Maggie's Farm

I have said many times I believe Bill Clinton was recruited by the KGB while he was in Moscow. Time will tell..perhaps. there are always those in government who feel "we" should be protected from those types of truths less it undermine our delicate constitutions....so much for that.
Kerry was a honey bucket carrier for the Soviets, a shit handler, a dupe.
Most of our populatioin does not know that at the height of the Cold War in the 60-70's the KGB and GRU had the CIA outnumbered 10:1 ..they had variously 600,000 agent while we had about 60,000...they had this nation covered like Sherwin Williams and it was a target rich environment for them...intergenerational social unrest, cities being Mau Maued with regularity and disenchanted draftees poisoning every college campus with Pacepas noted Soviet scripted propaganda...

Most people also don't realize that ownly 60,000 of the 525,000 service men and women we had in Vietnam actually fired weapons at the enemy..the remainder were support.

We were compromised on some of our biggest and tightest secret projects...Carter came inot office and it was "game over" Soviets win for he was and still is a fool, as was his DCI Stansfield Turner.

The Democrats have continued to do nothing constructive for the US in the matter of security for this nation in the last 40 years and each new generation of Democrats is more Boleshevik than the last.

Former DCI James Woolsey said today that he firmly believes that AQ will hit the US with a nuclear device before this winter. He also stated that taking out Iran with the next few months was imperative.

Get ready for TEOTWAWKI ....

The US will take out Iran. #1 We need to collect on some payback that started Nov 4,1979 and continuing through their other machinations over the decades since. #2 It simplifies an Israeli flyover of "Arab" territory, ie.Iraq #3 Israel will take out Syria and the the deepwater port they are building to accomodate the Soviets..The Israeli's owe the Syrians some ordinance and we can't have the Soviets with a Haiphong Harbor in the ME backyard....they may end up with their fleet in the Med but with few places to port. If the Soviets get a port in Syria they'll do exactly what they did in Vietnam ..provide a constant flow of weapons to the Islams and make the place unmanagable from an oil exporting point .. we can't have that ..we need to save the Caribou in the Anwar so we have to have ME oil.

You know John Milius may have been way
ahead of his time with "Red Dawn" cause what are we gonna do if the new Chinese blue water navy or the Soviet navy starts to port in Cuba and Venezuela?

We'll be forced to bulk up the PossumTater Expeditionary Force.

People tell me that your estimation of the window is in harmony with wht is going on. I understand the packages are ready for delivery anytime we desire, that Missouri, Diego Garcia, and a few other spots will be very busy sooner rather than later. I understand the packages are really very special and come with a guarantee to get the job done.

Imagine our enemies facing thousands of these UAV's

Paranoia will set in for them..we've got these things flying together in close proximity and in real time reprogramming themselves to "do the right thing"...which of course means doing it for the children...(sudden sarcastic flatulence from Habu.oops) Kool article.

UAV's and The Electric UAV ACID TEST






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By David A. Fulghum

Research into unmanned flight is finally producing solutions for operating piloted and pilotless aircraft in the same small airspace. The template is being forged in Iraq. There, the operation of UAV's with manned helicopters, transports and combat aircraft -- simultaneously and at night without lights -- is maturing from a basic "policy of hope" to "controlled chaos" and, finally, to positive control of all those moving pieces on the aerial chessboard. The following series of articles also looks at several other issues, including Europe's efforts to integrate unmanned aircraft, new aircraft designs that are flying first as highly sophisticated UAV's (a money-saving tactic for advanced concepts), and the emergence of tactically useful but much smaller designs.


Unmanned reconnaissance aircraft are now cooperating with one another to control their simultaneous flights, aided by automated software but with no input from a human operator.

In a demonstration, three Boeing ScanEagles also coordinated their searches—including the location, tracking and interception of a moving target—which were monitored but not manipulated by a lone pilot.

The capability is being hailed by outside observers as a giant step toward coordinated, cooperative flight ops and the management of large numbers of unmanned and manned aircraft in a small airspace.

UAV specialists say July’s test flights by Boeing researchers are remarkable in opening the way to “cooperative rather than de-conflicted air operations,” particularly in Iraq. Because of the high-tempo air operations among unlighted manned and unmanned aircraft of many types at night in a geographically small area in Iraq, “hope has become a strategy for air control,” says Tom Ehrhard, a specialist in unmanned operations and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Having more positive control in that environment is “one reason the Air Force would like to be the executive agent for larger UAVs.”

