It’s not too early to be think­ing about Christmas, folks. So for that hard-to-please gift recip­i­ent, we’ve brought you a per­fect solu­tion to your conundrum.

Think a Nork nuke attack or a poor-man’s radi­o­log­i­cal bomb — you’re just mind­ing your own busi­ness play­ing fan­tasy foot­ball or read­ing DoD Buzz and *BOOM* the evil­do­ers pop off a 50 gal­lon drum of old X-ray machines wrapped in C4 sprin­kling nuclear fall­out all over your favorite dog park.

What do you do?

Grab your handy dandy Dirty Bomb Emergency Kit, that’s what.

Nukepills.com (don’t you love that name?), an online provider of radi­a­tion mit­i­ga­tion med­ica­tion, sent out a release announc­ing its new Dirty Bomb Emergency Kit for when the sh&!t really hits the fan…

The Dirty Bomb Emergency Kit is used to instantly detect radi­a­tion and safely, quickly and sig­nif­i­cantly decon­t­a­m­i­nate peo­ple and sur­faces of radioac­tive mate­r­ial most likely found in a dirty bomb using the sup­plied Quick-Decon resin-based decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion solu­tions. The included military-grade RADTriage Personal Radiation Detectors instantly detect radi­a­tion expo­sure in the event of a dirty bomb, nuclear reac­tor acci­dent, nuclear weapon fall­out and other sources of radi­a­tion.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I’ve always wanted a per­sonal radi­a­tion detector)

The web site says the kit costs $250 and works on the entire fam­ily. So if you live near Three Mile Island, Manhattan or DC, it might be worth ask­ing Santa for one of these just to be on the safe side.

(Photo: Nukepills.com)

– Christian

The Pentagon has shown it has a great appetite for drones and robots — every­thing from missile-firing UAVs to pro­to­type patrol-bots guard­ing air base perimeters.

But a Maryland com­pany work­ing on a pro­gram for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, has the idea of giv­ing the robots their own appetites, let­ting them feed on bio­mass as a means of fuel­ing themselves.

But as the image of flesh-eating drones refu­el­ing off the bat­tle­field dead has spread in recent days, Cyclone Power Technologies of Florida, the com­pany devel­op­ing the robot’s engine, has issued a state­ment about the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot’s — aka EATR — diet.

It is veg­e­tar­ian, the com­pany said in a press state­ment released Thursday, in response to sto­ries with head­lines such as “Dawn of the corpse-eating robots?” and “Pentagon con­tracts com­pany for flesh-eating robots.”

“We com­pletely under­stand the public’s con­cern about futur­is­tic robots feed­ing on the human pop­u­la­tion, but that is not our mis­sion,” Harry Schoell, chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of Cyclone, said in the state­ment. “We are focused on demon­strat­ing that our engines can cre­ate usable, green power from plen­ti­ful, renew­able plant mat­ter. The com­mer­cial appli­ca­tions alone for this earth-friendly energy solu­tion are enormous.”

EATR is being devel­oped by Robotic Technology Inc. of Maryland under a pro­gram spon­sored by DARPA. EATR is envi­sioned as a robotic plat­form able to con­duct long-range, long-endurance mis­sions with­out the need for man­ual or con­ven­tional refu­el­ing, Cyclone explained in its statement.

Cyclone said RTI’s EATER will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from bio­mass — that is, “twigs, grass clip­pings and wood chips — small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic tech­nol­ogy is designed to forage.

“Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is cer­tainly not some­thing sanc­tioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI,” the com­pany said.

– Bryant Jordan

Our boy Bob Cox at the Ft. Worth Star Telegram sent me a hilar­i­ous blurb he wrote for his paper on an embar­rass­ing admis­sion by one of Bell’s top offi­cials recently.

Bob spot­ted an inter­est­ing lit­tle vehi­cle pro­to­type a few years ago at the inter­na­tional air show in Farnborough and wrote about the thing, which looks a bit like Luke Skywalker’s land speeder from Star Wars IV, and it sort of ended there…

Tuesday,July 18, 2006
Edition: Tarrant, Section: Business, Page C1 

FARNBOROUGH, England George Jetson would have loved this one. If only hed been a space cop, not a sprocket-company employee.

On Monday at the Farnborough International Airshow, Bell Helicopter announced that it will team with an Israeli com­pany to develop a futur­is­tic air­craft that would allow sol­diers and police far greater mobil­ity in cities.

The X-Hawk, as envi­sioned by Bell, could hold a pilot and up to 11 troops. It could nav­i­gate con­gested urban areas by fly­ing above nar­row streets and between closely spaced buildings.

