PENTAGON BLIMP FETISH REVEALED

The old blimp-building airdock in Akron hasn't been on the cutting edge of much of anything for almost 70 years. But that may be about to change.

In the early 1930s, Goodyear Co. used the nearly 1,200-foot-long, 325-foot-wide hangar to house a set of zeppelins designed to launch an era in lighter-than-air transport.

A series of horrific crashes put those dreams to rest. Over the years, airships became little more than advertising vehicles at sporting events.

Now, the Pentagon has become fascinated with potential new uses for blimps -- to spy on potential adversaries, transmit conversations and maybe even haul helicopters or Humvees one day.

That's given the Akron airdock, now owned by Lockheed Martin Corp., a new mission. The massive hangar is being used to put together a tethered blimp for the U.S. Army in Iraq. By June, it will be keeping watch over western Baghdad from 2,500 feet and relaying commanders' orders and insurgents' coordinates to troops in the field.

Generals aren't the only ones interested in airships, however.

Thanks to tougher fabrics, more efficient solar panels, and longer-lasting batteries and fuel cells, blimps can now hover over an area for months at a time. That durability could allow airships to essentially act as cell towers or wireless Internet hot spots -- ones that sit thousands of feet up in the sky.

My Chicago Tribune story has details.

DARPA PLAN: SOLDIERS -- BLOOD OPTIONAL

Darpa, the Pentagon's research arm, has already started to investigate ways for soldiers to fight without sleep or food. Now the agency wants to see if G.I.s can carry on without most of their blood.

"The vision for the Surviving Blood Loss (SBL) Program is to develop novel strategies that delay the onset of irreversible shock and allow an injured warfighter to survive with significantly reduced oxygen delivery for extended periods of time," a Darpa solicitation reads.

It's all part of a larger effort to shore up what the agency sees as the "weak link" in the military's chain: the fragile human being.

If all goes according to plan, phase one of the SBL effort will crescendo with a group of rats being able to live with 60% of their blood removed for three hours. Darpa wants to see a survival rate of 75%. Proposals are due by next February.

REPORT: SADR SURRENDERS

The radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who's militia has clashed so violently with Coalition forces, has accepted a deal to surrender, Juan Cole says, passing on an arabic newspaper report.

"It would provide for the senior ayatollahs to issue a ruling or fatwa dissolving the Army of the Mahdi, Muqtada's militia. Muqtada [would] surrender to the grand ayatollahs and agree to have [top religious leaders] negotiate for him with the Americans," Cole writes. "Muqtada would accept the outcome of those negotiations without condition. Iran would offer him temporary asylum, until June 30 and the formation of a sovereign Iraqi government, at which time he could report to Najaf for his trial. In return, the US would withdraw its forces from the environs of Najaf."

The New York Times reports that a group of Iranian diplomats has been doing the negotiating. And that their work is not done yet. Stay tuned.

DIGITAL DOG TAG TELLS FRIEND FROM FOE

As violence boils in Iraq, American troops and allied forces are in danger - not just from local insurgents and militias, but from their own side as well.

Despite precautions taken by the G.I.'s, despite the growing accuracy of bombs and other weapon systems, despite an ever clearer picture of the combat zone from surveillance drones and spy satellites, soldiers continue to be killed by fire from their own comrades.

But new technologies being tested by the American-led forces have the potential to prevent many of these accidental attacks. Using a combination of radio frequency transponders, laser sensors and microwave-like transmitters, the Defense Department hopes to give every allied soldier, tank and plane a unique identifier to distinguish friend from foe.

My New York Times story has details.

THERE'S MORE: "I think that the issue of friendly fire illuminates a fundamental weakness in the American way of war: we think our wonderful technology can solve any problem, surmount any challenge," Storm the Horizon author David Morris tells Defense Tech.

Case in point: "the Marines shot up by a USAF A-10 at Nasiriyah [last March] had blue force trackers [satellite-guided systems for tracking friendly forces], they just didn't know how to use them. Combine that with a pilot who was unfamiliar with Marine armored vehicles and you end up with 10 dead Marines."

GLIMPSE OF STATELESS WAR IN IRAQ

Look at the streets of Fallujah and Baghdad, and you may catch a glimpse of the future . Two sides are fighting there. But, for brief moments, this has become a war without a state. And it could be the first of many to come.

On the ground in Iraq right now, there are about 20,000 private military contractors – maybe more, no one really knows for sure. They're handling a huge swath of tasks, from security to logistics, for coalition militaries and other companies. But their ties to the American government are nebulous, at best.

