Darpa Wants You to Transcribe, and Instantly Recall, All of Your Conversations

The Pentagon's blue-sky researchers are funding a project that uses crowdsourcing to improve how machines analyze our speech. Even more radical: Darpa wants to make systems so accurate, you'll be able to easily record, transcribe and recall all the conversations you ever have.

Analyzing speech and improving speech-to-text machines has been a hobby horse for Darpa in recent years. But this takes it a step further, in exploring the ways crowdsourcing can make it possible for our speech to be recorded and stored forever. But it's not just about better recordings of what you say. It'll lead to more recorded conversations, quickly transcribed and then stored in perpetuity ' like a Twitter feed or e-mail archive for everyday speech. Imagine living in a world where every errant utterance you make is preserved forever.

University of Texas computer scientist Matt Lease has studied crowdsourcing for years, including for an earlier Darpa project called Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text, or EARS, which sought to boost the accuracy of automated transcription machines. His work has also attracted enough attention for Darpa to award him a $300,000 award over two years to study the new project, called 'Blending Crowdsourcing with Automation for Fast, Cheap, and Accurate Analysis of Spontaneous Speech.' The project envisions a world that is both radically transparent and a little freaky.

The idea is that business meetings or even conversations with your friends and family could be stored in archives and easily searched. The stored recordings could be held in servers, owned either by individuals or their employers. Lease is still playing with the idea ' one with huge implications for how we interact.

'In their call, what [Darpa] really talked about were different areas of science where they would like to see advancements in certain problems that they see,' Lease told Danger Room at his Austin office. 'So I responded talking about what I saw as this very big both need and opportunity to really make conversational speech more accessible, more part of our permanent record instead of being so ephemeral, and really trying to imagine what this world would look like if we really could capture all these conversations and make use of them effectively going forward.'

How? The answer, Lease says, is in widespread use of recording technologies like smartphones, cameras and audio recorders ' a kind of 'democratizing force of everyday people recording and sharing their daily lives and experiences through their conversations.' But the trick to making the concept functional and searchable, says Lease, is blending automated voice analysis machines with large numbers of human analysts through crowdsourcing. That could be through involving people 'strategically,' to clean up transcripts where machines made a mistake. Darpa's older EARS project relied entirely on automation, which has its drawbacks.

'Like other AI, it can only go so far, which is based on what the state-of-the-art methodology can do,' Lease says. 'So what was exciting to me is thinking about going back to some of that work and now taking advantage of crowdsourcing and applying that into the mix.'

Crowdsourcing is all about harnessing distributed networks of people ' crowds ' to do tasks better and more efficiently than individuals or machines. Recently, that's meant harnessing large numbers of people to build digital maps, raising funds for a film project at Kickstarter, or doing odd-jobs at Amazon Mechanical Turk ' one system being studied as part of the project. Darpa has also taken an interest in crowdsourcing as a way to analyze vast volumes of intelligence data, and Darpa's sibling in the intelligence community, Iarpa, has researched crowdsourcing as a way to find the best intelligence predictions.

But a few problems have to be overcome before crowdsourcing can be used to analyze speech. According to Lease, both crowdsourcing and automated systems for analyzing and transcribing speech are ' by themselves ' pretty weak. Audio transcripts written by humans are very accurate, but they take time to produce, and the labor is too expensive when applied on a large enough scale.

Meanwhile, automated systems are not very accurate, and require humans to copy-edit the result: adding missing punctuation marks, capitalization, and correcting for verbal disfluencies ' those little noises we make when filling gaps in our speech, like 'um' or 'ah.' We don't always finish our words when we talk. (But our brains are really good at not noticing it.) We change phrases mid-thought, or mistakenly begin a sentence by saying one word, only to quickly correct ourselves by switching to another word. Background noise ' which has plagued voice recognition machines ' can also interfere with the quality. All in all, this kind of conversational, casual speech plays havoc with our automated machines, the result being a sort of unintelligible word salad.

'There's a linguistic sense in that conversational speech is quite different than text,' Lease says. 'So we really need to think about how we make this form of our language, which is so natural to us in speech, something that is accessible to us when it's written down, in a way that it may not naturally be.'

It also raises some thorny legal and social questions about privacy. For one, there is an issue with 'respecting the privacy rights of multiple people involved,' Lease says. One solution, for a business conference that's storing and transcribing everything said by the participants, could be a mutual agreement between all parties. He adds that technical issues when it comes to archiving recorded speech are still open questions, but people could potentially hold their cell phone conversations on remote servers; or on individual, privately-held servers.

