Out of the frying pan

Wow, everyone blames the President for the VA scandal.

How can we divert attention and get this off the front page?

I know! We'll trade terrorists for a POW! That will work great!

Ms. Rice. In one of the most tone-deaf statements in White House history (we’re making a lot of history here), the national-security advisor, on a Sunday talk show, described Bergdahl as having served “with honor and distinction.” Those serving in uniform and those of us who served previously were already stirred up, but that jaw-dropper drove us into jihad mode.

But pity Ms. Rice. Like the president she serves, she’s a victim of her class. Nobody in the inner circle of Team Obama has served in uniform. It shows. That bit about serving with “honor and distinction” is the sort of perfunctory catch-phrase politicians briefly don as electoral armor. (“At this point in your speech, ma’am, devote one sentence to how much you honor the troops.”)

I actually believe that Ms. Rice was kind of sincere, in her spectacularly oblivious way. In the best Manchurian Candidate manner, she said what she had been programmed to say by her political culture, then she was blindsided by the firestorm she ignited by scratching two flinty words together. At least she didn’t blame Bergdahl’s desertion on a video.

The president, too, appears stunned. He has so little understanding of (or interest in) the values and traditions of our troops that he and his advisers really believed that those in uniform would erupt into public joy at the news of Bergdahl’s release — as D.C. frat kids did when Osama bin Laden’s death was trumpeted.

Both President Obama and Ms. Rice seem to think that the crime of desertion in wartime is kind of like skipping class. They have no idea of how great a sin desertion in the face of the enemy is to those in our military. The only worse sin is to side actively with the enemy and kill your brothers in arms. This is not sleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.

But compassion, please! The president and all the president’s men and women are not alone. Our media elite — where it’s a rare bird who bothered to serve in uniform — instantly became experts on military justice. Of earnest mien and blithe assumption, one talking head after another announced that “we always try to rescue our troops, even deserters.”

Uh, no. “Save the deserter” is a recent battle cry of the politically indoctrinated brass. For much of our history, we did make some efforts to track down deserters in wartime. Then we shot or hanged them. Or, if we were in good spirits, we merely used a branding iron to burn a large D into their cheeks or foreheads. Even as we grew more enlightened, desertion brought serious time in a military prison. At hard labor.

This is a fundamental culture clash. Team Obama and its base cannot comprehend the values still cherished by those young Americans “so dumb” they joined the Army instead of going to prep school and then to Harvard. Values such as duty, honor, country, physical courage, and loyalty to your brothers and sisters in arms have no place in Obama World. (Military people don’t necessarily all like each other, but they know they can depend on each other in battle — the sacred trust Bergdahl violated.)

President Obama did this to himself (and to Bergdahl). This beautifully educated man, who never tires of letting us know how much smarter he is than the rest of us, never stopped to consider that our troops and their families might have been offended by their commander-in-chief staging a love-fest at the White House to celebrate trading five top terrorists for one deserter and featuring not the families of those soldiers (at least six of them) who died in the efforts to find and free Bergdahl, but, instead, giving a starring role on the international stage to Pa Taliban, parent of a deserter and a creature of dubious sympathies (that beard on pops ain’t a tribute to ZZ Top). How do you say “outrageous insult to our vets” in Pashto?

DoD wants to scrap the A-10 to keep the F-35

This seems like a bad idea. [Link]

Known for its survivability, the A-10 is capable of flying with half a wing, one tail fin, one elevator, and one engine torn off. It’s also cheaper to fly and can fly more frequent missions than the aircraft that the Air Force proposes to replace it with: the F-35. But because of its low glamor and low-tech nature, the A-10 is assigned largely to Air National Guard squadrons these days. So with the Department of Defense now planning to re-shuffle the roles of reserve and Guard units in a shrinking fighting force, the A-10s are an easy target for the budget knife. The Air Force announced in January that it would eliminate a third of the existing A-10s in its inventory—102 aircraft—with the remainder to go when the F-35 finally arrives for service. The new plan will retire the entire A-10 fleet.

The A-10 was originally built in the early 1970s, and it was designed to combat Soviet tank columns with its enormous seven-barrel 30-millimeter Gatling-gun cannon. Known for its pugnacious looks as the “Warthog,” the A-10 could also carry a variety of guided and unguided weapons, and it proved its usefulness against a wide range of enemies while flying close air support for troops in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Air Force reported that the 60 A-10s that flew in Iraq had an 86 percent mission success rate.