Opposing these mercenaries in Iraq are thousands of insurgents. They may have loyalties to a cleric or tribal leader or fallen regime. But they have few connections to any government currently operating. And Iraq isn't the only place where we're seeing stateless adversaries of the U.S. operate. As many observers have noted recently, Al Qaeda seems to be getting along just swimmingly, without a home state.

Of course, there are several governments' troops currently mixed up in this Iraq fight, too. The militias and mercenaries have clashed directly in only a few instances. The contractors have mostly served in a support role to the official militaries. But it's not to hard to imagine a battle down the road in which states are all but removed from the equation.

Taking on nests of stateless terrorists or drug-dealers, a government might not want to put its official boots on the ground. An army-for-hire, with limited leadership from the regular military, might be the cleaner solution. There are no official budgets to approve. No Congressional committees to clear. No testy allies to consult. No weeping families of guard and reserve units to console, as their spouses and parents and children are taken off the war. And no flag-draped caskets to carry home.

In fact, argues Corporate Warriors author Peter Singer in an upcoming Salon article, such a future is underway, in fits and starts, right now:

When a CIA plane mistakenly coordinated the shootdown of a planeload American missionaries over Peru in 2001, few realized that the plane was actually manned by contractors for Aviation Development Corporation, based in Alabama. When suicide bombers attacked an American compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia last spring, few understood what it meant that the targets worked for Vinnell Corp., a Fairfax, Virginia-based defense contractor that trains Saudi Arabia's and Iraq’s army. When Palestinian militants killed three Americans in Gaza last fall, most didn’t realize that they were private military contractors working for DynCorp, a multifaceted government services firm, based just outside the Washington-Dulles airport.

This stateless future would be a return to the past, Singer notes. Before the 20th Century, private armies were as common as government-backed militaries – maybe more so. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all used arrows-for-hire. "Contract armies fighting contract armies, led by contract generals," is how Singer describes the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

By 1782, the British East India Company had a corporate force 100,000 men strong – much larger than the army of the Queen. The Dutch East India Company's 140-ship navy, similarly, dwarfed its government's fleet.

The private companies sometimes clashed with states' armies. But often, they fought with groups that had little ties to any government – "tribes, pirates, and each other," according to Singer.

Now, in Iraq, things are starting to come full circle. Private companies are once again tangling with tribal and religious militias, who belong to no state. "You have contractors making up a division's worth of troops, and taking a division's worth of casualties," Signer says.

And that raises an array of troubling questions, Phil Carter notes in a recent Slate essay. How can these stateless groups be held to the laws of war? How can they be held accountable to the public, or to a government's military standards? And what happens if they decide that a particular fight is no longer good for the tribe or for the bottom line?

The answers will begin to take shape in Najaf and Karballah and Kirkuk.

As Singer writes, "Iraq is not just the largest private military market in modern history, but also a testing ground for just how far the outsourcing trend will play out."

THERE'S MORE: Captain's Quarters has a fascinating account from a Special Forces veteran who's now working as a private military contractor in Iraq.

SADR MILITIA BACKING DOWN?

WaPo: "A week after seizing control of Najaf, Iraq's holiest city, members of a militia loyal to radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr relinquished their hold on police stations and government buildings Monday as hundreds of U.S. soldiers mobilized in preparation for an assault on the city.

"The withdrawal of Sadr's forces, the continuation of a cease-fire in the violence-wracked city of Fallujah and the release of seven kidnapped Chinese civilians amounted to the most positive developments for U.S. occupation forces since a two-front war with Shiite militiamen and Sunni Muslim insurgents erupted a week ago."

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports, leading Shi'ite clerics -- including representatives of Grand Ayatollah Sistani -- are now meeting with Sadr in Najaf, to try to defuse his standoff with American troops. But Juan Cole is pessimistic about the talks.

I think it most unlikely that the terms of the negotiations reported above will be acceptable to the United states. Coalition spokesmen continued to talk about capturing or killing Muqtada. The tough talk may be intended to put pressure on him to surrender, but if so it is a miscalculation. Muqtada is a millenarian who thinks the world is about to end, and for the foreigners to discuss killing him might well drive him to seek the advent of the apocalypse through a call for more violence.

ARMY TO GET KILLER DRONE OF ITS OWN

The U.S. Air Force has a couple dozen unmanned Predator planes, equipped with deadly Hellfire missiles. But the Army wants killer drones of its own.

After months of indecision, the Army has decided to buy 60 Extended-Range Mission Payload (ERMP) pilotless planes, according to Inside the Army. The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are supposed to be ready by 2008, will have a range of 300 kilometers, and will be able to stay in the air for 12 hours.

