Mountain, to guard the entire compound. Blue Mountain paid its Libyan guards $4 an hour. It's speculative, but the State Department's expectation that the CIA would be 'the cavalry' in an assault, as an anonymous official tells the Journal, might have contributed to State's relatively lax security posture at the consulate.

It's worth noting that, in the CIA's telling, the agency did come to the compound's aid. One CIA team, at the annex inside the compound, prepared an extraction mission within 25 minutes of the attack beginning, arming itself with heavy weapons and lining up a vehicular fleet to extract personnel while dodging rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and thick smoke. A second team raced to Benghazi from Tripoli, toting a suitcase full of cash to commandeer a plane ride, and arrived about three hours later owing to Libyan officials who wanted Libyan security officers on the scene. Ultimately, the extraction proceeded without U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was lost in the chaos and died, apparently at Benghazi Hospital.

Petraeus is not used to being under the bus. His record commanding the surge in Iraq has given him a tremendous reputation, within official Washington and beyond. Politicians and the press tend to downplay his missteps, such as his less-than-impressive record training Iraqi security forces and the stalemate that persists in Afghanistan despite Petraeus' year in command. Additionally, there is some concern that under Petraeus, the CIA is focused too much on counterterrorism and insufficiently on its broader intelligence mission, although the CIA denies that's the case.

It's unclear what Petraeus' future holds, either in a second Obama term or a Romney administration. Regardless, congressional investigation into Benghazi is expected to accelerate after next week's presidential election, including a closed-door hearing in two weeks by the Senate intelligence panel. Petraeus may have more tire-treadmarks on the back of his suit jacket before the Benghazi inquiries conclude.

Your Favorite Army General Actually Sucks

The U.S. Army only seems impressive. Yes, it's got plenty of tactically competent and physically heroic enlisted soldiers and low-ranking officers. But its generals are, on the whole, crappy, according to a new book that's sure to spark teeth-gnashing within the Army.

That book is The Generals, the third book about the post-9/11 military by Tom Ricks, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the Washington Post's former chief military correspondent. Scheduled to be released on Tuesday, The Generals is a surprisingly scathing historical look into the unmaking of American generalship over six decades, culminating in what Ricks perceives as catastrophic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The basic problem is that no one gets fired. Ricks points back to a system that the revered General George Marshall put into place during World War II: unsuccessful officers ' defined very, very liberally ' were rapidly sacked, especially on the front lines of Europe. Just as importantly, though, getting relieved of command didn't end a general's career. Brig. Gen. 'Hanging Sam' Williams, was removed as the assistant commander of the 90th Infantry Division in western France in 1944 for lacking 'optimism and a calming nature' in the view of his superior. Six years later, Williams commanded the 25th Infantry Division in Korea and retired as a three-star. Marshall's approach simultaneously held generals accountable for battlefield failures while avoiding a zero-defect culture that stifled experimentation.

Over the course of six decades, Ricks demonstrates at length, the Army abandoned Marshall's system. It led to a culture of generalship where generals protected the Army from humiliation ' including, in an infamous case, Maj. Gen. Samuel Koster covering up the massacre of civilians at My Lai ' more than they focused on winning wars. On the eve of Vietnam, 'becoming a general was now akin to winning a tenured professorship,' Ricks writes, 'liable to be removed not for professional failure but only for embarrassing one's institution with moral lapses.'

It's not an airtight case. Ricks is sometimes at pains to explain why good generals who probably should have been fired under Marshall weren't (George Patton) or why adaptive generals later on weren't driven out of the Army (David Petraeus). And it's overstated to blame dumb wars on dumb generals. But the fact is, the Army almost never fires generals for cause, unlike the Navy, to the point where a lieutenant colonel famously wrote in frustration during the Iraq war that a private who loses a rifle is more likely to be disciplined than a general who loses a war.

Ricks explains how it got to be that way. And it's something the Army has to reckon with as it deals with its future now that its decade of perpetual warfare is ending, and ending inconclusively. He spoke with Danger Room right before The Generals dropped its bomb on the Army.

Danger Room: So how poor are today's Army generals? What percentage of them would you say need to be fired outright? Is the public wrong for seeing the Army as an uber-competent institution, a learning organization and a meritocracy?

Tom Ricks: The U.S. Army is a great institution ' tactically. Our soldiers today are well-trained, well-motivated, cohesive, and fairly well equipped.

But training is for the known. For the unknown, education is required. You need to teach your senior leaders how to address problems full of uncertainty and ambiguity, and from them, fashion a strategy. And then be able to tell whether it is working, and to adjust if it isn't.

Our generals today are not particularly well-educated in strategy. Exhibit A is Tommy Franks, who thought it was a good idea to push Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda from Afghanistan into Pakistan, a larger country that also possesses nuclear weapons. Franks also thought that he had won when he took the enemy's capital in Afghanistan and Iraq ' when in fact that is when the wars really began.

When generals don't know what to do strategically, they tend to regress back down to what they know, which is tactical. That's one reason why in Vietnam you saw colonels and generals hovering over company commanders giving orders. It is also why our generals were so slow to adapt in Iraq. By the time they became operationally effective, it was 2007, and we had been fighting in Iraq for nearly four years, longer than we had during all of World War II.

