Military Study Looked to Rome for Lessons

Wired Danger Room:

The Pentagon’s legendary Office of Net Assessment is known for peering into the future of conflict — at subjects like wartime biotech, fighting robots, networked battles, and the military in space. The office’s head, Andrew Marshall, has been called the Pentagon’s “futurist-in-chief.” But for one study, concluded in 2002, Net Assessment-funded researchers looked back, to the empires of Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleonic France.

The study, “Military Advantage in History,” examines these “pivotal hegemonic powers” to draw lessons about how the United States “should think about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century.” Mother Jones’ Justin Elliott obtained the report through the Freedom of Information Act.

Much of the report reads like a fairly standard military history — not unlike Max Boot’s War Made New. However, “in an extraordinary passage, the study cites the Roman experience — from over a millennium ago — as a precedent for America’s long-term dominance,” Elliott notes.

Mother Jones:

In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA) published an 85-page monograph called “Military Advantage in History”. Unusual for an office that is headed by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon’s “futurist in chief,” the study looks back to the past—way back. It examines four empires, or “pivotal hegemonic powers in history,” to draw lessons about how the United States “should think about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century.” Though unclassified, the study was held close to the vest; a stamp on the cover limits its dissemination without permission. Mother Jones obtained it only through a Freedom of Information Act request. Though the report is far from revelatory, it provides a window into a mindset that unselfconsciously envisions the United States as the successor to some of history’s most powerful empires.

The study looks a little like a high school text book, devoting chapters to Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleonic France and citing texts by Sun Tzu, Livy, and Jared Diamond. It attempts to break down exactly how historic empires sustained their military might across continents and even centuries. The study posits that the historical examples offer “insights into what drives U.S. military advantage,” as well as “where U.S. vulnerabilities may lie, and how the United States should think about maintaining its military advantage in the future.” There is no one secret to world domination, however. The Mongols’ military advantage was rooted in their “tactical and operational superiority”; the Macedonians’ in the “exceptional leadership” of and “cult of personality” surrounding Alexander the Great; Napoleon’s in “innovative operational concepts” and “information superiority”; and the Romans’ in “robust tactical doctrine” and “strong domestic institutions” which were “designed to incorporate conquered peoples as the empire grew.” In an extraordinary passage, the study cites the Roman experience—from over a millennium ago—as a precedent for America’s long-term dominance: “The Roman model suggests that it is possible for the United States to maintain its military advantage for centuries if it remains capable of transforming its forces before an opponent can develop counter-capabilities. Transformation coupled with strong strategic institutions is a powerful combination for an adversary to overcome.”

The report’s language is jargon laden and opaque—a lance used by Macedonian horsemen is referred to as a “primary weapon system.” That may be due to the methodology of “net assessment,” a fancy term for the ONA’s approach to analyzing complicated real-world situations that is rooted in systems analysis and game theory. Military author James Dunnigan compares it to engineering. “You take apart historical events, reassemble them as a simulation, and then tinker with the simulation until you can recreate the historical event accurately,” he explains. “What that allows you to do is play out ‘what if?’ situations: What if Napoleon did this? What if Ghengis Khan did that?”

While the study was produced under the auspices of the ONA, its five authors work for government intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, and they wrote the study as part of a contract for the Defense Department’s Information Assurance Technology Analysis Center. Booz Allen won a 10-year, $200 million cost-plus contract to establish and “host” that center in 1998. (In May, the Carlyle Group announced it will be taking over Booz Allen’s government services arm.)

The original idea for the study predates the Bush administration. Mark Herman, the Booz Allen vice president and war-game designer who is the study’s lead author, recalls being asked to give a presentation on historical empires at one of Andrew Marshall’s famous “summer studies” at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1999. At that annual retreat, experts from government, academia, and beyond are invited to contemplate a big-picture question. Newt Gingrich, for example, participated in the 1999 program, according to Herman. He says that the ONA “liked the presentation so much they felt it should be written down” and expanded. A earlier version of the report, titled “Sustaining Military Dominance: Examples From Ancient History,” was presented at the 2001 summer study and was later cited in a Maureen Dowd column. The current version was published a year later.

