‘Smears’ Turn Milbloggers on Their Frontline Hero

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To military bloggers and conservative hawks, Michael Yon was a super hero — a fearless Green-Beret-turned-citizen-journalist who spent years on the frontlines of Iraq and Afghanistan when most big media outlets kept their reporters at home. But now, those same military bloggers are turning their sights on Yon, after he began savaging America’s top general in Afghanistan and warning that the American war effort is all but doomed.

There was a time when Yon lauded U.S. commanders, and military bloggers celebrated Yon. Now Yon, reporting solo from Afghanistan, tells Danger Room that he’s the victim of a “smear campaign” orchestrated by Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s closest advisers. And milbloggers are reluctantly telling their former star to knock it off.  “He has called his own competence into question,” writes Jim Hanson at the popular Blackfive.net blog.

Online writers have been sniping at one another since the Internet’s Cretaceous era. But this “is not just another dumb blogosphere flap,” writes blogger and Boston Herald editor Jules Crittenden. It “apparently involves some serious issues potentially compromising a vital asset for anyone trying to understand these wars of ours.”

The troubled started earlier this month, when the military ended Yon’s embed with the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province after three months. That’s weeks — months — longer than most reporters are permitted (or want, or are able) to hole up with a single unit.

But to Yon, it was still a betrayal. The 5-2’s commander agreed to let Yon stay until the brigade went home. The shorter embed was to him a sign that “McChrystal himself thinks we are losing the war.”

“Today, I do not trust McChrystal any more than some people trust the New York Times, Obama or Bush,” Yon added. “McChrystal is a great killer, but this war is above his head. He must be watched.”

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Obama Revives Rumsfeld’s Missile Scheme, Risks Nuke War

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The Obama administration is poised to take up one of the more dangerous and hare-brained schemes of the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon. The New York Times is reporting that the Defense Department is once again looking to equip intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. The missiles could then, in theory, destroy fleeing targets a half a world away — a no-notice “bolt from the blue,” striking in a matter of hours. There’s just one teeny-tiny problem: the launches could very well start World War III.

Over and over again, the Bush administration tried to push the idea of these conventional ICBMs. Over and over again, Congress refused to provide the funds for it. The reason was pretty simple: those anti-terror missiles look and fly exactly like the nuclear missiles we’d launch at Russia or China, in the event of Armageddon. “For many minutes during their flight patterns, these missiles might appear to be headed towards targets in these nations,” a congressional study notes. That could have world-changing consequences. “The launch of such a missile,” then-Russian president Vladimir Putin said in a state of the nation address after the announcement of the Bush-era plan, “could provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces.”

The Pentagon mumbled all kinds of assurances that Beijing or Moscow would never, ever, never misinterpret one kind of ICBM for the other. But the core of their argument essentially came down to this: Trust us, Vlad Putin! That ballistic missile we just launched in your direction isn’t nuclear. We swear!

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld couldn’t even muster that coherent of a defense.

“Everyone in the world would know that [the missile] was conventional,” he said in a press conference, “after it hit within 30 minutes.”

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Air Force Launches Secretive Space Plane; ‘We Don’t Know When It’s Coming Back’

Atlas AV-012 OTV LaunchThe Air Force launched a secretive space plane into orbit Thursday night from Cape Canaveral, Florida. And they’re not sure when it’s returning to Earth.

Perched atop an Atlas V rocket, the Air Force’s unmanned and reusable X-37B made its first flight after a decade in development shrouded in mystery; most of the mission goals remain unknown to the public.

The Air Force has fended off statements calling the X-37B a space weapon, or a space-based drone to be used for spying or delivering weapons from orbit. In a conference call with reporters, deputy undersecretary for the Air Force for space programs Gary Payton acknowledged much of the current mission is classified. But perhaps the most intriguing answer came when he was asked by a reporter wanting to cover the landing as to when the X-37B would be making its way back to the planet.

“In all honesty, we don’t know when it’s coming back for sure,” Payton said.

Payton went on to say that the timing depends on how the experiments and testing progress during the flight. Though he declined to elaborate on the details. The vague answer did little to quell questions about the ultimate purpose of the X-37B test program.

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Navy Converts Biofuel Into Noise to Celebrate Earth Day

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It’s starting to feel like hardly a week goes by without getting a press release regarding a jet flying on a new biofuel somewhere in the world. The Navy and Boeing did manage to time this latest move well by flying an unmodified F/A-18  Super Hornet on Earth Day with a 50/50 blend of camelina sourced biofuel and traditional JP-5 fuel powering the jet.

