Armchair Generals Wanted: Army Outsources Criticism of New Defense Strategy

Ever felt like you could fix U.S. national security strategy, if only the military would listen to you? The Army is ready to listen. Especially if your arguments mean a bigger role for the Army.

This is a tough time for the Army. Its reward for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for 12 years is to have its soldiers downsized and its budget slashed. Worse, from the ground forces' perspective, its future relevance is in question: The defense strategy that the Obama administration unveiled in 2012 is big on robots, commandos, and air and sea power in places like Asia. Ponderous ground warfare is out.

What's a ground warfare organization to do? If you're the Army, commission a study on why the strategy is a looming disaster.

Last week, the Army put out feelers to small businesses for a review of the strategy's weak points. The idea is to identify, over the next 10 months, 'strategic shock' ' that is, 'the likelihood of failure and/or prohibitive cost in securing one or more of [the Defense Department's] new strategic objectives.'

The strategy has a direct relationship on the size and shape of the force that the Defense Department seeks. And an assessment of the strategy failing in certain ways could help the Army argue for its enduring primacy in an era of lean budgets and unclear conflicts. That isn't a case that even the Army's best friends currently find compelling.

'With the Iraq War over, the Afghan War ending, and a limited number of obvious conventional combined arms opponents on the horizon,' the Army announcement reads, 'the department has begun the process of consciously assuming increased risk in large-scale ground operations, especially those operations that might entail widespread hybrid combat action and extended opposed stabilization.' Such increased risk 'will certainly manifest downstream with respect to ground force performance against 'future challenges.''

So the Army wants to get detailed. 'The objective is for the contractor to extrapolate a set of specific at-risk interests from the enduring national interests outlined in the President's National Security Strategy and identify the likeliest and most dangerous ground-centric threats to those at-risk interests,' according to the announcement. This being the Army, the announcement recommends war-gaming out the prospects for failure.

The Army's certainly seizing an opportunity. Numerous defense officials have said over the past several months that the automatic budget cuts now in effect, known as sequestration, jeopardize the Pentagon's ability to implement the new defense strategy. On Friday, new Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that he still believes the strategy is 'the correct policy,' and he intends to continue implementing it.

That's the Army's fear. And maybe it can change Hagel's mind if it can itemize for him exactly how much 'strategic shock' to 'large-scale ground operations' it represents.

Pentagon's Mad Scientists Want to Launch Killer Drones From Small Warships

The military's next killer drone could be launched and landed aboard small surface warships, extending the reach of America's robotic arsenal to more remote battlegrounds than ever before.

That is, if an ambitious new effort by Darpa, the Pentagon's fringe-science wing, can overcome a technical challenge dating back to the 1980s. Namely: how to boost a drone to flight velocity without the benefit of a five-acre aircraft carrier deck, and without resorting to a speed- and range-limiting helicopter design.

The new Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node program, or Tern, 'envisions using smaller ships as mobile launch and recovery sites for medium-altitude long-endurance fixed-wing unmanned aircraft,' Darpa announced on Friday. That's for unarmed spy drones as well as those armed for 'strike' missions. The blue-sky researchers want to launch a prototype within 40 months.

Tern complements one of the Navy's main robotic development efforts. The Navy wants a drone, equipped with missiles and advanced spy gear, to take off and land from a full-sized aircraft carrier, one of the hardest maneuvers in aviation. It's currently experimenting with a 62.1-foot span, batwing-shaped prototype, called the X-47B, which the Navy expects to launch the X-47B off a carrier deck at sea for the first time by May.

Except the jet-powered X-47B and the Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike System it will yield will be much farther out to sea than the Tern. 'About 98 percent of the world's land area lies within 900 nautical miles of ocean coastlines,' Darpa program manager Daniel Patt explained in the announcement. 'Enabling small ships to launch and retrieve long-endurance UAVs on demand would greatly expand our situational awareness and our ability to quickly and flexibly engage in hotspots over land or water.'

Some of the specs Darpa wants: The as-yet-undesigned Tern drone must carry up to 600 pounds of sensors and weapons while flying out 600 to 900 miles from the launching ship. That places Tern in the same class as the Air Force's iconic Predator and Reaper, both capable of flying 12 hours or longer while hauling cameras, missiles and satellite communications gear.

The launching ship could be as small as the USS Independence type of Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) , which sports a 7,300-square-foot flight deck. The science agency's concept art, shown above, depicts a somewhat Predator-esque drone flying over a Burke-class destroyer, the Navy's workhorse warship, which is three times heavier than an LCS but has a slightly smaller flight deck.

