Military’s Newest Recruit: C-3P0

The Pentagon has spent decades and gazillions of dollars trying to build the perfect translation device. Now, its far-out research arm is looking at a new direction: a robot that can interpret all sorts of languages — and think for itself. That’s right: The Defense Department wants to build a real-life version of C-3P0.

Thursday, Darpa announced its new Broad Operational Language Translation, or BOLT, research initiative — the latest in a long, long line of military interpretation gadgets and algorithms. The United States tends to fight its wars in places where it doesn’t really speak the language. Training up troops in critical languages like Arabic would be difficult, time-consuming and not entirely practical on a large scale.

Enter BOLT, which Darpa has asked Congress to fund at $15 million this year. Once developed, BOLT would act something like C-3P0 from the Star Wars movies, performing a variety of difficult translation feats for troops in hostile territory.

It would go well beyond the array of handheld phrase-translation machines currently in use. BOLT would use language as well as visual and tactile inputs so that it can “hypothesize and perform automated reasoning in the acquired language.” The end result, Darpa’s announcement says, will be a robot with visual and tactile sensors that can recognize 250 different objects “and understand the consequences (pre-state and post-state) of 100 actions, so that it can execute complex commands.”

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Libya War Costs M.I.A.

How much will the Libya war cost America, now that NATO jets are hitting Moammar Gadhafi’s forces? Good luck figuring out an answer.

Michael Donley, the secretary of the Air Force, leveled with reporters that the cost estimates for the war are coming “by the hour” now that U.S. “participation in strike operations has now gone away.” NATO says it’s now done with U.S. combat planes like the A-10 Warthog or the F-15 Strike Eagle. It’s now the job of foreign warplanes to hit Gadhafi loyalist tanks and artillery. The U.S. is moving on to refueling, spying, and jamming missions instead, with its planes on “standby” if needed.

Donley’s best estimate, given to reporters at a breakfast meeting on Tuesday, was that the war has cost the Air Force about $75 million so far, with expenses running to $4 million a day. That was the bill when 89 U.S. planes were directly or indirectly involved in the combat mission. Now he expects it to drop, but to what, he didn’t say.

By contrast, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress last week that without a U.S. combat role in the Libya war, he expects the bill to run to $40 million per month. That doesn’t exactly match the Air Force’s tally. By Donley’s figures, if the Air Force slashed its costs for the war in half, it would still exceed Gates’ totals — and that’s not counting the Navy’s contribution.

None of this confusion should come as a surprise. The Libya war was launched on the fly and its goals are uncertain. No wonder the war bill is written with an Etch-a-Sketch.

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Mace and Vomit: The Latest in Anti-Pirate Tech

There’s no shortage of ideas on how technology can solve the Somali piracy problem.

Folks have called for zapping pirates with lasers, pounding their eardrums with sonic blasters and spotting them in advance with mini-drones.

Now two companies are offering new solutions to keep pirates at bay: blinding them with pepper spray and incapacitating them by making them hurl.

The maritime security company Shipboard Defense Systems has partnered with the makers of Mace to offer an industrial strength version of the hand-held pepper spray can for merchant vessels. The system, Rainstorm, gives boarding pirates a pressured shower of up to 300 gallons worth of tingly, piquant Mace. The chemical’s effects last for about 45 minutes and include “paralysis of the larynx,” “intense eye irritation” and an “acute burning sensation,” among others.

Another company, Maritime Security Company, LLC, is selling a somewhat similar product as part of a package of anti-pirate defenses. Maritime Security’s Triton Shield system offers ships an increasingly aggressive range of products and services beginning with a network of security cameras.

In the event pirates are able to get close enough to try and board, Triton offers a high-pressure hose system to push them off and an unnamed chemical that, when sprayed onto pirates, makes the vomit. (Triton also provides armed guards and a safe room in the event its other measures fail.)

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Libyan Rebel: Destroy Gadhafi’s Army for Us!

The U.S. may be trying to dial back its involvement in the war against Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Ali Aujali, the rebels’ representative in Washington, would like America to crank it way, way up. He tells Danger Room that NATO airstrikes need to “destroy” the remaining loyalist army, which has inflicted nearly a week of damaging military setbacks on the rebels.

“Gadhafi’s forces have to be destroyed, of course,” Aujali says, following a talk at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington closely tied to the Obama administration. “Anybody who is standing by this regime has to be destroyed, of course. They are killing the Libyan people. And the international community has the right to stand by the Libyan people.”

That’s further than U.S. commanders went when they were in command of the war, now in its third week and under the command of NATO. Gen. Carter Ham, the chief of U.S. Africa Command, pointedly told Pentagon reporters two weeks ago that “there is no intent to completely destroy the Libyan military forces.”
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Darpa: We Have Conflicts of Interest All the Time

The director of the Pentagon’s premiere research arm has hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in one of her agency’s contractors — and an outstanding IOU with the firm for hundreds of thousands more. But according to her deputy, it’s no cause for concern. In fact, the financial ties are the price Darpa pays for excellence.

As Danger Room has been reporting, Darpa Director Regina Dugan is owed $250,000 by her family firm, the explosives-detection company RedXDefense, which has won $1.7 million worth of contracts with the agency since Dugan took over July 2009. Darpa says the relationship is on the up and up because Dugan has recused herself from any business dealings with RedXDefense.

That doesn’t satisfy government ethics watchdogs, who wonder how Darpa program managers can reasonably be expected to reject the boss’ old company.

Dugan’s deputy, Kaigham “Ken” Gabriel, provides an unlikely exculpation for the conflict of interest: A ton of people at Darpa have one. “Honestly, this is something that is prevalent,” Gabriel (pictured) tells the Los Angeles Times. “We just know how to deal with it. It’s not that big of a deal, frankly.”

