Most Dangerous Week Ever


This is what you come to expect: the secret near-death experience of Boeing’s Phantom Ray killer drone. Drug lords who build their own MRAPs and Afghan insurgents who blow up MRAPs with our reporter in them. Mental calisthenics for intelligence analysts.

On one side of the ledger, stealth is on the way out; on the other side, missiles and rocket propelled grenades might start to see the dawn of their own obsolescence. Even as that all happens, the wars of the future will get longer — starting with the Afghanistan training mission.

We started with that sort of terror. We ended far, far away. Russian toilets that withstand terrorist attacks. Endorsements from the next secretary of defense for more joint CIA-JSOC hit teams, like a lethal Justice League. Custom-built DNA, courtesy of Darpa. And come next week, it gets even more intense. Stay tuned. And reset expectations.

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NATO’s Newest Bombing Tool: Twitter


In the early days of the Libya war, U.S. commanders were adamant that they didn’t communicate with the Libyan rebels about what targets to bomb. As it turns out, they don’t need to. They’ve got Twitter.

NATO officials conducting air strikes on forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi don’t have soldiers on the ground to spot for the warplanes and armed drones overhead. (Well, at least not officially.) But they do have a barrage of tweets about Gadhafi’s troop movements in beleaguered cities like Benghazi and Tripoli, all of which come in handy when picking out targets.

“We get information from open sources on the Internet, we get Twitter,” British Wing Commander Mike Bracken told AFP. Another NATO official attested, “Twitter is a great source.”

None of which is to say that an errant tweet is enough to launch a Hellfire missile. NATO flies AWACS surveillance planes over Libya, as well as other spy aircraft and satellites, to aid with targeting. NATO officials assure that they don’t just set targeting coordinates based on what someone says over Twitter — just that Twitter has value as a source of tactical intelligence.

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Navy Commandos Expect Their Shrinks to Be Waterboarded


Want to help Navy SEALs stay mentally fit enough to survive capture by the enemy? Good. Just let me put this cloth over your face while I fill my water bucket.

The military trains its troops to deal with the contingencies of getting stranded behind enemy lines. That involves passing a rigorous course called Survival Evasion Resistance Escape, or SERE — which, for elite commandos, simulates capture and torture. If SERE sounds familiar, that’s probably because former Air Force psychologists involved in the program brought its harshest methods, like waterboarding, to the CIA shortly after 9/11 for use against captured terrorists. The rest is infamy.

But that was an aberration. SERE psychologists are actually supposed to stop torture if they observe it. And they’re supposed to provide guidance during the extreme training “if students show signs of becoming mentally unstable,” according to a recent solicitation for SERE shrinks from U.S. Special Operations Command. One of the ways they’ll know is that they’ll have had to experience all the pain of the SERE course themselves.

SOCOM clarified that before psychologists can ship out to San Diego to assist Navy SEALs pass the SERE course, they must “be a graduate of a SERE level C training curriculum.” Level C is the highest level of SERE training, the ones that commandos with a “high risk of capture” endure.

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NSA Declassifies 200-Year-Old Book

A cryptology instruction book… 202 years old. A photograph of the U.S. Army’s cypher bureau… from 1919. A breakdown of Russian electoral districts… circa 1948. Schematics for a magnetic tape memory system… nearly half a century old.

These are just some of the items that, had you seen them, would have irreparably damaged U.S. national security. These are just a few of the documents, mere citizen, that for decades were far too sensitive for your uninitiated eyes.

At least, that’s what the American intelligence community would have you believe. Earlier this week, the National Security Agency announced that it had declassified and released to the National Archives “over 50,000 pages of historic records,” according to an agency statement. The document dump was “the first in a series of releases planned over the next two years” as part of NSA’s “commitment” to comply with President Obama’s January, 2009 memo demanding more transparency from federal agencies. Last month, the CIA released a trove of allegedly-explosive information from World War I, including the 90 year-old German formula for invisible ink.

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Pentagon’s New Factory: Your DNA

Darpa is sick and tired of waiting around for Mother Nature. Instead, it wants to take the life-making business into its own hands — and manufacture new biological forms in a factory of mix-and-match bio-bits.