The Navy is calling the airplane the “Green Hornet” and today’s test flight out of Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland was the first of 15 planned test flights that will last through the middle of June. The Green Hornet program will test the biofuel blend throughout the operational flight envelope for the F/A-18 Super Hornet. This will include the first supersonic test flights using biofuel. In March, the Air Force flew an A-10 Warthog at Eglin Air Force Base using a similar blend of Camelina based biofuel and traditional jet fuel.

During the Hornet’s 45 minute flight, the aircraft flew as expected with no surprises, according to the pilot. Once the flight test program is complete, the Navy hopes to certify the F/A-18 E and F models to use the blended biofuels throughout the fleet.

Last year, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced plans to have an operational strike group burning biofuel for local operations by 2012 and could be fully operational by 2016. If that actually happens, then we’ll really know that the military is going green. Until then, these demonstrations are nice, but not exactly packed with meaning.

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The Future of American Combat Aviation: FUBAR?

The future of American combat aviation is wrapped up in a single jet, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. And right now, that future is looking pretty damn cloudy, with skyrocketing costs, missed deadlines, and slowed production rates.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairmen Admiral Mike Mullen tells Danger Room he’s “concerned about the increasing costs of the F-35. We’ve got to bound that. That’s one of the reason we’ve got a new program executive officer and a tremendous amount of focus. We think we’ve got much better cost estimates now. What we have to do is contain ourselves within those estimates — and not have the program skyrocket in terms of cost. [If] the unit price keeps going up. And we’ll be in a position where we’ll buy many fewer that we planned.”

If you’re not familiar with the F-35 saga — and even if you are — this primer segment from PBS’ News Hour is worth watching. Plus, you get to see Danger Room pal Bill Sweetman’s snazzy new glasses.

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Question for Afghanistan Vets: Non-Lethal Weapons?

A quick question for anyone who recently been in Afghanistan — or is still over there. Have you seen any non-lethal weapons or “escalation of force” kits used at checkpoints? I’m talking anything from laser dazzlers to vehicle-stopping nets to simple caltrops and loudspeakers. Drop me a line either way.

Crystal-Covered Protester Arrested After Nuclear Break-In

538544_1Ordinarily, James Richard Sauder spends his time writing books like Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide? and Kundalini Tales, “which deals with paranormal and mind control themes.” But earlier this month, Sauder took a break from his investigations to scale the fence of a nuclear missile silo.

“We need cooperative, mutually beneficial economic arrangements, and harmonious relations between peoples and nations on this planet. As a symbol in that regard, I have left a skein of multi-colored Red Heart yarn at the missile silo to signify that here the thread of a new, world-wide narrative begins. It is a new global narrative with heart,” he wrote just before his arrest at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota for federal criminal trespass.

“I leave here as a ceremonial gift a pouch of Virginia tobacco, symbolic of the matrimonial union of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, their marriage itself being a symbol of the union of the European and Native peoples and cultures on this continent,” he continued. “Many other large crystals adorn my headdress – from Arkansas, New York, Tibet and Brazil. The crystals represent the living Earth. The feathers in my headdress are from the Rio Grande species of the North American wild turkey. Benjamin Franklin felt that the American wild turkey should be the national bird. I agree! For me the wild turkey exemplifies the natural spirit of this continent.”

It will shock you to learn that Sauder’s manifesto also touches on the “inside job” of 9/11, the death of the American dollar, and “DNA data bases.”

Still, when it comes to loony symbolic protests, Sauder is still running a distant second. A few years back, a retired Catholic priest and two veterans put on clown suits, busted into a nuclear missile launch facility, and began beating the silo cover with hammers, in an attempt to take the Minuteman III missile off-line. No crystal-festooned headdress can top that.

[Photo: Keyhole Publishing; direct hit: JS]

Can Algorithms Find the Best Intelligence Analysts?

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The U.S intelligence community has a long history of blowing big calls — the fall of the Berlin Wall, Saddam’s WMD, 9/11. But in each collective fail, there were individual analysts who got it right. Now, the spy agencies want a better way to sort the accurate from the unsound, by applying principles of mathematics to weigh and rank the input of different experts.

