Major government-to-government arms sales and grants to Pakistan since 2001 have included items useful for counterterrorism operations, along with a number of “big ticket” platforms more suited to conventional warfare. In dollar value terms, the bulk of purchases are made with Pakistani national funds — the Pentagon reports total Foreign Military Sales agreements with Pakistan worth $863 million in FY2002-FY2005; inprocess sales of F-16s and related equipment raised the value to $3.5 billion in FY2006 alone. The United States also has provided Pakistan with about $1.23 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) since 2001, with a “base program” of $300 million per year beginning in FY2005. These funds are used to purchase U.S. military equipment. Pakistan also has been granted U.S. defense supplies as Excess Defense Articles (EDA).

...

Major US Arms Sales and Grants to Pakistan Since 2001

The federal government is on a “burning platform,” and the status quo way of doing business is unacceptable ...

Current Fiscal Policy Is Unsustainable: we cannot simply grow our way out of this problem. Tough choices will be required.

So much for the robots ...

DoD Transformation: Challenges and Opportunities

An officer working on Future Combat Systems comes out against robotic soldiers:

Although we have made extraordinary advances in technology over the years, it is unlikely that any robotic or artificial intelligence could ever replicate the ability of a trained fighting man in combat.

This reminds me of those quotes about heavier-than-air flight and 640 KB of random access memory.

But can you imagine the outcry when a team of robotic police respond to a swatting prank?

Who decides: Man or machine?

Senior Airman Amanda Fauci's job is so sensitive she has nearly the same security clearance as a Secret Service agent. She sometimes goes on weeks-long classified assignments.

But on a recent mission, the 23-year-old was struggling. Her Texas-shaped sugar cookies made from prepared dough "blew up," she says. She ended up making a new batch from scratch at home that night. The next day, she served them to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, former President George H.W. Bush and other VIPs aboard a Boeing 757 bound for College Station, Texas.

"There was a sense of panic there for a moment" when the initial batch flopped, says Airman Fauci, a five-year service veteran.

On These Planes, In-Flight Service Is Super-Secret

This is what you might call a timely delivery.

Understanding how terrorists conduct successful operations is critical to countering them. Terrorist organizations use a wide range of network technologies as they plan and stage attacks. This book explores the role that these communications and computer technologies play and the net effect of their use, the purpose and manner in which the technology is used, the operational actions of terrorists and possible responses of security forces. The authors conclude that future network technologies modestly improve terrorist group efficiency, particularly for their supporting activities, but do not dramatically improve their attack operations. Precluding terrorists from getting the technology they want is impractical; developing direct counters is unlikely to yield high payoffs. Instead, exploiting the technologies and the information such technologies use to enable more direct security force operations are more promising options.

I want this on a t-shirt:

AQI runs SAP.

Presumably the global AQ is also up to date, although they might be GNU guys. I wonder if it took bin Laden four years to transition all of his legacy applications. Anyway, I'm sure the old guard is kvetching about how the new software has made things worse. ("If everything is in the system, why do I still have to print out my expense report?")

Network Technologies for Networked Terrorists: Assessing the Value of ICTs to Modern Terrorist Organizations

A group of researchers at Sony and the University of Alabama in Huntsville have come up with a wide-angle camera that can image a 10-kilometer-square area from an altitude of 7.5 kilometers with a resolution better than 50 centimeters per pixel.

The trick is to build an array of light sensitive chips - each one recording small parts of a larger image - and place them at the focal plane of a large multiple-lens system. The camera would have gigapixel resolution, and able to record images at a rate of 4 frames per second.

The team suggests that such a camera mounted on an aircraft could provide images of a large city by itself. This would even allow individual vehicles to be monitored without any danger of losing them as they move from one ground level CCTV system to another.

Wide-angled gigapixel satellite surveillance

the official line ...

A new Pentagon policy directive for US military intelligence mandates information-sharing with US domestic agencies and foreign partners and recognizes the leading role of the new director of national intelligence.

Although both have been long-standing priorities for the Bush administration, the new directive, drafted in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and published last month, is the first time that they have been promulgated in such a high-level policy document at the Pentagon.

And reality on the ground ...

We all get briefed on how important information sharing and collaboration is, but in practice it is actively discouraged. The older generations (everyone in charge) are afraid that someone will steal an idea or publish something before they do and get all the credit.

Yes.

the official line and the reality on the ground

There is a lot of talk about how agility in IT systems is necessary to "out turn" our adversaries in modern conflict.

The reality is that IT systems in the DoD today manifest very little agility. They are slow to build, slow to respond to changing requirements, and are frequently still integrated in a manner that makes for an incredibly brittle enterprise. This may not be the end of the world when your physical assets can still outperform everyone else's, but what about in the cyber domain? Is it ok there?

In cyber warfare, coding is the new maneuver.

Imagine a world where an armored maneuver commander would have to get to Milestone B before he could conduct a "thunder run," or one where an Air Operations Center would have to draft an RFP and obtain approval before it could dispatch a mission package to a deep target. It sounds silly, but a cyber domain commander working under the constraints of our current system for software acquisition might feel similarly constrained.

Yes.

In Cyberwar, Coding is the New Maneuver

Abstract
Normal design practice is to decouple the design of applications using a network from the design of the network itself. Designers optimize network performance by only focusing on network transport layer mechanisms for robustness (connectivity), efficiency (throughput), and speed of service (latency). Applications offer loads to the network and rely on the QoS function in the network to prioritize the traffic flows. By contrast, network centric operations focus on application layer features like situation awareness and synchronization to enhance force effectiveness. Therefore, in contrast to enterprise networks in which QoS processes messages based on fixed priorities by data type, in mission orientated MANET, QoS must be a cooperative function between application and network resource management that uses dynamic priority allocations derived from task priorities established by commanders within the echelon hierarchies.

QoS in Mission Orientated Ad-hoc Networks

As the US military transforms to an information-based force, it will need processes and methods to collect, combine, and utilize the intelligence that is generated by its assets.

The process known as fusion will play an important role in determining whether this intelligence is used in the most beneficial manner. The process of fusion, combining pieces of information to produce higher-quality information, knowledge, and understanding, is often poorly represented in constructive models and simulations that are used to analyze intelligence issues.

This report describes one approach to capturing the fusion process in a constructive simulation, providing detailed examples to aid in further development and instantiation.

The Knowledge Matrix Approach to Intelligence Fusion