42 replies to this topic

[Mangala]

Greetings, Tis' me, Mangala.

So, I haven't been on here for a long time and for those new people who have no idea who I am, I was the moderator for the once longest Thread ever assembled on Imminst. While I have since abandoned the topic and seemed to dissappear from Imminst.org forums, I want to start to slowly get back into the rhythm of forum writing, as I will have a lot of time on my hands this summer.

So anyways lets get started. This particular thread will be about Robotic warfare.

Gulf war II seemed to be a win not only for the United States, but a victory for military officials who stated over and over again leading up tot he war, that new technology and revised policy regarding unification of all aspects of the military (army, airforce, special ops), would bring quick victory to the United States and minimize Iraqi civilian and American soldier casualties.

Given this, imagine if you will a different apporach to war in the future. What if there was no big hoopla about war in general for this hyperpower? What if in the drive to war any American President could easily take out a dictatorship without having to think twice about resistance from any major world opinion?

How would this be acheived? Simple. We realize that from Vietnam to conflicts in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and any other military undertaking by this country, there seems to be a slight trend in the ability of our military quickly go in, destroy opposition, while making sure the least amount of innocent people die. This ability is caused basically by advances in technology.

For instance, in the war in Iraq run by Bush senior, the most technologically superior missiles available to the military were laser guided. Now although this represented military might unparalleled on the battlefield, it still meant a lot of misses that could not find their targets. What has changed since then regarding this new war is that many missiles have been upgraded to using global positioning systems rather than laser guidance, meaning that a missle can be more accurate when aimed at a target. This accuracy when it came to firing missiles at the enemy near civilian buildings, made all the difference in the politics of this war. With less civilians accidently hit, less controversy was made about how "immoral" this war was.

So seeing as just one new technological advance can make so much of a difference on the battelfield, we know that to go further would proaboably make war a lot easier for us to implement. The next question is then, what happens with future advances?

What happens when American military might becomes no less than god-like due to it's unquestionable dominance over new technologies? Imagine the following new technologies drastoically changing our perception of war:

- Spy planes that can be controlled directly from the Pentagon
- Fighter jets that fly themselves, reaching speeds no human being can handle while staying concious
- Tanks that roll, go underground, fly, attack upside down and attack in groups without human help
- Army drones, capable of attacking easily in urban warfare, moving from room to room. These drones could fly, hover, walk, or drive themselves carrying out vague missions on their own without human command.
- Cloaked steel
- Soldiers with suits that instantly change camoflage depending on what environment the soldier is in.
- Military suits light enough to feel as if the soldier is wearing nothing, yet hard enough to repel bullets
- Helmets with viewscreen glass enabling direct information to be displayed regarding locations in a military environment.
- Military suits that wash soldiers as they carry out any battle
- Facial Recognition drones capable of identifying military personnel in civilian clothing
- Automated submarines
- Satellites capable of firing at the enemy using high powered lasers

These new technologies might mean an end to petty squabling with dictators around the world. With the ability to easily go into a country, topple a countries ruler and bring the dream of worldwide democracy to the globe, people might not question the next war fought without signifigant proof of cause (Weapons of Mass Destruction, Cruel attacks on their own people, disobeying UN mandates).

So what I would ask is that people give their idea of what the war of the future could be like and how will it affect the world when the US may have the ability to basically do whatever it wants (even more so than now). Both private opinions and newspaper and magazine articles are welcome.

Maybe even better than that, what other technologies can you think of that can change this military for the better?

Edited by Mangala, 24 April 2003 - 06:06 AM.

[Lazarus Long]

Nice to have you back Mangala, long time no see

I was hoping you would weigh back in on the debate about the Iraq situation because I feel that we needed to get beyond the "validation" phase as it became moot and start to discuss questions of: What now?

Well this is one area that will come up, and I raised it as well in my discussion about arms proliferation and new age weapons. I see a new generation arms race beginning between both the world's still consolidating hegemonies with each other, and as a separate and more sinister conflict, one that is "assymetric".

The counter to robotics is biotech, and the counter to WMD's is increase the number and versatility of suicide bombers. It is a battle that will be fought out as a loss of security on our streets around the world, rising rates of drug use, and the failure of disease control measures when clinics and hospitals get overrun by panic. This certainly won't always happen but the thin veneer of civilization is eggshell fragile and the principle of assymeteric warfare is to find vulnerable areas of tech and turn the force of the infrastructure back upon itself; cause Chernobyls, dam breaks, transit incidents and even bankrupt critical sectors like what is starting to happen to airlines, but do this from the board rooms and control rooms, not as a rock tossing rioter.

There is another aspect, and these are "mind control methodologies", non-lethal pain induction weapons for crowd control, and the general systematic destruction of the free and open society in favor of the false security of the draconian (and Orwellian) benefits of purportedly "benign" dictatorships.

These seemingly Sci-Fi approaches are more practical then we should feel comfortable with and more available then most people imagine. But the shift in tactics to assassination, sabotage, and corruption is only logical as it says target the children of Pentagon Workers if you can't reach the workers themselves, target their mail, their water, their food, or even their parents back in Kansas. Target a city's traffic controls and support local crime. encourage gang violence, lower the price of available drugs and make more psychotropes available that produce aggressive self destructive behavior like Crack, PCP, and methamphetimines. These are examples of assymetric tactics.

What I am trying to explain is that the very concept of "war" as you obviously suspect is changing and the response to fighting against a hypertechnical machine is to take the battle to where it isn't, use methods that are not part of the design parameters for the tech, and target the more vulnerable support structure of the technology, attack the economy. Assymetric warfare will be fought between machine and common folks and most everyone will be caught in the cross fire. This is why as the conditions steadilly deteriorate it will eventually develop into full fledged WWIII as a kind of global riot in response to a failed Rule of Law.

The Rule of Law is not created by force, it is "enforced" with it. If we fail to create a valid and recognizable system of global juris prudence that can esablish a common social commitment to a "Rule of Law' all the tech in the world will only contribute to the carnage that ensues. This is not a situation that has a specific, or even general technological fix, it's a social dilemma with memetic parameters that must be adequately addressed, and addressed in a timely manner or we are in serious trouble. I know this is difficult for "boys that love toys" to grasp but the game is played by a different set of rules then the average "technocrat" is ready for.

Besides this thread you are creating I think a cross over discusion to these threads is also important and these are just a few available at Politics and Sociology
http://www.imminst.o...php?act=SF&f=56


What are the causes of war?


Intelligence Lessons


High Tech Crowd Control


Missile Defense


Global Arms Prolferation

And there are numerous social conflicts already begun under the politics and Sociology Section that ALL deserve constant attention now and each defines a different set of strategies and tactics that are requisite for the theate of operations.

Lastly, we have left idle for some time the thread on Socialism and capitalism and this is blindsided because much of the rising global conflict is a derivitive of "class war" and the roots of class war are inherent in the debate you moderated in that vein AND now a relevent aspect of rebulding Iraq. Class war is at the heart of Globalization and the consolidation of wealth, particularly as it relates to a rising new power elite and us as aspiring immortals.

This topic is one that I started as a CIRA topic that I would encourage you to participate in Globalization & Immortality

Lets get this straight, there is no tech that will "fix" society, society can use tech to "fix" specific concerns but if "We the People" worldwide are the problem then we must look inside ourselves and into each other's heart's and minds to seek and implement solutions, not into our warchests.

Towards that end I say again the issues really are about the UN, global hemonic capitalism, Theocracy versus Democracy as well as Technocracy, and a variety of complex cultural interactions such as issues of human mating that are at the real core of concern, such as which is better serial monogamy versus egalitarian polygamy, or these both compatible mating strategies for the human apes?

It takes more than the most powerful weapons to rule the world, even to defend the seats of power. It takes knowledge of how to fight and what people are fighting for. I am more interested in intelligence then in the tech toys that make a juggernaut out of a single fighter, in this area I expect significant improvment as well.

Edited by Lazarus Long, 24 April 2003 - 12:43 PM.

[Bruce Klein]

Welcome back Mangala. Now, if I could only get you as interested in physical immortality as you are in war and politics, that'd be awesome!

[Mind]

I see the military tech getting better. Robots and unmanned planes and such will be in use soon. I can also imagine some non-lethal weapons being developed. I know the military has been working with low frequency sound to disorient the enemy. Remeber that the Russians used a strong narcotic to end the "Theatre" hostage situation. I am sure the world took notice of that. I believe non-lethal airborne drugs will be used more often in the future in urban (house to house) combat situations.

Having stated this I also believe the military will have a bunch of toys with no one to fight in 5 to 10 years. The days of large armies "fist fighting" over the country-side is rapidly coming to a close. No one can fight the U.S. militarily. It is suicide.

As the world grows more connected so will our forms of government. There will be no impetus for Communists to fight Capitalists, except for the case of paranoid tyrants like Kim Jong Il or Castro. They will be dealt with, with little fanfare.

The main threat in the future will be small groups of religious zealots, environmental luddites, or psycopaths. In most cases the free world's technology should be superior to these groups. But there is the chance that one of these groups could employ some unconventional weapon and destabilize a large part of the world (as Lazarus mentioned previously).

These are my predictions for the future of warfare.

[Mangala]

Hmm, I actually meant to discuss subjects relating the future of the battelfield directly dealing with robots on the field. But, I guess non-biological and societal warfare could be discussed as well.

Lazarus, why is the counter to Biotech? And in what sense?

[Lazarus Long]

I hate to do this but let me make a reference to Sci-Fi, remember Terminator?