In a separate program, Boeing is developing an unmanned landing and air traffic management capability for unmanned combat aircraft systems (UCASs) from aircraft carriers. Program officials say they could land an F/A-18F surrogate UCAS on a carrier within two years. This work is also being looked at by the U.S. Air Force to refuel UCAVs and UAVs from manned tanker aircraft—another area where manned and unmanned aircraft operate close to one another (AW&ST June 4, p. 44).

The leap in network-centric capability that was demonstrated by Boeing has the promise of accelerating combat flight tempos and slashing the long-term cost of UAV operations and crew training. Or it could make the massive growth in UAV and UCASs more affordable, if the demonstration wins Pentagon favor and a place in the defense budget.

But the tests’ real importance is to serve “as a waypoint to highly automated and completely cooperative air operations,” Ehrhard says.

The operator in the series of trials assigned each of three long-loiter Scan­Eagles to search separate areas in an effort to find and follow an evading vehicle and, finally, to provide targeting data for an air strike, says Marshall Williams, program manager for mission management research at Boeing Advanced Systems.

“The tests were to show the simultaneous control of multiple vehicles by a single operator through the use of automation,” says Williams. “That had never been done before.”

He contends that the usual ratio of one or two operators per UAV crew could be changed to three or more UAVs per operator. Originally the Pentagon wanted one operator for four UAVs. Workload could be orders of magnitude less than today, he says. A long-endurance UAV crew usually includes a sensor operator/intelligence analyst as well as the pilot.

With automation, “we’re talking about multiple, mixed types of vehicles operated by a single crewman at the same time,” says Williams. Instead of manipulating sensors and maneuvering aircraft, the operator tells the automated system, “I need pictures taken in these spaces,” he says. “You figure out how to do it; and if you find something interesting, cue me so I can look at it. Meanwhile, I’m going to be doing something else.”

While Ehrhard is optimistic about the benefits of automated air operations, he warns that they bring their “own fog and friction. It’s an order of magnitude more difficult in a denied environment”—where the enemy is jamming heavily or otherwise disrupting communications, or when foes are searching for the source of emissions (such as a UAV or aircraft) to attack.

“We have to worry about detection,” he says. “To surmount the problem, we need a low-probability-of-intercept-and-detection network that allows UAVs to operate in a denied environment,” he says. “You don’t want them to know you are there.”

During current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has identified a need for more than one UAV to conduct successful man-hunting operations. There’s an emerging requirement for a number of UAVs to focus simultaneously in the search for moving targets of many kinds.

“You need multiple UAVs to stop the squirters like the guy that jumps out of an SUV and takes off,” says Ehrhard. “If you have several UAVs, one can follow the squirter, but they would all be controlled by a single operator. It would no longer be like our initial operations in Afghanistan where you had one target vehicle, one UAV and one observer.”

While observing that the military is going through an era of resistance to automation, Ehrhard contends that this will give way to the “creation of automated flight” and cooperation between unmanned and manned aircraft for air traffic control. While there’s concern about unmanned aerial combat, he maintains that there’s the potential to move at a measured pace into the production of, first, nonlethal (information operations, network invasion and electronic attack) and, later, lethal (small precision-guided weapons) effects from software-controlled, UAV-carried systems.

Distributed Information-Centralized Decision mission control software managed the simultaneous flight of the three ScanEagles. Stalker target-tracking software enabled the UAVs to follow the fleeing vehicle without human oversight. The Stalker automated system also kept the aircraft out of hearing and visual range of the target—a metric Boeing researchers won’t discuss, but was probably at least several miles in slant range.

“We simulated insurgents fleeing the area by getting into a truck and driving away,” says Williams. “The Stalker software saw that target, tracked it automatically, kept the camera focused and positioned the ScanEagle so that the target was in view the whole time. Tracking moving targets is one of the highest workload events going on with UAVs today. You have to drop waypoints ahead of and around a target that’s moving in real time [in case it turns, slows down or stops]. That’s very difficult to do well. There’s a lot of manual interactions that you don’t have to do anymore. By lightening the workload, you must be increasing the quality of the decision making.”

A third package, Open Mission Management software, ensured that the UAV, AWACS, cell phone operator and F/A-18 strike aircraft could all work together using a NATO 4586 standard communications format. The plan is expected to let NATO aircraft, particularly UAVs, communicate.

The battle scenario for the tests had an AWACS positioned over eastern Washington. Three areas had to be searched for targets. Simulated Scan­Eagles were placed in two of them and three live-fly ScanEagles in the third.

“Once the UAVs were in orbit and online, we got the tasking request from the AWACS,” Williams says. It was a text message sent via e-mail from a cell phone to the AWACS. Because the message was written in a standard nine-line format, it was processed through the AWACS battle-management software to create a time-critical target on the AWACS display. That display was then forwarded to the UAV operator.