The other problem is figuring how out how to search massive amounts of transcribed speech, like how search engines such as Google use complex algorithms to match and optimize search queries with results that are likely to be relevant. Fast and cheap web analytics ' judging what people type and matching it up to what they click ' is one way to do it. Studying focus groups are more precise, but expensive. A third way, Lease suggests, is using more crowdsourcing as a sort of a 'middle-ground' between the two methods.

But it's unknown how the research will be applied to the military. Lease wouldn't speculate, and it's still very much a basic research project. Though if it's similar to EARS at all, then it may not be too difficult to figure out. A 2003 memorandum from the Congressional Research Service described EARS as focusing on speech picked up from broadcasts and telephone conversations, 'as well as extract clues about the identity of speakers' for 'the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities.' Though Lease didn't mention automatically recognizing voices. But the research may not have to go that far ' if we're going to be recording ourselves.

Now Al-Qaida Wants to Torch Your Car and Snarl Your Commute

Once they turned hijacked airplanes into missiles. Now al-Qaida is encouraging jihadist wannabes to set your car on fire and blow out your tires on the highway.

That's the advice from the DIY jihad section in the latest issue of al-Qaida's English-language web magazine, Inspire. The new 'Open Source Jihad' (.pdf) is all about vehicular vandalism.

One suggestion, penned by 'Ibnul Irhab' in the new issue of Inspire, is to run up on parked cars with gas cans and a matchstick. 'How safe will the West feel when parking their cars, knowing they're up for a TORCHING,' Irhab writes. His helpful tips: avoid CCTV cameras; hide the gas in an apple juice bottle; and, importantly, 'don't get petrol on yourself.' This is what Open Source Jihad bills as 'America's worst nightmare.'

Nor is it safe to drive to the store or the office. Inspire encourages the inspired to smear 'lubricative oil' on roadways right before sharp blind turns to cause a traffic accident. ('Demolition Derby Style,' it promises.) If that doesn't sound terrorist-y enough, another tip is to hammer nails into a pegboard painted black so oncoming cars blow out their tires. There's even a chart explaining the physics behind car crashes for Inspire's slower readers.

Once again, Open Source Jihad is lowering its standards. Earlier issues of Inspire's 'Jihad Kitchen' gave Anarchist Cookbook-style tips about cooking up explosives and instructions on blowing up apartment buildings. Its last foray into vehicular assaults involved tricking out the grille of an F-150 with knives to create an 'ultimate mowing machine.' (Even Osama bin Laden rolled his eyes at that one.) The apparent calculation behind the half-assed car torchings and unsafe driving conditions is that they need to lower the barriers to entry for jihad, since pretty much no American Muslims bother with it.

On the other hand, road accidents kill way more Americans than al-Qaida ever has, so its junior-varsity squad might as well try to take credit for them.

Watch This Robotic Dog Throw Cinder Blocks With Its Head

Updated, 5:23 p.m.

Flesh-and-blood dogs merely fetch. The robotic pooch that Darpa funded can throw.

Boston Dynamics' BigDog started life as a headless four-legged robot capable of hauling soldiers' gear along rough and uneven terrain. The BigDog's upgrades and follow-on robots are expanding the boundaries of robotic motion, initially with cash from Darpa's Tactical Technology Office. Its quadruped packmate the Cheetah can outrun Usain Bolt. Its cousin the Legged Squad Support System can follow voice commands. Its big brother the AlphaDog can stand up from a prone position.

But the BigDog has some new tricks: like, um, throwing a cinderblock, as shown in the video above that Boston Dynamics released Thursday. And the robot also a head. Kind of.

Whereas once the BigDog disturbingly lacked anything topping off its torso, Boston Dynamics has attached a fifth appendage where a humanoid robot's head should be. It's not really a head: It's an arm-like limb, almost as long as the robotic legs on the 'Dog, and terminating in a gripping mechanism. But that grip serves as an ersatz jaw, and a strong one: This upgraded BigDog can pick up a hunk of concrete and toss it like a shotput. Darpa, it should be noted, is done funding the BigDog, so it didn't add the arm/head/limb/whatever to the machine.