A recent call for research by the Pentagon’s mad science agency proposes a new program called “Living Foundries.” The idea is to use biology as a manufacturing platform to “enable on-demand production of new and high-value materials, devices and capabilities.”

In other words, let’s engineer life to make stuff we want.

The fields of bioengineering and synthetic biology have already produced some useful, scary and flat-out bizarre entities. Besides renewable petroleum or steel strong spider silk, there are all sorts of potential therapeutic, industrial and agricultural purposes for reorganized DNA.

But Darpa thinks progress is too slow. Previous projects (it calls them “primitive”) are ad hoc and labor intensive, chugging along by trial and error in secretive silos. Hence we are “limited to producing only a small fraction of the vast number of possible chemicals, materials and living systems that would be enabled by the ability to truly engineer biology.”

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Panetta: Escalate Shadow Wars, Expand Black Ops


Icing Osama bin Laden? Just the beginning, once Leon Panetta makes it to the Pentagon.

At his Thursday confirmation hearing to become secretary of defense, CIA Director Panetta made a broad case for expanding the U.S.’ already extensive shadow wars. Now that bin Laden is dead, “we’ve got to keep the pressure up,” Panetta urged senators. Expect a lot of drone strikes and a lot of special ops raids — some conducted by future CIA Director David Petraeus. In a lot of places.

Panetta said he wants to hit al-Qaida’s “nodes” from Pakistan to North Africa, “develop[ing] operations in each of those areas,” so terrorists have “no place to escape.” That means working with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the elite commandos that executed the raid on bin Laden’s Abbotabad compound. And Panetta has some specific ideas about how that should work.

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Oh, Crap! Moscow Mulls Terrorist-Proof Toilets

It’s a problem we’ve all faced. You enter a public restroom, recline for an afternoon constitutional and suddenly that dreadful, awful fear strikes you in the pit of your stomach: Is this bathroom fully protected against the planet’s most disturbing individuals? Fear not, for Russia’s terrorist-proof toilet may soon allow you to unburden yourself in peace and security.

The high art of security theater — measures that look and feel reassuring but lack substance — may have been perfected in the United States with our get-naked airport scanners and questionable equipment purchases. But it’s not an exclusively American phenomenon. Moscow Times reports that Moscow city officials are mulling over the idea of installing public toilets that can withstand terrorist attacks. The makers say the johns are made of a super-strong fibrous concrete that can hold up even after a bomb explodes inside. With the counterterror commode, the only bombs that will threaten the public are the ones you drop yourself.

To be fair, Russia does face a serious terrorist threat. Just this January Suicide bombers killed over 30 people in an attack against Domodedovo Airport. Last year, female suicide bombers killed 34 on the Moscow metro. Trying to harness porto-potties to mitigate this threat, though, is absurd.

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The Next Secretary of Defense Is Kind of a N00b

No one doubts that CIA Director Leon Panetta is qualified to become secretary of defense. Not the senators who said they couldn’t wait to vote for his confirmation, and probably not Osama bin Laden, whose death is the direct result of Panetta’s leadership. But at a few points during his Wednesday confirmation hearing, Panetta appeared out of his comfort zone on key issues he’ll have to tackle at the Pentagon — everything from shipbuilding to cybersecurity to the size of the Army. He even backed a plan that could edge us closer to a nuclear nightmare.

In his written responses to the Senate Armed Services Committee (.PDF), Panetta endorsed one of the crazier schemes in the U.S. military arsenal. That’s a program called Conventional Prompt Global Strike, in which non-nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles smash adversary targets halfway around the world. “A unique conventional capability to strike time-sensitive targets, so that distant, hard-to-reach places will no longer provide sanctuary to adversaries,” Panetta called it, and a “valuable option” the president ought to have.

It’s also a great way to start World War III. The Chinese, Russians or anyone else has no way of telling if an ICBM in flight carries a nuclear payload or not. A rational response is to assume armageddon is nigh, and launch their own nukes — whether that missile is headed for them or for anyone else (like North Korea, say).

The Obama team, which hates nukes, has embraced Global Strike as an alternative to nuclear war. But the scheme is more likely to be an ironic accelerant of it. Now Panetta’s on board.

Speaking of the apocalypse: Panetta got all doomsday when talking about cybersecurity. “There’s a strong likelihood that the next Pearl Harbor we confront could be a cyber attack,” he intoned.

