Danger Room

China's second J-20 stealth fighter. Image: David Cenciotti and fyjs.cn

Last year, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates was greeted in Beijing by China’s experimental stealth jet buzzing over his head. Gates didn’t sweat it: He proclaimed that the J-20 wouldn’t be ready until at least 2020. Oops.

The Pentagon’s top China official has now revised that estimate. The J-20, China’s first stealth jet, will be operationally ready “no sooner than 2018,” David Helvey, deputy secretary of defense for East Asia and Asia Pacific Security Affairs, told reporters Friday.

The new anticipated timetable for the J-20 hardly augurs the end of American military dominance. But it wasn’t the only Chinese military development that took the Pentagon by surprise last year.

According to the Pentagon’s new report (.pdf) on the Chinese military, China’s got three nuclear-powered submarines — an advance that Helvey conceded the U.S. military didn’t anticipate. China also fielded an “improved” amphibious assault vessel last year, while the U.S. Marine Corps is having trouble upgrading its own.

And that’s just the stuff that the Pentagon can see. Helvey speculated that the Chinese military keeps its research, foreign military acquisitions and nuclear modernization off its books. The report estimates that China’s declared $106 billion annual military budget is really more like $120 to $180 billion.

None of that means China’s military will overtake America’s anytime soon. China won’t, for instance, have a global communications and navigation satellite network until 2020, which means it doesn’t have a prayer of having a truly global Navy until at least then — even if it starts building its own aircraft carriers. Helvey disclosed that China still has neither built nor acquired any armed drones, and the spy robo-planes it has are the Harpies that Israel sold it nearly a decade ago. And while China may have an amphibious ship, the report says it can’t actually invade or hold nearby Taiwan, let alone any target further away or better defended.

At the same time, it’s hard not to notice that America’s own stealth fleet keeps racking up #fails.

First there’s the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor. It’s choking its pilots, and the Air Force doesn’t know why. Gates’ successor, Leon Panetta, this week restricted Raptor flights and hurried up an installation of a backup oxygen system onto the jets — which won’t be complete until at least 2014. Panetta did not ground the F-22, so the nearly 200 planes will definitely be in Air Force’s arsenal ahead of the J-20. But until the mysterious oxygen problems are decisively fixed, pilots may be wary of flying them, and the Air Force leadership may be wary of ordering it into combat.

Then there’s the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a family of jets for the Air Force, Navy and Marines. It’s already the most expensive weapons program in human history — current estimates peg the F-35′s lifetime costs over decades at $1.1 trillion-with-a-T — and not a single one of the advanced, powerful stealth jets is in the air. The Marines’ variant was so riddled with cost-overruns that it was put on a timeout in 2011; it’s off probation now. But testers keep finding expensive engineering flaws with the family of jets, and the Pentagon has given up predicting when it will actually patrol the skies.

The U.S. doesn’t want conflict with the Chinese, whose economy is inextricably tied to its own. But it might not see one coming. Especially not if China’s stealth planes are advancing while its own are stalling.

The commercial space race is about to begin. Early tomorrow morning at 4:55 a.m. ET, the first privately designed and built spacecraft destined for the International Space Station is expected to lift off from the historic Cape Canaveral Air Force Station not far from the Atlantic ocean on Florida’s east coast. The Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule are designed and built by Space Exploration Technologies – the company better known as SpaceX – at the company’s factory not far from the Pacific ocean in Hawthorne, California.

Tomorrow’s scheduled launch puts an exclamation point on a new era of space transportation. If the first era of space flight focused on a Cold War driven race to show what could be done, and the second era focused on making space flight and delivering orbiting payloads routine, this new era is focused on making all of the above a lot less expensive.

Detainees at Afghanistan's largest U.S.-built prison were able to literally kick through their poorly constructed cells, according to a new Pentagon report. Photo: Defense Department Inspector General

The detention facility that the U.S. built in Afghanistan is state-of-the-art. Except for all of the faulty hinges on the cell doors. Or the locks that are, in the words of a new report from the Defense Department’s inspector general, “incapable of locking either manually or electronically.” Or the construction that’s deemed “not up to the standard suitable for a detention facility.”

The worst part? U.S. military commanders have known about these flaws since the prison opened its doors.

Built in 2009, the Detention Facility in Parwan is a sprawling campus of 14 buildings, capable of housing — once a planned expansion is completed — some 2,000 detainees. The U.S. spent $60 million to construct it, to demonstrate the professionalization of detention operations after years of scandals in Iraq and Afghanistan. What the U.S. military didn’t reveal was that it has known from the start that the building has serious engineering flaws — flaws that lead to security liabilities. And all of this was the result of lackadaisical oversight of contractors hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The magnetic sensors and electronic locks on the “access doors” that prevent detainees from traveling between cell blocks, are “defective” and had to be removed, according to a report the Defense Department’s inspector general released on Thursday. That removal caused the electronic systems integrating and remotely controlling the doors to be “ineffective.”

“The integration system was supposed to monitor the status of all doors with electronic locks and magnetic sensors, thereby electronically monitoring the status of all detainees entering and exiting the secured areas,” the inspector general found. “The lack of a final functional test on the building integration system was considered a deficiency when the building was accepted. However, [Pentagon inspector general] engineers noted during their inspection in July 2010 that the integration system was still not functioning. Instead of ensuring that the doors had magnetic sensors and locks so that the Integration System would work properly, a soldier was required to stand and guard the door, as a means of securing the rooms.”

Senior U.S. military officers tour the detention facility in Parwan, April 2012. Photo: U.S. Army

The doors themselves are shoddily built, too. The hinges on them were “incorrect,” according to the inspector general. “The poorly constructed cell doors allowed detainees to damage the doors easily by repeated kicking,” the report states. There are also problems with the fire-prevention and sewage systems that the inspector general says pose a “health and safety risk” to detainees.

The damage was not limited to minor areas of the prison, either. “The construction quality was not up to the standard suitable for a detention facility,” the report concludes, “and … the quality of construction of greatest interest was the areas where the detainees spent most of their time such as detention cells and the recreation yard.”

No detainee appears to have escaped as a result of the construction woes. But that may be a matter of time. Afghan detainees have been able to literally tunnel out of another prison in the country — twice. And while the leadership of the prison reports that it doesn’t have problems with the cells anymore, other construction problems with the prison persist: “The access doors
are still in disrepair and will be replaced as soon as new prison grade doors arrive in
theater from the United States.”

Except that the U.S. won’t run the Parwan prison for much longer. The Afghans signed a deal with NATO in March to take control of it by September. That means Afghan troops, less capable on average than their U.S. counterparts, will soon be in charge of hundreds of detainees in a giant prison with chronic security vulnerabilities.

That prison isn’t in an isolated area. It’s on the outskirts of Bagram airfield, one of the U.S.’ major bases, housing over 10,000 U.S. troops. Bagram is about an hour’s drive from the capital city of Kabul.

The Army basically pled nolo contendere to the Pentagon inspector general. While picking at nits, a senior Army Corps of Engineers official wrote to the inspector general on April 2 that his department “concurs with all but one” of the recommendations in the report — some of which are as simple as urging “continuous oversight” on the facility.

These days, Parwan is infamous for being the site where U.S. troops accidentally burned Korans, a February debacle that caused days of countrywide rioting. Needless to say, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. I took a tour of the detention facility in August 2010, and officials boasted of the sophisticated security systems that would allow guards to humanely and firmly monitor and control detainee activity.

But this is the legacy that a decade’s worth of U.S. detention operations will leave in Afghanistan: locks that don’t lock. And across Afghanistan, even as U.S. troops withdraw from the country, the U.S. is still building jails.

Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel “Starship Troopers” presents a futuristic war fought by heavily armored infantry, that when suited up, makes you look like a “big steel gorilla.” Today, the U.S. Army and Marines are edging closer to the Mobile Infantry of Heinlein’s world by reportedly taking an interest in armored face shields.

The Army hasn’t made the shields part of its standard kit — not yet. But, according to Military Times, it has deployed thousands of them, and is looking to buy 160 more, with potentially 2,000 more shields to follow. The Marine Corps, meanwhile, is “keeping tabs on the Army’s plan to test face shields,” and is looking at “gear that will protect Marines’ faces.” Currently, individual Marines deployed to Afghanistan pay for face shields on their own — the Corps has so far not ponied up the money to field the shields.

Designed to protect turret gunners against explosive fragments, the shields are starting to find a role with infantrymen and are now advanced enough to stop rifle rounds. In a demonstration by Indiana-based manufacturer MTek (above), a 7.62mm round fired from an AKM variant impacts one of the company’s FAST G3A shield, blowing it off a mannequin’s head. (Before being blasted off, the shield was bolted onto the mannequin’s helmet.) The shield’s polyethylene armor stops the bullet, but looks painful. A bullet hitting a face shield can possibly break bones and knock out teeth. Though, consider the alternative.

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s going to hurt,” said Gunnery Sgt. Ryan Bowser, a Marine reservist and business development manager for MTek. “It’s going to hurt a lot, probably. But it’s better than the other option. You get hit in the face with an AK round, it’s probably not going to hurt because you’re dead.”

