Defense Tech will be back next Monday.

The cur­rent “orange alert” appears to be more than scare­mon­ger­ing.
“Unlike past ele­va­tions of the ter­ror­ism threat level, the deci­sion to raise the alert to orange this time was unan­i­mous and deci­sive, because it was based on what senior Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials described as the most alarm­ing, cred­i­ble and spe­cific infor­ma­tion they had ever seen,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
“I have never seen the national secu­rity lead­er­ship as tense and anx­ious as they are right now,” a senior fed­eral law enforce­ment offi­cial tells the paper.
The threat is thought to be in the skies.
“According to data received as recently as Monday, offi­cials remain pri­mar­ily con­cerned about Al Qaeda oper­a­tives plot­ting to hijack pas­sen­ger and cargo planes and fly them into U.S. tar­gets,” the Times says.
CNN notes that, because of the alert, the Pentagon his hold­ing a “continuity-​​of-​​government” exer­cise today — a drill to make sure the gov­ern­ment can keep oper­at­ing in the face of disaster.

The Pakistani gov­ern­ment was the Taliban’s best friend. And they sold nuclear weapons tech­nol­ogy to Iran and North Korea.
So tell me again: why is the Bush admin­is­tra­tion — so wor­ried about weapons of mass destruc­tion, and so con­cerned about cod­dlers of Al-​​Qaeda — now cozy with Pakistan?

Citizens of Patuxent River, Maryland, do not be alarmed. When you see a fly­ing saucer over­head some­time in 2007, it will not be a sign of alien attack.
Instead, the strange craft in the skies will mean that the Russians are finally here — with a lit­tle help from the U.S. Navy.
For more than two decades, engi­neers at a for­mer Soviet aero­space plant have been toil­ing on a drone air­craft that looks a whole lot like a prop from Plan 9 From Outer Space. But finan­cial woes have frozen progress on the pita-​​bread-​​shaped, stubby-​​winged, wheel-​​less, unmanned ship, dubbed the Ekip (short for ecol­ogy and progress).
Momentum on the project may pick up again soon, how­ever. After an intro­duc­tion from an American con­gress­man, the Ekip’s design­ers at the Saratov Aviation Plant have a new part­ner: the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, which has agreed to join in the devel­op­ment of the unortho­dox drone over the next sev­eral years. Test flights are ten­ta­tively sched­uled for 2007 at Webster Field, near Patuxent River.
My Wired News story has more — includ­ing some of the odd­est of the odd-​​ball attempts at real-​​world fly­ing saucers since World War II.
THERE’S MORE: A great dis­cus­sion of fly­ing saucers, real and imag­ined, is going on now at /​.

I’ll be on BBC Radio’s “Up All Night” at 9:15 pm east­ern time tonight, talk­ing about real-​​life fly­ing saucers.
Last week, I spoke with NPR’s “Future Tense” about non-​​lethal weapons. You can hear me stum­ble through that inter­view here.

Here’s your Sunday round-​​up:
– Time has made a great pick for its 2003 “Person of the Year”: the American sol­dier.
– New-​​fangled Stryker armored vehi­cles and satellite-​​guided JDAM bombs are among the advanced weaponry that the U.S. mil­i­tary has brought to South Korea, the L.A. Times reports.
– Employers and par­ents are increas­ingly using the GPS chips in cell phones to keep tabs on their work­ers and kids, notes the New York Times.

A slew of new tech­nolo­gies may give the American mil­i­tary non-​​lethal ways to slow down ter­ror incur­sions in Iraq: A fast-​​hardening foam could ren­der muni­tions stock­piles use­less; a portable net­ting sys­tem could stop vehi­cles in their tracks; and a microwave-​​like “pain ray” could scat­ter a crowd with­out a drop of blood being spilled.
But there are still a num­ber of tech­ni­cal and bureau­cratic hur­dles these sys­tems have to leap before they make it into Iraq. The foam and the net­ting have to go through the long, hard slog that is the Pentagon’s buy­ing chain. The pain-​​ray deliv­ery sys­tem must be shrunk down to fit on the back of a Humvee. And, oh yeah, mil­i­tary researchers want to make sure it doesn’t cause can­cer or any­thing, either.
Today, U.S. forces do have a few non-​​lethal weapons–devices that are designed to hurt, not to kill–in their arse­nal. Some of these have been dis­trib­uted to Iraq, includ­ing electricity-​​firing tasers, rub­ber bul­lets and old-​​fashioned riot batons.
But “the state of the art for non-​​lethal is prim­i­tive,” said Charles “Sid” Heal, an author­ity on non-​​lethal weapons who is a com­man­der in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “There’s noth­ing out there with what the mil­i­tary con­sid­ers suf­fi­cient range pro­vid­ing ade­quate pro­tec­tion against a lethal coun­ter­mea­sure.” Rubber bul­lets, flash-​​bang grenades and other non-​​lethal weapons travel only a few hun­dred feet.
But the pain ray being devel­oped by the Air Force Research Laboratory, with a reported range of more than 700 yards, could make the grade. Officially des­ig­nated the Active Denial System, the sys­tem fires millimeter-​​wave elec­tro­mag­netic energy–like microwaves but in a dif­fer­ent band­width. Penetrating just a 64th of inch beneath the skin, the waves feel “like a hot iron on you,” Heal said.
The burn­ing sen­sa­tion is bad enough that peo­ple have to run away from them, quick. And that causes mobs to break up in a hurry. It’s no won­der, then, why Heal calls the ray the “Holy Grail of crowd con­trol.“
My Chicago Tribune arti­cle has details.

Jeremy Botter says he’s a medic in the 1st Squadron, 10th U.S. Cavalry — one of the groups in the 4th Infantry Division that helped cat­pure Saddam Hussein.
In his weblog, Botter promises a first-​​hand, blow-​​by-​​blow of “Operation Red Dawn,” the mis­sion that got Saddam. Today, he has up a fas­ci­nat­ing back­grounder on the events lead­ing up to the raid. Stay tuned.