Propelled by two jet tur­bine engines that would drive pusher pro­pellers and downward-thrust lift fans, sim­i­lar to those on the short-takeoff-vertical-landing ver­sion of the F-35 Lightning II, the X-Hawk could oper­ate in spaces far more con­fined than a heli­copter can.

Mark Gibson, Bells vice pres­i­dent of advanced con­cept devel­op­ment, said the X-Hawk is not some­thing out of a sci­ence fic­tion film.

“People look at this and say Star Wars, but theyve been build­ing these since the 1950s,” Gibson said.

That is until a lit­tle lun­cheon last week with the Fort Worth cham­ber of com­merce where a curi­ous attendee asked Bell CEO Richard Millman what that weird thing in the cor­ner of the hanger was…

The pro­to­type, a sort of air­borne hov­er­craft, is still sit­ting in a hangar at Bells Alliance Airport facil­ity. And CEO Richard Millman appar­ently has no inten­tion of pur­su­ing the project.

At a Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce lun­cheon hosted by Bell at the Alliance hangar Thursday, Millman was asked what the odd-looking object in the cor­ner was.

“How embar­rass­ing,” Millman said sheep­ishly, as if asked about a daffy rel­a­tive wan­der­ing loose.

“That was a mis­take. Built before I got here. I wish wed never done it.”

…writes Cox in his May 17 update.

And Millman is right. Too vul­ner­a­ble, too slow, too rick­ety. But kind of a cool idea. I’ve got to admit, I wouldn’t mind giv­ing one a test drive over the crowded com­muter routes of the DC area. And hey, the Jetsons know it’s inevitable, right?

(Kudos to Bob Cox)

– Christian

EDITOR’S NOTE: Greetings folks…I’ve been in touch with David Crane from Defense Review who was inter­ested in a lit­tle con­tent swap between our two orga­ni­za­tions and I thought I’d give it a whirl. This is his first entry in the exper­i­ment and I’m hop­ing we can get a lit­tle feed­back from you folks on some of his more provoca­tive content.

My good friend and pro­fes­sional con­tact, pro­lific infantry small arms/machine gun designer Jim Sullivan (a.k.a. L James Sullivan), has com­plained to me quite a bit about U.S. mil­i­tary infantry warfight­ers not hav­ing an American ver­sion of the Russian RPG-7 / RPG-7V shoulder-launched, anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade weapon sys­tem (recoil­less rifle) at their dis­posal to match our cur­rent and poten­tial future ene­mies RPG-7s / RPG-7Vs. The advan­tages of the RPG-7 anti-tank weapon sys­tem are several.

First, the size of the RPG-7s warhead/projectile is not lim­ited to the size of the launcher tube, so you can use variable-size war­heads that carry more pay­load and greater pen­e­tra­tive capa­bil­ity than an M72 LAW (Light Anti-Tank Weapon a.k.a. Light Anti-Armor Weapon) 66mm HEAT war­head. Second, the RPG-7s reloadable/reusable aspect allows the user to carry a quiver of dif­fer­ent types of RPG rounds (i.e. stan­dard HEAT war­head, dual-HEAT war­head, and ther­mo­baric rocket-propelled grenades) on his back and quickly choose the best one for the job, load it, fire it at the tar­get, and then reach back and grab the next one in the quiver (or have his buddy grab it for him), load it, and fire it again, which may offer some tac­ti­cal advan­tages over car­ry­ing mul­ti­ple dis­pos­able rocket launch­ers on his back. And third, both the the RPG-7 and enhanced-armor-penetration-capable RPG-29 Vampir (Vampire) recoil­less rifles respec­tive launcher tubes, ammu­ni­tion (grenade rounds), and train­ing require­ments are sig­nif­i­cantly less expen­sive than the U.S. mil­i­tarys clos­est equiv­a­lents, the M3 Carl-Gustaf 84mm Recoilless Rifle / Multi-Role Man-Portable Anti-Tank Weapon a.k.a. M3 Carl-Gustav Recoilless Anti-Tank Rifle made by Saab AB a.k.a. Saab Bofors Dynamics and the Shoulder-launched Multipurpose Assault Weapon (SMAW) MK153 Mod 0, which is an 83mm multi-purpose recoil­less rifle.

The M3 Carl-Gustaf is, no doubt, an excel­lent weapon sys­tem, but it is cost-prohibitive (i.e. too expen­sive) for many armies to pro­cure it in large num­bers. The M3 Carl-Gustafs rel­a­tively high cost (launcher, ammo, and train­ing) has even con­tributed to its rel­a­tively lim­ited num­bers in the U.S. mil­i­tary inven­tory. The U.S. ver­sion is des­ig­nated as the M3 MAAWS (Multi-role Anti-Armor Anti-personnel Weapon System), and is pri­mar­ily in use with U.S. mil­i­tary Special Operations Forces (SOF) under USSOCOM a.k.a. SOCOM.

