The contract calls for the Iron Curtain with Darpa’s sniper-detection system, CROSSHAIRS. It detects and locates enemy shooters using radar and acoustic sensors, and is intended to work against Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs), missiles, bullets and mortar rounds. Iron Curtain itself is currently designed to deal with RPGs; the makers Artis LLC planning future developments to deal with more challenging threats.

Iron Curtain system detects and tracks the incoming rocket with a radar, which then cues an optical sensor — a smart camera, essentially. The optical sensor identifies and classifies the threat — pinpointing the location of the rocket with an accuracy of about half an inch — and selects an aim point.

A row of explosive countermeasures is mounted on a rail running around the top of the vehicle. The system selects the best one of countermeasures, and fires it vertically downwards at the exact moment the rocket is passing. This does not destroy the warhead but ‘duds’ it so that the warhead deflagrates, rather than exploding properly. By the end of the collision of RPG and countermeasure, Artis claims, the warhead bounces off of the vehicle’s side.

In field tests mounted on uparmored Humvees, Iron Curtain has proven its effectiveness against RPGs, so the makers’ confidence is understandable. Here’s some video, from a corny-but-cool National Geographic documentary:

Iron Curtain is one of many, many competing systems for RPG protection, ranging from metal slats and bars to Kevlar airbags and missile-firing Active protection Systems. Iron Curtain is at the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, and one of its most distinctive features is how the countermeasures work.

Collateral damage is a major issue for “active” protective systems like Iron Curtain. Whatever you fire at the incoming round is going to end up somewhere, and it may do real damage. Systems that spray out shrapnel are likely to be a major hazard for anyone in the immediate vicinity. This can included dismounted troops who have just stepped out of the vehicle, or local civilians if an attack takes place in a crowded area.

One way around this is to use Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME), basically micro-shrapnel made of powdered dense metal which only travels a few feet. Another approach is to have shrapnel made of Reactive Material which burns up in the air and only gets a short distance before it complete vaporises. The Iron Curtain approach – of simply firing downwards – could be safer than either of these and should ensure that the countermeasures only hit what they’re aimed at.

It’s not clear how the system could defend against attacks from above, but the makers’ web site says that Iron Curtain “can be configured to protect almost any surface, from just the sides of a vehicle to all-around protection, including top.”

The integration with CROSSHAIRS makes this more than just a system to protect one vehicle. The aim of CROSSHAIRS is to “engage enemy shooters” with both automatic and man-in-the-loop modes. And it might even go one step further than that, according to Darpa: “Additionally, the program is investigating the feasibility of a variety of technologies to detect enemy shooters before the firing of a weapon.”

This suggests that in principle, a CROSSHAIRS-equipped vehicle with a convoy could open fire on any potential ambushers before they fire a shot. Or it might just engage them with something like a non-lethal laser dazzler, which could avert an ambush without risking shooting the wrong people.

It could be a useful capability, and one that can’t be delivered fast enough: the MRAP vehicles equipped with Iron Curtain and CROSSHAIRS should be ready for testing in Juy 2010. Meanwhile, there are also studies to integrate Iron Curtrain with Hummers and with the LAV’s operated by the Marine Corps.

Images: Artis, LLC

The hyper-prolific Spencer Ackerman was kind enough to respond to my critique of his call for applying counterinsurgency techniques to domestic policing. (Note to Spencer: This is what you call a relaxed posting schedule?)

In short, Ackerman’s arguing that smart counterinsurgency and community policing can be informed by the same ethic: Getting to the root cause of why a population, actively or passively, supports the bad guys. “The principle at stake — give the people enough security and services and they’ll have a better reason to cooperate with you against the undesirable element — is the same in both cases.”

I respectfully disagree: I still think the practice of domestic counterinsurgency (versus intervening in someone else’s counterinsurgency) can have a corrosive effect on civil liberties in the long run, but there’s still plenty of room for debate about this. Go read the whole thing, and chime in in the comments section.