Coming out of the Office of Net Assessment, the study’s theme of military transformation is not surprising. Described by the Washington Post as “an obscure but highly influential unit,” the ONA was established as an in-house think tank in 1973. Its founding director was Marshall, a strategist who achieved demigod status in the press after years of colorful profiles portraying him as a visionary. (A 2002 article in the New York Times Magazine named Marshall the “Yoda of the Rumsfeld Defense Department”; William Safire dubbed him “the freshest mind in the Puzzle Palace.”) ONA specializes in trend spotting and forecasting military threats. The office spent the 1980s exhaustively studying the US-Soviet balance; recently, it has turned to topics as diverse as neuropharmacology, Islamic warfare, and the national security implications of climate change.

Now in his 80s, Marshall has been a chief proponent of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs, a cause also championed by Donald Rumsfeld that emphasizes speed and increased use of precision weapons and advanced communications technology. In 2001, Marshall was given a high-profile assignment by Rumsfeld to conduct an extensive review of the military and the possibilities of military transformation.

Most striking is how the study conceives of the United States in imperial terms. “You’ll see some neoconservatives at the beginning of the Bush administration crowing that ‘we do have an empire, let’s just come out of the closet and say we do,’” said Ivan Eland, the author of a book on America’s “informal empire” and the director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute, on hearing a description of the study. “But the administration never did that because empire doesn’t sell well with the public.” After reviewing the study at Mother Jones‘ request, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, said he was struck by its “arrogance and immorality.” “The presumption that the United States should rule the world, sword at the ready, for the foreseeable future is an unacceptable basis for a just, even-handed foreign policy.”

Even coming from an office vaunted for its intellectual seriousness, “Military Advantage in History” often reads like it was meant as window dressing for the Revolution in Military Affairs agenda—sometimes at the expense of historical fact. (Herman says that the theme of transformation emerged naturally from his research.) After reviewing a section that identifies five discrete “transformations” of the Roman military over a period of 1,000 years, Lee Brice of Western Illinois University, president of the Society of Ancient Military Historians, described it as “so completely incorrect as to be useless.” In general, Brice noted, “it is inappropriate to apply modern concepts of systems theory, doctrine, and strategy to ancient armies. That required a level of planning and centralization that simply did not exist.”

Eland speculates that a study like this would “get warped by the military-industrial-congressional complex into more money for weapons.” Furthermore, he says, it ignores the economic implications of military expansion. “The Office of Net Assessment is doing this to show, ‘Well, gee, these other empires transformed themselves, they were successful, we need to do the same thing,’” Eland says. “Well that’s going to cost big bucks, and that will cause economic overstretch. People say it can’t happen to us since we have such a big economy, but every empire has said that.” It is unclear how the study has been used; the Office of Net Assessment declined a request for an interview. Herman says only that “a whole bunch of [copies] went out to the government.”

The idea that contemporary society can or should try to find direct guidance in the past has been assailed by some historians. The American historian Bernard Bailyn wrote of “an obvious kind of presentism, which at its worst becomes indoctrination by historical example.” But the ONA study charges ahead, plumbing the past for contemporary lessons. An extraordinary color-coded table in the study’s conclusion attempts to literally “map” the historical findings to the United States with an eye toward “enduring dominance.” (See image above.)

Several historians who reviewed the study differed on its quality and meaning. Walter Scheidel, a Stanford professor of classics and the coauthor of a forthcoming survey of ancient empires, called it “a successful distillation of relevant information and scholarship complemented by very interesting systematic analysis.” Others found the scholarship to be shoddy and superficial. Pamela Crossley, a Dartmouth historian who teaches on the Mongols, described the chapter on Genghis Khan as mostly “an accumulation of popularly transmitted misconceptions.” She also noted the study’s “amazingly strange spelling ‘Chengis.’” Brice, the ancient military historian, said the text suffered from “an intense, myopic habit of wanting to make the ancient world fit into modern stereotypes.” He compares it with “much lower-undergraduate-level work.”

Justin Elliott, a former senior fellow at Mother Jones, is news editor at Talking Points Memo.

Video: Rat Brains Grown for Robot Control

Wired Danger Room:

We’ve seen all kinds of animal-machine hybrids in recent years — remotely-steerable sharks, cyborg pigeons, monkeys that can control robotic limbs with their minds.

At the University of Reading, researchers are actually growing rat brain neurons, in order to build a robot control system, New Scientist reports.

At the heart of the device is “a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made – and continue to make – connections with each other… [and] sending electrical signals. It’s these spontaneous electrical patterns that researchers want to harness… [B]y stimulating the neurons with signals from sensors on the robot [they're] using the neurons’ response to get the robots to respond.”