Today, there are two arguments for cutting the A-10. The first argument from the Air Force is that in an era of shrinking budgets and pared-down ambitions, the military needs a more flexible, multi-role aircraft to do more jobs—not an airplane that's perfect for a smaller number of them. But considering the troubles that the F-35 has faced and the fact that not a single squadron of any of the variants of the F-35 has yet to be fielded, the wisdom of the Pentagon’s aircraft calculus is open to debate.

The F-35 is being built in three variants—one for the Air Force, one for the Navy, and a "jump jet" version for the Marine Corps. It has had a litany of woes in testing. A high-tech helmet that replaces nearly all the aircraft's instrumentation had problems with "jitter" on its display, which forced an investment in a backup plan that was eventually discarded. More recently, discoveries of cracks in a significant number of parts in the F-35s currently being tested led to the grounding of all the aircraft. A report by J. Michael Gilmore, the DOD's director of Operational Test and Evaluation, stated that the F-35 is not ready for combat. The aircraft's “overall suitability performance continues to be immature and relies heavily on contractor support and workarounds unacceptable for combat operations,” Gilmore wrote.

The Air Force has never liked the A-10. It's not glamorous enough, but they also don't want to cede their monopoly on aircraft to the Army.

The 'Killer Robot' Olympics

DARPA Robotics Challenge. [Link]

Valkyrie and her fellow competitors—Chimp, RoboSimian, Hubo, Schaft and Thor—are at the center of a debate beset by distortions and spin on every side. Their developers want to portray them as benign; their detractors want to ban “killer robots.” But what’s certainly true is that we’re at “the beginning of a historic transformation in robotics,” as DARPA puts it. And the inescapable reality is that some machines will save lives and some will take lives, and they’ll be programmed to make the relatively simple but critical decisions on their own that determine who survives and who dies.

Many of these “robots” will take the form of airborne drones, big and small; some will be weapons systems on ships; and some, like Valkyrie and the other competitors scrambling over the obstacle course at Homestead-Miami Speedway, will be moving more or less like animals and humans.

The implications are enormous as all this comes amid widespread and growing excitement about robotics in daily life. Jeff Bezos just floated the imaginative notion that Amazon.com will be using drones to deliver packages in the not-too-distant future. The Google empire, always the spotter and setter of trends, is busy meanwhile buying up some of the best robotic labs in the business. But there’s no doubt the sinister Schwarzeneggan shadow of The Terminator haunts much of the discussion of military automatons.

A year ago, Human Rights Watch and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard published a report with the arresting title “Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots,” that I found perfectly convincing when I first read it. “Fully autonomous weapons,” it concluded, would be unable to meet international legal standards under the Geneva Conventions and, in action, they would have no compassion to temper their lethal judgments.

Pew pew pew

Army laser truck. [Link]

The HEL MD is being developed to show directed-energy force-protection capabilities against rockets, artillery and mortars, known as RAM. It is also intended to protect against unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs, and cruise missiles.

Mortars travel at low velocities for short ranges in high-arching trajectories. These weapons, as well as UAVs, are representative of the threat encountered by U.S. and allied forces on the battlefield, officials said.

Initial system effectiveness was proven through low- and medium-power test demonstration that took place in 2011. High-power testing has now concluded at the High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility on White Sands Missile Range.

The demonstration and testing confirms the capability of a mobile solid-state laser weapon system to counter mortars, UAVs, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sensors mounted on the UAVs, officials said.

The recent testing utilized a 10-kilowatt class laser. In the future, a 50-kW class laser will be integrated into the HEL MD platform, officials said. The 50-kW laser is scheduled to be upgraded to a 100-kW class laser in subsequent demonstrations, they added.

The supporting thermal and power subsystems will also be upgraded to support the increasingly powerful solid-state lasers, according to USASMDC/ARSTRAT officials. They said these upgrades will increase the effective range of the laser or decrease required lase time on target. 

That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!

The launch code for U.S. nukes was 00000000 for twenty years. [Link]

Remember all those cold war movies where nuclear missile crews are frantically dialing in the secret codes sent by the White House to launch nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles? Well, for two decades, all the Minuteman nuclear missiles in the US used the same eight-digit numeric passcode to enable their warheads: 00000000.

