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"It has the same power as a stun gun. It knocks you down."

It's been done, pretty much. http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001437.html

From DefenseTech:

Pentagon Cuts: Bogus?

Philip Coyle:

The ground-based midcourse defense system, as it is now called, has not shown that it can hit anything other than missiles whose trajectory and targets have been preprogrammed by missile defense contractors to eliminate the surprise or uncertainty of battle. Nor has it proven that it can hit a tumbling target, perform at night, or find ways to counter the decoys and countermeasures that a real enemy would use to throw a defense off track. Tests so far have all been conducted at unrealistically low speeds and altitudes, and it is not clear that the system will be able to track and identify the warhead it is supposed to destroy.

Defense Tech:

collection of top physicists concluded that it was essentially impossible to knock down a missile in its "boost phase," right after it launches.

Slate:

In the past six years of flight tests, here is what the Pentagon's missile-defense agency has demonstrated: A missile can hit another missile in mid-air as long as a) the operators know exactly where the target missile has come from and where it's going; b) the target missile is flying at a slower-than-normal speed; c) it's transmitting a special beam that exaggerates its radar signature, thus making it easier to track; d) only one target missile has been launched; and e) the "attack" happens in daylight.

But hey, it's not like they aren't doing their best, testing it thoroughly, acting to develop a real system capable of doing real work:

Thomas P. Christie, director of the Pentagon's office of Operational Test and Evaluation, said a shortage of testing data would likely make it difficult for him to assess the system's effectiveness ahead of any deployment

But, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all those scientists working for the military contractors know something that the rest of the scientific world doesn't.

Philip Coyle:

The ground-based midcourse defense system, as it is now called, has not shown that it can hit anything other than missiles whose trajectory and targets have been preprogrammed by missile defense contractors to eliminate the surprise or uncertainty of battle. Nor has it proven that it can hit a tumbling target, perform at night, or find ways to counter the decoys and countermeasures that a real enemy would use to throw a defense off track. Tests so far have all been conducted at unrealistically low speeds and altitudes, and it is not clear that the system will be able to track and identify the warhead it is supposed to destroy.

Defense Tech:

collection of top physicists concluded that it was essentially impossible to knock down a missile in its "boost phase," right after it launches.

Slate:

In the past six years of flight tests, here is what the Pentagon's missile-defense agency has demonstrated: A missile can hit another missile in mid-air as long as a) the operators know exactly where the target missile has come from and where it's going; b) the target missile is flying at a slower-than-normal speed; c) it's transmitting a special beam that exaggerates its radar signature, thus making it easier to track; d) only one target missile has been launched; and e) the "attack" happens in daylight.

But hey, it's not like they aren't doing their best, testing it thoroughly, acting to develop a real system capable of doing real work:

Thomas P. Christie, director of the Pentagon's office of Operational Test and Evaluation, said a shortage of testing data would likely make it difficult for him to assess the system's effectiveness ahead of any deployment

But, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all those scientists working for the military contractors know something that the rest of the scientific world doesn't.

Re: "spray lots of bullets" Have you heard about the Metal Storm project that the New Jersey Institute of Technology (yes the same place quoted in the press release that started this conversation)is working on. The question is Surveilance or High Altitude Weapons Platform ?
see also http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000742.html

When do we get to vote on how the military handles housekeeping?

How about every two or six years? Remember, the Congress approves how the military spends its money, and they define the laws by which the military must operate.

Bring this issue up to your representative's office, and let them know that we don't approve the lax I.T. policies. Or how about write to someone on the Armed Services Oversight Committee, inform them that things like this are taking place, that national security is at risk. If they can shut down Los Alamos over floppy disks, then something needs to change here.

Seriously. Los Alamos has had TONS of problems. Remember the Chinese spying scandal under Clinton ? Los Alamos. Intrusion tests have resulted in attackers breaching the facility and leaving with a wheelbarrow filled with nuclear material. More recently, the Los Alamos lab has been losing Classified Removable Electronic Media left and right. Employees have had security badges stolen. Hell, CREM's have been found for sale with obvious confidential labels in nearby stores.

I'm far too lazy to get appropriate links for all of their issues. I've got some examples in a post I made yesterday, but those aren't Los Alamos specific. Why not peruse the summaries and madcap linkage from someplace like DefenseTech ? The vast majority of those articles detail the University of California's complete mismanagement of the Los Alamos facilities.

