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Tomorrow’s Missile Subs: Smaller, Cheaper, With Lots of Robot Pals

On March 19, the guided-missile submarine Florida fired more than 90 of the roughly 120 Tomahawk cruise missiles that took down Libyan air defenses, clearing the way for NATO strike planes. It was the major-combat debut for America’s fleet of “SSGN” subs. Each of the four vessels packs up to 154 Tomahawks, making them some of the world’s most powerful warships.

But there’s a problem. The SSGNs, commissioned in the last five years, are actually modified ballistic-missile submarines dating from the 1980s. Around 2026, their nuclear power cores will wear out. At that point, the Navy must replace the subs … or lose a huge portion of its missile firepower. But building new submarines the size of the SSGNs could cost up to $8 billion apiece, nearly half what the Navy spends on ships every year. In other words, way too much.

Fortunately, Electric Boat in Connecticut, the Navy’s main submarine-builder, has a plan. Instead of designing new SSGNs from scratch, Electric Boat intends to pack the current Virginia-class attack submarines with extra missiles — and give them new eyes and ears in the form of sophisticated underwater and flying robots. The meaner, smarter Virginias wouldn’t carry as many missiles as today’s SSGNs, but at just $2 billion a pop, the Navy could afford many more of them.

The Virginia missile-boat plan is key to preserving the Navy’s overwhelming firepower advantage. It’s also the subject of my latest feature for AOL Defense.

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Obama: Libya War Will End ‘Soon’

Eight months, 9,618 airstrike missions, $1.1 billion and one dictator later, President Obama announced that his not-quite-a-war in Libya is in its final phase.

“Our NATO mission will soon come to an end,” Obama announced on Thursday afternoon, hours after a NATO airstrike and rebel offensive led to the death of Moammar Gadhafi.

Obama’s statement provided no timetable for precisely when U.S. aircraft, warships and drones will end the NATO-led air campaign and naval blockade of Libya. But the Guardian reports that NATO military commanders are urging that the “air campaign should now be brought to an end,” with a decision coming as early as Friday.

Talk of a NATO peacekeeping mission, first floated by NATO commander Adm. James Stavridis, have waned as NATO capitols wearied of the Libya war. Vague as Obama’s statement was, it probably shuts the door on the possibility of one, even if an insurgency coalesces in Gadhafi’s wake.

Indeed, shortly after Obama’s speech, NATO’s civilian leader, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, put out a statement vowing, “We will terminate our mission in coordination with the United Nations and the National Transitional Council,” Libya’s interim government.

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Libya: The Real U.S. Drone War

Updated 3:58 p.m.

It took Predator drones about three weeks from the start of NATO’s war against Moammar Gadhafi to arrive in the skies over Libya. Since then, they’ve been busy: from April 21 to 9 a.m. Central European Time today, the Predators have launched 145 strikes, according to Pentagon spokesman George Little.

By comparison, that’s way more than twice the 57 drone strikes so far this year in Pakistan, the central locale for the U.S. drone war, and significantly more than 2010’s entire all-time-high of 117 drone strikes in Pakistan.

The Predators did not let up after Libyan rebels captured Tripoli in late August. By then, the U.S. drones had dropped their Hellfire missiles 92 times in four months. In the remaining two months, the Predators slightly stepped up their deadly pace during the residual hunt for Moammar Gadhafi, with 52 more strikes.

But the Pentagon will not confirm that the Predator, or any other U.S. airframe, was involved in the NATO airstrike in Sirte preceding Gadhafi’s death.
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Gadhafi, ‘Mad Dog of Middle East,’ Has Been Put Down

Hours ago, a convoy of 100 cars sped out of Sirte, the besieged final bastion of support for Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. NATO warplanes overhead struck the massive vehicular procession twice — but did not destroy it. That job went to Libyan revolutionary fighters below, who swarmed to apprehend the quarry within the disabled convoy.

Soon after, Mohammad Shammam, the information minister of Libya’s transitional post-Gadhafi government, told al-Jazeera that “a big fish” was captured.