Continue reading “Video: Rat Brains Grown for Robot Control” »

Defense Spooks: Let’s Control Enemy Minds

Wired Danger Room:

Forget performance-enhancing drugs for soldiers, the next frontier is performance-degrading drugs for our enemies. Rick Weiss at the Science Progress blog has just written a nice post about a just-released 150-page report from the National Research Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency that argues that the military needs to do a better job keeping up with neuroscience: in part so it can learn how to make our enemies stupider.

“Although conflict has many aspects, one that warfighters and policy makers often talk about is the motivation to fight, which undoubtedly has its origins in the brain and is reflected in peripheral neurophysiological processes,” quotes Weiss from the report. “So one question would be, ‘How can we disrupt the enemy’s motivation to fight?’ Other questions raised by controlling the mind: ‘How can we make people trust us more?’ ‘What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain?’ ‘Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?’… As cognitive neuroscience and related technologies become more pervasive, using technology for nefarious purposes becomes easier.”

National Academies Press:

Date: Aug. 13, 2008

Contacts: Rebecca Alvania, Media Relations Officer

Luwam Yeibio, Media Relations Assistant

Office of News and Public Information

202-334-2138; e-mail <news@nas.edu>

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

National Security Intelligence Organizations Should Monitor Advances

In Cognitive Neuroscience Research

WASHINGTON — Technological advancements in specific fields of neuroscience have implications for U.S. national security and should therefore be monitored consistently by the intelligence community, according to a new report from the National Research Council. In order to do so effectively, intelligence organizations need analysts with advanced scientific training and resources for the collection and analysis of neuroscience research and its technological applications, said the committee that wrote the report.

The intelligence community has had a long-standing interest in monitoring global technology trends that could affect U.S. national security. However, in fields where technology is advancing rapidly, the pace and breadth of research can overwhelm analysts. In addition, few intelligence analysts have scientific skills specialized enough to allow them to recognize significant advances in highly complex and emergent fields.

A 2005 National Research Council report described a methodology for gauging the implications of new technologies and assessing whether they pose a threat to national security. In this new report, the committee applied the methodology to the neuroscience field and identified several research areas that could be of interest to the intelligence community: neurophysiological advances in detecting and measuring indicators of psychological states and intentions of individuals, the development of drugs or technologies that can alter human physical or cognitive abilities, advances in real-time brain imaging, and breakthroughs in high-performance computing and neuronal modeling that could allow researchers to develop systems which mimic functions of the human brain, particularly the ability to organize disparate forms of data.

Research in these areas is progressing rapidly both nationally and internationally within the private, government, and academic sectors. Technologies such as brain imaging and cognitive or physical enhancers are important to the health industry and desired by the public; such forces act as strong market incentives for development. As these fields continue to grow, said the committee, it will be imperative that the intelligence community be able to identify scientific advances relevant to national security when they occur. To do so will require adequate funding, intelligence analysts with advanced training in science and technology, and increased collaboration with the scientific community, particularly academia.

The study was sponsored by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter. The National Research Council is the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. A committee roster follows.

Copies of Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies are available from the National Academies Press; tel. 202-334-3313 or 1-800-624-6242 or on the Internet at http://www.nap.edu. Reporters may obtain a copy from the Office of News and Public Information (contacts listed above).

QinetiQ Awarded DARPA Contract For New Sensor System

Space War:

by Staff Writers
Farnborough, UK (SPX) Aug 13, 2008
A QinetiQ led team has secured a 33-month $22m follow-on research contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in support of its Large Area Coverage Optical Search While Track and Engage (LACOSTE) programme.Following a successful initial phase, DARPA selected QinetiQ to continue development of a new sensor system to provide persistent tactical surveillance and precision tracking capabilities.

The concept is to develop a sensor system that operates at high altitude (~20 km), possibly on an airship or endurance UAV, that detects and simultaneously tracks large numbers of moving vehicles in dense urban areas with a high degree of accuracy, 24-hours a day.

In order to achieve this, the sensors need to be high resolution and sensitivity and have a wide field-of-regard, with low mass and system volume.

QinetiQ’s solution is the based on novel adaptive coded aperture imaging, an all new disruptive camera technology with a wide range of defence, security, industrial and commercial applications.

QinetiQ is being assisted in delivering the LACOSTE programme by Goodrich ISR Systems which is responsible for designing the optical system, assisting with CONOPS and architecture development, and performing laboratory and flight testing.

The second phase of the programme covers the building and flight testing of a working sensor module to meet the LACOSTE goals. This builds on a successful first phase in which new sensing and processing technologies were developed and proven.