But after taking a close look at the technical specs on Iran’s Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, two arms-control experts arrived at a different conclusion. Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Ivan Oelrich and Ivanka Barzashka make a fairly persuasive case that this has to be one of a bunch of secret sites, designed to keep Iran’s nuclear weapons program in case of an attack on Iran’s main enrichment plant at Natanz.

“The facility’s size and capacity would make the most sense if it were part of a network of clandestine nuclear facilities,” they argue.

Worries about a covert site have been articulated by others before. And while Oelrich and Barzashka say that it’s too soon to know how, exactly, Fordow might fit in with a weapons production program — the facility’s dimensions, they say, are “not ideal” for producing weapons-grade stuff — they also note that Fordow is not a plausible site for large-scale production of nuclear fuel.

“In fact, it would take almost 90 years for the cascades at Fordow to fuel a single 1,000-megawatt commercial nuclear power plant for just one year,” they write.

While there are always some caveats to add, it lends more strength to the argument that Iran, at some level, is pursuing the bomb. But what we are really waiting for is for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to post some photos from Fordow on his website.

[PHOTO: President.ir]

ALSO:

• How To: Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Program
• Iran Going Nuclear? Get Over It, Strategist Says
• Iran Has a Secret Nuke Plant
• Iran Is This Close to Getting a Nuke. Maybe.
• Atomic Watchdogs: Iran May Have More Secret Nuke Sites
• Inspections Won’t Solve Iran’s Nuke Mystery
• Gates Hints at More Secret Nuke Sites in Iran

Next month, the Iarpa, the intelligence community’s mad science division, is holding a researchers’ conference in Virginia to discuss the agency’s latest program. It’s called TRUST, short for “Tools for Recognizing Useful Signals of Trustworthiness.” The idea is to bring a little confidence to the art of BS-detection by developing “sensors and software” that can “amplify our own useful signals in order to more accurately predict trust and trustworthiness in others.”

“Both trust and trustworthiness - as concepts, much less measures - remain highly qualitative and often unproven,” the agency complains. Even the term is hopelessly muddied. “Trust to an organizational psychologist rarely refers to the same thing as trust to a behavioral economist, or a cognitive neuroscientist, or others… Without at least some common understanding and measures of interpersonal trust, knowing who is trustworthy under specific conditions may remain more speculative than it might otherwise have to be.”

Iarpa is looking to take a two-step approach to assemble those “combinations of sensors that will detect reliable signals of trust in operationally-relevant scenarios.” Phase one entails settling on some “experimental protocols that can be validated in order to measure, quantify, and assess different kinds of interpersonal trust.” Step two: use those protocols to develop liar-spotting tools. The hope is to give spooks some peace of mind. God forbid our professional deceivers should have to feel paranoid and untrusting.

I just got off the phone with Carter. “I know this is a Washington cliche, but sometimes the cliches are true,” he tells me. “I made this tough decision for personal reasons, even though I loved the job and the work we were doing. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to serve again.”

I got to know Carter nearly seven years ago — before he was a military police officer in Iraq, before he was a corporate lawyer, before he was a veterans’ coordinator for the Obama campaign, before he was a well-known defense pundit, and before he moved from Los Angeles to New York to Washington to take his position at the Pentagon. We were neighbors in L.A., and we’ve thrown back a boat-load of sushi and beer over the years. I know he’s had some very real family matters to handle along the way. So I think he’s being straight-up, and not just giving the typical Washington exit excuse.

Were detainees a bear of an issue? For sure; that’s a job you couldn’t pay me enough to tackle. Did the Obama administration handle it the same way that the Obama campaign suggested it might? No, not exactly. Carter was pragmatic enough to keep going, though. Of course, no big decision is made on a single factor. But I don’t think he resigned over policy differences or over professional personality conflicts. For private reasons, he just needed a change.