The idea is that as you develop more and more effective weapons, the enemy sees the objective in gaining access to those weapons to turn them back on the creators. SOP, (Standard Operating Procedure) for Strategy and Tactics 101.

Organic versus electromechanical is a logical area of competing technologies, bio is “the spanner in the works”. I can genetically design various molds, bacteria, and even complex species that "target” the support structure of techno. And the cost of doing this is relatively very slight and totally consistent with the technologies of many nations around the world that have no hope of competing with the direction of our technology.

Additionally, as I keep emphasizing and few seem to heed, by creating a focus on bio, (and altering safeguard strategies) a group can leapfrog over our more methodical and profit/security based investment effort for nanotech. Whoever makes that breakthrough first moves to the head of the class and our weapons become a gigantic white elephant that no longer competes in the same battlefield. China and India for example are moving very quickly in this direction as it is consistent with their needs and cultures anyway.

For example the oft touted Predator is very vulnerable to having its control frequencies identified and jammed, as well as a clever operator (with access codes) using a tighter beam transmission delivered at closer range to take over the device's control, jamb the source transmission and turn the weapon back upon the group in the field that deployed it.

The Iraqis were brutal thugs and relatively primitive, we were fighting amateurs. Don't read too much into this victory about the "future" of the battlefield, it would be a mistake to make too many assumptions and extrapolations about how sophisticated opponents would respond to the threat being mounted.

I expect the first response will be a massive increase in investment world wide in all forms of weapons productions that will make Defense related industries the big winner in every nation that possesses this industry for the next decade or two. Of course this is totally antithetical to the claim that we are trying to "reduce” weapons proliferation.

The weapons being touted are all derived from Sci-Fi and all fall into the problem of being more and more effective at allowing and even encouraging social repression in the wrong hands and there is no guarantee that even in the US this control won't fall into the wrong hands at some point in the future. Be careful what you wish for, it may come true.

Bio isn't just a question of “disease;” that is too simplistic. How effective would the robots be if a bug could destroy the circuits? And what if a really good cybernaught (an analogue of bio) could infect the Operating System with a "virus” that allowed either a shutdown, or worse, an override? Chemicals that target "function" for machines are also a new weapons category that alters how we must think about chemical warfare. Did you know that Jet A fuel suffers from a pseudomonad bacterial infection that adulterates its effectiveness as a fuel?

I can imagine creating a strain of those bacteria to work faster and destroy lubricants as well as the fuel stocks across whole industrial sectors. Is this sinking in? We use a synthetically modified variant of this strain now to help clean up oil spills. But I can imagine creating a weapon of mass destruction that destroyed a society's fuel supply and leaves the people wondering what to do next as they walk to work and their sophisticated weapons don’t leave the hangars.

The ultimate Biological warfare weapon is the martyred suicide bomber. Create a "will" among a significant proportion of billons of dissatisfied and desperate individuals worldwide and this will come back to haunt even the shiniest most sterile and pristine technology and will cover the polish in blood. Most people don't care as long as they maintain a psychological detachment but the operators will eventually come to realize that they are committing genocide at the other end of their video game.

Edited by Lazarus Long, 25 April 2003 - 12:19 PM.

[Lazarus Long]

Since we are so carelessly demonstrating the hubris of power lately let me include this article for those that take the time to really read; because it is quite long.

Here is the dilemma, creating a New Age Arms Race doesn't insure that Mutually Assured Destruction will protect us, it insures that in asymmetric conflicts smaller States will threaten larger States with being the suffering survivors of this policy while they go to Heaven, and leverage their "MAD"ness for their continued sovereignty.

You can only threaten someone with oblivion once because after they reach oblivion they don't care and they don't negotiate. So it is in their interest to guarantee an ability to inflict as much damage as they can one time to as many vulnerable parts of the Goliath as can be reached.

As we are also increasing these more practical "weapons” we are also rapidly increasing the proliferation and interest in the tried and true arsenals of Next Generation Nuclear Bombs.

What is also becoming rapidly apparent is that the stocks of these weapons (new and old) lack the conspicuous "Command and Control" structures of the former foes and that the very quantity and diversity of sources now threaten to make them everyday vastly more plentiful to terrorist structures that can willfully apply them because there is no concurrent deterrent of "Mutual Destruction" with which to threaten these organizations. They do not possess a State structure to destroy. Hence the reason I say to you all: If al Qaeda destroys Los Angeles is the response to devastate Saudi Arabia or Yemen, because that is as close as you get to an "Official Hostage Nation State".

Archived text in forum discussion on weapons proliferation




The United States conducted aboveground nuclear tests, shown in these declassified photos from 1945 to 1962. After the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, the tests went underground. Above: 6/9/62 Christmas Island (now Kiritimati), Pacific Ocean. {right photo}6/29/58 Enewetak atoll, Pacific Ocean


The Thinkable
By BILL KELLER
May 4, 2003, NY Times
In each of the major cities of Pakistan, you can find a strange monument depicting a saw-toothed mountain and a poised missile.

The mountain is a peak in the Chagai Hills, in whose granite depths Pakistan conducted its first nuclear tests five years ago. In the Islamabad version of this tableau, which sits on a traffic island amid a congestion of garishly ornamented trucks, three-wheeled taxis and donkey carts, the mountain is bathed at night in a creepy orange light, as if radioactive. The camouflage-dappled missile is called the Ghauri, and it has a range of about 900 miles. If the chronic tensions along the border between Pakistan and India should ever escalate to a nuclear war, the Ghauri would try to deliver at least one of Pakistan's warheads onto New Delhi. Lest anyone miss the point, the missile was named for a 12th-century Afghan warrior whose most memorable accomplishment was conquering part of India.

A couple of things about these odd shrines are worth considering. The first is the way Pakistan flaunts its nuclear potency in such a proud, even provocative public display. Traditionally most countries that possess nuclear weapons have maintained a discretion about them, befitting their stigma and mystique. Israel has never even publicly acknowledged the existence of its program, nor did the white rulers of South Africa before they quietly decided to dismantle their arsenal in 1989. Pakistan, too, used to be coy about whether it possessed nuclear weapons, but in the past few years the Pakistanis have decided that their weapons are more useful when brandished. Useful, first, in warding off the superior conventional army of India, but useful too as a nationalist proclamation and a beacon to Islamic pride.

A second salient fact about these roadside sculptures is that the Ghauri is, beneath its Pakistani cosmetics, a copy of a North Korean missile called the Nodong. A strong suspicion of American and Indian intelligence services is that Pakistan paid for this missile -- which can deliver a nuclear warhead -- in part by giving North Korea vital tidbits of information about the production and testing of nuclear explosives. Pakistani officials deny this categorically, but not very convincingly in the view of more impartial experts. (The father of the Pakistani bomb, A.Q. Khan, is known to have paid at least 13 visits to North Korea.) If the suspicion is justified, then Pakistan -- which lives at the busiest crossroads of Islamic terror -- is the first nation to have bartered away nuclear weapons technology on the black market.

What Pakistan has unwittingly memorialized is a new nuclear era. A dozen years after the Soviet Union crumbled, nuclear weapons have not receded to the margins of our interest, as many expected. On the contrary, in this second nuclear age, such weapons govern our foreign policy more than they have in decades.

Full Text of article registration required (not money)

Edited by Lazarus Long, 03 May 2003 - 02:04 PM.

[Member-Of-The-Conspiracy]

If al Qaeda destroys Los Angeles is the response to devastate Saudi Arabia or Yemen, because that is as close as you get to an "Official Hostage Nation State".

And Iran and Syria and Libya, etc etc. The proper response to a nuclear detonation by Al Qaeda in LA would be the complete destruction of the Arab world. I say this because a nuclear explosion in a major US city would change the atmosphere of international relations from potential coexistence to a mode of survival.

[Lazarus Long]

I say this because a nuclear explosion in a major US city would change the atmosphere of international relations from potential coexistence to a mode of survival

From the perspective of those opposed to our society this has already happened. This is no longer about "coexistence" it is about assimilation and their sense of their survival too. Groups like al Qaeda would rather take us with them into oblivian under a variation of Mutually Assured Destruction then continue to negotiate on our terms. In other words the response attitude you are suggesting increases the likelyhood that LA is targeted by extremist groups because they want the extreme disproportionate response. Destroying the Arab world includes the total destruction of Israel and this is what MAD politics is all about.

What you have to ask yourself is are they really "believers"? You see if they really believe then making us create the apocalypse sends all of us to hell and them to heaven and achieves the global ruin of all we value.

If people like yourself cannot get beyond your limitations of cultural bias you are only playing into the strategy that groups like al Qaeda are using to effectively unite a global grassroots opposition that will come to do far more destruction methodically then is now understood. It is sad but by making such a response we are creating the moral equivalence for terrorism we are trying to claim isn't legitimate.

As an example; why didn't we blow up Oklahoma for the bombing of the Murry Building? Or all of Texas for what happened at Waco? Well very simply because the vast majority of people are innocent and do not deserve a collective punishment. This is why Isreali policy is backfiring as they have created another generation that will conspire to the death against them going on, and on, and until it is resolved rationally, or all are dead on all sides of the conflict. Mutually Assured Destruction isn't about victory, it is about preventing anybody else from winning. It is a"spoilers' Strategy that at best is "hopeless and even a rat will fight to the death under those terms.

This thread is about the "battlefield of the future". Everyone thinks in terms of weapons, locations, and targets because that is how history has defined conflict, but the battlefield is in the minds and hearts of all humanity and the battle is waged with media manipulation, economies of scale, and cultural iconography such as sacred and profane imagery.

