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E-Bomb Awareness Day: Grab Your Tinfoil Hat

starfish_prime_aurora_from_honolulu_1Imagine a day on which all members of Congress had their BlackBerries simultaneously switched off — and then had to go without lunch. Change we can believe in! Well, that’s idea behind “EMP Recognition Day,” an idea being cooked up by our friends at the Heritage Foundation.

That’s right, Heritage is proposing a special day to raise awareness about the threat from electromagnetic pulse attack. Electromagnetic pulse weapons — what our own Sharon Weinberger dubbed “the boogeyman bomb” — are the favorite doomsday scenario for national-security scaremongers. In theory, an EMP attack — triggered by the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear device — would short circuit electronics, resulting in a devastating electronic first strike. (During the Starfish Prime test in 1962, pictured here, the resulting electromagnetic pulse shorted out streetlights, set off burglar alarms and fried a telephone company’s microwave link.)

“If, just for one day, Congress simulated even a fraction of the impact such an attack would have, the scope of the danger would be clear,” argue Jena McNeill and James Carafano. “To do so, Congress should establish an EMP Recognition Day.” On EMP Recognition Day, they propose, Congress should:

  • Close all cafeterias. Because, after the big EMP strike, Domino’s won’t deliver (um, unless it’s by bike, but whatever).
  • Walk to work. “Traffic lights would no longer function, so all roads would be gridlocked,” they write. Gridlock? In D.C.? unheard of …
  • Turn off Members’ Blackberries. Now this is an idea I can really endorse: McNeill and Carafano may be trying to point out that communications networks would be interrupted, but I can only imagine that this move would yield greater benefits to the nation.
  • Shut off the lights. Hey, no groping the Congressional aides!

In seriousness, I think Congress do it. And then we can look at funding some real solutions: Create a contingency fund to revive the Pony Express (I’m sure there’s a contractor that would be willing to do this on a cost-plus basis). Cancel lunch for members of Congress (they are going to need to be svelte if we are going to get through this EMP attack). And start building EMP-hardened bunkers for the top members of the executive branch (oh wait, we already have that).

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Air Force Enforces BlackBerry Crackdown

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In the military, a true PowerPoint Ranger goes nowhere without a firmly holstered BlackBerry. But new Air Force regulations are about to make life much more complicated for users of the popular handheld device.

Last week, the Air Force introduced sweeping changes to boost BlackBerry security. Among other things, the service will disable most Bluetooth functionality: The only Bluetooth feature that will continue to work will be the smartcard reader cradle, a device that holds the user’s Common Access Card (a Department of Defense smart ID that is used for computer and network security, pictured here).

The new measures also mean users will not be able to receive text messages with attached photos or videos (Translation: If you get that message that says “FW: Daytona spring break pictures,” you won’t be able to retrieve it.) And they will also restrict users from downloading additional apps to their handheld device.

Don’t like the changes? Too bad. Software on the devices will be automatically updated: Users will get only have one chance to decline their software update while syncing, and any subsequent attempts to sync will disable the BlackBerry until it is updated.

It’s part of a larger shift requiring BlackBerry and Windows mobile devices to be Public Key Infrastructure enabled, so they can send and receive secure e-mail messages. The BlackBerry crackdown seems driven by the service’s focus on cybersecurity. For instance, the Air Force has been reluctant to rescind a ban on thumb drives and other removable media, despite a new Pentagon directive that encourages access.

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Military Helicopters May Get Gunshot Location System

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Military helicopters have sophisticated electronic countermeasures to detect and defend against surface-to-air missiles, by jamming or fooling the seekers that guide the missiles to target. Now the Pentagon’s far-out research arm wants to take things a step further, by protecting against unguided — but equally dangerous — small arms fire.

In testimony yesterday, Regina Dugan, the new head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, described a new acoustic sensor the agency was developing to alert aircrews to ground fire.

The system — called HALTT, for Helicopter Alert and Threat Termination — is a hostile-fire indicator that would give the pilot a warning of attack, and pinpoint its origin. It would work by detecting the distinct acoustic signature (or “crack”) of a bullet as it passes through the air. It would then indicate the shooter’s position. HALTT, Dugan said, “would make it very dangerous to shoot at U.S. forces — because the first shot may very well be the adversary’s last.”

Dugan also gave an interesting statistic: Incoming small arms fire, she said, accounted for 85 percent of hostile engagements against helos. A prototype of the system has been installed on an Army UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, and Dugan said the military was planning to deploy several systems to Afghanistan for real-world evaluation.