This is a new frontier for the BigDog. Pack mules don't need to toss anything. Giving the BigDog a gripping tool will surely allow it to carry more stuff. Throwing what it carries is a less obvious functionality, but one wonders when Boston Dynamics will apply the BigDog's voice-activation commands to its new robotic hurler.

Update, 5:23 p.m.: I've changed the headline, since Darpa didn't provide the add-on for the BigDog to throw anything. Still, the BigDog exists because of Darpa's initial funding.

Watch the New and Improved Printable Gun Spew Hundreds of Bullets

Late last year, a group of 3-D printing gunsmiths developed a key component for an AR-15 rifle that anyone with a 3-D printer could download and make at home. The problem: It only lasted six shots before snapping apart. Now the group is back with a new and improved receiver that can fire more than 600 rounds.

Defense Distributed demonstrated the receiver ' the base of a gun that includes the trigger mechanism ' in a video posted this week to the group's blog. Its arrival comes the week Congress returned from vacation to debate a series of potential gun regulations. In the video, dozens of bullets contained in a high-capacity drum magazine are seen being fired by the printed receiver. (The magazine was shoved into the printable receiver, itself attached to traditional rifle parts.) It's also the first printable receiver to fire .223 caliber high-pressure rifle rounds without breaking. An earlier version fired low-pressure .22 caliber cartridges.

It's important to note that fully 3-D printed guns don't exist yet. So far, activist groups like Defense Distributed and individual hobbyists have produced only partially printed weapons ' usually, printed magazines.

That's still a big deal, though. With no lower receiver, printable or not, there's no gun. For legal and regulatory purposes, the lower receiver is the piece of the firearm that's considered the gun ' not the barrel, magazine, buttstock or other component. A world where the blueprints for a gun's most critical component can be freely shared online, downloaded, and then printed out, raises thorny questions about the feasibility of regulating them. Last week, one 3-D printing pioneer told Danger Room it'd be more feasible to regulate the gunpowder.

The printable components are also getting more advanced. Printable magazines have been produced that don't fail after releasing hundreds of rounds. Late last year, Defense Distributed tested a 3-D printed lower receiver for an AR-15, but it snapped apart after firing only six shots. Pushing up that failure point became the difference between having a 3-D printed gun that works and a gun that doesn't ' not to mention one that's safe to use.

The group had to take out as many angles and points of stress inside the new receiver as possible, thicken several areas to withstand pressure from vibrations, and 'let the piece act more as a spring,' developer Cody Wilson e-mails Danger Room. Angles below the buffer tower ' which helps absorb recoil ' were also curved and strengthened. The group still had to bolster the piece with some metal parts, though. A one-eighth inch compression bushing is embedded in the back.

The group also produced two receivers with two different printers. One was produced by a stereolithography (SLA) printer, which uses beams of high-powered light to cut light-sensitive liquids ' called SLA resin ' into a pre-determined shape. The other receiver was produced by a fused deposition modeling (FDM) printer, which uses heat to harden thermoplastic that's squirted out in very thin layers. The latter also 'approximates the result you'd get with an ultimaker or other DIY FDM printer. So both [are] cheap and accessible,' Wilson e-mails.

'The changes had been in note form for a while. It's just that we were directing the lion's share of our efforts on magazines for a month,' he adds. In the meantime, the group plans to get back to testing 3-D printed magazines. This weekend, the group plans to reveal a printable AK-47 magazine, which will be a first. Congress, get ready to freak out.

Bradley Manning Takes "Full Responsibility" for Giving WikiLeaks Huge Government Data Trove

Updated 4:08 p.m.

FORT MEADE, Md. ' Wearing his Army dress uniform, a composed, intense and articulate Pfc. Bradley Manning took 'full responsibility' Thursday for providing the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks with a trove of classified and sensitive military, diplomatic and intelligence cables, videos and documents.

In the lengthiest statement to a military tribunal Manning has provided since his nearly three-year long ordeal began, Manning, 25, said WikiLeaks did not encourage him to provide the organization with any information. But he also sketched out his emotionally fraught online interactions with his WikiLeaks handler, a man he knew as 'Ox' or 'Nathaniel' over Internet Relay Chat and Jabber, and whom the government maintains was Julian Assange.

Manning's motivations in leaking, he said, was to 'spark a domestic debate of the role of the military and foreign policy in general,' he said, and 'cause society to reevaluate the need and even desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore their effect on people who live in that environment every day.' Manning said he was in sound mind when he leaked, and did so deliberately, regardless of the legal circumstances.

