The victors in battles are those who create, modify and deploy ideas faster and more nimbly than opponents. Regrettably, limiting the U.S. military’s access to ideas risks failure.

For years, the U.S. military has been losing an asymmetric battle that involves not improvised explosive devices, bullets or al-Qaida, but instead swarms of defense industry contractors seizing control of taxpayer-funded ideas because government policy and regulations were engineered to buy iron and steel, not to deploy a software-based military.

Much like the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rapid and continual evolution of technology demands that the military accelerate just as rapidly, and the only way is to manage the ideas it has funded.

A common theme since 9/11 is that the U.S. government lacks imagination. We have not misplaced our imagination; we are simply unable to deploy new ideas as effectively or as quickly as we could. This loss of agility stands in stark contrast to private industry, foreign governments and nonstate actors, who are adopting and deploying software technologies once exclusively in the military domain.

For instance, China deploys advanced electronic warfare technologies, Iran builds unmanned aircraft, al-Qaida evolves explosive devices, and private companies like FedEx and eTrade create complex, redundant and failsafe command-and-control systems.

Software is the fabric that enables planning, weapons and logistics systems to function. It might be the only infinitely renewable military resource. New software builds on the raw material of previous software, evolving capabilities. Software is pervasive, from ground sensors to satellites; it is the final expression of a military idea transformed into human readable source code and deployed to a battlefield.

The Department of Defense spends tens of billions of dollars annually creating software that is rarely reused and difficult to adapt to new threats. Instead, much of this software is allowed to become the property of defense companies, resulting in DoD repeatedly funding the same solutions or, worse, repaying to use previously created software.

The lack of a coherent set of policies and regulations for the DoD’s intellectual property has eroded the U.S. military competitive advantage, leading to compromised missions and lost lives. Improvised explosive device countermeasure systems can’t be upgraded rapidly without replacing entire systems; personnel position systems can’t update in real time; billions are wasted on software radios that don’t interoperate.

The byzantine rules governing the military’s intellectual property portfolio use an antiquated rights structure where the contractor always retains copyright, and therefore effective monopoly, control over taxpayer-funded software ideas. By contrast, commercial industry ruthlessly exercises control over its own software ideas.

The U.S. government has legislated a belief that the defense industry will do right by the military. However, the defense industry will, understandably, do what is best for its shareholders: maximize profit.

Monopolies via copyright ultimately increase costs and decrease adaptability and agility in military software. Examples include the General Atomics Predator and the recently canceled Future Combat Systems, where only one company can control these platforms and manipulate the software. Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify or upgrade that rifle. This is where the military finds itself: one contractor with a monopoly on the knowledge of a military software system.

A first step would be to require all taxpayer-funded software ideas to be licensed with an open source software copyright. An open source license would define the rights, roles and responsibilities for the military and defense industry and simplify how military software ideas can be shared. To keep the U.S. military ahead of its adversaries, the DoD and defense industry must end this dysfunctional partnership of nonsharing.

Defining a modern software intellectual property regime would broaden the defense industrial base by enabling industry access to defense knowledge, thereby increasing competition and eventually lowering costs. Over time, DoD would evolve common software architectures and industrywide baselines to increase the adaptability, agility and – most important – capacity to meet new dynamic threats.

As Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at the Eisenhower Library, “The gusher has been turned off and will stay off for a good period of time.”

The Department of Defense must develop a rights regime that explicitly deals with taxpayer-funded software ideas to increase returns on software investments.

The software idea chain is a future weapon; we can either plan for it now or be on the receiving end of it later.

[Via: DefenseNews]

A whistle-blower website has published what it says are more than 90,000 United States military and diplomatic reports about Afghanistan filed between 2004 and January of this year.

Corporal gets flack during battle in war in Afghanistan

The first-hand accounts are the military’s own raw data on the war, including numbers killed, casualties, threat reports and the like, according to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.org, which published the material Sunday.

“It is the total history of the Afghan war from 2004 to 2010, with some important exceptions — U.S. Special Forces, CIA activity and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups,” Assange said.

CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents. The Department of Defense will not comment on them until the Pentagon has had a chance to look at them, a Defense official told CNN.

Assange declined to tell CNN where he got the documents. He claims the documents reveal the “squalor” of war, uncovering how many relatively small incidents have added up to huge numbers of dead civilians.