“This award is an endorsement of the team’s ability to deliver novel sensing technologies,” explained Dr Chris Slinger, QinetiQ’s Principal Investigator on the LACOSTE programme and a QinetiQ Senior Fellow.

“Our adaptive coded aperture imaging draws on several elements of QinetiQ’s rich technology base, combining leading edge micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS), optical and sensor physics, signal processing, image recovery, tracking techniques and systems engineering. It is an example of a new wave of disruptive, computational imaging systems that offer orders of magnitude improvement in mass, size, economy and performance when compared to conventional sensor technologies.”

Tom Bergeron, President of Goodrich’s ISR Systems business added: “This contract award is an important endorsement of the adaptive coded aperture imaging approach successfully demonstrated by the QinetiQ/Goodrich team during the LACOSTE Phase 1 programme. This novel computational imaging approach has now demonstrated real potential as a disruptive technology for the ISR Market. The Goodrich ISR Systems business has a long history of offering world leading capabilities in real time electro-optical systems in space and on manned and unmanned airborne platforms and is ideally placed to transition this capability into the ISR market.”

Analysis: FBI heads new cyber task force

Space War:

by Shaun Waterman
Washington, April 21, 2008
Last summer the FBI quietly established a special working group with U.S. intelligence and other agencies to identify and respond to cyber threats against the United States.The group, called the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, now has “several dozen” personnel working together at an undisclosed location in the Washington area, according to the man in charge, Shawn Henry, the bureau’s deputy assistant director in charge of its cyber division.

In an interview with United Press International, Henry was tight-lipped about the task force’s makeup, saying only that it involved “several intelligence, law-enforcement and other agencies from across the U.S. government.”

Documents released earlier this month by the Department of Homeland Security said that the task force was being expanded “to include representation from the U.S. Secret Service and several other federal agencies.”

The Secret Service says on its Web site that, as part of its mission against counterfeiting, it investigates “computer-based attacks on our nation’s financial, banking, and telecommunications infrastructure.”

In a previously unnoticed aside during congressional testimony last year, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the task force was a partnership with other agencies to deal with cyber threats from foreign intelligence.

The bureau’s justification for next year’s budget, in which it has requested an additional 70 agents and more than 100 support personnel for its cyber division, says the task force “seeks to address cyber intrusions presenting a national security threat.”

The budget justification says the task force will “develop a global view of information warfare activity; �� identify intelligence gaps; �� create a strategic framework to develop operations; �� de-conflict investigations and operations (and) �� generate timely intelligence.”

It says the task force is divided into an analytic group that “seeks to synthesize a common operating picture of hostile intrusion related activity to aid investigations, reviews all-source data, and produces quarterly reports” and an information operations group.

The information operations group “provides a forum for de-conflicting and collaborating on investigations and provides centralized coordination of operational initiatives.”

The idea, Henry said, is for the partner agencies to “share information and make sure we’re not overlapping in our response.”

“If you serve a physical search warrant, and other agencies are involved, you can see them at the door,” he said, adding that in virtual investigations it was harder to know who else might be on the trail.

“We’re sharing investigative and threat information,” he said, “looking at the attacks (each agency is) seeing and the methodologies being used.”

From the FBI’s point of view, he added, the task force “allows us to get visibility for our field offices across the country” into how threats are developing and what investigations are going on.

The cyber task force looks at “all cyber threats,” Henry said, but is currently focused on “organizations that are targeting U.S. infrastructure.”

He declined to comment further, but in recent congressional testimony Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell named Russia and China as among the most important cyber adversaries for the United States.

Henry said it was important to be “adversary neutral” in combating cyber threats.

“A network can be attacked by a terrorist group, a foreign power, or a hacker kid from Oklahoma City. �� Networks need to be protected from all threats because once (sensitive) data has been stolen, it can be transferred anywhere,” he said.

In his recent testimony McConnell said the U.S. government is “not prepared to deal with” the cyber threats it faces. And Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a bloggers’ roundtable last month that cybersecurity was “the one area in which I feel we’ve been behind where I would like to be.”

Asked whether the U.S. government is now getting a handle on the problem, Henry replied: “Our response has to constantly change and grow because the threat is constantly changing and growing.”

He said that one of the most worrying aspects of cyber threats was the extent to which “the offense outstrips the defense.”

“The pace of technological change �� the increasing connectivity (of networks) creates more opportunity for exploitation” of vulnerabilities, he explained.