Remarkably, Manning said he first tried to take his information to the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico, before contacting WikiLeaks.

The statement came as Manning pleaded guilty on Thursday to ten of 22 charges the Army has levied against him. Manning admitted to improperly storing classified information; having unauthorized possession of such information; willfully communicating it to an unauthorized person; and other 'lesser-included' offenses. Each of the ten offenses to which Manning pleaded guilty carries a sentence of up to two years' imprisonment, for a total of 20 years in prison.

But Manning pleaded not-guilty to 12 more charges, including the most serious: aiding the enemy, which carries a sentence of life imprisonment. He also denied disseminating any information that he believed could harm U.S. national security, a key aspect of prosecution's espionage case.

That means the guilty pleas will not necessarily end Manning's legal woes. The government has the option of pressing forward with the remaining charges, as well as to contest aspects of the lesser charges Manning pleaded guilty to committing. If they proceed, Manning's trial is expected to formally start here in June.

Manning spoke for over an hour as he read from a 35-page document detailing and explaining his actions that drove him to disclose what he said he 'believed, and still believe' are some of the most significant documents of our time.' He rarely grew emotional, with the exception of describing his alienation from his fellow soldiers in Iraq and his relationship with Julian Assange.

Manning described accessing, investigating and ultimately spiriting away and leaking military and diplomatic documents as consistent with his training as an intelligence analyst, attempting to put together a factual picture of complex events. He came to view much of what the Army told him ' and the public ' to be false, such as the suggestion the military had destroyed a graphic video of an aerial assault in Iraq that killed civilians, or that WikiLeaks was a nefarious entity.

The leaking came gradually, Manning explained ' providing a window into the military's poor data hygiene. While serving at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq in 2009, Manning accessed, compressed and copied databases containing voluminous accounts of military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, known as CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A.

'I never hid the fact that I downloaded copies of CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A' and burned them onto CDs, Manning said, even labeling and storing them 'in the open' in his unit's tactical operations center. Nor did he hide that he also downloaded compression software to facilitate the transfer, Manning said.

That practice apparently made it less conspicuous for Manning to take the burned discs into his military housing, insert them into his personal laptop and send them securely to WikiLeaks' password-protected online dropbox, often using Tor and other anonymity protocols to mask his identity. Manning stated that he used the same process to spirit away information on detainees at Guantanamo Bay; unspecified documents from an 'intelligence agency'; and the State Department's 'Net-Centric Diplomacy' database of diplomatic cables to which the military had access.

Often, Manning would download classified or sensitive information while he simultaneously compiled his intelligence analyses for his unit.

In each of these cases, Manning denied that he was compromising national security. The military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan were often 'historic,' with its intelligence value perishable after '48 to 72 hours.' The Guantanamo Bay documents had 'no useful intelligence' and did not disclose any results of detainee interrogations. The State Department cables were available to 'thousands' of people throughout the government. A Washington Post reporter, David Finkel, had already written about a deadly Apache helicopter attack in 2007, in which civilians were killed, that Manning viewed on video.

Manning said he often found himself frustrated by attempts to get his chain of command to investigate apparent abuses detailed in the documents Manning accessed. 'As an analyst, I always want to figure out the truth,' he said. He considered the military unresponsive to the helicopter attack video and other 'war porn.' At Guantanamo, while Manning said he had sympathy for the government's interest in detaining terrorists, 'we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely.'

But Manning conceded that he did not 'even look at the proper channels' on how the military chain of command could release the sensitive information.

While in Iraq, Manning ' alienated from his fellow soldiers ' began visiting WikiLeaks IRC channels and conversing about topics ranging from Linux to gay rights. The chats 'allowed me to feel connected to others, even when I was alone,' soothing the emotional stresses of deployment.

But when Manning took a brief mid-tour leave from Iraq in January 2010, he was grappling with disclosing his information trove ' but not necessarily to WikiLeaks. While staying with his aunt in Potomac, Md., Manning said he tried to talk to an unnamed Washington Post reporter to interest her in the Iraq and Afghanistan documents, but 'I did not believe she took me seriously.' He left voicemails with the public editor and the news-tips lines for the New York Times and heard nothing. A blizzard, he said, kept him from driving to Politico's office to discuss the documents. According to Manning's account, only after his attempts to give the documents to mainstream media organizations fail did he consider giving them to WikiLeaks.