Iarpa, the intelligence community’s way-out research arm, will host a one-day workshop on a new program, called Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE). The initiative follows Iarpa’s recent announcement of plans to create a computational model that can enhance human hypotheses and predictions, by catching inevitable biases and accounting for selective memory and stress.

ACE won’t replace flesh-and-blood experts — it’ll just let ‘em know what they’re worth. The intelligence community often relies on small teams of experts to evaluate situations, and then make forecasts and recommendations. But a team is only as strong as its weakest link, and Iarpa wants to fortify team-based outputs, by using mathematical aggregation to “elicit, weigh, and combine the judgments of many intelligence analysts.”

The system Iarpa’s after should be able to collect and evaluate expert opinion based on each expert’s specific expertise, learning style, prior performance and “other attributes predictive of accuracy.” It’ll then parse out the different predictions offered by analysts, and assign them degrees of probability based on where a particular expert sits in the rankings.

If Iarpa is able to master the mathematical art of aggregated probability, the agency’s program would likely be in hot demand. Using probabilistic expert aggregation to make decisions has been toyed with in circles as diverse as big business, climatology and even criminal court. But until Iarpa’s also mastered their plan to nip biases and memory lapses, they’ll still be forced to contend with the inevitability of human imperfection. Notes risk communications expert Professor Morgan Granger in a decades-old paper, “One can only proceed with care, simultaneously remembering that elicited expert judgments may be seriously flawed, but are often the only game in town.”

[Photo: Wikimedia.org]

Top Officer Fears Cyberwar, Hearts Karzai, Tweets With Help

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ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Maryland — America’s top military officer believes there’s a cyberwar already in progress. He believes that the Defense Department’s controversial new Cyber Command should become the “engine” of our national network security — not just the builder of better Pentagon firewalls. He believes it’s time to end Afghanistan’s drug war. He believes in the battered presidency of Hamid Karzai; “there is no plan B” in Afghanistan, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen tells Danger Room. And he believes in tweeting for himself (well, with a little help from his staff).

Those are just some of the surprising answers the Mullen provided in a wide-ranging interview with Danger Room, as we flew from Morgantown, West Virginia to Washington.

Danger Room: I’ve been following the creation of the military’s new Cyber Command for — ugh — almost three years now. And I still can’t figure out what the heck it’s really supposed to do: protect military networks, logic bomb other countries, handle civilian cybersecurity, or all of the above. Help?

Michael Mullen: It is focused most centrally on having a command that spends its time addressing a very, very significant challenge of our day: the whole cyberwar. It’s become such a large-scale concern that the Secretary of Defense and the President and others, including myself, thought it absolutely critical to stand up a command that devotes itself full-time to this challenge. [New White House network security czar Howard Schmidt, on the other hand, says "there is no cyberwar" -- ed.] I think initially, principally, it’ll be focused on defending. But there’s a blurring, if you will, in the speed of cyber between defense and offense. And so I think you’ll see that, as well.

But more than anything else, I believe Cyber Command will be the engine for us as a country to look a how we meet this challenge. [Others have described Cyber Command as focused almost exclusively on securing .mil domains -- ed.] And all of us — the senior leadership, the senior military leadership — recognize the growing threat that’s out there. And that’s why we think this new command is so critical to set up.

Danger Room: That new command is based at Ft. Meade, Maryland, the headquarters of the National Security Agency. It’s headed up by the NSA’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander. So how can Americans feel comfortable about what seems like the arm of an intelligence agency becoming the “engine” of our network defense?

Mullen: There’s no better agency or commander — there’s no better commander, there’s nobody who understands this better than Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander …

I understand the concern. I can only say that this command is stood up in full disclosure of everything that we’re doing. And it is focused on a threat that’s very real. We’re being attacked today, from other countries. I’m confident that both in its stand-up and in its oversight that we’ll be able to execute the mission successfully and keeping in mind those concerns you expressed in your question. Not just keeping in mind, but regarding them, paying an awful lot of attention, making sure we’re fully complying.

Danger Room: I’m almost as confused about Afghanistan as I am about Cyber Command. In a recent speech, you talked about wartime victories being “iterative.” So what would the next one or two iterations looks like over there? Because I have a hard time imagining what they might be.

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Five for Fighting 4/21/10

* Army: arm our small drone

* Gates: make sense of military exports

* “Space Station lightsaber-sparring hoverdroids to be upgraded”

* Internet security’s privacy impact? Classified, CYBERCOM says.

* Al Qaeda leader is dead. Does that mean he was real?