[Photo: DoD]

(Sorry, it’s for Army types only. But here’s a screenshot…)

Remember the days when “transformation” and “net-centricity” was all the rage within the Pentagon? On Sept. 10, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared war on the military’s Cold War-era business practices, describing the Pentagon as “one of the world’s last bastions of central planning.”

Now, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is trying to drag his country’s military into the 21st Century. In the latest issue of Newsweek, Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova have a great piece about how Russia’s president has embraced a vision of a leaner, more wired force that is capable of responding to current-day brushfire wars, not just great-power conflict.

Interestingly, this latest push for reform came out of Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia. While Russian troops managed to defeat the Georgians — and prop up separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia — the victory was a close-run thing. “The campaign,” Matthews and Nemtsova write, “exposed what independent military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer calls ‘embarrassing failings” in Russia’s fighting ability.” And they offer a few vignettes:

At least 11 Russian aircraft and several drones were shot down, and there were reports of extensive burning and looting of abandoned Georgian villages by undisciplined troops. Many Russian soldiers were spotted going to battle in running shoes and polyester sweatpants instead of boots and camouflage uniforms, and one junior officer even asked Newsweek reporters to lend him a Georgian SIM card to call his superiors after radios failed.

Almost immediately after the war, Medvedev launched a top-down review. And what they found was not surprising to anyone who followed the collapse of the Soviet military and the debacle in Chechnya: Russia still has a top-heavy force structure (one officer for every 2.5 men, and way too many generals); a completely effed-up conscription system; and seriously out-of-date equipment.

Of course, fixing Russia’s broken military won’t happen overnight: The aftereffects of economic crisis are still being felt, and the country’s creaky industrial base is still dependent on subsidy. And then there’s once-and-future-Tsar Vladimir Putin, who is now prime minister but is widely seen as the power behind Medvedev. Whether Russia’s shadow elite will ultimately support reform is open to question.

[PHOTO: Kremlin.ru]

See Also:

• Obama, Medvedev Agree to Nuke Cuts; No Deal on Missile Defense …
• Russian Prez Launches Flame War vs. Ukraine
• Kremlin 2.0: Russian Prez Discovers Social Media
• Obama Gets a Sense of Putin’s Super-Villain Soul
• The Kremlin’s Eeeevil New Plan to Rein in Bloggers

This wasn’t the first time a magician worked for a western government. Harry Houdini snooped on the German and the Russian militiaries for Scotland Yard. English illusionist Jasper Maskelyne is reported to created dummy submarines and fake tanks to distract Rommel’s army during World War II. Some reports even credit him with employing flashing lights to “hide” the Suez Canal.

But Mulholland’s contributions were far different, because they were part of a larger CIA effort, called MK-ULTRA, to control people’s minds. Which lead to the Agency’s infatuation with LSD, as David Hambling recounted here a few weeks ago:

In the infamous Operation Midnight Climax, unwitting clients at CIA brothels in New York and San Francisco were slipped LSD and then monitored through one-way mirrors to see how they reacted. They even killed an elephant with LSD. Colleagues were also considered fair game for secret testing, to the point where a memo was issued instructing that the punch bowls at office Christmas parties were not to be spiked.

The Boston Globe has put together a great visual summary of some of Mulholland’s best tricks for the CIA: the shoelace pattern that means “follow me”; the hidden compartment to smuggle in an agent; the best ways to appear dumb and non-threatening. Because there’s no better misdirection than appearing to be a fool.

[Neat trick: @earth_battalion]

ALSO:

• Vets Sue CIA Over Mind Control Tests
• Pentagon’s Psychic Vision Revisited
• Psychic Spies, Acid Guinea Pigs, New Age Soldiers: the True Men …
• Secret Strobelight Weapons of World War II
• Russia Expands Inflatable Arsenal
• Inside the Army’s Far-Out Acid Tests

So the President has apparently made his decision about Afghanistan: He’ll send another 34,000 troops there, according to multiple reports. The White House is preparing for Obama’s first-ever prime-time address to formally announce the move. But for the moment, it’s not at all clear what those troops will be doing.

