The cash request "includes $524 billion in spending authority approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget this spring... as well as $57 billion in additional needs the Office of the Secretary of Defense identified over the summer," reports Inside Defense.

The final figure does includes some money -- $12 billion -- to pay for a few "predictable war costs," Inside Defense adds. But that's less than what operations in Afghanistan and Iraq cost every month.

In contrast, President Bush inherited a Pentagon budget that was a mere $302 billion.

On Monday, the Navy posted a request for information on possible concepts for "selectable output weapons." According to the description, this future weapon would have a variable blast radius, limiting the potential for dead civilians collateral damage.

"Current cylindrical steel-cased blast fragmentation warheads distribute fragmentation radially in all directions from the detonation point. Often, many fragments travel far beyond the intended target. These fragments can create collateral damage hazards," the Navy understates. And that can lead, alas,to "restricted rules of engagement."

Currently no technology has been proven to be available that can deliver variable damage radius from one build configuration. Developing this sort of weapon could improve tactical flexibility and effectiveness by maximizing the number of kills per sortie and reducing the timeline necessary to prosecute a wider spectrum of targets.

The American military has rarely been under greater pressure to keep non-combatants safe. Every misfire in the U.S. air war over Afghanistan and Pakistan becomes another international incident -- and a propaganda win for the Taliban.

The Navy has already deployed something called the Low Collateral Damage Bomb, which is essentially a 500-pound JDAM with most of the explosive fill removed. Designing a variable yield bomb is a bit more challenging -- and you still have to deal with the problem of blast fragments from a steel casing.

This is not a formal competition, however. At this point, the Navy is asking interested parties (we assume that means everyone from garage tinkerers to defense contractors) to submit idea papers: 12-point type, single spaced, 10 pages max.

[PHOTO: Wikipedia] 

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(High five: Capn Van, RC)

In a recent meeting with the Russian parliament's defense committee, General Nikolai Makarov, chief of Russia's general staff, reportedly told parliamentarians the Russian military would acquire Israeli drones -- in the very near future. Mikhail Musatov, a member of the committee, quoted Makaraov as saying: "We'll buy them from Israel. The general staff has decided that, since we don't have pilotless aircraft of our own, we'll buy them in Israel in the next two or three years."

This would be an unusual turn of events. Israel has sold arms to Russia in only a few limited instances. And as Ha'aretz notes, Russia supplies weaponry to Israel's arch-enemies, Syria and Iran:

In the past, the two countries have signed several agreements for military equipment but mostly on a small scale, such as bullet-proof vests. In the biggest of these deals, Israel Aerospace Industries acquired four Ilyushin planes from Moscow to be fit with the Falcon early-warning system sold to India. Security relations between the two countries have been characterized largely by complaints from Israel that Russia is supplying an aerial defense system and anti-tank missiles to Iran, as well as missiles to Syria, both of which eventually reached Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.    

Russia's interest in robotic aircraft stems in part from the recent war with Georgia. As DANGER ROOM readers know, Russia and its allies in the separatist republic of Abkhazia shot down at least two Georgian drones in the run-up to war this summer (click here for video of a Russian MiG-29 taking down a Georgian reconnaissance drone). Ironically, the Georgian drones were reported to be Israeli-made Hermes 450s.

Despite inflicting a painful defeat on Georgia, the Russian military is undergoing something of an overhaul. Russian Minister of Defense Anatoly Serdyukov has ordered sweeping changes, including equipment modernization and a move away from conscription. As reported in Jane's Defence Weekly (subscription only), Russia's military campaign against Georgia laid bare some serious problems, including lack of friendly-force tracking, low-resolution surveillance equipment and piss-poor communications.

[PHOTO: Wikimedia]

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The video also claimed an ambush that killed 10 French troops in August was carried out by the Taliban. It was not clear when the recording was made.

“We have killed 10 French soldiers today as a message to the French so that they rectify their mistakes and withdraw from Afghanistan, and if they don’t they will hear our response in Paris,” said Mullah Farouq, identified as the commander of the unit that raided the French troops, on the video. His remarks were dubbed into Arabic by the station.