The video requires a little bit of explanation, too. The mask being flung off by the bullet is the “absolute worst case scenario,” Bowser said. “The only way that effect would be exactly replicated on a person is if they were standing with their heels, their rear end, their back and head up against a wall,” he added. And that’s without the added weight of a 200-lb Marine (not including equipment) helping absorb the kinetic energy.

Fortunately, the likelihood of being hit in the face with a bullet is pretty slim in comparison to the massive threat posed by bomb fragments. Still, “guys are using them for everything,” Bowser said. The shields are popular with members of the military’s bomb squads, and the company has released a lighter and more compact model for dismounted soldiers and Marines, which helps get around the problem posed by larger face shields, namely disrupting the the wearer’s ability to manipulate small arms.

But there’s also questions over how much armor is too much. How much armor is necessary to save lives without cutting into Marines’ speed and maneuverability? (MTek’s latest shield weighs less than one pound — not a lot, unless it’s hanging on your head.) How much armor is too much? At what point do troops keep behind the armor instead of moving forward to confront the enemy? Too much “turtling” behind body armor and giant blast-resistant trucks can also put distance between troops and the civilian populations they’re supposed to protect.

Often, groups of heavily armed Marines can be intimidating to the locals. Want to make them more intimidating? Face shields.

Another problem is that the larger shields can block a soldier or Marine’s cheek from his or her rifle stock, disrupting the ability to quickly acquire a sight picture. MTek’s newer PREDATOR FAST G4 is shaped with this in mind, Bowser said, allowing a dismounted soldier or Marine to use his weapon more effectively than if he or she was wearing a bulkier version intended for vehicle-mounted troops.

“It can be done, but it’s like any piece of equipment,” he said. “It takes some time and practice to do that. Depending on what kind of suite you’re using, what kind of suiting you’re doing. You absolutely can put it on and engage with an M4 or an M16, or any of those things.”

Perhaps the best news is the shield’s potential to “mitigate some brain trauma sustained in bomb blasts,” according to the Military Times. This is because the shield works to help absorb explosive blast waves, which can cause traumatic brain injuries that contribute to early dementia.

And if the Army makes face shields standard, and the Marines follow, that could be a sign the military might again dial up the armor. During the Iraq War, some up-armoring was necessary to protect against lethal bombs, but the military slowed the trend as it shifted to COIN — or counterinsurgency — doctrine that emphasized engagement with the civilian populace instead of riding around behind steel plates. And at some point, all this armoring gets kind of ridiculous.

If the U.S. wants to ship goods for the Afghanistan war through Pakistan again, it may cost $5,000 per container. Photo: U.S. Air Force

Washington believes it has a deal, finally, to reopen Pakistan’s resupply routes for the Afghanistan war, saving a bunch of cash. But not before its Pakistani frenemies drive the price up.

Pakistan wants a $5,000 fee on every shipping container that passes through what NATO calls the Ground Lines of Communication, or GLOCs, on its territory. The old fee? $0. But that was before a U.S. commando raid in November on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead. (Never mind that a U.S. investigation found that the Pakistani troops fired on the Americans first and repeatedly.)

Islamabad shut its gates immediately afterward, and kept them shut. The U.S. and its allies adjusted, resupplying the war through air routes running from the Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan. But that’s much, much more expensive: the Pentagon says the air route costs $15,800 per container, compared to $6,200 per container trucked through Pakistan.

And so Pakistan has leverage. The Pentagon has tried to limit that leverage as negotiations to reopen the GLOCs have ground on, refusing to disclose exactly how much the GLOC closure has cost taxpayers, or even how many containers actually pass through Manas. (NBC’s Richard Engel reported on The Rachel Maddow Show on Wednesday that Pakistan’s fee will amount to $1 million per day from the United States — plus another $1.1 billion for “services rendered” in the 10-year war.) But that can only mitigate Pakistan’s leverage, not eliminate it. A $5,000 container fee will still be less than what it costs to ship through Manas.

You cannot hate the player here. Pakistan has something the U.S. wants: cheaper resupply for the war. And it has its own needs: simply reopening the route like nothing happened in November would be politically unacceptable; to say nothing of straight-up dumb. And the U.S. still operates its drone war over Pakistan, so Islamabad can always play that card, too.

If you want to hate, hate the game. The U.S. has given Pakistan something like $15 billion worth of mostly-military aid since the Afghanistan war began — sometimes literally in cash — and as long as the war grinds on, Pakistan has every incentive to keep its hand out.

The Washington Post reports that Pakistan’s desired $5,000 container fee “has been difficult for the Pentagon to swallow.” Get ready to swallow. Next week is NATO’s big summit on Afghanistan, occurring in Chicago — which, by the most astonishing of coincidences, is the home base of President Obama’s reelection campaign. Pakistan is invited and will attend. The cost for the show of unity on the war that the U.S. — and the Obama campaign — wants is the fee for the GLOCs that Pakistan will impose.

Maybe U.S. negotiators will get Pakistan to bring the fee down before the summit. Maybe they won’t. But it’s just another cost of doing business for a decade-long war that is increasingly dependent on the interests of the unreliable ally next door.

China's second J-20 stealth fighter. Image: David Cenciotti and fyjs.cn

The second copy of China’s stealth fighter prototype has just flown at a research facility in the city of Chengdu. The first flight of the J-20 Mighty Dragon with the nose number 2002 doubles Beijing’s stealth test fleet at a time when America’s latest jet fighters are hobbled by cost overruns, labor disputes and lethal design flaws. But it’s far from certain how much, and how fast, the new Chinese jet will alter the military balance.

The challenges for American stealth developers are clear. It has come to light that Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor — the first of the current generation of stealth fighters — is steadily poisoning its pilots owing to a faulty oxygen system. Meanwhile, the F-35 has been delayed by several years and the overall cost to design and build thousands of the new jets has risen by hundreds of billions of dollars. To make matters worse, workers at Lockheed’s F-35 factory have gone on strike, with no end in sight.

At first glance, China appears to be making huge progress where the U.S. falters. The twin-engine Mighty Dragon 2002, painted black like its predecessor, made its first appearance in April in photos snapped by Chinese bloggers (who may or may not be on Beijing’s payroll). The second J-20 spent a month or so performing ground tests before launching on its inaugural test sortie sometime in the past few days. If the initial flight of the first Mighty Dragon (nose number 2001) in December 2010 is any indication, 2002′s debut mission amounted to little more than a lap around the Chengdu airfield to test the aircraft’s basic functions and show off for the aforementioned bloggers.

With two airframes to work with, the Chengdu engineers can now double the roughly five-flights-a-month development program apparently aimed at producing a front-line stealth warplane. Before the first Mighty Dragon ever flew, General He Weirong of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force said the J-20 would enter service between 2017 and 2019. Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates countered, saying it would be 2020 or later before China possessed a combat-ready stealth fighter. It’s unclear who’s right — or even what definition of front-line service either man was using.

Certainly, the Mighty Dragon’s engineers have a lot of work ahead of them. For comparison, the development program for the U.S. military’s latest F-35 Joint Strike Fighter includes more than 10,000 test flights spread over 15 years. If China duplicated the American testing profile, it could take decades for the J-20 to complete development.

But China traditionally does not take the same approach to warplane testing that America does. Instead, China follows the Russian model: some basic tests after which small numbers of new jets with rudimentary combat capabilities are handed over to a regular fighter squadron. After a few years of real-world use, engineers build a second batch with improved capabilities, and so on.

In that way China usually builds its aerial arsenal in small increments in parallel with testing. On the upside, new designs can enter service faster than they do in America. The downside is that the new fighters often fly with undetected flaws. The U.S. initially tried that “concurrent” approach with the Lockheed Martin-built F-35, only to scale back early production after testers discovered design flaws costing billions of dollars to fix. The J-20 could encounter the same problem.

Moreover, it seems both J-20s are still flying with Russian-made AL-31 engines rather than motors specifically designed for the J-20′s huge size and apparent weight. China has had so many problems inventing its own jet engines that it has revived imports of Russian models. Finalizing advanced avionics, sensors and weapons could prove equally difficult for the Chengdu developers.

All the same, Mighty Dragon 2002 does appear to be a step towards an early combat capability. It features several apparent improvements over its sister Mighty Dragon 2001, including stockier landing gear and a redesigned nose that could house an ultra-modern electronically scanned radar. If Beijing chooses to build a squadron of J-20s for early front-line use, they could look a lot like jet number 2002.

That said, there are signs China is cooling its stealth-fighter ambitions. Until recently, analysts had predicted the J-20 would be joined by several other brand-new Chinese stealth fighter designs, including one code-named J-16. But this spring reporters got their first look at the J-16. Turns out it’s a bolt-for-bolt copy of the Russian Su-30, a decidedly non-stealthy design.

That should prove comforting to American warplane developers who are in the throes of parallel crises involving the F-22 and F-35. Which is to say, China’s stealth fighter development is faring no better and no worse than America’s. For every big step forward there are little steps back.

Until the Navy and the Air Force develop better data-integration systems, their plan to dominate the seas and skies could be hung up by an inability to communicate by more than semaphore, shown by this sailor aboard the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk. Photo: U.S. Navy

No one really understands the Navy and the Air Force’s new blueprint for dominating Earth’s seas and skies. But what’s increasingly clear, even to the heads of both the Navy and the Air Force, is that there’s a big challenge ahead for it, one that doesn’t have anything to do with an adversary like China: getting U.S. ships, subs, planes and drones to actually talk to one another.