That fact, originally revealed in a column in 2004 by then-president of the Center for Defense Information Dr. Bruce G. Blair, a former US Air Force officer who manned Minuteman silos, was alsomentioned in a paper by Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University who teaches security architecture. Both of these sources were cited this week in an article on the site Today I Found Out written by  Karl Smallwood, as well as in an article in the UK's Daily Mail.

The codes, known as Permissive Action Links (PALs), were supposed to prevent the use of nuclear weapons—and the nuclear weapons under joint control with NATO countries in particular—without the authorization of the president of the United States. The need for such controls became clear during the 1963-1964 Cyprus crisis, when NATO members Turkey and Greece were reportedly seeking control of NATO nuclear weapons—to use on each other.

At least that's the way it was supposed to work, following an executive order from President John F. Kennedy. But at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, more than half of the missiles in Europe, including those in Turkey, lacked PAL controls. And while Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara directly oversaw the installation of PALs on the US-based ICBM arsenal, US Strategic Command generals almost immediately had the PAL codes all reset to 00000000 to ensure that the missiles were ready for use regardless of whether the president was available to give authorization.

Dr. Blair stated that that the not-so-secret code was hardly a secret from the crews manning the silos. "Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel," Blair noted.

DDG 1000 launched

A stealthy, deadly ship. Her fist commander: Captain James A. Kirk. [Link]

The U.S. Navy has unveiled its most ambitious and expensive warship to ever hit the high seas: The Zumwalt DDG 1000.

Launched into the water earlier this week by General Dynamics, a Maine-based shipbuilder, the Zumwalt—named after the former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Elmo R. “Bud” Zumwalt Jr.—is built for both land and water attacks, and is equipped with some of the world’s most advanced Naval weaponry. Its intended purpose, according to the Navy, is to “provide independent forward presence and deterrence” and to “operate as part of joint and combined expeditionary forces.” In other words: It’s a destroyer ship.

The ship’s appropriately titled “Advanced Gun System,” built by Raytheon, the global defense contractor, is designed to fire rocket-powered missiles at a distance of 63 miles, guided by a system five times more accurate than anything the Navy currently uses. The ship may be big, but it’s stealthy, too. The Zumwalt features a  “tumblehome” hull, which keeps the ship’s location relatively clear from radar screens. And the ship’s propulsion system, designed by the maritime division of Rolls-Royce, can generate 78 megawatts of electricity. That’s enough wattage to power a laser weapon on board the ship’s deck—a much-rumored new feature of the Zumwalt.

They’re just rumors, so far, because the Navy hasn’t yet finished building the ship. Though General Dynamics launched the Zumwalt into water this week, the Navy won’t actually receive it until early 2014. At that point, Navy engineers will finish building out its weaponry system and activate the ship’s combat systems. The Navy predicts the Zumwalt will be ready for battle by 2016.

And yesterday, the Navy announced the ship’s commander-to-be: Captain James A. Kirk, a navy veteran. Yes, that’s right. Captain Kirk will pilot this futuristic vessel. (Hear that? That’s the sound of Star Trek fans high-fiving around the globe.)

Old weapons with new life; tools for making new weapons in the field

First, old weapons finding new life in Syria. [Link]

Watch enough YouTube videos of the fighting in Syria, and you’ll start to notice it: a long-tubed gun, mounted on the back of either a jeep or large, fast pickup. Usually it’s blasting bunkers, blockhouses, fortified positions, or places where snipers are hiding. It even goes after tanks. And whenever it fires, the gun seems to kick up way more hell behind it than what it sends out the barrel’s front end. It’s theM40 106mm recoilless rifle, an American-made, Vietnam-vintage weapon that got dropped from the Army and Marine inventory back during the early 1970s. Until recently, the 106mm hadn’t seen much action in the irregular wars that have swept the globe. Then M40s somehow came into the hands of rebels in Libya and Syria. Suddenly, the 106mm – light, cheap, easily transportable, simple to operate, and packing a punch all out of proportion to its modest size — has emerged as a possible Great Asymmetric Weapon of the Day.