“The general public is not aware (enough) of the threats,” he said. “People need to be sensitized to potential vulnerabilities �� (They) need to be aware that their information is at risk if they don’t take precautions.”

In its 2009 budget request the FBI is also asking for $5 million to expand the task force infrastructure through a services contract to provide IT services property and facility maintenance and management, and a 24/7 security force for the group’s facility, where “task force elements have full visibility and connectivity into all member agency operations.”

Pentagon suspends program for military ‘media analysts’

by Staff Writers
Washington (AFP) April 28, 2008
The Pentagon has suspended a public affairs program that has come under fire for using retired military “media analysts” as surrogates to get out its messages on the Iraq war, a spokesman confirmed Monday.Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the program was undergoing an internal review following criticism that the retired officers offered Pentagon talking points as their own during the run-up to the Iraq invasion and thereafter.

“It’s temporarily suspended so we can take at look at some of the concerns,” said Whitman.

Teleconferences and briefings for the military analysts have been halted pending the review, which is being conducted by the Pentagon’s public affairs office, he said.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has not directly addressed the issue since the New York Times carried a lengthy report on the program April 20, except to say that the analysts should make clear they were speaking only for themselves.

The New York Times found that the Pentagon laid on special briefings and conference calls for the retired officers, many of whom then repeated the talking points as military experts on television news shows.

The Times also found that many of the media analysts also worked as consultants or served on the boards of defense contracting companies, but that those ties often went undisclosed to the public.

The only time Gates has met with the military media analysts was in March 2007, Whitman said, revising his earlier recollection that the secretary met with them in September.

Whitman said the program was designed to provide information to the US public “by any number of means, the media being one of them — analytical assessments and discussions on network television is another.”

He said the Pentagon also interacted with bloggers, corporate leaders and education leaders as part of the effort to reach out to the public.

Google “gadgets” called gateways for hackers

by Staff Writers
Las Vegas, Nevada (AFP) Aug 8, 2008
Hackers turned computer security specialists accuse Google of setting users up for online disasters by letting them personalize home pages with applications that could be tainted.Software that hackers can trick people into installing on “iGoogle” home pages can track users’ activities and control their machines, SecTheory chief executive Robert Hansen showed AFP on Friday.

“I could force you to download child porn or send subversive material to China,” Hansen said. “The exploitation is almost limitless. Google has to fix it.”

Google lets people customize iGoogle home pages with mini-software programs called “gadgets” such as to-do lists, news feeds, currency converters, and calendars.

Hackers can program malicious code into proffered gadgets or break into systems hosted by engineers providing legitimate mini-programs.

“It turns out a lot of people who develop these things aren’t good at security,” Hansen said, citing research he and Cenzic security analyst Tom Stracener shared at a notorious annual DefCon hacker gathering in Las Vegas.

“We pretty much break into anything we try.”

Hackers can resort to a tactic of luring people to websites that trick people into installing applications in iGoogle home pages. A hacker can remotely control a victim’s computer as long as the iGoogle page is open.

Gmail users face danger from the same “hole” in security, according to Hansen, whose hacker name is “RSnake.”

“We’ve been telling Google about these vulnerabilities for years and they have not made corrective actions,” Hansen said.

“They chose to open the doors and insomuch put a lot of consumers at risk.”

Google says it checks gadgets for malicious code, rarely finding any, and that it removes tainted programs.

Typos can bedevil online political campaigns
Las Vegas (AFP) Aug 7 – Typos can bedevil online political campaigns by letting evil software wizards or crafty king-makers turn misspellings into opportunities for sabotage or theft, a security specialist warned Thursday.

In a practice referred to as “typo squatting” people not connected to campaigns can buy rights to Internet addresses with candidates’ names misspelled and use them to malign, mock or steal from contenders.

“You can guarantee that more of these will become common in future elections,” Oliver Friedrichs, director of emerging technologies at Symantec’s security response unit, said while detailing such attacks at a premier Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

“More than likely the people who do this are the extremists or people who are in it for a profit. Campaigns need to become more aware of these kinds of attacks.”

For example, a Symantec check in February revealed that 47 out of 160 variations on “www.barackobama.com” were being “typo-squatted.”

Ironically, one squatter’s web page featured a legitimate Obama ad.

“Obama is paying for advertisements, through Google, on a site that is a typo-squatter on a domain name the Obama campaign should own in the first place,” Freidrichs said.