The watchword for the Navy and the Air Force in the future is an idea called “AirSea Battle.” And if you listen to Adm. Jonathan Greenert and Gen. Norton Schwartz, the heads of both services, it’s more like a state of mind. AirSea Battle is “a concept, a way of thinking things through, a conceptual approach to establishing access,” Greenert said at a talk he gave with Schwartz at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. on Wednesday morning.

If that sounds airy — or, if you prefer, lost at sea — Greenert and Schwartz tried to bring it down to earth at Brookings (where, full disclosure, Danger Room boss Noah Shachtman has a non-resident fellowship). From now on, they said, the Navy and the Air Force will partner closer than ever before to jointly ensure that no adversary can deny the U.S. military access to the “global commons” — that is, the shipping lanes, airspace, low-Earth orbit and electronic avenues necessary for the military to operate anywhere on or above Planet Earth.

In practice, that means connecting the vast fleet of ships, subs and aircraft — manned and robotic alike — that Greenert and Schwartz possess. But there are at least two interrelated problems with that. The networks aboard the Air Force’s stuff and the Navy’s stuff don’t talk well with one another. And getting sufficient bandwidth to connect them across vast distances is difficult and expensive. “Our links need to be similar,” Greenert said, “or at least minimally compatible.”

In other words, AirSea Battle is supposed to make the Navy and the Air Force a hyper-connected juggernaut. But standing in its way, to a significant degree, is the Navy and the Air Force.

Greenert and Schwartz can already credibly claim successes for AirSea Battle that, they argue, prove the blueprint’s value. During the first ten days of last year’s Libya war, submarines sent powerful Tomahawk missiles to destroy Moammar Gadhafi’s airstrips and air defenses while the Air Force planes bombed them and Navy planes jammed their radars — and even Libyan tanks. That cleared the way for the months-long bombing campaign. Halfway around the world, the Navy and Air Force also worked together to help Japan recover from its earthquake and mitigate the damage to a nuclear reactor. They’ve also started using the same stuff: the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance program is an Air Force Global Hawk spy drone that carries Navy-specific sensors. And the Air Force has begun testing out its long-range bombing and strike capabilities for use over the Pacific — as with the last month’s secretive “Operation Chimichanga” — efforts that will partner with the Navy.

Now Greenert and Schwartz want to take that teamwork and make it “more of an assumption in the future,” as the Navy chief put it. They’ve got “more than 200 initiatives” to get the Air Force’s chocolate into the Navy’s peanut butter, ranging from combining headquarters staffs to examining data-link protocols for information sharing.

But the problem right now is that those protocols, by and large, don’t yet exist. And the further the Navy and Air Force get out to sea, the harder it is for planes, ships and subs to share data: the bandwidth aboard Navy ships alone, for instance, is already taxed by distance.

Asked about the problem by Danger Room, Schwartz was up front that “data links [are] a foundational element here of what we’re talking about.”

Schwartz said both services are working on a “next-generation data link” for ship-to-plane communication, which involves thinking through “how much data the links should carry [and] its low probability” of an adversary intercepting the information traveling across the pipes. “We’re not thinking about this in the airman’s or the sailor’s stovepipe anymore,” he said. “We will come to a decision on what exactly those interfaces should look like.” In other words, they don’t know yet.

And that’s totally fair; AirSea Battle is a young concept that the Navy and Air Force is still fleshing out. (Phil Ewing of DoDBuzz jokingly tweeted, “Air-Sea Battle is everywhere & it is nowhere. It is everything & it is nothing.”) Schwartz conceded that connecting “legacy platforms” — ships and planes built in the Reagan era, for instance — are “more difficult to deal with.” But Schwartz is already thinking about technical fixes for the connectivity problem: he talked about “communication gateway capability” that “could be lighter-than-air” rather than aboard a plane or a ship. (That sounds intriguingly like using the military’s experimental giant blimps, currently the subject of a fight between the Air Force and Congress, as big-ass floating cell towers or data relay points.)

As a stopgap, Schwartz said both services already have developed unspecified data “gateways” that “allow translation between one format or another.” Neither service, however, has decided yet about how deeply these gateways and other communications integration tools will be built into the architecture of the ships, planes, subs and drones of the future — like the Air Force’s next-next-generation Long Range Bomber or the aircraft carriers the Navy will build after 2017.

Other technological challenges may be more fundamental. The U.S. Navy has a huge advantage in stealthy submarines. But the more the subs have to communicate with the outside world, particularly over vast distances, the greater the likelihood that an adversary can intercept their electronic signatures.

And that’s on top of higher-level concerns about the uber-concept. Schwartz and Greenert insisted, repeatedly, that AirSea Battle is “agnostic” about any particular adversary or region of the world. (coughChinacough) But a mega-plan to ensure that the U.S. dominates the skies, seas, spaceways and electronic passages of Planet Earth may sound provocative when translated into Mandarin, Russian or Farsi. That is, unless the Navy and Air Force’s big communications challenges make it sound hard of hearing.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visits an exhibition of Iran's laser science. Photo: AP/Mehr News Agency

Next Wednesday, Iran will try to launch an experimental reconnaissance satellite into orbit — just as international negotiators gather in Baghdad for talks about Tehran’s nuclear program. The timing couldn’t be more inflammatory, and rogue state satellite launches are usually considered to be missile tests in drag. So why isn’t the world throwing itself into a tizzy about the mission?

After all, when North Korea last month tried (and utterly failed) to get a satellite past the sky, the U.N. Security Council promptly condemned the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for the launch. President Obama called it a “provocative action.” House Republicans even called for the Pentagon to bring back from the scrapyard a flying laser cannon to zap any future North Korean rockets. But for this Iranian launch, the latest in a series of space missions going back to 2005? So far, crickets.

Back in February, a New Yorker writer found herself taken to Iran’s Alborz Space Center for a preview of the upcoming mission. All she could do was snicker at the Iranian presentations’ techno music and their misuse of the word “lunch.”

Originally scheduled to launch last October, the “Fajr” (Dawn) satellite could be the first Iranian spacecraft with an ability to maneuver in orbit. Unconfirmed reports say it may even use a pulse plasma thruster to get the job done. As a spy satellite, it won’t be much of a snoop. Its images are supposed to have a resolution of 500-1,000 meters – at least 1,000 times fuzzier than the pics snapped by the American GeoEye-1 commercial imaging satellite.

Still, the upcoming mission “is clearly a step on the way to learning about rocket technology that could be used for a larger booster, and that could be applied to a missile. And Iran’s program is much more systematic than North Korea’s program, so in that sense it seems to be building more technical competence in the area. So why isn’t there a UN resolution [against Iran's launches] like there is for North Korea?” asks David Wright, of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It seems odd that while the U.S. and its European allies are spending money and complicating relations with Russia over developing a missile defense system motivated by the future development of Iranian missiles, they do not seem to be responding to the development of Iran’s rocket technology as strongly as you would expect from the reaction to North Korea’s development.”

One major, major reason why: Iran is still believed to be years away from having nuclear weapons (even as it makes progress on enriching uranium). North Korea, conversely, built and tested its nukes years ago — and occasionally threatens to wipe out its adversaries in an atomic holocaust. Plus, Pyongyang is about 1,200 miles closer to Seattle than Tehran is to D.C. Take into account the west-to-east rotation of the planet, and Iran simply has to work harder than North Korea to send us scrambling for the keys to the fallout shelter.

Still, that only partially explains what veteran intelligence analyst John McCreary calls the “odd double standard [that] seems to govern issues of missile proliferation. Unlike the North Korean space launch attempt, no nation has accused Iran of using a space launch to disguise a test of systems useful in long range ballistic missiles.”

That’s partially because Iran can plausibly claim to have a civilian space program. Tehran has already placed four spacecraft into orbit, starting with the 2005 launch of the Sina-1 joint Russian/Iranian satellite. In 2010, Tehran even sent a rat, two turtles and several worms into space. (A 2011 mission with a monkey on board was not so successful.) Next week’s scheduled launch of the 110-pound, solar-powered  Fajr imaging satellite — due to stay in orbit for 18 months, at a height of 180 to 270 miles up — is just the latest.

On the other hand, “there is little to no evidence for concluding that the North is serious about its peaceful space activities,” writes Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “Pyongyang has not yet demonstrated the ability to construct or even operate communications satellites, interpret data from remote sensing systems, or even engage in cooperative international space science research. In comparison to other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the sophistication of the DPRK’s space efforts might be placed behind Bangladesh and Mongolia.”

But ballistic missiles and space-bound rockets are close cousins, right? Doesn’t that mean every Iranian launch is another step toward an Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) — one that can hit America? Shouldn’t we be ringing Teaneck, New Jersey, with missile interceptors right about now?

“The argument is, well, this teaches them about a whole bunch of technologies that go into an ICBM” — including the separation, ignition, and control of an ICBM’s three stages, notes Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “The counter-argument is a lot of things are useful for them. It’s still not a friggin’ ICBM. It’s still not the same thing as doing it.”