Although the U.S. military no longer officially uses the M40, they still keep some around. A few found their way to Afghanistan where they were put to use by certain Special Forces units. The Danish and Australian armies, which acquired them from the U.S. decades ago under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, used them extensively during their ground operations there.

In Libya, the M40 was used primarily in urban warfare, killing tanks and fortified positions. How exactly it found its way into the hands of the rebels there is a bit of a mystery. The M40s showed up in Libya along with thousands of brand new Belgian FN rifles, apparently from Western arsenals. That lead many to suspect they were supplied by Western intelligence. The M40s currently being seen in Syria might be coming either from the same sources that supplied the Libyan rebels or even from the Libyans themselves.

There is also a strong possibility that these weapons might actually be of Iranian origin. Iran’s state-owned weapons arsenal, the Defense Industry Organization, has been manufacturing what was originally a licensed-version of the M40. Now called the “Anti-Tank Gun 106,” it is being offered on the open market, and are probably being supplied to the Syrian Army, which have since lost them to the rebels.

While the M40 makes a big comeback in the Middle East, dozens of other armies all over the world never stopped using it. The Danish and Australian armies have used the 106mm in Afghanistan with excellent results. It turns out that in many instances they have outperformed the expensive, high tech, anti-tank rockets like the TOW,  the Javelin and others that were supposed to replace the M40 four decades ago.

Second, using aircraft carriers as 3D printing factories. [Link]

According to one Lieutenant Commander Michael Llenza, the Navy's future lies in converting aircraft carriers into “floating factories,” each carrying a fleet of 3D printers to churn out weapons, drones, and even shelters at a moment’s notice. There’s money and time to be saved in the sheer logistical rationality of the scheme. For example, when cylindrical bullets are stacked, tiny bits of wasted space are created—which add up, when you're talking about millions of the things. Rectangular packages of powder, which could be printed into bullets when needed, are a far more efficient use of space.

Right now, research on such a scheme is being done in bits and pieces. Llenza points out a handful of examples, including Contour Crafting, the building-sized 3D printing system, as well as several recent projects in which complete UAVs were produced overnight:

[…] The University of Virginia printed a UAV controlled by a relatively cheap Android phone whose camera was used to shoot aerial imagery. Designed for a top speed of 45 mph, the aircraft crashed on its first flight. The students just went back to the lab and printed out a replacement nose cone, a capability envied by any squadron maintenance officer. The eventual goal is a drone that flies right out of the printer with electronics and motive power already in place. An organic ability to print replaceable drones from ships, forward operating bases or during disaster relief operations to serve as targets or observation platforms could be a huge enabler for sailors and Marines.

Of course, there are still huge gaps to be bridged, technologically speaking, before 3D printing can be adopted as a large-scale military inventory strategy. It’s supremely expensive right now, and more importantly, the structural stability of many materials is inconsistent—so replacing critical pieces of machinery is out of the question.

Chinese Chutzpah

China wants Japan to stop scrambling fighters when they violate their airspace. [Link]

Perversely, China accused Japan today of escalating tension in the East China Sea by scrambling fighter jets every time Chinese aircraft or ships violate Japan’s territory. Japan announced yesterday that it had sent its own planes to intercept Chinese aircraft a record 306 times in the year ending March 31, double the number of times in the previous year.

“We believe the Japanese side should not be sending out more aircraft but…find a way to appropriately manage and resolve the problem through dialogue, talks and consultations,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said today. A defense paper that China released this week also accused Japan of “making trouble.”

Bayonets

Do we have more bayonets now than in 1916. Yes. [Link]

As 1916 opened, the US Army's total size was about 110,000 troops. The Marine Corps was minuscule since the Marines were still seen then as a raiding or expeditionary force rather than a major land combatant force.

In 1916, the Congress passed the National Defense Act that doubled the Army to 220,000 (rounded slightly). The USMC was marginally affected.

So a compromise was passed in May 1916, as the war raged on and Berlin was debating whether America was so weak it could be ignored. The army was to double in size to 11,300 officers and 208,000 men, with no reserves, and a National Guard that would be enlarged in five years to 440,000 men.

The US Army today has more than 560,000 troops and the USMC more than 200,000. Obama is wrong. we have hundreds of thousands more bayonets now than in 1916.