Just In blog: What is WikiLeaks?

The significance lies in “all of these people being killed in the small events that we haven’t heard about that numerically eclipse the big casualty events. It’s the boy killed by a shell that missed a target,” he told CNN.

“What we haven’t seen previously is all those individual deaths,” he said. “We’ve seen just the number and like Stalin said, ‘One man’s death is a tragedy, a million dead is a statistic.’ So, we’ve seen the statistic.”

CNN iReport: Help crowdsource the documents

WikiLeaks publishes anonymously submitted documents, video and other sensitive materials after vetting them, it says. It claims never to have fallen for a forgery.

It has made headlines for posting controversial videos of combat in Iraq.

The site gained international attention in April when it posted a 2007 video said to show a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq killing a dozen civilians, including two unarmed Reuters journalists.

At the time, Maj. Shawn Turner, a U.S. military spokesman, said that “all evidence available supported the conclusion by those forces that they were engaging armed insurgents and not civilians.”

Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, suspected of leaking a classified 2007 video, has been charged by the U.S. military with eight violations of the U.S. Criminal Code for transferring classified data, according to a charge sheet released by the military earlier this month.

Attempts to reach Manning’s military defense attorney, Capt. Paul Bouchard, were unsuccessful Sunday. However, U.S. Army spokesman Col. Tom Collins has said Bouchard would not speak to the media about the charges.

Assange says WikiLeaks has attempted to put together a legal team to defend Manning, something it will do for any “alleged” whistle-blower that runs into legal trouble because of WikiLeaks.

Assange, a former teen hacker who launched the site in 2007, denies that WikiLeaks has put troops in danger.

“There certainly have been people who have lost elections as a result of material being on WikiLeaks,” he said.

“There have been prosecutions because of material being on WikiLeaks. There have been legislative reforms because of material being on WikiLeaks,” he said. “What has not happened is anyone being physically harmed as a result.”

The website held back about 15,000 documents from Afghanistan to protect individuals who informed on the Taliban, he said.

But he said he hoped his website would be “very dangerous” to “people who want to conduct wars in an abusive way.”

“This material doesn’t just reveal occasional abuse by the U.S. military,” he said. “Of course it has U.S. military reporting on all sort of abuses by the Taliban. … So it does describe the abuses by both sides in this war and that’s how people can understand what’s really going on and if they choose to support it or not.”

Assange said the organization gets material from whistle-blowers in a variety of ways — including postal mail. He said WikiLeaks vets it, releases it to the public and then defends itself against “the regular political or legal attack.”

He said the organization rarely knows the identity of the source of the leak. “If we find out at some stage, we destroy that information as soon as possible,” he said.

[Via: CNN]

The Pentagon said on Wednesday it may be forced to take extreme measures — like not paying salaries — if the Democratic-led Congress fails to pass a $37 billion defense spending bill before lawmakers begin an August recess.

A senior Democratic aide said lawmakers would find a way to get it done. “We will pass it this work period. We have to,” the aide said.

Tensions are growing in the Pentagon about the fate of the bill, which has languished in Congress despite repeated pleas for action by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who needs to fund a 30,000-troop surge for the Afghan war.

The White House has added to the drama, threatening to veto the bill over $800 million in education spending cuts that were added by the House of Representatives.

“While we hope and expect the Congress will get this done, we also are obligated now to begin seriously planning for the possibility that they don’t,” Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters.

He noted that “absent more drastic action” certain Army and Marine Corps spending accounts would run dry in August.

The Defense Department would do everything in its power, Morrell said, to continue to protect the United States and support troops “deployed in harm’s way.”

“It may involve asking a lot of hard-working people in this department to report to duty without an ability to pay them or other extreme measures we would rather avoid,” he said. “But we will get the job done, including in Iraq and Afghanistan and where else we operate around the world.”

Gates raised his concerns with Republicans at closed-door talks on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and afterward Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “this is a true emergency.”

“Secretary Gates is not involved in the politics of the add-ons, but he wants the funding for the troops. And he told us clearly today that it has to be done by the end of this month or he will not be able to pay the troops,” McConnell said.

Source: Reuters

A revolutionary pair of men’s briefs are not just comfortable to wear but may also save lives as well.
An electronic biosensor is printed on the waistband and measures blood pressure, heart rate and other vital signs through constant contact with the skin.