And that appears to be the end of Moammar Gadhafi. Rumors are still spreading over whether Gadhafi is captured, grievously wounded in captivity, or — as al-Jazeera is confidently reporting — dead. (Update, 10:40 a.m.: al-Jazeera says this graphic photo shows Gadhafi’s body.) But al-Jazeera’s Tony Birtley, al-Jazeera’s reporter in rebel-held Sirte, told the cameras, “The era of Moammar Gadhafi is over.”

No U.S. official, as of right now, is confirming a thing about Gadhafi’s death/capture. Understandably: When rebel forces finally swept into Tripoli two months ago, reports breathlessly circulated that his son Saif al-Islam was captured, only to be discredited when Saif made a defiant speech.

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Exclusive Video: Robot Mini-Tank Battles Homemade Bombs

An Alabama company has built one of the most ginormous robots the Army could ever want: a mini-tank that drives itself. Now to sell the Army on a bomb-fighting ‘bot the ground service actually once funded.

The machine in the video above is the Acer. Built by Mesa Robotics, it’s a tracked ground robot that weighs a whopping 4,500 lbs. and is about the size of a Bobcat loader or European electric coupe. Mesa considers it a one-stop shop for all the Army’s ground-robot needs, from stopping insurgent bombs to acting as a pack mule, with human control strictly optional. And yes, that is the soundtrack to Terminator 2 playing in the video.

What makes the Acer Terminator-esque is its artificial brain. An ex-Darpa employee named Steve Bruemmer designed a “Behavior Engine” that provides “intelligent instantaneous reactive responses to local environmental, sensor, and other data.” When Bruemmer’s 5D company won an Army contract for his Behavior Engine to help detect improvised explosive devices, he told Danger Room last month he was incorporating it into “a 4,500-pound vehicle that’s very promising,” but wouldn’t elaborate.

That vehicle is the Acer. “You could literally send it down the road and it’d run for 18 hours,” Mesa vice president Tim Cutshaw tells Danger Room.

But the Army’s effectively out of cash. It’s used a lot of ground robots at war — not always with good results — and may not see the need for an autonomous mini-tank.
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Budget Hawks Shoot Down Pentagon’s New Missile

The Pentagon only has one program to upgrade its inventory of small, deadly missiles. Or it did, before impending budget cuts detonated it prematurely.

The next-gen Joint Air-to-Ground Munition, or JAGM, project aimed to put an advanced missile onto drones, manned planes and helicopters. But Inside Defense reports that the $8.3 billion missile modernization effort is on the chopping block, right before the Pentagon decides on a design for it. Lockheed Martin is competing with a Boeing-Raytheon team-up to design a replacement for small missiles like the TOW and the Hellfire.

The cost of the program is a concern in these days of financial austerity (which, in this case, means spending perhaps as little as $4 trillion over ten years, compared to the $5 trillion currently projected for defense over that time). Pressure to close the federal deficit is forcing the Pentagon to scale back its modernization wish lists. The missile upgrades might be a casualty: budget projections submitted by the Army and the Navy quietly but conspicuously left the JAGM off the planning sheets.

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Military ‘Not Quite Sure’ How Drone Cockpits Got Infected

It’s been more than a month since a virus infected the remote “cockpits” of America’s drone fleet. And the U.S. military still doesn’t know exactly how the machines at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada got infected.

“We’re not quite sure how that happened yet,” General Robert Kehler told reporters Tuesday. Kehler is the head of U.S. Strategic Command, which is nominally in charge of the military’s Cyber Command and all other online activities.

“It was a virus that we believe at this point entered from the wild, if you will, not specifically targeted at the RPA (remotely piloted aircraft) activities but entered through some other process,” he added.

The Pentagon is ordinarily reluctant to talk about any computer security breaches; even routine infections are treated as military secrets. For example, the clean-up of a common, if widespread, worm was considered a classified mission — undertaken under the name “Operation Buckshot Yankee.” When Kehler’s predecessor mentioned the phrase at a conference in May of 2010, several people in the room gasped at the seeming indiscretion.