The leaking began in February 2010, shortly before Manning returned to Iraq. Via Tor at his aunt's house, he uploaded to WikiLeaks a document he composed for the Post about events in Iraq he said he hoped would lift 'the fog of war.' Although WikiLeaks didn't immediately publish it, Manning said he felt 'a sense of accomplishment' by the time he went back to Iraq.

Only after Manning gave WikiLeaks the video of the Apache assault in Baghdad shortly thereafter did he start to hear back from someone in the IRC using the handle 'Ox.' He believed that Ox was 'likely Julian Assange' or Assange's then-second-in-command, 'Daniel Schmitt' ' the German activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Shortly thereafter, Manning encouraged Ox to use a different handle to contact him, 'Nathaniel,' after the author Nathaniel Frank.

Manning said his ensuing discussions with 'Nathaniel,' often about the classified material, became friendly, enjoyable and long. 'I could just be myself, free of any concerns about social labeling in real life,' Manning said, his voice catching at times.

'In retrospect, I realize these dynamics were artificial,' Manning continued. 'They were valued more to me than Nathaniel.'

The online interactions seemed to make Manning's relationship with WikiLeaks at once intimate, and remote. For all his long discussions with 'Nathaniel,' Manning on Thursday mispronounced Julian Assange's name as As-SAN-gee.

But Manning said that no one at WikiLeaks ever encouraged him to leak ' which may be significant, if the U.S. government is, as rumored, considering charging Assange in connection to the leaks.

'No one associated with the WLO [WikiLeaks Organization] pressured me to give them more information,' Manning said. 'The decision to give documents to WikiLeaks [was] mine alone.'

He said he took 'full responsibility' for a decision that will likely land him in prison for the next 20 years ' and possibly the rest of his life.

Stealth Jets Return To The Air Following Engine Snafu ' For Now

The Pentagon's fleet of next-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighters has been cleared to resume flying, six days after the discovery of a half-inch crack in an engine blade led to the grounding all 50 or so training and test jets.

Engine-maker Pratt and Whitney said it is confident it has isolated the source of the crack in the F135 engine and can fix it. But the stealthy F-35's propulsion problems are anything but fixed. Finicky motors are an inevitable side effect of the plane's design.

Pratt and Whitney put the best possible spin on the turbine blade's potentially catastrophic flaw, which if undetected could have caused a crash. 'Prolonged exposure to high levels of heat and other operational stressors on this specific engine were determined to be the cause of the crack,' the company announced late Thursday. 'No additional cracks or signs of similar engine stress were found during inspections of the remaining F135 inventory. No engine redesign is required as a result of this event.'

But the F-35, meant to replace almost all of the military's existing jet fighters, could very well experience similar problems throughout its planned 50-year service life. Originally meant to be long, narrow and highly aerodynamic like most other fighters, the JSF was redesigned to be wider and more squat to accommodate the internal weapons bays that are key for radar-evading planes. 'What is different is that this airplane has accelerational characteristics with a combat load that no other airplane has, because we carry a combat load internally,' Lockheed exec Tom Burbage told aviation reporter Dave Majumdar last year.

But the redesign has an adverse effect on the plane's aerodynamics, making the F135 work harder than is normal for a fighter engine. Generating more than 40,000 pounds of thrust, the F135 is the most powerful fighter motor ever. Even though the Pentagon has downgraded the F-35's acceleration specs to ease the strain on the engine, the F135 runs extra hot ' a problem that has concerned Lockheed and Pratt and Whitney engineers for at least seven years and likely contributed to turbine problems in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Through an initiative called Advent, The Air Force and several aerospace companies are investigating a host of new engine technologies that could someday be installed in the F-35, potentially alleviating some of the engine problems.

According to the Air Force, Advent's advancements include 'turbine section for increased thrust, third stream cooled cooling air for engine hot section thermal management system, and lightweight high temperature materials.' General Electric, Pratt and Whitney's main rival, completed some major testing of Advent tech late last month. Trials of a complete Advent engine is slated for 2017. The Pentagon has said the new motor must be scaled to fit the F-35.

But Larry Burns, government program manager for Advent, said it's unlikely the full Advent motor will be installed on the F-35. Owing to the high cost, such retrofit are 'few and far between,' Burns told reporter Steve Trimble.

So the Pentagon's mainstay future fighter is probably stuck with its existing engine, as well as with that motor's high temperatures and fragile turbines. And that means groundings like last week's could be a distressingly common occurrence.

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.