The liquid-fueled Safir B-1 rocket being used in Iran’s upcoming mission is relatively small, with only two stages. It’s similar to the rocket that the North Koreans used in 2009 for their flop of a launch. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the first stage is basically a souped-up Shabab-3 medium-range ballistic missile, using a single North Korean Nodong engine. The Safir’s second stage uses small engines roughly equivalent to those in the old Soviet SSN-6 missile.  All together, the Safir’s top range is estimated at 1,200 miles, well short of American soil. ICBMs, which use three stages, don’t just fly five times as far. They carry payloads of 1,100 to 2,200 pounds — 10 to 20 times larger than what the Safir is schlepping into orbit.

It’s not the only technological hurdle Iran has to overcome. Each ICBM engine has to provide precisely the same amount of thrust — or else the pulses of acoustic energy from one engine might destroy another. The re-entry vehicle, the warhead, and the associated guidance systems all have to be able to withstand the heat and pressure of screaming through the atmosphere at many, many times the speed of sound. All of which is tough — even without a worldwide embargo on nuclear and missile technologies.

A 2010 U.S. report on Iran’s military power (.pdf) said that “with sufficient foreign assistance Iran could probably develop and test an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the United States by 2015.” But with increasing international cooperation in containing Iran, that help is much harder to come by these days.

The Iranians shouldn’t be underestimated. As Uzi Rubin, former director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization, recently noted, “Iran managed to transform itself from a nonplayer to a significant missile power in less than one generation. For a country that never has had a world-class aerospace industry, this is quite remarkable.”

But at the moment, America’s spy agencies don’t believe there’s an imminent threat. The last two directors of national intelligence declined to make predictions (.pdf) during congressional testimony about when the Iranian ICBM would materialize. “The bottom line,” veteran CIA Mideast analyst Paul Pillar told Danger Room in February, “is that the intelligence community does not believe [the Iranians] are anywhere close to having an ICBM.”

A U.S. Army National Guardsman at his post along the U.S.-Mexico border near Nogales, Arizona, on Jan. 17, 2007. Photo: Department of Defense.

This summer, Mexicans will go to the polls to choose their country’s next commander-in-chief. But the new president will also have to deal with ominous developments in the drug war and the fact that few Mexicans believe the government’s strategy is working. He or she will also have to negotiate with the U.S. on the scope — and responsibilities — of America’s role in fighting the cartels.

The reason is stunning. More than half of Mexicans (52 percent) want an increased U.S. role in the drug war, and 28 percent want the U.S. military to intervene on Mexican soil, according to polling conducted by The Dallas Morning News, Mexico’s El Universal and Texas Spanish newspaper Al Día. Only 21 percent of Mexicans say the government’s strategy is working, though 64 percent think the military should continue “leading the fight” against the cartels. Ending the drug war through striking a deal with the gangsters is as popular as the current strategy: Only 21 percent think it’s a good idea.

“That tells you that Mexicans are really, really tired of this drug war, and they would rather see an end sooner than wait years fighting this by themselves,” Jorge Buendía, president of polling firm Buendía & Laredo, told The Dallas Morning News. Buendía added that because many Mexicans blame the U.S. in part for the drug war (with plenty of justification), many are becoming “more pragmatic and tolerant about alternatives.”

Especially with no end in sight. On Sunday, the Mexican military discovered 49 headless bodies dumped on a highway connecting the border city of Reynosa to the northern metropolitan city of Monterrey. According to news reports, Mexican officials pointed to the Zetas as the likely killers. (The Zetas have denied responsibility.) Two other mass “dumps” of dismembered bodies were reported earlier this month, one in Guadalajara and another in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. Northeastern Mexico — near the Texas border — and Monterrey have also seen a renewed conflict between the Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel as the latter move in to contest increased Zetas control of the region, a conflict that Latin America security analyst Patrick Corcoran wrote “is expanding across Mexico” into a prolonged turf war.

The alternatives have as much to do with politics as they do with military strategy. The ruling center-right National Action Party, or PAN, appears to be headed for a major defeat in July elections, setting up the return of the moderate Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico as a single-party state for much of the 20th century. The PRI’s candidate, front-runner Enrique Peña Nieto, has pledged to defeat the cartels and has proposed a new national police force comprised of former soldiers to phase out the military on city streets. (Left-leaning candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, now polling in second place, has vowed to end the drug war.)

But if Mexico’s politicians have been unable to stop the violence, then there’s no guarantee an increased U.S. presence will succeed where Mexico has failed. Likewise, the Mexican government will not allow the U.S. to deploy troops against the cartels, and Mexican laws prohibit foreign military and police from operating in Mexico. Foreign nationals — which would include U.S. soldiers — are subject to tight regulations which makes carrying weapons difficult.

The U.S. and Mexico have routed around these restrictions by allowing U.S. federal agents and civilian military employees to assist Mexican forces in an advisory role. U.S. agents have also been caught in the fighting. In February 2011, Mexican narcos shot and killed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jaime Zapata as he and another agent traveled through northern Mexico. The U.S. also operates a small drone fleet along the border and even into Mexico proper to spy on the cartels, though critics have cited high costs and poor results at stopping smuggling. The U.S. has also been pumping billions in aid to Mexico’s police and military forces.

“The majority of the Mexican population isn’t angry that [President Felipe] Calderon is using the military to fight organized crime. They’re angry that he’s done such a lousy job of it,” blogged Latin America security analyst James Bosworth. He added that this is “not an argument that the U.S. should have large numbers on the ground in Mexico,” he said. “That would be a disaster. Those numbers would quickly reverse to enormous opposition once the troops were actually there.”

But the fact is: The U.S. shares some responsibility, or even most of it. And it’s possible the data might open the space for an increased U.S. role. After all, demand for drugs north of the border fuels the cartels, and U.S. weapons and ammunition helps keep them in the fight.

“Hiding from the debate every time a criticism comes up isn’t just bad policy, it’s bad politics. More transparency about cooperation in an environment where citizens want to see more cooperation should be an obvious policy,” Bosworth said.

Though, it looks like we’ll have to wait until the next Mexican government comes to power — and whether a second-term Obama (or first-term Romney) administration will be open to expanding a U.S. presence. Either way, the drug war is likely not going to end anytime soon.

An F-22 Raptor. Photo: USAF

For five years, America’s most expensive fighter jets have been poisoning their pilots and crew. On Tuesday, the Defense Secretary finally stepped in — restricting the flights of the F-22 Raptor, and ordering the Air Force to begin an “expedited installation” of an automatic backup oxygen system for the entire fleet of Raptors, Pentagon spokesman George Little tells reporters. But Panetta is allowing the stealthy dogfighter to keep flying — for now.

The new oxygen systems will undergo flight tests through November, with installation beginning in December and proceeding in January 2013 at a rate of 10 planes per month. Additionally, the Air Force will have to fly its Raptors near a “proximate landing location” to make sure that pilots can land quickly if their planes’ oxygen systems begin to fail. And the Air Force will both work with the Navy and NASA to figure out the Raptor’s mysterious engineering flaw — whose root cause the Pentagon still does not know — and must now give Panetta monthly reports on its progress.

“There’s no margin for error here,” Little’s colleague, Navy Capt. John Kirby, said. “Safety is a zero-sum game.”

But Panetta isn’t grounding any of the planes in the Raptor fleet — a step the Air Force took twice last year after pilots reported disorientation and other symptoms of “hypoxia,” a condition indicating a lack of oxygen. “The secretary believes that this is the prudent course right now,” Kirby told Danger Room. Ongoing flights “allow us to continue to examine the aircraft closely and to try to figure out what happened. There’s a troubleshooting process that’s going on right now, so the aircraft being in operation assists in that process.”

At least 12 pilots have reported symptoms of hypoxia since April 2008. More mysteriously, F-22 ground crews have also reported hypoxia-like symptoms. At least one pilot may have died in connection with the oxygen problems, though the Air Force attributes the death to pilot error. On Tuesday, Sen. Mark Warner claimed that seven more Raptor pilots had contacted his office, hypoxia-like symptoms. And while the Air Force doesn’t yet know the source of the problem, some aviation experts think the problem isn’t suffocation, but rather amounts of engine oil contaminating the F-22′s air systems.

Both spokesmen denied that Panetta had lost confidence in the Air Force’s handling of the F-22 inquiry. “The Secretary believes that the Air Force leadership shares his sense of urgency,” Little said. Neither explained why Panetta was stepping in to the Air Force’s investigation, aside from calling him “deeply concerned with pilot safety.”

Earlier this month, however, two Raptor pilots came forward to discuss the plane’s flaws on 60 Minutes. They said they spoke for a “vast, silent majority” of pilots apprehensive about flying a jet that could choke them. The pilots sought out protection from Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a fellow Air Force pilot, but that hasn’t appeared to stop the Air Force from issuing a letter of reprimand to one of them that could herald the end of his career.

The F-22 will continue to fly, for the time being, even as the search for the engineering flaw continues. Panetta’s rules limiting how far pilots can fly the F-22 are flexible — pilots must show a “prudent amount of proximity to a landing strip,” Kirby said — in order to make sure pilots can complete their assigned missions. Still, that’s a pretty serious restriction on an aircraft with a range of more than 1,600 nautical miles. But Little said it will mean “long-duration airspace control flights in Alaska will be performed by other aircraft.”