Sarcasm and condescension only work if the speaker's presumption of lofty superior knowledge is borne out by his command of actual facts. You can't successfully accuse your opponent of being an ignoramus when you don't know what you're talking about yourself.

New mini-carrier

USS America. [Link]

She’s 844 feet long, 106 feet wide and displaces 45,000 tons of water. The future USS America,christened in Mississippi on Saturday, is technically an amphibious assault ship, a type of vessel optimized for carrying Marines into battle. But subtle changes under America‘s steel skin mean she can double as a small aircraft carrier, capable of sustaining a short air war all on her own.

The changes to America and her sister ship Tripoli came at the cost of some of the usual amphibious capabilities possessed by assault ships. By investing a combined $6 billion in America and Tripoli, the Navy and Marines are betting that future warfare will involve more aerial combat and fewer potential beach assaults.

It’s not a totally reckless wager, but it does involve some risk. With the America class, the Pentagon istaking a chance on air power and, more to point, on the Marines’ version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. When America‘s sister ship Tripoli enters service in 2018, the Navy will (in essence) possess 13 carriers — these two smaller, newer models, plus 11 of the big, nuclear-powered variety. That’s up from the 11 nuke flattops in today’s fleet. Commensurately, the number of old-school assault ships will drop by two.

The sailing branch’s other assault ships — currently numbering nine — can also support dozens of helicopters plus a handful of Harrier jump jets apiece. But they lack the facilities for sustained flight ops, meaning they’re more assault ships than classic carriers. The older vessels are built around cavernous “well decks” — in essence, giant swimming pools that open to the sea through the ships’ sterns, allowing them to launch and recover landing craft, hovercraft, swimming vehicles and river boats. These small craft are the primary means of moving Marines onto shore, complemented by helicopters and V-22 tiltrotors taking off from the flight deck.

America and Tripoli don’t have well decks. In their place, the newer ships possess extra hangar space, bigger tanks for aviation fuel and larger weapons magazines. These facilities allow America and her sister to operate, for days on end, as many as 30 fixed-wing planes including today’s Harriers plus the F-35B stealth jump jet that’s still in testing. “It is, for all intents and purposes, a light aircraft carrier,” Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix wrote of America. But the new ship and her sister can still send Marines ashore in helicopters and V-22s.

That shift toward aerial capabilities was deliberate on the part of the Marine Corps, and reflects continuing doubt about the usefulness and wisdom of World War II-style beach assaults, which were among that conflict’s bloodiest operations. Two years ago, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates considered eliminating the beach-invasion mission altogether, although he ultimately settled for merely de-emphasizing it.

Adding Insult to Injury

Fighter planes above American Russian warships at Democratic National Convention were American Turkish. I know the Democrats have a reputation for being anti-military but this is just embarrassing. [Link]

The Democratic Party’s national convention in Charlotte, N.C., may have doubled down on insulting the U.S. military community.

The Democratic National Committee has already apologized for using a photo of four Soviet-era Russian warships in a giant stage backdrop intended to illustrate the party’s support for military personnel and veterans.

That huge image, visible in the Time Warner Cable Arena during speeches by Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and retired Admiral John B. Nathman, also depicted a synchronized formation of jet aircraft that convention-goers assumed were American fighter planes.

But the F-5 fighter planes in the photo are part of the air force of Turkey, a nation whose government is now jailing journalists and establishing Islam as a state religion.

Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, did not respond when the The Daily Caller asked why the convention planners displayed Turkish-flown aircraft alongside Russian warships while seeking support from the American military community.

Hillary made decision not to post Marines at Benghazi

Why not? [Link]

Earlier, on Howie Carr's radio show Thursday, Colonel Hunt said that the American mission at Benghazi "was like a cardboard building, there wasn't even bullet proof glass." In addition, Hunt said the security guards inside the mission didn't have bullets:

Howie Carr: They weren't allowed to have bullets, is that correct? 

Colonel Hunt: That's true. They were private security. The rules of engagement were ridiculous. 

Hunt told Breitbart News that the new State Department Rules of Engagement for Libya, approved and signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton since the 2011 fall of Khadafi's regime, severely compromised the safety and security of murdered Ambassador Stevens and all American diplomatic staff in Libya. 