The battlefield is physical and psychological and the battles are waged first here in the conceptual realm of the internet as we test one another's resolve through formal and informal debate. But when debate fails to expose and resolve real conflict effectively humans return to violence in its physical manifestions and we will see that in a myriad of activities from threats of extreme violence to common corruption.

At some point we must go beyond partisanship or we will reduce this to a powerstruggle likely to have the most counterproductive results and certainly we must get beyond thinking in the prejudicial manner you propose.

Why? You see the Arab world as a unified entity, is it? IS the Christian world so unified? I don't think so and I most certainly will not "join or die" in this modern day variant of the attempt to recruit Christian Soldiers for Crusades. Crusade is no more valid then Jihad, but ironically together they validate one another. I see this as sinister not holy, I see this as a major part of the problem, not the solution.

When people feel they have something to "live for" then they will care about preserving it. If they have nothing worth living for then your threat is empty, and likely to backfire by being seen as a dare that will be tested; hence increasing the likelihood that LA is targeted.

Edited by Lazarus Long, 08 May 2003 - 11:54 AM.

[Mind]

Why? You see the Arab world as a unified entity, is it? IS the Christian world so unified?

This is why Isreali policy is backfiring as they have created another generation that will conspire to the death against them going on, and on, and until it is resolved rationally, or all are dead on all sides of the conflict.

Polls consistently show that 2/3 of Palestinians believe peace with Israel means complete destruction of Israel. I would say Palestinians are quite united. Meanwhile Lazarus...do you propose that Israel make peace with 1/3 of the Palestinians. One cannot make peace with the minority and expect anything to change. That is ridiculous. It is easy to say "ok, just go make peace" when we are so far removed from the daily violence of suicide/homicide attacks. As long as our children are not being attacked and killed it is easy to say "make peace".

Now...making peace with the peaceful third of Palestinians would be a good thing, but that is redundant. There was no war between these factions in the first place. The violent 2/3 (programmed that way by their rulers) still needs to be dealt with.

[Lazarus Long]

The polls are like the weather they change from day to day. When the 2/3rds on both sides of the conflict after Oslo "appeared to want peace" they also seemed to lack the committment of interested parties among the established political structures to bring in line the rank and file of their constituencies and I am well aware this was true in the Israeli side of the debate because I am more intimate to that side then the Palestinian.

When I warned the "moderates" among Isreali and Islamic politicos I communicate with of the need for a "bold and demonstable committment" to a "peace process" or the probability that the dialogue would get usurped by extremists on both sides there was no commeasurate action without the "necessity of crisis". This complacency and blaise response to the pragmatism of politics is also a reason for escalating problems; war and violence are like the "squeaky wheel".

Ironically by the time there are crises it is usually too late and the polemic is dominated by extremism again. It isn't that the Palestinians believe in Israel's destruction per se anymore; it is a total lack of belief in Israel's integrity as a bargainer for peace. This is also counter-intuitive because in fact Israel HAS bargained in good faith; but only sometimes.

Sadly however when even upstanding high level Israeli's are too serious about making peace they are killed by their own extremists too. I am not saying just "go make peace" I am saying "demonstrate a committment to make peace", current Isreali policy doesn't do that any better then Arafat's.

Actually Arafat had been marginalized by extremists on his side of the conflict for some time and the incremental Israeli policy of basicially pushing him further a field only increased the effectiveness of the extremists by removing any ability to police their actions as well as ANY motivation to.

Boldness would have been demonstrated by Sharon supporting Arafat and then DEMANDING at the same time compliance with enforcement. This was never done and now it is too late. Arafat is now a dying issue, destroying him was something that Sharon made more important then peace in our time and this is the price of revenge and hatred.

What can be said in defense, is that a new generation is coalescing in opposition and this is very important to understand because it is this generation that can change the situation on the ground, or escalate the conflict for years to come. That is the hope for Abbas, the new Palestinian PM, but if he is commonly seen as a token puppet then his actual popular support will disappear and we will be back to fighting shadows.

Isreal's continued used of collateral and collective punishment only mobilizes and fosters the kinds of polls you refer to Mind, and the now commonplace use of high tech weapons for assassination increases the volunteers for martyrdom and while eliminating a known protagonist only creates a vacuum that will be filled by numerous unknown ones.

I see this somewhat differently for I see our children as already under attack and I see building a system of justice and opportunity for real redress of grievence on a global scale as the best method for removing the impetus for why these wars continue ad infinitum.

That is the "Long View" and the short of it; not "go play nicely children" to paraphrase "just make peace".

Edited by Lazarus Long, 08 May 2003 - 02:20 PM.

[Lazarus Long]

This really belongs under nanotech but as it is more about applications then actual substantive theory I just thought I would make sure everyone sees why there is a debate about who is funding the R&D.
LL/kxs

http://story.news.ya..._nm/arms_mit_dc
Army, MIT Unveil Futuristic Soldier Center
Thu May 22, 5:40 PM ET Science - Reuters


Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news - web sites) President Dr Charles Vest © greets U.S. Army Sgt. Raul Lopez ® and Army Equipment Specialist Dan Harshman, seen wearing prototypes of future combat uniforms, at the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 22, 2003. They are participating in the grand opening of the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology, which will develop microscopic high technology that can be incorporated into the equipment and apparel of U.S. troops. (Jim Bourg/Reuters)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) - If you ask the U.S. Army's chief scientist what the future American soldier may look like, he points to the science fiction body armor depicted in the "Predator" movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mock futuristic warriors took center stage on Thursday at the debut of The Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. Last year, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (news - web sites) won a $50 million Army contract to form a center that develops combat gear using materials the size of atoms.

The idea is to develop high-tech gear that would allow soldiers to become partially invisible, leap over walls, and treat their own wounds on the battlefield.

"If you want to visualize the impact of nanotechnology, think about" the movie "Predator," U.S. Army Chief Scientist Michael Andrews told Reuters. "It's about the ability to have a uniform that protects you totally against your environment."

Instead of bulky bullet-proof vests made of Kevlar, ISN scientists envision uniforms lined with a slurry of fluids that respond to magnetic fields, creating an armor system that can go from flexible to stiff during combat.

"This predator, until he took his uniform off, he was the meanest SOB in the world," Andrews said. "Nobody could kill him. That suit is science fiction, but it portrays what might be possible."

MIT and the U.S. Army are joined by several U.S. corporations in a scientific collaboration motivated by patriotism, intellectual curiosity and capitalism.

DuPont Co. (NYSE:DD - news), for example, will explore creating light-weight uniforms that change colors on command to camouflage soldiers in changing environments. Other ideas include weaving radio communication materials directly into a uniform's fabric or creating a fuel cell the size of a transistor radio.

Standard soldier gear typically weighs up to 120 pounds. The goal is to cut that weight by more than half.

"Within five years we will see the first inklings of what might give us probably increased ballistic protection," Andrews said.

[DJS]

Groups like al Qaeda would rather take us with them into oblivian under a variation of Mutually Assured Destruction then continue to negotiate on our terms.

Then riddle me this batman... Why hasn't a chemical attack taken place yet within Israel? (I think it is fairly safe to say that a unconventional attack within Israel would completely change the dynamics of the Middle East and quite possibly lead to a full scale regional war).

Massive amounts of weaponry are constantly being smuggled into Israel. Do you really think it would be that hard for a suit case of VX to find its way in? Of course not. Which leads to me the question of why. Why hasn't such an attack taken place? State sponsors of terror such as Syria and Iran have them. Westerm intelligence is also fairly certain that Al Qaeda has them in some limited capacity.

The whole situations resembles a draw master playing the exchange variation of the french hoping to maitain some kind of static equalibrium. Is the terrorism directed against Israel really a rash, premature attack against the king, or is it simply a tool in a war of economic attrition designed to win with the opposition and a pawn up in the end game? And even if that is their strategy, what makes them think they have the capacity? I'd still take our side of the board any day of the week.

Are they really so clever Lazarus, or is the whole Middle East just a case study in cause and effect? Can you really be so sure that you are not simply projecting a level of cognisants on the part of the Arabs that isn't really there? Of course, we still have to play the game out as if we were playing a master, taking into account every variant from the mainline, never letting down our guard. But at what point would it be safe to say that our opponent's level of assessment is not...competitive??

Another question that keeps floating through my head...

What kind of capacity does Al Qaeda really have? (hard/soft/homeland/abroad) --I must admit that I am starting to have my doubts about their capacity here in the continental US.

[Discarnate]

Check out the latest US News & World Report - verrrrry interesting article regarding Al Quaeda, the history and flow of data scores and how they resulted in future actions, etc - including indicia of the mainland US capabilities, such as the alleged R-bomb luster Padilla (I think that's the name)

[Lazarus Long]

Is this the article you are referring to Dis?
http://story.news.ya...playing_offense

Good morning and good to see you back too Kissinger.

Have you figured out where all the WMD the Administration said before invading was; that it was such an imminent threat that it could be launched on a 45 minute notice?

Please don't get into the old saw about how they hid it all too deep or that it was all destroyed because the latter leaves great tell tale traces and the former makes it kind of counterproductive to bother having from a strategic and logistical perspective.

They were never deployed of that we can be certain as that would have been detected by now and even field military commanders are suggesting the intelligence was spun EXACTLY as I was alluding to earlier on to blow the threat out of proportion into a must do scenario when we didn't yet have hard evidence.


http://story.news.ya...intelligence_dc

http://story.news.ya...s_were_inflated

http://story.news.ya...aq_weapons_hunt

Now don't tell me the evidence was so good because as the reports are coming in it is clear it wasn't. We the People are getting played. The Cabal had no need of the “truth” and they are now going to be suspect of forever “Crying Wolf;” 'O what wits, by at least half as smart as they think themselves to be.