Enter the good folks at Airtronic USA, Inc. who have recently devel­oped an American-version a.k.a. Amerikansky RPG-7 / RPG-7V with a cou­ple of M4/M4A1-Carbine-type fea­tures that U.S. mil­i­tary infantry warfight­ers should enjoy (see fea­tures below), and its about time some­body did. Quite frankly, an American-made RPG-7 / RPG-7V sys­tem is long, long overdue.

Airtronic USA RPG-7 Features:

- Mil-Std-1913 Quad Rail System for mount­ing com­bat opics (opti­cal sights), flip-up BUIS (Back Up Iron Sights), aim­ing lasers/illuminators, tac­ti­cal white lights, and ver­ti­cal foregips

- Flip-Up BUIS

- AR-15 Carbine-type Vertical Foregrip

- AR-15/M16 Pistol Grip

- M4/M4A1 Carbine Collapsible/Telescoping Buttstock.

Read more at DefenseReview.com…

– Christian

O.K. folks, let’s pick some scabs here…

It may be chalked up by his­to­ri­ans as the most cat­a­strophic intel­li­gence fail­ure of all time, but for the Air Force, it seems to be an oppor­tu­nity to dance in the end zone.

One of the main jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for the inva­sion of Iraq — what many crit­ics say offered the Bush admin­is­tra­tion a bumper sticker sales pitch for over­throw­ing Saddam Hussein in 2003 — was the con­tention that Baghdad had stock­piles of WMD that was too great a risk to allow to poten­tially slip into ter­ror­ist hands.

Now, I beg you dear reader not to rehash this argument…that’s not the point of the post. But while nearly every­one in the U.S. (and for­eign) secu­rity estab­lish­ment deserves at least some penalty for get­ting it wrong, the Air Force deserves lau­rels for mak­ing that crash­ing intel screw up possible.

Listening to Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, the Air Force’s top Global Strike com­man­der and 8th Air Force chief, at a break­fast meet­ing today with reporters in Washington I was struck by the con­tention that it was indeed the Air Force’s suc­cess that led to the Bush admin­is­tra­tion (and nearly the entire intel com­mu­nity) fail­ure on WMD in Iraq.

Listen to this:

“We’re real excited about the suc­cess of Northern Watch and Southern Watch which was there to enforce the U.N. Security Council res­o­lu­tions — two of them, one for the north, of course, was to pro­tect the Kurds, in the south, the Shiia, but the third one had to do with pre­vent­ing Saddam Hussein from devel­op­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion which was a pretty suc­cess­ful oper­a­tion.”

Of course, the logic fol­lows that Elder has a point here. But I guess it took the pass­ing of the pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion for a top Air Force gen­eral to get the gump­tion to actu­ally cel­e­brate the service’s con­tri­bu­tion to an intel­li­gence fail­ure that led to an inva­sion of Iraq and its bloody aftermath.

All I can say is “Air Power!”

– Christian

In case you didn’t see this else­where, Lockheed Martin recently unveiled a down-scale com­peti­tor to the exoskele­ton wars. At the February Association of the US Army sym­po­sium, LockMart intro­duced its Human Universal Load Carrier system.

According to LockMart, the HULC can help a Soldier carry up to 200 pounds “with min­i­mal effort.”

HULC trans­fers the weight from heavy loads to the ground through the battery-powered, tita­nium legs of the lower-body exoskele­ton. An advanced onboard micro-computer ensures the exoskele­ton moves in con­cert with the indi­vid­ual. HULCs com­pletely un-tethered, hydraulic-powered anthro­po­mor­phic exoskele­ton design allows for deep squats, crawls and upper-body lift­ing with minor exertion. 

Look, you know I’m par­tial to Troy Hurtubise’s Trojan II, but I’ve got to hand it to LockMart — the HULC seems to take the mid­dle ground between being a full-on exoskele­ton and a pas­sive assis­tance device to help carry heavy loads. I can see 240 gun­ners and mor­tar­men eat­ing this thing up, trudg­ing through the Afghan hills a lot more eas­ily than before. Maybe the HULC could give plan­ners more options by mak­ing organic indi­rect fire sup­port a viable alter­na­tive for pla­toons in the bush.

Obviously it looks a bit ungainly in the video, but in the end, if it does what the video shows and with a few ergonomic tweaks, we’ll see a work­able option in the field soon. With all the news about load stress on Soldiers’ bod­ies these days, why not use tech­nol­ogy to ease the burden?