Nevertheless, a scheduled deployment of Raptors to an airbase the United States uses in the United Arab Emirates, near Iran, will continue as planned.

The Air Force wants the F-22, one of the most advanced warplanes ever designed, to be among the centerpieces of its future. Yet the jet has never fired a shot in anger, and the persistent oxygen problem raises questions about whether it will any time soon. It is also one of the most expensive planes the Air Force has ever purchased, costing between $137 million and $678 million per plane depending on how you count. But the Pentagon isn’t backing away from a plane that chokes its pilots.

“We still value it,” Kirby said. “We still need it. It is a very powerful arrow in the quiver.”

An F-15E at an air show last year. Photo: Air Force

An innocuous-seeming U.S. Air Force press release. A serendipitous satellite image in Google Earth. Snapshots from a photographer on assignment at a Spanish air base. The crash of an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bomber in the United Arab Emirates. These are some of the fragments of information that Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti has assembled to reveal the best picture yet of the Pentagon’s secretive war in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.

In a series of blog posts over the past two weeks, Cenciotti has described in unprecedented detail the powerful aerial force helping wage Washington’s hush-hush campaign of air strikes, naval bombardments and commando raids along the western edge of the Indian Ocean, including terror hot spots Yemen and Somalia. Cenciotti outlined the deployment of eight F-15Es from their home base in Idaho to the international air and naval outpost at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, north of Somalia.

Over the years there have been hints of the F-15s’ presence in East Africa, but “their actual mission remains a (sort-of) mystery,” Cenciotti writes. Based on the evidence, he proposes that the twin-seat fighter-bombers — one of the Air Force’s mainstay weapon systems in Afghanistan — are dropping bombs on al-Qaida-affiliated militants in Yemen. If true, that means the U.S. intervention in the western Indian Ocean is far more forceful, and risky, than previously suggested.

Ten years ago the Air Force openly acknowledged the initial F-15E rotation in Djibouti, but since then the flying branch has released few details. New official information on the Indian Ocean aerial armada has emerged only after airplanes crashed. An accident involving an Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone in the Seychelles late last year forced the Pentagon to admit it was building a drone base on the island nation. Reporters followed the Seychelles lead to uncover additional Reaper bases in Yemen and Ethiopia. Armed drones operated by the CIA and the military have killed scores of militants in Somalia and Yemen under steadily loosening rules of engagement.

Similarly, the deaths of four American airmen in a crash in Djibouti in February confirmed the involvement of the secretive U-28 spy plane in the escalating intervention.

The F-15Es carry more bombs and fly much faster than the Cessna-size, propeller-driven Reapers. Where the long-endurance drones are persistent and patient, the twin-engine Strike Eagles are fast-reacting and powerful. “When you need to quickly reach a distant target and hit it with a considerable payload, you might find a Strike Eagle a better platform,” Cenciotti explains. On the other hand, “air strikes with conventional planes are considered less respectful of the local nation’s sovereignty than drones’ attacks,” he adds. “This could be the reason for keeping the eventual F-15E involvement in the area a bit confidential.”

Again, it was a crash that helped draw reporters’ attention to the F-15s in Djibouti. In early May a photographer friend of Cenciotti photographed several Strike Eagles passing through Spain’s Moron air base en route to an unspecified deployed location. One of the F-15s crashed near its next layover in the United Arab Emirates. (The two crew members ejected safely.) Cenciotti scrutinized the aircraft involved and matched them up with a Pentagon press release describing a change-of-command ceremony for a fighter squadron in Djibouti.

An image from Google Maps showing six F-15s on the ground in Djibouti helped confirm Cenciotti’s theory that Strike Eagles are active in the Indian Ocean region. Evidence the jets are bombing Yemen is more circumstantial: Cenciotti notes that the pro-U.S. Yemeni air force was on strike at the time of one widely reported air raid in the country, meaning another nation was likely responsible for the hit.

The 37-year-old Cenciotti rivals ace Aviation Week reporter Bill Sweetman for breaking news about military aircraft. But his strict focus on aviation means he misses other compelling evidence of the U.S. shadow war in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The Navy maintains around 30 warships in the Indian Ocean as part of several international task forces. American destroyers have launched missiles and fired guns at terrorists in Somalia and Yemen.

But arguably the most interesting vessels in the area are also the least flashy. Lewis and Clark-class supply ships, normally used to carry fuel and cargo, have also been used as Afloat Forward Staging Bases — in essence, seaborne military camps for housing Special Forces and launching helicopters and small boats. The ships can be configured with makeshift jails for holding captured pirates and, in theory, terror suspects.

The Lewis and Clark class ship Carl Brashear visited Djibouti in early May, according to a military press release. Where the ship went next — and what exactly she did there — is unclear. But if Cenciotti’s investigation of the F-15s is any indication, there could be a surprising truth beneath the layers of official secrecy concealing America’s underreported Indian Ocean shadow war.

Marine Gen. John Allen, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, inspects a border position in Paktika Province, 2011. Photo: ISAF

Afghanistan war commanders have tenures as long as Spinal Tap drummers. Army Gen. David McKiernan got fired in 2009. His replacement, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, resigned the next year. Now the current commander, Marine Gen. John Allen, may be out the door as well, more than a year early.

If Washington Post ace Greg Jaffe is correct, Allen isn’t leaving under the cloud that haunted his predecessors. He’s getting a big promotion: military chief of NATO, one of the military’s most prestigious jobs. President Obama loves him. But Allen’s impending departure still leaves the war primed for its fifth commander in four years, an astonishing amount of top-level turnover for a war that still has over 87,000 U.S. troops in combat.

Allen hasn’t exactly had an easy tenure since taking over from Gen. David Petraeus in September. The war effort has been wracked by a series of disasters he couldn’t have controlled, from dead Pakistani soldiers to burnt Korans to massacred civilians to cratered domestic support. If Allen gets this NATO promotion, it won’t be because he turned the war around; that ship has sailed. It’s because he shifted from waging it directly to making the Afghans wage it themselves.

Allen oversaw the initial withdrawal of U.S. forces from their 2010 peak of about 100,000, a process that will be complete by the end of the summer. Just as importantly, he emphasized to his company commanders that they had to let go of the reins and make the Afghan troops they mentor take the lead for the fight — a crucial, if difficult, step for getting the U.S. out of Afghanistan. (Well, sort of out.)

That endeared Allen to President Obama — a rarity for an Afghanistan commander. It’s no secret that Obama has had icy relations with his previous commanders. Allen’s two predecessors, respectively, ran a command comfortable with mocking the White House and pushed back against the long-telegraphed troop withdrawal. Finally, the White House had an ally in Kabul. “John Allen is my man,” Obama recently gushed, according to the Post‘s Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

Accordingly, Allen is getting what he wants from the White House. Obama has agreed to an upcoming U.S. offensive in eastern Afghanistan against the buck-wild Haqqani Network of insurgents — something the White House telegraphed last year it wasn’t comfortable waging. He’s deferring an announcement of how many more U.S. troops will come home after the summer until Allen makes a recommendation. And now, apparently, he’s sending Allen to Belgium, a major promotion.

But even with the next year’s worth of troop reductions and the slow transition to Afghan control, Afghanistan is the U.S.’ largest active battlefield, and the turbulence at the top has impacted the way the war is waged. McKiernan didn’t buy into counterinsurgency with sufficient vigor for ex-Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ tastes. McChrystal really bought into it, and shifted operations and tactics accordingly. Petraeus reversed McChrystal’s restrictions on air power and fought with surprising tactical intensity. Allen all but abandoned counterinsurgency and refocused on training Afghans to smooth the pullout.

All this occurred in under four years. When historians assess why the Afghanistan war underperformed, the frequent command shifts may prove to be a factor.

On the other hand, Allen won’t be handing over the war to a n00b. Jaffe reports that Allen’s likely successor is either Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, who ran the day-to-day war under Generals McChrystal and Petraeus; or Vice Adm. Robert Harward. There’s reason to think either commander will show some continuities with Allen, even beyond the troop withdrawal’s they’d inherit.

Rodriguez often spoke to reporters about how his priority was mentoring Afghan forces. Harward’s background even more naturally suits the future of the war: not only did he overhaul Afghan detentions in 2009 to give Afghans more say over the process — although he might have, um, acquiesced to torture — but he was a leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, an organization that will be crucial to the war’s next phase. Of course, it’s an open question if Allen’s successor will stay in Kabul long enough to make an impact.

Airmen load up supplies bound for Afghanistan at Manas Airbase, Kyrgyzstan, Feb. 2009. With a vital Pakistani trucking route closed, expensive aerial shipping is how the U.S. resupplies the war. Photo: U.S. Air Force

For nearly six months, Pakistan has closed its ground shipping routes to convoys resupplying the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Getting those resupply routes open is preoccupying U.S. military officers and diplomats as they haggle, sweet-talk, beg and cajole their Pakistani counterparts, since alternative shipping routes are vastly more expensive. Exactly how expensive, the Pentagon won’t say, probably because disclosing that figure could undermine the U.S. in its talks with its Pakistani frenemy.