They blew this because they thought they could undermine a legitimate investigation that had turned up more than they have utilizing fewer men, less money, and far less cooperation. We have control on the ground and ZERO evidence to date and whether or not we ever find WMD it says they were lying when they claimed the evidence they possessed was so credible, reliable and certain. When they claimed they knew so much more than the United Nations investigators that we couldn’t wait for a more determined and rational approach because the threat was imminent and we have located it so we had to take it out. But the stakes aren't just domestic and the scenarios aren’t just about Israel, or Iraq.

First of all to your question about Israel why bother with a chemical attack?

Yes the Israeli’s are generally "popularly" prepared is true, but they also represent a more mixed population under normal circumstances (Israeli Arabs & Palestinian workers) it keeps the targeting more succinct to keep attacking the "infidel in their den's of iniquity. Also you are assuming that until now it was in their interests to escalate the level of attack above the Intifadda, why?

If there is any success with the "Current Peace Negotiations” then watch out for an escalation designed to derail the entire process.

I think we got to this phase under what will be determined to be false pretenses and there is great mistrust that will threaten to undermine the negotiations, I also think there is a risk of some elements of the domestic politics to behave like a certain group of Republicans did in ‘79/’80 when Carter’s negotiations were undermined by domestic presidential politics but I think that regardless of how we got the protagonists back to the table this opportunity must be cultivated. Even if like Nixon opening Cina it were to make a hero of Bush.

Let’s test your assumptions, massive amounts of weaponry were never smuggled into Israel, they were smuggled to the Palestinians largely in their own territories, and secondly they were largely policing weapons and urban guerrilla ordinance. What role does a WMD play in the modern popular uprising on a domestic combat level?

Too much blowback and not enough precision; not that these weapons don't exist, nor that some may already be in the wrong hands but the popular mythology about how and why they get used is simply not generally credible and has been exploited for pandering to a domestic political agenda.

And from the aftermath it has become clear that we were far more interested securing the oil fields and refineries then we were interested in securing nuclear materials as they were known and now are known to have been looted. Where was our self proclaimed concern about the spread of materials for WMD’s then?

The Truth Will Emerge
Sen. Robert Byrd
"The American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing international law, under false premises."
Posted on May 23, 2003.
http://www.alternet....l?StoryID=15989

Why hasn't a chemical attack taken place yet within Israel? (I think it is fairly safe to say that a unconventional attack within Israel would completely change the dynamics of the Middle East and quite possibly lead to a full scale regional war).

You have actually answered your own question if you think about it. Perhaps the enemy finds maintaining an enemy in existence that unifies its clandestine movements more suitable to actually turning all its own communities into a bloodbath, also I have tried and tried to disabuse you of the mindset that al Qaeda is "working for" one of the governments in the area.
Saying al Qaeda is analogous to Hess, Standard, or BP Oil, Citibank or even Enron on its organization level. It is a Transnational Organization whose marketplace is an attempt to develop delivery based on criminal activity. They are trying to unite mafias and local groups around the world into a loosely knit system of related enterprises. They are NOT state sanctioned. That was another over blown myth about Saddam. You keep attributing to them the market agenda and "objectives” that one of the classic players would have and this means you don't understand your opponent.

In Nigeria the Oil companies don't want to take over the government OR EVER be responsible as a government, they want to promote whatever “tin pot” dictator serves their best interests, Al Qaeda is no different.

The agenda for al Qaeda doesn’t need WMD’s and their ability to undermine us by turning our infrastructure into WMD’s when desirable is always an option that can be hardened against but will never go away. We can make their access tremendously more difficult that is true but not without a punishing destruction of the very liberties and open access technology that we cherish as important culturally and critical to advancement.

That was their larger objective probably, to get us to do what we have in fact done, begin to destabilize our own economic and technological infrastructure by closing down reflexively too hard, and if we do any less they hit us again. Damned if we do damned if we don’t. So again about Israel don’t expect an attack unless the negotiations are going well because the last thing these groups of extremists want is peace.

Remember why the military grew distrustful of the politicos during Vietnam? They got tired of being used and abused, lied to and then hung out to dry when the lies they were being fed turned out to be more about self serving politicians and their ego maniacal lust after power then about any strategic or even logistical advantage. Most of our troops are young but they are not stupid and they are beginning to notice that there is a big gulf between what was told to justify this war and what is occurring on the ground. And while they are more professional then the draft Army was tehy are also less tolerant of being misused.

I told you before; the taking of Iraq wasn’t the issue. There is a small opportunity now because of the destabilization threat that everyone is beginning to perceive to turn this mess into something productive but if this is lost it will be vastly harder to replace in the future.

The Israeli Palestinian conflict is more like a gang fight than a true regional conflict between Nation States, there’s too little strategic advantage from the use of WMD’s. Terrorism is a threat you want someone to remember, you want to make sure they know you are coming one on one forever. That you are capable of looking into the eyes of your victim and pulling the trigger killing yourself in the process, in a gang fight one side will kill someone’s whole family, even their dog, but you don’t burn down the neighborhood because you live there too.

Here is the take from the “moderate” Arab press http://www.arabnews....le.asp?ID=26801 now ask yourself: If everybody knows this why isn’t it effective at stopping or reducing terrorism?

I suggest it might be because “terrorism” is neither the objective nor the primary means, it is a diversion, a massive distraction on a global scale for the biggest in fight for real wealth and power since the fall of (yes there I go again) the Roman Republic.

Then of course there is this perspective.

The Fictional War On Terrorism
Ted Rall, AlterNet
Recent suicide bombings in Riyadh and Casablanca proved with bloody eloquence that al-Qaeda and similar groups are anything but "on the run," as George W. Bush puts it.
Posted on May 27, 2003.
http://www.alternet....l?StoryID=15987

Edited by Lazarus Long, 01 June 2003 - 09:59 PM.

[Discarnate]

That is indeed the article, Laz, but there're missing sidebars and graphics which added quite a bit to the overall information available...

-Disc

[Lazarus Long]

Feel free to post your copy or a better link and we can share the extra wealth.

[Discarnate]

Unfortunately, the copy I have is hardcopy. *wry grin*

[Lazarus Long]

Well here is an excerpt from this weeks U.S. News and World Report

Nation & World 6/9/03
Truth and consequences
New questions about U.S. intelligence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass terror

By Bruce B. Auster, Mark Mazzetti and Edward T. Pound
On the evening of February 1, two dozen American officials gathered in a spacious conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. The time had come to make the public case for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the Bush administration argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell should--and should not--say at the United Nations Security Council four days later. Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein's misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared. "This is bulls- - -."

full text [>] http://www.usnews.co...ews/9intell.htm

and add these two links direct to U.S. News & World reports original post

News Briefing: War on Terrorism (05/27/2003) (Links Page)
http://www.usnews.co.../terror0901.htm

Playing Offense (06/02/2003)
The inside story of how U.S. terrorist hunters are going after al Qaeda
http://www.usnews.co...ews/2terror.htm
(Thisis the better link with some interactive stuff that is from teh actual magazine) It is a very good article.

[Lazarus Long]

So are you personally armed and dangerous or just another victim waiting to happen? [":)]

http://news.bbc.co.u...ast/3058383.stm
Al-Qaeda adapts to survive
Friday, 11 July, 2003, 17:00 GMT 18:00 UK
By Frank Gardner BBC security correspondent

There are at least 680 people being held at Guantanamo Bay The war on terror, launched by President George W Bush and supported with vigour by Prime Minister Tony Blair, is now well into its second year.

Attacks on westerners have continued, although nothing like on the scale of those of 11 September. So how is the war being fought and how is al-Qaeda adapting to the new realities after losing its bases in Afghanistan?

In November last year, the CIA took the war on terror to its enemies. High above the Yemeni desert, one of its unmanned Predator drone aircraft fired a missile at a lone car, carrying six al-Qaeda suspects. All died. They had been tracked from their base by a Yemeni informant, who phoned in their location to a joint US-Yemeni command centre.

This was the first targeted assassination by US forces outside Afghanistan.

In the fight against al-Qaeda, the rules of the game had changed. Not far off the Yemeni coast, a hi-tech US warship is keeping constant watch over six countries around the Horn of Africa.

From Yemen to Kenya, its analysts are collating information on suspect ships, smugglers, and arms traders - anyone, in fact, who could help al-Qaeda establish a firm base in east Africa. Earlier this year, the man in charge, Marine Corps Major-General John Sattler, told me he was getting good co-operation from the countries in the region.

"What we're looking to do is to work military to military, to train side by side, to enhance both of our forces to work in the tactics, techniques and procedures of combating terrorism.

"The other key part is the sharing of the information and intelligence."

Ready for attack

The Pentagon's Combined Joint Task Force in the Horn of Africa keeps a fleet of blacked-out helicopters for Special Operations on permanent standby in Djibouti. They are on a moment's notice to go into action if they get hard intelligence about an al-Qaeda presence there.

The Pentagon has a similar capability at its airbase at Bagram, in Afghanistan. MJ Gohel, from the Asia Pacific Foundation, says that since the attacks of 11 September, this ability to react quickly is needed to keep al-Qaeda on the defensive.

"The main thing is to keep hounding and harassing the al-Qaeda movement, and the idea is, if they are kept on the move they will have less time to plan attacks or to organise attacks and to recruit personnel.