He also stated that the decision not to staff Benghazi with Marines was made by Secretary of State Clinton when she attached her signature to the State Department Rules of Engagement for Libya document. Breitbart News has subsequently learned that under those rules of engagement, Secretary Clinton prohibited Marines from providing security at any American diplomatic installation in Libya.

Hunt told Breitbart News that "the rules of engagement have been changing drastically over the last 10 years. . . The reason the surge in Iraq worked was we had another 40,000 soldiers and the rules of engagement were changed to allow our guys to shoot. What’s happened in Libya is the final straw of political correctness. We allowed a contractor to hire local nationals as security guards, but said they can't have bullets. This was all part of the point of not having a high profile in Libya."

According to Hunt, the debacle at the American mission in Benghazi is directly the result of Obama's new policies. "The policy of the Obama administration led to this," he said.

"It was the policy of the Obama administration to have a low profile in Libya. That's why the rules of engagement were approved by the Secretary of State to have no Marines at Benghazi, and to have an American contractor hire Libyan nationals to provide security there. The rules were they couldn't have ammunition."

"Obama may not have known the details of the State Department Rules of Engagement for Libya, but his Chief of Staff and National Security Advisor would have. The Secretary of State absolutely would have."

"The Department of State Security are the people in charge of diplomatic security. They enforce the rules of engagement, which are set at Clinton’s level at State. The Department of Defense was told we’re not going to have Marines at Benghazi. Whether it goes higher than the Secretary of  State to the President, I don't know."

Like the Onion, but Military.

The Duffel Blog. And like the Onion, occasionally satire is not noticed and gets posted as real news.
This one is a particularly believable.

Iran scarier than thought

They have UFO technology! [Link]

Meet Mehran Tavakoli Keshe, who purports to be the father of the RQ-170 abduction. In a recent post to his eponymous foundation’s online forums, Keshe claims the Iranians used “advanced space technology” that he pioneered. “The craft has been air-picked-up and been put down on its belly through the use of field forces,” Keshe writes — by which he means force fields. It’s feeling a lot like Tinfoil Tuesday, our weekly round-up of the planet’s most insane conspiracy theories.

‘The Defense Secretary would like his lightsaber back.’

The U.S. has yet to confirm that the drone Iran claims to have is actually the stealthy “Beast of Kandahar,” and the yellow model that Iran has peddled out looks like it’s made out of fondant, like a drone-shaped cake constructed for an episode of Food Network Challenge. Keshe claims that the drone looks as smooth and clean as it does in Iran’s propaganda photos because his force fields intercepted the RQ-170, like a tractor beam would, and deposited it gently to Iranian soil. As summarized by Pure Energy Systems News, Keshe’s technology, part of an “Iranian [flying] saucer program,” harnesses “a fusion reaction that manipulates dark matter, regular matter, and antimatter.”

“We have no comment on this individual’s claims,” George Little, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, tells Danger Room, “but tell him the Secretary would like his lightsaber back.”

Luckily, we have Jedi - or Sith on our side, depending on your political views.

Pakistan Carts Its Nukes Around In Delivery Vans

Oh yeah, this is a great idea. Nothing could possibly go wrong. [Link]

Freaked out about the insecurity of its nuclear arsenal, the Pakistani military’s Strategic Plans Division has begun carting the nukes around in clandestine ways. That might make some sense on the surface: no military wants to let others know exactly where its most powerful weapons are at any given moment. But Pakistan is going to an extreme.

The nukes travel “in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic,” according to a blockbuster story on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in The Atlantic. Marc Ambinder and Jeffrey Goldberg write that tactical nuclear weapons travel down the streets in “vans with a modest security profile.” Somewhere on a highway around, say, Karachi, is the world’s most dangerous 1-800-FLOWERS truck.

Tom Clancy should be suing Pakistani generals for ripping off the basic idea behind The Sum Of All Fears. You’ll recall that Pakistan is home to al-Qaida, a particularly fearsome version of the Taliban, the leadership of the old-school Taliban, its friends in the Haqqani Network and a host of anti-Indian terrorist groups that the Pakistani intelligence service employ as proxies. Sometimes the Pakistani military helps these terrorist and insurgent groups attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan. And any one of these groups would love a chance to wield a nuclear weapon.