But most cybersecurity pros think that kind of big, knockout blow from another state is just about the least likely scenario, even in the age of the Stuxnet worm. Worse, watching the skies for a Cyber Pearl Harbor is a good way to miss the steady growth of cyber crime, as Danger Room boss Noah Shachtman notes in his upcoming paper for the Brookings Institution. Sony, Lockheed, Citibank — the number of big companies getting pwned piles up by the day, while the annual losses to individuals keeps climbing and climbing. Watch it while you hold up your “End is Nigh” sign, Leon. Someone just might be stealing your wallet and robbing your store.

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Revenge of the Zombie Terrorist: Jihadi’s Drone Death Disputed, Again

What’s more evil than a terror mastermind? A terror mastermind who won’t stay dead.

U.S. officials are casting doubt over whether llyas Kashmiri, commander of the Islamist terror group Harakat ul Jihad Islami (HUJI), actually died in a drone strike last week. Earlier this week, U.S. officials told Reuters, “our working assumption is that he’s still walking around.” This despite the fact that Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik claims to be able to confirm “100 percent” that jihadi boss (and reputed al-Qaida pal) is dead.

Kashmiri was reportedly slain by a U.S. drone hovering over South Waziristan last week. In addition to his history of attacks in Pakistan and India, he allegedly conspired with Mumbai plotter David Coleman Headley to attack the offices of the Danish newspaper responsible for printing the allegedly-offensive Mohammed cartoons. Headley also told a federal court that Kashmiri ordered him to research a plot against Lockheed Martin, mistakenly believing they were the company that manufactured the killer drones over Pakistan.

Adding to doubts over his death, photos purporting to show Kashmiri’s corpse faxed by HUJI to Pakistani news organizations are reportedly fakes. Instead of showing the impressively-bearded face of Ilyas, Pakistani authorities claim they show the clean-shaven mug of Abu Ismail Khan, one of the attackers killed during the Mumbai shootings of 2008.

Moreover, Kashmiri’s profile is still posted on the U.S. government’s Rewards for Justice website along with the promise of a $5 million payout for information leading to his arrest.

If reports of his death turn out to be premature, Kashmiri will join the war on terror’s legion of zombie jihadis — those pronounced dead in drone strikes only to rise again.

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Leon Panetta Does His Best Robert Gates Impression


Leon Panetta wants senators to leave his confirmation hearing to helm the Pentagon with one overriding message: if they like Robert Gates’ performance in that office, they’ll love him.

Calling Gates a “dear friend” whom he consulted on how to serve as secretary of defense, Panetta gave the Senate Armed Services Committee little daylight between him and the man he’s nominated to succeed. His “reforms are reforms I intend to carry on,” Panetta said on Thursday morning, whether it means the wars or the Pentagon budget.

“My first task at [the Department of Defense] is to prevail in the conflicts we’re engaged in,” Panetta said, reminiscent of Gates’ 2006 testimony that his priorities were “Iraq, Iraq and Iraq” — with the caveat that the Pentagon must be mindful of “how we spend the taxpayers precious resources.”

On Afghanistan, Panetta steered very, very far away from offering any number of troops he thinks ought to come home this year. Fitting with Gates’ mantra, Panetta repeatedly said, “this has to be a conditions-based withdrawal.” He focused instead on the “2014 date” for Afghans to take the lead for security, and said he wanted to defer to Gates, Gen. David Petraeus and President Obama for the scope of troop reductions this year. Panetta even echoed Petraeus’ mantra that progress in Afghanistan is “fragile and reversible” — which pleased Sen. John McCain, who wants only a token withdrawal from Afghanistan this year. His written remarks to the committee even praised counterinsurgency, perhaps a sign that just because he’s a CIA director doesn’t mean he’ll shift the strategy — which he called sound — to pure counterterrorist strikes.

Same goes for Iraq. Gates recently urged that some U.S. troops ought to stay after 2011 if the Iraqi government asks. Panetta, who in 2006 favored a staggered withdrawal from Iraq instead of the surge, endorsed Gates’ call: “I believe that if Prime Minister Maliki and the Iraqi government requests we maintain a presence there, that ought to be seriously considered by the president.”
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