"Its members are in many, many countries and you can't just keep chasing them. Eventually, the only way to get rid of this problem is to capture them."

Behind the scenes

The overt US military presence, projected on to potential terrorist hotspots like the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan and the southern Philippines, is only one aspect of the way the war is being fought.

The real war is taking place out of sight, being waged by intelligence officers, satellite analysts, translators, researchers, psychologists and interrogators.

The war on terror is primarily about trying to gather and collate intelligence.
Britain and the US are sharing intelligence. There is now a realisation in the West that the intelligence resources it had two years ago were woefully inadequate.

Since then, the CIA, the FBI, and British intelligence have all been on a major recruiting drive. Hundreds of Arab and Asian linguists have been hired. Co-operation between agencies has improved. Britain has set up the secretive Joint Terrorism Assessment Centre in London.

"For very many years, particularly in the US, they moved away from human intelligence and focused on technological capabilities and have paid the price for that," said Garth Whitty, from the Royal United Services Institute.

"The UK is in a much stronger position, but there is still a long way to go before we have the sort of coverage and penetration that is necessary."

Al-Qaeda's tactics

But what about al-Qaeda itself, the principal target in the West's war on terror? How is it adapting to being permanently on the run?

Several times in recent months, both Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri - or at least people purporting to be them - have made fiery broadcasts to their followers. They no longer send videotapes to TV stations. It is considered to be too risky for their own safety.

But on the airwaves and on the internet, al-Qaeda's fugitive leadership has been calling on Muslims to rise up against their rulers and to attack Americans. There have been attacks - in Bali, in Kenya, in Tunisia and Pakistan.

A former CIA operative, Mike Baker, who now runs the security company Diligence, believes al-Qaeda has effectively decentralised its operations.

"They have proven to be tactically adaptive. We have done significant damage to their financial structure, to their ability to communicate amongst themselves, and to their ability to move resources and personnel. But what they have done is to decentralise the way they do business".


'Endless patience'

What this means in practice is that small, localised groups with previously local agendas, like those in Africa and Asia, are now being encouraged by al-Qaeda to broaden their hit-list to include westerners.

MJ Gohel says we should now think of al-Qaeda, not so much as an organisation, but more as a global movement.

"In the past there were regional groups with regional aspirations, but over the last few years what has happened is they have all come under a kind of global jihad movement.

"These are people who now have agendas which go beyond their own borders. They wish to form Islamic caliphates, Islamic super-states, around the world."

The worry for the West, and for Israel, is that al-Qaeda has endless patience.

It sees 11 September as a wake-up call to Muslims after centuries of colonisation and repression.

For many, recent events in Iraq and the Palestinian territories have only confirmed those beliefs. [":)]

[Lazarus Long]

Here is why it is called "terrorism" when you think "high tech" you are blowing smoke, and if you think its all "over there" then you are in for a rude surprise.

When you depend on a weapon, what do you do when you don't possess the weapon, panic and surrender? Or adapt?

For example stealing and preparing a civilian Boeing 727 for use as a disguised human guided cruise missile.
http://edition.cnn.c...rism/index.html

We are depending on technology to save us from a mounting threat and every time we raise the bar with ever more complex technology the "enemy" adapts and uses the levels of advance against us, or causes us to overreact and use it against ourselves, as in the Patriot Ats I & II.

Why aren't enough people demanding a change in the "battlefield strategy" to one that addresses the substantive issues and develops a polemic of love and reconciliation instead of hate & war?
LL/kxs

http://edition.cnn.c...g.ap/index.html
FBI warned of al Qaeda forest fire plot
Saturday, July 12, 2003 Posted: 0141 GMT ( 9:41 AM HKT)

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- The FBI alerted law enforcement agencies last month that an al Qaeda terrorist now in detention had talked of masterminding a plot to set a series of devastating forest fires around the western United States.

Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, told The Associated Press that officials there took note of the warning but didn't see a need to act further on it.

The contents of the June 25 memo from the FBI's Denver office were reported Friday by The Arizona Republic. Davis declined to share a copy of the memo and an FBI spokeswoman in Denver didn't immediately return a telephone call.

The Republic reported that the detainee, who was not identified, said the plan involved three or four people setting wildfires using timed devices in Colorado, Montana, Utah and Wyoming that would detonate in forests and grasslands after the operatives had left the country.

The memo noted that investigators couldn't determine whether the detainee was telling the truth.

The newspaper said many forest law enforcement officers it contacted had no idea the warning had been issued.

[Lazarus Long]

Stop thinking in terms of Hollywood, the future of warfare is in a neighborhood near you;, everywhere on Earth. That is why I keep trying to explain to everyone to go beyond conventional opinion about this entire issue. World War III began as a Third World War. That's right, I used the past tense.

It won't end for some time and the battlefield will keep shifting and the protagonists will wear all types of uniforms (or none at all) but determining who are the good guys and who are the bad guys will take a lot more than a score card and National ID.

Here is why I suggest both the Third World linkage and how it enters the specter of rising street violence worldwide. This article is from the perspective a street cop turned scholar that is honest enough to proclaim what many of us have been saying for decades, that the entire approach is doing vastly more harm than good.

But the unintended consequences are that there exists global drug cartels that can shift sufficient wealth into underground economies for the acquisition of WMD's and they can afford them. Shining Path in Latin America and North Korea are only two examples of a growing trend of using our own avarice for psychotropes against us but blaming the victim is the worst form of counterproductive hubris. I only hope society at large comes to its senses in time, but the time bomb has been activated and is already ticking.

LL/kxs

http://www.washingto...1-2003Jul8.html
Victims of the War on Drugs
By Peter Moskos
Wednesday, July 9, 2003; Page A27

In 1998 the Drug Enforcement Administration sent its Mobile Enforcement Team into Benton Harbor, Mich., while state troopers patrolled the crime-ridden streets. With 42 arrests, the DEA struck a major blow at the drug ring responsible for some 90 percent of violent crime in the city.

In congressional testimony the following year, the DEA boasted: "After the intervention of law enforcement officers. . . . Benton Harbor was being brought back to life. . . . They brought a sense of stability to the area."

This was wishful thinking. Not only has there been no lasting effect on the drug trade, resentment of outside law enforcement in Benton Harbor recently has exploded into riots. Residents of the crime-ridden and depressed city see police as an occupying force.

Outsiders find it hard to believe that residents of dangerous communities -- those most in need of police services -- can be anti-police. Our drug laws create this paradox.

I policed ground zero in our "war" on drugs on the streets of Baltimore. Police in such circumstances, myself included, do the best they can. But faced with constant levels of drug-related violence and hostility, one should not expect the model for Officer Friendly.

Benton Harbor is not the first or last anti-police race riot. The pattern is always the same: a poor community ravaged by drugs, a history of real and perceived police misconduct, a racially charged spark, then riots.

Terrance Shurn was Benton Harbor's spark. He died after crashing his motorcycle June 16. He wouldn't stop for police. He might have been running to avoid a drug conviction. His license was suspended. Had I stopped him, I would have searched him, legally. I would have found the small bag of marijuana he was carrying. Suddenly, it's jail and a criminal drug conviction.

Most citizens in and out of our ghettoes, including drug users, despise drug dealers. But nobody supports heavy-handed drug enforcement.

Those at the receiving end of our drug policy know it simply doesn't work. People will riot as long as police keep locking them up without anything getting better.

Liberals are correct to note that rioting does not happen in the absence of poverty, poor education and poor policing. Conservatives are right to blame the individual rioters. But both sides miss the central point: The problems that lead to riots stem from the drug trade. Eighty years of failed drug prohibition have destroyed swaths of urban America.

While the damage from heroin and cocaine use is real and severe, prohibition creates an illegal market based on cash, guns and violence. While drug use can destroy an individual, the illegal and violent drug trade destroys whole neighborhoods.

If the war on drugs were winnable, we would already have won it. Drug prohibition criminalizes large segments of the population, even the majority in some areas. Police can't hire from some areas they police because not enough men reach hiring age without a drug conviction.

We need to accept the fact that drug addiction is a personal and medical problem. We need to push violent dealers off the street even if it means tolerating inconspicuous and peaceful indoor drug dealing.

Users don't belong in jail. Drug dealers see themselves as businessmen. Arrest one and another will quickly move to take the market. As long as addicts need to buy, somebody will sell.

How can tolerance lower drug use? We can learn from our already legal recreational drugs.

In 40 years cigarette smoking has decreased by half. This is a great victory against drugs. Public education hammered home the harm and changed our culture's attitudes towards tobacco.

Alcohol prohibition was tried and failed. Few argue that alcohol is an absolute "good." But for the most part people are happy with their localities regulating sales, balancing the rights of individuals with the harm to society. For both tobacco and alcohol, high taxation discourages new users and raises money for education.

We should implement similar policies for drug use. Treat drug abuse as a medical problem. Separate the problems of drug use from the violence of the drug trade. Acknowledge that drugs are bad, but don't frame drug policy as a moral war against evil.

Until we do these things, people in communities such as Benton Harbor will be under siege and sparks will set off riots.

The writer, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Harvard, worked two years as a Baltimore City police officer.


© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Lazarus Long]

While we are at it let me use my "'splainer" on you all about the reality of combat and what it is, and is not about. Never forget that all combat is predicated upon achieving objectives and those objectives must be fully understood or the result is not just a fog of war but the unleashing of a storm of unprecedented magnitude that wreaks havoc on all involved. The Law of Unintended Consequences is merciless and totally inconsiderate of "us and them".