The so-called “Ground Lines of Communication” — GLOCs, pronounced “Gee-Locks” in military parlance — slammed shut after a November disaster in which U.S. troops killed 24 of their Pakistani counterparts during a chaotic nighttime border mission. That’s a costly closure. Last year, every U.S. shipping container crossing in through Pakistan cost the U.S. about $6,200, according to Defense Department figures provided to Danger Room. The average container flown in from the air transit route at Manas, Kyrgyzstan cost a whopping $15,800.

Military officials won’t disclose just how much more it’s actually cost to ship goods through Manas. “I have nothing releasable on transportation costs, or percentage of increase in spending,” says Cynthia Bauer, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Transportation Command. Privately, they know exactly how much it costs, as logistics are a crucial factor in prosecuting any war.

Jeffrey Dressler, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank with close ties to the U.S. military, explains what the Pentagon won’t. “It’s pretty simple: if we released a number on how much it’s cost us, Pakistan would come back with a number below it, and probably not too far below it,” he says. “When dealing with a difficult negotiating partner, you don’t want to show your hand.”

Talks between Washington and Islamabad to open the GLOC back up don’t seem to be going well. “The effort to try to get them open before Chicago” — that is, NATO’s big summit on the war next week — “doesn’t appear like it’s going to happen,” Dressler says.

But it’s possible to get some sense of how much Pakistan’s unwillingness to reopen the gates actually costs.

As Inside The Army first flagged, a recent Pentagon report on Afghanistan cited “nearly 4,194 [Afghan army vehicles] are currently stranded in Pakistan due to the closure of the Pakistani ground lines of communication.” (.pdf) That figure was just about Afghan army logistics vehicles, so it’s hardly indicative of the total amount of halted shipping. But it does allow for some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Assume that each shipping container requires two trucks to haul it. That’s about 2,100 containers. Each of them costs $15,800 to fly through Manas instead of trucked through Pakistan, which costs $6,200 instead. Cost: about $33.2 million, instead of about $13 million. So operating on conservative cost assumptions, the U.S. spent about an extra $20.1 million in shipping just for those 4,194 Afghan vehicles idling across the border in Pakistan.

To be clear, the Pentagon won’t say how many shipping containers are actually going through Manas instead of the GLOC. And we probably won’t know until talks with the Pakistanis on reopening that ground trucking route conclude.

Pakistan has already exacted a cost for its dead soldiers. It kicked the CIA out of a Pakistani airbase used as a launchpad for the drone war. Should the U.S. publicize how much extra the closure of the GLOCs cost, Pakistani negotiators would probably suddenly think of new, costly concessions to extract from Washington in exchange for opening the gates.

The U.S. continues to negotiate with the Pakistanis over reopening the GLOCs. Marine Gen. John Allen, the commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, met with top Pakistani general Ashfaq Parvez Kayani over the weekend, and the issue came up. But to no avail.

U.S. military officials, including Allen, have consistently said that losing the Pakistani shipping route is a problem, but it hasn’t actually affected the war effort. Still, keeping the figure concealed means U.S. taxpayers don’t actually know how much the Afghanistan war costs. Congress approved $115.1 billion for wartime spending (.pdf) last year, the vast majority of which paid for Afghanistan. But that price has clearly gone up, entirely in secret. Which also means the taxpayers don’t know how much Pakistan’s intransigence is really costing them.

The U.S.S. Farragut after disabling a pirate skiff in the Indian Ocean, 2009. The Navy now wants Web apps to cut down on piracy. Photo: U.S. Navy

Updated 9:09 a.m., May 15

The Navy’s far-out research wing thinks it’s found a way to cut down on the scourge of maritime piracy: apps. Commence the face-palming.

The Navy announced on Monday that it’s awarding $1 million in grants to develop a suite of web applications to “analyze data and other information to combat pirates, drug smugglers, arms traffickers, illegal fishermen and other nefarious groups.” Aboard the future ships of the U.S. Navy and its allies, the so-called International Collaborative Development for Enhanced Maritime Domain Awareness will, the researchers hope, run software that “improve[s] automation, small-target detection and intent detection.”

In other words, the hoped-for apps will help sailors figure out if the unfamiliar trawler approaching that U.S. destroyer is carrying fish, fishscale, or a crew of pirates intent on taking a shipping vessel for ransom. Engineers at Chile’s Technical University of Federico Santa Maria got the contract to start designing the apps; partnered with the Office of Naval Research, the Navy’s locus for next-generation technology, they’ll get going in the fall.

If you thought the U.S. already had a slew of intelligence assets to help make such determinations, you’d be correct. The unmanned Fire Scout helicopter has already been used to hunt drug smugglers (although the things are in the shop at the moment). The Navy is also flying modified Global Hawk surveillance drones to spy on big swaths of saltwater. What will a suite of apps add to the mix?

It’s not obvious. For one thing, bandwidth aboard Navy ships is a precious commodity. Satellite links for voice, text and data fight for space on deck, a challenge for ships built, in some cases, decades before the widely available internet. It’s not clear if the app suite will operate over an unclassified web — slow as dial-up aboard Navy ships — but it’ll definitely have to work with ships from multiple navies, within “a coalition-accessible Web portal,” according to Navy engineer John Stastny in a prepared statement. In addition to the frustrations of slow connection speeds, that’s going to set up a headache for access, since navies within the anti-piracy coalition run the gamut from allies like South Korea to frenemies like Pakistan.

Then there’s the challenge of actually pinging the different ships with the relevant data. Satellite connections keep the Navy’s navigation systems communicating around the globe. But as the U.S. Marines have learned to their frustration, pushing data out over the Navy’s pipes is a challenge from distances greater than 100 nautical miles. Add to that the aforementioned problem of linking coalition navies together to share data — what the military likes to call “interoperability” — and the apps may be stressed to load updated data from disparate ships, raising relevance issues.

Also, to be clear, these are web apps (perhaps optimized for the archaic versions of Internet Explorer aboard Navy ships). Don’t even think about pushing these apps to smartphones — you’re not getting 4G LTE connectivity in the middle of the vast blue oceans.

Maybe the Chilean team can design apps that crunch data into teeny-tiny packets that minimize bandwidth. (The Navy’s putting the open source code for the program up here, in case you’d like to play along at home.) Even then, the challenges of working with partner navies and redundancy with existing or developing intelligence systems will remain. The Navy might learn that there isn’t always an app for that.

Update, 9:09 a.m., May 15: This piece initially said the Office of Naval Research (ONR) awarded the $1 million grant. While ONR announced the award and will aid the Chilean engineers in designing the app suite, the actual cash comes from elsewhere in the Navy and Pentagon bureaucracies.

A boatswain's mate fuels an F/A-18E jet aboard the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush. Photo: U.S. Navy

On Monday, the U.S. Navy will officially announce the ships for its demonstration of the “Great Green Fleet” — an entire aircraft carrier strike group powered by biofuels and other eco-friendly energy sources. If a powerful congressional panel has its way, it could be the last time the Navy ever uses biofuels to run its ships and jets.

In its report on next year’s Pentagon budget, the House Armed Services Committee banned the Defense Department from making or buying an alternative fuel that costs more than a “traditional fossil fuel.” It’s a standard that may be almost impossible to meet, energy experts believe; there’s almost no way the tiny, experimental biofuel industry can hope to compete on price with the massive, century-old fossil fuels business.

Committee Republicans, like Rep. Randy Forbes, insist this isn’t an attempt to kill off military biofuels before they have a chance to start. “Now, look, I love green energy,” he said in February. “It’s a matter of priorities.”

But if the measure becomes law, it would make it all-but-inconceivable for the Pentagon to buy the renewable fuels. It would likely scuttle one of the top priorities of Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. And it might very well suffocate the gasping biofuel industry, which was looking to the Pentagon to help it survive.

“We’d be years behind if it wasn’t for the military,” said Tom Todaro, a leading biofuel entrepreneur whose companies have supplied the military with tens of thousands of gallons of fuel made from mustard seeds.

When Mabus took over as Navy Secretary, he declared that the service would get half of its energy from sources other than oil by 2020. The two-day Great Green Fleet demo, scheduled for the end of June in Hawaii, is supposed to be the biggest step yet towards that beyond-ambitious goal.

The destroyers USS Chafee and Chung Hoon will plow through the Pacific and F/A-18 jets will scream off of the USS Nimitz‘s flight deck, all thanks to a 50/50 blend of alternative and traditional fuel. It’ll not only show the world that the Pentagon is serious about biofuels — a full-scale Green Fleet deployment is scheduled for 2016. It’ll also serve as a signal to skittish investors that biofuel companies have a willing customer in the U.S. Navy.

But the Green Fleet’s 450,000 gallons of fuel made from chicken fat and other waste greases (plus a dollop of algae oil) didn’t come cheap. At $12 million — arguably the biggest biofuel purchase in military history — the algae-chicken goop costs about four times more than an old-school petroleum product.

There were political costs, too. Committee Republicans — unhappy about shrinking defense budgets and skeptical about the White House’s green initiatives — used the biofuel buy as a way to go after the administration.

“I understand that alternative fuels may help our guys in the field, but wouldn’t you agree that the thing they’d be more concerned about is having more ships, more planes, more prepositioned stocks,” Rep. Randy Forbes said during a February hearing with Mabus. “Shouldn’t we refocus our priorities and make those things our priorities instead of advancing a biofuels market?” Then he told Mabus: “You’re not the secretary of the energy. You’re the secretary of the Navy.”

