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Most Dangerous Week Ever

We may have ended Friday with real-life superheroes. But all week, this site read like a comic book come to life.

We kicked off Monday on a supervillian note, with Darpa’s plan for on demand robotic death-from-above. Then we quickly transitioned into Mike Tanji’s instruction manual on hacking the power grid (if you’re a big military) and Kim Jong-il’s underground airfields. Skull Island was booked, apparently.

But the heroes had tricks of their own: super-strength suits, mind-controlled artificial arms, robotic rescue copters, red balloon hunters, and “subterranean threat” sensors. (Which might prove pretty helpful, I’m guessing, for checking out Kim’s below-ground bases.)

There was also a strong spy-thriller vibe to Danger Room this week. When he wasn’t reporting on the Kafka-esque story of the journalists banned from Gitmo for reporting stuff you can find on Google, Spencer tracked the odder-than-odd case of Shahram Amiri, the AWOL Iranian scientist. Depending on who you believe, the guy was either a simple scholar or a key player in Tehran’s nuclear program; a CIA abductee or a long-time American intelligence asset; an anxious, scraggly YouTube-loving whiner, or the relaxed, well-dressed star of a professional video. Or maybe he was all of the above.

The policy wonk section of the bookstores was filled, too. We covered the risks and rewards of local militias in Afghanistan, the future of the American nuclear stockpile, the right way to keep the U.S. Air Force from dropping out of the sky.

Finally, there was the Army’s attempt at graphic novels. 2001’s “Dignity and Respect” taught soldiers how to snitch on gay G.I.s in just a few easy panels. Frankly, I like Danger Room’s comics a lot better.

And speaking of heroes: R.I.P., Sugar Minott.

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Real Life Superheroes Gear Up With Ninja Throwing Stars, Ax Handles, ‘Stun Knuckles’

Mark Millar and John Romita Jr. asked a simple question in their 2008 comic book (and 2010 movie) Kick-Ass: Why don’t fanboys actually suit up and try their hand at being superheroes? As it turns out, a bunch of fanboys are in fact suiting up. Hundreds of them. Face front, true believer.

Cosplay is nothing new. Its variant, Real Life Superheroes, are somewhat next-level. Check out TheRLSH.net, a message board where aspiring supes — costumed adventurers who describe themselves as doing “humanitarian work” or otherwise generically helping those in distress — can discuss tradecraft, assemble into makeshift Avengers and escalate misunderstandings into internet brawls ahead of the inevitable team-up.

Seriously. On this thread, for instance, a crimefighter called the Dark Ghost rallied his fellow champions of the innocent to find a seven-month old baby kidnapped in Tennessee. Amazonia, the Minuteman, Gadgetastic and the Sparrow pledged support. (As it turned out, the vigilante community didn’t need to get involved, as law enforcement found young Drake Boyd’s abductor in Florida.)

Now, obviously these dudes don’t have superpowers. But come on — neither does Batman. So like Batman, what they lack in meta-human ability, they make up for in weaponry.

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Nation’s Spies, Contractors Brace For Post Expose

BERJAYAThat acrid scent in your nostrils? It’s the intelligence community’s hair on fire. No, not from an imminent terrorist attack, but from an imminent series on the community’s expansive use of contractors since 9/11, courtesy of the Washington Post and PBS’ Frontline.

We haven’t read the series, set to drop starting Monday. But John Noonan of the Weekly Standard tweeted at us with a memo that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sent to its contractor partners, warning that reporter Dana Priest will probably publish “a compendium of government agencies and contractors allegedly conducting Top Secret work.” Whoa.

If reporters call trying to follow up what Priest reports, the memo warns, contractors need to shut their mouths. “Employees should be reminded that they must neither confirm nor deny information contained in this, or any, media publication, and that the publication of this website does not constitute a change in any current ODNI classifications,” the memo states. “They should also be reminded that if approached and asked to discuss their work by media or unauthorized people, they should report the interactions to their appropriate security officer.”

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CIA Acts Like Clingy Ex After Iranian Nuke Scientist Splits


If there’s one thing that’s become uncomfortably clear since Shahram Amiri dramatically sought a return to his native Iran, it’s that that his CIA handlers/kidnappers/captors aren’t emotionally prepared to let the Iranian nuclear scientist (or mere scholar?) leave in peace.

Read through this New York Times piece, the latest recitation of the agency’s account of its relationship with Amiri. Following on the dramatic stories it gave to the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal this week, it entrenches an emerging pattern. From the agency’s telling, CIA ran Amiri as an agent for “years” inside Iran, yielding “significant, original” intelligence on Iran that contributed to a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. Interestingly, that much-criticized estimate found that Teheran had made significant technological progress on civilian nuclear capability but had put an effort to get a bomb on the shelf.