When top commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal laid out his gloomy Afghan war report in August, he cautioned that “additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.”

Right now, there’s no word of any big strategy shift — just news of an influx of more forces.

According to McClatchy, “the plan calls for the deployment over a nine-month period beginning in March of three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky.; the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y.; and a Marine brigade from Camp Lejeune, N.C., for as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.”

In addition, a 7,000-strong division headquarters would be sent to take command of U.S.-led NATO forces in southern Afghanistan - to which the U.S. has long been committed - and 4,000 U.S. military trainers would be dispatched to help accelerate an expansion of the Afghan army and police.

An increase of that size “would mean deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war,” Spencer Ackerman recently noted. Yet paradoxically, it also repreents a relatively small number of extra trainers, given NATO’s stated goal of radically expanding Afghanistan’s armed forces, from under 100,000 today to 250,000 in the future. Will new NATO Training Mission – Afghanistan commander Lt. Gen. Bill Caldwell will have the forces he needs to accomplish this key job?

The New York Times recently speculated that an increase of 40,000 troops might mean as many as 10,000 troops in Kandahar province, 5,000 to Helmand, and another 5,000 to the country’s east. Any less than that, the Times mused, could mean a significant drop in the number of trainers that Caldwell gets.

And that’s hardly the only unanswered question about these new troops. We are still waiting for real answers about the geographic focus of operations; how NATO allies will fit in to the picture; and where all the civilian reconstruction experts will come from.

As McChrytsal advisor and CSIS strategist Anthony Cordesman notes, the broad recommendations for Afghanistan “can only be fully judged when they can be tied to clearly defined requests for military resources; a matching plan for civil-military action from [U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl] Eikenberry; a clear picture of the role allied forces and aid will play as part of action to create unity of effort; and a realistic net assessment of how they can affect the outcome of the war. It is a sick joke, and a devastating indictment of the U.S. interagency process in Washington, that we are still debating concepts and not resources and actions. We have to list metrics, not report on the actual status of the war, eight years after it began.”

And then there’s Pakistan. Early in the new administration, a fair amount of lip service was paid to the idea that Pakistan and Afghanistan would be treated as a “single theater.” But while some of the alarming headlines in Pakistan have receded, there’s still plenty of evidence that the Taliban and their affiliates maintain their headquarters, and their recruiting base, across the border. Rory Stewart’s priceless quip about the “cat-tiger strategy” still holds true.

– Noah Shachtman and Nathan Hodge

[Photo: DoD]

After the sickening murder of a 9-year-old boy in Washington, our friend Spencer Ackerman made an impassioned plea: U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus for D.C. metro police chief. The idea of America’s leading counterinsurgent taking on one of its most crime-ridden towns definitely has a certain visceral appeal. But militarizing our approach to policing is an idea that could backfire in a hurry.

Spencer’s done an outstanding job of explaining counterinsurgency as a progressive military doctrine: The whole point is to not uphold the social status quo, it’s an attempt to get at the “root causes” of violence through political reform and public works. These days, that’s a job for both the armed forces and the police. “The ’soldiers aren’t cops’ argument isn’t going to fly here,” he wrote. After all, talented military officers are now telling their fellow soldiers to “view neighborhood security as if they were running Kansas City police patrols.”

Ackerman’s not the first to pick up on the idea that smart counterinsurgents could teach the police a thing or two. Last week, Karl Vick of the Washington Post reported on how the police in Salinas, Calif., enlisted the help of the Naval Postgraduate School to help them combat a homicide wave. And earlier this year, Andrew “Abu Muqawama” Exum hosted an interesting discussion thread about using counterinsurgency tactics in Oakland.