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Epic Border Battle a Bad Sign for Afghanistan


MARGAH, Afghanistan — Brett Capstick was in bed when it happened. The 22-year-old Army specialist from Ohio awoke to the sound of “screaming, explosions,” he says. It was around 1:20 in the morning on Oct. 30 at a tiny American outpost in Margah, a dusty border town in eastern Paktika province.

Capstick’s unit — Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry — had been in plenty of firefights and rocket attacks since arriving at Combat Outpost Margah in August. But as he reached the roof of the outpost’s main building, Capstick realized that this … well, this was different.

The rainy, overcast night was alive with tracers and explosions. The noise was apocalyptic. The battle raging on all sides of the soccer-field-size outpost and its adjacent hilltop observation post was “all-out,” Capstick says six months later. He’s sitting in one of the mouse-infested, concrete-and-plywood buildings where two platoons of infantry hunker between exhausting, hours-long foot patrols.

That night, Capstick and his teammates manned two separate mortars while other soldiers fired rifles, machine guns and anti-tank missiles to beat back hundreds of insurgents attacking from all sides. Artillery at a nearby U.S. base added its firepower to the melee, as did Air Force jet fighters and Army Apache helicopters. When the sun rose and the dust settled, 92 insurgents lay dead around the outpost, according to Army figures. Five Americans were wounded, but none was killed.

Capstick estimates he personally fired up to 16 mortar rounds. Spec. Matt Barnes, firing his M-4 rifle from one the outposts guard towers, says he burned through at least 300 rounds. To keep Fox Company fighting through the night and following day, Blackhawk helicopters swooped into the outpost’s gravel landing zone hauling body bags filled with ammo and a fresh M-2 machine gun.

It was the one of the biggest localized fights of the 10-year-old Afghanistan war — and one of the most lopsided battlefield victories for American forces. But the nearly 12-hour Battle of Margah barely registered in the news cycle back in America.

All the same, a half-year later Margah remains an important object lesson for the U.S. military and NATO, and for politicians betting on improving security to allow them to withdraw troops from Afghanistan starting this summer.

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‘Paranoia Meter’ Is HBGary’s Plot to Find the Pentagon’s Next WikiLeaker


Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that HBGary won’t create a rootkit to record your keystrokes, read your e-mail and track where you move your mouse.

Most (in)famous for proposing a wide-ranging plan to discredit the defenders of WikiLeaks, the security company HBGary Federal recently pitched the Pentagon’s premiere research branch on a Paranoia Meter to hunt down the next Bradley Manning.

The proposal was valuable enough to the company that CEO Aaron Barr wrote it himself. Barr resigned in the wake of the firm’s WikiLeaks scandal.

Last August, as Danger Room reported, blue-sky research firm Darpa asked software engineers to design a system to sift through Defense Department e-mail, web and network usage for “anomalous missions” indicating that a user might intend to siphon sensitive information to unauthorized entities. The program is called CINDER, short for the Cyber Insider Threat Program. It’s managed by legendary hacker Peiter “Mudge” Zatko.

Months before HBGary became synonymous with an attack against WikiLeaks and its posse, Barr offered Darpa a way to make CINDER a reality, potentially taking down the next big U.S. government secret-leaker. Continue Reading “‘Paranoia Meter’ Is HBGary’s Plot to Find the Pentagon’s Next WikiLeaker” »

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Most Dangerous Week Ever


We’re taking the next space plane home, but before we go: this week, right? Navy lasers of the future. al-Qaida messaging on the Mideast revolutions. The downsides of night vision. A relentless amount of unclear, transitioning, possibly-peacekeeping-filled, hope-as-a-strategy war. The spore-laden fallout of the nation’s most nightmarish bioterror event. And then there’s the questionable financial doings of Darpa’s director, whose family firm — and agency contractor — owes her quite a bit of money. We’ll leave you with that one while we board and prep for our voyage to the beyond.

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Dot-Mil Cyber Security Spending: Now Extra FUBAR


In February, when the military released its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, the Air Force said it planned to spend $4.6 billion on cyber security. Which was a little bit odd, since the Pentagon said it only planned to spend $2.3 billion for the entire Defense Department — the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, everyone.

And so begins a look by Nextgov into the migraine-inducing, Borges-esque world of dot-mil defense spending. The Air Force asking for twice the money as the armed forces overall? Just one of the many head-scratchers uncovered in the Pentagon’s network defense ledgers. At this point, the services can’t even agree on what’s “cyber security,” what’s plain ol’ IT infrastructure, and what’s… something else. (Thus the giant discrepancy between the Air Force’s figures and the Pentagon’s.)

“When people can’t even agree about the most basic terminology, you know there is going to be a lot of confusion,” quips one Brookings Institution non-resident fellow. “The chances there aren’t billions of dollars in redundancies are slim to none, and slim is out of town.”

Speaking of bureaucracy and confusion: How are we all feeling about this org chart for U.S. Cyber Command, above?

Illo: CYBERCOM, via @jimmysky and Crucialpointllc.com.
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Libyan Rebels Want to Trade Oil for Guns


Conspiracy theorists, you probably called this one. The rebels in Benghazi say they’ve reached a deal to send oil abroad in exchange for guns to keep their revolution going. Only it looks like an act of desperation.

The rebels’ de facto finance minister, Ali Tarhouni, tells the Associated Press that Qatar will buy oil “currently in storage” in southeastern areas of the country that the rebels hold. What will they buy with the Gulf state’s cash? “Any kind of arms that we can get to,” Tarhouni tells the wire. “We have a list of the arms we need and we’re trying some different fronts to buy them.”

That’s a relief for Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who urged lawmakers that “someone else” needs to train and arm the rebels — anyone but U.S. troops. But practically everything about the deal makes it seem improbable.

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