“Campaigns are spending a lot on online advertising and some of this money is really being misspent and going to typo-squatters.”

Some typo-squatters use the web pages to mock or deride candidates. A “hillaryclingon.com” website poked fun at her and other candidates by depicting them as characters from “Star Trek” films and television shows.

“Typoed” web pages can be used to spread false announcements, such as a candidate withdrawing from a race, or tell stories of scandals that don’t exist.

A candidate who has dropped out of the US presidential race was accused of being an animal killer on a typo-squatted website.

Malicious software secretly planted in computers of people who visit squatted websites could reveal where they go online or even take control of machines.

“If I want to attack supporters of a particular campaign I can easily put malware on my site,” Freidrichs said of typo-squatters.

“You can target candidates, cause confusion, pop-up ads, or re-direct computers when they try to log on to a candidate’s website.”

Typo-squatters can create realistic looking campaign websites and take donations, keeping the cash and using credit card information for further fraud.

Online donations intended for one candidate could be routed to an opponent without donors knowing.

Once someone owns a website based on a typo, they can also intercept and redirect similarly misaddressed emails.

Campaign emails containing speech drafts, contributions, or strategy notes could be intercepted due to errant keystrokes while typing addresses, according to Freidrichs.

“This is a serious problem that spans not only campaigns but every company with email,” Freidrichs said.

“Even more scary, we went and looked at defense contractors and found a typoed domain routed to India and another routed to China.”

US Missile Defense In Europe Becomes A Reality

Space War:

by Yury Zaitsev
Moscow (RIA Novosti) Aug 19, 2008
On August 14, Poland and the United States signed an agreement on the deployment of 10 ground-based missile interceptors (GBIs) on Polish territory.The timing of the event leaves little doubt that it is linked with the recent conflict in the Caucasus. Like Washington, Warsaw unreservedly backed Tbilisi at all levels, and eventually agreed to host U.S. missile defense. Thus, a third positioning missile defense area has become reality.

Despite Russia’s repeated appeals to the United States to clarify the status of missile defense, Moscow has not yet received a meaningful answer. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the “U.S.-promised transparency and confidence-building measures have not yet become reality.”

Russia has serious differences on missile defense with NATO, which cannot decide on its format in Europe. Will Russia be included in European missile defense, or will it be merely a segment of U.S. national missile defense?

These questions became urgent in 2007, when the Americans started carrying out their plan of deploying radars and interceptor missiles by launching geodesic and surveying work at the future sites on Polish and Czech territory. They also began intergovernmental talks to draft agreements on their legal status.

The Czech Republic will host a radar station, in exchange for which it is hoping to get some benefits, primarily participation in military R and D, and access to any information received through the radar.

Warsaw has won a promise from Washington to augment its armed forces in exchange for placing 10 GBIs on Polish territory. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk also demanded additional security guarantees for his country from the United States.

Washington will not hesitate to give such guarantees, but what are they worth? Russian missile defense systems will not be able to distinguish missile interceptors launched from Polish territory from ballistic missiles.

Any launch of an interceptor will automatically result in retaliation, and not only at the interceptor deployment site. A Soviet warning system once mistook a Norwegian-launched high-altitude weather rocket for a ballistic missile.

It is clear that the Americans will not limit themselves to Poland and the Czech Republic. Experts believe that after refining the technology of creating a missile deployment site in Poland, the United States will be able to build one positioning area per year. In the near future, Russia will face dozens of positioning areas along its borders.

Russia is also concerned over possible deployment of U.S. missile defense elements in Ukraine. U.S. officials consider Ukraine to be well-versed in missile technologies. This is a major difference from Poland and the Czech Republic, and makes it an even more attractive host for missile defense elements. That would bring U.S. missile defense even closer to Russia’s borders.

An analysis of America’s global missile defense system shows that Washington is deploying its elements primarily in Eastern Europe rather than Japan, other Asian countries or Australia.

This is probably because Washington does not want to irritate China, which could respond by stepping up the development of its own missile program and increasing the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles on combat duty.

On the other hand, Russia’s opinion, in line with the stereotype of the last 15 years, may be ignored – at worst it will reply with “yet another serious warning.” In line with this thinking, it seems strange that the Russian leaders have finally given an adequate response to the Georgian aggression in South Ossetia, despite the Western reaction.

Russia does not want to be dragged into another arms race, but it should not ignore the emerging threats. Its most obvious reply to the U.S. missile defense deployment would be equipping its Topol-M missiles with supersonic maneuverable warheads, using jammers, and reducing the boost phase of Russian missiles. It is also important to equip the armed forces with new MIRVed missiles.