What percentage of them need to be fired? All those who fail. That is how George Marshall ran the Army during World War II. Failures were sacked, which is why no one knows nowadays who Lloyd Fredendall was. Successful generals were promoted ' which is why why we know names of younger officers of the time such as Eisenhower, Ridgway and Gavin. This was a tough-minded, Darwinian system that reinforced success. Mediocre wasn't enough back then. It is now, apparently. Back in World War II, a certain percentage of generals were expected to be fired. It was seen as a sign that the system was working as expected.

DR: How would George Marshall's system of relieving failing generals and placing them in remedial positions work today? Wouldn't a relief inevitably be seen as an irredeemable black mark?

TR: Relief today is indeed a black mark. The system only works if relief is so frequent that it isn't seen as a career-ender. Of the 155 men who commanded Army divisions in combat during World War II, 16 were fired. Of those, five were given other divisions to command in combat later in the war. Many others who were fired got good staff jobs, or trained divisions back home.

That said, Marshall was pretty hardnosed about this. He didn't run the Army for the benefit of its officers. In a war for democracy, he wrote, the needs of the enlisted came first. He believed that the Army owed its soldiers competent leadership. That was not the case with the Army in Vietnam, where officers were rotated in quickly to get some time in combat command and then rotated out.

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The Kremlin's New Internet Surveillance Plan Goes Live Today

On the surface, it's all about protecting Russian kids from internet pedophiles. In reality, the Kremlin's new 'Single Register' of banned websites, which goes into effect today, will wind up blocking all kinds of online political speech. And, thanks to the spread of new internet-monitoring technologies, the Register could well become a tool for spying on millions of Russians.

Signed into law by Vladimir Putin on July 28, the internet-filtering measure contains a single, innocuous-sounding paragraph that allows those compiling the Register to draw on court decisions relating to the banning of websites. The problem is, the courts have ruled to block more than child pornographers' sites. The judges have also agreed to online bans on political extremists and opponents of the Putin regime.

The principle of internet censorship is not a new one to the Russian authorities. For five years, regional prosecutors have been busy implementing regional court decisions requiring providers to block access to banned sites. To date this has not been done systematically: Sites blocked in one region remained accessible in others. The Register removes this problem.

The new system is modeled on the one that is used to block extremist and terrorist bank accounts. The Roskomnadzor (the Agency for the Supervision of Information Technology, Communications and Mass Media) gathers not only court decisions to outlaw sites or pages, but also data submitted by three government agencies: the Interior Ministry, the Federal Antidrug Agency and the Federal Service for the Supervision of Consumer Rights and Public Welfare. The Agency is in charge of compiling and updating the Register, and also of instructing the host providers to remove the URLs. If no action by the provider follows, the internet service providers (ISPs) should block access to the site in 24 hours. The host providers must also ensure they are not in breach of current law by checking their content against the database of outlawed sites and URLs published in a special password-protected online version of the Register open only to webhosters and ISPs.

Most importantly, however, the new Roskomnadzor system introduces DPI (deep packet inspection) on a nationwide scale. Although DPI is not mentioned in the law, the Ministry of Communications ' along with the biggest internet corporations active in Russia ' concluded in August that the only way to implement the law was through deep packet inspection.

'At the end of August, under the chairmanship of Communications minister Nikolai Nikiforov, a working group was held, drawing representatives of Google, SUP Media (the owner of the Livejournal social network), and of all the other big hitters. They discussed how to ensure that the [filtering] mechanism ' they used the concrete example of YouTube ' how to block a specific video, without blocking YouTube as a whole. And they reached the conclusion that pleased them all,' Ilya Ponomarev, a member of the State Duma and an ardent supporter of the law, told us.

Are we are talking about DPI technology? we asked.

'Yes, precisely.'

Most digital inspection tools only look at the 'headers' on a packet of data '- where it's going, and where it came from. DPI allows network providers to peer into the digital packets composing a message or transmission over a network. 'You open the envelope, not just read the address on a letter,' said an engineer dealing with DPI. It allows ISPs not only to monitor the traffic, but to filter it, suppressing particular services or content. DPI has also elicited concern from leading privacy groups over how this highly intrusive technology will be used by governments.

'No Western democracy has yet implemented a dragnet black-box DPI surveillance system due to the crushing effect it would have on free speech and privacy,' said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International. 'DPI allows the state to peer into everyone's internet traffic and read, copy or even modify e-mails and webpages: We now know that such techniques were deployed in pre-revolutionary Tunisia. It can also compromise critical circumvention tools, tools that help citizens evade authoritarian internet controls in countries like Iran and China.'

'There are basically two functions in DPI ' filtering and SORM,' added IBM East Europe Business Development Director Boris Poddubny, referring to the Russian government surveillance system for monitoring both internet traffic and phone calls. 'There may be devices to copy traffic. DPI helps analyze it. And there will be a detailed log: what is downloaded by whom, and who looked for what on the internet.'

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