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Break Up the NSA!

st_essay_nsa_fWhen Google called in the National Security Agency to help secure its networks, it made a lot of us queasy. Sure, the NSA has some of the world’s most sophisticated cyber defenders. But the agency’s intelligence arm has a long and ugly history of mass surveillance on American citizens. So when Google teams up with the Puzzle Palace, everyone watching sees it as a package deal. The company wants geeks; the rest of us worry about the spies rummaging through our Gmail.

Fortunately, there’s a relatively straightforward solution: We should break up the NSA.

As I explain in this month’s Wired magazine, the NSA really is two agencies under one roof. There’s the signals-intelligence directorate, the Big Brothers who, it is said, can tap into any electronic communication. And there’s the information-assurance directorate, the cybersecurity nerds who make sure our government’s computers and telecommunications systems are hacker- and eavesdropper-free. In other words, there’s a locked-down spy division and a relatively open geek division. The problem is, their goals are often in opposition. One team wants to exploit software holes; the other wants to repair them. It doesn’t make sense to have both of them on the same playing field.

We need a top-flight cyber security agency that can give companies like Google a hand. But we’ve got to be able to trust that agency, too. That won’t happen until we separate the sysadmins from the spooks. Time to split the NSA.

Illustration: Markus Hofko

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Mercs vs. Pirates: Deadly Shootout on the High Seas

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For months, shipping firms have been testing ways to repel pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia, trying everything from sonic blasters to warning shots. But things have now escalated to lethal force: A Somali pirate was apparently killed yesterday in a gunfight between a cargo ship and a pirate skiff.

According to a news release issued today by the European Union Naval Force Somalia, or NavFor, the Panamanian-flagged cargo ship MV Almezaan came under attack by pirates while sailing to Mogadishu. “An armed private vessel protection detachment on board the ship returned fire, successfully repelling the first attack, but the pirates continued to pursue. A second attack was repelled and the pirates fled the area.”

In response to a distress call from the Almezaan, NavFor sent the Spanish frigate ESPS Navarra (pictured here) to the scene. The Spanish warship located the cargo vessel — as well as the boats belonging to the attackers.

A naval boarding party searched two pirate skiffs. They found six suspected pirates, as well as the body of one individual, dead from what were described as “small caliber gunshot wounds.” All six suspected pirates, as well as the body of their crewmate, were taken aboard the Navarra.

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Danger Room Mythbuster: Nazi Rocket Barge, Sunk

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In a speech yesterday on missile defense, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn talked about a “new and more complex era of hybrid threats” in which potential U.S. adversaries might combine high-tech and low-tech tools to mount a surprise attack. And to make his point, he drew on a history lesson: German plans during World War II to develop a longer-range version of the A4 ballistic missile, better known as the V-2 rocket (pictured here in postwar testing).

“Had the war lasted longer,” Lynn said, “The Wehrmacht may have been able to hit New York.”

Lynn then made an intriguing reference to another secret Nazi rocket program. “In a desperate attempt to attack targets in the U.S. with existing capabilities, they launched Project Laffarenz,” Lynn said. “What the Germans lacked in range they tried to make up for in inventiveness.”

In the deputy secretary’s telling, Project Laffarenz involved using U-boats to tow a battery of V-2s across the Atlantic on submersible barges. “Once within striking distance of the East Coast, the V-2 carrying containers would be flooded with water, righting launch tubes,” he said. “The Germans got as far as building a carrying container at the Baltic port at Elbing before the allied assault stopped any deployment.”

So, did the Germans come close to building a sort of prototype for a submarine-launched ballistic missile? According to Michael Neufeld, an authority on early rocketry and chair of the division of space history at the National Air and Space Museum, not even close.

“The one somewhat dubious source I saw made it clear that this was the same project as ‘Test Stand XII’ that was undertaken in the last months of the war, to create a towed V-2 canister behind a submarine,” he told Danger Room. “The canister would be flooded to float upright and the V-2 fired. They were building a few such canisters at the end of the war, but there is absolutely no evidence that the Germans were anywhere near ready to actually launch a missile out of a container.”

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Rocket-Launched ‘Rapid Eye’ Drone’s Rapid Demise

Drones are an indispensable tool in modern warfare: They can loiter for hours, providing crucial surveillance of distant targets. But what if you need to get a drone somewhere in a hurry?

That was the idea behind Rapid Eye. In 2007, Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out science arm, announced plans to package a folding drone inside the nose cone of an intercontinental ballistic missile. The concept was fairly straightforward: In the event of an emerging crisis, you could launch Rapid Eye. Within an hour, the drone would be on station, and once its mission was complete, it could be replaced by another long-loitering, pilotless aircraft.

