BLOOD CLOT BANDAGES DEBUT
The U.S. mil­i­tary is rolling out ban­dages with clot­ting agents inside, CNN reports. Made from a shrimp-​​based prod­uct, the dress­ings can sup­pos­edly stop bleed­ing within two min­utes. They’ve just been approved by the FDA, and there are imme­di­ate orders from the mil­i­tary for 6000 units.

VIDEO, POWERPOINT CLOG MILITARY AIRWAVES
Think down­load­ing a video clip at home is a pain? Try doing it aboard a frigate, chas­ing enemy forces through the north Arabian Sea dur­ing mon­soon sea­son. Or under hos­tile fire in a makeshift Army post in the Afghan hin­ter­land.
The typ­i­cal American sol­dier sta­tioned over­seas has access to hun­dreds of times as much net­work band­width as the aver­age grunt in the first Gulf War. But despite all the extra capac­ity, U.S. troops face a band­width short­age that dic­tates where ships are sent, when drones can fly and what kind of mes­sages sailors and sol­diers can receive.
Streaming video is the biggest band­width hog, accord­ing to Steven Aftergood, an ana­lyst with the Federation of American Scientists. Everybody wants to look at what the spy drones and satel­lites see.
Take the bat­tle of Takur Ghar — one of the blood­i­est encoun­ters in the Afghan cam­paign. While U.S. spe­cial forces engaged in a moun­tain­top fire­fight, a Predator drone fed real-​​time dig­i­tal video to top brass in Tampa, Florida.
Gen. Lance Lord, the chief of Air Force Space Command, said the Afghan effort used 10 times more band­width than Operation Desert Storm, with one-​​tenth the human forces involved.
Video was one rea­son. But so was the military’s predilec­tion for PowerPoint pre­sen­ta­tions.
“Some say that 70 per­cent of that band­width was con­sumed by PowerPoint brief­ings,” Lord joked.
My lat­est Wired News story has addi­tional details on the military’s band­width short­age.
THERE’S MORE: The Pentagon does have some long term solu­tions to this prob­lem. By 2004, the Defense Department hopes to fat­ten its pipes by link­ing 90 sites world­wide with fiber optic cable into a “Global Information Grid.” The mil­i­tary is also look­ing into satel­lites that com­mu­ni­cate by laser light to ease the band­width squeeze.
But that’s years away — at least. For now, U.S. troops will have to rely on aging birds and bor­rowed time to talk.

DRONE VIDEO ONLINE
Wanna see through the eyes of a Predator drone? Soon, all you may need is a web browser.
MITRE, a not-​​for-​​profit group that han­dles a fair amount of Defense Department research, has been test­ing out a sys­tem that makes online acces­si­ble video from the Predator and Global Hawk unmanned spy planes. So far, MITRE has only worked with archived footage. But the idea is to get the shots in some­thing approach­ing real time.
That’s not going to hap­pen with­out Defense Department involve­ment, how­ever. And so far, the Pentagon hasn’t sunk any money into the project. MITRE is hop­ing to get such fund­ing soon.

NAVY: TATTOOS NOW TABOO
Like tomato sauce and pasta, like the Lone Ranger and Tonto, like J. Lo and that big ol’ ass, sailors and their tat­toos have long seemed like one of nature’s unal­ter­able com­bi­na­tions.
But now, the U.S. Navy is putting the brakes on some tat­toos and orna­men­ta­tion, accord­ing to Stars and Stripes.
“Tattoos/​body art/​brands that are exces­sive, obscene, sex­u­ally explicit or advo­cate or sym­bol­ize sex, gen­der, racial, reli­gious, eth­nic or national ori­gin dis­crim­i­na­tion are all out. So are forked tongues. So is brand­ing, or “scar­i­fi­ca­tion.“
The other armed ser­vices also have lim­its on “ink.” In the Air Force, taboo tat­toos are ones that exceed one-​​fourth of the exposed body part. Marines can’t have body art on the head or neck. Nor are they allowed “objects, arti­cles, jew­elry or orna­men­ta­tion through their skin, tongue or any other body part.e
“Mom” or “Semper Fi,” writ­ten across the shoul­der, are, pre­sum­ably, still allowed.