LL/kxs

http://writ.news.fin...4_sprigman.html
Hacking for Free Speech:
A New Breed of "Hacktivists" Takes on Internet Censorship
By CHRIS SPRIGMAN
----
Tuesday, Jun. 24, 2003

The free exchange of information over the Internet has proven to be a threat to the social and political control that repressive governments covet. But rather than ban the Internet (and lose valuable business opportunities), most repressive governments seek to limit their citizens' access to it instead.

To do so, they use specialized computer hardware and software to create firewalls. These firewalls prevent citizens from accessing Web pages - or transmitting emails or files - that contain information of which their government disapproves.

U.S. Internet users may be familiar with the kind of firewalls that limit unauthorized access to confidential information kept on personal, business, or government computers. But the type of country-wide firewalls this article will look at are broader, and more pernicious. In countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Myanmar, Singapore, and at least 20 others, the only way to access the Web is through a firewall.

Fortunately, however, this kind of wholesale Internet censorship now faces a serious challenge. Hacker groups such as Hacktivismo are determined to poke holes in firewalls used for repression.

An Example: Saudi Arabia and The Internet

To understand what motivates the "hacktivists," it's important first to understand how serious the situation is in some countries.

Imagine, for example that you're a Saudi Arabian citizen, surfing the Internet to find information on converting to Christianity. You'd desperately like to keep your surfing secret from the government; in Saudi Arabia, apostasy from Islam is punishable by death. But it may prove difficult for you either to find the information you're looking for, or to keep your search confidential.

To begin, many of the sites you are seeking will be blocked. Citing a passage from the Qur'an as justification, the Saudi government significantly restricts the types of information Saudi citizens can access on the Web.

As researchers at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society have documented, the Saudi government blocks not only pornography, but also a wide range of relatively benign information about religion, health, education, reference, humor and entertainment. In particular, it blocks sites deemed to be proselytizing against Islam, or containing information hostile to Islam - even sites such as religioustolerance.org that merely advocate religious tolerance as a human right.

Meanwhile, web surfing is not only restricted, but also recorded. All Internet traffic in Saudi Arabia is routed through servers operated by the government's Internet Services Unit, and the Saudi government admits that it keeps logs of Internet traffic flowing through its servers.

The government denies any spying on individual users' browsing habits, but no one surfing for information deemed illicit will want to take its word on that.

How Repressive Regimes Censor the Net, and How U.S. Companies Help

How do these "country-wide" firewalls work? First, a user enters a URL - the address of a Web page - into his or her browser. This URL gets passed to the firewall, which checks to see if it is on a list of Web sites banned by the government. If so, then the firewall refuses to forward the user's request, and may instead send a message back to the user indicating that access is denied.

Firewalls may also be configured to filter Web sites for banned content; to log the IP addresses of users who have requested access to banned sites; and even to snoop on email communications. The consequences of detection by a firewall can be severe - China has jailed dissidents for downloading Internet articles critical of China and executed hackers for committing cyber-theft.

Ironically, some of the largest U.S. software companies - firms that have built their fortunes on open access to the Internet - have helped the efforts of China, Iran, and other repressive regimes to build and improve their firewalls. (A law preventing the companies from exporting firewall software wouldn't do much good, though: censorious governments would simply get their software elsewhere.)

Defeating Net Censorship Through "Hacktivism"

Enter Hacktivismo - an international group of programmers, some of whom sport nommes de guerre like "Oxblood Ruffin" (its principal spokesman), "Mixter" and "MrHappy." It practices "hacktivism", which it defines as "using technology to advance human rights through electronic media." (As its Declaration makes clear, the group's aims do not include providing access to materials, such as child pornography, that are properly restricted).

Hacktivismo takes its inspiration from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights - both of which declare freedom of opinion and freedom to seek, receive and impart information through media to be basic human rights. To vindicate these rights, the members of Hacktivismo have dedicated themselves to writing and disseminating software tools that interfere with governments' efforts to censor the Internet.

Hacktivismo's first project is Camera/Shy, a software application that helps Internet users transmit banned content across firewalls by hiding the content within ordinary .gif images. (This practice, hiding information within other information, is referred to as steganography). For example, Camera/Shy can hide information about the murder of a Chinese democracy activist within a contemporary Chinese painting by Liao Bang Ming.

Steganography, when done well, offers an important advantage: Censors may not even realize that encrypted information is being exchanged. Hacktivismo distributes Camera/Shy as an Internet Explorer-based Internet browser that leaves no trace on a user's system. The software has been downloaded hundreds of times from Hacktivismo's servers, and has been used by activists in China and Iran to evade those countries' firewalls.

Now, Hacktivismo has released a new software tool aimed at allowing access to any type of information anywhere on the Internet. It is named "Six/Four" in commemoration of the June 4, 1989 date of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Six/Four allows users to access a peer-to-peer network composed of many small "virtual private networks" that are secure because they administered by "trusted peers" - network participants who apply to Hacktivismo for permission to handle routing. It is thus an instance of what Hacktivismo refers to as H2H - hacktivist-to-hacktivist - architecture.

Oxblood Ruffin explains it this way: "H2H networks are like nuclear families living in large communities. Everyone may live in the same area, but each family has its own home where the doors open, close, and lock. And occasionally, a family member will bring someone new home. Everyone will sit around the living room, and if all goes well, the guest will be shown the library, perhaps, and maybe even someone's bedroom. All of this is based on earned trust."

Once a user has tapped into an H2H network, he or she can exchange encrypted files, send emails, or request Web pages, by using, as proxies, network nodes located outside the government firewall. Thanks to Six/Four, the firewall sees only certain IP addresses belonging to computers in a constantly shifting "cloud" of proxies. As a result, it is difficult for the firewall to block data transfer to and from these computers.

The Six/Four network is still in its infancy. And, like Camera/Shy, it is, in theory, subject to counter strategies by government censors. Nonetheless, the software promises, at a minimum, to substantially raise the cost of Internet censorship.

The Hacktivismo "Enhanced" Software License

In addition to its code-writing, Hacktivismo - working with their pro bono lawyer, Eric Grimm of CyberBrief, PLC - has also come up with a new form of software license aimed at preventing human rights abuses.

The license - called Hacktivismo's Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement, or HESSLA - governs the Six/Four software. It will also govern future versions of Camera/Shy, as well as new types of hacktivist software still on the drawing board.

Like a typical traditional "open source" software license, HESSLA grants users the freedom to redistribute copies of Six/Four, and to access, improve, or otherwise modify Six/Four's source code. But it also contains some novel terms.

The license forbids use of the software in a malicious manner, or to introduce harmful changes to the software's source code. A government might violate HESSLA, for instance, by seeking to invade the Six/Four network by setting up a node, and then writing a tool to identify the source of traffic through its part of the network.

In the event of such a government violation, the license says that Hacktivismo and Six/Four's end users - who may be citizens of any country in the world - may sue in any court of competent jurisdiction. (The license requires waiver of sovereign immunity, in a provision that, like all of HESSLA, has yet to be tested in court.) Meanwhile, if a private citizen uses Hacktivismo software to violate human rights, he or she can also be sued, but only by Hacktivismo.

These new license provisions may or may not stand up in court. If they do - and especially if they are emulated by some larger open source projects and perhaps even an idealistic commercial software company or two - they may work in tandem with hacktivist technologies in the fight against Internet censorship, bringing the battle into courts the world over.

Pro-Censorship and Anti-Censorship Technologies

Hacktivism's approaches raise a number of interesting questions. Can hacktivism really work? That is, can a technology successfully complement, supplant, or even defy the law to operate either as a source of enhanced freedom (or, for that matter, social control)? On balance, will technological innovation aid or hinder Net censorship?

Consider, for instance, the U.S.'s Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA). CIPA requires federally-funded public libraries to install filters to block Internet pornography. In a decision yesterday, the Supreme Court upheld the Act, despite a First Amendment challenge - and despite evidence that the mandated filtering blocked information about breast cancer, homosexuality and other legitimate subjects. The Court relied heavily on users' ability to request that the filters be turned off, despite the privacy sacrifice such a request entails.

Meanwhile, censorious governments in other countries are hardly likely to accede to such user requests (indeed, they're much more likely to blacklist those who make them). In those countries, therefore, we are likely to witness a simple arms race between the governments who seek to control information, and the hacktivists who wish to free it.

Interestingly, groups like Hacktivismo argue in favor of hackers' voluntarily limiting their own arsenal in this battle. They disapprove of destructive techniques like Website defacements, viruses, or denial of service attacks that tend to give hackers a bad name.

Instead, Hacktivismo's Oxblood Ruffin favors a strategy of "disruptive compliance," which he defines as the dissemination of innovative technology that nudges the Internet back toward its original spirit and intent. ("Innovative compliance" might be more accurate: "disruptive" might wrongly suggest illegal means.) Originally, the Internet was meant to serve as a vehicle for fast, cheap, and unfettered communication across borders and cultures, Oxblood Ruffian points out, and it should continue to do so.

In the end, who's likely to win the battle - the censoring government, or the hackers who oppose them? The hackers make clear that they expect their own ultimate victory:

"Hacking is a contact sport. We're trying to maintain contact with as many people as possible. The world is far too small a place to disconnect millions of people from one another. And governments that attempt to separate and divide the world rather than bring it together are on a collision course with the inevitable. There's an arrogant and misguided notion that somehow dictators will be able to exploit the Internet to improve their economies, yet put a chokehold on content they don't like. Good luck, nitwits."

Chris Sprigman is an antitrust and intellectual property lawyer practicing in Washington, DC.

