The National Reconaissance Office — the gov­ern­ment agency in charge of all U.S. spy satel­lites — is a mess, Aviation Week reports.
Morale is in the toi­let, with too many peo­ple ask­ing the snoops to do too many things with too lit­tle money.
To make mat­ters worse, the agency hasn’t put any large spy satel­lites into orbit in five years, accord­ing to the mag­a­zine. (Although there have been other big launches, notes a Defense Tech pal in mil­i­tary intel­li­gence.)
The lat­est launch, sched­uled for last week after 18 months of delays, has been put off again. The ear­li­est the satel­lite — likely a 100 foot-​​plus “folded eaves­drop­ping antenna,” the mag­a­zine says — will be launched is September 6. But the Air Force notes that date could eas­ily slip.
NRO direc­tor Peter Teets fried cir­cuits ear­lier this year when he sug­gested that the U.S. should actively deny the use of space for intel­li­gence pur­poses to any other nation at any time — not just adver­saries, but even long­time allies.

Could law enforcers one day fore­cast crime like the weather? Wired mag­a­zine says yes. Of course, they say yes — in bright orange 72-​​point type — to every­thing techno, so who knows…

Pentagon spend­ing on “black,” or clas­si­fied, projects has almost dou­bled since the mid-90’s, the Washington Post says. Relying on this think tank report, the paper notes that such out­lays are now at their high­est lev­els — $23.2 bil­lion — since 1988.
“But unlike the 1980s, when it was widely known that the ‘black’ bud­get was going to the devel­op­ment of stealth air­craft such as the B-​​2 bomber and F-​​117 fighter, the uses of the clas­si­fied accounts today are far murkier,” accord­ing to the Post.
“This is an admin­is­tra­tion that likes to play I’ve got a secret,” Globalsecurity.org’s John Pike tells the paper. “The growth of the clas­si­fied bud­get appears to be part of a larger pat­tern of this admin­is­tra­tion being secre­tive.“
THERE’S MORE: “A large part of the increase in the DoD black bud­get is due to the surge in intel­li­gence spend­ing,” Steven Aftergood, who heads the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, tells Defense Tech.
“There has been a sig­nif­i­cant thrust towards ‘recap­i­tal­iza­tion’ of intel­li­gence, includ­ing new ini­tia­tives in over­head recon­nais­sance (spy satel­lites), NSA mod­ern­iza­tion, etc.”

“The Army’s new state-​​of-​​the art infantry vehi­cle slated to make its com­bat debut in Iraq in October is vul­ner­a­ble to the kind of rocket-​​propelled grenades now being used by Saddam Hussein’s guer­ril­las, a consultant’s report charges,” accord­ing to the Washington Times.

The Army, which rebuts the report’s find­ings, plans to send 300 Stryker armored vehi­cles and 3,600 sol­diers to Iraq. This first Stryker brigade will help put down the resis­tance that has killed more 60 American troop­ers since May 1. It will also be a pre­view of a lighter, more mobile Army for the 21st cen­tury.
But a report pre­pared for Rep. James H. Saxton, New Jersey Republican, says the vehi­cle is ill-​​suited for such war­fare.
“Poorly armored and entirely vul­ner­a­ble to RPGs,” states the report, pre­pared July 18 by con­sul­tant Victor O’Reilly. 

Stryker has had a long his­tory of con­tro­versy — even before its first deploy­ment. During the Millennium Challenge 2002 war game, for exam­ple, sol­diers com­plained that the Stryker was sus­cep­ti­ble to flat tires, couldn’t hit tar­gets on the run, and would get unbear­ably hot inside — 120 degrees and higher.

The strug­gle over Orwellian home­land secu­rity mea­sures is high­lighted in two fas­ci­nat­ing Wired News arti­cles today:

* “More and more peo­ple are becom­ing sus­pi­cious of radio-​​frequency iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tags — tiny trans­mit­ters that track the where­abouts of prod­ucts with stun­ning accu­racy. So the food indus­try is adding biosen­sors to the tags in a bid to present them as terrorism-​​fighting tools.“
* An unusu­ally diverse cola­tion of Washington power play­ers — includ­ing the NAACP, the ACLU, and the ultra-​​conservative Americans for Tax Reform — is work­ing together to stop CAPPS II, the Transportation Security Administration’s con­tro­ver­sial air­line pas­sen­ger screen­ing system.

They came flush with cash, packed with cutting-​​edge equip­ment, and were led by the field’s best-​​known fig­ure — the man who dis­cov­ered the Titanic.
But a high-​​profile explo­ration of ancient ship­wrecks has ended sud­denly, with one of its cen­tral goals aban­doned.
Excitement ran high when Robert Ballard — the leg­endary under­wa­ter explorer who found the Titanic, the German bat­tle­ship Bismarck and John F. Kennedy’s PT-​​109 — announced his sum­mer mis­sion off the shores of Turkey and Egypt.
It wasn’t just that Ballard and his crew were going to explore some of the old­est ship­wrecks ever found dur­ing this $7 mil­lion mis­sion. They were going to do it with the first robot ever designed for deep-​​sea arche­ol­ogy and with watch com­man­ders direct­ing parts of the expe­di­tion from thou­sands of away.
“In 1981, I sketched out a vision of the future of under­sea explo­ration,” Ballard said before the expe­di­tion began in August. “And it’s exactly what we’re going to do in a week.“
But inter­na­tional pol­i­tics have a way of over­whelm­ing ambi­tious goals and sophis­ti­cated tech­nolo­gies. After scram­bling to straighten out visa prob­lems in Turkey, which kept his crew stuck on a dock for two days, Ballard ran into a road­block from the gov­ern­ment of Egypt.
Although the researchers say sev­eral of their most impor­tant aims were met, includ­ing suc­cess­ful tests of their mechan­i­cal arche­ol­o­gist, named Hercules, the entire Egyptian por­tion of the expe­di­tion had to be scrapped.
My story in today’s Chicago Tribune explores how this ambi­tious adven­ture to the depths went awry.