Except that Pakistan isn’t trying to safeguard its nukes from them. It’s trying to safeguard its nukes from us. The Navy SEAL raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden has made important Pakistani generals think that the U.S. military’s next target is Pakistani nukes. So off the vans go, along what Ambinder and Goldberg term “congested and dangerous roads,” trying to throw off the scent of the U.S., with little more than hope to protect them from an adventurous highwayman.

The irony is that the U.S. isn’t planning to steal Pakistan’s nukes — but Pakistan’s cavalier attitude toward nuclear security is making the U.S. think twice about whether it should revise some worst-case-scenario contingency planning.

Should any of the nukes go missing, an “Abbottabad redux” would likely occur, Ambinder and Goldberg report. An anonymous military official tells the pair that the Joint Special Operations Command “has units and aircraft and parachutes on alert in the region for nuclear issues, and regularly inserts units and equipment for prep.” Seizing Pakistani nukes during or after a military coup is a much harder mission, but the reporters consider it doable. “[I]t’s wise for the U.S. to try to design a plan for seizing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in a low-risk manner,” Goldberg and Ambinder advise, placing a lot of rhetorical freight on the words “low-risk.”

That is, if the U.S. actually knows where the nukes are. “Anyone who tells you that they know where all of Pakistan’s nukes are is lying to you,” ex-national security adviser Jim Jones allegedly said. The Econolines of Doom make that knowledge even more uncertain.

Updates to Military Rations

Caffeinated jerky. SNAP INTO A SLIM JIM! [Link]

[A]n Army lab here is testing a beef jerky stick that looks and tastes just like your average Slim Jim but contains an equivalent of a cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine to give even the sleepiest soldier that up-and-at-’em boost.

After a decade of war, military food scientists have been hard at work at a little-known research facility outside Boston transforming the field ration — known as the Meal, Ready to Eat, and perhaps the most complained about food in the world — into something not just good-tasting but full of energy-enhancing ingredients.

“There is a lot of science that goes into this,” said David Accetta, a spokesman for the Natick Soldier Research, Development & Engineering Center, where every item put into an MRE is tested and tasted. “And that’s what a lot of people don’t realize. It’s not just a bunch of cooks in the kitchen making up recipes.”

In addition to caffeine, military technologists are lacing food with supplements such as omega 3s and curcumin, which act as anti-inflammatories. Maltodextrin, a complex carbohydrate that gives service members a little turbo charge, is injected into an amped-up applesauce called Zapplesauce.

And that energizing goo gobbled by marathoners? The Army is developing its very own.

Complaining about the MRE has been a sport within the ranks for years. They’ve been called every derogatory name possible: Meals Rejected by Everyone. Meals Refused by the Enemy. Materials Resembling Edibles. Meals Refusing to Exit.

But in its latest permutations, officials here say, the MRE has gone gourmet — or as gourmet as can be for food that has a shelf life of three years at 80 degrees and can withstand an airdrop from thousands of feet.

The no-name casserole, mystery meat and mealy tuna have been replaced by dishes endorsed by the Natick center’s “sensory evaluators.” Recent chow additions include chicken and pesto pasta, feta cheese and tomato. Dining al fresco in their trenches, soldiers now can choose from ratatouille, garlic mashed potatoes, salsa verde and a strawberry-banana dairy shake.

If you have the time to heat water, there’s instant Irish-cream coffee. If not, caffeinated beef jerky, the military’s variation on the commercially available Perky Jerky, should soon be turning up in MREs.

The technologists’ efforts may be paying off. In reviewing one of the newer entrees, a food writer for the Boston Globe wrote, “The pasta is tender but not falling apart, the sauce dense and sweet, similar to many commercial sauces.”

Maple Seed Drone

Neat. [Link]

After five years behind locked doors, researchers at Lockheed Martin's Intelligent Robotics Laboratories in New Jersey have emerged with a working prototype of the "Samarai," a tiny DARPA-commissioned surveillance drone. The nano air vehicles (NAVs), modeled after falling Maple leaf seeds, are designed to be super light weight and agile for vertical lift off, hovering, and navigation in tight spaces.

UAV Carrier Ops

F/A-18 lands on carrier automatically. [Link]

On July 2, the F/A-18 performed dozens of arrested landings without any input from the pilot in the Atlantic Ocean off the Virginia Capes. What’s really interesting about this is that the jet wasn’t controlled by someone in the carrier the way current drones are controlled from ground stations. No, this jet simply received a command from the carrier’s air traffic control to enter the landing pattern and execute the landing all on its own; the same way a piloted jet would.

