Darpa Turns to Canadian Tobacco to Fight Viral Terror

The Pentagon’s after a faster, more reliable way to fight pandemics and viral terror threats by mass producing vaccines. So far, plant-based approaches seem to be their top pick to replace old-school methods. Now, in a bid to hasten the development of vaccines that are ready for human use before the next H1N1 emerges, the military’s looking for a little help from our northern neighbors.

Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm, handed out $21 million to Canadian biotech firm Medicago Inc. The company, based in Quebec City, will use the money to build a 90,000-square-foot facility that’ll use tobacco plants to produce 10 million monthly doses of influenza vaccine.

The funding is a smaller part of Darpa’s burgeoning Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP) program, which aims to revolutionize current, egg-based vaccine production models, and yield vaccines within three months of “emerging and novel biological threats.” In February, the agency gave $21 million to Texas A&M for the construction of a 145,000 square-foot “biotherapeutic production facility” that uses mobile “pods” to grow vaccine-infused tobacco plants.

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Forget the Drones: Executive Plane Now an Afghanistan Flying Spy

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — With its rail-thin interior and the twin propellers flanking its nose cone like Salvador Dali’s mustache, the tiny MC-12 looks like it should be leisurely ferrying well-heeled passengers to the Vineyard. In the United States, this plane’s corporate cousins handle cushy jobs like that every day. But here in Afghanistan, this executive carrier has been turned into an unlikely spy — one of the U.S. forces’ most valuable intelligence assets, airmen say.

One of the things that makes it so valuable, and so seemingly unusual: There’s a pilot sitting in the cockpit. Armed Predator and Reaper drones have become the robotic face of the American air war here – able to stay in the air for a day at a time, and blast insurgents with hellfire missiles. The MC-12, on the other hand, has no firepower. It typically flies for a couple of hours at a time. And it’s not supposed to be a competitor to the drones, but rather a more tactical and collaborative supplement.

If the Predator gives ground commanders and intelligence analysts long-term viewing, for instance, the MC-12 gives ground units more and complementary options: a snapshot overview of a rapidly changing battlefield, right at the moment when information needs change, working in collaboration with the unit on the ground. Or, to use the mantra of Lt. Col. Douglas J. Lee, the commander of the Old Crows, the MC-12 squadron for the Bagram-based 455th Air Expeditionary Wing, “flexibility and responsiveness.” Welcome to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance with a human face – or, maybe, welcome back.

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Pentagon Disbands Network Warfare Shop

At the turn of the milenium, they were some of the most influential thinkers in the military — promoters of a new, “network-centric” style of warfare that would be ruthlessly efficient, Internet-quick, and largely bloodless. They promised “a revolution in military affairs unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age.” And the top brass believed them, using their theories to help plan the invasion of Iraq and guide investments in new weapons worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

But that was before the Iraq war morphed into a bloody counterinsurgency, and before those weapons programs collapsed under their own weight. The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration began to lose influence. Sure, “NII” still continued to craft policy on how troops could use social networking sites, employ open source software, or register XML components. (The head of NII also shared the title of Defense Department Chief Information Officer, after all.) But NII’s authority dwindled, even as it retained theoretical responsbility to oversee the military’s “Global Information Grid,” manage the electromagentic spectrum, and help buy new IT systems. There hadn’t been a permanent head of the Office since January, 2009.

So when Defense Secretary Bob Gates announced earlier this year that he was looking for offices to shutter as part of his drive to make the Pentagon more efficient, NII became an obvious target. Yesterday, he announced that the office would be dissolved, along with Joint Forces Command and the Joint Staff’s office for command, control, communications, and computer systems.

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New Afghan Air War? Don’t Count On It, General Says (Updated)

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — Of all the controversial moves Gen. Stanley McChrystal made while he was in charge of the Afghanistan war, the most controversial was the directive that reined in air strikes — even when his troops were in mortal danger. Last week, new commander Gen. David Petraeus revised his predecessor’s much-criticized guidelines.

So how will Petraeus’ revised rules change the air war? The answer, according to one of the generals in charge of it: not much.

“I don’t know if there’s this shocking change,” Brig. Gen. Jack Briggs II, commander of the Bagram-based 455th Air Expeditionary Wing, tells Danger Room. As Briggs sees it, there’s more continuity than change between Petraeus’ directive and McChrystal’s. Both documents balance the need to protect NATO troops with the need to keep collateral damage to an absolute minimum.

Both documents say that civilian deaths can turn tactical victories into strategic setbacks. Both documents order troops to make sure no innocents are in the way when the bombs start falling.