Mabus and his allies countered that the Republicans were taking an overly-simplistic view of things. Of course relatively small batches of a new fuel are going to be expensive — just like the original, 5GB iPod cost $400 and held fewer songs than today’s $129 model, which holds 8 GB. That’s the nature of research and development. With development time and big enough purchases, the costs of biofuels will come down, they argued; already, the price has dropped in half since 2009.

“It’s a false choice to say that we should concentrate on more ships versus a different kind of fuel. If we don’t get a different kind of fuel, if we don’t have a secure domestic supply of energy at an affordable price… the ships and the planes may not be able to be used because we can’t get the fuel,” Mabus told the Senate Subcommittee on Water and Power in March.

What’s more, Mabus added, there’s a value in a more stable, domestic supply of fuel; every time the price of oil goes up by a dollar per barrel, it costs the Navy $31 million. “We simply buy too much fossil fuels from places that are either actually or potentially volatile, from places that may or may not have our best interests at heart,” he said. “We would never let these places build our ships, our aircraft, our ground vehicles, but we do give them a say on whether those ships steam, aircraft fly, or ground vehicles operate because we buy so much energy from them.”

None of those arguments managed to sway House Republicans, who last Wednesday voted to impose its ban on alt-fuels that cost more than the traditional stuff. InsideDefense.com first noted the measure.

Long before the congressmen made their decisions, biofuel industry insiders told Danger Room that their products would never be as cheap as petroleum-based ones.

“This idea that we can match [the price of] crude oil — I think it’s such a bullshit question,” Tom Todaro said back in October. “A car with airbags costs more than a car without. Society decides how valuable those airbags are. Society can decide the value of renewable fuels.”

But the armed services committee didn’t put limits on all alternative fuels — just the ones with environmental benefits. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 forbids federal agencies from buying alternative fuels that are more polluting than conventional ones. Last week, the congressmen ordered to exempt the Defense Department from those regulations.

That would free the military up to start using the so-called so-called Fischer-Tropsch method of squeezing fuel out of coal or natural gas, both of which America has in abundance. The process helped Apartheid-era South Africa survive sanctions against the regime, and enabled the Germans to produce 124,000 barrels of fuel per day during World War II. It could help make our military more energy-independent, too. There’s just one small problem: “you end up kicking a whole bunch of additional carbon dioxide out into the air,” as Lt. Col. Bob Bateman once noted. “More carbon dioxide, in fact, than you do just using and burning the refined products you get from crude oil.”

During his testimony in March, Mabus insisted that “the Great Green Fleet doesn’t have an environmental agenda. It’s about maintaining America’s military and economic leadership across the globe in the 21st century.” Still, it’s hard to imagine him agreeing to a Great Green Fleet that polluted the planet even further.

Afghans in Jalalabad install a satellite dish for the city's endangered Wi-Fi network. Photo: Peretz Partensky

It was a project that symbolized America’s grand ambitions to rebuild Afghanistan: a DIY Wi-Fi network, free for Afghans to use, powering the aid projects and business ventures of the eastern city of Jalalabad. But now funding for the JLink network has run dry, and like so much of the Afghanistan war, it’s run out of time. Most of Jalalabad is about to go offline.

The sudden collapse of the network is causing local aid workers, entrepreneurs and the entire city to adjust to the prospect of life without a freely available internet. JLink is woven into the fabric of Jalalabad: It took about two years for high-speed internet to become available through JLink in the city’s public hospital, local elementary schools and the women’s dorm at Nangarhar University. After one of JLink’s two satellite connections went dark on May 1, some in the city’s aid community considered it a prelude to a larger international withdrawal from Afghanistan.

JLink is not something the Taliban destroyed. Its impending collapse illustrates what happens when grand ambitions lead to grand achievements that ultimately prove unsustainable — perhaps because they proceeded from unstable, utopian premises. And like the war itself, the group that created JLink is out of time to salvage its project.

“The demise of the JLink is going to be a huge blow to Jalalabad’s nascent community of tech entrepreneurs — creative, dedicated young people who are pushing innovation in their own communities and creating well-paying, skilled jobs for their peers,” says Una Vera Moore, a development worker in Afghanistan who’s part of a last-ditch effort to save JLink. “What kind of message will we, de-facto representatives of the international community in Afghanistan, send when the network finally goes down? A message of fatigue and abandonment.”

JLink’s genesis came out of a heralded 2009 project begun by some MIT students working out of Jalalabad. The “Fab Labs” were pop-up workshops that taught Afghans to fabricate small-scale projects from T-shirts to, importantly, wireless antennas. The connectivity for those Labs came from expatriate Americans in their 20s and 30s who came to Afghanistan in the hope of helping, nonviolently, to rehabilitate a country fractured by decades of war. Two of those expats, living out of a guesthouse in the city, loaned the Fab Lab a place to work, and then connected the lab to their own wireless network.

“At the Fab Lab, some of the [Afghan] students came up with the idea of using point-to-point antennas and off-the-shelf routers to create a mesh network, to share internet around Jalalabad,” explains one of those expats, Todd Huffman, a 32-year-old San Franciscan. “Initially, MIT students were using a laser cutter at the Fab Lab to fabricate point-to-point dishes. Afghan students quickly figured out you didn’t need a laser cutter — you could build them out of tin cans and whatnot. That’s the core of how this got started.”

A Grey Eagle drone prepares for takeoff at Camp Taji, Iraq, 2010. Photo: U.S. Army

It’s official: the U.S. drone war over Pakistan, Yemen and beyond really does exist. John Brennan, President Obama’s principal counterterrorism adviser, disclosed the government’s worst kept secret in a Washington speech last week. So now the Pentagon has to talk about it. Kind of.

A memorandum for the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s public-affairs shop provides talking points for military mouthpieces to discuss the secretive war in public. Its bottom line: yes, you can say there is a drone war — but don’t say much more about it.

“We are not in a position to comment on specific classified operations or specific areas of the world in which we engage in such operations,” the talking-points memo instructs public-affairs officers to say.

Much of the rest of the memo instructs those officers to recapitulate Brennan’s few disclosures: “the United States Government conducts targeted strikes against specific Al-Qaeda terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones.” That line is a quote from Brennan’s speech.

There is no advice given to officers who receive questions about precisely what laws govern the undeclared drone war. Nor is there instruction about discussing the standards by which they can target American citizens, like the al-Qaida propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a drone strike in Yemen in September, or Awlaki’s 16-year old American-born son, killed in another strike shortly thereafter.

Pose those questions, or similar ones, to the Pentagon, and this is what you’re supposed to hear in response: ” Mr. Brennan discussed why targeted strikes against Al-Qaeda terrorists using remotely piloted aircraft are legal, ethical and wise.” He actually didn’t, though. Brennan simply asserted that the strikes are legal, ethical and wise.

Ask about civilian casualties caused by the drones — something Brennan has denied and/or minimized — and the response will be: “These technologies conform to the laws of war by precisely targeting a military objective while minimizing collateral damage, including the loss of innocent life.” (Source? John Brennan.)

Bizarrely, the public-affairs memo undermines the very purpose of Brennan’s April 30 speech: the disclosure of the drone program. “There is nothing new here,” the memo instructs officers to say. “Attorney General Holder, State Department Legal Advisor Koh and DOD General Counsel Johnson have already described the legal authorities which allow the U.S. to use lethal force against Al-Qaeda.”

Again: sort of. All those officials have indeed asserted that those authorities exist, usually pegged to the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force that Congress quickly approved after the 9/11 attacks. But congressional Republicans have (correctly) pointed out that the vague Authorization was written before the targets of many drone strikes even existed, like al-Qaida’s Yemeni offshoot. When they suggested passing a new congressional authorization to update the law, the administration resisted it. And it’s also resisted releasing a key Justice Department document explaining the Obama administration’s legal reasoning behind killing Awlaki.

But get used to the non-explanations embedded in that memo. Even with al-Qaida in rough shape around the world, the U.S.’ global counterterrorism campaign — reliant on drone strikes and commando raids — shows no sign of relenting. “As long as [al-Qaeda] franchises threaten the United States,” Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Denis McDonough, told Danger Room on Friday, “we’re going to stay on the offense.”

An Israel Air Force flight simulator. Photo: IAF

TEL AVIV, Israel — Nano drones that an infantryman can pull out of his pocket; helicopters piloted by robots who extract wounded soldiers from the battlefield; micro satellites on demand; large spy balloons in the upper reaches of the stratosphere; virtual training with a helmet from your office; algorithms that resolve pilots’ ethical dilemmas (so they won’t have to deal with those pesky war crimes tribunals); and farming out code to a network of high school kids.

Since mid-2009, some 300 Israel Air Force officers have been brainstorming about the next steps for one of the world’s most advanced air forces, and the main pillar of Israel’s strategic power. This “IAF 2030″ project has just come to an end. Besides a standard press release issued by the military, little has been disclosed about it. Exclusive details are reported here for the first time.