Russia could also revive its program to develop global missiles, which could be put into near-Earth orbits and directed at enemy territory while bypassing missile defenses.

It may be worth revising the role of tactical nuclear weapons. First of all, Russia should give up its unilateral commitments to reduce them, separate warheads, or redeploy in the middle of the country. Maybe it should even station them as far out as possible, say, in the Baltic enclave of the Kaliningrad Region.

Currently Tochka-U tactical missiles with a range of 120 km are stationed there. Russia could also deploy Iskanders, with a range of up to 500 km, there. Initially any missiles in Kaliningrad would be strictly non-nuclear, but they could be equipped with nuclear warheads when Poland hosts the interceptors, and the radar starts monitoring Russian territory from the Czech Republic.

START-I, the strategic arms control treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, expires in the end of next year. Foreign Minister Lavrov believes no vacuum should be allowed to develop in the sphere of arms control, and so a replacement treaty is likely to be negotiated.

However, for obvious reasons reducing the number of strategic offensive arms enhances the role of missile defense systems – their combat effectiveness is inversely proportional to the number of attacking missile warheads they are meant to defend against.

Therefore, Russia should keep an adequate nuclear deterrent in the next few decades, which must become one of the most important military and political tasks. The new treaty should not be one-sided, as START-I was.

We are facing real threats. We are tolerated and sometimes even taken into account primarily because of our nuclear missile shield. No matter what U.S. military leaders may say, neither Russia nor the United States can fully protect itself against a missile strike.

Therefore, now that the United States is deploying its missile defense in other countries and in space, Russia should make sure that its retaliation would still deal unacceptable damage to the enemy.

Yury Zaitsev is an academic adviser at the Russian Academy of Engineering Sciences. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

Source: RIA Novosti

Army Funds ‘Synthetic Telepathy’ Research

Wired Danger Room:

The Army has given a team of University of California researchers a $4 million grant to study the foundations of “synthetic telepathy.” But unlike old-school mind-melds, this seemingly psychic communication would be computer-mediated. The University of California, Irvine explains:

The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would “think” a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target.

All across the military, there’s interest in translating thoughts into computer code, and vice versa. Darpa-funded researchers have taught monkeys how to control robotic limbs with their thoughts. Defense contractor Northrop Grumman is building binoculars that tap the unconscious mind. Honeywell has built a system that monitors pre-conscious nueral firings, to help pick out targets in satellite imagery. The JASONs, the Pentagon’s premiere scientific advisory board, has warned of the dangers of enemies implanted with brain-computer interfaces. And the Defense Intelligence Agency just released a report, saying the military needs to spend more on neuroscience – up to and including “mak[ing] the enemy obey our commands.”

*The United States of Iran: A Reversology

*The United States of Iran:
A Reversology

By IgnoranceIsntBliss

NOTE: Most of these images probably need to be clicked on, and this story can’t really be told without them.

This is a little perspective into the Iran war situation that is sure to be a big fuss after Iran’s Presidents badly worded remarks the other day. Pretty stupid if you ask me because normally he has it by the balls being the weaker nation that is threatened by invasion from imperial America.

In any case I’d still like to give everyone a little satire and a perspective of what must be going through the minds of the Iranians in light of the American threat. Sorry pro-war people, but Iran isn’t going to invade US or nuke us ‘just because’.

“…but no matter how you slice it (German Nazism, Italian Fascism & “Divine” Imperial Japan), it was just plain old militaristic imperialism.” – The United States Military, in the WW2 prpaganda film, “Why We Fight” Part 1 : Prelude To War.

Our Declaration of Independence would have been on February 1, 1979, after we retook our government from Iran. Before this, in 1953, they had overthrown our democratically elected leadership to install a repressive regime (admittedly to control our vast oil fields).

