Defense Tech: UCAV - Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle: "The other question is whether UCAV programs can recover from the summer movie 'Stealth,' which has gotten a number of terrible reviews. I’ve only seen the trailers, so I can’t say. The picture is from DARPA, by the way, and makes it look like some of these programs are pretty far along."

(Via a DefenseTech.)

Salon.com Wire Story: "After days of Democratic deference to John Roberts, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said Thursday that documents made public so far indicate the Supreme Court nominee holds a 'rather cramped view of the Voting Rights Act.'

Materials that Roberts drafted while at the Justice Department and White House counsel's office during the Reagan administration 'certainly raise some questions in my mind about his commitment' to civil rights, said Kennedy, D-Mass.

Kennedy's remarks showed a willingness to raise pointed questions when most other Democrats have stuck to pleasantries about Roberts' credentials ahead of his confirmation hearings.

Sen. John Cornyn said senators should not draw 'premature conclusions based solely' on memos drafted when Roberts, now a federal appeals court judge, worked at the Justice Department two decades ago.

'And I hope that no senator would attempt to paint Judge Roberts as hostile to civil rights based on memos written for a client -- memos analyzing the law, not personal views,' said Cornyn, R-Texas."

(Via Salon.)

Defense Tech: Buy or Build: "It keeps getting harder and more expensive to build modern weapons. The combination of cost and complexity drives companies from the market. The most noticeable effect has been on the emerging economies that tried to become arms producers. Brazil, India, Taiwan, Korea, Israel, Pakistan and South Africa all began major arms programs in the 1970s and 1980s. Even when there was substantial foreign assistance, these countries couldn’t sustain their programs. A few decided to specialize in niche production, but none could bear the development costs of major next-generation systems. In those cases where they persevered, the systems they developed tended to be over-expensive, underpowered variants of modern weaponry. This is one reason why all of these countries were also attracted to WMD - it’s cheaper and easier to build. In the West, shrinking budgets, cost and complexity drove defense industrial consolidation."

(Via a DefenseTech.)

Schneier on Security: UK Police and Encryption: "On Channel 4 News today, Sir Ian Blair was asked why the police wanted to extend the time they could hold someone without charges from 14 days to 3 months. Part of his answer was that they sometimes needed to access encrypted computer files and 14 days was not enough time for them to break the encryption.

There's something fishy going on here."

(Via Schneier on Security.)

AlterNet: The $256 Question: "The US Attorney's office now has an 'anti-terrorism' division. It has been an utter failure in its mission to prosecute terrorists. So its mission is changed to intimidate any citizen it can in the name of fighting terror. Indeed, the so called 'global war on terror' is more accurately, 'the war of a terrorist state against the world and against any of its citizens who think they have rights against the state'. From the point of view of the authoritarian Bush regime, citizenship and equality are the enemies at home. This is what fascism is all about, the elimination of equality in a society organized by giant corporations, a corporate society and a corporate state. This is how Mussolini defined it and he should know; he invented it. "

Actually, this is a comment to the article, but it's just that good.

(Via AlterNet.)

ArmsControlWonk | an arms control weblog: What we have here is a failure to operate: "In December 2002, President Bush declared that he would deploy long-range anti-missile systems in 2004.

The deadline became September 30, 2004, conveniently before the November elections.

The Missile Defense Agency dropped all other priorities (like, say, for example, testing to see if the system actually works) and put everything into getting missiles in silos.

By September 30, five interceptors were in. But was the system turned on? No. Why not?"

...

"So, the ballyhooed missile defense program, the driving goal of the Bush administration when it first came to office, sits in limbo. The Missile Defense Agency says, in essence, it could be turned on at any time.

But the Pentagon’s spokesperson, Lawrence Di Rita, made it clear that the system may never declared operational:

I don’t know that such a declaration will ever be made.

I don’t know what else to say."

(Via ArmsControlWonk.com.)

Last Gasp to Undermine Global Warming: "The science community has roundly criticized Chairman Joe Barton's (R-TX) misguided Energy and Commerce Committee investigation into a specific global warming study. Last week letters from the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a letter signed by 20 leading climate researchers voiced strong concerns about the value of the investigation as well as its intimidating approach. In addition, Congressional leaders of both parties spoke out strongly against the investigation, calling it 'misguided and illegitimate.'

'Rep. Barton receives thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Exxon/Mobil, the fossil fuel dinosaur that has a long and unflattering history of funding junk science to cast doubt on the fact that burning oil and other fossil fuels is a major factor in global warming."

(Via Union of Concerned Scientists.)

ArmsControlWonk | an arms control weblog: "Since last year’s vote, the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council has weighed in on the issue as well, with an authoritative report that confirms what many critics of the weapon have been saying:

1. The explosion cannot possibly be contained underground, and deadly radiation would spread hundreds of miles downwind.
2. Tens of thousands to a million or more people would likely be killed if this weapon is used.
3. Despite its enormous yield, it is ineffective against bunkers that are deeper than 300 meters underground, a distance reached easily by current tunnelling technology.
4. In attacks against underground stocks of chemical or biological weapons, the explosion is more likely to release the deadly agents above ground than it is to destroy them.

These facts are also shown clearly in the animation I mentioned above. Check it out.

Oh, and tell your Senator to support the Kennedy amendment."

(Via ArmsControlWonk.com.)

Salon.com Wire Story: "With escalating violence threatening Afghanistan's future, the U.S. military has a new focus: employ as many of the poor as possible to rebuild schools and medical clinics so they don't join the Taliban or al-Qaida.

The U.S. military operational commander in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Jason Kamiya, believes that the more Afghans being put to work helps take away some of the enemies' ability to recruit.

'I'd rather have an Afghan national working on a road or helping build a clinic than getting three to five bucks or whatever the Taliban or al-Qaida-associated movement pays him to plant an IED (improvised explosive device),' he told The Associated Press on Saturday.

'We are hiring as many Afghans as we can.'"

Finally, people are realizing what kills terrorism: prosperity.

(Via Salon.)

Schneier on Security: Profiling: "But people make bad security trade-offs when they’re scared, which is why we saw Japanese internment camps during World War II, and why there is so much discrimination against Arabs in the U.S. going on today. That doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it effective security. Writing about the Japanese internment, for example, a 1983 commission reported that the causes of the incarceration were rooted in ‘race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.’ But just because something is wrong doesn't mean that people won't continue to do it.

Ethics aside, institutionalized profiling fails because real attackers are so rare: Active failures will be much more common than passive failures. The great majority of people who fit the profile will be innocent. At the same time, some real attackers are going to deliberately try to sneak past the profile. During World War II, a Japanese American saboteur could try to evade imprisonment by pretending to be Chinese. Similarly, an Arab terrorist could dye his hair blond, practice an American accent, and so on."

(Via Schneier on Security.)

Defense Tech: Fun With Nuclear Targeting: "My wing o' the blogosphere is all worked up over an article -- in Pat Buchanan's The American Spectator, of all places -- that claims the OVP wants to nuke Iran in the event of another 9/11 attack ... whether Tehran was involved or not"

...

So, what's this got to do with DefenseTech?

Most discussions about target sets leave the impression that the decision to use a nuclear weapon here or there is a deeply rational business, with great care taken not just in the selection of each target, but also to ensure each nuclear weapon is really necessary. After all, if we are going to put a nuclear weapon on a tank factory sitting next to a grade school, you'd think that someone made a careful, anguished decision about the lesser of two evils in a morally ambiguous world.

You might think that, but you'd be wrong.

(Via a DefenseTech.)