The task of preparing the project was given to Major Nimrod Segev, head of the IAF’s long-term planning department. Segev divided his 300 officers into nine teams: Advanced Information Technology, Vast Data, Space, Cyber, Environment, Intelligence, Human Factor, Organizational Behavior, and a ‘Red Team,’ to challenge the other eight’s assumptions.

The participants were asked to think ahead — far ahead — something that doesn’t come easy in the military culture here, where long-term planning is almost unheard of. What changes would it have to make in weapons systems, platforms, technology, manpower, and organizational behavior to meet potential new threats? What new planes, guidance systems, and technology would they want? Let loose, the officers were told. Don’t worry about the how and the how much; just let your imaginations go. The air force even brought in Israel’s number one dreamer — President Shimon Peres — to fire their imaginations with a pep talk.

The vast majority of the “IAF 2030″ document is classified. The interview with Segev at the IAF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv — nicknamed the “Canary” — was conducted with a security officer present. No questions about the Red Team were answered.

Robots will fly helicopters and extract wounded from the battlefield, if the vision of the "IAF 2030" project materializes. Photo: IAF

Segev did open about one of the more controversial ideas that came up, however: the notion of “mathematical formulas that solve even the difficult ethical dilemmas in place of human pilots.” The air force has been developing technologies for quite some time now that can divert missiles in midair if all of a sudden a civilian pops up near the target, but often this kind of thing happens too quickly even for the most skilled operators. It’s part of an uneven, decade-long IAF effort to try to bring down collateral damage — a necessity, since the air force fights asymmetric enemies in densely populated areas. But this is something the IAF is keen to develop even more.

The concept of a computer taking over almost all the functions of this kind of thing is very tricky, though; you can’t very well say at a war crimes tribunal that you’re not responsible for unintended deaths, or tell the judge it was all the algorithm’s fault.

Some machines may vanish, too. In the meantime, some machines may vanish. Many in the IAF 2030 group thought that the future didn’t lie in large, expensive simulators at air force bases, but rather portable simulators you can use almost anywhere. “Virtual training from your office. Strap on a helmet and you’re in the air,” Segev said.

While the last aerial dogfight between Israeli and Arab warplanes took place somewhere in the early ’80s, Segev said that aerial combat was now, and would continue to be, a staple of IAF pilot training. “While we didn’t get to the point of making the human pilot obsolete, we do see that the job of a pilot is vastly different from what it was. These days the air-to-air missile is the ‘dogfight’ – the missile can be launched from a vast distance at an enemy plane. The point is to see the enemy way before he sees you, and for that you need datafighters, not dogfighters,” Segev says.

Segev also told Danger Room that the Space and Intelligence teams found the 100,000 feet layer of the stratosphere “very interesting.” These days, the best warplanes can only fly to somewhere around 50,000 feet, and the best satellites in low orbit can get down to 500,000 feet. That leaves a whole ‘middle layer’ where “you can get really creative,” he adds.

Another off-the-wall idea: farming out complex coding and other technical tasks to a network of six technical high schools run by the IAF across the country. These technical schools already exist. But by 2030 — when today’s infants will be enrolled — these teenagers could be at the core of a revamped Israel Air Force.

An F-22 Raptor. Photo: USAF

The Air Force is continuing disciplinary action against one of the Air Force pilots who refused to fly the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter because the pricey jet’s faulty oxygen system was steadily poisoning him. Capt. Josh Wilson, from the Virginia Air National Guard, has been granted whistleblower protection under federal law — a status the Air Force has publicly acknowledged. But that hasn’t stopped the flying branch from beginning a process that may very well threaten to end the pilot’s career.

Wilson and Maj. Jeremy Gordon, also a Raptor pilot with the Virginia Guard, stopped flying the $400-million-per-copy F-22 after they and dozens of other pilots reported in-flight symptoms consistent with oxygen deprivation, including confusion and blackouts. The Air Force temporarily grounded some or all of its roughly 180 Lockheed Martin-made Raptors twice last year so it could study the jet’s onboard oxygen generator.

When the flying branch failed to pinpoint the problem, as a stopgap measure it installed an extra carbon filter in the F-22′s oxygen system then ordered the pilots back in the air for an intensifying program of training exercises and deployments. But the carbon filter was faulty, too, and shed black dust into the pilots’ masks. F-22 fliers began coughing up black phlegm. Ground crews who spent time in the Raptor’s cockpit also reported symptoms. Air Force doctors advised the aviators to stand down.

Wilson and Gordon were the only pilots who refused to get back into the cockpit — that we know of. But in an interview broadcast Sunday the pilots told 60 Minutes that a “vast, silent majority” of the Air Force’s 200 or so Raptor fliers feared for their health or their lives. Gordon’s flight qualification soon expired. Wilson, the younger and less experienced of the two, faced a harsher punishment. The Air Force sent him a letter of reprimand that Frederick Morgan, the two pilots’ Ohio-based lawyer, says is just the first step in a potentially career-ending disciplinary process.

In addition to seeking legal counsel, Wilson and Gordon appealed to Rep. Adam Kinzinger, himself an Air Force pilot, for protection under the federal whistleblower law. Kinzinger and Sen. Mark Warner issued a letter Thursday urging the military not to mess with these pilots — or any others that bring up problems with the Raptor.

“We need to make sure there is a culture in which others feel safe coming forward,” Warner wrote.

The Air Force acknowledges the protected status. “Air Force leadership has made clear that the we are treating the pilots as whistleblowers,” service spokesman John Dorrian tells Danger Room.

But Wilson’s disciplinary action continues all the same, Morgan tells Danger Room. “They didn’t rescind the letter.” Fearing for his career, Wilson has offered to resume flying. “He’s eager not to be disciplined,” Morgan says.

Regarding the letter of reprimand, Dorrian says he cannot comment on private personnel matters. He refers Danger Room to the Air National Guard, but warns that the Guard, too, probably will not comment on any pilot’s individual case.

The Air Force did remove the carbon filters that Morgan says only “made the problem worse.” That was some comfort to Wilson and Gordon, according to Morgan. Now Gordon says he’ll get back in the cockpit, too — but only to help the Air Force work on fixing the oxygen problem. “All these guys want is for the airplane to work,” Morgan says.

This battle is far from over. While the Air Force mulls over Wilson’s and Gordon’s offers, the pilots along with their lawyer are meeting with Air Force doctors and Sen. Mark Warner, a new ally alongside Rep. Kinzinger. Maybe Warner can get the Air Force to explain how whistleblower protection should not stop Wilson’s ongoing disciplinary action.

Photo: Department of Defense

America’s top military officer condemned in the strongest possible terms a Defense Department course that taught troops to prep for a “total war” on Islam using “Hiroshima”-style tactics.

“It was totally objectionable, against our values and it wasn’t academically sound,” Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a Pentagon press conference on Thursday. The instructor responsible for the course, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, is “no longer in a teaching status,” Dempsey added — but he is still employed at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va.

Dempsey’s comments were prompted by a Danger Room report on Thursday that described Dooley’s course in detail. For at least a year, Dooley taught an optional course at the college for lieutenant colonels, colonels, commanders and Navy captains that proposed taking a war on Islam “to the civilian population wherever necessary,” which he likened to the bombardment of Dresden and nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Guest lecturers in the course encouraged those senior officers to think of themselves as a “resistance movement” to Islam.

Dempsey and his deputy for military education, Marine Lt. Gen. George Flynn, pulled the plug on the course last month. The general said he was “quite thankful” for an unnamed military officer who brought word of the anti-Islam material to his attention. Dempsey and his staff launched an investigation into “what motivated that elective to being part of the curriculum,” as he put it on Thursday, and the general also sent a letter to the heads of every military service and regional command instructing them to jettison any similar material, as per a White House directive issued last fall.

The inquiry, conducted by Army Maj. Gen. Frederick Rudesheim, is scheduled to conclude on May 24. Any disciplinary action against Dooley; the college’s commandant, Maj. Gen. Joseph Ward; or any other officer is contingent on its findings.

“Final judgment should await General Rudesheim’s findings, but it’s not too early to say that these excerpts are offensive (though that word may be a bit mild here),” e-mails Douglas Ollivant, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Iraq veteran who has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “Further, presentations like this do real harm to those trying to carefully distinguish extremism and support for it from otherwise admirable religious devotion.”

The harm perpetuated on student officers “who accepted the implied authority of the instructor,” Ollivant added, “is obvious.”

The military is hardly alone in dealing with anti-Islam instructional material passing itself off as responsible counterterrorism. Over the years, hundreds of documents claiming “mainstream” Muslims are “violent” have made their way into FBI curricula, alongside internal claims that agents working on counterterrorism cases could “bend or suspend the law.”

“Plenty of U.S. military officers and troops were inspired by their service in either Iraq or Afghanistan to learn Arabic or Dari and study the peoples of the region. I left the Army in 2004, as a matter of fact, to pursue a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut,” says Andrew Exum, a retired Army captain who now serves as a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “But plenty of other officers and troops began their own amateurish studies of Islam and now, like Lt. Col. Dooley, peddle claims to know the truth about the violence and hatred at the heart of Islam. Pope’s warning that a little learning can be a dangerous thing is certainly relevant here. These hucksters, like the Robert Spencers of the world, know just enough to make themselves sound credible to an uninformed audience and hide their prejudices under a thin layer of amateurish, ideologically motivated scholarship.”