“There are some more specifics about execution,” Briggs says. According to the Rolling Stone article that ended McChrystal’s career, unit commanders were adding all kinds of extra restrictions on firepower that the brass never intended. “One of the bold-faced statements right there at the beginning of the tactical directive really is the fact that subordinate commanders are not going to be more restrictive,” he says.

But shooting guns or dropping bombs — going “kinetic,” in mil-speak — remains the least-favored option. “If it comes to a point where [ground troops] cannot withdraw, if they cannot maneuver themselves out of a situation, that’s when air, and particularly our kinetic air [power], comes in and becomes sort of our choice of last resort,” Briggs says.

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Special Operations’ Robocopter Spotted in Belize (Corrected)

Watch out, humans, the U.S. military has released an all-seeing, unmanned helicopter-like aircraft into the wild, according to Aviation Week. The Boeing A160T Hummingbird was photographed in Belize, where it was test flying a tree-penetrating Darpa radar called FORESTER. Locals were given a heads-up thanks to a press release from the U.S. Embassy. There’s no sign of the document on the website, but local reports say that the the Belize government invited the U.S. to test the Hummingbird in a mountain range 25 miles from the Guatemalan border. A few dozen military personnel – both Belizean and American – are involved in the testing, which will last until September.

U.S. Special Operations Command got its new gear in November of 2008, but at the time the unmanned hovering aircraft couldn’t see through trees. The synthetic-aperture radar now onboard is designed to detect slow moving people and vehicles – even if they’re hiding in dense foliage. It enables super high resolution imaging by using the motion of the helicopter to create an artificially large aperture. As if the unmanned A160T platform, which can fly 2,500 nautical miles for 24 hours at up to 30,000 feet, wasn’t high tech enough. The Hummingbird represents a completely new approach to helicopter design, with a special adjustable-speed rotor enabling it to be super quiet.

This particular model is unarmed. But the aircraft – officially dubbed the YMQ-18A by Special Ops – could also prove useful in urban areas or in Afghanistan, where its radar could help it surveil forested mountains and bring supplies to special forces teams at night.

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Open Source Tools Turn WikiLeaks Into Illustrated Afghan Meltdown (Updated)

It’s one thing to read about individual Taliban attacks in WikiLeaks’ trove of war logs. It’s something quite different to see the bombings and the shootings mount, and watch the insurgency metastasize.

NYU political science grad student (and occasional Danger Room contributor) Drew Conway has done just that, using an open source statistical programming language called R and a graphical plotting software tool. The results are unnerving, like stop-motion photography of a freeway wreck. Above is the latest example: a graph showing the spread of combat from 2004 to 2009. It’s exactly what you wouldn’t want to see as a war drags on.

“The sheer volume of observations [in the WikiLeaks database] inhibit the majority of consumers from being able to gain knowledge from it. By providing graphical summaries of the data people can draw inferences quickly, which would have been very difficult to do by serially reading through the files,” Conway e-mails Danger Room. “For instance, in the most recent graph I posted [see above], many people were noticing the increasing number of attacks around Afghanistan’s ‘ring road,’ over time, and seeing that as an indication of the Taliban’s attempt to undermine the Afghanistan government by cutting off villages from one another.”

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U.S. Supersizes Afghan Mega-Base as Withdrawal Date Looms

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — Anyone who thinks the United States is really going to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 needs to come to this giant air base an hour away from Kabul. There’s construction everywhere. It’s exactly what you wouldn’t expect from a transient presence.

Step off a C-17 cargo plane, as I did very early Friday morning, and you see a flight line packed with planes. When I was last here two years ago, helicopters crowded the runways and fixed-wing aircraft were –- well, if not rare, still a notable sight. Today you’ve got C-17s, Predators, F-16s, F-15s, MC-12 passenger planes … I didn’t see any of the C-130 cargo craft, but they’re here somewhere.

More notable than the overstuffed runways is the over-driven road. Disney Drive, the main thoroughfare that rings the eight-square-mile base, used to feature pedestrians with reflective sashes over their PT uniforms carrying Styrofoam boxes of leftovers out of the mess halls. And those guys are still there.

But now the western part of Disney is a two-lane parking lot of Humvees, flamboyant cargo big-rigs from Pakistan known as jingle trucks, yellow DHL shipping vans, contractor vehicles and mud-caked flatbeds. If the Navy could figure out a way to bring a littoral-combat ship to a landlocked country, it would idle on Disney.

Expect to wait an eternity if you want to pull out onto the road. Cross the street at your own risk.

Then there are all the new facilities. West Disney has a fresh coat of cement –- something that’s easy to come by, now that the Turkish firm Yukcel manufactures cement right inside Bagram’s walls.