The technology was developed by nano-engineering Professor Joseph Wang of University of California San Diego.

He said stresses of everyday wear such as folding or stretching did not affect the performance of the sensor.

It is hoped the intelligent textiles will allow patients to be monitored at home rather than at hospital, cutting medical costs.

The method, outlined in The Royal Society of Chemistry journal, is similar to conventional screen-printing although the ink contains carbon electrodes.

The project is being funded by the U.S. military will first benefit American soldiers.

Professor Wang said: ‘This specific project involves monitoring the injury of soldiers during battlefield surgery and the goal is to develop minimally invasive sensors that can locate, in the field, and identify the type of injury.’

Ultimately, the biosensor that detects an injury will also be able to direct the release of drugs to relieve pain and even treat the wound. But the technology’s range of application goes beyond the military.

‘We envision all the trend of personalised medicine for remote monitoring of the elderly at home, monitoring a wide range of biomedical markers, like cardiac markers, alerting for any potential stroke, diabetic changes and other changes related to other biomedical scenario,’ Professor Wang said.

Wearable biosensors can also provide valuable information to athletes or even measure blood alcohol levels.

But Professor Wang said it could be some time before these smart underpants are worn by soldiers in the field as more work is needed to ensure the monitoring systems are robust and durable enough to cope with daily activity.

Despite this he concluded clothing-integrated sensors hold ‘considerable promise for future healthcare.’

After more than a century of popular sci-fi fantasies that feature deadly energy weapons, including War of the Worlds, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Star Trek and Star Wars, it looks like the ray gun has finally arrived in the real world.

ARMY CONCEPT FIELD LASER: The U.S. Army hopes to better protect our troops by fielding in the next few years a mobile, ground-based laser weapon that can zap out of the sky multiple incoming rockets, missiles, or mortars. Live-fire tests of the compact, 100-kilowatt-class, solid-state laser technologys capabilities for precision targeting and area defense missions are to begin by the end of this year.

And even if the first ray guns out of the lab can barely fit on the bed of a 30-ton off-road truck rather than in a soldier’s palm, the novel, “speed-of-light” capabilities that lasers could bring to the battlefield has drawn the keen interest of the Pentagon brass, which spends about $400 million a year on directed-energy beam weapons.

At the end of this year, which marks a half-century of amazing progress in lasers, defense contractors Northrop Grumman and Boeing plan to test-fire a prototype mobile laser weapon against examples of the lethal ordnance—rockets, artillery, mortars—that insurgents in Afghanistan and elsewhere shoot at U.S. troops every day, says Mark Neice, director of the Department of Defense’s High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office in Albuquerque, N.M. As long as such an area-defense system is fed electrical power (from the grid or battery packs), its 100-kilowatt, solid-state, or electric, laser should be able to use its “unlimited magazine” of low-cost shots and ultra-precision tracking/targeting system to zap out of the air multiple inbound munitions from several kilometers away, he explains.

Weapons engineers will use the live-fire tests of the one-micron-wavelength (infrared) beam, which will take place at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, “to validate our notional models of beam propagation,” Neice says. These results, “will allow us to determine what targets we can take on, at what power levels, what ranges and so forth.” The U.S. Army hopes that laser cannons can shield its bases from insurgent attacks while minimizing the risk of collateral damage to the civilian populations among which guerrillas often hide. A cannon’s powerful beam will be able reach out to incoming weaponry, and either detonate, disable or knock them off-course, whereas its ultra-precision aiming capability would presumably enable troops to pick off ground targets without hitting nearby non-combatants.

The U.S. Air Force has in the meantime taken the lead in a project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop even more powerful and compact solid-state lasers that could fit on combat aircraft. Such systems could provide the nation’s air arm with what Michael W. Zmuda, manager of the Air Force Research Lab’s Electric Laser on Large Aircraft (ELLA) program, calls the “game-changing capability” to carry out beyond-the-horizon, air-to-air engagements and precisely targeted, air-to-ground strikes. “It would open up a raft of new tactical and defensive roles, such as defeating targets that are close to our own troops while avoiding collateral damage to civilians and property, as well as a range [of] rapid-response missions against a whole new set of targets,” he says.
… Continue Reading