Tern would fill a big gap in the Navy's drone arsenal. The sailing branch currently flies the 10-foot-span ScanEagle drone from destroyers and other vessels, and the Fire Scout robot helicopter from LCS. In addition to developing the X-47B prototype and its descendants for aircraft carriers, it's also got a land-based, unarmed patrol 'bot, the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance drone, based on the Air Force's 737-size Global Hawk.

The latter have long range and high speed, but they're tethered to the Navy's 11 precious aircraft carriers and equally scarce land bases. The former can (in theory), take off from most of the Navy's roughly 122 surface warships but lack range, speed and payload. What's missing is a middleweight drone: a fast-flying, long-range, armed robot that takes up minimal deck space and is compatible with a wide range of surface ships.

One of Tern's major technical obstacles is 'devising a reliable launch and recovery technique,' according to Darpa. LCSs and destroyers don't have the deck space for a long takeoff run ' hence their reliance on the catapult-launched ScanEagle and vertical-liftoff robo-copters. In the 1980s and early '90s, the Navy's four World War II-vintage battleships carried the Pioneer drone, which was roughly twice the size of the ScanEagle and was boosted into the air with inelegant strap-on rockets.

The Pioneer landed aboard ship by awkwardly flying into a suspended net, whereas the ScanEagle catches a dangling wire and the Fire Scout, of course, lands vertically. A higher-performance, fixed-wing drone could require a smoother and more powerful takeoff boost than the older models and a less unwieldy means of returning to its launching vessel.

It's worth noting that in the 1990s, U.S. helicopter-maker Bell designed a small tiltrotor drone call the Eagle Eye, which, like the company's V-22 Osprey, took off and landed like a helicopter but cruised like an airplane thanks to its rotating engine nacelles. Eagle Eye never found a buyer and went defunct. The Tern initiative could very well lead to a revival.

If Tern succeeds, Darpa is poised to significantly expand the Navy's flying robotic arsenal, potentially transforming almost every warship into a mobile drone base. All the agency has to do is solve a decades-old launch and landing problem.

Russia Fears Its Troops Will Riot if Cigarette Rations End

Russia's new defense minister wants to extinguish one of the Russian military's most endemic health problems and martial perks: giving free cigarettes to troops. His challenge is to prevent nicotine-deprived soldiers from violently freaking out.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has reportedly drawn up a rule to end the longstanding practice of providing enlisted troops and cadets with 10 cigarettes a day. According to the Russian newspaper Izvestia, the reason is pretty straightforward: Russian soldiers choke down cigarettes, and the subsidy is encouraging the next generation of uniformed addicts.

'New non-smoking conscripts who find themselves among the smokers generally begin to smoke too,' Alexander Kanshin, national security chairman of the Kremlin's Civic Chamber, told the newspaper. 'This is not good for anyone.'

But troops may not be able to handle losing their free smokes. 'Tobacco shortages will affect the psychology of the smokers,' Valentina Melnikova, executive secretary of the Union of Soldiers' Mothers' Committee, a human rights organization focused on the military, told Izvestia. 'Platoon or company commanders will start collecting money from the ranks, including non-smokers. This will result in speculation, extortion, bullying and even violence.' (In case you were wondering, the Defense Department included free cigarettes in some K-rations until 1975.)

The reason, Melnikova implies, is that troops won't necessarily quit smoking, and won't have enough money to pay for cigarettes over the counter, leading to a black market within the military. It wasn't until January that service members saw a raise from 500 to 1,000 rubles, or $16.50 to $32 per month. Before the raise, many soldiers spent much of their take-home pay on cigarettes, according to RIA Novosti, even with the government ration. (Smoking's expensive.) Izvestia also suggests that troops would need their salaries to quadruple to support their habit.

Russia has one of the highest smoking rates in the world: About 40 percent of the population smokes, compared to 19 percent of U.S. adults. It's a particular problem with males, who represent 60 percent of Russian nicotine addicts. Smoking has been an acute problem in the post-Soviet era. Foreign tobacco companies flooded the country with cheap cigarettes in the 1990s, which were blamed for contributing to a surge in mortality rates that had economists panicking.

Ending the Russian military cigarette subsidy hasn't been easy: A brief 2009 effort was actually reversed. At the time, the chief of the Russian army's catering corps said the backtrack owed to the hundreds of millions of cigarettes sitting in warehouses, which allowed the army to continue to meet demand for the next several years. Clearly, the military didn't want to go cold turkey.

So does this mean a more bellicose Russian military? Just don't aggravate Russia until its troops kick the habit.

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.