Tony Tether, the previous director of Darpa, was a fan of the idea. But the rocket-launched drone had some serious conceptual flaws. For starters, lobbing an ICBM across the planet without warning could be mistaken for a surprise nuclear attack. That’s the same general issue that plagues other high-speed, hit-anywhere-in-the-world weapons concepts like Prompt Global Strike. If you want to put non-nuclear payloads like a drone or a conventional warhead on a ballistic missile, you need to make sure you don’t trigger Armageddon.

In a statement to Danger Room, Darpa spokeswoman Johanna Jones confirmed the cancellation of Rapid Eye. “Program and budget priorities resulted in Darpa not continuing to fund the Rapid Eye program,” she said.

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Holding Afghanistan’s Corrupt Cops To Account

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In Afghanistan, the weakest link when it comes to providing security is the country’s cash-strapped and often corrupt police force. But billions of dollars spent by the State Department and the Pentagon haven’t helped matters either: As a recent Newsweek/ProPublica investigation pointed out, outsourcing the training of Afghan police forces has been nothing short of disaster.

So it will be interesting this week to see what the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs unearths when it holds a hearing on Pentagon and State contracts for police training in Afghanistan.  The hearing will build on a newly released joint audit by State and Defense Department Inspectors General, and will feature testimony from the State Department’s assistant secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia affairs.

Conspicuously absent from the witness list, however, are representatives of the contractors themselves. Last week, the Government Accountability Office upheld a protest by DynCorp International, which has been doing police training work for several years under a State Department contract. The backstory is complicated, but it boils down to a dispute about whether civilian police training contracts should be competitively bid, and whether the Army’s plans to award new task orders for training Afghan police and security officials fell outside of the scope of previous Army contracts for counter-narcotics.

But it will also be interesting to see how much the investigators probe the past performance of DynCorp, as well as the generally abysmal track record in discouraging corruption in Afghanistan’s police forces. As we’ve reported before, Afghan security forces have been implicated in high-level narcotics trafficking: Last July, for instance, a drug raid in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province in July led to the arrest of an Afghan Border Police Commander.

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Inventors Design Less-Lethal ‘Taser Me Elmo’ Rifle

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Lund Technologies dreams up prototypes for just about everything, from hydrogen-powered toy rockets and light-up footballs to the top-selling Honey My Baby Pony and T.M.X. Tickle Me Elmo dolls. But with a little financing from the Pentagon, the company has also devised a new type of less-lethal rifle.

According to the company, the Lund Variable Velocity Weapons System (LVVWS) is an all-in-one weapon: lethal when used at high velocity, or less-lethal at low-velocity. The gun uses pump action, shoots two rounds a second and weighs a little over six pounds. It also substitutes a uses a hydrogen-powered combustion chamber for a standard cartridge, and doesn’t produce any smoke or powder residue.

And, given that less-lethal rounds can be notoriously dangerous when fired at close range, the LVVWS also uses a rangefinder-based safety system to prevent high-velocity shooting at close-range targets. (Warning: Streaming video may offend fans of Richard Strauss.)

It’s part of the Pentagon’s push for more varieties of less-lethal weaponry. Despite decades of research into cutting-edge weaponry, the military has yet to find an effective solution. Most less-lethal weapons are either useless at long range, or can be downright deadly if fired too close (think here of flexible baton rounds and rubber bullets).

Lund Technologies finalized production of its non-lethal, combustion-powered firearm with Small Business Innovation Research funds.

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Dogfighting over the Taiwan Strait

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For national-security dorks who like to read the Defense Department’s 36(b) arms sale notifications, watching the back-and-forth over weapons sales to Taiwan is pure entertainment. It’s partly a question of political spin, but it’s also an interesting look at how the Pentagon sizes up the military balance between China and Taiwan.

Back in January, the Defense Intelligence Agency issued a stark assessment of Taiwan’s air power: Without a serious upgrade, the report said,  Taiwan’s air defenses would not be able to fight off an attack by China. The Pentagon report — which was sent to Congress in January, but only became public last month — noted the growing obsolescence of Taiwan’s fighter inventory, which includes F-5 Tigers, Mirage 2000-5s and some older F-16A/Bs. “Taiwan recognizes that it needs a sustainable replacement for obsolete and problematic airframes,” the unclassified version of the report said.

That came as welcome news to Taiwan, which has been lobbying to buy more advanced F-16s, the F-16C/D model, from the United States. (China, predictably, is opposed to the plan.)

But here’s the catch: The F-16 production line is eventually going to shut down as the United States and its allies switch to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Now members of Congress are now stepping up pressure on the administration to sell the aircraft, in part to keep a production line in Fort Worth, Texas, open.

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