But the drone cockpit virus has already received so much publicity that the military decided to speak up, just a little. Last Wednesday, the Air Force issued a press release calling the infection “more of a nuisance than an operational threat.” An anonymous defense official told the Associated Press that the malware “is routinely used to steal log-in and password data from people who gamble or play games like Mafia Wars online.”

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Killer Kamikaze Drone Gets The ‘Taiwanime’ Treatment

AeroVironment’s tiny robotic murder-suicide weapon has struck a chord. Today it took a trip to the uncanny valley, courtesy of those Taiwan-based animators who make creepy cartoons out of the news.

The video above is courtesy of Next Media Animation. Unlike its previous efforts at explaining the downfall of Moammar Gadhafi or the Transportation Security Administration’s loving caresses, this one merely animates AeroVironment’s video pitch for the Switchblade kamikaze drone, which Danger Room brought to you on Tuesday.

What they might have added is that the Switchblade is no hypothetical flying knife. After our story ran, Bloomberg’s Tony Capaccio reported that the miniature killer drone was secretly deployed to Afghanistan last year. Elite commandos fired the drone under a dozen times, finding it “enhances the small unit’s ability to quickly identify and precisely engage combatants in rugged terrain,” Capaccio quoted the Combined Forces Special Operations Command as saying in a request for more of ‘em.

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Video: Robot Builds Other Robots From Foam

Roboticists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Modlab have built a robot that can build and repair other robots using modular parts and an insulating spray-foam.

Wired U.K.

Robots tend to be designed with a specific task in mind, and their parts are built accordingly. However, there are many missions where this approach doesn’t work. In cases such as disaster recovery, intelligence gathering and space exploration, it isn’t always clear what task a robot might be assigned.

The Foambot was created by a team led by Shai Revzen and comprises of a central platform — a “foam synthesizer cart” — and several jointed modules that be released from the cart and then maneuvered into position. Once the configuration is right, the mothership can spray insulation foam to connect the clusters in order to make a robot — be it a quadruped or a snake.

Foambots can be useful for other applications, such as picking up dangerous objects and quickly creating an emergency doorstop. In the future it could carry a selection of collapsible moulds that the robot could use to make specific components — such as wheels, wings and floats — to ensure it can tackle any terrain it is faced with.

Check out the video of the Foambot creating a quadruped above — watch out for the extraordinary, frog-like movement of the robot when it comes to life.
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New Mission for Military’s ‘Human Terrain’ Experts: Interrogation

Updated October 20 10:55 am

For the past five years, a military cadre has been pushing the Pentagon to make greater use of social scientists and other cultural experts. The idea is to understand a warzone’s “human terrain” as well as it maps its physical geography. As I report today in a new article for Nature, it appears now the the Pentagon may have found another unique application for cultural expertise: interrogating detainees.

Cultural expertise was “key in the support I was providing to the interrogator to develop a relationship with the detainee”, said Julia Bowers, principal senior analyst for human terrain at SCIA, a company based in Tampa, Florida, that provides socio-cultural services for the military and intelligence community.

“Typically human-terrain analysis is more of a human data-gathering and mapping approach,” Bowers said at a conference in San Antonio, Texas, on 16 October. In this job, her assignment was more to help the interrogator to gain the detainee’s trust. The program was experimental and ran “for just a few months,” she said.

Bowers worked with the U.S. Central Command’s human terrain analysis branch, which is separate from the Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), a better known program that embeds social scientists in combat units. Both, however, are designed to provide the military with better cultural understanding and expertise.

The interesting question is whether anyone associated with the HTS, which has been dogged with controversy over its five year existence, has been involved with interrogations. An internal memo — dated March 16, 2009 and signed by then-HTS program manager retired Col. Steve Fondacaro — notes that “HTS does not have DoD [Department of Defense] approval to conduct interrogation operations.” (.pdf)

“HTS personnel are not trained and certified in interrogation methodology and as a result will not conduct interrogations,” the memo continues.

Nevertheless, one former employee me that this is precisely what appears to have happened in 2009; but when the employee complained to the program’s senior leadership, they did nothing.

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