“Once he’s on his approach, we actually take control of the aircraft via the systems we have installed as part of the demo and actually the aircraft is controlled by flight [rules] we put in place, all the way down to trap,” said Don Blottenberger, Navy UCAS-D Dep. Principal Program Manager during a phone call with reporters this morning. “There is no remote control of the aircraft, there is no pilot control of the aircraft; we’ve given it instructions and it executes those instructions.”

Just to make it clear, Blottenberger added:

“There is no remote control, meaning there is no joystick, there’s no one that’s flying this aircraft from the carrier, we give it commands via the network we have in place … tying in with existing carrier systems and then the aircraft executes those commands.”

The system, which uses precision-GPS navigation data transmitted over Rockwell Collins’ Tactical Targeting Network Technology (which I thought was defunct), allows the air traffic controllers, air boss and landing signals officer to tell the plane to enter the approach and perform all the necessary adjustments in heading, altitude and speed necessary to perform a trap. In the final phase of the approach, the LSO can even order the jet to wave off using his terminal that has been modified to communicate with an unmanned jet, according to NAVAIR officials.

According to the Hornet’s pilot, Lt. Jeremy DeBons, the landing felt no different from when an F/A-18 lands using the Automated Carrier Landing System, although. Still, he kept his “hands very close” to the controls during the ‘hands-off’ landings.

The new, GPS-based system developed for the UCAS-D has 360-degree coverage around the ship; the ability to control multiple aircraft and allows the actual airplane to determine how it will fly according to the commands from air traffic control. The older radar-based auto-land system has limited coverage off the stern of the carrier, determines what type of stick and throttle inputs should be performed for the plane and can only control a limited number of aircraft, according to NAVAIR officials.

Navy's laser and railgun programs on the chopping block

The Navy is fighting for them. [Link]

Lawmakers have traditionally left military research budgets intact, tinkering at the margins only when they feel money is being seriously misspent or the R&D projects are seriously off-track. Rarely, if ever, do they go after a service’s top research priority.

Last Friday, however, the Senate Armed Services Committee broke with tradition, and declared that Carr’s babies, the Free Electron Laser and the Electromagnetic Railgun, weren’t fit to grow up any more. The panel said funds for the programs should be terminated.

Neither project was in trouble — in fact, both had recently broken records in their respective fields. But in Washington’s new atmosphere of austerity, the ray gun and the railgun were suddenly considered futuristic luxuries, not the “game-changers” Carr had touted for so long.

The recommended recommended cuts took the Navy by surprise, according to ace naval reporter Sam LaGrone at Jane’s. Carr’s shop has said nothing since then, referring all questions to Big Navy.

Big Navy, at least, isn’t throwing in the towel.

“The programs were part of the president’s budget and we hope to see them in the final bill,” says Lt. Cmdr. Justin Cole, a Navy spokesman. “We will continue to work with Congress to answer any questions they may have about the programs in an effort to secure authorization and funding for their continuation.”

But the strongest advocate for both the Free Electron Laser and the railgun has been Carr himself. He told Danger Room in February that technology had basically maxed out the possibilities for hitting “maneuvering pieces of metal in the sky with other maneuvering pieces of metal.”

The solution, as Carr sees it, is hypersonic guns and multi-wavelength lasers. They’d allow the Navy’s surface ships to fire at targets from hundreds of miles away and burn incoming missiles out of the sky. For the Senate panel to put them on the chopping block is to ask the Navy to rewrite what it considers the future of surface-ship defense.

Iron Curtain

Raise shields. [Link]

Iron Curtain differs from Trophy in that instead of firing outwards to intercept projectiles, it firesdownwards from the top of the vehicle it's protecting straight towards the ground. The system uses racks of downward firing explosives coupled with sensor arrays that track incoming projectiles, and when Iron Curtain spots something, it waits until the projectile is just inches from the side of the vehicle, and then triggers the proper explosive to explode downward, shredding the projectile into bits that bounce harmlessly off the vehicle's armor. Iron Curtain can deal with multiple incoming projectiles at the same time, and the downward blast helps to keep anyone around the vehicle from getting hit: