A Okie look at all thing Politics, eCampaign, New Media and Warfare - - - I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. - John Adams
Recent financial reports from U.S. aircraft manufacturer Northrop Grumman showed $2 billion in mystery money ("restricted programs", or secret stuff.)
This means an unnamed "black project," and one of the likely ones is a prototype of the U.S. Air Force's next generation heavy bomber. The air force has been openly discussing building their next heavy bomber as pilotless, or as a "crew optional" aircraft.
Meanwhile, over the past few years, considerable work has been done on smaller UAV bombers, that appear to be small scale versions of larger aircraft. The prime suspect is the X47B, a 15 ton, 36 feet long UAV, with a wingspan of 47 feet. It has a two ton payload and able to stay in the air for twelve hours. This is actually a navy project, a scaled up model of the X47A.
The Department of Defense wants the air force and navy to agree on a single design, although the navy version will need stronger landing gear and better corrosion protection (from the salt water exposure) for carrier operations.
Nevertheless, the X47B has "scale model prototype of UAV heavy bomber" written all over it. The $2 billion that Northrop Grumman had to show in its mandatory (as a corporation whose stock is publicly traded) financial reports would cover the costs for that.
Procurement documents from the U.S. Air Force give a rare glimpse into the Pentagon's plans for developing an offensive cyberwar capacity that can infiltrate, steal data from and if necessary take down enemy information technology networks.
The Broad Area Announcement, posted Monday by the Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate in Rome, N.Y., outlines a two-year, $11 million effort to develop "access to any remotely located open or closed computer information systems," lurk on them "completely undetected," "stealthily exfiltrate information" from them and ultimately "be able to affect computer information systems through Deceive, Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, Destroy (D5) effects."
"Of interest," continues the announcement, "are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root level access to both fixed (and) mobile computing platforms ¿¿ (and) methodologies to enable access to any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware."
The announcement "reflects the fact that the Department of Defense views information operations as critical to success in modern warfare," Air Force spokeswoman Larine Barr told United Press International, and is designed to "ensure that Air Force Cyber Command stands up on the leading edge of technology and expertise." The announcement is the latest stage in the Air Force's effort to develop a cyberwar capability and establish itself as the service that delivers U.S. military power in cyberspace. Last year the Air Force announced it was setting up a Cyber Command, alongside its Space and Air Commands, and was developing military doctrine for the prosecution of cyberwar operations.
The United States is not alone in thinking along these lines, and NATO announced Wednesday that seven European nations had signed up to participate in a cyberdefense Center of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia, which suffered a cyberattack last year that many officials believe was orchestrated by Russia.
The center will conduct research and training on cyberwarfare and include a staff of 30 persons, half of them specialists from the sponsoring countries of Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Spain, according to a statement from NATO.
The developments highlight the murky legal territory on which the cyberwars of the future will be fought: terrain on which attackers can cloak their identity and use as weapons the home computers of unsuspecting Web surfers that have been recruited to so-called botnets -- networks of PCs that unbeknownst to their owners have been compromised by hackers. The cyberattack on Estonia last year, for instance, was carried out by botnets, and Russian officials have denied any involvement.
In a recent article for the Armed Forces Journal, Col. Charles Williamson, a staff judge advocate for the USAF Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, argued that computer users whose equipment was recruited to botnets because they failed to patch their systems could not properly be considered innocent bystanders.
"If the United States is defending itself against an attack that originates from a computer which was co-opted by an attacker, then there are real questions about whether the owner of that computer is truly innocent. At the least, the owner may be culpably negligent, and that does not, in fairness or law, prevent America from defending itself if the harm (from an attack) is sufficiently grave," wrote Williamson in the article, which officials were keen to stress does not represent U.S. policy.
More importantly, because of the difficulties in identifying attackers and immediately quantifying damage from a cyberattack, it can be hard to determine when such attacks constitute an act of war -- as opposed to crime or even vandalism.
"The speed and anonymity of cyberattacks makes it very hard to distinguish what actions would be those of terrorists, criminals, nation states or just some lone prankster," said Gen. William Lord, who heads up the new Cyber Command.
The legal minefield that U.S. cyberwarriors must negotiate was spelled out in an analysis prepared by the Defense Department general counsel.
"It would be useful to create a process for determining when the response to a computer intrusion should shift from the customary law enforcement and counterintelligence modes to a national defense mode," reads the analysis.
"No one's come out and defined that yet," Cyber Command spokeswoman Karen Petitt told UPI, adding that the Air Force saw its role as developing capabilities for cyberwar, but that the decision about when and how to use those capabilities would be one for the national leadership.
The U.S. Air Force wants to maintain its current fleet of B-52s at 76 aircraft, despite a Congressional mandate to reduce that number to 56. That's because the B-52 has become the cheapest way to make war these days. With the development of GPS guided bombs (JDAM), heavy bombers have become the most cost-effective way to deliver support to ground forces. The B-52 is the cheapest American heavy bomber to operate.
In the last fifty years, the air force has developed six heavy bombers (the 240 ton B-52 in 1955, the 74 ton B-58 in 1960, the 47 ton FB-111 in 1969, the 260 ton B-70 in the 1960s, the 236 ton B-1 in 1985, and the 181 ton B-2 in 1992.) All of these were developed primarily to deliver nuclear weapons (bombs or missiles), but have proved more useful dropping non-nuclear bombs. Only the B-70 was cancelled before being deployed. The well maintained B-52s are quite sturdy and have, on average, only 16,000 flying hours. The air force estimates that the B-52s won't become un-maintainable until they reach 28,000 flight hours. The B-1 and B-2 were meant to provide a high tech replacement for the B-52, but the end of the Cold War made that impractical. The kinds of anti-aircraft threats the B-1 and B-2 were designed to deal with never materialized. This left the B-52 as the most cost effective way to deliver bombs. The B-1s and B-2s are getting some of the same weapons carrying and communications upgrades as the B-52, if only because these more modern aircraft provide a more expensive backup for the B-52.
Of the 744 B-52s built, only 94 are still fit for service. Nearly fifty have already been donated to museums (including one in Australia and one in South Korea.) Because of the Russia-U.S. START treaty, hundreds of B-52s in the "bone yard" were stripped of any useful equipment in the 1990s, and, since then, chopped up for scrap. This was all done out in the open, so that Russian spy satellites could confirm it.
India has awarded Russia a 965-million-dollar contract to upgrade its multi-role MiG-29 warplanes, officials said on Monday.
The two post-Cold War allies Saturday signed the deal to extend the life of India's fleet of 70 MiG-29 jets another 15 years from their current 25 years, an air force official said.
"The project entails two to three years and only six of them would be re-fitted in Russia while the work on the remaining squadrons would be carried out by them at Indian bases," he said asking not to be named.
The pre-condition was a "precaution" against delays in the modernisation of the MiG-29s which are among the main combat planes in India's inventory.
"We learnt our lessons with the MiG-21 project," he added, alluding to years of delay in the promised upgrade by Russia of the jets, now labelled "flying coffins" and "widow-makers" because of frequent crashes due to engine failure.
Under the contract Russia will re-arm the twin-engined MiG-29s with air-to-air missiles, modern bombs, increased fuel capacity and the latest avionics, the contract said.
The MiG-29 deal came after India last month resolved a protracted dispute with Russia on the sale of the Soviet-era carrier Admiral Gorshkov to the Indian navy.
Russian export firm Rosoboronexport in 2004 signed up to refurbish the 44,570-tonne carrier for 970 million dollars but last year demanded India pay an additional 1.2 billion dollars.
The two sides buried the hatchet after India agreed to pay 900 million dollars more for the 30-year-old carrier which will now join the Indian navy in 2011.
Gorshkov is to fill a vacuum left by the scrapping in 1997 of India's first aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant, which had been in service since 1961.
The Indian navy has only one operational aircraft carrier, the INS Viraat, which is to be phased out in coming years.
Russia accounts for 70 percent of Indian arms supplies but late deliveries and commercial disagreements have led New Delhi to use other suppliers such as Israel, Britain, France and the United States.
Russia is in a race with Western rivals for a 12-billion-dollar deal to sell 126 fighter jets, artillery worth two billion dollars and 317 helicopters worth a billion dollars to India.
US and European military aircraft manufacturers have emerged as the forerunners to win the fighter deal which will enable India to junk the crash-prone MiG-21.
Last September, Huawei Technologies, a network equipment manufacturer headed by Ren Zhengfei, a former officer in China's People's Liberation Army, cut a deal with Bain Capital to acquire an interest in 3Com, which among other things, makes network hardware and software that's widely used by the Defense Department and other federal agencies.
This includes, according to 3Com, Voice over Internet Protocol systems deployed by the Defense Information Systems Agency and the Social Security Administration. 3Com also sells software that detects network attacks to the government.
In addition, the company has provided local area network hardware used in the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, a network that operates at the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level.
Considering the security implications of a Chinese company acquiring even a passive interest in 3Com, members of Congress viewed the takeover with alarm. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich., chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, called it a "stealth assault on America's national security."
Last month, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, the committee's ranking Republican, sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson saying there was a "growing apprehension in the Congress" about the security implications of the transaction. Paulson chairs the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which examines the national security implications of such investments.
Shortly after Dingell and Barton raised their concerns, Xu Zhijun, chief marketing officer at Huawei Technologies, told the Financial Times that the views on the deal expressed by some U.S. lawmakers were "bullshit." Huawei, he said, only intended to take a 16.5 per cent investment in 3Com.
Zhijun's blast wasn't exactly well-timed. Last week, the Pentagon released a report concluding -- surprise -- that a series of attacks against U.S. government networks appear to emanate from China.
I wonder if these attacks were discovered by 3Com intrusiondetection software?
The Pentagon noted in its report that Huawei is one of a group of Chinese IT companies that serve both military and commercial users in the country. The report said such companies have "close commercial ties with the [People's Liberation Army] and collaborate [with the PLA] on research and development."
Zhijun tried to deflect criticism of the 3Com deal by telling the Financial Times that China is a big customer for network gear made by Cisco, so maybe the Chinese should worry about that company and its software. "Cisco is everywhere within China," he said. "Who should be more concerned?"
Zhijun has a good point. If Cisco gear is all over China, does this mean it could be used to mount attacks against U.S. networks? I posed this question to a Cisco representative, but have not heard back from her. Marlboro, Not Marlborough
3Com is headquartered in what is now known as Marlborough, Mass. But when my grandfather built a summer lake cottage there in the early 1900s, it was known simply as Marlboro, an appellation gussied up to the tonier name sometime in the early 1980s.
Though Marlboro now is replete with tech and IT companies, it ironically was the home of the last operator-based telephone exchange in New England, which finally converted to dial tone in the late 1960s.
I spent my summers in Marlboro with a bevy of aunts, uncles and cousins, and always marveled at the ease of use of that system -- you just picked up the phone, told the operator who you wanted to talk with, and she connected the call without even asking for a number.
You can't do that with an iPhone.
Hey, Let's Track Supplies Over a 49-Percent Chinese-Owned Network
This may sound loopy now that the Pentagon has all but pinned a series of cyberattacks on China, but it's true.
Last June, I wrote an article that detailed plans by the Army's Program Manager, Joint-Automatic Identification Technology to use a radio frequency identification network in Pakistan partially owned by a Chinese company to track supplies shipped from ports in Pakistan to U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
That RFID network is owned and operated by Savi Networks LLC, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin subsidiary Savi Technology and Hutchinson Port Holdings, a subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa Limited of Hong Kong, controlled by Chinese billionaire Li Ka Shing. Savi Technology owns 51 per cent of Savi Networks and Hutchison 49 per cent, according to a 2005 press release from the partnership.
Considering the sensitivity of logistics and supply chain data -- we all know generals win battles and logisticians win wars, right? -- Air Force Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, told me last June that Defense "is still assessing whether to utilize a commercial solution for Pakistan ... in accordance with DoD information assurance policy."
Last December, Ryder sent me an e-mail saying that Defense had decided to use the RFID network after a risk assessment conducted the Army's Information Assurance Security Engineering Directorate concluded that "DoD's use of Savi Technology's commercial RFID reader network in Pakistan does not increase the operational risk to U.S. forces or the [Global Information Grid]."
This statement did not address the fact that the network in Pakistan is not operated by Savi Technology, but Savi Networks, and so flummoxed me I did nothing with it until now.
I have a new query in to Ryder asking if Defense intends to continue to use this network considering that China now appears to be very busy doing bad things to us in cyberspace, and Ryder said he is working on it. Mark Nelson, a Savi Technology spokesman, said he would get back to me this week with a response.
Good News: The Air Force Is Ready to Fight the Cyber War
New threats mean new organizations -- and even better, new funding. So the Air Force has been positioning itself during the past year to manage and run the cyber war.
Until recently, Air Force leaders have relied on speeches and briefings to try to make sure the service gains the lead role in cyberspace. But last week, I stumbled over a very slick Air Force video that takes this approach to a new level. "It takes cyber dominance to defend America in a changing world," the ad says, plugging a new "elite" Air Force organization that "defends us from millions of cyber threats every day."
Cue the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder."
The Space Race
The Pentagon's China report also singled out the country as a new and potent adversary in space, with the ability to attack satellites.
Gen. Robert Kehler, commander of Air Force Space Command, recently told the Strategic Forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee that unnamed adversaries are "actively pursuing" space dominance. U.S. space efforts, he said, face a range of threats, including jamming of radio frequencies and the Global Positioning System, as well as anti-satellite attacks and laser blinding of sensor systems.
The good news is the Air Force also has produced a slick video ad informing viewers that the service has the space dominance thing down.