[Mind]

Have you figured out where all the WMD the Administration said before invading was; that it was such an imminent threat that it could be launched on a 45 minute notice?

Lazarus, no smoking gun indeed, however there is a vast mountain of circumstantial evidence (not just from 2003). So much so that any flunkie prosecuter could get a conviction on the Hussein Regime.

The justifications for war should be high (a smoking gun would be good), but you seem to be in denial with regards to Hussein's weapons aspirations and capabilities.

[Lazarus Long]

The justifications for war should be high (a smoking gun would be good), but you seem to be in denial with regards to Hussein's weapons aspirations and capabilities.

If we think the fact that each other is a threat is a prima facia justification to preemptively strike then we have embarked down a slippery slope that encourages everybody to grab their guns. I am not sanguine about little/big bad Saddam. I was able to treat him as a known quantity, that is until now. I wasn't complacent about WMD's. I just didn't confuse a lot of BS for a rational threat.

Yes, I am irate that what before the war was the only "legal" justification for any action turn into such a catastrophic loss of adequate intelligence and Command & Control such that now we have less than ZERO.

Let's be clear, this entire operation can be classified as a failed operation given the PROCLAIMED OBJECTIVES. Worse, we have escalated the global threat level without a real policy in place for how to defuse the growing crisis. We aren't leading we are reacting in an overly predictable fashion.

I am not in denial at all I simple know we have less control over the threat Saddam is than he was. The issue is not only a question of criminal behavior on our part rationalized through paranoid logic but that we refused to preserve a growing coalition that was far more effective than we were crediting and have replaced it with destabilization that has shifted a vast arsenal of small to middle level tactical urban guerrilla weaponry into far more places around the world for all the weapons we did seize. The issue isn't any longer one of us protecting either ourselves or others, if the WMD's exist now they will be found when used.

Now we must face the real issue of Nation building versus regional destabilization as the true strategic interest and this was true before the war. We have now built al Qaeda training facilities at the US taxpayer's expense and made WMD's available to them. If you want to hold the Administration blameless for this level of incompetence that is your choice I think their fear, greed and mis-management of authority got the better of them.

[Lazarus Long]

Well here is another post that belongs both in this thread and in Nanotech. I will try and remember to post a link over there. And this article doesn't even address energy recycling by having the electronics powered by body heat, full stealth possibilities for covering thermal signatures and physical strength augmentation utilize bio-mimetic metal exoskeletons that amplify our muscles dozens of times.

http://news.bbc.co.u...ogy/3154203.stm
Tiny tech to help big soldiers
By Ian Hardy
BBC ClickOnline

Nanotechnology, the science of manufacturing tiny mechanisms and robots not much bigger than molecules, could soon become a big part of national security in the US.


By 2025, soldier uniforms could be tough and flexible

Much of it is still fantasy, but nanotech students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have received a $50 million (£32 million) grant from the US Army, which is hoping for long and short term results.

It means that by 2025, soldiers could be wearing thin uniforms which are not only flexible but are also tough enough to withstand bullets and blasts.

Uniforms under development have GPS guidance systems and live satellite feeds of the battlefield piped through an eyepiece in the helmet. There is also a built-in air conditioning system to keep the body temperature normal.

2010 warriors

By the end of this decade, the Objective Force Warrior may be a common sight on the battlefield. Ultra lightweight body armour protects the soldier and the suit is fitted with a wireless computer, video camera and communications devices.

"It's all about lightening the load. Today the soldier has a system that weighs about 100lbs, that's what's called the fighting weight," said Dr A Michael Andrews, chief scientist with the US Army.

"Our objective is to cut that weight in half, and to do that in about 3 years from now," he told BBC World's ClickOnline.


By 2010 Objective Force Warrior could be fighting

Underneath the suit is a full range of bio-sensors sending back medical data about the body in real-time to a command post. A medical team could be alerted automatically the moment a soldier is shot and his blood pressure drops.

MIT researchers will be allowed to train with the military to hear first hand about problems encountered by soldiers in combat, like Sergeant Raoul Lopez who fought al Qaeda fighters in the mountaintops of Afghanistan.

"The air up there is very thin and the weight on our backs was very heavy, so a lot of guys had problems doing extended periods of walking with those loads," said Sergeant Lopez.

"It became excruciating. Plus, the inability to breathe definitely took a toll on some people."

Nanotech waterproofing

"Soldier survivability" is a top priority for researchers and work is already under way to ensure this. Conventional methods of waterproofing, for example, rely on a single coating that gradually loses its effect.

With new revolutionary techniques, individual fibres from a bullet proof vest can be covered with a few nanometres of Teflon. This adds almost no weight to a uniform, yet keeps every drop of water out.

It's all about lightening the load. Today the soldier has a system that weighs about 100lbs, that's what's called the 'fighting weight'.

Dr A Michael Andrews, US Army 

Another useful discovery is the ability to turn microscopic iron spheres from liquid state to a solid in a few seconds using electromagnetic forces. This could bring about major changes to the flexibility and comfort of body armour and it means bullet proof vests of the future are likely to have on and off switches.

"The current Kevlar jacket is a composite material that involves layers of Kevlar fibres woven into a fabric, and ceramic plates in between which give you the large ballistic impact," explained Gareth McKinley, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, MIT.

"The goal is to replace the ceramic plates, which are rigid and not very moveable, with something that is liquid when the field is off and then becomes rigid when the field is on."


Mechanical nanostructures can also be made to act like human muscles, so particles can expand and contract on cue.

One use for this is for uniforms which could sense a gunshot wound and automatically tighten around it to prevent blood loss. Mechanical nanostructures could tighten around gunshot wounds Suits of the future may also be able to make normal tasks easier. This could be anything from simple lifting or motion, to jumping higher than before. But it does not end there.

Nanotechnology has infinite uses. A pack of sausages can last much longer if the tray has a special coating, goggles can stop bullets without splintering, and boot soles can last for decades.

The immediate focus for the researchers however is miniaturisation. Even current devices are being adapted for the Army's use. Using a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) for example, soldiers could transmit co-ordinates of a target back to base in less than three seconds, 10 times faster than now. Bulky radio handsets will be replaced with button-size microphones on the collar, and night vision goggles may become the size of contact lenses.

Top secret

Not surprisingly there was great enthusiasm for these ideas at the recent opening of the Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies.

MIT wants to be at the centre of military innovation and describes much of the research as fundamental, not just to the military but to society as a whole.

In a few years there could be major changes in everything from the clothes we wear to the gadgets we carry as advances in nanoscience become increasingly evident.

There are security safety nets in place though. If a project becomes too sensitive it will immediately become classified and moved to the Army's own laboratories to minimise exposure to terrorists or spies.

As long as the experiments remain in the MIT labs, the details will be available for public inspection.

[Mind]

Oakland Tribune

Warfare at the speed of light
By Ian Hoffman
STAFF WRITER


Sunday, October 19, 2003 - DOWN THIS tiled corridor, light does muscular, noisy work. Lasers dig dirt and weld metal. They pound aircraft parts into shape.

In Bob Yamamoto's lab, light devours.

He straps on emerald green goggles. A technician stabs a fire button and calls out the computer countdown. "Three ... two ... one ..."

Then ... nothing. Just a buzz of electronics and an ephemeral glow in this darkened room at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. But inside Yamamato's target chamber, a block of steel spits flame and molten metal.

In those two seconds, 400 blasts of light poured into slabs of clear, manmade garnet. Swollen in energy, the crystal's atoms then unleashed torrents of infrared light to ricochet 1,000 times between two mirrors and multiply, finally escaping as 400 pulses of pure, square beam.

Kilowatt for kilogram, this is the world's most powerful solid-state laser. Its invisible beam drilled Yamamoto's inch-thick steel plate in two seconds. Add larger crystals and it will eat steel a mile or more away.

Read the rest here

Being a Libertarian I would rather attack terrorists on their soil in order to preserve freedom at home (Al la Afganistan). Also being a libertarian I do not like too much power in the hands of any one government. I was never afraid of the any country using nuclear weapons, even though I grew up through all the "nuclear winter" hollywood stories in the 80's. I am not afraid of guns or missles or tanks because I can see them coming. These weapons operate within the realm of human senses.

However, my mental jury is still out on lasers. It is really getting close to the time of great "promise and peril" as many futurists have opined.

[Lazarus Long]

I was never afraid of the any country using nuclear weapons, even though I grew up through all the "nuclear winter" hollywood stories in the 80's. I am not afraid of guns or missles or tanks because I can see them coming. These weapons operate within the realm of human senses.

Actually they not only operate on the realm of human sensibility they are being assimilated into social acceptability. There is a strong push on to create a vast new generation of "Tactical Nukes" whose limited yield, cost, and portability encourages rather than diminishes their likelihood of use.

This is a complex and dangerous issue. The lasers are are part of the trigger mechanism of fusion devices by the way as well as potential weapons and ABM devices in their own right. China's entry into manned space operations heralds a sea change on the issue of the militarization of orbital and outer space that is being quietly renegotiated as we speak and certainly is becoming a hot topic among many circles like the PNAC (The Project for a New American Century).

Here is a follow up on a new integrated weapons system that is evolving out combining the new tactical realities of Iraq with urban policing methods that we can expect to have cross over applicability both over there and domestically.

http://www.nytimes.c.../23DETE.html?hp


COUNTERINSURGENCY
New Spy Gear Aims to Thwart Attacks in Iraq
By ERIC SCHMITT
Published: October 23, 2003

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 — The Air Force and the Army are working on a classified project to use new combinations of surveillance aircraft and other sensors, along with intelligence on the ground, to try to detect and counter the increasingly deadly ambushes against American forces in Iraq, senior Pentagon officials said on Wednesday.