We eventually seized their embassy here in our country because it was an Iranian intelligence command center and because we were still upset after they had enslaved us with imperial force for almost 20 years. This would have given the Iranian government plenty of polarizing propaganda because the Iranian public wouldn’t have known of the real nature of the relations between their country and ours. Instead, all they’d know is that some crazy looking Christian guy over here started some Christian revolution and then took their guys hostage. That would polarize them for decades just so long as the masses never realized what the affair was really about. (Iranian Hostage Crisis)

We would have an extra sort of resentment because Iran would be a full blown empire-state, bent on global domination, who had been using underhand tricks and military force when needed to control half of the nations on our side of the hemisphere. To add insult to injury, those countries were all Christian while they were Muslims who were trying to convert us. This would further polarize us into our ‘national religion’ and would have masses of us in an uproar that the Iranians would refer to us crazy extremist terrorists. (American Imperialism)

We would have an extra sore spot when thinking of Iran for the audacity of helping to influence (a Canadian) Saddam Hussein, after putting him in power, and then helping to build his chemical and biological weapons programs so that they could help him maim and gas to kill some 500,000 of our people in a 10-year war. (Iran-Iraq War)

Shortly thereafter, we would have seen further evidence of Iran’s imperial posture after watching them tell the ‘Canadian Saddam‘ that they wouldn’t intervene if he invaded his oil rich neighbor and then invaded him after he did. Not before they fabricated an emotional account of ‘Canadian‘ forces throwing babies out of incubators to rally the Iranian people to gain support for the war. (Kuwaiti Incubator Babies Hoax)

As the rest of the world, we’d be anxiously watching Iran build their “New World Order” (as their president in 1990 referred to it as) with their backroom deals, underhanded tricks and military force when needed. A good example would have been when they used Al Qaeda (still our enemy in this narrative) as they went sector to sector in the Yugoslavia war-zone region, throughout the 1990’s, which they had helped to instigate in 1991 (Iran is still representing our actual actions, AND ally of Al Qaeda in this line) [we seemed to have used Al Qaeda in the Balkan's in the late 90's].

Finally, they would have secured the area to install their pipeline connecting to our nearby Caspian Sea (assuming our nation had the best access to it like in Iran’s case). We would have gotten an extra sense of patriotism on our 1^st of February Day of Independence national holiday knowing that they would much rather enjoy our beach front real estate for their pipeline beyond their age old desire to control our nations physical resources. Nevertheless, we’d probably found their Afghanistan pipeline interests (to connect to the Caspian Sea) interesting since the Caspian Sea holds some 47 billion barrels of oil and 257 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Soon thereafter, the world would have watched them get attacked on September 11^th. In the months following, their president would declare US as being part of the “Axis of Evil”. He would later refer to the war as a “crusade” and as “World War 3″.

In the months following, Iran then rather justifiably invaded Mexico, ‘to get’ “Osama” (Usama), but then in a fit of imperialism marched into Canada. Next they began a propaganda war not only in the world press, but even more so in their own country.

We’d probably be too shielded and busy to note how the Iranians don’t seem to mind that propaganda is psychological warfare even when their own government is using it against them to justify wars, but other societies probably would. We’re too busy sucking up all of our nations propaganda since both sides are using against their own people. But at the end of the day the best way to view it is who’s propaganda is more honest. In our case it would be to rally us in preparation of the imperial machine that has our country surrounded.

To them, their foaming at the mouth would be justified because we took their intelligence wing embassy as “hostages” after liberating them from enslaving our nation. For some strange reason they don’t seem to understand how their imperialism is no different than any of histories other empires when you stack the bodies.

RELATED MAPS:

The domination of the Caspian-region dreams of the ultra(neo)conservative political faction ‘The Project for a New Iranian Century‘ that has been holding the reign’s of the nation were about to come into their firm grip. All they need is for us “to attack them” to swing their public opinion and give their overlords the green light to march their empire into the final stronghold in the ‘oil rich kingdom’ of the world ‘North America‘.

In all fairness, it’s not like our hypothetical leadership is helping by making outlandish comments and claims while even allowing the state-run news sites convey poor translations of such. Our leadership is also ballsy in choosing to break OPEC standards and switch from trading oil in the Iranian Dollar to the Euro. Canadian Saddam performed the exact same stunt during Iran’s contested 2000 election and got himself hung.

It’s important not to disturb Iran’s “Dollar Hegemony” because there isn’t any gold backing their Dollar. Its value is artificial because the world has to trade in Iranian Dollars to purchase oil. It’s why their country needs national debt and income taxes, yet for some odd reason nobody knows about it. They (many of them anyways) assume that the wars are simply for securing the oil, but it goes even deeper to maintain Iranian Dollar Hegemony. They need the national debt and inflation to pay for the wars that are required to maintain their busted ass system.

Anyways, all is well here, for now, in the land of the “free” ‘Totalitarian Christo-Fascists‘. Those “Totalitarian Islamo-Fascists” have another thing coming if they think they’re going to take US down!