The video included footage of what appeared to be a French armoured unit being stalked by Taliban fighters. Some insurgents were later shown wearing uniforms of the French soldiers they had killed.

Source

http://twitter.com/ntarc

This story comes to us via Homeland Security - National Terror Alert. National Terror Alert is America's trusted source for homeland security news and information.

A suspicious substance mailed to the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is on its way to FBI headquarters in Quantico, Va., for further testing.

FBI agents in Salt Lake City said they received a final report from the state health department on the white powdery substance in an envelope mailed to Temple Square last week. Tests were conducted to ensure it wasn’t ricin, anthrax or any other biological weapon.

“It is not any kind of biological agent or toxin or even a new strain,” FBI Special Agent Juan Becerra said Monday.

Envelopes with white powder were mailed to Temple Square, the LDS Church’s temple in Los Angeles, and a printing press belonging to the Catholic-affiliated Knights of Columbus in New Haven, Conn. Both churches were heavy backers of California’s Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage in that state.

The FBI has labeled its probe a domestic terrorism investigation. Becerra would not say whether the agency had identified any suspects in the case, but reiterated Monday that the FBI had no evidence that linked the threats to Prop. 8 or its opponents.

Many gay rights organizations have also decried the threats.

Source

This story comes to us via Homeland Security - National Terror Alert. National Terror Alert is America's trusted source for homeland security news and information.

President-elect Obama may not exactly see eye-to-eye with the chiefs of the Missile Defense Agency. But don't expect the latter-day Star Wars program to go away, Time magazine's Mark Thompson argues. "The Russians — along with the two men most likely to end up running the Pentagon for the President-elect — have already made sure of that."

If Obama keeps Defense Secretary Robert Gates on, as some advisers are arguing he should, that would come as no surprise. "Russia has nothing to fear from a defensive missile shield," Gates said Thursday as he argued for extending the system to Europe... The other leading contender for the Pentagon post is Richard Danzig, a Clinton Navy secretary, who recently told reporters that the Obama team has "a strong view that national missile defense is a rewarding area and should be invested in."

True. And, as Nathan noted last week, the agency has done a masterful job of spreading its largess throughout Congressional districts. But I'd bet either man might use the change-of-administration to force the sprawling, $10 billion-per-year Missile Defense Agency to make some cuts. In lean budget times, the MDA is looking awfully blubbery.

Last month, a report by the influential Institute for Defense Analyses suggested that the MDA become a research and development shop -- letting the other military services run the anti-missile projects, once they're more than glorified lab tests. In the transfer, some of the MDA's thousand-and-one projects could get sifted out.

UPDATE: "Congressional committees are looking to scale back the role of the Missile Defense Agency, an organization that has operated outside the normal rules for weapons programs since it was created by then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in 2002," writes CQ's Josh Rogin.

"I think it’s unlikely you’ll see MDA in its current form after next year. It’s going to be downgraded," one Democratic committee aide tells Rogin. "MDA needs to stop doing everything, and they need to go back to their core mission."

[Photo: MDA]

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During the Cold War, the Navy's "big-deck" amphibious assault ships, with full loads of Marines, helicopters and Harrier jump jets, rotated through two stations: one in the eastern Mediterranean, and another in the Pacific. The idea was that the Pentagon would always have a reinforced battalion of troops close to potential hot spots, primed for action.

Iraq changed all that. Since 2003, with the Marines busy in the sandbox, it became impossible to keep a battalion at those old sea stations, and the Marines' "expeditionary" amphibious skills decayed as a result.

Now, with the Marines beginning a gradual pull-out from Iraq after five years of war, it's time to "get back towards our expeditionary culture," Colonel David Coffman, commander of the Marines embarked on the big-deck USS Boxer, told Danger Room. 

The Boxer expeditionary strike group -- six Navy and Coast Guard vessels carrying 2,200 Marines -- is at sea off the West Coast working up for a six-month cruise to the Pacific region, beginning early next year. Boxer's group is the first in years to sail fully loaded, and with no major pre-planned combat or humanitarian mission. Instead, it will just sail around, Cold War-style, ready to leap on emerging crises.

