The Pentagon has revealed what it wants to spend next year on clas­si­fied intel­li­gence pro­grams. That’s “an implicit repu­di­a­tion of the Director of Central Intelligence,” accord­ing to Secrecy News. DCI George Tenet has said that “pub­lic dis­clo­sure of a sin­gle aggre­gate fig­ure for all intelligence-​​related spend­ing would dam­age national secu­rity and com­pro­mise intel­li­gence sources and meth­ods. Even fifty year old bud­get data remain clas­si­fied at CIA.“
The Pentagon fig­ures don’t say much– just that the gen­er­als want about $4.1 bil­lion for intel­li­gence R&D and $544 mil­lion in pro­cure­ment funds. “Which is why,” Secrecy News says, “there are no grounds for clas­si­fy­ing them, let alone a much broader aggre­ga­tion of all intel­li­gence spend­ing government-​​wide.”

“The Bush admin­is­tra­tion plans to announce that, in a step to lessen the dan­gers of land mines, it will end the use of long-​​lasting mines in war­fare and instead con­cen­trate on mines that go inert within hours or days,” the New York Times reports.
However, “there are no plans for the United States to sign the inter­na­tional treaty to ban land mines, which has been in effect since 1997.“
Nor is there any indi­ca­tion whether or not the U.S. mil­i­tary intends to pur­sue the so-​​called “Self-​​Healing Minefield” — mines that can move, and reor­ga­nize them­selves, to avoid being cleared.
THERE’S MORE: The Washington Post puts Bush’s land mine move in a much harsher light, say­ing it “rep­re­sents a depar­ture from the pre­vi­ous U.S. goal of ban­ning all land mines designed to kill troops. That plan, estab­lished by President Bill Clinton, set a tar­get of 2006 for giv­ing up antiper­son­nel mines, depend­ing on the suc­cess of Pentagon efforts to develop alter­na­tives.“
AND MORE: “The biggest prob­lem right now in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Chechnya is not related to land­mines,” says Phil Carter. It’s “the use of clus­ter muni­tions, like the CBU-​​87. These are large bombs dropped from air­craft which, at a cer­tain point close to the ground, break up into hun­dreds of lit­tle bomblets which are essen­tially the size of a hand grenade or RPG war­head. The dud rate for these bomblets inevitably pro­duces a hand­ful of duds from each bomb or sor­tie, which stay in the ground long after the bomb­ing run.“
AND MORE: Human Rights Watch thinks “smart” mines — like the ones Bush is propos­ing to use — aren’t much bet­ter than the dumb ones. “Experience has shown that nations — espe­cially those in the devel­op­ing world where mines have been used the most — are unwill­ing to give up the dumb mines in their arse­nals, if more wealthy and tech­no­log­i­cally advanced nations insist on the right to keep the smart mines in their arse­nals,” the group says.

The mil­i­tary satel­lite busi­ness is a strange beast. The Pentagon long ago made it pol­icy to rely on civil­ian con­trac­tors to sup­ply their eyes in the sky. But there’s not enough of a com­mer­cial mar­ket to make the satel­lite busi­ness worth­while. So, instead, the U.S. mil­i­tary throws extra cash at the com­pa­nies, to make sure they’ll keep mak­ing the orbiters.
Yesterday, for exam­ple, the Air Force announced it would start pay­ing Boeing and Lockheed Martin “50% more to send U.S. mil­i­tary satel­lites into space to com­pen­sate for the col­lapse of com­mer­cial demand that threat­ens their launch busi­nesses,” accord­ing to Bloomberg News.
“Payments will increase to as much as $135 mil­lion per launch from $91 mil­lion, based on a pre­lim­i­nary esti­mate, because the ser­vice wants to ensure the com­pa­nies stay in the mil­i­tary pro­gram, said Richard McKinney, the Air Force’s deputy direc­tor of space acqui­si­tion.“
Last year, the Pentagon handed out a $500 mil­lion con­tract to com­mer­i­cal satelitte imagery provider Digital Globe. Shortly there­after, it promised to make a sim­il­iar pay­ment to Digital Globe’s com­peti­tor, Space Imaging, so the com­pany could stay afloat.

UPI: “The Pentagon reversed course Wednesday and told Congress it would look into whether an anti-​​malaria drug… might be caus­ing sui­cides, one month after assert­ing the drug could not be a fac­tor.“
21 G.I.s assigned to Iraq and Kuwait have com­mit­ted sui­cide, accord­ing to the wire ser­vice. “The Army is inves­ti­gat­ing another five deaths in Iraq as pos­si­ble sui­cides, along with six deaths among sol­diers in Iraq who returned to the United States and then killed them­selves.“
That amounts to 15.8 sui­cides per 100,000 sol­diers per year, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr. told a House Armed Services Committee panel. That’s not much more, he claimed, than Army sui­cide rates of between 9.1 and 14.8 per 100,000 in the Army between 1995 and 2002.
Last fall, a Naval Reserve com­man­der in Iraq alleged that the mil­i­tary doc­tored his med­ical file to get rid of any evi­dence of lar­iam, which he claims made him suicidal.

Army Times has just tested out the service’s new rifle, the XM8. To say the paper’s psy­ched would be some­where south of an under­state­ment. “One Awesome Weapon” is their XM8 cover story.