In addition to the spy duties that have become traditional for UAVs, the drone will serve as a communications relay in the sky. And it will carry 400 pounds' worth of munitions. The Hellfire, Viper Strike and BLU-108 munitions are all possibile candidates for weapons work on the new drone.

"Several commanders serving in Iraq last year have requested more UAVs," Inside the Army notes, "including 4th Infantry Division Commander Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno and then-3rd Infantry Division Commander Maj. Gen. Buford Blount."

THERE'S MORE: Robotics researchers have long had trouble getting cash and respect for their work. No more. A "perfect storm" has landed on bot-makers, dumping a deluge of Defense Department dollars (sorry, couldn't resist).

"The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University has seen federal funding jump 48 percent since 2000, and by 117 percent since 1994. Much of the $24.8 million in federal funding for 2003 came from the Pentagon," MSNBC reports. "Other universities, such as the California, Virginia and Georgia institutes of technology, say funding for robotics is up at least 50 percent or more in recent years."

AND MORE: In today's Wired News, Mark Baard looks at the new generation of PackBots -- the 25-to-42 pound mechanical critters that are removing bombs and keeping an eye on adversaries for the Army. The story's headline is a bit misleading, though: these remotely-operated drones are for surveillance. They aren't about to "fight" anyone.

ARMY SLOWING "FUTURE COMBAT" PLANS

Ten days after a damning Congressional report, the Army is beginning to scale back its sweeping, $92 billion modernization plans, Defense News reports.

The Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) project was supposed to replace the lumbering, heavily armored tanks and personnel carriers of the Cold War with lighter, more maneuverable vehicles. Now, the M1 tank and Bradley fighting vehicles will be around for more than two decades, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker tells Defense News.

"The current force we have today, the heavy force, for instance, is still going to be in this Army out to 2030 — M1 tanks, Bradleys and all the rest of them," Schoomaker said. "The FCS, as we design that, we know the kinds of capabilities that we want resident in that force out there in the future. And the challenge is to balance that future with the current readiness that’s required to perform.”

Meanwhile, the 19-ton Stryker armored vehicle, designed as a bridge to ultimate transformation goals and now deployed to Iraq, has shed its “interim” moniker and is critical to the current force and to the development of FCS, Schoomaker said.

"It’s a near inevitability that the Army of tomorrow is going to be largely equipped with the technology of today," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank. "The service is short on money and it is also short on vision in terms of what it is replacing existing equipment with."

Senior program officials from the Boeing and SAIC-led lead system integrator industry team met last week in Phoenix for a semi-annual "state of the union" meeting on FCS, said a program spokeswoman.

But a top item on that meeting’s agenda was "damage control," with the goal of shielding FCS from program delays and budget cuts, according to a source. (emphasis mine)

THERE'S MORE: It gets worse. Consulting firm CommerceBasix got "the cold shoulder from Army acquisition officials for doing exactly what it was hired to do — provide critical due-diligence analysis of the Army’s $14.8 billion contract with Boeing to develop the net-centric Future Combat Systems," Eric Miller writes in a Defense News op-ed.

The honchos at Alexandria, Va.-based CommerceBasix were not aware that one of the quickest ways to get in trouble at the Pentagon is to tell the truth... The firm also rather bluntly advised the Army that it needed to rework the FCS contract because it lacked the necessary provisions to protect the Army — and the taxpayers — from $1 billion worth of risk. The Army signed the contract anyway.

MILITARY QUESTIONING POLITICAL MOVES IN IRAQ

Decapitating a double-headed insurgency in Iraq is the easy part. It's what comes next – the political process – that's hard, current and former military officers are saying.

"With less than three months before the American-led occupation force hands sovereignty to an Iraqi civilian government, the process for a political transition remains unclear," the New York Times notes. "There are no firm plans yet for who the leaders will be on the transfer date of June 30."

"We can beat these guys, and we're proving our resolve," one officer tells the paper. "But unless the political side keeps up, we'll have to do it again after July 1 and maybe in September and again next year and again and again."

A recently retired, 30-year-plus Marine Corps veteran – one who saw action in Iraq, Vietnam, Somalia, and elsewhere – tells Defense Tech a similar story.

He's confident that, in Iraq, "the jihadists don't own the battlefield, we do."

But he's mystified about what comes after the fight.

What is the end state? That was never made clear to me during the war and I'm not sure now. For example, during the first Gulf War we all understood that our end state was to liberate Kuwait...