Plus, with the addition of USS New Orleans, one of the latest San Antonio-class "small-deck" assault ships, the Boxer group can carry and effectively operate the full load of around 30 helicopters and Harrier jump jets. This hasn't been possible for a decade or more, as the Marines have had to store increasingly bulky and heavy armored vehicles (MRAPs, for example) on smaller ships' flight decks.

But Boxer's is an old-school cruise with a twist, coming on the heels of a period of experimentation for the U.S. sea services.

In the past couple years, while the Marines were fighting in Iraq, the Navy's amphibious ships stayed busy testing out different humanitarian concepts. Boxer herself toured Latin America earlier this year with a load of doctors taking the place of her Marines. Boxer's sister ship Kearsarge took over that mission beginning in August, again carrying doctors instead of Marines.

Naval analyst Bob Work says that big-deck amphibious ships won't be used for such humanitarian missions once the Marines depart Iraq. "In the future, Kearsarge would go out with Marines on board -- and they'll do different types of missions."

Sort of, Coffman said. He stressed that humanitarian assistance -- responding to a natural disaster, famine or political crisis -- has emerged as a primary mission for the Navy and Marines. And having all his troops, all his choppers and even his armored vehicles gives him more humanitarian tools, Coffman said.

"We don't see [humanitarian missions] as a 'that might happen.' We're preparing for that as a fundamental tasking of what expeditionary strike groups and Marine expeditionary units are forward-deployed to do." In other words, with Boxer, humanitarian "soft power" now has taken its rightful place alongside old-fashioned, firepower-heavy "hard power."

With the Iraq war slowly (and I emphasize slowly) winding down, the Pentagon will enter a new era: one where Afghanistan is the major focus, and where the military finally has a little breathing room to get back to basics, and to apply some hard-learned lessons. Boxer is an early indicator of the direction the Navy and Marines are headed in the post-Iraq world.

[Photo: U.S. Navy]

After investing in a fleet of over 10,000 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, the Pentagon is preparing to buy more -- lots more.

The super-sized trucks have been credited with saving many lives, but as reported here previously, the Pentagon's new ride has fared poorly in some terrain: the trucks are too heavy for the primitive roads of Afghanistan; too wide for the alleyways of Iraq; and they are prone to rollover. The military now wants a scaled-down version that will combine the off-road agility of a Humvee and the survivability of an MRAP.

But the real news here is the potential scale of the "MRAP Lite" buy: the Army may buy as many as 10,000 of them. On Friday, the Army posted a pre-solicitation announcement for a vehicle called the MRAP All-Terrain Vehicle, or M-ATV. The announcement -- issued in response to an urgent request from the field -- says the M-ATV order could run from a "probable" production quantity of 2,080 vehicles up to a maximum of 10,000 new trucks.

That's a lot of new trucks. Potential bidders are being asked to deliver five test vehicles for MRAP Lite; the Army will then select as many as five models for further testing. At the end of testing, the government may source vehicles from a single M-ATV producer -- or place production orders with multiple manufacturers.

Designing a nimble, survivable off-road vehicle will push the boundaries of design. The new vehicle is supposed to incorporate protection against explosively formed projectiles and rocket propelled grenades, and that probably means bulking up with an extra layer of armor. While effective defenses have been developed against such threats, the addition of EFP and RPG protection has driven up the weight of the standard MRAP. 

Making a vehicle that is both light and survivable is also the goal of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, a project to develop a next-gen successor to the Humvee. The Pentagon recently picked three finalists in the JLTV contest. But with more money going to mini-MRAPs, one has to wonder where the money is going to come from for the next-generation truck buy.

* Feds can snoop on cell phones, without telcos' knowledge

* "How Sarkozy saved Georgian president's private parts"

* General hints China may add carrier

* Few Iranian arms in Iraq?

* Over 1 million liters of booze for German forces in Afghanistan in '08

(High five: RP, EM, RC)