Land Warrior Is Dead
FCW – Looks like it –
With one line item among hundreds of pages of budget documents released Feb. 5, the Army revealed that it is eliminating the $2 billion, 10-year-old Land Warrior program, even as a lone brigade of soldiers prepares to take the system on its first-ever field deployment to Iraq.
Until yesterday, Land Warrior was the military’s vision for bringing network-centric warfare to level of the individual warfighter. But the system designed to connect every soldier the network was disconnected from any future funding.
Land Warrior, under its latest configuration, includes an advanced combat helmet with an optical display attachment, a modified M-4 rifle, digital imaging equipment, a lithium-ion battery with a 12-hour life span, a voice and data radio, a Global Positioning System, a computer subsystem, a multifunction laser, and a control card for identity management.
There is still an effort to “connect the dots” on the battlefield, but seeing as how NCW is irrelevant in facing current and future threats this is probably the right move. (Wish it was for the right reasons.)
Two Instances Of Hacking
InfoWorld details a massive botnet attack on root servers today (that went largely unnoticed) –
“Two of the root servers suffered badly, although they did not completely crash; some of the others also saw heavy traffic,” said John Crain, chief technical officer with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
The two hardest-hit servers are maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense and ICANN, he added.
Petro said engineers are still “scratching their heads” about the reason for the attack.
Scotsman covers ongoing (and accelerating) MoD penetrations by most likely the Chinese –
Ministry of Defence computer networks have been repeatedly penetrated by hackers, raising fears that sensitive military information could have been obtained by foreign powers.
The MoD yesterday confirmed its systems have been hacked into at least nine times since 2002. Five of the successful “attacks” took place last year. Computer-security experts say the real number is likely to be even higher, as some hackers are skilful enough to leave no trace of their activities.
The ministry was unable to say where the attacks originated, but Western security officials are increasingly concerned that China is using hackers to target sensitive information.
PMC Hearings
Via MR – Something to keep an eye on over at David Phinney’s site, he’s going to be covering the House Government Reform Committee’s hearing on PMCs –
Rumor:
“On [Christmas] eve (2006) here in the Green Zone a Blackwater employee got into a scuffle with an Iraqi personal guard that was guarding a judge and shot him ten times and killed him. The Blackwater employee was drunk.
Silence:
Is this true? Don’t know. Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell is silent on the question.
Reporter Bill Sizemore with Virginia-Pilot didn’t get anywhere with Tyrrell either. But he did get State Department confirmation a month ago that a civilian U.S. contractor shot and killed an Iraqi security officer.
Other Sources:
The US embassy spokesman in Baghdad declined to say what company was involved, citing the U.S. Privacy Act. However, two independent sources told The Virginian-Pilot that the alleged killer worked for Blackwater.
Questions:
Given Blackwater’s business with the State Department, are we going to hear that Blackwater, by extension, enjoys diplomatic immunity? Will Blackwater comment on the incident while under oath?
Truth:
So far, not one private security contractor in the course of four years has been publicly charged with any criminal wrongdoing in Iraq.
Floodgates of Fraud
BadGuysBlog – The National Reconnaissance Office has an annual budget of around $7.5 Billion (Around 17% of the IC budget). The NRO’s Inspector General –
Feldman suggested something was amiss in the Journal of Public Inquiry, an obscure publication put out twice a year by the nation’s inspectors general. With Alan Larsen, his general counsel, he described how contractors have systematically delayed and brushed off IG requests for information. When his office pushed through a revision to all contracts, explicitly stating the need to cooperate, some contractors “were hysterical, accusing NRO of violating four different amendments to the U.S. Constitution,” they wrote.
No specifics are out yet but with a track record as stated in the article –
The agency’s troubled next-generation satellite, a $25 billion boondoggle called Future Imagery Architecture, has been so dogged by cost overruns and technical trouble that the director of national intelligence cut the project in half last year.
It doesn’t look good.
XML vs HTML
Nice little user friendly clip to pass on to family or friends who don’t quite get the major difference between HTML and XML and its impact.