Only after the CIA-Amiri relationship matured did they take the next step: moving him to the U.S. by secretly spiriting him out of Saudi Arabia during a June 2009 pilgrimage to Mecca. They gave him a new life, new academic opportunities, and all the money he could ask for. But the mercurial Amiri got cold feet, anonymous officials insist, and then, boom: runaway nuke scientist. And — publicly at least — the Iranians act like they won their ex back at the end of the date movie.  Continue Reading “CIA Acts Like Clingy Ex After Iranian Nuke Scientist Splits” »

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Video: Army Tests ‘HULC’ Super-Strength Gear, No Gamma Rays Allowed


The Army is moving one small step closer to giving its troops super-strength, with a fresh round of biomechanical tests for Lockheed’s Human Universal Load Carrier exoskeleton. The trials, held at the Army’s Natick Soldier Systems Center, are supposed to gauge whether GIs can really move freely wearing the “HULC” system. It uses robotic leg braces to augment troops’ muscles, giving them the ability to carry loads of up to 200 pounds without tuckering out. If these tests work out, it could be on to field trials. (OK, OK. You can make your HULC joke now.)

In the promo video above, at least, the exoskeleton-clad soldier looks pretty agile — when he’s not staring off into the distance, assuming his best macho pose. He scampers up a mountain crag, hops from rock to rock, and trudges through sand. The maneuverability has long been the selling point of the system, originally designed at the University of California at Berkeley.

Unlike Darpa’s new robotic arm, the super-suit isn’t directly controlled by the user’s mind; instead, the exoskeleton senses the wearer’s movement, and augments it. Unlike its super-strength competitor from Raytheon, HULC doesn’t have arm attachments.

But Lockheed insists that the “un-tethered, battery powered, hydraulic-actuated anthropomorphic exoskeleton” helps the wearer perform “deep squats, crawls and upper-body lifting with minimal human exertion” by transferring weight down to the legs.

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Daily Pentagon Jackpot: 556 Contractors Edition

BERJAYA

Sometimes a contract doesn’t have to be awarded to win the Daily Pentagon Jackpot. It just has to take on sufficient scope and ambition to pique our interest. To wit: today the Navy and the Marine Corps announced that they’re allowing a whopping 556 contractors to bid on a whole mess of projects.

Today’s Winner: Why don’t you save us both some trouble and click through the link?

Score: Up to $5.3 billion.

For What?: “Research and development support; engineering system engineering and process engineering support; modeling, simulation, stimulation, and analysis support; prototyping, pre-production, model-making, and fabric support; system design documentation and technical data support; software engineering, development, programming, and network support; reliability, maintainability, and availability support; human factors, performance, and usability engineering support; system safety engineering support; configuration management support; quality assurance support; information system development, information assurance and information technology support; ship inactivation and disposal support; interoperability, test and evaluation, trials support; measurement facilities, range, and instrumentation support; acquisition logistics support; supply and provisioning support; training support; in-service engineering, fleet introduction, installation and checkout support; program support; functional and administrative support; and public affairs and multimedia support.” That’s it?

Wait, Seriously?: Yeah. These 579 deals to 556 different companies “are in addition to the existing 1,675 contracts previously awarded under the SeaPort Enhanced acquisition program.” It’s an online system that lets the Navy hold eBay-esque reverse auctions to buy services electronically from companies big and small. The program has already huge. Looks like it just got even huger.

Photo: U.S. Navy

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Human Trials Next for Darpa’s Mind-Controlled Artificial Arm

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Pentagon-backed scientists are getting ready to test thought-controlled prosthetic arms on human subjects, by rewiring their brains to fully integrate the artificial limbs.

Already in recent years, we’ve seen very lifelike artificial arms, monkeys nibbling bananas with mind-controlled robotic limbs and even humans whose muscle fibers have been wired to prosthetic devices. But this is the first time human brains will be opened up, implanted with a neural interface and then used to operate an artificial limb.

It’s a giant step that’ll transform the devices, which were little more than hooks and cables only 50 years ago. And the progress is courtesy of Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out R&D agency, who’ve been sponsoring brain-controlled replacement limbs as part of their Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program.

A team of scientists at Johns Hopkins, behind much of Darpa’s prosthetic progress thus far, have received a $34.5 million contract from the agency to manage the next stages of the project. Researchers will test the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) on a human. The test subject’s thoughts will control the arm, which “offers 22 degrees of motion, including independent movement of each finger,” provides feedback that essentially restores a sense of touch, and weighs around 9 pounds. That’s about the same weight as a human arm.
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Iran Nuke Scientist YouTube Vids Explained! (Sort Of!)