And 'Liberal Whacko' is a strange term to hurl at them. "Completely oblivious to security concerns".


--LordPixie

DOE is more than capable of doing this and have done so for many years. Admittedly there have been a few problems but it never started a real situation of calamatious proportions.

Last I checked, the DoE ran the Pantex nuclear weapons plant. The same site with some obscene safety issues. Accidentally drilling into the core of a nuclear device resulted in the evacuation of the entire plant. Securing a warhead with duct tape increased the chances of a flat out nuclear explosion. And that's ignoring the clichéd "OMG THREE MILE ISLAND" commentary.

+++Warning to any fool that thinks it's easy to steal radioactive material from one of these teams. You'll die twice before you get to pull your trigger once!+++

Perhaps you reached this conclusion because the security teams were cheating during their security drills ? Cheating. for twenty years. It's not too hard to look impenetrable when you know the exact building and wall where an attack will take place. A DoE whistleblower admitted to a 50% success rate for security tests. Special forces teams were able to penetrate Los Alamos and wander off with enough material to create a nuclear bomb. Even an freakin' journalist was able to sneak into Los Alamos. There are plenty of other issues raised over at the Project On Governmental Oversight. Again, that's ignoring all the major security issues with CREM's going on over the last month.

Now, you're absolutely right in the fact that we need to get that waste cleaned up. But thinking that the DoE, NNSA, or the US government on the whole is "more than capable" is bullshit. We're flirting with disaster. If we take the outlook that everything is fine and dandy, we're going to quickly hit the point where someone will cause a situation of calamatious proportions.


--LordPixie

Sanswire folks are trying to get an airship to reach a desired altitude of 65000 feet. The navy has been working with blimps lately which top out at about 20,000 feet, which I would consider pretty good. 65000 on a rigid frame ship is pretty unlikely. However, the unlikelyness of their statements does not make any dent in my plans to steal one and go airship-piratin'. Yeeaaar, matey. I'd like to be the first airship bucaneer, if I may.

There's a bunch more on how the Trek-inspired 'bot was built and tested here.

Very true. Which is one of its problems, actually. FCS -- the Army's $92 billion modernization effort -- is looking like it might slip, big time. Luckily, FFW might detatch from that albatross.

There's a whole bunch more on NASA's way-out research over here.

Defense Tech has a blimpload of info on the Pentagon's lighter-than-air efforts, including communications dirigibles for Iraq, and a Darpa plan for a giant zeppelin that keeps watch over an entire city.

Defense Tech has info on Darpa's plan for a blimp that can keep watch over an entire city, and other Pentagon airship efforts, too.

Defense Tech has info on Darpa's plan for a blimp that can keep watch over an entire city, and other Pentagon airship efforts, too.

Right. We need to spend more than the next twenty nations combined.

We need to spend more than we have in over fifty years to Fight Terror, a nebulous proposition at best.

We need to spend money on programs that should have died with the Cold War... and to fight who? Terrorists with a decentralized power structure?

Yeah, new trident missile submarines and fourth-generation stealth fighters are definitely necessary for that. Just like how it's necessary to destroy a house in order to get rid of a rodent.

Defense Tech has more on the Air Force's space war plans.

There's lots more on "Foodless Fighters" at Defense Tech.

It's worse than you think. Seisint, the company behind Matrix, was founded by a guy who was implicated in a Bahamian drug smuggling ring back in the 80's.

There's more about so-called "power beaming" here at Defense Tech...

BRIDE OF "TIA" LIVES

Congress may have driven a stake through Total Information Awareness. But there are lots of other government data-mining programs -- eeriely similar to TIA -- that are still very much alive.

One TIA-like project is Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD), an initiative of the little-known Intelligence Community Advanced Research and Development Activity, notes secrecy guru Steven Aftergood, with the Federation of American Scientists.

"Pursued with a minimal public profile and lacking a polarizing figure like Adm. Poindexter to galvanize opposition, NIMD has proceeded quietly even as TIA imploded," Aftergood writes.

The NIMD effort aims to comb through "structured text in various formats, unstructured text, spoken text, audio, video, tables, graphs, diagrams, images, maps, equations, chemical formulas, etc." to help "intelligence analysts to spot the telltale signs of strategic surprise."

