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Apr
4
B1-B Bomber Burns In Qatar
Filed Under Air Force, B1-B Lancer, Iraq War, Middle East, Qatar, homeland security, military | Leave a Comment
B1-B Lancer
A B1-B Lancer bomber has crashed in Qatar, reports CNN.
The crew escaped safely.
A U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber caught fire Friday after a landing at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, U.S. military officials said.
A sweep-wing B-1 bomber, similar to this one, caught fire after landing Friday in Qatar, the U.S. military says.
The crew evacuated safely, the officials said.
They said the fire began while the plane was taxiing after landing about 9:10 p.m. at al-Udeid, the headquarters of U.S. military air operations for the Middle East.
Mar
31
A SWORDS military robot in Iraq
Recent talk of a turing test possibly making autonomous military robots legal because they will have ability to distinguish between friends, foes, and civilians raises the possibility that the new weapons systems of the future could be autonomous military robots.
“Can a robot commit a war crime?” That question was raised at the conference on The Ethics of Autonomous Military Systems behind yesterday’s story on ethical concerns over robotic weapons.
Barrister and Engineer Chris Elliot explained his thoughts on the legality of future “intelligent” weapons, within international, criminal and civil law. He started by suggesting that as systems become more autonomous, they become capable of actions that are not, in legal terms, “foreseeable”.
At that point, he suggested, it would be hard to blame a human for its actions. “We’re getting very close to the where the law may have to recognise that we can’t always identify an individual – perhaps an artificial system can be to blame.”
Military robots are already in use in Iraq — the SWORDS system is controlled by a remote operator.
The U.S. Army quietly entered a new era earlier this summer when it sent the first armed ground robots into action in Iraq.
So far, the robot army’s entrance into the war has been a trickle rather than an invasion.
Only three of the special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system (SWORDS) have been deployed so far.
The Army has authorized the purchase of 80 more robots — which are being touted as a potentially life-saving technology — but acquisition officials have not come forth with the funding.
“As [soldiers] use them and like them, I’ve heard positive feedback, they want 20 more immediately. It’s a shame we can’t get them to them,” Michael Zecca, SWORDS program manager, told National Defense.
Feb
23
Cyber Command: The Future Of The Military
Filed Under Air Force, Cyber Command, Cyber War, internet, military | 3 Comments
Air Force Cyber Command
While I’m partial to the U.S. Army — I’m an Army brat and my dad has spent 40+ years working for the Army either on active duty or as a civilian — the U.S. Air Force always has the fun stuff that’s always fascinating — killer airplanes, stealth fighters, remote controlled UAVs, nuclear missiles, B52s and all sorts of other expensive and alluring technology.
The latest cool Air Force command is it’s 10th — the Air Force Cyber Command — designed to stop the bad guys who are making their own plans for cyber war and terrorism.
Writes Gautham Nagesh in Government Executive, the Air Force is moving ahead with building the 8th Air Force into Cyber Command.
The Air Force is moving ahead on establishing its new Cyber Command, searching for permanent facilities and planning meetings to establish rules by which it will operate, according to Air Force officials.
In September, the Air Force announced it would establish a Cyber Command to prepare for fighting wars in cyberspace by defending national computer networks running critical operations and to attack adversaries computer networks.
The Air Force now operates a Provisional Cyberspace Command at Barksdale Air Force Base in northwest Louisiana. Its vice commander, Col. Anthony Buntyn, said the provisional command is solely involved with “standing up the permanent command,” meaning it is developing a structure, finding a location for the base and hiring and training staff. Buntyn spoke this week at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s annual Air Force IT Day in Vienna, Va.
Next week, Air Force officials, mostly with the rank of major and colonel, will meet at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., to begin laying out the rules that the command will follow during a possible cyberwar. Called the Cyber Space Warfare Doctrine, the rules will include defining what constitutes an act of cyberwar as opposed to what is merely a cybercrime or act of cyberterrorism.
Marty Graham writes about Cyber Command for Wired and the competition among politicians to host its headquarters in one of their Congressional districts.
He gives a detailed overview of the mission of the new Air Force command.
The Cyber Command is rooted in a historic vision statement penned in 2005 by the secretary of the Air Force, Michael Wynne, and co-signed by the Air Force chief of staff. In the 21st century, Wynne wrote, America’s enemies would contest America in a new range of theaters, and the armed forces must be ready to meet them and, if necessary, “destroy them” there. Henceforth, he vowed, the Air Force would “fly and fight in air, space and cyberspace.”
“Tell the nation,” Wynne reiterated in a speech last September, “that the age of cyberwarfare is here.”
“Our mission is to control cyberspace both for attacks and defense,” says Lord’s boss, Lt. Gen. Robert Elder — a three-star general who totes a Blackberry and holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Wearing a green flight suit with no brass, bars or Bronze Star in sight, Elder relaxes in a leather chair away from his desk, and lays out the vision, which amounts to nothing less than a complete transformation of the Air Force.
“We have to learn to plan years out for operations, security defense and integration, to plan how to deter attacks, how to posture to prevent attacks, and we have to stay very current,” Elder says.
Some suggest Cyber Command is here to counter future threats from foreign powers, such as China — which is also one of our major creditors.
Reports Graham in Wired:
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the reorganization. Defense expert John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, says the Cyber Command’s mission is murky. “There’s been so much gee-whiz flackery to this,” Pike says. “They’ve got the whole thing tarted up, and it’s hard to tell what they’re actually doing.”
Pike says the Cyber Command may be part of a secret Air Force plan to prepare for war against China, already suspected of trying to hack Department of Defense networks. He says the new command’s defensive mission is muddled and duplicative: The NSA already defends military networks. As for civilian infrastructures like the internet and power grid, they’re privately owned, and the Air Force has no jurisdiction over them.
But, there might be a need to be able to bring about peace through superior firepower. There are reports that the Cyber War has already started, writes Michael Posner in Government Executive.
A technology expert said Tuesday that the United States is in the midst of an active cyber war and is now implementing still-secret security plans for protection.
Andrew Palowitch, a former CIA official who is now an industry consultant to the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, peeled back a gauzy layer over the secret national cyber-security initiative that will be a blueprint for protection.
“We are currently in a cyber war and war is going on today,” Palowitch said in a talk at Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies. He credited Gen. James (Hoss) Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with that assessment but said he agrees with it.
“America is under widespread attack in cyberspace,” Palowitch said in citing Cartwright’s statistics that there were 37,000 reported breaches of government and private systems in fiscal 2007. There were nearly 13,000 direct assaults on federal agencies then, and 80,000 attempted computer network attacks on Defense Department systems, he added.
Some of those assaults “reduced the U.S., military operational capabilities,” Palowitch said. He never discussed who the enemy might be.
Jan
12
A 2002 Pentagon war game shows how swarming teams of small speed boats can use asymmetrical war fighting tactics to defeat a superior naval force, reports the New York Times.
There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships.
In the days since the encounter with five Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, American officers have acknowledged that they have been studying anew the lessons from a startling simulation conducted in August 2002. In that war game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats.
“The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack,” said Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who served in the war game as commander of a Red Team force representing an unnamed Persian Gulf military. “The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes.”
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