Tag Archives: military

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Cold war getting hotter scenario from 1987

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DD-ST-87-08751Alternate-history fans will appreciate these US Department of Defense maps of a projected Soviet invasion of Western Europe, heralding as they would have done the beginning of WWIII:

This map is a really a picture in macro-scale of the epic tank battle for the plains of Germany, that entire generations of Western and Soviet officers built careers around planning and preparing for. In the history of human civilization, the Soviet Western TVD invasion was probably the most researched, contemplated, and gamed out battle that was never actually to take place. Fifty years of voluminous strategic studies were compiled by both sides on this very subject, as both sides searched for advantages in a truly enormous field chess game.

I don’t know enough about the history to say if this is paranoiac or just horrific.

[via the Exile][image and article from TechConex]

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Cube a breakthrough in smart matter

darpa_origami2DARPA are still at it busily inventing the all the science-fictional goodness we expect and deserve. Now they’re going in for programmable matter, of a similar flavour to that found in Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, Accelerando by Charles Stross, and Dune: The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. The goal of the project is to create matter that can “self-assemble or alter their shape, perform a function and then disassemble themselves.”:

One day, that could lead to “morphing aircraft and ground vehicles, uniforms that can alter themselves to be comfortable in any climate, and ’soft’ robots that flow like mercury through small openings to enter caves and bunker complexes.” A soldier could even reach into a can of unformed goop, and order up a custom-made tool or a “universal spare part.”

One team from Harvard is working on a kind of “generalized Rubik’s Cube” that can fold into all kinds of shapes. Another is trying to order large strands of synthetic DNA to bind together in a “molecular Velcro.” An MIT group is building “’self-folding origami’ machines that use specialized sheets of material with built-in actuators and data. These machines use cutting-edge mathematical theorems to fold themselves into virtually any three-dimensional object.

Very powerful and potentially gamechanging. Presumably if and when these become available to the general public they will have various restrictions built into them that will promptly be overcome and hacked origami-tools will become the ultimate criminal penknife.

On a more cheerful not this have wonderful applications in art and performance.

[from Danger Room]

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Has the UFO myth been fostered deliberately?

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alien or human?OK: as that headline should make clear, you’re going to struggle with this one if you’re an Agent Mulder type, but run with me for a moment. While there are ample stories suggesting that alien spacecraft have visited (or crashed into) our planet, solid evidence thereof is very much lacking in proportion. The usual response to that is “well, of course, the government/military/Illuminati/lizard-people have covered up the evidence!”

It’s a conspiracy theory classic. But consider for a moment the old aphorism that the most effective lies are the ones that include substantial elements of truth. Then apply the cui bono test – who benefits from people believing in UFO cover-ups?

Nick Redfern has been thinking along these lines, and has gathered a bunch of clues to support his own hypothesis – namely that the majority of the big UFO conspiracy stories have been quite deliberately encouraged by the more secretive echelons of the  world’s military and governmental organisations. After all, if you’ve got something worth hiding, flat-out denial is never going to be quite as effective as pretending to let something slip that is actually a smokescreen for the real story. Says Redfern:

… it seems to me that – for years – the crashed UFO community has been well and truly played, manipulated, and even controlled.

The trick to overcoming this is to throw out your belief systems and start fresh, with no preconceived ideas about crashed UFOs, and no emotion-driven need to believe in wrecked saucers, dead aliens, underground cryogenic chambers filled with ET body-parts, and all the rest.

Do that, be totally unbiased, and you may find some surprising facts about the origins of certain crashed UFO events.

If you’ve ever been into UFOlogy, I heartily recommend reading the whole piece for interest’s sake. What I will note here is that, much like the original conspiracy theories, Redfern’s re-readings of the classic UFO stories are based on interpretations of old classified documents, which means they’re based on the same suppositional logic as the stories they aim to replace; their appeal is that there’s less of a cognitive leap involved in assuming that the whole business is an elaborate smokescreen than in assuming that the aliums r comin OMGZ.

I used to be mad-fixated with conspiracy theories, but as time has passed they’ve been eroded by the same cynicism that initially nurtured them. And much as the military red-herring theory as presented above is more plausible than actual alien visitations being covered up, recent events suggest to me that the governments of the West aren’t anywhere near as capable of keeping secrets as that story demands I believe.

But then again, what if all the recent bungling and slip-ups in government secrecy are just another layer of the smokescreen, eh? Maybe best not to throw out all the tinfoil just yet… 😉 [via PosthumanBlues; image by Simczuk]

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Hackers of the future – the Pentagon is hiring!

hackerWell, maybe John Robb was wrong about the Pentagon… because here they are, announcing a recruitment contest for young hackers with the intention of turning them into military cybersecurity professionals.