Before Shahram Amiri exchanged CIA custody/hospitality/captivity for his Teheran home, the central question we had about the missing Iranian nuclear scientist was: What was up with those YouTube videos of him? One showed him scraggly and complaining of being kidnapped; in the other, he was clean-shaven and discussing all the great educational opportunities here in the U.S. of A. Although the broader questions about this bizarre and confusing intelligence operation remain unsettled, anonymous American government officials have at least proffered an answer to the Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman about the Great YouTube Intelligence Mystery.

First things first: contrary to what we initially thought, the man in both YouTube videos is Amiri. Just because his story shifts up — in the first he’s been kidnapped by the CIA and the Saudis and in the second, he’s chilling at some American university — does not mean it’s not the same guy. At least not according to Gorman’s sources. Here’s how they explain it.

Amiri defects. (It’s not totally clear when, but he disappeared from Mecca in Saudi Arabia in June 2009.) But soon after arriving in the U.S., without his family, he starts hearing that the Iranian regime is threatening on his family. That’s why he records and releases the I-was-kidnapped YouTube video. Amiri’s blindsided CIA handlers, who are paying him $5 million for information about the Iranian nuclear program, don’t appreciate that. They arrange for him to make his relatively sedate second video. And that’s how it stands — until Amiri calls the whole arrangement off and goes back to Teheran.

Of course, that’s the CIA’s side of the story. It has the benefit of explaining how someone who’s been “kidnapped” could send out a viral SOS. But it’s also a tremendously self-serving explanation, dodging all of Amiri’s allegations of abduction and psychological abuse. Given that all sides in this drama have issued assertions about Amiri rather than provided evidence, it’s probably safest to mark this, intellectually speaking, As-Read. We’ll return to it when we find something more definitive.

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Lockheed Using Gravity to Spot ‘Subterranean Threats’

BERJAYAThe military could soon be hunting for terror threats using detailed maps of the planet’s subterranean territory — thanks to aerial vehicles that tap into the “anomalous gravity signature[s]” of structures built beneath the earth’s surface.

Lockheed Martin has received a $4.8 million, 12-month contract to create a prototype sensor that spots, categorizes and maps man-made facilities concealed underground. And does it all from the safety of the sky, embedded in a drone and linked to cameras that’d stream the data in real-time.

Pentagon blue sky R&D arm, Darpa, is behind this one. Last year, the agency’s Gravity Anomaly for Tunnel Exposure (GATE) program sought proposals for a system that used a gradiometer to measure miniscule variations in the pull of gravity. Those variations detect differences in the earth’s density, indicating underground space. And the sensors would even be attuned enough to “discriminate a man-made void from naturally-occurring features such as topography and geology,” according to Lockheed’s press release.

“Our expertise in gravity gradiometers will help increase the capability to detect and characterize subterranean tactical threats,” Lockheed’s Dr. James Archibald says. (I assume he’s talking about the guy dressed in black and illustrated above.) “This capability will help prevent both underground infiltration of secure perimeters and tactical underground operations, keeping our assets and troops protected.”

The final product should be able to “detect tunnels [and] offer a mapped outline of their pathways.”
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How To: Get a New Air Force, Without Going Broke

BERJAYA

Every time the Air Force sends a B-1B bomber on a mission over Afghanistan, it spends costs $720,000 in fuel, repair, and other costs. And when the plane comes back, it has to spend 48 hours being repaired for every hour it was in the air. All of which is double-crazy, because the bomber doesn’t really drop bombs over Afghanistan any more, thanks to the military’s airstrike restrictions. The B-1B just lingers over the country with a camera: a big Predator drone, at many, many times the price. “If the B-1 is not dropping its load of ordnance, we should withdraw it, and use unmanned systems instead,” Michael Wynne, former secretary of the Air Force, tells me. “They’re much cheaper.”

That’s one of a number of ideas I float in today’s Wall Street Journal about revamping the U.S. military’s creaky air fleet on the cheap. (The piece is — blech — subscriber-only. Sorry.) Other suggestions include scrapping the Marines’ version of the Joint Strike Fighter (to save the troubled stealth jet program), investing in new weapons (instead of new planes), designing a new long-range bomber (just in case, God forbid, we’re in a fight with a big, well-defended country), and picking a damn tanker already (those things have been flying since the Elvis era).

It’s a piece that’s pretty much guaranteed to piss off everyone in the broad military community — from air assault-loving marines to big bomber-loving airmen to the counterinsurgency cadre that’s loathe to prep for any war that isn’t irregular. Anyway, tell me what you think in the comments.

Photo: Noah Shachtman

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