There on the flightline: the skeletons of new hangars. New towers with particleboard for terraces. A skyline of cranes. The omnipresent plastic banner on a girder-and-cement seedling advertising a new project built by cut-rate labor paid by Inglett and Stubbs International.

I haven’t been able to learn yet how much it all cost, but Bagram is starting to feel like a dynamic exurb before the housing bubble burst. There was actually a traffic jam this afternoon on the southern side of the base, owing to construction-imposed bottlenecks, something I didn’t think possible in late summer 2008.

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Pentagon to Troops: Taliban Can Read WikiLeaks, You Can’t

Any citizen, any foreign spy, any member of the Taliban, and any terrorist can go to the WikiLeaks website, and download detailed information about how the U.S. military waged war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009. Members of that same military, however, are now banned from looking at those internal military documents. “Doing so would introduce potentially classified information on unclassified networks,” according to one directive issued by the armed forces.

That cry you hear? It’s common sense, writhing in pain.

There was a time, just a few months ago, when the Pentagon appeared to be growing comfortable with the emerging digital media landscape. Troops were free to blog and tweet, as long as they used their heads and didn’t disclose secrets. Thumb drives and DVDs could be employed, as long as they didn’t carry viruses or classified information. But the WikiLeaks disclosures — tens of thousands of classified documents — seem to have reversed that trajectory.

Now, the Marine Corps is telling troops and civilian employees in a memo:

[W]illingly accessing the WIKILEAKS website for the purpose of viewing the posted classified material [constitutes] the unauthorized processing, disclosure, viewing, and downloading of classified information onto an UNAUTHORIZED computer system not approved to store classified information. Meaning they have WILLINGLY committed a SECURITY VIOLATION.

The other branches of the armed services have put out similar notices. The memos were initially reported in the Washington Times. But the story has been removed from the paper’s website.

Sumit Agarwal, the former Google manager now serving as the Defense Department’s social media czar, explained the Pentagon’s logic in an e-mail to Danger Room.

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5 Minute Delay Scuttles Chance at $40 Billion Air Force Deal

Somehow, against all odds, the already-surreal competition to build America’s next fleet of tanker planes just got sillier and more venal. A tiny, troubled aerospace firm and its Ukrainian partner have been disqualified from the bidding because they handed in their proposal five minutes too late. The companies, for their part, insist that their messenger had a few minutes to spare.

For at least a decade, the Defense Department has been trying to replace its creaky cadre of Eisenhower-era refueling aircraft — the planes that keep the entire American fleet flying. A combination of corruption, jingoism, political preening, lack of will and sheer incompetence has kept Washington from accomplishing what should have been a relatively straightforward task. (Compared to, say, fighter jets, these tankers are technically simple.)

In 2003, the Air Force gave Boeing a $20 billion deal to lease some tankers. But the contract award process turned out to be beyond-shady; the deal was canceled. In 2008, EADS and Northrop seemingly beat out Boeing in a fair fight, winning up to $40 billion in business. Then the Government Accountability Office ruled that the competition wasn’t so fair, after all.

The ongoing drama has been manna for journalists and publishers, as Nathan Hodge recently pointed out. Not only has the tanker saga included everything from back room deals to dramatic reversals to heated Congressional hearings to military officials going to the pokey. The two main competitors, Boeing and EADS, also indirectly subsidized with their advertisements and marketing just about every defense industry publication around.

Then, on July 2nd, just when the steel cage match between Boeing and EADS looked like it might be heading for some sort of final resolution, into the octagon stepped a third wrestler.

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Darpa’s Inhaled Drugs to Boost Troops at Extreme Altitudes

Extreme altitudes are a major barrier for troops fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan, and the military’s spent millions trying to minimize altitude’s impact on physical and cognitive ability. Now, Darpa-funded researchers are making impressive progress towards inhaled drugs that would pump up troop performance by fast-tracking the body’s natural adaptations to altitude.

The Pentagon’s blue sky research arm has awarded $4.7 million to scientists at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, to develop pharmaceuticals that can rapidly boost oxygen delivery. Blood carries less oxygen at high altitudes, leading to a lack of oxygen in bodily tissue, called hypoxia. That, in turn, can cause nausea, confusion and fatigue — hardly the attributes the military’s after in battle-ready troops. By augmenting blood flow to tissues, the research team hopes to enhance oxygen delivery too.

That’s an adaptive process the human body is already capable of, but the necessary acclimatization can take weeks. Dr. Jonathan Stamler, who’s leading the research at Case Western, says the drugs will essentially do what we already can.

“We’re essentially mimicking nature here,” he tells Danger Room. “Take people climbing mountains, who will set up base camps at varying altitudes to give their bodies time to adjust. We’re making these mechanisms much, much more acute — a matter of minutes, rather than days.”

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