Entries Tagged "military"
Page 12 of 17
An Overdependence on Technology in Iraq
Fascinating article on how an overdependence on technology hurt us in Iraq.
Movie-Plot Threat Described as Movie-Plot Threat
The lead paragraphs:
The plot was like something from a Hollywood blockbuster: dozens of foreign terrorists working with a Mexican drug cartel to attack a Southern Arizona Army post with anti-tank missiles and grenade launchers.
Paying one of Mexico’s most ruthless drug cartels $20,000 apiece, 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists would be smuggled into Texas and hole up at a safe house.
Their weapons, Soviet-made and easily acquired on the black market, were funneled through Arizona and New Mexico in hand-dug tunnels that cut across the border.
Their target: 13,500 military personnel and civilians working at Fort Huachuca, roughly 75 miles southeast of Tucson.
But (no surprise):
But the plot, widely reported by local stations and national TV networks and The Washington Times, turned out to be nothing more than fiction, an FBI spokesman said Monday.
Terrorist Insects
Yet another movie-plot threat to worry about:
One of the cheapest and most destructive weapons available to terrorists today is also one of the most widely ignored: insects. These biological warfare agents are easy to sneak across borders, reproduce quickly, spread disease, and devastate crops in an indefatigable march. Our stores of grain could be ravaged by the khapra beetle, cotton and soybean fields decimated by the Egyptian cottonworm, citrus and cotton crops stripped by the false codling moth, and vegetable fields pummeled by the cabbage moth. The costs could easily escalate into the billions of dollars, and the resulting disruption of our food supply – and our sense of well-being – could be devastating. Yet the government focuses on shoe bombs and anthrax while virtually ignoring insect insurgents.
[…]
Seeing the potential, military strategists have been keen to conscript insects during war. In World War II, the French and Germans pursued the mass production and dispersion of Colorado potato beetles to destroy enemy food supplies. The Japanese military, meanwhile, sprayed disease-carrying fleas from low-flying airplanes and dropped bombs packed with flies and a slurry of cholera bacteria. The Japanese killed at least 440,000 Chinese using plague-infected fleas and cholera-coated flies, according to a 2002 international symposium of historians.
During the Cold War, the US military planned a facility to produce 100 million yellow-fever-infected mosquitoes a month, produced an “Entomological Warfare Target Analysis” of vulnerable sites in the Soviet Union and among its allies, and tested the dispersal and biting capacity of (uninfected) mosquitoes by secretly dropping the insects over American cities.
IEDs in Iraq
This article about the arms race between the U.S. military and jihadi Improvised Explosive Device (IED) makers in Iraq illustrates that more technology isn’t always an effective security solution:
Insurgents have deftly leveraged consumer electronics technology to build explosive devices that are simple, cheap and deadly: Almost anything that can flip a switch at a distance can detonate a bomb. In the past five years, bombmakers have developed six principal detonation triggers—pressure plates, cellphones, command wire, low-power radio-controlled, high-power radio-controlled and passive infrared—that have prompted dozens of U.S. technical antidotes, some successful and some not.
[…]
The IED struggle has become a test of national agility for a lumbering military-industrial complex fashioned during the Cold War to confront an even more lumbering Soviet system. “If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement system. It will bring them to their knees within a week,” a former Pentagon official said.
[…]
Or, as an officer writing in Marine Corps Gazette recently put it, “The Flintstones are adapting faster than the Jetsons.”
EDITED TO ADD (10/8): That was the introduction. It’s a four-part series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
Idiotic Cryptography Reporting
Oh, this is funny:
A team of researchers and engineers at a UK division of Franco-German aerospace giant EADS has developed what it believes is the world’s first hacker-proof encryption technology for the internet.
[…]
Gordon Duncan, the division’s government and commercial sales manager, said he was convinced that sensitive data could now be sent across the world without fear of it being spied on by hackers. “All the computer technology in the world cannot break it,” he said yesterday.
At the heart of the system is the lightning speed with which the “keys” needed to enter the computer systems can be scrambled and re-formatted. Just when a hacker thinks he or she has broken the code, the code changes. “There is nothing to compare with it,” said Mr Duncan.
EADS is in talks with the Pentagon about supplying the US military with the system, although some American defence companies are also working on what they believe will be fool-proof encryption systems.
Snake oil, absolute snake oil.
EDITED TO ADD (9/26): Steve Bellovin, who knows what he’s talking about, writes:
Actually, it’s not snake oil, it’s very solid—till it got to Marketing. The folks at EADS built a high-assurance, Type I (or the British equivalent) IP encryptor—a HAIPE, in NSA-speak. Their enemy isn’t “hackers”, it’s the PLA and the KGB++. See this and this.
Of course, Marketing did get hold of it.
David Lacey makes the same point here.
Insider Terrorist Attack
Pakistani Army officer as suicide bomber:
According to reliable sources in the local police, a Pashtun army officer belonging to the elite Special Services Group, whose younger sister was reportedly among the 300 girls killed during the Pakistan Army’s commando raid on the Lal Masjid in Islamabad between July 10 and 13, blew himself up during dinner at the SSG’s headquarters mess at Tarbela Ghazi, 100 km south of Islamabad, on the night of September 13, killing 19 other officers.
There probably isn’t any practicable way to prevent these sorts of attacks by trusted insiders.
Pentagon Hacked by Chinese Military
The story seems to have started yesterday in the Financial Times, and is now spreading.
Not enough details to know what’s really going on, though. From the FT:
The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American officials.
The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.
Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army.
One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a “very high level of confidence…trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.
EDITED TO ADD (9/13): Another good commentary.
Real-World Trojan Horse
Here’s a clip from an Australian TV programme called “The Chaser”. A Trojan Horse (full of appropriately attired soldiers) finds its way past security everywhere except the Turkish consulate.
At least they remember their history.
Robotic Guns
Scary, but philosophically no different than land mines:
Developed by state-owned Rafael, See-Shoot consists of a series of remotely controlled weapon stations which receive fire-control information from ground sensors and manned and unmanned aircraft. Once a target is verified and authorized for destruction, operators sitting safely behind command center computers push a button to fire the weapon.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.