The surveillance effort could include a range of tactics and technology, the officials said, including equipping remotely piloted Predator aircraft with special radar or sensors to help find homemade bombs or suspected guerrilla activity.


U.S. Air Force via Agence France-Presse
Remotely piloted Predator aircraft like this one would be used in a new Army-Air Force project to help find guerrilla booby traps in Iraq.

Air Force experts are culling lessons from the New York City Police Department about helicopter surveillance techniques in urban areas. The Army is rushing to deploy new technologies aimed at detecting and crippling roadside booby traps, which have proven particularly effective in attacks on the occupation force's convoys.

In a newly disclosed memo to his top aides, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has questioned the Pentagon's ability to change quickly enough to be effective in the global war on terror, and has cited mixed results of efforts so far in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on surveillance and other new ways of fighting insurgents, Congress has been told. But senior military officials are wary of disclosing too much about the Air Force-Army surveillance project, saying they do not want to tip off Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters who are clashing with American forces as many as two dozen times a day.

"We want to find ways to help ground forces in Iraq not be ambushed," Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, said in an interview. "The Army is building data all the time as they experience one episode after another. There are ways we should be able to have the persistence of surveillance that's available to us, and help us shortcut these guys before they are able to take action."

To some extent, the Pentagon is pursuing a goal that has eluded it in counterinsurgency operations since the Vietnam War, when the military struggled to track the movement of arms and troops from the North along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Advances in surveillance technologies since then make it possible to monitor the movement of people day and night, even through cloud cover, but senior Pentagon officials conceded that the latest devices were not a foolproof solution that would prevent more attacks.

"They're not going to be 100 percent solutions," Anthony Tether, head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, told reporters on Wednesday. "But when you're in a situation where you have no solutions, even a 25 percent solution is going to be great."

The new Army and Air Force program, called Project Eyes, is part of a broader effort by the Defense Department to arm troops against increasingly sophisticated attacks that reflect careful planning and coordination. A total of 203 American troops have been killed in Iraq since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1, including 104 by hostile fire.

At the urging of commanders in the field and lawmakers in Congress, the Pentagon is rushing to Iraq extra protective equipment, including body armor and armored Humvees, and in many cases, pulling antiguerrilla devices out of the laboratory and sending them to the field.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz last week directed the military to spend an additional $335.5 million to buy or speed up production of new countermeasures.

In a letter on Oct. 16 to senior House and Senate members, Mr. Wolfowitz said the spending would include $38.3 million for tethered blimps equipped with digital cameras to spy on guerrillas' movements, more than $30 million for electronic jammers to disrupt their remote-controlled bombs, and $70 million to develop and buy what the letter called other "rapid-reaction/new solution" technologies.


An Air Force photo shows a type of surveillance balloon that could be used against attacks in Iraq.

Some devices would help detect roadside bombs and booby traps that have been killing American-led occupation forces, Mr. Tether said. These countermeasures use a variety of approaches including lasers, acoustic sensors and electromagnetic technologies, he said. He said the devices would be shipped in the next three to four months or sooner, after accelerated, last-minute development and testing.

The urgency of the efforts reflect the vulnerabilities of America's vaunted high-tech arsenal against an enemy that uses hit-and-run tactics, and hides homemade bombs in soda cans, plastic bags or dead animals.

"What we all need to understand is that with some of these improvised explosive devices all that is required is someone with a paper bag or a plastic bag to drop it as a walk-by," Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top American ground commander in Iraq, said this month. General Sanchez has repeatedly said that successfully countering the attacks relies heavily on tips from ordinary Iraqis.

The new project is being led by the Air Force's strategic and operational planning cell, called Checkmate, along with experts on the Army staff in Washington and at some Army field units.

An Army spokesman with experience in Iraq, Col. Guy Shields, said the Army has been analyzing the attacks for several months, and adjusting tactics accordingly. "We look at where the attacks took place, if there were recurring patterns, and if so, take appropriate action," Colonel Shields said. "It's a continual learning process."

The Army-Air Force project has succeeded in getting the two services to integrate the information from their different remotely piloted aircraft, to provide one common surveillance picture, officials said.

Using that information and other forensic data, analysts using complex computer programs try to identify patterns of behavior leading up to an attack. "Once you have some analytical pattern, you could then go out with a Predator that stares for 24 hours," General Jumper said.

General Jumper said detecting hostile forces mingled among civilians was one of the most difficult challenges facing American forces and military analysts. He said: "When you're dealing with people who are in a marketplace looking exactly like everyone else, and are pulling a weapon out, or are controlling a place where someone is shooting at you out of second-story window with rocket-propelled grenade, you've got to back off one layer and say: `How did that grenade get there? How did those people arrive at the places they were?' "


******************************

BTW, On lasers check this out

Anti-sniper laser set for Iraq

[Lazarus Long]

Speaking of lasers here is a comprehensive article on the new tactical weapons system planned to be fielded by 2010 as written up in the Army News Service.

http://www.space.com...ser_031021.html

An engineer from the Army’s Tank and Automotive Command shows off the laser weapon mock-up at the Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Oct. 6. CREDIT: Spc. Bill Putnam

Sci-Fi Weapons Closer Than Most Think
By Spc. Bill Putnam
Army News Service
posted: 02:20 pm ET
21 October 2003

WASHINGTON (Army News Service) -- The technology behind space ship lasers and force fields is a lot closer to reality than many think.

Although those lasers and force fields won't be fielded for a few more years, Gus Khalil, an engineer at the Army's Tank and Automotive Command in Dearborn, Mich., said the Army has identified what they want for the Army's Future Combat System.

"There's a lot more demands for the FCS vehicle than there are for the legacy force today," he said. "Anything we do today that gives the soldiers less capability than he has is unacceptable."

That technology is being developed for the Army's Future Combat System, the family of 16 manned, unmanned, ground and aerial vehicles the Army wants fielded by 2010.

The manned ground vehicles have to weigh less than 20 tones. They also have to be as fast, as mobile and as lethal as an M-1A2 Abrams and M2 Bradley fighting vehicle. Doing all that will be like making a Toyota truck as durable as an 18-wheel semi-truck, one TARDECE engineer quipped at a recent FCS conference in Dearborn, Mich.

But it is doable Khalil said. To demonstrate that, Khalil had a mock-up of the laser gun system at the Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Oct. 6-8.

The gun program falls under the Combat Hybrid Power System. Initiated by DARPA six years ago and handed over to TARDEC two years ago, the program is developing the FCS' "pulsed power" weapons. Since the system is just being developed, the weapons could be Electro-thermal Chemical guns or even a laser gun capable of firing artillery rounds or destroying tanks, he said.

The mock up showed how TARDEC wants the system to work. On one end was a pack of three lithium-ion battery modules. When it was "fired" it went through a converter that increased the charge from 100 volts to 1,000 volts.

From there it goes to the pulse-forming network, a nest of capacitors and inductors, where the now 1,000 volts will be turned into a "pulse discharge" that will last less than one-millionth of a second, he said.

From there the pulse of electricity goes through an out-put switch that will fire the pulse to its intended target, Khalil said.

The pulse was demonstrated through a bank of four strobe lights. If someone wasn't careful the lights could burn holes in their retinas, he said.

Khalil said tests have shown that 600-volts to 10,000-volts weapons are possible. And that's what they're forecasting to be in the FCS, Khalil said.

The modules' life span depends on how they're used, he said. If they're used just for mobility they can potentially last years, about 15, he said. If they use chemical or laser guns, they won't last long, he said.

"I don't know the exact number because we have not done that yet," Khalil said of how many times the batteries will fire the weapons.

He wants the batteries to last 50 rounds or "firings" but the modules will last only 20 rounds right now, he said.

The FCS is projected to have anywhere from 20-50 of those battery modules and since battery technology is getting smaller, that requirement will be met, Khalil said.

The pulse gun will also have the ability to fire something like today's sabot anti-tank round. But the FCS pulse weapon will give it more penetration capability than it already has, Khalil said.

To the soldier on the battlefield, it will look similar to a sabot round -- a flash of light -- and the result might be the same -- a destroyed tank or armored vehicle, he said.

But Khalil's team isn't stopping there. His team is also developing electro-magnetic armor capable of stopping not only other pulsed weapons but conventional weapons.

The electro-magnetic armor will also be run from the same power source that will power the weapons system and the engine.

If the power system that powers the pulse gun that Khalil is designing fires in milli-seconds, that same source will power the electric armor in micro-seconds, he said. In other words, it's much faster and uses a lot more juice, he explained.

The biggest challenge for his team is to run the gun and armor off the same batteries that will run the engine, Khalil said.

Pentagon to Offer Combat Videophones

Going Hypersonic: Flying FALCON for Defense

New Device Uses Cosmic Rays to Detect Nuclear Contraband

[imminstmorals]

I'm not worry about Automated Warfare here,
it is hard to use this tech to conduct hacktism

u've to noe integration of all science ,build from scratch and wif million buck facilities, unless u sneakinto lab, i'm pretty sure anyone reali into this fing won't do somefin stupid

The only I afraid that triggers nano war is the government,
u noe any government loves SPY ACTIVITY, eventually some government would get pissed!!

this tech is undetectable

We've to unite, share and SIGN TREATY !!!!!!!!!

OR WE R DEAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


THIS IS SERIOUS!!
LET"S SAY TREATY BEGINNING NEXT YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!