I cannot tell you what it is supposed to look like in this case, and yes, I don't think we can expect any help from our NATO or UN "partners" either for the same reason. You're not the only one who is confused. There [are] a lot of us.

CEASE-FIRE: GOOD SIGN OR BAD?

"American troops withheld their firepower on Sunday outside three Iraqi cities where insurgents have seized control, allowing Iraqi intermediaries time to seek negotiated solutions to the most serious challenge yet to the year-old occupation," the Times reports.

U.S. military officials said they decided to pause for the Shi'ite festival of Arbaeen. And, according to the Times, they warned that the resistance in Falluja, Najaf, and Karbala "would be crushed if the insurgents maneuvered for long."

But The Agonist notes that "you do not negotiate a cease-fire from a position of strength if you are the occupying power."

Steve Gilliard agrees, noting that the Marines' tactics in Falluja don't bode well for their operations there.

One exmple, the use of the AC-130. That plane is never used in offensive operations. It can kill a football field's worth of soldiers. No one can move forward when Spectre is above, unless they want to die. It is usually used when US forces are pinned down. Then, it can wipe an attacking enemy out. The fact that it was used in Fallujah indicates that their attack stalled out. Then, they had to call in more AF fighters, which means they were in serious trouble. Marines hate calling in the Air Force because they have a habit of killing Marines.

Then, of course, they bought up a third battalion. A full regiment of troops still stuck in that one mile area of Fallujah.

In no war game you could play, in no Lessons Learned, do you bring up another unit if your attack is going well. You do that when your other units are getting hammered.

Not so, says Defense Tech reader RB. Although 18 Marines have died in a week's worth of fighting in Falluja, "citing Marine casualties as a flat number is misleading in the extreme."

The real issue is a) ratio of Marine to enemy casualties, b) casualties as a percent of engaged Marines and c) effective control of the city vs. damage to infrastructure & civilian casualties.

From what reports are available, the Marines are doing an unprecedented job in all 3 of these categories... Apart from the missiles that took down the wall around a mosque early on, this operation seems to be highly effective without the use of major force options. The house to house fighting is in fact a sign of our strength – we can do this with a minimum of collateral damage.

THERE'S MORE: Defense Tech reader MS thinks Steve Gilliard's all wrong about the AC-130 gunship's symbolism.

"This is far, far, far from your daddy's orbiting bullet hose of yesteryear," MS writes. "Steve's statement may have had some accuracy back in the day of the original(s) going to the DC3 with 7.62 miniguns, up through the shortlived -119 version, and even the original -130 variant.

"Current models, however, while useful in a perimeter defense, are also very, very useful in plinking individual targets with limited collateral (damage)."

OUTED BRIEF = 9/11 GONE FROM BUSH CAMPAIGN

On Meet the Press this morning, Washington's cognoscenti declared that the release of the August 6, 2001 President's Daily Brief -- "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US" -- won't hurt Bush politically.

They're wrong. Here's why.

It wasn't long ago that the President was ready to make 9/11 the centerpiece of his campaign. That's why this year's Republican National Convention was being held in New York, in September. That's why his first campaign ad used images from the tragedy. It cemented his position as a steely leader in times of crisis, the thinking went. And anyone who opposed Bush would implicitly be for the terrorists that brought down the Towers.

But with the release of the brief, and other events of recent weeks, that strategy is gone. A pillar of the President's re-election strategy has been taken away. The Convention's timing and location are looking like liabilities, not assets. "Bush won't dare show more 9/11 images in his campaign ads," the Republican columnist Jim Pinkerton predicts.

That means Bush has to now run on the economy and on the war. And judging by the last week in Iraq, that's an iffy proposition, at best.

THERE'S MORE: The Democrats have tried for years now to portray Bush as weak on homeland defense. It didn't work. Sure, Bush skimped on equipping firefighters, gave New York City the finger instead of a helping hand, and resisted (at first) putting together a Department of Homeland Security. But none of that mattered, while Bush was seen as strong on 9/11. If that starts to change -- and it looks like it might -- then all these other attacks suddenly gain new potency, new power.

AND MORE: "I think I have to disagree with you on whether Bush can still run on 9/11. I just don't see what evidence there is that the president is going to be held personally responsible for missing the attack; he definitely should have done more, but even if the attacks were technically 'preventable,' I think most of the public understands that it would have been very difficult to stop them," Defense Tech pal (and Salon writer) Farhad Manjoo says in an e-mail.

"I'm no Bush fan, but I buy this argument; I think he was wrong not to look for specifics, but I don't think any other president in his position would have done something differently."