The competitions, as planned, go far beyond mere academics. The Air Force will run a so-called Cyber Patriot competition focused on network defense, fending off a “Red Team” of hackers attempting to steal data from the participants’ systems. The Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center will expand its Digital Forensics Challenge, a program it has run since 2006, to include high school and college participants, tasking them with problems like tracing digital intrusions and reconstructing incomplete data sources.

The security-focused SANS Institute, an independent organization, plans to organize what may be the most controversial of the three contests: the Network Attack Competition, which challenges students to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software, compromise enemy systems and steal data.

All that stuff that the Chinese aren’t supposed to be able to do to US systems, in other words. The brass are worried that China’s got the jump on them as far as young hacker talent is concerned:

China, for its part, may be well ahead of the U.S. in cybersecurity education and recruiting, Paller argues. In a hearing before the Senate’s Homeland Security last month, Paller told the story of Tan Dailin, a graduate student in China’s Sichuan province who in 2005 won several government-sponsored hacking competitions and the next year was caught intruding on U.S. Department of Defense networks, siphoning thousands of unclassified documents to servers in China. “China’s People’s Liberation Army is running these competitions all the time, aiming their recruits at the U.S.,” Paller says. “Shouldn’t we be looking for our best talent the way other countries are?”

But a parallel track of domestic cyber training raises the specter of U.S. government-trained hackers not only stealing data from foreign enemies–a diplomatically thorny prospect in itself–but also hacking other targets for fun or profit, and potentially becoming a rogue collection of skilled cybercriminals. “There probably could be a couple people we train that go to the dark side,” admits Jim Christy, director of the Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center. “But we’ll catch them and send a message. The good guys will outweigh the bad.”

You’ll catch the ones who aren’t so good at covering their tracks, perhaps. Still, I wonder if the same motivations will express. As mentioned before, China’s hackers are allegedly self-trained and motivated by their own patriotism; will the same apply to the geek demographic in the US, or will the young console cowboys see more opportunity (or less risk) in the civilian sphere? [via SlashDot; image by ioerror]

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Neuroscience soldiers

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modern soldiersNothing says “futuristic” quite like new tools and techniques of warfare, which probably says something rather sad about our socio-cultural mindsets. Nonetheless, there’s no ignoring the fact that technological advances are changing the state (and nature) of the battlefield more quickly than ever before, meaning that military organisations the world over are looking for any possible way to get a jump on the other side.

Enter the US National Academies of Science, who were hired by the US military to assess the neuroscientific investment paths that would provide the best bang for their buck. It’s not about bigger guns and better armour any more, though; the soldiers themselves are the latest subject for improvement, be it by careful recruitment selection or wetware upgrades, or both.

Genetic testing might also enable recruitment officers to determine which soldiers are best for specialist jobs. For example, by combining psychological testing with genetic tests for levels of brain chemicals, a clearer picture of a soldier’s competencies might shine through. “We might say that given this person’s high levels of brain serotonin, they’re going to be calmer under pressure, so they might make a good sniper,” says Paul Zak of Claremont Graduate University in California, who was on the NAS panel. Alternatively, someone with low dopamine might be less likely to take risks, he says, and therefore be better suited as a commanding officer in a civilian area.

[…]

Zak emphasises that the panel was not asked how to turn soldiers into better “killing machines”, although “the whole purpose of maximising and sustaining battlefield capacity is to gain superiority over opponents”, admits Floyd Bloom of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who chaired the panel.

That’s not to say someone won’t try it, though. Zak’s own work focuses on the role of the hormone oxytocin in trust and empathy. If drugs were developed to block oxytocin, the effect might be to reduce a soldier’s ability to empathise with enemy combatants or civilians.

“There are lots of stories of soldiers who refuse to shoot other soldiers,” says Zak. “If you could get rid of that empathy response you might create a soldier that’s more prepared to engage in battle and risk their life.”

Um… OK. The practical benefits are obvious enough, I suppose, and if you can justify war itself I dare say you’ll not struggle to justify chemically adjusting your soldiers to be less bothered about the risk of bleeding their life out on some sand dune somewhere.

But research into easy ways to suppress empathy has worrying implications beyond the military sphere. After all, haven’t we just seen first hand what happens when people with a low empathy quotient are given control of the financial instruments that span the globe? Sure, they’re efficient and ruthless – but that’s a double-edged sword, right there. [via Scumlord Warren Ellis; image by Soldiers Media Center]

To be honest, I’d blame our erratic sense of empathy for most of the problems the world suffers currently… and while I suppose that research into oxytocin levels would inevitably throw up ways to boost empathy, that’s never going to be as financially or militarily appealing as the opposite. And of course, one must remember that the street always finds its own use for things…