“We asked our automation software . . . to plan a mission automatically, execute it and send the video back to me when it’s available,” says Williams. “The system did a re-plan in real time without operator intervention. It created new routes for the UAVs within a second that included the time-critical target. Video of the new target was sent back to the AWACS and opened in a normal browser to confirm it was important. We vectored in simulated F/A-18s to destroy the target. The video was forwarded to the guy on the ground using a regular Cingular cell phone.”

Follow-on tests are planned to demonstrate simultaneous flight of a mix of UAVs—rotary and fixed wing—using a single operator. Researchers also want to show interoperability of the system with manned aircraft and surface platforms including ships.









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A Slow Moving Chinese Train Wreck
By Desmond Lachman : 07 Aug 2007

As US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson ends yet another round of Strategic Economic Dialogue talks in Beijing with very little progress to show for his efforts, one cannot help feeling that one is watching a slowly unfolding Greek tragedy. For all the main protagonists of this drama play their parts seemingly oblivious to the very unhappy end towards which their actions are inexorably leading them. And they certainly pay no heed to the growing chorus of Cassandras warning of the grave dangers to the global trade system that lie ahead.


Among the leading protagonists in this drama are Chinese President Hu Jinato and Vice Premier Wu Yi, who represent the Chinese Communist Party in these talks. Filled with hubris, they never seem to tire of reminding Mr. Paulson of China's 5,000-year glorious imperial past. Nor do they tire of making it quite clear that a country of China's historic importance is not about to change its exchange rate policy under pressure from the United States, a relative newcomer on the international stage. Rather, they insist that the Chinese government will set its exchange rate policy exclusively in China's own national economic interest.


The Chinese also make it quite clear by their actions, if not by their words, that they view China's economic interest as that of maintaining an artificially undervalued exchange rate. They do so with a view to allowing China's exports to grow each year by a staggering 30 percent, which they see as the only realistic way that the Chinese economy can absorb the 10 million workers who leave the Chinese countryside for the cities each year.


For his part, Secretary Paulson consistently seems to allow hope to triumph over experience in maintaining his belief that China will revalue its currency on its own accord in an effort to reduce its ballooning trade surplus with the United States. He also never seems to tire of counseling Congress to be patient in its dealings with China on the exchange rate issue.


In adopting his softly-softly approach towards the Chinese, Mr. Paulson seems to ignore the fact that over the past two years China has egregiously failed to deliver on the promises that it made to the United States in June 2005 to become progressively more flexible on the exchange rate issue. Indeed, over the past two years, China has allowed only the minimum of appreciations of its currency against the depreciating US dollar, while on a trade-weighted basis China's currency is as grossly undervalued today as it was in June 2005.


While Mr. Paulson urges patience and while he steadfastly refuses to deem China a currency manipulator, China's trade surplus with the United States continues to grow like Topsy. In the first six months of 2007 alone, China's trade surplus with the United States swelled to a record US$112 billion, which was a full 85 percent greater than China's surplus in the same period of 2006.


True to script, the US Congress is adopting an increasingly confrontational stance towards China with the approach of the 2008 elections growing nearer every day. It does so knowing full well that China bashing is a sure vote getter at a time of increased economic insecurity. As the US economy slows under the weight of its severe housing market slump, external scapegoats like China always come in handy.


Seemingly forgetful of the disastrous consequences for global prosperity of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, today Congress has before it no fewer than 60 proposals to do something about the Chinese trade surplus. More ominous still, last week the Senate Finance Committee approved a proposal that would require the US Treasury to impose anti-dumping duties on China should China persist in maintaining an undervalued exchange rate. And the Committee did so with a 20 to 1 majority, which should be seen by China as the clearest of warnings that Congress could very well approve veto-proof trade legislation that would be inimical to China's longer-term economic interest.


For its part, the International Monetary Fund, whose supposed role in this looming US-China showdown is that of acting as international umpire, also sticks unswervingly to script by maintaining a deafening silence on the Chinese exchange rate issue. Still smarting from its loss of credibility in Asia for its mishandling of the 1997 Asian currency crisis, the IMF lacks the backbone to declare that China's currency is grossly undervalued and to call upon China to do something about its undervalued currency.


There is of course always the chance that China blinks in time and takes substantive exchange rate action that might avert a breakdown in US-China trade relations. However, all the clues are currently pointing in the direction of China not budging from its present policy script. At a time of increased global financial market volatility, this is a great pity as it is certainly the last thing that the world economy now needs.