“The Iraqi mil­i­tary came within sec­onds of pos­si­bly wip­ing out the head­quar­ters of the coali­tion ground forces with a mis­sile on March 27,” CNN reports. “The mis­sile was inter­cepted and destroyed by a U.S. Patriot mis­sile shortly before it could have hit its tar­get.“
The short range, rel­a­tively slow al-​​Samoud mis­sile was launched toward Camp Doha in Kuwait from just north of Basra.

An analy­sis of the Iraqi missile’s tra­jec­tory by the U.S. Army’s air defense unit showed it would have landed on or near the build­ing hous­ing the Coalition Forces Land Component Command oper­a­tions cen­ter and war room.
The mis­sile was launched dur­ing the mid­dle of the command’s morn­ing bat­tle­field update, a time when ground forces com­man­der Lt. Gen. David McKiernan and other top offi­cers were in the build­ing.
A U.S. mis­sile bat­tery crew based across the street from Camp Doha fired two Patriot mis­sile at the Iraqi al-​​Samoud. One inter­cepted it…
Just min­utes after the Iraqi attack, the air defense com­mand was able to plot the loca­tion of the Iraqi launch site and two A-​​10 Thunderbolts already in the Basra area destroyed the mis­sile battery. 

Years to buy com­puter sys­tems. Palm Pilots treated like hand­guns. Technology inno­va­tion dis­cour­aged. Analysts unwill­ing and unable to share what they know with their col­leagues.
These are just some of the things Hoover Institution fel­low Bruce Berkowitz found in his tenure as a “scholar-​​in-​​residence” at the CIA, exam­in­ing how the Agency uses infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy. His con­clu­sion: the spooks don’t use it all that well.
Check out his report here.
(via /​.)

Thanks to their sleek, form-​​fitting bat­tle suits, ordi­nary sol­diers may some­day turn into super­men.
Bullets won’t stop them; nei­ther will chem­i­cal attacks. Their nanotech-​​made mus­cles might let them jump higher and kick more butt than their oppo­nents. And if they do some­how get hurt, the suit could imme­di­ately start to heal them and report their injuries back to head­quar­ters.
At least, that’s what a col­lec­tion of indus­trial, aca­d­e­mic and mil­i­tary big­wigs promised, as they gath­ered here this week for the offi­cial launch of MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
The real­ity is that a new kind of water­proof­ing for their vests and pon­chos is the only tech­no­log­i­cal advance infantry­men are likely to see in the next few years from “ISN.“
The 125-​​person-​​plus Institute, started last year with a $50 mil­lion grant from the Army, got its offi­cial kick­off Thursday at MIT’s Technology Square. Under a pair of large white tents, and in the Institute’s new offices, a bat­tal­ion of gen­er­als and vice pres­i­dents her­alded the dawn of the ber-​​soldier with high-​​end videos, slick brochures and a buf­fet lunch.
Grunts paraded around in mock-​​ups of their new uni­forms. And Army Specialist Jason Ashline, shot in the chest dur­ing the Afghan con­flict, briefly men­tioned how body armor saved his life.
But it was the ner­vous, smil­ing MIT grad­u­ate stu­dents and pro­fes­sors in the ISN labs upstairs who gave the most real­is­tic assess­ments of what to expect from the Institute.
Yes, they’ve devel­oped mol­e­c­u­lar struc­tures that can swing open and shut like a hinge when hit with an elec­tric field. And sure, some­day, if they can fig­ure out how to coor­di­nate mil­lions and mil­lions of these hinges, they could maybe turn them into exo-​​muscles on a soldier’s bat­tle suit that could “pro­vide addi­tional mus­cle strength for lift­ing or jump­ing.“
But right now, they can’t even get the hinges to line up, “even on a micron (1,000th of a mil­lime­ter) scale,” said grad­u­ate stu­dent Nathan Vandesteeg. It’s a long way from a micron to a mus­cle.
“We’re always con­fronted with the fact that the peo­ple we’re work­ing for are com­ing up with these crazy ideas,” he con­tin­ued. “It gets you excited. But then there’s the whole real­iza­tion of whether this will hap­pen when I’m here — or ever.“
Check out my Wired News arti­cle for more from the ISN.
MEDIA TECHNO-​​DROOL ALERT: Those crit­i­cal thinkers at Reuters and USA Today have swal­lowed MIT’s super-​​soldier hype, no ques­tions asked.

Reuters: “If you ask the U.S. Army’s chief sci­en­tist what the future American sol­dier may look like, he points to the sci­ence fic­tion body armor depicted in the ‘Predator’ movie star­ring Arnold Schwarzenegger.“
USA Today: “It was once the stuff of sci­ence fic­tion movies: sol­diers equipped with high-​​tech gear that made them stronger, swifter and smarter invul­ner­a­ble to bul­lets and able to sur­vive the harsh­est con­di­tions. On Thursday, the U.S. Army and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled a joint project that gen­er­als and sci­en­tists said could make fic­tion a real­ity within this decade.” 

CNet, on the other hand, plays it straight — pro­vid­ing good back­ground on nan­otech — while the Register gets deli­ciously mean.

The Bush Administration is back­track­ing — hard — from their pre-​​war claims that Iraq had stock­piles of bio­log­i­cal and chem­i­cal arms.
It doesn’t mat­ter whether or not Iraq actu­ally had any of the tox­ins in their pos­ses­sion, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton said today. What counts is that Iraq had the “intel­lec­tual capac­ity” to build these uncoven­tional weapons.
As Global Security Newswire notes, this directly con­tra­dicts state­ments made by the pres­i­dent dur­ing the build-​​up to war.
In his March 17 tele­vised address, Bush said, “Intelligence gath­ered by this and other gov­ern­ments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime con­tin­ues to pos­sess and con­ceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” (empha­sis mine)

Women wor­ried about their safety have a new alter­na­tive to mace or pep­per spray: a jacket that fries would-​​be attack­ers with an 80,000 volts of elec­tric­ity.
“Dubbed ‘exo-​​electric armor,’ the No-​​Contact Jacket looks like an ordi­nary fash­ion­able women’s coat,” Wired News reports. “But an inner layer of con­duc­tive fiber car­ries a low-​​amp charge that deliv­ers a nasty but non-​​lethal shock to any­one who messes with its wearer.“

“It’s kind of like stick­ing your fin­ger in a wall socket,” said Adam Whiton, one of its design­ers. “It hurts. If some­one tries to grab you from behind, they get the full, hefty shock out of it. That’s really painful.“
The jacket is made from Aracon, a con­duc­tive fiber devel­oped by DuPont, which is sand­wiched between an inner rub­ber lin­ing which pro­tects the wearer from shocks and an outer layer of water­proof nylon.
Powered by a reg­u­lar 9-​​volt bat­tery, which builds a high-​​voltage but low-​​amp charge through a series of step-​​up cir­cuits, the jacket uses tech­nol­ogy sim­i­lar to the cir­cuitry in stun guns and bark-​​deterring dog col­lars. While the charge is enough to deliver a jolt, it won’t kill any­one, Whiton said.