By now, we all know what that means.
Posted by noahmax at September 26, 2003 02:03 PM

There's more info on LifeLog here and here.

nms

Stavatti Percussion conducts the retail sale of percussion products Stavatti's founder and current CEO, Christopher R. Beskar, plays the bagpipes. Early in his piping career, Mr. Beskar joined a bagpipe band. This band was in need of drummers to play the snare in accompaniment of the pipes. Mr. Beskar's brother Shawn joined the band and became an accomplished pipe band snare drummer capable of Grade 2 competition while yet in High School. Later on, Shawn became CFO of Stavatti. While serving as CFO, Shawn began marketing Premier Pipe Band Products under a business entity designated DSDC.

You can all get back to work now.

http://www.warblogging.com/
Breaking news, analysis, also covers related events in the US. Cynical slant.

http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
An Iraqi blogger. Hoax? It's well done

>> Wherever you go you see closed shops and it is not just doors-locked
>> closed but sheet-metal-welded-on-the-front closed,
>> windows-removed-and-built-with-bricks closed, doors were being welded shut


http://volokh.blogspot.com/
Excellent analysis of causes and outcomes. Breaking news, too.

http://www.sgtstryker.com/
Military / conservative perspective on Iraq and the news. Liberal and conservative views in the discussions.

http://www.defensetech.org/
It's all about the gear. The Slashdot of war technology.

http://timblair.blogspot.com/
Conservative and irreverant news analysis

http://www.andrewsullivan.com/

http://uswarblog.tripod.com/warblog/

http://www.nowarblog.org/
"Stand Down: The Left-Right Blog opposing an invasion of iraq"

http://www.back-to-iraq.com/
Back to Iraq 2.0

http://www.warblogs.cc/

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

Many people here have commented that my story wasn't a big deal, because the area into which I went wasn't sufficiently top-secret. If I had walked out with, say, a wheelbarrow full of uranium, then they would have been impressed.

Well, in 1997, during a security training simulation, soldiers were able to do just that. In 2000, during a similar exercise, feaux bad guys "gain(ed) access to the reactor fuel... potentially causing a sizable nuclear detonation that would have taken out part of New Mexico and caused havoc downwind."

I'm a scared, out-of-shape lummox without any military training whatsoever, and with no motivation to do anything harmful. Yet I got into an area that I was assured could not be accessed by any outsider - an area that no one will even say officially what it's purpose is.

If I could do what I did - and these simulated attackers coudl make such spectacular inroads - what could a more determined adversary accomplish? That's the question my story asks.

Several Slashdotters said that TA-33 couldn't have been that important, if Bussolini and Alexander stored their allegedly fraudulently-purchased goods there, and if I was able to get in.

To that, one Slashdot reader replied, "I'm not comfortable assuming that the buildings he managed to get into were useless just based on the fact that he was able to access them. It seems like that sort of head-in-the-sand circular logic does not good security practices make."

I agree.

--

For more, go to Defense Tech.

Of interest to this discussion from Defense Tech:

HAMAS TOYS WITH DEATH
A leading Palestinian militant has been killed by, of all things, a remote-controlled toy plane. Hamas chieftain Nidal Farahat and others had been working on a way to load explosives onto such toys and use them as weapons of terror.

On Sunday, Farahat appeared to fall victim to his own designs. He and five other Hamas operatives died in a Gaza City car bombing. A toy plane was found inside the vehicle.

"This is an assassination done by Israel," Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, a leader of Hamas, told the New York Times.

In January, DebkaFile claimed that Yasser Arafat was arranging for the deployment of new weapons: "Model planes packed with explosives and operated by remote control."

Last month, Palestinian toy importers in Jerusalem and Ramallah were told to order hundreds of these toys for distribution to Palestinian children in hospitals. Subsidies from European Union member-governments could legitimately be allocated to this humanitarian purpose. The model airplanes were purchased in Europe and shipped quite openly to the Palestinian shopkeepers.

According to our sources, not a single toy reached an injured Palestinian child. The model planes were sent to Palestinian workshops for conversion into miniature air bombers with explosive payloads.

DebkaFile estimated that the modified toys could fly for about a kilometer, and an altitude of 300 meters.
posted: 5:14 PM