At first glance, counterinsurgency (at least the “soft,” population-centric American version) bears a fair amount of resemblance to community policing: It’s all about changing the dynamic in the communities where insurgents operate, encouraging troops to “walk the beat” and bringing in social services. And many of the tools of the modern counterinsurgent — forensic exploitation, pattern analysis and social-network diagramming — would be familiar to any detective. (The Law Enforcement Professionals program for combating roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan even called on retired agents from the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF to help take down insurgent networks.) And if you look at the geographic reach and organizational sophistication of some gangs — think Mara Salvatrucha or 18 — and it’s tempting to draw comparisons with, say, a Hizbollah or a Hamas.

But to the COINdinistas I would say: Be careful what you wish for. Counterinsurgency is still a tool for dealing with political emergencies, and it involves a heavy degree of population control. And at home, it’s a bridge too far.

“Policing can be informed by counterinsurgency – and they are in fact similar at some points,” said John P. Sullivan, a lieutenant with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and an expert on transnational gangs. “But at others they really diverge. So you need to be very, very careful.”

Sullivan, the co-founder of the Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group, told Danger Room the parallels with community policing — patrolling contested areas, identifying centers of gravity — make it tempting to view counterinsurgency as a tool for containing gang violence. But domestic policing and military operations, he added, are inherently different. “It [counterinsurgency theory] is attractive, and I think that people looking at gangs should look at the literature,” he said. “But to wholesale take it in and do it is probably not a good idea.”

Take, for instance, checkpoint operations — a regular feature of any counterinsurgency. No harm, right? Well, the police in Washington tried that; the whole idea was to “protect” the endangered population of the Trinidad neighborhood by cordoning it off and restricting the movement of vehicles. A federal appeals court struck down the operation as unconstitutional. Same for “cordon and knock” — going house to house, politely searching for contraband. The police tried that in D.C., too, under something called the “Safe Homes Initiative.” It didn’t go down well, either.

That’s not to mention the more potent intelligence tools of control that are essential to fighting insurgents: Human intelligence (i.e. informants); intrusive surveillance; biometric collection. Those methods are available to domestic law enforcement, but the point is counterinsurgency is to establish sweeping civil control. Anacostia ain’t Anbar province. As Sullivan described it, the bar for collecting intelligence on your own population has to be much higher.

“The liberty issues are vital,” Sullivan said. “What gives you legitimacy in the long haul is preserving liberty while providing security. If you don’t end up doing it right, it ends up enhancing the legitimacy of the gang.”

Want to see what a place looks like when counterinsurgency starts to seep into policing? For a softer example, take a look at the United Kingdom. I’m not going to wade into Second Amendment territory here, but suffice to say that the United Kingdom has a pretty expansive surveillance system that in part was developed in response to IRA terror. (It also has a more robust Official Secrets Act.) For a more dismal example of what happens when the police take enthusiastically to checkpoint operations, take a look at Russia. We’ve been spared much of this, because we tend to intervene in other countries’ counterinsurgencies. Let’s not start looking for one at home.

There is still plenty of overlap between good policing and counterinsurgency “best practices.” Collecting unbelievably fine-grained statistics and holding local commanders responsible for their patrol areas are essential tasks. But we are dealing with two different things. Insurgency, at its heart, is a political struggle. I don’t see drug dealers or street gangs expressing a political grievance, or trying to control of some part of the government. We have an unhappy tendency to declare “war” on problems (drugs, crime, poverty, terrorism) that defy easy solution; do we need to treat a D.C. crime wave like a mini-Malaya Emergency?

[PHOTO: Nathan Hodge]

See Also:

• Spook ‘Fusion Centers’ Battle Gangs, Weather
• Mexican Drug Gang Builds DIY Gun Truck
• Danger Room Debrief: Gang Threat Could Top Al Qaeda, Mr. President …
• The Gangs of Iraq
• Generals: Army Focusing Too Much on Fighting Insurgents