PILOTS’ UNREAL WORLD
How can you land a plane if you can’t see the ground? When rough weather dials vis­i­bil­ity down to zero, even the most rou­tine land­ings become fraught with dan­ger.
The U.S. Air Force is try­ing out a fix for this prob­lem — an onboard com­puter that dig­i­tally recre­ates pilots’ sur­round­ings. It lets pilots look at a ren­dered world, when they can’t rely on the real one to guide them.
The pro­gram — called “synthetic-​​vision” — has been in use on civil­ian flights for years, National Defense mag­a­zine reports. And now the Air Force’s 412th Flight Test Squadron is try­ing it out in a mod­i­fied C-​​135 trans­port plane. Just like night-​​vision gog­gles let troop­ers roam around in the dark, this sys­tem is sup­posed to let pilots see in stormy skies.
But “synthetic-​​vision” is still years and years away from wide­spread mil­i­tary use. Digital maps of most major com­mer­cial air­ports already exist; but recre­at­ing the rough ter­rains an Air Force pilot would encounter — and updat­ing those images in real-​​time — is going to take a lot of work.

“TIA” AIN’T DEAD YET
For those of you who thought that the Senate killed off “Total Information Awareness,” the scandalously-​​broad, uber-​​database being devel­oped by the U.S. mil­i­tary, think again. Salon’s Farhad Majoo reports:

TIA is already steam­ing for­ward. According to peo­ple with knowl­edge of the pro­gram, TIA has now advanced to the point where it’s much more than a mere “research project“‘ There is a work­ing pro­to­type of the sys­tem, and fed­eral agen­cies out­side the Defense Department have expressed inter­est in it. 

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is devel­op­ing a sec­ond data­base project, the “Terrorist Threat Integration Center,” that, to pri­vacy advo­cates, sounds eerily rem­i­nis­cent of TIA.
THERE’S MORE: The Bush Administration now says that the CIA will be in charge of the new “Terrorist Threat” data­base project.

INTERNET ATTACKER: MYSTERY MAN
The FBI thinks they can catch who­ever launched the “Slammer” worm that gummed up the Internet last week­end? Fat chance, com­puter secu­rity experts say.
While “Slammer” is some­what sim­i­lar to the “Honker” worm launched in 2001 by a Chinese hacker group, it’s impos­si­ble to tell whether or not the same cul­prits unleashed the lat­est assault.
The Associated Press says, “Exhaustive reviews of the blue­prints for the attack­ing soft­ware are yield­ing few clues to its ori­gin or the author’s identity.”

NAVY GOES WIRELESS
The White House has labeled easy-​​to-​​access wire­less net­works a home­land secu­rity threat. The Defense Department believes the so-​​called “wi-​​fi” con­nec­tions many inter­fere with as many as ten dif­fer­ent radar sys­tems.
But, appar­ently, some­one for­got to tell the Navy all of this.
The destroyer USS Howard is being fit­ted with an 802.11b “wi-​​fi” net­work. According to Network World, The Navy is hop­ing it’ll let crewmem­bers check motors and pipes from a sin­gle loca­tion — instead of mak­ing rounds — and con­trol heat­ing and air con­di­tion­ing units, remotely.
Ultimately, the goal is to let the cap­tain com­mand from any­where on the ship, and to reduce crew size from 300 to 90 through automa­tion.
The Navy may want to think twice before hand­ing sailors their pink slips, how­ever. As sev­eral Slashdotters have pointed out, “wi-​​fi” net­works are noto­ri­ously hack­able. And any­thing from a cord­less phone to a microwave oven has the poten­tial to inter­fere with the “wi-​​fi” signal.

SMART BOMB STOCKPILE
StrategyPage details the U.S.’ inven­tory of precision-​​guided weapons. The Air Force, for one, now has 17,000 Joint Direct Attack Munition kits — which turn a reg­u­lar bomb into a satellite-​​directed killer. The ser­vice expects to buy a total of 236,000 of the kits, some of which they’ll share with the Navy and with the Marines.

FUTURIST-​​IN-​​CHIEF SPEAKS
Wired mag­a­zine has a Q&A with Andrew Marshall, “the Pentagon’s 81-​​year-​​old futurist-​​in-​​chief.” The inter­view doesn’t reveal much. But Marshall does say that he’s wor­ried about performance-​​enhancing drugs. He quips, “A future intel­li­gence prob­lem is going to be know­ing what drugs the other guys are on.”