– Christian

Those of us whove laid there for hours on end, watch­ing a sus­pected insur­gent ORP, or gath­er­ing intel on that homi­cide sus­pect before the knuckle-draggers go serve the war­rant, under­stand that adult dia­pers arent the best answer to the bodys bio­log­i­cal imper­a­tives (par­tic­u­larly with regards to mat­ters scat­o­log­i­cal). The same thing is true (and pos­si­bly even more seri­ous, just ask them) for those poor bas­tards try­ing to make it through a heroic run of Utgard Keep in one night, or attempt­ing to fin­ish Dire Maul while suf­fer­ing gas­troin­testi­nal distress.

Well, the Japanese have cre­ated some­thing that will not only elim­i­nate those trou­bles, itll let you leave the atmos­phere with­out crap­ping your­self. This space dia­per is designed to use pow­er­ful suc­tion to gather up all the nas­ti­ness cre­ated when nature calls. Sensors strate­gi­cally placed around your ass and crotch let the dia­per know when to acti­vate, and it will even dry and clean up its wearer after the fact. JAXA, Japans equiv­a­lent to our NASA, wants to have the space dia­per fin­ished and ready for deploy­ment within the next five years. Thats con­ceiv­ably in time for the guys slated for deploy­ment in OEF XXIV or so…

– The Mad Duo

How low have we gone…?

From this afternoon’s head­lines at Military.com.

Associated Press

CAPE CANAVERAL — NASA is telling muse­ums across the coun­try that have expressed inter­est in obtain­ing a gen­uine space shut­tle that it’s really going to cost them.

How much? A mere $42 mil­lion — includ­ing $6 mil­lion for ship­ping and handling.

That’s NASA’s price tag for clean­ing up each of the three remain­ing shut­tles — now sched­uled to be retired in 2010 — and deliv­er­ing one to an air­port near the museum.

NASA has never charged insti­tu­tions such as the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum — which wants at least one of the orbiters — for rock­ets, cap­sules and other artifacts.

But Wednesday, the agency issued a “Request for Information” to gauge muse­ums’ inter­est in obtain­ing a shut­tle — and the depth of their pock­ets. At least five loca­tions across the coun­try — includ­ing Kennedy Space Center — have expressed inter­est in dis­play­ing an orbiter.

The RFI serves “to notify poten­tial recip­i­ents of NASA’s intent to require poten­tial recip­i­ents to assume all costs asso­ci­ated with trans­fer of these assets,” it states.

Another pur­pose is “iden­ti­fy­ing whether poten­tial recip­i­ent orga­ni­za­tions are capa­ble of bear­ing the full cost of Space Shuttle Orbiter saf­ing and final dis­play preparation …”

“Safing” means decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion of the ship’s fuel sys­tems — includ­ing toxic hydrazine — and removal of other safety and envi­ron­men­tal hazards.

NASA spokesman Mike Curie said that, although NASA gen­er­ally has not charged muse­ums for relics, the agency rec­og­nizes that there is now a mar­ket for space arti­facts. What’s more, he said, some muse­ums allowed Apollo-era relics to dete­ri­o­rate because they got them for free. 

– Christian

Well, we told you this was going to hap­pen, but the Army just announced that it was set­ting up a pres­ence in the Second Life vir­tual world.

As the Virtual Worlds blog reports:

The U.S. Army will open up two islands in Second Life in the next 30–45 days aimed at recruit­ing new sol­diers. The plans were announced at the Army Science Conference this week, which has a heavy focus on immer­sive tech­nolo­gies. The project sounds sim­i­lar to the cur­rent imple­men­ta­tion of the Air Forces MyBase, which opened in Second Life yes­ter­day. Users will find a wel­come cen­ter with infor­ma­tion and links to con­tact a recruiter on one island and military-themed activ­i­ties like rap­pelling, shoot­ing, and para­chut­ing on the other. Completing the activ­i­ties will earn users points toward free Army-branded vir­tual goods. 

You’ll remem­ber that we reported in a pre­view of the Army Science Conference that the ser­vice was plan­ning to enter mas­sively mul­ti­player online games with vir­tual humans to try and trick real ones into believ­ing the dig­i­tal Soldiers were made of more than 1s and 0s. Well, don’t look now, but that dig­i­tal dude in the cammo pants and jaunty beret could be giv­ing you a vir­tual pitch to be an Army of One.

– Christian

Dr. Parmentola men­tioned this video a col­league of his sent to him the other day, so I tracked it down and embe­ded it here for DT read­ers.

I just got fin­ished read­ing an excel­lent SciFi book titled “Old Man’s War” (I had already read the “Ghost Brigades”) and it talks about a brain-embedded com­puter called a “brain pal.” Well, it looks like we’re closer to that than many had once thought.

– Christian